But there were other tracks. Boot tracks, some of them overly large, as patrols of Goblinoids marched in spiral patterns out from Gora Umadar. They saw none that first day, even after they stopped for the night when a storm brought little snow but howling winds down on the plain. Tarrin was forced to resort to magic to build a shelter made out of ice, a rounded one that could stand up to the wind, but was surprisingly warm inside when they got a fire going. He'd made sure to make small windows in all four directions so the one staying up could see, windows clogged up with wads of cotton to keep the light of the fire from spilling out of those holes and to also keep the cold from getting inside.
Before setting out well before sunrise the next day, Tarrin consulted the map, looked at the watch, and then checked the stars. "We need to slow down," he announced to Jesmind. "We'll walk for most of the morning, then pick up after we stop for lunch."
"Alright," Jesmind growled, activating the Illusion that concealed them on the featureless plain.
Tarrin's use of magic the night before had ramifications. Not an hour after setting out, they skirted wide of a large force of about a hundred Goblinoids, being led by an armored cambisi, and they were marching with great haste towards where Tarrin had erected the shelter for the night. The Illusions worked very well to hide them from a force of Waern, Dargu, and a pack of twenty Trolls, for they saw them coming well before they got close enough to be a danger, went very wide of them, then laid down on the snow and waited patiently for them to pass.
"Well, there's your diversion, my mate," Tarrin had whispered to her as they hurried by. "Still feel like venting?"
"I think that's a little too much exercise," she said primly. "I don't want to wear myself out now, do I?"
Tarrin watched them curiously, his eyes narrowing. "Why didn't it Teleport?" he wondered aloud.
"What?"
"The Demon isn't Teleporting," he noticed. "They could have sent a horde of them after us, but they didn't. That Demon is marching to where we stayed last night. Why?"
"I have no idea."
"Neither do I, but I think it's fairly important I found out," he said seriously.
They got their chance to beat up on some of Val's forces later that afternoon, as they picked up the pace after lunch. They caught up to a patrol of about fifteen Dargu, looking to be returning to Gora Umadar, and this time Tarrin had no say in the matter. Jesmind's distortion went flying by him as he slowed to take in the possible threat, and he was forced to rush after her to at least give her some support. Jesmind had meant it when she said she was looking forward to having someone at hand she could use to release her fury, and she had not been joking. She abandoned the Illusion when she caught up to them, letting them look death square in the face, and attacked the lot of Dargu with infuriated savagery. Were-kin hated Goblinoids with a passion, and that only helped spur Jesmind on as she assaulted the tail end of their column with the Cat's Claws. Tarrin barely had reached them by the time she'd cut six of them down, and the remaining nine looked torn between engaging the wild-eyed, cursing Were-cat, screaming hideous obsceneties at the top of her lungs as she tore through Dargu flesh with her metal claws, and turning and running away. But the Were-cat was faster than them and they knew it, so they banded together to mount a desperate defense against her. It turned out that they only lined up in a convenient array that let Jesmind attack them all without having to chase any of them down. She fell on them with mindless fury, ignoring their jabbing spears and their rusty swords, sending blood and little pieces of dog-faced Dargu flying with every whip-like rake of the Cat's Claws.
Tarrin slowed to a stop and leaned on his staff, seeing that Jesmind was in no danger from this lot. She needed the exercise, needed the distraction, and it would do her good. So he stood back and let her have her way with the Dargu, tearing into their lines with wild-eyed glee and killing five of them in the process. The four survivor turned with yipping calls of fright and tried to run away, but Jesmind simply chased them down, grabbed them by the backs of their heads, often by their ears, then slashed a metal blade of the Cat's Claws over their throats, not only cutting their throats, but taking the heads off their bodies. She did that with the first three, methodically killing them one by one, then she loped after the last, who was squealing with fright as he ran as fast as his lanky legs would carry him, a mangy tail up between his legs as he ran for his life. She loped along after him easily, then took the severed head of the last Dargu she'd killed and threw it at him. Jesmind's aim was true, and her inhuman strength made the decapitated head strike with the power of a musket ball. It struck the Dargu right in the back of the head, sending a pink cloud into the air as both skulls shattered from the impact, spilling it to the clean white snow. She caught up with it quickly and drove all ten metal blades of the Cat's Claws into its back in a simultaneous movement. The body did not jerk or flinch, meaning that it had been dead the instant it hit the snow.
"Feel better?" Tarrin asked conversationally.
"No," she huffed fiercely, kicking the Dargu corpse before her. "But it's a start."
Tarrin let her clean herself up, then they started out again.
The problem with the Demons gave him something to occupy his mind as they ran on into the darkness, as the four moons set one after another very early into the darkness, casting the snowy plain in the multicolored hues of the Skybands. Why hadn't they Teleported in to attack? He'd been so worried about that for so long that it really annoyed him that they hadn't. Did the Demons have some kind of limitation with how they could Teleport as well?
