"As sweet as ever, eh daughter?" Anrak said with a rueful, gravelly chuckle.
"Just making sure you understand the consequences," she warned.
"In this family, there are always consequences," Anrak said.
Tarrin returned to Dolanna and the others half an hour before the noon bell, and they had him back on the grounds by the determined time. After a quick lunch in the kitchens, Tarrin was summoned to the Chambers of Seven, which was the council chamber used by the Council. Tarrin was not looking forward to it. Just as he suspsected, the Council itself was going to try to correct his problem in using Sorcery, and that made him very nervous. Tarrin didn't trust the Council. He had some friendly feelings towards Koran Dar, because the man seemed calm, wise, and gentle, but he was only one of the seven. Of the others, he only had had contact with Amelyn and Ahiriya, and neither of those meetings had been entirely friendly. He didn't even know the names of all seven.
And now he was going to be forced to put his life in their hands. That didn't set well with him, and by the time he reached the ornate, bronze gilded door that was the entry to the Chambers of Seven, his tail was lashing back and forth like a farmer reaping wheat with a scythe.
For the ruling body of the katzh-dashi, they kept themselves in a humble state. The room wasn't that large, and it was totally devoid of all decoration. The gray stone walls were illuminated by a large glowglobe hovering in midair over a circular table made of white stone. Inlaid on the surface of that round table was a shaeram device, in full color, and around that table stood seven simple padded chairs. Where each triangle that represented a Sphere pointed away, a Council member sat, and Tarrin realized immediately that the Seat of each Sphere sat with their own color pointing towards them. The Keeper, who represented no Sphere, sat in a void between two spheres, and she also faced the door. Seven faces turned to look at him, and Tarrin very nearly turned around and left. They were hard faces, all of them younger than he would have imagined for a ruling body of a world power, a couple of them outright hostile, and their scents were as hard as their expressions, though they were tinged with fear. They were his enemies, he knew that at that moment. They had always been.
"Come in," the Keeper ordered. "We have much to do."
"What are we going to do?" Tarrin asked, staying by the door.
"You will address the Keeper in a term of respect!" Amelyn snapped at him suddenly.
"Amelyn," the Keeper said sternly. "We're going to try to help you," she told him. "We have to understand what's happening to you when you try to touch the Weave, and then we'll try to help you work around the problem."
"What do I have to do?" he asked warily.
"Just come in, and have a seat on the table," the Keeper said. "Right in the middle."
Approaching them, he stepped up onto the table, but as soon as he looked down at the shaeram, memories of the fight with the Wraith flooded into him. He almost couldn't bring himself to step across that green circle, and it made him extremely nervous and unsettled to seat himself cross-legged atop the concave star that represented the Goddess. He wrapped his tail around his body and rested it in his lap.
"Very good. Now, reach out and touch the Weave. If you feel yourself losing control, let it go, wait a few minutes, and then touch it again."
Silently, Tarrin assensed the room. It was in very close proximity to the Heart, and the air was almost saturated with very large strands that carried alot of magical energy. There was alot of power in the room. Touching the weave was almost instinctual for him, and he achieved communion with the Weave as easily as others may pick up a basket. He felt that sudden heat approach, the avalanche of raw power that always sought him out when he touched the Weave, and he broke away before it had a chance to find him.
"That was too soon, Tarrin," the Keeper's voice called to him. He looked down at her, and could see her form shimmering in a curious way that seemed to tell him that she was touching the Weave. "We have to see what happens, and you broke contact too soon."
"I'm not going to let that happen, Keeper," he said adamantly.
"We're here to cut you off, Tarrin," she soothed. "We won't let it get away from you. Just touch the Weave again, and this time let whatever happens happen."
"That's easy for you to say," he snorted under his breath, then he reached out and touched the Weave again. Almost immediately, the onslaught of magical power was upon him, and he gasped reflexively as it tried to fill him with the full power of the Weave. It overwhelmed his ability to let go of the Weave instantly, creating a connection so powerful that just letting go wouldn't be enough.
