Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  Keritanima had things well in hand. He had every confidence in her, mainly because she was doing it all without letting the katzh-dashi know what was going on. That spy was still in the Tower, and she could warn the ki'zadun that the Sulasians knew that the army's target was Suld. She had Miranda and that one fellow called Jervis, and they had quite effectively locked the katzh-dashi out of the loop of information. Only the Keeper was being kept informed of what was going on, and she deferred to Keritanima, since she had to use Keritanima's spies, messengers, and resources to do anything regarding the invasion. Keritanima was the real power in the Tower now, the Keeper in everything but name, and that suited him just fine.

  There was also bad news. Jula had been set loose to track down the spy, but so far she had had no luck. Tarrin had felt the fringes of her frustration from time to time, skulking the Tower in search of her elusive prey, but Tarrin had confidence in his bond-child. Jula was smart, resourceful, and now she had the Were-cat temper to give her a fearsome reputation. It would only be a matter of time before her quarry made a mistake, and that one mistake would be all it would take. Jula would have her then, and Keritanima and the Keeper could move their preparations out of the secret closets and into the public eye.

  But bad news often held good news. Triana had told Keritanima to tell him that Jula was about as stable as she was going to get. Triana had requested for a Druid to come and evaluate Jula, and Triana had high hopes for her. Jula had managed to find her balance, just as Tarrin had done, and it looked very hopeful that she would be the third of the turned Were-cats to be accepted into Fae-da'Nar. Jula was alot like Tarrin, relatively feral thanks to her treatment by the ki'zadun, but she had managed to stave off the madness. He knew that she could do it. Jula was an iron-willed woman, all she had required was someone to teach her how to keep control over her instincts. Triana was the best teacher in the world at that kind of thing, teaching what the instincts meant as well as how to keep them in check. With a better understanding of herself, Jula would be able to maintain the laws of Fae-da'Nar, and not be a danger to herself or others. At least no more of a danger than any other Were-cat, anyway.

  Tarrin had the feeling that Triana had grown somewhat attached to his bond-child, but he knew that Triana would never admit to it.

  Denai nudged at his arm and pointed towards the forest, where a very large, dark shape moved behind the initial treeline, then disappeared. "We've been noticed," she told him. "You know how kajats are. If he thinks he can chase us down, he'll try."

  "Let him," Tarrin grunted, dropping down to the base of the small escarpment. "He'll only try once."

  Denai laughed. "You'll have to teach me how to kill kajats."

  "Easy. All it takes is insanity."

  "Or the ability to jump twenty spans," Sarraya chuckled.

  They stayed about a longspan away from the forest, skirting its edge, and they kept one eye on the trees, and the other on the surrounding rocky, scrubby terrain. Tarrin could smell the kajat and the inu, both old tracks and fresh trails, and their prints were visible between the low, fluffy bushes that grew near the forest, soaking up the water that seemed to be more abundant in this small area. Their prints as well as chisa, sukk, and a few tracks and scents he didn't know. There were also Selani tracks, their soft-soled boots leaving those distinctive marks in the ground as they moved towards or away from the forest, from north to south.

  "It's getting pretty hot," Denai complained, fanning the top of her loose shirt. "Strange for it to be so hot this far north."

  "I didn't notice," Tarrin replied absently. "I hope that doesn't mean it's getting warm in the West," he added with a grunt.

  "I'm sure your Wikuni will let us know if something important happens," Sarraya told him. "Are we going to stop for the midday?"

  "No," Denai said before Tarrin. "We'd be crazy to stop this close to the forest. I don't want to stop until we have an entire afternoon between us and the forest."

  "Good plan," Tarrin agreed, slowing to a stop and looking at a skull laying near a bush. It was a large, narrow skull, the skull of an inu. It had a hole in the side of it skull, and there were deep gouges near the base of it, the signs that the skull had been raked by sharp teeth. The bone was still slightly pinkish, a sign that it hadn't been dead very long. "That's fresh."

