I owe two people debts of undying gratitude and love for not only proofing bits of this, but in SpacefullofObject's case for coming up with large chunks of the story-line in this part. The man's inspiration was invaluable, and I can never thank him enough, though I'll spend the rest of my life trying. SpacefullofObjects? Your stories are freakin' witty and stunningly beautiful and the mind behind them is equal to them. Here's proof: http://www.fireflyfans.net/fulluserbluesunlist.asp?un=spacefullofobjects. Y'all go read Spacie's goods, and believe me afterwards.

Engine Angel patiently and tirelessly read huge portions while vanquishing my tendencies to run-on sentences and tedious verboseness (there's a good example for you, neh?) Any and all mistakes in the story are purely the result of my own stubborn nature. Read on, ONLY if you can stand that, and the bad, bad torture scenes you're gonna be reading. Oh. And tell me what you think, okies? I need to know. Love you all. You Gentle Readers mean much to me.

The Way of Jayne, Part 9

Crazy Inga, who had until recently been a resident of the planet Jayne Cobb grew up on, had had a much younger brother, Adelai. He and she had been close – so close as to be more mother and son than sister and brother. Although she'd never married, in fact staying a virgin until her sixty-first year, she had taken on the raising of her young brother when their Russian father and German mother died in a murder-suicide pact. Inga had been 21 and Adelai six when they were both thrown into the new relationship – Inga adopting the role of both sister and mother to the boy. She trained him up to be a proud Aryan – pure of blood and pure of mind in hatred of anything not lily white. She raised him to shun anything that did not add to the riches in the family coffers and to detest things not dedicated to the cause of increasing their family's reputation as a superior race.

The last survivors of Adolf Hitler's direct family line via through their mother's DNA, Inga and Adelai were united in the desire to bring new glory to the old causes. She had taught him patience enough, however, to be methodical and careful as he matured. When the boy turned nineteen he left Inga safely ensconsed on a small farm on the edge of town and set off for the black of space. It was there he hoped to find gold to bring back to his dear instructress, his greatest love, his sister, his life: Inga.

They kept in touch over the long four years by sending waves back and forth several times a year. Inga's complete confidence in the upbringing she'd given him and Adelei's adoration of his sister and of their cause kept them both warm between talks. It had been three months since her last communique, but he was not worried yet. It would come. It always did.

~Three months later~ The quality of the wave was so poor he could only make out the shape of her head, could hear only the semblance of a human voice neither male nor female, yet it was Inga. He’d know the lyrical cadence of her speech patterns anywhere. He’d had a lifetime to learn everything she’d painstakingly taught him in that unforgettable voice of hers.

He visualized her now as she was when he was a child: A martinet of a sister turned parent, Inga had not spared the discipline of the lessons in their shared Third Reich background, had drummed into him hard and fast the tenents of the creed. Books and vids aplenty had aided the lessons, and Adelai’s strong young mind and spirit had engulfed every morsel of evil intelligence she cared to share. Oh yes, her voice was his life to him, he loved it, loved her with a fierce and all-consuming ardor that burned away any chance of his loving another as much as he cherished his sister, Inga. Mother to his soul. There was nothing forbidden, nothing physical about that love, it was more that she was confessor, his teacher, his hope, his heart in the ‘verse that surrounded them both.

Inga’s dear sweet voice carried to him now over time and space. “Addy-boy…..need….not sure but…he’s good (or was that “got?”)…love him, not trust…” and the wave faded out to blackness, then was replaced by infuriating vacant static. That was all that was left.

