Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 19

The afternoon sun beat down on a throng of exhausted girls as they wearily out of the square-embossed bronze gates of Form. Relief, if nothing else, was the emotion they held in common as the sweat from a day of military training soaked through their scant white clothing. Some were relieved to have finished with the gruelling physical activity. Others were relieved to have escaped the disturbing, guilt inducing aura that permeated the section of the Temple most known for its rigorous enforcement of discipline.

"Talla? Talla?" a shaky voice called out.

She spun around quickly upon hearing her name, before realizing that the enquiry was clearly being spoken by someone who didn't know her, for the tone of voice was that of a teacher taking roll call on her first day with a new class.

Talla grimaced. If she hadn't reacted so quickly, she could have pretended not to have heard her name and simply sauntered back to Endowment and soaked in a pool. Even if this was trouble – even if it was the whole affair with Jenni and Zhair'lo falling apart – she wouldn't have been able to dodge it forever. Ordeals, after all, were to be confronted.

The chance to run away had slipped by, so she faced the young Initiate craning her neck and scanning over the horde of departing girls in white.

"Yes?"

The Initiate fixed her eyes on Talla.

"Are you Talla?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"Mistress Tia wishes to see you immediately."

Talla was taken aback. Had she heard right?

"The doctor?"

"My Mistress is the Second of Within and also a physician," the Sweetness girl confirmed.

Talla disguised her sigh of relief as an entirely authentic sign of exhaustion. This was not a trip to Form.

She hadn't been caught ... at least, not yet.

"What about?"

"Not for me to say," the girl replied with a dutiful set of her shoulders. "I was only to summon you when you finished your assignment."

Since they were both Initiates, clad in the same style of tiny skirt and simple top – though Talla's was larger to accommodate her significantly larger breasts – they walked side by side.

"Is there a rush?"

"I hope not," the Initiate blew out a breath. "I've been doing nothing but running errands." She wiped away sweat that had been beading down her forehead and threatening her eyes.

Talla couldn't be sure of her own feeling right then. What could the Summons possibly be about? She wasn't due for any kind of check up, was she? She didn't think so. What else would a doctor want with her?

They marched through the Goddess's central triangle up the hill toward Sweetness and possibilities began to filter through Talla's head. Was this about that nonsense from the upgrade? Had they figured out something about Zhair'lo and her? Did it have something to do with whatever had happened in the Priming room?

Talla tried very hard to convince herself that this had to be a simple check up, following up on her quadruple upgrade. But this rationalization had more to do with the heat and her level of exhaustion than any logical examination of the facts.

'I'm just too tired to believe anything else right now,' she sighed in resignation.

The weary girls passed through the triangle-embossed, bronze gates of Sweetness and Talla found that her guide was leading her quickly through the hospital wing. Travelling down the hallway Talla spotted the room where she'd once helped revive Shen. The sight jarred her for a moment.

She did not want to remember Shen, lying on that table, grey as death and wasted away.

Wasting away, she reminded herself. Not wasted.

Talla had been in a panic then, knowing that she'd probably broken him that night. In her desire to right one wrong – of having escaped punishment where her friends had not – she had wronged another. She had selfishly forced her needs upon Shen, drawn the blood of her punishment from his veins, and damaged his mind in doing so.

Not her greatest moment, simply put.

Talla tried to shake it off, but pale ghosts clung to her back as she trod down the hallway.

"This way, Talla," the Initiate said, waving her through a narrow archway into the room beyond. "My Mistress will see you in short order."

It was a small, windowless space in which she found herself. No one would be foolish enough to light candles or torches on an afternoon as hot as this, so the only light was the many-times reflected sunlight that wended its way down the corridors.

Talla gulped. She sat, alone, on one of the four chairs which were the only furnishings in this room. No question which way she would go next, for there was only the archway back the way she had come and a heavy oak door – slightly ajar – opposite.

She found the heel of her left sandal tapping nervously on the floor.

'Don't think about Shen,' she steeled herself. 'Don't. Don't. Don't.'

"Talla. Is that you?" a mature voice called from beyond her door.

Talla inhaled stiffly, drawing as much courage as possible into her voice.

'I'm not guilty. I'm not.'

