The Questing Game

by James Galloway

  Tarrin thought about that a moment, and he had to admit that it was a rather intelligent practice. Human men being what they were, they wouldn't be able to resist looking at Camara Tal's admittedly fine body. That left her open to use her sword in the manner in which it was intended. It gave the Amazons an edge in battle against male opponents, which he'd learned were in no short supply. The Amazons fought a continual war of raids against Stygia, for the evil kingdom was trying to conquer Amazar. The Amazons were well suited to defending their home, for their islands were surrounded by deadly reefs and riptides, and only they knew the paths to get through them. It ensured that no sizable army could land on their islands, and those survivors that did make it found themselves facing formidably trained opponents. Amazons were warriors, and they were dangerous ones.

  "This is why you disdain armor then, mistress Tal?"

  Camara Tal snorted. "Armor is for people who expect to be hit," she replied. "A well trained warrior doesn't need armor. A good sword is all a warrior needs to keep herself protected."

  "I say, you can't discout the fact that it is useful."

  "It has advantages, but it also has disadvantages," she said. "Take that Knight. He wears that suit of armor, and it makes him harder to hurt. But it slows him down, restricts his ability to move, and that helmet limits his field of vision and his hearing. That's what you give away for that extra protection. He's sacrificing speed and mobility for a layer of protection, when the speed and mobility would protect him just as well as the armor if he knew how to use them."

  "He's not all that slow, Camara Tal," Tarrin defended his friend. "He can move like a cat in that armor."

  "Camara," she corrected. "You're a personal friend, so you can call me Camara. And I agree, he's very quick in that armor, but imagine how much faster he'd be if he didn't have it on."

  Her calling him friend didn't impact him much. "The Knights have learned how to take that armor and use it like a weapon," he replied. "Their using it makes them just as effective as an Amazon, because it gives them some options you don't have."

  "I never said that they weren't good, Tarrin. I'm just saying that it's not absolutely necessary to wear armor and be a good warrior. The Knights have taken armor and learned to use it, and it helps give them their deserved reputation. But it's not absolutely necessary for them to wear it, because they could be just as good without it. That's all I'm saying."

  Tarrin turned that over in his mind, and found no insult in it. Tarrin was also a Knight, so he had a duty to defend the honor of the order. She had acceded that the Knights were a formidable order, so it satisfied him. And, after all, she was telling the truth. Armor didn't make a warrior. The Ungardt rarely wore anything more than a mail shirt, something to stop those annoying little nicks and cuts, because the Ungardt style relied on training over armor for protection.

  The cook handed Tarrin a huge bowl of stew when they reached the galley, and they turned around and went back up on deck. Tarrin sat on a rope coil and enjoyed the meal, stew with hardbread, as Camara Tal leaned against the rail beside him and Phandebrass wrote something down in his book quietly. "Where's the bug?" Camara Tal asked. "She's not hiding on your head today."

  "She's up in the rigging sulking," Tarrin replied between bites of stew. "She did something to Renoit, so she's hiding."

  "She's going to get her wings ripped off if she doesn't stop," Camara Tal snorted. "I found a snake in my footlocker this morning."

  "I say, where did she find a snake?" Phandebrass asked.

  "From the sea, wizard," Camara Tal snorted. "There are sea snakes. She'd better be lucky I saw it in time. The snake she put in my locker happens to be the deadliest snake in the world. If it would have bitten me, I'd have been dead inside two minutes."

  "I say, I hope she didn't know that. I'd have a different opinion of her if I knew she was being malicious."

  "She's a Faerie. She probably has no idea about the animals in the sea. I doubt she knew it was poisonous, but it wouldn't take a genius to figure it out."

  "Why?" Tarrin asked.

  "Simple, my boy," Phandebrass said. "Snakes are well known to be venemous, and snakes kill prey either by venom or by constriction. A sea snake would find constriction to be a very difficult means of killing prey, so they must therefore be venemous."

  "Why would a snake have trouble constricting in the sea?"

  "Constriction doesn't crush the victim, it simply squeezes them to the point where the victim can no longer breathe," he answered. "A fish doesn't have lungs, my boy, so constriction wouldn't work very well on one unless the snake was strong enough to crush it."

  "Oh. I guess that makes sense," Tarrin agreed.

  "I say, where did you learn about sea snakes, mistress Tal?"