"Jhew lun dou," the brother's voice bit out, his tone clear and even, though clipped. One long finger tapped a rectangular nav-locater button until the screen showed a small dustball of a planet. “Eldwin, plot us a course to these coordinates, if you please. Spare no time, for we have none to waste, I fear.” The little ship lurched about as the second in command rushed to do his captain’s bidding, knowing from hard experience the consequences of failing in even the smallest detail of duty. In a trice they were bound for Inga’s home planet. The man who’d given the order stood with booted feet planted firmly, arms crossed at his middle, a look of warmed-over death on his fish-belly white face. The thoughts behind the terrible visage were consumed by worry, but tinged also by a reddened joy at the prospect of wreaking havoc on any hands that could dare to touch his sister and mentor.

~~~

Young Jayne's crime boss, Wood Harbinger, was tired, fighting a vague malaise centered in his mid-section. The headache had gone away, thank all the gods and devils, but his bowels had been turning to water to make up for the relative ease of his head. He’d spent the better part of the morning in the outhouse, and had taken to carrying a tarnished metal bucket and rags around with him in the house in case of repeated attacks.

He wanted some quality time in bed, figured sleep might ease things a mite, but the two recent times he’d crossed the threshold of Inga’s old room he'd been sleeping in for weeks, the vise got replaced on his head and the gut-squeezin’ commenced a dozen-fold. He was now stretched half on, half off the couch in the parlor, spitting on the pretty tapestry floor rug every now and again, adding bile-colored stains to the jewel-colored fibers of the pattern.

Visions of Inga’s death at his hands kept playing on the separate screens of his eyelids, but these didn’t give him the pleasure he’d once felt upon trotting out the memories. No, these murderous images weren’t no kind of satisfying as they’d been earlier. He seemed to be seeing things from a different perspective now; from the point of view of the victim. It was he who was getting a drubbing, then a strangling from his own hands tight, then loosening, then tight again, killing any attempts of his to breathe.

He panted, writhed on the couch stained a wet ocher from rivulets of filthy sweat congealing there. His dungarees absorbed most of the thin viscous nastiness his lower body exuded, sparing the couch that indignity, at least. He was so miserably lost in the nightmare of his current existence that he couldn't even revel in his own stench, as he loved to do.

The unfortunate Wood didn’t hear the Black Hole Sun touch down outside, although the wind was blowing just right to send the warning sounds of her landing his way. Shortly after Adelai and his minions touched boots to the dry earth near Inga’s neighbor’s house, Wood Harbinger slipped into a deep dreamless sleep broken only by the tiniest painful murmurs. The sufferer's bout of inflammatory bowel disease and fever was cause for his being nearly comatose when Clear-Eyed Death landed on the planet, come to call in markers owed for his sister Inga's murder.

~~~

Dust devils swirled to chest height, motes of debris bringing squint eyes to the four men surveying the land around them. Adelai strode to the forefront donning black leather second-skin gloves as Eldwin gave the all-clear nod. Inga's freshly-gloved brother stood, chin raised, ski-lift of a nose scenting the air like a predatory hound. Though he was upwind of it, he detected the stench of decaying flesh coming from a barn between the closest neighbor’s house and Inga’s. A stink less redolent of corpsified flesh but still noxious enough to offend his olfactory centers came from the direction of his sister’s home.

“At least one unseemly organism masquerading as humanity currently occupies that particular house,” his lyrical velvet-on-a-red-ant-pile voice spoke to no one in particular. “My friends, we go this way, for I believe we will find the dear woman who should live there could not bring herself to take in air such as is found in her home just now.” His slender fingers skewed sharply to the left toward the barn, his immaculate suit clad legs striding onward toward that goal.

No intention of letting Eldwin, his Second, walk point on this patrol, Adelai himself reached the barn first. He stood and waited for his fiance’s nephew, Hubert, to close the gap behind him, then watched the weakling struggle and heave the crossbar off the broad barn door to allow entry. 'The boy does not show promise. My Dear Intended's hopes for him are mislaid, most assuredly,' he thought to himself, an almost intelligible "Tsk, tsk, tsk," drifting off his tongue as it swept behind his perfect upper teeth. As the door creaked open, Adelai strode just inside the big barn, body alert and statue-still, allowing the shards of his ice-blue eyes to penetrate the interior gloom.

While his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, his nose did not need that slight period of acclimating to scent markers in the big storage area. His glacial facial features turned slightly to the left, his remarkable nose leading the way to an area of disturbed soil several meters away from the long side wall. He stood, looking down at the ground at his feet. Eldwin and Hubert rushed to Adelai’s side, one of them immediately attacking the dirt with a shovel found leaning against a post, the other kneeling, using cupped hands to dig as if his life depended on it, which, in fact, it did. The fourth member of the crew, a sharp-shooter, stood at the door, laser pistol at the ready, alert to any signs that they might be disturbed as the other two men in the party dug up the ground for signs of death.

