James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

Allia snorted. "You mean for imposed torture."

"That's about the way I feel about it," he agreed with a grunt. "Maybe we'll get lucky and do it today, because they're supposed to reform a class once all the Initiates can touch the Weave. I won't have to stare at walls again."

"Maybe so," Allia hummed. "But let's worry about today more than next ride."

Alert, tense, wary, Tarrin jumped onto his very cramped window sill and prepared for the tricky negotiation through the open space and down the wall. Much as he realized when first looking around the room, the window gave him the perfect way to get in and out without being seen. It was on the third floor and was too narrow to squeeze through, so nobody would associate it with being an exit. But Tarrin's small cat form easily fit through the small opening, and Tarrin had a need for using it.

After another exhaustive day of aggravation, Tarrin went to bed early that night to put off anyone keeping tabs on him. For this, he didn't want an audience, because if he was successful, he'd not want others to know what he was doing. He was going to figure out how Jesmind got off of the grounds. He wasn't quite sure how to do it, but he had to start somewhere. He figured that the best place to start would be at the Ward itself, and to do that, he'd have to go take a look at it. He knew it was too much ground to cover to look at every span of the ward, but Jesmind's scent was still fresh on the ground, and he could easily track her movements to find where she had crossed through the ward. But first thing was to get out of his room.

Backing out of the window, he lowered himself over the sill and carefully backed his forepaws off the window. It was much too precarious a position to attempt to shapeshift, so he simply let go and began to fall. Shapeshifting in midair, he drove his claws into the stone of the tower wall, expertly hitting a seam between the blocks, and stopped his downward momentum. He quickly climbed down to the ground, changed form, and then faded into the shadows like a ghost.

Finding Jesmind's scent was easy. Trying to figure out why it went into the main Tower was not. He puzzled at what she would need from there, and instead picked up her scent from the door from where she both entered and exited, then began tracking her across the grounds. Jesmind's scent was faint, but its striking uniqueness when compared to the multitude of humans, dogs, cats, mice, and horses made it easy to follow. There had been no rain to wash it out, and it was too warm still for dew to form. He followed it through the shadows and between buildings, noticing that she kept herself out of the open whenever possible. From the smell of it, she stayed in her humanoid form instead of relying on her cat form to cross the open areas. That spoke alot about her ability to hide. Or perhaps she simply didn't care about who saw her.

Stalking across the grounds, Tarrin skulked along, keeping his nose to the grass and his ears alert for any roving patrols. He doubted they'd pay attention to him, for he looked just like any of the large numbers of other cats that roamed around the Tower's grounds. More than once, the scent of a mouse attempted to distract him into a little hunting, but he kept his mind and his nose on the job and promised to attend to the hunting after he was satisfied that the work was done for the night.

It took him almost an hour to track across the expansive area enclosed by the fence, following a fading trail laid down by his bond mother the night before. It took him to a section of the fence deep in the dark shadows between the torches and lamps of the city beyond, a place very well suited for a lone figure to slip over the fence. The street past the fence was large, an avenue of some kind, but it was also deserted. The smells of the city, the foul miasma of human waste, decay, and sweat, were strong in his nose as the evening breeze wafted them in from the cobblestones beyond. The slender iron fence was directly before him, and Tarrin paced back and forth with an eye out for patrols and a mystery forming in his mind.

Jesmind's scent went right up to the ward. From the smell of it, she didn't backtrack to give herself enough of a running start to jump over the fence. She somehow walked through the fence without touching it. He hadn't been born with his nose, so he could be wrong, but he didn't detect the faint layering of scent that would have hinted at her laying scent over the same ground again.

Quickly changing form, Tarrin used his height advantage to study the fence, and do it quickly. Nightly patrols of the fence perimeter were frequent enough to make him move quickly. The fence itself showed no sign of tampering, and that close to the ward, he could actually feel it. A slight electric tingle that intensified when he reached toward the fenceline. He wasn't sure what would happen if he actually came into contact with the ward, so he was careful to keep his distance from it as he scrutinized the fence again. But another look gave him the same result. The fence showed no sign of tampering, and Jesmind's scent wasn't on it. He sat down, tail lashing in irritation, studying the fence and the ground. There was no physical sign of her passage, but then again, there wouldn't be after a full day. The scent trail simply stopped at the edge of the ward. Like she had simply vanished.

Annoyed, he paced back and forth along the fenceline, looking for a possible second scent trail, but there was none to be found. How in the furies did she do it? She walked right up to the fence, and then it was like she turned into a bird and flew off. He was stronger than she was, and he couldn't clear the fence without a running start, so he knew that she couldn't have jumped it. But she got out somehow, and he had absolutely no clue as to how. She left no clues behind.

A roving patrol sent him into the shadows, and he returned after the squad of men marched further down the line. The glint of the light from their breastplates played in weaving lines as they moved off, and Tarrin had a fleeting memory of the way that same color played in Jesmind's hair when the sunlight shined on it. Then he sat down again and went through his memories of the ward that had trapped him within the scribed symbol, when he fought the Wraith. The ward had trapped him, but it had not trapped Sevren, because Tarrin was a magical creature. Where Sevren wasn't. Tarrin had come into physical contact with the ward, like it was a solid wall that was preventing him from crossing.

Yet Sevren had passed through it harmlessly.

Tarrin's eyes lit up, then he silently shapeshifted back into his humanoid form and chuckled ruefully. "Oh, Jesmind, if that's how you did it, I'm going to kiss you on the cheek and thank you for being so clever," he said to himself. He reached out very carefully with his paw, taking painstaking care to see exactly where the ward began. He still wasn't sure what it would do if he contacted the ward, but this was something that made the risk worthwhile. He felt his fingers impact an invisible barrier a few fingers in front of the bars on the fence, and to his relief, it caused no flash of light, or pain, or anything that would give him away. Taking off his shirt, he wrapped his right paw and forearm up in the shirt tightly, making sure that it totally and completely covered his entire arm and paw. Then he approached the ward cautiously, stopped within arm's reach of it, and slowly extended his wrapped paw.

His paw extended well past the bars of the fence.

Grinning, careful not to extend his arm past the protection of the wrapped shirt, Tarrin pulled back his paw and then extended his bare paw slowly. He carefully reached out, slowly, and then felt his fingertips strike a solid invisible barrier.

"Jesmind, you clever girl," he said with a smile. By insulating himself from physical contact with the Ward, he allowed himself to pass through it. By surrounding her magical body in a non-magical material, Jesmind had literally walked right through the ward. And she did it as a cat. The reason her scent seemed to stop just before the Ward was simple. Tarrin would bet that she took off her clothes there, threw her pants over, then carefully laid her shirt across the Ward's boundary. Then she shapeshifted and used the shirt like a tunnel, going in one side and then wriggling out the other. All it would take would be a careful slip through the bars and then reaching back in for her shirt, and a fully dressed Jesmind could leave from the other side. And when she picked up her shirt, which had held her scent-trail, it picked up her scent along with it. Putting his shirt back on and shifting back into his cat form, he tested the grass just before the Ward, and picked up the telltale scent of cotton from which her shirt had been made. He remembered the scent of that shirt. That shirt had been laid upon the ground, and it made him confident that he knew exactly how she managed to do it.