Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 16

"What great emergency is this?" Abundance asked, her eyes flashing in irritation at the way her attention was being dragged away from the paperwork in front of her.

"Three of our lot, returned after the twelve bells of midnight last night," Atreya replied.

"Those three there?"

The Sorceress looked past Atreya to where a pair of Adepts and a Keeper waited at the edge of her innermost sanctum, nervously twiddling the hems of their yellow skirts.

"Yes," Atreya said, reading from a sheet. "They were out at Halfway Camp Seven, one of Master Lyric's camps, and all returned late."

"Don't I have better things to do than worry about this?"

Atreya pursed her lips.

"The gate guards wanted them tried today."

Abundance rolled her eyes.

"The gate guards want everyone whipped for everything," she sighed. "I don't care -"

She paused a moment and tilted her head thoughtfully.

"All three of them?"

"Pardon?"

"I mean," she explained. "All three of them came back late. I've heard of one woman falling asleep or losing track of time. But three, at once? In separate rooms with different men?"

Atreya rubbed the bridge of her nose with her index finger.

"Separate tents," Atreya corrected. "But that is odd, I agree."

"Bring them in."

The Second turned and waved the three law breakers into their Mistress's presence. They passed through the doors, one at a time, curtsying as they came. She had never seen such a dishevelled lot. There was darkness in their eyes that said they hadn't slept in days, though the troubling events were only the night before.

The Sorceress looked them over carefully, then picked one of the Adepts.

"Speak," she commanded. "Tell me the truth."

The woman in question rubbed her palms against her temples as if trying to grind her memories out of her head.

"There's little to tell, Mistress," the woman replied, her eyes on the ground, her voice quavering just slightly. "We arrived as we always do, with the women from Form and Sweetness alongside. We called out for our men as we always do."

Abundance folded her arms, waiting patiently.

"I began to Serve mine," she went on. "I'd been using my mouth and my breasts, to get him really ready, you see -- when something happened."

"Had he penetrated you?"

Now the woman turned a deep shade of red.

"No, he never did. I never actually Served him."

"What?" Atreya exclaimed. "You never Served the man you were assigned?"

The Adept let out a sob.

"I never had a chance," she complained miserably. "Something came over us. I don't know what it was. One moment I was there, playing with him in my cleavage; the next moment I'm being woken up by one of the Form girls, yelling that it's time to go and we're more than a bell late getting home."

"How did she know this?"

"The moon, I imagine, Mistress."

The Sorceress let out a sigh.

"So you rushed back? Without Serving?"

"The men were all deeply asleep, Mistress. It seemed pointless to try."

"Wait," Atreya interrupted. "A woman from Form was also late getting back, then?"

"All of them were," the Adept responded. "All the women. Endowment, Form, Sweetness. Everyone."

"You were all struck unconscious?" Abundance asked, waving her gaze over the three women before her.

The pathetic trio nodded in reply.

The Sorceress twisted her lips and straightened herself up to her full height.

"Tell the enforcers that their intention to punish my Disciples is ridiculous," she told Atreya. "I'll dictate a scroll shortly to their Mistress. We will also tell them that We are interested in their investigation into what caused sudden unconsciousness of so many women -- and men. Such a disturbance in the minds of so many speaks of something rather powerful and We will hope that Our attention is not so focused on rule enforcement that We are neglecting the health of Our Disciples."

"They mentioned no investigation, Mistress," Atreya replied.

The Sorceress speared her Second with a flash of angry, blue eyes.

"Ah," was all Atreya could think to say.

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Zhair'lo ducked through the flaps of his tent -- his tent, not the one he and Talla had used in the far clearing. Nine hells if he would do anything even slightly out of the ordinary this morning. He intended to behave as much as possible like everyone else.

He was doomed to failure, of course, but didn't know that quite yet.

The first problem was the encampment. Zhair'lo couldn't remember ever being the first to wake up, but it was clear that no other Hunter had yet risen from his bed. There was a chill fog resting quietly over the wet grass as Zhair'lo uncomfortably noticed the lack of a crackling fire at the camp's centre.

