Chiang Chan used the buggy whip to gently flick the horse which pulled the cart in which he and his three henchmen were seated. It was strange, he thought, how Princess Dena's baleful malediction had come to pass. While gloomily pondering whether her curse had indeed played a role in Feng's unlucky fate, he happened to see a coolie snoring drunkenly in the dark doorway of an abandoned textile warehouse, an empty wine bottle on his chest, his ricksha leaning against the building. Anxious to cheer his suddenly morose companions, a thought occurred to him. "Why so glum? Have you all forgotten that pretty little pig-tailed pleasure-girl back at the Pit? I'll bet she's lying there waiting to give us a hearty homecoming. You boys want to have some real fun with her tonight? Just like those English dukes and earls?"



"Is the Great Wall made of stone?" Dao replied with a wink to the Ox who sat behind him in the cart. He'd heard stories of how some of the English nobility treated their servant girls. "Well, someone grab that ricksha over there and bring it back to the barracks. Don't worry; it would take an earthquake to wake that drunken fool." Lin, the junior Scorpion, was ordered to climb down out of the cart and commandeer the rickshaw. It took him only a moment to step over the sleeping man, turn the rickshaw around, and, using its long arms, to pull the two-wheeled human-powered taxi behind him as he fell into step behind the horse cart. As the two vehicles approached the door to the Pit, Ci-ci, the girl whose body the four Scorpions were bent on enjoying once again, could hear the gentle clatter of the wheels turning, and the intermittent words and laughter of its half-drunken passengers in the distance.

Ci-ci had been lying there in the dark and the cold, her throat parched, her limbs contorted with pain, since the four Scorpions had left on their harbor errand more than an hour earlier. During their absence she had tossed the horrifying events of the past twelve hours, indeed the past twelve months, over and over in her mind, wondering what she might have done differently. And desperately trying to think how she might escape from the cruel sexual slavery to which she had been so unjustly condemned. Her older sister Peony, whom Ci-ci admired for both her beauty and her goodness of heart, had begged her not to go into service at the Black Pagoda. She had heard rumors, Peony had told her a year ago, that the palace of Richard Chan was a citadel of dark secrets, that no good could come from her employment there



But Ci-ci had insisted that it was not fair that Peony should have to bear the entire burden of supporting both themselves and their four small brothers and sisters. The six of them had been orphaned when Peony's father had died in a mysterious accident a few years earlier and their mother had died, some said of grief, not long after. The younger children lived with their grandmother, a difficult old crone embittered by a life of poverty, who would not have offered the little ones so much as a spoonful of rice or a cup of cabbage broth, had not Peony provided the money to pay for their meager board from her earnings at Madame Wong's.

Ci-ci, though, knew nothing of Peony's life at the brothel; her sister had told her only that she worked as a hostess at an inn that catered to wealthy foreigners and others. But the younger sister slowly become aware that the elder's work must have been unusually physically taxing. On many nights, Peony returned home very late, sometimes after midnight. More than once Ci-ci had lain, late at night, in the tiny room they shared, feigning sleep, while she watched her sister undress with a slowness that could only have been the result of pain or extreme fatigue. Or both. On one such occasion, it had only been a few hours before dawn when Ci-ci had watched in breathless silence as her slim and lovely sister had slipped slowly out of her clothes and crawled gingerly under the meager blanket on the other side of the humble room. Peony had lain there, cradling her own slender body in her arms and moaning softly for some minutes as if she were in great distress. But when the new day dawned a few hours later, Peony, as always, greeted her younger sister with a cheerful smile while she prepared the morning tea. Each morning, after they had finished their tea, Peony set out on her three-mile walk to their grandmother's poorly-kept lodgings so that she might leave money for the children's keeping, before going on to her "hostess" job - as if the soft sobs in the night had been the stuff of dreams.

Seeing the toll her sister's means of employment seemed to be taking on her, Ci-ci had been all the more determined to seek work herself. She was fifteen, after all, and bright, and, she thought, pretty. It had been the attractive, rather brazen-looking young daughter of the greengrocer, who had suggested that Ci-ci might find employment at the Black Pagoda; the pay was good by Shanghai standards, the woman had said, and the living quarters were incomparably better than the tiny room Ci-ci shared with her sister.

When Peony got wind of Ci-ci's plans, she scolded her sister for having such an idea. When Ci-ci asked if the money would not be useful, Peony, almost in tears, promised to work even longer hours if Ci-ci would give up her thoughts of working at the Black Pagoda. But Ci-ci chided her sister for her foolish fears. And finally Peony relented. At that time, after all, Peony had had no direct knowledge of the affairs of the Chans, their base desires, or the nature of their underground chamber of sexual horrors. Peony, though she was familiar with the wispy cobwebs of rumor that enveloped the Black Pagoda, actually had no concrete knowledge with which to convince her beloved sister.

