Talla's Fallen Temple

Edited by Ken Scades.

*****

The walls of Endowment Hall shifted and flickered as the flames in the myriad fire pits danced in all the hues of orange and yellow. The scent of incense mixed with the aromas from the overheated flesh of hundreds of women. In every colour of clothing, they had come out after a night of Service to sing and drink and regale each other with the tales of the bells they had spent with the men of the city.

Not all took in the merriment, however. Off in a corner, the unsteady light of the flames failed to beat back and the shadows and four girls in white took advantage of the relative darkness to sit with their heads together.

"Are you sure this can work?" Illya wrinkled her nose in doubt.

"Zhair'lo is sure," Talla answered firmly.

"Yeah, but, come on," Illya pleaded, turning to look at Tina and Yua for assistance.

"What?" Talla's lips thinned in frustration.

The three girls looked at each other, cringing.

Talla titled her head with impatience. "Spit it out."

Yua and Illya, by way of of refusing to look at either each other or Talla, elected Tina to speak on their behalf.

"Have you ever worked with a furnace?" Tina asked.

"No," Talla shook her head in confusion.

"So how do you know this will work?"

"I told you," Talla repeated slowly. "Zhair'lo is sure."

"And how does he know?" Tina made her voice as gentle as possible. "I mean, he's not an engineer, is he? He's a boy."

Talla's brow lowered and her eyes hardened.

"He's pretty smart," she kept her voice cold and slow. "He's been a blacksmith, a baker and he's even made roof tiles."

"I know, I know," Tina held up her hands defensively. "I'm sure he's made a lot of fires."

"Listen, Talla," Yua slipped in softly as Tina turned her eyes aside. "You're asking a lot here."

"No, I'm not! We were all willing to go down in those sewers every night to find the Synergist room's vent. What makes it different now?"

"Now we'll be carrying wood and straw," Illya mimed carrying heavy loads under her arms. "It's a lot to sneak around with."

"As long as one of us carries the wood and the other carries the torch," Talla dictated in her best Sorceress voice. "There shouldn't be any accidents."

Her co-conspirators cast their eyes down.

"None of those are the real problem, though, are they?"Talla put a heavy dose of accusation in her question.

"Talla," Tina sighed. "He's still a man. Men are really good at doing things we've already worked out for them. We do the thinking. They do the work."

The axioms the Temple taught its girl children died hard, and the one Tina had just pronounced marked one of the most fundamental divisions of labour.

"Maybe if we could find a couple of engineers," Illya supplied helpfully. "Present it to them as a problem from a school test or something. See what they say?"

"If I did that, one of them is bound to recognize the room," she took in a deep calming breath before speaking again. "Yua, am I your Mistress or not?"

Yua recoiled as if slapped . "I - I - . Of course you are."

"Illya? Tina?"

The girls nodded in turn.

"Well, then," Talla flattened her voice, using the tone she'd heard Teachers, Officers and Sorceresses use. "Your Mistress is telling you this will work . I've been inside Zhair'lo's head and he sees these things in a way I don't. He knows it will work. So I know it will work. Clear?"

"Yes, Mistress," they murmured back.

"We'll start bringing wood in tomorrow," she instructed. "The straw will go in last, since it's the most dangerous to have around. Let's do this."

Despite the worries they'd expressed, Talla found herself rewarded with resolute smiles from her companions.

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

Fin'la entered Principia Form as the morning sun's rays slanted past the horizontal blinds on the east facing windows. In her role as the investigator of the recent bouts of unconsciousness, her Queen had assigned her a privileged place in Principia Form. Her space included a bulletin board on which she had tacked numerous pieces of parchment listing those affected by fainting spells. Her Queen had also awarded her a modicum of privacy in the form of a low wall of stretched sheets of fabric, and a single assistant of the rank of Keeper. That assistant, a petite blonde girl with a perpetually bored expression, waited patiently for Fin'la to give her instructions.

'She's twenty-two, though,' Fin'la thought. 'I ought to call her a woman.'

"Sheila," Fin'la gave the woman a nod.

"Mistress."

"Our medical records have arrived, then," she nodded wearily at the piles of parchment on the desk.

Sheila hadn't touched any of the files because Fin'la hadn't left any explicit instructions for her to do so. No spark of initiative lit inside the girl and Fin'la couldn't help thinking of her in the childish form. At first, Fin'la had wanted to make a project of building her assistant a spine, but had given up the effort shortly after beginning. Some people, she had determined, the gods cast in bronze and no help could remold them.

