Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  Good old Ironwood. Virtually indestructible.

  Since it was alive, that meant that he could affect it. Despite being a little tired from the summoning, Tarrin reached within once more. This time, his image and intent were perfectly clear, and the All responded. The drain on him was noticable, but nothing like what he felt when he summoned the staff. The magic infused the staff, revitalizing the wood, bringing it back to full vigor, and the magic urged the wood to grow. The staff lengthened and thickened visibly, growing swiftly in his paw, until it had fleshed out to the exact dimensions he had envisioned. A good staff should be slightly taller than its owner, and thick enough to be easy to grip, but no thicker than necessary.

  What Tarrin got when he was done was a staff that was an almost perfect replica of his old one, sized perfectly to his tall frame. It resembled his old staff, even down to the scratches on it; Tarrin realized that he must have been imagining his old staff when he used the spell to make the staff grow, and the All had taken that image and made it a blueprint rather than a guide. The new staff was proportioned for his new height, and it was a bit heavier, but other than that, it looked and felt exactly like his old one. The weight was no issue, since he himself was now stronger than he had been before, thanks to Shiika. Just looking at the staff made Tarrin smile just a little bit, and he felt as if some long lost friend had reappeared in his life.

  He put the staff into the middle grip and felt its balance. It was perfect. The All had done more than just change the staff according to his image, it had changed it according to his desires. It had made him the perfect staff, the perfect weapon, and already, before he even swung it once, it felt like an extension of his arms. It felt like a part of him. And that was the key element that was lacking when he used the sword. He was aware of the sword, thought of the sword, took account of the sword. He didn't do that when using his staff. He didn't have to. He could fight with his staff in a state of total unthinking oblivion, working on reflex and training alone, and that gave him a reaction so fast that few could keep up with him, even when he was a human.

  The sword. It was still on his back. But he wouldn't throw it away. Carrying it these months had taught him that each weapon had certain uses, and had advantages in some situations. He would keep and use them both. The sword would be used, but only when it had a greater advantage than his staff. Fighting kajats was a good example. His staff would probably just bounce off the scaly hide of one of those formidable reptiles.

  "Well now," Sarraya said, "I wondered when you'd think to try that."

  Tarrin shook off the reverie and looked towards the voice. Sarraya was hovering in the air not far from the single tree, a berry of some sort in her hand. "Conjured or Created?"

  "Summoned," he replied. "I totally forgot about this one. I made it when I was younger and gave it to my sister. It's been sitting in her room for the last five years. I hope she doesn't mind if I take it back."

  "She probably won't miss it," Sarraya said with a light laugh, but her expression turned sober. "You've been over here a while. What's bothering you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You usually don't do this," she replied. "That means something has you unsettled."

  He blew out his breath, reminding himself that Sarraya wasn't half as scatterbrained as she seemed. In that way, she was alot like Keritanima. Sarraya had a keen insight into his mind. He wasn't sure if that was such a good thing, at least for her.

  "Jegojah is coming," he announced bluntly, staring at her. "Coming into the desert. Coming after me."

  "Seems to be rather suspicious timing," Sarraya said after a moment. "Convenient that he just happens to be on the way when you're unable to use Sorcery."

  Tarrin noticed that she didn't ask how he knew. She just seemed to accept it as truth. "I know. The Goddess warned me about him coming, and I'm going to be ready. That's why I summoned a new staff, because I fight better with a staff than I do with a sword." He blew out his breath and looked right into her eyes. "There won't be a next time, Sarraya. This time will be the last time."

  "Unless you have a miracle in your pocket, I don't see how you're going to do that," Sarraya told him. "If you destroy him, he'll just find another body and come back."

  "This time I'm not going to do that," he grunted. "I've been thinking about this all last night and today, and I've come up with some ideas. I think the best way to eliminate Jegojah would be to imprison him and leave him somewhere where the Selani won't accidentally release him. So long as his current body isn't destroyed, I don't think he can just abandon it for another one."

