The Questing Game f-2

by James Galloway

  She was just like Jesmind. Her face was a more mature version of his fiery bond-mother, high-boned, sharp, and graceful, dominated by a pair of crystalline green eyes. Her hair was a tawny color, and it perfectly matched the tawny color of her fur. She wore a simple cotton shirt, unlaced a bit so it hung on her loosely, and a pair of dark leather breeches. Like him, she wore no shoes, letting her tawny fur on her feet look something like boot leather from a distance.

  Could this be Jesmind's mother? She certainly looked like Jesmind. No, more to the point, Jesmind looked like her. She was more mature, though she looked no older than thirty, and even from that distance, he could feel the power of her presence. This was no woman to be trifled with. She wore authority like a cloak, and it showed in her every move and look, no matter how subtle. Jesmind's few remarks about her mother fit in with what he saw before him.

  "You can come out now, cub," she called in a powerful voice, blunt and sharp, as if the doom of Death would befall any who didn't obey her instantly. "I know you're here." She looked right up at him, and he knew immediately that she'd known exactly where he was the whole time.

  Despite that, he still didn't rise up. Jesmind told him to treat all Were-cats as enemies. He trusted Jesmind now, in a way, and this one was an unknown. He wasn't going to risk giving up his high ground just because she made it clear she knew he was there.

  "Don't make me come up there," she said, crossing her arms.

  "Who are you?" Tarrin called, feigning courage. This one rattled him. He was afraid of her, but he had no real idea why. There was just something about her that unnerved him.

  "I'm Triana," she replied. "I'm Jesmind's mother. And you have alot to answer for, cub."

  "I don't have anything to answer for," he shot back.

  "Oh, you certainly do," she replied. "I went to Suld. I heard about what you did. That was monumentally stupid. Just come down, and we'll make this easy on both of us."

  "So you can punish me? I think not."

  "Just come down," she said, looking up at him with steely eyes. "And I'd be a fool for telling you I was. You're hard enough to track down as it is."

  This wasn't going well. She was tense, wary, and she'd been to Suld. He didn't know any of the laws of the forest folk, but he had a good idea of how many he'd already broken. She knew about his shame, and he had the strange feeling that she wasn't there to be a friend. Jesmind had told him that she would try to send someone to replace her as bond-mother, but if she had been to Suld, had seen the damage he had done, then she was probably not there to take up that role.

  Jesmind made it clear that Rogues were dealt with quickly and permanently. And what he had done had probably damned him in the eyes of Fae-da'Nar.

  Tarrin now understood his mistake. He had led her right past the very ship he was using, and what was worse, now she stood between him and the ship. She probably knew about the ship, if she caught his scent coming away from it. And they weren't leaving Den Gauche until tomorrow. That was too long.

  He couldn't see any other choice. She was probably there to kill him, and they were going to be in port too long for him to hide from her. He had to deal with her now, immediately, either drive her away, injure her bad enough to back off, or kill her. He'd rather not kill her, but he would have to at least make her stay away until tomorrow. He'd blundered, and now he had to pay for that mistake by driving the other Were-cat away.

  "Go away," he blustered. "I don't want to have to fight you."

  "You don't bring enough to the table, cub," she snorted. "Now come down here."

  "No. I can't trust you."

  "You're getting on my nerves, cub," she warned in a dangerous voice. "If you keep this up, you're going to pay for it."

  Tarrin stood up quickly and purposefully. Grabbing a piece of the low wall, Tarrin ripped it from its foundations, giving himself a good sized chunk of masonry. Heaving it, he brought it over his head, then hurled it at the female with inhuman force. He came up short, intentionally, but she made no effort to dodge out of the way. "Go away," he warned.

  "No," she said bluntly, walking forward. "I think it's time for you to get spanked."

