The Tower of Sorcery

by James Galloway

  With both paws up, and his claws out.

  The Troll shrieked in abject agony, bending over as Tarrin's claws literally ripped out everything that was under its fur clout. Allia dashed forward as Tarrin knelt down, and she put a boot on his shoulder and leapt, then sprang off the head of the doubled Troll, high in the air. The other Troll, which had just turned around to see where Tarrin went, got a perfect view of Allia rear back both hands, and then throw her daggers with precise and deadly accuracy. They drove into each of the Troll's eyes, the tips and more finding the monster's brain, putting it forever into darkness.

  As the Troll Allia felled hit the ground, Tarrin absently reached up and ripped the throat out of the doubled Troll, ending its hideous wailing.

  A small formation of armored Knights and cadets came around one of the storebuildings about that time, quickly surrounding the two lamed Trolls and convincing them that sudden pacifism would lead to a longer life. Tarrin was panting as he wiped the flesh and blood off his claws in the grass, trying not to vomit at the overpowering stench of Trolls and Troll blood, which was the core of their awful smell.

  "Four Trolls that fast?" Faalken said appreciatively.

  "It was almost much shorter," Allia said grimly as she pulled her daggers free of the Troll corpse. "It was like they appeared from the thin air."

  "They did," Tarrin said, putting the back of his paw to his face, letting his own scent drown out the stench. "I didn't see or hear them, not even when they attacked."

  "Magic," Valden growled. "It had to be. They'd never have gotten onto the grounds any other way."

  Tarrin looked up at him. "Someone went to alot of trouble to arrange this," he said tersely, getting his instincts back under control.

  A red-robed Sorcerer walked around the building, coming up short at the display. He was a young man, not long a Sorcerer, with sandy colored hair and a rather handsome, full-cheeked face. "My," he said. "Trolls, here? However did they manage to get onto the grounds?"

  "We don't know yet," Valden told the man.

  "Tarrin, you and Allia go on," Valden said. "We'll take care of this."

  "Yes, Master Valden," they said in unison. "I have got to get this Troll-stench off of me," Tarrin told Allia fervently.

  Tarrin almost scrubbed off his fur in the baths, then they went for the afternoon meal. Afterwards, Allia went to her room for her private meditation. Tarrin caught up with Dar, and they went out into the garden to talk.

  "Trolls?" Dar said, taking the apple Tarrin offered.

  Tarrin nodded. "I felt one of them put his foot down. That was the only warning I got." He looked out over the gardens, to the hedge maze. He was still feeling a bit unsettled after the attack, and he desperately wanted to go to the central courtyard, but there were too many people watching him. "We got very lucky. If hadn't have moved, both of us would probably be dead now."

  "This is getting serious, Tarrin," Dar said. "Whoever is doing this is starting to bring in harder things to kill. He may pull a Dragon out of his hat next."

  Tarrin scoffed. "No," he said. "It probably took them a very long time to get those Trolls here. I seriously doubt that they could do it again. Not any time soon, anyway. If they stay on their little pattern, I have at least a ten-day before they try again."

  "I don't see how you can be so calm about it," he said.

  "I'm not," he said flatly. "But there's nothing else I can do, so it's best for me not to get myself worked up about it."

  "Just be careful, Tarrin," Dar said, putting his hand on his friend's shoulder.

  "I intend to, Dar," he assured him. "I, I want to go out tonight," he said. "Can you leave the door open for me?"

  "I guess," he said. "Want me to stay up?"

  "No, just don't lock the door if you wake up," he replied. "I just want to get out a while without so many people watching me. It's almost creepy."

  "I can understand that," he sighed. "Oh, they're giving me the Test next ten-day," he said.

  "We already know how it's going to turn out," Tarrin said with a grin.

  Dar grinned back. "I know, but it still has to be done," he said.

  "Like it matters."

  "They give it to you gifted ones too," he said.

  "I've already taken it."

