Monica and the Black Fortress

by Richard Alexander (Gromets Plaza)

(story continues from Monica and the Black Fortress)

Chapter Thirteen  –  Rising Waters

The long hours passed.  I could tell it was dark outside as I looked up through the hole in the roof, through which the rain continued to pour, the relentless deluge kicking up spurts on the floor like machine gun bullets.  

The noise of the rain hissing and echoing around the walls merged into an all-encompassing sense-surround of pain that seemed to pervade every fibre of my body.  My arms were on fire as my muscles strained to take some of the weight of my body, sharing it with my thighs, which struggled to avoid sitting back on the big conical linga penetrating and dilating my butt hole.  My jaws ached from the gag that had been strapped there all day, and I was feeling the lack of food as well.  As though this was not enough, the padlock around my cock and balls, along with the attendant chain, was causing major discomfort, made more so when fat Babur had turned up a couple of hours previously and hooked two more iron balls on to the chain.  And did I mention my arse?  My sphincter was railing against the inanimate, passive object that I was slowly forcing past it, albeit at the rate of millimetres an hour, each millimetre enlarging it by some ridiculous factor that no doubt involved Pi and some function of the diameter.

Sure, I had some distractions.  I gazed at the rain as it drummed on the surface of the shallow pool beneath the hole in the roof, then flowed in a rush across the floor to disappear through a tunnel or passage off to the right, presumably leading to an underground stream running through the bowels of the fortress.  I studied the ornamental battle-axes and swords on their wall mountings.  I watched the sky turn from grey to black.  I also watched Abby Wilkes succumbing to her own body acting under gravity, slowly impaling itself on the big linga. The weights suspended from her nipples were getting closer and closer to the platform surface where their load would be negated, and that would be the point where Abby would be totally engorged with the full extent of the stone prong.

I have spent some uncomfortable times in the service of Monica, either as a direct consequence of her hand, or a consequence of her actions.  This particular night was up there with the worst of them, probably surpassing whatever was in second place simply by dint of the fate that I was destined to befall under the surgeon’s knife.  If I survived that, the fate that followed might be even worse.

The lights remained on in the cavern, and every now and then Abby and I would exchange glances, our eyes sharing the moral support and sympathy that comes with shared pain.  She knew me as Asha, an Indian girl who for some reason remained clothed, and for some reason had a chain hanging below the edge of her sari on which weights were hung.  I couldn’t begin to guess what she would make of that.  At least being out of the rain meant my clothing had slowly dried from being dripping wet to being simply damp in the humid tropical atmosphere.

As the night wore on I suffered from cramps in my arms and legs, but managed to beat the latter by extending one leg at a time to the side and taking the full weight on my arms.  When I had overcome the cramps, I took the full weight on my legs and managed to give my arms a brief rest.  The sensation slowly disappeared from my hands as they became numb, and I ended up supporting my weight by my tied wrists.  Occasionally I would doze, and wake up suddenly with a sharp pain as the linga jammed further up my arse.  I didn’t know how long I could take this, nor how long I would have to.  My groans were overwhelmed by the waterfall noise.

As time passed something struck me as odd.  At first I couldn’t identify it, then I realised that the sound of the rain was changing – or rather the sound of the water within the cavern was different.  I noticed that the pool below the hole in the roof was in fact larger, and with a shock I saw that the edge of the pool was starting to spread slowly across the floor.  The water was no longer draining away!  

The platforms on which Abby and I knelt were on the lower side of the chamber, perhaps two metres or so below the level of the door.  I realised that if the rain continued and the blockage remained, we would be submerged before the water reached the base of the door into the cavern.  I mmmphed as loudly as I could, trying to attract Abby’s attention, but her head was down and her eyes were closed.  Whatever my predicament, until now I had still had some hope of survival.  Now my mortality abruptly seemed to become more real, and my lifespan suddenly finite.  If nobody came in the next few hours, we would drown while impaled on the lingas.