  She may have been expecting trouble, but she certainly didn't expect him to dive off the roof. It even surprised him. He impacted against her like an arrow, driving both of them to the packed dirt yard between the two warehouses. They rolled with each other several times, until she kicked him off, and he landed on his feet as she rolled to her own feet. She had her claws out, and where he had an angry look on his face, her expression was calm and collected. "So, you do have spunk," she said calmly as he extended his claws and hissed at her threateningly. Tarrin could feel the Cat rise up in him in response to his fear, and he struggled to maintain control of himself in the face of her confidence.

  Two things were apparent to him after he engaged her. He was faster than her, but she was more experienced. She didn't fight in any specific style, but she firmly kept him on his heels with open-pawed slaps, light rakes, and pushes. She was fast, very fast, slapping away his every attempt to punch, kick, or rake her, and that speed combined with her skill overwhelmed his formal training in fighting. He didn't really want to hurt her, just make her go away, and she took advantage of his unwillingness to fight by pushing him back. In a shockingly short time, he was being backed up, protecting his face and neck from her seeking claws, trying to get some distance from her. He blocked several attempts to try to get to his face, then he doubled over in pain when her long claws tore a quartet of ragged, deep lacerations in his belly, just under the ribcage.

  He realized quickly that the wounds weren't healing. She had struck him true! She had somehow injured him in such a way that prevented his regeneration from healing the wound. That was something that even he didn't know how to do, to injure another Were-cat in a way that prevented them from regenerating. He tried to straighten up, but a white-hot lance of pain through his torso put him down on one knee, panting heavily. "I warned you," she said. "I'm not Jesmind, boy. I know how to fight. Now give over this nonsense and come with me."

  His answer was to rise up from his kneeling position with the palm of his paw leading, catching her squarely in the midriff. She rose off her feet and crumpled around that paw, her breath blasting from her lungs, then she sailed through the air to land heavily on her back some paces away. His eyes had ignited from within with their unholy aura, a clear indication of his growing rage, and he totally ignored the pain of his injury and rushed her. She rolled to her feet and met his charge, and it was she that was put on the defensive. Tarrin had lost some of the delicate, refined control taught to him by Allia and had replaced it with sheer savagery, and he pressed the taller Were-cat with powerful punches and rakes, using his strength to try to literally beat her to the ground. But she met him blow for blow, and he realized to his horror that not only was she taller than him, she was stronger than him. Pure physical force wasn't going to work, because she held that advantage over him.

  Tarrin took a few steps back, looking up into that grim, beautiful face, feeling his heart racing. She outclassed him in every sense of the word. She was stronger than him, more experienced than him, more dangerous than him. He found real fear of her in his heart, and that fear was giving the Cat the strength it needed to overwhelm him and take control. His stomach both hurt and felt cold and warm at the same time, cold pain soothed by warm blood flowing from the deep tears in his stomach, but the pain faded under his need to stand against her.

  He lunged in and tried to punch her, but she caught his wrist easily. He tried with the other paw, but she caught that one as well, and held him immobile for several seconds as he struggled against her superior strength, trying to free himself, staring into his eyes. There was no worry in her eyes, and her towering confidence began to rattle him more and more, making him doubt his sanity at trying to attack her. "Manacles?" she asked, glancing at the steel cuffs on his wrists. "Did someone try to imprison you, cub?"

  His answer
to that came as he brought up his foot, twisted in her grip, then brought his foot straight up behind him, claws leading. His foot struck her right under the chin, his claws punching four small holes in the skin under her jaw and snapping her head back. It was an awkward kick, what Allia called a split-kick, depending completely on his flexibility, but it had enough behind it to make her stagger. She let go of him, and his tail instantly lashed out, striking her across the ankle and sweeping her legs out from under her. Claws out, Tarrin stabbed down with both paws before she even fully hit the ground, but she somehow managed to slither out of the way, rolling backwards and to her feet. Tarrin's claws dug ten deep gashes in the dirt where her chest and stomach had been, but he recovered from it quickly. She wiped the underside of her jaw with the back of her paw absently, then spat out a single tooth along with the tip of her tongue. "Cute. You're better trained than I thought," she said in a conversational tone.

