Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  "Looks like they're getting ready to move," Sarraya said, shading her eyes against the morning sun and looking back to where their pursuers were arrayed. "Some of them are moving, coming this way at a walk."

  "They're waiting for me to reveal myself to their magic," Tarrin replied sedately. Some of them had mounted up and were slowly moving forward. They knew that Tarrin was somewhere ahead of them, and they were trying to get closer to run him down before their mounts tired. They just didn't realize that Tarrin had kept moving after changing into cat form, nearly half the night, to put them several longspans behind. He doubted that very many of them understood the nature of their quarry. He doubted that even a few of them knew very much about the nature of Were-cats. If they did, they would have abandonded their vain pursuit long ago. They simply would never catch him on open ground. And even if some fluke did allow them to catch up to him, he would turn and attack, and that was something that they would not surive. A Were-cat was as strong as five fully grown human men, even the weakest of their kind had that kind of inhuman power, and he was blessed with the dexterity and agility of the Cat to which he was bonded. In a fight, Tarrin was an absolute nightmare, using his Were gifts with his extensive training in myriad forms of combat to destroy any who challenged. No single human could ever hope to defeat him, and even a large group would have to be lucky to even lay a weapon on him. Even if they did, his Were immunity to any weapon that was not magic, silver, or a raw natural force or unworked weapon of nature would protect him from a vast majority of his pursuer's weapons. Their only true weapon against him was magic, and the fact that Tarrin was a Sorcerer, who could control the very arteries through with their Wizard magic travelled, made their Wizard magic a mere shadow of its former might. Against a Sorcerer, a Wizard was powerless. Without their magic, they had no chance. Tarrin knew that. It didn't make him arrogant or vain, it was more of a simple acceptance of truth. He had fought against Jesmind when he was human, so he understood how powerful a Were-cat could seem to a human in a fight, and he had himself been overwhelmed by Sarraya's Druidic magic, so he could appreciate how having one's magic taken away could turn the tide of a battle.

  He could have turned around and attacked them all, slaughtered them to prevent them from threatening his sister and friends, but he didn't want to do that. It wasn't what Triana would do. Triana would simply draw them off, then leave them behind. He had been striving to be less violent lately, since he'd realized that indulging in his first violent impulses was bad for his mental condition, making him even more prone to greater violence. He had slipped badly after Shiika had kidnapped Jula, Allia, and the others, but in retrospect he couldn't blame himself for that. He had killed a few thousand innocent people, but Shiika had done the one thing that she should never have done. Tarrin blamed her for those deaths, not himself. She had provoked him in the worst possible way. Tarrin's protective instincts over Allia and Jula were absolutely overpowering, and when they were in danger, he would react in the most direct manner to protect them, no matter how much damage it caused.

  These were no threat, really. They couldn't catch him, and they were now too far away to harm his sister or bond-daughter. Triana wouldn't kill them, so he wouldn't kill them either. He would leave them be. If they got too close to him, then he'd change his mind, but as things were right now, there was no reason to kill them. The only ones who had died were the ones that had come at him from in front, who had ambushed or attacked him. Those who did not challenge him would not be killed. If they wanted to waste their time by following him, that was just fine with him. It was one less person to threaten his family and friends. But they were safe now, safely out to sea where only ships could reach them. And no ship would have a reason to attack an unarmed circus ship, carrying nothing but performers and their gear.

  It seemed too little too late, sometimes. He had changed since he had left Aldreth, changed in ways that would horrify his mother. He had become...evil. There was no other way to say it. That truth was something that gnawed at his soul, but not even he could deny it anymore. He no longer cared about the people he had started out to save. He didn't care about their lives, their health, their dreams, their rights to survive. He didn't care about the land or the world, he didn't care about anything anymore. Only those things immediately before him, only those things that were so deeply implanted within him that nothing could alter them, those were the only things he cared about anymore. He was no better than a rampaging Troll, or the calculating Kravon. It was only the cause of the destruction they wrought that differed. Trolls or Kravon destroyed for pleasure, or power. Tarrin destroyed in the name of saving the world, which was itself the greatest irony. Whatever was left of the world when he was done would probably not be very fond of him. Tarrin had killed just as many people as Kravon during this mad quest. He had probably killed more than Kravon. Sometimes Tarrin wondered just who was on which side. And just like Kravon, he didn't think twice about the lives he snuffed out. They were things, objects, inconveniences that stood in his path to victory, and that made them worthless in his eyes. It was ironic that all his striving to become a better person, to conquer the savagery within, had turned him even more cold-blooded.