I was now wide awake, and conscious of every ache and pain in my tautly stretched body.  Time passed and Abby seemed to revive.  The weights on her nipples were only an inch away from resting on the platform, as she struggled to cope with the giant phallus filling her.  She appeared desperately tired - and I suppose I looked the same - until like me, she realised things had changed within the cavern and that the water was now steadily rising.  At this point it was at the level of the base of our platforms.  I had been watching it with a kind of morbid fascination as the edge of the pool slowly crept up the slope of the rocky floor like an incoming tide up a beach.  The implications now dawned on Abby and she gave a cry, and struggled momentarily.  The struggle was the last thing she should have done, for it provided the impetus for her tired muscles to surrender, and she slipped down on the phallus with a drawn out wail of capitulation, the weights resting on the platform in front of her.   Her head drooped and I could see her full breasts heaving with the effort of absorbing the intruder into her body.  I could just hear her moans above the hiss or the incoming downpour.

At some stage – I had no idea what time it was – the door opened and closed.  The water had risen to the bottom steps of the platforms and we were both now marooned on our respective islands.  The door was located behind Abby, though I couldn’t see who had entered until the person was halfway across the cavern.  It was Babur.  

I groaned, for I was sure he would be coming to make my life more of a misery by loading my goolies with more weights, and I didn’t know if I could take any more.  But with the water rising, perhaps that was not really relevant any more.  Maybe he had come to free us, but somehow that didn’t seem very likely, for his master and mistress wanted us dead by whatever means was convenient and appropriate.  I figured death from the forces of nature would be as appropriate as anything else.

Babur paddled a couple metres through the water to the steps at the rear of Abby’s platform.  She was unaware of his presence until he climbed up the steps knelt behind her, gripping the biceps of her raised arms in his enormous hands and raising her body an inch or two, before pulling it down again, then repeating it, so that the linga was being worked inside her.  The weights on her breasts bounced up and down and Abby screwed up her face with pain, screaming into the rubber ball between her teeth.  

Babur grinned at me from behind Abby’s shoulder.  He pointed to the rising water and made a sign that it would rise above our heads, and I realised then what he was up to.  The bastard had come down here to have a last play with what I presumed had become one of his toys – with or without the knowledge of his superiors.  I was now sure that he had raped Abby in the time that Seeta and Sanjay had not been there, and maybe even when they were.  She would be a chattel to be used then discarded when it all became too inconvenient.  And maybe that was now.  Our showing up may have caused Sanjay and Seeta to decide that Abby and Claire were a liability, if their presence attracted the attention of others.  Like us, they would be disposed of.

Babur dropped his trousers.  He wore nothing underneath and sported an enormous erection.  He was busily rubbing it up and down Abby’s back while wrapping his arms around her and mauling her breasts when I saw movement behind him in the doorway.  It was Claire.  She wore a pale blue sari and crept into the cavern through the half-open door.  She was directly in my line of sight beyond Babur and Abby, and stopped short when she saw what was about to take place.  For a moment she looked bewildered, frightened, unsure what to do, then, as though making up her mind she moved to one side and lifted a rusty sword down from one of the ornamental displays that hung from the wall.  

The sword was as long as her arm and looked heavy and awkward the way she held it.  She advanced to the edge of the water, then stepped into it, the hem of the sari swirling around her.  The water was above her knees by the time she reached the steps to the platform.  I tried not to look at her, terrified that Babur would see the direction of my gaze, but he was too intent on pinching Abby’s nipples and tormenting her body to even be bothered with my presence.

I held my breath as Claire mounted the steps behind him, carrying the sword two-handed ahead of her.  She reached the top step and lunged, thrusting the sword forward and upward.  It must have penetrated Babur’s rectum and continued up through a number of vital organs.  Then it seemed to stick and Claire lost her grip.  Babur’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened, though whether any sound came I couldn’t tell above the noise of the rain.  He had been half crouching when she struck, and the initial impact had made him cannon into Abby, who had no idea what was happening, but incurred further pain with the collision.  Babur bounced backwards at that point, and lost his balance entirely.  For a brief moment he windmilled his arms and sat down on the platform.

The weight of his body falling on the exposed hilt of the sword thrust it the full length into him, the top bursting out of his chest in a spray of blood.  He looked surprised as all hell, before toppling over the side and into the water, where he lay still.  Claire held up her hands to her open mouth in horror, and seemed transfixed by what she had done, while Abby, from her position facing me, could not tell what had happened.  She managed to control the tears streaming down her face to look at me with a frightened expression querying what was going on behind her.

