Tag: assault

1980 07-01 Massively- (Magically-) Enhanced Interrogation
1981 07-01 What’s that on your cheek–oh, no, you bit right through it!
1982 07-01 Aww!  He looks so sad and pathetic!
1983 07-01 It’s a pity he only has one more to pop!

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 07-01X The Chamber of Torment III at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah are interrogating Gasparo Orseolo in the Chamber of Torment, the nighttime nerve center of the Venetian Republic.  In another part of the Palace, Chava waits nervously for further instructions with the ensorcelled child, Pen, trying not to think about how much time is passing.  NOW:

“You evil little roach.  You will be spending eternity with us, in hell.”

“No!  No, I am a pious man!  A churchgoing man!  I was confessed just this morning!”

The two succubae laughed vindictively.  “And you were torturing prisoners again before we found you tonight, weren’t you?” Channah observed.  “Even under your church’s absurd superstitions, you are no innocent.  You’re not even good.”  She peered at him—into him and through him—with narrowed eyes, ignoring his blubbering protests, before nodding.  “Damned as Judas, your filthy, tarnished soul is.”

“My priest—”

“Legerdemain!”  Rivqah roared with amusement.

“Prestidigitation!” Channah concurred.  “There are no magic spells that can save you from your Maker’s judgment.  Your soul is as you have fashioned it.  Old men in dresses, chanting and making hand gestures, cannot alter or hide the filth on it—within it—from God.”

“God is merciful!”  This idea seemed to incense both of the succubae, but he was doubling down before he could even consider whether it was wise or not:  “He will forgive me!”

After taking her own peer at his soul, Rivqah exchanged a wry glance with Channah.  “I wouldn’t count on it,” was all Rivqah said.

“I’m going to ask Rivqah to come find you—what’s left of you,” Channah decided.

“Yesss!” Rivqah hissed, her eyes dancing with delight at the prospect.

“And then we’re going to hang you up again and have another little chat,” she nodded to herself, her voice dripping with malice.  Channah laughed.  “And down there, we can leave you in exactly this position as long as we want.  You’ll never pass out or rest.  Not in hell.  I’m so going to hope you remember this.  Enough of it, anyway, to appreciate how right I was, and how wrong you were.  So I can really gloat and rub it in.”  And seeing his frown of uncertainty and doubt, she shrugged.  “It’s true!  And quite irritating.  You damned little ants can be quite disoriented and overwhelmed by hell.  The red shades can’t remember anything specific about their lives.  They’re consumed and defined by their lust.  White shades,” she pointed to him helpfully “—that’s going to be you, loser—may remember a few details of their Earthly lives, sometimes many of them, or maybe nothing at all.  That’s why I had to come interrogate you here, to learn what I need to learn before you forget it.”

“You’re mad!  You can’t just—just question me, inside the Doge’s own palace!  The guards—”

“Oh!”  She and Rivqah smirked at one another.  “I see.”

“Are you, perhaps, hoping for a rescue?!”  Rivqah snickered.

Channah disappeared and reappeared a foot to the left of where she had been.

“Wha–?!” the Capo gasped, and even Rivqah—the swordswoman—was clearly taken aback by the sudden shift, although she quickly covered up that reaction.

And then, just as suddenly, Channah was standing two feet to the right of where she had been.

“I can stop time itself, Gasparo.  And move through it.”  And as she saw the hopelessness she had been looking for, creep into his eyes, she laughed throatily with satisfaction.  “That’s right.  We have all the time in the world we could ever hope for.  But if you don’t cooperate with me, I won’t do that.  I’ll loiter here, until another Lord of the Night or a night watchman appears with another prisoner to torture, and kill them.  Who do you imagine would win, in a contest between us—your army and navy of Venice?  Or my demon warriors?”

“Hail, Mary, full—”

“Oh, stop it, sinner!” she laughed, slapping Orseolo brutally across the face, more-than-incidentally pulling on his arms and eliciting another cry of agony from him.  “You can’t very well be answering my important questions, when you’re chanting and whimpering, can you?  No.”

And when he started up again, not quite rationally, she appeared thoughtful, moving counterclockwise around him until she stood by his left leg.  With more force than Orseolo could have imagined, she twisted as hard as she could.  With a scream ending in abrupt silence, Orseolo was knocked out from the pain.

He was awakened again, by a ladle-full of cold, stale water (again), hanging in the strappado—again—in the Chamber of Torment, wracked with pain.  Again. 

“I think we’ve established your leg isn’t dead yet,” Channah reminded him, as his eyes blinked and tried to refocus on the world around him.

“Not dead—what?”

And she barely poked it, eliciting another scream, this one not ending in abrupt unconsciousness. 

“Your leg is still alive.  But the tourniquet will kill it soon enough.”

“Tourniquet?!” he looked down and wailed again in horror at the rope constricting his left leg.  “Oh no,” he gasped, panicking, head twisting back and forth, eyes rolling in his head.  “Oh no.  Oh no.  Oh no….”

“You won’t be bleeding out on us, Gasp-o,” she assured him.  “Sorr—eee.  But after we kill the leg, we’ll have to continue above the tourniquet.  So….” She leaned down and tugged his chin to the left so he couldn’t avoid her eyes.  She smiled brightly.  “I’d best take advantage of your shattered knee right now, hadn’t I?  How did you first come to suspect Anzola was ‘possessed’?”  And then she dug her thumb in , shuddering with pleasure as she watched him cry and shudder.

