The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Jak:

“I accept your terms,” I said, as if we were two enemy generals who had never met. But we weren’t, and one of us was going to die in a few minutes. I’ve known for a long time that a split second’s decision, like snatching a sword out of a scabbard, could get me killed, but I hadn’t seen how entangling it could be. When we met empty-handed, either of us might disable the other in any number of ways, without killing. This expensive foreign sword I had taken from her, with its characteristic wavy forging pattern, would slice off an arm as easily as a lock of hair, and I would bet that the replacement blade she had borrowed was almost as good. With these weapons, it would be easier for us to kill each other than not.

For weeks, I had been practicing a combat approach that only the mystics among us gave much attention. “The mind of no-mind” is what it’s called, but no one has explained what that really means. I thought it sounded like a way to hide one’s intentions from the opponent—by having no intentions. Things just happened, triggered by long lists of attacks and conditioned reflexes. I had been training inside my own head for weeks, right in front of her eyes, envisioning hundreds of attacks and queuing up automatic responses, until she enchanted me into thinking that the fight had not been lost.

Those were all empty-hand drills, and now we both had swords in our hands. Could I transfer my recent training to sword combat? If I did, was I condemning one of us to death?

She held the sword in front of her, in highline. That meant that the duel had begun, if a duel was what this was. But she had more to say, apparently.

“Jak, I can’t let you run, and I don’t want to kill you. Don’t force this on us.”

“You forced this on us. I’m ending it. To stop me from leaving, you’ll have to kill me—if you can. Worry about your own life.”

“What if I said—“ she began, and I clapped both palms over my ears. Her expression sagged a little; she shook her head to promise, No enchantment, and she began again. “What if I said I’m sorry for what I did to you?” she said. “I never meant to hurt you once the duel was over; it was just the opposite. We’re taught that pain is to be avoided if possible and, when it can’t be avoided, relieved as soon as possible. I never—”

“I’d say that you were either lying or telling the truth, and that it wouldn’t matter. You’ll never understand freedom, any more than you’ll understand honor. So it wouldn’t matter.”

She actually looked surprised. And hurt.

“How can it not matter that I’m telling the truth?”

The appeal in her tone got to me, as well as the illogic of my trusting her unspoken promise not to re-enchant me while claiming I didn’t believe a word she said. But I had learned not to trust my own emotions around her. I chose harsh words, aimed at me as well as her. I said,

“Because truth and lies are just tools for you slavers, to manipulate your slaves and your fools. Like me.”

Her eyes looked desperate. “I can’t—“ she said, and then she slashed at one of my legs with the sword.

I jumped over it without thinking, and in the air, my own sword formed an overhead strike; it seemed to have its own mind. I stopped it—or something did—just in time to avoid splitting her skull like a pumpkin. She swung her sword back-handed, attacking the other leg, and I automatically stepped inside the swing, locked up her sword arm, and dislocated the elbow. She cried out. When I wrenched the sword out of her hand, it came away more easily than I had expected and the blade cut the back of her leg, which collapsed instantly in a spray of blood. I stepped clear of her and held the sword at the ready, watching the two other women. They stared back.

“May we go to her?” the one called Mira said. “You’ve won.” Her hatred of me was written on her face by its very blankness. I looked down at Jess again. She was controlling her breathing to control the pain, but her whole right leg was covered in blood, and it was welling out in pulses from behind her knee. I fought down a panic that I barely understood. What had I thought was likely to happen in a sword duel?

“Put a tourniquet on her,” I said. “Cut strips off your clothes; weave them together into a rope, twist it tight, above the knee.”

“And how do we get her back to the healers before she bleeds out?”

“She just tried to cut my leg off. If it didn’t work out for her, that’s not my problem.” I turned.

“That’s not your sword, the younger sister called out, indignantly.”

“Prize of war,” I said.

No one followed me. I stayed on the cliffs, close to the edge where I could see the beaches below, and maybe an unattended boat. Uninvited, the rhythmic pulse of the blood coming from her leg showed itself to me again. They probably wouldn’t get her back to the healers. If they kept the tourniquet tight enough for long enough to save her life, the leg would begin to die.

