"They sound like they enjoy violence," Ianelle sniffed.
"Moderately so, yes," Tarrin agreed bluntly. "Nothing makes an Ungardt happier than a nice little war."
"I think your grandfather will be disappointed if we don't bring him some people to kill," Miranda teased. "And his warriors may not like getting their hopes up and end up having nobody to fight."
"Anrak'll have to take that up with his kinsmen," Tarrin shrugged. "Besides, if they can't fight with outsiders, they'll just fight with each other. They do it all the time anyway." Tarrin looked at his bond-mother. "I know it's asking alot, but I need Sarraya, mother," he told her. "We work well together, and I'll need her if I'm going back to the desert."
"I can have her here by midnight," she said confidently.
"Good. Thank you."
"Why can't I go with you?" Keritanima said. "Why just Allia?"
"Because I'm Selani, sister," she answered simply. "Tarrin did not undertake the desert alone the first time. Remember, he travelled with two Selani. My brother's wise in knowing that he will need a Selani with him."
"It makes things easier, Kerri," he nodded. "I don't have to worry about Selani groups attacking me outright, and Allia's knowedge of the desert will be very useful. Besides, they're going to need you in Ungardt to maintain the misdirection. It's not going to end as soon as you get there, because we have to make everyone believe that I'm there. That's important. Besides, Var and Denai taught me enough to survive in the desert, but it's still going to be much easier on me if Allia's there."
"What dangers are there in the desert?" Darvon asked. "I've heard that it's a barren wasteland."
"Well, first off, just about everything is poisonous," Tarrin said, ticking off a finger. "Then there are the inu and kajat, and quite a few other nasty desert animals that make life there very interesting."
"What are those?"
Immediatley, Tarrin turned and wove an Illusion of a kajat, a very detailed image that appeared to the side of them. It was fifteen spans tall, with mottled brown skin, and a huge mouth full of dagger-sized teeth.
"Karas' hammer!" Darvon swore as they all gaped at the massive Illusion. "Is it really that big?"
"This is an image of a small one, Lord General," Allia said sedately. "The adults are considerably larger."
" Inu are about the height of a man, with the same general build as a kajat," Tarrin said. "But they're very fast, smart, and they hunt in packs. Even the Selani fear them."
"We respect them, brother, but we don't fear them," Allia said pointedly.
"I'd fear them," Darvon muttered honestly, staring at the Illusion.
"After we get to the desert, I'm not quite sure what we'll do," Tarrin admitted. "Probably join up with a Selani clan and simply wait until Gods' Day comes and goes. After all, it's the getting there that's important." He looked at Allia. "Maybe we'll go see Ariana. I've always wanted to show you Amyr Dimeon. I think you'd be amazed by it."
"I would like to see it," she nodded with a smile.
"So, what do you think of my idea?"
"I think it's bloody clever," Keritanima said. "You're going to give gray hair to everyone chasing us, brother."
"I think that is the general idea, Kerri," Dolanna told her with a smile.
"It has merit," Jenna said soberly, tapping her chin with a finger. "We'll be pinning down the eyes and ears of our enemies, and putting them in a position that they will not enjoy. Besides, I like the irony of it. You pretend to seek shelter with one group of dangerous people only to go take shelter with another. It's a plan inside a plan. Even if they do realize that Ungardt is just a ruse, they won't have any better luck trying to ferret you out of the desert." She looked at him. "There's just one little flaw."
"What?"
"You know Grandfather, Tarrin. He'd never believe Kerri. I''ll have to take a little trip up to Dusgaard and have a talk with Grandfather. You know how he likes to argue."
"That's true," he conceded. "Since mother and father are back in Aldreth, I guess you would need to set things straight. Think you can Teleport up?"
"I don't know how," she admitted.
"Sister, by tonight, you'll know more about Sorcery than Ianelle," he told her confidently. "I haven't told anyone this yet, but when I was turned, the memory potion was affecting me. It has several, interesting side effects. One of them is that I picked up a great deal of information from the echoes of memories in the Weave. I can weave almost any spell any Sorcerer has ever used, and Mother told me to teach them to you. I only have one day, so you'd better be very attentive."
