Chapter 8
Henrik
The Sicilian heat hit me as I exited the Sons of Odin’s Learjet onto the tarmac.
I felt like I’d run headfirst into a wall of bricks fresh from the kiln.
An air-conditioned black Mercedes waited for me only a few steps away, but by the time the driver had closed the passenger door behind me I could already feel the sweat cooling on my skin.
How did the Normans survive this? I wondered idly. My brain clicked through a series of answers as the car started to move: maybe the climate had been cooler in the eleventh century… maybe they had gotten used to it on the vastly more time-consuming journey from Normandy…
Maybe they went home after a hundred thirty years, not because the Germans conquered them, but because it was just too hot here.
Went home, leaving a sanctuary behind. Unused, but not forgotten: once a decade the Sons of Odin sent a pair of my brothers to maintain the ancient longship and, since the 1970s, the sensor array.
The last visit had happened nine years ago.
We had no illusions of reconquering Sicily for the North, but the Sons of Odin valued tradition and continuity.
And, frankly, we valued the occasional Mediterranean beach vacation. I would have felt very differently about the heat, I knew, under different circumstances.
Indeed, since two years ago, when we had formed our alliance with the Pretorian Guard, circumstances around our Sicilian sanctuary had changed greatly.
The Guard’s reach extended further than ours did, and as a group that followed the ways of the Roman Empire, they kept their Sicilian mithraeum as an important outpost.
My driver, surely an initiate of the Guard—a corax, perhaps, if I remembered my briefing about the Guard’s convoluted rank system correctly—had not offered his name and did not make eye contact in the rearview mirror.
That suited me perfectly. I had not come to Sicily to make friends; the entrance of the young woman into our ship sanctuary presented serious jurisdictional issues that I needed to negotiate cordially but firmly.
The drive into Palermo took forty minutes. I watched the landscape through tinted glass: the motorway giving way to the older roads, the limestone escarpments rising golden-white in the late morning light, the sea appearing and disappearing between headlands.
I had been to Sicily twice before, both times on business of the financial kind—the Magnusson Group had interests in the port infrastructure at Palermo that required periodic attention.
I hadn’t seen the ship sanctuary here, though; the last visit of brothers had taken place a year before I had joined the Sons of Odin.
My familiarity with the city, though, made me the obvious choice to come deal with the Guard here.
The Sons of Odin and the Pretorian Guard maintained what Sven called a productive détente.
That meant we cooperated when our interests aligned and watched each other carefully when they didn’t.
I hadn’t had any personal experience with them thus far, and I had to admit to having felt some skepticism about Sven’s embrace of the alliance.
The cooperation over the past two years, though, had proven the value of intelligence sharing: the Guard watched over the Americas and the Mediterranean while the Sons of Odin kept a very close watch on what we called the Global North.
In the rapidly thawing subarctic, the inevitable energy wars in the wake of the economic collapse had already started to take shape.
Here in the South, things still looked more or less as they had for the past few decades, but that veneer had become thinner and thinner.
This incident with our medieval ship sanctuary—more specifically the presence of this girl, Ilsa Matthews, who had seen the sanctuary—deep in Guard territory could come to nothing, certainly.
It could also precipitate events that reached far beyond this ancient island.
When the car pulled up in front of Agenzia Ostia, it took me a moment to remember that the high-end modeling agency served as the Pretorian Guard’s elegant, apparently respectable presence in the business world.
The agency occupied the ground floor of a pale stone building on a quiet side street that I could not have found without the driver.
Nothing about the facade suggested anything other than a fashionable storefront.
I noticed a discreet camera above the door, though, as well as the quality of the lock, and the way the ground-floor windows had been glazed with something that I could tell wasn’t ordinary glass.
Then the door opened, and I saw that the gorgeous young receptionist had a subtle collar around her neck.
“Signore Magnusson,” she said, with a practiced smile. “Welcome to Palermo. Leo Aetnaeus is waiting for you in the control room.”
“And the girl?” I asked, as she ushered me into the marble lobby and closed the door behind us.
“Bellatrix Hestiaea and her nymphobus are questioning our new columba in an intake room right now. You’ll be able to observe.”
* * *
Ilsa
I sobbed into Giovanna’s wet, moving pussy as she sought her pleasure by means of obscene friction against my face.
Her fingers returned to my own private lips, and the complicated topography of the hood that sheltered the burning nub of my clit.
The alternation of the two sensations—her warmth above me, her touch below—made coherent thought nearly impossible.
Nearly, but not entirely, I realized. The PhD candidate in me, stubborn and apparently indestructible, kept assembling words in my head, rehearsing the answer I would give when she lifted herself again and repeated her question.
She rubbed firmly against my lips, letting out a breath through her nose that sounded rough with enjoyment. Then she raised her hips a little and spoke.
“Tell me how you found the cavern,” she said again, as if she had simply paused to consider a minor point and was now returning to the matter at hand.
I gasped in the fresh air. “A… a mosaic,” I managed.
“At my team’s dig site. There was an inscription in the border…
Latin, but in… in Younger Futhark.” I heard how professional my words sounded and felt a wild, absurd pride in it, given that my legs were spread and restrained, while a gorgeous, terrifying woman rode my face for her pleasure.
“I followed the directions to the… cliff… Capo Zafferano. The entrance was nearly invisible from any approach.”
“Put your little tongue out, columba,” Giovanna said. “Make it nice and stiff for your mistress.”
At first the change of topic thoroughly confused me. My brain had just managed to produce actual, meaningful facts, and those facts didn’t seem to have anything to do with the words Giovanna had spoken in response.
Then she… my mistress, it seemed… lowered her pussy onto my face again and began to ride me harder.