Trying to convey something through facial expressions alone, while gagged with a rubber ball, is difficult at the best of times.  You can frown, but you can’t smile or mouth things.  I tried my best but it was hopeless.  I was shocked as much as Claire, for I had never seen someone die before, much less with the violence that Babur had met.  Only when Claire finally pulled herself together did the scene unfreeze, as she mounted the last step and put her hands on Abby’s shoulders.  Abby turned as best she could and looked at her friend in astonishment.  As she did so, Babur’s body floated past the front of the platform trailing a slick of red, and Abby’s eyes opened even wider.

Claire was shaking – I could see that even from my position a short distance away.  I think we all were – for various reasons.  Claire undid Abby’s gag strap and tenderly eased the ball out of her friend’s mouth.  Abby worked her jaw and said something, but I couldn’t hear above the roar of the rain.  I suspect it was along certain lines relating to making haste in untying her.  Claire tried the knots holding Abby down at the waist, but they seemed too solidly knotted.  Frustrated she splashed back through the water to the armorial display on the wall and took down a sword that was the other pair of the one she had just used so effectively on Babur.  She used this to saw through the rope holding Abby’s waist, then undid the clamps on Abby’s nipples.  The chains dropped to the platform with a dull clinking.  Then she helped her friend to stand ever so slowly, easing herself up off the stone linga.  I saw now that the head was intricately carved, tapering from two inches in diameter at the top to three inches at the base.  No wonder poor Abby had struggled.  She was crying now, I could see.  Like me, her hands would be numb and she would be wobbly on her feet.  Claire supported her as best she could while she used the sword to cut through the rope that had held Abby’s wrists in the air.  

Abby nearly fell as her arms came free, but Claire grabbed her with her free arm and assisted her down the steps and through the water back to the rocky floor that was still exposed.  Here Abby sat down, head in hands, her wrists still tied, exhaustion showing in every fibre of her body.  

Now Claire turned in my direction, wading through the water to climb the stairs at the back of my platform.  She sawed through the rope anchoring my waist to the back of the platform, just as she had done with Abby, and started to help me to rise.  A terrible pain ripped through my loins as the movement jiggled the chain weighing down my balls.

“Mmmph!  Nnnph!”  I cried out in pain, before Claire recognised the need to remove the gag as a priority.  She quickly unbuckled the strap and extracted the ball with great difficulty from where it had been trapped behind my teeth for over twenty-four hours.  I had never lasted this long with such a gag before, and while I had had no choice in the matter, my experience in coping with various gags had undoubtedly stood me in good stead, if it could be called such.

My mouth was dry and I could hardly speak properly.

“No – lift the chains up in front first – please!”

Claire looked at me oddly, and I realised my voice must have sounded decidedly different from her expectation of a Hindu girl.  It would have sounded both Australian and decidedly male.

“You’re…you’re the guy at dinner, with Monica!”

“Yes, I know – shit, look, please lift those chains up before I turn into a bloody girl in a very painful way!”

She reached around me, holding on with one hand to the overhead rope and reaching down to grasp the chains and lift them up so that they could sit on the edge of the platform.  Then she carefully removed the iron balls and dropped them into the water.  I sweated on this bit, scared as hell that the whole lot would roll off the edge while still attached to my vulnerable bits, and I would end up unexpectedly singing falsetto, just when I thought I was free.

At that point I was able to slowly raise my right leg and put my foot flat on the platform, easing my weight on to that leg and – with Claire’s help – lifting myself ever so carefully off the linga, conscious of the chain still locked around my other parts.  I confess I made some gasping and groaning noises in the process.  Everything seemed to be hurting below the waist as more weight came on from the chain while the awful intrusion in my arse was gradually lessened, then removed, as I hauled myself clear of it.  All my muscles were protesting at having been confined for so long and having various painful tensions imposed on them.  I felt like a cripple as I straightened both legs and spread my weight the way nature intended.

I agreed to Claire cutting the rope holding my arms up, but when this was done and my arms dropped I could still feel no life in my hands.  

“Can you carry the chains?” I asked Claire.  “I’m rather attached to them.”

She seemed to understand and picked them up before helping me like a nurse to turn around and stagger down the steps and into the water which was now almost waist deep.  We waded back to where Abby sat, still with her hands bound.  She looked up and gave me a tremulous smile.

“Hi.  I’m Steven,” I said.