In far less time than it had taken Wood Harbinger to kill her and dig her grave, the peaceful face of Inga's corpse was uncovered. At first sight of her star-silver hair, Adelai inhaled sharply, taking in the sweet decay of her flesh, noting the odd mixture of the soft hair congealed in rusty dried blood combined with dark fertile soil. He held out scant hope that this was not his sister, his only living relative unlovingly, even hastily, disposed of on land that she had loved, away from the rays of sunlight that had blessed her dear countenance the day he had left her here to settle. Eldwin’s gaze lifted to his captain's own, denoting the slight widening of Adelai’s eyes. The ice blue orbits were the only clue to the emotion surging under the cool exterior.

His Second bent back to his task, fingers delicately, tenderly sweeping clotted earth from around the woman’s face. Adelai removed a supple dog-leather pouch from his belt, extracting a soft boar-bristle brush from the torture kit inside. He handed it to Eldwin as if it were a scepter of royalty. The man accepted the tool reverently and carefully brushed the dirt from the lined face beneath with all the care of an Egyptologist uncovering Princess Nefertiri from centuries of pyramid dust.

Once the last vestige of debris was removed revealing her smiling lips, her brother fell to his knees beside the hole and kissed her tenderly, sliding the dirt away from her neck and shoulders with his own hands. He lifted her upper body in his arms and slid on his bottom into the depression, unmindful of the 40,000 credit suit he wore. Niska cradled the corpse to his shirtfront, rocking gently, murmuring soothing words in an oddly toned combination of ancient German and Mandarin.

His men turned away briefly to give grief privacy only to swerve their gaze back to the tableau of the young man and old woman, unable to fathom their leader giving water to the soil, giving emotion to anything at all, let alone something so ordinary and inevitable as death. They had no clue as to Adelai’s connection to the old bag of bones. They would never know, in fact, but they greedily sucked in the sole sign of human frailty they’d yet seen in their ruthless leader as he listed side-to-side cradling the older-than-mud female.

The vision before the henchmen was poignant enough for even the most jaded eyes, but the effect was doubled when the quiet murmurs suddently deteriorated into a keen of misery so terrible that it could never be duplicated. The only wail that had ever come close was when a fairy-tale farmboy turned legendary pirate had screamed his fair life away in a Pit of Despair. The younger of the henchmen, nephew of Adelai’s fiance’, covered his perfect ears to muffle the shrieks that echoed in the barn’s rafters, the noises slamming back and forth like mice trapped in a sweltering box. Eldwin alone steeled himself to it, continued to swab dirt away from the floral skirt clad legs of the woman his boss had so obviously worshipped and whom now was mourned to the point of insanity.

When she was bare of dirt as best as could be managed, her brother awkwardly rose to his knees still holding the wasted woman to his breast. Eldwin slid mindful hands beneath her thighs to lift the slight weight in tandem with Adelai; Hubert aided the grieving man by cupping his expensive suit-clad elbows to raise him to his feet.

“Careful, you fools!,” cried the grieving Adelai, as Eldwin’s grip slipped, allowing one long withered arm to flop bonelessly groundward. Hubert rushed to fold the limb back up to the chest and the trio paraded awkwardly out of the barn to a garden of emerald grass bathed in sunlight. Following Adelai’s lead, they lowered the woman to the ground and stood sentinel around the corpse as her brother carefully went about a cursory autopsy of the remains.

His fingers caressed her head wounds, noting that they had been applied pre-mortem based on the copious amount of gouted blood on her scalp. He ran his hand down a thin white arm, noting both radius and ulna bones were broken. Hands along her ribs, he found a compound-fractured rib piercing her skin, poking raggedly through her torn dress. He opened the material to find rusty blood coating her skin, another cruel pain-wracked injury inflicted on her precious flesh before she died.

“Ahh, liebling, what have they done to you? I promise, I swear it, payment shall be exacted, full and overflowing. Every stroke of misery I find on your form will be met by pain extraordinary, yes, oh yes indeed. I will build my reputation on the skin and the bones of the one who has done this.”

