Weavespinner f-5

by James Galloway

  "You proposed?" Tarrin asked in surprise.

  "Not yet," she admitted with a slow smile. "And don't you dare warn him. I don't want to give him any chance to run away."

  "We wouldn't dream of it, but why Allyn?" Tarrin asked. "He's not even remotely Selani."

  "You and Kerri have shown me that there is strength in diversity," she said simply. "With the Selani strength and the Sha'Kar magic in their blood, our children will be powerful. And I like Allyn, brother. He's very attentive to me, he makes me laugh, and I know I can depend on him when I need him. He'll make a fine husband, even someone my clan can accept after I've suitably trained him."

  "He's a bit soft for the Selani life, sister."

  "Don't let Allyn's demeanor fool you, brother. He has steel in him. His is a Sha'Kar upbringing, but he has the soul of a Selani inside. There's more to him than you realize. Even I'm surprised by him from time to time."

  "As long as you're not thinking with something a little south of your brain," he told her bluntly.

  "That had a say in it," she said with a smirk.

  "It would," he accused.

  "We knew this would happen," Keritanima told her.

  "What?"

  "That you'd whip him into shape," she said with a grin. "I knew you were too much man for him."

  Allia looked at her, then laughed brightly. "I'm too much woman for him, you mean," she corrected.

  "Humans call it henpecked," Tarrin said dryly.

  "We call it sensible," Allia said. "He'll learn that my way is the only way. If he doesn't, he'll have a very unpleasant marriage."

  "No wonder she doesn't want to give him the chance to run away," Keritanima teased, giving Tarrin a bright, mischievious smile.

  "Allyn won't be easy to tame," Allia admitted. "But I'll enjoy the challenge of it."

  "Well, we forgot to say congratulations, so congratulations, sister," Tarrin told her.

  "Yes, congratulations, sister. Now we're all married," Keritanima said with a smile. "Or at least something approaching it. Now we can sit up all night and gossip wickedly about our spouses."

  "We do that already," Tarrin shrugged.

  "But at least now some of us aren't left out," Keritanima said with a bright smile.

  "That was your fault. We couldn't help it if you were a virgin," Allia told her frankly. "We could have fixed that for you any number of times, you know. There were any number of suitable men handy, but you were stubborn about keeping your royal chastity. So don't complain if you missed out."

  Keritanima's face poofed out as all the fur on her face stood on end, then she laughed helplessly. "And I thought I was dirty-minded!" she admitted. "I submit to your even dirtier mind, fair sister," she said with a mocking smile. "I'm yours to train in all those kinds of things."

  "If you want training, talk to Miranda," Tarrin told her bluntly. "She's more corrupt than all three of us put together."

  "That's certainly saying something," Keritanima chuckled. "I'm not sure it's a good thing, but it's certainly something."

  Bantering with his sisters had done much to leech off the majority of his blinding anger, but it didn't totally vent it. He was still plenty angry, but it was again the cold, calculating anger of the human in him, the anger that would allow him think rationally without losing his ire. Vengeful anger, his father Eron would call it. A kind of anger he'd always warned Tarrin not to cultivate in himself, for good things rarely came of it. It allowed him to approach the problem before them with more than a driving need to hunt down and chastise someone-anyone-in the most vicious manner possible. Now he could follow leads, think calmly, and then let that blind fury go when he was sure of who did it.

  They met Sapphire and Jenna as soon as he returned to his room, where the two Knights still stood silent vigil. They came out as soon as he approached the two armored men, and Jenna was swept up in the arms of Keritanima and Allia both when she reached them. Tarrin had his memory back, and he knew intimately well now just how close Jenna was to his his adopted sisters. Allia had become close to her before they left the Tower, and Keritanima had done so after they had returned to the Tower while Tarrin was in the desert, after Keritanima herself had returned from Wikuna. Keritanima and Allia were accepted by his parents as an intimate part of his immediate family, and his mother often absently called them both daughter. Sapphire still looked incensed, but at least lightning wasn't flying all over the place.

  "Are you ready, little one?" she asked in a tightly controlled voice.

