Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  "To influence a thing, you must first be aware of that thing," she told him. "You cannot master things you cannot understand. You cannot master your power without first understanding its truth."

  That made sense. He couldn't deny that. "Mother...what was I meant to be?"

  "What you are," she replied cryptically.

  "But...but I'm not worthy of any of this," he said meekly. "I'm a half-crazy Were-cat who'd sooner kill you than shake your hand. I don't deserve to see such wondrous things. Why me?"

  "Why not?"

  She had asked that question of him every time he asked his own, and he still had yet to find a suitable answer for her. In this crazy, illogical world, it was only fitting that a feral Were-cat be given the responsibility for saving the very people he did not care about.

  Fate, he had discovered, had a very strange sense of humor.

  "Don't worry at it too long, my dear kitten," she said to him in a silvery voice, a voice full of humor, warmth, and love. "You have other things to consider."

  "What?"

  "You have faced your power, and have conquered it," she told him. "You have crossed over into a new realm of magical ability. You are now a true Weavespinner, in heart and soul as well as name. But as with any new beginning, there is a period of adjustment, of learning. And so it is with you, my dear child. You are so fond of thinking of things in linear terms, so consider it this way. One path has come to its destination, but another leads you off to the horizon. Your body has changed, as has your connection with the Weave. These are your first obstacles, the first challenges you must face and overcome."

  "Changed? You mean I have to learn everything all over again?"

  She laughed lightly. You see to the point, as always, she said winsomely. You have crossed into a new realm, Tarrin. In your prior land, you were the master. Now, you are again the Novice. You must relearn everything you learned before, because now, everything is different."

  "But, but that other one was using High Sorcery," he reasoned. "That means that I can still use Sorcery the old way."

  "You can use Sorcery in the way that other Sorcerers do, but that is but one aspect of your power, and it is also something you must learn again. Your connection to the Weave is different now. Surely you remember Dolanna's lessons."

  He realized that he already knew the answer. "Every Sorcerer has his or her own way of touching the Weave," he repeated the lesson. "It's unique for every Sorcerer. It's why no Novice is permitted to read or study Sorcery before their first lessons, because it may contaminate their ability to use their magic."

  "It is a personal communion, and it differs from person to person. But now, my Tarrin, you are a different person. So you must learn to touch the Weave anew."

  That proposition seemed daunting. Learn it all again? Go through it all again? Suffer the dangers of his power all over again?

  "No, my kitten," she said gently. "There is no more danger. There will never be danger of that sort again for you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You are sui'kun now, Tarrin. That's a Sha'Kar term for Weavespinner. A Weavespinner cannot be harmed by the power of the Weave."

  "I'm immune to Sorcery?"

  "No. You are not immune to Sorcery. You will simply never again be threatened by its power. It cannot harm you, no matter how much of it you hold."

  "So I can't be Consumed?"

  "A Weavespinner cannot be Consumed," she affirmed. "My time grows short, kitten. You're about to wake up now, and you're not going to remember any of this immediately, because I don't want you interrupting your rest with your usual pondering. But you'll recover your memory after you rest, and I want you to think about it when you do remember."

  "I will. Mother, who was that Sha'Kar woman?"

  The Goddess laughed sweetly. "That is none of your business. But don't worry, you'll see her again someday. I guarantee it."

  The sense of her seemed to both retreat and not move, a strange feeling of paradox, and then the web-covered black sky suddenly began to shift, then to spin. He felt a strange sensation behind his eyes, as if the real world was recalling his soul from the nether regions to which it had travelled. He closed his eyes as a sense that he was travelling a million longspans in a breath swept over him...and then there was nothing but darkness.

  Light.

  It seeped into his vision, interrupting the dark security of sleep, and it stirred him out of a deep, dreamless slumber, that and a strange sound that sounded like someone dragging a chain over stone.

