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The Inn Ch. 01

By: IanSaulWhitcomb



Author's note: this is my first real serial on Literotica. I'll be publishing the chapters as I write them instead of finishing the whole story first the way I normally do. So it may be a bit longer between installments than usual. No idea how long it will run. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy it! 

***** 

Chapter One: 

In the middle of a wonderful hedge-maze I found a carved marble bench to sit on, where with one leg crossed beneath my notebook, I began to write. The slightly brisk British morning air, the blue sky making a long, bright panel atop the looming green of the hedges, the distant sounds of English birds - every speck of sensation felt at once peaceful and alive, a perfect muse of an environment, brimming with creative promise. 

"If you're ever in England and want to stay in a castle, Mister Kettridge, look me up," Lord Eric Weltfordshire had told me at a convention two years earlier. I almost hadn't done it - in fact, I'd almost thrown away his number that very night. But for whatever reason, I'd held onto the regally emblazoned calling-card, and when the invitation to this book launch in London came up, I'd decided what the hell, and gave him a call. 

And now here I sat, having been picked up at Heathrow the evening before by a chauffer in a vintage Bentley, spirited out to the countryside on impossibly spacious, immaculate leather upholstery, and then literally treated like royalty by Lord Weltfordshire's staff until bedtime. Even my nervousness of having to sit around making conversation with a fan for hours hadn't materialized, because Weltfordshire had some overnight aristocratic engagement to attend and left right after dinner - an outrageously elegant feast the likes of which I'd never consumed in my life, made even better by the fact that Eric turned out to be a clever and engaging host with just the right combination of fanboy nerdishness and highborn British accent. 

The only awkward moment came when he gave me a present - a sapphire blue fountain pen with fittings that for the life of me looked like real gold. He said it had been in his family for ages, and I tried every which way to turn it down gracefully, but he insisted with such good cheer and charm that I really ended up with no choice. 

"It's small recompense for all the hours of joy and contemplation your books have given me," he said. 

Now, after a fantastic night's sleep in the most comfortable bed I'd ever experienced, and with several hours to go before time to leave for my book launch, I decided I'd write my host an original story, just a brief one, as a token of thanks. My new pen turned out to be a marvel - weighted and balanced just right, with ink that flowed smoothly, effortlessly onto the page and never blobbed or smeared. Before I knew it, I'd finished the first page and moved on to the second. And then the third, and then the fourth. Fifth. Sixth. The story absorbed me. I stopped counting. 

And then ... 

A raindrop smacked down onto the open notebook, making me blink. 

The light, I realized, had gone dim. When I looked up, I found the hedges around me topped with a ceiling of dark cloud, heavy and portentous. More drops hit with leaden weight against the bench, the gravel walk, the manicured lawn. 

I'm about to get drenched, I thought. Shutting the notebook, I capped my pen and put it in a pocket. Which way out of the maze? 

I hurried across the close-clipped grass to the break in the hedges through which I'd entered. Rain tickled and spattered against the leaves, making them quiver, random drops giving me a tap or two on the head, running through my hair to the scalp. Thunder sounded off to my left. How had I missed the storm approaching? And how long had I been sitting there writing? I hadn't brought my phone with me - it still sat charging on the nightstand in my room. 

I'm going to miss the launch. Surely not. Surely I hadn't been out here that long. But the rain fell steadily now, and I couldn't remember which turn to take to get out of the maze. 

More thunder. Closer. 

The skies opened up. 

I ran through sheets of rain so thick I could barely see the hedges around me, navigating more by the sound of the storm hissing off their leaves than by actual sight. Instinctively, I huddled my notebook against my chest and moved bent over to keep it from getting soaked and ruining all the work I'd put into writing that story. 

Lightning flashed across the narrow strip of sky overhead, providing a moment of light in the night-black downpour. 

'Author Simon Kettridge was found this afternoon on the estate of Lord Eric Weltfordshire, drowned by a freak storm.' I tried to laugh at the idea, but the water gushed down on me so hard I almost thought it would push me to the ground. Is that a gap up ahead? 

It was. A narrow column of greyish-black instead of greenish-black. Another flash of lightning confirmed it - the way opened up in front of me instead of just making another turn or intersection with a new corridor of the maze. I dashed forward. Something snatched at my right foot - I tripped, fell - 

Lightning. A crack of thunder as I slammed to the ground, losing my grip on the notebook. More thunder, rolling in closer and closer as I tried to get to my feet, dazed. Strangely, this new barrage of thunderclaps had a steady cadence, and didn't follow on the heels of a series of flashing bolts. Instead, it came at me, I swore, from ground level. 

And then it shrieked, just as a female voice cried, "Hey!" 

Now the lightning came again, and as I staggered up, I found an enormous stallion rearing over me, hooves flailing, its rider pulling at its reins for control. 

"Jesus Christ!" I yelled, jerking backward and instantly falling to my ass in the mud. The shriek sounded again as the hooves came down right beside me, and I recognized the sound as a horse's whinny of alarm. 

"Ofara's hairy cunt!" swore the rider, regaining control of her mount. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" 

I froze, hands and butt planted in ice-cold muck, rain streaming down my forehead through my eyes. 

"What did you say?" I shouted, unable to believe my ears. 

"I said, are you trying to get yourself killed?" she shouted back. 

"No, before that!" 

"Oh, gods of all fucking," she said. "You're not some priest going to lecture me about language while the storm's trying to drown us both, are you?" 

This can't be happening, I thought. And then, Of course it can. Weltfordshire's more than rich enough to hire somebody for a gag like this. 

"Eric hired you, right?" I asked the mounted figure through the rain and dark. "Lord Weltfordshire?" 

"No idea what you're talking about!" she shouted down at me. "Are you going to just sit there on your arse waiting for the road to flood and sweep you away?" 

Another stroke of lightning showed me her face, at last. Oval, flawless, the skin a rich, earthy brown, the eyes black as night yet somehow flashing at the same time, lips full and sensual, eyebrows sharp, sarcastic ... 

Juliette Ravendark. 

What the fuck? It had to be Weltfordshire. But where had he found such a dead ringer for my most famous character? And is he rich enough to somehow pay for a thunderstorm to come up out of nowhere? 

Of course not, but I told myself the storm must just be coincidence. 

"Hello! Did you get brained by a hoof? Are you getting up, or not?" 

I maneuvered my feet under me and tottered up, staring at her, though the dark had closed back in and she was barely a shadow in the curtain-thick rain. 

"Look," I said, "I don't know -" 

A gloved hand thrust down through the rain at me. "Shut up! I've been riding half the day and I'm chilled to the bone! It's maybe a quarter-hour more to Piperville. Do you want a ride, or will you stay here and try your hand at suicide again when the next horseman comes along?" 

I glanced around but could see nothing of the manor or even the hedge-maze behind me. It looked almost as if I'd run out of a stand of woods. 

"Well?" 

My clothes were sodden by this point, and the cold had started to get to me. I could either tell her off and try to find my way back to Lord Weltfordshire's mansion, or I could play along and let her take me wherever this practical joke was meant to take me. 

Reaching up with my hand, I said, "I guess I'll -" 

But she grabbed my arm and heaved before I could finish the sentence, and quick as that, she'd swung me up behind her in the saddle and whipped the reins to get us moving. I had to grab on around her waist or I would have fallen. 

This is fucking crazy, I thought. Finding a woman who looked exactly like I'd always imagined and described Juliette was one thing. Finding one who also had the raw muscle-power to lift me up one-handed like a doll? Surely it wasn't even possible. 

Well, what's your alternative, Simon? Are you thinking this is really the Phaeland Empire and the ass you're bumping up against belongs to Juliette Ravendark? 

I didn't answer that question, though. Because I realized that I was, in fact, bumping up against a woman's ass with every galloping lunge of the horse's body beneath us. And I had my hands around her waist, which felt at once powerful and supple, and my belly was pressed against her spine. 

Oh, crap. I'm about to embarrass the hell out of myself with this actress or whoever she is by getting a boner right in her ass-crack. Think about something else, Simon. Think about how cold you are. Think about the fact that you're missing the goddamn book launch that's the whole reason you came on this trip. 

But instead, all I could think about was Juliette Ravendark - my perfect heroine, my narrator for nine straight books, strong and skilled and beautiful and bawdy with a laugh to make men quiver in fear or tremble with delight depending on how she used it. Six feet of sublime dark flesh, almost inhuman strength, and a brazen set of larger-than-life appetites that I'd spent most of my literary career developing - and more than a few masturbational hours fantasizing about. How many times had I had my hands around her before, daydreaming? How many times had I imagined us this close, usually with her looming over me, powerful, in control, riding us both into an ecstatic sunset of orgasm? 

My dick went as hard as the handle on one of her swords. I couldn't help it. Maybe this was just a prank by Lord Weltfordshire, but he'd put me in a position that was the greatest wish of my adult life: to touch the most amazing woman who'd ever lived in any man's imagination. 

Fuck it, I thought. Weltfordshire's paying her, right? And it's not like I'm trying to have a boner. Just enjoy the ride and apologize to her when we get wherever we're going. 

So I spent the next fifteen minutes nursing an erection against this woman's wonderful derriere, as the downpour went to a steady rain and then a drizzle, clouds lightening until we could see storm-doused green farmlands to either side, a line of dark woods behind us, and a rustic little township spread out to either side of the road ahead. 

Not a power line or satellite dish in sight. Not an air-conditioning unit. Not a car. The few people out in the misty streets wore clothing straight off a fantasy novel cover, except a little more drab and plebian. We clopped up in front of a perfectly medieval inn, where my benefactor swung a leg up and over to slide lightly to the ground, then turned and offered me a hand down after her. 

When I made it to earth, though, she didn't release her grip. 

"Felt like you were more than a little glad of the ride, eh?" she asked. The tilt of her smile and the upward nudge of one fine, dark eyebrow made it clear exactly what she meant. And in case I'd been too dumb to read that expression, her eyes flicked down at my crotch for just a second to erase any doubt. 

"Look, I'm sorry," I said, both hands up. "I wasn't trying to -" 

She laughed that laugh, flashed those amazing white teeth, exactly the way I'd always imagined her doing. Something inside me glowed in disbelief. With the sky grey instead of black and the rain no longer blurring my vision, I could see her clearly now, a marvel in road-scruffed, water-logged clothes, a couple of inches taller than me, silky black hair pulled back in a tail with a few stray strands sticking slickly to her deep cocoa skin. She had on a loose-sleeved ivory shirt beneath a vest of plum-colored leather, sword belts and then tight black breeches below that, knee-high boots rounding her ensemble out. No jewelry of any kind. 

Damn, Eric really did an amazing - 

She had the notch midway along the upper curve of her left ear. It was small, but noticeable - an old cut, long healed. 

"Where are we?" I asked her. 

"Piperville. I told you." She turned, tied the horse up, and headed for the door of the inn, stripping off her gloves as she went. "You coming in? I'm going to rent a room, hang these clothes in front of a fire and wring the water from my hair. Wouldn't mind testing out that bar in your pants if you'd like to do me a turn as payback for the ride." 

I just stood and stared. He couldn't have found someone like this. The face, the build, that strong, with that scar. What the fuck is going on here? 

"Are you right in the head?" she asked, lifting her eyebrows slightly. "Didn't hear me? Promised to some girl, or taken a vow of celibacy?" 

"I don't know if I'm right in the head or not," I said honestly. "Um, I heard you, not promised to anyone, no vows." 

"Then ...?" 

Whatever the fuck was going on, this woman apparently wanted to have sex with me. This gorgeous, powerful woman who looked exactly like the woman of my dreams. I might have had a mental breakdown. I might have slipped and hit my head. I might be dreaming. Lord Weltfordshire might be playing the world's most elaborate practical joke on me, complete with a custom-built medieval town and a lead actress willing to cut off part of her ear to complete the picture. 

Regardless of which scenario I picked, she was still saying she wanted to have sex with me. 

"I ... would ... definitely be willing to do you a turn," I said, stepping up to the inn's wooden stoop. 

She grinned and held out a hand. "Better. I'm Juliette." 

"Simon," I said, taking the hand in mine, shaking it, and feeling enough strength there to pulverize every bone in my hand, though she didn't squeeze particularly hard at all. 

"Come on, then, Simon," she said, opening the door. "Let's see what you've got." 

Following her inside, I found myself in the inn's common room, a wide and deep space dominated at the far side by a substantial bar and at its left end by a fireplace the size of Citizen Kane's - though considerably less fancy. A flotilla of tables filled the area, while a stairway on the right ran up to the second story. Light came from the fireplace, two smallish windows, some oil lamps in sconces behind the bar - and a corner table where a man in robes sat reading. Juliette walked forward toward a young blonde woman in a plain sky-blue dress who stood whisking a broom across the floor near the stairs. 

I blinked several times at the one bright corner table. 

The light by which the man sat reading had no source. 

It was just a floating ball of blue illumination hovering a bit above the grey-bearded fellow's eye level. After a moment he noticed me looking and gave me a scowl. I turned quickly away to find Juliette handing a coin over to the blonde - who was smooth-skinned and stacked in a way that normally would have had me drooling, but currently just added to my sense of being wrapped up in a hallucination. 

"That's a fine cut of clothing for someone who acts like he's never been inside an inn," said Juliette as I drew even with her. The bob-haired blonde had headed over toward the bar. 

I looked down and plucked at my soggy dress shirt. "Maybe I'm just from a place where inns are a little different." 

Behind the bar, the serving girl rifled through a collection of keys hanging in a shallow cabinet on the wall. 

"Do they have beds in the inns you're used to?" asked Juliette with a wicked lift of her eyebrow. 

"Yes." 

"Then this one will probably be close enough." 

No shit, I thought. 

The blonde came back with a long iron key, handed it to Juliette. "Number three, up the stairs and to your left. I'll get your horse around to the stable and bring in your saddlebags." 

"Thank you, Leyna," Juliette said with a smile, reminding me that I'd made her both good with names and nice to people. Hopefully, I was about to find out how nice. With a toss of her head, she beckoned me to follow her toward the stairs. 

On the second floor, our room proved modest. A bed just larger than a twin, a small table with a stool, a tiny window, a chamber pot. But it had its own fireplace - cast-iron with a pipe running up through the ceiling. After pulling her boots off, Juliette went directly to it, took a tinderbox from the little shelf nearby, and got the wood inside going with a few clicks of the striker. 

My throbbing cock was very glad I'd given this world alchemists cheap enough for inns to afford pre-treated wood. It really didn't want to wait ten minutes for Juliette to fuss over a bunch of kindling and fire-starting. 

With flames licking up from the firewood already, she closed the grate, stood, and shucked her vest. Beneath it, the ivory shirt had mostly been spared from the rain. She undid its buttons and tipped her chin up at me. 

"The quicker you get out of those, the quicker you'll dry off. And then the quicker we can both get strategically wet. If you know what I mean." 

I swallowed and unbuttoned my dress shirt - slowly, because I couldn't help staring at her in awe. As she peeled herself out of the soaked sleeves of her top, Juliette revealed a physique just shy of a female weight-lifter's. Not one of those blocky East European ones from the Olympics, I mean - the kind you see posing in bikinis for sports-channel competitions. Except that she wasn't posing, and she had enough body fat to avoid that ripped, veiny look. 

And she had scars. 

Not a lot of them - I hadn't written her on the losing end of too many fights, and she didn't let a blade get past her guard often - but they were there, and obvious, and real. Across her left bicep swept four parallel marks where a Herkathian lion had slashed her in her teens. 

Definitely dreaming or hit my head. 

Juliette squeezed her long, black hair out and then ruffled it with the dry part of her shirt. I watched her as I absently finished the buttons on my shirt and doffed it. Her breasts, full and rich and gleaming from the rain, strained at a simple brassiere that laced up the front. You'd never get away with that design at Victoria's Secret - very unsexy and just meant to hold things in place while riding or fighting. The only advantage from where I stood was that it took her a while to loosen the laces, so I had time to get my shoes and pants off as I watched her. 

And as she watched me. 

If this had been real life, those eyes - deep brown and piercing - would have had me a bit nervous as I stripped. I'm a pretty good-looking guy, average height, dirty-blond hair that I keep neatly trimmed, and you can probably tell I go to the gym, though not quite as often as I should. But I was a scrawny runt in high school, and that left me self-conscious about undressing in front of a good-looking woman. 

In this case, though, the play of Juliette's muscles as she unlaced her bra combined with my sense of surreality to keep me from worrying. Since this had to be a dream, she might turn into my high-school geometry teacher at any moment, but for now she obviously liked what she saw ... and what I saw left me dazzled. 


The Inn Ch. 01



When the bra came off, it unleashed two absolutely perfect, smooth, dark breasts - not huge, but ample enough and shaped like God had commissioned his favorite sculptor to design them. 

Or I guess Kethera, goddess of beauty, in this world, right? 

"Hellpits and demons, my tits are glad to be out of that," she said, looking down and massaging them two-handed. 

"Yeah, I'm glad they're out of that too," I said honestly. 

She grinned at me and gave her thimble-sized nipples a tweak, then undid her belts and leaned to toss the sheathed swords across the desk. Her eyes fell below my waist as she undid a set of brass buttons down the front of her pants. "Fancy bloomers you've got there! Who's your tailor?" 

"Uh, fellow named Hanes," I said, getting my socks off as she continued to eye my boxer briefs. "Surprisingly cheap, but he's a long way off." 

"Well, shuck them and toss them over so I can spread everything out by the fire and we can get to it." 

With that, she stripped away her pants and underwear at the same time, then turned and bent to lay them out in front of the fireplace. 

I did not immediately do what she'd told me to. 

