Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  "We can't do that here," Sarraya said. "These houses are too large and too far apart. We need an area congested with buildings and with lots of places to hide."

  Tarrin nodded. "One of those areas down there would suit us perfectly," Tarrin said, pointing to the areas of small houses on the tiers below.

  "It sounds workable, but from the sound of it, you want to do it now," she said. "Why?"

  "Why not?"

  "Simple, silly," she laughed. "We still want to see what's up there, don't we? What if we find this Ariana, and she won't let us go there? Maybe it's a holy place, and it's against her religion to allow us in there."

  Tarrin hadn't considered that.

  "So, let's go up there now, and then, after we've seen what we wanted to see, we can find your Aeradalla and get a ride down. That way we don't have to tell her why we're up here."

  "That's clever, Sarraya."

  "Of course it is. I thought of it, didn't I?" she said imperiously.

  "Save it," he told her cooly. "I was hoping that Ariana would fly us up there, but you're right. If she won't agree, I'll go anyway, and that may cost us a ride down. Better to do this now, when she can't say anything about it, then find her when we're done."

  "Alright then. Saved again by my superior intellect. You're such a lucky Were-cat," she said grandly.

  "Cursed is more like it," he said in a grumbling tone, turning from the tier and moving back between the two buildings, starting the long, highly vertical journey to the center of the city.

  It was not easy going. The buildings on the tier--and the ones above, he was certain--were spaced widely apart, and that meant a considerable amount of distance to traverse with no cover. That meant going in cat form, which slowed down his progress significantly. In a matter of moments, Tarrin adopted a strategy of moving through such open areas in cat form, often in direct view of the Aeradalla who were out, and then shifting back to his humanoid form and eating up any distance he could from covered or concealed alleys. Using that tactic, he was able to travel the half a span or so that made up the tier in a matter of several moments, until he reached the tier wall.

  This was where it would be the most dangerous, but at least at the smaller tiers, it wasn't a great danger. He'd have to expose himself in humanoid form to the supposedly sharp eyes of the Aeradalla, so it was a matter of being lucky enough that nobody was looking in his direction when he ascended the tier walls. The smaller tiers were easy--they were within the limits of his jumping ability. A little running start was enough to vault him up to the tops of those tiers. He sailed up into the air, almost looking like he was flying against the black stone backdrop of the tier before him, and then he crested the ledge and landed lightly on the top. He found himself facing a large open area with even larger buildings than the ones on the tier below, and was forced to shapeshift immediately and dart across that large expanse of paved stone to reach the shelter of a low, whitewashed wall that surrounded one of those buildings. These were large houses, with courtyards and gardens, houses of the rich or important.

  Why they built a wall around it, when everyone in the city could fly, was quite beyond him. Maybe the Aeradalla were descended from landbound beings, and certain landbound peculiarities bred true in them. Or then again, maybe the wall was merely a physical demonstration of ownership of the land upon which the manor house rested.

  "That was easy," Sarraya said from her invisible position.

  "The little ones will be," he told her in the manner of the Cat. "It's the big ones I'm worried about. I can't jump those."

  "It's dark, and so are you," she said with a chuckle. "You look like an Arakite now."

  "Blame the sun," he shrugged. "At least for the skin."

  "No doubt. That rope hanging off your head is almost white now. You've been sun-dyed."

  "When my fur starts turning white, I'll start to worry," he said mildly.

  Moving among the buildings on that tier was unexpectedly easy. They all had walls surrounding them, and those formed shadowed passageways that ran for considerable distances. He could move a long way in humanoid form before being forced to shapeshift into cat form to traverse the open areas between the walls. What made it even easier was that there were many voices on that tier, but they all emanated from within the walls themselves. There was almost no one walking outside the walled manors, giving him free reign of those dark, paved streets that seemed slightly like a maze, were it not for the fact that all the walls were straight, and he had a direct line of sight to the tier wall ahead. He managed to navigate the tier in a matter or moments rather than the near hour it took for the tier below, thanks to those long walls enclosing large manors. A running vault brought him up to the next level, and from the short look he got before darting against the safety of a wall, it was much the same as the tier below him.

