The Questing Game

by James Galloway

  "Can we prove it, though?" Keritanima asked.

  "Actually, yes," Dolanna said. "We have two humans here, and Dar knows how to circle. Dar, Keritanima, join into a circle. Keritanima, you lead it."

  Tarrin felt the edges of it. Dar reached out to Keritanima in the oddest way, almost as if he were trying to touch the Weave. But instead of touching the Weave, he was trying to touch Keritanima. He felt Keritanima respond to that searching probe, and when they met, he felt their power pool together and expand.

  "Very good. Now, Keritanima, join with me in another circle. I will lead it."

  Tarrin felt it again, as Keritanima simultaneously maintained her contact with Dar, and reached out to touch Dolanna in the same manner Dar had reached out to her. He felt Dolanna's reply, and then they too were linked together into a circle. The pooled power of Dar and Keritanima suddenly expanded into Dolanna, joining the two human Sorcerers through their non-human conduit.

  "Yes, I think it does work!" Dolanna exclaimed. "I can barely feel Dar at all! Keritanima is isolating him from me, yet I can still access his power!" She looked at Tarrin. "Did you feel it? How it was done?"

  Tarrin nodded. "It was like trying to touch the Weave, except she was trying to touch you."

  "Try it," she urged. "Reach out to me. Try to touch me."

  Tarrin nodded and closed his eyes. He knew how to touch the Weave; it was almost instinctive now. He used the same sensation to begin, but instead of trying to touch the Weave, he reached out for Dolanna instead, using her scent and her feel and her presence to guide his awareness.

  It was shockingly easy. He touched Dolanna, almost as if she were the Weave, and he felt her mind respond. There was almost something of a door opening between them, and he found he could peek through it and look into her mind. But she could also look into his, and the Cat took immediate notice of this unknown, strange sensation, of this strange presence. It rose up to investigate, to challenge the interloper.

  Dolanna gasped audibly as the Cat invaded her through the contact between them, and he felt her mind attempt to push it back away from her. He tried to rein it in, convince it that the mind in contact with them was a friend, not an enemy, not an attack, but the impulse was powerful and it was irresistable. He felt the Cat rise up and smite the doorway between them, shattering it like a window.

  Both Tarrin and Dolanna cried out, reaching for heads that were suddenly splitting with pain. The Sharadi Sorceress sagged in her chair and Tarrin's head banged into the wall behind him. Keritanima winced, flinching away from the other two, but Dar made no outward motion at all that he felt anything. "That was very unpleasant," Dolanna said delicately, rubbing her temples.

  "I felt it too," Keritanima said. "What happened?"

  "Tarrin rejected the link," Dolanna replied. "Violently. The disruption of the circle fed back into us as a backlash."

  "I didn't do it on purpose," he said defensively.

  "I did not say that you did, dear one," she assured him. "I do not wish to try that again any time soon."

  "I warned you it may happen."

  "So you did. But we do seem to have unlocked a forgotten secret. This is something I must write down and send back to the Tower for further study."

  "You're going to tell them?" Tarrin flared. "I don't trust them, Dolanna!"

  "True, but we cannot allow knowledge to be cast aside," she said calmly. "If we fail in our quest, we very well may perish. I will not allow this to die with us." She patted his paw. "Besides, dear one, how can they possibly use this against us? All of the non-human Sorcerers are right here. This provides them with absolutely no hold over us. Because of that, I see no reason not to share it."

  He looked for a good logical reason to object, but he couldn't find any. He decided that logic was a great deal overrated. "Well, I still don't like it," he snorted, crossing his arms.

  "I do not like it very much either, but I see little recourse," Dolanna assured him. "Because of my newfound headache, I think we will stop for now. After I recover some, we will continue with normal lessons."

  "That's fine with me," he said flatly. But then the words of the Goddess, about how he chose his own path, echoed in his mind. "We'll try it your way, Dolanna," he said, with considerably less hostility in his voice. "I guess I can trust you to do the right thing."