Not my problem. Never was, in reality—just tricks played with my mind. This sick feeling that dragged on my running legs as they left her further behind me—why couldn’t that be just another part of the spell? Wanting to protect her, remembering her long nights awake healing me—it could all have come from the spell. All lies. Do nothing without thinking, I told myself. Keep running while you think. I remembered how fragments of memory drifted up as Mord told me things, how the pieces sought each other out like droplets of floating oil merging into one. How thin and scattered my false memories had been, by contrast. How could I know? What if this reluctance to leave Mar territory was just part of the binding spell? But if she had ensorcelled me to prevent me from leaving, she wouldn’t have needed to pursue me so hotly. She would have had all the time in the world to form a huge hunting party while I ranged up and down along the border, unable to cross it. Maybe I just wasn’t willing to know she was dead. No time for that. I had to get away. I had to get to . . . Where? Maybe get to my uncle and ask him to stake me for passage overseas; work as a mercenary in the Spice Islands. It would be a living, until I got killed.

I stopped running. The only person who wanted me around was a thousand running strides behind me, dying of the wound I gave her.

Jess:

Weak and dizzy, I gave Mira instructions for applying the tourniquet and loosening it twice every hour. If that wouldn’t keep me alive, so be it. I wasn’t willing to spend a few weeks waiting for gangrene to kill me. I wasn’t even sure I was willing to walk with a crutch for the rest of my life, if the tendon had been severed. After the bleeding had been arrested, I had her and her sister together reduce the dislocated elbow. I cast a brief spell of numbness on myself for that one; as they stretched the arm out and then popped the hinge of the elbow back into place, I felt it, but dimly.

And then Jak stood in the cave mouth, his chest heaving. He had been running. His face bore an odd mixture of resentment, fear for himself, and the one thing strange—fear for me. Even as light-headed as I was from the bleeding, I could read that he had come back for me. –And not to kill me.

He carried two lengths of driftwood with him, trunks of saplings, about two inches thick, with their branches trimmed off. He dropped them on the cave floor and came over to me.

After rolling back an eyelid and putting two fingers lightly against the side of my throat, he then bent down to look at the wound and the tourniquet above it.

“Do you want to live?” he asked me. I thought it an inexplicable question until I remembered his telling me, while in trance, that he had wanted to die when he knew that he had lost the duel.

“Do you?” he asked more sharply.

“Yes.”

“Even if there’s pain?”

“Stupid question.”

“Then you have to lie still, control your breathing, but above all, don’t fall asleep.

Are you willing to stand more pain to preserve a chance of walking again, even a faint chance?” he asked.

“Another stupid question,” I said.

“Then I need to loosen this tourniquet for a few minutes,” he said. “It has to be gradual and it can’t stay loose too long. When I retighten it, you’re going to hurt.”

I thought of the epigram: Sometimes pain is the only coin that will buy your happiness, or protect it. “Please do it instead of talking about it,” I said.

Then he took off the leather shirt he was wearing. He turned to Mira.

“Go find a couple of stout poles, about five spans long, trim them, then cut this into strips, a yard long, an inch wide. Spread the strips out evenly, the length of the sticks, and tie—

“—We know how make a litter,” Mira said coldly.

“Then do it. And make it strong; we will have to move at a trot, not a walk. If we don’t get her to a surgeon soon, she’ll die.”

“I seem to remember telling you that,” she told him coldly, “just before you said it wasn’t your problem and ran away.”

“I’m back. Practice your sarcasm silently while you’re making the litter,” he said. “

They went out of the cave and left us.

“Why did you come back?” He shrugged.

“You let me live when you could have killed me.”

Once again I spoke and then wished I had not.

“Sparing you didn’t cost me nearly as much as your coming back is likely to cost you. You know they’ll arrest you. They might execute you. It doesn’t make sense that you’re doing this.”

“Where I come from, men grow up as soldiers. Maybe we just have a different standard of honor than people who grow up studying how to swindle other people in trade.”

