The Tower of Sorcery

by James Galloway

  Just the sound of that word made him visibly bristle. "Nobody holds me," he hissed.

  "Fine. Tell that to someone that can do something about it," she said with deceptive mildness.

  "Sorry," he said after a moment.

  "Not a problem," she said with a toothy grin. "I think I can look past your faults. You are a friend, after all."

  "You're so kind," he drawled.

  It didn't take Tarrin long to explain the plan to Allia, just as it didn't take long for her to understand and accept it. She was a bit put out with him for meeting with Keritanima alone, but he knew that she had been up almost all night, standing at the door while Jesmind was in the room. That he did as soon as getting back to the room, bathing, and dressing for another day of being frustrated. He explained things to her as she braided his damp hair, back in his room.

  "I should have been there, deshida," she admonished him as she yanked on his hair, pulling it against his ears.

  Tarrin winced and bent his head back to take the pain out of it. "I'm sorry, but you needed to sleep," he replied. "I may have been busy with Jesmind, but I could hear you at the door."

  She didn't blush in the slightest. Things between him and Allia were always completely open. "I am Selani, my brother. I can go with a night's lost sleep easily. You don't have to protect my well being."

  "Well, I will anyway," he said bluntly. "You're one of the few people I have here, my sister. I have to keep my eyes out for you."

  "It's so nice to be appreciated," she said with a warm smile, beginning the braid. It had grown back even longer than before, much to his irritation. He was almost afraid of how much it would grow if he lost his braid again.

  "The way Kerri talked, she expects to run," Tarrin told her.

  "That's not a problem, my brother," she said easily. "My tribe will protect us, and not even the Keeper herself would dare refute the commandments of my chief. If she did, the Selani would call council." Calling Council was a Selani term for declaring war. And not even the Keeper was insane enough to provoke the Selani, who were, by no doubt, the most devastating fighting force in the entire world. The Selani could possibly conquer the entire west, but conquest and spoils weren't important to the desert-dwelling nonhumans, just as leaving their precious desert was something no Selani would do without serious motivation. Allia was the first of her people to willingly leave the desert since the war with Arak.

  "I hope so, Allia," he sighed. "If we run, it's a good bet that we'll have a sizable army on our tails. We'll need somewhere to go that's safe, because we certainly can't hide."

  "Hide? A Were-cat, a Selani, and a Wikuni, hide?" Allia laughed. "I would think not."

  "Exactly," he said with a wry chuckle. "Maybe your father's camp is about the only place in the world we can go that puts us beyond the Tower's reach. They're probably one of the few peoples that the Tower would have reason to fear."

  "It's not of any worry to us, my brother," she assured him. "Let's speak of your idea to invade the cathedral of Karas."

  "Later," he told her. "We're almost late for class."

  Allia snorted. "You mean for imposed torture."

  "That's about the way I feel about it," he agreed with a grunt. "Maybe we'll get lucky and do it today, because they're supposed to reform a class once all the Initiates can touch the Weave. I won't have to stare at walls again."

  "Maybe so," Allia hummed. "But let's worry about today more than next ride."

  Alert, tense, wary, Tarrin jumped onto his very cramped window sill and prepared for the tricky negotiation through the open space and down the wall. Much as he realized when first looking around the room, the window gave him the perfect way to get in and out without being seen. It was on the third floor and was too narrow to squeeze through, so nobody would associate it with being an exit. But Tarrin's small cat form easily fit through the small opening, and Tarrin had a need for using it.

  After another exhaustive day of aggravation, Tarrin went to bed early that night to put off anyone keeping tabs on him. For this, he didn't want an audience, because if he was successful, he'd not want others to know what he was doing. He was going to figure out how Jesmind got off of the grounds. He wasn't quite sure how to do it, but he had to start somewhere. He figured that the best place to start would be at the Ward itself, and to do that, he'd have to go take a look at it. He knew it was too much ground to cover to look at every span of the ward, but Jesmind's scent was still fresh on the ground, and he could easily track her movements to find where she had crossed through the ward. But first thing was to get out of his room.