Fucking hell, I thought instead, my eyes probably the size of half-dollars. She had the long, sleek, toned legs of an athlete, of course - absolutely drool-worthy despite a couple of long scars here and there. But what froze me in place was her ass and the peek of her cunt lips between her legs as she bent over facing away from me. My cock turned into one of those indestructible comic-book alloys the superheroes make their armor out of - hyperdickanium or something. 

As she rose back up, I shook myself from paralysis and yanked down my underwear before she turned around and saw me staring. Or maybe not quite before, because she grinned that grin at me again and said, "Looks like my assets were putting Master Hanes's seamwork to the test, eh?" 

I swallowed and handed her the briefs, trying to move nonchalantly - not easy when you're waving a hyperdickanium erection around in front of you. She tossed them to a bare spot on the floor and straightened them out with a toe. The muscles of her inner thigh tautened and shifted with each graceful motion of her foot, further engorging my prong, now freely leaking precum. 

"Am I doing all the work here?" she asked, putting hands to hips and raising an eyebrow. "You could at least throw back the bedcovers, couldn't you?" 

"Sorry," I said, blushing and turning to the bed. But she only laughed. 

"Teasing," Juliette said as I drew back the blankets and sheets. "I'm as fond of getting stared at by a helplessly aroused man as any woman is." 

Then, before I could turn back again, she came in behind me, reached around to grab my cock and my chest, one hand each, and pulled me flat against her. The incredible strength of her muscles gob-smacked me. If I'd been trying to resist, I would have failed utterly. 

But, no way would I ever have tried to resist this. 

Her lips and then tongue ran up my throat to my right earlobe. I could feel the hard beads of her nipples just under my shoulder blades. Her left hand squeezed at my right pectoral. Her right hand pumped my cock once, then twice. 

"Now, Simon," she breathed roughly into my ear, "how do they like to get things started in this far-away place you're from?" 

I moaned a little and shivered as she trapped my earlobe between her teeth. "They, uh, don't complain if things get started about like this." 

"Hmm." She traced the circumference of my nipple with one finger as she slid her grip forward and then back along my shaft, slicking it with streaks of thick, glossy fluid from the tip. 

"Oh god, that's good," I said. Her mouth explored my trapezius and she scraped her incisors there. "Uhhhh ... yeah, that's ... that's definitely a way to get things started." 

The hand on my rod worked me more firmly now. Fuck, she's going to make me come like a virgin teenager if this keeps up. 

"Look," I said, "I could put my tongue to work down between your legs if you want - we get things going that way too, where I'm from." 

"Hah!" She spun me around, her eyes and teeth flashing, then pushed me over onto the bed like I was a life-size carnival plush doll. "You're made of tougher stuff than I am, if you could go down on the two days of saddle sweat since my last bath!" 

"Oh. Well -" Before I could get anything more out, or do more than straighten my legs a bit on the mattress, she prowled over me like a panther, her black hair loose and still damp, her body fiercely female and intimately intimidating. 

"Listen, Simon from very-far-away," she said, staring down into my eyes. "I'm a quick fire to light and I'll burn as long as you can keep my coals fed. Are you ready to fuck?" 

I nodded. She grinned. 

"Good." 

And with that, she dropped her hips and engulfed me - didn't even have to guide me in with a hand. 

"Oh, Jesus!" I gasped. The slide of her around me, wet and delicious with a ferociously muscular grip, just about popped my eyes out. "Holy fuck, Juliette!" 

She brought her lips down to mine and ground herself all the way to my root, clit pressing hard to my pubic arch, hips rolling, those magnificent breasts swaying just above my chest to graze me with their soft curves and engorged nipples. My hands made their way unthinkingly along her thighs and up and around to the powerful hills of her ass, feeling their relentless muscular rhythm as I thrust up in time to her motions. 

"Yessss," she whispered, the sinuous, titan-strong curve of her spine pressing her belly down against mine. Crushed beneath her, I could feel her abs working, tighter and firmer than my own. "Yes, keep going ..." 

Holy shit. Julia Ravendark is fucking me - and loving it. 

I watched the clench of her brow as her breath quickened through her nose, then switched roughly to her mouth to break our kisses with ragged gasps each time she rocked herself forward and back atop me. Her tongue lunged past my lips, clashed against mine, retreated to let her breathe, then returned. Groaning into her mouth, I wrapped my arms around her back and felt the gliding steely planes of muscle there as I jammed my hips up to match the roll of our groins together. 

A sense of heroic prowess burned through me - an awareness of her magnificence and an amazement that I could keep up with her, please her, make her growl with raw sexual appreciation. My cock had the strength of a dragon's tail, burying itself in the golden trove of her cunt, reveling in the smooth, flowing treasure hoarded there. Again and again, I plunged into the riches of her mound, where she heaped ecstasy upon me in a slide and glide of diamond-brilliant sex. 

"Close ..." she gasped atop me. The fluid heat of her snatch stroked my cock lightning-fast. Her teeth clenched and a couple of powerful grunts escaped her. "Close ... keep at it, Simon ... there ... that ..." 

We'd started off clammy and damp from the rain - and now the sweat drenched us even wetter than the storm had. The slick, sweet gloss of her dark skin floated along mine as she rode me, clutching tight. I kissed salty beads from her throat, her collarbone. She lifted up and thrust a breast at my mouth so I could latch onto its firm brown nub and broad areola, suckling, tasting her passion in the perspiration that coated it. 

"Yes, Simon - YES!" A roar of animal release burst from her throat. She stiffened and spasmed, her nails digging into my deltoids as she came. Her cunt tightened around me with the throbbing tides of her orgasm. "AH! Ahhhh - NGHH!" 

I'd never felt a woman come so hard. It was like being fucked by a blood-pressure cuff. 

And it didn't stop. The incredible, pulsating, drenching pleasure should have made me spew within seconds, but I was so awestruck by the bestial delight on her face that I kept dazedly thrusting and thrusting up as she bucked atop me and swore with climax. 

"Glor's mighty cudgel, yes, fuck me!" 

Somehow, I did. My dick had never had anything like this. Heat and cunt juice poured along my length. Smooth, fearsomely strong flesh oscillated in and out around me. Back and forth and back and forth she rode, dark skin gleaming with exertion, gorgeous face taut and tremorous with orgasm, voice an unending hail to the gods of sexual release. The purity and perfection of her moment held me like an insect caught in a flow of sensual amber. I was fossilized by her reveling bliss. 

And then I came unstuck. 

"Oh my god, Juliette!" 

My balls let loose like the clouds had done earlier. Jets of carnal satisfaction erupted from me up into her still-hungry, still-grinding snatch. 

"Uh!" Juliette's eyes and smile flashed as her movements slowed. "Ah! Yes ... there we go." 

I just held on for dear life, still fountaining up inside her, panting and gasping as the white joy gushed. She rolled her hips languidly to coax a few more dwindling expulsions from me. 

"Hmmmm," she purred when my erection finally surrendered and fell still. She rubbed my shoulders and nibbled at my chin. "Good man." 

"Thank you," I said weakly. "You're ... really something, yourself ..." 

"So I've been told." A finger toyed with the hair over my ear. "Know what else I've been told?" 

I shook my head. Her most wicked grin returned. 

"That I'm even better on the second go." 

"Oh good lord." 

Juliette Ravendark laughed, then fell to kissing me again. 

* * * 

I woke to morning sunlight through a window, accompanied by the sounds of birds. For half a second, I thought I'd come out of the dream and now lay in one of Lord Weltfordshire's many guest bedrooms. But the lumpiness of the mattress and close, crude-grained wooden walls dispelled that idea before it could even fully form. 

Where's Juliette? 

Throwing back the covers, I swiveled to sit at the edge of the bed, clearly alone in the tiny room. The ache in my groin brought back flashes of the previous afternoon and evening, when we'd gone at it two more times with such robust, athletic fucking that I'd fallen asleep from exhaustion after my last orgasm. 

My clothes still lay spread on the floor. Juliette's did not. 

I got up and dressed hurriedly - both because the room had gone cold once the fire died, and because my heroine's disappearance half-panicked me. 

Downstairs, the serving girl - Leyna? Lenya? - stood shifting plates of eggs and sausage from a tray on her shoulder to a table between two ample-waisted male travelers. A burly fellow polished the bar from its far side. Otherwise, the room lay empty. 

My nerves made me want to hurry over and ask the bartender where Juliette might be. But the man had a dour look and did his polishing with disagreeable intensity. 

I waited for the girl to finish serving her table. 

"Oh, good morning, sir!" she said when she turned around. Her smile had that deep and genuine quality that would have put me right at ease if the one person I knew in this hallucinatory world hadn't vanished on me. "Can I get you some breakfast?"  

"Have you seen Juliette? The woman I came in with yesterday?" 

"Well, piss my britches," she said, smacking her free palm to her forehead beneath her fine golden bangs. "I'm sorry, I should have remembered and given this to you right off." 

The hand went to her bosom, where I now saw that a folded piece of paper had been tucked through the low neckline over one full, pale breast. She plucked it out and held it toward me with a smile of contrition. 

"Off before dawn, that one! But she wrote this for you and paid your room and board for a week." 

A week? 

I opened the paper up with an unsteady hand. 

"Do you have your letters, then?" Leyna or Lenya asked with a bright-eyed smile. 

"What?" Even as the word came out of my mouth, I realized she was asking whether I could read. "Yes, of course." 

But when I looked down at the page, it wasn't even in English. My mouth must have hung open slightly, because she said, nicely, "You sure, then?" 

I felt my face burning. Fortunately, something occurred to me and I looked again. Sure enough, the alphabet wasn't alien or foreign - it was a runic cipher I'd made up back in high school for my Dungeons and Dragons group. But I hadn't used it in years, not since writing an inscription to go over an ancient tomb in the second Juliette Ravendark book. 

Clearing my throat, I said, "Yes, I can manage." 

"Have a seat for some breakfast while you read it?" 

"Um, sure." 

I found a table by one of the front windows and pulled the fountain pen from my shirt pocket where I'd tucked it the day before. The bold black characters on the page - in a strong but flowing hand - looked entirely familiar, but didn't even begin to translate themselves as I stared. Still ... I could see a signature at the bottom, and a greeting at the top. The letters in those got me started, because the five-letter one had to be mine and the eight-letter one at the end, hers. 

_oo_ mo_nin_, Simon, 

[Short paragraph of gobbledegook] 

Loo_in_ _o_ _ _ _ _ to _not_e_ tum_le _it_ _ou _oon, 

Juliette 

That let me figure out the first and last lines: 

Good morning, Simon, 

[Starting-to-look-less-gobbledegooky paragraph] 

Looking forward to another tumble with you soon, 

Juliette 

By that point, I had seventeen letters to work with. The rest fell into place without too much trouble. 

Good morning, Simon, 

If they're all like you in your far-away land, I'll need directions for a visit sometime! Meantime, I've put my last shilling down to keep you fed and indoors a few days. If I've misjudged the state of your coin purse, sorry, and I'll get the money back from Leyna when I ride back through. My business in Vandestre shouldn't take more than a week, assuming my friend Ymbrod meets me there on time. Be nice if you're still around for me to plumb a few of your mysteries when I return! 

Looking forward to another tumble with you soon, 

Juliette 

Leyna had put a plate of eggs and sausage on the table while I worked, but I suddenly had no appetite at all. Instead, I looked around the room at the two other diners, the gruff-looking bartender, and winsome young Leyna, who'd taken up her broom again to keep the area spick and span. 

I've killed them all. 

This was the start of The Doom of Necromanata. The fourth book in Juliette's series. The opening scene has Juliette show up at a tavern in Vandestre to meet a friend. Her first line is, "Ymbrod! On schedule for once! And thank Ofara, you've already bought the drinks? Brilliant! I spent my last shilling on the ferry across the Elderflow - was betting I'd have to wait on you here with a throat as dry as a Proodlin nun's vagina." 

If Juliette spent her last shilling on my room instead of the ferry, she'd have to take the Cooperdam bridge to cross the Elderflow. If she rode to Cooperdam, that's three hours north and three hours back, and instead of arriving just shy of lunch, she'll get there near nightfall. If she shows up at nightfall, she and Ymbrod will stay over in Vandestre instead of getting in an afternoon's travel today. If they stay over they won't reach Sanderton in the nick of time to save Pelfreyda Lightfingers from being hung on just slightly trumped up charges of larceny. 

If Pelfreyda Lightfingers swings from the gallows, then instead of narrowly escaping the Maze of Dissolving Eyes thanks to her lockpicking skills, the whole group will die a horrible death. 

Dear god ... Juliette, Ymbrod, Pelfreyda, Halvard the Twisted, Mikila Magestone ... all turned to ocular goo by the Maze. Well, not Pelfreyda, she'll be dead from hanging. 

If they die, no one will put together the clues they're supposed to find in the next few days. 

If no one puts together the clues and confronts Necromanata, he'll summon his undead army and finalize his pact with the orcs of Sutherdun. 

If that happens the two armies will sweep across the empire destroying everything in a frenzy of rape and unholy devouring. 

Thanks to me stumbling across Juliette Ravendark in the rain, every decent person in a thousand miles would be enslaved, or dead, or enslaved and then dead, or enslaved and then dead and then undead, within about six months. 

I had no clue how to do anything about it, especially considering my assets consisted of the clothes on my back, a week's room and board ... 

And a pen.



The Inn Ch. 02



The story so far: While a guest at an English nobleman's manor, author Simon Kettridge finds himself transported to the magical realm of Phaeland, where his heroine Juliette Ravendark nearly tramples him under the hooves of her horse. After a quick ride through pouring rain, they reach a nearby village, get a room, and have crazed sex like nothing in Simon's real world. In the morning, though, Juliette has gone, leaving a written message that makes him realize he's bumbled across he path at just the wrong time, and thrown the entire plot of the novel into ruins. 

* * * 

I read the note from Juliette again. I remembered her laughing and looming above me, dark skin bright with sweat, body a temple to glorious passion. I looked around the common room. My mind painted it over with fire and ash and blood, demons pulling the head off the big, grim-faced bartender, a gang of orcs holding sweet blonde Leyna down and – 

Fuck! There has to be something I can do. I invented this whole fucking world. It's exactly like I imagined and wrote it. I – 

Looking at the sleek, cobalt-and-gold pen in my hand, I stopped myself. 

That's right ... I wrote it. 

With a pounding heart and unsteady fingers, I leaned back over the page before me and scrawled, "As fate would have it, under the mattress of the bed Simon had so recently left, there rested a magical ring of teleportation, hidden there by none other than Krezikren the Mileblinker." Then I capped the pen, pocketed it, and jumped up to climb the stairs, note fluttering in my hand. 

At the third room on the left, I threw open the door. There stood the still-rumpled bed on which Juliette and I had screwed and screwed and come and laughed the night before. With a tight chest, I yanked up the mattress – a heavy, floppy thing that didn't want to cooperate with my search. Heaving at it, moving a bit, heaving some more, leaning in, peering, squinting because the light wasn't the greatest, and gritting my teeth harder and harder, I went over every inch of the frame and the slats and the sheets that someone – Leyna the serving girl, I presumed – had carefully tucked under the lumpy, thick bedding. 

Zilch. Absolutely nothing. Certainly no magical ring that would let me teleport ahead of Juliette and tell her that she had to get to Vandestre by lunchtime, or the legions of Necromanata would devour the empire and all the Western Reaches in two or three seasons' time. 

"Fuck." 

I sat heavily to the floorboards and stared at the bed with its sweat-and-sex stains from the marathon of heavenly fucking I'd had with Juliette Ravendark the night before. 

Juliette Ravendark, skin like rich loam with lighter tracings of scars along her limbs powerful and commanding atop me, kissing, coaxing, rousing me from my first orgasm to the sound of light rain on the rooftop and the crackling of the fire. 

Juliette Ravendark, feeling me stiffen and swell again inside her, pulling up from our kiss to show gleeful, pure white teeth and then flick her tongue against them. 

"Is that a request for seconds I feel?" she'd asked, wiggling her hips to tease a moan from me. 

"Uh-huh," was the best I could manage. 

"Good. Let's roll over and let me see how you run things from the top side of the saddle." 

Without waiting for an answer, she hooked an arm around beneath my back and an ankle in under my left thigh, then raised and flipped us both so I was on top. 

Holy shit, this woman's strong, I thought. Working up my courage, I tried to pull back for my first stroke as the one in control, only to find that her other leg had encircled me too, and her arm hadn't loosened by a millimeter, and I had all the freedom of a mouse in the coils of a python. 

Juliette grinned up at me, lifting my stomach with her abs as she breathed, crushing the full swells of her breasts against my pectorals. 

"Do you want the reins, Simon?" she asked mischievously. "Will you ply this filly's rump with your whip, bring her to a gallop until she's spent? Or would you rather let her take you where she likes and just enjoy the ride?" 

If the squeeze of her vagina hadn't been just as tight as that of her legs and arm, my ego might have spent a few moments struggling with that challenge – take her dare and be the one in control trying to please her? Or surrender to her will and leave her in charge even though I was on top? But the power of those cunt muscles and the laughter in her eyes told me she had me where she wanted me no matter how I answered the question. So I answered it the only way that would truly pick up her dropped gauntlet. 

"Let's not play games, Juliette," I said. "We both know it's up to you. Do you want me to be your partner in this, or your plaything? I'll enjoy it either way, so take your pick and let's get going." 

Her grin went to an easier smile, and her eyes roamed my face a moment as though seeing something to respect there. 

"Let's do play games, Simon," she replied quietly, her muscles melting from vice-tight to gossamer all around me. "Let's." 

"Hmn," I said, not yet moving. The feel of Juliette Ravendark, gentle and waiting beneath me, made me burn with power like I'd never known before. 