  "Clever idea, but that won't work either," Sarraya warned. "The ones who made him can recall his animating force and put it into a new body. The only way to stop a Doomwalker is to take the soultrap the Wizards who Conjured him used to create him. So long as they have his soul, they can just keep Conjuring him again and again, until they either get tired of it or he kills you."

  Tarrin frowned. He hadn't considered that. The prospect that he had no real way to put an end to Jegojah once and for all was disheartening, and it made him just a little angry. There just had to be a way! He wasn't going to fight Jegojah again after this next time, that was something he had absolutely sworn to himself. There had to be some way to put Jegojah down permanently, something that didn't involve physically finding and taking the soultrap that held Jegojah's soul.

  That put his plans off a little, but the simple fact that he had to be at the top of his game when Jegojah did arrive was still high in his mind. He'd have to think up some other way to permanently defeat Jegojah later, but for now, he still had to get ready for him.

  "I know the Doomwalker is a pain in the butt, but there aren't any human bodies out here suitable for him, Tarrin," Sarraya soothed. "Chop him up and make him spend another couple of months travelling back into the desert."

  "No," he said fiercely, motioning in her direction with his staff. "Jegojah killed Faalken, Sarraya. It's my fault Faalken died, but it was Jegojah that killed him. I'll never forgive him for that. I'll destroy Jegojah once and for all, no matter what it takes."

  "And that," she said seriously, "is exactly what I'm afraid of."

  "Why?" he demanded, staring at her intently.

  "Because I've seen what happens when you get like that," she replied. "You'll kill yourself if you think that you can take Jegojah with you. Well, you're not much use to the rest of us dead, and I'm not going to be the one to go back to your sisters and Triana and tell them that I let you kill yourself in a tiff. You can forget that," she snorted. "Sometimes, 'at any cost' is a price too high to pay for the people you leave behind, Tarrin. Sometimes it's a price too high to pay for you. Think about that."

  With that, she turned and flitted back to the other side of the oasis, leaving him alone with her words, alone with his thoughts.

  Thoughts that could only agree with her.

  He was awakened early the next morning by rage.

  It startled him awake from his comfortable furry ball near the fire, assaulted his Cat-dominated mind and forced him to flounder to find full awareness. It wasn't coming from him, this was something outside. It took him a moment to sift through the strange feelings and realize that, that it wasn't him. They were emotions that the Cat in him wasn't well equipped to handle, so he shifted back into his humanoid form and knelt by the fire, a fire that Var was tending silently to ward off any Sandmen in the area.

  It was coming from Jula. He realized that immediately, because what he was feeling was coming through her bond. It had been quite a while since he'd felt anything from her, so long he almost forgot about the bond, but this was intense. As complete a rage as he had ever sensed, even in himself. Only very strong emotions or strong disturbances in the mind or body's harmony came through the bond, serious ones that demanded the bond-holder's attention. It was a mechanism for parents to monitor their volitile cubs, and in this case, it was working all too well. Blind fury was raging through Jula's entire being, thro
ugh her core, so intense was it that he could sense its depth from half a world away.

  But it didn't tell him why. Jula was in a rage, but he had no idea what caused it, and what was happening to her now. All he could do was hunker down by the fire and close his eyes, feeling the bond intently as the moments passed to sense any changes to what came through to him. It was agonizing for him, knowing that something had set Jula off, and that at that moment any number of people he cared for may be desperately fighting her off. He had absolutely no clue what had started this or what was happening now. He was torn between his parental concern for Jula and his fear that someone he loved had caused her to snap, that she may be killing someone he loved at that very moment.

  "Sarraya!" Tarrin said loudly, so loudly that it startled Denai out of her bedroll.

  "What, what?" Sarraya asked woodenly, grumbling in her semi-aware state.

  "Wake up!" Tarrin snapped. "I have to talk to Triana right now."

  "Now? What--"

  "Now!" Tarrin thundered, opening his eyes and pinning the Faerie to the ground with a baleful glare.