The men around the body shivered involuntarily in misplaced sympathy for their quarry, for the man or men who were now their prey. They’d witnessed Adelai’s payment policy in action before, had assisted with more or less vigor on occasion. But the level of mayhem slated for the killer of the woman on the ground was going to be of epic proportions, there could be no doubt. Hubert grinned a death's head grimace, for tortured death was something he fancied, a grand benefit to working for this man.

Adelai ended his pro forma post-mortem by removing his supple gloves and sliding his hands around Inga’s throat, matching his fingers to the mottled indentations of the hands that had ended her. The hands' imprints were bigger than his own, the telltale signs suggested strong spatulate fingers. He doubted Inga had struggled much at the end, fighting a man that big with that large of a joy in killing would have been hopeless.

He kissed her grayed lips again, rose from the ground and slipped his gloves back on. His fingers wriggled into the sockets of the black leather, flexing once, twice. As he clapped the palms together, he smiled a slow evil grin, looking almost joyful.

“Boys? We hunt now. And I expect we find, yes?”

Eldwin, Hubert and Adelai strode toward Inga’s house, the sharpshooter staying behind to sit shiva over the wasted woman on the grass by the barn.

Three pairs of booted feet belonging to trained killers stepped comically on tiptoe up the wooden steps, gaining the porch and then the front door. Eldwin held his hand up, pulled the door open, stepped into the front room ahead of his boss, intent on giving protection from danger, from such as had killed the woman whose revenge was coming soon.

The stench in the room was strong, rank and full-bodied, and it emanated from a thick-set piece of go-se laying on Inga’s lovely floral-patterned couch.

The two minions investigated the entire house, upstairs and down, seeking other inhabitants, possible additional candidates for torture and death. All the while the search ensued, their leader approached the sleeping couched figure one slow and steady step at a time, measuring the man’s life out in inches by way of his footsteps.

He stopped at the sofa's side, inhaling deeply the odor of decay and sickness carried by the man. He flinched, jerked his head up, his eyes locking on the doorway of Inga’s bedroom, sensing a presence there, although he knew Eldwin had moved on to the upstairs after checking that chamber for signs of habitation.

He left the humanoid heap on the couch, walked into Inga’s room. The moment he entered, her love, her warmth flowed over him like a deep and fragrant full-length jacket. He sighed, stretched his arms akimbo, head tossed back, mouth open as if to take his sister’s shade inside himself along with the air of her room. He breathed through his mouth, lightly, quietly, the better to listen for her voice, should she care to (should she be able to) speak to him.

