Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 30

Zhair'lo pushed until he felt his swollen head poke her throat, gave one gentle thrust and pulled back. Areese, he knew, would want more, so he pushed again and again, giving her just enough time to catch her breath, watching her eyes widen with the moment of panic she needed to give her the adrenaline rush she wanted.

Finally, Zhair'lo felt a muscle spasm from somewhere in her throat and knew Areese had hit her limit.

"Come to me, now," she gasped, falling on to her back.

"You don't want to be on top?" he knelt between her legs.

"No", she shook her head urgently. "It's better if you are."

'Better', he took to mean as 'a better orgasm' but not necessarily 'less painful sex'.

Zhair'lo shrugged. At least she got to make decisions like that about her body.

"You ready?" he braced himself on his hands, his erection laying across her lips.

"Don't ask," she said, raising her arms and stretching them on the bed behind her. "Just hold me down until I tell you to stop."

Zhair'lo supposed it took all kinds of people to make a diverse world. As long as her mouth wasn't covered, she could at least call him off if it got too hard for her. Her oral ministrations had certainly made him slippery enough and, as he set himself against her lips, he felt the warmer wetness leaking out of her as well.

He pinned her wrists above her head and pushed his erection inside her. As rough as he made his thrust, Areese offered little resistance. Whatever effect the recent Within upgrade had had on her, the potion and her arousal had cancelled it out.

The biggest problem for Zhair'lo lay in satisfying Areese without destroying himself. His day after the first night with Tia had shown him the disaster awaiting any exertion on his part toward an attempt at orgasm. The previous night, with Dol'ya on top, he'd merely had to hang on.

Areese, however, desired an extreme sort of aggression, one he'd be hard pressed to fake. But what could he do?

Buried inside her to the hilt, holding her arms fast to the bed above her head, Zhair'lo began to thrust. He kept it mild at first but, spurred on by the squirming and moaning each increase in force brought, soon found himself eagerly pounding at Areese's body.

He had to stay in control of himself. Whatever else happened, however much effort she required of him, his temper had to remain in check.

"Yes! Yes!" she hissed at him.

Nine hells, he thought, knowing the precariousness of his knife edge control.

Areese closed her eyes, passionate in her pretended desire to fight against his grip and twist against his penetration. On the upside for Zhair'lo, she couldn't see his face anymore, which cut down on his obligations. He continued to thrust as she spread her legs wide, throwing away her facade of protest, but he no longer had to maintain any other pretence of enjoyment on his part.

He knew Areese closed upon her orgasm when her legs locked around his back. The point of this endeavour, the fortifying of the magic in his body for the final leg of the journey, would not go untended.

Her chest heaving with every twist, those many times upgraded breasts bouncing side to side, Areese pushed against his erection and wrenched against his arms. Zhair'lo knew better than to release her. He felt her pleasure through a kind of half-mesh and knew what she wanted right down the finish line.

Finally, with his patience about to give out, her body seized up, her back arched and her vaginal muscles began to spasm around his erection. A faint blue glow started just under her breasts and pulsed downwards, intensifying as it went and flowing into his body. He felt it; a dark, hollow death inside him being surrounded with layer after pulsing blue layer of quickly drying stone, cementing and encasing the emptiness.

When Areese's body relaxed, Zhair'lo withdrew his still rock hard erection from her body and fell to the bed beside, feeling the shivers that overtook his body.

The sweating woman, pity in her eyes, wrapped her arms around him and pulled his body close to her, his head against her breasts.

"It's okay," she petted his head soothingly. "You'll be okay. Everything will be just fine."

Zhair'lo couldn't respond, feeling his brain twitch as much as his body.

"Drink," she said softly. "It will make it better."

Areese turned her body to push her breast into his barely open mouth. With a squeeze, she forced milk from her nipple. Instinct took over his body and he latched on to her, suckling like an infant.

This had been done to him before, but he only knew because others had told him. For the first time, he experienced it while remaining conscious.

But his memory of it would lack strength, for he faded out within a few heartbeats.

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Zhair'lo slept in fits and starts, his dreams plagued by panicked shouts and the sound of metal grating against metal. Images danced in his head, nightmares conjured to match the sickening sound of a man run through with a sword.