  "Alright, give me a moment," she said. "What's wrong?"

  "Jula is in a rage," he replied quickly, as if talking faster would make her move faster. "If Triana's not there, she needs to be. Triana may be the only one that can stop her."

  "She's probably in Suld now," Sarraya protested. "The Sorcerers--"

  "Jula is a Sorcerer!" Tarrin snapped at her.

  "I--Oh. Quite right. I'll try to reach her, but she may not answer." Sarraya probably realized the truth. If Tarrin could use Sorcery in a fit of rage, so could Jula. And in her rage, she would be capable of levels of magical power that would usually be beyond her ability. That made her ability to destroy go up by several degrees, and it meant that Triana was probably the only one there that could handle her.

  "Who is Jula?" Var asked Denai, who only shrugged.

  It continued. Jula's rage did not decrease over the eternal moments that Sarraya tried to make contact with Triana with Druidic magic. There was no sense of injury from her, so that told him that either nobody was fighting back, or nobody had the means with which to combat the enraged Were-cat. It kept on and on, wave after wave of fury crashing against him, enough to start unsettling him--

  --and then it simply stopped.

  Just like that. It just stopped. No slow period of calming down, no sense of anything now. Jula was still alive, so that meant that whatever had happened to break her fury had been quick and harmless to her. Tarrin blinked in confusion. He never came out of rage like that before. There had always been a sort of realization that the rage was no longer necessary, and then it bled out of him. But this was like someone had reached inside Jula and snatched it out of her. What had calmed her down? For that matter, what had set her off in the first place? He had no idea, and that was driving him crazy.

  "Sarraya--"

  "Don't put a knot in your tail!" Sarraya interrupted acidly. "Triana's not answering me."

  "I think she handled it, then," Tarrin told her, blowing out his breath. "Jula's not raging now. I have no idea what just happened to her."

  "Alright, got her now," Sarraya announced. Above the fire, that strange circle of energy appeared, a band of power within which a blue pattern swirled. That pattern faded and solidified, forcing Tarrin to stand to look squarely at it, until an image of Triana greeted him.

  More than Triana. She was in what was probably a very well-appointed bedchamber of some kind, furnished with antique furniture. At least what was left of it. The place was a disaster area, with shattered furniture, broken glass, and bits of torn cloth scattered about the room. Behind her, Tarrin could see Jula's form sprawled on the floor, and it looked like she was sleeping. He could feel that she wasn't dead--wasn't even hurt--so he had the suspicion that Triana had put her out with some kind of magical attack.

  "I was expecting to hear from you," she said shortly. "Jula's alright."

  "What happened, mother?" Tarrin demanded quickly.

  "The Keeper said something that upset Jula. A great deal," she snorted. "The Keeper should be glad that the job has such a high bar for its holders. If she'd been any less of a Sorceress, she'd be dead now. Jula came at her with both magic and claws."

  "What did she say?" Tarrin asked.

  "I have no idea. I felt it the same time you did, most likely. I got here just in time to peel the Keeper off the floor. Jula was about a heartbeat from ripping her head off."

  "Was anyone hurt?"

  "A couple of the Keeper's guards got a little banged up, but nothing life-threatening. Lucky for them that Jula only went through them to get to the Keeper."

  Tarrin blew out his breath. What a relief! Though he had no idea what started it, at least nobody he cared about was dead. "Thanks, mother. I'm glad you're there."

  "Any time, cub. I was waiting for something like this to happen. It'll be a good learning experience for your wayward daughter. This is the first time she's went off the wagon since I took her. She needs to face that side of her." She looked to the side. "I can't talk anymore, Tarrin. I'll contact you with an explanation, at least as soon as I get to the bottom of this mess. Bah, what a bother. This was not how I like to be woke up in the middle of the night."

  Tarrin still had trouble contemplating that. Keritanima had told him that it took the sun time to travel around the world, and that the time in one place wasn't the same as the time in another. When it was noon in Suld, it was sunrise in Wikuna. Since they were so far east of Suld, that meant that it was much later where he was than it was there. "Well, it didn't do me much more good. Mother, is that what you felt whenever I--"

  "Of course it is," she interrupted. "Welcome to adulthood, cub. And all the headaches that come with it."

