Read Flesh Gambit for Free Online

back another step and then sank to his knees in hopeless surrender. Terror had robbed him of every virtue, of every ideal or aspect of nobility.
    Khat heard himself whimpering but could not stop. The dark shape loomed above him impossibly high, and as it drew closer, the shape congealed more fully from the melanoid wash of darkness. Khat knew a greater, fuller horror. Presented with the inexplicable, the corsair now bore witness to a vision of the impossible.
    Clip-clop, clip-clop
    The sound of hoof striking marble floor grew loud as thunder in high mountain valleys. It cracked and roared and seemed to shake the earth with the warning of its dire power. What came was many things. It was legend, it was horror, it was power in corporeal form. What it was not was rider and horse.
    The creature came to a stop inches from Khat’s cowering form.
    Still sobbing his fear, Khat at last summoned the courage to lift his face when the killing blow did not fall. He saw a hoof of gleaming atramentous, as large as his head, rising into a massively muscled leg. Whimpering, he scrunched backward and continued looking up.
    The beast rose above him in an endless flow of pitch-black hide and bulging, corded muscle, so that the transformation from equine to demi-human beginning at the horse’s shoulders was seamless.
    The human torso rose above the sleek black coat of the horse into skin of ebony so deep it seemed glossy. Each muscle was etched as if in warm, living marble, twice as large as its largest human counterpart. The twin rows of the abdominal wall were stacked one atop the other like blocks in a prison tower. The incredible, broad looping muscles of the back protruded like wings on either side of the gigantic torso. A wide, muscled chest supported massive, jutting breasts with nipples and aureoles of deepest purple. They sat high and the line of the creature’s feminine cleavage was as clean and vivid as the lines etched like polished steel in the huge, warrior arms and powerful shoulders that framed them.
    The shock of seeing the monster was female somehow felt even more incongruous to Khat than all the rest of it. He fell mute and looked up into the harsh, wild beauty of the beast’s face. Her hair was long and wild, flowing in thick tresses down her back where it became more mane than hair. Piceous eyes were set between prominent cheekbones, framing full, sensuous lips and a broad nose.
    The look in her eyes and the cast of her features were haughty and utterly alien to anything Khat had even seen. The vision of her struck him dumb like a slap in the face. Her nostrils flared as she took in huge draughts of air, her lungs working like industrial bellows as her chest rose and fell. At her flanks a long tail flicked idly.
    From behind Khat came the sound of a chain running through metal pulleys and he turned toward this new stimulus. He saw the porticos rise, and a short, misshapen figure emerged from the elevator. Backlit by the cavern, the figure’s features were impossible to discern, but seemed male. The outline was short, reaching to only a little past Khat’s waist.
    “Impressive, isn’t she?” The figure asked.
    It stepped forward as it spoke, and the voice was rough with a thick, guttural brogue. The fear that had emanated from the open elevator now rolled before the approaching dwarf like fog.
    “I’d be careful, though,” the homunculus figure warned. “She’s in heat at the moment and the slightest thing can set her off. Nasty .”
    The squat manikin stepped in close enough for Khat to make its features out. Dressed head to toe in leather of a dark emerald green, the dwarf’s swollen belly was cinched tight with a wide belt of animal skin. The end of its long, crazed beard was tucked behind a buckle embossed with a strange bronze device.
    He grinned at Khat, and his breath was fetid behind yellow teeth as crooked as a shark’s. His nose was a potato lump set under bloodshot eyes the color of mud but clever,