  He was no better than Kravon.

  That truth still hurt. He hadn't wanted to turn out this way, and he was trying to pull away from his dark nature. But it wasn't easy. His feral nature made showing mercy or compassion very difficult for him, for he would have to show those things to people he did not trust, and his feral nature would not permit that. He found it nearly impossible to extend his paw to someone his instincts were screaming at him to kill. The only strangers for which he could allow that kind of compassion were children. And even they weren't safe from him. He was certain that he had killed children when he destroyed half the arena in Dala Yar Arak. Beautiful children, innocent children, whose deaths had come simply because they were in his way.

  That had been the defining moment, he realized now. When he had turned his power on innocents, when he killed hundreds of people just to slow Shiika down, he had gone beyond the point of reclamation. His attempts to climb out of his pit seemed ridiculous to him. He didn't even understand why he was bothering to continue with it. What he did...there was no absolution for it. None. He had placed a deep black stain on his soul with that heinous act. And even now, he felt very little remorse. He had an awareness that what he did was wrong, but there was no real regret. Given the circumstances, he would do the same thing again. To know that he should feel guilt, to know that he had done wrong, yet feel no remorse for his actions...he didn't know what word described that, but he felt that evil came pretty close to the mark.

  There was no grief. There was no happiness, no joy, no fear, no anxiety. There was only the mission. That was all he had left. He had thrown away his life, destroyed his humanity, lost dear friends, sacrificed his very soul, all of it to save a little girl named Janette. That was all there was, now. It was the only thing that motivated him to go on. And she was worth his effort. She had saved him, saved him in ways that nobody could ever understand. He would kill a million people for her, he would die a thousand times for her. He would do absolutely anything he had to do to protect her life, protect the world that she would grow up to inherit. And if it meant casting away everything inside him, if it meant becoming just as ruthless, monstrous, and evil as Kravon, then so be it.

  They were getting closer. They would have to leave soon. He considered shapeshifting and going out to destroy them, but he dismissed the idea immediately. It wasn't what Triana would do.

  "We have to go, Sarraya," he called calmly.

  "I was about to say the same thing," she replied. "You ready?"

  "I'm ready," he replied emotionlessly. With barely a thought, Tarrin shapeshifted. The large black housecat was suddenly replaced by a towering, menacing Were-cat male, more than a head taller than a tall man, with a stony expression marring a handsome face, and green cat's eyes that would make a man shiver to stare
into them. There was no light in his eyes, only a sinister quality that would make a grown man fear. His cat's ears atop his head shivered, and his tail lashed only once before settling behind him. He reached down and opened his huge paw, holding it flat for the small Faerie. She stepped up into his palm and sat down, and he carefully lifted her up and deposited her on top of his head. He felt her burrow her legs into his hair, sitting right on top of his head and between his ears, then grab hold of his hair with both of her exceptionally tiny hands.

  Without changing expression, the towering Were-cat turned and started off towards the northwest at a ground-eating lope, letting his long legs eat up the longspans, a pace that a horse could not match for very long. He didn't look back. He never looked back, unless the sound he heard coming from behind him changed enough to make him curious. He knew that the men behind him suddenly could find him again, and those that hadn't already mounted up and started moving towards him were now scrambling to do so. Those that had already began were spurring their horses into a flat sprint, trying to use their horses' superior speed to catch up to him before they tired out. But Tarrin wasn't all that worried. He was more than five longspans ahead of them, and that was a distance that very few horses could run at top speed. Once they wore out, Tarrin would pull away, and this time he would not slow down to let them keep up with him. By then, they'd understand that the Were-cat was just leading them away, had been playing with them the entire time.