  "Looks like an inu wasn't paying attention," Denai mused. "Those teethmarks look like a kajat."

  "A small one," Tarrin agreed, looking towards the forest when a slight sound reached his ears. Those cat ears picked up, turning towards the sound, locking in on it. "There's something moving around over there."

  "It's not stupid enough to attack us here," Denai scoffed. "It would have to run over a longspan just to reach us!"

  The sound was a strange rumbling, not the thudding of feet or the rustling of trees. "It's not that, it's something else," he said, opening his senses. It was indeed a rumbling, a low-sounded rumbling, like the rumble of thunder moving through the ground rather than through the air. As he opened his senses, his sense of the Weave also expanded, allowing him to feel more and more of it. Whatever it was was affecting the Weave as well, causing it to shudder and vibrate as if being shaken.

  He could feel it in the pads of his feet now, a vibration in the ground. Tarrin knelt down and put the palm of his paw on the ground, feeling that strange rumbling. It was coming from the ground.

  "I think it's--" Sarraya began, then everything suddenly got turned on its ear.

  The ground suddenly heaved violently. Tarrin, who was already squatting down, put his other paw down to stabilize himself as the ground rocked and swayed underneath him, and the sound of it became a loud crackling, the sound of breaking stone. Denai gave out a cry and tumbled over onto her back, then rolled over on her belly and covered her head with her hands. Tarrin turned and looked to the south, and saw the escarpment suddenly buckle, then heave and buckle again, rising up visibly as the ground shuddered horrendously.

  It was an earthquake! And what was bad luck, it was a natural earthquake!

  "It's an earthquake!" Sarraya shouted as a cloud of dust began to rise from the quivering ground. "Stay down, don't move! That escarpment is a fault line!"

  Tarrin watched in a kind of nervous curiosity as the escarpment seemed to undulate wildly, growing higher and lower visibly, until the shuddering and the motion ground itself to a halt. The ground still shook and grumbled, until that too began to die away, as a cloud of dust rose up around them.

  Denai began to laugh. "You are bad luck, Tarrin!" she jibed at him. "It had to be an earthquake, didn't it! It couldn't have been something simple, like a kajat attack. No, you just had to go and bring an earthquake with you!"

  Tarrin looked at her, hazy in the rising dust, then snorted. "Don't blame nature on me," he told her. "This was natural. I had nothing to do with it."

  "Very natural," Sarraya agreed. "The escarpment is almost a span higher now. It's a fault."

  "What is a fault?" Denai asked as she regained her feet.

  "It's a crack in the earth," Sarraya explained as Tarrin stood up, brushing dust off of his pants. "The earth moves, Denai, it doesn't just sit there, but it only moves a finger or two a year. A fault is where two parts of moving earth push up against each other. They can't move freely, because of the grinding, so they move in big jumps and heaves, and those are earthquakes."

  "I'll take your word for it, Sarraya," Denai chuckled. "I don't know anything about any of that."

  "Well, there's something else I can add to the story," Tarrin grunted.

  "All we need now is a flood, a tornado, and a hurricane, and we'll have the complete set of natural disasters," Sarraya laughed.

  "Floods happen in the desert, when it rains," Denai told them. "I don't know what a hurricane or a tornado is."

  "Types of storms," Tarrin told her. "This dust is getting thick. Let's move away from the forest."

  "Good idea, it's giving the predators cover," Denai agreed.

  They
moved south, away from the forest, for about five longspans, climbing back up the now taller escarpment to do so, then continued westward. They did so carefully and cautiously as the dust settled, making sure that nothing surprised them. The going was as quickly as the dust would allow, but several smaller earthquakes, what Sarraya called aftershocks, kept both Tarrin and Denai a little edgy during their skirting of the forest. They managed to get the forest behind them by sunset without any trouble, and set up for the night in a hollow niche in the side of a small rock spire. There were several more aftershocks over the course of the night, but they did little more than shake dust from overhead, and the two landbound beings eventually became accustomed to the faint rumbling.

