Tarrin laughed. A Vendari on the throne meant that he would follow the absolute letter of the law. And he would be totally unbribable. If Kerri left her kingdom in the care of a Vendari, she was absolutely guaranteed to still have a throne when she returned.
"Other than that, she said that the nobles are actually starting to warm a little to her new system. She sat down with some of them yesterday and showed them how their noble houses could use the new system to their advantage, and make money. That made them all more amenable to her ideas."
"It would take money to appease Wikuni," Tarrin said.
"That's no stretch of the truth, my brother. I've never seen such a greedy group. They're running this ship and escorting us, so I've had a great deal of contact with them."
"Kerri said she sent her forces to protect you."
"Seven clipper water-carriages," she reported. There was no Selani word for ship or boat, so she improvised a bit to convey her meaning. There also was no Selani word for clipper, but there was no way for her to make up a meaning for that, so she simply reverted to Sulasian. "Renoit said we couldn't be safer if were we being carried on the back of Saltemis."
Saltemis was the Elder god of water and the oceans, one of the ten Elder Gods that represented the world's natural forces. "I think you'd be a bit safer if you really were, but few ships on the seas are crazy enough to attack seven Wikuni clippers. You should have no trouble getting to Suld."
"Well?" Sarraya demanded. "I'm getting tired of waiting!"
"Sarraya is getting impatient, and we've already talked too long, my sister. I should go. I'll do what Dolanna wants. I won't like it, but I'll do it."
"I'll let her know. Be well, my brother. I'll contact you again if something important comes up. May the winds ever be at your back."
"May all the water you taste be sweet," he reciprocated in the ritual Selani farewell.
And the connection dissolved.
For such a short conversation, its effect on him was dramatic. He suddenly felt much, much better, not even a bit frustrated or annoyed. Allia's voice had always had that kind of effect on him, and hearing her after their long separation made him feel, if only for a moment, that she was still with him. That took a great weight off his heart. It reminded him of what waited for him in Suld, at the end of his journey, and it made everything he endured more than worth it. He would crawl the entire way if it meant seeing Allia again.
At least the change in the amulet didn't disrupt its abilities. He hadn't really thought of that as a possibility, and in hindsight, that was probably a good thing he didn't. The Book of Ages was kept locked within the magic of the amulet, and that was something he couldn't afford to lose. The very thought of it would have made him retrieve it, and that may have alerted unfriendly people to exactly where he was in the desert, how far along he had travelled since escaping them. They could possibly use that information as a guage, to tell them when and maybe where to station their forces to intercept him as he came out. He wasn't about to give his adversaries any help if he could avoid it.
"Well? Spill! Spill spill spill spill spill!!" Sarraya said in aniticipation, jumping up and down near the melon in time with her shouting.
"In a nutshell, they're doing alright," he told her. "Dolanna ordered me to teach you Sha'Kar, that's why we were talking about you."
"It's about time!" she said with an explosive release of breath. "I figured you forgot that we were supposed to be taught. I was going to ask you to do it, at least when you weren't in such a cranky mood."
"I thought Dolanna taught you."
"She taught me a little," Sarraya told him. "I still have a great deal to learn."
"Alright. I'll teach you as we travel. That way I have the time after we stop to work on Sorcery."
"That's fine with me. It'll fill up all those dusty, boring hours we have while we're moving. You sure you can run and talk at the same time?"
"You sure you can fly and learn at the same time?" he shot back.
"I've done it before," she said in a teasing voice. "At least out here, there are no trees to crash into."
"Sounds like you speak from experience."
"When I was learning to fly," she grinned. "No Faerie can say he or she has never crashed into a tree. Or the ground."
"Sounds like a dangerous business."
"Flying isn't easy," Sarraya told him. "It's as much an art as a skill. It took me nearly thirty years of constant practice to master it. Wow, you're suddenly in a good mood. I think you should talk to Allia every night."
"I wish I could, but Dolanna said that people may be able to listen in on us when we talk that way, so I can't do it in good conscious. She was supposed to speak Sha'Kar, but I think she was up on deck. Dolanna won't let us speak it unless nobody else can hear it."
"Seems like a silly rule."
"It's only thought of as a dead language if people believe that it's dead, Sarraya," Tarrin told her. "I understand completely why Dolanna wants us not to use it in public. It's something we need to keep back. A trump card."
"I can understand it like that, but it seems silly not to use it," she said.
"If I went around speaking in a language nobody knows, someone may get curious as to which it was. Then you have to deal with a bunch of questions, or someone that's really smart and can piece it together without asking a single question."
"I know, I know. I'm saying it seems silly because that's how I feel."
"I do alot of things I think are silly," he grunted. "I gave up on trying to understand them a long time ago."
Sarraya laughed. "That's true," she agreed with a smirk. "Now then, I have this melon here waiting for me, and if I don't eat it soon, it's going to dry out."