When he woke the next morning he found himself alone and naked in the giant bed. As he came to his senses, the dim grey light of pre-dawn filtering in through the open doorway, he heard the distinct sounds of the Fighters disassembling the camp all around him.

It had never occurred to him to wonder what happened in the mornings. Probably, just like Areese, the Seconds who had bedded him hadn't felt any obligation to reclothe him. On each of the previous days, he must have been found in this bed naked, dressed by someone and then carried off to his wagon.

Not today, he determined.

Bracing himself against a wave of dizziness that never came, Zhair'lo sat up and crawled over to the shirt and shorts he'd left on the corner of the bed. Donning them, he took to his feet and walked out of the tent.

"Zhai!" Bree exclaimed, and seven soldiers in full armour turned to look at him.

With their helmets in place, it took Zhair'lo a heartbeat to recognize the members of his squad, even as they reached out to touch his shoulders, clasp him wrist to wrist, or pat him on the back.

"What's with the armour?" he asked.

"Enraged, man," Kit said. "They've been hitting the camp all night."

"What?!"

Zhair'lo reached out for Talla and found her mind waiting for him.

'Is it true? We've been attacked?'

Talla confirmed it to him and professed her own mystification.

"Didn't you hear any of the fighting?" Del asked pointedly. "It wasn't quiet."

"I ... I thought those were my nightmares," he answered. "How far into the camp did they get?"

"Not past the guards, obviously," Tara said. "They're just Enraged men with scrounged up pitchforks and axes. They come in one or two at a time, screaming their heads off. If the archers don't pick them off, the first sword they meet takes them down."

"That's stupid," Zhair'lo's brow furrowed. "Why would they fight like that? They're just getting themselves defeated in detail."

No Soldier worth the title would ever throw his life away so casually. Smart women and men fought in groups, watching each other's backs, making the best of their abilities and, if necessary, their lives.

"Well, they're Enraged," Kit repeated. "The word implies a certain level of irrationality."

"Are you well enough to walk?" Bree asked. "We should get you into your armour. I'd hate to lose you now to some idiot who gets his hands on a bow."

"Yeah, armour," Zhair'lo nervously scanned the sky to the east, feeling more naked than he had in the tent. "Good plan."

But what could he make of these attacks? The people he sought in Beshenna would certainly put considerable effort toward stopping a Conduit coming to resurrect the Temple. That made sense. But would they send screaming, suicidal people into the enemy camp armed with axes and pitchforks? That signalled a level of madness he didn't care to contemplate.

The people he wanted to meet, he decided, must have some separate agency.

His squad maintained the closest guard around him they'd ever kept, protecting him from the arrows they imagined falling from the sky. How dumb would he feel, getting killed by people he wanted for allies? Zhair'lo hadn't even considered the possibility. What if he ran to them and they decided their most efficient path to victory lay in his assassination?

His friends had laid out his armour in his wagon, its bed nearly empty as almost every other implement of war had been removed from it. Only a few spare swords and sharpening tools remained.

"How well can you walk, lad?" a rumbling brogue called out to him.

Zhair'lo turned on his heel and snapped to attention and faced the man who approached him.

"As well as ever, Master Kendrick, sir!"

The old man, wearing every bit of his armour except the metal helm tucked under his arm, peered down into Zhair'lo's eyes, studying him for gods-knew-what quality. Zhair'lo, not quite sure if this constituted a military inspection, chose to look back at his Master rather than stare off at the horizon as protocol dictated.

"He'll be fine," he declared with a weary sigh to the giantess next to him. "We can leave the carts."

"You're certain?" Gillian stepped up beside him.

Zhair'lo stared at her, mustering up all the strength and defiance he could manage.

"He's trained for this," Kendrick pointed out. "Have someone carry his sword for him until we get close to the city. The bow and quiver he keeps."

"Aye," Gillian agreed. "Armour up, then, boy."

She turned on her heel and headed east, toward the glowing horizon and the front of the army.

Kendrick closed up the gap between himself and Zhair'lo and pitched his rolling voice low.

"We'll have a couple of the carts following us with a skeleton guard," he muttered. "If you start to have problems, let us know. But as it is, I'd much rather reach Beshenna before nightfall, and the horses can't pull the carts fast enough on this part of the trail to do it."

"Aye, Master Kendrick."

"And you lot," his voice boomed and rolled over his squad. "Stay close to him. Aye?"

