[Runesmith]

Zaheera's fingers glided under the shoulders of the unzipped dress and found the tense knots between Madam Li's shoulder blades. Like the old crone had taught her, she teased them out, feeling the satisfying crunch under her fingertips. Madam Li sighed, relaxing and closing her eyes, lulled by the sound of water burbling in to the bath tub. Zaheera could feel the weight of the woman's body relaxing down on to her arms. The movements of Zaheera's hands pushed the off-the-shoulder dress even lower, gliding the front of the dress smoothly off the woman's breasts.

Her breasts were small, but perfectly formed. The pale skin framed neatly circular milk-coffee coloured areolae, topped by tiny shy buds that hardly raised their heads above the tops of the mounds. Zaheera's hands moved from under the shoulder blades to the tops of the shoulders, around the neck, and between those exquisite breasts pressing down on the chest bone, eliciting another sigh from the woman. As she leaned forward, letting her fingers curve under the bottom of the breasts, avoiding touching the nipples, Zaheera's own breasts pressed up against the woman's head, cradling it against the softness.

The fingers circled the woman's breasts, kneading them but avoiding the nipples, following the Malayan Urut Jamu massage technique Zaheera had learned from the old crone, originally developed for post-natal care, but modified in the harem to tease and arouse. The teasing and arousal were definitely working, as the woman's breathing became shallower and tiny motions of her body tried to push those nipples on to the path of Zaheera's roaming fingertips, that were studiously trying to avoid them. The tiny buds hardened in to tiny sharp points as the arousal painted the pale nipples in a shade of blush pink. The dainty Asian porcelain-doll sighed again and relaxed in to the massage, with only the flutter of her closed eyelids and the beating of her heart against the chest betraying the nervous excitement she felt.

Teasing only works as long as you deprive the person of what they crave at the moment. So Zaheera deftly moved her hands back to the shoulders, gave them one final squeeze, and rested the woman's head back on the upholstered arm of the divan. Kneeling at the open side of the divan, she started rubbing the woman's feet, pressing on the pressure points as she had been taught, and, moving on to the Achilles tendon and calf muscles. The woman shifted her legs, bending her knees slightly, allowing Zaheera's hands to reach underneath and perform the painful but pleasurable squeezing. When the hands moved to the knees and pushed them apart, the woman complied, letting Zaheera push the hem of the elegant dress above the knees.

The fingers moved slowly up along the inner thighs, caressing, gently spreading the thighs apart, until they met at the point where feverishly warm flesh was covered only by sheer lace, and then the fingertips would traverse along the edge of the lace to the front of the thighs and begin their slow journey back to the knees. Each cycle increased the woman's rate of breathing, and each time the fingers met the lace, an almost involuntary thrust of the pelvis betrayed how aroused the woman was, just as how the increase in warm wetness seeping through the lace did.

A beeping from the bath tub indicated that the bath was ready. Leaving the woman's side, Zaheera walked over to the sideboard, tested the bath water and added rose-smelling bath salts from a crystal bowl. She helped the the woman rise up from the divan, letting the dress crumple down to her ankles. Kneeling in front of the woman, Zaheera slowly peeled down the black silk panties from the woman's hips, letting them join the dress on the floor, revealing a dark triangle of jet black straight pubic hair neatly trimmed on the sides and along the bikini line, the downward point of the triangle ending neatly at the cleft where the soft mound was split in half.

Almost unable to stop herself, Zaheera glided her hands on the woman's smooth skin from the ankles where the panties were lying in a heap, along the front of the calves, veering to the inside of the thighs the moment they climbed over the knees, then circled the woman's hips around, the palms coming to a rest cradling her pert buttocks. Not even thinking anymore, Zaheera pressed her face against the woman's crotch, the thick straight Asian pubic hair pricking her forehead, and inhaled deeply.

Madam Li smelled similar, but yet different from the only other woman Zaheera had known intimately in her life - her fellow captive at the cabin in the woods, the girl who called herself cumrag. Cumrag's cunt smelled of carbolic soap when it had been washed, but when not, it had a strong but alluring musky odour, with a light overtone of urine, and sometimes that wet bark smell of semen indicating that the men had used her. Madam Li's pussy smelled clean, with almost no discernible smell except a light musky tang that was different from cumrag's but just as alluring... maybe even more alluring.

Madam Li sighed as she opened her legs, knees slightly bent outwards, letting the Pengiring better access. Her hands grabbed the harem slave's head and pulled it tightly towards her crotch, pushing her sensitive clitoris against the kneeling woman's face. She was feeling extremely aroused from the massage, and humped herself on the western slut's face almost as if punishing her for awakening the dragon within.

From the time she was a teen, Li Xue Feng had been attracted to women - a desire she had kept well under control. The first person to awaken those feelings had been her cousin, several years her elder, who slept in the same bed as her in her parents' tiny apartment in Suzhou. Mei Zhen, whose name meant "beautiful pearl", had guided her sexual awakening with both passion and patience. After she had lost her beautiful pearl, Xue Feng had had several female lovers, along with some men, who couldn't arouse in her the same passion that a female body could. The men were just the cover story. When she was recruited in to her main job after completing her degree in foreign languages Shanghai, her recruiters knew about her "flexibility" and valued it instead of judging her - like her family did when they found out.

This assignment in this god-forsaken harem did help keep her away from unwanted attention from men, but she had up to now also kept away from the women. A dalliance with a titled woman could damage her neutrality in the fierce harem politics and put her position (and maybe even her life) at risk, and an affair with a harem slave could harm her position of authority. The harem was a veritable swamp of gossip, and one had to be always on guard.

But now, as she brutally mashed her clit against the slave's face, smearing the pale woman's nose, lips and chin with the secretions of her desire, all caution was thrown to the wind. A line had been crossed. After months of deprivation, Xue Feng let her desire take flight, and as she reached the peak of her climax, she whispered the name of her beloved, who had been taken from her, but never gone from her memories.

Later, as she stepped out from the relaxing bath in to the bathrobe the pengiring was holding out for her, Madam Li shot her a cold hard glance, and said, "Well, as I expected, you did everything wrong."

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This part took me the longest to write. I've been stuck here for months. I wanted to convey the interplay of complex emotions, and I wanted to experiment with using certain titles to express the complexity of Li Xue Feng's personality. I refer to her as Madam Li when she is authoritative and powerful, as "the woman" when she lays the mantle of authority aside and relaxes, and use her name when she is most vulnerable and alone. I also shift the point of view from Zaheera to Xue Feng and hopefully the transition was not too abrupt. Out of all the variants I tried, this seems the best, and this will form the cornerstone of what is to come.