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After ages of near-isolation, the light tap on her behind came as a shock. She jerked into instant motion, almost running the few steps forward to the starting line, where a maid stood, green flag raised. Once she had covered the requisite distance, twin tugs on her reins dragged up her nipples and urged her to an instant stop.

She assumed that her twin was next to her, but she had no way of telling. She adopted an on-your-marks pose in readiness. As she waited, the crowd gathered along the ribbons: slaves, servants, masters and mistresses all side by side, faces full of excitement. She had been right: this race was the main event. She wondered who the favourite was.

With a flourish the maid dropped the flag, and she was off. The rain of whip-cracks on her arse was entirely unnecessary.

The cart suddenly seemed to be twice as heavy, and she caught her first sight of her opponent, gradually overhauling her, and for the first time she realised that she might be the loser, the one dragged off screaming. Again she didn’t need the stinging blows on her rear to spur her on. The brunette took the racing line as they rounded a bend and Sarah fell in behind the leading chariot. The view was impressive. The charioteer’s costume was almost as fetishist as her steed’s, tight multicoloured rubber covering her whole body. She leaned forward urgently in her seat, reins in one hand, swinging whip in the other. She glanced back to reveal a snarl of triumph. Her pony’s legs pumped high and hard, her hooves dancing off the turf.

The other rider was a woman, and a petite one at that! If Craig/Carl was Sarah’s load then they were at a distinct weight disadvantage. With a furious scream she pumped her own legs all the harder, feeling the tickling kiss of the vibrator lodged inside her. The other rider looked around at her as she started to overtake, and the woman’s face contorted in fury. Still, the whip-blow to the base of Sarah’s breasts came as a shock. She staggered, losing ground and speed.

More whip-cracks rained down on her behind. Yeah, Yeah. I know! She snarled and pulled in behind her opponent, biding her time.

The course led them towards the edge of the woods, where a gap in the ribbon coincided with a muddy track between the trees. A series of stabbing pains in her left nipple signalled that she was to take the diversion, and sure enough their opponents turned down the track ahead of her.

She plunged into cool, green shade, onto an uneven track criss-crossed with roots that threatened to trip her at every step, far too narrow for her to consider overtaking. At least her passenger realised this too: the whip was quiet for now.

They followed the path as it snaked through the forest and began to climb towards a sunlit crest. She carefully picked her way over thickening roots, feeling the splash as a hoof landed in a mud-filled puddle, the errant pull of the chariot as its wheels found their own path. The vibrations of her dildo and the constant swing weights on her nipples and clitoris were distracting, cresting whenever she swerved to avoid some obstacle. Her boots weren’t all that were soaking wet.

The path ahead angled to one side up a steep root-covered slope, and Sarah watched the lead charioteer jumping in fury as her whip cracked, galvanising her pony into greater effort.

It happened in slow motion. The cart ahead bounced dangerously over the thick tree roots, throwing the furious passenger around, and the ponygirl’s legs suddenly slipped from under her. She pitched forward and, unable to use her arms to brace her fall, hit the slope hard, her feet flying into the air. That’s got to hurt! Sarah thought, even as the brunette ponygirl started to lift herself up again, encouraged by a tirade of blows from her driver.

A series of pulls on Sarah’s nipple signalled that she was to go around the accident. She didn’t want to end up the same way! She stepped carefully despite a couple of sharp blows on her rear, placing each foot before putting her weight on it, pulling the fearsome weight of her chariot with utmost care. When she reached level ground again the brunette was barely ahead of her, still staggering after her fall, and Sarah saw her chance. Screaming and pumping her legs, she dragged speed into her load. As she drew level with her rival, though, there was a strange, unaccustomed pulling at her hair, throwing her head from side to side, shaking her tunnel of vision crazily – it was the driver of the other chariot! With a sudden jerk the bitch thrust her head violently to one side, and the sound of a hysterical scream filtered through Sarah’s muffed ears as a kick landed on her corseted abdomen. She staggered, out of control, her vision filled with leaves, and tree bark, and SLAM!

.

.

.

The cool mud felt good on her raw behind, but her head was killing her. Where was she? Why was she sitting here? Were those her legs, encased in mud-spattered rubber?