He felt something try to fall between him and the Weave, an invisible something with no substance, yet had a palpable effect on the magic trying to flood into him, but it was rebuffed forcibly when it tried to choke off the flow of power into him. In half a heartbeat, his body was saturated with power, energy that built and built and built and had nowhere to go. He felt another attempt to limit that influx of magical energy, but it was again slapped away by the raw magnitude of the energy it was trying to stop.
In sudden desperation, he opened himself to the Weave more fully, allowing the energy to flow through him rather than build within him. That helped, but not by a great amount. The power still sought to build inside him, but it did slow it down. That gave him the time he needed to recover his wits, to remember how to sever himself from the Weave, and he slammed the door in the face of that power. The backlash put spots behind his eyes and a sudden pounding in his head, a shockwave of intense pain through his body, and it even made the seven Sorcerers studying him reel back in their seats as if struck by a physical blow.
"Amazing," he heard Koran Dar murmur.
Tarrin sagged a bit, paws to his head as the pounding eased. The pain faded quickly, but it left an imprint of itself in his mind. He opened his eyes just in time to see a ghostly white radiance, wispy like smoke, fade from around his paws.
It had been the first time he'd let it go that far, foolishly trusting that the Council could control him, and the pain of disconnection was almost intolerable. His body was trembling from the lightning-fast wave of pain the rushed through it, as if some intangible being had flown through his body. Panting, he put his paws on the table to brace himself, letting the trembling cease and the memory of the pain dim.
"Alright, Tarrin, try it again," the Keeper said.
"No," he snapped. "I felt you try twice, and you couldn't stop it. If you didn't know, that hurts. I'm not going to torture myself just so you can study me." He felt the Cat rise in his mind, and a sudden irrational fear began to choke off his reasoning. He had no idea where it came from, but it was incredibly powerful. It was all he could do to stop himself from jumping off the table.
"Tarrin, you have to trust us," the Keeper said in a reasoning tone. "We can't help you until we have a complete understanding of what's wrong. If you let us try again, we could succeed this time." He felt them all join into a circle, and the Keeper's body almost began to glow in a white aura to his eyes. She was the lead of the circle. How he knew that, he had no idea. "Now, one more time," she said. "Try it again."
That they joined in a circle meant something. Perhaps joined, they could control the power. Tarrin pushed that irrational fear away enough to get a center on himself, then reached out and touched the Weave.
Almost instantly, he was overwhelmed by power. There was more of it, and it came faster and harder than it did before. Thought disintigrated before that tidal wave of power, and only sensation told him that something was trying to stop the energy. But again, to no avail. The incoming power simply flowed around the attempt to block it, overwhelming it, pulling it into him.
And in the instant it was carried into him, Tarrin was forcibly joined to their circle.
He felt an expansion of consciousness as his own power and even his mind reached out and made a connection to a greater whole. The Group Consciousness of a circle. And in that fleeting moment, he understood several fund
amental truths. Sorcerers could join in circles no larger than seven, for an eighth member with a similarly structured mind created a permanent group consciousness, a mass mind that existed independent of the bodies of the Sorcerers involved, an amalgamation of the personalities of the victims. And when the circle was broken, the mass mind faded away, leaving the linked Sorcerers nothing but empty shells.
But that mass mind was formed because of the similarities between the minds of those forming the circle. Seven humans, who thought in similar ways, could form a safe circle, but eight would push the similarities over that intangible border, and create a permanent mass mind. Tarrin was not human, and because of that, human weaves of mind couldn't affect him. The human mind could not comprehend the way his mind worked, and thus could not affect his thoughts. But Tarrin's dissimilar mind joined to a circle of seven and made it eight.
And the dissimilarity of his mind prevented the formation of a permanent mass mind.
