The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  "You do so much for my self-esteem, Kerri," he said in a dry drawl. "Try that tonight. Meditation will do more than focus yourself, it will calm you down. Miranda may be right, sister. I tried to push it when it happened to me, and I got so wrapped up in trying to use my magic again that I didn't sense that I could do it all along. I think you're falling into the same trap I did."

  "Maybe," she acceded after a moment.

  "I say, hello there, Tarrin," Phandebrass greeted as he led Kimmie towards the stairway below decks. "How go the lessons?"

  "Fairly well," he replied. "Though we're more or less circling until Kerri regains her powers."

  "Well, well, good luck, your Majesty," he said with a smile. "How are the language lessons going?" he asked her.

  "It's scary," she told him. "That spell he uses lets him memorize everything. He's fluent already, all he needs is to expand his vocabulary. It's Dolanna all over again."

  "Well, my dear, Dolanna is a very clever woman, she is. I think I might try to develop a spell to duplicate that effect," he mused to himself, looking up. "To think that I could go into a library and remember everything I read! I say, what a wonderful thing that would be, it would!" He looked at them. "I say, how are the lessons going?"

  Tarrin suppressed a chuckle. Whenever Phandebrass was heavy into his magic, he tended to get extremely absent-minded, even forgetting things he'd just said. It looked like he was in one of those states at the moment. "Kimmie, you'd better take him down below before he forgets we're on a ship," Tarrin told the female.

  "We're already on the way," she said with a light smile.

  "Now I see why he irritates Camara Tal so much," Keritanima said with a giggle as Kimmie led him below decks.

  "That's not what irritates Camara," Tarrin replied. "What irritates Camara is how his studies overwhelm reality. Did I tell you that he tried to stop a Demon and ask it questions during the battle in Suld?"

  "He didn't!" Keritanima gasped with a laugh.

  "Oh yes he did. Camara told me about it. Tried to stop it in its tracks and ask it all sorts of questions. Camara said that if she'd been beside him, she would have brained him herself."

  "Phandebrass puts learning above almost everything. Even his own safety," Miranda surmised in a calm voice. "He must be either terribly brave or completely crazy."

  "I think he's a little bit of both," Tarrin said, glancing back to the stairs below. The wind had shifted, and Kimmie's scent, left on the deck, was touching his nose, tickling at him. Her scent caused all sorts of impulses to rise up in him any time he scented it now, impulses he both wanted to satisfy and actively tried to ignore. He put his paw over his nose in irritation, letting his own scent and the scents left behind on his paw drown out that smell.

  "You know, I think Kimmie's the most unusual Were-cat I've ever met," Keritanima said. "She seems almost human."

  "She was turned, like me. But the turning didn't seem to change her all that much," Tarrin told her. "But don't let her personality fool you, Kerri. She's just as much a Were-cat as me."

  "I've noticed. I've also noticed that you've been avoiding her lately," she said slyly.

  Tarrin growled lightly in his throat, glaring at his sister. He had a feeling where this was going to go. "I think you should mind your own business," he warned.

  "You are my business, brother," she said mildly. "And I have a nose too, if you recall. I've been noticing a change in Kimmie's scent lately, and now that I've seen how you react to it, I know what it is."

  "Well, what is it?" Miranda asked.

  "She's either in heat or she's playing for him," she replied with a glance to where the female had gone below decks. "You'd better not let Jesmind find out. She'll kill both of you."

  Tarrin snorted, putting his chin in his paw. "I think she doesn't realize she's doing it," he replied. "She doesn't act like she's after me, so I think it's unconscious."

  "And that means you're not going to do anything about it."

  "I don't plan to," he replied.

  "You should. Every time Kimmie goes by, you suddenly get very short-tempered."

  "I can't argue about that," he admitted. "But it would be cheating on Jesmind."

  "Cheating or not, if you kill one of my sailors in a tiff, we're going to have a very nasty fight, brother," she warned.

  "I can keep a handle on things. I've gone through this before."

  "I know, Allia told me about it," she said. "With Jula."