Literature Section “07-01[X] The Chamber of Torment III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 01 of Chapter Seven, “Channah’s Slavegirls:  Pawns of the Court of Lust”—Abridged 896 words::Explicit 1121 words—Accompanying Images:  1980-1983—Published 2025-07-01—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.


1976 06-128 Channah & Rivqah show their cards… and their claws
1977 06-128 Nothing Gasparo Orseolo EVER hoped to see

1978 06-128 …and I bet he can take it all the way up to HERE
1979 06-128 Standing under a former Lord of the Night

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-128X The Chamber of Torment II at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials who were supervising their torture of a Venetian prisoner in the Room of Torment of the Doge’s Palace.  Now one of Venice’s 3 Capos—who rotate responsibility for day-to-day management of Venice—awakens to find himself bound and hanging by his wrists, which are tied behind his back, with his knee shattered, learning that his captors know him already.  NOW:

“Finally.  You find yourself in the place you most deserve, Gasparo Orseolo.” 

The capo couldn’t conceal the uneasy alarm in his voice.  “How—how do you recognize me?!”

The women laughed.  “We don’t ‘recognize’ you,” Rivqah assured him.

And Channah explained:  “We came for you.  We picked a night when you would be on duty here.  Because we want to know what you know.  Well…” she exchanged an amused glance with Rivqah.  “That’s half the truth.  They say if you want a thing done right, you should do it yourself.  But that’s why I keep charge of training my operatives:  to make sure every one of them is trained right.  If all I wanted from you was information, I could have sent any one of them here for you tonight.  Instead of honoring you—and indeed, all of Venice—with my esteemed presence, and that of my Duchesses, in this little backwater.”

“Backwater?!  Duchess—” the Capo looked genuinely incredulous and confused, as well he might.  Venice was one of the brightest lights in Latin Christendom, and (in his relatively seasoned and well-informed experience) Duchesses were ladies rather than thieves and assassins.  “But—what could you possibly want from me?!”

“24 Sha’ban, 921.”

“What?”

Channah made a circular motion with her hand.  “Ahhh…” looking mildly frustrated, she shrugged.  “It doesn’t really matter to us.”

“What you would call, um…  Wednesday, October 3rd, anno Domini 1515,” Rivqah clarified, with exaggerated formality.

“Thank you, my dear.”

Orseolo looked discomfited, nervous, and uncertain.  “October… October two years ago….”  His thoughts were slow, even stuck.

Channah let him fumble around for a moment, her eyes flat and hard.  “This one, for your sake, I hope you can remember:  Anzola Ipato.”

Orseolo gasped.  “You—you are what, her sisters?  I promise you—I swear to you in the Lord’s name, the Anzola Ipato I knew, she was not your sister!”

“Oh, yes she was!”

“No, I swear it—your poor sister had departed before I ever met her.  The Devil had already taken her!  Her body was a vessel for him when she was brought to me.  I swear it!  Three patricians swore it to me and I confirmed it.”

Both women were incensed, stepping forward, faces contorting with rage.  “Liar!  She was no devil!”

The Capo’s voice rose several octaves, as if they’d already castrated him:  “I swear it!  The Archibishop himself confirmed it!  Her flesh was scarred by Holy Water—it evaporated on he—”

“You threw holy water on her?!”  Channah’s hand shot out to seize his jaw and pinch it, hard, impossibly hard for what Orseolo imagined to be a frail woman.

He was baffled and scared; their reactions completely inappropriate, indeed illogical.  “I don’t—I don’t understand, I’m telling you—we tried to save her!  We did everything we could to expel the demon from her!”

“You did expel the demon from her, exorcist!  And with it, extinguished her ability to live and move in this world!”

“What–?!”  No one had ever been more baffled than Gasparo Orseol was in that moment.  “Praise be to the Holy Mother Church!”

“Fuck and damn the Holy Mother Church!”

“Who are you?!”  He wailed.

And with a sly glance at one another, for his reward, they showed him.

It took him a moment to wrap his mind around what he was seeing, the horns rising from their foreheads, their teeth and fingernails sharpening and lengthening, their skin taking on a ruddy hue under the olive one, and even—though he didn’t spot them until later—their tails extending under their skirts to swirl and brush the floor.  But as soon as he did begin to try and make sense of the insensible, to the succubae’s delight, Orseolo started quaking and blithering Catholic incantations:  “Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee.  Blessed art th—”

“You honor the mother of your lord by urinating?!”  the demonesses laughed.

“Wh—what?” Orseolo looked down and sobbed to see the evidence of his own shame on the platform below him.  Then he noticed a second puddle, much larger, and of a much darker and stickier liquid, on the same surface but much nearer to his head than his groin.  What attracted his attention was movement, of another dark red drop plummeting past him to land in the puddle.  Gasping with shock, before even thinking how much sudden motion would hurt him, he craned his neck to look up, his screech of pain turning into a prolonged scream of terror at the sight of his Lord of the Night hanging half a dozen feet above him by the very same rope.

The two demonesses chuckled and shook their heads.  “We haven’t even started to torture him properly yet!”  Rivqah clucked her disappointment.

The demonesses simply enjoyed his horror and shock, drinking it in and appraising it with experienced eyes for perhaps 2 or 3 minutes, until he came back to them, and to the room around him, well enough to start thinking and calculating and—this was the sweetest to them—hoping and praying as desperately as he was fearing and dreading, all at once plunged into a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts.

As his eyes came back into focus on Channah’s, Channah asked him conversationally:  “You’re an experienced torturer.  What are the advantages of the strappado?”

“Wh—what?”