  "I live on an island, wizard," she smiled. "An island surrounded by coral reefs."

  "Good answer," he chuckled.

  By the time Tarrin was done eating, Allia, Dar, and Dolanna came up from below decks. They had been having another learning session. The little green-scaled drake on Allia's shoulder flapped away when she approached Tarrin, who stood and took her hand gently when she approached. "Deshida," she greeted. "You should have been with us. Dolanna taught us about healing."

  "How did it go?"

  "I'm strong enough in the necessary Spheres," she said in Selani. "Dar, on the other hand, doesn't have enough affinity with Earth to heal much more than a scratch."

  "His talent seems to be Illusions," Tarrin speculated in Selani. Usually, when they spoke to each other, they both tended to speak Selani, for it was Allia's native language, and she was much more expressive and comfortable with it. Tarrin's natural aptitude for languages made him just as comfortable with it as she was. "Earth isn't an Illusion Sphere."

  "I seem to have trouble with Air," Allia frowned. "I think that's why I find Illusions so difficult. I've gotten spoiled by you and Keritanima. You make it look so easy, when I go to practice, I get discouraged."

  "It's never easy for me, deshaida," he grunted as they walked away from Camara Tal and Phandebrass, without so much as a goodbye. Allia didn't really know either of them, and Tarrin didn't care enough either way to be courteous. "Kerri just makes it look easy because she can duplicate spells. She still has to practice when the spells have to be altered."

  "Brother, she does make it look easy," she pressed.

  Tarrin chuckled. "Alright, I guess she does," he admitted. "How much did you learn?"

  "Healing is hard," she frowned. "Dolanna said that we have to go slow and be careful, because there isn't room for mistakes when you heal."

  "There's not. If you mess it up, you can kill your patient."

  Allia nodded as they stopped by the rail and looked out over the wavy sea. The tension in her eyes arose immediately at the sight of all that water, and she unconsciously put her hand on his forearm and held on. Allia was afraid of great expanses of water--an understandable phobia for someone who was raised in a desert--but she was very good about conquering her fear. She wouldn't hide from the water or refuse to look at it, she would stand at the rail and stare at it every day, in an attempt to acclimate herself to its presence and eliminate her fear. Allia wasn't the kind to hide from anything. "All she taught us today was the basics of how it's done," she continued. "I learned how to use it for small things, things that aren't dangerous. I healed a cut on Faalken's arm," she said proudly.

  "That's a good start," he replied. "Everything about healing works on that one basic function. Mending cuts. It's all mending cuts."

  Allia nodded. "Where is the little winged one?" There was no Selani word for Faerie, so Allia made do as best she could.

  "Hiding," he replied. "She pulled a stunt on Renoit, and she's hiding from him."

  "Someone should teach her that doing things to people that they don't like is unhealthy."

  "I'll teach her the next time she tries something on me," he promised with an ominous growl.

  "I've never seen such a frivilous
person," Allia said seriously.

  "Triana described them to me, and so far, she's a perfect example of her race. Triana said they all have almost no self control."

  "That's a good description," Allia grunted. "If not for that, I'd probably like her."

  "She's not so bad," he said in defense of her. "She's pretty intelligent, and she's sincere. I can understand her actions, even if I don't like them, because it's a part of who she is. We just have to get her to calm down, that's all, and I think people won't mind her as much."

  "You? Defending her?" Allia said with a wry smile and a little giggle.

  "I guess someone has to," he returned. "Outside of her pranks, she's not that bad. A little too unstable, but everyone has faults."

  "True, true," Allia agreed. "It looks like it's time to earn my way," she sighed, looking at the acrobats that had come up from below and down from the rigging. It was time for then to practice. Allia had been teaching them new maneuvers and helping them create a new act, an act more breathtaking and impressive than their old act. They had acclimated well to Allia, at least everyone but Henri, who was still a little resentful of the graceful Selani's towering superiority over her human pupils, and had learned much from her.

