Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  Tarrin, help her! the Goddess implored.

  With that plea came an almost unconscious understanding of exactly what he could do to help, what he could do to save his sister's life. He immediately dashed from the ruined lean-to, rushing towards the nearest strand which he could physically touch. It had to be done while in physical contact with the Weave. He reached it, a rather small capillary feeder joining two minor strands together, and then thrust his fist inside it. That contact expanded his awareness of the Weave tenfold, opened himself up completely to its every tiny shift of energy. He reached into that power, joining his consciousness with it, and soon found himself hurtling through the very Weave itself.

  He could actually see the power of the magic, actually hear the beating of the communal heart, actually feel the sensation of moving through the strands. Through a network of feeder strands, into a larger base strand. From the base strand to a minor Conduit. From there into the major Conduit back at the Cloud Spire. Down to the core, to the Heart of the Goddess, and then up the largest of all the Conduits, the one that ran through the two Towers, one in Suld, the other in Sharadar. Branch into a minor Conduit, into a base strand, then through a series of secondary strands, hurtling hundreds and hundreds of leagues in the blink of an eye, so fast that he didn't have time to feel awed or amazed at what he was doing. Jenna's life depended on him getting there instantaneously, there was no time to gawk.

  And then he was there. He could feel the strand writhe about him as Jenna's power caused havoc in the Weave, as it sought to infuse her with all of its power. He found that he could still enforce his will upon the Weave, could still use his Weavespinner magic even in this strange, disembodied state he was in. He wove together a spell of Fire, Air, and Divine, the flows of Illusion, a simple weave that created an image of himself, then he projected it out from the Weave and pushed his consciousness into it.

  The memory of it was still in the Weave. They called it a simulacrum. A projected image of self that could see and hear, but could not touch or taste or smell. As he opened his phantom eyes, he immediately took in the situation, could see into the physical world.

  They were in Ungardt, on the side of a bare hill covered in snow, with the morning sun shining above the eastern horizon. Several Ungardt children, holding sleds and tobagans, stood around watching in horror as Jenna, his dear sister, was enshrouded by magical fire, arms wrapped tightly around her belly and screaming at the top of her lungs as the power of the Weave sought to burn her to cinders from within. She was literally on fire, with her hair burning and blazing light emanating from her eyes, her skin blackening as the power destroyed her from inside out.

  He suppressed a wild instinctive urge to rush to her aid. He could not touch her, he could not beat out the flames. He could do only one thing to help his sister, to help her survive.

  Teach her.

  "Jenna, stop fighting it!" he shouted in a magically augmented voice, a voice that carried to her ears, even in her writhing agony. "Don't fight! If you fight, it will destroy you!"

  Her screaming lowered in its intensity, and she closed her eyes. He had no idea if she heard him, but then the power flowing into her suddenly increased dramatically. She was doing as he bid! The pain it caused her made her shriek mindlessly, and the memory of his own experience washed through him then, making him shudder and causing his heart nearly to break for his sister. Poor Jenna! The little girl didn't deserve to suffer such pain! She was just a child!

  "Surrender to it, Jenna! Let it flow through you! The more you resist, the more it will hurt!"

  Her screaming stopped, but she whimpered and gave tiny cries as she pressed her eyes closed, pulled her arms from her belly and reached outwards. He could feel the power flowing into her get stronger and stronger, until she was absolutely filled to the maximum, and he knew that this was the moment of truth. If she could find the Heart of the Goddess, could find her core, she would transcend the limitations of standard Sorcery. If she could not, then she would literally explode, her body eradicated in a Wildstrike of monumental proportions.

  "Look into it! Don't be afraid!" he said urgently, powerfully, forcing her to listen to his voice. "Seek it out and join with it! Join with it, Jenna, join with it!"

  Her clothes burned away, leaving her standing there in a widening circle of melted snow and blackening grass, the sheathe of Magelight looking like ghostly fire as it danced around her body, joining with the real flames to form an eerie shimmering aura of dancing light. He watched on in terrified anticipation as his dear sister struggled against the power, struggled to do as he told her to do, her body sagging as the fire become stronger around her.