  "Let's go," he said. "Allia and Kerri are going with us. Both of them are very observant. They may catch things we miss."

  Sapphire looked profoundly skeptical of that notion, but sniffed indifferently and swept in the direction that Jenna pointed.

  Where they kept that blood turned out to be the destination of a very long trip. It took them nearly a half an hour to get there, a cellar in a part of the lowest basement as remote as one could get in the Tower. It was a hallway he hadn't even known was there, and that was saying a great deal, because he and Dar and Auli had explored what they thought was absolutely everything. He was surprised that they'd missed something, but they obviously had. It was a large room filled with a very thick layer of dust, and under the dust was contained boxes upon boxes upon boxes. They were stacked on the floor. They were stacked on old, old tables. They were stacked on heavy stone shelves carved directly out of the rock of the walls themselves. They were piled to the very top of the low ceiling in the far corner. And every single box had not a single mark on it to discern it from any other box. All the boxes were uniform, made of wood slats nailed together, and all their dimensions were proportional. Some were larger, some were smaller, but they all appeared identical to one another in that all of them looked to be perfect cubes or long rectangular boxes.

  Tarrin stared in dismay, Keritanima sneezed, and Sapphire glared at the room as if it was the room's fault that it looked that they were going to have to undergo a rather exhaustive search just to find out in which box the blood was stored.

  "Hold," Sapphire said quickly, holding an arm out to stop Jenna from entering the room. "The dust itself is a clue."

  "It is uniform," Allia announced. "Whoever came was careful to upset the dust so it would resettle and hide evidence of their visit."

  Tarrin's eyes scanned the thick dust, and he had to agree. It was of an even thickness on the floor and on the boxes, giving no hint as to where the culprit had looked, or where the culprit had gone in the large storeroom. Without giving it much thought, Tarrin wove a quick spell of Earth, Water, and Divine, a spell that lifted up faded scents and made them glow with a ruddy light. To his surprise, not only did the spell fail to locate any recent scents, it failed to find any scent at all except dust, stone, and wood.

  Tarrin's ears laid back slightly, and his eyes narrowed. Whoever had done it knew that someone was going to try to find out who they were, and more to the point, had known a Were-cat would be involved. Whoever it was had absolutely erased every trace of scent in the room, scouring it completely clean, making it as if the room had never been entered by anything larger than an insect.

  "What's the matter?" Keritanima asked him.

  "The room's been purged of scent," he replied. "Totally. There's not even any old traces of the workers who cut the stones."

  "So whoever came along before us knew someone was going to be looking," Keritanima concluded grimly. "And they were familiar enough with your kind to take steps."

  Tarrin turned the spell into the hallway, turning as he moved it, and again he was set back. The only scents laid into the passage were their own. But Tarrin realized that the purging only went in one direction in the continuing passageway, as if the culprit hadn't thought to do both sides to cover his passing, or perhaps didn't bother to think that purging in both directions would make a difference. It did make a difference, however, because now Tarrin had a trail to follow, a trail of anti-trail, for the purging itself marked the passing of the
guilty party indirectly.

  "I'm going to follow this a little," Tarrin told them.

  "Follow what?" Allia asked.

  "The purging only goes in one direction," he told Allia, pointing the way they themselves had come. "Maybe whoever did it messed up, and we'll be able to get something where it ends."

  "A reasonable idea," Sapphire nodded. "You follow that, little one, while we try to find clues in here."

  "I will come with you, brother," Allia offered, and Tarrin nodded in agreement.

  "Keep us posted," Keritanima said, tapping her amulet meaningfully.

  "I'll Whisper if I find something," he answered, then he and Allia started down the hall.

  Moving with good speed, for Tarrin could sense the purging as easily as he could smell Allia, the pair traced it along the meandering, confusing passages of the cellars of the Tower. Tarrin realized quickly that whoever had done it had gotten lost more than once, for the purging would go off in two directions at intersections, and one of those trails would end abruptly, as if the culprit had realized that he was going in the wrong direction. They went up another level, up a tiny, narrow, dank staircase that Tarrin hadn't known was there, and probably hadn't seen the passage of anyone other than the two of them and the culprit in hundreds of years. He realized that the culprit had become lost, and was meandering around looking for something he could identify. He could only follow behind that trail, which led him in a roundabout manner.

