Tower of Sorcery

by Fel

  "That's a silly answer."

  "No, it's not. Those are common everyday things, things we expect would be around two thousand years from now. Why waste time describing something everyone has already seen?"

  Tarrin thought about it. "Oh," he finally realized. "Everyone back then knew what a Sha'Kar looked like, the way everyone today knows about the Wikuni."

  "Precisely. So they never really went into depth about them. All the books about the Sha'Kar were written in their language, and we can't read them. All we've managed to find out about the Sha'Kar is that they were a very human-looking race, just a bit taller than humans on the average, and were frail and delicate beings. They also had large eyes, and some in the Tower think that they may have had pointed ears."

  The description sounded a little like Allia, up until the "frail and delicate" part. Allia was by no means frail and delicate. She only looked delicate, because she was so beautiful. Maybe the Selani and the Sha'Kar were very, very distantly related.

  "When alot of people in the Tower saw Allia, they thought that maybe the Selani and the Sha'Kar shared some kind of common ancestor," Jula told him, mirroring what he was thinking. "I think they've already put Sha'Kar books in front of her to see if she could read them."

  "She didn't tell me about that."

  "I guess she didn't think it was very important," Jula told him. "And since they're still working to break the language, I guess that means it didn't work."

  "I guess not."

  "So, why are you in here?" Jula asked. "You should be in class."

  "My instructor had to talk to the Council, so I was given the rest of the day off," he replied. "She told me to come up here and read instead. But she didn't tell me what to read."

  "I suggest that you start with Studies On Efficiently Spinning Weaves," she told him. "It was written by a Sorcerer named Walina about a thousand years ago, but her techniques on weaving spells are still fundamental principles taught to all our students. She was a real trailblazer."

  "Where can I find that book?"

  "It's that big book they keep on the pedestal in the entrance hall," she smiled. "But you can get another copy over there. Nobody's allowed to touch the original." She pointed to a shelf across from the Lorefinders, just behind the circular desk that served as the main station for the librarians. "You should just ask the librarians, Tarrin. Tell them what you're interested in, and they'll send you right to it."

  "I wasn't sure they'd let me have important books, since I'm just an Initiate."

  "Tarrin, this library is for any who can touch the Weave," she told him. "You have as much right to be here as the Keeper herself." She glanced around. "Well, it's about time for me to get back to what I was doing. I'll see you later."

  "Later," Tarrin mirrored, standing up with her.

  Walina's book was very interesting. She described the raw forces that the Sorcerer was working with when they were touching the Weave, and then went on to discuss techniques of weaving flows that expanded on simple spellcraft. Techniques like knotting a weave so it would sustain itself for a while without having to be maintained, and layering one so that a second weave would activate after the first unravelled. Sorcery was limited in that there was no such thing as permanent spells for them, except when using Ritual Sorcery. All their magic lasted only as long as the Sorcerer concentrating on it. The effects of that magic could be permanent, like healing, but the magic itself was not. Knotting a weave made it draw on its own magic for a while, depending on the complexity of the weave and how well the knot was made. But even a knot only lasted a while before the weaves naturally untied themselves. Layering, Walina wrote, required tremendous skill to use, because placing one weave inside another without them interacting took considerable skill. Tarrin could see why. His own knowledge of Sorcery was somewhat limited, but his own short experience with it told him that flows loved to interact. To weave them in such a way that they wouldn't interact wouldn't be easy.

  He was interrupted by someone knocking on the table, and he immediately scented Allia and Dar. He looked up in surprise, and realized that he'd been reading, totally absorbed, for the entire afternoon. "I wondered if you were awake," Dar said with a chuckle. "That must be some book."

  "Actually, it is," Tarrin replied. "How did it go for you?"

  "Boring," he grunted.

  "How was your day, sister?" he asked Allia.

  "They have started teaching me weaves," she replied. "I still cannot touch the Weave half the time, but they seem to be rushing me."