That began a pattern of activity over the next five days, as they moved more and more out of the rocky terrain and more and more into the verdant belt of the desert, the land in the desert that was surprisingly vegetated. Tarrin found himself picking his way through strange prickly shrubs quite often, and in one shallow valley they found the entire desert floor covered in small bushy plants that had wide, thick blades for leaves, and were lined and tipped with very sharp thorns and ridges almost like the blade of a knife. As they moved during the day, Tarrin taught Sarraya Sha'Kar, and the little Faerie proved to be quite adept at learning. At night, Tarrin continued to try to find his magical power again, but as it had been the first night, every attempt ended in failure after failure. That, paired to the return of the nightmare that had haunted him, did very little to improve his mood. He became short-tempered and downright nasty to Sarraya during the day, almost to the point where he didn't want to teach her anymore.
The return of the nightmare was expected, but its effect had changed. It still made him very afraid, but it also made him very angry now, nearly as mad as he was frightened. He was pretty sure that anger was because he feared something that couldn't hurt him, and that defied the logic of his instincts. Now that they had had time to work through his reaction to the dream, they were more outraged than they had been before.
That was only one thing weighing on his mind. It had been five days since talking to Allia, and that meant that they were now in Suld. There was no doubt of that. They were back in the Tower, most likely, and that meant that they were now in danger. The mysterious spy for whom Jula had worked in the Tower, an agent of the ki'zadun, was still there. Or at least he was pretty sure that she was still there. He had little doubt that Jula's presence was going to incite her to strike out against his friends, to eliminate them before they became a threat to her.
He thought of that as he moved along a butte of sorts, a long shelf of rock overlooking an irregular valley of sorts filled with rocky outcrops, spires, and some loose stones that were interspersed with a goodly amount of vegatation, both little shrubs, grass-like growth along the north side of the valley, and several strange trees that looked like almost all their branches pulled off. They were gnarled and stunted, with only a few branches, and those bra
nches held tufts of large needles. The top of the butte was much easier travelling than down on the valley floor, and from there he could see a flock of sukk, the large, flightless birds the Selani herded for their livelihood. They were quite distant from him, and he couldn't see an Selani around them. It was a very small flock, which meant that it could possibly be wild. He was worrying already about Allia, and the strange feeling he had about Dar. Four days there, four days to get into trouble. That worried him, worried him a great deal. But Dolanna was there, and Triana was also there. Triana would see to the heart of things, and her presence alone was enough to make himself feel foolish for worrying so much.
From below came a strange sound. He slowed down to a walk, then stopped and squatted down by the edge of the shelf, looking down some forty spans to the desert floor. Coming the other way on the valley floor was a lone Selani, dressed in desert garb, with hood and veil down. It was a female, a sharp-featured woman with long blond hair, dark skin, and striking hazel eyes. She had come around a pile of loose boulders, and was running at full speed. He looked closer at her,and realized that her scabbard was empty, her clothes were torn in more than a few places, and she was bleeding under those torn patches. She had been fighting with something.
That something--or more to the point, those somethings--came around the rocky pile a few seconds later. They were medium-sized reptiles, bipedal ones that looked like miniature versions of a kajat. Smaller, but they were also built more leanly, with longer, whip-like tails, and their forelegs were much differently shaped than the massive desert predators, ending in surprisingly long, wickedly curved claws, with similar claws on their feet. They had the same generally shaped heads as a kajat, and those mouths were filled with rows and rows of sharp teeth. Their hides looked scaly from that distance, a color not far off from sand, with dark mottled patches to serve as camoflage in the desert. From the look of them, these had to be inu, the Quick Death, one of the most feared of the desert's predators. There were about ten of them, and they were chasing down the Selani female with shocking speed for such strangely-built animals. They looked ungainly, but their long tails served to counterbalance their forward-leaning bodies, giving them a center of gravity from which their powerful legs could work. They looked strange, but their bodies were very much adapted for running.
Between their speed and their natural weaponry, he had little doubt that the name Quick Death was well deserved.
"It's a Selani," Sarraya noted aloud as she landed on his shoulder. "That's a pack of inu."
"I figured that out, Sarraya," he told her gratingly. "It doesn't look like she's going to outrun them."
"Then we should do something about it," she told him.
"Why? She's no concern of mine."
"Because it's the right thing to do," she said crossly.
"She's a stranger," he said bluntly, using the one term with which Sarraya could not argue, the term that would tell her why he felt as he did.
The Selani was almost directly under them. She tripped over something and fell to the ground in a cloud of dust, but was up and with her back to the wall before she came to a complete stop. The inu slowed down and surrounded her, but they didn't simply lunge in for the kill after all the woman's escape routes were closed. They hissed and growled at her, snapping at the air in her direction, pacing back and forth as the woman kept her back to the wall. Odds were, he realized, that the inu had made the mistake of attacking Selani in the past, and they were afraid to make the first move. They had cornered a solitary Selani, but now that they had her, they were reluctant to press in for the kill.
That, or they were just toying with her. One or the other.
Something inside him shifted at seeing that. Seeing a Selani cornered like that offended his sensibilities. She was unarmed, incapable of defending herself. His Cat side told him to leave her to her folly, to make it no business of his, not to get tangled up with a stranger. But the Human inside, the Human looking for redemption for the evil that had been done in his life, couldn't abandon the Selani to fate. This was a chance to wear away at the dark stain that had infested his soul, a little act of charity to balance the darkness of his past.
