Imperial Inquisitor III

Crackity Jones said:

So a couple of months ago I posted a couple of stories and said I do weekly updates. Unfortunately real life gets in the way of things and I'll be lucky to write a story a month

That aside, here's part three of Natasha's adventures. I suggest new readers read the other two, so as not to feel lost.

As always, constructive criticism is welcome.

Part I
Part II

Imperial Inquisitor III

Once again, Natasha peered into the darkness above her. She knew that the next part of her tale could damn her to a lifetime of hysterical torture in the bowels of the Keep’s dungeons- or worse, but lying to the council was unthinkable. She’d tried to keep her discovery quiet as long as possible but now was the time to lay everything before her superiors.
‘Continue, Inquisitor,’ the voice from above commanded, and Natasha obeyed.

---

It is said that demons exist in a realm where they are in a constant state of torment. Having lost their war with the Goddesses aeons ago, the great Demon Queens and their countless infernal minions were banished to the underworld. Knowing their foe to be as immortal as themselves, the Goddesses inflicted the cruellest punishment they could devise for their vanquished foes. Demons were tickled endlessly, without mercy or reprieve, never growing accustomed to the sensations. They were often kept on the edge of sexual release, with unimaginable sensations running through their bodies, never able to achieve the climax they had craved for millennia. There was only one escape: to enter the body of a mortal in the physical realm.

In order to successfully summon a demon in this way, an unwilling vessel had to allow the infernal being in. This involved creating the same sensations in the victim that the demon would be feeling in the underworld. This was what Natasha had witnessed in the abandoned bathhouse where the Daughters of Lamia had their hideout. They’d alternated extreme tickle torture and intimate pleasure of their beautiful captive, creating the perfect conditions for a demon to enter cross into the physical world. This wouldn’t have been enough, however. If tickle torture and orgasms alone could summon demons into the mortal world then every Inquisitor interrogating a cultist, every pirate crew initiating new members, every cruel aristocrat breaking in a new slave were potentially summoning one of the dark ones. In order to truly summon a demon the walls between the physical world and the underworld had to be broken down; a gate had to be created through which the demon could pass into the tickled victim. This was achieved by the right sorcery, dark chants and artefacts arranged in a circle around the woman being tormented. Centuries ago, the Inquisition had succeeded in confiscating all the dark texts and objects that detailed how to achieve this sorcery, and tickled to insanity the witches and cultists who held the same knowledge. This was why modern cults were always frustrated, kidnapping victims, tickling them to breaking point but only achieving a traumatised victim left to wander the streets barefoot. No dark coven had succeeded in coming close to summoning a demon in two hundred years.

Until now. What Natasha saw from her hidden vantage point above the main room of the abandoned building convinced her that not only did this cult know the ways to summon a demon; they had acquired the means to do so. She recognised the glowing obelisks, the sigils on the walls and even the chants the hooded figures below were making from her study of texts in the Inquisitorial library. Understanding their most evil foe, however powerless they had been for so long, was a key part of an Inquisitor’s training.

This revelation was what caused Natasha to jump from her position above the ritual. Normally she would have waited for her assistants and bodyguards to get in position around the chamber but the situation was too dire. She’d seen the woman staked out in the pit get closer and closer to release or madness as her tormentors alternated between tickling and pleasure and that the obelisks were glowing and the dark energy that pervaded the place felt stronger.

She leapt from the balcony, her bare feet making no sound as she hit the floor. She managed to dispatch two of the cultists with well-aimed punches before they were even aware of her presence. As the others began shouting and moving towards her, their leader in the pit began screaming for them to take her. Luckily, Natasha was well versed in close-quarters combat. She knew some Inquisitors eschewed combat training, preferring to let their retinues do their dirty work while they focussed on the interrogation and investigation aspects of the calling. Natasha was glad she wasn’t one of them as she fended off the attacks of ten enraged acolytes. Luckily, before she was overwhelmed, her entourage made it into the chamber, taking the cultists from knocking them out.

