Chapter 15

        The night was a different time of day, to be certain, but it was also an entirely different state of mind. It was a time of mystery, a time for things to occur that had no place under the light of the sun, a dark time for dark creatures, carrying out dark deeds.

        But just as many things were, the dark was often misunderstood by those who were not governed by it.  Tarrin stood on the edge of the selfsame ledge he had occupied during the daytime, standing between those same two buildings with a surprisingly warm, gentle wind pulling at his braid and tail.  He was wearing his body for the dark, his natural form, standing on that ledge and looking out on the city with eyes much better suited for taking in the landscape.  To any Aeradalla that may happen to see him, he looked a mysterious, ominous figure, a creature out of bedtime stories--or nightmares, as the case may be--a decidedly unnatural being that was clearly invading the home territory of that avian race.  But such conclusions were incorrect, for the Were-cat had not come as a baby-stealer or an inciter of chaos, but merely as a curious tourist of sorts, who was there for one reason and one reason only.

        Now that he could see the city, he better understood how it probably operated.  What he had seen as empty holes in the regularity of the landscape were indeed open patches on the tiers, but what he hadn't seen before was that they weren't the last tiers in the vast rings.  There were many more past them, and they all glowed greenish in the soft light of the Skybands and the full White Moon, Domammon.  They were farm fields, and they occupied the outside rings of the city's land.  The Aeradalla weren't just hunters and gatherers, they had found a way to farm up on this skyborne city.  The effort required to haul dirt suitable for farming up to this city was quite staggering to consider, and it increased his respect for the winged race by many degrees.  Especially when considering that the open land devoted to farming took up over a third, but not quite nearly half of the available land that existed up on the city's platform.  On a platform that ran about ten longspans from center to outside edge, three or four longspans of that radius was given over to farmland.

        Since they did farm, that meant that water had to be plentiful here.  He hadn't seen any indications of it yet, but he had a ways to go, and he was pretty sure he'd find the answer to that question on his way up.

        The buildings immediately inside the ring bordering the farms was filled with large buildings of open construction.  Odds were that they were buildings supporting the farming efforts, holding harvests, tools, and other implements required to farm the land brought up here.  Instead of building their barns and sheds on the precious land, they had moved them up to the next tier, so every available inch of farming land was made available.  That was a very smart move, he recognized.

        The buildings inside the barn tier were somewhat large, and those few tiers were where the openings in the skyline were located.  Those had to be shops and taverns; a merchant district of sorts.  The buildings above those tiers were occupied by a slew of smallish buildings that had to be homes, and he saw as he looked that the further up one looked, the larger and more ornate the houses became.  Altitude was a measure of wealth and influence in this strange city, he reasoned.  The higher one lived, the higher one's station.  He had come out on a tier that had relatively nice homes--something of a middle class of sorts--and he realized that he was just inside that tenuous border.  Smaller, cruder houses were on the tier just below the one on which he stood.  At the edge of each tier, located symmetrically, were block-and-tackle platforms built off the tier's edge.  Loading platforms, he realized, to move items too heavy to carry in flight from one tier to the next.

        That seemed all well and good, but it made him curious as to how they got all those goods up here in the first place.  If they were too heavy to carry up the tiers, how did they get them up into the city?  It was a puzzle, a curiosity, and he would probably skulk around for an answer while travelling to his destination.  There were too many things about this city that didn't add up, and his curiosity as to how things worked was starting to override his duty to simply take a look at the object and leave.  He'd probably never get another chance to find out, and those things would nag at him for the rest of his life if he didn't find the answers.

        He concluded that the platform had not been magically created.  The lava tube had brought him out here, and by doing a little surveying, he realized that he was outside of the perimiter of the Rock Spire.  The tube had sloped up and out, all the way across the spire.  He had entered on the eastern side, and he could tell that he was now on the western side of the city.  It had spiralled a little at first, then settled into a long, straight angle that obviously went west.  That meant that the platform had to be part of the original stone, and the rest of it had been either worn away by weather or removed.  The magic had made it in a sense that it only protected so much stone, and then the rest of it was removed.

        That staggered his imagination.  This had to have been a mountain at some time, but magic had somehow removed the rest of the mountain, leaving only this behind.

        They had always joked that magic could move mountains.  Now he was sure that it was no jestful exaggeration.

        He couldn't see too much of the buildings above, since the tiers were rather deep, and other buildings got in the way, but he could see all the way to the center of the city.  It was on a raised tower of natural rock that was elevated over the highest tier by several hundred spans, and atop it stood a curious black obelisk of sorts, a very large one.  His inner senses told him that that was the exact center of the city, and the exact center of the Rock Spire.  It was also where the Conduit ran through the spire, and his sense of that object told him that it was located within that curious obelisk.

        Of course.  They couldn't have made it easy and put it somewhere where he could get to it.  No, they had to go and stick it on a pinnacle in the very center of a city designed for creatures with the ability to fly.  What would take an Aeradalla about five minutes of flight would take him nearly half the night in gruelling ascent of tier after tier, then a murderous climb up that towering rock tower to the obelisk at its peak.