  "I appreciate that," she said, standing up. She swooned slightly, but Dar was there to give her a reassuring arm. "I think I need to lay down a while," she announced.

  "I'll take you to your room, Dolanna," Dar said in a gentle voice.

  "Thank you ever so much," she said with a bright smile to her pupil.

  "Are you alright, brother?" Allia asked in Selani as Dar helped Dolanna from the room.

  "I'm fine, just a little headache," he replied. "I think Dolanna took the brunt of it."

  "I think she did too," Keritanima agreed. "It was about the same as being hit in the head by a cannonball. I can only imagine how bad it was for her, since she was the lead."

  "Sorry," he apologized to Keritanima.

  She snorted. "It was a calculated risk," she replied. "At least it wasn't a complete failure. I doubt we'll get you into a circle, but at least you remembered that part about non-humans. That's new information, and that's always good to have."

  "Whatever," he yawned. "How are dance lessons going?"

  Keritanima visibly bristled. "You have alot of nerve to ask that," she said ominously.

  Allia giggled like a little girl. "She has the other dancers in a state of terror," she told Tarrin. "They're afraid she's going to pull out a knife and stab them."

  "What about you?" Keritanima challenged. "Didn't you break Jak's arm this morning?"

  "I can't help it if he can't land on his feet," she shrugged.

  "Renoit's talking about making you dance instead," she told the Selani in a light tone.

  "Fine. Unlike you, I find nothing wrong with dancing. I enjoy it."

  That seemed to take the wind out of Keritanima's sails. She gave Allia an irritated look, then took Tarrin's paw. "Well, at least Tarrin understands," she grunted.

  "No, I don't," he said bluntly. "But I'm not going to tease you about it. If you don't like to dance, then that's fine."

  "Hmph," she snorted. "I'm going to spend time with Miranda. At least she doesn't make fun of me."

  And with that, she stormed out.

  "She'll never learn," Allia chuckled.

  "What were we teaching her?" Tarrin asked curiously.

  "That fear is there to be conquered," she replied easily. "Keritanima is afraid of dancing in front of people. Stagefright, I think Renoit called it."

  "That's a strange condition for someone who lived her entire life in the public eye," Tarrin mused.

  "True, but she was always in a position of control before, or at the very least she was on familiar ground," Allia reminded him. "This time, she must dance to the beat of another's drum, in unknown territory. It's an entirely different situation."

  "If you say so," he shrugged.

  "I do say so," she teased, poking him lightly in the ribs. "And I also say that it's time for you to take a nap."

  "But I'm not tired."

  "But I am, and I miss napping with my brother," she said. "I'm starting to chafe at the time they take from me to train."

  "I don't mind. You don't have to be right beside me for me to know you're near."

  "Yes, but we don't talk as we used to do, deshida," she sighed. "The loss of private conversation could make us drift apart again, and I won't have that." She scooted up onto the bed more fully. "Now make room."

  Tarrin gave her a light smile, then shifted into cat form. She laid down on the bed without a word, and Tarrin curled up beside her. His head nestled under her chin, he could hear the beating of her heart within the vessels of her neck. He listened to it for quite a while, listening to it slow, become stable and calmed as Allia drifted off into sleep. The sound of that, the coppery scent of her, the very feel of he
r closeness was usually more than enough for him to enter a state of utter security and contentment. Much as he felt with Janette, Allia's presence made him feel totally safe and secure, knowing that she wouldn't allow anything to happen to him.

  Closing his eyes, he began to purr. To him, there were few things better in life than peace.

  Chapter 7

  The city of Tor was alot like home.

  Tarrin and the others stood at the rail, looking at the port city as they approached. The city's architecture was dominated by wood, cut from the thick forests surrounding the city's stone walls and farms. Wood houses with thatch or tiled roofs covered the visible city skyline, with the occasional stone house, tower, or turret breaking up the wooden monotony. Very few of the houses were painted, the vast majority of them either whitewashed or covered with wattle and daub to protect the wood against the corrosive salt air. The result was a city of white and brown, the white of the walls with the brown of the thatch or the slaty grayish color of those houses with either tiled or flat roofs. Tor was a very large city, sitting in a very wide basin, almost like a teacup saucer, a depression in the land around the mouth of the River Tor, which bisected the city. The buildings they could see on the waterfront were all warehouses. Tor was a merchant city, dealing exclusively with the food grown in the breadbasket lands of the Free Duchies and sent down the river by barge. It was the sole reason the city thrived.

