Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 25

"Then both of you can go," the Queen ordered. "Be off."

Two more disappeared.

"The rest of you, about your business."

Bows all around, and the Queen was soon alone with her Sorceresses, all three of them still standing with their arms folded, none of them looking at anything in particular.

"What fresh hell is this, I wonder?" the Queen asked.

Her Sorceresses could only shake their heads.

---===================----

Tina sank into the tub, slithering down between Talla and Yua. Under the guise of dunking herself in the water, she slid down the entire length of Talla's body and, finding her thighs closed, rose up higher to kiss one of her nipples under the water.

"What gives, Mistress?" she whispered when she cleared the surface of the water.

"Trouble, maybe," Talla kept her voice low.

Tina only raised her eyebrows and drifted across to the middle of the tub to face Talla and Yua.

"I found what I was looking for," Talla said. "A vent leading up to the Synergist room."

"Probably," Yua pointed out before returning to a tired silence.

"Probably," Talla admitted. "Although it's exactly where V'shika thought the Synergist room would have to be."

"That sounds like good news ,though," Tina said suspiciously, cupping one of her breasts with a wince.

"Biter last night?" Talla asked.

"No, he just sucked on it really hard," Tina's eyes widened, "you should have seen how long he made it get."

Talla and Yua winced in sympathy.

"Anyway, your vent?"

"I was hoping it would be a way in to the Synergist room," Talla gritted her teeth.

"No luck?"

"It's too narrow and there's grate in the way that we could never get off."

"Unless," Yua put in wearily, "we wanted to make enough noise to alert every guard up there."

Tina nodded thoughtfully.

"That's alright, though," she said. "We'll make another plan."

The other two girls shrugged guiltily.

"What else?" Tina asked.

"We were kind of, fooling around," Talla cast her eyes downward. "And that ... thing ... happened, like it did with Zhair'lo."

Tina's eyes widened.

"The thing with the lightning? That happened with Yua?"

"Zhair'lo was there, too, in my head. So was some girl he was fucking out at the Barracks. Yua and ... and whoever she was almost tore us apart again. But I got Yua to make me come and we got out."

"But the lightning?" Tina asked.

"I don't know what it did," Talla looked worried now. "We think we knocked people unconscious with it last time."

"And you did this under the Synergist room?"

Talla nodded.

"Are you sure you didn't leave anything behind?"

"We're good there," Yua said. "Chalk and both torches."

"It's probably fine, then", Tina put in, uncertainty tainting her voice. "They won't even know anyone was down there. There's nothing connecting you to it and even if they put guards down there, so what? We couldn't have used it anyhow."

Talla tilted her head back and forth thoughtfully.

"I guess so."

She couldn't quite, however, get the trembling feeling out of her stomach.

---===================----

"You've got a bell to rest up, Recruits," Sergeant Yung told them once they exited the mess hall. "I don't recommend fucking. Might want to save your energy."

"Aye, sir," they murmured back.

"Sergeant Yung, sir?" Zhair'lo asked as the others drifted off to their sleeping quarters.

"Zhair'lo?"

"Where's Berel, sir?"

"Sleeping."

"This late in the morning?"

Sergeant Yung twisted his lips, a gesture of uncertainty Zhair'lo had never seen on the man's face before. His gaze lingered on Zhair'lo eyes, then traced a line down to the rank badge on his chest. It seemed as if he couldn't decide what to say.

"We got all the information we could from him," the Sergeant said finally. "He'll be tired for a couple of days."

"So he won't be going with us?"

"No. Definitely not," the Sergeant seemed on the verge of smiling. "Now get some rest."

"Sir," Zhair'lo nodded and turned on his heel.

He was still wondering what Sergeant Yung had been unable to confide in him about Berel when he entered the darkened building the Recruits had for sleeping quarters.

"He's mine!" Zia yelled out.

'Oh, Madra Zen,' Zhair'lo sighed.

Of course Zia would be horny now, just before a battle.

Zhair'lo's eyes hadn't even adjusted so he was only aware of vague shapes in the various beds. Was everyone else fucking, despite the Sergeant's warning? Zia dragged him to the middle of the room and pushed him to sit on the foot of the nearest bed.

"Shouldn't we rest?" he asked.

"Nothing doin'," Zia said.

"Look I know you're horny -"

"I'm not."

"What?" Zhair'lo's voice went up an octave in surprise.

"I'm just not, okay?"