"Yes, Mistress," she assured herself that her voice absolutely did not sound like the squeak of a mouse.

"Come in, girl."

Talla stood, pushed the door open and entered the office beyond. It was a pleasant space, a storey and a half tall. The windows faced south but were very near the ceiling so sunlight shone off the north wall and softly lit the room. Behind a desk, half hidden by a mound of parchment sat a woman Talla well recognized.

But it was not the Second of Within who had called for her. Another woman, in yellow, beckoned her forward with a friendly wave and smile that seemed sincere.

"Hello, Talla," she beckoned amiably. "Please. Please, sit. We called you here because of Shen M'han."

Talla tried not to freeze in mid-step, but knew that Jora had seen her stumble.

"What – what about him?"

"Perhaps you could tell us," Tia looked up from her papers, a stern expression on her face. "Before you came along, he was an unstable wreck of a boy. Yinay ador. Unsuitable for upgrades. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Barely able to please his partners."

"My – my experience was the same," Talla said.

Gods damn it. Stammering was no good at a time like this.

"Was it, though?"

"He came in my mouth, entirely by accident," she defended. "He was ashamed – it wasn't on purpose, I'm sure of it."

"Had you Served him before?" Jora asked.

"No, Mistress."

Was the 'Mistress' necessary? It seemed safer, at this point.

Jora turned to Tia.

"She must have Served him, to know that about him."

Talla was taken aback by this. There was still some question of whether she'd done her duty that night?

"Indeed," Tia did not take her eyes off Talla. "Tell us, Initiate, what he was like."

"Ashamed, mostly," she looked down at her hands. "It took a lot of work to get him around for a second try, you know? But I couldn't leave him like that, feeling bad about it. I think he'd already had a lot of negative sexual experiences."

She paused a moment before looking up into the physician's eyes.

"We're supposed to help other people, right?"

The fierceness in Talla's expression surprised Tia so much that she blinked before smiling with amusement.

"Indeed we are, Initiate," she replied. "Go on."

"So I got him going, as gently as I could," Talla said. "And I rode him once, which went well because I could kind of control him, you know?"

"Control him."

Tia's voice was dead flat.

"You know, to keep him from coming. Hold off his orgasm?"

"Indeed, I know."

Talla gulped. Something had gone wrong here, but she had no idea what.

"So I made him come that way, and he felt better. So we talked for a bit – a long time, actually. It seems like he's had problems for a while. He'd come all over the Primers once and never gotten over it, I guess."

'Please,' she begged. 'Please understand that I was helping him. I was trying to do what you taught us. I was trying to Serve the one you assigned to me and make him better.'

"You though it your duty to restore his pride."

Wow. The women had read her well.

"As best I could," Talla drew herself up. "At least I could keep him from feeling worse."

"Did you Serve him again?"

"Yes," she reddened.

"Don't be embarrassed," Jora put in helpfully. "We've heard everything by now."

Talla cast a glance aside at the woman, before turning her eyes down. She'd really rather not talk about this in front of the doctor and her assistant.

"I got him to do it from behind," Talla admitted.

"Like a Form woman?"

That was uncomfortably close to mark, given what had followed.

"Yeah."

"That's nothing to be ashamed of, just because you're from Endowment," Jora noted. "You should feel free to experiment."

Talla nodded.

"It's also because my breasts are so big," Talla put in. "I hadn't had my Strength upgrade then, so they really hurt."

"And it was more comfortable lying down than if they were dangling?" Jora asked.

"Yes."

"There is something else," Tia hinted at accusation. "Something you do not wish to tell us."

Avoiding the appearance of guilt was apparently not in Talla's skill set. At least not today. What could she do? She was certain that it wouldn't be any good revealing what she'd done to Shen's mind. That sort of thing ought to be well outside her abilities.

She cast her eyes down. They knew she was hiding something, so she'd better have something good to hide, and it was best to stick as close to the truth as possible.

"He wanted to spank me," she muttered.

Both women twitched at this. She saw it in the corners of her vision.

"And you allowed this or did not?" Tia asked.

It was not an idle question. Men were not to hurt women, but what was arousal for both parties was always acceptable.

"I -"

She paused, putting as much drama into the moment as possible.

"I wanted it," she declared.

