When I was done I gathered her back into my lap and held her until the
trembling passed. Her beasts were tight and swollen now, her nipples so
hypersensitive that a casual tug was enough to make her squeak and twitch as
another sharp little climax cascaded through her tender flesh. But the fog
gradually cleared from her eyes, and after a few minutes she twined her arms
around my neck and kissed me tenderly.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
“You’re welcome. You alright now?”
“Yes! Oh, Daniel, I love you so much right now. Ask anything you wish
of me, I’m yours.”
I shook my head with a grin. “Ah, the mating cry of the well-fucked
woman. You say that now, but you’ll be back to spending all my money and
ordering the servants around in a few hours.”
She giggled. “Maybe. I guess you’ll have to fill me again whenever you
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want me breathlessly swooning for you. The rest of the time I’ll just be your
practical, hard-working house-nymph. Such a hard life you lead.”
“Yeah, it’s a rough job but somebody has to do it. Speaking of which,
that wall isn’t going to build itself.”
Tearing myself away from that vision of buxom blonde beauty wasn’t
easy. It was so tempting to just stay there and make love to her all morning.
Maybe get her help giving Tina a special first time, and then pounce on Cerise
when she got back from whatever errand she was on. With the near-infinite
endurance my amulet gave me it would be easy to get carried away.
But if I went down that road we’d all be dead in a matter of weeks. So
instead I pried myself away, and went to work.
There were men patrolling the top of the wall now, and troops moving
into several of the new towers. They were glad enough to get out of the
overcrowded barracks in town, although the exposed position of the new
construction left them a little nervous. Since the new wall didn’t connect to the
old one it would be easy for monsters to sneak into the empty ground between
the two fortifications at night, and stage ambushes or try to break into the
towers.
But there was no way to reach the top of the wall without going up
through a tower, and their exterior doors were heavy masses of stone mounted
on pivots set into the wall. Nothing small enough to fit through the doorway
was going to break in overnight, so as long as they didn’t get careless they
shouldn’t have much to worry about.
Besides, it was a temporary problem.
By lunchtime I’d extended the wall well around the curve of the town,
although of course the tops of the new defenses towered over all of the original
construction. Still, it was good enough that after Beri delivered lunch I felt I
could afford to take a few breaks. So once she was safely gone again I
retreated to the top floor of a newly-built tower and pulled out the book Holger
had sent me.
No, I wasn’t planning to put some kind of slavery spell on the witches.
But with both of them warning me about Cerise’s problems I’d be a fool not to
look into my options. Maybe there would be something here I could use?
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It was slow going at first. Like most hand-written books it was short,
barely a hundred pages of neat calligraphy. But the language was dense and
obscure, full of unfamiliar references and poetic turns of phrase. I would have
been completely lost if not for the grounding provided by my mana sorcery,
and even then making sense of it wasn’t easy.
I spent most of the afternoon alternating between projects, snatching
twenty or thirty minutes at a time to read in between throwing up new walls
and towers. It wasn’t the most efficient way to do things, but it gave me time to
mull over each chapter’s contents.
There was a lot of talk about souls and spirits, which I tentatively
decided were probably real in this magical world. There was also a fair
amount of stuff I would have dismissed as standard medieval bullshit back
home, but here I had to stop and think about it. Did biology run on some kind of
elemental magic here? Was it actually meaningful to talk about non-sentient
forces like magic being innately good or evil? Was it plausible to think of
corruption as a literal force that drags anyone who deviates from divinely
mandated moral principles down into utter depravity?
Fortunately I had the right forms of magic to check some of these ideas.
A careful self-examination confirmed my previous impression that
magical forces were an addition to normal biology, not a replacement for it.
Living things had a natural magical field that acted as a sort of life force,
affecting and sometimes enhancing physical processes. But I still had organs,
cells and biochemistry, and so did the various people I’d healed.
Similarly, my understanding of magic made it pretty obvious that it was
a force of nature rather than a living thing. But this world was swarming with
tiny, invisible elemental spirits that were basically made of magic, and they
seemed to have at least animal levels of intelligence. So it was entirely
possible that when Cerise stole power from a magical creature she was
ingesting fragments of its personality too. That wasn’t exactly the same thing as
the ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic the book talked about, but it was close enough to
explain why people would believe in such things.
As the afternoon wore on I gradually began to see how these bindings
could work. At first I’d thought it was a matter of imposing commands on the
victim, but the human mind is far too complex and malleable for that to be
practical. Even if you invented a spell to let you perceive the subject’s mind,
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how would you ever pin down what the individual parts did in enough detail to
accomplish anything? You’d need some kind of mind control sorcery to make
that work, and I got the distinct impression that there wasn’t any such thing.
So instead, binding rituals always involved making the subject consent
to some sort of verbal or written agreement. A basic binding simply compelled
the victim to avoid any action she believed would constitute a violation of the
agreement. More complex versions could force actions or even changes in
mental state, which I found rather chilling. The victim’s own magic was the
power source for such a binding, so the more powerful she was the more
complete it could be.
With that foundation laid, the second half of the book was a dissertation
on how to word a binding to enslave a witch in the most abject servitude
imaginable, and how to torture her into agreeing to the binding.
After a few pages of that I was sorely tempted to march into town and
level the temple. Maybe try out some of their own torture techniques on the
priests, and see what they thought of them. A gang rape would be hard to
organize, but the hot pokers and thumbscrews would be easy to duplicate.
I kept reading, though.
It had struck me that the Church’s witch-binding techniques sounded
like they had a lot in common with the coven-bonds the witches themselves
used, and there were a lot of potentially important observations in between the
stomach-turning passages about the best ways to torture a young woman