“So the fact that you’re not very good at things that take brains, like business, means you’re better than we are? How has that idea been working out for you?”

“So the fact that you’ve been cheating us for years makes you better than we are?”

I was not going to let that pass.

“We can influence you because we have taken the trouble to study you. You are so rigid, so arrogant in your ways that you never bothered to study anything about us but our battlefield tactics and the most superficial aspect of our martial art. Your losses are the fruit of your childish, willful backwardness. ”

He flushed up with anger at this, and I felt him getting it under control.

“Let’s say that you are right. Say that we are childish and ignorant. But what kind of person uses a child’s ignorance, his weakness, to abuse him, to exploit him, to crush his prospects? You compared us to wolves; you said we worship only daring and strength. So what kind of predators are you, then, that prey on the children you say we are? Wild dogs, that wait for a chance to snatch a baby off a porch? You tell yourselves that your enslaving us is justified by the laws of nature. What you mean is that you have the right to do to us whatever you can get away with doing. That puts you on the same level as the most brutal Terian warlord I ever heard of.”

“Is that really what you think of me?” My own voice sounded hoarse to me as I asked. “You said yourself; I could have killed you,” I added, and felt ashamed even as the words came out of my mouth.

“Yes,” he said. “You decided to enslave me instead. That’s what you people do. You think owning a man, calling him ‘property,’ is a business transaction like any other. You don’t even recognize the obscenity of how you live.”

“You want to talk about obscenity? We are moving away from slavery; in fifty years it will be just history. But you? Half your people can expect nothing out of life but breeding more soldiers for your armies. How soon is that going to change?”

“Our women are proud of that—“

“You’ve left them nothing else to be proud of. Yes, you let them walk alone in the street, you keep them physically fit, you teach them a little about handling arms, so that they can defend your children and your exclusive claim to their bodies when you’re away fighting. Your women are brood mares.”

“And you made me your stud horse. You ‘spared’ my life because you thought I could be used. For trade, for pleasure, even for company, as long as you kept me under control, and in the dark.”

“Don’t tell me what I think. You don’t know what I think—“

“I don’t even know what I think any more!” he shouted at me. “You took that away. When I feel something, I don’t know if it’s me, or some spell you planted in my mind. So I ran, and kept running, until I knew that I had crossed the border, that you hadn’t put a spell on me to stop me doing that. I chose to come back. My life for yours. Your head witch will have me killed. But as I’m dying I’ll know I decided to do this, that I won’t owe you a fucking thing, and that you can never use me again.”

His words hurt so much that I did not want to examine their logic. I didn’t answer, only partly because of my dry throat. I was glad his back was to me. My eyes burned, as if tears would come, but I had none. I was too dried out.

I would like to believe that this failure of tears was the reason that I said to him,

“How do you know that I didn’t make you feel this way?” And I saw despair in his face then. Seeing that did quench my anger. Like someone trying to swim out of a bog I said, trying to sound still angry so that he would believe me,

“Well, I didn’t. Trust that, or don’t. I don’t care.”

Show them a truth; then blind them with a lie. Deception is a sword. Marian war lore.

I don’t know how long the litter jolted along—only that we were well away from the sea cliffs and into the forested coastal hills when he called for a halt. We were on the edge of a clear-running stream. I was weak, and very thirsty. He and my two sisters were soaked in sweat and breathing hard.

JAK:

After the words we exchanged during our walk out of the coastal woods, only the thirst of a bleeder could have led her to say anything to me at all. We stopped at a clean-running creek with a nice rock drop-off to roil the water in the gravel-bottomed pool beneath and keep it fresh and sweet.

“Water. For the gods’ mercy.” Her voice sounded like a crow’s.

“All right, let’s rest a little,” I said. “Give her the water slowly, and not too much. I want to look at the wound again.” They did what I asked, Mira with a few significant looks. When I looked at the wound and loosened the tourniquet, the blood resumed leaking out in that rhythmic pulse, but it was more sluggish. The blood itself looked thicker, almost syrupy.

“We’re not going to make it with the tourniquet,” I said. “I need to stitch up that artery, or she’ll die.”