  Then the fire stopped.

  Tarrin felt it in the Weave, an explosive release of energy as the boundless power within Jenna was suddenly absorbed back into the Weave, but what startled him was that it was more power than she had originally held. He felt a sudden sense of presence within the Weave, and he clearly felt his beloved sister appear within the strand he was occupying, hurtling away from her body and into the core, into the Heart of the Goddess. She went to float in that black void filled with the sense of the Goddess, the core of the Heart, the Heart of the Weave, the one place where mortal and god existed within the boundaries of its nonexistent space in a harmonious union of love. Jenna went to stand before the Goddess and find benediction.

  He felt that exact moment inside his soul, and it caused tears to well up in his eyes. The Goddess reached out and enfolded Jenna's soul with her love, and at the very instant, a blazing halo of glorious golden light surrounded his sister's nude form, taking the form of the cancave four-pointed star that lurked within the center of the shaeram. Blackened skin became smooth and pale and unmarred once again, dark hair that had been burned away quickly and immediately grew back, the tortured pain on Jenna's lovely face was replaced with an expression of peaceful serenity.

  The simple silver amulet around her neck changed in that moment of transendence, eight small tines growing out from the center star to join with the triangles that surrounded it, transforming itself into the shaeram that graced the neck of the Goddess' Children, the amulet marking his sister as one of the Weavespinners.

  The glow faded away softly, leaving the children to stare in awed silence. Jenna's little body began to sag forward, and she very nearly fell, if Tarrin had not caught her in flows of gentle Air, warmed by Fire to keep the deadly cold of Ungardt winters from finding her. He couldn't touch her in his illusory body, but he could still use Sorcery. He picked her up in that flow of warm, soft Air, then cloaked her nude body in an Illusion of simple cloth.

  "Sister," he said thickly, emotionally, full of relief and pride and joy and fear for his little sister. She was again his sister, by more than just blood. She was now a sister of the Weave, joined with him by bonds of power and common ability, by their position as the few who had stood in the presence of the Goddess and found her favor.

  Well done, my kitten, the Goddess said to him in a voice of profound relief, of towering pride. Very well done. Take her home, Tarrin. She needs to rest now.

  Tarrin looked around. They were in Ungardt, and he had no idea what was where. He could see no houses or buildings where they were. "You!" Tarrin snapped in Ungardt, pointing at the nearest of the kids nearby, a rather tall, wide shouldered lad with red hair and snow-crusted furs. "Show me where she lives!"

  The boy didn't move. He just stood there and gaped at Tarrin in mute shock. Then, as one, all the children turned and ran in all directions.

  Tarrin snorted and blew out his breath, which was little more than an automatic reaction, given that his projected image didn't breathe. He reached out and wove together a spell of Divine and Mind, a spell of seeking, sending it out like ripples in a pond and having them search for the familiar presences of his mother and father. It was one of the few ways he could use the Mind sphere when not dealing with members of his own race.

  He felt a response immediately, about half a longspan
west. He also felt a considerable drain on himself, on his real body back in the desert. Using the illusion and holding Jenna in air was taxing, considering he was actually doing it all from thousands of leagues away. His consciousness may be in Ungardt, but the body that powered his magic was still in the desert. Reaching directly into the Weave as he was doing was the only reason he was able to affect things half a world away, and then only because Jenna's powerful disruption of the Weave had guided him exactly to where she was. He already realized that if not for that, he would never have found her. The Weave was not the real world, and its locations didn't correspond to reality in a precise manner. Without someone like Jenna to guide him, he could not have found her. He could not even find the Tower unless someone there showed him the way.

  He became aware of something tugging at his ear, his real ear. He was separated from his body, but his pause to sense his body's condition had made him aware of it. He found that he could divide his attention by closing his phantom eyes and yielding a part of himself back into the Weave, enough to become aware of his body. It was Sarraya yanking at his ear, screaming at the top of her lungs for him to wake up. She was very nearly hysterical.