"How did that happen?" Jenna asked in surprise.
"I'm not sure," he said. "But it did. I've also had something of an expanded memory since I woke up. I can remember absolutely every second of my entire life, even from before I was born. It's a very weird feeling," he admitted.
"I say, what an amazing turn of events!" Phandebrass said brightly. "I really must talk with you, lad, I must! I thought that there may be some unusual side effects of your turning, but I hadn't expected this! I say, why, I may be able to manufacture a new potion that enhances the ability to remember! I may make a potion that increases intelligence, I may!"
"It'll have to wait, Phandebrass," Tarrin told him bluntly. "I have too much to do today."
Phandebrass looked a little crestfallen, but said nothing.
"Mother told me that the life memory will fade, but what I learned from the Weave never will," he told them to assure them. "She said that though it was a bit hard on me, I wasn't permanently harmed by the ordeal. My memory will return to normal after a little time, except for those things I learned from the Weave."
"That's a relief," Jenna said sincerely.
Tarrin looked to Sapphire. "I know you were just waiting for me to recover, my friend," he said. "As you can see, I'm well now. What do you intend to do?"
"I intend to return home," she said calmly. "Since you are going to the desert, I guess I will leave with you tomorrow. You'll cut a great deal off of my travel time."
"You're more than welcome to come with us," he told her honestly.
"I need to get home. I have no doubt that my brood has destroyed our caves with their revelling in my absence, and I must be there to set things right."
Tarrin chuckled. "I guess young ones are young ones, no matter what species. They all seem to have this knack for upsetting parents."
"Truly," she agreed with an impish smile.
"Well, I guess that's about everything," he said. "What we need to do now is get ready to leave. And don't make a secret out of it," he told them. "We want them to know that we're leaving, remember that. Jenna, I need to start with you as soon as we can."
"I will handle the arrangements, my Keeper," Ianelle told her.
"I appreciate that," she nodded.
"I have just the Knight in mind, son," Darvon told him. "He's an overly clever young Senior Cadet that calls himself Fox. He's half Ungardt, just like you, and he's a born troublemaker. I think he can do the job nicely."
"He'll need a crash course in how I behave," Tarrin said.
"I can handle that," Keritanima told him. "Me and Dar need to go see him to tailor the Illusion to him anyway." She took on a thoughtful look. "Darvon, do the Knights still have those Trollskin gloves?"
Darvon looked at her, then laughed. "That's quite clever, your Majesty," he said. "Yes, we still have them. And if we put them on Fox, then he can have a little help convincing people he's Tarrin."
"My thoughts exactly," Keritanima nodded with a wicked little smile.
"I can help with that," Triana told them bluntly. "Bring him to me. I'll make him as tall as Tarrin, and then the Illusion will only have to change his features. I've noticed that Illusions that change height have trouble dealing with the physics of movement."
"Can you put him back, Mistress Triana?" Darvon asked.
"As easily as I grow him, I can shrink him," she said confidently. "It won't be too pleasant, but it'l
l work."
"That will make the Illusion much more convincing," Dar said professionally. "It's a good idea."
"I already know how Allia acts, so I think I can handle being her," Auli added. "I hear about nothing but Allia from Allyn anyway. If I didn't know her by now, I never will. And since I'm about her size, you shouldn't ahve to do anything to me to make it believable," she said quickly.
"You'll be fine as you are, girl," Triana said to her absently.
"I say, I need to make a few preparations, and break down my lab," Phandebrass said.
"I'll be staying here, Tarrin," Kimmie said. "I'm getting a bit too round to be travelling just now."
"I didn't want you to go," he told her. "I'd rather have you and our child out of harm's way from now on. I think Jula can serve well enough as the party's resident Were-cat."
"Me?" she said in surprise.
"You," he told her. "They may need our unique abilities before it's all said and done, and you're also a Weavespinner, daughter. I'd rather have that kind of power protecting my friends. Is that alright, mother?"