As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the rest of the beds were occupied by individuals, not couples, and that they were all turning to face him.

"I can't stand having debts," Zia said, unlacing his shorts.

"Debts?"

"Owing people things."

"I know what debts are, thanks."

"Well," she said, taking his testicles in one hand and his semi-rigid penis in the other, "We're going into battle today, aren't we?"

"With you so far," Zhair'lo spoke slowly as he peered into her eyes.

"And we could, possibly, die, right?"

Zhair'lo tilted his head thoughtfully as Zia gave the tip of his shaft a wide tongued lick.

"Not likely, from our position -"

"But possible."

"But possible," he acknowledged.

"And I owe you," she said. "And I'm not going to my death in debt. The slate will be clean; the toggles will be level."

"Toggles?"

"It's a girl thing," Bree put in from the next bed on his left. "They used to give us toggles as awards for services and special acts of heroism. Women could trade them, or lend them out to their sisters for special events."

"But you have to give them back," Tara, on his right, added. "It's really important to level all your debts."

"Okay ..."

Zia leaned over and took his half erection in her mouth.

"I still don't get ..."

"She owes you," Bree said in exasperation. "When she was dry, you licked her to make her wet."

"So what?"

"You made me come," Zia came off his cock long enough to say. "And it was really, really good."

"And then you meshed," Bree added, as Zia's mouth was full again. "And you both came."

Comprehension, slow in coming with all the blood missing from his head, finally dawned on him.

"So I'm, like, one orgasm short?"

"Basically."

"And you're all gonna ... ha! ... watch?"

"Yeah," Kit put in from across the room, "we're all too smart to fuck when we know we have a big run coming up."

"Thanks, jackass."

"No probs, brother."

"You can rest right after," Tara assured him. "We have lots of time. Won't take long anyway."

"For the Goddess's sake, Zia," Del spoke for the first time from her corner of the room. "Take off your clothes or you'll get them stained."

"Really, Del?" Bree asked.

"Think about it, Zia," Del rose up indignantly, "How would you feel going into your first battle with drops of come on your uniform?"

Zhair'lo was getting a bit unnerved by all the chatter. It was one thing when everyone was fucking in the same room, but quite another when they were all watching him. This made it different from doing an upgrade. In the Augmentation Chamber, there were strangers, off in dark anonymity. Around him today were his brothers and sisters.

"Just swallow it," Bree said. "I'm sure I emptied him out last night. Can't be much."

Tara hopped out of bed and knelt behind Zia.

"I'm afraid, Del, prissy as she is, is right this time," she said, unlacing Zia's top.

Zia pulled off Zhair'lo's now significant erection for a moment.

"You're saying I can't handle it?"

"No," Tara said, stripping Zia's top off and casting it aside before reaching for the skirt.

"The skirt, too?" Zia sounded irritated.

"He was naked when he did you, wasn't he?" Del put in.

Del, thought Zhair'lo, would be the only one to both remember and care about that sort of thing.

"Besides," Tara whispered in Zia's ear, "You want to do right by him, don't you?"

There was a mystified look on Zia's face as she rose up slightly on her knees so Tara could unravel her skirt.

Wearing just her white panties, Zia continued to stroke him very slowly.

"What do you mean?" her voice was suspicious.

"Um?" Bree nodded at Zia's waist. "Naked is naked."

With an impatient sigh and roll of her eyes, Zia stood up and yanked her underwear down to her ankles.

"Are we good now?" she looked at Zhair'lo, who could only shrug innocently, leaving her to redirect her ire at each of her three sisters in turn, who nodded. "So I can suck him off, then?"

"But he doesn't want to come in your mouth," Tara whispered, circling around now on the bed behind Zhair'lo. "Do you, Zhair'lo?"

She knelt, pressed her body against his back, and wrapped her arms around him so she could grope at his chest muscles.

"Do you?" she repeated.

"I, uh -"

Zia looked up at him expectantly, even as she bobbed up and down on his erection.

"He's a Seal Breaker, Zia," Tara hissed. "Didn't you know?"

"Oh," Zia mumbled around his cock. Her gaze fell from his eyes down to the base of his erection just under her nose.

"What's a Seal Breaker?" Renzi asked.

Zia was now pumping furiously at his cock, leaving only the tip in her mouth, which she lavished with her tongue.

"It means he's a guy they bring in to give Virgins their first upgrade," Tara explained, still pressed against Zhair'lo's back. "It means he comes a lot. It also means he really enjoys coming ... all over ... skinny ... little ... girls."