  That wasn't the only thing to look at. There were many ships in the city's wide, undefended harbor, and most of them were military in nature. Tor maintained a decently sized navy to protect ships in its waters, but Keritanima remarked that they were rarely concentrated as they were now. Cargo ships, fishing boats, and flat-bottomed barges being ferried out to a wide sand bar to the left of the city had to carefully wind their way through anchored naval vessels.

  "I wonder what's got Tor all stirred up," Faalken asked absently as they looked out at the city.

  "What do you mean?" Dar asked.

  "They have an army camped just outside their walls," he replied, pointing to the where the wall of the city descended right into the water. "They're flying Torian banners. It's a friendly army."

  "And they've called in their entire navy," Keritanima added. "They're definitely worked up about something."

  "We are certain to find out soon enough," Dolanna said dismissively. "Renoit said we would be here for nearly ten days."

  The performers were somewhat puzzled, and not a little worried, as the ship slid into port, its ropes being caught by dock workers. Tarrin was in his human shape, using the meditative techniques that Allia had taught him to shunt the pain away to the side, to make it something not worth holding his attention. Because he looked that way, the other performers had forgotten who he was, or perhaps didn't consider him to be dangerous, and had gathered around his group of friends. "What's the matter?" Dar asked one of the gymnasts, a small, lithe young girl whose name Tarrin did not know.

  "There's nobody here to greet us," she said pensively. "Usually the Dancer attracts a crowd at the dock, and we greet them. But there's nobody here."

  "Maybe they have something else to worry about," Faalken predicted. "An army, a navy, and I don't see a whole lot of people moving around. Something's definitely going on."

  Keritanima blew out her breath, then immediately looked at Miranda. "Don't start," the mink Wikuni said immediately.

  "I'm certainly going to start," she said threateningly. "You still haven't recovered from your injury yet. You're going to take it easy, do you hear me?"

  "I'm not a china doll, Kerri," she said dismissively. "If I've been well enough to dance, I'm well enough to do some of my real duties."

  "Come come, my friends, just because there is no crowd to meet us does not mean we are going to just sail away!" Renoit's voice boomed over the deck. "We have a tent to raise! Let us begin making ready!"

  Tarrin's position in the troupe had been redifined after the incident with the other gymnasts. Now he was nothing more than a deckhand, hired help to aid the circus in setting up and breaking down their carnival. He was confined to his human form when working in the public eye. He moved with the others towards the hold, but Miranda took him by the arm and pulled him aside. "I'm going to need someone to go with me," she said. "Sisska will be busy with the carnival, and you're the only one she'll trust to take her place. What do you say, Tarrin, want to be my escort?"

  "What are we going to do?"

  "I'm going to visit the Wikuni mission here in Tor," she replied. "I happen to know the current lead diplomat personally. We're old adversaries. I'm sure he'd tell us what's going on."

  "What about Keritanima's little situation? Won't he turn us in?"

  "No, not this Wikuni," she grinned. "He owes me a favor. I'll just call it on him."

  "That must be some favor."

  "Let's say that he owes me his ability to father children. I don't know about Were-cats, but Wikuni men treasure that particular part of their anatomy more than life itself."

  "That must be quite a tale."

  "Not really. I'm the one that was about to deprive him of it."

  "Then it must really be quite a tale."

  She laughed. "So, interested?"

  "I guess. It beats dragging canvas around, but we'd better get permission first."

  "Permission? If I asked permission for half the things I did, I'd never get anything done," she said with a cheeky grin. "The only permission I need is from Sisska. We'll leave Kerri a note."