  He only gave her a terse nod. He already had a good idea why. "Wait here a second," he told them, standing up. He went over to the librarian's station, where two small, older women busily sorted through a large number of books. They were sisters, from their scent, and had similar brownish, leathery skin and graying brown hair. They wore dresses of a pearly gray, made of a good wool by the smell of them, and were both well made and well maintained. "Excuse me, but can I borrow this?" he asked, holding up the book he was reading. The woman looked up at him, and to her credit, didn't so much as flinch when she realized who was talking to her.

  "Let me see it," one of them said, holding out her hand. Tarrin gave her the book, and she glanced at the cover and opened it. "Yes, you can take this one with you," she told him. "Just write your name down on this sheet of parchment," she instructed, hastily scribbling the name of the book in a column on the right. There were alot of names and alot of book titles on that sheet of parchment. She turned it around and offerred the quill pen she was using to him.

  Tarrin took the small pen between two large fingers, struggling with it a bit. His body was very handy and he felt comfortable in it, but his oversized paws were simply incapable of some things. One was handling the tiny quill pen with enough delicacy to be able to write legibly. He had the agility and dexterity, but to try would probably break the pen. Such a delicate thing put between his fingers would most likely break, no matter how gentle he was trying to be. He solved the problem by taking on his human hands, feeling the ache instantly shoot through his knuckles and fingers as soon as claws were replaced by nails, and he quickly scrawled his name down on the page. It wasn't very pretty, because the shooting pain made it difficult to write with elegance, or even efficiency.

  "You need to work on your penmanship, Initiate," she said in distaste, looking at the writing.

  "That's the best I can do," he told her bluntly, letting his paws come back. He cracked his knuckles and flexed his fingers, working out the pain. "At least until you have a pen that fits in these paws."

  "Alright, I can accept that," she said with a straight face. "You have to either bring the book back or check it out again in three days. Don't be late."

  "I won't," he said, putting the book under his arm and then going back to his friends.

  Lounging in his room, Allia sitting on the bed behind him, playing idly with his tail as she read from a book given to her by her instructor, Tarrin puzzled through the book written by this Walina. Even though he'd had so little practical instruction in Sorcery, alot of what the woman wrote made alot of sense, and it went beyond the tricks she wrote about. The woman seemed to have a fundamental understanding of the Weave that went quite beyond that of the normal Sorcerer. She explained the flows and their power, the act of using Sorcery, even the mysterious seventh sphere in terms that Tarrin could easily understand.

  Though Dolanna had already told him, Walina's writing drove home the very significant point that Sorcery was the magic of life. It represented the six basic forces that affected mankind: earth, air, fire, water, the power of the gods, and the human mind's intelligence and drive, and in a more esoteric way, the human will. It also encompassed the seventh sphere, that which held all the others together, and the power of this seventh sphere was limited only by the ability of those who tried to use it. Where the other six spheres represented single forces, the seventh was both its own unique power and a power that comprised the other six, at the same time.
It was all six, and none of them. That didn't make much sense to him, and Walina didn't explain it. She wrote that it was a paradox, a living representation of the mysterious ways in which the world worked, ways incomprehensible to mortal minds.