Leaning in, I brushed my lips to hers, felt her breath, watched her eyes close with sublime anticipation. When the kiss began, it was my mouth touching and inviting, hers responding and welcoming. I dipped my tongue beyond her lips, tipped my pelvis just enough to shift glossily within her, and got a subtle, throaty hum as my reward. The tip of her tongue danced with mine, beckoning it deeper. One foot tilted to run its arch and toes along the back of my thigh. 

Paradise. 

I rolled my lower spine. She made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sigh. A wave of pressure swept through the vaginal flesh around my shaft. 

"Yes," she whispered. "More." 

Kissing her harder, I worked my hips to pull back for a long, slow stroke, push in for a firm, circling grind. Her mound pressed hungrily against me in reply, the mouth of her cunt suckling wetly at my root. 

"Ahh, Juli," I breathed, moving my lips to the corner of her jaw where the hot pulse of life beat quick and passionate beneath the skin. Her hand went up to the nape of my neck, forearm deliciously gracing my spine between the shoulder blades. Her other hand appeared at my waist, slipped around to the small of my back, drove lower and tighter to glide the middle finger down the valley between my buttocks, then grabbed and squeezed my ass-cheek in wide-spread, powerful fingers. With urging heels and that clutching grasp, she asked me to fuck her for real, and I answered with a lunging thrust that made her coo. 

I'd made this woman perfect – perfect at everything – and now that I probed fully into her depths, she was teaching me what perfection meant. 

"Faster, Simon," she murmured, her hips speaking need with their rhythmic, questing twists. "Aim higher and loose your bolt inside me." 

"Uhhhh," I groaned, lost in wet pleasure, sharpening my pace, feeling her accelerate with me. "Juliette ..." 

The slick, splendid tides of our lovemaking rose higher. We moved in waves, in resonant, fluid compressions and expanses. A hot wind drove us toward a distant, golden shore where we would inevitably crest and then crash into foam, but for now we rode a whole ocean of sex together. 

"Nnggghhh ... Simonnn ..." 

"Uh! God, Jul –" 

Her physical might took hold of us both, urgent instinct telling her muscles what to do, where to grasp, how to squeeze, when to flex, where to extend. I focused on riding the loop of her cycling, arching passion – pushing in when I could, holding tight where I had to, keeping my mouth on hers whenever the rush of our breaths would allow it. The intensity with which her snatch milked my cock electrified my viscera from belly to brain. 

A beast stirred within my groin – a creature of fire and relentless inertia. It woke itself in heat and ecstasy as I heard the catch and conflagration in Juliette's panting breath. 

"Uh! UH! AH!" she cried in a voice that lured the beast ever up from its sleep. Her body threw itself off the mattress against me, dark arms and legs a cage to shape me to the bow of her form. Stuck as high within her coruscating, orgasmic cunt as it would go, my dick beheld the brim of heaven as the beast in its foundations roared to life. 

"FUCK!" 

An infernal blaze of pleasure burst from my nuts and coursed out like wildfire through my shaft. The sculpted, titanic curve of Juliette's body shook beneath me with her furious rapture, receiving insatiably every gush of cum I expelled as climax spiraled up and through and out of me. I spouted and spurted and blurted myself down to a trickle, and she finally collapsed and dropped us both back to the sheets. 

"You all right? Need me to change the linens?" 

The unexpected voice lurched me back to reality (reality?), my ass on the floor, the empty bed in front of me. 

In the open doorway stood Leyna, her clean, fresh expression shaped into a look of concern. 

"You didn't touch your breakfast. Did something put you off it?" 

I looked up at her a moment – the bobbed blonde hair, the innocent empathy in her blue-eyed gaze, the youthful luxury of her figure, the simple, plain blue of her dress. 

This can't happen, I thought. Juliette can't die. This girl can't be ripped to bloody fragments by Necromanata's hordes. 

But what could I do about it? 

My stomach grumbled. 

Eat breakfast, for starters, I thought. Getting my feet under me, I stood up and brushed my hands on my pants. 

"Sorry," I told the pretty young woman at the door. "I had an idea and came up here to think it through." 

"On the floor, staring at the bed?" Her eyebrows went up, but the smile on her full, pink lips stayed cheery. "You're a bit of a strange one, aren't you?" 

"I suppose I am. Is my plate still on the table downstairs?" 

"Unless Burgham's cleared it away. And he's not much on clearing tables, Burgham." 

"All right. I'll go and get to it, then." 

"And the linens?" 

None of this could really be happening. Except that it was happening. And at the moment, I couldn't stand the thought of returning to this room and finding everything in order, the bed neatly made and fresh, all evidence of Juliette and our hours of passion erased. 

So ... what? Are you going to come back here later today or crawl into bed tonight and curl up with the stale smell of sex and sweat as company? I tried to work up enough shame to make a bold answer to that. But what I thought instead was, Yeah. Maybe. 

I sighed and told Leyna, "Just leave them for now." 

Then I went downstairs to eat. 

* * * 

My plate had gone cold on the table where I'd been sitting before. Slumping into the chair in front of it, I forced myself to take the fork up and shovel a few mouthfuls of clammy scrambled eggs down my throat. 

These were probably pretty good ten or fifteen minutes ago, I thought. Instead of taking another bite, though, I just stirred the remnants around on the plate. Right, like Juliette was really good eight or ten hours ago. And thanks to me, not long from now she'll be cold goo too. 

If my trick with the pen had worked, this would be the best day of my life. I could take the enchanted ring I'd written into existence, teleport ahead of Juliette on the road, and magically whisk her to Vandestre in plenty of time for her rendezvous with Ymbrod. Hell, I knew the whole rest of the novel's plot – I could use my new-made wizard's ring to throw in with my characters and shave days or weeks off their hard-fought battles and near-fatal perils. We could skip the Maze of Dissolving Eyes entirely, bounce ahead to Arvenon's Pavilion, avoid the landslide in the mountain pass between Skarpendus and the Hadaccerin Wastes ... 

But it didn't work, Simon. I sighed and had another robotic swallow of eggs. And there's no horse in town fast enough to catch me up with Juliette before she heads north to Cooperdam, so Pelfreyda will hang and everyone else in the group will be stuck in the Maze to get liquefied. 

There literally was nothing I could do. I knew exactly how the characters could survive the dangers ahead of them, but I had no way to communicate any of it. The amazing hero who last night had become a real and amazing woman to me was headed for unavoidable death. 

If I could get myself to wake up, it'd be a snap to fix. Just write a sequel where some clever new hero learns the Maze of Dissolving Eyes doesn't kill you when it turns you to ocular sludge. It ... what does it do instead? Maybe it just spreads your matter out into a viscous matrix of suspended animation. Then the right magic could pull you back out later. 

Out of old habit, I uncapped my pen, flattened Juliette's letter on the tabletop, and dispiritedly scratched out some notes about the idea. Why? I thought after a sentence or two. It's not like I'm going to have this paper when I wake up. And if I wake up, then it was just a dream, right? 

I put the pen back down and took hold of my fork again – then realized that someone had come up to the table while I made my notes. 

The grey-bearded fellow in robes from the day before. The one who'd been reading by that magical light. 

"You wouldn't happen to be a scribe, would you, lad?" he asked. When I glanced up at him, he didn't look like much of a wizard – rheumy old eyes of dull brown, a bit of his breakfast still in his moustache. 

But maybe he is. Maybe he could ... I realized he'd just asked me a question. 

"Um – a scribe?" I certainly didn't want to say no and have him turn and walk off. "I guess you might say that." Not really a lie; I earn my living by writing. 

He raised an aged, knob-knuckled hand and worked the fingers creakily. "What do you charge a page? I've got a twenty-page disquisition I need five copies of before the imperial post comes through tomorrow, and the cold's got in the bones of my hand too bad for me to write them out myself." 

"If there's any way you could get me to the Elderflow ferry in the next hour or two," I said, feeling my chest tighten with nervous hope, "I'd be glad to write them out for free." 

He had that magic light. He's got to be some kind of magician. Come on, please ... 

But the furzy grey eyebrows just dropped in a scowl and his throat cleared with a rattle of phlegm. "If I could manage a trick like that, I wouldn't need the post to carry my missives, would I?" 

Hope cooled like the gelid heap of eggs on my plate. 

"Sorry," I said. "I saw you with some kind of magical light yesterday, and –" 

"Phffgh. Knowing a couple of minor hexes doesn't make me an arch-mage, son." 

"Yes, but I really need to –" 

"Look," he growled, "do you want to earn a few coins scribing for me or not? I don't have time to stand around all day educating you on the subject of wizardry, which you obviously know even less about than I do." 

I shut my mouth. Clearly, this guy wasn't getting me to Vandestre. Why couldn't I have written The Doom of Necromanata with a prologue of Juliette encountering a kindly magician in Piperville on her way to meet Ymbrod? 

"Wel-lll?" He drew it out into several impatient syllables. 

My brain turned over a couple of polite ways to decline before realizing I had nothing better to do and shouldn't really be turning down employment, given my penniless state and the fact that Juliette's charitable shilling would run out in a week and leave me on the street. 

Although it might be better to starve in the gutter now than hang around until Necromanata's horde's arrive. 

"Sure," I said, after contemplating how much I hated it when my stomach got hungry enough to growl. "Of course." 

When this earned me an exasperated glower, I realized I still hadn't answered the critical question of how much I would charge a page. How much would a scribe earn here? I'd always been a bit vague on pricing things in the books because Juliette and her larger-than-life associates had more money than any common person would know what to do with. (Hence her willingness to hand the ferryman a whole shilling and not ask for change, even though a shilling clearly represented a whole week's food and lodging.) Twenty pages ... that's an hour or two. Times five copies means probably eight or ten hours of writing before the mail carrier comes tomorrow. Could I ask a week's living expenses for a day's work? It is skilled labor ... 

"What say a penny for two pages?" I asked, hoping I wasn't lowballing myself or asking the outrageous. "So, a shilling-and-a-quarter for the whole job?" 

The man mulled for a moment, but only a moment, which told me I'd probably gauged about right. 

"Done," he said, holding out a hand. "Galufrand of Gattington ... though lately I'm more inclined to say Galufrand the Gouty." 

"Oh ... well ... sorry to hear that. I'm Simon. Simon Kettridge." 

"Don't be too sorry. I travel by foot –" he lifted one leg cumbersomely "– and if my gout weren't acting up, I'd have left town last week and you wouldn't be earning your tidy sum. I'll bring the disquisition down from my room in a trice. You have your own paper?" 

I shook my head, remembering the journal I'd lost track of tripping into the mud. "I lost my supply in the storm yesterday." 

"Well, I'm already well stocked, so I don't suppose I'll dock you for using mine. But assuming you do a good job and you're interested in scribing next week's copies, I'll expect you to provide your own materials if I'm paying a hafpenny a page."  

"Of course," I said, blinking. 

"Right, then. Back in a hare's hop." 

Galufrand turned and moved off with more of a slow limp than any kind of hop. I watched him get halfway to the stairs before I went back to my eggs. 

The room had taken a strange lurch somewhere in that conversation – I couldn't quite put my finger on what the change was. But some of the grimness had faded. From the sun getting higher? Had some clouds cleared away outside? 

No, you're just not going to be out in the street come next week. 

I scraped up the last of my eggs, not sure why I felt any better. I was set for two weeks now. And if Galufrand liked my work, it sounded as if I might have a steady job – at least until his gout calmed down and he left town. But ... Necromanata. This was all just prolonging the agony, wasn't it? 

And then it hit me. I'm feeling better because I'm actually in the fucking Phaeland Empire. Whatever the hell this is, it's not a dream, and I'm apparently not expecting to wake up. I'm living in the Phaeland Empire, and I have a skill I can earn a living with, and ... 

The imperial post was coming through town tomorrow. 

I didn't have a ring of teleportation. I didn't have a band of epic adventurers to help me take down Necromanata. But I had something no one else in Phaeland could even imagine. 

I knew exactly how The Doom of Necromanata would play out. I'd outlined and drafted and revised and re-revised it. I knew the Mortuary Mage's plan, and his timetable. I knew where to find all the pieces needed to stop him. I knew the future. And not just one novel's worth – I'd written five whole books after this one. I'd filled dozens of notebooks with a comprehensive understanding of the politics and history of this land, and published about a million words' worth of plot twists, hidden treasures, Phaeland social structures, and skeletons in the closets of aristocrats and wizards alike. 




The Inn Ch. 02



The Imperial Mail is quick and reliable here. With a few good letters, I can blackmail or finagle or bait any number of heroes or plutocrats or master thieves into doing the things Juliette was supposed to do with the help of her friends. I can stop Necromanata from right here, if I work it correctly. 

But the thought of Juliette made a dash of gloom sneak back into the air. Even if I could do all that, it wouldn't prevent her and the rest of my favorite characters from meeting a horrible end in the Maze. 

No, it won't. But Phaeland is crawling with arch-magi who know how to traverse the planes of existence. All I have to do, once I've figured out how to outfox Necromanata, is play on all the secrets I know, pile up enough money to hire a master sorcerer, and get myself home. Then I write that sequel where it turns out the Maze of Dissolving Eyes is survivable. 

I finished my eggs and got out my pen. Turning Juliette's note over, I started a list. 

vault of the Golden Temple 

Queen Freymara's Catacombs 

Vark's Sword – still hidden under those floorboards until book seven 

Tome of the Hidden Lands in Auurmithian Library 

Duke Phurl – three mistresses, angry wife 

Hireable Hal 

the Folded Im 

"Well, you're looking a sight more cheerful! Take your plate?" 

Apparently it was my day to get crept up on while writing. Leyna stood at the table's edge, the swells of her cleavage right at eye level when I turned my head. I lifted my eyes to her face hastily, feeling my cheeks redden. If my look at her tits bothered her, though, it didn't show – she gave me that pretty, open smile and waited for me to answer. 

"Sure. Yes, I'm done," I said, pushing the tin plate her direction. She picked it up with both hands and wiggled it slightly, still watching me. 

"You and Galufrand hitting it off, then?" she asked, blue eyes lively and thoughtful. 

I tapped my pen to the paper. "Apparently. He needs some document scribed several times over and saw that I'm handy with a pen." 

She laughed. "That fellow and his books and papers! Is he paying you?" 

"Thankfully," I said, nodding. "It looks like you won't have to turn me out when my shilling is up next week." 

For some reason that put a slight crease in her brow, though it didn't dent her smile. "But ... I thought Juliette said she'd be back in a week. Aren't the two of you ...?" 

Now my whole face went hot with embarrassment. "Oh. Um, well, we –" 

The crease disappeared, and Leyna's fingers touched my shoulder reassuringly, for just a moment. "It's all right. Don't worry over it. I didn't mean to put any shame on you." 

"Thanks," I said. Her smile, sympathetic and bright, smoothed away the awkwardness. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure she won't be coming back this direction. But I'm not going to let it get me down." 

"There you have it!" She tapped the plate's edge to the table, once, and stepped away with her body half-turned. "Let me know if you need anything else." 

"I will," I said. Then, before she'd gotten halfway across the room, I called out, "Leyna." 

She pirouetted neatly at the sound of her name. "Yes?" 

"I've changed my mind about those sheets." Things had turned a corner. I wouldn't be cringing under the covers tonight, sniffing for comfort in yesterday's cum stains. "Could you put on a new set when you have a chance?" 

"Indeed I could!" she said, and then skipped off to deliver my dirty plate to the kitchen. 

* * * 

Galufrand dropped off my work a few minutes later, and I spent the rest of the morning and all afternoon making copies of a dense treatise that was half herbalism and half philosophy and all extremely sloppy bird-scratch, written in my runic alphabet besides. The process absorbed me – having to puzzle out the eccentric handwriting, translate as I went, and keep my own penmanship neat enough to earn me more work down the road. Leyna appeared humming from the back of the inn and made her way upstairs, carrying an armload of linens. A bit later she came back down with the dirty ones, still cheerful and bustling. Townfolk wandered in for lunch, were served by Leyna or Burgham, and wandered out again. My own midday meal consisted of stew and bread, which I ate left-handed so I could keep writing. 

By dinnertime, I found myself beyond grateful for Lord Weltfordshire's heirloom pen. You can't write for that many hours without your fingers starting to ache or develop indentations, but the glossy blue barrel of that fountain pen fit so comfortably in my grasp that I got through three of the five copies I had to do before any real discomfort showed up. And after a break for sausage and porridge, I managed a fourth without crippling my hand. 

Capping my pen to call it a night, I found the evening crowd had thinned out, leaving just a few patrons at the bar and a table of card players. Leyna stood chatting at the base of the stairs with some middle-aged fellow who had a mercantile look to him. I tapped my papers square and rose to head up to my room. 

But when I came abreast of the merchant and the inn's nubile blonde serving girl, I heard her chipper voice say, "... 'll be tuppence a blow, a fiver a go, or ten for the whole night." 

The words stopped me like a conk on the head. Was I really hearing ...? Leyna gave me a perfectly innocent smile and a winkling-fingered wave, then returned her attention to the man, who worked at his beard with a thumb and forefinger like someone about to haggle. He opened his mouth, then shut it and gave me a glare when he realized I'd come to a gawking halt in front of them. 

"D'you mind?" he asked bristlingly. "I'm trying to buy this girl a locketful." 

"Sorry, my apologies – excuse me, please," I said, jerking my gaze away and hurrying past. I couldn't believe it ... sweet, amiable Leyna, selling herself by the copper piece to passers-by? 

"Beds here aren't well-sized for two," came the merchant's voice as I continued up the staircase. "So just a tumble will suit me. I'd be happier paying four than five, though." 

"Four will get my skirts up," Leyna replied brightly, "but I don't unlace my bodice for less than five. Too much time and effort." 

The man said something back to her, but I'd reached the second floor and turned the corner, where my footfalls on the wood floor were enough to cover the receding sound of their conversation. 

