The Shadow Realm

by James Galloway

  "What happens when all seven are born?" Dar asked.

  "The Weave will be restored," Tarrin told him. "Completely. We'll have the same magical power in the Weave that the Ancients did back in the Age of Power."

  "Wow," Dar said breathlessly.

  "Are you alright, Sapphire?" Tarrin asked her gently, stroking her scales.

  The drake looked up at him and chirped, then laid her head against his chest.

  "My poor little baby," he said compassionately, putting his huge paw over her protectively. "Let's get you back in the cabin and in your bed, alright? You need to rest."

  Tarrin Conjured his drake a large meal, then put Sapphire in her bed and let her rest after she ate. He found out after coming back up that Chopstick and Turnkey were also affected, and Phandebrass had to pause in his research on the flying device to tend to his two drakes, making sure they were alright, comforting them through their period of fear, then giving them a good meal and setting them down to rest and recover from their ordeal. After that, Tarrin gathered with Allia, Dolanna, Dar, and Keritanima and explained what had happened, and they were visited by Jenna and Jula in their projected Illusions while he was explaining what happened to them. "Tarrin, Tarrin, did you feel that!" Jenna said in excitement even as her Illusion solidified.

  "Of course we did," Tarrin told her. "Did the Goddess tell you where the baby is?"

  "No, should we ask?" she replied.

  "You'd better," Tarrin told her. "If someone kills that baby, its effect on the Weave will be removed. Protecting the new sui'kun is the most important thing you can do right now."

  "Good point," Jula agreed. "Maybe you should ask, father. The Goddess always seems to talk to you."

  "This is important, Jula. Right now, she'd probably tell any Sorcerer who asked where the baby is."

  There is no need for worry, my children, the voice of the Goddess touched Tarrin. From the sudden surprised expressions on the faces of Dar, Dolanna, Allia, and Keritanima, it was not a personal contact. The Goddess was speaking to all of them. The baby was born to a Sorceress at the Tower in Sharadar. They understand what the baby is, and they will protect him very carefully. The baby is quite safe.

  "That's a relief," Jenna sighed as the sense of the Goddess retreated from them.

  "What changes can we expect from this?" Dolanna asked.

  "Every time another sui'kun is born, it increases our power a little," Jenna answered her. "What it does for the other orders is returns an aspect of their magic that they lost after the Breaking. You'll have to have Master Phandebrass and Mistress Camara Tal to research it and find out what they regained. But as for us, you'll all find that your powers are stronger than they were before."

  "Our limits cannot change," Allia said uncertainly. "That was taught to us in the Initiate."

  "In this respect, they can," Jenna told her. "I'm not telling you to go out and try to move mountains, but you should see an increase in the amount of magic you can handle. That means you can work with some stronger spells than you could before."

  "We will explore your new limits," Dolanna told Allia and Dar. "As Tarrin will help Keritanima and myself explore ours."

  "You mean Tarrin's even stronger now too?" Dar asked.

  "No," Jenna told him. "Sui'kun are a little different. The reason Tarrin could do things none of you thought was possible two years ago is because he exists outside of those restrictions, just like I do. We're not affected as much by the change in the magic as you will be. We will have a little bit more strength, but it won't really be enough to make it matter."

  Jula looked at Tarrin. "Where are you now, father?"

  "Allia thinks we've reached the edge of the wind," Tarrin answered her. "For two days now we've had a strong headwind, and yesterday we came through a pretty strong storm."

  "Well, be careful, father," Jula said. "Jesmind is just starting to calm down now. I don't want her getting all worked up again."

  "How has she been?" he asked. "She always tries to put on a good face when we talk."

  "She's actually been in a pretty good mood," she answered. "Triana told her about Kimmie, and surprisingly enough, she was happy about it. Strange, seeing as how Jesmind has been planning how to kill her when you two come back," she chuckled.

  "Even Jesmind has to feel happy about a baby," Tarrin chuckled, a little surprised. Tarrin hadn't told Jesmind about Kimmie being pregnant yet. If Jesmind already knew, why didn't she say anything? He had to ask her about that.

