Honor and Blood

by James Galloway

  She stepped out of the tent and stood beside him, putting a paw on his shoulder. He reached up absently and patted her paw, then put his arm around her waist. That seemed to surprise her, tensing up for just a moment before leaning in against him. "Morning," he told her in pleasant tones, gripping her waist gently. "Sleep well?"

  "You should know," she replied with a glance and mischevious little smile.

  "Keep that happy mood, mate," he told her. "We're going to be doing some unusual travelling today."

  "Don't remind me," she grunted.

  "It won't be so bad. I think you may actually like it."

  "I hope so," she said.

  "Trust me. It's a, wonderful feeling, looking down on the land below," he said in a dreamy kind of way. "You feel so free, Jesmind. Like the entire world is open to you."

  "I feel that way already," she shrugged.

  "I guess I'm not as lucky as you, then."

  "Can we go now, papa? Can we can we can we can we?" Jasana asked, seeming to wake up and get to be her usual bubbly, energetic self.

  "As soon as a couple of certain someones stop playing around and get their tails out here!" Tarrin said in a loud voice.

  "I'm coming, don't get your tail in a knot!" Kimmie shouted back in reply, coming out of the tent while still in the act of putting her shirt on. Thean came out just behind her, shouldering the pack that he carried with him everywhere. Thean was a very transitory Were-cat male, having no permanent den or territory. He spent his life on the road, travelling from city to city and place to place. He had few possessions, and those that he did have were carried with him in that battered old backpack. Thean was much different from some Were-cat males, like Laren, who had a very well established territory and rarely left it.

  "Did she wear you out, you old gray rascal?" Jesmind asked with a smile, looking at the gray-furred male as the pair joined them.

  "Oh, yes, she did," Thean grinned at her. "We stayed up til nearly midnight debating the role of Arcane magic in the downfall of the Torian empire, and its effects in modern politics. Kimmie has some very insightful ideas. It was a very productive night." He looked at the smaller female. "I don't often get the chance to talk about magic with an actual Wizard. Since Kimmie also happens to be one of us, it makes it easier, since she understands what I'm asking after."

  "You knew I studied magic, Thean. All you had to do was come find me and talk."

  "I know, but our paths never seemed to cross, Kimmie," Thean sighed. "It's not easy for two Were-cats to meet when both of them are always moving around."

  "True," she agreed. "Alright, we're packed and ready, Tarrin. What now?"

  "Now it's my turn," he said. "Are we ready to go, Jesmind?"

  Jesmind pointed at a large pack laying near her feet, which contained the totality of the scant possessions that they had brought along. Tarrin Conjured everything else they needed.

  "Alright then," he said, letting go of her and stepping away from them. But then he stopped, and turned and looked back at them. "Jasana," he called. "Come here, cub."

  Jasana looked up at him in curiosity, then wandered over as Jesmind scowled deeply in his direction. Almost as if she realized what he was about to do.

  Jasana padded over to him and looked up at him with an intent expression. He dropped down into a squat and looked down at his cub so she didn't have to crane her neck so severely to look up at him. He reached down and brushed her strawberry blond hair from her face as the wind began to pull at it, and she reached out and took hold of his paw in both of hers. She too seemed to sense that he was about to tell her something important. He looked down into those luminous eyes, so large on her small face, and fell in love with his little daughter all over again.

  "Are you going to show me how to do magic, papa?" she asked with eager eyes.

  He smiled. "That's right, cub. What I've seen the last couple of days has shown me that if I don't, you're going to start doing it whether I teach you or not. So it's better to show you what you're doing now, instead of having you try to flounder around and make mistakes that might get someone hurt." He tapped her on her nose, which always made her giggle. "Now then, the first thing you need to do is learn not to be afraid of it," he told her. "There's alot of things you're going to be able to do, and some of them may seem scary right now."

  "Like the dark place."

  "Like the dark place," he agreed. "Well, what you have to remember is that the shining lady is everywhere in the magic. She's in the magic, and she's also in the dark place. She's everywhere, and if you trust her and listen to her, she's going to help make sure that you don't make a mistake that could get you hurt. Alright?"

  "Umm."

  "Now, I'm not going to just show you what to do and set you loose, cub. It doesn't work that way. All I want you to do right now is watch. Watch and feel what I'm doing. Feel how I do things, but don't feel around at how the magic acts towards me. My magic is alot different from yours right now, and it's not going to act the same way towards you that it does towards me."

  "I saw that already."

  "Good. I'm not ready to start teaching you how to throw spells quite yet, because you need to learn alot more about the magic and how it works before I let you, alright?"

  She looked a bit disappointed. "Yes, papa," she sighed.

  "Alright then. Now, watch. Watch, listen, and feel. And stay out of it, cub. Don't reach out to me while I'm doing this. You'll distract me."

  "Yes, papa."

  Tarrin stood up and turned his back to his daughter, who grabbed hold of his leg and looked up at him.

