James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

"You're getting good at this," Tarrin said.

"I think I have a knack for it," she said with a shrug. "I think I may need it," she said, holding up the three pages the illusory Keritanima had been holding. "I got these from Jervis' desk."

"What are they?" Allia asked.

"Reports about me," she replied. "It seems that the katzh-dashi never said anything about training me in Sorcery. Jervis almost scared my fur off this morning, and he sent a report off almost immediately. The reply came back about an hour ago."

"That fast?"

"Priests of Kikalli are on every ship the Wikuni puts afloat, and there are two of them on the grounds," she told him. "They've developed magic that lets them talk with each other over any distance. That lets us move our ships around very precisely, and it keeps us in control of the seas. The priest sent to aid Jervis sent off the message, and the priest there at the Royal Palace relayed the response from my father."

"How did you get those?" Tarrin asked curiously. If they had been private reports, then she'd had to do something sneaky to get her paws on them.

Keritanima only grinned at him slyly. "A good magician doesn't reveal her secrets," she winked, then she smoothed out the papers and looked at them. "The first is the message Jervis sent. It tells father that, for one, I have talent for Sorcery, and that the Sorcerers haven't taught me anything other than Sorcery since I got here. My father replied with a suitable consternation," she said with a slight sniff. "My father thinks I have the mental capability of a goldfish, so for them to tell him that I have talent in Sorcery is about the same as telling him that livestock is doing navigational mathematics."

Allia chuckled, but Tarrin only gave her a calm look. "That's what you want him to think, isn't it?"

"Well, yes, but it'd be nice if he at least suspected that I wasn't a total waste of space," she said with a tightness in her voice that set off a bell in Tarrin's head. Keritanima wanted her father to find out that she was more than she appeared, but she'd die before she gave it away. She didn't want to be queen, but she also wanted her father's respect. It was quite a paradox, one he felt that even she couldn't reconcile. Keritanima's act was aimed at her sisters and enemies more than her father. After all, her father wasn't trying to kill her to get the throne. He was probably fighting off his own enemies to keep it.

"He also demanded them to send the message again, to make sure they got it correctly. After they confirmed it, he went into one of his rages. He replied that he didn't send me here to learn Sorcery, and even though he understood the need for me to learn how to control it, that I'd better be getting the education the Tower promised to give me. He told Jervis that if they didn't take me out of the Initiate and put me in normal classes, he'd drag me back home."

"That," Tarrin said after a moment, "could be a problem."

"Slightly," she grunted.

"How long do you think it's going to take for them to make that decision?" Allia asked.

"It's going to depend on how effective the Tower is at stalling," Keritanima replied. "They obviously want me in the Initiate, and they'll play their own game to keep me there. It's going to be a dance between the Crown and the Tower until one of them blinks. After that, things will definitely happen. So this means that we have to act before things get dangerous enough to slow us down."

"We're moving up?" Tarrin asked.

Keritanima nodded. "I want to go visit the cathedral in three days," she told him. "And we can't be delicate about it, either. It's going to be an old fashioned robbery, Tarrin. We're going to steal anything we can carry out of there that'll be useful to us." She put the papers on his desk. "And because that will cause a row, we can't keep it anywhere obvious. So I'd like you to steal a good waterproof tent and several chests, and try to sneak them into the courtyard inside the maze. We'll cover the chests with the tent canvas and camoflage it so anyone looking in from the top of the Tower can't see it."

"They can't see it anyway," Allia told her. "I've been to the top of the Tower, and the courtyard isn't visible from it. You can't even see the statue."

"As tall as it is, I'm surprised," Keritanima said sincerely. "I'd have thought that anyone could just look right down into it. What can you see?" she asked curiously.

"Nothing, just hedgerows," Allia replied. "It's like there isn't a courtyard."

"Allia, the courtyard is too large," Keritanima protested. "You have to be able to see it."

"Maybe not," Tarrin said cautiously.

"What?"

"Maybe they can't see it," he said.

"Tarrin, how could they miss something like that ?" the Wikuni demanded.

"Maybe it doesn't want to be seen," he said after a brief hesitation. "There's something magical about that place, Kerri. I think all three of us agree to that." Both of them nodded in agreement. "So maybe the place hides itself. It's obvious that nobody knows that it's there. Or at least nobody bothers to visit it."

"You mean that someone or something went out of its way to create a place that nobody can find?"

"I found it," Tarrin said calmly. "Maybe it's just someplace that a human couldn't find. Maybe a Sorcerer used a weave from the flows of Mind that hides the place, and since I'm not human, it didn't affect me."

Keritanima gave him a very penetrating look, then she snorted. "I don't think I like where this is going, so I think I'll drop it," she told him tersely.

"Why not?"

"Alright, since you want to press it, think a minute. Allia said she couldn't see the place from the top of the Tower."

"That's right," Allia said. "I couldn't see anything."

"So, Allia isn't human ," Keritanima pointed out. "So there goes that theory. I can't explain it, and I don't think I want to know how , but I'll accept that something is hiding that place."

Tarrin thought that he knew, but he wasn't sure if he should tell them. Even his friends knew his sanity was tenuous, and if he started claiming that he had spoken with the Goddess of the Sorcerers, they'd probably go running for the Keeper. And he really wouldn't blame them. He was pretty sure that she kept the courtyard hidden, but he didn't know why, and he wasn't sure why she allowed him to find it.

"Alright, but do we want to depend on that?" Tarrin asked. "My parents live in the city. I'm going to go visit them tonight. If I ask, they'll probably let us bring the booty there."

"No," Keritanima said. "The Priests may be able to track it down with magic if we hide it in the city. But I'll bet my furry tail that their magic won't penetrate the Ward surrounding the grounds, so they won't know where to look to find what we steal."

"That's a very good point," Allia agreed. "If we have to live with the Ward, we may as well use it in our favor for a change."

"Just so," Keritanima agreed with a smile.

"Well, I was going to tell you this later, but since you're here, it may as well be now," Tarrin began. "I went to the library where they hold all the real books on magic, Kerri, and your idea of researching may come up empty."

"Why?"

"Because the Ancients wrote everything down in the language of the Sha'Kar," he told her. "Nobody knows it anymore. Jula told me that the Tower already has almost everything the Ancients knew in their library, but there's nobody left that can read it."

Keritanima scratched her muzzle absently. "So they lied in the lesson where they said the Ancients took everything with them."

"Probably not," Allia said. "They very well may have. What the Tower managed to gather is probably the books that the Ancients missed. It may be everything they knew, and it was just copies of what was already here."