This was his chance to set at least one small thing right. For all the difference it would make.
The inu surrounding the woman were getting closer and closer, working up the courage to attack, that, or tiring of the game. One of the larger ones came out from the circle of them, a really big one with a scar on its snout, the claws on its forepaws showing that it had put a few marks on the Selani. It hissed at the Selani woman, and then bunched up its legs beneath it. It suddenly sprang out, rotating so the huge claws on its feet would rend the woman to pieces--
--and it was suddenly being driven into the ground by Tarrin's feet, feet planted firmly on the base of its neck. The forty span fall had given him terrific momentum, and that momentum crushed the aggressive reptile under him as he drove it into the rocky ground. He felt bones shatter under his feet, and the breath was crushed out of the monster's lungs by the impact, lungs that would not refill.
Kneeling on the shattered carcass, Tarrin turned to glare at the other inu, his eyes blazing from within with the unholy greenish radiance that marked his anger. He drew himself up to his full height and drew his sword in one smooth motion, then roared his challenge to the pack. All the frustration and aggravation he had endured for the last five days had suddenly found an outlet.
The inu, sensing the unique aspects of this foe, were nevertheless incensed by his bellowed challenge, an affront to their superiority in the harsh desert. They were almost compelled to attack.
In the blink of an eye, two halves of the first inu to charge him went flying behind him, to each side, cleaved in twain as it lunged at him. The Cat had control now, and it knew how to use the weapon in its paws, drawing that knowledge from the Human within. Knowledge the Human freely granted to the Cat to aid in mutual defense. Tarrin lunged forward, charging into the very center of the pack, his own shouts and roars competing with the screeching cries coming from the pack of reptiles. He slashed another in half as three jumped on top of him, claws ripping and tearing, jaws clamping around one arm and teeth sinking into the back of his neck. The pain was almost nothing to the Cat, wanting to dish out punishment more than it was ready to submit to pain. A flashing paw took out the throat of one trying to tear his arm off with its jaws, and a swipe of the sword in the other sent the front half of the muzzle of the inu on the other side of him spinning away. His free paw caught the clawed forepaw of the inu that filled the gap, crushed bones and sinew in his inhuman grip, then picked up the animal and whipped it into its fellows, with a small inu on his back the entire time, seeking to tear off his head with its jaws. Tarrin reached up over his shoulder and drove his claws into the side of the inu on his back, and then he closed his fist. Fingers sank into the flesh of the creature's side, making it shudder and recoil, then he pulled his paw away. The wound he left behind was ghastly, with two ribs showing through as he ripped a huge chunk of flesh from the monster's flank, and it screeched in pain and let go of its biting hold on him. He turned and slammed the back of his fist into the monster's head as it tried to jump off of him, driving it into the ground.
But for each he killed or wounded, two more took its place. He was again swarmed over by the surviving pack, and their claws and teeth sank into him, tore through muscle, tried to disembowel him, but the pain only made him more and more angry. Even the Cat began to lose its composure, regressing into his primal state, a state where he felt no pain, felt nothing but raw fury, and his eyes hazed over with red as he felt himself snap in the face of the assault.
Inu went flying in every direction as Tarrin exploded upwards, leaving the ground, using his inhuman strength to overwhelm the six uninjured combatants that remained. He brought his sword down as he returned to the earth, in a vicious overhanded chop that was aimed at the head of the nearest opponent. The sword swept through the monster with no effort
, and drove partly into a stone beneath it, a stone partially buried in the sandy soil around them. He delivered an elbow to the jaws of one that tried to come at him from behind, shattering teeth and bone and sending it staggering back, with blood and tooth shards flying in all directions. Another lept at him, but the enraged Were-cat caught it by its foot, then turn and whipped it into the ground with enough force to split its belly. But that wasn't good enough. He picked it up and slammed it into the ground again, spilling its organs out onto the bare rock, then picked it up once more and hurled it in the direction of its packmates, sending bowels and other organs flying in an arc before it went spinning away. Another lunged at him, dodging under the carcass of its packmate, but he raised the tip of his sword to intercept it, and it had nowhere to go. It skewered itself on his weapon, and he turned and swung the sword, inu and all, at the one whose muzzle had been taken off earlier. The blade didn't kill it, but the impact with the dead inu carried along with the sword did, crushing its head and spilling both carcasses to the ground.
There were only three left, and one was wounded. They looked around and suddenly began to make shrill barking sounds, and turned to flee. But the enraged Were-cat would not accept that. It rushed forward with blazing speed, taking the head off the injured one as it turned to run with a swipe of the sword, then the sword was cast aside as it grabbed the tail of one of the remaining two. The creature barked in alarm, but that bark turned into a squeal when Tarrin yanked it into his clutches, then broke its back with an overhead smash of his other paw. He put his claws into the wounded animal and heaved it over his head, then hurled it at the last one as it started to dash away. The two collided several paces from him, and the weight of the thrown inu drove the other one to the ground.
He was on them before they could even move, and with clawed paws, he took their throats.
Honor and Blood Page 37