  Pushing her presence out of his mind, he reached out and made a connection to the Weave. It resisted, as it always did, but the strength of his will and his power overwhelmed its objections. The link formed between them, and that allowed the power of High Sorcery to flow into him. His paws limned over in Magelight as the power infused him, built up inside him, and he opened himself up completely to it to allow himself to draw in what he needed quickly. Once he had gathered up what he considered to be a suitable amount of magical power to perform the task at hand, he tapered off the influx and then began his work.

  He had two things to do. The first he directed back behind him, weaving the flows into the large tent that had served him for the days he was here. He wove together a weave of Earth and Divine energies, and sent it down into the ground. He had thought about doing this last night, and it seemed relatively simple. The weave flowed through the earth, spreading out for longspans in every direction, and every time it touched gold, it triggered a response that caused it to surround the gold, infuse it with magical power, and then draw it back to the center of the weave's energy. That happened to be the tent. It would have taken a long time, if there had not been a surprising amount of gold in the immediate vicinity. He never knew that the northwestern corner of Sulasia was so rich in gold, but the Skydancer mountains, which were famous for heavy deposits of metals of all kinds, were probably the reason for that. Tarrin drained the entire surrounding land of every scrap of gold it possessed, causing it to draw up from the earth inside the tent, where it couldn't be seen. When he was done, the tent was ankle-deep to him--which made it shin-deep for a human--in small gold nuggets of every imaginable shape, enough money for Arren to rebuild Torrian and have plenty left over.

  Then he turned his attention back to the outside, to in front of him, and began the process to summon the Elemental. A chaotic jumble of flows of Air and Divine power, with token flows of the other seven Spheres to grant the weave the power of High Sorcery. Tarrin charged the weave with a tremendous amount of extra energy, for that would be the magical power the Elemental would use to perform its tasks once it arrived, and he wanted to make sure that it had everything it needed to do what it would need to do. He didn't want it disrupting on them while they were all high in the air. The weave snapped taut when Tarrin pulled at it, suddenly pulling it into its proper alignment, and then he released it to do its work.

 
This time, now that he had done it before, he could distinctly feel what it was doing. He felt a section of the weave penetrate into something, something beyond his description, and then it held open that breach between where he was and wherever the other side of the breach was. He sensed about that breach, feeling that whatever it was on the other side was decidedly alien, something beyond his world. He felt the weave shudder slightly, and he realized that the animating force that lived on the other side of that breach had been summoned forth. It flowed in from the otherworld and filled the shell of the weave he had constructed before him, an invisible mass of coherent air with defined limits but no set physical form. The weave suddenly shimmered, and then the control of it was pulled away from him as the animating force of the Elemental settled into the mortal form Tarrin had created for it with his Sorcery. He felt a tenuous link form between him and the Elemental, a mental connection that was just light enough to prevent the Cat from trying to reject it, for it was not an invasive form of communion, as Circling was. It was simply a sort of window open between them, a window that allowed it to hear certain thoughts that he wanted it to hear.

  "Greetings," Tarrin called audibly. "My name is Tarrin. I'm sorry to draw you out like this, but we need your help. Would you be so kind as to manifest for the ones who can't see you?" he asked politely. He'd learned from the Fire Elemental that treating an Elemental with respect and consideration made it a much more pleasant travelling companion. They weren't very smart, but they were sentient creatures, and they had pride.

  Thean and Kimmie gasped when an amorphous mass of what looked like misty vapor appeared in front of Tarrin and Jasana. It was massive, nearly forty spans across, but its boundaries shifted randomly like a cloud being pushed by a stiff wind. Tarrin looked at Jesmind, but her expression had turned decidedly stony.

  "By the Mother's milk!" Thean exclaimed. "What is that, Tarrin?"

  "This," he said, looking back at Thean, "is an Elemental. An Air Elemental, to be precise."

  "It's...big," Kimmie said, looking at it nervously.

  "It won't hurt you, Kimmie. The Elemental understands our need, and it's agreed to help us. It wouldn't be here if it wasn't here of its own will."

  "Will? It's sentient?" Thean asked.

  "Very," Tarrin replied. "What you see before you is a shell of magic that I created for it, so it could enter our world and animate the shell. The way it works is that the magic of the weave goes to where the Elementals live and more or less calls out, looking for an Elemental willing to serve. This one responded. And next time I summon an Air Elemental, it will be this Elemental. Once summoned, an Elemental will always respond to the same Sorcerer who first summoned it. So it behooves us to treat them properly," he smiled. "If I mistreat the Elemental, it's going to be rightly mad at me the next time I summon it to help me."

  "Very wise," Thean chuckled. "What if it dies?"

  "Nothing on Sennadar can hurt it, Thean," Tarrin said mildly. "The worst it can do is disrupt the magical matrix the Elemental animates. If the Elemental is attacked and destroyed, it only destroys the shell I've created. The animating force will go back to where it came from unharmed. That's why Sorcerers often summoned Elementals to fight for them back in the old days," he reasoned. "Elementals don't have any compunction about attacking at a Sorcerer's command, because they know that they can't really be hurt. If could really get hurt, I'd never ask it to do something like that."