        "What do you see?" Sarraya asked.  She knew that in the night and in humanoid form, Tarrin's sight far outstripped hers.  He enjoyed the best of both worlds in that regard, gaining both the cat's night vision and the human's clarity of vision.

        He quickly explained the layout of the city to her, then turned and looked back to the farmland below.  "This isn't going to be easy, Sarraya," he grunted.  "I'm going to have to do alot of climbing."

        "I noticed.  Strange that nobody seems to be out," she said.  "I could fly by this light."

        "You can hover and go slow, too," Tarrin told her.  "It'd probably be alot more dangerous for them."

        There were Aeradalla out.  He knew that.  His sensitive ears had picked them up all around them, but he could tell that they were walking instead of flying.  That explained the streets.  They didn't fly at night, so they had made streets so they could move around on the tiers during the night.  That also meant that the general layout of the city wasn't absolute, as well.  There had to be shops, inns, festhalls and taverns on every tier, since moving from tier to tier would require flying.  But they were probably small affairs, open only during the night for those land-bound Aeradalla that wanted to go out, while the ones on the tiers below were probably much larger and better stocked.

        Tarrin turned and looked up.  By his count, he had to go up about ten or so tiers to reach the tier surrounding that rock tower.  Some tiers were only twenty spans or so high, but others were around forty or fifty spans high.  Those had to be major boundaries, with a significance to the Aeradalla who lived here.  He stood on the edge of one such major tier, so perhaps he stood at the border of, say, another district of the city.  There were three major tiers above him, but he couldn't tell how many were below him, because of the sloping of the city and the buildings that were in his way.

        Ariana.  She had to be up here somewhere, the tall woman with blue hair, chiselled, muscular features, and a generous nature.  He had warm memories of her, of their brief conversation with her, how he had uncharacteristically opened up to her, when she was a complete stranger.  If he could somehow find Ariana, it would make all of this much, much easier.  She owed him a debt, and she could repay it by flying him up to that obelisk and let him take a look, then fly him back down to the ground.

        He remembered her scent.  He never forgot a scent.  He could wander around and try to find it...

        Or he could arrange it so she came to him.

        It wouldn't be that hard.  He had no doubt that Ariana remembered him, remembered him very clearly.  If rumor began to drift across the city that he'd been seen, he might be able to lure her out to where she could find him.  She knew he was a Were-cat, so if she saw him as a cat, it was a good bet that she'd make the connection.  It would cost him a couple of days, though.  That was the drawback.  He'd have to get himself noticed and then hide until those rumors reached Ariana.  It would only take him a night to get to the obelisk...but if he did it that way, all his questions about the city would probably go unanswered.  He was starting to waver between doing what he came to do and exploring a little bit.

        Regardless, the idea of climbing back down didn't sit well with him, not when a much faster and easier way down was at hand.  His impulsive climb up hadn't taken into consideration the long, gruelling ordeal of getting down.  Ariana could fly him down in a matter of moments, where it would take him an entire day of exhaustive work to get down on his own.  He knew he was on something of a schedule, but delaying a day or two wouldn't be that great a layover.

        "Sarraya, what would you say if I said we were going to delay a little?"

        "What's on your mind?"

        Tarrin glossed over his sketchy plan.  He didn't want to get halfway through this one before blundering into it.  For once, he was going to think through a plan before rushing headlong into it.  "It'll cost us some time, but Ariana could fly us down easily.  I really don't want to climb down, and I don't think you do either."

        "It's got possibilities, but how are we going to find her without giving ourselves away?"

        "Easy," he said.  "This is a closed city, and in a place like this, I'll bet that rumors fly.  If I let myself be seen here and there, by just enough people, the rumors of it are going to spread all over the city like wildfire.  Ariana probably remembers me, and she knows I'm a Were-cat.  She'll hear the description, know it's either me or a relative, and her curiosity should bring her right to me.  All I have to do is stay in one area without getting caught until she wanders over."

        "We can't do that here," Sarraya said.  "These houses are too large and too far apart.  We need an area congested with buildings and with lots of places to hide."

        Tarrin nodded.  "One of those areas down there would suit us perfectly," Tarrin said, pointing to the areas of small houses on the tiers below.

        "It sounds workable, but from the sound of it, you want to do it now," she said.  "Why?"

        "Why not?"

        "Simple, silly," she laughed.  "We still want to see what's up there, don't we?  What if we find this Ariana, and she won't let us go there?  Maybe it's a holy place, and it's against her religion to allow us in there."

        Tarrin hadn't considered that.

        "So, let's go up there now, and then, after we've seen what we wanted to see, we can find your Aeradalla and get a ride down.  That way we don't have to tell her why we're up here."

        "That's clever, Sarraya."

        "Of course it is.  I thought of it, didn't I?" she said imperiously.

        "Save it," he told her cooly.  "I was hoping that Ariana would fly us up there, but you're right.  If she won't agree, I'll go anyway, and that may cost us a ride down.  Better to do this now, when she can't say anything about it, then find her when we're done."

        "Alright then.  Saved again by my superior intellect.  You're such a lucky Were-cat," she said grandly.