Shrugging, he walked over to the fire and started to assemble kindling and tinder. He'd been an apprentice at enough vocations that this was a procedure well known to him. Scrape out some flint onto the tinder, then scratch, scratch, scratch. The dry grass, protected as it had been, was quick to catch. A few swift breaths brought the flames to the twigs and then to the larger branches. The dew hadn't been heavy, even with the fog. The smell of burning pine needles wafted up to his nose, an odour always attached to a promise of warmth.

Breakfast, when the Hunters were out and about, was usually a meat stew made with a good portion of boiled oats and that meant he would be getting a cauldron full of water from the well. Zhair'lo, dumping the first bucket into the big pot, was just lamenting the fact that he would have to do this all by himself when he started feeling a little odd. It just wasn't like his comrades to be this lazy.

The sun was up, for the gods' sakes! Where was everyone?

For a moment, he was angry, but this quickly melted into worry. Had he been the one to sleep in? Had they already left? This concern seized him like a yoke around his neck. What if they had skipped breakfast and made off?

He wasn't precisely sure where each man had gone the night before, but he knew which was Kenji's tent and it was there that he went first.

Pausing at the doorway in a moment of hesitation, it crossed his mind that he might be letting paranoia jerk his cart down the wrong path. He listened closely, hoping that he might hear some snoring or, if he was lucky, the sounds of his comrade and mentor stirring from sleep.

Not a sound reached his ears.

Could they really have left him behind?

Worry getting the better of propriety, he gently pushed aside one of the overlapping flaps at the front of Kenji's tent. The fact that the toggles hadn't been tied from the inside was a vague hint that something was amiss. It meant Kenji hadn't been awake when his guest left at the end of the evening.

Not like him at all, Zhair'lo thought.

There was Kenji, though, lying on his back, a deerskin blanket thrown carelessly over his lower body. Zhair'lo looked just long enough to see a hint of movement in the man's chest.

'He looked dead, there, for a moment, though, didn't he?' Zhair'lo thought.

His paranoia had been wrong and they hadn't abandoned him. Relief flushed through him, washing away even his vague embarrassment at having revealed his insecurity. They'd just had a really long night, that was all. Possibly the women had been extra energetic, due to some festival or other in town that had gotten them all excited. The men were a little more tired than usual and were taking their ease on a brisk morning.

Returning to the fire, he realized he hadn't put nearly enough water in the cauldron. He set about gathering more from the well and would follow that with stoking the fire to a proper blaze that could boil the whole thing.

They would all wake up eventually, and he would be very casual and stoic about how he'd prepared everything for them, just like a proper Hunter.

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A woman with an iron circlet on her brow stood up indignantly behind her oak desk.

"What is your purpose here?" she challenged.

Atreya looked at the Adjudicate and gave her best shot at a Withering Glare. She'd seen her own Mistress do it multiple times every day, seen dozens of women crack under that blue-eyed, blonde-haired gaze. A Sorceress needed that kind of look, so a Second ought to start practising.

Regardless of the effectiveness of her expression, she waited.

There was a pause from the angry woman with the iron circlet, not quite long enough to violate protocol, but certainly enough to be rude, before she added a final word.

"Mistress?"

Atreya smirked before nodding to Shanata behind her.

"We are here on the orders of the Sorceress of Abundance, to observe."

'Be vague,' Abundance had said, 'let them stew over what I've ordered you to observe.'

The Adjudicate, what was her name? Sonja, that was it. Sonja glared back.

"Your Mistress did not wish to come here herself?"

"My Mistress has many affairs to which she must see," Atreya countered. "Besides, there are protocols regarding the physical separation of Perfections."

'Accidents happen,' was another way of putting it, and accidents that happen to too many important people all at once had terrible consequences. It was a principle of Temple life that those who carried Perfections had obligations to keep their lives and, more importantly, their deaths very predictable. Putting several women with Perfections in the same room, when it wasn't necessary, was an unwarranted risk.

All of which had nothing to do with why Abundance hadn't made this trip.

'I hate that gods damned place,' the woman in green had muttered. 'You go; take Shanata. She'll know enough regulations to keep that whip away from Our Collective Ass Cheeks.'

Atreya's lips twisted as she remembered the phrase, spoken with a nobility only a Sorceress could lend it.

Almost poetry, she thought.

"Very well," Sonja replied. "We've questioned all of our women and those of Sweetness already. Your three will be next."