  He caused his body's eyes to open, and found himself staring into the sky. When he sent his consciousness into the Weave, it left his real body inert, and he had fallen over. The strand he had used to do what he had done had actually moved with his fall, attached to him by a power great enough to force it to move when he did. "Sarraya, stop that," he said in a distant tone. "Calm down, I'm alright."

  "Tarrin!" Sarraya screamed, coming into view over him. "What in the nine Hells happened?"

  "Jenna was being Consumed," Tarrin told her in a kind of daze. "I had to help her find the path, or she would have died."

  "She survived? She's a Weavespinner now?" Sarraya asked in surprise. Sarraya remembered what it meant when a Sorcerer survived being Consumed.

  "Yes. Now leave me be for a little while. I'm dividing my attention between you and Jenna, and Jenna needs me more than you do. Just be patient and guard my body. I'm not aware of it when I'm like this."

  "I will, I promise," she said quickly, much of the anxiety flowing out of her expression. "You just take care of your sister."

  "I will," he said in a lazy smile. He knew that there had to be reasons that he liked Sarraya. Her compassion and concern for his sister reminded him of many of them. He closed his eyes and returned to the hazy semi-real state of existing within the bounds of a generated illusion.

  At first, he forgot what he was doing and tried to walk in the direction that his weave told him to go, but he found himself trundling along without moving a finger, walking in place. That unsettled him a bit, until he remembered that he was not actually there, and that he was going to have to approach the concept of moving from a magical rather than a physical viewpoint. Moving, he realized, was going to be a matter of shifting the illusion, not of walking along. That required working with the flows of the Weave as they were operating, moving them along through space without disrupting their integrity. It took him a little bit to get the idea of shifting the illusion in a manner that kept it together, but he adapted quickly to the concept of it, and was moving along in an eerie kind of floating movement forward, as if he were flying just above the snow.

  The sense of surrealness did not dissipate as he moved. There was no sense of cold around him, all he could feel was the heat of the desert on his real body. He could hear and see, but what disturbed him most was that he couldn't smell anything but Sarraya and the desert. He was a being very strongly grounded in his sense of smell, his most acute sense, and it made his movement through the rugged Ungardt hillsides seem like floating in a dreamworld, a place with no smell to it. It also helped remind him that this was nothing but a dream to him, a landscape a thousand leagues away, and that he was literally not there. Everything he was seeing was being given to him by the illusion, carried back to him through the Weave, but done with such smoothness and speed that it was as if he really were standing on that hillside in Ungardt.

  Floating along those snowy expanses, carrying the unconscious form of his sister behind him, Tarrin crested the hill and found himself looking down on the Ungardt port city of Dusgaard. It was where his grandfather lived, in a large town at the head of a very narrow bay-like feature his mother called a fjord. The city was built of low-beamed houses and lodges scattered randomly along a flat strip by the fjord, bordered by the steep hill over which he had tread. All the buildings were made of gray stone, most of them with steeply sloped tile roofs to allow the snow to slide off of them. As Ungardt towns went, it was rather large, probably about three hundred buildings with about a thousand or so Ungardt dwelling within them. The Ungardt didn't build large cities, they spread their population out over the entirety of the coastline, with only a few sparse settlements inland. Instead of large cities separated by villages every day or so apart, Ungardt was literally one large, open, sparsely housed village that went from the border with Tykarthia right up to the snowpack. You couldn't go ten longspans without coming across a homestead or a small village in Ungardt, at least as long as one stayed near the ocean.

  Tarrin's spell of seeking was still active, and it showed him exactly which lodge was the one his parents occupied. They lived in a small house on the inland edge of the city, with considerable land separating them from the nearest house. Probably to satisfy his father's need to have land around him, and they lived away from the others because his father probably didn't feel very comfortable around the outspoken, rather rough-and-tumble Ungardt. He wouldn't have to carry Jenna through the city and gather up a throng of followers. That was a good thing. The house was on the northern edge of the city, so all he had to do was skirt the crest of the hill until he was lined up with it, then come down and directly enter his parents' new homestead.

