Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  That, or Shiika's attack on him, her draining and the subsequent aging, had been ordained.

  That was something of a scary thought. That what to him had been a completely random act, an act undertaken in the middle of a fight, had been something that was fated to happen, it worried him. It made him wonder just how much had happened to him, how much he had done, had been things that would have happened no matter what. It made him feel curiously helpless, as if he were nothing but an actor playing out a part, rather than a free-willed individual doing what he wanted to do. Tarrin didn't like feeling helpless.

  "I heard half of that," Sarraya noted from just beside his head. "What old powers are coming back?"

  "All of them," he replied quietly. "She said that all the old powers were returning. She said because it was the right time for it."

  "That's certainly interesting information. I guess that means that we're going to be entering another Age of Power, and it's doomed to end in another Breaking. Humans certainly won't learn their lesson from the last one."

  "I guess so," he sighed.

  "What was all that about other Sorcery?"

  "I think the Goddess was trying to tell me that I should be trying to learn how the old Weavespinners used their magic," he told her. "She said that the changes I feel in the Weave are actually changes inside me, and that now I'm ready to try to expand my abilities. She also told me why the Weave feels different to me. Shiika's little gift did more than age my body. It also changed my touch on the Weave. It made me stronger." He sighed. "She told me that I'm beyond your power now, Sarraya. If I lose control, you won't be able to stop me. So I don't think you should try. It might get you killed."

  "I knew it would come to this, Tarrin," she told him evenly. "Your power has been growing ever since we met. Every time you use it, you're stronger the next time. Almost like every touch on the Weave brings it closer to you. What this means is that now you can't use Sorcery unless we really don't have much choice, and when we do it, you have to be very calm, very collected, and know exactly what you intend to do. And you can't do anything that I can't control."

  "I figured that already," he replied. "I was going to use Sorcery to sweep out the Trolls at the border, but now we're going to have to find another way." He looked up into the sky, at the Skybands. "She said something funny. She said that she couldn't teach me how to use Weavespinner magic, but she said it in a strange way. I think she was trying to tell me that there is someone that can teach me that."

  "But all the Weavespinners are long gone," Sarraya protested. "They disappeared with the Ancients and the Sha'Kar."

  "I know. That's why I can't figure it out. There's just nobody left to teach me something that disappeared a thousand years ago."

  "There has to be someone. She wouldn't have told you that otherwise."

  "I know, but I haven't got the faintest idea who. Not even the katzh-dashi know, and if anyone in the world would know, it's them."

  "Why wouldn't she teach you?"

  "She said she's not allowed. She's my patron, and she can't give me that kind of help. It's against their rules."

  "Well that's no big deal, Tarrin," Sarraya said impishly. "Answer me this. Do you think a God would know something like that?"

  "Well, they've been around since the age of Power, so they might," he said after a moment. "I don't know if gods use Sorcery."

  "You're being very narrow-minded, Tarrin," Sarraya chuckled. "Gods know lots of things that really don't do them any good. It's part of what being a god is all about. You know, that omniscience angle to impress the peons."

  Tarrin had to laugh at her irreverent tone.

  "And you've forgotten, you're an equal-opportunity peon. You're walking around with more than one god under your belt. I remember what Dolanna said about you, and about these," she said, and he felt her finger touch his shoulder, touch the fabric of his shirt, under which were his Selani brands. "That when Allia put them on you, you became subject to the Selani goddess. When you get into the desert, you think you could convince her to teach you what you need to know? After all, she's not your patron. She's just a goddess that has partial ownership of you. She isn't bound by the same rules that your Goddess is."

  Tarrin sat up, then he looked down at the reclining Faerie with wide eyes. What a clever idea! Of course! Fara'Nae wouldn't be bound by the same restrictions as the Goddess! If he could convince her to teach him, she very well may be able to do so, provided that she knew about Sorcery. When he passed into the desert, he would pass into her lands. He would be right where he'd need to be to learn anything she was willing to teach.

