Tarrin staggered back, cradling his numb arm as the creature simply pulled the dagger out of her own chest. There was a great deal of blood smeared on her breasts and flowing down her belly, but the wound, that would have killed about anything Tarrin could think of, hadn't seemed to phase her much at all. She fixed him with a gaze full of hate, but oddly enough, a sort of grim respect.
Tarrin knew he had no chance against her. He never really did. And if nobody had come by now, then nobody would. But he'd given her a fight that would make her earn her kill, and he wasn't about to stop now. He was Ungardt. He would die with honor.
"Come on," Tarrin growled, letting his numb arm hang limply at his side and balling up his fist. "Let's get on with it."
She snarled at him, baring her fangs stained with his blood. She then took his dagger and threw it at him. He saw the throw coming, so he easily evaded the missle as it streaked by as if shot from a bow. The dagger struck the door, and there was a loud snapping sound as it went through the door and cracked into the wall outside. She then advanced on him slowly, as if she knew that he was too wounded to make any sudden or fast moves, as Tarrin tried to back up. She took her time, letting him take a step back for every step she took forward, and it wasn't until it was too late he realized what she was doing. His foot snagged on a piece of what was left of the desk, and he stumbled slightly. She lunged at him in that exact instant. She hit him fully in the chest, driving him backwards to land heavily on the floor. The back of his head cracked into the floor, making his vision dance and weave as stars filled his eyes. He managed to focus his eyes just in time to see her rear back one hand-paw, claws extended, as the other came to rest on his upper chest to hold him down.
But she never delivered the blow. She stayed like that for several seconds as her eyes registered surprise, then shock, then rage. He felt the muscles of her legs, up against his sides, flex and bunch, as if she was trying to move something or push something, but she wouldn't move. He even felt the claws of the hand on his chest shimmy and flex, as if something was holding her hand down, and she was pushing against it.
"By Karas' Hammer, what is that thing?" he heard Faalken's voice. Faalken came into view quickly over his view, from behind.
"Do not touch her!" Dolanna's voice cracked like a whip. The creature glared at Faalken with that unholy gaze, and Tarrin saw the knight take a step back.
Tarrin put his head on the stone in relief. Talk about arriving in the nick of time. His heart was still racing from the fight, and that racing was what made him realize what was happening to him.
The numbness had spread, and now there was an angry itching and burning in the arm where she had bitten him.
She lifted off of him as if an invisible hand had picked her up, and she was pushed back and off of him. She came to rest on her knees, still locked in that position of delivering the fatal blow. Tarrin sat up unsteadily, putting a hand over his racing heart. He could feel it inside him, like a venom. Could she have a poisonous bite? Whatever it was, it had already spread all through him. He was almost totally numb inside and out, from head to foot, except for the itching and burning in his ripped arm. "Dolanna," he said in a slurred voice, as he tried to roll over and get to his feet. His actions were jerky and erratic as unfeeling muscles tried to respond to his mental commands. He felt Faalken's hands on his sides, and he was helped to his feet.
"Tarrin, lad, what in the Abyss happened in here?" Faalken asked, looking at him with a professional eye, assessing injury. Tarrin was a mess of blood and shredded clothing, with angry red welts that would develop into spectacular bruises later. His left arm was badly mangled, and he had exceptionally deep lacerations on his neck, back, and on both thighs from the creature's claws. The room was completely smashed; Tarrin had given back as good as he got.
"It, she, tried to kill me," he returned in a wooden, listless voice.
"Tarrin!" Dolanna said quickly. "Tarrin, did she bite you?"
He tried to find the words to reply. It took a moment as he worked through the haze in his mind. "Yes," he finally replied. "She almost ripped my arm off."
"Faalken," she said in a suddenly strangled voice, tightly controlled, "Faalken, do exactly as I say. Do not argue. Let go of him, Faalken, let go of him and step away from him very slowly."