"Aye!" they shouted back.

A tired grimace took over their Master's face before he gave them a stiff nod and headed east after Gillian.

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The sun reached the top of the sky before they came across the first bodies.

At the time, Zhair'lo had started to feel almost his old self. The fresh air and the consistent blood flow to something other than his erection had combined to reinvigorate his vitality. The magical, ephemeral pain in his groin still grew worse by the bell, but the rest of him had recovered.

The sense of foreboding came from the front of the army. As they had closed on Beshenna, the army had certainly reduced its raucous behaviour in favour of a more professional demeanour. Everyone expected that and everyone felt it. But a new and darker formality, a change of step and a sudden dark quiet crept over the army from east to west.

When their part of the long column of armour passed over the spot, the whole column curved to the left side of the path, giving a wide berth to the scene on the southern roadside. A woman lay there, multiple stab wounds in her back, left to die face down in the ditch. Beside her lay a child of no more than three, killed in some way unclear. Beyond them, numerous other bodies lay in states of certain decomposition.

Zhair'lo saw them through the gap in his squadmates' formation and wondered how that could have happened.

'Did you see that?'

'Yeah. I'm about ten paces back of you. So?'

'Talla, think about it for a moment. Who would do that?'

'I don't know. We don't know whose side she was on or why she was killed.'

'But the child? She looks like she was just trying to get away from the city.'

'So why not stay in the city?' Talla pointed out. 'The Temple's gates were secure a couple of days ago, for sure. She's been dead quite a while.'

Zhair'lo slipped out the mental connection with a shrug.

"Narrows!" Master Kendrick's voice rolled over the column from the front and every Soldier drew his sword or notched her bow with an arrow.

The path ahead went down into a lush, green ravine, a peaceful place to the untrained eye, a brilliant place for an ambush for an enemy so inclined.

"I suppose there's no way around it," Zhair'lo muttered as he notched an arrow.

"We would have taken it, if so," Sonja called from behind him.

Zhair'lo didn't take the time to wonder where she'd come from. He hadn't even noticed her creeping up from behind. How many bells had she lain in his shadow back there, anyway?

His squad followed the column, crawling down into the valley as it became a ravine. Though the sun beat down on them from near the top of the sky, green-leafed tree branches began to stretch from the top of the ravine to lend unwanted shade.

Bowstrings stretched and the marching column turned into a porcupine, notched arrows and swords pointed at the dirt and rock ledges above their heads.

"Are there Rangers up there?" Zhair'lo started to get queasy, looking up at the high ledges.

"No" Sonja muttered back to him, her voice tense with the effort of holding her bow steady. "These ledges are only accessible from the eastern side. We can't know what's on them."

"Someone's up there -"

Far ahead in the column, a Soldier loosed an arrow. With the army dead silent, the sound of it whipping through the air spread across the entire column. It snapped through a few leaves before making a dull thud of contact.

Zhair'lo recognized that final noise, not as the sound he'd heard many times from an arrow striking a practice tree, nor of one sinking into a bale of hay. This noise marked the target as flesh, a distinct sound he knew from the solitary occasion on which he'd watched a man die in battle. His eyes moved of their own volition to look ahead and he watched a body fall from the right hand ledge, tumbling along the side of the steep rock face and land with a thud at the feet of a swordsman.

Had someone killed an innocent straggler, fleeing from Beshenna? Zhair'lo felt a twinge of sympathy for the unfortunate soul, but the sense that more people lurked in the trees overhead subdued his pity. A moment later, all such feelings washed away when he heard a roar that chilled him from the base of his skull all the way back down his spine.

The howling came from the forest above and to his right; indeed, from everywhere along that bank. Suddenly, the woods were full of moving, screaming bodies hurling themselves downwards.

Zhair'lo spared no thought for whether these angry, barbaric creatures might wish to form an alliance against the Temple. He saw the madness in their eyes, took his mark according to the number of archers to his left and right, and put an arrow through the chest of the closest man above him.

Bows twanged after his, even as he reloaded and fired again. The magic he held in his body enhanced every motion, increased his speed, turned him into a machine churning out arrows as regularly as a mill crushed grain into flour.

Even then, wild men made it down the sides of the ravine to the ground and met the front line of swordsmen.

In a handful of heartbeats, up and down the line, the battle ended.