And so Ci-ci had entered into the service of Richard Chan. Her housemaid's duties were not onerous, especially once the master of the house had taken a fancy to her. She had been frightened and fearful when he had taken her to his bed for the first time, for no young man had ever touched her before. But knowing that she could not hope to find a position that paid an inexperienced girl so well, she submitted to his carnal embraces in the hopes that she could ease her sister's lot in life. Even as her sister had submitted to the embraces of the clients at Madame Wong's only to ease the lot of Ci-ci and her other brothers and sisters.

But while Richard Chan himself had treated her well, until today, Ci-ci sensed early on that his number one concubine, the exotic and beautiful Eurasian, Mai-Lee Tan, harbored a great bitterness toward her. Some of the other servants, especially the hatchet-faced battleaxe, Yian, were jealous of her dark eyes, her soft skin, her youthful figure, and most of all her favor with the master. She could only guess that either Mai-Lee or the servants had somehow sought to incriminate her in Richard Chan's eyes and succeeded, and thus were responsible for her horrific ordeal, first in the cellars of the Black Pagoda, and now here in the dark and dismal dormitory of the Black Scorpions. The pain of the fearful flogging she had undergone in Richard Chan's dungeons had lessened now, hours later, but there were new pains now, between her legs, where the Scorpions had ravished her, and in her soul, now that her young body had become little more than a trophy to be mounted by the winners of their boisterous dice games.



And now, as she struggled helplessly in her hempen bonds she could only hope that the sounds she heard outside did not signal the momentary return of some of the Scorpions. Particularly the quartet who had already used her body so ruthlessly. The voices outside grew louder as they drew nearer; and for the first time Ci-ci recognized the high-pitch laugh of the boy and the cavernous voice of the one they called the Ox. She shuddered at the realization that the men outside were indeed the same foursome who had bound her earlier, and were now, in all likelihood, returning for new pleasures at her expense.

A moment or two later the Ox threw open the door to the Pit, and he and his comrades entered. The tall man with the bad teeth and the scrawny teenaged boy proceeded to light a pair of large kerosene lamps near the entrance, while the other two waited in the doorway When there was sufficient light to see, the returnees realized that most of their barracks-mates were not there; Chiang Chan surmised correctly that many of the missing were deployed in twos and threes, scouring the city looking for members of Li Chang's rebellious cells. Three or four Scorpions slumbered noisily on their cots, snoring the heavy snores of drunken debauchery. On the nearest cot, an unsavory looking cut-throat pawed his naked hairy genitals in his sleep, no doubt re-enacting in his dreams the depraved pleasures he and his fellows had enjoyed at the expense of the girl whose tempting body confronted Chiang Chan and his men. For the almond-eyed, golden-skinned pleasure girl was exactly where they had left her earlier following their return visit to the Pit - lying face down on the same oaken table on which the men had rolled their dice, with her lovely face just extending over one end of the table.



The reason why Ci-ci's limbs were wracked with pain, and why her face was contorted in misery was hardly a mystery to her visitors. The only part of her tempting body that was in contact with the table was her belly and pubic mound; her legs had been doubled up and bent back behind her, so that her dainty feet hovered above her nicely rounded derriere. Meanwhile her arms had been extended to their fullest behind her, so that her wrists could be cross-lashed to her ankles, right wrist to left ankle and left wrist to right. Ci-ci's back was thus curved into an alluring but agonizing bow, while her taut thighs and pouting, dark-nippled breasts were poised several inches above the table. Several threads of male Scorpion-juice were splattered across her girlish face - her eyelids, cheeks, lips, chin - and chest. As if each of her evil assailants had wanted to defile her most beautiful features.

To complete her painful bondage, one of the Scorpions had dug up a pair of robust thistle plants from the grassy area between the Pit and the Black Pagoda and placed them on the table beneath Ci-ci's soft, semen-streaked breasts. So that each time one of them had pulled her head down to pay homage to his thuggish organ, Ci-ci's succulent young breasts were crushed against the prickly plants. And now, the thistles, too, were sticky from the Scorpion semen which her assailants had splattered, in one shuddering ejaculation after another, onto Ci-ci's tempting love globes. Ci-ci's breasts, in turn, were both rosy and raw from the irritating surface of the thistles. A thin trickle of scarlet could be seen just outside her left nipple, where the sharpest of the thistle-spines had scraped her breastflesh. Chiang Chan noticed that the lurid streaks across her breasts - which unbeknownst to him had been the work of his sadistic father - that he had noticed earlier, had faded somewhat.



"Water.please.water," Ci-ci implored; she had had a single cup of tea in the early afternoon, and not a drop of water in the twelve or fourteen hours since. When the four men had entered the Pit, Ci-ci had begun to shiver anew; partly from the chill of the cold night air which followed them into the room, and partly from fear - deep, gut-wrenching fear. It was ironic that the Chans had stretched her supple young body by elongating it, while the Scorpions had elected to torment it by bending it back upon itself - into a taut, muscle-straining oval. An oval of naked feminine flesh that was punctuated by two sharp-tipped brown nipples that the coolness of the night air had chilled into a most appetizing erection.