Triana looked to Jula. "Only for a short time," she said bluntly. "Jula is still a child."
"I know, but I don't think a couple of months alone will hurt her too much."
"I don't like it, but it's necessary," she said sourly. "I'll be stopping by to check up on you, girl, so don't think you'll be out of reach of my arm," she warned.
"Yes, Triana," Jula said obediently.
"Mist won't like it, but I'm going to have her stay here," Triana said. "It'll be easier to keep an eye on the cubs if they're together, and she can replace Jula as a babysitter."
Jula flushed a little at that, but wisely said nothing.
"If I want to get Sarraya back here by midnight, I have to start getting things done now," she announced, standing up. "It won't take me long to stretch this human, but I have a few other things to do before I can leave."
"Yes, we have much to do," Ianelle agreed. "Keeper, I'll be at your earliest convenience."
"I'll let you know when we're done," she said.
They broke up then to prepare for tomorrow. Tarrin did pause to talk lightly with them, with Dolanna and Dar and Camara and Koran Tal, answering a few questions and assuring them that he was alright. He wanted to spend more time with them, tell them all about what happened to him, but they all had too much to do now to waste time on idle chitchat. Things were starting to come to a head, and everyone knew it. When they all left the Tower tomorrow, nobody doubted that their leaving wouldn't cause shockwaves through all of Sulasia, all of the West, that could possibly lead to another war. Only this war would be fought in Ungardt, and the odds were going to be stacked most decidedly in the other direction. Tarrin wouldn't need to assemble an alliance of different peoples to stand against that. The Ungardt would use their rugged, hostile homeland as all the ally they would need to protect it.
Summers were very short that far north. Very soon now, as summer wound down into autumn, the first snows would fall, and not long afterwards the countryside would be a snow-choked quagmire, hostile to any kind of large-scale action. Ungardt weather was never very good, and all those elements would combine to make any idea of forced invasion very costly. Any attackers would be faced with two overwhelming opponents if they invaded Ungardt. The Ungardt people, and the Ungardt winter. Both were equally formidable, and equally merciless.
And if things worked as he hoped they would, they would all be bashing their heads against the proverbial rock to get to him, and he wouldn't even be there. If everything was done right, every eye in the world would be affixed to Ungardt. That meant that since he'd be in the desert, he'd be relatively safe. As if he wouldn't be safe enough. Even if he did tell everyone where he was going, he doubted they could do anything about it. The desert was even more hostile to an invading force than Ungardt, but he wasn't going to take any chances. Not over this. The Firestaff was too valuable, too precious, too dangerous to take any risk whatsoever. With Tarrin leaving, Jenna could seal the Tower to protect his mates and children, and anyone who tried would find themselves facing an army of Sorcerers and fanatically loyal Knights. Anrak Whiteaxe, his grandfather, would use every resource at his disposal to make his friends unassailable in Ungardt, and Tarrin would do the same in the desert to make the Firestaff just as unreachable.
If everything worked as he hoped, them leaving and diverting the attention of his enemies to the fortress kingdom of Ungardt would prevent them from getting any kind of hold in any one place. And if he could keep them off balance and guessing for just a few short, critical rides, then he would slip completely beyond their reach. The Firestaff would be safe in the desert, Gods' Day would come and go, and then he could finally end this madness. He would put the Firestaff somewhere safe, wherever the Goddess told him to leave it, and not worry about it for another five thousand years. He could then return to Aldreth with his mate and children, with Mist and Kimmie close by, and settle into the life of wonderfully ordinary domesiticity that he so desired.
All they needed was a little luck.
To: Title EoF
Chapter 9
There were a great many things to do, and it almost seemed to Tarrin like they weren't going to have enough time to get to all of it.