  "Jasana?"

  "Fine," she smiled. "She's looking forward to seeing this new baby. She seems to think that Kimmie already had it."

  "You'd better break her of that notion."

  "I'll try, but Jasana can be very stubborn about things," Jula said with a slashing gesture of her paw. "When she makes up her mind about something, she's decided that she's right, and everyone else has to be wrong. Even if you tell her straight that she's wrong, she won't believe it unless you can prove it to her."

  "That sounds about like her," Tarrin chuckled.

  "Is it a boy or a girl? Jesmind wants to know."

  "I don't know, and Kimmie won't let me find out," Tarrin told her. "She wants it to be a surprise."

  "She's a strange woman," Jula mused.

  "Well, we'd better get back," Jenna said. "Me and Jula are sitting at a dinner table with your parents, Triana, Jesmind, Jasana, Thean, and Sevren. Odds are, they're looking at us funny right about now."

  "Be careful, you two," Tarrin said.

  "And please do not tell people where we are," Dolanna warned them. "The ki'zadun may still have eyes and ears in the Tower. Do not make it easy for them to discover where we are."

  "We'll be discreet, Dolanna," Jenna nodded. "See you later, brother, everyone."

  "Good luck, father, and be careful," Jula added, and then their Illusions wavered and vanished.

  "Well, that's good news," Dar said. "At least the new sui'kun is safe."

  "Sharadar is the one place where the baby would be completely safe," Dolanna nodded in agreement. "The katzh-dashi have run the nation for thousands of years."

  "I have always meant to ask how that works," Allia said to her. "Do they help the king?"

  "The Keeper of the Tower in Abrodar is the king," Dolanna told her calmly. "Or queen, in this case. The current Keeper and queen of Sharadar is Alexis Firehair, a very powerful Sorceress. She is an example of how hard work and devotion can raise one from the lowest gutter to the highest pinnacle of the mountain."

  "Why is that?" Dar asked curiously.

  "Alexis Firehair was once a street urchin in Darrigon," she answered. "A kingdom south of Sharadar. She was a beggar and a thief before the Tower found her and discovered that she was a potentially powerful Sorcerer. She rose through the ranks at the Tower in Abrodar more quickly than anyone has ever done so before. She went from a mischevious Initiate that got in trouble about three times a day to the Queen of Sharadar in fifty-three years. That is positively meteoric in the way that katzh-dashi reckon time."

  "A living rags to riches story," Dar said with a grin. "I thought those were just bedtime tales."

  "Alexis is not one you would want to tell stories about to your children," Dolanna smiled. "She never lost her rough edges. She is a very beautiful woman with a tongue sharper than a razor, and a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. She is quite a unique person."

  "You know her personally?" Allia asked.

  Dolanna nodded. "We went through the Initiate together. Alexis got me in trouble almost every day," she said with a wistful, distant smile.

  "Dolanna? You got in trouble when you were younger?" Dar said in shock, then he laughed.

  "I was once as precocious as any youth, Dar," she said mildly. "Alexis always managed to provoke me. She and I were the scourge of the Tower of Abrodar," she said with twinkling eyes. "Of course, that was seventy years ago. I have mellowed much since then."

  "It is hard to imagine you as a troublemaker, Dolanna," All
ia said with a smile.

  "We all change, dear one," Dolanna said with a mysterious smile. "Time cannot help but change us."

  The new sui'kun had changed the Weave, had restored magic to the Priests and Wizards, had incresased the power of the katzh-dashi, and Tarrin discovered to his surprise that it had much greater far-reaching effects. And those effects were personified in Sapphire.