  They were off again in the morning, but they had barely gone more than five longspans when Tarrin pulled up abruptly and stared at a patch of sandy ground, between two large thorny bushes. It was a pathway of sorts, an animal trail, and there were footprints in it that Tarrin never thought he'd see in the desert.

  Trolls.

  Tarrin knelt by the tracks, even bent down to take a whiff of them. The stench of Troll was all over the footprint, and what was more important, it was very fresh. Not even an hour old.

  "What manner of beast made those?" Denai asked.

  "Trolls," Tarrin said, nearly spitting out the word as the instinctual hatred for the Goblinoids roared up inside him. Were-kin and Goblinoids were bitter natural enemies, and every fiber of Tarrin's being screamed out for him to track down and kill the invading marauders.

  "Trolls? I thought they lived in mountains."

  "Usually they do," Sarraya said. "I have no idea how they're surviving out here in this heat. Trolls aren't built for it. You think it's a coincidence?"

  Tarrin snorted. "They know where I'm going, Sarraya. They know that there are only so many passes through the mountains. These must be scouts, sent to find me and catch me before I can cross."

  "I'll bet the passes too are infested with Trolls," Sarraya fretted.

  "They're after you?" Denai asked.

  "They're after what I'm carrying, and they'll kill everything they can get their hands on to get it," he told her bluntly. "Are there any Selani holdings nearby?"

  "I really don't know, but they can't be too far if they harvest the nuts from the forest," she said. "Don't worry about them, Tarrin. Most of the warriors are at Gathering, but those remaining behind to watch things won't attack these Trolls if there are too many of them. And they'll never find my people," she added with a grin.

  "Let's hope so," Tarrin grunted. "Your people aren't ready to deal with Trolls."

  "They can't be that bad."

  "Not really, but a few of your people may get killed before they understand what they're fighting," Sarraya told her seriously. "Trolls are nasty customers."

  "What is a Troll like?"

  "Taller than Tarrin, and about three times as wide," Sarraya told her. "They look ungainly, but they can move very fast when they want to. They're probably as strong as Tarrin, if not stronger."

  "Formidable," Denai said. "But my people would respect their size."

  "It's not their size you have to watch, it's their speed," Tarrin told her, looking out into the desert, in the direction the tracks led, looking due south. "Trolls use their size as a feint to make a quick lunge for the kill. They're stupid, but they know that most people don't expect them to move as fast as they do."

  "They'd not catch my people off guard," Denai upheld.

  "In either case, let's hope they're smart enough to stay out of sight and wait for the rest of their clan to arrive before trying to chase them out."

  "Let's not overlook the real problem here," Sarraya said. "If there are Trolls in the desert, that means that there are Trolls in the pass. I'd rather not fight a running war with Trolls on steep mountain trails. That's their territory, and we'd be at a serious disadvantage."

  "Are there any other passes near here?" Tarrin asked Denai. "Anything, no matter how small?"

  "Not really," she replied after thinking a moment. "My education of this stretch of desert is pretty old, but I do remember that there are only two passes in the north. The other one is a hundred leagues north of here."

  "That's too far," Tarrin grunted. "What about going straight over the mountains?"

  "The Sandshield is a narrow mountain range, but the mountains that are there are very rugged and very high, Tarrin," Sarraya said. "Those passes are the only way through for a reason."

  "Could I get over the mountains without using the pass?"

  "Probably, but it would be a very hard passage," Sarraya told him. "You'll be climbing up and down the mountains. And we're talking about some formidable mountains."

  "Well what do you expect me to do, Sarraya?" Tarrin said to her in a little frustration. "We can't go through the pass if it's being occupied, and I don't have time to make any detours. I have to get to Suld as fast as I can."

  "Well then, stop thinking with your muscles and think with your head," Sarraya said sternly. "You're a Sorcerer, Tarrin. Do you know any magic that might help you get over the mountains?"