  With awakening came memories, images. A Sha'Kar woman, an Ancient. An Ancient that attacked him! They had fought, and he had lost control of his power, finally lost total control...but he hadn't been Consumed. Something else had happened, something strange, something inexplicable.

  Something...beautiful.

  Groaning, Tarrin returned to full consciousness as his senses seemed to reawaken with the rest of him. He could smell Sarraya somewhere about. He could smell sand and rock and dust, but there was also a latent smell like sulfur, like brimstone. A smell he had only just recently smelled, but the memory of it was very fresh. His body was spent, exhausted. The sun hung low on the horizon, meaning that it was either sunrise or sunset. The stone around him wasn't radiating heat and the wind was just starting to stir, so he knew that it was morning. The only reason he woke up was because he was hungry and thirsty.

  That wasn't the only thing he noticed. He could see the Weave now, see it as a ghostly backdrop to reality. He could see the strands crisscrossing through the sky and the land, see them yet not see them, as if they were ghostly after-images that faded from view if there was something solid behind them. He could see them all, but it was as if he were looking upon them with a separate set of eyes. The strands of the Weave didn't interfere with his normal vision in the slightest. Almost as if both images were being imposed over one another, yet both were completely separate and could not interfere with one another. He could see the strands, and he could sense the power within them. Not just the flows and spheres, he could feel the true power within, the pulsating energy that flowed through them, and he could feel the eddies and currents, the bottlenecks and the rapids, the pools and the trickles that made up the energy of the strands. It was an energy that was part of the Weave, created by the seven spheres interacting with one another in ways that the modern Sorcerers could not comprehend.

  The fight. His body still shivered over what had happened between him and the Sha'Kar. Magic on a level he didn't think possible had passed between them, and though he didn't remember it at the time, he began to recall the way the Weave shuddered as it struggled to meet the demands on it from the two of them. Well, most of it had come from him, aimed at her. He recalled that the Sha'Kar didn't really attack him with as much power as he used against her, using instead her experience and finesse to counter his attempts to use brute force. But the sense of her had not lied. He knew that she would have been able to meet him power for power, if it had come to that.

  The battle was confusing. He was still alive, so why didn't she finish him off? Why did she attack him in the first place? She was Sha'Kar, an Ancient, and she had knowledge that didn't exist in the world anymore. What he wouldn't have given to spend an evening talking with someone like her! She was at least a thousand years old, and she had knowledge of the old powers, of the Weavespinners, knowledge he desperately needed. Such vast knowledge, and she had used it to literally spank him in a magical clash. He had no illusions about who had come out of their confrontation the winner.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe she didn't come to kill him, but to test him. Maybe she was just there to take a measure of him, for some reason. She had to know something about him, after all. There was no way that she could have found him, called to him in that weird way, without knowing who he was, what he was doing, and where to find him. It was about the only reason he could think up for her to do such a wild thing.

  Or maybe she knew exactly where to find him. She was a
Sha'Kar, an Ancient, and that meant that she was a Sorcerer. She had to have an amulet around her neck just like him, and she answered to the Goddess the same way he did.

  It had to be a test of some kind, because only about six people knew where he was. Sarraya, Triana, Keritanima, Allia, Fara'Nae...and the Goddess.

  It was the only thing that made sense. The Sha'Kar had been sent, sent to test him in some manner.

  But why? That was the question. Did the Goddess want him to get a taste of a real Weavespinner? Was it a lesson? An ordeal? A test of loyalty? A test of faith? A test of power?

  On the other hand, if someone like that was really alive, what did she need him for anyway? That Sha'Kar Ancient could have easily taken the book from Shiika. She probably knew where it was all along. She may even know exactly where the Firestaff was located. Why send him, when she could have gotten it by now? It was certain that nobody living on this world could possibly take it from her. She was the paramount, the most powerful living being he'd ever seen.

  It made very little sense. And since it had no easy answer, it was something best left to think about when he felt more rested.