  "This is a different test," he replied. "It gauges what spheres of Sorcery you're strong in. That way they know how and where to teach you."

  "I didn't know that," Tarrin said, sweeping a fly off his back with his tail.

  "I didn't until yesterday," he replied. "I managed to get an Initiate to explain it to me."

  Tarrin shrugged. "It's still nothing to worry about," he said.

  "I know," Dar replied.

  The Keeper was walking towards them. "Uh oh," Tarrin said in a low voice. "Trouble off the port bow."

  "Man the catapults," Dar quipped. Tarrin had to stifle a laugh. They stood respectfully as she approached, and it was quickly obvious that she meant to talk to them. They bowed as she stepped up before them. Tarrin noticed that the Keeper was only slightly taller than the fifteen year old Dar.

  "Tarrin," she said.

  "Keeper."

  "I have a gift for you," she said tersely. "It was something that we didn't want to give to you until you reached the Initiate, but it seems that you can use it now." She reached into a pocket of her cream colored dress, and withdrew a shaeram, one made of some kind of black metal, but it wasn't steel. Tarrin knew the scent of steel. This was some other kind of metal, one he'd never smelled before. "It's been enchanted," she explained. "It'll let you change form without losing your clothes or anything in your hands. They'll go to some other place when you change, and come back when you change back. The shaeram itself will turn into a little metal collar when you're in your cat shape."

  "Uh, thank you, Keeper," he said uncertainly, accepting the black metal amulet. It was surprisingly light, and the metal seemed both cold and warm at the same time.

  "Let me help you put it on," she said, motioning for him to turn around.

  He really couldn't deny her her request. He turned around and knelt so she could reach his neck easily, and she fastened the black metal chain of the amulet around his neck. He had the most peculiar feeling the instant she fastened it, but it faded so quickly that he doubted he felt anything at all. "Now let's have a look at it," she said, patting him on the side. He turned around and let her inspect the amulet, and then she smiled. "It looks nice on you," she said.

  "Uh, thank you, Keeper," he said.

  "Let's test it, make sure the weave was made right. Change shape, and then change back."

  "Alright." He stepped away from them and willed himself into his other form. There was the customary blurring of vision, then he had a new point of view at the level of their shins. He sat down as the Keeper knelt beside him and put her hands on the delicate black metal collar now around his neck, a collar so close to the color of his fur that it was almost invisible. "No clothes," she told him. "The amulet did that part of its job. Alright, change back." When she moved away, he did so. And he was fully clothed, with the amulet around his neck.

  "Excellent," she said, smiling. "The weave is working just fine."

  Tarrin looked down, smiling. That solved the one problem he constantly had about changing his shape. It opened entire new levels of sneaking around for him. "Thank you, Keeper," he said sincerely. "This is an excellent gift." He already had plans. Little did the Keeper know, she'd just given him the opportunity he needed to do a little snooping. There were many, many cats on the Tower grounds, there to chase down the rats, or the cats that were personal pets. One more wouldn't attract much attention.

  "I'm glad you like it," she said with a smile. "Oh, by the way, don't worry about what happened today. I'm going to see to it that it doesn't happen again," she said with a bit of steel in her voice.

  "I won't," he replied civilly.

  "Well, I won't keep you any longer," she said. "Enjoy the rest of your day." She looked up
at the late afternoon sun. "What's left of it, anyway."

  "That was nice of them," Dar said as the Keeper disappeared from view.

  Tarrin held the amulet in his paw, looking down at it. It seemed....warm. "It's a welcome gift," he said sincerely. "I don't change form because I'll lose my clothes. This solves that problem. I'm going to have to start wandering around as a cat from now on. That way I won't attract as much attention."

  "Probably not," he agreed. "There are cats all over the grounds."

  "It'll also let them get used to not seeing me," he said with a wink.

  "Oh," he said, winking back. "That could come in handy too."

  "Just a bit."

  Tarrin's "gift" had an unforseen side effect, one that very nearly caused him to go into a rage.