  Backing out of the window, he lowered himself over the sill and carefully backed his forepaws off the window. It was much too precarious a position to attempt to shapeshift, so he simply let go and began to fall. Shapeshifting in midair, he drove his claws into the stone of the tower wall, expertly hitting a seam between the blocks, and stopped his downward momentum. He quickly climbed down to the ground, changed form, and then faded into the shadows like a ghost.

  Finding Jesmind's scent was easy. Trying to figure out why it went into the main Tower was not. He puzzled at what she would need from there, and instead picked up her scent from the door from where she both entered and exited, then began tracking her across the grounds. Jesmind's scent was faint, but its striking uniqueness when compared to the multitude of humans, dogs, cats, mice, and horses made it easy to follow. There had been no rain to wash it out, and it was too warm still for dew to form. He followed it through the shadows and between buildings, noticing that she kept herself out of the open whenever possible. From the smell of it, she stayed in her humanoid form instead of relying on her cat form to cross the open areas. That spoke alot about her ability to hide. Or perhaps she simply didn't care about who saw her.

  Stalking across the grounds, Tarrin skulked along, keeping his nose to the grass and his ears alert for any roving patrols. He doubted they'd pay attention to him, for he looked just like any of the large numbers of other cats that roamed around the Tower's grounds. More than once, the scent of a mouse attempted to distract him into a little hunting, but he kept his mind and his nose on the job and promised to attend to the hunting after he was satisfied that the work was done for the night.

  It took him almost an hour to track across the expansive area enclosed by the fence, following a fading trail laid down by his bond mother the night before. It took him to a section of the fence deep in the dark shadows between the torches and lamps of the city beyond, a place very well suited for a lone figure to slip over the fence. The street past the fence was large, an avenue of some kind, but it was also deserted. The smells of the city, the foul miasma of human waste, decay, and sweat, were strong in his nose as the evening breeze wafted them in from the cobblestones beyond. The slender iron fence was directly before him, and Tarrin paced back and forth with an eye out for patrols and a mystery forming in his mind.

  Jesmind's scent went right up to the ward. From the smell of it, she didn't backtrack to give herself enough of a running start to jump over the fence. She somehow walked through the fence without touching it. He hadn't been born with his nose, so he could be wrong, but he didn't detect the faint layering of scent that would have hinted at her laying scent over the same ground again.

  Quickly changing form, Tarrin used his height advantage to study the fence, and do it quickly. Nightly patrols of the fence perimeter were frequent enough to make him move quickly. The fence itself showed no sign of tampering, and that close to the ward, he could actually feel it. A slight electric tingle that intensified when he reached toward the fenceline. He wasn't sure what would happen if he actually came into contact with the ward, so he was careful to keep his distance from it as he scrutinized the fence again. But another look gave him the same result. The fence showed no sign of tampering, and Jesmind's scent wasn't on it. He sat down, tail lashing in irritation, studying the fence and the ground. There was no physical sign of her passage, but then again, there wouldn't be
after a full day. The scent trail simply stopped at the edge of the ward. Like she had simply vanished.

  Annoyed, he paced back and forth along the fenceline, looking for a possible second scent trail, but there was none to be found. How in the furies did she do it? She walked right up to the fence, and then it was like she turned into a bird and flew off. He was stronger than she was, and he couldn't clear the fence without a running start, so he knew that she couldn't have jumped it. But she got out somehow, and he had absolutely no clue as to how. She left no clues behind.

  A roving patrol sent him into the shadows, and he returned after the squad of men marched further down the line. The glint of the light from their breastplates played in weaving lines as they moved off, and Tarrin had a fleeting memory of the way that same color played in Jesmind's hair when the sunlight shined on it. Then he sat down again and went through his memories of the ward that had trapped him within the scribed symbol, when he fought the Wraith. The ward had trapped him, but it had not trapped Sevren, because Tarrin was a magical creature. Where Sevren wasn't. Tarrin had come into physical contact with the ward, like it was a solid wall that was preventing him from crossing.