Her expression changed comically from one of having shared a difficult experience with another female, albeit of a different culture, to one of realisation that her perceptions were nothing like reality.  She gaped. 

“Steven was on the train with some other girls,” she explained.  

“We came to rescue you two,” I said simply, aware that to date we’d made a pretty poor fist of it.

“But how…?” asked Abby, as Claire sawed gingerly at the ropes around Abby’s wrists.

“It’s a long story,” I said, conscious that now was not the time for lengthy explanations.  Abby’s wrists came free, her flesh deeply indented from the cords, and she shook her hands to get the blood circulating again.  Then it was my turn and a minute later I, too, was feeling the exquisite pain of returning circulation.  

“You make a very nice girl,” said Abby quietly, but with a shy smile.

“So do you,” I said, and I’m sure she blushed, conscious now of her nakedness and that her impalement had been in front of a male, rather than another female.

Claire, meanwhile, had slipped out of the soaking petticoat under her sari and had wrung it out before offering it to Abby.  It had a drawstring at the top and Abby stepped into it gratefully, while Claire pulled it up above her friend’s breasts before tying a bow in the string.

I knew we had to escape, and to do it fast, but I was conscious of two things.  Firstly, Claire’s ankles were manacled and linked by a chain, and even more in the forefront of my thoughts were the chains dangling from my own dangly bits.  It would not only be a serious impediment to fast movement, but would mean I would probably have to carry the chains while being very careful what I did.

I picked up the chains and felt under my skirt.  I had been getting a curious numbness of my dick and scrotum caused by the padlock while I was kneeling on the platform.  The recent movement made things feel a bit more normal, but I was fearful of the excruciating pain that could arise from a wrongly-positioned testicle or a brief awkward loading on the lock.

“Let me see,” Claire said, and I obediently raised my skirt again.  Her face frowned in concern.  “Maybe Babur has the keys on him.”

“Do you want me to look?” I offered.

“No, I’ll go,” Abby volunteered.  She was smart enough to realise that Claire was still very shaky over what she’d done.  “I’m not afraid of that shit.”

Abby stood and waded into the water, to where Babur floated face down near one wall.  It was nearly chest deep at that spot, the water stained with blood, and Abby fished distastefully for keys in the pockets.  She returned with a bunch, her petticoat now a watery pink colour.  She passed the keys to Claire and removed the garment and again wrung it out, while Claire found the keys to her ankle cuffs and unlocked them, before passing the keys to me.

I felt awkward sitting there with my skirt around my knees, trying to work out what was happening down around my goolies.  They are not the easiest things to examine.  You’d think that God, in the layout of such important parts, would at least have put them somewhere more accessible.  I met with no success and had to ask Claire if she could have a go.  I had long since ceased to be embarrassed about this sort of thing.  I had suffered many indignities at Bilboes, with most of the girls there – and a lot of pleasurable experiences, come to that – and having my most intimate parts fondled was hardly new.  Claire could get a much better look at everything than I could, and I knew from the apologetic look on her face that the news was not good when the head of red hair came up from her explorations.

“Sorry.  None of the keys fit.”

“Bollocks,” I said, frustrated.

“Yes, I found those.”

I smiled, in spite of myself.  “Thank you for that.  I’ve been very confused lately and I was beginning to wonder…”  Claire smiled back.  She seemed to be getting over her act of violence.  “Well, I can’t drag the chains around with me like this.  I’ll have to support them somehow.”

We experimented a bit.  The two chains were long enough to be run up under my sari, front and back, and to meet over my shoulder, where we tied them together.  While not altogether comfortable, it was a bearable arrangement, and with a further rope securing them over the other shoulder, I made sure there was no chance of them falling off unexpectedly.  I could only presume Seeta had the key, and she was definitely on my hit list.

I had thought about my appearance, but while I definitely wanted to shed my female attire, we really didn’t have the time, and there was no other option at that moment.  My long black hair was glued on, and it could be argued that my current persona was the best of a bunch of bad alternatives.

I picked up the sword that Claire had used to cut the ropes, and we headed for the door.  Not to be outdone, the girls retrieved two more swords from another display, and – looking like a motley group of female pirates - we exited cautiously into the corridor.  At that point I thought we should at least have some sort of plan.

“Where are we going?” I whispered.