The only sound he caught was eerily similar to the garbled wave he’d received aboard the Black Hole Sun. Hanging his head, saddened at his failure to grasp the message from the grave, he hung his head and shook it from side to side in regret, before he realized that all he needed to know resided in the mind and tongue of the man in the next room. Hugging his arms around his waist so as to hug his sister’s remnant against himself, he bid her auf wiedersehen and took the few steps needed to gain couch-side, to be near to one of the original building blocks in what would be a grand reputation.

~~~

The binding was done with ineffable care, a task performed with enviable patience. Such was the gently-done immobilization of Harbinger on the couch that he did not wake. No sound was made by Adelai as he spun a web of razor cord back and forth across Jayne's employer's form on Inga's formerly lovely couch. What did wake Wood was the no longer stealthy footsteps of Hubert and Eldwin on the steps as they tromped down to report an "all clear" to their leader.

Wood's eyes snapped open, his forearms raised automatically, wanting to tug at his wetly clinging pants, only to reap searing nerve endings along several severed layers of his skin as the wire cut him in a scored-ham pattern on both arms. He screeched at the upshot of the pain, hot tears leaking from his wincing eyes.

"Nothing in the house but the heap on the couch, Sir," said Eldwin from the arched doorway into the parlour. Hubert peered over his superior's shoulder, the better to hungrily view what might have caused the pained sounds. Both men stood quietly watching, listening as the expert application of honesty-inducement already began to bear fruit.

"Unnnh! UNNNHHH! Gawds above, please, please, take it off me. Whatever you want, Mister, I want it too! I swear it to ya on my swingin' cod, so I do!," the binder smiled coldly and nodded at the interjection. "Yes, yes, of course I understand, my friend. And I know your heart's fondest wish is to give me what my own heart craves. And by the time our dance is done, we will know much about one another, I think, yes?"

Encouraged by the soft, almost maternal nature of his captor's voice's elegant choice of words, Wood wept hard. Relief and hope in the form of wracking sobs caused rods of thick snot to slide from his nostrils down the sides of his stubbled cranberry cheeks. The captive lifted one leg experimentally, feeling for cords binding him there too, found he could not move his lower limbs. Thankfully, the attempt did not cause his leg to be cruelly sliced; the thick canvas material of pants cushioned him from anything but feeling tethered. His wet eyes had been staring down his own body, willing his leg to lift, but now he swept his gaze back to that of his Master who knelt on the floor at the side of the couch.

Wood grated out, "I, I, I...."

"Shhhh, no words from you now. We will have the talking from me, then we will have the talking from you. We understand each other. Nod if this is true."

Harbinger nodded, the green snot wetness along his face sliding in a zig-zag direction at the motion.

"Good, good. Now tell me the name, define for me the manner of man it is who works with you, aids you in your work." Niska yawned a little as if to feign disinterest, when in reality he had long ago learned that the action of yawning was good for increasing oxygen flow into his brain. This made him sharper, his senses keener, the mentat-like computer of his mind becoming even more a micro-processor of information.

Though Wood had been crying hard, he stilled, utterly quieted when he realized that the jerking of his lungs inside his chest as he wept caused the wires cross-cutting his arms to bite deeper. He discovered this not due to increasing pain. The nerves in his skin had sung as loudly as they could, so many deep hurts at once had silenced neural communication. What clued him in was warm blood as it tickled, oozing from cuts on the forearms. He looked at his tormentor, his possible saviour, and gave a watery smile.

"Only-est employee I've got's name of Bob, yer Worship, Sir," he breathed out slowly, carefully.

"Bob, ah yes. Did the man's progenitors give him no other name?"

"The who?," quoth the prisoner.

"What would be his other name, my Man?," Adelai rejoined.

Stuttering, abjectly terrified, realizing he had never ASKED the last name of his erstwhile employee, Wood blathered out, "Bob-ah-Bob-ah..." Niska rapped sharply upon the man's mouth with the flat of his hand, stopping the useless sounds and sending the copper taste of blood along the crushed lips beneath. Swallowing liquid pennies, Wood closed his eyes and tried to find any sort of happy place inside his head. He'd need to seek quickly, he figured, because the probability loomed large that the man whose hand tortured his lips would soon end him.

The last living descendant of a twisted dictator named Hitler removed his hand from Wood's mouth gingerly, prepared to thwart more useless flapping in like manner, should it arise again. The man in his power rested still, however, so the inquisition continued.

"You will tell me of him now, Dear, we can dispense with need of his father's name, in favor of a viable description," Inga's brother stared hard at Wood as he spoke, prepared now to simplify any words that the bumbling simpleton's expressive face showed were not understood. "Mmmmm-ahhh, how does Bob look? What is his aspect?," he questioned.

"Big. Tall. Strong as an ox. 'Bout 25 years old, I reckon, by the look on his face. Cain't rightly tell age, never could."

"Color of hair?"

"Brown, kinda mousy-lookin'. And he don't never smile, all business. Yep, that there's yer Bob." He grinned hopefully, in no way expecting the knife jab of fresh pain he got as Niska quickly sliced away the material of Wood's pants leg, exposing it to the slicing wires that tightened and cut into his shin down to the white of bone. Wood passed out from the onslaught (as expected) and the tormenter turned to his underlings.

"Boys, I have things to do here, yes, wonderful things, and for this I do not require your aid." The duo in the doorway nodded slowly in unison, ears perked at every word that was uttered, needing to be sure as hell that they followed each syllable to the letter. "You go now and find this man, this Bob who works with Mr. Wood Harbinger. You find him and give him my compliments, yes? Break his limbs, then bring him to me, mind you keep breath and body together however. I want him alive. Do we have an understanding?"

~~~

Jayne (also known as Bob, to his boss) and Maeve were dreamless, restful, deeply asleep in each other's arms on the forest floor. The utter exhausted satisfaction of an hour of lovemaking coupled with well-filled bellies had conspired to bring loving relaxation. Neither heard the approach of minions; perhaps 'twould have been worse if they had. Time to dissemble, to search hard for excuses, might have earned them a place in the reputation that was even now being writ large upon Jayne's boss back at Inga's former home.