  Laying his ears back, he glared at her, but his hunched posture betrayed how much her rake had hurt him.

  "You're bringing this on yourself, cub," she snorted. "All you have to do is stop fighting. It's not the first time I've had to beat one of my children into submission."

  "You're not my mother," Tarrin hissed.

  "Oh yes I am," she said. "Jesmind may have turned you, but she's not capable of raising a bonded child. That makes you my child. And I'm not as gentle as she is. If I have to beat you to within an inch of your life to make you listen, then so be it. That's the price you pay for disobeying me."

  "You can try," he hissed.

  "It's your pain," she said with a shrug, then advanced on him.

  What happened next couldn't be classified as anything other than a whipping. The female Were-cat struck Tarrin almost at will, stinging slaps and rakes of her claws, punishing punches, into every area of his body that was sensitive. She did not pull her punches, and Tarrin found it hard to stand straight after only a moment or two. Never had he been so overwhelmed, and every strike from her intensified the Cat's attempts to take control. Any attempt to defend himself brought him another stunning blow, as she seemed to totally bypass his every attempt to block her paws. He suffered blow after blow, until the Cat had enough. He screamed with sudden rage and lunged at her.

  It came out of nowhere. One minute he was trying to rip a hole in her cheek, the next her foot was right in front of his face, and he went flying through the air. The sky and ground traded places a few times before he came to a stop flat on his face, his tail kinked from where it had been broken during the tumble. He shook his head to clear the stars, but it didn't do any good. She kicked him squarely in his injured stomach, and he fell over and howled in pain. But he continued with the roll and came up on his hands and knees, panting heavily from the pain and suddenly fighting an internal war against the Cat. He was being overwhelmed, and his fear of losing, of being killed or captured by her, was starting to unhinge his mind. If he lost control, the Cat would simply try to take her with brute force, and his conscious mind already understood that it would be a fight the Cat would lose. She would be able to contain even his most savage rage.

  "Give it up, cub," she said in a flat voice, a voice that got louder as she approached him. "You can't beat me, and I don't want to have to pound you flat just to make you listen."

  "No," he said through gritted teeth, his mind whirling as the instincts struggled to gain mastery over him. "No!" he said again as he felt himself lose his grip on himself, and the Cat roared into the forefront of his mind.

  " NO!" he screamed, paws flying up and to his head, as the Cat grabbed hold of the Weave in a crushing grip that forced it to give it its power. The incredible power of High Sorcery roared into him so quickly that his body exploded in Magelight, limning over and causing the air around him to instantly displace away. Eyes filled with incadescent white light opened and bored into the female. His paws came back around his head and pointed at her, and a chaotic weave of Fire, Air, Water, Divine power, Confluence, and token flows of the other Spheres quickly wove itself together, and then a blazing white shaft of pure, raw magical power erupted from his paws and lashed out at the female Were-cat. No physical force could withstand that magical onslaught, which had seared through a hundred spans of stone in the Cathedral of Karas in Suld, and it lanced through the air directly at the Were-cat female.

  But she made no move to dodge. Instead, she raised her own paws, and then the bolt suddenly deflected away from her, going straight up into the sky harmlessly.

  "Is that all you have?" she chided in a grim voice.

  Nonplussed, Tarrin jumped to his feet with a scream and wove together another spell, one of pure Air with only token flows of the other Spheres, one that reverberated inside him like a living thing. It was so large, so charged with magical energy, that it hurt him to put it together, and it took everything he had to maintain control of it until it was time to let it go. But in his rage, he didn't care about how much it hurt, or how quickly it tired him. It was going to eliminate a threat to him, and that made the end justify the means. He felt it reach a crescendo, where he knew that it was ready, and he knew that his entire body was glowing with an angry reddish light, a physical indication that he was about to unleash another spell. He made a vast sweeping motion with both paws, and unleashed the Weave with an inarticulate scream of anger and rage.

