Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 24

While the Fighters and their Ranger kin plotted the destruction of a small tribe of barbarians, Talla and Yua were climbing down a ladder, plotting out a map of the sewer and drainage system of the Temple of Gern.

"Doesn't smell quite as bad as Tina said," Yua tried not to wrinkle her nose.

Talla tilted her head up, intending to give Yua a look of scorn, but found herself staring at the other girl's bare genitals instead. With a roll of her eyes, she continued climbing down the ladder.

"Do you really want to go without underwear down here?."

Yua might have shrugged - it was hard to tell from just the sounds and Talla didn't feel any particular desire to look up at Yua right now.

'Maybe later,' she thought. 'After a shower.'

Maintaining her Service schedule had been a tough decision for Talla. Certainly, easing off would have left her more time and energy for mapping out the vast, forking tunnels underlying the Temple. On the other hand, she didn't want to arouse any suspicion. There was, firstly, the danger that her superiors might find out what she was really up to. Secondly, less dangerous but more likely, they might begin to think her loyalty to the Temple was failing. Talla had the distinct feeling that the women of Form had been watching her ever since the day they'd made Zhair'lo whip her.

'But I got away with meeting him, didn't I?' she thought. 'Beat you then, you heartless bitches.'

Yua hadn't gone out to Serve this night, but Talla had, and she still had the faint feeling that a bit of semen might be dripping out of her.

They had all accepted there were sacrifices to be made, and if one of those sacrifices was walking around torchlit tunnels late at night with breasts sore from squeezing and legs weak from being held in the air so long, then Talla would gladly be the one to pay that price.

"Follow the yellow chalk marks on the left wall," Talla explained. "We'll head down to the main output pipe and than work our way up toward Pussy's domain."

Yua was still standing by the ladder, looking back up the long shaft that led up to the laundry rooms.

"Why do you suppose the sewers are so deep?"

"What?"

"The ladder," Yua pointed upward. "It's really long."

"The whole system has to slope downhill to prevent backups," Talla shrugged a guess. "Maybe that's just how deep it needs to be for everything to flow down from Sweetness."

Yua marched alongside Talla, looking for the chalk marks on the walls.

"Naw," she said. "Think about it. Sweetness is already way up high on the hill."

Talla tilted her head thoughtfully.

"Okay," she admitted. "We know there are some underground rooms throughout the Temple. They must need room for those."

"That makes sense," Yua said slowly, not quite agreeing.

Now that she knew where she was going, and was far braver for it, Talla was able to lead Yua to the main output trough within very short order.

"The smell does get worse."

"Yes," Talla agreed, looking across a wide canal. "This is the largest tunnel in the place. From here we go up about thirty metres and cross a bridge."

"Why do we cross?"

"Because the information V'shika gave us makes it look as though the Synergist room is on the left side of Sweetness, and Endowment is on the right."

"How do you keep your sense of direction down here?" Yua worried, hugging close to Talla.

"I just do," Talla shrugged. "The chalk helps."

"Yes, Mistress."

Talla could see that Yua was getting worried, but that 'Mistress', thrown in with all the usual banter, was a sign of Yua's faith.

'She's not doing this because she thinks it's a good idea,' Talla realized. 'She's doing it because I think it's a good idea and she trusts me.'

The other point, however, was that the only one who really needed to be down here was Talla. She was the one with the 'direction sense' and the wherewithal to navigate the subterranean maze. Tina, or Yua, or whomever else she brought along, was there to keep her company. Oh, she could pretend to herself it was for safety, that two women in the sewers could cover one another in case of injury. But, when she had an honest moment, Talla admitted she just didn't want to be down here alone.

'It's gods damned dark is what it is.'

Talla squeezed her body along the wall and felt a twinge in her hips that made her wince.

"Spanker?" Yua asked.

"What?"

"The way you're walking," she clarified. "Somebody spanking you tonight?"

"No," Talla rolled her eyes. "Just one of those guys who likes the same position over and over again."

"Ah."

"Here we are," Talla pointed to a stone bridge hanging over the canal.

Whoever had designed the crossing had meant it to last. It was an arch made of solid stone blocks, each one a wedge with the whole assembly held together by a central keystone. The rest of the sewers might seem to be arranged haphazardly, but the bridge had been done by a woman with her head on straight.

'Or, possibly, a woman who never, ever wanted to come back down here again.'