Neither of the women stirred at this statement. After a moment passed, it was Jora who spoke.

"That's not uncommon, Talla, even without a Tight upgrade."

Knowing she was in for it now, she decided to go all the way.

"My friends and I," she said. "Back a couple of weeks or so. We were – well – we were flashing our breasts at each other. They got caught, you see, by a couple of Enforcers from Form."

She didn't have to pretend to be choked up at that point. The images of that whole episode were burned into her mind as thoroughly as the whips had burned into the flesh of her friends.

"They were whipped?" Jora asked.

Talla nodded.

"And you were not?"

Her head dipped again.

With her eyes still down, she couldn't see what passed between Tia and Jora, but the rustling of blouses told her that they looked at each other.

"So," Tia concluded. "You thought to let Shen deliver your punishment and expunge your guilt."

"I made him spank me," she blurted out, faster than she meant to. "Forced him to, inside the mesh. Harder than he really wanted to, I think. Three times. He only barely held on. Then we came and after that he went to sleep and I left."

There, the whole of her crime was laid bare. She'd been guilty of getting M'lis and Adria in trouble for Jin Ree – for exposing themselves. From there, she'd tried to make things even but had only broken Shen instead.

Tia leaned back in her chair and looked over her steepled fingers at Talla.

"He still had difficulty withholding his orgasm the last time you Served him?"

What?

Talla looked up. Why weren't they angry at her?

"Uh, yes, Mistress," she replied.

"How odd," the physician thought out loud. "He is unstable with you, right up until he falls asleep. He sleeps for three days and when he wakes up, he is one of the strongest men I have ever seen. Do you know he held off two Initiates, determined to make him ejaculate, for almost an entire bell?"

Still stunned that she'd gotten away with her confession, Talla simply stared open mouthed at the woman in front of her. Didn't they realize that she had broken his mind? Forced him to go beyond what he was willing to do?

"We're going to give him another shot at an upgrade," Tia concluded. "The result will be interesting."

The physician inhaled and waved a casual hand at Talla.

"You are dismissed, young lady."

Talla bowed, not believing her luck, and stumbled out of the room as quickly as she could.

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When the girl had gone, Jora scratched her temple and turned to Tia.

"Mistress?"

"Yes," Tia replied, returning to the pile of documentation on her desk.

"What else do you supposed she was hiding?"

Tia looked up for a moment.

"Yes, there was something else there, wasn't there?"

She looked pensive, her eyes darting from one corner of the room to the other.

"Nothing important, in all likelihood," Tia concluded. "Probably something similarly juvenile. Perhaps she found having a man ejaculate in her mouth more exciting than she cares to admit."

Jora shrugged. Her Mistress was probably right.

"I'm more concerned about the other thing," Tia pointed out.

"Which, Mistress?"

"'Control him', she said."

"Indeed," Jora replied. "Can't any girl do that?"

"Not in Endowment they can't," Tia explained. "You and I, with our Within upgrades, could hold off his rush to orgasm almost indefinitely, or until we dehydrated at least."

Tia acknowledged Jora's wince with a nod.

"You gained that ability so long ago, my dear, you didn't realize what she admitted to being able to do."

She narrowed her eyes, looking through the open door toward the archway where the girl had bolted away. There was something odd about that girl.

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In a field otherwise darkened by a moonless night, a single torch lit the space around a pair of vaguely human shaped straw men.

Out of deepest darkness, an arrow whistled and struck, with a low thud, the straw man just to the left of where his breastbone would have been if it had been a man.

A handful of heartbeats later, a second arrow cut through the air and struck, two paces to the side, the second target.

Standing alone some sixty paces away, Zhair'lo lowered his bow and contemplated what it was that Master Lyric had asked him to do.

"See if it bothers you imagining it's a man you're striking down ... striking dead."

'But, Master Lyric,' he called out in his mind, 'there are no men I desire to strike dead.'

Were there any women?

He didn't think so, though that awful Form bitch who had forced him to whip Talla might rate an arrow to the knee, at the very least. He was honest enough to admit that he wanted her to suffer. He probably didn't want her dead, though, even if he'd contemplated the image of her severed head more than once.

Could he imagine himself putting an arrow through even that woman?

He tried to picture it: Sonja the Adjudicate coming at him with a whip.