“Over, say… the Judas seat.  Or…” she raised her hand, holding an exquisitely-detailed and -inlaid dagger with a radically curved blade.  “a simple blade?”

“I don’t—I—I—”

“Oh, I am disappointed,” Channah professed, shaking her head and frowning.  “First question, and a simple one.  And not even a state secret, by any stretch of the imagination.  And you can’t answer it.  It’s so easy:  Longevity.  Specifically, yours.”  She shrugged.  “Relatively speaking, of course.  You know you’re going to die where you hang, don’t you?”

“What?” he barked hoarsely, like a small dog kicked in the stomach.

“You’re never going to leave that rope,” she explained slowly, as if speaking to a small child.  “Not inside your body, anyway.  Never going to know another second free of pain.”  She tut-tutted, as if there were something about the situation she regretted, rather than relished.  “Never going to be happy again.”

“Hallelujah, I will when I join my Lord—”

And here both of them laughed, a sharp, mocking cackle with a supreme confidence that rattled the Capo.  “Oh, is that where you think you’re headed?”  Channah could barely contain her mirth.

Literature Section “06-128[X] The Chamber of Torment II “—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 128 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1087 words::Explicit 1200 words—Accompanying Images:  1976-1979—Published 2025-06-30—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1973 06-127 We’re gonna fuck you up so hard
1974 06-127 YES!  Keep screaming for us, little piggie!
1975A 06-127 Before: You’re just WOMEN!…
1975B 06-127 Before: Serious persuaders, ready to motivate
1975C 06-127 After: … for whom I have only the utmost respect!
1976D 06-127 After: Another successful conversion

Explicit version containing graphic violence, gore, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-127X The Chamber of Torment I at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah have just killed two Venetian soldiers and captured two Venetian officials and a Venetian prisoner being subjected to strappado, in the torture room of the Council of Ten.   NOW:

The prisoner continued to moan and struggle, but the other sounds—sounds of movement and violence—abruptly ended.  Channah had already begun to move to her left, keeping her arrow trained on one Venetian official while remaining mindful of the second official face-down on the floor before her with his arms extended to the sides.  Cautiously, she darted a glance toward the middle of the room, nodding with satisfaction to see Rivqah was the only figure standing.

The two of them remained motionless and silent, eyes on their respective prey, listening intently for any sound of alarm.

The Capo began:  “What is the me—”

“Shh!” Channah hissed, with sufficient force, and a gesture from her bow, that the Capo fell silent while the interlopers listened for a beat, two, three, four, and five.

Channah flicked her eyes back to the middle of the room, meeting Rivqah’s, and raised her chin questioningly.  Rivqah shook her head slightly in response, and both women relaxed. 

“Stay still until we get to you,” Channah barked at the two men in front of her, watching the Capo’s eyes widen at the sound of her voice, while Rivqah sheathed her sword and returned to the wall, unwound the rope, and let the prisoner down.  He groaned and wept in an odd, sobbing combination of pain, and much-greater relief from the weight finally coming off of his arms.  Still holding the pulling end of the rope, she released the man’s arms from the hanging end, and helped him off the platform to a standing position on the ground.

“Thank you!  Thank you!” the prisoner wailed gratefully.  “My arms—please—for the love of God—” the man pleaded, sincerely, turning his back towards her.

Emotionlessly, Rivqah spun him to face her and pushed him backwards to the wall, where she tied the lifting end of the rope back to the ring in the wall, and then tied his arms to the ring, ignoring his sad and pitiful whimper.  “Do.  Not.  Try.  To.  Escape.”  She commanded, staring into his pain-wracked eyes with her own, ice-cold ones, satisfied by his brief nod and hanging head.

“You’re women!”  the Capo cried out in surprise, and then humiliation immediately turning to a hard, contemptuous rage.  “Just women!”

Rivqah had already moved to join Channah, stepping around the table and grabbing the Capo by the shoulder of his expensive robe.

Imagining he saw his chance, the Capo cried:  “Let’s take them!” as he spun towards Rivqah, who stepped back—yanking him off-balance by tugging on his robe—even as she executed a side-kick into his knee, the Capo fell to the ground, never to stand again.  When Rivqah pitilessly dragged him further towards her, to pull him out from behind his table, the twisting and turning of his ruined knee elicited a sharp scream and then silence as he became unconscious.

The Lord of the Night, gamely—or, perhaps, with a foolish, misplaced, misogynistic self-contempt—responding to his superior’s cry, pulled his arms and feet in towards his body, gathering himself to rise to his feet.  His effort was killed instantly and decisively by Channah’s boot, which she raised and slammed down on the back of his head, knocking him unconscious, his arms and legs falling slack with the rest of his body as blood pooled on the floor.

Channah and Rivqah exchanged another glance and shrugged, like:  “well, so much for them.”  Then they both turned their faces toward the prisoner to make sure he wasn’t trying to take advantage of the ruckus to get loose.  If he’d thought about it, maybe even tested his bonds in the initial seconds after the Capo cried out, he wasn’t doing so now.  Now, he was looking towards them, appalled, his face whiter than the rest of him, shrinking back towards the wall as if it might shelter him.

When the Capo stirred back into consciousness, light reaching his eyes through his fluttering lids, he felt cold water rapidly warming on his face, the room swimming slowly back into focus.