  "This is easy," Sarraya said lightly as he made the wall.

  "Then let's trade places," he said quietly. "I'll fly and be invisible, and you skulk in the shadows."

  This tier was much the same as the one below, except for the large fountain he encountered about halfway along to the next wall. It was a very large fountain, filled with clear water, with water gurgling lightly from a statue in the center of it. It was a nude humanoid female holding a pitcher, from which water poured into the pool below. The statue did not have wings, he noticed, and the image of the female looked more Selani than human. The hands were four-fingered, the figure too slender, and the ears had those distinctive points. The face held that same ethereal quality of loveliness as a Selani, but the face was much softer and inviting than a Selani female.

  Selani? No. That was a Sha'Kar. The figure was too soft, too human to be a desert-raised Selani. This was a female that looked more like a human woman than a Selani woman. She was thin and shapely, very curvaceous, but lacked that corded definition that would have denoted a Selani. Allia was both voluptuous and muscularly defined. This figure was not.

  "Selani?" Sarraya asked in curiosity.

  "Sha'Kar," Tarrin replied. He stood in the shadow of a wall, staring at the fountain in its large courtyard. It inspired a memory of the fountain in the center of the hedge maze, back in the Tower. The figure there, however, absolutely put this figure to shame. The Sha'Kar figure was but a statue. It lacked that awesome detail and exacting perfection that made the statue at the Tower so striking. This statue looked like a statue. The statue in Suld looked alive. And, he had to admit, the face and body of the statue in the Tower were much lovelier than this one. "So we know who lived here at one time."

  "Maybe. Or perhaps the Sha'Kar were used to make alot of statues," Sarraya noted. "If all Sha'Kar women looked like her, no wonder men would want statues of them everywhere."

  "Feeling a little jealous, Sarraya?" Tarrin noted.

  "Of course not," she snorted. "For my size, I'm very well proportioned."

  "For a doll, yes," he agreed mildly.

  "Dolls don't fill out their dresses like me," she challenged.

  "Unless the dollmaker was perverted," he said quietly, which earned him a smack on the back of the neck from his invisible companion.

  "Men!" she hissed.

  "I'm sure the sculptor enjoyed his work," Tarrin added as an afterthought.

  "What do you mean?"

  "He had to have a model."

  She smacked him again. "Perhaps you should ask her out?" she said venemously.

  "I don't get excited at the thought of masonry, Sarraya," he replied calmly. "Sight isn't half as exciting as scent."

  "Let's not go any further," she said quickly.

  "You asked," he shrugged, then shifted into cat form. "And you are jealous, aren't you?" he added in the manner of the Cat as he padded towards the fountain.

  "Grrrohh!" Sarraya growled in furious embarassment, then flitted after him.

  He paused to take a drink of the water, and found it to be very, very cold. That was strange. The air was brisk, but the water was much colder, when it should hav
e retained at least a little heat from the day. It was so cold that little wisps of fog had formed on its surface, condensing what little moisture there was in the air. It poured from the pitcher at a steady pace, meaning that there was no interruption in the water supply that fed it. The water smelled of rock and minerals, and he realized that the water came from underground.

  The water was from a well! But how did they get it up the Rock Spire? To make it travel against gravity such a tremendous distance, it was astounding!

  Magic. It had to be magic. No conventional wellpump could move so much water straight up, over such a distance. Magic had to draw the water from the ground.

  He'd bet that that lava tube he climbed wasn't the only tunnel piercing the spire. There had to be one big wellshaft in there as well, drawing up water from the ground so far below.