  The air around him suddenly exploded outward with horrific force, in every direction, shattering the two warehouses between which they had been fighting and sending pieces of them flying far, far out to sea and raining down on the rest of the city. The explosion of pure air damaged buildings all around him, caused one of the mighty cranes to come free of its rails and topple with an earth-shaking whoomp, and cause ships at port to flinch away from the origin, some snapping their mooring lines. It created a large wave of water that raced away from the city's harbor out into the open sea. The sound of the explosion, a ear-splitting boom, shattered windows all over the city and made the ground shake, and kicked up a cloud of dust that rose high into the sky.

  It had taken almost everything he had to generate that weave, and Tarrin sagged to the ground beneath him, which was curiously untouched considering all the ground around him showed indications of being scoured by the force of the air as it raced away from him. But the power of High Sorcery quickly began to rebuild inside him, replacing what he had used. But it didn't replace his own power, the power he used to control that energy. It had exhausted him, and even the Cat seemed to sense that if he tried another weave, it would probably kill him. But dying by his own hand seemed better than dying by hers, so there was no regret. He would fight for his freedom, even if it meant he would die for it. The cloud of dust obscured her, and he didn't know if he'd gotten her or not. He managed to regain control of himself with her disappearance, as the Cat could no longer perceive an enemy, and he desperately hoped that she wouldn't be there when the dust cleared.

  As the dust cleared the awful truth of what he had done was clear. The ground around him had been scoured, and was lower by about a finger. Absolutely nothing within two hundred spans of him was left standing; in fact, there nothing within two hundred spans of him at all, for it had all been picked up by the powerful force of the air and carried away. The echoes of the tremendous sound of the weave still bounced around the hill, coming back to them.

  Except for her. The female remained, totally unharmed, her paws crossed over her face to protect it from flying debris. The ground under her feet was raised, had not been scoured down by the force of his spell, and it marked a perfect circle that extended about five spans out from her in every direction. She stood in a tiny island of sanctuary in the middle of the destructive chaos of his weave. She lowered them and gave Tarrin a brutal look.

  Tarrin didn't care to wonder how she had survived, he merely decided to try something else that would hopefully defeat her. He knew that he was about to put together his last weave, so it had to be enough to get rid of her. But he felt the Weave just dis
solve away from him, as if someone had grabbed it and pulled it out of his reach, and the power within him simply dissipated, causing him to suffer a backlash of such magnitude that it almost caused him to pass out. He fell to his knees and elbows, sucking in air, trying desperately to get over the pain of losing contact with the Weave.

  "Rule number one, cub," he heard her voice as it approached. "Sorcerers are powerless against Druids. Druids can cancel out your magic. I've never met a Sorcerer with your kind of power, so it took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to sever you from the Weave. Rule number two," she said, reaching down and grabbing him by the shirt, then hauling him up. "Never use everything you've got. If it fails, then you die. Rule number three. Never disobey me again." She held him by his shirt as he stared up at her listlessly.

  And that seemed to catch her off guard. Tarrin's paws rose up and at her in a broad sweep of each, and the heavy steel manacles on his wrists struck her on each side of the head with a chiming clang. Had he been in better shape or stronger, the crushing blow would have destroyed her head, but in his weakened condition, he just couldn't put enough behind it to kill. But it was still a powerful attack, more than a human could manage. Her Were-cat immunity to weapons and regenerative powers were like his, so he knew that they'd heal the injury, but they would do nothing about the sheer physical force put behind the blow. The blow would stun her, because her magical nature couldn't overwhelm the sheer power of the blow, regeneration or not.

  Her eyes rolled back into her head, and she crumpled to the ground like a sack of meal.

  Tarrin bent over and panted, holding his injured stomach. She was bleeding from the sides of her head, where human ears would have been, where the manacles had struck her. She was helpless at that moment, and looking down at her, all Tarrin could see was Jesmind.

  And that saved her life.

  "I've never… been one… to obey the rules," he said in a wheezing voice, then he turned and limped away from the blasted battlefield.