"Let us make ourselves useful, then," Fin'la resolved aloud, setting a pile of the documents on each side of the desk. "The ones you've read go in the middle when you're done."

"Yes, Mistress."

'At last the girl has found something she'd be good at,' Fin'la held her sigh inside. 'A mountain of tedium.'

Watching Sheila set to work, Fin'la found herself annoyed that anyone could attack such pointless work with such contentment and devotion. With a twist of her lips, Fin'la set upon her own stack.

Nearly two bells into the brutal slog through the dry medical records, Sheila looked up.

"Mistress," the Keeper's voice came out flat and dull.

"You found something?" Fin'la asked.

The girl's tone made it impossible to tell if she had discovered the secret to the universe or merely needed to void her bladder.

"No, Mistress. A guest."

Fin'la looked up at Sheila to find the younger woman looking over Fin'la's shoulder. Fin'la turned around to see a woman in an Enforcer's light leathers standing uncomfortably at the edge of the small domain of her office.

From the woman's stature, with her hard mid-riff bared and her legs at stiff attention, Fin'la recognize her as coming from Iron with very little Tight. This one had obviously preferred the Facial upgrades - her hair showed a great deal of strawberry blonde.

"We have not met, I think?" Fin'la rose to greet the woman. "I am Fin'la."

"Mistress," the woman replied with a stiff awkwardness altogether different from Sheila's sheer boredom. "My name in Marissa."

"Is there some way I can help you?" Fin'la asked. "As you can see, we are quite busy."

Some battle waged behind the woman's eyes and Fin'la developed a sense that Marissa had something embarrassing to say.

"You are investigating the ... fainting spells?"

"Yes, I am. Do you know something of them?"

Marissa inhaled deeply before speaking, "May I sit?"

Perplexed, Fin'la waved the troubled woman to the only empty seat in the small space. Taking the seat, Marissa sat stiffly focused her eyes over their heads.

"Several weeks ago," she spoke with painful formality, "during one of the heat bells, I chased a girl roaming out of place."

"A trivial matter," Fin'la shrugged it off.

"I pursued her, in the worst heat of the summer, and found myself suddenly struck unconscious."

Even Sheila perked up at this.

"At first," Marissa went on, "I put it down to the fact of the heat, my recent upgrade and the weight of my leathers."

"What of the girl you chased?" Fin'la asked immediately.

"Exactly, Mistress," Marissa almost snapped back. "Endowment. Abundance. Even with everything I had against me, she should have passed out first."

With a sniff, the Enforcer returned her gaze to the walls and her demeanour stiffened once more.

"When I woke, she ran past me, unaware of my presence but still full of energy. Foolishly, she returned two days later, meeting - as it turned out by her own confession - the same boy she had met before."

"So she outran you," Fin'la steepled her fingers in front of her face, "and had enough energy left to have sex with a boy and run past you again? Meanwhile, you had passed out."

"Yes," Marissa's cold voice replied.

"She then came to meet the same boy again?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Did she have sex with him then?"

"She caused him to ejaculate in her mouth - rather thoroughly - which was enough for the charge of Monogamy."

"But on the second occasion," Fin'la stroked her jaw, "did you experience any fainting?"

"No, Mistress."

Fin'la brushed her hair back, "Was the usual punishment applied for Monogamy?"

"Of course, Mistress," Marissa relaxed now, meeting Fin'la's eyes. The embarrassing part of her story had past.

"Then you must have the names of both parties?"

"Yes, Mistress. Talla Ch'lai and Zhair'lo M'han."

"Zhair'lo?" Sheila blurted out as she rose from her seat to examine the bulletin board.

"He's on our list, isn't he?"

"Yes," Sheila pointed at the last name, scrawled in Temple Script on a piece of parchment hanging off the bottom of the bulletin board. "He was at the Hunter's camp."

"A connection at last," Fin'la breathed. "Let's find out where he slept the night of second incident, re-interview whoever Served him the night of the first ... what else?"

Fin'la smiled.

"And let's bring this Talla woman in for an interview."

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

Maksa looked up as a woman crept into the catacombs late in the afternoon. Even in the dim light near the steps at the entry to her chilly work place, Maksa recognized Agra, an Adept and co-conspirator, and stood up eagerly when she saw the small scroll the woman held in her hand.