Four pence to fuck her! I thought as I turned my key in the lock. It sounded so cheap and sleazy. But as I shut the door behind myself, the man's phrase came back to me: I'm trying to buy this girl a locketful. 

A locketful of purity oil – the magic fluid people in this world used to fend off pregnancy and venereal disease. Phaeland isn't Earth, I reminded myself. They've got perfect protection, and there's practically no sexism or sexual neurosis to be found. I'd written the place that way. It shouldn't shock me to see it in action. 

As I put Galufrand's painfully dense disquisition on the room's tiny desk, I shook my head, uncertain whether to feel pleased with myself for creating a world of largely uninhibited, entirely safe sex – or guilty over setting that pretty young blonde up to whore herself. 

And then I heard footsteps and Leyna's laugh pass by outside my door. 

That's not an act, I thought. She's perfectly happy to be earning some extra money and having a good time in the sack while at it. 

I knew how this worked – I'd written a number of brothel scenes into the Juliette Ravendark books, and there was that temple of holy prostitutes I'd thrown in after reading up on ancient Corinth. But somehow I still fought against the idea of it being perfectly within social convention for people to trade sex for money. 

No, I realized. It's not people trading sex for money that I'm fighting against, is it? It's Leyna trading – 

Through the wood-paneled wall that the bed butted up against, I heard a door shut, and then more of Leyna's laughter. 

Oh shit. They're right next door. 

I looked around the room. Fuck. This isn't like staying at the Hilton for a convention or a book tour. I'd come upstairs just like I would have after any long day on an out-of-town trip. But medieval inns didn't have mini-bars or a television to turn on. Leyna and the bearded traveling peddler were about to do the nasty on the other side of an obviously thin wall, and I had nothing to cover the noise or even distract myself from it. From my spot by the desk, I could hear every third or fourth word either of them said. Once they got going, there'd be no ignoring it. 

Should I go back downstairs? 

Unbidden, the thought came to me: If the walls are this thin – anybody in the rooms to either side or walking down the hall must have gotten an earful when Juliette and I were banging away yesterday. 

And then another thought: Overhearing your neighbors is like the hotel-room porn channel in a place like this. 

Leyna's curvaceous figure and smooth, pale neck and the mounded-up bounty of her bosom in that low-cut blue dress all came back to me. My mouth went dry. 

Would she think I was a total creep for eavesdropping on them? 

Of course she wouldn't. She knew this inn. She worked here. She knew which room was mine. She knew I'd just come upstairs. So she had to know I was going to hear it if they got noisy next door. 

And she didn't care. 

It's the kind of place this is, dude. You invented it. 

I walked quietly over to the wall that held my fireplace in one corner and the head of my bed in the other. I couldn't hear clothes being shucked or belts being unbuckled, but I could mostly hear the merchant's voice as he undressed. 

"... fine lush fruit you are, lass," he said. "Damn it ... at extra pence for ... look at your teats ... sounding more and more worth it!" 

Leyna laughed again. "I've been told they're cheap at the price." 

"Oh, by Kethera's sculpted clit, then! Five pence it is." 

"I'll start unlacing." 

An image popped into my head: her dainty, smooth fingers ticking their way up the bustier-style front of her dress to the bow-knot at the top. 

"So what do I call you, good sir?" she asked. 

"Turrup," he said. "I suppose some friends say 'Turry,' but my wife does too, so ... Turrup would be better." 

"Haha, but what would be better than 'Turrup?' I didn't ask your name. I meant, what would you like to be called." 

"Oh. Ehr ... well ... I mean, Turrup is fine." 

"Aha! There's something else, though, isn't there? I can hear it plain as day. What do you really want me to say – in the throes?" 

He left a long pause, then said, "I ... have this niece, Cossy. And I'd never touch her, mind you, even if she weren't married. But ... she's grown so full and womanly these last few years, and she looks a bit like you, so ... 'Uncle.'" Something solidified in his voice, and when he spoke again, he sounded surer. And pleased with himself. "There, that's what I want to hear. 'Uncle.'" 

"Uncle it is! So how would you like me, Uncle? On my back, or on-the-knees, bitch-in-heat-wise?" 

The verve in her voice made me swallow. I sat quietly on the edge of the bed where I could lean in against the wall. It felt dirty and sordid and sneaky in the most cock-engorging possible way. I could hear everything. They were about to fuck. My chest seemed to forget how to breathe. 

"On your back, if you please," Turrup said. 

"Oh, I do please. Promise! And look, these laces are done." 

"Lords of laying!" he swore. "They're magnificent!" 

"Thank you! Worth the penny, would you say?" 

"Let me touch them. Oh yes, best I ever spent." 

"Here then, Uncle. Come and bed your favorite niece." God, Leyna! So nasty! 

A creak came through the wall then, a gentle one, and I imagined that beautiful young golden-haired woman, easing herself to the mattress, breasts bare as she gathered her skirts toward her waist. 

"Ahh, these legs! There's so much more to them with the skirts up! And they're like silk!" 

Leyna responded in a voice low and sultry and coy all at once. "And what should I do with them, Uncle?" 

"Spread them, Cossy." The merchant had a fire in him now. "Be a good girl and spread your legs for Uncle." 

"Like this?" 

"Sweet Saint Eldava, that's a sight. Wider, though, dear girl." 

"Like this?" 

"Gods ... your slit looks like the valley of the heavens." 

"And the lowlands are well soaked, Uncle. So why don't you nestle in here and stob that stick in my muck?" 

Jesus. 

Their bed made a sharp, woody gasp at Turrup's weight. 

"Oh, Cossy. You're so ... this is ... I mean I ..." After a clearing of his throat, he finally got out, "Are you ready?" 

"I'm aching for the taking, Uncle Turrup. Please. Now. Take me." 

"UH!" 

"Oooh! Uncle ... Uncle, yes! Uhhhhnncllle ..." 

I said 'uncle' too, and undid my pants at last. I tried to shift quietly to get them down and let my hard-on loose, but a bang of Turrup's headboard against my wall said I had no need for stealth. 

"Fuck!" cried the merchant. "Cossy, this cunt!" 

"Oh, Uncle, you're so big in me. It's like an ox pizzle ... yes ... Uncle, bull me like I'm a heiffer!" 

The knob of my dick had precum all over it, slippery and shining with voyeuristic lust. 

"Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh, girl!" With every grunt, Turrup hammered their bedframe to the wall. I smeared the slick leakage all over my shaft and stroked it in time to his thrusts – eyes closed, brain on fire with images of ripe young Leyna getting stuffed full of cock. 

"Plow me, Uncle! Oh, till me with it, till me ..." 

I could hear the catch in her voice, hear her groans beneath his grunting. If she was faking it, she belonged in a theater somewhere, not hoisting her legs in the lumpy beds of a country inn. That's not acting, I told myself as each firm pump of my hand seemed to coax out her gasps. She's really enjoying herself. 

And of course, the merchant was too. "NGHH! Cossy! Oh, my fine little Cossy! Uncle's about to burst!" 

Not yet, you bastard! I'm not close enough! 

"Oh, yes, Uncle! But slow down, slow down – I'm almost ready – let's meet the cusp together ..." 

"Cossy – ahgh – it's so good ..." 

"Uncle, not yet! Don't you want to please your little niece?" 

"Huhhnnnn ..." The shaking clatter of wood against wood paused, and then a slower, softer song of bed-squeaks followed. "I do, Cossy. Show Uncle what a man he is. What a tool he has." 

"Yessss ... Uncle, work it in me like that ..." 

Oh, thank you, sweet Leyna. My cock responded to the rumble in her voice and the pumping of my hand. Their rhythm fell gentle but steady. Her moans came in time to the sighing of the bed-frame, swelling and easing and swelling and easing until my balls felt lit-up and brimming with eager seed. 

"Oh, Uncle ... more ... more ..." 

Yes, Uncle Turrup, give it to her. Somehow, instead of jealousy, I felt an immense gratitude toward the merchant as the two of them humped louder and orgasm roused itself deep in my groin. Give her that cock. Make her cum for me ... 

"Uhhh, Cossy ... I can't ... not much longer ..." 

"I'm there, Uncle – I'm there! Oh, gods of delight, Uncle, fuck your spew into me!" 

"Ah! Yes! Cossy!" 

Three hard slams rang against the wall, the last one powerful enough to shake my bed too. I whacked with steam-engine heat and speed, precum flowing in gobs, the flesh of my shaft thickening, flaring ... 

"UHHH!!" 

"Ooooohhhh!!" 

Fuck! 

The train of my orgasm arrived and gouted in streamers past my knees and my lowered trousers to spatter the wood-grained floor. I had to grit my teeth to keep from crying out along with the couple next door. How well I succeeded I'll never know, but the orgiastic clash of Turrup's voice against Leyna's doubtless covered any whimpers or groans that got past me. 

My dick throbbed and gushed. The wall beside me trembled in time to the lowering vocals of climax on its other side. A few final moans paired up with the last dribbles of semen I let out on the edge of the mattress. 

"Pearls and diamonds, girl," Turrup gasped from the other room. "I've never had a fuck like that." 

"Thank you," Leyna giggled. "It's nice to have my talent's noticed ... although I'm guessing Cossy gets a smidgen of the credit too." 

"Oh, gods, don't say that," the merchant replied. "If I allow that she might be as good as you, I'll end up sneaking past her husband and making a total ass of myself sometime." 

"Well, I hope her husband's as good for her as you were for me just now. A well-wielded prong does make sluttery a joy. Sure you don't want to throw in the extra five to make it a night?" 

"Gah. What I want and what I can afford's two different things. I'm to be up by dawn tomorrow and headed for Umbleshire, and thanks to those wondrous breasts of yours, I'm already a penny over budget here in Piperville." 

Leyna laughed once more, then gave what sounded like a large and wet kiss. "Up and off me, then, dear Uncle. I must douche and get myself to bed as well. Burgham's cross if I'm not downstairs ahead of the first breakfaster of the day." 

I heard him sigh, followed by more creaks of their mattress and bed. 

Then Turrup said, "Can I touch those once more before you put them away?" 

"Of course!" 

They both went soundless, so that I could only imagine him fondling her, staring down at her plentiful rack in his hands. 

"Marvelous ..." 

"Well, keep them in mind for the next time you're back in town – and plan a bigger budget!" 

"Yes ... yes, I'll do that." 

She laced back up in silence, and then I heard the sound of the door, followed by a head dropping heavily into a pillow beyond the wall. 

I felt lucky I didn't have five pence to spare ... because I'd probably have stumbled to the door pants-down and made an idiot of myself propositioning her if I had the money. 

Would I really? I wondered. She seemed so happy and nice. Would I really buy a trip between her legs if I had the chance? 

One thing seemed certain: if I stayed long enough, and Galufrand paid me well enough, I would probably find out the answer to that question.



The Inn Ch. 03



The story so far: Transported into the magical realms of his own fantasy novels, author Simon Kettridge accidentally detours his epic heroine, Juliette Ravendark, from the plot lines she's supposed to follow, creating a chain of events that will ensure her death and allow the dread arch-mage Necromanata to subjugate the entire world. With no way to contact Juliette and warn her, Simon is stuck at the Nestled Goose, a small-town inn where his only allies are a serving wench who moonlights as a prostitute, and a gouty old sage who hires Simon to scribe interminable copies of philosophical treatises. The only hope he can think of is to use his knowledge of this world and of the plots of his books to manipulate events through a few carefully planned letters, which he hopes can reach the right hands in time ... 

* * * 

I made it through the fifth copy of Galufrand's disquisition shortly after breakfast, at which point I turned to writing letters of my own. An evening to think on it had fired my imagination, so that I had to force myself to slow down, word things just right, and establish the proper level of credibility. 

Who could manage the same feats I'd written for Juliette and Ymbrod in The Doom of Necromanata? Who could fill Pelfreyda's shoes, Halvard's, and Mikila's? I realized I didn't need a Halvard substitute -- he mostly played the part of rescue-bait in this adventure, being the one whose stumble led them into the Maze of Dissolving Eyes, and then later getting himself captured by Necromanata's orcish allies. He redeemed himself in the next book, but he was mostly a putz in this one, the other characters ribbing him about it to provide comic relief. 

Pondering the group's talents and arsenal of magic items, then plotting out the straightest course through Doom of ...'s various dangers and detours, I arrived at a short list. Then I penned a half-dozen letters: one to a mage in the Kvarthian Isles, two to the imperial capital of Phaeratos, a couple to some dwarven undertowns, and one to Armasqua on the distant Worldedge Cliffs. 

Galufrand came along as I was writing, and I handed off the work I'd done for him. 

"Hmm." His nose twitched back and forth as he paged through the copies, but at length he nodded and said, "Fair enough. It's a bit of an odd style, but legible, and very neatly blotted, I must say. Well ahead of the post's arrival, too." 

With that, he handed over four silver quarter-shilling pieces and ten copper pence. "I'll have my next paper complete in four or five days' time. That one's going out to six colleagues instead of five. Will you be interested in doing the hexicate on it?" 

Hexi -- right, as in duplicate, but six times. 

"Definitely," I said. "And about the post ... I'm working on some letters of my own here, but I'll need envelopes. Did you bring yours with you, or could I get some here in town?" 

"I have my own," he said. "But there's a sundries shop right across the street. Haven't even poked your head out of the inn since you got here?" 

Trying not to bristle, I pointed at the pages I'd given him and said, "I had a thing or two preoccupying me." 

"Fair point," he admitted. "Well, you've time and money now, so good shopping to you." 

With that, he nodded and trundled off, leaving me to finish my letters. 

At the shop across the way, I discovered that "envelopes" meant broad sheets of parchment that you could fold yourself and seal with melted wax. A dozen sheets, along with a kit for melting and pressing the wax, cost a pretty penny -- or ten, to be more precise. Unbidden, some gonadal region of my brain said that was the same as paying Leyna to fuck her twice. 

God, I hope I don't start translating every single expense into a sex-with-Leyna equivalent. 

As if to rub it in, while shelling my money out to the old beanpole of a shopkeeper at the counter, I happened to notice a set of bottles labeled "Purity Oil" on a shelf behind her. Don't even ask, I told myself. You're not going to 'buy Leyna a locketful' anytime soon. There's a fucking empire to save from about a million zombies and orcs. 

"Women and shop masters have an eye for reading a man's gaze," said the white-haired merchant as she took my coins. I saw her give a smile and a tweak of the almost-invisible wisps she had for eyebrows. "Something on the wall back there catch your fancy?" 

"Maybe for down the road," I said lamely. Then I cleared my throat. "I'm on a tight budget at the moment." 

She shrugged amiably and thanked me. I left the shop and headed back across the road. 

Without the magnetic figure of Juliette Ravendark to distract me, I took my first good look at the place I'd been staying the last day and a half. "Quaint" or "authentic" might have popped to mind if I'd happened across it in modern-day England near Lord Weltfordshire's estate. But in the context of pleasant young women casually prostituting themselves and an impending horde of orcs and undead, it had a reality that nothing on my trip to England in the "real" world could match -- heavy wooden beams, tan plaster, and a wood-shingled roof too weathered for a tourist place or a constantly maintained historical building. Swinging slightly in the breeze above the door hung the inn's placard -- a rough-painted image of a nesting waterfowl that gave the place its name: the Nestled Goose. 

I've got to do something about those zombies and orcs, I thought, although I admit it was partially to keep myself from thinking, I've got to do Leyna the first chance I get. 

Since a common-room table might not be the best place for folding envelopes and lighting a candle to melt the sealing wax, I took the stairs up toward my room. Leyna rounded the second-floor corner as I climbed, and she passed me with a smile and a "Hello, Simon," in her innocently honeyed voice midway up the steps. 

I said hello back, and tried to tell myself that wasn't a gloss of sweat I saw on her forehead and on the open swell of her bosom within her dress. 

Good lord, Simon. It's not like she spends every hour of the day spreading her legs for whoever happens along with a handful of pennies. If it is sweat, maybe she was just scrubbing a floor upstairs ... or maybe she lugged a pail of hot water up for someone's bath. They have to have some kind of bathing facilities here, don't they? 

Half an hour later, with fingers smarting from drips of hot wax, I went back down to the common room, six self-made envelopes in hand. Thankfully, between the pain of repeatedly burning myself with wax and the aggravation of ruining my first two sheets of parchment, I managed to put my obsession with Leyna's medieval escort services out of mind. 

Downstairs, at a table near the door, Galufrand sat talking to a sharply uniformed individual I hadn't seen before. On a seat next to the stranger rested an oversized satchel, so it didn't take Sherlockian deductive powers to figure out the man's identity. As I headed for the table, Leyna beat me to it and put a tankard down in front of the postman. 

"Capital," he said, giving her a crisp nod and holding up a penny. "I know Burgham won't take money from the mails, but here's a copper for your trouble and lovely smile." 

"Well, thank you very much," Leyna replied with a curtsy. Then she took and pocketed the coin. "Anything else for either of you gentlemen?" 

"This will do," he said, raising the tankard. Galufrand merely shook his head. 

The buxom girl turned, spotted me, and came over with her serving tray tucked under one arm. 

"Oh, so you're a letter-writer as well!" she said, her eyes dancing across the envelopes I held. "Post-corporal Mestzel will have his hands full today." Leaning in with a conspiratorial verve, she added, "You know, someday, I'm going to know people in distant towns too and write the most eagerly awaited letters you could think of." 

"About the goings-on here at the Goose?" 

That made her laugh. "Oh, spurs of Klognar, no! I won't be here at that point. I'm off to Silver City or maybe even Phaeratos once I've made enough for the trip and resettling. The goings-on at the Goose indeed!" 