The string was loosed and the arrow streaked, striking one of the straw targets very close to where his previous arrow protruded.

'Are you a killer, then?'

Talla had a way of popping into his head at times like these. She'd returned from a night of Service somewhere far enough away he'd only caught the faintest glimpse of her passion.

'I will be, I think, the way we're going.'

A wave of regret washed over him. He raised his bow, notched an arrow, and let it fly, sinking an arrow into the stomach of the second dummy.

'In the belly?' she asked.

'Easiest to hit the torso,' he replied. 'It'll stop a man just as well as anything else.'

'It's weird that you know that.'

'Yeah,' he agreed.

She was alone in her bedroom. He knew that, but there was no sexual desire in him right then, and she recognized it. They could have done something, together, if that had been the case. Gods only knew what sort of effect their mesh might have if they masturbated together.

Not tonight, though.

'I'm still going to do it.'

'Become a Fighter?'

'Yes. I'll tell Master Lyric in the morning.'

Zhair'lo's lips twisted cynically.

'He already knows, though. So do they. Sweetness has already scheduled me for a Seal Breaking tomorrow instead of a Hunt.'

No need to say who "they" were. Zhair'lo showed Talla how Lyric had revealed the Temple's plans to him.

'They knew you would join the Fighters?'

He confirmed this over the link, drawing another arrow from his quiver and setting it into his string.

'That makes no sense,' Talla told him.

'Makes sense if I hate 'em.'

'But they think you don't. They think you're loyal.'

Zhair'lo paused, just short of releasing his arrow. He hadn't really considered the ramifications of what Master Lyric had told him. He'd been so focused on himself that it had never occurred to him to think of the Temple women and their point of view.

'So they think I'm doing this out of loyalty.'

'Exactly. You're so fundamentally Heroic that you can't think of anything else.'

His lips twisted, this time in a sneer.

'They're in for a surprise.'

He released the arrow. It struck the dummy in the head, squarely between its two crudely drawn eyes.

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Maksa's eyes – her gods-damned purple eyes – were pouring over sheet after sheet of genealogical parchment. The riddle of guessing a woman's Discipline was, for her, long since solved. There were others, brighter with mathematics, who were busily applying exponential curves, inverse squares and quadratic functions to what she had seen instinctively, using some unfathomable algorithm deep in her brain.

That problem no longer piqued her curiosity.

Much more intriguing was the problem of the Catatonic, Enraged and Heroic. She could see how the women of centuries past had gone about trying to breed away the Enraged. Trivial associations had been noted.

They'd wasted decades, first of all, squeamishly trying to find some way to test men that didn't involve tasting their ejaculate. Having established that there was nothing better, they had simply taken steps to make sure women intending to have children didn't Serve any men who had tested out as Enraged.

A generation later, things had not improved. According to the records, they had known this in very short order. But they let experiment go on for thirty years anyway. Either the machinery of change was very slow or the women had let hope and pride cloud their analysis.

In any case, they had eventually realized they had failed. Even so, they had collected several generations of information.

Sadly, their observations hadn't been perfect. Men who had tested as one category were retested and found to be another – the present Sorceress of Pussy assured Maksa this was an observational error. In the more rigorous days that had followed, it had been unequivocally demonstrated that men could not make such changes.

Maksa trusted the Sorceress on this, as least provisionally. The only other option was to spend years letting dozens of men ejaculate in her mouth and run her own rigorous experiment. A possibility for the long term, but it wouldn't help her now.

She spared a glance up at the wall, where she had hung that strange, beautiful gift from the Sorceress of Facial. Beauty, was it? She shook it off. There was a task at hand and she didn't want to waste mental space on a matter of artistic comprehension.

The observations those ancient genealogists had made had demonstrated that merely kicking Enraged men out of the pool didn't work. The male children of Catatonics and Heroics could also be Enraged.

She looked at the results of ancient studies, copied over time and again for preservation, and saw thorough charts listing fathers and grandfathers for six and sometimes seven generations. Whole trees, branching out, making no sense or pattern that Maksa could discern. Catatonics, Heroes and Enraged were mixed together in one man's family tree so thoroughly it seemed like the men were randomly chosen rather being his ancestors.