Ci-ci lay there helplessly while the four men congratulated each other on their quarry's stringent bondage. Their demeanor sent fresh waves of terror coursing through Ci-ci's body. Their faces were masks of lust; their eyes, cold, dark and unblinking, were the eyes of the cruel and implacable evil spirits that haunt a child's nightmares. Unfortunately it seemed all but certain that her own nightmare was still far from over. Ci-ci had good cause to fear each of the cruel quartet, but it was the skinny, acne-flecked young one that she resented the most; he was not much older than she. Surely he should have been sympathetic to a girl's plight. But he stood there, ogling her nude body, smirking like a village idiot. His hair, still damp from the sea air, was slicked down in dark strands, while his feverish eyes raped her nakedness even as a thin trickle of saliva leaked from the corner of his mouth. Every now and then the pimple-faced boy surreptitiously moved his hand to his crotch to fondle his genitals, which, she knew, were swollen in mute testimony to her desirability and her helplessness.



"Water." she entreated them again. "Please, sir," Ci-ci addressed the largest of the foursome, who had led them into the room. "This is all a mistake.I stole nothing." The Ox's brawny chest swelled in manly pride; he wasn't used to being called "Sir". "Hmmm," replied Chiang Chan, young and handsome but with the same black, unfeeling eyes of his uncle, as he stepped in front of his slow-witted henchman before Zheng could reply. "Notice, my friends, that in the same breath she asks for water, she calls my father and uncle liars?" "The lying slut!" It was the boy's high-pitched voice. "I'll show her." Out of the corner of her eye, Ci-ci could see the Lin reach for the cord-like sash that held his loose-fitting black trousers up.



"No, my friends. Let us be generous to those less fortunate than ourselves. The wench is thirsty. Shall we not satisfy her thirst?" Dao gave the Ox a look of puzzled surprise. Was this the son of George Chan? Chiang Chan moved closer and lifted his left index finger to Ci-ci's cheek, swabbing the thickest strand of semen onto his finger. "Here, wench, is something for you to drink. Stick out your tongue, girl." Ci-ci blushed in shame to the accompaniment of the the ribald chuckles of her captors.



Dao breathed a brief sigh of relief, grateful that Chiang Chan's seemingly charitable gesture had been only a cruel ruse. The girl might yet prove to be good sport. The gap-toothed thug noticed with satisfaction that the tooth-marks he had left on her left breast when he had raped her earlier were still visible; he might not have all of his teeth, Dao thought to himself, but he still knew how to make the most of the yellowing stubs that he still possessed! Ci-ci's aversion to oral sex, which she had concealed since the first time Richard Chan had pulled her pretty head down toward his throbbing thick-veined phallus, had only worsened as this long night of degradation had dragged on. She had long since lost count of how many Scorpions she had been compelled to pleasure with her mouth. She looked down at Richard's finger, caked with the viscous anonymous seed of one of her tormentors, and shook her head from side to side.



"N-n-no." Ci-ci began, but her protest went unheard. Chiang Chan's powerful right hand closed on one of her pigtails and pushed her upper body down slightly so that Ci-ci's tender teen-aged lust mounds brushed against the brace of bristling thistle-plants. "Ooouuhhhhhh!" "I said, 'stick out your tongue!' " Chiang Chan repeated, a little louder. When Ci-ci still demurred, Chiang Chan pushed down harder, crushing her love-globes into the spiny plants. "Your tongue, girl! Don't pretend that you're not used to the taste."



When Ci-ci could bear the pain no longer, she at last extended the pretty pink tongue that had been made to lick the rigid cocks and hairy balls of one dice-lucky Scorpion after another, and was rewarded with the vile dollop of thug-sperm. "Swallow, wench!" Chiang Chan did not pull her clear of the breast-pricking thistles, even after he was satisfied that Ci-ci had swallowed her slimy mouthful. "This slut is rebellious, my friends, as well as a liar and a thief!' Chiang Chan exclaimed to his colleagues. "But we'll put an end to her rebelliousness tonight, won't we lads?" "Aye!" answered his men, almost as one, each of the three anxious to sate his savage lusts on the tempting body of the dark-haired, doe-eyed teenager. "It will be a fitting wake for Feng, will it not?" Dao added, as he felt his virile manhood thicken with unholy desire.



Dao suddenly had the fancy that that lust-crazed descendant of untold generations of barbaric warriors was probably watching the subjugation of the beautiful thief from some dark corner in the depths of hell. He pictured Feng, his bald head and hairy body enswirled by noxious vapors, grinning and stroking that massively rapacious organ of his, while he looked on as Chiang Chan, the heir to his position as squadron leader, had forced the young beauty's sweet, succulent breasts deep into the spiny plants, causing her taut, bound body to vibrate with pain. Dao felt his lips curl into a thin cruel smile at the notion. It was a shame though, that the Butcher could not be there to enjoy the festivities first-hand. There was an element of selfishness in Dao's regret as well; no one could have been more innovative at finding ways to extract the last ounce of sadistic pleasure from a young beauty his late mentor. But, judging from his leadership so far, and the way Ci-ci had squirmed to free her tender breasts from the bristling plants upon which she was impaled, Chiang Chan promised to be a worthy successor.