  He nodded. "I didn't have much trouble with her. I shouldn't have much trouble with Kimmie."

  "There's a difference here, brother," Keritanima said mildly. "You didn't like Jula at the time. You do like Kimmie."

  "True, but it doesn't matter."

  "We'll see," Keritanima said absently.

  The rest of the day went on more or less as usual, except whenever Kimmie was close to him. Telling Keritanima about it seemed to make it stay at the forefront of his mind, and he found himself thinking about Kimmie whenever his mind wasn't actively engaged with something else. More than once, he caught himself thinking of some way to get her alone, and he had to crush all those impulses and keep himself occupied to stop it. But those thoughts rekindled any time he came across Kimmie's scent.

  That was the problem. They'd been on the ship for twenty days, so Kimmie's scent was everywhere. The rain washed her scent out of the exposed deck, but Phandebrass' habit of moving around meant that she put her scent back down all over everything very quickly afterwards. Below decks, her scent was mingled with all the other scents layered on the floor and walls and furniture, but Kimmie's scent was the first one he noticed, and he realized that he was actively looking for it. There were few places on the ship he could go to get away from her scent. The crow's nest, his room, and Allia's room. That was it. Kimmie had been in everyone else's rooms, even Keritanima's.

  Keritanima had been right. He had been getting short-tempered whenever Kimmie passed. It was a combination of her and the resurgence of the feral aspects of his personality. Surrounded by strangers and trapped on a ship with an available female, he wasn't surprised he'd been so contrary lately. It got worse when she was close, when he started resisting the call of his instincts. That was a very fast way for a Were-cat way to get unpredictable, as the instincts warred with the human will. So far, Tarrin's will had won out, but the instincts only had to win once. And he knew that.

  He pondered the problem through dinner, as Kimmie's proximity and her alluring scent dominated his mind, picking at his food without much enthusiasm. He listened as Phandebrass prattled on about some kind of magical spell that he and Kimmie had been developing as part of her training, a spell that supposedly would cause any book that contained magical Wizard spells to glow when they came within the spell's area of effect.

  "So, how is the training going, Kimmie?" Dar asked.

  "Pretty well,"she replied with a cute little smile. "I've already tripled the size of my spellbook, and Master Phandebrass taught me some things that allowed me to understand some of the spells I already had, but couldn't cast."

  "I say, for a self-taught dabbler, she has considerable potential," Phandebrass praised. "I think she could learn some of the greatest secrets of the art if she applies herself."

  "It'll be a ways before I get there," she chuckled wryly. "I looked through Master Phandebrass' spellbook. I think I could only understand about ten of them."

  "You were looking through one of my advanced books, my dear," he chided her. "If you did understand ten of them, then you do have potential, you do. I say, I couldn't possibly keep all my spells in one book, I couldn't. Why, it would be so big that I wouldn't be able to carry it!"

  "No need to brag, Master Phandebrass," Kimmie teased. "You're offending my one little spellbook, you know."

  "Give yourself time, my dear," he assured her. "I say, you'll have a spellbook collection just as large as mine, you will."

  Tarrin excused himself after that, and went up on deck. After leaving the dini
ng room, his appetite returned, and he Conjured the meal he'd left sitting on the table and finished it sitting at the bow, looking out over the sea. It was a bit before sunset, and the ships were still plying their way westward before a strong tailwind. The wind was very warm and muggy, and some threatening clouds were gathering ahead of them, threatening to swallow up the sun before it reached the horizon. There was a small island just to the right, some distance away, but it was large enough to support a colony of seagulls. Some of them were circling over the ship, cawing and crying, looking for a meal. Birds followed ships to partake of the scraps that were thrown overboard from time to time. Tarrin looked at the island, just being eclipsed by a clipper sailing alongside, and saw that it was carpeted with green. It was too far away to see much else, though. He'd never heard of an island out here, so odds were it was uninhabited.

