Talla's Fallen Temple Ch. 23

"I think that was a contraction," the Goddess whispered.

"Imminence?" a young woman's voice replied out of the darkness.

One of the Adepts was always awake and alert, even when the Goddess slept, and while it was difficult for the Goddess to see her attendant, the blue sparks that twinkled off the older woman's eyelashes and the tips of her hair made her easy enough to find.

"I think it's beginning," the Goddess reiterated.

The bed sank slightly and there was a sound of bare flesh sliding along silk as the younger woman sought the hand of the older.

"You think, Imminence?"

"A pulsing in my belly."

There was a thoughtful, perhaps critical, pause as the third bell past midnight began its quiet ringing. People existed who needed to know the time of night, but there was no need to waken the whole city.

"When did you birth your last child, Imminence?"

It was politely worded, that question, but it carried a careful hint of doubt.

"Some ten years ago," the Goddess earnestly wished the younger woman could hear her eyebrow rise in disdain. "Why should that matter?"

"I gave a child to the Temple less than a year ago," the Adept answered. "I would humbly suggest what you felt was not a contraction, Imminence."

The Goddess let out an indignant breath.

"It may have been years, my dear, but I think I would ... AGH!"

Sparks flew from her hair as she attempted to double over - and failed.

"Imminence?"

A sharp inhalation was followed by a slow exhale.

"Yes."

"That was a contraction, Imminence."

The Goddess coughed faintly in an attempt to regain her dignity.

"You may summon Within."

"Promptly, Imminence."

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

Tina couldn't possibly be skipping along behind Talla, given where they were, but it certainly felt that way.

"We're gonna be exhausted in the morning," Tina pointed out gleefully.

Talla nodded and held her torch aloft so she could look farther down the tunnel

The thing about sewers, though, was that they were the most uninspirationally designed structures ever built by a woman. It was as if the women who'd laid them out knew exactly how much respect would be paid to them over their entire existence..

"Sad story," Talla replied as she made a chalk mark on the wall.

"How come you always mark the walls on your left?"

"So the marks'll be on the right on the way back," Talla shrugged.

"Huh?"

"Right. Returning," Talla explained. "Both start with 'r' so it's easy to remember."

"Oh."

The passage they'd come from, barely wide enough for Talla to stretch her arms out, had ended at an intersection where it was dumping its water (they'd decided it was better to just call it "water" and leave it at that) into a trough at least as wide as two women were tall.

"That's got to be it," Talla grimaced.

"Gotta be what?"

"The main output line," she told Tina, nodding toward where the wider tunnel vanished into darkness. "That'll run underground right out of the Temple and come out in the river down by the farms somewhere. I bet there's some huge metal grate - maybe even several of them - to prevent anybody coming in that way."

"So we go that way?" Tina pointed down the long passage.

"We have to go up the hill, toward Sweetness." Talla shook her head and turned to face the opposite direction.

"This is going to take a while, isn't it?" Tina sighed.

"Most likely," Talla admitted ruefully. "I had no idea how many forks were involved in this mess."

Tina's lips twisted.

"I don't suppose there are any maps or anything we could dig up?"

"Maybe," Talla was doubtful, "It seems more like they trenched these things when they built the Temple, then just built over top of them."

Tina put a hand on her bare hip thoughtfully.

"So it looked good from the top, and that was it? To hell with future planning?"

"As long as they had regular places where they could dump, uh, water into the system, and they marked them from above, that might have been good enough. Honestly, this doesn't feel very well planned out at all. Way overdesigned, in fact."

"So how long do you think it'll take to find this ... thing you're looking for?" Tina asked, the first hint of worry in her voice.

Talla looked around the tunnels, trying to picture all the forks and mergings, spreading out like branches of a tree, always reaching upwards.

"Six nights?" she guessed. "Maybe more if we're really unlucky. But V'Shika gave us a good idea which direction to go, right?"

"We'll need more parchment, for sure," Tina pointed out.

"Yeah," Talla agreed. "The first thing to do is find a bridge across this, uh, trough."

They'd been careful, so far, to keep their sandals out of the continuously flowing streams of liquid occupying the centres of the passages they were exploring. The larger trough, however, was well beyond their ability to leap.

"You think there's a bridge somewhere?"