"No danger of this thing falling into the water," Yua remarked.

"No," Talla agreed.

They began their march up the left bank of the free flowing trough.

"Where are we now, you think?"

"Under the Goddess' domain," Talla replied. "We'll follow this up a couple hundred metres into Sweetness and hopefully find a branch that takes us farther left."

Yua gulped.

"We'll get back in time, though, right?"

"Oh, yes, don't worry. The important thing is being able to find our way back to Endowment. But there's only this one bridge, so that shouldn't be too bad."

They walked on in silence.

"Kinda funny, isn't it?" Yua asked.

"What's that?"

"Did you ever think finding your way back to Zhair'lo would mean crawling through this muck?"

"Gotta hit the bottom before you come out on top?" Talla asked. "Is that how it goes?"

"Guess so."

"I think I hit bottom when they made him whip me. Can only go up from there."

Another lengthy silence.

"What was it like, when you saw him again?"

Talla hesitated. On the one hand, everything about sexuality she had ever been taught by the Temple made openness with other women mandatory. She should be willing to tell Yua every detail, so they could learn from each other. These were Temple teachings, which made Talla suspicious, but she had no intention of discarding the few good lessons the Temple offered out of juvenile contrariness.

On the other hand, the relationship she had with Zhair'lo was special. There was an undefinable emotion, a feeling for which she had no word, which made it separate. Talla felt she could still go out and Serve the boys the Temple sent her to Serve. She could still enjoy their penetrations, just as Zhair'lo most assuredly enjoyed the girls he was with. These held no meaning to her. But the meshes with Zhair'lo and the way she felt about him were something else.

The conflict occupied Talla's mind for so long, there was time for Yua for to make a small coughing noise.

'In a way,' Talla thought, 'I owe it to you to say something on the matter.'

Yua, Tina, Zoe and everyone else in her conspiracy had put their asses on the line for her, after all.

"It was a bit crazy," Talla said. "Something electric happened when we touched."

"Electric?"

"A bolt of lightning, literally," Talla went on. "Threw us on our backs. Blew out the fire."

"Wow. What is with you two?"

"I -," Talla stammered, stopping suddenly at the bottom of a short series of steps, "I really don't know. But there's no one else like him, no mesh like the ones with him. I feel ... I feel ..."

Yua held her torch high as Talla turned to face her, a completely lost look on her face.

"There's a closeness," Talla fumbled for words. "It's a feeling where I want to have sex with him, but sex isn't enough. I want - I want him to be deeper inside me than sex can go."

Talla turned around and started walking again. It was a moment before Yua followed.

"I like Zhair'lo," Yua offered. "He was nice, and he broke my Seal."

"Yeah?"

"And it seems he's pretty special, too. I mean, having sex with him was really good."

Talla shrugged.

"I'm just saying," Yua stammered. "I don't feel that way about him - or anybody."

Talla felt uncomfortable suddenly.

"Yua," she stopped the other girl with a raised hand.

"Yes, Mistress?"

They all knew better than to use that title where anyone could hear them. Talla had long since decided to accept it, though always with a warning glance whenever they were in public. Yua, however, used the title noticeably more often than any of the others, even if it was just whispered in the baths.

"I don't ... I don't own Zhair'lo, okay?"

"What?" Yua looked confused.

"It doesn't bother me that he's Served by you and other girls," Talla explained.

The two girls stared at each other for a moment before Talla realized that she'd misunderstood Yua.

"It's not that," Yua said. "It's just that I don't - I don't have anyone the way you and Zhair'lo have each other."

"Oh."

"I mean," Yua stammered. "There's just you, really."

"Me? You're jealous because I have Zhair'lo?"

"Let's get going," she insisted, her face suddenly quite red. "I'm getting cold."

Talla shook her head once to clear it before nodding in agreement. They really didn't have any more time to waste. Whatever was troubling Yua could wait until they were done and out of the sewers. Holding her torch high and moving slowly, Talla surveyed the branching tunnels arrayed before her.

"Based on what V'shika told me, and the angles I could stake out from the surface, the place we're looking for is just to the left side of Sweetness's triangle."

Yua followed silently along, her torch bobbing only slightly.

"We'll stay as close as we can to the central tunnel and see if we can find a branch maybe fifty metres up or so."

"How can you be sure?"