  After drinking his fill, he looked up at the statue one more time, studying it. So that was what a regular, run-of-the-mill, Sha'Kar looked like. Well, there was absolutely no doubt now that the Selani and the Sha'Kar were related. He knew that from meeting that Sha'Kar woman, but now there was absolutely no room for error in that assumption. That woman may have been a fluke among her kind, but now he'd seen two examples of Sha'Kar, and they both matched Selani physiology. His eyes drifted down to the base of the statue, and he saw that spidery script that he'd become so familiar with back at the Tower, the written language of the Sha'Kar. The letters were carved into the stone, and were large enough for his eyes to make out, despite his inability to make out fine details. He had no idea what it said--

  --at least until he looked at the line below. That was written in Sulasian, albeit a very archaic form of it. It took him a while to decipher it. That line, he could read. It read May happiness and good fortune find you.

  Curious. That line was considerably longer than the Sha'Kar script. The Sha'Kar writing was only eight characters long. Did it say something different? No. Something told him that it said the same thing. He didn't know why he knew that, but he did. Almost like it was something that he had always known, yet hadn't realized until that moment.

  Almost like a memory long submerged, coming back up to the surface.

  That made something click in his head. No wonder nobody could read it! Every character in the Sha'Kar language represented a word instead of a letter! It explained why there were so very many different characters. He'd looked through the books and realized that often, he didn't see the same character in the same paragraph. He'd never thought to think about why it was that way, but now he did, and the reasoning made sense. He would bet that Keritanima already knew what he just realized, but Keritanima was much smarter than he was. He wasn't too proud to admit that.

  No wonder. If every character was a word, it would be next to impossible to break the language without some kind of written translation to go on as a base.

  But how did he know that they said the same thing? He looked at the Sha'Kar script, and it...tickled at him. He didn't have any other way to describe it. Something about it seemed very familiar to him now, when he hadn't felt that way before. Somehow, he knew exactly which characters represented which words in Sulasian, though their order was different. What was may happiness and good fortune find you in Sulasian roughly equated to to-you happiness and good fortune may yet come.

  He blinked. He could make that out? How, for the Goddess' sake? He didn't know the first thing about Sha'Kar outside the spoken tongue.

  Think, kitten, the voice of the Goddess came to his mind. Think for a moment, and the answer will come to you.

  You did it? he asked within his mind.

  No, actually, I didn't, she admitted with a laugh. What happened to you the last time you touched the Weave?

  The voices from the past, he thought. Am I getting that again?

  In a way, she replied. The memories of the Weave are beginning to reveal themselves to you, and among them is the memory of the written form of Sha'Kar. It is an aspect of your power. The Weave is much more than a simple source of magical power, as you have discovered. It holds inside it the memory of many things, though most of them are connected with Sorcery in one way or another. What's happening is that a part of you you don't even know is there is seeking out those memories, and making them a part of you. You've been doing that for a while now, Tarrin, though you never knew it.

  "What do you mean?" he asked aloud in the manner of the Cat.

  How did you learn to do the things you do with High Sorcery? she asked. You use magic unseen in the world for a thousand years, and you use it flawlessly, without anyone teaching you. How do you do that?

  That brought him up short. "I, I just knew," he replied uncertainly.

  Silly kitten, the Goddess laughed within his mind. You knew because you could feel the memory of it in the Weave. Before, only memories of spells and magic were finding you, because your need for them was so great that it caused you to extend past the boundaries of your own power. Now the more mundane memories of the Weave are beginning to come to you. Among them are the memories possessed by the Sha'Kar. Including their written language.

  The ramifications of that were not lost to him. The entirety of the knowledge of the katzh-dashi were not written in books. They existed within the Weave itself! The Weave served as the greatest library in the world!

  It meant that anyone who could read the memories of the Weave could see anything that anyone ever did that was related to Sorcery! All the vast knowledge of the Ancients had been within his grasp the entire time!