  Yet Sevren had passed through it harmlessly.

  Tarrin's eyes lit up, then he silently shapeshifted back into his humanoid form and chuckled ruefully. "Oh, Jesmind, if that's how you did it, I'm going to kiss you on the cheek and thank you for being so clever," he said to himself. He reached out very carefully with his paw, taking painstaking care to see exactly where the ward began. He still wasn't sure what it would do if he contacted the ward, but this was something that made the risk worthwhile. He felt his fingers impact an invisible barrier a few fingers in front of the bars on the fence, and to his relief, it caused no flash of light, or pain, or anything that would give him away. Taking off his shirt, he wrapped his right paw and forearm up in the shirt tightly, making sure that it totally and completely covered his entire arm and paw. Then he approached the ward cautiously, stopped within arm's reach of it, and slowly extended his wrapped paw.

  His paw extended well past the bars of the fence.

  Grinning, careful not to extend his arm past the protection of the wrapped shirt, Tarrin pulled back his paw and then extended his bare paw slowly. He carefully reached out, slowly, and then felt his fingertips strike a solid invisible barrier.

  "Jesmind, you clever girl," he said with a smile. By insulating himself from physical contact with the Ward, he allowed himself to pass through it. By surrounding her magical body in a non-magical material, Jesmind had literally walked right through the ward. And she did it as a cat. The reason her scent seemed to stop just before the Ward was simple. Tarrin would bet that she took off her clothes there, threw her pants over, then carefully laid her shirt across the Ward's boundary. Then she shapeshifted and used the shirt like a tunnel, going in one side and then wriggling out the other. All it would take would be a careful slip through the bars and then reaching back in for her shirt, and a fully dressed Jesmind could leave from the other side. And when she picked up her shirt, which had held her scent-trail, it picked up her scent along with it. Putting his shirt back on and shifting back into his cat form, he tested the grass just before the Ward, and picked up the telltale scent of cotton from which her shirt had been made. He remembered the scent of that shirt. That shirt had been laid upon the ground, and it made him confident that he knew exactly how she managed to do it.

  His respect for his bond-mother grew more and more. To think up such an unbelievably clever way to circumvent a barrier did her tremendous credit. The only reason he figured it out was because he'd seen a Ward once before, and he remembered the explanation that a Ward like that would only prevent a magical creature from crossing it. But when he surrounded his magic with nonmagical material, it acted to insulate him from the power of the ward.

  The simple fact that Tarrin knew that he could leave the Tower grounds whenever he wished lifted a tremendous weight off of his shoulders. The gnawing fear that had been sitting in his belly since they raised the Ward disappeared, and he actually felt himself relax a great deal. The Cat now felt secure in the fact that it was not caged. This cage could be opened whenever he wished, and until he wished to do so, it served to keep his enemies out. So both he and the Cat were more than content to allow it to remain, because it no longer affected him personally.

  Purring for the first time since returning to the Tower, the large black cat turned and bounded back towards the Tower proper, a spring in his step and his mind high with thoughts of the future.

  He missed seeing a large skeletal figure with glowing red eyes step from the shadows on the far side of the boulevard across the fence, cackling in a raspy, dusty voice. It was a tall, gaunt figure, wearing ancient, battered armor of an archaic design, and with an old broadsword belted to its hip and a shield strapped onto its back. A large burgonet helmet concealed a grayish skull-like visage, but did nothing to conceal the lipless gray flesh that ended abruptly in yellowed teeth. It was obvious that the form was not a living one.

  "Clever you are, Were-cat, yes," it said in a voice like the grave, cackling again. "Clever indeed to show Jegojah the way in. Time comes, it comes, when sword and claw will cross, yes. We will test your blood, we will, and see if it is as sweet as it is hot. Yes."

  Jegojah, Doomwalker, the most powerful creature the mages could summon short of a Demon itself, stepped back into the shadows, and its iron-shod boots rang in harmony with its inhuman cackle as it stalked away. It had things to do, places to be.

  And people to kill.