"I can't," Talla admitted earnestly. "I'm just guessing based on a look I took from one of the three storey buildings in the central triangle. V'shika gave me the location of the entrance and the length of cavern underneath it."

"So we could be doing a lot of exploring?"

"Yeah," Talla sighed, "But we've got a couple of bells, right?"

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

"Imminence?"

Groggily, the Goddess awoke and searched the darkness for the source of the voice.

"Yes?"

A slim, naked woman, was covering a candle with her hand so the light wouldn't shine in the Goddess's eyes. Instead, the light shone and reflected off her bare, pinkish flesh.

"The child is awake," she said. "Will you nurse or should we -"

"I will nurse Magnus," the Goddess said immediately, feeling the rush of milk to her breasts. "My milk will leak otherwise."

Relieved of her abdominal burden, she had been able to sleep on her back the last night, a blessed relief. Still, the moments with her child were more precious than sleep and as she only had a few such days, she intended to make the best of every moment.

As she sat up in her bed, a second woman, guided by the candlelight of the first, brought Magnus to her.

"He already seeks milk from my breast," the woman smiled, watching the baby mouth at her nipple. She chided him lightly, "Nothing there, baby."

"Indeed," the Goddess tried not to sound offended. It was her intention to give this child the best start she could. What could be better than the milk of her own body? Not only was she his mother, she also had breasts imbued with dozens of upgrades.

No one else would nurse her child for as long as she could help it.

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

"Talla, wait."

"What?"

"What's that?" Yua lowered her torch to angle the light into a side passage.

Talla looked down the narrow alley. A little ways in, she made out an even narrower cutting which, upon inspection, contained a steep stairway.

"It goes down pretty deep."

From the top of the stairway, Talla gave a glance back at the water rushing past their feet on its way to the main trough.

"It turns at the bottom," she peered into the darkness. "Nine hells, it must go around and underneath that trough."

"Why would they do that?" Yua asked.

"I can't imagine," Talla scratched her head. "But there must have been a really good reason to go that deep. We have to check it out."

Careful, and ever mindful of the condensation that collected on every surface, Talla and Yua walked down one stair after another. Twelve steps were enough to reach the bottom, where the passage turned right and went under the trough.

"I don't fancy going under a sewage trough," Yua wrinkled her nose.

"It doesn't look to be leaking," Talla said hopefully. "And it barely smells here at all."

"The tunnel looks small," Yua shied back.

Small was an understatement. Talla had been trying, with some success, not to imagine what a collapse would do to them. She continually reminded herself that these passages had every signature of having been over designed for their waste water draining purpose. Hopefully, the structural design was similarly overdone.

The first thing they noticed, ducking their heads to cross under the trough, was the breeze that rushed through the tunnel.

"Nine gods," Yua shivered. "I could cut glass with my nipples."

They entered a space so large that their eyes couldn't make out the far end in the torch light, at least not right away.

It was just tall enough for the two of them to stand up.

"Look at the floor," Talla said. "This place was carved out of the rock, not laid from quarry stone like upstairs."

"So?"

Talla shrugged.

After some investigation, they found the space they were in to be a circular room with a rough, stone floor and a square pillar in the middle made out of smooth, quarried, rock. They stowed their torches in sconces that had been mounted on the walls near the entrance and examined the pillar more closely. The sides of the pillar, central point of interest, had openings near the floor.

"What's the point of that?" Yua asked, pointing at the square, thirty centimetre gap between the floor and the bottom of the pillar.

Talla got down on her stomach to examine the space. Yua knelt next to her, quickly found the floor too rough for kneeling, and squatted down on the balls of her feet instead.

"It's not a support," Talla whispered, more to Yua's crotch than her ears. "It's an air vent."

"An air vent."

Talla carefully extricated her head from the pillar and sat up, smiling.

"The Synergist has to be kept cool, doesn't it?"

"V'shika said ... oh!" Yua shouted.

"Sh!" Talla glared at Yua.

"Sorry."

"This vent probably goes straight up to the room behind all those locked doors," Talla pointed out. "Shout loud enough, someone might hear you."

"This late at night, even?" Yua worried.

"I imagine it's guarded night and day. This is how they control us, after all, right?"

Yua nodded, realization still dawning on her face.

"This is why you were so excited about the draught of wind?"

"Yeah," Talla's face fell.

"What's wrong?"