  Admiral Torm wandered over and looked off the rail just beside him. Tarrin wasn't sure about Admiral Torm. He was a sober fellow, not much of a sense of humor, all business and all leader. He was respected by his men, and from what Tarrin had heard, the man had a very, very impressive reputation.

  "Ah, Twinfluke," he mused aloud. "We'll be in Wikuna in six days, with Kikalli's favor."

  "That's the name of that island?" Tarrin asked, standing up.

  "Aye," he replied. "So named because of the whales that tend to gather around it."

  "That would be a nice place to live if you didn't want to be disturbed."

  "You wouldn't live there long," Torm told him. "It's populated by some pretty unfriendly animals, and some of them are rather rare."

  "Like what?"

  "Like a bird-like animal that can turn a man to stone if you touch its tailfeathers," he answered. "I think they're called Cockatrices. There are also a fair number of wild drakes, and it's also the island where the last of the Minotaurs were exiled some five hundred years ago. From what I've heard, there are some of them still living on the island."

  "Minotaur? I've never heard of that."

  "It's a creature with a man's body but the head of a bull," he replied. "They're not very smart, they're pretty rough customers, and they're very unfriendly. They were rounded up and exiled off Wikuna when we tried to bring them into the kingdom, but they just couldn't obey the law. It was decided it was more humane to move them than to kill them all off."

  "And they still live there on that island?"

  Torm nodded. "We don't know how many there are, because we won't land there. But some sailors see them on the shores as they pass, often enough to know they're still alive. I'm glad of that."

  "Why?"

  "It's a crime to kill off an entire species just because you don't get along with them," he replied. "They may have lost their home range, but killing them all would have been wrong. Wikuna has made some bad decisions in its time, but at least in that respect, it made a good one. They seem to be doing well on the island, so maybe it all turned out for the best. If they're happy there, then it turned out even better."

  "I guess," Tarrin said in agreement.

  The crying of the birds began to intensify, and Tarrin looked up at them. They seemed to be getting very agitated. Tarrin lifted his nose and tested the air, but found no scent that would seem threatening to him. Birds had good vision, so it had to be something they could see that was making them upset, or perhaps a change in the wind or the air.

  "That's odd," Torm noted, looking up. "Seagulls don't act like that unless there's a predator about."

  Tarrin saw it coming over the ship that now blocked the view of the island. A little cloud of smaller blue birds, all swarming around something in its center. From the looks of it, they were attacking whatever they kept surrounded, pecking at it and scratching at it with their claws.

  Those weren't birds! They were drakes!

  Tarrin watched in surprise as a large pack of blue-scaled drakes attacked whatever was in the middle of their group, flying closer and closer to the ship as the seagulls overhead scattered They weren't pecking at it, as he first thought, they were biting it, and there were weird little flashes of bluish light now and again. They came closer and closer to their ship, until he could make out what they were attacking.

  It was another drake!

  Tarrin and Torm watched as the victim of the assault, a blue-scaled drake just like all the others, tried to stay aloft, but was being bitten on the wings and having the membranes torn by the claws of its attackers. It was smaller than the other drakes, and it was being pretty well thoroughly thrashed by them. It managed to stay aloft until one of the largest drakes managed to bite it on the wingjoint, and he distinctly heard it squeal in pain and suddenly spin down on the same side that the drake had bitten it. The attackers gave chase, coming shockingly close to the ship, only spans away, and continued to pursue the victim until it fell into the water. They circled over it for a moment as it weakly tried to swim, keep its head above water as the water around became stained pink with its blood, then they all banked and flew back towards the island.

  "I've never seen that before," Torm said. "I wonder what made them attack that other one like that."

  Tarrin was leaning over the rail, looking at the drake as the ship passed it by. It was obviously going to drown, and its body sank deeper and deeper into the water as its attempts to stay afloat became weaker. On an implulse, Tarrin wove together a short weave of Water and caused the water surrounding the drake to become solid, to give it something against which to push. Then he brought his water cage up to the side of the ship and then, after making sure the other drakes were gone and wouldn't see what was happening, raised it up on a column of water to where he could reach it. The drake looked terrified by whatever was happening to it, but it was too weak and tired to struggle. Its terror didn't improve when a creature with a predatory scent reached down into the water with wickedly clawed paws and grabbed it, then pulled it free of the watery prison.