In that glimmer, he understood why the Ancients could do what legends said they could do. The Sha'Kar had been living then, and the Sha'Kar were not human. The Ancients could safely join into circles larger than seven. He wasn't sure of how the actual mechanics of it worked, but it was now obvious that the Ancients could join into circles of at least eight. And who knew what limit the Ancients truly had? Perhaps they could form circles with a specific arrangement that allowed even a hundred Sorcerers to combine their powers into one massive effort. A circle of a hundred Sorcerers with the power of the Ancients could move mountains. That was how they earned their reputation.
In joining into the circle, Tarrin had wrested control of it away from the Keeper. He felt the power flooding into him dissipate into the other seven, reducing the burden it was placing on his body, returning rational thought into his mind. He had never been in a circle before, and the sudden intrusion of the alien minds into his consciousness caused the Cat to instantly and savagely react, pushing the unknown thoughts away with such force that it disrupted the tenuous bonds that kept them linked in a circle.
Instead of a violent tearing away from the Weave, Tarrin simply let it go. But the backlash he had suffered the first time was now placed fully on the Council, as the power inside them evaporated like smoke and caused that shockwave of pain. The Keeper almost fell over backwards in her chair, and the little blond Water Seat fainted dead away. The remaining six all had looks of agony on their faces, which passed quickly into holding their heads in pain.
"What just happened?" Ahiriya groaned.
"Tarrin somehow got into the circle," the burly Earth Seat managed to say. "His Were-cat mind disrupted it. And a good thing too, else we would all be dead."
He hadn't understood it the way Tarrin had, he realized. How could they miss it? It was so obvious. But Tarrin said nothing. The less they knew, the better it would be for him.
"Why do I hurt?" Koran Dar said in a voice not too much like a sailor with a hangover.
"I think we're feeling the backlash Tarrin felt the first time," Amelyn said groggily. "With us linked to him, he pushed it onto us. Goddess, Tarrin, if this is what you felt, then I won't ask you to do it again."
That earned a bit of respect in his mind. His opinion of Amelyn had just improved by several degrees.
"We can't try that again until we research how it happened," the Keeper grunted, rubbing her temple. "Tarrin, what did you feel?"
"I'm not sure," he replied. "There was the rush, then I felt something connect to me, and then my instincts attacked it as an invader," he replied. "I didn't suffer a backlash this time."
"That's because we suffered it for you," the Keeper grunted. "But I have to agree with Amelyn. If this is what you feel, then we can't ask you to keep doing it. We'll go speak with the Lorefinders and see if there's a less painful way for you to try to get a grip on your power."
"I appreciate that, Keeper," he said calmly. He knew that the only reason she said that was because now she was at risk to suffer his pain. Him suffering was just fine, until she had to share in his agony. Then it was unacceptable. "May I go now? I don't think we'll be doing anything else."
"No, I think not. Go on. Just get some rest, there's no telling how that backlash will affect you."
"Thank you," he said calmly, getting down from the table, and leaving without a word.
That had been important, in more ways than one. Tarrin had received a hint of the ancient secrets, lost to the katzh-dashi since the Breaking. The true secret of the Ancients' power had been partially revealed.
And the Council had completely missed it. Then again, Tarrin had the feeling that in that instant, he was the only one of them that was coherent, so he alone could understand the forces at work on all eight of them.
He had to talk this out with Keritanima. The Wikuni's intellect and ability to reason were needed.
What Tarrin got was both Keritanima and Dar. When it was time for all the other Initiates to get out of class, Tarrin wandered over to Keritanima's room, and found her in the company of Dar. They were sitting in her room at the table, chatting idly while playing a game called chess. It was a Wikuni game that had become popular in the western kingdoms, because it required even more strategy than stones, and the lead-cast figurines used to play the game were easy to make. Miranda was sitting sedately on the bed, working on some embroidery, and Sisska and Binter stood vigil beside the door, protecting the Royal person. Tarrin nodded to Binter and Sisska as he entered, and Miranda flashed him a cheeky smile, unleashing her undenyable cuteness upon him. She was sitting with her long, very bushy tail curled up around her ankles, to keep the luxuriantly furred appendage out from underfoot. Her tail was the same yellow color as her hair, something of an oddity among Wikuni. Usually, a Wikuni with fur had colorings that matched their brother or sister animal. Keritanima was a perfect example, for her fur perfectly matched the distinct patterns of a fox, even down to her ears, hands and feet, and tail. Miranda's tail should have been white, like her fur, but it was instead yellow, the color of her hair.
