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From: perigryn.removethis@earthlink.net (Rosemerry)
Subject: The House: Initiation - Part 1 - (F/everybody, orgy, sci fi)
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Those who are under legal age or likely to be offended, please don't read
this. Copyrights remain with me. Archiving is okay, if no money is made,
with no alterations including credit and statements. Feedback would be
appreciated.

-----------------------------------------

The House
Initiation

	My feet stung as I ran through the streets. These weren't even
cobbled, only rutted dirt, crusted in half-frozen filth and
reeking. I grew up here, but I was class now. Except I didn't feel
like class, grabbing my once-expensive skirts up around my knees
with both hands and running as light and quick as I could manage
without losing control of my breathing. Behind me, the dogs were
barking that quick, excited, confident bay, the sound of hunting
hounds on a strong trail. My trail.

	The shoes kept my feet from bleeding and making their job even
easier, but the dogs were close enough that it didn't matter.
Likewise, my brown hair, now smutched with mud and stringy, and my
darkish coloring would have hidden me from view if my dress hadn't
been a confection of light green silk. Supposedly it brought out
the green in my eyes.

	I turned a corner, looking hopelessly for a moving carriage I
could catch hold of, or a stream I could splash through to hide my
scent in case I got a little more lead. I paused, aware of passing
seconds bringing the fleet dogs nearer, trying to orient myself in
the darkness. In this middle night, no oil lamps gleamed anywhere
in the black streets; no coaches could be heard rattling along the
lanes, not that a wheeled contrivance above the level of a
wheelbarrow would be seen on this side of town.

	This is what comes of having a steady customer, I chided
myself. Not that His Lordship Alan de Bastric was turning out to
be so steady, though advanced age hadn't cut our association
short, as I'd been expecting. My pursuers were his wife's
gardeners, with his own dogs on the leash. If I'd kept to my
previous short-term associations with draymen's windfalls and the
rich sons of merchants, I might still be living on the wrong side
of town, but I wouldn't be running through it in fear of my life.

	The pause for orientation cost me much. The baying of the dogs
suddenly changed sharply as they were unleashed. The gardeners'
voices, raised in rough encouragement and rougher humor, faded
behind the eager clamor of the hounds. Fear leaped in me, sharper
than anything I'd felt so far. I had only turned to face them when
the first was leaping at me, and I was down under their teeth. My
mind was still protesting that they couldn't really catch me, in
the middle of the unbelievable noise. Pain savaged me from all
sides.

	The dogs weren't mancatchers, but the de Bastric's personal
hunting hounds, used to boar and deer. Their technique was to rush
in all together, snap their jaws once and leap away, to return in
twos and threes and tear at the wounded, still dangerous beast.
For an instant they backed away, gauging my resistance. I was on
my feet somehow, leaping up the nearest stair to a building, any
building. This one towered at least three storeys overhead, much
taller than most in this area, and its doorstep was a lofty four
steps up from the muck of the road. This left the dogs room for
only one or two at a time, running up the stairs.

	Between dogs I pounded on the door. My breathing was too harsh
to cry out. Everything had narrowed to the simplicity of survival.
When a dog humped itself up the steps I kicked it in the head and
it rolled down again, yelping. They were gathering their courage
for a larger rush, with the gardeners close behind.

	The door opened sweetly and silently inward, and I fell
through it with a jarring crash. The dogs were locked outside. I
lay there, not caring a whit for where I was, concerned only with
the beautiful absence of danger. It was like waking up well for
the first time after being ill for months.

	"What are you doing?" came in an urgent whisper-screech from
my left. "Have you gone mad?" There was an accent I hadn't heard
before, not from sailors nor from merchants.

	In similar distorted words, a calmer whisper responded,
"Saving a life."

	Yes, I tried to say, and my enduring thanks, miladies--for
these were female whispers. My voice wouldn't work. At that moment
I became aware of a thousand pains, large and small, and my voice
certainly worked well enough to give a strangled moan.

	"She's been hurt," the second voice said, and someone knelt
over me. Fuzzily I saw her, a stunning beauty with that particular
shade of honey-gold hair no one will ever get with henna, dressed
very scantily in attire no self-respecting lady would wear even in
her own front hallway. It was more expensive than what I was
wearing. She was a lady of the profession, I knew. Not the
clothes. It's something in the face.

	"Lil, you can't let anyone in, not now!"

	"You'd rather let her die in the street? Those were dogs out
there."

	"It's worse than death in here," the first voice groused
incomprehensibly.