  The change in the Weave, Tarrin realized after noticing Sapphire, affected almost any creature with magical abilities. Sapphire's electrical powers almost tripled in power, so much so that the little drake had a hard time controlling her magical powers. Lightning would crackle and dance around her whenever she built up too great of a charge, and Tarrin could tell that the little drake was trying her hardest to keep her magic under control. Not only did Sapphire's magical abilities increase, Tarrin could tell that something fundamental had changed inside of her. Her eyes seemed much more lucid, almost sentient, and she seemed to pay a great deal more attention to him and Kimmie when they talked at night, or whenever she was with him. It was almost like she could understand them, or was trying to do so.

  Sapphire's alteration kept Tarrin's attention the rest of that day and all the next, as the ship continued to sail directly into the headwind, a wind that got stronger and stronger as the ship moved ever closer to its goal. He tended his little drake carefully as she recovered her strength, then tried to figure out how to help her get her powers back under control when it became apparent to him that her magical abilities had grown tremendously as a result of the birth of the new sui'kun. Her magical abilities were worrisome, but it was her change in personality that worried Tarrin more than anything else. Whatever had happened to Sapphire had had a distinct effect on her mind, almost as if the increase in magical power had expanded her consciousness. Tarrin considered using the Druidic spell to speak to her directly, but that didn't seem to be necessary, or needed quite yet. Though she was acting different, she was still Sapphire, and she still seemed more than content to be near him. She just seemed more attentive to what was going on around her, much less like an animal and much more like a sentient being.

  The dawn of the third day convinced Tarrin beyond any doubt that they had been penetrating the wind of the poem, for the ship moved into an area with a vastly, radically depoluated concentration of strands. The number of strands dropped as if they had crossed a line, as if they had walked out of a forest and onto a grassy plain with only a few trees breaking up the landscape. The effect on Tarrin was quite noticable, as the power that surrounded him dropped dramatically, and that actually made him feel listless and tired. The few strands that penetrated into the empty area dropped more and more as the ship moved during the morning, until Tarrin, standing at the bow, looked ahead of them and saw nothing. It was a massive region with absolutely no strands at all, a void of sorts, a place that Dolanna had speculated may exist but had never seen. Within that void, as soon as they got some distance from the last of the strands, no Sorcery and no Wizard or Priest magic would function. Only Druidic magic would function within the area, because it did not depend on the Weave.

  The magic influencing the minds of the humans and Wikuni had been the first defense. The wind was the second defense, a defense still actively pushing against the bow, and this, this magical void, it had to be the third line of defense. It had to be here to prevent any ship that used magic to get this far against the wind would have to continue without that help. And go a very long way, for Tarrin could see nothing ahead of them, nothing but empty sea all the way to the horizon. It told Tarrin that if the wind was indeed not natural, the magic that had created it had to be on the other side of the void. Weather magic was as temporary as any other Sorcery, but its effects were not so temporary. Wind created by Sorcery would continue to move after the spell was ended, for magic could not completely overwhelm or nullify basic natural laws. One of those laws was that when you moved something, if it was large enough, its momentum would make it continue to move. The spell that could create such a powerful wind may not be permanent, but the air it was moving got everything it needed from the spell when the spell pushed it. The wind continued of its own volition, being helped along by the air pushing at it from behind, until the resistance o the air around it that was not moving finally broke the wind up and nullified it. That storm they'd encountered a few days ago had to be the boundary where the cooler, drier wind finally died out and impacted the hot, muggy air blocking its progress, and those two colliding airmasses were generating storms. That storm they'd passed through was probably stationary, and had probably been in that same spot, raining away, as long as the wind had been blowing. A stationary, perpetual thunderstorm, and a pretty rough one at that. That may not have been one of the designed obstacles to cross, but it surely served as a damn effective one. More than once, Tarrin thought that the steamship was going to founder.

  Tarrin was standing on the deck, feeling tired, as the ship moved into that magical void, an emptiness that only Tarrin, Keritanima, and Dolanna could see, an emptiness that unnerved the Were-cat. He had never felt anything like it, and the emptiness around him felt like an emptiness within him as well. He was sui'kun, he was attached to the Weave in a myriad of ways, only some of them he understood or was even aware existed. Now he was moving into an area where his connection to the Weave would be stretched, maybe even severed temporarily, and that made him feel both curiously defenseless and almost yearning. He was being pulled away from the gentle presence of the Goddess, and that scared him more than the though of not being able to use Sorcery until they got to the other side. The Goddess' presence in his soul had been a constant thing since he'd accepted her, and now he felt that connection to her fading as the steamship moved deeper and deeper into the void.

