The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jak

So we ended up swimming to shore from just off Grand Cinnamon Island, two hundred leagues in the wrong direction. We stepped onto Grand Cinnamon with nothing but the saltwater-soaked clothes on our backs and a small purse containing two small rubies—enough to buy a week’s food and a couple of cheap swords. The swords were the only way we could think of to earn our bread when the money from the rubies was gone. The Council of Grand Cinnamon, essentially a collection of men who had inherited groves of cinnamon trees and conspired with each other to keep down the cost of hiring day laborers to harvest, dry, cut, and grind the bark, had been known to hire mercenaries to serve as marines on warships—also hired—to keep down the pirates that raided the sea lanes coming back from the cinnamon markets with heavy little chests full of gold coins. Unfortunately for us, the Council had just spent a great deal on a mercenary fleet which not only sank all the pirate ships operating in the area but had mounted a successful attack on their base, killing outright every single pirate, as well as all those found trading with them in the wild, roaring town that had grown up along their harbor on Farthest Cinnamon. They had no need of more marines, and they were already angry about the amount they had just spent on the pirate problem.

“We are having the blood drained from our veins,” one of the Councilor’s Assistants had told us solemnly. “First the pirate cutthroats, then more cutthroats to kill those cutthroats, and of course those short-sighted, lazy fools on the tree crews chose that time to lay down their bark knives and refuse to work unless they all received a raise in their day rate.”

“Don’t you negotiate the rates estate by estate?” Jess asked. “I also have some skill in negotiations; I would be willing to help for a very small consideration, to prove my worth to you.”

“What do you think you know about the cinnamon business?” he laughed, then lowered his eyes to her chest and added, “I imagine you have other ways of proving worth, and those we might discuss.”

The Councilor’s Assistant suddenly found the fork of my thumb and first three fingers locked onto his throat.

“Maybe you would like to clarify your remark,” I said quietly. “As a stranger to your island, I have fallen under the impression that you are calling my wife a whore. Mistaken, no doubt.”

The man’s face was purpling as he coughed and gargled around the grip on his throat.

“Husband, please,” Jess said in a placating tone, stepping to my side. “It is not proper to grip a man’s throat under such circumstances. You might kill him.” She touched my wrist. After a few seconds which, I hoped, felt to the Assistant like many more, I let him go and stepped back.

“Gripping like this,” Jess continued, smiling sweetly at me, “only makes him wish he were dead.” The Assistant gasped as a new pain like a hot blade skewered the nerve bundle where his shoulder muscle joined his neck.

“Apologize, you poisonous toad,” I could just hear her murmur into his ear.

“I apologize, a thousand times,” he gasped out. She release the pincer of her thumb and forefinger, and he whimpered with relief as he slunk away.

“One time will do. We should leave,” I said.

“Wait, Mistress,” called a voice from the back of the room. “It’s possible that we could use some very special skills that you may possess. Please join me in a meal and we will discuss that possibility.”

By then I would have joined Leila herself in a meal; neither one of us had eaten that day. Our host was a lean, tall man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty.

“I am Caspar,” he said, with a slight bow of his head. “Curio is something of a buffoon. I apologize for his appalling manners, in which you, my lady, appear to have instructed him memorably.”

His skin was leathery, as if he had known his share of work in the sun, but his body was tight, and the shoulders wide. I could almost smell a battlefield on him, and he knew it. He smiled mildly at me, saying, “Yes, Sergeant, I’ve wetted a spear or two in my time.”

“Sergeant?” I said, shaking my head as if in confusion. How had he known?

“I am not interested in your recent histories,” he said calmly, “either of them. I am interested in the skills and resolve that this young lady demonstrated a few minutes ago with poor Curio. We have a . . . specialized mission for which we would pay generously if it is carried out well. It’s not a battlefield mission . . .”

“What do you want us to do?” I said, not liking my speculations.

“Not you, although you can provide offsite support. I want her to remove a problem for us.”

There was a long pause.

“Violently?” Jess asked.

“It should not look violent,” he answered, still with that infuriating calm.

“Your time must be valuable, sir,” I said, standing up. “Whoever told you that we commit murder for hire was wasting it.”

He didn’t bother to answer me. He smiled at Jess like an indulgent father whose favorite daughter has just told him a fib. “I know for a fact that you have each killed scores of people.”

“On the battlefield,” I said, barely holding the rage down as I stood up. “For our people. Not in some back alley for money. Goodbye.”