  The trail did, after about a half an hour, come to an end, and much to his chagrin, it came to an end just down the passage from the staircase that led down to the baths, probabably the single-most heavily trafficked passageway in the entire Tower. The culprit had been very clever in making sure that his trail ended in the one place where it would be absolutely impossible for anyone to pick it up, for in a matter of hours any trail left behind would be destroyed by the passing of so many others. Tarrin knelt in the middle of the passage, making two curious Sorcerers, a dark-haired woman and a Sha'Kar, go around him and look at him curiously as they passed on their way to the baths. He put two thick fingers on the floor and realized that though the purging robbed him of the ability to identify the culprit, the purging itself may give him some information. He sank himself into the remnants of that spell. The ghostly vestiges of the spell may still be lingering in the rock, for here in the Tower, spells had a habit of leaving behind traces of themselves. It was because of the very rich magical atmoshphere… flows and spells could often linger long after the Sorcerer stopped concentrating on it. And if it were Wizardry or Priest magic, even Druidic magic, there may be some lingering trace of it he could identify.

  From the feel of it, it was rather old, maybe two rides or so, but that was all he could really tell. The magical power of the Tower had infused whatever was left and drowned it in the ambient magical energy that thrived here, an environment just like Sha'Kari, where he had trouble sensing the more delicate things because of all the interference. The only thing he could sense was the age of the magic, but the texture of its remnants gave no hint as to the kind of magician that created it. It was one of the few times when he couldn't be sure about what kind of magic he was confronting. But even if he could tell which order did it, the magic itself told him some things. It told him that whoever did it had done it well before he intended to carry out his plan, and it showed that his target had had both the time to think things over, and more than enough time to get everything ready to keep himself hidden. His target had had two rides to make sure that every trace of his activities had been destroyed. The person also was either a magician or had a confidante that was one, for them to use magic to cover their tracks. They may be looking for a single person or a pair or trio, but someone in the guilty party was definitely a magic-user.

  He realized, without much enthusiasm, that this was not going to be as easy as he thought. They were chasing someone that obviously knew what they were doing. Even a fool with a little magical assistance and two rides to prepare could do a good job in destroying the trail that led back to him.

  Raising his awareness partially up into the Weave, he became immediately aware of the many conversations taking place among the Sha'Kar. He'd never noticed that before-at least not here-and he had to make a few adjustments just as the Sha'Kar did to speak to Jenna and Keritanima without disturbing other conversations, and also without letting anyone else currently bridging into the weave eavesdrop on what they were saying.

  "Sisters," he called.

  "Any luck?" Jenna's voice responded immediately.

  "It peters out in front of the stairs leading to the baths," he said sourly. "I checked the spell itself, and it's about twenty days old. It was made by a Sorcerer."

  "I've found some traces of that here too," Jenna told him, and Tarrin quickly adjusted what he was receiving to make it audible from his amulet so Allia could hear what was being said. "Whoever stole the blood was very careful. One of the crates, the one with your blood in it, was moved by Sorcery, and it's the only crate that seems to have been touched. The culprit knew exactly where the blood was."

  "That's not a damning fact, Jenna," he said. "My blood would be easy to detect with magic. It's not exactly normal."

  "Kerri mentioned that. She said she could make up a spell on the spot to find it."

  "I know. So could either of us, for that matter."

  "Sapphire tried to use a couple of spells herself, but that purging effect has destroyed everything they could find, even Druidic and Wizard spells can't get any information. That's a strong spell, brother. I don't think any Sorcerer would be capable of it, not as powerful as its effect is. I'm not even sure what spell it is."

  "I can't tell either," he admitted. "I can only tell that it was made about twenty days ago."

  "That's something, at least. We can always grill everyone in the Tower and find out where they were that day. But we do know now that it has to be a strong Sorcerer that did it."

