Dungeon of Darkness

  Dungeon of Darkness

  By

  April Hill

  ©2014 by Blushing Books® and April Hill

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Blushing Books®,

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  Hill, April

  Dungeon of Darkness

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62750-3730

  Cover Design by ABCD Graphics

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  Table of Contents:

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  EBOOK OFFER

  APRIL HILL

  BLUSHING BOOKS NEWSLETTER

  BLUSHING BOOKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Drumannach Castle, a manor house in the North of England, near the Cumbrian Hills. Early March, in the Year of Our Lord, 1191. King Henry II is dead, and his eldest son, Richard the Lionheart, is in the second year of his reign.

  It was still dark when young Katherine Drummond woke suddenly and sat up in bed, cold and frightened, but unsure what had awakened her. A harsh and seemingly ceaseless winter still held the North of England in its merciless grip, and to a child of only five years, spring was little more than a pleasant, half-remembered dream. Tonight, as it had on every previous night for weeks, the bitter chill had slipped its icy fingers under the castle's windows and tightly bolted doors, and crept along the damp halls and up the wide stairways into her small bedchamber. Shivering, Kathy held her breath, listening for what had disturbed her. A sickly yellow light from the smoking torches in the courtyard filtered through the lead mullioned windows of her second-floor bedroom, casting flickering, eerily dancing images across the stone walls. It was a time of night the child dreaded, and which she usually escaped by pulling the thick covers well up over her head, sometimes singing to herself to drown out the wind and the creaking night noises.

  Tonight, though, even over her own humming and the howling March wind that moaned around the granite corners of Drumannach Castle, she could still hear the voices from the courtyard below—voices raised in anger, and accompanied by a thunderous pounding on the outer gates. Trembling and still sleepy, Katherine was nonetheless curious as to what might be going on at such a late hour, and on such a pitiless winter night. After first peering cautiously from between the heavy draperies, she crawled to the edge of her warm, wide bed and slid to the cold floor, her small, bare feet making only the faintest thump on the aged oaken planks.

  The disquieting noises had abruptly increased in volume, and now appeared to be coming from just beneath where she stood. Katherine cringed against her bedroom wall, frozen with terror as the angry voices turned to shouts, and then to a series of fearsome screams. Across from her, at what suddenly seemed an impossibly long distance, was the door that opened into the hallway. Somewhere, perhaps in their own bedchamber down the long corridor, Father and Mother were waiting for the terrible night to end, as frightened for her as she was for them. For a little girl in a heavy nightdress that tangled between her feet when she walked, their bedroom seemed a very long way to run, but Katherine knew that somehow, she must find the courage to do it— and to do it quickly.

  It required both her small, chilled hands to turn the heavy brass doorknob on her door, but once the door was open, she slipped out into the hall. Then, without so much as a backward glance down the darkened corridor, and with her nightdress snatched up around her knees and her bright red hair flying out from under her nightcap, Katherine ran as fast as her short, plump legs would carry her, down the endlessly long, cold hall, to her parents' bedroom.

  Breathing heavily, she turned the last corner at a dead run, and stopped. The door to her parents' room stood slightly ajar, moving slowly back and forth on its creaking hinges in the draft. Fighting an almost overwhelming urge to cry, or to simply flee back to her room, Kathy pushed the door open a bit further and looked nervously inside. Except for the dim shaft of light coming from the one dripping candle in the hallway, the room was totally dark and empty. The rumpled bedding had been thrown about the room. On the floor alongside her parents' bed, a thick tallow candle lay on its side, as though someone had dropped it in haste. When Katherine knelt and touched her finger to the puddle of melted wax, it was cold and hard.

  In the dark, her chilled fingertips brushed through at least two smaller pools of something else on the floor. A wet, sticky substance, also cold. She knew without looking at her stained fingers that it was blood, but for reasons that would later puzzle her, the horrifying significance of this discovery didn't disturb her as profoundly as did her parents' empty bed.

  In reality, Katherine was too frightened and preoccupied with the sound of approaching footsteps to absorb the dire implications of the pooled blood on the floor. The angry voices were very near now and coming closer. The combined footfalls warned of perhaps four or five people, all of them coming up the winding stone stairwell from the Great Hall. Then, abruptly, the voices stopped, apparently at the harsh command of yet another voice—a cruel voice, deep and guttural in tone and frightening in its ferocity.

  And then, Katherine shrank against the side of her parents' empty bed, and threw her hands to her mouth to stifle a scream. The footsteps had begun again, trying now to move stealthily down the hallway, and directly toward her.

  Until this awful night had begun, Katherine Drummond's young life had been an indulged and comfortable one, but otherwise unremarkable. Surrounded and protected by loving parents, family and a large number of loyal and affectionate retainers, she had never known hunger or grief or real pain. She had never experienced terror, nor even felt threatened. Years later, when this night was a dark and ghastly memory, she would learn that there had been profoundly important reasons to be afraid—reasons from which she had been carefully protected, perhaps unwisely.