"You're interviewing them separately, of course?" Shanata asked.

"Of course," Sonja hissed in reply. "Though yours have likely polluted their recollections in the bells since by speaking to each other."

Shanata was unfazed. Unlikely Atreya, she didn't outrank the Adjudicate. In fact, she was two ranks below. On her side though, was her sure knowledge of the law and her certainty that she lived her life by those laws. As she knew herself to be above reproach, she could afford to be quite bold.

She let her voice go to ice against the fire of the Adjudicate.

"Have the accounts of the women you've interviewed differed substantially?" she asked.

Something cracked in the other woman; she pursed her lips in discontent and her tone softened quite suddenly.

"No," she admitted ruefully as she sank down into her seat. "And I doubt the reports of yours will differ either."

As Shanata took a breath to speak, Atreya made a small hand gesture to stay her. Shanata didn't understand until the Adjudicate went on.

"It makes little sense," she remarked, almost conversationally. "They called out names, just as they always do. They were in various states of undress and activity when suddenly ... nothing. It was one of ours, if it matters, who woke up first and alerted the rest when she realized how late it was."

Sonja rubbed the bridge of her nose.

"I've never seen anything like it."

Shanata turned to Atreya, silently asking permission to speak.

The Second nodded, meaning, 'Yes, now is the time.'

"May we sit in?"

Sonja started to shrug but caught herself and disguised the motion as an awkward sort of shoulder-rolling stretch.

"Be my guest," she said with a wave of her hand toward the empty chairs at her side.

She turned to her aide, a prim and proper Neophyte with several sheets of parchment on a small desk.

"Send the first one in, dear."

"Mistress," the girl bowed.

By the time the next bell rang, Shanata had determined that Sonja had been right. The accounts from the Endowment women, all three of them from Abundance, shed not a torch's worth of light on the situation, unless one considered iron clad confirmation of the ineffable to be somehow virtuous.

The last of the women to sit before them was an Adept, looking sheepish but somewhat relieved when she began to realize that the questions being put to her seemed more academic than accusatory.

"Well, thank you, dear," Atreya said. "Is there anything else you remember? Anything at all that might help us determine what happened last night?"

The Adept shook her head, but paused a moment.

"Did the young one come home late as well?"

"Young one?" Shanata asked. "What young one?"

"I was the last to go into the tents, you see," she explained. "But there must have been someone coming after. A young girl, probably in white, who was late."

"There were no Whites who came back late," Sonja said. "Hunters are generally too old for such girls."

The Adept's expression firmed up.

"No, Mistress," she said. "There was a young boy there. Couldn't have been twenty, even. He was the only one who didn't get named. I remember assuring him his girl would come."

"Is it possible he wasn't being Served that night?" Atreya asked.

"At a Hunter's halfway camp?" Sonja asked, entirely focused. "It could happen, but not likely. The halfway camp is usually where they stop after three nights without Service. Even then, the schedule would be to Serve half the men one night and half another night. We would never schedule to Serve all except one."

"Mysterious," Shanata declared. "We must find this one."

Atreya let out a breath.

"That will be difficult," she pointed out. "Determining who got sent where, after the fact, isn't easy."

Sonja shook her head.

"Not that bad," the Adjudicate argued. "We have to do similar things quite often."

"You have to search for lost girls?"

She shook her head.

"I mean when we suspect that two women have switched assignments. In that case we have their names and have to determine where they were sent -- that is to say -- where they were supposed to be."

"And this time," Atreya fired back, "You know where's she supposed to be, but not her name."

"It'd be easier if we at least knew the Hunter's name," Sonja tilted her head to the Adept. "Did you happen to get it?"

"Sorry, Mistress. No."

Sonja grimaced.

"It can still be done. I'll give the orders immediately."

"Thank you, dear," Atreya said. "You're done here. Tell the others you can all go home."

"Thank you, Mistresses," The Adept replied, quite grateful indeed, and departed with a quick bow.

If Sonja noticed that Atreya had just waived all punishment aside, effectively for all of the women involved, there was no reaction. Her facial expression was that of a woman deep in thought.

"I need to find a girl in white, knowing only where she was sent last night," she muttered as she stared blindly through the farthest wood-grained wall in her office. "Where to begin?"