The void. Of course. That had to be at least part of it. Inside that void, only Druidic magic would function. That, and he realized that Val, whose power was within him, would also have his power function normally. Everyone else, his Wizards, Priests, and Sorcerers, were powerless. And since the magic the Demons used also travelled through the Weave, they were rendered powerless. That was definitely a part of the solution, but not all of it. Val could herd them out to the edge of the void and then have them Teleport to attack him, but it hadn't happened. Could they not Teleport to where he was? Did they too have to know where they were going in order to Teleport there? He wasn't sure. Shiika could Teleport to the Tower, but then again, he had the feeling that she'd been there before.
Fear could be a reason. Tarrin had decimated Val's Demons, and he showed that he was still more than capable of handling as many as Val could throw at him. His ability to strip them of their power was the great equalizer, that and his deadly sword. Only the Cambisi had any kind of chance against him, and most of them were not up to dealing with an opponent quite like him. The only Demon that Tarrin had never bested was the marilith, that six-armed Demoness. He'd had to resort to Priest magic to defeat her, a testament to her fighting prowess. He hated her with a passion that was nearly holy, but he was not fool enough not to respect her ability.
Tarrin realized that Val had not once tried to find him since the Goddess confronted him. That seemed to click in his mind with the Demon problem...perhaps, just perhaps, Val was letting him come. Now that he thought of it, he hadn't seen a single vrock since then either. Maybe Tarrin had ticked him off to the point that he was moving his forces out of the way to clear a path for the Were-cats to reach him. That was certainly possible, and if that were true, it would explain why Val hadn't sent the Demons after him. He may have sent that column of Goblinoids to find Tarrin and Jesmind, find them and shadow them, perhaps not to attack them. That or to make contact with all the other patrols and recall them. The fifteen Dargu had been travelling towards Gora Umadar, and they had to have crossed paths with the Cambisi's unit earlier in the day. They were travelling in the snowbreak that the Trolls had made when they came out, the same snowbreak that they had been loosely following.
Val did indeed seem to be letting them come. That made Tarrin smile maliciously to himself. He couldn't have asked Val to accommodate him more than he was if that was indeed what he was doing. The idea of getting to G
ora Umadar more or less unmolested was going to make this a whole lot easier.
They stopped for the night, and since the wind was relatively calm, they took turns sleeping in cat form out on the flat tundra as the other stood watch. Tarrin spent all his time staring up into the sky with his book of charts in his lap and Jervis' watch in his paw, studying the stars and counting time. He would watch the second hand of that little clock with absolute interest, memorizing the span of time that its movements represented, and began practicing counting backwards to zero the minutes and seconds that passed. He would look at the watch and try to estimate exactly when the minute hand would cross a chosen line, checking the watch when he believed that that moment had just occurred. He was wrong more often than not, because his Were-cat mentality made it hard to keep track of time, but he kept at it. There was going to be a moment very soon that his ability to count time was going to be vital, and him constantly looking at the pocketwatch was going to be like screaming at the top of his lungs that he was waiting for something to happen.
When they moved out well before the late sunrise the next day, with only three days left, Tarrin slowed them to a walk. Jesmind growled and complained and glared at him whenever they weren't hiding behind their Illusions, but he did not step them up at all. They encountered no resistance that day, only tundra wildlife, as if his assumption was correct and Val had recalled his patrols. As if Val was clearing the path for him. He paused often to check his watch, to check his map and track the distance to Gora Umadar, and he saw that he would have to go even slower for a little while. So they stopped for an extended lunch, then set out at a lazy walk, almost strolling along, though Jesmind's cursing and complaining at the slow pace made it seem much less a stroll than an exercise in patience. She just would not get it into her thick head that they had to get there at a certain time on a certain day. Moving slowly didn't please him much either, but he understood that timing was the only thing that was going to get their daughter back.
They camped early, and Tarrin let Jesmind sleep as he stayed up the entire night, studying his watch with single-minded determination, then checked his book of charts and studied the stars. Phandebrass had been right. He'd been calculating the time of the conjunction in the margin of the book, and though his own results took fifty times longer than it had taken Phandebrass, his deciphering of the charts coincided with the Wizard's prediction. He had never doubted Phandebrass, but it had given Tarrin something to do, something to occupy his mind and keep him from dwelling on the plan, a plan that he could not think about. Though Val had stopped trying to find him and attack him, he had no doubt that the bound god was listening. Spyder said that he could hear every thought in Tarrin's head. By not thinking about what had to be done, only thinking about the plan he wanted Val to see, he protected his true intentions from being discovered. When the time came, the Cat would guide him in what must be done. That was an intelligence that did not require thought, and the plan had become nothing more than programmed instinct, nonexistent until the moment the need for it brought it out of him. And since it did not exist, there was nothing for Val to find.
They moved slowly and without opposition the next day, with only two days until the conjunction. Jesmind cursed and complained even more as they moved at an easy walk, but they were only fifteen leagues from the edge of the pyramid's warmth effect, which was itself twenty longspans from the pyramid. Fifteen leagues was nothing to a Were-cat. They could cover that in a single day, but they had to stretch it into two. They had to get to the edge of Val's army just after sunrise. That would give them two hours to travel that twenty longspans and reach the pyramid, and then he would need to play things by ear, depending on his ability to count back the time until the conjunction occurred.