  Just moving was an effort. He was laying on his side, and his tail was numb from where he was laying on it. He managed to slide a paw under him, then push himself off the bare rock, but it felt like he weighed a thousand stones. He pulled himself off the ground, then pulled his tail out from under him and rolled over to sit down. He dropped the limp tail in his lap, waiting for the blood to flow back into it and reawaken it.

  He nearly got knocked over when Sarraya slammed into him at full speed, her tiny body almost toppling him as she grabbed hold of his neck and hugged him fiercely. "Tarrin!" she said in excitement and relief. "You're awake!"

  "You nearly knocked me back out," he wheezed, putting a paw down to steady himself. "For a little thing, you hit hard."

  "Sorry," she said, letting go and hovering before him. "I take it you're tired?"

  "That's an understatement," he said tonelessly. "I think the only reason I woke up was because I'm hungry."

  "Well, say no more," she smiled. She motioned with her hand as he felt her come into contact with her Druidic power, and a large roasted goose simply appeared on the ground before him. The smell of it wafted to him, and it caused his stomach to almost take control of his body. "I usually don't steal like this, but this is a special condition." Then she giggled impishly. "I'm sure the cook who made it must be rubbing his eyes in disbelief about now."

  "No doubt," he said with a tired smile, reaching down for it. It was still hot. She must have swiped it right off someone's dinner table with her Conjuring.

  The goose was perfectly cooked--she'd probably Conjured it off some inn's main dining table--and the first bite unleashed an onslaught of ravenous hunger. He stripped both drumsticks before Sarraya had much of a chance to do anything, and he began working on the main body of the bird with his claws and teeth by the time she was sedately perched on a rock facing him. She'd Conjured up some berries for herself, and they shared a meal in relative silence, at least until Tarrin slowed down in his eating enough to speak between bites.

  "How long was I asleep?" he asked.

  "Just over the night," she replied. "I brought you over here to get you away from that mess you made."

  "What mess?" he asked, but Sarraya was already pointing. He looked in the direction she indicated, and he saw a black pillar of smoke boiling up from the ground some distance away, spreading out into the high sky. The smoke was being distorted by the morning wind, wind caused by the sun's heating of the air, wind that rushed from the east to the west, then was turned back by the prevailing winds that came in from the west once the sun had heated the desert.

  "That's your doing," she told him archly. "In ten years, there's going to be a mountain there."

  "A mountain? What did I do?"

  "You ripped a hole in the earth that runs all the way to the magma," she said casually, but he could tell that just saying it was of monumental importance to her. "I can't fix something that big, so it's just going to have to stay."

  "Magma?"

  "Liquid rock," she explained. "The earth rests on an ocean of liquid rock, so hot that you wouldn't even have time to feel pain if you fell into it. Not that you'd live long enough to get that close to it in the first place."

  "Oh. My father calls it lava. He saw some when a volcano in Shacè erupted."

  "Lava, magma, it's the same thing," Sarraya shrugged. "Since your little hole goes all the way through, now it's spewing out of it. It'll cool off and turn back into rock, then build itself up into a mountain."

  "The land isn't going to sink, is it?" he asked fearfully.

  Sarraya gave him a curious look. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

  "You said that the land floats on it. When you put a hole in a boat, it sinks."

  She glanced at him, then laughed. "No, that's not going to happen. You don't know very much about the real way the world works, do you?"

  "I'm not Phandebrass, Sarraya," he said defensively. "I know what my parents taught me, that's about it."

  "All that time in the school in Suld, and you didn't learn anything?"

  "They didn't give me much time to learn anything but Sorcery," he grunted in reply.

  "Funny that you didn't know about the magma, yet you wove a spell to cause it to erupt."

  "I do things I don't understand when I do that," he told her. "It's like when I'm like that, I know things I don't really know, and I forget them when it's over."

  "Probably because you're in touch with the Weave," she speculated. "Nevermind. You don't look like you're up to a debate right now."