Oh, the race! She struggled to get her feet under her and to her vast relief she felt arms around her, lifting her. As she regained her feet, a wave of dizziness and nausea swept over her, and she nearly fell again, but the arms kept steadying her, and there in front of her was Craig’s face. It was Craig who was her rider, after all! His eyes were filled with urgent concern, but he smiled as he guided her forward, coaxing her to walk, then to begin to run. Soon he was running ahead of her, leading the way, and the cart was suddenly easy to pull. The renewed vibration between her legs and a fresh burst of excited adrenaline pushed her pain and nausea into the background.

How much time had they lost? Craig seemed to exude confidence, but there was no sign at all of the other chariot. On and on they ran, following the track as it twisted and turned and began to slope downwards again, and there were their rivals! Perhaps thirty yards ahead. The rubber-clad driver turned and snarled with fury, and her whip swung high and hard, startling her mount into a full run.

The lead chariot sped into full sunlight as it broke from the forest. Craig slowed to let her overtake him and she felt the drag as he mounted her chariot. A moment later they were back on the open field, the final straight to the finish line ahead of her. Craig’s whip merely tapped her. I can do this, she realised. She’s had no time to recover, and I still have plenty left! The vibrator sang and her chains bounced as her legs pumped high and fast.

A hundred yards to go. The brunette pony was visibly tiring, body pitching forward with the effort of pleasing her cruel mistress. Sarah was definitely overhauling them. Watch out you bitches, here I come!

Here I Come… Craig couldn’t have stopped her if he had wanted. With the approaching finish line came her own imminent climax. Her breathing was a tortured rasp through the tiny nostril holes of her mask, but still she pushed herself harder, drawing level with the other chariot in the last twenty yards. It was probably the rubber bitch’s whip blows on her breasts that finally sent her over the edge. Climax arrived just as her chest hit the finish tape.

Hands held her as she pitched forward, as exhausted as she’d ever been, and supported her as she was detached from the chariot. Her climax passed, her fatigue and pain hit her like a club. She sagged into the support of the unseen crowds around her.

She felt the heavy chains being unclipped from her nipples and clitoris, then there was a rattling at the back of her head and the sound of a zip, and she was immersed in a cacophony of cheers and laughter, bathed in unbearably bright light. The gag was finally pulled away from her mouth.

“You did it, Sarah!” Craig’s voice shouted somewhere behind her. “You won!”

There was more rattling and movement behind her, and then – oh bliss! – her arms were finally free. Sarah was learning all about the kind of pain that could be a pleasure, and the sheer joy of being able to separate her arms after all these hours was just wonderful. Her shoulders and ribs popped and cracked as she hugged herself, brushing her sensitised tits…

She couldn’t stand. She doubted she would ever walk again. They carried her to a long trestle table, to a chair placed right in its centre, and she gasped in pleasure-edged pain and as they sat her down, forcing the plugs deeper inside her. She tried to raise her hand to brush away an errant lock of hair, and realised that they had attached her wrists to the sides of her corset. Still bound, she thought. She was too weak to care as straps were placed around her thighs and waist, attaching her to the chair.

Craig sat beside her and hugged her, planting a kiss on her cheek. “I knew you had it in you, Sarah.” She looked back at him, working moisture into her lips, flexing her jaw muscles. He grinned back at her. “You are the guest of honour now. You are going to be royally entertained.”

She cleared her throat. “Jesters, clowns?” Should she be elated? Instead she felt oddly detached. Numb. She was suffering from emotional and sensory overload.

“Well,” he said, “no.” He turned forward, to where perhaps twenty feet from them the loser of the previous race hung naked and spread-eagled on a tall wooden frame, unconscious. Her skin from head to foot was a bright angry red, criss-crossed with swollen welts.

Their rival charioteer, the rainbow-rubber-clad bitch, pulled up the chair to her left. “If you had lost, your punishment would have been twice as bad as hers, as we are about to see.” Her hand massaged Sarah’s breast, caressing the whip-marks she had left. “Her pain will be our pleasure.”

“Speak for yourself,” whispered Sarah. “I’m no sadist.” How should she react to this woman? How could she get rid of her? She looked to Craig for help, even as a finger threaded its way through her nipple ring, pulling and lifting as the woman’s hand squeezed her breast tissue, making her breath catch at the sharp stab of pain.

“Don’t you have anywhere else you need to be, Marti?” Craig gripped the bitch’s wrist, and she reluctantly let go with a final angry tug. “Try tormenting your own slave.”