  For the entire morning and most of the midday, Tarrin ran effortlessly through the savannah heat, keeping that same pace that had caused those chasing him to fall further and further behind. It wasn't the pace he'd kept before, a pace that allowed them to keep up. This was a murderous pace, a relentless expansion of the ground between him and his pursuers, a pace that killed quite a few of their horses as they attempted to maintain their distance from him. Those that understood that there was no way to catch up to him had broken off or fallen behind, saving their mounts to get them back to civilization. But Tarrin didn't really notice it. His eyes were forward, his mind wandering as it tended to do while he was running, allowing his body to carry through the monotonous motions of running great distances and freeing his mind to pursue other matters. But there were few matters that caught his fancy, causing him to run in a nearly dazed state of unawareness, a sense not of past or future, a condition with which he was familiar. It was the eternal now in which animals lived, where only now mattered. It caused him to blink as the sun began to shine into his eyes, a sun that was now lowering into the western sky.

  Tarrin pulled up slightly, then slowly brought himself to a halt. He had run the entire day. Sarraya was still on his head, but the feel of it was that she was laying down, tied down by his hair, and was probably asleep. His belly was a little empty, but it was a sudden sense of thirst that got his immediate attention. He was rather acclimated to heat, but he had run in the brutal savannah heat the entire day without stopping, even for water.

  A grunt from between his ears heralded a shifting in his hair. "Wow, you actually stopped!" Sarraya said acidly. "I'm tired, hungry, thirsty, and I'm about to wet your hair, Tarrin! Put me down!"

  "You should have asked," Tarrin said bluntly, reaching up and letting her climb into his paw, then setting her down on the grassy ground, grass nearly as tall as she.

  "I figured we needed the distance," she grunted as she wandered into the grass and disappeared from his sight. "Are you hungry?"

  "Thirsty," he said, turning around to look towards the east. They were all long behind him now. They'd catch up with him, there was no doubt about that, but by the time they did he'd be well away from where they sensed him last, in cat form. They'd never find him out in the savannahs. If they even knew what to look for.

  A thousand longspans. That was about how far it was to the border of the desert, and he'd have to cross almost all of it in cat form. A journey of months. It was a daunting proposition for a little cat, but he had little choice. They could find him unless he was in cat form, and only within the protection of the desert could he move about freely in his humanoid form. Only the truly rabid zealots would dare enter the desert after him, and they wouldn't get far. Tarrin himself would face resistance from the Selani, but at least he had an edge in that regard. Allia's teachings about the desert and his ability to speak Selani would help him get across the desert in one piece. And if it came down to it, he could defeat Selani in combat, where no human would stand a chance against the agile, speedy desert dwellers. But he had to get there first, and that wasn't going to be easy.

  Movement to the south got his attention. Tarrin turned and looked in that direction, where strange dark shapes had appeared near the horizon. Strangely enough, they were above the land, which was why he noticed them. Large birds? Rocs, immense hawk-like birds with a wingspan around seventy spans, were an uncommon sight around Aldreth, but they did see them from time to time. Perhaps Yar Arak also had Rocs, but he didn't see where they would roost. The Rocs back home nested in the jagged peaks of the ClouddancerMountains to the north, where this land was a flat table of dry soil.

  Whatever they were, they were a very long distance away. The wind had begun to stir, as the heat of the sun began to wane, and the air started to cool and shift, and that was creating a shimmering haze that made it hard to see the birds, so far away they were from him.

  "Want some berries?" Sarraya called as she moved back towards him. She had a large blackberry in her tiny blue hands, already gnawing a goodly sized divot out of it.