“Your friends are prisoners on the next level up,” Claire said.  “We need to get to them in a hurry.  We’ll go the back way, so we don’t have to go past the guard room.”

We turned left out of the cavern and followed a dimly lit but quite wide passage that had been hewn from the rock.  I noticed that there were a number of fissures in the rock, and here and there minor falls had occurred where water was seeping through.  The rock looked weathered and quite loose, and I started to have an uncomfortable feeling that the monsoon deluge we were experiencing was something a little out of the ordinary.

At that moment there came the sound of voices behind us, echoing in the tunnel.  We broke into a trot, passing several side tunnels and turning a corner.  I could not tell if the voices behind were in pursuit, but the sight ahead of us did not help my state of mind.  The tunnel sloped down and the floor became carved steps, disappearing into a murky pool.  Overhead the roof did likewise, where the entire passage had been flooded.

Behind us the murmured voices suddenly became echoing shouts and I had the distinct feeling that our absence from the torture cavern had been noted.  Maybe Babur’s presence had also been discovered.  I wondered if these guards would be devoted servants ready to defend their lord and lady’s honour and property to the end, or whether they were conscripted peasants who found the life less onerous than scraping a living from a hillside rice paddy.  Either way, I didn’t really want to put it to the test by seeing how well they could fight.

However, the change in the tenor of the voices gave added urgency to our situation.  I didn’t fancy sprinting about on the high heels that were still locked on my feet and were uncomfortable to say the least.  I figured bare feet wouldn’t be much better, and so resolved to stick with the shoes until such time as I needed to cut the straps with the sword, since it was the only way they would come off.  I looked at Claire for guidance, since I had no idea of the layout of the place.  

“I think we can do this,” she said.  The stairs go down here, to a little landing, then go up again.  There are stairs going down further, from the left of the landing to the next floor, but that must be flooded. Wherever the water drains out, it must be blocked, and everything’s building up.” I had already reached that conclusion myself.  “We want to go straight here – duck under the roof and come up on the other side.  We’ll have to swim for a few metres under water.”

Abby nodded in agreement.  The pair had probably been here several months, I guessed - long enough to know their way around the passages in the fortress.  Neither of the girls seemed to think the task was a problem and before I had really considered things, they both waded into the murky water and disappeared, Claire still gripping the sword.  I entered the water and promptly slipped over on the rocky floor.  I managed to hang on to my sword but realised as I was about to go under that the corset that remained tight about my body considerably affected my ability to take deep breaths.  I had been finding the going tough even for the small distance we had come since leaving the cavern.  Now I had focus on trying to expand my lungs against the constricting garment, and after three deep breaths I put my head under and swam as best I could.

The clinging sari and other garments made the effort far more draining than I expected, hampered more by the shoes and the sword, which I was reluctant to release, and the chains running up and down my body.  I kicked out in what I hoped was the right direction, banging my head on the rock in the process.  My shoulder scraped down the roof of the passage in the darkness that was the water.  It seemed to go on and on and I feared I had become disoriented.  Then there was a flat section, which must have been above the landing, after which I detected the upward rise.  My lungs were burning by now, even though it had probably only been twenty seconds.  I kicked out desperately, flailing with my free arm, my back and heels now banging into the roof as the buoyancy helped me upward.

I broke the surface gasping and dragging in air for all I was worth.  Abby grabbed me and gave me an encouraging smile as she dragged me to where my feet could touch the passageway steps.  We staggered out of the water, our saris sticking to our bodies.  They were about the worst things we could be wearing, I thought, and resolved to rationalise the outfit at the first opportunity.  Right then there wasn’t time.  

We ascended the steps back to the level we had been on previously, and cautiously stuck our heads around a bend.  There was no sound to be heard.  We hurried on, leaving trails of water behind us, not that they could be seen on the wet floor.  The very rocks seemed to be oozing wetness at present.  Everything was damp and dripping.  We reached a tee-junction and again peered around.  There was still no sound of pursuit, though there might be no reason we couldn’t be walking straight into an armed search party coming from the opposite direction.  Why did I suddenly feel like a player in a Lara Croft video game?  It was too bizarre to even bother with any sort of reality check.  

To our left was another set of stairs, with a door visible at the top.  We climbed these and paused beside the door.  Claire opened it a crack, listening.  She eased it open further and we found ourselves in a cloister running around the edge of an open courtyard, in the middle of which was a round hole, with a balustrade around it.  I realised we had doubled back on ourselves and were now above the chamber in which Abby and I had been imprisoned.  