Blinking, he found himself facing two of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life.  Despite the sweat on their faces; despite the tangled state of their black hair after peeling off their hoods and masks; and despite their middle age—thirties or forties, he guessed, although it was hard to tell precisely because their olive skin glowed with the vigor of youth, even as their dark hawklike eyes regarded him with the cold, acute scrutiny of the most hardened and wizened crones—the two of them were unimaginably lovely.  So lovely, in fact, they made the most expensive courtesans and the most-desirable debutante noblewomen of Venice look common enough.  “Angels…” he gasped before he was entirely alert, even as he was noticing the wood-paneled wall and the shocked, terrified prisoner pressing himself tightly back against the wall behind them.

Memory came flooding back as his body alerted him to the most extreme kind of pain, more than anything he had felt since he was shot fighting the Turks over a generation ago; more than he could have even imagined before that injury.  His knee, shoulders, elbows, and wrists stung and burned worse than any sting or burn he could conceive of.

“It hurts!  It hurts worse than I—” he screamed.  And as full recollection reminded him where he was, he screamed again, twice as terrified to see the corners of the women’s mouths turning up, delighting in his cries.

“Angels…” the swordswoman, now holding an empty ladle, returning it to the water bucket near her feet, sneered.

“Of a kind,” the archer smirked.  “You are surprised to be in pain?  You know where you are, yes?  Where we found you?”

“The Chamber of Torment,” he sobbed. 

“The Chamber of Torment,” the archer practically purred.  “But not your usual seat.  Capo.”  The word was spoken with all the venom and hatred of a viper.

“My arms!  My leg—” and then he cried in horror, memory and recognition finally completely returned.

“I think you’re a little overdue for this chair, don’t you?”  And with a vindictiveness that shook him even deeper:  “And unlike the… I’m going to guess, thousands of others who came to sit here before you, you came into this room voluntarily, didn’t you?  Like you knew you deserved to be here.  Gasparo Orseolo.” 

Literature Section “06-127[X] The Chamber of Torment I”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 127 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1067 words::Explicit 1173 words—Accompanying Images:  1972-1973—Published 2025-06-28—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.


1968 06-126 Succubaean Strike Force
1969 06-126 We’re gonna avenge Tirtzah

1970 06-126 Lord of the Night’s last moment of contentment
1971 06-126 Rivqah prepares to carve monkey-boy like a holiday turkey
1972 06-126 Gimmee 3 steps: Stick-boy’s last stand

Explicit version containing gore, graphic violence, and enhanced interrogation themes at 06-126X Death in Venice at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Channah and Rivqah are concealed on the stairway, just below the floor line of the interrogation room of the Council of Ten, seeing one of their primary targets—a Capo of Venice—and a Lord of the Night before them, but aware from the noise that someone was being tortured beyond their line of sight to their left.  They have agreed Channah will break right and Rivqah, left on the count of three.  NOW:

Three counts later, Rivqah exploded up and forward, Channah nearly on top of her, so close if either of them had slipped the momentum of the other would have taken them both to the floor.  Other than their boots drumming on the wood, they remained silent until they were noticed.  It was the Capo who, frowning with irritation wondering who would be barging into his domain creating work for him, flicked his eyes towards them first.  Channah, her metabolism and nerves on overdrive, imagined she could actually see his eyes begin to widen as he saw her coming out of the darkness, barreling towards him, the plague-mask magnifying his shock and alarm, forcing him to deal with two different surprises at once.

To further throw him off-balance, Channah let out a blood-curdling scream, echoed a second later by Rivqah.  The Lord of the Night spun around to identify the threat, wide-eyed and empty-handed, just in time to offer his crotch to her.  She accepted his invitation with alacrity, and with a violent kick containing every last bit of adrenaline and seething rage she was feeling.  “Stand and surrender!” she demanded of the Capo, her arrow pointed straight in his eye, and he did, immediately, his hands shooting straight up in the air.  Thus tamed, she looked down and kicked the howling magistrate:  “Take your hands off your cock and spread them where I can see them on the floor!” And when he didn’t immediately do so, she barked:  “Do it now, or I swear I’ll nail your head to the floor with my arrow!” 

With a frightened wail, he extended his arms, not perfectly, but well enough.

While Channah had charged forward, Rivqah had pivoted to the left, immediately spotting more-or-less what she had surmised would be awaiting her:  a big, burly, hirsute man with olive skin dangling from a rope tied tightly around his wrists, behind his back, dangling above a waist-high wooden platform spattered with blood and sweat.  The rope went straight up to the high ceiling at right angles to the horizon, almost two stories high, then through a heavy iron ring embedded in the ceiling, and back down at an angle to where the other end was tied to another iron ring embedded in the wall at about chest height.  His figure was sandwiched between those of two rough, thuggish, laughing Venetian soldiers, their red cuirasses set aside for ease of movement while they worked their prisoner over.  One was hanging like a monkey from the long rope, near where it was tied to the wall, jumping up so that when he fell back down again, the weight of his body jerked the rope hard, making the prisoner cry out.  The other was using a long staff to hit the prisoner whenever he saw a moment of vulnerability, adding a horizontal dimension to the vertical dance called out by his partner on the rope.

The two goons were clearly cannon-fodder, without any knowledge of interest to the succubae; and that near-instantaneous appraisal signed their death-warrants.  With no value, they were only threats.  And she saw no need to tolerate extinguishable threats. 

Stick-boy was armed and standing, on balance, and thus the bigger and more-immediate threat.  But she could hardly reach him without passing and exposing her back to unarmed monkey-boy; nor could stick-boy reach her for 2-3 seconds.  Even if he was capering about idiotically now, monkey-boy would become a threat immediately if he could produce a knife from the back of his belt.