  Because it was the magic of the world, it was limited to the world. That meant that Sorcery had no effect on things and creatures that existed outside of Sennadar's natural order. Tarrin already knew what that meant; the creatures conjured up by Wizards. They weren't of this world, they were brought in from somewhere else. Sorcery existed in a balance between the other four orders of magic, where each was checked by another's power, and itself held yet another in balance. Walina explained that there were no physical or magical rules for why this was the case, only that it had to be something set forth by the Elder Gods, the ten gods of creation who represented the primal forces of the universe. Sorcerers could disrupt the magical spells of Wizards and Priests by cutting them off from the Weave, for the magic they utilized had to travel through the Weave to reach them, despite the fact that it originated from a place not of the Weave. Sorcerers could also create Illusions, something which only they could do. Sorcerers, in turn, could be choked off from the Weave by Druids, who had the power to alter nature itself, and the Weave was a natural part of the world. Wizards could Conjure creatures from beyond Sennadar, and had the most versatile type of magic. There were thousands of researched magical spells for use by the Wizards, waiting to be learned and used by them. And since Arcane magic, the magic of the Wizards, was a learned skill and not a natural ability, anyone with sufficient intelligence could learn its secrets. This made the Wizard both the most common form of magic-user, and the most versatile. Priests could perform true healing and cure diseases, something that Sorcerers couldn't even come close to matching, and they could disrupt Druidic magic by using their power to call on their patron God to isolate the Druid from the power of nature which was at his command. A Sorcerer's healing was a very limited and crude form of healing when compared to the granted power of the priest. There was a bit of overlapping. Both Sorcerers and Priests had healing capability, and Wizards could casts spells called phantasms that made people believe that something was real when it was not, which was a shortcut to the power of Illusion. And though only Wizards could conjure beings from outside the world, which were the most powerful of creatures, all four orders of magic had the capability to summon types of beings and creatures particular to their orders. Priests could summon forth spiritual forces called Avatars which were minor physical manifestations of the God's power in the world, and therefore would help the priest, and the priests of the twin gods of death, Dakki and Dakku, could speak to the souls of the dead to gain information. Both Sorcerers and Druids had the power to call forth beings called Elementals, creatures comprised entirely of one of the four elements that existed in nature. They would obey Druids without question, but they did not like Sorcerers, and would resist any orders given to them by a calling Sorcerer. Druids could also directly summon forth beings of nature to act in the defense of the Druid. Tarrin himself fell into that category; if a Druid made such a summons, and he was in range to hear the call, he would be compelled magically to respond. Tarrin was human-born, but Were-cats were Were, and all Were were creatures of the land.

  Sorcery was the only order where magic was not permanent for the most part. Only spells woven in Ritual Sorcery, utilizing the seventh sphere, were truly permanent weaves, and they usually tended to be Wards and the enchantment of mundane objects with magical capabilities. But, on the other side of the coin, Walina wrote that Sorcery was the most powerful of all four orders, for three simple reasons. Firstly, that a Sorcerer could stop the magic of Wizards and Priests. That Druids could stop them was generally not an issue, due to the fact that Druids were an even rarer breed than Sorcerers. Secondly, that only Sorcerers could combine their power in linked circles, which magnified their power tenfold. And thirdly, because a linked circle, using High Sorcery, could directly control the weather. Not even Druids could accomplish that feat, because the weather was the most powerful natural force there was, and no one Druid had that much power. Walina wrote that some suspected that the Sorcerer's inability to create permanent weaves was a check placed on their power, but she herself considered it simply a natural function of the Weave itself. Spells woven from the Weave were not natural, and flows pulled from strands always tried to return to them, which made weaves unravel. Tarrin had to agree with that.

  It seemed pretty complicated, but Walina wrote that she firmly believed that if a Sorcerer understood how all types of magic worked, it would help him or her in dealing with the magic of the Weave. Tarrin wasn't so sure about that, but everything else he'd read so far seemed to make sense, so he'd take the author at her word.

  The door opened, and both of them looked up to see Keritanima almost fly into the room, then slam the door behind her and lean against it. There was a wild look in her eyes, and she had a few crumpled sheets of paper in her furred hand. Tarrin was about to say something to her, but then he realized that her obvious panting was making no sound, and that he hadn't heard her bump up against the door. She also didn't have a scent.

  "Ker--" Allia began, but he cut her off with a quickly waved paw.

  The door opened again, going through the Princess. Or, Tarrin realized, through her Illusion. The real Keritanima strode in calmly, shutting the door, with a very wide grin on her face.

  "That was an illusion?" Allia asked in surprise.

  Keritanima nodded, her eyes bright and her grin evil. "Pretty good, isn't it?" she asked brightly in Selani. As always, when she wanted to talk about something imporant, she spoke in Selani. That told Tarrin her visit wasn't entirely a social one.