Once the cultists were unconscious Natasha was able to take stock. With the ritual interrupted, the dark energy seemed to have dissipated and the obelisks had returned to their previous state. The woman tied down in the pit was still writhing, covered in sweat and moaning softly. Livia, Natasha’s alchemist, dropped down into the pit, removed her blindfold and began untying her, softly cooing words to the effect that her ordeal was over. Meanwhile, Natasha addressed the six other members of her retinue, all women with their own specialist skills and talents which aided her in her duties.

‘You are probably aware that this was no ordinary cult and no ordinary ritual. We need to interrogate these women and find out how they came to know the details of such dark sorcery, and we need to do it quickly.’

‘Should we not inform the Inquisitorial Council?’ The questioner was Saskia, Natasha’s protégé who had caught them up at the bathhouse after punishing a reluctant source. Her voice quavered as she asked the question, evidently shaken by what she had seen and felt in the place. Secretly, Natasha shared her fear, but couldn’t give any outward sign of it.

‘The only place in existence to find the details of how to create a ritual like this is the library in the Inquisitorial Keep. If one of the order has turned, we need to find out now, before word gets around.’ Natasha saw the effect her words had on her followers, normally women stout of heart and mind. The idea that someone in the Inquisition itself could have been involved with their enemies was an unthinkable one.

To take their minds off this fear, she had them prepare the unconscious cultists for interrogation. Her entourage dragged each cultist upstairs to where Natasha had been hiding not five minutes previously. Each one was hung upside down and tied there, hanging from the ledge, their robes billowing around them. Whilst they waited for them to regain consciousness, Natasha stripped their leader naked, blindfolded her and took her to an adjoining room and, returning to the main chamber, barred the door behind her. Upon waking up, the leader of the group would find herself nude, in a pitch black room and listening to the sounds of her followers being interrogated. This would prepare her nicely for her own questioning.

Natasha took walked to the edge of the pit in the main chamber. Shivering in the centre was the blonde woman they had rescued. Livia had covered her with own cloak but she seemed unable to talk, and it would be a while before they could get any useful information out of her. Instead, Natasha surveyed the more likely sources, nine cultists, all hanging from the balcony by their ankles with bare feet within reach of her entourage’s fingers.

Usually, a few would already have started pleading, selling out their friends, crying, anything to escape the ticklish horror they knew the Inquisitor would inflict. These cultists were different however, hanging in silence and surveying Natasha with dark eyes, looking as dignified as one can be whilst suspended upside-down. There was a real mix amongst the women, with a dark-skinned Nubian hanging alongside a pale, red-haired Celt. The only common feature was the beauty of the women.

Unnerved by their silence, Natasha decided to go on the offensive.

‘The first one of you to speak will be freed, here in this chamber. The rest of you will spend a lifetime experiencing what you inflicted on this girl.’

None of the cultists so much as blinked. Natasha signalled to her party who were standing on the balcony. They immediately began their assault, seventy fingers assaulting nine pairs of feet. Natasha was glad to see an immediate effect on the suspended women. None started laughing, but she could see their stony facades were starting to crack. One olive-skinned beauty’s eyes started twitching and the Celt’s mouth curved upward. Natasha made a point of teaching all who accompanied her the rudiments of tickling, and she could see her entourage performing well, reading the reactions they saw in the soles they were tormenting. It was evident that these cultists had also been trained however, in the techniques to withstand this kind of torture, with none of them yet making any audible reaction.

Natasha caught Saskia’s eye once she’d looked up from the wiggling feet she was working over. Her assistant understood the signal and disappeared for a moment into the gloom. She then re-appeared, distributing tools to the other members of Natasha’s party. The cultists suddenly found the sensations they were feeling were changing. Saskia, Livia and the rest of the party were now applying slippery oils and devious powders to the soles in front of them. Once this was done, brushes replaced fingernails as the primary tool of attack. Some of them were using soft haired brushes, perfect for tormenting the base of the toes, while Livia was happily using a stiff hairbrush to scrub away at the Nubian’s pale soles.