We could now see the sky, and knew that morning had arrived, for the sky was a distinctly lighter shade of grey, though the rain continued to hammer down, at the very least covering our sounds.  We followed Claire around the cloister to a door on the other side, again checking what might be inside by opening it a crack.  A light shone underneath it and after a moment, Claire pushed it wider and slipped inside.  

We were in a temple of some sort, the place lit by a multitude of candles on some sort of frame on a stone platform to the left.  The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and incense.  My attention went quickly from a sinister-looking idol on an altar to a glass-walled box to the right in an large alcove.  I was stunned by what I saw.  Rani was on her hands and knees inside the box, her head down, seemingly supporting a metal tank that filled the inside of the glass enclosure.  The glass box was only a little more than a metre square, and looking at the tank she was supporting, I saw it fitted snugly inside the glass walls and was perhaps a metre high.  At the top there was a small pipe from which water was running slowly into the tank.  When it was full, a cubic metre of water would weigh a tonne – I knew that from my building experience, and Rani was now struggling to support however much was in there.

Before I could react further, there was an exclamation from Abby.  I turned to see her reaching under the candle frame above the platform.  Only then did I spot the arm stretched vertically down the side of the stone platform, with the wrist bound to an iron ring.  God!  Leila!  It had to be!  I don’t know why I assumed it was her, rather than Monica.  Somehow I felt that the absence of Sanjay and Seeta meant that Monica was elsewhere.

“Help me!” said Abby, grabbing one end of the frame.  I was torn between going to Leila and Rani, but Claire was ahead of me, and at once grabbed the other end of the frame, lifting it off in a matter of seconds.  Beneath a mountain of wax was Leila.  I could see her arm streaked with runnels of wax down its length, while the underside of her bent leg still relatively untouched.  Abby gripped the mass of wax that was over Leila’s face and ripped it away.  There was a snort and a sob, and while I knew Leila was all right at that moment, and I would have loved to hug her and hold her, Rani’s plight was the most scary, for at any second she might surrender to the crushing weight bearing down on her.  I had no idea how full the tank was, but looking at her position braced with her upper arms and thighs for support, I didn’t think I had very long.

I had no idea how the device worked.  The glass seemed to extend up beyond a downstand projection from the ceiling, and I didn’t know how to get upstairs or even what to do when I got there.  Most of the time I like to approach problems with some sort of considered plan.  Now I figured brute force was the best bet, and picking up a heavy stone lamp base I hurled it at the panel to the rear of Rani.  The damned thing bounced off!  The glass must have been an inch thick.

A considered plan had been the best bet, after all, I thought again, realising that the stone columns might in fact be the weak link, for stone has little tensile strength in comparison to its compressive strength.  These columns were as thick as my thigh, but had a quarter of their diameter cut out over the full height, where they anchored the corners of the glass.  

There seemed to be plenty of armour around this fortress, and as my eyes cast around for something to use, I spotted a pair of crossed pikes on one such display.  Seizing one of them, I drove it horizontally along the face of the glass and in between the glass and the stone column.  From here I levered the pike outward.  There was a faint crack, which I thought might be the stone.  Claire was smart enough to see what I was doing and – while Abby was freeing Leila – she grabbed the second pike and did the same thing on the adjoining glass face, so that we were both trying to prize the column away from the glass.

There was another, louder crack.  We were pressuring the mid-height point of the column, at around chest height.  I hoped to hell it wasn’t a major load-bearing column but it seemed smaller than the others.   Columns were typically made of sections of stone, and this was no exception, as with a further cracking a piece of stone disintegrated.  Several sections fell to the floor, and we were able to shift out the remainder without a major collapse.  Significantly, we could now lever two panes of glass apart, sufficient to get a head and shoulders through them.  I grabbed a section of the stone column and rolled it into the glass box.  Rani looked up as much as she could.  The poor girl looked exhausted and close to collapse.  She didn’t say anything.

I wormed my way half into the box, pushing the broken section of column ahead of me.  

“Hang on, Rani, almost there…” I whispered encouragingly.

“How… do you know my name…?” she stammered.