	I wasn't worried about being thrown out onto the street. The
first woman's voice had that flustered insincerity to its griping,
and she didn't make a move to stop me as Lil raised me to a
sitting position and tilted my head back gently to see where I was
hurt.

	I was in a hallway, as I'd guessed unawares. The sconces were
brass, the woodwork was beautiful, and I was bleeding all over a
carpet that could have bought and sold me three times. The doors
proved to be ornately carven on the inside, although I didn't
remember them being that way outside. Speaking of outside, the
barking had receded.

	"Did anyone knock?" I tried to say. From the worried,
uncomprehending glances they gave me, I didn't say it very well.

	"Is it already too late?" the beautiful one asked from very
far away. I thought I heard the answer, in the affirmative, but I
was out.

	There was a lot less pain when I came to. I was alone,
bandaged and patched in an alarming number of places, naked in the
strangest room I'd ever seen in my life. There was no bed. I was
on some sort of pad, perhaps composed of numerous blankets and
sheets, all in rich colors of blue and purple in the sunlight
slanting through the high window. The entire assortment raised me
no more than two inches from the carpeted floor. Everything that
wasn't swirled with two colors or even three was embroidered
heavily. The pillows, some of which were as small as my spread
hand, some of which longer than my body, were edged in silk cord
and tasseled. Pieces of furniture I didn't understand were cozily
grouped, and there was a construction of glass and tubing in the
corner that I couldn't figure out at all. It gave off a faint
sweet odor.

	Sitting up showed me just how badly I'd been torn. There was a
sensation of heat in my shoulder that turned into a tiny blossom
of red on the pure white bandage. I tucked my feet under myself,
propping up on my arm, and waited for things to settle down from
their spin. There was nothing familiar in the room except for the
utilitarian chest at the foot of the bed, with a pair of spider-
silk stockings, shocking scarlet, draped across it.

	The door, a heavy thing of stone set almost invisibly into the
stone wall (stone? in this end of town?), opened without a sound.
A small redheaded woman padded in, her mouth pursed with her
private thoughts. She nearly dropped the tray she was holding when
she saw me sitting up, and said something scolding. I gathered it
was scolding from her tone of voice. I couldn't understand a word.

	She set down the tray, her green dressing gown jingling as if
jewelry or bells were hidden underneath. Pointing to the tray, she
said something sternly, but the smells of toast and spice and some
sort of meat were rising from it, more tempting than her words and
far more understandable. I didn't even watch her leave.

	When I'd eaten, I felt momentarily horribly sick. My head
pounded. Then it cleared up, and after a moment spent leaning
against the stone wall behind the bedroll, I felt so much better I
actually climbed to my feet. I debated with myself about the tray,
but politeness and a vague desire to have an excuse to leave the
room made me bend down and get it. I almost got dizzy again, but
the spell passed.

	The corridor was worse than the room I'd awakened in; there
was light from sources I couldn't put names to, fabric hangings
with scenes most curious, and everything was stone. The walls were
dry, too.

	The redhead turned the corner ahead, talking animatedly with
Lil, the gorgeous blonde who'd brought me in. They broke off,
startled, when they saw me.

	Lil was wearing even less than she had before, her attire now
restricted to a gauzy, flowing skirt thing in silver that revealed
at least as much as it hid. Her feet were bare, as was everything
not covered by the skirt; and I had to stare. I'm not really
attracted to women, although a girl in my position can't be too
fussy about what a man asks her to do. But she could have aroused
a fish.

	"You're awake," she said in that accent I couldn't place. The
redhead added something businesslike and took the tray from me,
not giving me so much as a friendly nod before turning and
scampering back down the passageway and around the corner.

	"Where am I?" I asked Lil.

	"You're not well enough to get up. Please, come back to the
room with me. Lie down." She curled her arm around my shoulder,
jiggling as she supported me solicitously, and got me back into
the bedroom from which I'd come. I wrapped a blanket around my
shoulders, but refused to lie down. Lil sat beside me
companionably, apparently entirely comfortable in her nakedness.

	When I was able to raise my eyes to hers, I felt my original
assessment confirmed. She was a working girl. I'd never met one so
exotic, gorgeous or well-to-do, though. She must dangle kings at
her... ah... fingertips. Certainly those earrings were a princely
gift. I began to wonder if she could give me pointers, if I
promised to take them far away so as not to be competition.

	 "Now," she said. "First, let me assure you, you're safe." Her
face was more sober than reassuring. Bad news was to follow. "You
must have questions."