The flame-headed Celt was the first to break, her impassive face quickly dissolving into a giggles and these women had a weakness. As if the red-head’s laughter was a signal, her eight fellow cultists erupted into laughter and protestation.

‘Please…not there…not…’

‘Get out of my toes! Anything but…’

‘I surrender…no more! No more!’

‘Our mistress will feed on your laughter for eternity…wait…no! No! Not the brush!’

Natasha stood before the nine women who were trashing futilely, occasionally trying to reach up and free their ankles. She drank in their laughter like water that could wash away the darkness she’d seen in this very chamber earlier. After a few more minutes during which the laughter became more and more desperate she held up a hand to signal her entourage to stop their hard work.

The silence following the cacophonous laughter was broken only by the sound of nine women breathing heavily.

‘You will answer my questions. You will do it quickly and truthfully or we will begin again.’

Natasha let the implications of her words sink in

‘What were you attempting to do here?’

After a brief moment in which Natasha thought she was going to have to order a re-commencement of the tickling, a young cultist with tanned skin and a pretty oval face spoke up

‘S-Summon a demon,’ the words were half-spoke, half-sobbed. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the same woman told Natasha everything she knew. It seemed that until a few weeks previously, the Daughters of Lamia had been a group of bitter and rebellious young women of the kind Natasha encountered often in Rome. They would dabble in harmless sorcery, kidnap drunks or whores and tickle them inexpertly in an attempt to summon Lamia, one of the great demon queens.

Everything had changed with the arrival of Lucia, the woman Natasha had left naked in the antechamber. Lucia claimed to be an ambassador from a group determined to release the demons from their torment, and aid them in conquering the corruption of Rome, and dominate the whole physical world. She brought with her gold and knowledge of the dark arts. As a demonstration of her power, she’d had the previous leader of the Daughters wrapped in an old sailcloth so that only her head and feet were exposed, then tickled her soles with a supposedly enchanted feather until the woman had begged for mercy. Having thus secured her position as the new leader of the Daughters, Lucia taught the arts of tickling to the cult, first using their old leader as a subject and after she’d gone insane, they’d used Helvia’s whores. This night was supposed to be the first of many summoning rituals, bringing a minor demon into the body of the blonde woman, who was a member of the cult and former lover of Lucia who had displeased her in some way. Of where Lucia had obtained the dark knowledge needed to create the ritual they’d witnessed, the cultist claimed to have no idea and Natasha believed her.


Natasha believed she’d obtained all the information she could from these women. She beckoned Saskia down and together they went and retrieved the blindfolded, naked Lucia from the room she’d been left in. They brought the silent woman back to the main chamber and tied her down using the same stakes that had secured her captive in the pit. After all the obelisks surrounding the pit had been toppled over to prevent any more dark magic, Natasha approached Lucia who was tied down spread-eagle in the same fashion as her victim, who was now huddled against one of the walls.

Natasha and Saskia began rubbing Lucia’s naked body with the same oil that had been used on the soles of the other cultists. This made the skin slippery and doubled the effect of any tickling. Lucia was tall, with small, firm breasts and long legs. The oil made her pale skin glisten and as they rubbing the oil into her thighs, Lucia cooed with pleasure.

‘If I had known you were looking for a lover, Natasha, I would have arranged a meeting between us earlier.’ The words made the Inquisitor’s blood run cold.

‘How do you know my name?’ she asked.

‘Lamia has gifted me with much knowledge.’

Before this bitch could once again get the upper hand, Natasha decided to let her actions do the talking. She began tickling Lucia’s stomach, dragging her nails in circles round the flat surface. Lucia immediately erupted in girlish giggles. Natasha redoubled her efforts, moving her hands down to just above Lucia’s hips, eliciting further laughter from the blindfolded woman. Natasha beckoned Saskia over and indicated the she should deal with their captive’s feet. Lucia had elegant, long with feet with nicely-shaped toes. Saskia immediately dug all ten fingers into the high arches, and this combined with Natasha’s efforts on her hips had Lucia howling with laughter. The woman was straining at her bonds trying to escape, tugging in vain.