Watching the lively light in her eyes made me twist through several unexpected emotions. First, surprise that Leyna had ambitions beyond the Nestled Goose and Piperville. Quick on the heels of that, a guilty embarrassment that I'd boxed her in as just a serving girl with a side business whoring. And finally, a kind of warmth mixed with anguish in my chest that said I owed this girl better than I'd been thinking of her, and that more than ever, I needed to find a way to keep Piperville and the rest of the Empire from Necromanata's corpse-fingered clutches. 

"The mail carrier," I said, looking over at the table to break my eyes from her knowing, open gaze, "Post-corporal Mestzel -- should I wait for him and Galufrand to be done before I try to give him these, or ..." 

"Only if you want to wait all through lunch," she said, following my gaze. "Those two will be talking the business of the entire Portleshire-to-Havenwold mail line until it's time for Mestzel to get back on his horse. No, if you've business with the post, just walk up and make your apologies for butting in -- and don't wait for a pause in the chatter -- there's none likely to come." 

"Thanks." I turned back to find her smiling at me, pink lips in a friendly curve that I wondered what I'd done to deserve. Nothing, I told myself. She really is just that nice a girl. "Thank you, Leyna." 

She nodded and spun to make her rounds of the other tables, the room starting to fill up for lunchtime. I watched the energy in her form as she went, the twirl of her blue skirts, the sway of her curves. 

Good God, how could I pay five pence to get myself off humping between the legs of a person like her? A dry hunger in my throat made me feel like a creep. 

I shook my head and walked over to the table where the two men sat conversing. Mestzel slouched easily in his chair like a man who's made a skill of maximizing his limited rest breaks. Galufrand had one foot propped therapeutically in a spare chair, his arms crossed over his rumpled robes as he spoke. 

"So Hartswan's still the librarian there? An incompetent boob like that? Libara's lofty shelves, I can't imagine why the --" 

"Excuse me," I interrupted, trusting to Leyna's advice. "I hate to intrude, but I have some letters to mail." 

The post-corporal shifted slightly, and just like that, his pose was all diligence and business. "Of course. Let me see them and I'll give you the rates. Are they going far?" 

I handed the stack of envelopes to him. "A couple." 

"Armasqua?" he asked, eyebrows raised at the top envelope. He shuffled to the next one. "The Kvarthian Isles! You've a broad acquaintance, haven't you?" 

"I guess you could say that," I replied, less than reassured by the series of expressions he went through with each subsequent address. 

"I guess as well," Mestzel said once he'd finished. "Is your coin purse as broad? It's strangling season in the Noose Woods, so the road through to the dwarfhills is closed until the trees go dormant again. Triples the distance those ones will have to travel. And there's no regular service to Kvarthia. A letter to the Isles requires a dedicated courier -- very expensive." 

I stood blinking. Somehow my brain had not left the world of ten-dollar stamp booklets and three-dollar priority mail. Working up my courage, I asked, "How much?" 

Mestzel spread the letters on the table and tapped each. "Half a shilling, half a shilling, two shillings, a sovereign ... and these to the capital at least a tad cheaper, ten pence apiece." 

My brain filled up with orcish war-horns and the moan and shuffle of undead battallions. I picked up the letters to Armasqua and the Karvathian Isles, both far out of my price range. I tried to think which of the two dwarven undertown letters would do the most good -- or if I should send both and skip the ones to the capital. Nothing came to me. Without Evador the Enchantress or Hireable Hal, my whole plan fell into disarray. 

Then something else occurred to me. 

"And how long will it take those four to arrive?" I asked Mestzel. 

His head tipped one direction and his eyes went the other as he calculated. "Two weeks to Phaeratos, probably a month and a half or two to the undertowns." 

I picked the undertown letters up as well and stuck my hand dazedly in my pocket to search for my quarter-shilling pieces. Necromanata would have almost everything he needed by the time a month and a half went by. 

"Sorry to disappoint, sir," said the postal carrier. "It's no mean feat, I'm afraid, running missives the whole length of the empire." 

"No, of course not," I said, putting down half my remaining money for the only two letters I could afford that would also reach their destinations in time to do any good. With a deep breath, I added, "Thank you. I apologize again for interrupting." 

"No trouble at all, sir," said Mestzel. Galufrand gave an indifferent shrug. 

I took my four unmailed envelopes to a table on the far side of the room to sit and stare at them and think. The letter to Duke Phurl contained an anonymous threat of blackmail, naming his three mistresses and threatening to reveal them to his wife if he didn't deposit a significant sum in a blind account at the Metropolitan Bank of Phaeratos. I knew he was subject to extortion, because the sixth book started off with him hiring Juliette to track down a blackmailer who'd been gouging him for a year. The blind account belonged to Kleburn Mandermorte, a bit of a rapscallion who could be trusted when well paid and had a talent for sneaking into places bare-handed and returning with full pockets. My letter to him revealed the resting place of Vark's Sword, a legendary enchanted weapon I intended for Laluthe the Lumply, one of the two dwarves I'd hoped to mail and a cunning swordswoman. With the money from Phurl, Kleburn would make a quick trip to Cymbelville, burgle the sword from under the floorboards of Vark's unwitting heir, and hold it in the capital for further instructions. 

But what am I going to do with a magic sword and no warrior to wield it? And no Evador to whisk that warrior into Necromanata's keep? And no Hireable Hal to pick the dungeon locks and free Amia the Pristine? Amia's fatal sacrifice played a critical role in Necromanata's plans, and getting her out would buy me another several months while the arch-mage searched for a replacement Pristine. 

Leyna brought me dinner -- stew and a stiff wheat roll, with mint tea to wash it down. 

Halfway to the bottom of the bowl, I noticed a shapely woman about to pass by my table, and my picked-bare brain decided to focus on her as a moment's distraction from my complete void of ideas. 

And when I focused on her, I realized that she wasn't about to pass by my table at all. 

"Can I fall to a seat?" she asked with a smile and a lilting, hollow accent. 

My tongue sat like a fallen log in my mouth, because I had no idea what she was. 

Above a sharp chin, her face rose pale and pinkish -- fading darker toward the ears and hairline. The effect created a kind of scarlet frame for her features, and I didn't think it looked like makeup. Glossy hair swept up from that frame into an asymmetric black ziggurat. Her ears and her eyebrows had a sharp cast like her chin, and the eyes under those brows glittered like a starry night. This exotic face hovered above a high, blood-red collar that perfectly matched her lips -- except that after a moment, I realized she had no collar. The red was the skin of her throat. It swooped down into a satiny purple top, open almost to the navel and full of carmine cleavage. At her waist, a golden sash bound the shirt and accentuated the swell of her belly and hips below it. She wore brown pants to mid-shin, where the skin again went pale. 

Evidently, my helplessly goggling expression pleased her, because her smile widened and she sat down across from me. 

"I hear your way with a nib makes note," she said, eyes sparkling. "I could use a quickly reproduction or two. How much do you charge to fill sheets?" 

"Oh. It's a hafpenny each," I said, thankful to have something to distract me from the smooth, deep red flesh of her throat, which pulled at my gaze as I struggled to stay focused on her pallid face. 

Her eyes went very large. "So very a pittance! Only a hafpenny? In truth?" 

Something began to feel very odd to me. The enthusiasm in her voice, the way she leaned closer across the table, showing still more of the cherry decolletage within her tight, silky top ... 

"Um, sure," I said cautiously. "Is it something unusual you want me to scribe?" 

"Scribe -- this word I do not know." 

"Copy," I explained, pretending to write in the air with my right hand. "Make a reproduction." 

"Yes, really? For a hafpenny you make reproduction with me?" 

"What ... kind of reproduction? Exactly?" 

She neatly circled the thumb and forefinger of one hand -- the palm a cotton-candy pink the back fire-engine red. Then she inserted her other forefinger through. 

With inquiring eyebrows, she asked, "Reproduction, yes?" 

I coughed a little, and had trouble getting a breath in afterwards. "What -- where did you get the idea that I --" 

She looked over her shoulder, to the far side of the room where Leyna stood chatting with a table full of wayfarers. "Serving girl. She gave a high recommendation of your nib-sinking." 

What the hell? 

I rose up almost without thinking, said "Excuse me please," and wove quickly through the tables toward Leyna, who'd apparently finished taking orders from the travelers and now headed toward the bar. 

"Leyna," I said when I caught up to her. 

She turned her head, enthusiasm brightening her expression. "Aha! Simon! Did the welf-woman come to engage you, then? Just a moment." 

I had to wait as she relayed several quick drink orders to Burgham, who glared at me sourly before turning to fill them. Once I had her attention again, I said, "Did you really tell her I was hiring myself out as -- in the bedroom?" 

She looked confused for an instant, then her face fell. "You aren't? But -- when Juliette left, after you and she -- and you said the two of you weren't involved with each other -- well, I assumed a woman who made that much noise and then paid the man's rent and then left without the intention of coming back ..." A hurt look pulled down at the full pink curves of her lips. "I've shamed you. I thought ... but I see in your face, it's not something we have in common at all. It puts you off entirely, doesn't it." 

The disappointment in her voice hit me like a brick-bat of guilt. She wasn't just let down about us not sharing a profession -- she thought I disapproved of it, and by extension, of her. 

I took up her hand without thinking. It felt soft and uncertain in mine. "Look, Leyna ... I don't judge you at all for what you do. I think you're a wonder. I just hadn't ever considered doing it myself." 

Her eyes came up from where they'd fallen, vulnerable and unsure. "Well ... do you want me to go and apologize to her for you? I can tell her it was all my mistake. Only, she's loaded with money, Simon, and I know you're down to pocket-lint. Don't you think she's attractive?" 

I gave an involuntary glance toward the ... welf, Leyna had said? What the hell is a welf? I couldn't for the life of me remember writing anything like that two-toned woman into my books. The sparkly black eyes met mine from across the room and the peaked eyebrows lifted in a question. I looked quickly back to Leyna, suddenly aware that I still had her fingers, warm and gentle, in my hand. 




The Inn Ch. 03



"She's stunning," I said. "Honestly, I'd kill to take her to bed. But ..." 

The rest of my sentence drowned in the earnest blue pools of the serving girl's eyes. I just can't, I'd been about to say. And why exactly couldn't I? 

"Hey," growled Burgham from his side of the bar. Several mugs, bottles, and liquor-filled shot glasses sat atop the counter in front of Leyna where I realized he'd been placing them as we talked. "Customers. Drinks." 

Leyna took her hand loose and turned to the drinks, loading them onto her serving platter. 

"I understand," she said. 

How fucked up is this? I asked myself. You feel like shit because you're making her feel like shit because you won't have sex with a crazy-hot welf-whatever and make some money in the process? How is this not a no-brainer? 

My chest burned with what I wanted to say, but a lifetime in a society that vilified sex-work made finding the words a fight. Finally, I tried coming at it indirectly, touching one hand to Leyna's shoulder just before she lifted her tray. 

"The thing is -- I don't have any purity oil." 

Her expression fluttered a little, like a new butterfly with still-wet wings trying uncertainly to get off the ground. 

"Well ... I'd spare you a bit of mine, but I understand welfs always have their own." She paused, searching my eyes. "Are you really going to give it a spin? She'd be a good first one for you -- lady welfs are a gadabout's dream, they say, very easy to please. But ... I know not everyone approves of mining the sheets. It doesn't hurt my feelings so much you should do something against your creed on my account." 

If I had any thought of backing out, the empathy and generosity in her liquid blue eyes killed it right there. To have a girl this sweet and pure putting my social anxieties ahead of her own emotions -- I just couldn't think anything was wrong with her or how she lived her life. Turning back now would mean I considered her choices beneath me, considered myself her moral superior. Me, the guy who'd whacked off eavesdropping to the sound of her having sex last night. 

"Leyna!" 

Burgham's growl made her pick up her tray and take a step away. 

"If you're really going to," she said, "tell her you need a bath first, and I'll draw one for you and spot you some advice, okay? And ..." She wrinkled her nose in a kindly way. "... you do need one, a bit." 

The suggestion barely even made me self-conscious. I just nodded, and she moved off toward her tables with a twist of her pretty lips that made me glow. 

The welf woman's eyes tracked me all the way back to my seat. They had a zest and a hunger in their twinkling depths, a mixture of curiosity and libido that gave a surprising pump to my ego. 

"Sorry to run off like that," I said, hoping I managed an even voice as I settled into my chair. "I don't know if you can tell, but I'm strange to this region and what the coins are worth here. My friend says a hafpenny's a very different thing than I'm used to." 

"Hmm." Her dark eyes and blood-red lips glinted with feminine interest and amusement. "In the moments, I was thinking, 'Here is a man who does not sell his nib. Did the girl tell me wrong?' So, I am glad it is no question but of currency. What did your friend advice you, then, on price?" 

Shit, maybe I should have asked Leyna that if I was going to use it as an excuse. 

"Well, she said that first I should ask your specific pleasure, and how much you felt would be reasonable." 

She seemed to find that a good answer and gave a grin. "My pleasure is to have you in me ... I think, three times, this night. Or two if I am well enough filled and three is too much for you. Half of one shilling, I paid at the last town. But he did not have your pretty yellow hair or teeth as white." 

Half a shilling? That's four times what Turrup paid Leyna ... is she crazy or just loaded? I deliberately avoided getting mad at Turrup for thinking Leyna was worth less than this welf lady thought I was. 

Trying to appear easygoing and professional, I said, "As long as I don't have to change my hair color or my teeth, I don't feel right about charging for them. A half-shilling is very fair." 

I'll pay Leyna a finder's fee, I thought. However questionable the rest of this is, that's certainly the right thing to do. 

The look in the welf-woman's eyes, though, wasn't questionable at all. She held her hand out as if offering it for me to shake. "This transaction suits me. I am Kizaah." 

"Simon," I said, taking her hand with only a little hesitation. People in the Phaeland Empire shake hands all the time. Even if she means something else by the gesture, she shouldn't be surprised or offended at a handshake. "Pleased to meet you." 

Kizaah smiled and rose from her chair. "I will leave you to total your dining, then. I am room eight when you find readiness. Agreeable?" 

"Very agreeable," I said, standing along with her to be polite. "I, ah, meant to have a bath after dinner. That won't be too much of a delay, will it?" 

"No," she replied, looking me up and down and licking her teeth. "I even will pay for the bath, if there are bath oils and such like for the skin. Tell our hostess, please." 

"Um, yes. I will do that." 

And she turned and walked off, hips and a smooth, round ass swaying beneath that golden sash and her tight brown pants. 

Christ, I'm going to get paid to hit that? Who invented this place again? Some fucking genius! 

* * * 

"Half a shilling!" Leyna said, her eyes wide as she worked the handle of a pump attached to the bathtub. The way her breasts swayed each time she pushed down on the lever -- the way they strained at the fabric of her dress -- made the pervert in me count the number of times I could buy her services in bed for that half-shilling. "Either she's desperate to have her hole filled and her nubbin thumped, or she's even more money-flooded than I guessed." She stopped pumping a moment. "I mean, not that I wouldn't pay half a shilling for you if I had it, but -- I mean, I'm not saying -- well --" 

Her clean pale cheeks went about as pink as Kizaah's. 

I cleared my throat and pointed at the pump. "Look ... why don't you let me do that? I hate to make you wear yourself out --" 

Laughing, she went back to her task -- up, down, up, down, leaning over to get her weight on the lever-arm and then pulling up at the bottom of the stroke when the spigot finished gushing. 

"Oh, no," she explained. "If the tub overflows a smidge when you get in, that rim on the floor catches it. But if the rim tops over, it trickles down through the floorboards and drizzles into the kitchen. I've learned not to let customers draw their own baths, or it's me Burgham shouts the ears off of when his victuals get soaked. You just take your clothes off and sniff your way through that kit of bath oils to see which ones you like." 

Shaking her head, she repeated what she'd said before: "Half a shilling!" 

"I figured I'd give you at least ... I don't know, five or six pence out of it for sending her over to -- wait, my clothes?" 

"Of course," she said, putting her back into her work. "I can't carry them out to wash them while you're bathing if you're still in them, can I?" 

My cock, already half hard from watching her cleavage swing over the pump handle, surged fuller within my pants. 

"Uh, but ... you can't wash and dry them while I'm in the bath, right?" 

She stopped and gave me a curious smile. "Of course I can. I'll just dust a little desiccant powder over them when they're clean, a hafpenny worth'll do, which you can certain spare out of half a shilling as long as you're paying for baths and bath oil too. What's the use washing yourself and then climbing back into breeches that smell of another woman's cooch and your splurt?" 

"Do they?" I glanced down at my burgeoning crotch, alarmed that I'd been walking around stinking of sex the last two days. 

"Not from here, they don't," she giggled. "But I happened by your room three times trying to drop off Juliette's saddlebags the other night, and by the sound of it, she wet your pole plenty to leave a lasting whiff. To say nothing of how your sheets smelled when I washed them!" Looking down at the tub, she gave one last plunge on the pump handle and said, "There, I think that's enough. Shuck 'em and climb on in." 

"Wait," I said, and not just to delay getting naked in front of her. "Don't you have to pour in some hot water too?" Room temperature couldn't be much more than sixty degrees in the inn, except near a fireplace. 

"Where in the world are you from, Simon Kettridge?" Leyna asked, walking over and rummaging in the bin of washing supplies beside me. She came up with a bottle and uncapped it, revealing a bottle-mouth so narrow it was barely a pinhole. "It's like you've never heard of an alchemist." 

Returning to the tub, she tipped the bottle up once, twice, and then recapped it. Each time, a single drop fell into the bathwater, which gave a hiss and a spit of steam. She picked up a long-handled back-scrubber and used it to stir the bath, then dipped a finger in and nodded. 

"That's hot as I like it," she said, setting the bottle down next to the tub. "You can add another drop if you're dead set on a real simmer. Hey, not even a button undone? Come on, then, show me how you're going to drop your trousers for her in a bit. If it's as shy as this, she may want part of her half-shilling back." 

