Chapter 10

The neko screamed, blood in his mouth from where the inside of his lips had been torn against the sharp edges of his teeth.

The boot connected with his genitals again and there was nothing he could do to protect them, bound on the floor as he was, arms tied behind him, legs bent and ankles lashed tight against his thighs and those in turn bound to a sturdy pole they'd laid under him, keeping him spread wide and vulnerable and helpless to avoid their punishment.

They'd been furious when they'd stomped back in, frustrated at the flight of their victim and the loss of his riches. It had not taken long for them to turn their attention to Dharsha or place the blame at his feet.

"You warned him, you little slut," they cried at him, dragging him out of his cage and delivering the first blows. He'd admitted to nothing. There was very little they could do to him that hadn't already been done and pain had become an old acquaintance.

He'd just shook his head in denial, horrified at the axes still in some of their hands and the wild look in their eyes.

They'd hit him then, trying to get the answer they wanted, fists in the face and the body, and then the unforgiving strike of heavy leather. They'd hung him from the rafters and laid waste to his torso and legs with their thick belts. The longest beating they'd ever given him, taking turns at striking his bruised flesh, and when he passed out they brought him back with ice water in the face, or sharp yanks on his testicles.

With still no admission of guilt, they cut him down, a few of them using him roughly as he lay, half conscious on the floor, before they bound him.

King came over, drawn by the smell of blood, but they chased him off, not in the mood to watch the dog satisfy itself when their own emotions boiled so hot.

"What did he give you that you betrayed our confidence?" Karl asked, jerking the neko's head up off the floor by one ear. "Gold that you've hidden somewhere in the woods? Or was his cock so much more to your filthy tastes than ours that you felt the need to warn him?"

Dharsha just stared up, dazed and hurting, shivering now and then with the expectation of worse. Karl slammed his head down and a few more stars joined the collection dancing around the edges of the neko's vision. Karl reached down and grasped the neko's smarting nuts, squeezing hard.

"I think," Karl said. "It's time to get rid of these.

Dharsha whimpered, new tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.

"Sven, get me the pig cord." Karl barked and soon enough Sven brought him a long piece of elastic-seeming cord with a loop and a slipknot. Karl knelt between the neko's spread thighs and hefted his shrinking testicles, pulling them out from his body and slipping the loop over and up close to the base and pulling the slipknot tight with a sudden, cruel jerk. He began winding the cord tightly around the base, and almost immediately Dharsha could feel the pressure of trapped blood tightening in his balls.

"This is how we castrate pigs," Karl explained while he wound the cord. "Takes a few weeks, but soon enough your nuts will shrivel up and die and drop right off, what with no blood flow. Hurts like hell, I imagine."

"No, no, no . . ." Dharsha whispered, blood and tears mixing in his mouth.

Karl cocked his head. "What was that? I hear words out of your mouth, cat?" He reached out with a free hand and slapped the inside of Dharsha's left thigh. "Just as well we do take your balls, you're getting uppity and putting on muscle that no little cat-eared slave needs when mostly what he does is spread his legs and take cock up his hole. Yeah, it's the right time to get rid of your sack and stop those male juices from turning you ornery. It'll calm you down right nice, with nothing dangling down there but your poor little cock."

Karl tied off the knot, then slapped the neko's tight, reddened balls. Dharsha squealed at the intensified pain.

"Now put the little bitch in his cage and let him think about what its cost him to betray us." Karl ordered.

The twins picked him up, but Sven called for them to wait.

"I don't want to hear him cryin' and complainin' all night," he said and forced one of the larger, curved, cock shaped wooden gags between Dharsha's teeth, fastening in securely with straps around his head. It stretched his mouth painfully wide.