In any event, she moved to the left first, slashing monkey-boy’s neck and watching with momentary interest as his stupid grin collapsed into what Rivqah judged was a far-more-comical look of surprise.  His last act, sitting dejectedly on the floor like a child’s sad, discarded, stuffed monkey, was to try and stop the blood pouring from his neck by clapping his hands over the gash in near-imitation of the Confucian maxim to speak not what was contrary to propriety.  Sadly, it was a finale without an audience, because before he could complete the gesture, Rivqah was already turning and raising her blade defensively to meet the second soldier. 

A bit slow off the mark, he had hesitated a beat or two as his mind tried to make sense of what was happening around him—precisely as the succubae had intended with their speed of attack and shrill battle cries.  Rivqah met him halfway around the back of the dangling prisoner, seeing he had raised his stick over his head intending to bring it down on her head in a killing blow.  Either he badly underestimated her, or the Venetians only used the staff as an implement of torture, for he was clearly not trained as a soldier to do battle with it.

She thrust her blade towards his heart, and he, to his credit, managed to check and reverse his forward momentum, even as he began turning the staff from its slow, clunky, all-or-nothing coup-de-grace position toward a more-convenient and better-balanced position that might actually serve him on both defense and offense.  Alas for him, sound tactics had asserted themselves too late.  Rivqah’s initial thrust having barely scratched his chest, Rivqah, snorting and spitting in frustration like a Tasmanian Devil, whipped her own blade back and, judging the guard’s stick moving fast enough to give him a good chance of protecting his neck or even chest, flicked the blade forward and in a downward arc, slicing open the man’s stomach. 

Rivqah, something of a student of the human face—especially in battle and in sex—observed with interest as his face, too, began to transform in the moment of his mortal injury, from surprise and rage, to agony, fear, and perhaps just a touch of resignation.  As if in slow-motion, his hands loosened and the stick began to drop out of his fingers as he reached to protect his belly, or perhaps to try and repair the damage she had done.  A moment later, Rivqah slashed again, this time opening him up and watching with interest as he suffered the ignominy of slipping to the floor.  Not to put him out of his misery, but to protect their mission and allow them to communicate normally, she stepped forward, sighing with irritation, and cut his neck wide open.

Just like that, the battle had ended as abruptly as it had begun a few moments before.

Literature Section “06-126[X] A Murder of Crows IV”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 126 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—1072 words::Explicit 1163 words—Accompanying Images:  1968-1972—Published 2025-05-26—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1964 06-125 Death in Venice
1965 06-125 A Haunting in Venice

1966 06-125 Death comes in hot
1967 06-125 We’re off to fuck the wizard up

PREVIOUSLY:  After eliminating the guards in the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace, Channah and Rivqah race along the loggia towards their assigned entry door near the front of the palace.  Chava and her little boy separate from them near the middle of the palace, while Miryam remains behind in disguise, in place of the dead guards.  NOW:

Channah and Rivqah didn’t pause until they reached the double entryway to the Stairway of the Censors.  Checking quickly for any sign of movement or human presence, and detecting none, Channah pulled open one door even as Rivqah tumbled through it, landing on her feet on one side of the door while Channah tumbled to the other, both of them trying to minimize the time they would be framed in silhouette against the lesser darkness of the courtyard.

After a tense moment, scanning the darkness as quickly as possible—ideally, before any Venetian guards spotted them and attacked—they relaxed as soon as they determined they were alone here and undetected.  The palace seemed quiet and deserted, except for muffled cries coming from somewhere up the stairs. 

With a glance, Rivqah transferred her crossbow and bolts to Channah, drew her sidearm in her left hand, a falchion with a short curved blade, and darted up the right side of the stairway.  Like most of Channah’s operatives based in the West, she was most familiar with the curved swords that dominated the wealthier, better-educated, more-civilized Muslim world most of them occupied.  Channah herself was considering relocating from Cairo back to Constantinople; and normally used a shamshir.  But the sight of such a blade would have attracted attention in Venice, so Rivqah carried the ancient Greek falchion, undergoing a revival in Italy and other parts of Europe.  She had been trained in a wide variety of swords.

Channah waited, scanning and listening, until Rivqah reached the tenth step, then began moving up the left side of the stairs after her.  Rivqah peered carefully around the landing at the top of the staircase, waiting tight up against the right-hand wall at the base of the second flight, while Channah reached the landing, sweeping broadly to the wall on the opposite side of the stairs and slipping along it to the far corner, crossbow trained on the top of the stairs, where the low flickering light of candles or torches coming from somewhere further on gave them the advantage, down in the darkness of the stairwell.

Rivqah then began moving again.  As she approached the top of this staircase she moved to the left, motioning Channah to the right as she remained on the top stair watching to the left.  When Channah reached the top of the staircase, she saw what Rivqah had seen:  a third, short and much narrower stairway to their left.  From here, the cries were much louder, and between them lower groans of pain were now audible, overlapping with two other, impatient voices demanding information and cooperation between the screams.

Channah slipped to the right, across the landing in front of them, crossbow aimed at the top of the third staircase.  With another glance, and a slight nod, Channah raised her crossbow to the ceiling while Rivqah crept up the third staircase.  If she fired into the stairway now, the only thing she could reasonably expect to hit would be her own sister.  She moved to the bottom of the stairs, keeping only her eyes trained at the third floor. Rivqah ducked as she approached the top, stopping in a crouched position with her eyes barely above floor level as she scanned what she could. 