	"Concubines," I blurted, realizing it. My heart sank. "You're
concubines, aren't you? Probably the King's own." There would be
no hints, then. I'd be lucky to get out alive, though I didn't
consider myself pretty enough to threaten this woman's position.
But--I had a vivid memory of splashing through muck and mud, of
the dark black streets of the ugly side of town. No harem would be
kept there.

	She was laughing. "No, of course not. You've already guessed
we're prostitutes, I see it on your face."

	I didn't understand the word she used, but it had to translate
into the profession. She'd seen what I was, as fast as I saw what
she was. I nodded. "My name's Vichelle. The Virgin, they used to
call me. I looked young for a long time. Now I'm twenty. I tried
to get a steady, but his wife set the dogs on me."

	Lil nodded. "I'm Liliane," she answered. "And this is our
House."

	My eyebrows lifted. Again, my perception of my future changed.
I wasn't sure if I liked this one either. A House of Pleasure
recruited constantly, as girls got too old or were bought as
slaves by Lords, or died of illness or wounds received in the
dangers of the profession. Knowing I was talent, they might find
it very hard indeed to let me go without, shall we say, persuasion
to stay and give them a percentage. Independent girls at least
picked their own men, although they often picked badly. I had.

	"Before you say anything," Liliane continued coolly, "wipe
that look off your face. We're a good House. You don't have to
stay, although we're responsible for you now and I for one would
hate to see you go, for your own sake."

	I ducked my head to show I apologized. What I really wanted
was to prevent her seeing the sting of fearful anger I felt at
that last. Don't have to stay, indeed. For my own sake!

	"If you do decide to remain with us," she said, going even
more cool and distant as she evidently read my mind, "you don't
have to work at the profession you're, um, accustomed to. We could
use another dishwasher, for example."

	I had to laugh at that, although the tension stayed with me.
She couldn't have known my mother was a dishwasher. Her hands
looked like an old woman of forty by the time she was my age. I
remember. Honest work wasn't for me, I'd decided at a tender age.
So far, up until the unfortunate de Bastric episode, that had been
an excellent choice.

	"At any rate," Liliane said, thawing a bit when I laughed,
"you will certainly stay until you're on your feet. Properly, I
mean."

	"Thank you," I said, finally getting the right thing out.

	Maybe it wasn't the right thing. It was Liliane's turn to duck
her head, her wide blue eyes failing to meet mine. "Don't thank
me," she said grimly. "You'll probably hate me before I'm done."

	I had been right, I thought dismally as I watched her leave. I
was in a House that would do its best to keep me.

	There seemed nothing I could do about it then. My body
demanded sleep, having eaten and taken to the privy, which was the
usual pot, although it had its very own room and involved a
washbasin as well as some towels I hesitated to use, on account of
their beauty. So it must have been almost sixteen hours before I
awoke and climbed painfully to my feet to look out the window. It
was high, its sill coming to my shoulders. The walls of the
building were stone all the way through, the glass of the window
set some eight inches away from the inner wall. Outside....

	I stared for a long time.

	The only thing I could think of was that I'd been hurt more
than I realized by the dogs. Days had passed, unawares. Days in
which they loaded me aboard some caravan, shipped me overseas,
brought me from my native chill, mist and trees to this
wilderness, this incomprehensible ocean of sand.

	Even as I thought this, I knew it was impossible.

	"Vichelle?"

	I'd forgotten how silently the doors here opened. I whirled,
setting the stone wall at my back, baring my teeth. It was
Liliane, looking at me with frightened concern. My heart beating
rapidly, I stared at her as if she were holding a knife. "Where am 
I? Where have you taken me?"

	"Vichelle," she said, advancing a step toward me. Suddenly the
most urgent thing in my life was to get away from whatever she had
to tell me. I ran past her, limping and staggering, thinking
illogically to get as high as I could and look out. Perhaps the
town, the world I had known would be visible from a distance and
I'd know which way to go to get back.

	The corridor was empty except for a small creature with a
feather duster. It was nothing I'd ever seen before, being both
taller and slenderer than a human being. It looked at me with
intelligent pupilless eyes as I leaned dizzily on the wall. I'd
caught it in the act of dusting one of the framed pictures in the
hall. I dashed past without a word or a falter, barely noting the
leather collar it wore over its simple garment.

	I must have died. Or the Good People had taken me to their
mysterious lands. Or I was caught in a fever dream that never
ended. Weeping, my weariness like a cloak of stone dragging at my
shoulders, I fled through the place I did not understand.