"Oh, yes, I'm certain," Talla lied.

"Okay," Tina said. "But we'll find the bridge and then go back. It's way colder down here than I expected."

Talla smirked and began walking upstream.

"That's because," she explained, "there's a breeze."

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

Sergeant Yung kicked the door open exactly as the sixth bell began to ring out.

Zhair'lo had lost count of the number of days he'd been in training. Weeks, had it been? In his dreams, he was excited about something but he couldn't remember what. The only certainty was that he was being very clever.

When the shouting started, his dreams were washed away (like water flowing through an underground tunnel?).

"Up and at it, Recruits!" the Sergeant called out.

Zhair'lo found himself entangled with a naked woman. Which one was it? Tara. He liked Tara the best as far as sex went. Bree was always in a hurry, Del was rote boring and Zia's bloodlust creeped the nine hells out him. Although, if he wanted to talk about anything, Bree was pref-

"You've got a patrol in half a bell, moving against the clock!"

The Sergeant had told them the previous day that they had graduated, in a way, from the confines of the palisade, to being allowed to take runs with the patrols. When you ran with the Fighters, the reward for becoming tougher was a job harder than the last one. None of them ever seemed satisfied with the strength or speed they had.

Zhair'lo had decided he could respect that.

Tara had hopped out of bed before he'd even finished gathering his thoughts.

"That's the least comfortable sleeping position I've ever managed," she winced, shifting her weight from one leg to the other.

She wiggled into her leather skirt as Zhair'lo stood up and reached for his own leathers.

"You sure it wasn't the - uh -"

"As if!" Tara protested. "How hard do you think you spank anyway, boy?"

The proper response to this, he knew, was to snap at her ass with his belt, but he was interrupted when Sergeant Yung called out again.

"Move, Recruits!"

Belligerent playfulness set aside temporarily, Zhair'lo laced up his shorts as he watched Tara put on her white, cotton top and then slide her arms through the upper part of her armour.

"Tie me up?"

Zhair'lo reached across the bed to fasten the toggles that held the back of Tara's top together. She could have done them herself, but it was faster to have someone else do it. He slipped his own shirt on and was throwing the leathers on top of that as they headed out the door.

"C'mon, Kit," he whispered at the last Recruit, stiffly getting out of bed.

"Fuckin' hurts, Zhai," Kit protested, rotating his shoulder.

Kit had taken a fall the previous day, during an afternoon run.

"We're just running today," Zhair'lo pointed out. "I'm sure it'll loosen up."

There might be push-ups, but there was no reason to mention that. Also left unmentioned were the purplish bruises on the outside of Kit's shoulder. He probably couldn't see them himself, without a mirror.

Sergeant Yung, for his part, was ignoring how long it was taking Kit.

"How's the shoulder?" he asked casually, without looking over.

"Alright, sir," Kit replied quickly. "Sure it'll be fine, soon."

"Good, good," the Sergeant muttered. "Get some breakfast and move out."

Gingerly, Kit put on his armour and walked with Zhair'lo over to the mess hall.

"It's just stiff after sleeping," Zhair'lo advised. "You'll see. It'll be fine once you're moving."

The mess hall was full of Fighters when they arrived. Most of them weren't armoured, favouring various shades of the same beige work clothes that were worn in the city. The difference here was that there were women wearing the same browns and off-whites as men. Zhair'lo had long since gotten used to the idea of men and women eating together - the first night, when they'd all been fucking in the same room, had put him well past caring about that.

As he sat down with the other Recruits, he realized how much his attitudes had changed since he got here. Privacy was irrelevant, discarded into the first ditch along the way with all sorts of notions of propriety, courtesy and complicated sexual interactions.

That was all fine, though. The thing he couldn't get used to was the noise.

Fighters, they had all discovered over the last couple of weeks, were loud and boisterous. They didn't talk to each other at mealtimes; they shouted. They laughed at high volume and made rude gestures - even between men and women.

Setting quickly to work on the ham and eggs already laid out before him, he compared the Barracks to his other accommodations.