"Dolanna--"
"Do it!" she snapped.
Tarrin felt a sudden sharp stab of pain in his wounded arm. He winced and grabbed it, but then he felt it again, then another pain in his shoulder. "Dolanna, something's happening," Tarrin said in sudden palpable fear. He could feel something inside him, something that suddenly felt like a knife in his belly. "Augh!" he cried, doubling over and putting both hands on his belly. His left arm was on fire, and that fire was sweeping through him like an avalanche.
In an instant, there was nothing but pain. Blinding, white hot pain that filled him like a cistern, flowing over and washing through him like fire in his veins. His small cry instantly became a howl of such agony that Faalken backed away from him like he was Death Herself come to claim him. The pain scoured away all conscious thought. But some part of his mind knew full well what had happened, and what was happening. Wherever the fire touched, his body began to change.
His hands cracked and split, cracked again as bones were broken and reformed, expanded, changed, and then reset. Fingers lengthened and thickened, and claws formed from the nails of his fingers. His feet lengthened and expanded, the toes becoming larger and more defined, with even larger claws forming from the nails. His back was hunched, but it was obvious that the bones in his spine had reformed themselves, adding to his height as his torso elongated slightly even as his legs and arms grew longer by a proportional amount. Tarrin's ears simply fell off as two black cat's ears sprouted up through his hair, just over and behind his eyes and just behind the hairline of his forehead and bangs. There was a ripping sound, and his tail emerged from behind him, pink with new skin as it grew as fast as a snake could slither, then it thickened and fleshed out. Then black fur quickly grew over it, over his arms to above the elbow, and his legs to above the knee. His teeth all simply flowed into slightly different shapes, slightly more pointed and sharper, except for the wicked fang-like insicors that grew out from the gums on both his upper and lower teeth.
Then his long scream ended. He slumped to his hands and knees, his tail hanging limply behind him and his claws retracting back into their resting positions inside his fingers and toes, as he panted in deep breaths of air. He tottered to one side, then the other, and then fell onto his side, oblivious to the world.
"By all that's holy," Faalken said in a mute, awed voice, staring at Tarrin like he was a live snake.
Dolanna's gaze was on the creature. She looked unsually subdued, her body still wrapped up in the solid air she'd woven around her. Her face carried a strangely remorseful expression, but it was her eyes that caught the attention of the Sorceress. They looked on Tarrin's altered form with pity. The collar, Dolanna could sense, was magical. Foul magic, the type used to control other beings. She could sense the weaves of magic inside it as she probed the black metal collar. It was specifically made to force the owner to do what the collar's owners commanded.
She has been forced into this, the Sorceress thought grimly. Something has sent her to kill him.
Several of the Duke's men arrived at last, and they tried to bull into the chamber. But Dolanna halted them with a single forceful command to stop. She wove certain flows of magic into the collar, disrupting its controlling effects, and then found the clasp to unlock it from her neck. She took it off of her smoothly, and could literally see the hazy, unfocused look in the creature's crystalline green eyes. It looked up at her in confusion. She turned to the guards. "You will take this creature to a holding cell," she instructed in a voice that would brook no opposition. "You and you," she pointed to two men wearing leather gloves, "you will carry her, and you will do exactly as I say. You will carry her to the cell, making sure you get as little bloo
d on you as possible. Once you are there, you are to lock it in the cell and leave it be. Both of you are to remove your uniforms and gauntlets as carefully as you can to make sure the creature's blood does not touch your skin. Then you will burn the uniforms. Is that understood?"
"Is it poisonous?" one of them asked.
"Not a poison, but the creature's blood is deadly to humans in its own way," she said. "So long as you do not touch her blood with your skin, you are perfectly safe. Sergeant, nobody is to enter that cell without my explicit permission. Is that understood?"
"Yes, Mistress," the guard sergeant said in a steady voice.