"Where are the documents I requested?"

"I'm sorry, Mistress," the Adept waved her empty left hand apologetically at the scroll in her right. "This is all that came for you. The rest were addressed to our Mistress, who requests your attendance in her Office immediately after you read your correspondence."

Maksa cracked the scroll open and hastily unrolled it:

---

While we are aware of the importance of your efforts, in light of recent events, We do not wish to use Our access at the present time to acquire the documents in question. Nor do We have the resources to copy such documents for your perusal.

Apologies,

Sorc Psy, Beshenna

---

Maksa's mouth hung open in speechless shock. The woman hadn't even had the decency to scrawl her entire title in the signature. What 'recent events' affected her research anyway?

"Our Mistress awaits us?" Maksa stood up to face the Adept.

Agra nodded and the two of them made their way out of the catacombs.

"Do we have any idea about these 'recent events'?"

"No, Maksa."

Rubbing her eyes in frustration, Maksa walked beside Agra up into one of the rearmost hallways on the ground floor of the Hall of Sweetness. Despite the shade and cool marble floors, a familiar wave of heat washed over them. As much as she liked the catacombs in the heat of summer, she felt a great deal of relief from her singly upgraded nipples when her chest warmed up.

"How many documents did Pussy receive?"

"A great number," Agra replied, keeping her voice flat. "Most of them were perfunctory matters."

'Perfunctory' ought to mean 'unimportant', but the conspirators used the word to indicate documents coded in some manner.

"They're working through them already?"

"Absolutely, M-Maksa."

On an instinct she attributed to her double Facial upgrade, Maksa had long ago gotten a feeling, despite their similar ages and identical ranks, that Agra looked up to her as much as any of the Officers. Stammering over her name, as if she had been about to say 'Mistress', indicated concretely the accuracy of Maksa's intuition.

"So by the time we get there," Maksa lowered her voice, "They should know what in the nine hells is going on."

They walked the rest of the way in silence, not daring to speak of serious matters in public and not caring to discuss anything else. As expected, they found the rearmost office of Principia Pussy sealed when they arrived, requiring them to knock and wait for the unlatching of the door from the inside. The breeze that wafted out as the door cracked open smelled of melted wax, burnt parchment and warm, nervous flesh. Inside, the entire coven of conspirators busied themselves at the documents spread about the room while a fire in a small metal basin in the middle of it all burned harder than the already unacceptable temperature of the room warranted.

'Records disposal,' Maksa supposed as she heard the door latch behind her.

"Your missive was less than informative, I presume?" the Sorceress asked without looking up.

"Indeed," Maksa looked around the room carefully.

The tight faces of the women told her that Beshenna, at least in terms of the genealogical conspiracy, found itself troubled. Occupied exclusively with the study of charts in the catacombs, she hadn't learned the subtle methods of encryption the women of Pussy used to communicate between cities. Instead, she relied upon half sentences and the faint muttering passing between those who knew the code.

'How odd,' she thought, 'even here, with the doors sealed, they whisper.'

The whispering sufficed, however, to fill Maksa in. Pussy in Beshenna had found herself under considerable stress on account of the complete failures of the Queen of Endowment to give up her search for further evidence. This continued in spite of Form's clearly stated antipathy to the subject. Pussy had gone so far as to arrange for the 'accidental' destruction of a ream of documents. The convenient fiery death of said parchment, carefully arranged by women of Pussy, had fooled those of Form but not their large breasted sisters with their knowledge of heat and cold.

Conversations made more details available, but Maksa didn't find them interesting. It sounded to her as if her compatriots had destroyed the offending evidence without tilting their tiles in a way that showed them to Form.

'That's why we keep our tiles so close to our chests,' Maksa thought, remembering the childish games she'd once played. 'And Endowment have far more cleavage in which to hide their tiles, don't they?'

A quarter bell passed before her Sorceress rose from her position leaning over a low table and slowly straightened her spine.

"I'm afraid they didn't have time for your request, Maksa," Pussy tilted her neck to stretch her stiff muscles. "I imagine your response was quite short."

"Yes," Maksa tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. "The more I think about it, the more I realize they never could have answered to my satisfaction anyway."

"Really?" the Sorceress raised her eyes in mock indignation. "Come. Let us not disturb the others."