  "Sarraya, if you weren't so small, I'd kiss you," he said sincerely. "That's a very good idea. She may not know what I need to know, but it's still a great idea."

  "Well, you finally admit to my superiority," she said with a wink.

  "Don't push it, bug," he teased with a smile, then he flopped back down onto his bedroll.

  It was certainly possible. Only a god would really know what he needed to learn, and Fara'Nae did have a stake in him. If she did know how Sorcery worked, she could conceivably teach him what had been forgotten by man for a thousand years. It gave him a new reason to get into the desert, a greater motivation.

  All that stood in his way was an army of Trolls.

  He hadn't forgotten about that. He couldn't just blast them out of his way now, so he had to come up with something else to get around them. But he was a clever Were-cat, with a devious companion. If he couldn't use brute force, then he could always use deception and subterfuge. Tarrin could handle deception and subterfuge, and Sarraya was born with vast quantities of it.

  If there was a way around those Trolls, they would find it.

  But that was something that was still days away. They had quite a bit of travelling to do first, and plenty of time to come up with a good plan to get them safely into the desert. When the time came, they'd be ready.

  But until then, there was time to plan. Time to prepare. Time. It was something that he'd felt was in short supply lately, but here, now, at least for this problem, he still had a great deal of it. He felt nearly luxuriously afforded that precious item, at least for a little while. Until his time ran out, anyway.

  Tarrin looked up into the bright sky, looking at the narrow white lines that were the Skybands as they crossed the empty, cloudless sky. Yes, just this once, he had time.

  He would make the most of it.

  Chapter 4

  Sometimes, Sarraya's cleverness amazed him.

  If it wasn't enough that she was a strong Druid, her devious nature would still make her an invaluable companion and friend.

  What she had done, quite simply, was make Tarrin Kael disappear.

  Tarrin sat on the top of a rather beaten wagon, patches and slapdash repairs obvious to any onlooker, being pulled by a pair of old, tired-looking horses with reins that had been broken and tied in a knot. The wagon was filled with baskets of carrots and bushels of raw wheat. Tarrin drove the wagon, scratching at his bare forearm, cursing the nagging pain that came with holding the human shape. Though it was Tarrin, the human driving the wagon looking nothing like the Tarrin that his opposition was probably expecting. They were looking for a young, tall man with long blond hair. What they were getting was a man with a curiously ageless face, looking neither young nor old, with short black hair, wearing a plain undyed robe and a turban.

  Sarraya had helped with what he could not fake. They had gone back to the overturned wagon during the night that Sarraya had engineered the plan, and found the two humans gone. Tracks and marks showed that someone had arrived in a wagon from the city by the river, picked them up, and gone back. They had left the wagon, which was what Tarrin had returned to get. He fixed it so that it was good enough for their plan, and then Sarraya conjured the two nags to pull it. Then she conjured all the vegetables and wheat, and Tarrin had used the remains of the wagon's cover to fashion reins and some other things to make the wagon look well used.
After they were done with the wagon, Tarrin had taken the human shape to test out their plan.

  And that had been the first real surprise. Sarraya had stared for nearly ten minutes, and he stared at himself in the reflection of water in a conjured pail. He looked so different. He still had his own features, but the young man that had been Tarrin was gone. Replaced with it was a male version of Triana, an ageless face that emanated its own power, as if the twitching of an eyebrow could pronounce doom upon the onlooker. Though he looked ageless, it was apparent to anyone looking at him that he was very mature, as if he was wise beyond his indeterminate years. In human form, his features were a little sharper, and he was nearly a span and a half shorter. He was still an immensely tall human, but nowhere near the towering height he possessed in his natural form. Tarrin's human form was now just as tall as his hybrid, humanoid form had been before Shiika's draining kiss. And because of that, it felt more correct to be at that height than it did in his natural form, for he still wasn't entirely used to the gain in height yet.