After they split up from the meeting at the courtyard, Tarrin and Jenna withdrew from the others and returned to her personal rooms, one of the few places where nobody would disturb her, and Tarrin got to work. After Jenna used the Priest spell to augment her ability to retain knowledge, he started training her in the many, many spells that he'd learned through his unusual turning. There were a great number of them, and having to think about each one to teach Jenna let him get a little better understanding of them and how they were used. Some were battle spells, like one nasty one that created a very powerful acid out of flows of Earth, Water, Fire, and Divine, which was sprayed forth to injure an opponent. There were many new Transmutation spells, including the one that allowed the Transmutation of a being into another kind of being. Shapeshifting. It was one of the spells, though a Sorcerer wouldn't use that particular spell on himself. Sorcerers were wary of spells that altered the body, because it may damage or destroy their connection to the Weave. There were few ways a Sorcerer would Transmute himself, and crossing over, changing the body to make it invulnerable to heat and fire, was one of them. Sorcerers could Transmute themselves in other ways, but a tiny mistake could strip them of their powers, so Sorcerers, even the Ancients, were very wary about doing so. It was such a dangerous and unused sphere of Sorcery that even Tarrin's knowledge of it was strangely incomplete. Then again, given how extraordinarily dangerous it was, there was little surprise in the fact that a very, very rare few katzh-dashi would even dare to experiment in that area. Some were spells of an aspect of Sorcery the modern katzh-dashi had never even seen before, Divination. The reading of signs and portents to predict a possibility in the future. Divination was terribly unreliable, for the future was not set, and elements of the present changed constantly to alter the lines of possibility in the future. The one spell that Tarrin had learned in that field of study that had any kind of reliability at all was a rather interesting little weave that predicted the probability of success of an impending action, provided that the action was accomplished within a minute of the casting of the spell. But even that one was unreliable if other factors influenced the possibilities of success, especially when other sentient beings were involved. So, the spell would be fairly accurate if Tarrin used it to see if he could successfully break down a door, but it wouldn't do him very much good in predicting a winner if he and Allia decided to race down a passageway. There was another spell that tried to gauge the severity of possible danger in the near future, but the spell couldn't determine the type of danger, nor its cause. But it did operate with at least a modicum of success, but it was notoriously fickle about what it considered danger. The concept of danger was a very personal one, and what Tarrin felt was not dangerous, o
thers would. That made the spell very erratic, especially when the danger would be caused by another sentient being, or the danger another caused was purely accidental. That made it moderately useful for a Sorcerer trying to detect the possibility of being attacked by brigands in an alley, as they intended to cause danger to the Sorcerer, but would not warn of a thief on a rooftop above that accidentally knocked a roof tile loose that fell on the Sorcerer's head and killed him.
There were a great, great many useful spells, many of which Auli had demonstrated in their endless games of fun. Sorcery was capable of battle and other things, but the Ancients had concentrated on finding ways to make Sorcery useful. That was why there was a weave to do almost any kind of chore or labor, there were weaves that affected clothing, mended broken items, and even trivial ones that changed the color of things. The Ancients placed greater value on spells that could do things for them, not spells that could kill people. Then again, back then the Sha'Kar dominated the katzh-dashi, and their pacifistic ways had influenced how they researched the ability. Tarrin taught Jenna an absolute plethora of handy little weaves that did any number of small, useful things, as well as a few that weren't quite so small, like weaves that determined the age of an object, or a weave that would tell the Sorcerer who had last touched an object, and more importantly, exactly where that person was, or even a weave that
After that, they moved into a more serious aspect of Sorcery, and that was healing. There were many spells of healing that had been forgotten, even by the Sha'Kar, and many of them were spells that affected more than just injury. There were weaves for helping the body fight disease, though the weave couldn't outright cure the disease itself. There were weaves that helped a Sorcerer heal mental damage, such as trauma or shock, but only a Sorcerer of the same race could do that. The boundary of species was a constant throughout all of Sorcery when it came to using Mind weaves, even to the Ancients. Only under truly extraordinary circumstances could that barrier be breached. Spyder was the only example of such an extraordinary circumstance. After ten thousand or so years, the Urzani had come to understand humans to such a detailed, exacting degree that it allowed her to use Mind weaves against humans. There was even a weave that partially reversed insanity, though it was not a permanent effect.
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