Tarrin noticed absently that Dar was the only one in the room that didn't have a tail.
"Hullo, Tarrin," Keritanima said without looking up. Like him, her nose was very sharp. She reached down and made a move, and Dar winced.
"Ouch," he said. "I was hoping you wouldn't see that."
"Dream on, Dar," she teased with a wolfish smile. "Want to give up now, or are going to go through the futile motions of trying to dig yourself out?"
Dar laughed. "I'll quit while I'm behind," he decided, setting one of the pieces on its side. Tarrin had no idea what significance that move had, because he didn't play the game.
"It's refreshing to find a human that knows how to play a real game," Keritanima told him. "Want to lose again?"
Dar laughed. "No, not right now," he said. "Judging by the look on Tarrin's face, he wants to talk to one of us."
Keritanima glanced at him, her penetrating amber eyes taking in everything at once. "Me," she said calmly, her voice losing its vapid demeanor instantly. "Would you mind excusing us for a while, Dar?"
Dar gave Keritanima a curious look, and nodded. "I'll see you at dinner?"
"Sure," she replied. "Save me a seat."
Dar patted Tarrin on the shoulder as he passed by, and then was let out by Sisska. "You're getting cozy with him," he noted after Sisska shut the door.
"I like him. Both of us do, for that matter," she shrugged. "He's impossible to not like. I've never met anyone quite like him."
"He had the same effect on me," he replied. "I think that's why they made him my roommate."
"It's possible. Something's on your mind, Tarrin. Why don't you just get it off you chest now?"
"Why don't we go take a walk," he said, giving Binter and Sisska a fleeting look.
"They know about me, Tarrin," she assured him. "They've been my guards for three years, and their honor forbids them from revealing the truth about me. Isn't that right, Binter?"
"It is so, your Hig
hness," he said calmly. "We have both sworn ourselves to secrecy. Death Herself could not make us reveal what we know to those who do not."
And that answered that suspicion.
Tarrin sat down on the bed beside Miranda and began to relate what had happened in the Chambers of Seven in a calm, analytical voice. "I have no idea how I know some of it," he grunted after explaining what he felt when he joined their circle. "I've never really been taught anything about circles. Just what Dolanna's said in passing. I knew that they couldn't go over seven, but I never asked why."
"Lula hasn't really gotten into circles either," Keritanima said. "I think that's something they teach after the individual instruction is complete. Lula said they'd be reforming a class again soon. Maybe even in a couple of days. Lula likes me. Maybe I could get her to teach me a bit about circles tomorrow."
"That may help, but what about the conclusion? Could we form a circle larger than seven, as long as there's a mind of another race present?"
"It certainly seems logical," Keritanima said after a moment. "Mind weaves don't affect members of other races, because of a dissimilarity in the way different races think. It only stands to reason that if circles are limited by a similarity in the thought processes of the Sorcerers that make them, then Sorcerers with different thought processes could expand that limit. By only themselves, at the very least, or perhaps they can act as a buffer between two smaller circles, letting two circles join into one through them."
"I never thought of that," Tarrin said, thinking about it. Who was to say that the lead of a circle couldn't turn around and join another circle?
"But I think that you're right, brother," she said. "There's a good chance that you may be onto something. Too bad we can't really take advantage of it. There are only three of us. Four, if you count Dolanna. Actually five, if we let Dar into our little group. And Dar hasn't yet managed to touch the Weave."
"There may be something we can use, Kerri," Tarrin told her. "When I got swept up into the Council's circle, the stress put on me suddenly lifted. I was still being flooded, but I could almost control it. I shunted most of what I couldn't control onto the Council, and that left me coherent enough to understand a few things before the circle was broken."
The Tower of Sorcery Page 81