  The Elemental, which could understand everything they all said, seemed to warm considerably to Tarrin at that remark. It was their first meeting, after all, and the Elemental wanted to get a good sense of the Sorcerer it had opted to serve.

  "Anyway, we're wasting time. The Elemental is going to carry us to Suld."

  "How is it going to carry us?" Jesmind asked curiously, looking up at it.

  "For it, it'll be easy," Tarrin told her. "It's going to carry us inside it. We'll simply float along as it flies to Suld."

  "Won't we suffocate?" Kimmie asked.

  "It's made of air, Kimmie," Tarrin chided her. "We won't suffocate."

  "Oh. Alright then, Tarrin, what do we do?" Kimmie asked.

  "All of you, come over here," Tarrin waved with a paw. He reached down and picked up Jasana, who was staring up at the Elemental with wonder in her eyes, and the others came up beside him, all three holding a pack. "Alright now, we're ready," he told the Elemental. "For all our sakes, please be gentle. None of us has done this before."

  That seemed to amuse the Elemental, whom, he realized, had a capricious nature much like Sarraya.

  Jesmind grabbed hold of his free paw, and he squeezed it reassuringly as the misty nature of the Elemental dissolved back into invisibility, and then Tarrin felt it move. The air suddenly swirled around them, like wind, and then it simply pulled at them. It was a gentle force, delicate and almost tickling, but Tarrin felt the Elemental envelop the five of them and lift them off the ground. He could still feel gravity pulling at him from below, but it was as if the air itself supported him in a gentle, comforting, almost feathery embrace. Kimmie gasped as Tarrin laughed, and the grip on his paw from his mate suddenly became crushing as the ground suddenly whisked away from them with such speed that it made Tarrin flinch.

  "Ohhhhhhhh, MYYYYY GOOOOOOODS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Jesmind screamed as the Elemental whisked them high into the sky in a matter of a heartbeat, then turned and flew towards Suld, just south of west, at a speed that almost seemed to be impossible. The ground literally blurred beneath them as the Elemental accelerated to a speed that the Fire Elemental could never hope to achieve even as it continued to ascend, the speed of the winds at the center of a hurricane or tornado, speed that seemed almost unreal. But the air did not move, and they all floated within the center of the Elemental as if they were standing in a meadow on a warm, sunny spring morning, giving it a surreal quality. As fast as they were obviously going, there should have been wind whipping at them, but there was not, because they were carried safely within the form of the Elemental. The dark clouds got closer and closer to them, and even Tarrin flinched as the Elemental barrelled right into them. None of them had ever been so close to the clouds before, and though they all knew that clouds were just fog high in the sky, it still gave all of them a moment of anxiety. After all, they didn't absolutely know if clouds were solid or not. They became surrounded by dark, murky gray mists, like the thickest fog, a murky gray that became progressively lighter and lighter as the moments passsed. And then they burst out from the cloud into a clear sky, a sky stained with the rosy hues of sunrise, and the clouds to the east were a similar pink as the sun climbed over them. The visage below was one of wispy gray continuity, the tops of the heavy clouds climbing out from the mass in little knobs and protrusions and waves. The tops of the clouds were nowhere near as flat and featureless as the bottoms of them.

  "It's beautiful!" Kimmie exclaimed in wonder, looking down as the Elemental seemed to level off, watching the gray cloudscape go by.

  "Are you alright, Jesmind?" Tarrin asked as Jasana laughed and struggled out of her father's arm. She floated freely beside him as Jesmind replaced her in his embrace, holding onto him tightly, even wrapping her tail around his leg. He chuckled and stroked her back comfortingly. "It's alright," he told her softly. "Look down. Look at how much beauty's been hidden from us, just because we couldn't see it before."

  She looked into his eyes with pure anxiety in them, then did as he suggested. She turned in his grip so her back was up against him, something solid for reassurance, and then she looked down. She seemed captivated at the sight of it, at the sight of the cloudtops rolling by a thousand spans beneath them.

  He held her from behind, put his chin on her shoulder, and felt her body seem to relax in his arms as she watched the clouds roll by beneath them. He realized that it wasn't the flying, or the heights, that had bothered her. Jesmind was a very old Were-cat. Over five hundred years old. It was the newness of it that had upset her. She was old, set in her ways, seemin
gly already experienced most of what life had to offer. When she came across something totally new, totally unexpected, it initially frightened her. But it didn't make her run away from it, either. It frightened her, but she would still come to understand it. And when she did, it didn't frighten her anymore. Jesmind was not one to hide from her fears. She faced them, and in in the facing of them she became a wiser, stronger person. It made him very proud of her, for some strange reason.

  Maybe saying it was fear was the wrong choice of words. Jesmind didn't fear new things, she simply approached them a bit more cautiously than others might. But in certain cases, like flying for the first time, something that completely went against the natural order of things, saying it was fear was justified.

  "Oh, mama, we have to do this again!" Jasana giggled as she held out her arms and fanned them, imitating a bird's flight. "I love this!"