I'd already felt the room warm up slightly from the alchemically heated bathwater. Now a greater heat rose up from my collar to my forehead. Man up, Simon, I told myself. She's right about Kizaah. Who's going to pay me that kind of money if I'm fumbling and awkward? 

Forcing myself not to take a deep breath, I stepped out of my shoes and took off my socks, keeping my eyes on Leyna's the whole time. She met that with a look of measured, professional appraisal that somehow relaxed me and lent me some boldness as I undid the front of my shirt and stripped out of it. Then I unbuttoned and unzipped, hooked my thumbs through my waistband, and eased my slacks and boxer-briefs down, trying to be casual because I figured I'd embarrass myself if I went for panache. 

When my erection popped out, Leyna gave a tiny breath and let her eyes fall down from mine. 

"Is that on cue?" she asked, one eyebrow up, then a faux coy smile broadening her lips. "Or is it for me? You'll make a girl think you fancy her if you're not careful, Simon." 

As soon as she said it, I felt my face reddening again. Leyna must have seen, because her teasing smile vanished into uncertainty. Not only that, but I saw, below the bobbed blonde coif of her hair, that her ears went back ever so slightly. 

"You'll need a towel," she said quickly, turning to a cabinet that stood opposite the bathtub. From inside, she pulled a folded and somewhat coarse-looking brown towel, which she placed on a chair nearby. By the time she turned back to me, I had my pants all the way off and she'd put her professional face back on. 

Gathering my clothes, I glanced down at the basket of bath oils and said, "I have no idea which one of those to pick. Do you recommend anything particular?" 

"The brindlebloom," she replied as she took the clothes. "Its lively and fresh and not too girlish to suit a man in the bedroom. The grey-and-black bottle, there. Just use a capful." 

I found the bottle she indicated and took it over to the tub. "So," I asked, trying to loosen the bottle's stubborn cap, "you were going to give me some, um, pointers?" 

A glance over my shoulder showed her with my laundry folded to her chest. Her eyes, taken off-guard, dashed up my legs and back and ass to meet mine, and she quickly wrestled down a sheepish smile. "Mostly, just that it's a thing to have fun at. I mean, any job's better that way, right, whether it's serving tables or combing down a horse? Only this one will wear you down a lot more than those would, if you come at it like it's a chore." 

I got the cap off and poured a measure of liquid into it -- the stuff smelled like a mixture of candles and fresh-brewed tea, with a dash of dryer sheet thrown in. When I tipped it into the bathwater, it bubbled and foamed up aromatically. 

"The other thing is," Leyna went on as I recapped the oil and returned it to the basket, "if she asks something you're not keen on, give her a surcharge. And if she asks something that really puts you off, draw your lines and be firm. Most men will respect that, long as you keep your good cheer while doing it. I'm guessing a woman might pout ... but from what I heard the other night, you probably have a trick or two to distract her if needs be." 

"Am I allowed to be picky when there's already a half-shilling on the table?" A finger in the water let me make sure I wouldn't scald myself getting in, so I stepped over the brim and eased myself under the bubbles to the waist. It felt glorious ... almost effervescent. "Wow, that stuff's really nice." 

She grinned. "Told you. And the half-shilling's no excuse for letting yourself feel used. She's paying you to make her feel good with what you've got -- and what you've got includes what you're willing to and what you're eager for. I don't let a drunk heave on me in the common room, and I don't let a horse nip my fingers in the stables, and I wouldn't even if someone offered me gratuity for either one." 

The practical integrity on her face as she offered that advice warmed me nearly as much as the bath, and I couldn't help telling her, "You know, Leyna, you may be the most sensible person I have ever met." 

"Oh, if that's true, you need a much wider acquaintance!" she laughed. But she also colored a little and then stepped toward the door. "Anyway, get yourself clean and I'll be back as soon as I've given these a soap and a rinse and some drying powder." 

Then she left, and I settled lower and let the bath relax me out of my very stubborn erection. 

* * * 

All of Leyna's advice notwithstanding, my heart could have been a set of bongos as I knocked at door number eight along the upstairs hall of the Nestled Goose. 

And the drummer upped his tempo at the sound of Kizaah's voice saying, "Come in," from the other side. I opened the door to find a room larger than my own, and a bed larger than my own, and the welf-woman lying in it against a heap of pillows, the covers pulled up over her breasts. Fire crackled and leapt in the iron hulk across from the bed, splashing feverish ruddy light onto the walls and furniture. 

"Mmmm," said the welf, her dark eyes reflecting the flames toward me. "I've been stoking my fire this whole hour, to keep things warm. Come in. Get out of those clothes." 

I did what she said, trying not to think of her as my employer. Customer, I thought, unbuttoning my shirt. No -- fan. She's a fan, right? Just a fan of my looks instead of my books. And this kind of fan could be how I earn my keep here, no different than how the other kind keeps my bills paid back home. 

Except that I tried to hold myself to a rule of not sleeping with fans, in the real world. Well, let's just reverse that too and make a rule not to write books for my 'fans' here in Phaeland. 

"A nice set are your shoulders, Simon," my welfish fan said from the bed. 

"Thanks. I must say, the same goes for you." And it did, in the most mouth-watering and yet throat-drying way. No longer hidden by that silky purple blouse, Kizaah's deep red neck and shoulders and collarbones made my hands ache to touch them. 

She smiled, the carmine lips dark and glossy in the firelight, accentuated by the pallor of the face around them. Her hair remained up in that intricate pyramidal coiffure, her hands folded elegantly together where the blankets covered her belly.  

I stepped out of my shoes, undid my belt, my fly, the button of my pants. Kizaah sat up a little higher against her pillows. I saw her tongue glide across the white of her teeth. 

Socks! I thought at the last moment, suddenly mortified at the idea of presenting this woman with a naked man in dress socks. I lifted one foot and then the other to peel them loose, keeping my eyes on hers the whole time. Then I gathered the undone waist of my pants in both hands. 

"Yes, my Simon," she breathed, "show me." 

I slid everything patiently downward, smiling at the "Ahh!" she gave when my erection jumped free. The bath had calmed it down for a while, but the calm ended as soon as Leyna came back in with my clothes, and it had stayed stubbornly firm the whole time I dried off and dressed and pep-talked myself along the hallway to Kizaah's room. As a result, I could feel a precum-slick spot in my underwear pull loose from my tip as my pants descended, and another drop swelled and then dangled while I got everything past my ankles. 

"Catch that!" I looked up to find her arm out and pointing at the clear, descending dribble. "I want it!" 

I got one palm under the viscous drop before it swung too low, and seeing the enthusiasm on her face, I clenched the inner muscles of my groin and milked my shaft to spill out as much more liquid as I could, ending up with almost a dime-sized dollop in the center of my hand. 

"Yesss," Kizaah moaned, both hands out toward me now, gesturing me to her. With her body upright and her arms stretched out, nothing held the bedcovers to her, and they fell free, revealing her breasts and belly. She had amazing breasts, full and smooth, large enough to be impressive but not so large that they drooped or sagged. In the firelight, their deep crimson was less noticeable than it had been in the lamplit common room downstairs, so that you might have mistaken them for a dusky brown. But unlike an African-American or a Sarti Highlander like Juliette, Kizaah's abdomen made a pale oval beneath the dark flesh of her rib-cage and luscious tits. The lighter skin of her belly faded to pink and then a dappling of red at each edge of her waist. I couldn't see what the two-tone pattern did below the crest of her pelvis, still hidden by the blankets. 

I moved over to her, made more confident by her enthusiasm -- and made enthusiastic myself by the incredible exoticism of her figure and coloration. The scarlet and pink and the darkness of her eyes and sharpness of her ears could easily have made her look a bit fiendish in the firelight, if her smile hadn't been so warm and happy and her lust so frankly open. Reaching out as I drew near, she cradled the back of my hand in one palm and caressed up around my elbow to my triceps with the other. Her nose dipped and sniffed at the glistening bead in my palm, those glinting eyes closing with a flutter. Then her tongue eased out to gently but steadily circle its tip through the precum before lapping the fluid up in three quick strokes. 

She looked up at me with a fiery grin of gratitude. "It is very good." 

"I'm glad you like it," I said, my head almost spinning with arousal and ego. I could feel heat from the fireplace radiating against my legs and ass and back, while the front of me basked in an entirely different heightening of temperature. "What should we do first? How do you want to get started?" 

"First," she said, releasing my hand and switching her grasp to the root of my cock, "I taste from the source." 

And she tugged at me and leaned in so that I came closer and her upper body came forward and her lips parted and swept around my tip and all the way up along my shaft. 

"Oh god, Kizaah ..." 

She just hummed with her eyes closed again, kneading my root with her lips and the squeeze of her grip, sucking hungrily with the muscles of her cheeks to coax another fat runnel of precum out of me. Then, swallowing, she slid off with a pop and said, "Ahhhh." 




The Inn Ch. 03



Her eyes opened. "And now, I think, you taste for a turn." 

I glanced down at the tip of my penis, already leaking out another transparent drop. "You mean, taste my own ...?" 

She laughed, and the hand that wasn't still wrapped around my cock threw back the covers to reveal her lower half. "No, taste of me." 

The red that rimmed her waist and belly swooped down almost like a bikini, accentuating the lower swell of her stomach by shading her crotch in scarlet. At her hips and the borders between her thighs and groin, the red faded again through another dappled margin, leaving her legs faint and pink, with a trail of scattered dark spots down each inner thigh. The strange beauty of her coloration absorbed my attention so fully that it took me a second to notice the other strangeness below her waist. 

Where I expected to see mons and labia and clit, the centerpiece of Kizaah's mound was a finger-thick curlicue that started where a clitoris would have been and looped a time and a half around her gash, fading from her bikini-bottom red with each circuit until the end of it dove into the encircled slit, both of them pink and glistening. 

"You have not had reproduction with a welf woman before, I see." Her voice melded delight and enthusiasm. "You I think will like this." 

For emphasis, her curlicue pulsed and constricted, narrowing its inner diameter from a spacious two-inches to a snug-looking couple of centimeters. 

"Come," she said, easing her tailbone down flat against the mattress. "Lick my curl." 

I know I never wrote anything like this! 

Magnetized by the weirdness of her genitals, I crawled onto the bed on my elbows, legs trailing behind. As I drew closer -- head between her knees, then her thighs -- her scent washed over me, almost like the smell of a fresh-baked peach pie. The coil of flesh wiggled and tightened and loosened, as if in anticipation of my ever-nearer mouth. She filled my vision now, the smooth pale curve of her belly, the bare dark skin of her mound. And that strange new thing, not quite a tentacle, not quite a tail, but clearly prehensile and under her control and quivering with want as it framed the dank slash of her vagina. 

I opened my mouth and stretched out my tongue. Nearer ... nearer ... almost there ... 

As soon as my taste-buds made contact, I remembered what I'd written about welfs: it was a single throwaway line in one of the later books where someone eating dessert says it's "as sweet as a welfish strumpet's cunt." 

Maybe I needed help for an obsession with prostitutes, but that line was no lie. Kizaah's soft, curling tendril of flesh tasted for all the world like some sort of mango-strawberry-flavored cream cheese, spread on a melt-in-your-mouth sweet roll.  

I looked up at her. She had her lips slightly parted, the tip of her tongue just barely in contact with her upper incisors. She knew what I was thinking, but I told her anyway: 

"Good god, you're delicious." 

The welf-woman laughed. 

"We will both like for you to take a longer taste." 

With my lower peripheral vision, I caught a movement that took my eyes from her face. The pink tip of her curl had emerged from her slit and now beckoned me just as she might have used a bent index finger to do. I leaned in with pursed lips and captured it, sucked a half-inch or inch into my mouth. The taste was heaven, and the tremor it sent through her made it even better. 

Unlike an ordinary clit, though, this tendril didn't passively await my attentions -- she extended it, probed it deeper into my mouth, dueled my tongue with it just as if we'd been making out. I used the ring of my lips to massage the supple diameter trapped between them, while licking and rolling my tongue against her eager finger of flesh. A slick sweetness pulsed out of its surface with increasing frequency as I kept at it. Her breath quickened and caught. She fed still more of her genital curl into my mouth and lassoed my tongue, which I proceeded to fuck in and out of her slick sex-tentacle's grip, faster and faster to the sound of her panting. 

"Uuahh!" she cried, bucking her crotch up against my lips. Inside my mouth, her tendril writhed and thrashed, then literally recoiled, whipping itself back in withdrawal to wind so tight against her mound that it completely obscured the vaginal opening beneath it. "Ah! Ah! Ahhhh ..." 

Her whole form shook and arched. When her hips dropped back to the mattress, I turned my head and kissed the smooth pink flesh of her thigh several times, moving up the red stippling there to close in on her crotch once more. One of her hands came down to cover her snaky twat, though, while the other curved around the back of my head and coaxed me up and forward along her body toward her face. 

I paused at the marvelous crimson swells of her breasts to kiss and then suckle one erect nipple. Her hands caressed both sides of my face as I licked and nibbled, then tugged at me again until I'd crawled into place fully atop her, eyes level with hers. In them, I now saw not just glittering dark pupils, but actual silvery motes, drifting across grey-black irises dilated by passion. 

"You must have natural talent in curl pleasurance," she said, gliding her hands along my back. "This is really your mouth's first trip to a welf-maiden's mound?" 

I nodded. "But I hope it's not the last." 

She laughed yet again. "Oh no, Simon, not the last for tonight, even. But my curl is in desire for something thicker to hold onto than a tongue. And I am eager that you plumb me. Are you ready?" 

My cock stiffened even harder against the sheets. "Very ready -- but ... do we need purity oil?" 

"I drank a thimble as your bathing was made. Come. Reproduction with me now." 

A tickle at my pubic hair made me shift a little without thinking, and then a lick of wet flesh against the base of my erection made me understand -- it was her coil reaching out for me, looping about my cock-root, tugging. I lifted my hips a little as she pulled me down for a kiss, long and lingering, and I felt her fleshy tendril encircle and guide me. 

Holy shit. 

My hands were around her on her shoulders. Hers caressed my back. And yet I was being angled and positioned, down between our legs, lined up and then brushed against a sopping, soft slit and urged forward by her dexterous genitalia clutching at me. I thrust my tongue deep into her mouth and simultaneously eased my hips down to enter her, feeling glorious satiny wetness envelop me inch by inch. 

"Mmmmmm," she hummed, her star-flecked eyes closing in rapture as I settled against her. I didn't shut my own eyes just yet -- I found the subtle play of muscles in her brow fascinating and completely responsive to the first gentle stroke that I made, sliding back and then forward inside her. "Mm-hmmmm." 

Her heels came up behind my thighs and her hips rolled and that red-and-pink tendril clasped my shaft deliriously with each movement of my dick in and out. It slithered and circled as I pumped, a gripping coil of damp, slippery arousal. 

Jesus, I hope this doesn't ruin me for women with normal clits. 

Kizaah began to jerk and twitch beneath me, grunting to the spasms of her body. A high-pitched sound came out of her throat. She clutched me to her, arms and legs squeezing. And then her curl wormed its way forward along my shaft, still wrapped entirely around. With each outward stroke, it snaked its way closer to my tip, so that each inward thrust tugged it deeper into her pussy. 

"AaaaaAAAH!" she cried. Powering as hard into her as I could, I felt that little tentacle throb and unwind, until it no longer held me but thrashed along the underside of my hard-on while I fucked and fucked deep in and against it. Kizaa went crazy. "Eeh! Eyhh -- UUHHH!" 

And suddenly her whole cunt strobed around me, convulsing, paroxysmal. My balls couldn't take it any longer, and erupted. 

"Fuck, Kizaah!" 

"Yes, Simon! Swell me with your flow!" 

Her curl slid around me again, milking and squeezing as I spurted my load deep into her hungry gash. 

"Ah! Yes! Clog me! Spew!" 

"UH! Uh -- FUCK!" The powerful muscular tugs of her cunt-coil wrung an unbelievable amount of cum out of me. The orgasm kept going and going until Kizaah hit another peak of her own and planked tree-limb stiff beneath me. 

"Gnnnhhh --" she groaned, vagina and sex-tendril once again throbbing mindlessly, furiously around me. A few more trickles escaped me before the orgasm let her go and she relaxed, gulping for breath. I felt that curl slither out and flop limply along one side of my root. 

For a minute or more, she just held me to her, gasps slowing and evening out. Then she put her hands in my hair and opened her eyes to look at me rapturously. 

"Simon," she breathed, her face sublime with contentment. "I hope you are not expecting to have sleep tonight. I am drunk on your studding and must have more." 

"Well," I said, my own breathing not entirely smoothed out yet, "I will do my best to make it worth your half-shilling." 

* * * 

In the morning, I woke to find Kizaah almost dressed -- this time in a silky green, wide-sleeved jumpsuit with silver cuffs and collar. Her hair fell in long, sheer waves of black past her shoulders, the ziggurat having come apart during one of our several bouts of strenuous fucking the night before. 

"You look like a very merry Christmas," I said, sitting up and trying to shake the sleep from my head. 

"Chrismas. This word also I do not know." 

"Don't worry about it. Are you in too much of a hurry for me to make sure you've gotten your money's worth?" 

She laughed, making the waves of her hair dance as she finished buttoning up the front of her suit. "My curl is sated. It requires much to do that, but you accomplished to suffice last night. Also, yes, I am of hurrying. My coach must gallop to Nanwael by lunch or I miss my colossus-hawk gondola to Ssss'ssla." 

"Ssss'ssla?" My brain took several hops higher into wakefulness. "In the Swamps of Dor? Isn't that dangerous?" 