        "Cursed is more like it," he said in a grumbling tone, turning from the tier and moving back between the two buildings, starting the long, highly vertical journey to the center of the city.

        It was not easy going.  The buildings on the tier--and the ones above, he was certain--were spaced widely apart, and that meant a considerable amount of distance to traverse with no cover.  That meant going in cat form, which slowed down his progress significantly.  In a matter of moments, Tarrin adopted a strategy of moving through such open areas in cat form, often in direct view of the Aeradalla who were out, and then shifting back to his humanoid form and eating up any distance he could from covered or concealed alleys.  Using that tactic, he was able to travel the half a span or so that made up the tier in a matter of several moments, until he reached the tier wall.

        This was where it would be the most dangerous, but at least at the smaller tiers, it wasn't a great danger.  He'd have to expose himself in humanoid form to the supposedly sharp eyes of the Aeradalla, so it was a matter of being lucky enough that nobody was looking in his direction when he ascended the tier walls.  The smaller tiers were easy--they were within the limits of his jumping ability.  A little running start was enough to vault him up to the tops of those tiers.  He sailed up into the air, almost looking like he was flying against the black stone backdrop of the tier before him, and then he crested the ledge and landed lightly on the top.  He found himself facing a large open area with even larger buildings than the ones on the tier below, and was forced to shapeshift immediately and dart across that large expanse of paved stone to reach the shelter of a low, whitewashed wall that surrounded one of those buildings.  These were large houses, with courtyards and gardens, houses of the rich or important.

        Why they built a wall around it, when everyone in the city could fly, was quite beyond him.  Maybe the Aeradalla were descended from landbound beings, and certain landbound peculiarities bred true in them.  Or then again, maybe the wall was merely a physical demonstration of ownership of the land upon which the manor house rested.

        "That was easy," Sarraya said from her invisible position.

        "The little ones will be," he told her in the manner of the Cat.  "It's the big ones I'm worried about.  I can't jump those."

        "It's dark, and so are you," she said with a chuckle.  "You look like an Arakite now."

        "Blame the sun," he shrugged.  "At least for the skin."

        "No doubt.  That rope hanging off your head is almost white now.  You've been sun-dyed."

        "When my fur starts turning white, I'll start to worry," he said mildly.

        Moving among the buildings on that tier was unexpectedly easy.  They all had walls surrounding them, and those formed shadowed passageways that ran for considerable distances.  He could move a long way in humanoid form before being forced to shapeshift into cat form to traverse the open areas between the walls.  What made it even easier was that there were many voices on that tier, but they all emanated from within the walls themselves.  There was almost no one walking outside the walled manors, giving him free reign of those dark, paved streets that seemed slightly like a maze, were it not for the fact that all the walls were straight, and he had a direct line of sight to the tier wall ahead.  He managed to navigate the tier in a matter or moments rather than the near hour it took for the tier below, thanks to those long walls enclosing large manors.  A running vault brought him up to the next level, and from the short look he got before darting against the safety of a wall, it was much the same as the tier below him.

        "This is easy," Sarraya said lightly as he made the wall.

        "Then let's trade places," he said quietly.  "I'll fly and be invisible, and you skulk in the shadows."

        This tier was much the same as the one below, except for the large fountain he encountered about halfway along to the next wall.  It was a very large fountain, filled with clear water, with water gurgling lightly from a statue in the center of it.  It was a nude humanoid female holding a pitcher, from which water poured into the pool below.  The statue did not have wings, he noticed, and the image of the female looked more Selani than human.  The hands were four-fingered, the figure too slender, and the ears had those distinctive points.  The face held that same ethereal quality of loveliness as a Selani, but the face was much softer and inviting than a Selani female.

        Selani?  No.  That was a Sha'Kar.  The figure was too soft, too human to be a desert-raised Selani.  This was a female that looked more like a human woman than a Selani woman.  She was thin and shapely, very curvaceous, but lacked that corded definition that would have denoted a Selani.  Allia was both voluptuous and muscularly defined.  This figure was not.

        "Selani?" Sarraya asked in curiosity.

        "Sha'Kar," Tarrin replied.  He stood in the shadow of a wall, staring at the fountain in its large courtyard.  It inspired a memory of the fountain in the center of the hedge maze, back in the Tower.  The figure there, however, absolutely put this figure to shame.  The Sha'Kar figure was but a statue.  It lacked that awesome detail and exacting perfection that made the statue at the Tower so striking.  This statue looked like a statue.  The statue in Suld looked alive.  And, he had to admit, the face and body of the statue in the Tower were much lovelier than this one.  "So we know who lived here at one time."

        "Maybe.  Or perhaps the Sha'Kar were used to make alot of statues," Sarraya noted.  "If all Sha'Kar women looked like her, no wonder men would want statues of them everywhere."

        "Feeling a little jealous, Sarraya?" Tarrin noted.

        "Of course not," she snorted.  "For my size, I'm very well proportioned."

        "For a doll, yes," he agreed mildly.

        "Dolls don't fill out their dresses like me," she challenged.

        "Unless the dollmaker was perverted," he said quietly, which earned him a smack on the back of the neck from his invisible companion.