	Everywhere I startled people in the midst of lazy, off-time
activities. Well, some of them were people. Chess players in the
corner; scrubbing being done in the kitchen; two creatures I
didn't look at closely doing something I didn't want to know about
near the ceiling of a dark room. In every case, they studiously
ignored my distressed, stammering, running figure. On the rare
occasions when someone actually met my eyes, they turned away
again with every evidence of having decided I didn't exist.

	Much more of this, and I would begin to believe it myself.

	A hallway led to the kitchens, and the many stone doors
opening off it appeared to be bedrooms. They weren't the working
bedrooms. There were seven separate ones for that, and well
equipped they were, too. Down a spiral staircase to the ground
floor, there was a tavern. At least, it would have been a tavern
in the places I'd been to. Here, I didn't know what to call it. By
then I was walking very slowly, knowing I had only to wait until
Lil caught up with me.

	The bar was of some variegated stone, richly green and brown
in color, supported by the plain gray stone that formed the walls
and doors of this extraordinary place. There was wood, invariably
reddish in hue and heavily carved. The abundance of pillows, rolls
of cloth for sitting on, and silk hangings was astonishing. There
were no chairs. The tables were all very low.

	I didn't see any patrons. Evidently the place wasn't open yet.
There was a second set of kitchens behind the bar. Two men worked
there, ferociously chopping and smashing and stirring and
sprinkling spices on everything. They looked at me and looked away
again, paying no attention to the tears on my face and the lines
of pain drawn there.

	Past the tavern entrance was a grand receiving hall. I began
to realize I wasn't in a stone house, I was in a castle, albeit a
small one. The front doors, carven stone inlaid with brass, were
tall enough that someone could have stood upon my shoulders,
upright, and not bumped their head going out. I pushed
experimentally at one. It swung open a few inches, silently and
easily; it had been meticulously weighted.

	"Vichelle," Liliane called from nearby, the relief evident in
her voice. "Are you all right? I was worried about you!"

	I turned to face her, glad only to see someone who
acknowledged my existence. "I'll live," I said. I didn't add that
I might not want to.

	Later, my bandages changed and my body weighted with
painkilling tisane, two blankets and a weariness I'd never come
close to before, she sat beside me and tried to explain. "This
isn't an ordinary House," she said. I tried to say I gathered as
much, but I was too tired. "You asked where we were. The truth is
that we don't know ourselves. But one thing I can tell you." She
took my hand, looking at me soberly to see how I'd take it. "You
won't ever get back to your home. None of us will."

	I looked up at her, waiting to understand why she'd say such a
thing. Her big eyes, the blue of summer skies, seemed utterly
sincere.

	"Liliane, that doesn't make sense."

	"I know. But it's true." She obviously believed what she was
saying. Of course, that meant I had fallen among madmen. But I
remembered the thing I'd seen dusting the hallway in happy
bondage, remembered the oceans of sand outside, and my mind
silenced itself. Liliane went on. "Look... in the short time
you've been with us, I've come to know you a little bit. I think
you're smart, I know you have a generous nature, and you haven't
let the life wear you down. It's my opinion you can handle this."

	"Handle what?"

	"It happened to all of us, Vichelle. It takes some time to
adjust, but it can be done. Did you... did you have any family?"

	"No family, but what are you talking about?" I almost shouted.
"What happened to all of you? What do you mean, I can't go back?"

	"There's no back to go to, anymore," Liliane said firmly.
"It's gone. The House... as far as anyone's been able to
determine, it just gets tired of a place and moves to a new one.
It changes too. You'll see. The important thing is to realize your
old home is gone forever, and you're now a permanent resident of
our House."

	"You're mad," I said with conviction.

	"You looked out the window." Liliane said. I couldn't answer.

	While I reeled, struggling to fight off the effects of the
painkiller and too many shocks, she went on. The House was a house
of pleasure, just as I'd seen at once. It had been to many worlds,
most recently mine, before coming to this one. Soon it would move
on.

	"Look," she said, pointing to the window. "The window
moldings. Yesterday they were iron. Today, rubber. It's a small
change, but it's a first sign. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, we'll
find ourselves in a different place. But in a way, it'll still be
the House we know and love." She nodded at the chest at the foot
of the bedroll. "Sometimes it's an armoire, sometimes a canvas
sack, sometimes a chest of drawers, sometimes I don't know what.
One time I couldn't even figure out how to open it. But it's
always got the same jewelry in it--my jewelry."

	I didn't understand half the words she used. What was rubber,
for instance? But a more important question was plaguing me.
"Lil... tell me why you're the only person who will talk to me."