“Is the locale so important, then? None of the men that I killed in battle seemed much comforted that they were dying in a field rather than somewhere else.” He smiled, as if hoping that I would appreciate the joke; then he sighed. “I didn’t want our conversation to go this way; it sounds too much like a threat. I would like to appeal to your reason. There is one man who has stirred up enough trouble on this island to cause the deaths of at least five people that I know of, probably more.”

“Caused them how?” That was Jess; I knew she was trying to read him and that the questions, if he answered them, were merely to let her hide her abilities behind the interrogation.

“He has persuaded some of our bark harvesters that they can receive more pay without doing any more work if they all agree to stop working altogether. This tactic, they think, will make us give in to them. Naturally, we refused this extortion; we brought in more men from nearby islands who were quite happy to have the work at the customary rate. This man and his deluded minions tried to intimidate our guest workers at first, and then went beyond intimidation and tried to bar them by force from the orchards and the bark works—orchards and buildings that don’t belong to them. We had to call out the marines, the mutineers rioted, and when it was all over one of the guest workers and four of the rioters were dead. None of it would have happened without this man, Rollo. By eliminating him, you could save countless lives. But if he dies by a deed of obvious violence, the hotheads will try to make a martyr out of him to stir up still more chaos. Our community cannot withstand this loss of—“

“—of some of the biggest profit margins in the known world,” I said. “Let’s not pretend this is about anything else. You want us to kill a man so that you won’t have to give your workers a raise. You want us to murder him in secret, for your convenience.”

He said to Jess, again as if I had never spoken, “Champion, your people above all should understand that what looks superficially like cruelty or injustice may actually be necessary to preserve the balance in a very delicate system. The cinnamon trade is such a system. I am asking you to save it, to save us. In return, besides preserving your secret I will pay you five hundred nobles and provide you and your—companion with passage to anywhere you wish.”

“And if I decline your offer, you will expel us from Grand Cinnamon?”

“We will hold you while we notify the Mar consulate. The bounty on you would go some small way toward reducing our losses. You might be treated somewhat leniently, Champion, but I doubt that the same would be true of your slave. I hope you will not force me into that channel, which will truly benefit no one.”

I grinned at him. “I can guarantee that it will not benefit you, or anyone you send to collect us.”

He smiled right back at me. “There are half a dozen crossbows trained on each of you as we speak. Please do not trade your lives for a dramatic moment.”

In a few seconds, I was sure that at least some of what he said was true. I heard the drawing windlass on a crossbow working, and on the other side of the gallery above our floor, a heavy drapery bellied briefly; someone was behind it, trying not to be seen.

“If you shoot us, your problem remains,” Jess said.

“True,” he answered, “but you are not unique as a possible solution. However, let’s not quibble. I’ll give you until tomorrow at this time to decide. Otha, show them to their quarters.”

The quarters were not a prison cell, as I had half-expected, but there were bars on their windows, and a sheer drop of seventy feet to the ground even if we had been able to break through them.

They ushered us inside—just short of a push, actually—, and “Otha” looked at the big bed and muttered something to the other, who laughed. I looked around, stepped close to Jess—closer than I had voluntarily been since the execution—and whispered.

“They’re using me to me to force you. I have to escape.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Maybe. If they do, I don’t care.”

“I do, so stop talking nonsense. And I’ll still die if I refuse their deal.”

Jess:

When I said that, he swallowed, and I recoiled inwardly at the shock and shame I read in his mind. Shame for me, that I was reluctant to lay down my life rather than do a dishonorable deed.

“Yes,” he said, “so you have to escape at the same time. I’ll try first, by a more obvious route, and during the diversion, you have to find another way out.”

“You mean you get caught, and I escape? Do you see how little sense that makes? They still have you and can use you to force me back here.”

“Once I’m on the loose, they can’t take me without—“he broke off, and then, instead of “without killing me,” said, “I’m hard to catch.”—As if I couldn’t read his real thoughts with agonizing clarity. That made up my mind, and I did not share it with him.

The quarters were sumptuous enough—two big rooms separated by double doors. While we seemed to have no choice but to wait around, Jak spent his time first inspecting every way in or out, then he went into the other room, where he went through his slow-motion fighting drills, an hour of them, then half an hour of meditation, then more drills. He was acting his faith that we would escape, by preparing himself to take advantage of any chance. I closed the door on his fighting dance, went to the locked door leading to the corridor and knocked softly, twice. I waited and knocked again. One guard opened the door and quickly stepped back, while the over leveled his spear at me in the doorway.

“Take a message to Caspar for me. Tell him I’ll do it,” I said. Then I closed the door, softly.