As it was, the lovers' eyes did not open until they both felt the cold hard muzzles of identical revolvers pressing against their foreheads. Their first sight was of a lean, calm-visaged middle-aged man staring down at them from a crouching position.

"The way you die will depend on how well you answer me in the next 60 seconds," Eldwin told them, nodding first at Maeve, then at Jayne, as he spoke. "One minute starts now..."

Maeve spoke first, "What in hell do ya want, what in hell are ya wantin' answers to, ya hundan," she bit out, the hard circle of metal firmly scraping across her skin as her head tilted back to look more clearly at their tormenter.

"48 seconds, Woman. Don't waste them asking me questions. I'm in charge here, you can't tell?"

Maeve quieted. Eldwin looked to Jayne. "Name, boy, and make it quick."

"Jayne!," he yelped loud and fearful in the echoing trees. "Please, gods, please don't hurt her. I don't care whatcha do to me, but oh sweet merciful yesu, let her go."

"Your name's Jane? Or hers is?"

Maeve sighed and said, "HIS is Jayne. You aint' 'zactly jing zi, are ya?"

'Too young to be Bob anyhow,' the man with the guns thought. Eldwin moved the muzzles from their foreheads and smoothly stood erect, guns tracking the pair on the ground as he did. "Okay, you passed the first round of questioning. Get up and we'll see how the next ten minutes go for you." The lovers sat, Maeve gathering the picnic blanket around her breasts and mid-section, Jayne not bothering to hide his naked form, simply grabbing each ankle to tuck under the opposite thigh, until he sat tailor-fashion on the bare earth. He wrapped his arms protectively around Maeve, pulling her pale supple back against his cold muscled chest.

Her presence so close to him, his ability to shelter her somewhat gave him courage to address the situation at hand in a bit of a more competent manner. "Jayne Cobb's the name. My dad's a farmer on this pile of rocks. The lady's Maeve, and she's mine. You make another move to touch her and I'll kill you, sure as you got the look of a gorram butt-cao'in ferret aboutcha." The man he spoke to did not seem concerned by the threat, armed as he was with double shooting irons. He knew who was in charge here, but he took a spare moment to admire the boy's gonadal quotient, impressed by bravado that reminded him of himself near that age.

Adelai's soon-to-be nephew, Hubert, spoke from behind his superior, "Awww, Eldwin. This un's a puppy, Man. The Boss ain't interested in no baby and his doxy, ya hear? Let's us-get back to the little house and see how much progress he's made on that Wood-fella he was carvin' up on the couch. Whatcha say?"

Ignoring the hopeful sibilant voice behind him, Eldwin responded to Jayne's threat. "You handle yourself right and there won't be need for any more touching. I have orders that involve a reptile named "Bob" who works for a murdering sha-gua named Wood Harbinger. The shen jing bing is well on his way to being ended, right now, for the crime of killin' an old lady, friend of our boss, and if you KNEW our boss, you'd know we ain't got time to sing and dance with you two lovebirds, no matter how intriguing that option might be given other circumstances."

Eldwin's eyes swept over Maeve's touseled twig-bedecked long red hair, focusing on her deep emerald eyes for a brief instant. Maeve felt Jayne tense behind her before she touched him on his bare thigh with one small hand to urge him to quiet. She saw through her touch that her lover was the Bob they were after, she didn't have faith that he could handle a believable reply to the man with the guns.

The redheaded reader rose to her feet, using her hand's perch on Jayne's knee to help push her up off the ground. Her other hand clutched the picnic cloth to her breasts, but only lightly, as she coyly allowed the edge of the piece to slide half-way below one dusty rose nipple as she slowly stood erect. Eldwin fixated on the rose colored treat, his mind leaving his fear of the boss long enough to send signals of lust-ridden blood supply to his groin. He cleared his throat and his head emptied of everything except Maeve when she stepped close enough to him to touch his bare wrist that held the gun still trained on her.

"We're nothing to you, Honey. Not even a speck on the radar for you or your superiors. Anybody can see that we're just lovers out for a tryst, hunting a place we can have our fun 'thout the lad's momma catching up with an old lady deflowerin' her boy."