  Tarrin was rather partial to drakes. Chopstick and Turnkey were very beloved companions for him, and he couldn't stand to see another drake die. Even if it was a wild one.

  He gathered the drake up in his paws, knelt, and set it on the deck, as it hissed threatening at him and tried to bite him. The other drakes had torn it up pretty effectively, and he could see countless tears in its beautiful, blue scaled hide. They were so blue that they almost shined. It did bite him when he put a pair of fingers on the base of its long neck, turning its head to take a bite out the paw holding it down, but its small jaws had trouble getting much of a grip on his thick paw, and the lower teeth couldn't even penetrate the pad on his palm. The pain it caused was barely even an annoyance, but the pressure he exerted against it did cause it to stop thrashing, beating its shredded wings against the deck.

  "Calm down," he chided the drake in a gentle voice. He thought about using Sorcerer's healing, but the discomfort it caused would make the drake think he was attacking it somehow. It wasn't something to use on a wild animal. So he instead reached within, through the Cat, and touched the vast, endless energy of the All. His intent was to heal, and the image was that of the little drake in perfect health. The All responded to him, sending its energy through him and into the drake through his fingers. The warm, gentle energy suffused the little animal, causing its natural healing processes to accelerate dramatically. Torm watched with wide eyes as the many tears and bite wounds on the drake smoothed over, as the holes in the membranes of its wings mended before his eyes, and the animal suddenly stopped struggling and yielded to the Were-cat.

  When he was done, he pulled his fingers away, resting his arm on his knee, and looked down at the drake. It was about the same size as Chopstick and Turnkey, maybe just a shade smaller than them, with the same appearance. It had the ridges on its back, and the little backswept horns on its head, but its muzzle was a bit more boxed and a little shorter, and it was a little leaner than the two red-scaled drakes. Its scent was a little different than the red-scaled drakes, probably a result of a different environment. It
seemed to lay there for a moment, then got up to its feet hesitantly, shaking its head and shivering its wings. "There now," Tarrin cooed to it in a gentle voice. "All better. You can go ahead and fly home now."

  "I've never seen a drake so close before," Torm said, looking at it. "Not even the two that Wizard owns gets this close to me. It's very pretty, isn't it?" he asked, leaning down to get a better look.

  And then the blue flashes he saw became very clear to Tarrin. The little drake hissed, then Tarrin sensed a sudden release of magical energy. A small arc of electricity, like a miniature bolt of lightning, emanated from the little blue drake's body and struck Torm in the chest as he leaned down. Torm was knocked backwards and crashed to the deck, his swearing telling Tarrin that he was alright. A little singed, but alright.

  "Wow," Tarrin said in appreciation. Now that was a defense mechanism! "Calmly, little one," he said in a soothing voice, not moving. "We're not going to hurt you."

  The little drake looked up at him, blinking, its front paws fidgeting and its claws scrabbling on the deck. Then, to Tarrin's surprise, the little drake ambled forward and rubbed the side of its head against his ankle, chirping pleasantly. Just like Chopstick and Turnkey did when they were in an affectionate mood.

  It liked him! The drake either liked him because he'd healed it, or it could tell that he was a Druid. Most wild animals wouldn't bother Druids, because the sense of the All that surrounded them put the animal at ease. No wild animal saw a Druid as an enemy. Tarrin reached down and rubbed the scales on its back, mindful of the little ridges and spines, then patted it on the head.

  "Ouch," Torm grunted from the deck.

  Tarrin looked back and saw that the Wikuni was sitting up, with a little scorch mark on the chest of his resplendent red uniform coat. "That was interesting," Tarrin told him. "I've never seen a drake do that before."

  "Me either," Torm agreed.

  "You alright?"

  "I will be in a minute. All my fur is standing on end."

  "It must have thought you were going to attack it when you leaned down. I wouldn't do that again if I were you."