“You’re not a healer,” Mira said with alarm. “If you start mucking around inside that wound you’ll kill her faster than the bleed.”

“In my Hundred, every man was cross-trained for battlefield surgery,” I said. “Fill her helmet up with water while I make a fire. Ask your sister to dig around in that pack for some strong, undyed thread and a good needle.” Mira stood, suspicious eyes on me.

I squatted down beside Jess. Our eyes didn’t quite meet.

“To get this artery secured and stitched,” I said, “I’m going to have to root around in that wound. It’s going to hurt, and you’re going to have to stay stock still while it hurts. Can you do to yourself what you did to me?

“Not now,” she said. “I’m too weak to maintain the concentration. You’ll have to do it.”

Dying or not, she hadn’t lost the ability to take me by surprise.

“I’m not a witch. I wouldn’t know how to do it even if I wanted to.”

“You know the kinds of things I say to you,” she said calmly. “I didn’t wipe all of them out of your memory. Just say them back to me,” she said, and then smiled wanly. “Well, some of them.”

I found myself starting to grin at her, as if it all hadn’t been a fiction resting on nothing but witches’ hocus pocus, as if she hadn’t ruined it herself. I pinched off the grin.

She groaned a little, and breathed out long and loudly, exhaling the pain. I recognized the technique.

“And don’t tell me to go to sleep—“

“I know what the death-sleep is,” I said.

“Anyway, I have an anchor word,” she said. “I’ll tell it to you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s a word or phrase you can set up in someone’s mind like a trip wire, to return him—or her—to a trance quickly.”

“Jess, don’t be a fool,” Mira hissed at her. “If you have to go into trance, let me do it. Just whisper the word to me. Don’t give it to this dirt-scratcher.”

“Mira, I appreciate your standing by me, I do. But I don’t require your advice on how I should heal myself, or with whom I should share my confidences. And I suggest you govern your tongue.” Mira turned her back and walked to the other side of the stream.

“Look,” I said uneasily, “she’s right. There’s no reason to tell me this stuff.”

“I was the one who had to hurt you,” she said. “I wanted to be the one to take that pain away. I could have just turned you over to the healing specialists, but I needed. . . Please . . . I told you I’d trust you with my life, and I have. Do you think I won’t trust you to protect me from pain?” She licked her lips. “My anchor phrase is “glimmering glow.” It will work better if you lay your hand on my forehead as you say it”

“What does that mean?” I said. “It’s nonsense.”

“Of course it is,” she said impatiently. “You think I want to use some everyday phrase anyone might say by coincidence in my hearing?” Then she could not stifle a groan.

“I need you to do this now, Jak. I can’t hold on much longer.”

So I did it. I whispered the words in her ear, helping to coach her breathing, encouraging her to pay attention to that and nothing else. I had seen one of the other slaves in her household sitting with his wife as she gave birth, whispering in her ear just the same way. It seemed to calm her. Mira came sulking back but took my directions about how to hold the wound open. Just before I reached in to stich the blood vessel, I whispered her trip phrase again, and on her next breath she sank into a stillness so profound that I thought I’d lost her. I felt as if I had to say something.

“That’s right, Jess; deep, slow breaths. Breathe low, down in the belly, and let it out slowly. Focus on that, on that deep, healthy breathing. That’s the breathing of a great athlete, and we know that’s what you are. The breathing of radiant health. The breathing that means healing. Think of that and nothing else. Just your breathing. Feel how its rhythm fits with the rhythm of your heart. How many beats to a breath? Just your deep, slow breathing and your slow, steady heartbeats. Thinking of nothing else. Feeling nothing else. Just your breathing.”

Jess let out a long, sighing breath, and her body seemed to spread out, somehow, on the litter. Five seconds later she inhaled again, deeply and slowly, and I began stitching. A quarter hour later I had the incision rinsed out with boiled water and a new cloth bandage bound over it. Jess had not moved a muscle during any of it. Slowly, in fear, I loosened the tourniquet. There were no squirters, not even a pulsing seepage under the bandage. The stitches had held. Mira looked at Jess’s wan face, with her own eyes tearing up. Then she tightened her mouth, turned to me, and nodded, just slightly.