  Henri was one of only about five names he knew among the performers. He knew Henri from their last encounter, an encounter that had the willowy man evade him like a leper. He knew Renoit, and he knew Shelli, who was one of the dancers. She was from the Stormhaven Islands, and spoke with the most unusual brogue that never failed to capture him when he heard it. That brogue had been why he had tried to overcome his fear and make friends with her, and to her credit, she had tried hard to urge him out of his shell. Shelli was a wonderfully sweet and compassionate girl, with a big heart and a kind word for everyone. But despite her exceptional compassion and sweetness, Tarrin was just too nervous around her. It had failed, like every other attempt he had made. He knew only one other name, and that was a juggler that doubled as the ship's head cook. He was a tall, rather portly man named Deward, a man who loved to laugh, could cook like nobody's business, and could juggle six knives with a blindfold over his eyes. The human's manual dexterity had awed Tarrin, who would be hard pressed to duplicate his feat, even with his cat-enhanced reflexes and agility. The man absolutely could not be beaten darts or knifethrowing. He could throw his dart or knife exactly where he wanted them to go. Deward had once been a knifethrower, casting knives at a living target to amaze the audience, but he had suffered some kind of seizure during an act and had put a knife through the leg of his assistant. Tarrin learned that Deward still suffered from those seizures occasionally, and that made it too dangerous for him to continue with a live target. Intending never to put another assistant in danger again, Deward had moved into juggling instead, where the only person at risk was himself. He still did a small portion of his throwing act, but threw at small corks thrown into the air instead of a scantily clad girl standing in front of a wooden slab.

  All the other performers were nameless faces to him, and he wanted it to stay that way. Dolanna didn't restrict him to his cabin anymore, but they all knew to give him all the space they could manage when he did come up on deck. Because they made him so nervous, he usually either stayed in his cabin during the day or stayed up in the rigging, because Camara Tal would stay either in his cabin or just outside his cabin when he was there. So long as he had his friends, he was content with the situation. They were busy sometimes, but they were there enough to keep him from getting lonely.

  Tarrin took Allia's hand for a moment, then she kissed him on the cheek and went to the acrobats. He watched her go with only a slight sigh, then turned and looked out over the sea for a moment.

  It was about a month to Dala Yar Arak, and once they got there, the hardest task they'd ever have to attempt would begin. Just thinking about it made his mind shudder with the staggering difficulty of the task. To find a single book in a city whose population was numbered in the millions, a city that was so large that it took more than a day to walk from one side to the other. And they weren't the only ones that would be looking for it. People had to know where he was going by now, and because he was who he was, they would follow. They had to know that he was looking for the book, so they would look too. It would come down to the simple fact that someone had to eventually find it, and it was imperative that that someone was him. The thought that he may have to fight to either retain or acquire the book had crossed his mind many times, just in case someone found him with it, or he found it with someone else. But there was no second place in this race, there were no second chances. The winner would take all, and that meant that there would be no quarter, no mercy.

  The details about the search were still murky. Dolanna was the one planning for that, and she'd yet to put anything out on the table for them to consider. But if there was one thing he could say about Dolanna, it was that she would have a plan by the time they got there, and it would be a good plan. Dolanna was a very intelligent and crafty woman, and she had a penchant for putting together plans. They weren't the occasionally overly complicated schemes that Keritanima thought up, but they worked. looked up to the steering deck and saw her up there, talking to Renoit. Faalken stood beside her, wearing a simple gray doublet and breeches, his curly hair blowing in the breeze as the Sorceress conversed with the Shacèan. Dolanna garnered a great deal of respect on the ship, one of the reasons being that she was one of the few people that could control him outright.

  The sound of fluttering wings heralded the arrival of Sarraya, who faded into view on the rail by his paw, sitting on it sedately and looking down into the water. Tarrin glanced at her, marvelling yet again at how incredibly small she was, small and delicate. He could squash her with his paw if he wanted to do so. Her multicolored, prismatic wings shivered slightly as she looked straight down, a reflexive action most likely created when she looked down and saw nothing but air between her and the ocean.

  "Got tired of hiding?" Tarrin asked quietly. Sarraya's presence had still not been reconciled by the humans. They were intrigued by her, amazed by her, for they had never seen anything like her before. They didn't know whether to be friendly to her or just keep quiet and stay out of her way. She tended to ignore the performers, however, except as victims for her many pranks, treating them as nothing more than an inconvenient presence.

  "Too much silence," Sarraya said sourly. "I hate quiet. I like things interesting."

  "Then you're talking to the wrong person," he said pointedly. "Why don't you go talk to Phandebrass?"