"Yes, for your kind. But welfs are of good terms with Septra's Children. I go to visit my good friend Eesia, who is upper priestess in the Second Temple of Scale. However, she becomes cross and spits venom at tardiness. So I like to arrive at time of her expecting and avoid the itch-and-twitch visions of viper-folk sputum." 

Ssss'ssla! It was on the road to Ssss'ssla that Juliette and her crew had to ambush Necromanata's emissary to the Sutherdun orcs. "Only fools brave the Swamps of Dor without express permission of the viper-folk," Ymbrod had said when Juliette proposed the mission, to which she'd replied, "It's fine to call Halvard a fool, but I take offense for Mikila, Pelfreyda and myself." But the five of them had snuck and fought their way through the swamps anyway, and prevented a hellish pact between orcs and undead. 

What if ... what if Septra's Children themselves had reason to take down Necromanata's envoy? 

My mind revved up to dangerous speed. In book six, Pelfreyda would steal the Heart of Asp ruby from the Thankortan vaults. In book eight, Juliette would use it to broker a peace between the Phaeland Empire and Ssss'ssla, where the viper-folk revered it as a holy relic. Right now, though, the gem just sat in that vault -- and the Knights of Thankorta had no attachment for it other than its worth as treasure. What the Knights did have an attachment for -- in fact, would literally kill for -- was an Artefact of Power like Vark's Sword. And with any luck, Kleburn Mandermorte would soon fetch that from Cymbelville. 

Do I really want the Knights of Thankorta to get their hands on Vark's Sword? The question answered itself with images of orcish berserkers and animated corpses ripping the Nestled Goose to pieces and shitting down the severed throats of everyone in town -- and everyone across the Empire. 

"Kizaah," I asked, hoping it would seem like a casual request, "if I were to write a letter and give it to you, do you think your friend could deliver it to the First Temple?" 

"Ha! No, the priestess of the First Temple is Eesia's sister, and when they meet, the ground sizzles with their most caustic drool. But an underling could be dispatched with a lack of worry." 

"You wouldn't mind, then?" 

She pulled her hair back to tie it in a tail. The motion lifted her marvelous breasts within the fine green cloth of her outfit. Then she came forward and kissed me. 

"Of course not," she said, the sparkles in her eyes bright and lively. "But ... next time, you must discount our bed-ventures!" 

I agreed with another kiss -- which raised my naked cock high enough to bump into her hip. 

"Oh," she said with a sigh, looking down at it. "Perhaps I spurn breakfast and make time for once again your poking treasure." 

Despite a keen desire to get to work on that letter, I decided professionalism obliged me to oblige her, and putting my lips against hers, I slowly unbuttoned the front of her jumpsuit.



The Inn Ch. 04



The story so far: Simon Kettridge has somehow been transported to the setting of his numerous fantasy novels, the Phaeland Empire. Unfortunately, the first thing he does is have sex with his greatest heroine, Juliette Ravendark – delaying her from a critical rendezvous and setting in motion events that will lead to the Empire's utter devastation at the hands of Necromanata, a cadaverous sorcerer bent on ravaging the world with an army of undead and orcs. Left on his own in a country inn with virtually no resources, Simon decides that his only hope of saving Phaeland is to craft a series of letters using his knowledge of the world to influence key players and personages who might be able to help. But letters are a costly luxury in this medieval world, and Simon must use any means possible to find a way to pay for them. After an innocent misunderstanding, the inn's serving girl (and part-time prostitute) recommends to an exotic female guest that Simon could be engaged as a gigolo. Unable to turn down the money (or the incredibly hot "welf" woman), Simon performs his first night of sex work in the Phaeland Empire. Then, as luck would have it, she reveals her destination to him and opens up a perfect opportunity for him to send a message along with her.

* * *

Between servicing Kizaah one last time and writing out my letter to the priestess of the First Temple of Scale, I arrived downstairs for breakfast later than usual. My employer of the previous evening gave me a kiss on the cheek with her deep red welfish lips and then headed out the door toward a carriage, pausing once more at the exit to wave at me with the envelope I'd given her.

As I settled into a chair at a corner table, a cheerful voice asked, "Your friend's not joining you for breakfast?"

"Apparently, she's got an urgent engagement in Nanwael," I said, smiling up at the pretty, blue-eyed face of the inn's serving girl, Leyna. She wore a sunny yellow dress today, the bodice a chocolate-milk brown. "Oh, and before I forget ..."

I dug in my pocket for some coins – six copper pence – and held them out in my palm. "I think I more than owe you this for your referral and advice."

She laughed and scooped the money from my hand. "Not that you seem to have needed much advice, Mister Half-a-shilling!"

My face colored at that, but I didn't let it distract me. "But I really did, Leyna. I'm from a place where ... things are done differently. If you hadn't encouraged me, I could never have taken Kizaah up on her offer. Or at the very least, I'd have been awkward or nervous and maybe made a mess of it."

Her eyebrows gave a naughty bounce. "We'll see whether you made a mess once the breakfast hour's done and I get to my sheet-changing duties. I'm a bit hoping you did."

That really put the heat in my cheeks – but it also made something burn deeper in my chest, a mix of thrill and ... pride? This beautiful, vivacious young woman knew what I'd done last night, knew who I'd done it with, and would soon be stripping the sordid results from the mattress in Kizaah's room. But instead of being jealous or disgusted, Leyna was happy for me, and delighted both in the part she had played facilitating things and in the part she would soon play tidying up.

We shared something now, and she liked that. I liked it too.

"Anyway," she said, "I'll bring by some porridge in a tad and maybe we can trade notes later." I nodded, and she jingled the coins in her hand. "Thanks for these!"

"You're very welcome. Thank you too. I'm in your debt."

"Hmm." She turned away with a sly glance over her shoulder. "I'll have to think on how to collect, then!"

Watching her hips sway as she walked off, innocently feminine, I wondered how exactly I could be living in the magical fantasy land of my novels, using a fountain pen to wage a life-and-death struggle with a cadaver-obsessed arch-mage, and having sex with not-quite-human, prehensile-clitoris women, and yet the most amazing thing out of all of it was this pleasant young woman who'd convinced me to prostitute myself.

Maybe you're just focusing on her so you won't have to think about legions of walking corpses, or about what Mom would say if she ever learned how easily you jumped into sex-work when given the chance. I shook my head. Or maybe I'm focusing on Leyna because she gives me a giant, concrete reason to figure this Necromanata thing out and stop the orcs and undead from destroying all of Phaeland.

And I was going to do it. I would figure out a way.

After breakfast.

* * *

Back in my room, feeling warm from a full bowl of porridge and the smile Leyna gave me when she brought it out, I settled down at my desk with paper and Lord Weltfordshire's heirloom fountain pen.

I'd sent out three letters so far: one to Lord Phurl, one to Kleburn Mandermorte, and this morning's, to the high priestess of the viper-folk in Ssss'ssla. "Philandering Phurl," as some called him, would read the first letter and quickly put the requested money into Kleburn Mandermorte's blind bank account. I hadn't asked for a lot, and I'd been very specific about my deadline and about the names of Phurl's mistresses, so I could count on the nobleman's fear of his wife to motivate him. He'd pay up first and ask questions later. So in two weeks, Kleburn would have both a financial incentive and the right set of instructions to go to Cymbelville and retrieve Vark's Sword from its decades-old hiding place. Meanwhile Kizaah had left for the Swamps of Dor, traveling from Nanwael to Ssss'ssla by colossus-hawk gondola. My letter to the priestess ought to beat the other two to its destination handily, and if I'd been convincing, the viper-folk would order a representative to the Phaeland capital straightaway.

With the resources of the First Temple at her disposal, the priestess could easily send her envoy to Phaeratos in a matter of days rather than weeks. But I needed Kleburn to have time to retrieve the Sword, return from Cymbelville, and also make a trip to Thankorta to trade the enchanted blade for the Heart of Asp ruby. Otherwise, the serpentine envoys would arrive in Phaeratos and find nothing there that they wanted to trade for. So my letter to Ssss'ssla had specified a date four weeks out for the viper-folk to expect the ruby in Phaeratos.

And this was where the timing got tricky. Assuming all went well with the mails, Kleburn would be off to Cymbelville before I could get another message to him. So he'd have a week or less to get to Thankorta and back after he'd fetched Vark's Sword. And Thankorta lay hundreds of miles from Phaeratos, which meant Kleburn would need magical transportation – which meant lots of money. A second letter of blackmail to Lord Phurl would be chancy at best. A sensible extortionist doesn't ask for two payouts within a week of each other – even a wealthy victim like Lord Phurl would balk if he came to expect an endless stream of financial demands.

So how could I pay for Kleburn to fly or planes-skip to Thankorta immediately on his return from Cymbelville?

Maybe if I could line up a few hundred wealthy welf-women like Kizaah and fuck them until my balls imploded ...

Writing all of this out, along with sketching a rough map to figure out distances and travel times, used up most of a sheet of paper and maybe half an hour's time. And before all this brain-work let me come up with any answers, a knock sounded at my door.

"Yes?"

"Hi, it's me ... have you a bit to chat now?"

Leyna! In my enthusiasm to get to the door, I almost knocked my chair over. Then, just shy of drawing the bolt, I glanced back at the desk in alarm – if she came in and happened to see my notes ... She'll what, dummy? They're in English, and for all you know, she's not even literate in the Phaeland alphabet. No, wait, she did say she planned to write letters once she – oh, for fuck's sake, just answer the door!

I pulled the door open to find her smiling at me.

"I was beginning to think you'd fallen back asleep from welf-pleasured weariness!"

"No, sorry," I said, glancing the desk. "I was caught up in some thinking."

She laughed. "You do a lot of that, don't you? Can I come in half an instant while Burgham's not stirring up a potful of chores for me to do?"

"Sure, of course." I stepped back to let her in, her daffodil-gold dress brightening the room as she moved in and sat on the bed.

"Oh, don't close that," she said when she saw me push at the door. "We'll want to be sure we can hear if Burgham takes a mind to come upstairs, so I can pretend I'm swapping out your sheets again instead of making idle chit-chat."

"Right." Leaving the door half-open, I returned to my chair and swiveled it to face the bed. "So ... what are we chit-chatting about?"

"How it was, of course!"

Her blue eyes, full of expectation, made it very clear what "it" was. 

"Oh ... ah, very good, actually." I paused, without really knowing why. Then I realized it was because I assumed the subject would embarrass me, and was surprised when it didn't. So I went on, "Welf-women have this ... thing ..." and followed that with a brief description of Kizaah's genital curl and some of the ways she put it to use. An enthusiastic widening of the blonde girl's eyes kept me from blushing too much or feeling too awkward, and not too long into the story, I found myself swept up in the sense of intimacy it gave me to be relating these things to her.

"Goodness," she interrupted me shortly, fanning herself with one hand. "I'll have to stop you there, Simon, or else I'll be running straight to my room to diddle myself next. But what I really meant was, how was it?" Her enthusiasm took on a hesitant shading. "I mean, I didn't convince you into something you're going to regret, or feel wrong about, did I?"

"To be honest," I said, "the whole thing was so wild I barely had time to think about it. Other than some nerves knocking at the door, I guess my brain was just in sex mode the whole night. It was all about how she looked and tasted and smelled and felt – and how I made her feel. She was really ... appreciative."

"Oh, I'm so glad," Leyna said. I could see something relax in her. "You don't know how worried I was that you'd think it sullied you. I know it's not for everybody, and I wasn't always sure myself, when I turned eighteen and decided to take it up. But ... well, I'm just glad you're okay with it."

I looked at her blue eyes, sparkling in their own way despite their lack of welfish glitter-motes, and something hit me without my even thinking about it.

"You haven't had anybody you could talk to about what you do, have you? Not in a long time anyway, I'm guessing."

Her mouth compressed, ever so faintly. Taken off-guard that I'd seen through her? Then she nodded. "I don't know how many men I've bedded the last three years. And they've almost all of them been enjoyable, but it's not what my mother planned for me, to be sure. Oh! But please don't think I pushed you into it just so that I'd have someone to –"

I leaned forward to touch her hand where it rested on one knee. "Leyna, I don't think I could suspect you of doing anything the least bit selfish, ever."

Blushing, she wriggled slightly and made as if to stand up, so I removed my hand. "It's nice you say that," she said, rising from the bed, "but I am selfish. I hoped it would be good for you, and I knew you needed the money, and those were the main reasons I didn't rush right over and tell the welf lady my mistake when I realized I'd sent her to you on a bad assumption. But it was selfishness that I presumed your bed talents were for hire in the first place. I could have asked you and made sure, but I didn't. I was just so eager to have met someone else who did it that I thought ..."

I stood up too and stepped in to give her forehead a kiss. "Well, you hadn't met someone like that when you made the assumption, but I guess you have now. And assuming I stick with it, I'll be more than happy to talk about it whenever you like."

Leyna smiled and nodded. "All right. And ... should I keep an ear out for more customers to point your way? You don't have to give me a finder's fee every time – I only took this one because you offered and seemed so happy to give it."

"Believe me," I said, "if they're all welfs like Kizaah, you'll deserve every penny every time. She was incredible. And half a shilling? I certainly didn't feel like I earned all of that. But if I end up with an ugly trader woman, I won't force you to take a cut."

"Deal!" she said, beaming. "Now I'd best get back downstairs before Burgham wonders what I'm lollygagging around at ..."

* * *

Instead of returning to my notes, I went downstairs after Leyna and took a walk around town to see if a little air would do anything for my thought processes. Despite having hit mid-morning, the temperature didn't much cooperate with me – I kept my hands in my pockets and my arms squeezed tight to my sides the whole time, wishing I had more than my thin dress shirt to keep out the chill. The sky overhead hung grey and flat, and the packed earth of the road remained slick and sticky from the earlier fogs.

Piperville hadn't much to keep a sightseer busy with. The general store stood across from the inn, a couple of rustic artisans' shops on either side. Farther down the town's one street, a smithy belched out smoke from its chimney and fended off the rural peace with a steady, muffled clanging from within. An alchemist and a tailor had shingles out advertising their services. Beyond that, the place was just a few modest residences and a cluster of flat-bed wagons where some farmers appeared to be trading.

I went maybe an eighth of a mile beyond the edge of town and saw only more road and simple agrarian countryside ahead. By then I'd gotten cold enough to turn around and head back.

Maybe I should stop at the tailor and see if they've got a jacket in my size.

But the thought didn't stick – after mailing my letters and giving Leyna her finder's fee, I had a little less than a shilling to my name. Thirty-four pence, to be exact. I could expect to earn another shilling or so scribing for Galufrand next week, but by then I'd be due to pay my own room and board, which would eat that money up. So barring any further welfish spendthrifts like Kizaah, I might very well have just thirty-four pence and two weeks to stop Necromanata's plans to overrun all of Phaeland.

Three more letters to the capital will put me down to four pence, I thought. How do I pay for Kleburn's trip to Thankorta with just three letters?

I tried to ignore the fact that the four leftover pence would be enough to get me a "tumble" with Leyna, as long as I didn't ask her to unlace her top.

Nearing the Nestled Goose again, now on the edge of shivering with cold, I saw a creature tied up to the post outside the inn that made me veer carefully around it instead of making a direct approach to the front door. 

That's a gatorcat, I thought. The actual word for the thing was hulgriff, and in truth it didn't look that much like either an alligator or a cat. But it had sharp ears and a long, wide snout full of sharp teeth, and between its low build and striped brown-and-orange fur, you could see why people called them gatorcats. 

And this one had a saddle on it.

Maybe an outcast goblin's in town? Is there anything about a goblin I could use to get at Necromanata?

Nothing of that sort occurred to me – but what did pop into my head was, Oh, god, please don't let it be a female goblin who's already had a talk with Leyna and is waiting to pay me for sex.

I'd been pretty damn unfair to goblins in describing them for this world – scrawny, misshapen, usually bearing unsightly warts, and absolute foes of any kind of bathing. Surely Leyna wouldn't pimp me to a goblin without asking me ahead of time ...

Inside the common room, I saw the first few harbingers of the lunch crowd – Galufrand at his normal corner table, a couple of farmers at the bar who looked familiar enough I must have seen them the day before, and the town cooper, who was apparently proud enough of the kegs and barrels he made that he liked to spend as much time emptying them as possible.

And in addition to these regulars, a short, broad-framed figure stood talking to Leyna not far from the bar. The blonde girl accepted some coins from the newcomer and handed over a key.

A dwarf? 

No. As the squat figure turned to head for the stairs, I saw a long-ish nose that might have been a dwarf's, and a blocky jaw that might have been a dwarf's – but the blue-green complexion and the slitted yellow eyes and the protruding half-inch tusks belonged to something else.

And of course, she was a she, and she saw me staring, and she gave me a glare before heading up to the second floor.

When I turned away from that ferocious look, I saw Galufrand waving me over from his seat. I went quickly to join him, not looking back because I didn't want the non-human woman to catch me staring again.

"Morning, Galufrand," I said politely as I got to his table. I didn't see any papers there, and he'd told me it would be several days before his next essay was done, but with no other clue as to why he'd call me over, I asked, "Do you have something else for me to scribe already?"

"No, no," he said, indicating the chair across from him. "Sit and have lunch with me, why don't you?" Then his gaze jotted toward the staircase. "You saw her, right? Could be a real stroke of luck for you, I'd say."

I didn't want to assume that everyone in the inn knew I'd banged Kizaah for money the night before, and I certainly didn't want to assume that Galufrand expected me to be interested in a dwarf-orc half-breed as a potential bed customer. So I sat down and tried to use a noncommittal tone to ask, "I did see her, but what's the stroke of luck?"

"That she's an orf, of course! And I gather, headed north on a hulgriff."

"Okay, but –"

Before I could ask what difference that made, Leyna came up and set a plate of sautéed mushrooms and potatoes in front of the scholar.