Pussy led her away toward a small, higher table where a carafe of water and glasses waited. Maksa, having the lower rank, filled two of the simple glasses to the brim.

"What makes you doubt our sisters?"

"It's not doubt," Maksa waved her hands defensively. "It's just that I know the information I need is going to be layers and layers deep. I won't even know what the second layer looks like until I've seen the first."

"I know this is frustrating for you," Pussy inhaled deeply. "But it will take time, given the priorities we have. You can't blame our sisters -"

"Oh, I don't, Mistress," Maksa's eyes went wide. She hadn't intended offence! "What I meant is that I need to go there."

Pussy's expression flattened.

"To Beshenna," Maksa clarified.

"You want to transfer cities?" the Sorceress twitched.

Maksa saw the older woman's face freeze; felt the other's body tense up. Weeks ago, without her Facial upgrade, she might not have picked it up at all. But here, now, it seemed to Maksa something had broken inside the woman in green.

"What's wrong, Mistress?"

Pussy's eyes turned away from Maksa for a moment and Maksa watched a vast array of barely controlled emotions cross her face.

"You're right," the Sorceress said finally, a touch of sadness in her voice. "Part of me wants to keep you here."

Their eyes met again and deep in those dark pupils, Maksa realized how personally the two had come know each other.

"I'm very proud of you, Maksa. I wish I could take credit for finding you and teaching you but I would be holding you here out of pure selfishness. I'll have the scrolls finished as soon as we have a moment and you'll be off."

"Th-thank you, Mistress," Maksa's eyes threaten to tear as the suddenness of her departure struck her. "You can just send me? We don't need permission from Beshenna?"

"It isn't necessary, no. If migration gets too one-sided ... well, that isn't important now. Your research, in spite of all this -" Pussy waved a hand at the busy women behind her "-is paramount. I'll have the documents signed by the end of day."

The Sorceress, lost for a moment, turned back to look at the Officers. Seeing her superior turn her back so quickly, Maksa felt a chill descend upon the room, regardless of the conspiratorial files.

"I'll think of some innocuous reason for your transfer," the Sorceress spoke distantly over her shoulder. "You may as well return to your research now. I don't know why I called you up here."

'You called me up here,' Maksa remembered very well, 'to check on the quality of the scroll I'd received.'

She said nothing of that aloud however, merely whispering, "Mistress" before curtsying her way out of the office. When she heard the door latch behind her, Maksa gulped back tears and wondered if she'd just ruined a friendship right in its infancy.

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

The promotion from Recruit to Soldier gave Zhair'lo access to maps he had never seen before, leading to surprising realizations. He hadn't, for instance, realized how close to the edge of city Harzen's farm lay. From the out buildings where he'd patched that roof, and more memorably ejaculated over a skinny messenger's chest, he'd needed to walk only a few kilometres to reach the tiny clearing where they'd found Merelda.

Barbarians, weak as he'd found them, had lain not far beyond! He could have walked away from the farm and met them himself. They'd have killed him, in all likelihood, but he'd never imagined the possibility.

Zhair'lo had already spent a great many bells in this Map Room, with its massive, centrally located tables of oak. Rolled up maps took up most of the space in slots along the walls, with window space cut down to the absolute minimum. Even the undersides of the tables held more maps, each one carefully labelled for the curious. Zhair'lo had yet to run the place out of interesting facts. Long after the others tired of this part of the Tactics School, he had remained. It might hurt him in the short run, for the others would be keeping themselves in fighting trim while he studied, but Sergeant Yung and the others supported his quest.

Besides, he wouldn't fall completely out of shape. His schedules still mandated participation in patrols with the rest of his squad, which also required a certain number of hours in both the archery and close combat yards. All of them attended tactical lessons as well. The difference lay only in how they spent their few free bells. Most preferred the yard, while Bree studied the tactical school, and Zhair'lo poured over these maps.

On the third morning after the night of his squad's joint promotion, he heard someone shove open the heavy oak door behind him and pause at the threshold.

"Zhair'lo," Aloe's sweet voice called out.

Following military courtesy, he stood up from his stool and turned to look at her. Instead of her leathers, she wore the clothing of her Temple rank: a yellow skirt and a pair of yellow sashes crossing her breasts. Her hair, normally pulled back tightly, hung in graceful, brown curls. When she closed the door behind her, she stood in a narrow beam of sunlight, a stunningly bright beacon in a dark sea of wood.