  He didn't allow himself time to think about anything other than getting Jenna home and in a warm bed as quickly as possible.

  He came down the hillside and approached the house, a neatly kept place with snow piled around the steeply sloped rooftop, nearly burying the eaves under the piled snow. The doorway was cleared of snow, showing him exactly where to take Jenna. There were snowshoes sitting beside the door, propped against the wall, three pairs of them.

  He used a weave of Air to push open the door, and then looked inside. The house was dominated by a large common room, which held a large hearth. The floor was stone, covered in bearskin rugs, upon which rested a large table and chairs for dinner, three upholstered chairs sitting near to the fire with small wicker baskets sitting between them, and a kitchen of sorts by the hearth with shelves and countertops for preparing food. He saw his mother and father, Elke and Eron Kael, sitting in those chairs by the fire, their profiles to him. His father was reading from a book while his mother sewed up a tear in a heavy cloak spread out over her lap like a blanket. Just seeing them brought forth a powerful swell of emotion in him, and he had to supress the urge to try to cry out and rush over to them. But he wasn't there. He couldn't touch them or hold them, he couldn't have their scents surround him with a powerful sense of family, of home, that he so craved. He was little more than a shade, a ghost, an image with no substance, and in that moment he bitterly hated it. To see his family without being able to touch them was like a torture.

  "Jenna, close the door," Elke Kael said in a commanding tone, keeping her eyes on her sewing. "You're letting the cold in."

  He didn't want to speak. He just looked at them, taking in their features with a wistful longing. His mother was still beautiful, with only a little more gray in her blond hair, just a shade of new wrinkle around her eyes. She was still tall and buxom and shapely, and still had arms developed by swinging weapons. His father looked much leaner now, probably had the fat worked off of him when moving up here, and the gray streaks at his temples were a little larger. He had a scar just over his left eye now, that was new, but he bobbed his lamed leg with a sprynes that told him th
at the healing done to restore his leg had worked perfectly. He probably didn't walk with a limp anymore.

  "Jenna, close the door!" Elke snapped, looking up. She looked short, but her irked expression melted into one of shock when she saw Tarrin standing in the doorway, with an unconscious Jenna hovering in midair directly in front of him. "Tarrin?" she called in a startled voice. "Son!" she cried out in sudden joy, jumping up to her feet as his father snapped his head in his direction. Elke rushed forward as if to embrace either him or Jenna.

  "Don't!" he said immediately, holding out his paws. "I'm not really here, mother. This," he said, motioning to himself, "is just an image, nothing more. I'm not here. I can't touch you."

  Elke pulled up short, then looked at Jenna. When Elke got a good look at her, her eyes widened. "I thought she fainted, but she didn't," she said in concern. "What happened?"

  "Take her," Tarrin said quickly. "It's tiring me out holding her like this and covering her up. I won't be able to hold this image much longer."

  Elke gathered up Jenna in her arms, and she stared in surprise when the illusion covering her nude form wavered and vanished. Eron had managed to get to his feet and rush over, taking a look at Jenna, then staring at him. "Tarrin, lad, what happened?" he asked in a calm tone. "What's going on?" His father always was hard to surprise or amaze.

  "It's a long story, father," he said in a longing manner, looking at his family. And he couldn't touch them! "Jenna had something of an accident. Well, not precisely that, but as you can see, it pretty much well wiped her out. She needs rest and attention right now. Is there still a Sorcerer training her?"

  "No, they won't come up here," he said as Elke quickly rushed off to put Jenna in her bed.

  "Damn," Tarrin muttered. "Then it's going to fall on you, father."

  "What will fall on me?"

  "Jenna's powers have changed," he said, feeling the effort of all of it start to wear on him. He was running out of time. "She's lost her magical powers for a while, until her body readjusts to what's happened to her. When that's done, she'll regain her powers, and they'll be much stronger than they were before. Just make sure you explain that to her, father. I'll explain it to her myself once she wakes up and has some time to regain her strength, but you need to calm her down once she wakes up."