  For now, though, safe in the soft warmth of a cocoon of ignorance and youth, young Katherine would have said that the most upsetting things that ever happened to her were the occasional very disagreeable spankings she received whenever she sneaked out the front gate on one of her frequent "scientific explorations." Sometimes Father or Mother, but more often her overworked governess, Petronella, would take her upstairs, explain the offense in more detail than Kathy usually required, and then administer a sound spanking, after which the punished "explorer" was usually confined to her room, to be bored and annoyed for the remainder of the day.

  But Katherine Drummond's entire world was about to change, and long after the events of this terrible night were over, she would wonder what gave her the presence of mind to do what she did next.

  Katherine had no way of knowing the motives of the men who now approached her parents' bedroom. They might well have been friends, or rescuers, yet something told her to run and hide. Had she had been asked why she chose to hide, she would have answered quite simply, "The Voice." It was that one, unknown but somehow terrifying Voice that she would recall with a shiver of horror for the rest of her
life.

  Cowering in her parents' room, Katherine listened as the men she now knew in her heart to be enemies first searched her own room and then the small sitting room and antechamber that comprised her parents' suite. When they found her missing from her bed, the group stomped down the hallway, swearing and shouting to one another. They made no further effort to be quiet, nor to mask their evil intentions and as they reached her parents' doorway, Katherine knew that she was trapped.

  The room was sparsely furnished, and not large, offering no exits and few hiding places. One wall was hung with draperies and a large tapestry, behind which was a small dressing chamber and assorted shelves, racks, and hooks for clothing and storage. A tall cabinet with doors quite large enough for a child to hide in sat against the opposite wall and contained linens and bedding. Kathy's only other immediate option, seemingly, was to slip underneath the bed, but from her countless childish games of "hide-and-seek," she knew that such an obvious place would be the first place someone would look for her.

  One of the men carried a torch and another a lantern. There were six in all, and two more who pounded up and down the hallway in heavy boots, tearing each tapestry from its place on the wall, and pulling every table out to peer behind it. In the bedroom itself, they ripped the draperies from the wall, tore everything from the tall cabinet and then overturned it, sending it crashing to the floor, where it broke apart. Two of the men dropped to their hands and knees to look under the bed, using the lantern and a long pike to poke into the dark corners. Two others opened the windows, inspecting the stone ledges and below to determine that she had not somehow escaped down the dead vines that clung to the outside wall. Yet another man pulled a bench to the end of the bed, stood on it, and ran his sword several times over the top of the canopy, slicing through the velvet cover. After perhaps fifteen minutes of searching, when they had not found her, the men stormed from the room, quarreling loudly with one another.

  "I tell you, the little bitch is here somewhere," The Voice screamed. "Search the smaller rooms again! The brat is said to be but five or six. She can't have gone far! We will not leave until she is found, do you understand?"

  They searched again, and the entire time, The Voice shrieked orders and insults at the searchers.

  When their efforts again failed, The Voice again berated them in excoriating terms.

  "You have obviously allowed this disgusting little vermin to escape, like the pack of blithering idiots you are! Down the stairwell, no doubt, past your so-called sentries, and out into the damned night! If you are extremely fortunate, this accursed whelp who has managed to make fools of all of you will simply freeze to death and save me the trouble of slitting her bloody throat! I would advise the lot of you to pray for such an outcome, because if that tiny, blue, frozen corpse isn't found by tomorrow, you will all spend the next month searching every wretched inch for ten miles in every direction! I did not wait this long and wade knee deep through Drummond gore tonight to lose the last puking Drummond brat because of your insufferable bungling and cowardice! Now, go below and cut the damnable throat of every last Drummond lackey that still breathes, and then burn everything to the ground! By morning, I will have this place nothing but ashes and scorched Drummond bones!"

  Only an hour later, the intruders rode through Drumannach's great portcullis, their horses thundering over the burning drawbridge, and shortly thereafter, still in her hiding place, Katherine began to smell smoke. Quickly, she released her grim hold on the canopy's cross bar and came out of her cramped hiding place, sliding down the tall bedpost until she could drop safely onto the mattress. Choking with fear, and with her small, cold arms aching with the effort, she had clung in the darkest interior corner of the huge curtained bed for well over an hour, cocooned in the dusty burgundy draperies like a plump moth with its wings folded.

  She had been terrified when the men opened the curtains, and when they thrust their blood-streaked weapons deep into the bedding, and through the mattress, but she had learned from those endless games of hide-and-seek that people will look down, under, over, and through, but almost never do they look up.

  "Do you see that large spider there?" Father had asked one day, pointing up into the highest corner of her bedroom ceiling. Katherine had looked up, and then, not being especially fond of spiders, she had made a disagreeable face. "That spider has been there, in that very corner, for a full week," Father said. "And yet you have not been frightened by him. Why is that, do you suppose?"

  "I didn't see the spider, Father," she pouted, wishing to be scrupulously honest and yet not look like a fool. "I do see him now, though, and would be happy if you would put him outside for me."