"One more," Sven said, and they bent him over the side of the cage, tender cock and balls pressed hard against the wire, while the twins unfastened the pole from his knees, but left his ankles lashed to his thighs. Sven worked another of his wooden carvings into the neko's ass. One of the ones he hadn't designed for easy entrance or exit, only for discomfort and pain on the neko's part. Without lubrication, it tore him on the way in, and sat terrible and heavy inside his body, the base stretching the stinging lips of his anus wide.

They shoved him into the cage, and slammed the door shut, glaring down with resentment in their small eyes before kicking the cage and stomping off to join their comrades in lamenting the loss of the trapper and his riches.

He lay whimpering, blood trickling down the back of his throat. He'd long ago learned how to breath through his nose, when his mouth and throat were close to filled with foreign objects, but the advent of hysterical fear made his breath come harsh and thin, and his vision spun with lack of air. Finally, half on the verge of a faint, he calmed enough to control his breaths. He shifted as much as he could, so that his bound arms were not trapped under the weight of his body and pressed painfully into the wire floor of the cage. His tightly bound testicles lay throbbing on his thigh, numb already, cinched as they were.

He passed in and out of a pain-laced daze, roused one moment by the raised voice of a woodsmen, another by the shifting sputter of wood in the hearth. The cabin grew quiet, the woodsmen staggering to their beds on the heels of drinking away their bad fortune. Their snores rattled softly through the little house. The neko moaned around his gag, true sleep denied him by the virtue of misery-laced delirium.

He drifted, until the sudden growl of the dog brought him back to the surface. Then Ol' King was scrambling from his place on the rug before the fire towards the door, barking urgently, nails scratching at the wood in his demands to get out. The woodsmen stirred and Dharsha heard them stumbling out of their bunks, cursing in sleep fuddled bewilderment at the frantic dog. In the darkness and from his awkward position in the cage, he could only dimly make out a glimpses of movement - - then a man's voice crying out.

"Fire. The barn's on fire!"

They hastily pulled on boots and jackets over long winter underwear, but took the time for no more than that, flinging the cabin door wide and pelting out into the snowy night towards the faint roar of fire consuming aged wood. The neko could scent the smoke in the air now that the door was open and he was conscious enough to seek for it.

He could hear the barking of ol' King and the yells of the woodsmen muffled through the walls of the cabin, distant past the rushing of blood in his own ears. It had been better when he'd been half asleep, the pain in his nuts, in his cruelly bound arms a more distant thing. It throbbed now, a towering wave of pain that crested and crested, yet refused to ebb. He wished the fire might spread to the house and take him with it - - it would be preferable to remaining as he was - - to being less than he was even now, in a few weeks when what was left of his manhood shriveled up and dropped away.

He sobbed, hopelessly, helplessly, too immersed in his own misery to catch the sliver of movement in the shadows of the darkened cabin. It wasn't until it loomed above his very cage that he realized he was no longer alone. He looked up numbly, thinking it nothing more than one of the woodcutters, come in to blame him for yet one more calamity.

But it was no woodcutter that crouched before the door of his kennel, but the trapper, who by all rights should have been far removed from this place. Dharsha's eyes widened, pure animal desperation spearing through him as Calad used the heavy handle of his skinning knife to smash the lock off the wooden latch of the cage. He crouched, face shadowed in the darkness, but Dharsha heard a startled intake of breath as the man took in the bindings.

He hesitated barely a breath though, before reaching in and slicing through the rope binding one ankle to one thigh. Then he cut the other and grasped Dharsha by the upper arm when he could not easily move himself and hauled him out.

"Hestos," the trapper whispered, disgust lacing his voice, as he cut the ropes binding the neko's elbows and wrists and Dharsha's mind swimmingly connected the word to one of the human gods. He reached numbly for the dildo between his buttocks, mortified even in the midst of overwhelming pain, that Caled see the full extent of his punishment. Getting it out quickly was no easy feat, nor a pleasant one, and he tipped forward, balance entirely deserting him as he tried to reach around and dislodge it.