Archers stretched bowstrings, waiting for a second onslaught. Swordsmen panted for breath, eyes on the woods on both sides. Zhair'lo squad clustered around him.

"It's over," he told them. "There's no one else up there."

They relaxed, confident somehow that he knew this, as he had known about the Rangers across the river in the night.

He stepped forward, moving to a place behind the first row of swordsman who had stepped across several bodies embedded with Zhair'lo's very own arrows.

"These are mine," he muttered, recognizing the fletchery of his arrows, but suddenly unsure if the words he'd spoken referred to the arrows or the dead.

Suddenly, one of the wild men – one he'd taken for a corpse – opened his eyes and inhaled a painful gasp. With a fury born of all nine hells, he reached a grasping hand toward Zhair'lo's leg. No intelligence registered in the man's eyes. Zhair'lo might as well try to reason with a wolf as speak to this creature.

Without a thought, he leapt back and started to lower his bow, but others had already moved. Two of the swordsmen in the front line twisted around to slice at the struggling creature, while Kit and Renzi stabbed at him from positions on either side of Zhair'lo. Mercifully, the wild man felt silent.

"Move out!" Master Kendrick's voice boomed over them. "Double time!"

The army let no sign of shock show in their reaction. They formed back up in columns, a wary eye perpetually on the forest, and made their way eastward out of the ravine.

Zhair'lo, dumbstruck as anyone else, yanked the arrows he could from the nearest bodies and formed up with his squad and start jogging.

What, he wondered, had just happened?

'Talla?'

A strange, blank hollowness greeted his request. Somewhere behind him, he realized, Talla wandered in a state of complete shock. As much as her whipping had traumatized her, she had never seen anyone killed in battle, and here she'd experienced an absolutely insane level of bloodlust. Even Zhair'lo, who had studied tactics and strategy, had never imagined an engagement that could come on so savagely and yet end so swiftly.

He decided he would try reaching Talla once she came to her senses, and meanwhile trust Shanata to see to her.

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Bells later, after they had stopped in a partially overgrown clearing, the army took a rest. This close to what they considered enemy territory, they couldn't rest as well as they'd liked. Patrols moved constantly around the perimeter, checking and rechecking every suspicious grouping of weeds or conveniently located pile of fallen trees.

Zhair'lo and his squad took their food in silence at first, sitting in a circle on the grass and brooding over their first battle.

"How many arrows you fire, Zhai?" Kit finally asked.

"Six," Zhair'lo replied instantly, knowing this by virtue of having counted the remainder in his quiver, not because he remembered firing them. "Got four of my arrows back. Not sure where the other two went."

"I only got off two," Zia's distress told them she'd disappointed herself. "One shoulder wound to one those ... people."

She looked at Zhair'lo across the circle.

"You were so fast," she said, awe in her eyes and dread in her voice. She shook her head. "I could see you in front of me ..."

"It's the magic," Zhair'lo kept his eyes low. "I see everything so slow, like a dream, even things so dark or far away I couldn't normally see them -"

"How're you holding up?" Bree interrupted. "This is a long walk."

Zhair'lo shrugged. "I'll make it the rest of the day."

Silence reigned again, and he reached out for Talla.

'Hello?'

'I'm here.'

'Healthy?'

'Uninjured,' she replied and Zhair'lo sensed the evasion.

Prying a little, he loosened a memory from her brain. A wildly exaggerated, slavering man with a rusty hatchet stood over her, preparing to bring his weapon down on her. A useless twig of a bow appeared – Talla's hand holding it horizontally in a desperate attempt to parry the blow. Talla, he knew from the memory, had closed her eyes and someone else had struck the wild man dead before he reached her.

'Frightening bunch,' Zhair'lo conceded.

'This is not what we expected.'

Zhair'lo agreed. Even if this group had showed more organization than the stragglers who had invaded their camp the previous night, he couldn't imagine wanting to ally with such a bunch of lunatics. They hadn't called for surrender or negotiation, nor made any attempt to preserve themselves against some loftier goal. Their attack had demonstrated their utter indifference to any outcome. No force that small and poorly armed, no matter its vigour, could have overcome this assemblage of Fighters. Zhair'lo's fellow Soldiers had suffered a few injuries, but nothing so grievous that it even slowed their march onward.