“Put that tongue out, Ilsa,” she repeated, her voice carrying an edge, “or I’ll have Nymphobus Oceanus fetch the mastix.”
I wailed up into my new mistress’s hot, wet folds, and I extended my tongue, curling it and trying to make it firm, so that my bottom wouldn’t have to face the horrid whip again.
Giovanna’s breathing grew labored as she moved her smooth labia over the promontory I’d made.
“Good girl,” she murmured. “Good little columba. That’s very nice for Mistress’s cunt.”
She began to move her fingers again, between my legs; one light pass along my outer lips that made my hips strain against the belt that bound me. The soaking entrance to her vagina moved over my nose, pressing down.
“And inside the cavern. What did you do?”
She rose again, leaving me gasping. Her fingers stilled on my pussy.
“I looked at the ship,” I said. My voice came out only slightly ragged despite everything. “And the carvings. I documented everything I could with my phone.” All of that was true. I was telling the truth. I focused on that.
Her fingers withdrew entirely.
The absence was punishing in a way I would not have predicted before this afternoon. I pressed my lips, shamefully moist with my mistress’s arousal, together and said nothing.
“And then?” Giovanna asked.
“And then I left.” Also true, technically. Eventually.
Her fingers returned, a single fingertip this time, tracing a path so light it barely qualified as touch. My breath came out in a shudder. Above me, I saw Giovanna’s vagina clench. Hot shame and hotter arousal swept through me at the lewd sight.
“You were there for seventy-eight minutes,” she said. “The sensors are quite specific about duration.”
Sensors. Oh, God. What have I gotten myself into? The idea that there were sensors in that ancient, apparently forgotten cavern made my stomach lurch.
“I was thorough,” I tried. “I’m an archaeologist. I don’t rush.”
The finger withdrew again.
I lay there in the suspended, maddening absence of sensation, staring up at her waxed pussy, and I thought, she knows I’m leaving things out.
She doesn’t know what things. My job was to keep it that way, to give her enough truth to seem cooperative while the rest of it—the bride saddle, the voice, the tree, the young woman’s eyes looking up at me from inside a vision—I would keep behind my teeth, because I wasn’t even entirely certain any of it had happened.
I had been alone and overstimulated and academically overwhelmed.
The rational explanation remained available. I held onto it with both hands.
“The passage,” Giovanna said. “You went through the passage at the rear of the cavern.”
My stomach dropped. “There were other chambers,” I said carefully. “I looked inside them briefly.” I paused. “The preservation was extraordinary. Whatever treatment had been applied to the wood—”
“What did you see in the chambers?”
Her fingers returned. Two of them this time, and not feather-light: a proper, deliberate pressure against the slick heat of me that made my back arch off the table as much as the waist strap permitted. I cried out.
“What did you see?” she repeated, not raising her voice at all, while her fingers moved with a patience that seemed designed to make language impossible.
“Furniture,” I gasped. “Old. Well-preserved. Some kind of… a frame, with leather…”
The fingers stopped. Withdrew. Left me trembling and empty and furious at my own body.
“A frame,” Giovanna said. “With leather.”
“Yes.” My voice was almost steady. Almost.
She went quiet for a moment. I felt her shift her weight a little, and then her fragrant, wet, warmth descended over my face again and I understood that the interrogation was continuing on two levels simultaneously: that she would take her pleasure and withhold mine in alternating rhythm until she had what she wanted, and that what she wanted was something I hadn’t given her yet.
I opened my mouth and tried to breathe around her grinding pussy. I tried to think about the correct answer to a question she hadn’t asked precisely but was clearly circling.
Her fingers came back between my legs. One slow, exploratory stroke, and then—without any warning—the withdrawal again.
“Oh, God,” I said, muffled against her. “Please—”
She lifted. I felt the coolness of the air on my face where her hot wetness had been.
“Please what?” she asked conversationally.
I bit my upper lip. I would not say it. I would not say please touch me, not to this woman, not in this room, not strapped to this table.
“Please,” I said instead, “tell me who you are. What this organization is. The agency, the—the titles you use. The collar you wear.” I had nothing to lose by asking, I thought. The worst she could do was withhold her fingers again, which she was already doing.
Or she could whip me again, said another voice, and I felt my forehead crease at the dismaying clench the thought had brought, right where Giovanna would see. Desperate to distract her, I went on speaking.
“None of this is Roman,” I heard myself say, and only realized as the words left my mouth that I had been thinking this since the moment Giovanna had sat down across from me at the café.
“The agency’s name is Roman. Ostia. The nymphobus title is Roman.
But the cavern isn’t. The cavern is Norse.
The inscription was Norse. The ship is Norse.
” I was rambling, I knew, in the way I rambled when I was genuinely confused about something and the confusion was more urgent than the social discomfort of displaying it.
“Why does a Roman organization have a Norse sanctuary? How does—”
“Questions are useless,” Giovanna said, but she said it differently this time: not as a command but as something closer to an observation, and I thought—though I couldn’t see her face from where I lay—that there might have been a fraction of something else in her voice. Consideration, perhaps. Or assessment.
Her fingers returned. They stayed this time, working with a slow, thorough knowledge of my body that seemed unfair given that she had known me for less than three hours.
I felt the orgasm beginning to build from a very long way down, the same gathering pressure I had felt on the bride saddle, and I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to think about the Younger Futhark and the inconsistency that had been bothering me since the café and that I still could not resolve, because the Romans and the Norse had not overlapped in any way that would explain—
Giovanna’s fingers withdrew.
“No,” I heard myself say, raw and unguarded, and then I pressed my lips together and hated myself.
“Nymphobus,” Giovanna said. A short pause. “The girl trainer, please.”