She curled a lip at him, but nevertheless stood to leave. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, Black Beauty,” she whispered in Sarah’s ear before standing and stalking off.

The crowd around the finishing line was dispersing, revealing her erstwhile rival lying prone on the ground. The brunette still wore her full costume. Her bound breasts bulged under her weight.

Marti had taken Craig’s advice. She bent to pick up the girl’s controlling chain and provoked a muffled scream as she simply lifted her slave to her feet by her nipples. Her face grim with barely suppressed rage, she took two little black caps and fitted them over the girl’s masked eyes, rendering her blind. Then she dragged the staggering, sobbing girl towards the wooden frame.

The first woman’s punishment was over: at least the public part of it. Two bulky men in tuxedos – bouncer types, Sarah thought – released the simple rope nooses that held her limbs, and one of them slung her limp body over his shoulder and carried her back toward the house. The remaining bouncer turned toward her, his eyes lingering on her naked, bound chest. Their eyes met, and with a shock she recognised him: it was Joel McIntyr, inside man for the Criminal Intelligence Service and part-time letch. For the first time that day she actually felt naked. He acknowledged her with a barely perceptible nod, then turned away and ignored her.

Sarah reeled. For the first time she had absolute proof that she was where she needed to be, but her glimpse of McIntyr had been of a man utterly in his element, absolutely happy with his situation. Why would a man like that want to help her bring all this down? What reason would he have to even lift a finger to help her? Suddenly she realised the depth of her peril.

Marti had been using the time to release her ponygirl’s arms, which hung just as uselessly as Sarah’s had. Now she briskly took hold of one elbow-long glove and dragged it off her slave’s arm, bracing her foot against the girl’s waist. The exhausted, weeping girl staggered, bound breasts wobbling, and she fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“Hold her!” Marti ordered McIntyr, and he lifted her effortlessly back to her hooves. The second glove followed the first, then Marti started on the rest of her victim’s clothing. The crowd was gathering, either standing in a wide circle or joining Sarah and Craig at the table. A buxom, muscular-looking maid sat on Craig’s opposite side.

Something else was nagging at the back of Sarah’s mind. “Do you know the ponygirl’s name?” she asked.

Craig considered. “Not a clue. It never came up.”

“Babs, I think,” the newcomer volunteered.

The girl in question groaned and convulsed as the two long, long shafts were pulled out from between her legs.

“Would you have done all this to me if I’d lost?”

“No, Sarah,” he smiled sardonically. “Marti’s got no respect for her slave. She acts as if she hates her. I wouldn’t treat you that cruelly.”

“Really?” She recalled the times he had tortured her, taking her further than she would have dreamed possible.

“I’ve never pushed you further than you wanted to go,” he said, almost as if he had read her mind, “even today, so far.”

God, he was right. Her body had taken everything he had thrown at her and still come back eager for more, and she recalled the thrill she felt every time she passed the threshold between freedom and slavery. Fear, but excitement too.

She looked down at herself, past her breasts, bound and forced out from her body like two howitzer shells, past the slim waist of the corset, past the strap that held the shafts penetrating her so thoroughly, to her black rubber-clad legs, everything liberally spattered with mud and fragments of tree bark. So uncomfortable. So sexy. She was glad she’d won the race, though.

The girl was stripped of all but mask and thigh-length boots, now. Her two handlers positioned her inside the frame, allowing Marti to swiftly, almost impatiently, place rope nooses around her slave’s wrists. Stepping around the wooden uprights she pulled taut first one rope, then the other. The girl gave out a confused mewl, struggling weakly against the ropes, and Sarah guessed that, blind as she was, she probably had no idea what was happening to her.

Her body bore the echoes of its tight confinement, as Sarah’s surely must. The vertical ribs of the corset had left red lines that formed criss-crossing patterns with her ribs, and both breasts bore pale circles where the corset and the rings had squeezed them. One breast was mottled with purple and visibly swollen, and Sarah guessed that it had borne the brunt of her fall in the woods.

“Did you enjoy your training this morning, Sarah?” The voice distracted her, and she turned to find that other maid looking at her, and she couldn’t help noticing the intimate way the woman’s hand rested on Craig’s knee.

She thought back to her morning in the machine. All she could remember was the pain in her feet, the constant pulling on her erogenous zones. And a tide of unending climaxes. “You know,” she said, to her surprise, “I think I did.”

