James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"What?"

"Go over there for a while," he said, pointing. "I need to talk to mother and father for a few minutes."

"What, you don't trust me?" she challenged.

"Jenna, as much as I love you, there's nothing that you can do to help me with this," he told her. "Mother and father can tell you when you get home, and we don't have much time, so I don't want to have to explain things. They already know a bit about what we're going to talk about."

"Go on, sweetie," Elke shooed her off. "We won't be long."

"Alright," she sulked, stamping away in a huff.

"What is it, son?" Eron asked.

"They want something from me, father," he said.

"More than just teaching you?"

He nodded. "I can tell by looking at them. It's in their scents. The problem is, I don't know what it is they want. I've thought about it, and for the life of me, I can't figure out what it is."

"Are you so sure?" Elke asked.

"Mother, while I was, away, I found out that they were sending Sorcerers door to door looking for me," he told her.

"I don't see anything wrong with that," she said.

"Of course not. You're my mother," he told her. "Think of it like this. The Tower would send Sorcerers to hunt down a runaway Novice?"

"Tarrin, you said yourself that you weren't rational," Eron said. "They could have been trying to find you before you hurt someone."

"Father, my sense of time is very fuzzy, but I know that the Sorcerer that showed up where I was hiding was there a long time after I ran away from the Tower," he said. "It was well after the wife-well, nevermind that. It was a long time. They had no business looking for me door to door after that much time unless they were desperate to find me."

"Tarrin dear, we were desperate to find you," Elke said.

"Mother, you were. The Tower has different reasons," he replied. "After that much time, they knew I wasn't rampaging, else they'd have found me long before then. They knew I was still alive too, else they wouldn't bother to look in the first place. And despite me being gone for so long, they still kept looking. They even used magic to force Jesmind to find me."

"I think I'm starting to understand," Eron said. "By looking for him so hard, for so long, they tipped their hand," he told his wife. "They had no reason to keep up the search that long unless there was gain in it for them. The only gain that I can see was that they find Tarrin."

"I don't see anything wrong with it," she declared firmly.

Tarrin struggled for a moment. He knew because the Goddess in the statue had told him, more or less right out, that he was a very important person, and that had to be the reason the Tower was so serious about finding him. He didn't want to tell his parents about that-it seemed a bit too personal-so he cast out for a different way to phrase it so that his mother would understand the point he was trying to make. "Think of it like this," Tarrin said. "You know that serving pitcher grandfather gave you?" She nodded. "I know how much you love it. Now, would you hire someone to search for that pitcher for two months? Remember, you're paying for this man to search for it."

"No!" she said.

"That's what the Tower did to try to find me," he told her.

"I-oh. I get it," she agreed. "So you think you weren't worth that much effort."

"From you, yes, I was," he grinned. "From the Tower, no. I'm just one of the masses here, nobody special. The only thing that makes me different is this," he said, holding out his paws. "And there's more going on here than just this. Did you know they specifically arranged to have Allia come to the Tower?"

"Yes, she told us that story."

"Well, they've brought another Non-human here. A Wikuni princess."

"So?"

"So, I heard long ago that they're the first Non-humans, well, we , are the first to be here since the Ancients walked the grounds," he told her. "And now they bring in two of them, and get me by accident."

"What difference does that make?" Eron asked.

"Maybe none, but it's, odd," he replied. "I may be getting paranoid, but it's almost like they're collecting Non-humans that can use Sorcery. I may not have been part of their plans to begin with, but I certainly seem to be so now. After I left, they started giving Allia a lot of attention."

"Yes, she told us," Elke said.

"I was getting that attention before I, left," he said. "At first, I thought it was because someone was trying to kill me, and not just Jesmind. Now, maybe I'm not so sure," he said. "You weren't here for it, but I was attacked several times here on the Tower grounds. Once by Jesmind, and a few times by outsiders. Now that I think back on it, every time but one that I was attacked, Allia was there. They may have been attacking both of us, and not just me." He rubbed his chin with a furred forefinger. The Goddess in the statue didn't say anything about Allia, but that didn't mean that she didn't matter. There was a good chance that she was just as important, because of who and what she was. "Hmm. Perhaps they were attacking both of us, because we're Non-humans that can do Sorcery. It's the only thing that makes us different from every other Novice and Initiate."

"The question is why," Eron said calmly.

"That is the question," Tarrin agreed. "Until I can figure out what's going on, all my thoughts are just dust in the wind. The Tower wants to keep their hands on us, and someone else wants to kill us, and I want to know why. And I mean to find out. I wanted to warn you about this, and warn you that you may hear some bad things about me from the Tower in the next month or so," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to find out what's going on," he said adamantly. "I have no doubt that I'll have to break all sorts of rules to do it. And I may get caught a few times. So long as they don't realize what I'm doing, I don't care if they catch me or not."

They were quiet a few moments. "Anything we can do to help?" Eron asked.

Tarrin smiled at his father. "Not really," he said. "This will be an inside job."

"Just be careful," Elke said. "You don't want to get into too much trouble."

"Why?" he said. "If I'm right, I could kill someone on the front steps, and they'd just slap my wrist and put me back in class. If I don't miss the mark, I'm too important to misuse. They don't want me vanishing again."

"Don't push it too far, son," Eron warned.

"I don't intend to, father," he said. "The Cat is a very subtle creature. I have no doubt he'll help me sneak around and find what I need to find without raising too much of a ruckus. He's good at that."

"Just be careful, my son," Elke said, putting her hand on his shoulder. "We just got you back. I don't want to lose you again."

He gave her a short hug. "You won't," he told her. "I'll be careful, I promise."

He didn't really want to say goodbye, but he had to let them go. They were his family, but they didn't need to be any part of what was soon going to happen.

Tarrin was going to find out what was going on, even if he had to peel the Keeper out of her skin strip by strip to get the answer. He didn't like being manipulated, and he wasn't about to play someone else's game without knowing the rules. His advantage was that they really had no idea that he suspected something was going on. Oh, yes, they knew that he knew that someone out there was trying to kill him, some Wizard named Kravon. But they knew he didn't know why. They could give him any explanation that pleased them, and they felt that he would take it at face value. But it wasn't that easy.

The Cat was subtle, but it was also very suspicious . He had his suspicions about the Tower now, and he wouldn't trust them until he could lay those suspicions aside.