        "Men!" she hissed.

        "I'm sure the sculptor enjoyed his work," Tarrin added as an afterthought.

        "What do you mean?"

        "He had to have a model."

        She smacked him again.  "Perhaps you should ask her out?" she said venemously.

        "I don't get excited at the thought of masonry, Sarraya," he replied calmly.  "Sight isn't half as exciting as scent."

        "Let's not go any further," she said quickly.

        "You asked," he shrugged, then shifted into cat form.  "And you are jealous, aren't you?" he added in the manner of the Cat as he padded towards the fountain.

        "Grrrohh!" Sarraya growled in furious embarassment, then flitted after him.

        He paused to take a drink of the water, and found it to be very, very cold.  That was strange.  The air was brisk, but the water was much colder, when it should have retained at least a little heat from the day.  It was so cold that little wisps of fog had formed on its surface, condensing what little moisture there was in the air.  It poured from the pitcher at a steady pace, meaning that there was no interruption in the water supply that fed it.  The water smelled of rock and minerals, and he realized that the water came from underground.

        The water was from a well!  But how did they get it up the Rock Spire?  To make it travel against gravity such a tremendous distance, it was astounding!

        Magic.  It had to be magic.  No conventional wellpump could move so much water straight up, over such a distance.  Magic had to draw the water from the ground.

        He'd bet that that lava tube he climbed wasn't the only tunnel piercing the spire.  There had to be one big wellshaft in there as well, drawing up water from the ground so far below.

        After drinking his fill, he looked up at the statue one more time, studying it.  So that was what a regular, run-of-the-mill, Sha'Kar looked like.  Well, there was absolutely no doubt now that the Selani and the Sha'Kar were related.  He knew that from meeting that Sha'Kar woman, but now there was absolutely no room for error in that assumption.  That woman may have been a fluke among her kind, but now he'd seen two examples of Sha'Kar, and they both matched Selani physiology.  His eyes drifted down to the base of the statue, and he saw that spidery script that he'd become so familiar with back at the Tower, the written language of the Sha'Kar.  The letters were carved into the stone, and were large enough for his eyes to make out, despite his inability to make out fine details.  He had no idea what it said--

        --at least until he looked at the line below.  That was written in Sulasian, albeit a very archaic form of it.  It took him a while to decipher it.  That line, he could read.  It read May happiness and good fortune find you.

        Curious.  That line was considerably longer than the Sha'Kar script.  The Sha'Kar writing was only eight characters long.  Did it say something different?  No.  Something told him that it said the same thing.  He didn't know why he knew that, but he did.  Almost like it was something that he had always known, yet hadn't realized until that moment.

        Almost like a memory long submerged, coming back up to the surface.

        That made something click in his head.  No wonder nobody could read it!  Every character in the Sha'Kar language represented a word instead of a letter!  It explained why there were so very many different characters.  He'd looked through the books and realized that often, he didn't see the same character in the same paragraph.  He'd never thought to think about why it was that way, but now he did, and the reasoning made sense.  He would bet that Keritanima already knew what he just realized, but Keritanima was much smarter than he was.  He wasn't too proud to admit that.

        No wonder.  If every character was a word, it would be next to impossible to break the language without some kind of written translation to go on as a base.

        But how did he know that they said the same thing?  He looked at the Sha'Kar script, and it...tickled at him.  He didn't have any other way to describe it.  Something about it seemed very familiar to him now, when he hadn't felt that way before.  Somehow, he knew exactly which characters represented which words in Sulasian, though their order was different.  What was may happiness and good fortune find you in Sulasian roughly equated to to-you happiness and good fortune may yet come.

        He blinked.  He could make that out?  How, for the Goddess' sake?  He didn't know the first thing about Sha'Kar outside the spoken tongue.

        Think, kitten, the voice of the Goddess came to his mind.  Think for a moment, and the answer will come to you.

        You did it? he asked within his mind.

        No, actually, I didn't, she admitted with a laugh.  What happened to you the last time you touched the Weave?

        The voices from the past, he thought.  Am I getting that again?

        In a way, she replied.  The memories of the Weave are beginning to reveal themselves to you, and among them is the memory of the written form of Sha'Kar.  It is an aspect of your power.  The Weave is much more than a simple source of magical power, as you have discovered.  It holds inside it the memory of many things, though most of them are connected with Sorcery in one way or another.  What's happening is that a part of you you don't even know is there is seeking out those memories, and making them a part of you.  You've been doing that for a while now, Tarrin, though you never knew it.

        "What do you mean?" he asked aloud in the manner of the Cat.

        How did you learn to do the things you do with High Sorcery? she asked.  You use magic unseen in the world for a thousand years, and you use it flawlessly, without anyone teaching you.  How do you do that?

        That brought him up short.  "I, I just knew," he replied uncertainly.

        Silly kitten, the Goddess laughed within his mind.  You knew because you could feel the memory of it in the Weave.  Before, only memories of spells and magic were finding you, because your need for them was so great that it caused you to extend past the boundaries of your own power.  Now the more mundane memories of the Weave are beginning to come to you.  Among them are the memories possessed by the Sha'Kar.  Including their written language.