  "Does that mean that I could find--"

  No. The location of the Firestaff has been erased from the memory of the Weave, because Sorcerers aren't the only ones who can read the memories. Long ago, the Wizards and Priests could cast spells that gave them a limited ability to extract knowledge from the Weave. They called them spells of Augury. Because they could find the Firestaff through the Weave, the Elder Gods all joined together and eradicated all traces of the Firestaff from the Weave, from the books of mortal kind, and from the memories of very nearly all. Only a few maintained that knowledge, so they could put forth the clues necessary to lead you to the Firestaff now.

  That made sense to him, but something else bothered him. "Is that why I'm remembering things I never knew? Because I need to know Sha'Kar to read the Book of Ages?"

  No. I told you before, the location of the Firestaff is not in the book. But you need the book to find your way. Since you're starting to gain access to information that may confuse you, let me explain. The Book of Ages contains the majority of the known history of mortal kind in its pages. It contains lore of lost knowledge, even things that the Weave does not retain. Among those things is a comprehensive guide to learning the written Sha'Kar language.

  That is why you need the book, Tarrin, she said bluntly. The manner in which you're starting to decipher Sha'Kar isn't very comprehensive. It's very fuzzy and prone to mistakes, and as you've noticed, learning things in that manner isn't very reliable. The book holds everything you need to learn written Sha'Kar the right way. My children did write everything down, kitten. Not everything is held in the Weave, for the very reason I just gave you. Trying to conjure memories from the Weave isn't as precise as sitting down and reading a book.

  Tarrin made the leap intuitively. "Those books we took from the Cathedral!" he gasped.

  Yes, whatever happened to those books? she asked winsomely. As I recall, you left them sitting in the middle of my courtyard. Forgot all about them, didn't you?

  His heart about came out of his mouth. They left them out in the open! They were probably mildewed and disintigrated--

  Calm down, kitten, they're fine, the Goddess chuckled. I'm watching over them even as we speak. They're still as fresh and legible as the day you brought them into the courtyard.

  "Thank the Goddess," Tarrin sighed automatically.

  You're welcome, she replied with a laugh. Oh, just a word of warning, kitten. Now you know what's important, so now you know what to protect.
r />   "I know. Not a word. Not even a hint."

  That's a good kitten, she affirmed with a light chuckle.

  "Mother, can I, can I read the book?" he asked hesitantly.

  It's your book, Tarrin, she replied. You know the danger involved with bringing it from the elsewhere. If you are willing to risk that danger, then you can read the book any time you want.

  "Should I read it?"

  That's your decision, Tarrin. I'm not going to try to woo you either way. It's entirely up to you.

  "Well, if you were in my place, what would you do?"

  Nice try, she said in a teasing tone. I'm not that shallow, kitten.

  Had he been in humanoid form, he would have blushed. "I just want to know if it's the right thing to do."

  That's something for you to decide.

  And then he felt her withdraw from him. It was obviously something she didn't intend to argue about. Her sudden withdraw felt a little rude, but then again, she was never really that far away. He could feel her in the Weave, feel her presence surrounding him. She was only a heartbeat away from him.

  "I take it you just had a good conversation?" Sarraya asked.

  "Something like that. I just learned what I'm really doing out here."

  "Oh? What?"

  "Being a messenger," he grunted, looking around. "We'll talk about it when we're alone."

  "We're alone now."

  "Alone," he emphasized.

  "Oh. Right. Let's carry on, then."

  He tried to put that little revelation out of his mind. He had a job to do. He had to take a look at that object up there. He was convinced that it wasn't the Firestaff now, because of the little conversation he had with the Goddess, but the curiosity of the object remained. And it was strong enough for him to continue. He knew that it wasn't what he was seeking, but now his desire to see that object extended from personal curiosity more than a suspicion that he could cut this entire thing short by cheating.

  Or maybe he was wrong, and it really was the Firestaff. Either way, the only way to find out was to find the object and take a look at it.