She leaned very close then, her lips touching Zhair'lo's right ear.

"How many faces have you splattered, huh?" she breathed, tonguing his ear lobe.

"Dunno," Zhair'lo gasped back honestly. He was well beyond being able to count.

"Would you like to come in one more?"

Zhair'lo was panting, feeling his orgasm approach. He looked down and found Zia's wide eyes looking up at him. Her eyebrows twitched, offering. He nodded his head, accepting.

She took him out of her mouth and left the tip of his erection pointing at the bridge of her nose. For one last moment, her eyes met his before falling cross-eyed to look at narrow slit at the end of his shaft. Then, in a final act of acquiescence, she closed her eyes.

With one hand gently cupping his testicles, she pumped madly with the other.

For one rapid heartbeat, Zhair'lo held back to savour the moment, and then released his body. His loins spasmed, launching forth a wet, runny, string of semen. The pulsing of his muscles was just enough to overcome Zia's control. Instead of hitting her squarely on the bridge of her nose, his erection strafed her face from left eye to right, the liquid sliding out of the orbit of her eye and wetly down both of her cheeks.

"Ha!" Zia shrieked in surprise, pulling back slightly.

Her movement gave his second volley a new target, hitting her squarely on her upper lip. Zhair'lo noticed, even in his state of ecstasy, that there was a significantly different effect when Synergist wasn't involved. The clear syrupy liquid tended to act as a sort of barrier, containing his semen and preventing gravity from having any great effect on it. Now, with Zia on her knees and her face uncoated with syrup, he could watch his semen sliding down her skin. By the time his third volley hit her nose, the dripping from the first had run off her face, over her collar bone and down to her breasts.

A desultory fourth volley twitched out onto her breastbone. It was still runny enough, however, to run down Zia's bare, sweat-tacked stomach toward her genitals.

Zia took his erection back in her mouth and continued to milk the last out of him.

"Holy fuck, Zhair'lo," Tara admired quietly, stepping back momentarily. "Is that how much come you pump in to me?"

"That's a rhetorical question," Del said. "You don't need to answer it."

Zhair'lo took a deep breath before saying, "I know what a rhetorical question is."

Zia slipped her underwear off her ankles and used it to wipe her eyes clean, but she didn't come off his penis until she was sure he was done.

"Madra Zen," she said, looking at her underwear and the mass of semen in it. She then looked down at her body: the lines of semen on her breasts and stomach; the small pool collecting in the triangle between her thighs and her bare mound. "No wonder you're a Seal Breaker."

With a degree of careful effort, she managed to find enough dry spots on her little panties to clean herself up.

"Alright, then," she said finally, a breath of relief escaping her lungs. "Toggles are level."

"Sure," Zhair'lo agreed, although he'd never felt any debt had been owed.

Even though he knew it wasn't his bed, Zhair'lo fell backwards and almost immediately fell asleep.

---===================----

"Reports already?" the Queen of Form asked.

"Yes, Highness," the Officer in front of her desk replied. "We described the layout of the Synergist room to the Sorceress of Lips. She was very clear that she knows of no poison that could take out so many women, so far apart, without one of them being able to give a warning to those farther away. They would have had to be at an extremely low level of alertness for such a thing to happen."

The Queen twitched slightly, wondering if that was some kind of insult.

"Go on."

"Mistress Sonja reports that the Sorceress of Strength believes the ventilation in the sewers to have been designed correctly to avoid any such problem. If some poison or potion had been dropped into the sewers, it is unlikely to have released a poisonous gas in such a way as to cause problems for the ventilation shaft in question. Regardless, Strength has sent three of her Engineers into the sewers, with a contingent of Enforcers, in order to inspect the general area and see if some damage or fault can be found."

The Queen nodded sagely. The Discipline of Strength, though it was in Endowment, had always seemed like kin to her. They were better, at the very least, than the effete dancers and singers she had for neighbours. For the most part, she could admire the hard-nosed scepticism and sensibility of her far off sisters.

"Strength also pointed out that, while the incident at the Hunter's Camp may seem similar, there is nothing uniting the two events except what we believe to be sudden bouts of unconsciousness. The naturally available gases and poisons of the two environments are mutually exclusive and, given that no one appears to have taken advantage of either situation, it's unlikely that any unnatural agents were used to cause our people to pass out."