“Shush.  Concentrate for just a little longer.”  I worked the stone column section upright into a corner at the back, near her left leg, before reversing out again to retrieve another section.  This I slid under her stomach and breasts to the other side of her, apologising as I did so, though I didn’t really mean it.  A final section went beside her head.

“Now, Rani, you have to trust me.  You need to slide your arms out ahead of you, lowering the weight on to the supports.  Can you do that?”

Rani grunted uncertainly, then slowly began to slide her arms forward.  That was when she slipped on the marble floor of the box and her body fell flat.  She screamed and my heart leapt as the heavy tank dropped a couple of inches, crashing into the sections of columns.  There was a lot of crunching and cracking noises of steel on stone, as I grabbed Rani’s wrists and dragged her out of the glass box.

There were tears and explanations and lots of hugging over the next five minutes.  Leila had been about to suffocate, staying alive by blowing exhaustively through her nose each time a fresh drop of wax slid its way into a crater-like hole in the wax over her face.  It had been a terrifying experience for her, and she was still shaky from it.    

From what Leila had overheard, we could only guess that Monica was being taken to what Leila called the temple of the Fire God, which was evidently outside the main fortress itself, on the opposite side to the direction from which we had entered.  We took only time enough to organise our clothing, for Rani and Leila were both naked.  Claire and I stripped off our sari windings, and I removed my petticoat beneath.  I didn’t care that they saw what my nether regions were being subjected to.  My mauve sari cloth was about two metres wide and I ripped a metre off the end, wrapping it around my waist as a skirt.  It felt much better than the wet heaviness of the whole garment, and I finally decided the high heels would have to go as well.  The marble floor was treacherously slippery and the last thing I wanted now was to go down with a broken ankle.

Leila and Rani tore sections off Claire’s and my saris and wrapped them around their bodies over their breasts like a towel.  They reached down to their knees and looked quite comely.  Claire did the same, and suddenly we looked like a blue and mauve uniformed team of something – I was not quite sure what.

All of this took only a brief couple of minutes, and we managed to make a small impression on our hunger and thirst by wolfing down the remains of a meal that lay on the carved wooden table.  We were still chewing on samosas as Claire led us out into another corridor and down further stairs.  Everyone had perked up, albeit briefly, with the food, drink, clothing and mostly the release from captivity, and now we were focussed on freeing Monica and extracting our revenge.  It was all a matter of time, which, I suspected, we didn’t have much of.

We quickly left the luxurious rooms on the top level, descending a long series of stairs hewn from the rock.  Rani had taken the sword from Claire and I recalled Inspector Laxman’s boast that she had been a fencing champion at the academy.  Mind you, he’d also said she’d been trained in hand-to-hand combat.  That was just before Monica reduced her to a kneeling submissive with a wrist grip that she’d never seen coming.

At that moment I had no time to worry about who had the other sword.  I was more concerned with catching Monica.  We reached the bottom of the stairs and unbolted a heavy wooden door.  It gave on to a small landing projecting from the face of the fortress towering above us.  A series of further steps to the left joined up with a long covered walkway leading down the left hand side of a steep forested gully.  The walkway was mainly open on the right hand side, where strollers could look down on a small stream that seemed to emanate from somewhere at the base of the fortress below us.

On any other day, under any other circumstances, the closeness of the forest and the smell of damp greenery would have been a sensual nature experience.  Now, we were searching for Monica.  

We paused at that point, to peer through the rain down the open side of the walkway.  

“There!” exclaimed Leila.  I followed her pointing arm.  I saw movement maybe seventy metres away, just before a bridge which branched out to span the stream, before leading to steep steps climbing the right hand side of the gorge to some sort of platform with a shrine on top. 

There were four people, I thought.  Some bright coloured clothes on three of the people, the fourth naked, hands bound behind her.

“Where does this lead?”  I quickly asked Claire.

She pointed to a dark structure half hidden by the rain and forest at the end of the gorge, before the stream disappeared off to the right.  

“That’s the temple of Bhairava, the God of Fire,” said Claire, her words chilling my mind.  Beyond the group, within the temple, I could make out flickers of light that might have been flames.

Perhaps it had been Leila’s cry, or perhaps chance, but the group had seen us.  They hurried forward, propelling the bound Monica towards her fate.

*   *   *

21.02.05

story continues in Monica and the Black Fortress

o0o