  The major blessing of the disparate heights was what it caused the amulet around his neck to do. When he was in human form, the manacles went into the elsewhere because they would fall off his human wrists. And when he changed from human to his natural form, it caused any shoes he was wearing to go into the elsewhere, because they were too small for his hybrid feet. Now, when he took the human form, the backpack holding the Book of Ages also went into the elsewhere, because it was fitted for his much larger humanoid body. What that meant was that it would not lead them to him while he was in human form, and it also meant that when he had the time, he could bring the backpack back, take it off, change back into human form, shorten the straps and put it on, then change back to his natural form. Because the backpack's straps would be too small, it would put the book in the elsewhere. It meant that he now did have a way to stay in his much more mobile natural form, yet not have the Book of Ages out to draw every enemy in range right to him.

  Tarrin didn't scoff at this most important beneficial side effect, but it made him just a little bit curious. If things not fitted for the new form went into the elsewhere, then why didn't his clothes go too? After all, they were fitted for his natural form. When he changed into his human form, they were baggy and loose, and now he had to cinch up his pants to keep them from fallling off, and the shredded cuffs of the pants dragged the ground. But they didn't. This intrigued him, and it annoyed him just a little bit. It seemed strange that the amulet would somehow distinguish between clothing and manacles, shoes and backpacks. That it would pick and choose what it sent into the elsewhere. After all, it should have been all or nothing. It should either send everything, or send nothing at all. Why only this item or that item?

  But he didn't have all that much time to wonder about that. After they got the wagon fixed and Sarraya used her magic to summon horses to pull it, Tarrin got busy setting it up to look like he was a solitary trader, coming to the desert border to sell his food. Sarraya used her magic to conjure up some dye for his hair, and Tarrin cut off his braid. Then he dyed his hair and eyebrows black, and Sarraya used her magic to darken his visible skin, to make him look more like an Arakite. There was nothing she could do about his eyes, but she solved that by making another visor, this one a smoky grayish color that hid his eyes behind a dark veil. His ageless face made it hard to pin a nationality on him, so that helped even more. Then she conjured up the material for a simple robe, he fashioned a turban from a torn cotton shirt he found in the debris of the wagon, and he was ready to go.

  After it was all done, Tarrin had to be impressed with how thoroughly different he looked. There was no way anyone who knew him would be able to recognize him. He looked like an Arakite, though a tall one with sharp features. He looked just like what he pretended to be, a solitary merchant with a load of food. With the Book of Ages in the elsewhere and Sarraya hiding invisibly, there was nothing to give him away but his eyes and his amulet, and both of them were concealed.

  That had been eight days ago. Tarrin had been ambling along at a lazy pace for those eight days, getting progressively more and more uncomfortable in his human form. He'd never held it for so long before, and he was starting to ache in all sorts of bad places, and his muscles were prone to cramping if he sat in one place too long. Allia's trick to ignore the pain was the only thing keeping him from changing back, but changing back was no option now. If he did, he'd tell everyone just where he was, and it would put his disguise in danger. He didn't know how close he was to the border of the desert, but it couldn't be very far. He'd yet to see any Trolls--or anyone, for that matter--but they couldn't be very far away.

  The weather had held as they travelled west. There had been no more sandstorms, and the sky had even been a little cloudy a few days. The thin, high clouds couldn't possibly deliver any rain, but they kept the brutal sun off of him. But there had been other things in the sky as well. At least once a day, he saw at least one trio of large flying objects in the sky. None of them had been very close to his position, but they had passed at intervals that told him that they were looking for something. Probably looking for him. The fact that they weren't flying right over him told him that at least it looked like the disguise was effective.

