James Galloway - The Tower of Sorcery

Tarrin put it out of his mind as he considered the situation. Someone somewhere was spreading some kind of story that got men out on the road hunting down anything that looked Wikuni. Wikuni were also known as the Animal People, so the resemblence to Tarrin was not even remotely a coincidence. Whoever was after him was trying another tactic to get rid of him, a tactic that had come very close to working. It made the road unsafe for him. He rifled through the pockets of the dead man as he considered his original plan to skirt the road from the safety of the forest. That plan was still workable, but it meant that he would have to go quite a bit out of his way, at least an hour's travel south.

The man had a few coppers and a silver coin in his purse. Tarrin took it, and his dagger, and took his leather belt as well. Tarrin's pants weren't quite so snug on him now that he'd lost weight, and he needed something to help hold them up. The money would get him a meal in the morning, and the dagger, like any knife, had a multitude of uses, and would save his claws. As an afterthought, he picked up the body and slung it over his shoulder. It would be better to leave it somewhere other than on the road.

He slunk across several farms until he reached the treeline, being careful not to alarm the dogs on many of them, then went back well and far enough so that the body would be eaten by scavengers long before it started smelling bad enough to attract attention, back where the signs of human passage were so old that it didn't matter. Then he looked up to the Skybands and aligned himself so that he'd be travelling west. Then he left the body, naked, the clothes neatly folded on a nearby log, and continued on towards Suld.

Tarrin's encounter with another farming family did not go quite so well the second time. It took three tries before he would find a farmer or farm member that would even talk to him without running away screaming. The screams and fear stung Tarrin terribly, but he had to admit that as dirty and bedraggled, and as non-human, as we was, it wasn't much of a surprise. He finally found a farmer willing to listen to him, a tall, burly man holding a pitchfork who was standing outside his barn. Tarrin offered to buy his breakfast, and the burly man simply gave him a gruff nod. He was given a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a few apples in return for the copper coins he'd taken from the assassin. Tarrin left the farm and the farmer behind, eating his meal in the quiet safety of the forest, then he moved on. It was important to get as far as he could before stopping, maybe even to within sight of Suld.

He did manage that, around midday, but it wasn't quite what he had in mind. The forest simply stopped almost half a day's walk from the city walls, which were clearly visible well in the distance. The land sloped down gently towards the city walls, and it was covered with nothing but farmland and hedges separating them. He could see the fabled Tower of Sorcery even from here, its white stone soaring out over the distant walls of the city, and he could just barely make out a few of the six smaller towers that surrounded the main spire. He was within sight of his goal, and that simple realization swept a wave of relief and reassurance through him. The only problem was to get to it. He would have to do it at night. He had too much owned, organized land to cross to do it at any other time. Getting over the walls wouldn't be much of a problem. There wasn't a wall made that his claws couldn't help him climb. Once he was inside the city, it just became the simple task of reaching the Tower without Jesmind or any other interested party getting in his way.

Tarrin crept back from the treeline and found a nice crutch between a large limb and a trunk, then hunkered down to sleep out the rest of the day.

Orisen the guard stood on the high battlements of the impressive walls of the city of Suld. They were high walls, strong walls, and they had never fallen to an invading force. The job of guarding those walls fell to men like Orisen, but unlike most wall watchmen of Suld, Orisen took his duties very seriously. Every night, he prowled the city walls of the south sector like an impatient general, his eyes scanning the dark landscape for the slightest movement. His ears strained to hear any sound not normal for that sector of the city at that time of the night, since Suld was such a large city that it never truly went completely to sleep. In his illustrious ten year career on the South wall, he'd witnessed three robberies on the streets below, all of which had been solved and the perpetrator caught and convicted on his testimony. He'd also been privy to one murder, which was also solved. He'd even caught personally sixteen men that had tried to sneak either into or out of the city at different times of the night. Orisen was a good man, and he took his job as seriously as a surgeon did when he cut open a man. He stood at his favorite battlement, staring out over the farmland and small village outside the south wall, thinking how nice it was that the winter's chill was gone, and the early summer night was much preferable to prowling the walls wearing five cloaks and three pairs of breeches.

He never saw nor heard the ghostly shape that rose up from the wall not ten paces to his right, darted across the twenty spans that made up the top of the wall, and disappeared quickly over the other side.

He did perk up and rush to the city side of the wall when the sound of a roof tile hitting the street reached him. Many thieves liked to run the rooftops, and that sound was one of the most obvious that gave them away. He looked over the side of the wall. He could see the tile in the torchlight at the base of the wall, but there was nothing, and nobody, else to be seen. Longspan Street was deserted.

Reassured, Orisen the guard went back to his serious duty of defending the city of Suld from any and all threat, be it from inside or outside.

Tarrin stood in the shadow of a large manor house, near its fence, staring at the massive compound that was the Tower of Sorcery. He was a bit discouraged at what he saw. The obvious gates to the compound were guarded by men that frightened Tarrin not a little bit.

By the time he'd gotten to the huge towers, it dawned on him that the men guarding it would have no idea who he was. He didn't want to get into a fight with them, and he certainly didn't want them to go crazy at the sight of him, and more than once the thought that one of them would be happier turning him to the people looking for him crossed his mind. But he absolutely had to get inside. Jesmind could be behind any building, and the men that were obviously looking for him could be readying to slide a dagger in his back at any moment. The miasma smell of the large city, which was surprisingly clean for its size, effectively robbed him of his most powerful sense, his sense of smell, and the background noises prevelant in the city made it hard for him to lock in on the faint sounds of someone sneaking up on him. He had to get in, but he didn't want to risk trying to get in through the front gate. He wasn't going to feel safe until he was inside that tower, and in the presence of people that he felt he could trust. And that meant Dolanna, or Faalken, or Walten or Tiella.

That left doing it the other way. There was a fence surrounding the tower compound, an elegant structure of iron that rose up and ended in a tapered curl at the top. It was only about fifteen spans high, and it was much too elegant and showy to be very effective. It also had not one speck of rust anywhere on it. A one-eyed man with no legs could get over that fence in a very short amount of time, much faster than the regular patrols Tarrin saw roaming the fence perimeter to get there in time.

But it couldn't be that easy, and he knew it. That left only one solution. That fence had to be magic. This was the Tower of Sorcery. There were lots of people inside that could do magic. So if they were so lax about defending such a flimsy fence, then it only stood to reason that the fence was capable of defending itself.