  It wouldn't come off.

  It was held on by magic, about that much he was positive. Though the chain was long enough to slip over his head, it would not. And there wasn't a clasp anymore anywhere on the chain; it was a continuous chain all the way around. He'd ripped off a good amount of his own skin struggling to remove the amulet, and he'd worked himself up into such a frenzy that both Allia and Dar had to work together to calm him down.

  Like the rest of his kind, Tarrin had a nearly phobic fear of being trapped or captured. The fastest way to set him off was to put him in a cage, where the Cat was imprisoned, and its desperate need to be free caused it to all but overwhelm the human half. It was that instinctive reaction that had caused Jesmind to go berzerk in Torrian and kill so many people during her escape. The amulet necklace was no cage, but it was a collar, a symbol of his imprisonment. They may have well put a leash on him. To be subject to the will of another was so against the very nature of the Cat that it seemed alien to Tarrin's human half as well. They were fiercely independent creatures, and the amulet represented a limitation, a stricture on that freedom that he couldn't deny. Just thinking about it got his blood seething, and he felt the almost overpowering need to break things.

  He stalked about in a white-faced fury for the entire day, and people avoided him like Death herself. He had an entire bench to himself during breakfast. Even Allia and Dar were afraid to get too close to him. The setting for the day was when he woke up, and the door latch stuck as he was trying to get out. Without hesitating, Tarrin ripped the door off the hinges and threw it into the hall, nearly startling Dar out of his wits and sending two Novices running for cover. Elsa had tried to confront him about the door after breakfast, but one look at his face made her blanch and back away. Nothing was taught in his classes that day, since the instructors were too busy jumping every time Tarrin so much as twitched. A guard tried to stop him from leaving the Tower after lunch, and Tarrin left the man groaning with both arms and legs broken and his pike tied in a knot around his waist. He spent the whole afternoon pacing through the city, heedless of the fact that Novices weren't allowed off the Tower grounds, wandering aimlessly and not paying attention to anything. The gate guards had tried to stop him too, but after Tarrin had nailed one of them to the gatehouse with a dagger through each forearm, and hurled another into the magical fence, the others wisely got out of his way. They seemed to realize that he was keeping himself from killing anyone, but he had absolutely no reservations over hurting them. He walked right over more pedestrians than could be easily counted, and had overturned three carts and killed two horses that refused to get out of his way. Eventually a contingent of the city guard was dispatched. Not to detain him, but to clear the path in front of him. The fact that he wandered with absolutely no set pattern or goal made it very hard for them.

  And Tarrin never noticed them.

  After he'd walked himself into exhaustion, he returned to the Tower grounds, mainly because he had nowhere else to go. He was allowed in unchallenged, and when he was halfway there, Allia and Dar approached him together, a bit wary, and started the task of settling him. It took both of them, and it took them nearly two hours just to get him to sit down. And that took Allia pushing him down and literally sitting in his lap, straddling his legs and holding him down with both hands. "Tarrin!" she snapped in a harsh voice. "You dishonor yourself acting this way!"

  He gave her a flat, deadly look, and his ears laid back on his head.

  "Don't lay your ears back at me, boy," she challenged hotly. "You won't hurt me, and you know it. Now stop acting like a sun-baked shivat and talk to me!"

  Tarrin stood up, picking her up with him. Then he set her gently on her feet and walked away. She moved to follow, but Dar put a hand out. "No," he told her.

  "He will hurt someone like this," she told him.

  "No, I don't think so," he replied. "I know where he's going."

  "This is something he needs to work out for himself, Allia," Dar told her. "We calmed him down, but that was just putting the lid on the boiling pot. He needs more than we can do for him."

  She looked at where they were on the grounds. "Yes, that is the only place he would go, is it not?" She sighed. "I think you are right. When he is ready to talk, he will seek us out."