  "He's trying to get under the Amazon's skirt," Sarraya said with a wicked tilt to her voice. Tarrin glanced back to them, and saw them talking animatedly over something, Phandebrass waving his arms emphatically as he spoke and Camara Tal's body language stating that she was a little irritated with the wizard.

  "Hardly," Tarrin scoffed. "Phandebrass is too old for her, and she's married."

  "Amazons aren't that married, Tarrin," Sarraya giggled. "She has more than one husband, after all."

  "You could go ask her just how married she is," Tarrin urged. "I think she'd tell you. Camara Tal doesn't seem to be the shy type."

  "With clothes like that, I'd agree with you."

  "You're not wearing much more."

  "I'm a Faerie," she said dismissively. "I could go around naked, and nobody would care. Camara Tal is more human sized than me."

  "Whatever," Tarrin said, looking down into the water.

  "What are those fish down there?" Sarraya asked.

  "Someone said they're called dolphins," Tarrin replied. "They like to follow ships."

  "They're not really fish," Sarraya said, mainly to herself. "They breathe air."

  "Then what are they?"

  "I have no idea, I just know they're not real fish. Their tails are different too. See? Their tailfins are horizontal. Real fish have vertical tails."

  "I never noticed that," Tarrin told her honestly. "Strange that someone who spends so much t
ime flying around aimlessly can see things like that."

  "I'm not an airhead," she fumed.

  "No, you're just easily distracted," he replied calmly.

  "I didn't come down here to be insulted!" she said indignantly.

  "No, you probably came down here to insult me," he said in a mild tone, noticing that it made her blush slightly. "I thought so."

  "Well, you're the only one I can really talk to," she grunted. "Phandebrass just wants me to answer questions, and all the humans but Dolanna and the Amazon are too nervous around me. Camara's way too unfriendly, and Dolanna's no fun. She's all work work work, she never talks about anything fun."

  "That's because she's worried, Sarraya. You know what we have to do, so you have to understand that it's not going to be easy."

  "I think you're putting too much worry in it," she snorted. "If you just sit back and relax, things often fix themselves. You people plan too much."

  "I've seen what happens when you don't have a plan, Sarraya. I have scars to prove it. If I have a choice between Dolanna's plan and your luck, I'll take Dolanna's plan."

  "You have no faith."

  "I have plenty of faith. It's just not in you."

  Sarraya glared at him a moment, but he was unmoved by her pique. "You were alot more fun when you were still in awe of me," she growled.

  "The reality doesn't live up to the first impression," he said seriously, trying not to smile in her face and ruin it.

  "Were-cats!" Sarraya snapped, flitting off the rail and flying towards the stern.

  Tarrin smiled to himself as he watched her flutter off, then leaned down on his elbows and watched the dolphins swimming alongside the ship.

  Tarrin wasn't alone long. After about half an hour of letting his mind wonder, feeling Camara Tal's eyes on him the entire time, Dar rushed up to him holding a small construction made of sailcloth and small shanks of wood. It was a kite, something that Dar had never played with before. Phandebrass had been describing the kite festival held every spring in Telluria, and he had drawn out how a kite was made for Dar, who had never seen one before. He had been spending all his free time making his kite, and it looked like he was finally finished. "Tarrin, want to help me with this?" he asked brightly. Dar was fifteen, but a youth spent studying numbers and learning about how to act in proper Arkisian society had left the young man with a gaping hole in his childhood. He tried hard to be sober and mature, like everyone around him--except Sarraya, anyway--but he was still just a young man who still had daydreams and youthful visions of the world. Some young men still had a streak of their childlike infatuation with the world, and Dar was one of them. It was one of the things that drove girls crazy when they were around him. Dar was probably the most sought after young man on the ship by the dancers and the acrobats, and the funny thing to Tarrin was that he had no idea they were after him. He could smell it all over them every time Dar passed by. To his credit, Dar was a very handsome young man, dark, black hair, thin and graceful, with a clever mind and a way about him that made absolutely everyone take an instant liking to him. Though it wouldn't matter in Tarrin's eyes, Dolanna would probably disapprove if Dar began playing games with the girls, but it was a moot point. Dar wouldn't take advantage of the situation, even if he knew about it. He was a young man very solidly based in the upbringing he was given by his parents, who were moral pillars in Arkisian society. Arkisian morals were a bit different from the more western kingdoms, but he was always the soul of courtesy and knew where the line was between propriety and impropriety.