  Chapter 13

  Tail swishing back and forth, eyes closed, Tarrin kept his paws on the table and tried to remain in a meditative state. It wasn't easy, because he was still internally celebrating what he felt to be his independence from the Tower. He kept wanting to jump up and down, but he knew that it was imperative that he keep his elation to himself. Keritanima's plan depended on him looking unhappy, and it would ruin it. It was a good plan, and he wasn't about to destroy it. Dolanna's breathing kept anchoring him to reality, and her scent of ivory and lavender and silk soothed his jittery consciousness. Her scent had slowly begun to have that effect on him; her very presence was usually enough to take the raw edge off his nerves. Tarrin noticed it after Jesmind left, and he had the growing suspicion that his subconscious, his immature Cat mind--he was only a cub, after all--was seeking a replacement for a mother figure. With his own mother out in the city, temporarily distanced from him, Dolanna came the closest to that role. So he was starting to react to her differently than before.

  He was much calmer now. A night spent in sleepless joy had mellowed into a simple feeling of contentment, though if he thought about it too long he would get worked up again. That helped him focus on what he was doing a bit more, and the Weave was out there. He could feel it. He raised his chin and reached out with all his senses, reaching to make contact with the Weave. Thoughts and memories were centered on the Weave. Memories of the feeling of drawing in, and the fragmented memory of the only time he had ever managed to use Sorcery, were working with his active attempts, trying to shape his reaching out to seem to fit in with the memories of Sorcery he held inside. There had to be a middle ground there, and that was where he thought he'd finally manage to make a touch on the Weave. He had to push out and draw in at the same time, he reasoned. That seemed illogical, but he had noticed that logic rarely had a leg to stand on where magic was concerned.

  Realigning his thinking, he bowed his head and emptied out his mind, then took a crack at it. At first, it made him seem further away from the Weave, but then he began to feel it on the edges of his awareness. He tried to reach out and draw in at the same time, directing his attempts at the feeling of warmth and pulsating, heart-beat like throbbing that surrounded him. It tantalized him, staying right where he could sense it but just out of reach, and his serenity slowly began to erode into aggravation. He began to rise up out of his chair, eyes opening and lit from withi
n with that almost glowing radiance that meant he was angry.

  "Calmly," Dolanna said in a soothing voice. "Do not work yourself up, Tarrin."

  Blowing out his breath, Tarrin sat back down. Waiting for something to happen was getting to him, and his good mood quickly disintigrated into something more unfriendly.

  "I could feel you more active with the Weave before you lost yourself," Dolanna told him in a calming voice. "Whatever you were doing, continue. Maybe it will be what you need to succeed."

  Nodding, panting a bit, Tarrin bowed his head and closed his eyes--

  --closing his eyes. No wonder. Smacking himself on the head with a paw, he groaned in dismay.

  "What is it, dear one?" Dolanna asked curiously.

  Opening his eyes, Tarrin reached out while trying to draw in, focusing his eyes where he could sense the energy of the Weave. The strand slowly wavered into a phantasmic form before his eyes, and he felt himself make contact with it. The sudden influx of power into him felt like the glory of a god. It was warm, tingling, and it filled him like a vessel, saturating his body with a feeling that came close to rapture.

  "Tarrin!" Dolanna gasped. "You did it!"

  "I did it," he said, trying to both ignore and revel in the sensation at the same time. The strands in the room became visible to him as wavering, ghostly tendrils, and he could feel the pulsating power of the Weave, almost like a heartbeat, roaring through him. And it was building up. He wasn't drawing it in anymore, but it was still flooding into him, and that pleasure was starting to turn into pain. "Now how do I let go of it?"

  "Cut yourself off, dear one!" she said quickly. "You are building up too much power!"

  "I'm not doing anything!" he objected, feeling the pulsating like a hammer to the back of his skull.

  Dolanna's body seemed to shimmer, and then he realized that she had touched the Weave. He felt something sever his connection to the Weave like a knife, and then the power inside simply bled away, leaving him feeling cold and strangely empty. It also left a sharp headache, but the pain in his head began to fade almost as quickly as the power had.