  "I think I liked being a child better."

  "Reality is a pain, isn't it?" she asked with a curious smile cracking the stony mask that usually graced her face. "I have to go. I'll talk to you soon."

  "Bye, mother," Tarrin said, and the image of her slowly dissolved.

  "You have a child, Tarrin?" Denai asked curiously. "You never told us that."

  "Because it's none of your business," he said bluntly to her.

  "Was that your mother?" Var asked him.

  Tarrin fixed both of them with an ugly stare, then turned and stalked off from the campsite.

  "What's wrong with him?" Var asked curiously, in a low voice. Tarrin could tell that he wasn't saying it to him. Var probably didn't realize that Tarrin's hearing was so sensitive. Even walking away from them, he could hear perfectly.

  "You forget, he doesn't trust you," Sarraya told them. "He won't talk about private things with strangers. Be lucky he talks to you at all." He heard Sarraya snort. "You're both starting to wear on his nerves. Both of you had better back off from him, or he's going to do something you won't like."

  The matter was dropped after that. Tarrin thought about what had happened with Jula through most of the day, between sessions of teaching Sarraya Sha'Kar. He'd never felt rage from the outside before, and the experience had been unsettling. The feeling of it from Jula invoked his protective instincts, but it had also assaulted him, almost as if it was trying to incite him into a similar rage. It had been a frightening sensation, and something that he didn't care to go through again. Carrying Jula's bond had always felt like a responsibility, but now he realized that it was a serious responsibility. It was more than a symbolic representation of his duty to her as a parent.

  It had been quite a while since he'd felt anything through the bond, so long that he'd nearly forgotten about it. That was certainly an attention-grabbing way of being reminded of it.

  They reached the Great Canyon at sunset. That surprised Tarrin, because Denai told them that it was three days away, but they had reached it in two. And he was very impressed. It wasn't a canyon, it was a massive rift in the earth itself, just like the Scar in Sulasia. It simply began, with no warning or change in the surrounding terrain, a
cliff that descended a dizzying longspan at least, a cliff that dropped straight to the canyon floor so very far below. The canyon itself was a mind-boggling twenty longspans across, by his estimation, the far wall almost lost in the shimmering heat of the air. The walls of the canyon were rounded by the wind, showing many layers of rock of varying colors and textures, layers stacked one upon another as they descended down to the canyon floor. But those walls were almost arrow-straight, and though the wind had dug pits and hollows out of them, it was still easy to see that they had originally been straight. Almost as if they had been shaped by some titanic chisel.

  "Wow," Sarraya breathed as they all stood at the edge of it, looking down. There was leafy vegetation at the bottom, and he could see large four-legged reptiles, larger than a horse, munching sedately on the plants. They were grayish-green and rather chubby in appearence, with boxed snouts and a long, meaty tail. They were called chisa, plant-eating cousins of the carniverous desert reptiles, and were most often the dinner of their cousins. Allia said they were rather dimwitted and slothful, uncaring of anything that wasn't dangerous to them, but they were very, very skittish. So long as they weren't spooked, they were gentle as lambs. Frighten them, and they would go on a stampede that would kill anything smaller in their path. That combination seemed a paradox to him, but many horses were the same way. They were gentle and playful, but if you frightened them, they could be very dangerous.

  Tarrin knelt down and put a paw on the rock at the edge of the cliff. He felt something...odd. Putting his paw on the stone strengthened that feeling, a strange tingling. He closed his eyes and felt the stone through his paw, felt into it in ways he wasn't quite sure he understood, reached into it as if reaching into water to find what was at the bottom. The latent residue of it was still there, after all these years, a residue dating back more than five thousand years. An echo, a memory of what had happened here before, back when the Desert of Swirling Sands was a lush verdant belt of fertile farmland.