  "We'll hear her screaming in town."

  "So?"

  Tarrin gave her a look, at the mischievious glint in her eyes, and he had to laugh. "Alright. There's no fun in getting in trouble unless you have company."

  "That's the spirit," she said with a wink and a light poke in his ribs.

  After getting permission from Sisska and leaving the others a note, Tarrin and Miranda walked along the streets of Tor. Very quiet streets. For a city its size, the streets should have been absolutely packed with pedestrians. But the number of people on the streets looked more like it was midnight than daytime. Every few blocks, a large party of armed men marched by, wearing the axe and crescent moons standard of Tor and looking very wary and grim. Tarrin saw that the other pedestrians gave the soldiers a wide berth, but did not shrink away from them as if they were occupiers. It seemed that the army's presence had at least some approval from the citizens. But the soldiers didn't impede anyone or interrogate anyone. They were merely asserting their presence within the city. For what reason evaded Tarrin, but then again, they were on their way to find out.

  The Wikuni mission in Tor was a large stone building overlooking the city's main market square. It was staffed exclusively by Wikuni, few of which paid Miranda much attention. Tarrin, however, attracted more than a few glances, looks, and more than a couple of scornful glares. They spoke to each other in Wikuna, and they were probably unaware that Tarrin could understand parts of it. Keritanima had been teaching it to him, and he was a very fast learner when languages were concerned. What he could understand wasn't very flattering, and he had to resist the urge to change form and smack some people around for their unflattering remarks. They didn't challenge Miranda, however, nor did they challenge him, who was obviously in her company. They moved along dark hallways lit by candles, with old wood panelling put there to give the stone structure some feeling of more than stone. Miranda approached a desk on the second floor confidently, behind which sat a rather ugly-looking warthog Wikuni with a huge snout and tusks. He lacked the humanization of his facial features common in most other Wikuni. "What business you got here, missy?" he asked in a grating voice.

  "I'm here to see Jander," she replied calmly. "I'm an old friend."

  "Alright. Who should I say is callin'?"

  "Tell him it's the crazy lady with the scissors. He'll know who that is."

  The warthog nodded and got up, then went into a plain brass-bound door behind him. Almost immediately, a tall, lanky wolf
Wikuni that looked shockingly similar to Haley's hybrid form appeared in the doorway. He looked just like Haley, down to the gray fur and piercing eyes, but Haley's snout was a bit wider, and Haley was a bit taller and little more stocky than this thin Wikuni. This Jander had no human-like hair like some Wikuni did, just a wild mane of wolf fur on his head that poofed out and made it look like hair. "I never thought to see you here, my lady," he said in the doorway, with a wide grin. "Come in, come in. It's been years since we talked."

  Miranda led Tarrin into a spartan office about the size of his room back home. It had a large stone-topped desk near the room's only window, which looked out over the market, and a leather-covered cushioned chair behind it. The walls were the same wood panelling as downstairs, but his walls were decorated with a few wooden engraved plaques, a parchment framed and hanging on the wall, a portrait of an austere lion-Wikuni in a very elaborately decorated frame, and a sword and shield with a coat of arms enamelled to its metal surface on the wall opposite the portrait. The man's slate-topped desk was clean, immaculately clean, with only a sheaf of papers sitting before where one would sit, and a pair of small wooden trays sitting on the opposite corner, beside an inkwell that was capped off. Two upholstered chairs sat before the desk for whatever guests this Wikuni had in his office, one of which Miranda occupied after letting Jander take her hand in greeting.

  "Miranda," he said fondly, sitting in his chair facing them. Tarrin sat down as Jander smiled at her. "How have you been?"

  "Oh, same as always, Jander," she replied. "Jander, I'd like you to meet Tarrin, a friend of mine. Tarrin, this is Jander, one of my most favorite adversaries."

  Jander laughed. "Was I. Did she tell you that she once tried to cut off my--"

  "I told him about that," Miranda cut him off with a wink.

  "And she was only sixteen! I never expected such ruthlessness out of a stripling maid."