With a glance back, she signaled 2 to the right, unknown to the left, suggesting she didn’t have a direct line of sight to the left without exposing her position to the two on the right, but there were voices coming from that direction.  Not the best situation to face; but on the bright side, it wasn’t like they were interrupting a church service.  The occupants of this room were torturing another human being, without any effort to muffle their screams.  In her experience, most humans who hadn’t become completely inured to torture preferred to move out of earshot whenever it occurred, because they found it unpleasant.  And the minority who enjoyed it were drawn to it like flies to manure; they’d be in the room, almost on top of it.  All of that gave the succubae a lot of latitude for making noise.  They could, quite literally, scream and still blend.  Well, more or less.

Missiles?  Channah signaled.

None to the right, unknown to the left, Rivqah responded.

Considering the width of the building, Channah couldn’t imagine there was too much open distance to the left.  Still… She crept up behind Rivqah, pressing up against her back to see nearly what she saw in the crowded space at the top of the stairs.  On the right was a long desk, three chairs wide, closed in front, with a candelabra sitting on it to provide light.  Behind the desk sat a gray-haired man in elaborate robes of expensive fabric, talking to an equally gray but otherwise lesser man—in proportions, in status, and certainly finery—who wore a neat but simple and unexceptional robe, standing with his back to them. 

The seated man, she knew immediately, was the Capo, a member of Venice’s ancient and privileged patrician class, rulers of the Republic for the better part of a millennium.  Knowing from her mission planning, exactly who he was, she felt the faint ache of her horns, claws, and fangs straining to erupt, an instinct she was barely able to restrain in the nick of time. 

The other man would have to be, she thought, the Venetian Lord of the Night for San Marco—night commander, judge, and all-purpose representative of the Venetian state in this district of the city during the hours of darkness.  He had five counterparts in the other districts of the city; and some nights their business brought them together here.  But evidently not tonight; if it had, they would all be gathered around that table, or outside the torture chamber altogether.  If she’d seen this fellow on the street, she would have guessed he was a shopkeeper or clerk, perhaps a merchant on the make but not yet worthy of consideration for marriage into or other admission to the ruling class.  She tended to doubt the Venetians would tolerate giving anyone other than a patrician the title “Lord.”  So perhaps he was of an ancient family that had fallen on hard times.

Both of the men were old, for humans; and would be unlikely to pose a grave threat.  They were both examining a parchment as they talked, so their attention was focused elsewhere.  She doubted the standing man could turn around before she was upon him.

Leaning into Rivqah’s neck and enjoying the smell of her, she whispered “I’ll try to take both of them alive.  You take the left; I doubt any of them will matter.  If you need me, shout at me to turn.”  Rivqah nodded her understanding, managing to tickle Channah’s cheek with her hair.  With a final “on 3,” Channah slipped back to give her room. 

Literature Section “06-125 A Murder of Crows III”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 125 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1150 words—Accompanying Images:  1964-1967—Published 2025-06-25—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.


1713 06-84 Abandoned after serving her purpose
1714 06-84 Poor Chastity:Used, discarded, and forgotten

1715 06-84 Death is the only angel coming for you
1716 06-84 You’re one of us now

PREVIOUSLY:  Chastity has been completely deprived of vision, hearing, smell, and taste, disoriented with her hands tied behind her back and left lying on a platform knowing only that there is no way off it without risking death or serious injury.  After provoking Esmeray beyond reason, and being rescued and temporarily restored to hearing by Channah, who explained Esmeray would be allowed to spend her rage on Penny, Chas is put back under.  NOW:

Would they really let Esmeray hurt Penny?  Not injure her—Chas couldn’t believe that.  Because it would interfere with Channah’s mysterious plans.  But cause her pain?  Oh, yes. 

It was one thing for Esmeray to take revenge on Chas.  She’d expected it.  Shite, for reasons Chas didn’t fully understand, she’d egged it on.  Long ago, at grammar school, she’d discovered her ability to take pain was greater than others’, so much greater it gave her power against her bullies and could even make her an object of a twisted kind of respect.  But Penny was, if anything, the opposite—more vulnerable than most.  Weak, sensitive—easily hurt.  And she who was the most susceptible, had done nothing to deserve what was coming to her.  Chas felt bad, her cheeks reddening under her bonds with her shame.  A sharp, unambiguous moral shame that didn’t feed into her dark side at all.

She tried to scream in frustration and rage, imagining what was happening to Penny right now because of her.  She shook her head because it was one of the only things she could do, even as she felt hands taking hold of her collar.  Angrily, impulsively, she pulled away from the hands, refusing to cooperate.  And when they took firmer hold of her, she resisted all the harder, jackknifing and twisting her body over onto her left side to wrench away from them. 

Now two pairs of knees dropped on her, one from each side—one on her shoulders, their owner fighting with her collar; a second dropping on her hips.  Chas had the crazy thought that if she resisted hard enough, the hellspawned demons would all be so busy with her, they couldn’t hurt Chas.

When the person on Chas’s hips tried to seize her leg, Chas raised her knee sharply, jerking away and then kneeing that person in the arm or hand or somewhere, hard.  At the same time, she tried moving her head and shoulders to deny access to her collar to the first attacker.

More hands seized Chas’s leg, two or perhaps three people wrestling to hold it still enough for them to do something they seemed intent on, with her ankle cuff; while the person kneeling on Chas’s shoulder shifted, so they had one knee on her shoulder and the other on her head, pinning it to the ground. 

And now they had her, good and proper. 