"Here you are, sir," she told him, and without taking a breath, turned to me and said, "Did you see her, Simon?"

By this point, I couldn't help scowling. "Yes, an orf. And she's got a hulgriff, and –"

"A what?"

"A gatorcat," I explained. "But why are you both so interested in me noticing her?"

"Well, those letters of yours to the undertowns, of course!"

The surprise on her face made me feel even more obtuse. So the woman was half dwarvish, and was headed in the general direction of the undertowns, where I'd wanted a couple of letters delivered. I didn't see the use of the coincidence.

"You'll have to explain it to me as if I'm a dolt, apparently."

Galufrand seemed to accept that as his area of expertise. "Lad, she's an orf on a gatorcat. Even riding high in the saddle, she won't top four feet, and the strangler trees can't reach lower than five or six."

Finally, the clouds opened up and let the light through. Post-corporal Mestzel had told me the letters to the undertowns would take almost two months to arrive, which meant they weren't worth sending. But the reason for that inordinate delivery time lay in the Noose Woods, where the trees had animate vines they used to snare passersby with when in season. A human messenger on a horse would have to go the long way around, tripling the distance.

But if this orf were headed the right direction, she could ride right under the dangling nooses and get to the dwarfhills in three weeks or less.

"Okay," I said, trying not to let enthusiasm run away with me. "But just because she's part dwarf doesn't mean she's headed for the undertowns."




The Inn Ch. 04



"Oh, but she is," Leyna said happily. "Told me so herself."

All right, enthusiasm – get your jogging shoes on. I'd addressed those unsent undertown letters to Laluthe the Lumply and the Tinkervolde brothers. With the right sword in hand, Laluthe could hew her way through a whole platoon, while the Tinkervoldes had a machine they called the Earth Arrow that could carry a half-dozen passengers hundreds of miles in a day, tunneling through solid stone. Juliette Ravendark wouldn't meet any of these people until book five, but they all showed up in the sequels after that, so I knew plenty about what they could do and what motivated them. With Laluthe and the Earth Arrow on my side, there might even be hope of getting at Amia the Pristine in Necromanata's dungeons. That would upset the dread wizard's applecart for months.

"I guess you're right then," I said, looking from Leyna to Galufrand and back. "If I can get her to take the letters, that will definitely be a stroke of luck. Do you think she'd do it?"

The sage raised a hand pedantically. "Most people will do things that aren't out of their way if you can provide them reasonable incentive. The question is, what will this orf's be?"

My enthusiasm took a minor tumble. I'd gotten a fair enough look at the hulgriff rider before her glare made my eyes shy away. She had on a practical but finely cut tan-and-brown outfit – vest and breeches and fluffy-sleeved shirt, and well-polished riding boots to go with them. And a long-hafted battle-hammer hanging from a strap at her belt, jewels showing on sides of its polished head. So she didn't appear to be hurting for money. If her "reasonable incentive" didn't run along the lines of ten or twenty pence, was I prepared to offer an alternative?

"Ha!" Leyna said, grinning and poking my shoulder with a fingertip. "They can't all be welfs, Simon." When I scowled, she gave me a kinder pat where she'd poked. "Don't worry, I'm sure she's as susceptible to coins as anyone else. Or maybe she could use some of your scribe-work."

I considered making a joke of it with some remark about the orf wanting to 'dictate' a letter. But Galufrand had put on a befuddled expression, and I didn't care to explain to him that I'd started earning money with more than just my pen.

"So should I go and ask her?" I asked, to move the subject along. "Or did she say she'd be back down for lunch?"

"If you're going, you should hurry – it's past her bedtime, you know. She's an orf."

Oh. Right. Duh. Orcs are creatures of the night in this world, and dwarves live underground. Of course an orf will be on a nocturnal schedule.

I considered the look on the aquamarine-skinned face when she'd caught me staring, then added onto that the aggravation of being kept from bed at the end of a long day (night).

"Maybe I'd better try her when she wakes up," I said.

"Probably wise!" Leyna smiled, then tossed her head toward the front entrance, giving her bobbed blonde locks a bounce. "Now would you mind putting off your lunch just a few minutes? I could use a hand with getting that gatorcat into the stables ..."

My eyebrows went up. "She expects you to do that? Isn't it kind of ..."

"Psshh!" She flipped an open hand down at the wrist and rolled her eyes. "They look fierce, but rub a gatorcat's belly and they go all weak-kneed and purry."

Rising a little slower than my eyebrows had, I wondered why she needed help if the animal wasn't a threat. But I certainly couldn't turn her down.

"You don't mind, do you Galufrand?" I didn't know if he'd called me over just to tell me about the orf or if he had some other topic in mind.

"Not at all. I'm just going to tuck in these toadstools and potatoes."

Leyna tugged my hand, and we went out to where the orf had tied up her mount. As she undid its reins from the hitching post, I saw that the bridle and halter had a few more straps than a horse's would, effectively forming a muzzle for the thing.

"Come on," the serving girl said with a conspiratorial smile. "It's just a few minutes before the lunch crowd gets thick, and I want to hear more about your romp with Kizaah."

"Well ..." I followed her as she tugged the hulgriff toward the corner of the building. It waddled politely after without undue effort on her part. "... I guess I jumped a bit quickly to telling you about that curl of hers when we were in my room earlier. We didn't leap straight to ... you know, fucking."

"I do know fucking!" She laughed and went round the side of the inn. I couldn't help glancing around to see if anyone nearby might hear.

Keeping my voice lower than hers, I said, "Kizaah did too, that's for sure. But the part before that was – exciting. In a way I don't know if I've been excited before."

She nodded, splitting her attention between me and the orf-mount, but giving me the greater share. "Maybe I know what you mean. Hmm. Go on!"

"I've had women look at me with lust before –"

Her eyebrows gave a jump of verve. "I'm sure you have!"

With a swallow, I tried to ignore the flush of blood her words sent up my neck and down into my crotch.

"– just not anyone nearly as exotic as her." That faint pink face with its scarlet frame and night-black hair came back to me. "And more than that, there was something in the way she showed me that lust."

We reached the back edge of the building and headed for the adjoining stables in the rear. Leyna gave me a knowing nod.

"When someone wants you and tries to woo you, you're flattered, right? But if you say yes, then they get to be flattered too. Only, when they're paying – the good ones, anyway – they feel like they're getting something they couldn't charm their way into, something a little bit beyond what they deserve. And it makes them feel fabulously lucky and powerful all at once, but you know you're the one in control of them feeling that way, and that makes you more powerful still."

"Wow." I blinked at her as she lifted the latch on the stable doors. "That's ... exactly it. Only I don't know that I could have put it into words that well."

"It can go the other way, too, I'll warn you," she said, leading the beast through the open door. A couple of horses in nearby stalls gave nervous whuffles at the scent of the gatorcat, but Leyna hushed them and they seemed to calm down. Heading for and empty stall, she went on, "When they're not altogether impressed, and give you that guess-since-I've-paid, might-as-well-get-on-with-it look, it can run you down."

I shook my head. "I can't imagine anyone not being impressed with you, Leyna."

"Oh, Simon, you're so sweet. But I've lain with plenty of men who've sampled all the bordellos in Phaeratos, and there's ladies there who put me to shame. I've been told it in so many words."

The idea made me angry, and I opened my mouth to say so, but Leyna had gotten the gatorcat into its stall and bent to rub its low-to-the-ground tummy.

"There's a happy, silly monster! Who likes a belly-rub? I thought so."

While leaning down, she unfastened the straps of the creature's orf-sized saddle and then stood, heaving up on the saddlehorn and the curved cantle at the back and then swinging the whole affair up onto the stall's right-hand wall. "Oof!"

The hulgriff looked up at her plaintively, and she knelt to give its stomach another scratching. After a moment, the thing rolled over on its back and wallowed as she kept up the attention. "What a silly beast! Is this a good spot? Oh, you like that? Get ready at the gate, Simon."

"Um," I said, wondering if that meant I should be worried. With her free hand, Leyna loosened the straps of the gatorcat's muzzle and tugged it off. The creature's long, blue tongue immediately lolled forth. I stepped to the gate as she'd said.

"All right, you big gatorkitty, time for me to get back to work." Giving the flat, furry stomach a last, rapid scratch, she hopped up and came out through the gate. The creature twisted, still on its back, trying to see where she'd gone, then rolled over and started to whine as soon as it saw me shutting it in. "Don't worry," she told it, "I'll be back in a squeak with some dinner for you."

In one corner of the room, a kind of closet, or, it turned out, larder had been built, a little five-by-five pantry with its own door. Leyna went over to it, still talking. "So ... Simon, I wonder if I can ask ... I've heard rumors forever, and I've always assumed they must be exaggerations ..."

"Yes?" I tried to appear casual, as if I wasn't dying for any excuse to share the most intimate details of my experience with Kizaah.

She opened the door, revealing a small space lined with shelves. Stepping in, she rummaged on one of them. "You know, they say welf women ... down there ... are very ... tasty. People make a lot of hay over us girls smelling or tasting like certain things, but the story on welfish ladies is, they're like a sweets shop."

I scratched my head as she came out of the pantry bearing a knife and a black-casing sausage as long as my forearm. "I guess I can confirm that."

At the gate of the stall, she stopped, cut a long slit in the sausage casing, held it out over the now-capering hulgriff, and twisted the ends just right to pop the meaty filling out and into the creature's maw. Then she turned to me with an avid glow in her eyes.

"Really?" She looked like a schoolgirl being let in on a secret. "Like, a sweets shop mixed with girl-crotch? Or ..."

"No, just pure sweets. Like a bakery or a confectionary, or both mixed together. And I don't mean faintly – if it weren't for all the horse and hay smell in here, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a whiff off of me from where you're standing now."

Those blue eyes flashed, and her cheeks colored. Lifting a hand in front of her mouth, she said, "Ooh, Simon, would you really let me?"

"Let ..." I blinked, then tried to recover. "Um, I didn't mean I'd need to, like, offer you a smell or anything. I just meant I probably still ... well, the way you said I might still smell of Juliette after all the – all we got up to."

Her hand went down. "Oh, of course ... I didn't mean to be silly."

The disappointment in her eyes kicked at me, and I couldn't help trying to fix it. "Would you want to? Seriously?"

"Not if it would embarrass you! But –" She glanced over her shoulder toward the pantry. "– the feed room seals up and is full of keeping powder so the fodder won't spoil. There's no hay and horse smell in there ..."

How does she manage to be so overtly sexual and so shy at the same time? To my left, the gatorcat slavered and scarfed at its meal, finishing the last of it off with a loud gulp that I felt like emulating. Instead, I shrugged as if it was no big deal, and gestured for her to lead the way. "Sure, then. Why not?"

She grinned and grabbed my hand and hurried us both to the corner larder. Inside, she drew the door closed to all but a crack, put the knife and sausage casing down, and knelt to the floor unceremoniously. In the bare thread of light from the almost-shut door, I could just see her upturned face and the curve of her smile.

"Thank you, Simon," she said. "I'll try not to bump you with my nose."

And then she leaned forward and I heard her breath drawn in through her nostrils, saw it expanding the faintly lit swells of her breasts within her bodice.

I'll try not to bump your nose with my fucking hard-on, I thought, blinking away a sudden image of my insistently erect cock ripping through the front of my pants to whack her in the face. Even restrained in slacks and underwear, it felt like it might swell out hard enough to make contact any second.

"Hmm," she said. "I guess I get a little hint, but ..."

Oh shit. She's going to ask ...

"Your breeches – I think they're trapping it, mostly." One of her knees left the ground as though she meant to stand up.

I cleared my throat. "Well, I could take them down."

Leyna froze in place.

"Just the pants, I mean. I'd leave the underwear on."

Her knee went slowly back to the ground, and in a hushed voice, she said, "okay..."

Hoping the dark of the room kept her from seeing how bad my hands shook, I got my belt buckle loose, then unbuttoned and unzipped. Oh, fuck. Here goes.

I pushed down my slacks, feeling my cock throb hard against the front of my boxer briefs. Leyna had been right about whatever alchemical gimmick they used to keep the stable stench out of the feed room. But now, into the olfactory vacuum, I caught a waft of sex smell – my own, and Kizaah's. It had only been a couple of hours since our parting fuck that morning, and my room had no bath or shower of its own. So I still had on all the welf juice Kizaah had coated my dick with the night before and in our quickie before she left.

"ohhh, Simon, gracious me ..." The serving girl leaned in closer and breathed deep again. "Mmm. There's some definite man-groin going on down here, but you're right – it's mostly like ... like a fruit tart, with sweet cream and honey and ... oh, heavens, my cunt must stink like a swamp next to this."

Way too many inappropriate replies flew through my head. 

I'm sure your cunt smells fantastic.

Actually, I'm a big fan of swamp odor.

I'll be happy to do a comparison and tell you how you measure up.

But for good or bad, my tongue lay entirely paralyzed in my mouth.

Leyna took another breath and then sighed it back out. "And it tasted just as good? You lucky fellow!"

"Um, yeah. I told you you deserved that six pence commission for sending her my way."

"I'd give it all back if I could get a taste of her too!"

My dick made another attempt to tear its way out of my underwear. Leyna went silent. Beyond the door, a horse chuffed somewhere and clomped around a step or two.

"That may have sounded wrong." Her voice was full of apology, though I couldn't see her expression very well. "I didn't mean ..."

Dude! my erection said to me, crashing against the fabric that held it back. This is totally our chance! Let me out and her mouth's going to be all over us!

"Do you want to?" I asked her. "It's not like ... well, we're just kind of trading professional information here, right?"

She tittered a little. "Oh, yes. Just two chums letting each other in on some handy work secrets." Her eyes gleamed in the dimness of the little pantry. "Simon, would you really?"

"Sure."

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, throbbed my cock.

"Well, all right then, if it won't ... as long as we're not ... oh, hells in a teakettle, just push your shorts down, I guess."

I did. Instantly, my shaft flung itself up and out toward her. Thankfully, she'd leaned back a bit or I might have put her eye out. Leyna's breathing had turned very fast and audible.

"My!" she said. "It's always so eager to be let out, is it?"

I couldn't think what else to do but sheepishly say, "Pretty much."

"Here ... um, I'm just going to ..." She raised a hand, lowered it, raised it again, then gingerly trapped my cockhead between her fingertips. Shifting around on her knees and ever-so-softly tilting my shaft to one side with that careful hold on the end, she brought her pretty face in and alongside my length, inhaling richly as she approached contact.

I saw her mouth open, the lips gleaming in that pale illumination from the crack of the door. The wet tip of her tongue appeared, pushed forth, drew back in a moment of hesitation –

And then she thrust it out with a slippery flick that made me work to suppress a whimper.

"Ooh!" Her voice made it clear that whatever hesitation she'd had a moment before was thoroughly dispelled. More surely and assertively, her tongue returned to ride along the curve of my pole, as much of it out and flat against the sticky member as she could manage. "Good glandspew, and this isn't even fresh!"

Her fingers lifted me up by the tip now, and she licked all the way up and along the underside of my shaft, lapping, pressing her lips to the flesh, moving around to the side opposite the one she'd started on, and then finally levering me down and lollypopping the upper surface as well.

"Oh, gosh, Simon. I can't believe how –"

And then she gasped and her fingers jumped free and she leaned back and left my hard-on waving damply in the air between us.

"I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed. "That was much more than I intended on doing ... it just, I got carried away and – oh, look at the state I've got you in."

She looked and sounded genuinely apologetic as she stared at my utterly rigid cock, which even in the darkness I could see had started leaking precum severely.

Her eyes turned up to me, the brows squeezed together in concern. "Do you need me to ... you know, suck you off?"

Yes! Yes, hell yes, right now! Go down on me! No, I'm not going to think with my dick here ... you're not? Isn't it kind of fucking late to take that stance?

"I – Leyna, I'd really like that. But I'd feel like I'd tricked you into something neither of us meant to happen."

Coward! screamed my dick, pulsing and letting out another dribble of precum.

She kept looking up at me. "You're a strange and very chivalrous man, Simon Kettridge."

"Well ... thank you. I –"

Just like that, she lunged forward and swallowed me to the hilt.

"Jesus Christ, Leyna!"

She sucked her cheeks in tight, tongue a twisting river of pleasure against the underside of my shaft. I could feel the muscles of her esophagus at my tip as she deep-throated me, then pulled back, then gulped me all the way down again. The softness of her mouth all around me, the pressing ring of her lips at my root, the lash of her tongue, the wet slosh of saliva filling the little room with audible oral sex – and the clench of her eyebrows as she focused and worked, the gentle hollows where suction pulled in her cheeks, the almost spectral glow of her pixie-cut hair backlit by the minute strand of illumination from the door – it all rushed together like the layers of a giant star imploding just before a supernova.

Orgasm.

I'm not sure anything had made me come that fast since I was a teenager. Every drop of fluid in my body tried to gush down to my crotch and out into her throat. I think the sweat glands in my scalp spontaneously inverted and started pumping out semen.

"God ... Leyna ... UH!"

As the eruptions slowed, I found myself bent forward, one hand on her shoulder and the other on the back of her head. Her nose still pressed into my pubic hair, her lips calmly, gently suckling the last of my flow up and out of me. I let go of her, worried I might have blanked out beneath the anesthesia of climax and throat-fucked her like a beast without even knowing it. But she stayed in place and caressed my ass and the backs of my legs until the very last twitch of my cock was done.

With a pop, she pulled loose and brightly asked, "Fair trade?"

I coughed. "More than fair."

"Good," she said, standing up and wiping her mouth with the back of one hand. "And don't worry – if you fuck this orf later, I promise I won't corral you and molest you for a taste of her afterwards."

"Okay," I said weakly. Then I pulled up my pants and followed her back to the Nestled Goose.