That much, the Queen could agree, was true. Every vial and vat of Synergist was perfectly accounted for. Neither had the people at the Hunter's Camp missed anything other than the chance to have sex with each other.

"And Fin'la?"

"Still conducting her interviews, Highness."

So everything was, at least, in motion. Being a Queen meant having a lot of power to order people around, but it also meant a lot of waiting for them to get back to you. With a wave, she dismissed the Officer.

---===================----

Next door, the Sorceress of Facial was standing near the front of her own Domain, looking out over the balconies of her neighbours. Long green panels of translucent fabric, pinched at the waist, drifted down to varying lengths around her knees. She pushed her blond hair back over her right ear and leaned toward the Officer next to her.

"What are they all frenetic about this time?" she asked H'reena. "This is a bit more armour than we usually see, isn't it?"

"A bunch of their Enforcers guarding the Synergist were knocked out last night," H'reena replied, equally unconcerned.

"That would be upsetting. Do they know who did it?"

"They don't even how it happened, or if there is a responsible party."

"Even though the same thing happened before."

"Even though," H'reena nodded. "Although they don't know about the Little Girls and their games."

'Little Girls' was the phrase they used to describe the younger, lower-ranking women who arranged the switching of Service assignments. The Little Girls believed that they operated in secrecy, and they mostly did.

"An edge we have over them, I suppose," the Sorceress admitted. "But still, shouldn't they clue in by now?"

"They don't see the links we do," H'reena said. "You have Zhair'lo and Talla, aching to be together so much that, even after being punished for it, Talla is willing to risk switching assignments to get back to him."

"Which was obviously associated with the last bout of unconsciousness," Facial continued. "So clearly, they should be wondering where Talla and Zhair'lo are right now and where they were last night. Even if they didn't figure out about the assignment switching, they should still be watching those two. "

"Zhair'lo is out with the Fighters now," H'reena pointed out. "And they think their barbaric punishment and aphrodisiac fixed Talla."

The two women looked at each other and shrugged at the naivety of their neighbours before returning their gazes to the balconies before them. There was a long pause as they watched two squads of Enforcers race down opposite sets of stairways.

"This isn't going to get any better if they don't smarten up," Facial said finally, and made to return to her desk.

---===================----

Upon being nudged, Zhair'lo awoke feeling refreshed and, as he had never undressed in the first place, moved quickly with his fellow Recruits to the armoury.

At the lead of the column of male Recruits, he was, once again, given a bow rather than a sword like his fellows. As he made to take the bow, he found Sergeant Yung holding it tightly. Their eyes met, briefly, and Zhair'lo understood the wordless warning as well as any lecture that would have take a hundred times as long.

"We've got three kilometres," Sergeant Yung spoke so his voice carried only to the male Recruits. "Your armour is lighter than ours, so you shouldn't have trouble keeping up. The Rangers have marked the trail, but you won't see the markers. You eight will be the third squad in line, so all you have to do is follow along and not be too loud. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," the murmurs came back, quick but without the usual bluster.

"Good," Yung nodded at them.

There was a dark look of concern bringing his eyebrows lower than usual, but it faded as he stepped away from and addressed the group at large.

"Form up!"

A moment before Zhair'lo had felt himself surrounded by a wild tangle of muscle, leather armour, without coherence or organization. The next instant, squads had lined themselves up in front of and behind the Recruits. This army so formed was a fluid, living thing that adapted to its environment. And if that environment included a group of Recruits who barely knew how to march, then so be it.

"Move out!" Sergeant Yung called.

If they had been a liquid, flowing around the Recruits, they now became a living thing, a snake, slithering through the Barracks. They squeezed themselves through narrower alleys, widened to take up more space in the thoroughfares. Zhair'lo felt the pride of those around him, the sense of unity with their brother and sister Fighters. They were now part of this living animal, even if they could do little more than walk.

'We can't fight,' he thought of his fellow Recruits. 'When it comes down to it, only five of us would even know what to do with our weapons and even then we'd only know how to act as individuals. We're allowed on the battlefield only because they think these barbarians will offer little to no resistance.'

Zhair'lo personally had higher hopes for the barbarians. The reported state of their weapons wasn't encouraging, but they had an armoury and a degree of organization. Sometime during the morning, he had convinced himself that their tendency to fight one another meant that they were strong and keen for battle. Today, they would probably be overwhelmed and forced to surrender, but he would learn much from them anyway.