  "No, not really," he said, looking back at the smoke. "So, that'll be a mountain?"

  "A volcano, to be precise," she answered. "We can call it MountFury."

  Tarrin chuckled ruefully. "At least it'd be a fitting name."

  "Do you remember much about what happened?"

  "Some," he replied. "I get the feeling that after a while, the rest will come back to me. What happened to that Sha'Kar woman?"

  "She disappeared not long after you passed out," Sarraya said worriedly. "Tarrin, you were being Consumed. What happened? How did you weasel out of it?"

  "I, I have no idea," he replied. "I don't really remember very much about that."

  "The Sha'Kar spoke to me before she disappeared," she said. "She said she was there to test you. She said that she was sent to make you lose control."

  "I had a feeling that was the case," he said calmly. "I thought about that a bit just before I opened my eyes. I couldn't think of any sane or rational reason she would have come here and attacked me that way."

  "At least you're thinking," she teased, then she got serious again. "She said that you had to lose control if you were ever going to get stronger. She said that all Weavespinners had to face being Consumed. She said that if you survived, you were a Weavespinner."

  "I thought I already was one."

  "Maybe in name, but I think you had to do that to be able to use the power that the Weavespinners use. Can you feel anything different right now?"

  "I can see the Weave, Sarraya," he answered, looking around and surveying it with his strange second sight. "I can see every strand, and I can feel the pulsing of the power flowing through them like blood through a body. I can feel that power pool up in the strands nearest to me, and feel them bend in towards me. Almost like I'm attracting them."

  "I think you are," she agreed. "Look at your amulet."

  Tarrin picked it up off his chest, and immediately saw the difference. The central star now had two bent lines coming out of each side, reaching out and touching the triangles that surrounded the star. The star looked vaguely like a spider with those little leg-like formations extending from it.

  Spider. Weavespinner. How appropriate.

  He touched the new features in his amulet gently, feeling it through the pad in his finger, marvelling at it. If this was what
it meant to be a Weavespinner, why didn't he feel very much like celebrating?

  "I didn't get much out of that Sha'Kar woman, but she did say that she was sent by the Goddess herself. I guess your patroness got tired of you figuring out ways to avoid losing control."

  Tarrin chuckled. "That does seem to fit with what I know of her. My Goddess isn't one to wait too long, for just about anything." He stroked the amulet gently, almost lovingly, his emotions for his Goddess taking control of him for a brief moment. "In a way, I'm glad she did it this way. Better to face that moment here, against someone that wouldn't immediately finish me off if I survived, and where nobody else would get hurt."

  "Hmm. That's a good point. I didn't think of that," Sarraya grunted in agreement. "Maybe it's why she told you to come out here. If you would have failed, the result would have been...momentous. To say the least."

  "I can imagine. I remember a bit of what happened. I was full of power. When my body would have finally succumbed to it, all that power would have been released into the physical world. It would have been released as a Wildstrike. A really big Wildstrike."

  "I know. When I realized what was happening, I tried to get as far away from you as I could. I hope you don't mind," she said quickly.

  "I don't blame you at all," he told her with a warm smile. "I would have done the same thing."

  "Good," she sighed. "I didn't want you to think I was running away from you, or abandoning you."

  "You were doing the smart thing, Sarraya. I won't be mad at you for that. I completely understand."

  She beamed for a moment, then started on another berry. "I hate to say it, but your sword is gone," she told him. "It's still over there. I was too busy worrying about you to look for it."

  "Not a problem," he told her, holding out his paw. He was tired, but he felt strong enough to Summon it, and the sooner he did, the less energy it would take to retrieve it. He reached within, reached through the Cat within, and made contact with the vast source of power known as the All. The image and intent in his mind were clear, plain, and the All responded to the simple request immediately. But Sarraya had suddenly jumped into the air and screamed "Tarrin, no don't!"