“I was betting on you from the start, by the way.” Her hand squeezed Craig’s leg. His eyes were fixed on the proceedings at the frame, but he smiled wickedly.

“Thank you.” She swallowed the urge to be jealous. Craig’s affections weren’t hers to command in so many ways. “So what were my odds?”

The maid laughed. “Five to one. Babs was odds on favourite, but I knew that…” she glanced at Craig/Carl for a long second “…Craig would get you through.”

She fought down angry jealousy. “I hope I get a share of the winnings.”

“I don’t bet with money, only favours, and let’s just say that some people around here owe me big time.”

“Around here I wouldn’t want to owe anybody a favour,” said Sarah. Her mind was trying to tell her something. The girl in front of her, Babs: why did that name ring a bell? And why was that tattoo around her upper arm familiar.

Marti and McIntyr each took one of Babs’s ankles and lifted them from the ground, drawing from her whimpers of pain as her wrists took her weight for the first time. She fought valiantly, and uselessly, as they stripped her of her boots, then tied her ankles by short ropes to the frame. She was spread-eagled, just like her predecessor. The nooses around her wrists cut cruelly into her flesh.

“Jesus!” Sarah couldn’t help crying out. “She’ll lose her hands tied like that!”

“She won’t be up there long enough. This phase of her punishment only takes a minute.”

Babs’s flogging was brisk and hard. Marti, Mcintyr and two more suited thugs laid into her with heavy cats-o-nine-tails, Marti screaming with fury and effort with every swing. For the girl’s part, her moans and struggles died away as the flogging went on, even as the event climaxed and they concentrated on her bruised breasts and crotch.

“You bastards,” Sarah whispered.

Unconscious and limp, the girl was lowered into an ungraceful heap on the floor, legs still spread by the nooses about her ankles. Her whole body was an angry red, punctuated by bloody, broken weals where particularly hard blows had fallen. The other girl had been carried away in this state, but for Babs there was clearly more to come.

“Sarah,” Craig exclaimed in her ear, “I’ve been remiss! Can I offer you any of this delicious food?”

“I’m really not hungry.” In fact if anything she was feeling a little sick.

The flogged girl stirred, lifting a shaking arm towards her head. McIntyr must have been waiting for the moment. He moved quickly, lifting her forward onto her front, then gathering her wrists behind her and binding them there. Her mask gave out a fear-filled sobbing.

Joel McIntyr was enjoying this far too much. Sarah recalled their last meeting, and the creeps he had given her. Again, she wondered how someone with such a wide cruel streak could be working to end all this? It didn’t make sense.

Marti had returned, carrying handfuls of rope and metalwork. The steel item was just like a great, blunt fishing hook, perhaps a foot and a half long and an inch diameter. Marti liberally spread an oily lubricant on the short end, but still Babs screamed in shock and pain as it was forced inexorably between the cheeks of her arse. Marti smiled grimly while she attached the rope binding her slave’s wrists to the hook, leaving perhaps a yard of slack. Another rope was thrown over the top of the frame, and Sarah gasped in horror as the new rope was looped around the bindings between the girl’s arms and the hook. Mcintyr hauled on it, and the frame creaked as the girl was lifted by her arms and anus until she stood on the toes of her wide-tied feet.

“The strappado, a very nasty way to hang somebody,” whispered Craig. “The anal hook is actually a kindness, otherwise her shoulders might be dislocated.”

“Kindness. Right.”

The girl had reserves Sarah would never have imagined. Weeping with the pain, she tried to straighten herself. As her arms pushed back, her toes lifted right off the ground and she screamed as her whole weight hung from the hook in her rear. She only hung there for a few seconds before the strain became too much and she collapsed back to her bent-over position.

Marti clearly wasn’t happy, though. “I don’t want her doing that. Joel, tie her nipples to her toes.”

In a moment, Babs was immobile. As a finishing touch, Marti strung a rope between the top of Babs’s head and her strung-up wrists, forcing her head up. “Lift her another six inches, Joel”, she commanded as she removed the girl’s mouth plug.

“Klease, Ngo,” wimpered Babs. Her pack was arched painfully, her rear pulled up by the hook, her head by the rope attached to her auburn mane. Her shoulders were drawn together, thrusting her full breasts outwards and forwards, and her nipples were drawn into long spikes by the tension on their rings.

“She’s ready,” declared Marti.