  "No, I'm more interested in water," he said, dropping down onto all fours and closing his eyes as he breathed the air into his nose. His nose was more than just a decoration. Tarrin's sense of smell was just as acute as a cat's, giving him the ability to track by scent, to identify people and objects by their scents, and to detect distant things by their scent as well. The faint smell of water was reaching him, very faint, coming from upwind. His tail slashing behind him a few times, he deduced that the water was a good longspan distant, but that it was a sizable pool. "I can smell some nearby," he told the Faerie, rising back up to his considerable, intimidating height. The Faerie barely crested the top of his furred ankle.

  "Sounds like a plan to me," she said, looking at his leg. "Tarrin, you're fetting."

  "I'm what?"

  She pointed to his ankle, where long hair had appeared around the backs of his ankles. "Fetlocks," she replied. "Strange."

  "What are fetlocks?" Tarrin asked, looking down. He'd never noticed that before. And Tarrin was usually keenly aware of his own body.

  "Fetlocks. Shaggy tufts of fur around the ankles. Some horses have them," Sarraya told him. "Were-cats fet too, but the fetlocks are small, only the males fet, and only the very old ones. It's a Were-cat male's form of growing a beard, it's a sign of age. That's why it's so strange to see them. You shouldn't be fetting for another five hundred years."

  "I'm a changeling, Sarraya. Maybe that affects it."

  "You have a point there," she agreed. "The only male changelings I've ever seen didn't live long enough to find out." She looked up at him critically. "I need my wings."

  "Why?"

  "Tarrin," she said carefully. "Do I look, smaller, to you?"

  Tarrin was taken a bit aback by her question. What a silly thing to say! But then again, looking down at her, he almost had to say yes to her question. She did seem to be a little smaller. "I think you do," he said after a moment of reflection.

  "Bizarre," she said, reaching out and putting her hand on his ankle. He felt her do something with her Druidic magic. "Tarrin, you're growing!"

  "What?"

  "You're growing!" she replied. "You've been growing at an accelerated rate for a while now, but I didn't notice it! Has something unusual happened to you lately?"

  "Like what?"

  "Anything unique," she pressed. "Something had to trigger this. It's not natural."

  "Unique? Do you want a day by day dissertation, or would a blanket summary of
the last two months of my life satisfy you?"

  Sarraya screwed her face at him, then she laughed. "Point taken," she chuckled. "But something had to trigger this in you. You're growing, but the fact that you're fetting means that you're aging too, years for every day. Let's try it this way. Did anything extraordinary happen in Dala Yar Arak?"

  He looked right into her small eyes. "I used Druidic magic," he told her directly.

  She gaped at him. "You did what? Why didn't you tell me!"

  "I was waiting until you weren't in such a bad mood," he replied calmly.

  She glared at him, then she gave him a rueful grin. "Well, I'm certainly surprised that it took that long."

  "What?"

  "Tarrin, dear, my being here to control your Sorcery was only half the reason Triana sent me. She could feel it in you, and so could I. Any Druid can. You have talent. She sent me along to prevent you from realizing your ability, because it's way too dangerous to try to teach Druidic magic in anything but complete peace and isolation. I guess I didn't do a good enough job," she grunted. "Triana's gonna have words with me."

  "You knew I could use Druidic magic?"

  "Didn't I just say that?" she said waspishly. "But even that shouldn't be having anything to do with this growth. Did anything else happen?"

  "The Demoness drained me," he replied, shuddering a little bit. That was not a pleasant memory. The feel of her inside him, feeling her suck away his very life energy, it still made him cold inside. A cold that always seemed to be there, and the memory of it made it worse.

  Sarraya pursed her lips. "Now that could be it," she said. "Those Succubi drain life energy, which is loosely associated with youth and vigor. I've heard of what happens to humans that get drained. They die as dried-up husks, looking like they're a hundred years old. If she drained you, maybe your body is reflecting the loss of years, or more to the point, the advancing of years. But since Were-cats don't die of old age, it's really just cosmetic. You'll fet, and you'll grow to a height that corresponds with your body's new physical age. You'll probably be able to look Triana in the eye. It all depends on how long the Demoness drained you, how much she took."