        The ramifications of that were not lost to him.  The entirety of the knowledge of the katzh-dashi were not written in books.  They existed within the Weave itself!  The Weave served as the greatest library in the world!

        It meant that anyone who could read the memories of the Weave could see anything that anyone ever did that was related to Sorcery!  All the vast knowledge of the Ancients had been within his grasp the entire time!

        "Does that mean that I could find--"

        No.  The location of the Firestaff has been erased from the memory of the Weave, because Sorcerers aren't the only ones who can read the memories.  Long ago, the Wizards and Priests could cast spells that gave them a limited ability to extract knowledge from the Weave.  They called them spells of Augury.  Because they could find the Firestaff through the Weave, the Elder Gods all joined together and eradicated all traces of the Firestaff from the Weave, from the books of mortal kind, and from the memories of very nearly all.  Only a few maintained that knowledge, so they could put forth the clues necessary to lead you to the Firestaff now.

        That made sense to him, but something else bothered him.  "Is that why I'm remembering things I never knew?  Because I need to know Sha'Kar to read the Book of Ages?"

        No. I told you before, the location of the Firestaff is not in the book.  But you need the book to find your way.  Since you're starting to gain access to information that may confuse you, let me explain.  The Book of Ages contains the majority of the known history of mortal kind in its pages.  It contains lore of lost knowledge, even things that the Weave does not retain.  Among those things is a comprehensive guide to learning the written Sha'Kar language.

        That is why you need the book, Tarrin, she said bluntly.  The manner in which you're starting to decipher Sha'Kar isn't very comprehensive.  It's very fuzzy and prone to mistakes, and as you've noticed, learning things in that manner isn't very reliable.  The book holds everything you need to learn written Sha'Kar the right way.  My children did write everything down, kitten.  Not everything is held in the Weave, for the very reason I just gave you.  Trying to conjure memories from the Weave isn't as precise as sitting down and reading a book.

        Tarrin made the leap intuitively.  "Those books we took from the Cathedral!" he gasped.

        Yes, whatever happened to those books? she asked winsomely.  As I recall, you left them sitting in the middle of my courtyard.  Forgot all about them, didn't you?

        His heart about came out of his mouth.  They left them out in the open!  They were probably mildewed and disintigrated--

        Calm down, kitten, they're fine, the Goddess chuckled.  I'm watching over them even as we speak.  They're still as fresh and legible as the day you brought them into the courtyard.

        "Thank the Goddess," Tarrin sighed automatically.

        You're welcome, she replied with a laugh.  Oh, just a word of warning, kitten.  Now you know what's important, so now you know what to protect.

        "I know.  Not a word.  Not even a hint."

        That's a good kitten, she affirmed with a light chuckle.

        "Mother, can I, can I read the book?" he asked hesitantly.

        It's your book, Tarrin, she replied.  You know the danger involved with bringing it from the elsewhere.  If you are willing to risk that danger, then you can read the book any time you want.

        "Should I read it?"

        That's your decision, Tarrin.  I'm not going to try to woo you either way.  It's entirely up to you.

        "Well, if you were in my place, what would you do?"

        Nice try, she said in a teasing tone.  I'm not that shallow, kitten.

        Had he been in humanoid form, he would have blushed.  "I just want to know if it's the right thing to do."

        That's something for you to decide.

        And then he felt her withdraw from him.  It was obviously something she didn't intend to argue about.  Her sudden withdraw felt a little rude, but then again, she was never really that far away.  He could feel her in the Weave, feel her presence surrounding him.  She was only a heartbeat away from him.

        "I take it you just had a good conversation?" Sarraya asked.

        "Something like that.  I just learned what I'm really doing out here."

        "Oh?  What?"

        "Being a messenger," he grunted, looking around.  "We'll talk about it when we're alone."

        "We're alone now."

        "Alone," he emphasized.

        "Oh.  Right.  Let's carry on, then."

        He tried to put that little revelation out of his mind.  He had a job to do.  He had to take a look at that object up there.  He was convinced that it wasn't the Firestaff now, because of the little conversation he had with the Goddess, but the curiosity of the object remained.  And it was strong enough for him to continue.  He knew that it wasn't what he was seeking, but now his desire to see that object extended from personal curiosity more than a suspicion that he could cut this entire thing short by cheating.

        Or maybe he was wrong, and it really was the Firestaff.  Either way, the only way to find out was to find the object and take a look at it.

        Leaving the fountain behind, he moved on, towards the tier.  He still had quite a ways to go, and he wanted to be there and back to where he would start hunting for Ariana by morning.

        The idea of stalking and the hunt overwhelmed his desire to think about what the Goddess said in moments, and he was back to skulking about in the shadows, darting from open area to open area in humanoid form, only to shift to cat form to get across those vulnerable areas.  He navigated the tier quickly, and a vault up got him to the next tier, which was a border tier.  He could see a much higher wall rising up at the end of the tier, meaning he'd have to climb the next one.  This tier was exactly like the last, with walled manors separated by paved streets, large enough to make straight streets that would take him right to the wall.  It looked to be the same as the others, a quick trot to the wall.