‘Ah…Inquisitor…I..ahaha..I..hehe…I see they trained you well,’ Lucia said between bouts of laughter. In response, Natasha began probing elsewhere on Lucia’s torso, running her fingers up and down her ribs then quickly digging into her armpits, the oil letting her fingers glide effortlessly over the alabaster skin. Meanwhile, Saskia was using one hand to hold back the long toes on Lucia’s left foot, and tickling in the crevices underneath, causing Lucia to drum her legs up and down against the floor, just about the only movement she could manage.

After a few minutes of this, Natasha decided to discern the effects of their efforts.

‘Where did you find the secrets of this ritual? Do you have a source in the Order?’

Lucia’s only response was to snort derisively.

‘The precious Order. So convinced of your own omniscience.’

Natasha’s response was to resume the torment. This pattern went on for nearly an hour. She and Saskia would use all their craft on their captive, and elicit gales of laughter. Once it came to questioning however, Lucia remained as resilient as ever, the sweat covering her skin and hair the only indication that she’d been tickled. Natasha surveyed their prisoner. Even blindfolded, naked and tied spread-eagle after an hour of tickling Lucia was still beautiful, and Natasha was contemplating bring her back to the Inquisition headquarters. Despite the risk of alerting the traitor, Natasha was beginning to wonder if she was out of her depth as Lucia still showing no signs of breaking.

Looking around the chamber for inspiration, she saw that the blonde girl who had been Lucia’s victim was staring with hungry, vengeful eyes at her former leader and recent tormentor. Realising that she might represent a last throw of the dice, Natasha padded over to her. She knelt down and whispered in the woman’s ear.

‘What is your name?’ she asked.

‘Hana.’

‘Well Hana, as a member of a cult, you will spend the next five years in the Inquisitorial gaol,’ replied Natasha, watching as the woman’s pale blue eyes widened in fear. ‘If you help me break Lucia, I will lower that sentence to a year. Now, can you tell me, does she have any weaknesses?’

I can do better than that,’ was Hana’s reply. The blonde woman threw of Livia’s cloak and scampered naked down to the pit where Lucia was tied as Natasha’s entourage and their upside-down captives alike looked on in disbelief. Once she’d clambered down over her former lover, Hana knelt over Lucia’s legs and lowered her head down to the triangle of dark hair between Lucia’s long legs. Saskia made to stop her but Natasha held up a hand to stop her and let Hana proceed. Hana’s tongue was moving in slow measured movements as she pleasured her mistress, something she was evidently well practised at.

‘Mmmm…I didn’t realise this was a technique they were teaching Inquisitors,’ moaned the blindfolded Lucia as she strained against her bonds, already aroused. Natasha could see some members of her entourage stirring up on the balcony, either out of discomfort with what Natasha was letting happened or from a stirring in their loins that the sight below was causing. Within a few minutes Lucia was a ready for release as Hana was when Natasha had interrupted the ritual. It was at that point that Hana revealed whose tongue it was that she was so enjoying.

‘This isn’t the Inquisition, Lucia’ said Hana with a wolfish grin and for the first time since she’d been staked in the pit, the cult leader was lost for worlds.

Before Lucia had time to react to this knowledge, Hana began her assault in earnest. Natasha had never seen anything like it. Within seconds Hana had reduced her former lover to howls of anguished laughter, her fingers almost a blur as they scampered up and down the torso of her victim, from the hollows of her armpits to her quivering navel. Luvia’s straining became even more desperate but she couldn’t escape.

Hana was true to her word. She knew every sensitive spot on Lucia’s body, and was quite prepared to exploit them ruthlessly. Dragging her fingers round Lucia’s inner thighs, Hana drank in the laughter and inarticulate begging from the utterly broken Lucia.

‘Please! Hana, forgive me….ah!...not there! No!’

