Escape of the Schlange

This was highly unusual. Ishaq usually entered the chamber with his young men and spoke of their individual virtues until, after the young men, dressed in diaphanous harem leggings, had danced for the prince’s favor. Then A’zam usually chose one—or three or four—of them and withdrew to his inner room to give them their first taste of manly cock. While this transpired, Ishaq customarily was led to another area of the palace by a chamberlain and plied with expensive drink and food until A’zam was finished and ready to convey the used young men to Ishaq and provide instructions on his tastes for the next evening’s pleasure. But now Ishaq was just waved away but told to hover nearby. But the voices from inside the hoods were so frightening and the cloaked figures so overtowering that Ishaq did not quibble this time. He found himself trembling in their presence without really knowing why and felt as if he had escaped something terrible by withdrawing outside the palace and waiting there for further instructions.

Instructions that never came—or, at least, not as Ishaq expected.

As the five young men—gathered from all corners of the world to include a blond, alabaster-skinned young muscle man from the northern snows to an ebony giant from the darkest south—entered the room and were unshackled and made to kneel in an arc in front of the door they entered, they gathered to themselves the same sense of heaviness and foreboding that had sent their master scurrying outside the palace walls.

Four hooded and clocked figures, all shuffling and overlarge, were circling the room warily, giving the young men no question that they would not make it as far as the door if they chose to try to withdraw. And the way the cloaked figures moved left no doubt that they were powerful and would be cruel opponents. Off to the side was a four-man musical band, playing expertly but nervously and tentatively at a tune that wasn’t Egyptian but was mesmerizing and arousing in its influence, and looking very frightened of the roving cloaked figures.