  Tarrin got more and more unsettled as the ship moved deeper into the void, and he realized that he was getting short-tempered and a little paranoid as well. The loss of his magic was nothing compared to the loss of the sense of the Goddess, and without that he felt alone and vulnerable. Alone was something that the Cat could handle, but vulnerability was not a healthy emotion in one such as he. Everyone around him suddenly began to seem much more threatening, more dangerous, and his feral fears began to rise up in him with each ominous human or Wikuni face he viewed. His feral nature hadn't been any kind of problem for a long time because Keritanima had carefully told her crew and the engineers about Tarrin, and exactly how to act around him to keep him calm. They all obeyed Keritanima's rules, even the new crew, never talking to him unless he spoke to them first, never being impolite or untruthful in response if he did speak to them, never approaching him, giving him a cushion of personal space that they could not enter, and if they had to pass him on deck or enter his personal space because of the confines of the surrounding environment, to make very sure that Tarrin knew that they were there, by clearing their throats or whistling or speaking as if talking to themselves or another. They did a good job of keeping out of Tarrin's hair and preventing his feral distrust of strangers to become an issue that put their lives at risk. But with the change in the Weave before and the entering of the void now, Tarrin felt his ferality begin to claw its way into the forefront of his mind, and he realized that the best thing, the safest thing, for him to do right then was go to his cabin and wait things out.

  He did just that, joining Sapphire in the small, cramped cabin to try to regain his composure. He ended up taking a nap with her in cat form, curling up with her in the bed as the drake continued to rest comfortably after her ordeal. The time had done well for her so far, as she had managed to regain control of her power any time except when she was almost at a full magical charge. Sapphire alleviated the problem by burning off the excess charge when it got too much for her to control, which was happening about once every two hours or so. But every time she did so, she went longer and longer every time as the charge rebuilt in her. She would have full control of her magical powers very soon.

  That was why the sailors had
been periodically seeing a bolt of lightning flash out from the port side.

  It took them nearly a full day to breach the void. Tarrin had spent the entire time in his cabin, sleeping, but he felt it as the sense of the Goddess began to get stronger, and that awakened him. He opened his eyes and jumped off the bed, shifting back to his natural form, and feeling the proximity of a few strands. They were pretty far away, but they were ahead of them. That meant that they were coming out of the void.

  The return of that feeling reduced his anxiety by a great amount, and he felt composed enough to go back up on deck and look around. He was greeted by a brilliant sunset to the west, painting the sky red as the sun began to sink below the horizon, and looked ahead though the stiff wind, a wind that was even stronger now, whistling through the ropes in the rigging and threatening to tear the flag off the mast. His eyes watered from the strong wind, but his layered vision could make out several strands, and he had a sense that there were many more behind them, beyond his perception.

  They had crossed the void. That was one more barrier successfully breached, and one step closer to their ultimate goal. They hadn't quite got there yet, because the wind was still pushing at them. They had not passed behind that wind yet, and he wouldn't feel that they were very close until they did. The poem said that they had to get behind the wind before the next thing happened, the thing that Allia needed to do. Whatever that was. The poem said that Allia would find behind the wind. That seemed a little odd, but they were all convinced that it was a metaphor, or a generalization. Now that they had experienced some of the defenses set in their path to protect the Firestaff, Tarrin felt that the passage meant just what it said. After they got past whatever was causing the wind, Allia would be able to see their destination. Then it would be up to Tarrin to get them there, according to the poem.

  Tarrin was joined at the bow by Allia and Dolanna, as they shielded their eyes and looked ahead. "Do you see something, dear one?" Dolanna asked.