  The disguise had been the second choice. Sarraya had wanted to go with the most simple approach to getting past the Trolls, and that was to think small. In cat form, Tarrin would be able to easily slip past their picket line in the night. Or, if there proved to be too many, to wait for a sandstorm to hide their passing. But ever since the pain he'd felt in cat form, he'd been...afraid, to return to that form. He was afraid of the hollow emptiness he'd suffered while trapped in cat form, afraid of what it may do to him now. He wouldn't be afraid of cat form forever, but for now, for a while at least, he wanted to be free of the anxiety of knowing what would await him when he took that form.

  But as second choices went, it was an excellent one. The disguise was clever and complete, and it would allow him to get within spitting distance of the border, able to change form and run over it if needs be, before an organized attempt to stop him could materialize. He knew that there were trading posts on the border. Allia had told him that. The woman showed him that it was normal for merchants to come and go from those trading posts, and the road would lead him directly to one of them. All he had to do was misdirect whoever was there to prevent his passing long enough to get close enough to the border to get across. Once he was in Selani lands, under the dominion of Fara'Nae, he doubted that they would pursue.

  Only a maniac entered the Desert of Swiling Sands unescorted by Selani.

  But Tarrin wasn't known for his sanity. Kravon had seen to that, and his own nature had aggravated it. Doing insane things was his meat and drink, often before he realized just how crazy his actions really were. It was the impulsive streak in him, brought by the Cat. The Cat was a creature grounded in the moment, and often had trouble planning for the future. That caused his plans to only look a little bit into the future, and caused him to go by the seat of his pants once his brief plans ran out of steam. That was why he was so thankful that Sarraya was with him. He didn't want another repeat of the half-plans he'd used to get the Book of Ages from Shiika. It nearly got him killed. Sarraya was just as erratic as him, but at least she could look into the future better than him.

  Scratching at his forearm again in irritation, he looked over the flat expanses of the plains of Saranam, but they were growing less flat. Gentle ridges and rolling irregularities in that flatness had begun to appear, and on the horizon, lit by the morning sun at his back, was the strange stone formations that Allia had described to him. Sashaida Krinazar, the Mother's Fingers. They were colums of rock that dotted the entire desert, irregularly shaped pillars, sculpted by the wind into all sorts of exotic shapes and colors. Allia had told him that some were barely more than twice a Selani's height, and some were so tall that they had never been climbed. Some were as thin as a sapling, some were so thick that a v
illage could be placed atop it, with plenty of room to spare. One, called the Sose Imune, or the Cloud Spire, stood in the exact center of the desert, and had a continuous cloud concealing its top. If anything, the appearance of the Sashaida Krinazar told him that he could not be more than a day's amble from the desert. He was getting close.

  "Why did I listen to you?" Tarrin complained in irritation. "I feel like I'm being dragged through a bristle patch."

  "It's all part of the plan," Sarraya said from her seat on the top of his head. "We had to be consistent. We couldn't just appear on the road."

  "I could have hid under a robe. I'm so sore and stiff that I can't even walk straight."

  "That's another part or the disguise," she said. "They're looking for a young and trained Were-cat. Not a stiff-jointed Arakite merchant with a bad attitude. You move like a panther, even in human form. I had to make sure you didn't have that warrior's swagger by the time we got to the border."

  "You could have just told me to walk different," he said sourly.

  "It wouldn't have mattered. You can't take the swagger out of your walk any more than you can walk on your ears. At least this way, you won't be faking anything."

  "You could have explained that to me days ago."

  "Then where would the fun be?" she said impishly.

  Tarrin muttered things Sarraya would not like to hear under his breath, adjusting the visor on his nose. It pressed down on his nose in an uncomfortable way; it was smaller than the first visor she made for him, and the edge resting on his nose was almost sharp. But the wind was starting to pick up--nowhere near a sandstorm--and it put the loose sand and dust of the plain into the air. The Sashaida Krinazar began to get lost in the thickening haze caused by the wind sweeping over the plain, but he really didn't need to see them anymore. He knew he was close, he knew that things were going to get serious very soon.