"Do it," she said. Two guards hurriedly rushed in and grabbed the paralyzed creature by her sides, then carried her statue-like form from the room, keeping her as far from their bodies as they possibly could.
"Madam, what about that one?" the sergeant asked, pointing at the unconscious Tarrin, laying on the floor.
"Leave him to me," she said in a quiet voice. "Now leave us. I will not be disturbed. Faalken, get the cover and use it to pick up Tarrin, and place him on the bed. Do not touch any blood on him. It may be the creature's. Then stand outside the door so that I am not disturbed."
Faalken grimly collected up Tarrin's limp body in the quilt that was laying on the floor and gently placed him on the bed, which happened to be the only piece of furniture in the room that was still whole. "What happened to him?" Faalken asked quietly.
"I cannot tell you that yet," she replied, sitting on the edge of the bed with a look of dreadful concentration on her face. "Now leave me. I cannot afford any distractions."
Chapter 3
It took a long time for Tarrin to awaken.
It had almost been like he was drifting in a deep blackness, floating in a void where he could not see, but garbled sounds and impressions somehow drifted into his awareness. He registered several voices, but could not make them out. He would drift into and out of these impressions, hearing the voices murmur up from nothing, and the fade away after a time, never understanding the meaning of the words. There was more than sound in the void, there was also smell. Unusual smells and odors touched his awareness, from simple things like the smell of candles and wine and wood and stone, to complex scents that he could not even begin to describe nor understand. Unlike the sounds, the smells were there always, flooding his shrouded mind with its bizarre information.
Tarrin also realized that he wasn't alone in the void. There was something in there with him. It was a presence, a compilation of instincts and motivations that defied rational thought. It was always there, just behind him, as firmly attached to him as was his right arm. But at the same time it was not part of him. It was something that he couldn't describe, and he pondered on it for a long time before the brilliance of light penetrated the blackness, and he realized that he was waking up.
He opened his eyes, the sensations and impressions of his sleeping mind forgotten. The light was...bright. Very bright. He was in a rather small chamber that held nothing but the bed, a small table of some sort with two chairs, the chair Dolanna was sitting in, and a single stand beside the bed holding a lamp. Tarrin didn't feel quite up to moving yet, so he spent the few moments trying to remember what happened. There was...a fight. That cat-creature woman had attacked him. Had almost killed him. She would have, if Dolanna hadn't stopped her literally at the last instant. She'd torn him up too, broke his arm, nearly ripped it off. But the whole thing was a hazy blur in his mind. Only the part where she bit him was clear in his mind.
It was about that time that he realized what he was smelling. He could smell everything around him. The bed, the wool of the blanket, the leather of the chair. The spicy-musky-warm smell that was strong in the room was coming from Dolanna. And there was a myriad of other smells assaulting him, smells that he couldn't identify easily, faint ones and strong ones, sour ones and sweet ones, light ones and heavy ones. He could hear quite clearly his own breathing, Dolanna's breathing, and he could just barely make out the sound of the beating of her heart. Never in his life has his senses been so lucid, so sharp, so incredibly sensitive. The light of the single lamp, the fire turned down very low, was as bright as the daylight to his eyes.
The numbness. When that creature had bitten him, there was a numbness that had spread through him, almost like a poison. Then there was pain, pain so severe that his mind didn't want to remember it. Then nothing. Had the creature's bite caused this change in his senses? Was it a side effect of the venom she injected into him?
There was more, he realized. He was feeling odd new sensations along his body. His sense of touch was more acute, but there was a sensation of things being touched that he didn't have. There was no way for him to describe the sensation, even to himself, but he was feelings things where he didn't have things to feel. He decided to try to move. He shifted his legs, putting his feet down on the mattress, getting ready to push himself into a sitting position.
Then his claws snagged on the sheet.