  Her father smiled. "And so I shall, but you must first tell me why it was you didn't notice him."

  Katherine thought for a moment, and then remembered her games of hide-and-seek. "Because I didn't look up there, I suppose? I never look up at the ceiling," she explained sullenly. "There is never anything to see there but dust and cobwebs."

  "Perhaps," he conceded, "but if you truly wish to become a scientist, as you say you do, my love, you must learn to look closely, everywhere and at everything, and be frightened of nothing simply because you don't understand it."

  "Like the spider?" she grumbled, knowing very well that her father was not speaking entirely about spiders.

  "Exactly like the spider."

  And so, Katherine permitted the big black spider to remain peacefully in the corner of her bedroom ceiling, and each day, she tried to remember to look up for him. One day, he simply went away and never returned. Yet even in his absence, the long-ago spider had saved her life.

  * * * * *

  Katherine made her way that night through the thick smoke in the hallway until she reached the stairwell. As she started down the steep stairs to look for her parents, she saw with horror that the Great Hall was already an inferno, with the huge table and all its carved chairs and benches engulfed in flames, and the splendid tapestries that graced the stone walls scorched black or fully ablaze. Everything of wood or fabric seemed to be burning, and the fire was spreading relentlessly to the adjoining rooms. She watched in awe as an overhead timber split, raining sparks and chunks of flaming wood onto the lower steps of the very staircase where she stood. Seconds later the timber crashed down, and then another, crushing the remains of the great dining table, and forcing Katherine to back up the steps, shielding her eyes with her arm as the heat's intensity grew. Suddenly, there was an enormous boom, and a rush of scalding air drove her further backwards. Her sleeve caught fire, and she slapped at the flames as she continued to back up the stairs, feeling her flesh burn. Behind her on the stairwell wall, a giant hanging tapestry caught fire, and then another. Knowing there would be no escape from the burning building unless it was from an upper window, she turned and fled up the stairs to her bedroom, with the flames licking at her feet as she ran.

  Frantically, she fought with the latch of her bedroom window, but the locking mechanism was stiff with the cold and wouldn't budge. Ice had frozen the window in place and finally, in desperation, Katherine found a small stool and smashed it against the window until the leaded panes gave way, enabling her able to push out the colored glass panels. As the freezing air hit her face, Katherine looked around quickly, and then pulled the bedspread from her bed and dragged it to the window. She lifted the heavy mass of fabric as far as the ledge, held it there long enough to catch her breath and then shoved the bundled bedspread through the hole in the window. Then, still trembling with cold and an almost disabling fear, she crawled onto the window-ledge, reached out for the thick vines that climbed the wall, and with a short prayer that they would hold her, she put out one bare foot and began the long, terrifying descent to the courtyard below. She had climbed more than two-thirds the way when a tremendous explosion from somewhere shook the wall, and she lost her footing, falling the remainder of the way to land partially on her crumpled bedspread and partially in the frozen shrubbery. All aro
und her, parts of the wall she had just descended were crumbling. Katherine gathered up the damp bedspread and ran for her life.

  Everywhere she turned, there was fire and a thick, choking black smoke that burned her eyes and caused her to lose her bearings. Turning wildly in circles and shaking with hysteria, she saw the stables in flames, along with every other outbuilding she could recognize. Beyond the garden, even the poultry pens and the barns were burning, their hayricks smoldering and sending sparks and flaming bits of straw wafting twenty feet or more into the freezing night air. Katherine collapsed on the cold stones, weeping helplessly. She had not seen one person anywhere, and in that awful moment, she knew that they were all dead—-everyone— including her father and mother. They were still inside the burning castle, exactly as the cruel Voice had ordered.

  * * * * *

  Just before dawn, a pair of horsemen approached the ruins of Drumannach and dismounted. The drawbridge was impassable on horseback, but one of the two, a tall, gray-haired man dressed in the kilted fashion of a Scot, inched his way across the still smoldering framework of the bridge, his sword drawn and a quiver and longbow slung across his back. The Scotsman was not young, but though he favored his right shoulder, he moved with assurance across the silent courtyard, and went about his search quickly and efficiently. The roof of the great house had collapsed, and the fire still burned in spots among the rubble. The stench of burning flesh made it clear to him that there would be no survivors, but he walked on, kicking aside smoldering debris as he made his way through the courtyard to the huge oaked doors that once greeted visitors to Drumannach, and now opened onto a scene straight from the bowels of Hell.

  Swiftly, and in absolute silence, the stranger went from one ruined building to the next, taking in each hideous discovery with the steady, unstinting gaze of a man who had known much horror in his life. He knew who had done this, and recognized the man's work all too well to expect anything other than the carnage that surrounded him. Not a goat or a chicken had been spared the slaughter, and the Scotsman knew from experience that when Alric Grymwald had arrived at Drumannach, any man, woman, or child unlucky enough to have been there had died a death not to be envied.