James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"You sound convinced that we will."

"I am," she said. "I know a sinking ship when I see it, Tarrin. They want something from us, and they're more than willing to do whatever it takes to get it."

"How do you know that?"

"Just call it women's intuition," she told him. "I have alot of little reasons that all add up to the same conclusion."

"Well, we can try, but they've had whole platoons of Sorcerers trying to do the same thing that we're going to do, Kerri. I don't know if we'll have any more luck than them." He leaned forward. "The Lorefinders do nothing but try to find the lost secrets."

"True, but they're looking at it from a smashmouth perspective," she snorted. "They're looking for the secrets to be written down in the books, waiting for them to find it. The secrets are there, but they're not obvious."

"What are you talking about?"

"Tarrin, you'd be surprised at how much you can learn about a people just by figuring out what a day in the life of that person was like," she explained. "If we can figure out what they did from day to day, nothing serious or titanic or earth-shaking, just how Ancient Sorcerer Bobbi went about her daily routines, we may find something that they missed."

"How does that help us learn new Sorcery?"

"By understanding an effect , one can often make it come to pass," she pointed out. "After we learn more about Sorcery, we may be able to reverse-engineer some of those effects." She picked at her dress absently. "I'm pretty sure that the Lorefinders are looking for the wrath of the gods type things. They're not looking for how, perhaps, our Ancient Sorceress, Bobbi, cleaned her robes at the beginning of each day."

"And that information was probably left behind," Tarrin said in a glimmer of insight.

She smiled. "Of course. The Ancients took almost everything with them, and they probably didn't write about themselves, but I'll bet that others did. From what I understand, the Church of Karas hated them, and I'll bet that they were exhaustive in their study of the Ancients."

"Why?"

"How better to defeat an enemy than to understand that enemy?"

"'A predictable enemy is a defeatable one'," Fox quoted from one of his mother's many sayings.

"Just so," she agreed. "So we may be paying the Cathedral a visit. That's the main repository of almost all the lore of the church of Karas. I think we'll find some very interesting things there."

"They wouldn't let that kind of information out. And they'd boil their own gizzards before handing it over to the Tower," he reasoned. "So it's probably still there."

"Very good," she smiled. "I'll make a politician out of you yet."

"I hope not," he grunted. "So, what's our first move?"

"Our first move is to learn," she replied calmly. "I won't be ready to move forward for a few more days. Maybe a ride. But when I am ready, you have to get unfriendly. Find something that you really hate about your situation, but make sure it's something that they won't change. And when I give the signal, make it very clear that you're unhappy. Cause all sorts of trouble, until the Keeper herself has to deal with it. When she refuses to change it, then you go on strike."

Tarrin laughed. "That's a clever way to say it."

"Allia will stand by you, and after a bit of wishy-washiness, the Brat Princess will too. That will conveniently give us some time to kill, and we'll do it in the library. Miranda will be gathering information, as will Tiella and you. And hopefully, your friend Dolanna will give us some help. After that, we'll have to see where we stand with what we've got before we make our next move. We can't learn secrets unless we have at least a basic understanding of Sorcery, and for that, we'll need Dolanna."

"Dolanna is a katzh-dashi , Kerri," he said. "I trust her, but we can't let her know what we're planning. That will put her loyalty in conflict with our friendship, and I'm not sure which side of the fence she'll stand on."

"Hmm, that will make it a bit harder," she hummed. "But I'm sure we can work with it. No matter what, a visit to our local cathedral is very high on our list of priorities. My soul is feeling very unclean. I feel the need to absolve it."

"And I think that tells me exactly what I should feel so angry about," Tarrin said with a slight smile. "Just as soon as I figure out a way to get around it."

"What?"

"The Ward," he replied. "Jesmind said she could penetrate it. Well, I'm going to find out how she did it."

"That could be handy. They'd never dream that you could get around their cage."

Just the sound of that word made him visibly bristle. " Nobody holds me," he hissed.

"Fine. Tell that to someone that can do something about it," she said with deceptive mildness.

"Sorry," he said after a moment.

"Not a problem," she said with a toothy grin. "I think I can look past your faults. You are a friend, after all."

"You're so kind," he drawled.

It didn't take Tarrin long to explain the plan to Allia, just as it didn't take long for her to understand and accept it. She was a bit put out with him for meeting with Keritanima alone, but he knew that she had been up almost all night, standing at the door while Jesmind was in the room. That he did as soon as getting back to the room, bathing, and dressing for another day of being frustrated. He explained things to her as she braided his damp hair, back in his room.

"I should have been there, deshida ," she admonished him as she yanked on his hair, pulling it against his ears.

Tarrin winced and bent his head back to take the pain out of it. "I'm sorry, but you needed to sleep," he replied. "I may have been busy with Jesmind, but I could hear you at the door."

She didn't blush in the slightest. Things between him and Allia were always completely open. "I am Selani, my brother. I can go with a night's lost sleep easily. You don't have to protect my well being."

"Well, I will anyway," he said bluntly. "You're one of the few people I have here, my sister. I have to keep my eyes out for you."

"It's so nice to be appreciated," she said with a warm smile, beginning the braid. It had grown back even longer than before, much to his irritation. He was almost afraid of how much it would grow if he lost his braid again.

"The way Kerri talked, she expects to run," Tarrin told her.

"That's not a problem, my brother," she said easily. "My tribe will protect us, and not even the Keeper herself would dare refute the commandments of my chief. If she did, the Selani would call council." Calling Council was a Selani term for declaring war. And not even the Keeper was insane enough to provoke the Selani, who were, by no doubt, the most devastating fighting force in the entire world. The Selani could possibly conquer the entire west, but conquest and spoils weren't important to the desert-dwelling nonhumans, just as leaving their precious desert was something no Selani would do without serious motivation. Allia was the first of her people to willingly leave the desert since the war with Arak.

"I hope so, Allia," he sighed. "If we run, it's a good bet that we'll have a sizable army on our tails. We'll need somewhere to go that's safe, because we certainly can't hide."

"Hide? A Were-cat, a Selani, and a Wikuni, hide?" Allia laughed. "I would think not."

"Exactly," he said with a wry chuckle. "Maybe your father's camp is about the only place in the world we can go that puts us beyond the Tower's reach. They're probably one of the few peoples that the Tower would have reason to fear."

"It's not of any worry to us, my brother," she assured him. "Let's speak of your idea to invade the cathedral of Karas."

"Later," he told her. "We're almost late for class."