  "I--" he began, then it occurred to him that Sarraya was right. What good was his magic if he never thought to use it? He could think of any number of ways to use magic to get over the Sandshield, and all of them were feasible options. "You're right, Sarraya," he admitted. "I can think of about ten different ways to get over the mountains with magic."

  "Well then, there we go," Sarraya grinned. "Let's just head straight for the mountains, and when we get there, you can magic yourself across."

  "For someone with a small head, she certainly has big ideas," Denai teased.

  "At least I use what brains I have, Denai," Sarraya shot back playfully.

  "Which way do we go to get to the mountains as fast as possible, Denai?" Tarrin asked.

  "Due west," she replied, pointing. "If we push, we can get there in a little over two days. Maybe two, if we really push."

  "How far will we be from the pass?" Tarrin asked. "The majority of the Trolls will be near the pass, to intercept me."

  "A good day south of it," she replied. "It would have taken us four days to reach the pass."

  "Then that's where we're going," Tarrin said, standing up. "This bunch of Trolls is going south, so they shouldn't be a problem."

  "We'd better move carefully, if these Trolls are that dangerous," Denai warned.

  "We move as fast as we can," Tarrin told her bluntly. "If we run into Trolls, then we'll kill them and keep going. Dead Trolls can't report back and tell the others they found us, can they?"

  "I knew there was a reason I liked him," Denai said to Sarraya with a laugh as they started west.

  A strange sense of urgency welled up inside Tarrin as they ran due west, keeping the western edge of the Skybands firmly in front of them on the horizon as they raced across the increasingly stony, barren desert. He wasn't entirely sure what was making him feel that way, but there were certainly enough reasons for it. He had to get to Suld, and now the ki'zadun had sent their Trolls out into the desert to slow him down or catch him. When he'd heard about the plan to attack Suld, he'd more or less thought that they'd forget about him, concentrate on taking Suld and taking the Book of Ages off his dead body. But that obviously wasn't the case. He was still very high up on the enemy's list of objectives, important enough for them to divert Trolls into an environment that would kill them in a matter of rides, all done to intercept him.

  If that wasn't bad enough, he also worried about his sisters, all three of them. Jula hadn't found the spy yet, so that made the tower a dangerous place for Allia and Keritanima. Shiika's daughters would be arriving any day now, if they weren't there already, and that meant that it was going to tip their hand to the spy that something was going on. Six cambisi weren't going to just drop in for tea. The spy may find out what was happening, and warn her masters and try to kill Allia and Keritanima. It would be a very bad thing no matter what happened, because this spy ha
d to be someone very powerful to remain hidden, despite the intense efforts that had been undertaken to ferret her out.

  And then there was Jenna. Her ten days would be up tomorrow, and Tarrin intended to contact her and explain what had happened. She had to be pretty nervous by now, with an expanded sense of the Weave, yet no ability to touch it. He'd told his mother that the loss of powers was temporary, so he was sure that Jenna knew that too, but it would still be very unsettling for his younger sister. He wanted to talk to her, explain things, tell her that it was just a matter of time until her body adjusted to the changes and allowed her to use her powers again. He was sure that that would calm her down. And, to be honest, he just wanted to see her again. He missed his family, more than he realized, given that he was always so careful about not thinking about them. He just wanted to be near them again, even in the surreal manner of projecting himself through an Illusion. It was better than nothing.

  There was little worry for himself, but there was alot of worry for the Selani. He really hoped that they could stay out of the way of the Trolls. They had no idea what they'd be up against, and that was going to get some of them killed. Tarrin no longer had any real fear of Trolls, not since he'd faced the one at the trading outpost at the border of the desert. They had chased him and hounded him a long time ago, back in Sulasia, but that had been a younger, more inexperienced Were-cat, facing huge numbers. Now he was older, wiser, stronger, and he'd found that a Troll wasn't as formidable as it had once seemed. He was on par with a Troll in strength and size, but he was faster than them, and that was all the advantage he needed. Even a smaller Were-cat was more than a match for a Troll, but it gave him great comfort to know that they'd be the ones afraid of him, and not the other way around.