        But halfway into an intersection of streets disabused him of that notion.  He was padding out in cat form, when something big suddenly impacted him from above.  His first instinct was flight, but whatever it was had claws in him, and a maw was biting at the back of his neck.  There was no pain involved, but it happened so fast that he reacted like the animal he resembled.  He rolled over on his back and shook off the attacker, then scrambled to his feet and arched his back, hissing threateningly at his opponent.  The speed and surprise of the attack had made him feel more foolish that afraid.  To be taken by surprise like that!  He hoped Triana would never find out about this.

        It rolled over itself and got to its feet, chirping animatedly.  He got a good look at it and caught its scent, and it confused him slightly.  It was a Drake!  A rather large one, a good span longer than Chopstick or Turnkey, with iridescent green scales, reptillian wings, and a long tail.  It sat on its haunches and looked at him curiously, as if it had never seen anything like him before, then its serpentine tongue flicked out of its mouth and it chirped again.

        It was playing!

        Tarrin lowered his back and sat down himself regarding the curious reptile.  Chopstick and Turnkey had started out on his bad side, but he'd warmed up to them.  They would even sleep together, in a nice warm little bundle on his bed.  This one was a stranger drake, but drakes were animals, so they had broad generalities in their personalities.  Drakes were generally intelligent creatures, curious and inquisitive, but they were very playful and affectionate.  Phandebrass had done a good job raising his two drakes, and from the looks of this one, it was also well cared for.

        It looked right at where Sarraya hovered invisibly, and he heard the Faerie snort.  "Don't even think about it!" she said challengingly.  "You alright, Tarrin?"

        "Fine.  It was just playing.  It's someone's pet."

        "What's it doing out in this cold?" Sarraya asked.  "It won't stay active very long."

        "Then it must have just gotten loose," Tarrin replied.

        As if an affirmation of that, a voice suddenly called out.  It was a child's voice, and it spoke a language Tarrin didn't understand.  Tarrin darted to the shadow of a wall as a gate opened some distance down one of the streets, and a youthful Aeradalla exited from a manor's grounds.  It was a male, looked to be only ten or so, and what immediately caught his attention was that the child's wings were bound together with leather rope, right at the main joint.  Why do something like that?  It must have been some kind of cultural custom.  The child called out again, and the drake alighted from its seat in the intersection and flew to the child.  The child caught it in his arms and laughed, then nuzzled at the reptile and carried it back into the walled manor.

        "Cute kid.  He must be spunky," Sarraya mused.

        "Why do you say that?"

        "They had his wings tied.  We do it to certain children who don't have the sense to stay on the ground when it's needful," she replied.  "Since he can't reach the bindings, he can't take them off without help."

        "I was wondering why they did that," he told her, then they turned and moved on.

        "Flight can make you too giddy to keep your senses," Sarraya added.

        "Doesn't seem to wear off for some."

        That earned him a smack on the ear.

        The rest of the journey to the wall passed without incident, and he hesitated a moment when he reached the base of it, waiting while Sarraya looked at the ledge above to ensure nobody would see him climb over it.  When she returned with news that the way was open, he shifted into humanoid form and quickly started up the wall.  It had been cut by tools, and enough of those toolmarks remained to give his claws purchase on the stone.  He ascended the wall quickly, slipping over the top and quickly returning to cat form, then dashing off into the shadows.  It was there that he paused to catch his breath.  The air was so thin, the activity had worn him out, and he struggled to regain his breath.

        "Getting tired?" Sarraya asked.

        "It's the air," he panted.

        "I know.  I've been having to land every few minutes to catch my breath myself.  Let's just take a few to recover, alright?"

        "No argument here," he agreed.

        They lounged against the wall until Tarrin felt ready to move again, and they were off.  The open space on this tier was more than the space occupied by buildings, huge manors separated by large gardens with many fountains.  The tier was more green than paved, filled with grass, flowers, small trees, and many other types of plants.  The paved streets wound through those idyllic gardens in a roundabout fashion, giving the place the illusion that it was on the ground rather than two longspans above a desert.  Since his view was obstructed, he relied on Sarraya to guide him to the next wall, which was one of the small ones.

        "There are only four more tiers," Sarraya told him as he vaulted up to the top of the tier wall.  "One more above this, up another big one, up one more, then we're at the top level."

        "I figured as much," he replied.  "Then I get to climb up that tower in the center."

        "Well, let's get cracking," she said.

        Moving through those tiers was quick and easy, because the ones below the top level were just like the one he'd just left.  More huge houses, like mansions, surrounded by walls, separated by large patches of tended gardens that made the upper levels of the city look like some vast park.  There were no Aeradalla out on those levels, allowing him to rush through them quickly and without hindrance, letting him get up the next three tiers quickly.  He climbed up the last tier just as the moons signalled midnight, and looked out on a large plateau, probably a longspan across, that held only four buildings and the rock tower leading to the strange obelisk at its pinnacle.