They camped in the open once more, and again, Tarrin simply let Jesmind sleep as he studied his watch and watched the stars. The moons rose about three hours before dawn, all four of them almost at the same time, and it was then that he knew that the conjunction was nearly upon them. They would not rise simultaneously tomorrow, the critical day, with the moons rising in a manner that would cause them to intersect with each other in the sky an hour after noon. They were supposed to come close to conjunction today, with the event was occurring tomorrow, with Domammon and Vala crossing in the sky with the twin moons very close to them. The early rising of the twin moons would prevent the conjunction from happening.
Tarrin watched Jesmind sleep in her cat form, snuggled up on the fur coat laid on the snow, sighing to himself. Tomorrow. It would all be over tomorrow. For good or ill, tomorrow was going to be the day he got back his daughter. After two months without her, two months of agonized torture, he would finally get back Jasana.
And pay back those who took her from him.
They rose late that day, and though he'd not slept for two days, he didn't feel tired at all. They started well before dawn but again moved slowly, a leisurely walk across the tundra, but this time Jesmind did not complain. She knew that tomorrow as the day, and she finally seemed to understand that his pacing was necessary. They were only eight leagues from the edge of Val's void, and they would have to stop well before they got there to wait, to wait until tomorrow. Again they encountered no patrols, no opposition. There were no vrock in the sky, no scouts searching for them. Tarrin guessed that Val really did pull back his forces to allow Tarrin to reach him unchallenged. If only he knew how big a mistake that was. It was the utter proof that even though Val was a god, he was not as godly as he thought he was. If he was, he would have put absolutely everything he could between himself and Tarrin, to try to kill him and take his amulet long before any of the Were-cat's wild plans could be unleashed on him. But Val was confident in his superiority, thinking of Tarrin as nothing but a mere mortal, and too angry with the Were-cat to consider the consequences.
That was a huge mistake.
Time and time again he had learned that lesson. That anger was a weapon only to one's opponent. And for the first time, he had managed to turn that to his own advantage.
He was going to make Val pay dearly for underestimating him.
The seriousness of the situation made both of them silent and brooding all day, a day passed without incident. Jesmind was finally feeling the impending confrontation, and had become quiet and withdrawn. Tarrin had been feeling it in his bones for days now, feeling it coming. And now he only had a little more to wait.
There was no sense of anticipation, no nervousness, no anxiety when they made camp that night, a mere two leagues from the edge of Val's void. That was two hours of slow walking for them. They would get there precisely at sunrise, as he anticipated. And two hours after that, they would be standing in the presence of a god, playing a very dangerous game to reclaim their abducted daughter. He felt no worry, no fear. He felt nothing, strangely empty, as if this were yet another in a long series of exercises that had slowly numbed him to their importance. Even the worry for his daughter faded away, leaving only the knowledge that he had to get her back inside him, a feeling he knew would change when he finally laid eyes on her again.
Not even the strange things he was sensing worried him. He could feel Val's irritation, his worry, his anger that they were not there yet. Val knew that tomorrow was the day, and yet he still did not have the Firestaff in his possession. Surprisingly, though, Tarrin realized that Val had not yet panicked. Val probably knew that Tarrin was lurking very close by, and since his plan depended on him arriving before the conjunction, Val was probably content to allow that to come to pass. Though the Illusion hid them effectively from everything else, he had the feeling that Val knew exactly where he was even without having to actively search for him.
All the better for Tarrin.
He sat there, looking up into the sky, fully prepared for what was to come to pass tomorrow. By this time tomorrow, if things all went well, everyone he cared for would be alive and well and safe, and Val's army destroyed. The Firestaff would not be a problem for another five thousand
years, the gods would all go home happy--all but one, anyway--and Jasana would be home safe, and nothing would ever threaten her again.
He would make sure of it.
Chapter 15
They were off exactly two hours before sunrise, and they were both absolutely silent. There was nothing more that needed to be said, though he knew that some things would have to be commanded later. He had faith that Jesmind would do exactly as she was told without question, mainly because she understood the danger involved in what they were doing. Their getting their daughter back demanded things to happen in a very specific manner, and also required exceptional timing on their part. Val probably knew the plan by now, and he would understand why it was so important as well. He would do his best to interfere with the timing of that plan, but he also could not interfere with one vital fact. The fact that Tarrin had to be there with the Firestaff before the conjunction ended. He had considered several possibilities in his mind, but that ultimate deadline meant that Val was more or less forced to accept the timing and pace that Tarrin dictated.
What Val wanted was more important to him than Jasana was to Tarrin. That didn't mean that he wouldn't do anything to recover his daughter, but Val had worked and labored and planned for five thousand years to reach this moment, and his desperation to free himself would override Tarrin's desire to regain his daughter. Tarrin understood this, Val understood this, and that gave Tarrin a powerful advantage. So the game would be played by Tarrin's rules, if only because he held the one piece on the chessboard that Val could not counter.
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