  It wasn't until he was standing at the base of the fountain in the courtyard, gazing up at the incredibly beautiful face of the marble statue, that some semblance of rationality returned to him. He sank to his knees in front of it, putting his face in his paws, as he realized just how close to madness he'd went. He'd terrorized people, destroyed things, even killed animals. That rage was replaced with self doubt, loathing, and fear of himself, at what he had almost done. If someone other than Allia had gotten in his face, he wasn't sure if he would have killed him or not. If it had been the Keeper, then he had no doubt what would have happened. She would have died.

  It just seemed so complicated, even though it was so simple. He knew how the Cat thought. He even knew what it was going to do most of the time, but it was as if he was a spectator in his own body. Even knowing what it would do, he felt powerless to stop it. The Cat was so much stronger inside him than he ever dreamed, capable of throwing him aside like a forgotten toy whenever the mood suited it. All day it had not been a struggle for control, but a struggle for containment, to keep the Cat from doing something that Tarrin would regret for the rest of his life.

  And yet, staring up at that beautiful face, it was as if everything he'd done that day was washed from his soul, and he felt at peace with himself.

  And that peace allowed him to think, for the first time in nearly a day. Yes, the amulet would not come off, but it did not control him. He controlled it. And it was not a symbol of his slavery. The shaeram was the symbol of the katzh-dashi, an amulet just like any other. It was up to him to use it to his own advantage. It took him a fairly long time to reach those conclusions, and it was well after dark the next time he bothered to move his eyes off the statue.

  He had to control it. If he didn't, it would drive him mad. All his training was about control, all his experiences of life were about control. He had to start using them in his fight with the Cat, or the Cat would overwhelm him, and Tarrin Kael would be no more.

  Tarrin had thought he'd reached a balance inside himself. He knew at that moment that he could not have been more wrong. The real battle for himself had just begun.

  Sniffling a bit, Tarrin stood up again, looking at the soft light of the Skybands casting multihued radiance over the statue on the fountain, and it all but took his breath away. Such loveliness seemed impossible for the human hand to carve with such perfection. Without quite knowing why, he waded into the fountain and climbed up onto the base, standing in front of the statue. He put his paws on its shoulders, and leaned in and rested his forehead against the shoulder of the statue. "I don't know if I can do it," he admitted out loud, confiding in the statue, voicing the truths he felt in his heart. "I never would have done what I did just a month ago. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, bit by bit. I don't know if I'm strong enough. I never dreamed the Cat could be so strong. I just feel so, so lost. And I'm scared, and I don't know what to do. I'm, changing," he said with a shu
dder in his voice. "And I can't stop it."

  Faith.

  The word just seemed to echo through the courtyard, though he knew that he had heard no sound.

  You must have faith.

  Tarrin looked around, quite mystified at the strange voice he heard. It was sweet, melodic, but it had an odd choral quality to it, as if it carried a power inside it that was more than what a single voice could hold. "Who are you?" he called.

  Faith, my kitten, it repeated. Faith.

  Tarrin looked around in confusion. "What do you mean? I don't understand."

  But there was no reply.

  Tarrin started to wonder if he really was going mad. He backed away from the statue quickly, almost falling off the ledge of the statue's base. He hesitated only a moment, drinking in the calming beauty of the statue and the fountain, and then he turned and left.

  The events of that day were more or less forgotten; that was, Tarrin wasn't punished for it. Not a word was mentioned of it, but it had its own effects. The most obvious was that the Novices now would have absolutely nothing to do with him. They stayed as far away from him as they could. Before, where he got nervous looks, now they refused to even look at him. Novices would turn around and walk in the other direction, or duck into doors or side passages, when he walked the hallways. At dinner, the only time they were forced to be near him, the people who sat at his table finished in moments and hurried away.

  Their rejection of him hurt, and it hurt deeply. He could understand their fear, but that didn't make it any easier. He had lost control of himself, and shown them the monster that lurked underneath. And now they were treating him like that monster. He became moody and out of sorts the next few days. Not even Allia and Dar could get him back to his usual self for any extended amount of time.