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Zhair'lo had the pot boiling by the time the first of the Hunters finally woke up. He hoped that the scent of fresh spices wafting into the air would conjure some of them out of bed. It was Kris and G'len whom he first greeted, though their responses were well out of character for their occupation.

Scratching his head and squinting, even though the fog greatly diminished the light of the sun, Kris pushed his dark hair out of his eyes and grunted at Zhair'lo.

"How the hell was your night, kid?" Kris asked.

Zhair'lo raised an eyebrow. None of the Hunters had ever called him 'kid'. Not that he could remember. Eyeing them closely, he realized that both Kris and G'len, a lighter haired fellow who was sitting on the ground at the entrance to his own tent, looked like they'd walked through several hells just to get their eyes open.

"Fine," Zhair'lo deadpanned, trying to avoid the question by feigning that the stirring of a boiling pot needed a great deal of attention. "You?"

Kris shook his head groggily and began rubbing at his temples.

"Damned if I remember ..." he trailed off.

G'len, by this point, had figured out where he was and decided to try to stand. He did so with a reasonable degree of competence, but without any of the grace or stealth one expected of a Hunter. Walking over to the fire, the lighter-haired of the two experienced bowmen sniffed at the stew.

"A tad more paprika, lad," he advised. "Put any salt in yet?"

"Not yet."

"Two solid tablespoons, then," he added. "Say, did yours ever show up?"

"What's that?" Zhair'lo asked, pretending that the fetching of spices was consuming his mind and hoping the question would go away.

"Your woman. Last night," G'len clarified. "Did she show up?"

"Oh, yeah," Zhair'lo replied casually, focusing on stirring.

"What was she like?" G'len continued to prod as if it were his own memories he meant to poke.

"Oh, y'know," Zhair'lo said. "Typical Form type. Dark hair, blue eyes, into a good spanking. That whole bit."

It was Kris's turn to grunt.

"I can't remember a gods damned thing about last night," he said. "Not much past getting into my tent, anyway."

"Aye," G'len confirmed. "Me neither."

Zhair'lo twitched, but kept stirring, keeping his back to his comrades.

"But you remember yours?"

Now what? It was too late to lie, wasn't it? If he was going to lie, he should have started doing it quite a while ago. And what good was lying anyway? Should they ever find a way to check, what would Jenni say? She and Talla would have met on the way home -- at least that's what Zhair'lo assumed was to happen -- and shared stories. If Zhair'lo started lying so he sounded like everyone else at the camp, his story wouldn't match with Talla's. Or, more importantly, Jenni's.

"Yeah," he shrugged. "What happened to you guys?"

"I dunno," Kris said, still rubbing his temples and squinting. "I remember she wore orange. Must have been Endowment, what with the tits and all. She was rubbing me with them and then ..."

He shook his head.

"Nothing," G'len added. "Then nothing."

"Pretty much."

"Weird," Zhair'lo put in with a shrug.

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In the very centre of the widest, most cavernous office space in the entire Temple, an Adept stood nervously in front of the Adjudicate from Form.

"What you're asking isn't tenable, Mistress," the aide explained.

Though she stood with her arms folded, her attitude wasn't rude. Her manner was more defensive than outright rebellious. It wasn't that she didn't have a right to tick her chin up just a little, given that this was, after all, her place. But when a woman came from Form with that circlet on her head, it made everyone twitchy.

"Explain," Sonja replied.

"We don't have a way to track what you're asking for," she explained.

The aide took a deep breath and waved a hand around to indicate the giant, circular room that was officially called Central Service Allocation. Dozens of women were moving about and dozens more sat at desks. Satchels, labelled with the Division symbols of circle, square and triangle, were loaded up with cards. Once full, those satchels would be shuttled off.

"Our organization here is based on the men, not the women. The goal is to ensure no man ever goes more than three nights without being Served. When a man's name comes up, we send it off to one of the Divisions for handling."

"You must give them more than a name," Sonja insisted.

"Of course," she said. "We give them an age as well, to follow the protocols. If they're in a group, like the Hunters in question, or they've already gone three nights for some other reason, their cards are marked as high priority so that all get Served that night."

"And that's it?"