We broke camp and bound Jess to the litter so that she did not risk popping the stitches from a fall or some sudden attempt to move. After an hour or so, she said, “Water.”

Mira took over the grip on their end of the poles. Her little sister unslung her water bag and reached down toward Jess.

“Just a little, and slowly,” I said.

“She knows that,” said Mira.

“Does she know there’s no thirst like that of someone bleeding? Girl, you keep control of that water bag. Don’t let it out of your hands. When she’s had one mouthful, take it away. Wait a hundred heartbeats before you give her another one.”

I saw Jess’s cheeks hollow as she sucked at the bag, squeezing its sides.

“That’s enough,” I snapped. “Pause now. A hundred more heartbeats.”

Jess groaned. “Where are we?”

“We’re about to leave the forested part of the coastal hills,” I said. “We’ll be seeing farmers soon. Maybe someone will have a horse and wagon to get you back faster.”

“There’s a wagon,” Mira called from just beyond the tree line, with a good view all the way down into the valley. I went over to see for myself.

There was a wagon, all right. There were also half a dozen women in Marian lacquer armor, mounted on horses, and they were galloping toward us. Behind them was a wagon holding older bigwigs, followed by some infantry. They had dogs with them, too. We had maybe five minutes. We stepped back into the cover of the trees. They kept galloping our way.

I turned to Mira. “You signaled them.”

She looked me right in the eye. “Yes.” You think I’m going to increase Jess’s risk by a broken shell’s worth just to give you a better chance of getting away? Run now if you want. I won’t tell them which way you went. That’s about what I owe you for stitching her up after you cut her.”

“He can’t run,” Jess called out from the litter. “They’ll run him down, with the horses and dogs, and when they catch him they’ll kill him.”

“I’ll take my—“ I started to say.

“Sleep, my friend Jak! “ I heard, and my muscles started to turn to jelly, my eyelids to lead. “No!” I tried to tell myself, but Jess’s voice overrode me, so heavy with the pain she was putting aside to talk to me. How could I not listen?

“Yes, dear Jak, shhhhhh, Sleep, my friend Jak, it’s the only way; we have to convince them I still own your mind,” she said, “to save your life, and you know in your heart that I love you and want you with me. You know that, and that’s why you can’t resist the sleepiness coming over your now, you don’t really want to, because you know you can trust me and I know this is the only way, so you can go ahead and let your head feel so fuzzy and heavy inside, your mind so much adrift, I’ll take care of you now, just as you took care of me, I promise. I let you entrance me because I love and trust you, and if you love and trust me, you will let me entrance you now, so one way or another we’ll know, my love; sleep deeper quickly for me now, Sleep, my friend Jak, so we can save you, because if we can’t, I don’t think I want to save me, either.“

Her mate? A Mar woman can’t marry a slave without “freeing” him first; I knew that much about their law. But why say that now? Dimly, I realized that she might have already been thinking of this moment when she let me entrance her. Was it another trick? Part of my mind was telling me I couldn’t risk trusting her, but something else was in my head, too, and it was pushing that other mind aside.

“Trust me, my dear Jak, trust me and sleep, my friend Jak. You’re sleeping deeper now, hearing only my voice. No other thoughts in your mind. I’ll protect you, but you must do anything I ask, Jak. Anything I ask. You don’t have to remember it later, if the memory hurts you. But you need to do it today, without question. What will you do when the Council members get here?”

I heard my own voice saying, “Anything you ask.”

“Yes, my darling,” she answered in that hushed, whispery spell-caster voice. “Anything I ask. I will have a good reason for anything I ask you. Everything will be all right. You just have to trust me. And you do trust me, don’t you Jak? You know you do, because you trusted me to take you down into this deep trance. And that makes me so happy.”

I was wrapped in a cocoon made of her voice, her spell, and more than that. I was wrapped in my knowledge of who she was. I knew her, now. And I trusted her. The proof was in where I was, right now, this deep, dim, soft place. I had let her bring me here.