"Look at it," Talla waved her hand. "That's way too small a space for even you to fit into. Plus there's a grate at this end, probably at least one or two more up there somewhere."

"Oh," Yua sighed. "This isn't the back door you were hoping for?"

"No."

Sitting on the cold, stone, floor, Talla took a moment to reflect.

"The smell isn't as bad, here," Yua pointed out.

"Makes sense," Talla agreed. "They probably configured the whole system so there'd be fresh air where they needed to draw it."

"Or the Synergist room would smell awful."

There was another pause.

"Could we break through there somehow?" Yua asked.

"No chance," Talla shook her head. "You start making that kind of noise down here and this room will be full of Enforcers in no time."

She shivered, a memory racing through her mind of a hasty, painful invasion of her body when a group of such people had burst in on her and Tina.

"We'll have to think of something else, then," Yua tried to be confident, laying a hand on Talla's knee. "You will think of something, I'm certain."

Talla ran a hand through her own hair.

"I'm glad you trust me so much," she tried not to let her cynicism through.

"You're my, Mistress," Yua breathed, the way she always whispered when she said the forbidden word in public. "Of course I do."

"Are you alright?" Talla peered at her friend.

Yua gulped.

"I - uh," she stammered.

Talla tilted her head to show patience and understanding and put her hand over Yua's, which was still resting on Talla's knee.

Yua turned her eyes away for a moment, took a deep breath, and spoke.

"Nadine won't talk to me anymore, you see."

"I'm afraid I don't see," Talla shook her head.

"We were Sealed together, right?"

Talla nodded.

"And we, ah, had each other."

"Oh," Talla felt realization dawn on her this time. "And now -"

"Now that I hang around with you ..." Yua trailed off.

Nadine had abandoned Yua, although Nadine probably had a different opinion as to who had done the abandoning.

"You Serve often, don't you?"

"It's not the same," Yua replied. "When I joined your - when you tested me - I thought, well ..."

There was an embarrassed silence as Yua refused to finish her sentence.

"You thought?" Talla prodded.

Yua glanced around in the darkness, hoping perhaps that someone would rescue her. She seemed halfway to tears.

"I thought we would do that a lot," she blurted out suddenly, squeezing Talla's knee.

"Oh!"

Yua lowered her eyes.

"I didn't realize it was only that once -"

"It's not - it doesn't have to be -"

"I just ... what?"

"It doesn't have to be just that once," Talla said as earnestly as she could.

In all this time, it had never occurred to Talla that girls might be joining her for any reason other than their desire to avenge themselves against the Temple. Yua might have actually joined because of some feeling she had for Talla herself. And all this time, Talla had been completely neglecting that feeling. Had Yua been looking for time alone? Had she been looking forward to this late night adventure?

"Wait," Talla peered into Yua's eyes. "Is that why you're not wearing underwear?"

Yua nodded dolefully.

"Oh, Madra Zen, come here," Talla opened her arms and pulled Yua in before she burst into tears. "I'm sorry, Yua, I didn't know."

"It's alright," Yua gasped. "You didn't know."

Yua was curled up, facing sideways, with her right shoulder tucked between Talla's breasts.

"I should have realized, though."

They sat in silence for a while, as Yua got control of her breathing and slowly nestled deeper into Talla's cleavage.

"Yua?"

"Mistress?"

"Are you, ah, aroused now?"

Another sad nod.

"Down here, on this stone floor, in the cold?"

Yua nodded into Talla's chest.

Comfort cast aside, there was a simple problem in the way.

"I'm not ... quite ready," Talla admitted.

"It's okay," Yua said eagerly. She looked up into Talla's eyes, the water evident in her own, "I can help you."

"Oh ... I -"

Before Talla could say anything, Yua was pushing her on to her back.

"You've done this -?"

"Before?" Yua asked, pulling Talla's underwear down. "Yes."

Talla let out a brief noise of dismay, but surrendered to the smaller girl's ministrations and opened her legs.

"You have the most beautiful breasts," Yua simpered, moving her head between Talla's thighs. "But we're the same down here."

Half a breath later, Talla felt the barest trace of a tongue pressing at the cleavage of her genitals. All was hidden beneath the small skirt she wore.

She shuddered as she felt the little tongue dart against her clitoris.

"Right there, Mistress?" Yua whispered.

Talla hissed in the affirmative and the tongue plunged between her lips.