        The buildings were arranged around the rock tower by points of the compass.  The building north of the tower of rock was a large palace, from the looks of it, with an ornate fence enclosing a massive grounds and an even more massive mansion.  The building west of the spire, the one he'd come up facing, was a huge monolithic structure with carved pillars, made of marble.  The building to the south was a multi-storied tower with many ledges and balconies, also made of marble.  He could only make out a single sliver of the building to the east, since the large columned structure and the rock tower blocked his view, but it didn't look to be very large.  The land separating those four buildings was nothing but grass.  No flowers, no trees, no bushes, only grass.  The rock tower rose from the center of that pristine lawn like a black column, soaring overhead.  The object was at the top of that spire of rock, inside that strange black-stoned obelisk that rested at the top of the five hundred span tall pillar of basalt.  He was also very close to the Conduit that ran through the center of the city, and it looked to go right through the top of the obelisk and run down the center of the pillar, which rested at the exact center of the Rock Spire below.

        He had no idea if anyone was watching, so he immediately shifted into cat form and bounded across that grass.  It smelled lovely, and had very few other scents interfering with it as normal grass usually did.  Normal grass usually had scents of worms and insects and mice and other animals, but this grass was almost sterile in its lack of other scents mixing with the smell of grass.  There were smells of earthworms, but that was about it.  The altitude and thin air had probably prevented any insects from migrating up to the city.  The worms had probably been brought along in the soil that had been imported up.

        It took him a little while to get to the pillar, and when he was standing at its base, he was impressed.  He shifted into humanoid form and looked up its sheer face, seeing that it was absolutely smooth.  It was like glass, and almost as shiny as glass.  Putting a paw on it told him that there was nothing, not even a pore, for his claws to snag as holds to get him up the pillar.

        That was unexpected, and it messed up his plan.  He couldn't climb the pillar, not on his own.  It was too slick, too smooth.  He wasn't a spider, he couldn't walk right up the side of it.  And the stone was basalt, tough and dense, and it would resist any attempt to drive his claws into the stone.  More than likely, it would break his claws rather than give him a hold.

        He looked up at the pillar, his mind pondering the problem, when Sarraya interrupted him.  "What's the matter?"

        "I can't climb it," he admitted in a growling tone.  "The stone is almost like glass."

        Sarraya became visible, putting her hand on it tentatively.  "It's like it's been polished," she grunted.  "I'll bet that it's as shiny as glass in the sun.  A black-backed mirror."

        "Well, you have any ideas?" Tarrin asked.

        "Give me a minute," she said, frowning as she looked up the column.  "How fast could you get up there if you could climb it?"

        "What kind of question is that?" he asked.

        "I think I can do something to give you traction on the wall, but it won't last but a moment," she told him.  "It comes down to whether or not you think you can climb up there before the spell effect wears off.  It's going to wipe me out, so I won't be able to do it again."

        "Oh.  Well, it's not very high.  If I can move without worrying about slipping, I could go up pretty fast."

        "It's the only thing I can think of at the moment," she sighed.   "Unless--"

        She reached out with her hand, and he felt her use her Druidic magic.  Spiderweb suddenly spun out of her hand, and it quickly coated the side of the pillar in a sizable patch.  "This would hold you, but the drawback is that it's going to leave a trail of sorts," she said.  "They'll know someone was up there."

        "I can't have that, Sarraya," he told her.  "We'll have to go with the other idea."

        "Alright, but it's a gamble."

        "Everything we've done so far is a gamble," he shrugged.  "Besides, I have some Druidic ability of my own, if you recall.  I think that if I fall, I could fix it so I don't get killed when I land."

        "What do you have in mind?"

        "You'll see if it happens," he told her bluntly.

        "I hate it when you want to be mysterious," she muttered.  "Alright, get ready.  When I do this, you're going to be able to stick to the wall, just like an insect.  Keep in mind that the effect is only going to last a moment, so you can't waste any time.  I'll catch up once I get my breath, so don't worry about me."

        "Alright," he said, putting one paw against the mirror-like stone of the pillar.  "Whenever you're ready."

        "Get ready," she said, and he felt her again come into contact with her power.  He felt a sudden angry buzzing in his paws and feet, which quickly disappeared.  "Go!"

        It was creepy.  He pulled up around his paw, and found that his paw was sticking to the stone.  It released when he pulled away, and in a matter of seconds, he found a quick and easy rhythym of motion that allowed him to climb up the wall nearly as fast as a human could run.  Tarrin was much stronger and more agile than a human, allowing him to carry his entire weight on one paw or foot, letting him haul himself up the wall by huge chunks with every placing of a foot or paw.  The wind pushed against his face, cold air that was too thin, and he almost immediately became winded.  But he was mindful of Sarraya's warning, and dug down deep inside, keeping his eyes locked on that ledge that marked the return to safe, level ground.

        The tingling in his paws and feet returned what seemed only hearbeats after he began, and he instinctively understood that the Druidic spell that Sarraya had worked on him was starting to fade.  He doubled his pace, literally jumping up the stone by leaps and bounds, using his agility to keep his paws and feet within reach of the surface, only to make contact for a brief instant before vaulting himself higher.  The upper ledge got closer and closer, and his eyes fixated on it as the rest of him worked feverishly to get him to that point before the spell faded, and he plummeted back to the ground that grew further and further away with each second.

