James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

It wouldn't be easy. He knew that. It may be instincts and impulses, but it carried with it a greater intelligence that made what he called the Cat a very complex creature. But it was a start. And that was something that he hadn't had when they left Torrian yesterday. It did make him afraid, but at least now he felt that there was something that he could do in order to make peace inside himself.

After a suitable gawk at Skeleton Rock and a hot breakfast, the group was off again, riding hard in the cloudy morning. Captain Daran kept two men in the lead at all times, scouting out the conditions ahead as two men drifted behind them to ensure there were no followers. They passed one caravan train in the morning, and a brief stop to talk to them told them that the way ahead was all but deserted, and that they were making better time than they thought. At the pace they were going, they would reach Marta's Ford before noon tomorrow.

Tarrin spent the riding thinking about what Tiella had said to him, and thinking about Dolanna's instruction that morning, in concentration exercises. They were a bit like the aiming exercise that his father taught him, about emptying the mind of all thought and concentrating all of your attention onto a single thing, ignoring everything else. In archery, that one thing was the target. Dolanna was teaching him to center himself on himself . She told him that that was the first step to using Sorcery, to look within, and then without, then draw what was out within, then use what was within to change what was without. It sounded a bit confusing, but he was certain that it would make sense eventually. He couldn't do it riding the horse as hard as he was, but he could think about how what Dolanna had told him would fit in with the insights that Tiella had revealed to him early that morning.

They stopped for lunch near a small river which they had just forded. Lunch was going to be a simple affair of bread and cheese and some dried fruit, but Tarrin was more thankful for the time out of the saddle. His back didn't agree with all the bouncing around. He put his paws on his back and stretched it, bending backwards so deeply that his head nearly brushed the ground. His backbone was different now, he knew, with more bones in it that were a bit smaller, which let him bend like that. Playing around, he put one paw on the ground and walked over himself, bringing his legs up and over until he was balanced on that one paw perfectly. He'd never considered that he would inherit the cat's agility as well as the fur. Such a move was no strain on him at all to maintain. He bent his elbow and brought his nose down to tickle the grass, then pushed himself back out, then swung down into a hunched, all-fours position much akin to a cat sitting. "Having fun?" Walten asked him as he walked by.

"Just testing something," he replied. He sprang straight up, high into the air, then tucked in and began to roll backwards. The sky and ground traded places wildly, but Tarrin just knew exactly where the ground was, and he also just knew precisely how he was oriented to the ground at all times. He snapped out his arms, and his paws made perfect contact with the grass. He arched back and pushed off with his arms, coming to a perfect stop, bent like a bow, at a very shallow angle to the ground, using raw strength to keep from toppling over. It was incredible, and he wondered at it for long moments as he generally just jumped around, performing acrobatic feats that would had made the most grizzled veteran performer gawk.

"Impressive," Dolanna remarked. "Now, if you are done playing, we need to eat and move on."

"Sorry," he said, sitting down beside the Sorceress as Faalken grinned at him. "What?"

"You should tour," he said with a laugh. "Tarrin Kael, acrobat extraordinaire. I can see you pack them in."

"Oh, please," Tarrin scoffed.

"We can get you one of those tight-fitting costumes," he went on.

Jarax laughed, and Tarrin scowled at the knight.

"Dolanna can open for you, doing a magic act with things stuffed up her sleeves and ribbons hidden in her hair."

"That will do," Dolanna said frostily.

Faalken gave Dolanna an imupdent grin, then took a drink of water innocently.

"You can be the strongman," Tarrin told him with a calm voice. "Faalken, the half-brained strongman, so muscular because his body didn't want to waste the effort on his mind, so dumb we don't even pay him. I figure that should attract the baser audience."

Faalken gave him a look, then laughed jovially. "I guess I deserved that," he chuckled.

"You deserved worse," Dolanna said in an icy voice.

"Your dinner is getting warm," Faalken told her with a wink.

They camped that night in a clearing well off the road, and it was another sleepless night for Tarrin as the dreams invaded his mind. He awoke the next morning sandy-eyed and feeling like his head was stuffed in wool. Dolanna put them out on a pace even harder than the day before, and it wasn't long until the first farms surrounding Marta's Ford were laid out to the sides of the Skeleton Road. Dolanna slowed them to a walk, and as Walten and Tiella listened to the wiry Jarax tell some old tale, Tarrin rode up to Dolanna and listened as she talked with the captain of Arren's men and Faalken.

"We intend to take ship here, Daran, and there are too many of your men to make it feasible," she told the captain.

"I intend to see you to Suld, Mistress Dolanna," he said adamantly. "Arren ordered me to escort you through the front door of the Tower, and I mean to do just that. I'll bring five men with you."

"That is still too many. We have to board the horses."

"Four."

"Three," Faalken said. "That's about all the room that we'll have."

"Three then," he said. "Jarax and Orgal."

"Good choices," Faalken agreed.

"Jarax?" Tarrin asked. "Why?"

"There's more to worth than a man's arm, Tarrin," Daran told him. "Jarax is a good fighter, but he's also a talkative man that keeps the villagers entertained, and keeps their mind off what's going on. That makes him more than worth it."

Tarrin hadn't considered that. And it made sense.

"Orgal is the monster of a man that usually rides rear guard," Daran told Dolanna. "He's quiet and seems slower than he is, and he's got a good eye. Not much gets past him."

"Then arrange your packs so that your gear is with us," she said. "But I do not want any more than one extra pack animal in our train. Space is becoming a problem."

"I'll see to it, Mistress Dolanna," Daran said.

"Tarrin, go back to Tiella and Walten for a time," Dolanna told him. "And pull up your hood."

"Yes ma'am," he said, pulling back and letting the knight and Sorceress speak privately. He didn't even try to eavesdrop on them, which would have been easy because of his keen hearing. He settled the hood over his ears carefully, patting on it to feel if they were bulging, then joined the trio in the middle of the column.

Jarax was spinning a tale about history, about the civil war that had raged between Draconia and Tykarthia for the last seven hundred years. They were the two kingdoms north of Sulasia, which had once been one kingdom, and had fought a war so bloody for so long that victory wasn't even a goal any more. They lived only to completely eradicate the other off the face of Sennadar. "So," Jarax was saying, "the western nobles of Draconia were getting more and more displeased with King Dawon. They considered the weighted tithe system the king used to be unfair, seeing as how the western nobles were paying nearly four times as much as the eastern ones. The nobles of the east, led by the crafty Earl Winold, kept flattering the king with gifts and very carefully arranged plots to continue to discredit the western nobles and keep them out of the king's favor. Winold, you see, hated Duke Tykan with a passion, and he considered the more moderate practices going on in the western parts of the kingdom to be almost sacreligious. Winold was a man that would have banned the use of fire if the thought he could get away with it. Some men are like that.