His heart seizing in his chest, he realized that that was exactly what he was feeling. He pulled an arm out from under the covers, and stared at it in numb shock. His arm was fully healed, and it was covered in black fur to just above the elbow. His hand was almost twice the size it had been, with thick, long fingers that had pads on the insides and on the palm. He could see the tip of claws recessed up inside his fingers, retracted out of the way.
"I'm sorry, Tarrin," Dolanna said in a weary voice, looking at him. "There was nothing more I could do for you."
"How?" he managed to ask.
"It was her bite," she told him quietly. "Her condition can be passed to others through contact with her body fluids. When her spittle got into your blood, it began the change."
Tarrin stared at her, his mind whirling. Then a little voice in his head carrying his mother's imperious demeanor snapped at him to get over it. "What's done is done," his mother would always say. "Worry too much over what's behind you and you don't see the root in front of you," his father would remark. It was done. He had been, been changed. Crying and panicking over it would do no good, and breaking down wasn't going to help him now. Taking a deep breath, he pushed himself up to a sitting position. While doing so, he sat on something that had a feeling of pressure. Reaching under him with his other hand, he grabbed something that felt the sensation of being grabbed. Almost absently, he realized that it was a tail. Whirling images of the nude creature came back to him then, and he realized that he looked just like her now. The fur, the hands and feet, the claws, and the tail. Probably the ears and teeth too. A run of his tongue through his mouth confirmed that aspect of his suspicion. A tentative hand to his head proved the other, as the pad of his palm crushed down on his cat-ear. It was an eerie sensation.
"What now?" he asked calmly.
She gave him a curious look. "A strange question to ask," she said. "I thought you would have started demanding to know what was going on. Or perhaps start rearranging the furniture."
"My mother always says that's what's done is done," he said grimly. "Going into conniptions at the moment isn't going to help me."
"A wise woman, your mother," Dolanna said, sitting up. "And it seems that the training you have received from your parents is going to help you. That is very good. You have a strong mind and an even stronger will, young one, and those will be you allies.
"The worst of the news, Tarrin, is that I cannot change you back," she told him bluntly. "Your body is not what it was, and I cannot separate what was once you from what you are now without killing you."
"I sorta expected that," he sighed.
"The change is not just physical. You have taken in the instincts, the essence, of the animal of which you now are part. In her case and yours, it is the common housecat." She pushed her rather dishevelled hair back from her eyes. "Now this, this is where I have helped you. Do you feel the presence of that side of you? It should be there, inside with you, but it will not be easy to recognize."
He re
membered the sensation of not being alone before he woke up. It was still there, but not very strongly. But now that he knew what he was looking for, he could find that other side of himself, the Cat, sitting in a corner of his mind. "I can feel it, but it seems far away," he told her.
"That was my doing," she told him. "The sudden introduction of that animalistic set of impulses into you would have all but driven you mad," she told him. "I have contained that part of you so that you can adjust to its presence. As the days pass, the spell I have woven will weaken, and you will feel it more and more in your mind, until the spell is gone and you must deal with it on your own. But this will give you time, time to adjust to it, time to learn how to control it. Soon, in days, you will begin to hear the song of its instincts trying to guide your actions," she warned. "That song will get stronger and stronger as my spell wanes, but it will give you the chance to learn how to deal with it without any negative consequences."
"Consequences?"
"Tarrin, it is not human," she said. "When you are in danger, or angry, or afraid, that part of you will lash out, just as an animal would. It does not see right or wrong, or laws, or what is proper or improper. It is an animal, and it will react like one. It is up to you to control that, because if the animal takes control of you for too long, what makes you human could be lost to it, and you will spend the rest of your days as the animal you will have become."
Tarrin paled at that, but he nodded. Just as his conscious mind was in control, it seemed logical to him that if he had another mind, then it too could take control. Although the instincts he could feel in his mind wasn't precisely another mind, it was a different aspect of his own. The Cat was part of him, but it was not. More to the point, it was a new part of him, and that unfamiliarity was part of the danger.
The Tower of Sorcery Page 9