At her neck, fingers tugged and worked at her collar.  At her ankles, fingers tugged and worked at her cuff.  A second after that, the person kneeling on her shoulder started jerking Chas’s collar, not to get her to move—how could she?—but simply to hurt her and threaten her again.  And at her feet—they’d attached her ankle to… something.  A chain?  And they were using it to force her right leg up in the air, away from her left leg.

Chas was so busy defending her neck and ankles she let her attackers realize before she did, that opening her legs had created a new and much worse vulnerability.  The hard toe of a boot (Esmeray’s, she wondered?  Perhaps hoped, meaning her ruse was working?) slammed into her crotch, causing her to flinch—ineffectively, because she could go nowhere, let alone defend herself—and scream—again, ineffectively, because she could not even make a sound.

She could do nothing to the world, or to her attackers, not even compete with the other noises she knew they could hear but that were denied to Chas—their own speech, the roaring of the sea of devils and demons, the madness of the band pounding on their drums and discordantly screeching on their strings.  All she could do, was hurt.  And this did hurt, in a really terrible way, causing her throat and stomach to clench and spasm with a reflexive urge to vomit.  Which really scared her, because it shoved all her anger and frustration aside to make room for the sobering realization if she threw up in the mask, it would drown her.  She could die.

Between the extreme pain, the shock, and the fearful reckoning, she was distracted and limp for long enough for them to work on her other leg cuff and finish whatever they were doing.  A second later the knees lifted from her and even more hands rolled her onto her stomach and yanked her legs up behind her, bending her knees.  Something was controlling her ankles, pulling them both, in the same direction and with the same amount of force.  Something she eventually worked out was a bar securing her ankles at opposite ends, restraining both of them with one another but at a distance of about a yard from one another, making movement of any kind awkward.  It also gave her attackers new leverage in the form of clear, solid purchase:  something they could hold onto and force her to move with.  And they used it to bend her legs at the knees until they could secure Chas’s wrists to the center of the bar.

At that point, effectively hogtied, they had Chas right where they wanted her.  They didn’t have to hold her down any more:  her body secured itself.  She could no more easily move around, than a fish could maneuver itself after being taken out of the water.

Everyone climbed off her, then she was roughly picked up and unceremoniously carried, like a sack of potatoes, to wherever they were taking her.  At one point she was almost thrown from the hands onto a metal surface—or wood, except she hadn’t seen any wood up here—but definitely too flexible and resonant for stone.  Even her hips and shoulders could sense enough to know that.  Then she was picked up again and moved a bit further. 

Her anger and frustration had reasserted themselves as the pain in her testicles subsided from a blinding white agony to a grating throb.  Now, just as they returned, like companions more reckless than Chastity herself, they were shoved aside again by panic at the realization that as far as she could tell, she was being carried in a more-or-less straight line on a platform that was very limited in size.

They must certainly be reaching its edge.  She’d gone too far.  She’d pushed them too far and they were going to throw her off it!  It was a traitorous thought; a foolish one her mind tried to reason her out of:  if they were going to kill her, why would the Queen of Hell have married her?  Why would they have rescued her and raised her–? 

But she was too close to the eye of the storm to quite believe she mattered.  Chas knew.  No one knew that better than her, she who was nearest of all to Penny, almost her twin, made to appear her twin without being it and remaining, instead, her pale shadow.  Thank goodness, Penny didn’t know, the silly little cow!  But Chas knew, how could she not?

Everything was about Penny.  Channah was obsessed with her.  The other succubae were focused on her—not lovingly, but in a dangerous way.  Penny mattered.  In her weakest moments (and this was one of them) it hurt her so much—scared her so much—that she only mattered to Channah, to their Governess, maybe to existence itself—because Penny did.

And that made her vulnerable.  She knew it, of course she did.  In her heart, she was afraid she only mattered at all, to anyone, because of Penny.  What would happen when she outlived her usefulness?  When Penny was… ready, or whatever she was supposed to be?

What if that was right now?

What if Chas had pushed the envelope too far, and Channah had decided to wash her hands of Chastity?

Maybe Chas had even given her a perfect excuse, the one she was waiting for, to tell Penny Chastity had deliberately caused Esmeray to torture Penny?  If they wanted to get rid of Chastity without upsetting Penny, she might as well have issued them an engraved invitation.

They were going to throw her off the edge!

Literature Section “06-84 The Agony of Chastity”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 84 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)— 1360 words—Accompanying Images:  1713-1716—Published 2025-05-06—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.

1704 06-82 You can always kill him for the affront later
1705 06-82 So stupid!  He brought his junk to a knife fight!
1706 06-82 And then, she starts tugging on it!
1707 06-82 Sympathy from the Devil

Explicit version containing themes of arousal, afterglow at 06-82X The Real Punishment of Chastity Begins at Patreon.com/TheRemainderman

PREVIOUSLY:  Chastity has been completely deprived of vision, hearing, smell, and taste, disoriented with her hands tied behind her back and left lying on a platform knowing only that there is no way off it without risking death or serious injury.  But now her tormentor is choking her.  NOW:

Chas’s tormentor doubled down, tightening the noose and jerking Chastity’s head back and forth as if trying to snap her neck, using the leash to drag Chastity tight up against her so she could pull even harder.

Like a stone being shot from a sling, panic rushed forward overtaking her as her situation sank in.  Utterly and rapidly purged of every thought except for survival, she began kicking and thrashing—the only two things she could do—trying to ignore how much it hurt her own arms and hands, trapped behind her as they were on the stone, hoping against hope she might throw off the leather strip that was killing her, instead of helping to break her own neck by putting more stresses on it. 