  "It wasn't making any sound, and it doesn't have a scent," Tarrin told her critically.

  "Spoilsport," she said with a teasing smile, sitting down on the chair by the small desk. "You and me are the only two with noses that sensitive, and I didn't weave in the spell to create the sounds. I have too much trouble weaving more spells than one at a time." She pulled her hair away from her face. "But it'll do wonders driving Jervis and his men crazy. I've already sent them chasing after an image in the maze, then I just walked away wearing the illusion of a human."

  "You're getting good at this," Tarrin said.

  "I think I have a knack for it," she said with a shrug. "I think I may need it," she said, holding up the three pages the illusory Keritanima had been holding. "I got these from Jervis' desk."

  "What are they?" Allia asked.

  "Reports about me," she replied. "It seems that the katzh-dashi never said anything about training me in Sorcery. Jervis almost scared my fur off this morning, and he sent a report off almost immediately. The reply came back about an hour ago."

  "That fast?"

  "Priests of Kikalli are on every ship the Wikuni puts afloat, and there are two of them on the grounds," she told him. "They've developed magic that lets them talk with each other over any distance. That lets us move our ships around very precisely, and it keeps us in control of the seas. The priest sent to aid Jervis sent off the message, and the priest there at the Royal Palace relayed the response from my father."

  "How did you get those?" Tarrin asked curiously. If they had been private reports, then she'd had to do something sneaky to get her paws on them.

  Keritanima only grinned at him slyly. "A good magician doesn't reveal her secrets," she winked, then she smoothed out the papers and looked at them. "The first is the message Jervis sent. It tells father that, for one, I have talent for Sorcery, and that the Sorcerers haven't taught me anything other than Sorcery since I got here. My father replied with a suitable consternation," she said with a slight sniff. "My father thinks I have the mental capability of a goldfish, so for them to tell him that I have talent in Sorcery is about the same as telling him that livestock is doing navigational mathematics."

  Allia chuckled, but Tarrin only gave her a calm look. "That's what you want hi
m to think, isn't it?"

  "Well, yes, but it'd be nice if he at least suspected that I wasn't a total waste of space," she said with a tightness in her voice that set off a bell in Tarrin's head. Keritanima wanted her father to find out that she was more than she appeared, but she'd die before she gave it away. She didn't want to be queen, but she also wanted her father's respect. It was quite a paradox, one he felt that even she couldn't reconcile. Keritanima's act was aimed at her sisters and enemies more than her father. After all, her father wasn't trying to kill her to get the throne. He was probably fighting off his own enemies to keep it.

  "He also demanded them to send the message again, to make sure they got it correctly. After they confirmed it, he went into one of his rages. He replied that he didn't send me here to learn Sorcery, and even though he understood the need for me to learn how to control it, that I'd better be getting the education the Tower promised to give me. He told Jervis that if they didn't take me out of the Initiate and put me in normal classes, he'd drag me back home."

  "That," Tarrin said after a moment, "could be a problem."

  "Slightly," she grunted.

  "How long do you think it's going to take for them to make that decision?" Allia asked.

  "It's going to depend on how effective the Tower is at stalling," Keritanima replied. "They obviously want me in the Initiate, and they'll play their own game to keep me there. It's going to be a dance between the Crown and the Tower until one of them blinks. After that, things will definitely happen. So this means that we have to act before things get dangerous enough to slow us down."

  "We're moving up?" Tarrin asked.

  Keritanima nodded. "I want to go visit the cathedral in three days," she told him. "And we can't be delicate about it, either. It's going to be an old fashioned robbery, Tarrin. We're going to steal anything we can carry out of there that'll be useful to us." She put the papers on his desk. "And because that will cause a row, we can't keep it anywhere obvious. So I'd like you to steal a good waterproof tent and several chests, and try to sneak them into the courtyard inside the maze. We'll cover the chests with the tent canvas and camoflage it so anyone looking in from the top of the Tower can't see it."