  "No, we just know that a magician had a hand in covering it up," Tarrin told her. "We're coming back, Jenna."

  "We'll be waiting."

  Tarrin mulled it over as they went back, following a more direct route. A magician had a hand in things, so that more or less excused all the females except Kimmie at least directly. None of them were magicians, and more to the point, none of them would probably trust a human magician with that kind of a secret. Mist certainly wouldn't, and as far as the collusion theory went, that left only Jesmind. If Jesmind did it, then she had help. He'd never get anything out of her, but if he could find whoever helped her-if it was really her-then he'd get the truth. So, if it was an individual, it was Kimmie, but if it was a group effort, it was Jesmind. At least right now. He knew things would change in his mind as he got more information, and he told himself several times, over and over, not to get his mind set in stone about who he thought did it. It could have been anyone, even one of the original Council taking steps to put him back the way they'd put him the first time. It simply came down to the fact that they had to get more information before they could start eliminating possible suspects.

  Once they got back to the storeroom, they found that all the dust had been carefully pushed up against the walls, not removed, and Sapphire, Keritanima, and Jenna were carefully inspecting a single small wooden crate. He looked over them-an advanatage of height-and found that inside it, laying on a pillow and with shredded straw strewn around it, were six small vials of dark, reddish liquid. The array of the vials made it abundantly clear that there were two of them missing.

  "Those are it?" Tarrin asked over them, making Keritanima jump.

  "Don't do that!" she said with a nervous laugh, putting her hand to her chest. "You scared me out of my pelt!" She touched her face. "If I start shedding, it's going to be all your fault!"

  "These are," Jenna answered. "Two missing. The one Jula used, and the one whoever it was used on you."

  Tarrin reached down and picked up one of the tiny vials, inspecting it. It had
a mark of warning on it-the mark of death, actually-telling anyone who picked it up that what was held within was a substance of incredible danger. He could sense the magic of the blood within, his blood, blood he had shed fighting the Wraith. They had picked up his frozen fingers and other pieces of him lost to the icy touch of the Wraith and milked the blood out of them. Why they did such a thing, why they found the need to keep something so dangerous, was completely beyond him.

  "Any clues?" he asked.

  "Only one," Sapphire said, reaching down and picking up the lid, then turning it over and showing him the underside, where the nails stuck out from it. She pointed to the edge of the lid, and Tarrin peered there.

  He could see them. Four small depressions in the wood, small lines, looking like where a tool of some kind had been used to pry the lid free of the crate. They were straight and rather close together, but they had caused some very minor flaking of the wood. Whatever it was that they used had had some force behind it.

  "That rules out the females," he said grimly. "They'd just use their claws."

  "If they wanted to be found, sure they would," Keritanima said dismissively. "Whoever did this used a tool. Look, here's where they put in a crowbar," she said, pointing to a depression on the lip of the crate. The depression was strangely narrow, and was deeper along the edges than it was in the middle. "See how they rocked it back and forth to pry the lid up?"

  "I doubt any of the females would have done that," Allia mused. "As strong as they are, it would have been nothing for them to pry the lid with a crowbar. Rocking would have been pointless." Allia looked down at the crate, then her eyes seemed to focus on the floor by it. She knelt quickly and pushed Keritanima out of the way, then put her finger on the flagstone of the floor delicately. "There is a scratch here," she said. "It is fairly fresh, but not made today."

  They all peered at the scratch. It was visible, but it was very faint. It was about a finger long, deeper at one end than the other, as if something had been pushed along the floor that had dug into it and slowed the object to a stop. Allia's eyes peered in scrutiny at the floor. "There's another here, much lighter, and another here," she said, tapping the floor to the left of that scratch, but Tarrin's eyes could barely make those out. Only Allia's exceptional vision, that would let her read a book from across an open field, could make out such minute details. Allia put a finger on each scratch, and Tarrin saw immediately that they were roughly the same distance apart, about half a finger, and the scratches were deeper towards one side of the trio. That really didn't mean anything, but it did jump out at him.