Choking, gasping, except for the pain in her hands, her arms, and her neck, her entire world was limited to rapidly-blooming terror and the struggle to breathe, even the peripheral pains starting to fade as her attention and her world narrowed and narrowed down to a few inches under her jaw, her burning lungs, and her panic.

Her resistance started to weaken as the energy drained from her muscles, not even adrenaline able to replace what oxygen-deprivation was taking until she became vaguely aware, in some remote part of her brain, that there were hands and other bodies all around them, even on top of Chas, pulling on his would-be murderer’s arms, fighting with her for control of the leash, and trying to loosen it.

After what seemed like forever, the leash loosened and Chas began gasping, her lungs heaving with effort to catch up, her awareness rapidly expanding back to include the knee of one of her rescuers on her chest, restricting her lungs, and her tormentor’s legs and boots kicking her as she was dragged away.

Insofar as Chas could tell, she was now alone with the woman on her chest, who slid off to kneel beside her even as she unwound the leash, leaving only Chas’s collar around her neck and her breathing unimpeded. 

A moment later, she felt fingers at her ear and motion inside her ear canal.

Sound exploded back into her awareness as the plug was removed:  closest and loudest, laughter.  Laughter!  She recognized Channah’s voice—the woman kneeling by her—and further away, she thought she could pick out a couple of other familiar voices.  Hang’s?  Fong’s?  Despite only having just met the latter two, she felt hurt and betrayed by all of them, and if she’d had the emotional reserves for it she would have been outraged.  Somehow, the fact she knew some of them, even if slightly, made the feeling of betrayal worse and intensely more personal than with respect to the voices she didn’t recognize. 

Instinctively, Chas tried to protest.  But although she caught herself uselessly trying to talk through the gag and the spell, she could not really muster the intensity of indignation she felt the situation deserved because she was too exhausted and her nerves were too shattered.

Somewhere in the direction she had been dragged, Chas recognized Esmeray’s voice.  Screaming:  screaming with rage and fury and the kind of indignation Chas could not muster, all tinged with something Chas’s heart still had enough bandwidth to recognize as a cousin to her own instinctive panic.  Practically spitting, the bloodlust Chas could hear directed at her, doused her own feelings of being slighted like a tubful of ice water poured over her body.

Surrounding Esmeray, there were a cluster of winded voices of people trying to subdue or remove her, some barking orders at her, some trying to reason with her quietly, but most of them, Chas was sure, tinged with some mild shade of amusement over her act of attempting to murder Chas.  Below and behind all the other sounds, the roaring, raucous ocean of the damned not only continued, but had surged, their howling seeming to be at the highest and most frantic pitch Chas had heard yet.

“Are you all right?”  Channah asked, still laughing, resting her hand lightly on Chas’s neck in a form of attempted comfort.  And then, before Chas even realized she was grunting and snorting insensibly Channah reminded her:  “Sweetie, you’re going to have to nod or shake your head for me.  You sound like—well, like a gagged woman trying to talk.”  And she laughed a bit harder.

Assessing herself, Chas decided that despite the soreness of her neck, the post-adrenaline jitters, and the even deeper bruises to her psyche, she was physically more-or-less intact, and she managed a nod.

“Good.  That’s good.  Are you able to breathe and recover?”  Chas nodded again, almost feeling cared for until it occurred to her Channah was making no move to remove her other earplug or otherwise release her.  “I’m glad, wifey dear.  I told you, I have plans for you, darling.  You need to take better care of yourself.  Do try to remember none of the other women on this roof are your wives or girlfriends, and it’s not all about you.  It’s best for everyone if you try to please us instead of thinking of yourself.  Understand, honey?”  Chas nodded, ignoring his burgeoning outrage as he concentrated on trying to figure out what it was important for her to know and understand for her own survival.

“You’re not going to like what comes next either.  But we’re all going to enjoy ourselves more than enough to keep the damned in a lather.  And Esmeray’s anger… lust and anger, that’s all the damned can feel or understand.”  Her voice fell, to something like hushed in this environment, expressing wonder:  “They’re going mad!  That’s all they are, now… wanting what they can’t have.  Don’t you dare tell Penny yet.  She’ll put it together fast enough anyway and I need her strong.”  She patted Chas’s forehead protectively.  “But as much as the thought of your suffering satisfies my own urge to teach you a lesson, it’s counterproductive out here.  The power we take from the damned is spiteful lust, so you  won’t be able to share in that power.  Oh, well.  More for me!”  She practically giggled.

She leaned close to Chas’s ear, and kissed him on the earlobe, and then between her temple and her ear, making Chas shiver with delight.  “You and Esmeray, together… you’re an emotional firestorm, the two of you.  So think about this:  Because I can’t trust Esmeray to leave you alive, I’m going to have to give Penny to her today, and she’s going to take out all the rage and upset you can hear from her, on Penny.  You did that to your sister-wife.”

And with that, the plug was pushed back into Chastity’s ear, and her world was plunged back into near-perfect stillness.

Literature Section “06-82[X] The Real Punishment of Chastity Begins”—more material available at TheRemainderman.com—Part 82 of Chapter Six, “Le Saccage de la Sale Bête Rouge” (“Rampage of the Dirty Red Beast”)—Abridged 1132 words::Explicit 1290 words—Accompanying Images:  1704-1707—Published 2025-05-04—©2025 The Remainderman.  This is a work of fiction, not a book of suggestions.  It’s filled with fantasies, idiots, and criminals. Don’t believe them or imitate them.