	"What makes you think that?"

	I told her about my nightmare plunge through the lower two
floors of the building. "People saw me, and some of the... the...
stranger things saw me too. They ignored me. It was like I wasn't
there." I found myself shaking. There could be no good news in
that universal disregard.

	"Well," she said, smiling too brightly, "most likely they
didn't want to upset you. It's clear you still have a lot of
healing to do. And now I want you to get some sleep." She rose
gracefully, her golden hair falling around her generous breasts
with a silken hissing. "We'll talk more in the morning."

	Perhaps we would, I thought as I turned over and sought the
only refuge left to me. But why was it that for the first time I
felt she had lied to me?

	It wasn't morning when I awoke, but deep in middle night. I
borrowed Lil's brush and walked across the room, brushing my hair
before the view. The window, now a single sheet of unmolded glass,
far too big to make sense to my eyes, still showed the desert it
had yesterday. The stars glared down, a million diamonds tossed
haphazard onto a sheet of velvet, over the sand sea. Hunger
snagged its claws in my stomach, and I turned to the door.

	From the hallway, faint voices were heard, coming from the
stairwell. I hesitated, torn between the kitchen, downstairs, and
the unknown upstairs rooms. The voices rose in impassioned
argument, incomprehensible at this distance, and decided me. I
crept up the stairs, going slowly and holding to the brass
handrail in belated recognition of my wounded state.

	Finally, the thickly carpeted floor of a single enormous room
that stretched from side to side of the building. Each corner had
a rounded area with yet another spiral staircase, this one of
iron, perhaps leading up into the rounded towers I'd seen at each
corner of the mini-castle. The walls were hung with silk and
fabrics, like the rest of the House, in slightly more muted plum
and mint colors. Another of those odd glass and tube constructions
stood on a small table in an alcove. Otherwise it was all pillows,
bedrolls, little tables with pitchers on them, and small chests.

	In the center of the room a great round fireplace of stone
bricks glowed with heat and light, casting heavy shadow around the
rest of the place, including me. Around the light were the forms,
human and grotesque, of some thirty beings. Their own shadows
crawled across the walls, but it was their discourse I listened
to, in secret, flattening myself down against the stairs. I rested
my elbows on the floor and let the rest of me trail awkwardly and
somewhat painfully down the risers.

	It was a staff meeting.

	"Listen please," the patient voice of a woman was saying over
the hubbub of chattering. "Listen." She had an accent stranger and
more jarring than Liliane's. Her presence, though smaller than
some of the stranger beasts and people there, was commanding. She
had the lifeworn face and iron gray hair of a woman twenty years
older than I, yet her figure was lithe and she rose from her
crosslegged seat on the carpet without a hint of stiffness. As the
voices around her died down and every pair or triplet of eyes
looked to her, she nodded amiably. "Good," she said. "Now. We're
about to move again, so I want everyone to pay attention. Keep
your partner in sight as much as you can. Partners, if you've got
to go outside the House for any reason, tell your partner. Better
still, don't go."

	All this had the air of a well-rehearsed reminder. But one of
the two tall, gray, chitinous creatures, like humans that had been
coated in boiled leather and obscenely stretched, raised its
skeletal hand.

	"Yes, Rigo," she said, calling on it as if it were a
schoolchild.

	"We're all used to hearing that," the tall thing said in yet
another accent. It had no need to stand up to let everyone see its
face. Its two lidless eyes blinked soberly, deepest black. "But
it's more important than anything else we do here. Stay in the
House! Remember my partner Elisa."	

	"None of us could forget Elisa," said the elderly lady
sorrowfully. "She is missed." There was a murmur of agreement in
many languages around her feet.

	"She just went out to pick up her hat from the clothiers,"
Rigo said, half to himself. He wrapped his long arms around his
knees with the air of one whose pain is still fresh. There was a
long moment of silent sadness around the circle.

	The madam--it had to be the madam--broke the quiet.
Respectfully she nodded to Rigo, then firmly moved on. "Nobody
else will be left behind," she said. "It's my responsibility, but
it's also all of yours. Watch your partners! And now, we move on
to the next matter at hand."

	Liliane spoke up from the far side of the circle. "Her name is
Vichelle," she said with a slight hint of annoyance. In my dark
stairwell I started, suddenly very glad I'd come here instead of
to the kitchen.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Rosemerry
perigryn@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~perigryn/


As I lay me down to sleep, this I pray
That you will hold me dear, though I'm far away
I whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy...
      ---- Sophie B. Hawkins



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