Everywhere else he had been, from the bakery to the blacksmith to the farm, there had been a staid, controlled atmosphere. The farmers could be heard to cheer, occasionally sing, and slap each other on the back, but they were nothing like the Fighters. His time with the Hunters, who had to take second place in terms of sheer lethality, had led Zhair'lo to figure that his colleagues in his present occupation would be even more constrained. Their attitude, at least during the time when they were off duty, had been shocking. These people were trained, with the permission of the Temple, to use the deadliest of weapons?

The most unbearable effect of the noise was the feeling of not belonging. Zhair'lo and his fellow Recruits didn't yet carry the boisterous air of the veterans. The eight of them sat at their table, nervously eating their food, watching all of the raucous frolicking around them.

'At least we feel excluded together,' Zhair'lo thought.

"Ready for the run?" Bree nudged him eagerly.

"Damn straight!" Zhair'lo replied, casting his voice as loudly as he could. He winced as his voice failed to lay a finger on the ambient noise in the room. The right attitude had to be in there somewhere.

"What is it they talk about?" Bree added, looking around the room, clearly thinking along the same lines as Zhair'lo.

"I can't make out a single word with all the noise," he admitted.

"If we knew what to say to each other, we could be like them."

Zhair'lo could only nod and finish his food.

It didn't seem like enough time had passed, but Sergeant Yung was already standing, having polished off his breakfast.

"The Patrol against the Clock will leave in five!" he shouted over the din.

There was a modest cheer of acknowledgement before the crowd went back to normal. Chairs and benches scraped against the floor and Fighters - the real ones, not the Recruits - made their way out of the dining hall.

Once those authentic paragons of soldiery had exited, the Recruits followed.

The change in behaviour, as they made their way to the armoury, was pronounced. The two squads, sixteen Fighters with equal parts men and women, marched confidently and quietly once they were outside. The armoury, its door wide enough to admit them four abreast, was soon full of lethal, intense human beings diligently preparing for battle.

As they were already dressed, Zhair'lo and the other Recruits waited in the street. They formed two lines outside the crowded armoury, with Zhair'lo at the front of the boys and Bree at the front of the girls.

Sergeant Yung, the first to be fully armoured in neck to toe beige leathers, began handing short swords out to Zhair'lo. Meanwhile, a female Fighter was handing bows and quivers to Bree.

"Keep your weapons in their sheaths," he warned. "There's no trouble out there that any of you are ready to be involved in."

'And yet,' Zhair'lo thought, 'you would never send us out defenceless.'

"Authority on this patrol is held by Ji'ann," Sergeant Yung nodded to a tall, dark-skinned woman at the centre of the crowd of veteran Fighters. "But I have Command. If anything happens, she'll figure out what to do and I'll call out orders. You got that?"

This question was asked quietly, not shouted, so the response was a series of nods from the four boys.

"If, however, you find yourselves in the centre," he warned. "And she gives you the orders, that means you have Command, and you call out those orders for her."

There was a pause, then, as he let that sink in.

"You hear me?!"

"Yes, sir!" they shouted back.

So 'Authority' was what women had, and 'Command' was what men had. The woman in charge would make the decisions and a man would call the orders out. Zhair'lo couldn't fathom that delineation. Surely the women, with their many-times upgraded lungs, could shout as loudly as the men. He could only shrug.

The last weapon the Sergeant handed out was a bow and a quiver of arrows. This was for Zhair'lo. Of the male Recruits, he was the only one with any weapons training at all, so it made sense to give him the weapon he could actually use. If a battle found them, he would be the only one with any clue how to fight. The other three boys hadn't been taught anything at all. On top of that, Zhair'lo noted with pride, he was being given the same weapon the female Fighters got.

Lacing the quiver to his back, Zhair'lo considered the inexperience of the other boys. How long had they all been here without receiving any weapons training? It was all marching, standing and fucking. It seemed that the Fighters considered it far more important to instill discipline in them than to teach them the ways of war.

'Discipline,' he thought, 'is not what I came here to learn from you people.'

"Move out!" the Sergeant ordered.

In a moment, the three squads began marching with the eight Recruits now firmly in the middle. While they might not take precedence entering or leaving a dining hall, they would by no means be placed in the rear position in any formation that went out beyond the palisade walls.

Four abreast, they marched neatly through the wider boulevards of the Barracks until they arrived at the south gate - the one that faced away from the city of Gern and its Temple. Sergeant Yung stopped to converse with the gate guard, a conversation that lasted only a moment and, to Zhair'lo's ears, consisted entirely of nonsense words. He concluded that they were exchanging passwords for later use.