She fed the belief deep into Eldwin's mind, using aptly-chosen words to reinforce what the man already thought, 'This is just a boy, can't be the big burly man Wood was talking about. Can't be more than 13 years old, this kid.' Maeve smiled warmly, approvingly as her thoughts wove around Eldwin's to create a warp of facts that even the most effective possible torture would not be able to sway.

For his part, Jayne dug his palms into sharp-edged wood chips on the ground to keep from leaping up and dealing icy death on the man Maeve was clearly manipulating so as to save their skins. He winced at the pain on his flesh, but thanked it and her for saving them both.

"These two ain't the ones we're looking for, Hubert," Eldwin said kindly, smiling wistfully as Maeve brushed her fingers along his cheek before stepping away and sinking gracefully back down into Jayne's lap. "The boy's got him the luck of a yanse lang, is all, having an older woman teaching him the way of things."

Eldwin turned dreamily away, his twin revolvers leaving both Jayne and Maeve harmless for the first time since he and his partner entered the clearing some twenty minutes prior. Both men mounted their horses to return the way they came, riding fast and hard to report back to their boss. As the pair rode away, Jayne bent his head to rest his slightly damp eyes on Maeve's auburn hair-covered shoulder. She comforted him by her touch and words. "Shhh, bao bei. It's all over now. And it's time you and me talked about Bob, neh?"

He nodded against her, his arms snaking around her middle, his hands raising to cup her full breasts exposed to the cool air as his fingers tugged down the material. Maeve leaned back into his grasp, breath hissing as she continued, "Never mind, Baby. Next lesson is: exposure to the possibility of dyin' leads to a man and woman want'in to re-affirm they're alive in the best way possible." She turned in his lap to straddle him face-to-face, her hands guiding him erect and harder than granite as she took the purpled head into her soaking cleft. "Ahhhh, Jayne Cobb. You do have an uncommon way of making me feel alive, Love."

Maeve sank down onto his lap, his hands sweeping atop his thighs and cupping her ass just before she descended, so as to have leverage for lifting his woman far enough up to pleasure them both by taking her back down again. And so it went for what seemed like forever until the love-kindled voice of the man inside her body murmured into her ear, "Oh my gosh, Maeve, you're killing me..." He shot hard and long into her depths as she came for the third time clenching him tight, sighing his name into his own ear against her lips.

~~~

Back at Adealai's sister's house, the night was half gone. Eldwin and Hubert arrived weary after many hours of fruitless searching for Wood's nonexistent cohort, Bob. He heard the little that Eldwin had to tell him, nodding slowly, sure he had the main culprit trussed and ready to pay up, in any case. Wood Harbinger, now the sole object of cruel intentions, hung upside down from a catherine wheel structure inside the barn. Adelai's sharp-shooter had hefted the bloody stinking mess of a barely conscious victim to the barn and affixed him to the wheel, head downward to await the pain of Niska's continuing pleasure.

Adelai Niska wore a black latex apron knotted securely about his slim middle, gloved fingers interlocked, arms outstretched encircling the air in front of him at chest height. "So, my good man, my dear, dear achievement of reputation, we have done well, yes?

You have given me the information I want and I am most pleased." Niska smiled benevolently down at Wood, squatted on his lean haunches so as to be eye level with him.

"I know you have told me true, have left nothing out in the loving description of your treatment of my sister. I have heard of your taking her virginity not more than a month ago, your own mouth told me of it within the hour. You said you had the need to try her out, to find out if an "old hag" like her, all white of hair and wrinkled of face, could still be a virgin." Niska's smile turned hard and a touch more evil at the realization that this lump of illiterate impure-bred flesh was what his sister had allowed between her legs for the first time.

"She bled much? I do not recall if you said...," Niska asked, although he knew the answer, Wood had already told him twice, but was more than pleased to tell it again. "She bled like a stuck pig, Mister, so she did!" Thinking the wielder of his torture was enjoying the re-hearing of the event, Wood Harbinger cackled and continued to recount the first-time pleasuring of old crazy Inga in her own bed by Wood's wood, laughing the harder for the double use of his name in his twisted thoughts.

"HEEE-hee-hee-hee, Mister! You oughta seen how well she got into it, blood a'spurting all over my cock as I plowed her old dry furrow, givin' it to her deep an' hard. She clutched onta' me somethin' fierce, told me to give it to her, and boy, howdy, did I aim to satisfy..." The boasting monkey continued rhapsodizing about his prowess, eyes squinting shut as he paraded scene after scene out front for Niska.

The knowledge that the man spoke the truth did not aid Niska's fulminating anger. Knowing that Inga had enjoyed having carnal knowledge of this insect, his proboscis penetrating her, these things did nothing to help Wood continue breathing. Indeed, it stoked his ire to a fine fever pitch. "Ni juede wo hen ben ma?," he issued the rhetorical question as he rose swiftly to his feet. Taking a razer-sharp spatulate blade from his dog-leather torture kit at his belt he began to flay the skin from Bob's boss, starting at an ankle-bracelet of a cut around each ankle, peeling back the skin of both feet at once. Wood lost consciousness for the next to the last time that day, blissfully unaware of Niska's progress at relieving him of his outer flesh.