In the manner of one applying a coup de grace to a fallen foe, Hana straightened up and wandered around to Lucia’s quivering feet. The blindfolded woman staked beneath her swung her head from side to side to try in vain to guess where her tormentor was.

Kneeling down next to her victim’s soles, Hana picked up a feather from the floor. Natasha had dismissed it as useless, knowing that very few women were feather ticklish. The upside-down cultists however gasped in unison as Hana brandished the feather, and this suggested to Natasha that this was the supposedly enchanted feather they’d spoken of.

Her suspicions were confirmed when Hana dragged it lazily across Lucia’s right sole. The effect on the woman was extra-ordinary, she let out a high pitch noise that was half squeal, half laugh, and very quickly lost the power to make any noise at all and merely drummed her legs on the floor, tears streaming from beneath her blindfold. This continued for a few heartbeats before Hana sat back, evidently to drink in the effect her actions were having. This gave Lucia the opportunity to regain the power of speech.

‘Please…Inquisitor, call her off…I’ll do anything.’

Natasha nodded to Saskia, who pulled a protesting Hana away from the breathless Lucia. Natasha walked over to the cult leader and whispered in her ear.

‘The…the Iceni taught me,’ was the mysterious reply. Natasha had expected the name of someone within the Inquisition, not a tribe of barbarians causing trouble on a far-off frontier. Before Natasha could question Lucia further, she’d slipped into unconsciousness, the hour of torment evidently having drained her. Natasha ordered Saskia to travel back to the Inquisitorial Keep and fetch reinforcements to take Lucia and her captured sorority back for further questioning. Once those women arrived, Natasha had her entourage pack up their tools and head back, and Natasha travelled to the keep alone, her head full of troubled thoughts.

‘The next morning I was summoned before this council. I humbly submit myself to your mercy, aware as I am of my breach of protocol.’

Natasha bowed her head and awaited the voice above to inform her of her punishment. In not reporting the ritual she’d seen immediately, the council were well within their rights to have Natasha Cast Down. This was the ritual punishment for Inquisitors deemed to have fallen irredeemably from the path of light.

When she was merely a student, they’d had all the college assemble to witness one such ritual, as a lesson and a warning. An Inquisitor was discovered to have been demanding favours from cult members in exchange for their freedom. This same Inquisitor was stood naked, flanked by two guards in front of a dark pit. In that darkness was gathered every cultist, criminal and innocent that Inquisitor had imprisoned in her career. At a signal, the hooded guards began dragging the fallen one towards the pit. Natasha could still remember the sound of the bare feet scrabbling on the stone floor and the pitiful begging as the Inquisitor tried to escape the fate she was being dragged towards. As she fell into the gloom there was a moment of silence, then the sound of torturous laughter as hundreds of tickling hands descended in vengeance on the one who had imprisoned them. Each student was made to walk past the pit and look down. When Natasha looked down, the Inquisitor was entirely hidden under a mass of naked female bodies fighting to tickle her. The only exposed part was her face and Natasha would never forget the look of terror in the fallen one’s eyes as she realised she’d spend the rest of her days in hell.

Her reverie was broken by the sound of a voice floating down from above.

‘Under normal circumstances, Natasha, you would be severely censured for your actions. The situation has changed, however. On the journey back to the Keep, Lucia and her coven escaped by means unknown. As you have seen her face, it is your task to track her down. As such, you will travel to Britain to interrogate the Iceni tribe she spoke of.’

Natasha’s joy in escaping punishment was mixed with fear at the thought of the power behind Lucia if an Inquisitorial patrol holding her could be overcome.

‘Furthermore, we have interrogated your entourage thoroughly in the dungeons and each confirms your story.’

Natasha felt anger swelling in her breast. The council hadn’t needed to put her party in the stocks to get the truth from them; they’d merely punished them because they couldn’t do the same to Natasha. Before she could make any reply to this, Natasha was instructed to leave the chamber and prepare for the journey to the cold, misty isles of Britain, and an unknown and powerful enemy.

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