"Gate clear?" Yung shouted up to the men on the wall.

"All clear," a man's voice replied.

"Cover patches!" Yung ordered, and twenty-four people loosened the ties on the small patches over their left breasts, covering their rank symbols.

"Open the Gate!"

There were four guards, two men and two women, at ground level. Two of them pivoted the horizontal wooden locking beam, lifting it to a vertical position so that the left half the gate could be opened by the other two guards.

The opening thus made was only wide enough to permit two adults to exit side by side, even though Sergeant Yung's group - or was it Ji'ann's group? - was clearly arrayed four abreast.

"Move out!"

Without any further word, the men in the front squad slid easily into a two-abreast formation, followed by the women, the Recruits and the rear squad.

'We do that well enough,' Zhair'lo thought, a tick of pride putting a smirk to his smile.

The moment they were clear of the gate, Sergeant Yung gave the order to return to four abreast. With a few more orders, he had the three squads spaced out so that the women and their bows had a clear view and good firing angles at anything that might cross their paths. A copious amount of space was left between the two veteran squads and the protected (Zhair'lo tried not to think "coddled") squad of Recruits in their midst.

When they hit the ring road that ran a wide circumference around the city, they turned left. It was, after all, a counterclockwise patrol they were running. It would be five kilometres or so, non-stop, to the way-station.

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

"How long has it been?" the Goddess muttered through gritted teeth.

"Only four bells, Imminence," Within responded.

An attendant with a cold washcloth wiped sweat off the Goddess's forehead.

"You're doing very well, Imminence," the attendant put in.

The Goddess twitched an eyebrow at the younger woman, who disappeared to refresh the bowl of water in which she'd been soaking the cloth.

"She's learning," Within placated her superior. "Intends to be a physician herself, despite her start in Pussy."

No one in the small bedroom was clothed. Given the level of privacy that women could count on, women in labour were generally naked unless they became cold - which was very rare. Since this particular woman was a Goddess, the same state was imposed on everyone around her.

The Sorceress of Within sat comfortably in a small, black-cushioned chair, her legs crossed and a vague look of disapproval on her face. The Goddess meanwhile, waddled back and forth across the floor between the bed and the large, ebony dresser across the room.

Another contraction struck, freezing her in place.

"They're much closer together," Within observed. She waved at her medical kit and its array of potions. "Do you want something for the pain? Before we really get into it?"

The Goddess's eyes bugged out for a moment, the wind knocked out of her, and had to wait for the breath to respond.

"Eleven upgrades in Within?" she looked at her disciple haughtily. "I should think not."

Within made the pretence of having been chastised, but the expression on her face became more bemused once her Mistress turned to waddle in the opposite direction.

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

"You alright, Talla?"

Talla squinted warily at the girl who had called her name. She tried to recall her name. Nessa, was it? They were gathered outside Form's gate, waiting to be admitted for their day of the fighting lessons.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You look a bit tired," Nessa worried. "You been sleeping okay?"

"I slept alright," Talla offered a white lie. "Just a bit of a cramp today."

In truth, she hadn't slept more than a couple of bells, what with all the underground exploring. She realized that if she tried to do that every night, it would start to show. Her adventures in that regard would require a bit more spacing.

That did not, however, explain the twitching muscle spasms in her stomach.

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

"You gotta problem, Zhai?" Bree hissed at him, not entirely kindly.

"Whuh?" he grunted back to her.

The forward squad of Fighters was running a good ten to fifteen metres in front of the Recruits. It only gave them a modicum of privacy for whispered conversations.

"You keep lagging," she pointed out. "Hold steady."

Zhair'lo hadn't noticed until she pointed it out. He had been trying to ignore, for some time now, a nagging cramp in his side. As he focused on it, he put his fingers to the spot where he felt pain. There should have been tension in that muscle, if it was causing him so much trouble, but it was soft and pliable instead.

'It's not my pain,' he realized. 'It's Talla's.'

Ahead of him, at the periphery of his awareness where the four women of the forward squad were running two paces behind the men, he heard one of the women grunt out something that sounded like an order.