The Ivory Star

Chapter 6

"But my husband is your loyal servant, Master!" the woman sobbed. "His loyalty is boundless, Master, as is his love for you. He would never—"

The voice rumbled over her like a chariot wheel. "Silence, cow."

Uhr gazed down from his throne at the two naked women chained at his feet. Their smooth skin glowed as the blue-white fingers of lightning flickered across the open sky above. Two scarlet coals burned into them from the depths of his shadowy hood. Excitement rippled through him in a dark wave, and he gazed up through the opened roof of his highest tower, past the upright roof sections as they splayed toward the open sky, sensing the power gathering with his will in the elements above. He sucked a deep breath, savoring the cool moist air as it mingled with the lovely succulence of their trembling flesh, the lush warmth of their surging blood.

The woman who had not spoken, young and beautiful, struggled to contain her terror, but her bare shoulders shook as she tried to contains the sobs bubbling within her. She knelt curled up in her shackles, her shining auburn locks falling to obscure the exquisite softness of her sensuous flesh.

The first woman, plump and soft with age and inactivity, glanced at the younger, and her eyes grew wide with horror, as if realizing something for the first time. "My lord Uhr," she pleaded, "my daughter has done nothing against you! Oh, spare her life, I beg of you. Do your will with me, Master, but spare her life!"

Uhr leaned forward in the darkness. "You presume too much, woman. Your life is mine to use as I will. Perhaps I will spare her life, perhaps not, but your mate's incompetence has spent yours. His bloodline is ended here." He leaned back. "Take her."

Two pale-skinned servants rushed out of the darkness. She screamed in mortal terror as they took her by the soft, thick arms and drug her across the stone floor toward the block of black stone in the center of the chamber.

"No! Mother!" Tamarra screamed.

The two men heaved the pitifully writhing woman onto the altar like a goat for slaughter, fastening the shackles to black iron rings on the corners of the obsidian table, and Uhr rose to his full height. He stretched his dry, creaking arms to the sky.

"Watch girl," Uhr rumbled. "Ever disobey me, and the same shall happen to you."

An invisible fist grasped Tamarra's face, and wrenched her head into position to watch the horrible spectacle. She tried to close her eyes, but she found she could not, and the sobs burst out of her like a gushing spring, and tears of terror and helplessness stained her lovely cheeks. "Oh, mother, mother, mother, mother, mother ..."

Uhr stepped up to the altar, a wicked dagger appearing in his rotting claw. Tamarra watched the terror in her mother's eyes die as her head lolled to the side, and she plummeted into merciful madness.

Mercifully Tamarra remembered little of what she was forced to watch. Her mind went elsewhere for a time, while Uhr performed unspeakable acts on the living body, and then finally the ensanguined corpse of her mother. She dimly remembered his servants with their bowls of blood, the stripped, red-smeared bones in their bone-white fists, the blazing scarlet jewel, the horrifying syllables with which Uhr smote the heavens, the cyclone of noxious black and scarlet smoke swallowing the savaged mass of flesh that had once been her mother, the smoke spreading like a mass of languid snakes, the massive hulking thing heaving from the morass of eddying currents of crimson smoke, its obscene flesh as scarlet as the Stone, the thing that slobbered and rumbled, scaly, like a serpent, like her step-father's crest, its yellow idiot's eyes, limp crimson wings, heaving itself about the tower room floor on stubby legs at its Master's bidding, its obsidian talons dragging sparks across the stone floor, its long, spiked tail, this monstrous thing kneeling at Uhr's feet and nuzzling his black and crimson robes.