~~~

The happy torturer hummed Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries as he continued his task. Sub-dermal layer veins were carefully tied off or cauterized to prevent mortal blood loss as Niska worked. A good hour later it was done, and done carefully, so as to keep the body breathing till the very end, revivable for the grand finale. The last patch of flesh was left intact: one irregular circle of skin just below Wood's collarbone, dead center of his upper chest. It was a canvas, Niska decided, a medallion for the murdering scum, the trenen khazer could wear it proudly, a warning to all who saw him, who saw the results of the atrocity this insect had performed on one of the True Race.

Two things aided Wood's coming back to the world of the living just in time to die. Niska gifted him with an injection of adrenaline straight under his sternum into his heart and barely waited a second afterward to press the red hot brand of a swastika onto the pale skinned circle he'd first wiped carefully clean of blood and gore. Wood screeched out his last breath in an agony of heat and pain as Niska's face came within a hair's breadth of the hole where Wood's ear used to be to scream into the aural opening, "Inga was my SISTER, you miserable cretin! Now I give you leave, go and await me in HELL."

Niska's men returned in time to hear the final gutteralizations of Wood Harbinger's bubbling breath but did not dare to enter the barn. They heard their commander's words as they listened to the plinking of his torture implements being tossed into a bucket for them to clean later. "Zol er krenken un gedenken, 'let him suffer and remember', each person who sees this work of flesh. Let it be seen and remembered by everyone; from those who discover the body to those who perform the investigation and burial. Let them know my rage, my grief at the sacrilege performed on my Inga." His voice broke on the last words and he wiped tears from glistening ice eyes on a long white sleeve.

Stripping off the black rubber apron and adding it to the grisly bucket of tools, he hefted it in one strong hand and walked from the dark fetid barn to greet the daylight and his minions outside.

"Boys, we leave this place now, my work being done." He strode toward the Black Hole Sun, one fingernail prying at a mote of dust on his lapel, the rest of his ensemble remarkably free of even the hint of Harbinger's bodily excretions. "Eldwin? Inga rests safely, properly ready for a decent interment?"

"Yes, Herr Niska, she is safe."

"Very good. I want the stink of this most miserable piece of gravel off of me and mine immediately." He smiled mirthlessly, the look fierce with loathing mixed with a frightening touch of sensuality.

Niska's sleek point-nosed craft broke atmo over Jayne's home planet, reaching for the stars over Calderon. As the prow of the ship cut through time and space, Niska's crew settled in, each man dwelling on his own mortality tenuously held in the hands of their leader.

"Make us all speed to Calderon. I have a need to spend the urgings provoked by the night's exercises. I require a visit to my future mate." Hubert looked uncomfortable at Niska's reference to his dear aunt, but he covered it by busying himself cleansing and polishing his captain's torture implements, devoutly hoping there'd never be occasion to have them used on his own skin.

-End- Part 9

Mandarin and Cantonese:

Jhew lun dou - Pig's cock and scrotum Ni juede wo hen ben ma? - Do you think I'm an idiot? jing zi - ingenious cao- fuck yanse lang - male whore

Yiddish and German: auf wiedersehen - goodbye trenen khazer - the raping pig Zol er krenken un gedenken. Let him suffer and remember.