The ring of muscle had grown accustomed to the narrower width at the mouth of the thing and did not easily stretch to accommodate the thicker bulge. Dharsha cried out against the trapper's thick fur coat and yanked it out with a tearing jolt of agony. There was no time, nor the light to easily unbind his balls, and the trapper was urging him to his feet, and towards the door, despite protest from Dharsha's aching body.

Out the door and into the cold night. The darkness was lit by the fierce orange glow of the barn ablaze. Caled pulled him against the wall of the cabin and quickly edged along the porch in the shadow of it, then practically hurled Dharsha over the side rail and into the drifts of snow beyond. He followed, landing in a crouch, hustling Dharsha to his feet and half carrying, half dragging him into the shelter of the nearest trees.

Dharsha's toes curled at the icy crunch of snow, his body, already so badly abused, shuddered, knees giving out every half dozen paces, teeth chattering audibly. The trapper paused, shoving Dharsha hard against the rough bole of a tree to keep him upright, reaching around him to unfasten the straps holding the gag in place and pulling it out, dropping it distastefully into the snow, before stripping off his coat and thrusting it hastily around the neko's trembling shoulders.

"Hurry," he hissed. "They know these woods better than I, so I'd rather be long gone before they realize you're gone and start searching.

Dharsha staggered in his wake, clutching the coat tightly closed across his chest.

"You came back," he finally gathered the breath to croak. It was baffling, that this man had risked life and limb to come back for him - - for a slave, who was less than an animal to the men of this land.

Caled said nothing, intent on getting the neko moving as fast as his aching body would allow. His bound nuts bounced against his thigh, painfully swollen, screaming for release. Stopping to fumble with tightly knotted twine now was out of the question. Slicing at it blindly in the darkness with a skinning knife was beyond terrifying.

They reached a little trampled clearing in the wood, where the dark shapes of two horses stood tethered to young trees. The trapper's long legged hound whined quietly, straining at her own tether as she sensed her master's approach.

Caled slipped the rope from around the dog's neck and moved to untie the horses.

"Up," he whispered urgently to Dharsha and it took the neko a moment to understand he meant for him to mount the horse.

He didn't think he was capable, weak limbed as he was, feet going numb from the cold. He stood trembling, body refusing to even try, and the trapper cursed softly and came up next to him, urging him none too gently towards the horse, who cast a nervous, white-rimmed look back at him, sensing, no doubt, his panic.

Dharsha grasped the saddle horn and heaved himself up with Caled's help. His balls slapped the hard leather of the saddle and high-pitched pain wove its way through duller, more permeating hurts.

Caled rooted hastily through the packs on the second horse and came up with a pair of worn boots. He jerked them over the neko's frozen feet, quickly cinching them tight, before hauling on the lead of the horse Dharsha clung to and leading it and the pack animal that trailed deeper into the night. The dog padded ahead, shadow silent in the night.

Dharsha clung to the saddle horn with one hand and futilely tried to pick at the twine around his balls with the other. But the knot was on the underside and not easily reached. There was no loosening it one handed by his self. He'd need Caled's help and the shame of that made him stifle a miserable moan. He cradled his cold, swollen testes as best he could from impact with the saddle and endured the ride. He'd endured worse at the hands of the woodcutters.

Caled was moving as fast as he could through the dark wood, leading two horses on foot. Dharsha could hear the soft sound of his labored breathing, and remembered this man was sporting wounds of his own.

If the woodsmen found them, they'd kill them both. At least Dharsha hoped they would, for the alternatives were terrible to consider. He thought, mind swimming from pain and cold, that if they caught them, if they tried to retake him, tried to hurt this man with his pale blue eyes, who had risked so much to come for him he would find in it himself to unsheathe claws they had always kept carefully blunted.

If he could stay upright. If he could stop the world from swimming around him and the blackness from closing in. It was a losing battle. He swayed in the saddle and the snow rushed up.

He didn't feel himself fall into its frigid embrace.