        The spell disrupted just as he made his final lunge for the top, causing his feet to slide off the stone just as they sprang to cover the last of the distance.  He realized he was going to be short, so he reached out with all his might, stretched out to his absolute greatest, reaching for that sharp ledge.  His claws just barely managed to catch the edge of it, and for a panicked moment he scrabbled against that perilous hold to stabilize himself, feeling his claws slide on the hard, smooth stone.  But the hooked claws managed to find purchase on the sharp corner of the ledge, and his body relaxed when he felt that he had a hold on it.  He blew out a sigh or relief between labored breaths, feeling his lungs cry out for air and his muscles burn from a lack of breath, leaning his forehead on the cool stone and silently thanking the Goddess for strong claws.

        By main force, he dragged himself up and over the ledge, then rolled over on his back, rising up briefly to get off his tail, then laid there until he managed to get his breath back.  He didn't care who saw him by then, so thankful he was that he simply made it.

        Sarraya managed to drag herself up to the top of the spire a few moments later, landing on top of his chest and sitting down heavily.  Her tiny shoulders were heaving as she panted, but she looked at him and gave him a mischievious grin.  "I see you made it," she puffed.

        "Barely," he said in reply.  "It gave out on me just as I reached for the ledge."

        "Sorry about that," she wheezed.  "If I wouldn't have made that spiderweb, it would have lasted a few seconds longer."

        "I made it, that's all that matters," he said dismissively.  "The only problem now is how to get down."

        Sarraya looked at him, then laughed.  "We didn't think that far ahead, did we?" she admitted ruefully.  "I tell you, Tarrin, you're a bad influence on me."

        "I guess it's contagious."

        "Well, we can just wait a while and rest, and I can use the same trick to get you down.  Since you'll be going down instead of up, you'll probably be able to get to the ground faster."

        "Right.  I could jump off.  That would get me down faster."

        She looked at him, then stuck out her tongue at him.  "I meant safely," she said archly.

        "I'd be perfectly safe.  At least until I hit the ground, anyway."

        She looked at him crossly, then laughed.  "What's gotten into you, Tarrin?  You were never this funny before."

        "Blame it on the air," he said absently, dislodging her as he sat up.  She settled in on his thigh instead as he sat up and looked towards the obelisk.  It was about fifty spans high, made of the same black stone as the pillar.  But the obelisk was made of blocks of stone, not one piece, constructed with four sides that sloped to a central point, like a pyramid.  The sides were relatively steep, and he could see that there wouldn't be much room inside.  Probably one very large room, or a few smaller ones.  He had the feeling that it would be one room.  The place looked like a temple or shrine, and things like that demanded large rooms to showcase the holy objects that they often contained.  This place seemed to be little different.  He couldn't see an entrance, but he also could only see one side of the obelisk very well.  Its shape and design told him that it was four-sided, but he couldn't see the other sides.  "No entrance on this side," he noted.

        "What side are we on?"

        "West, I think," he said, looking up at the Skybands to determine his direction in relation to the obelisk.  "West," he affirmed confidently.

        "Let's try the north face.  Humans have this thing about north.  I've never understood why."

        "An irrational need to follow directions, I guess," he told her as he dislodged her again as he got up.

        "What do you mean?"

        "The compass always points north," he told her as she managed to flitter up into the air.

        "Ohhh," she said, following him as he rounded the obelisk to get on its north side.  "I get it."

        Despite Sarraya's concepts of humanity, there was no entrance on the north side of the obelisk.  He continued around to the east side, and that was where he saw the doorless opening.  It was a wide archway, with a keystone at the top made of a pure, snowy white marble that totally contrasted with the black stone surrounding it.  Tarrin gave Sarraya a flat look before crouching down and getting up against the wall, and then creeping along the wall until he reached the edge of that arch.  He couldn't hear anything coming from inside, but there was a light emanating from within, a pure white light that was made by no fire, torch, or candle.

        He peeked around the opening, and found himself looking into a singular large chamber, a chamber that filled the entirety of the inside of the obelisk.  Its floor was tiled with pure gold squares, with silver mortar holding them together.  The floor was burnished and polished to a mirrored shine, reflecting the white light within.  The interior walls of the obelisk were unadorned, the same glossy black rock as the outside, also reflecting the light and making the inside of the obelisk as bright as a cloudless day.  There were only three objects inside that grand chamber.  One was a rather plain wooden chair, its back to him.  The second sat within that chair, and from his view, he could see that it was an Aeradalla that, for some reason, only had one wing.  The third was the within the light itself, being generated by the Conduit that ran through the center of the chamber, hovering some six spans off the floor, just over the head of the seated Aeradalla.

        It was a crown.

        A large crown made of gold, beaten gold with eight tines circling its golden circumference.  Inset into that gold at each tine was a gem, each a different color that he could see.  And from that crown emanated the powerful magical energy he had sensed rides ago, a magic that had drawn him to it like moths to a flame.  From that distance, he could see the energy flowing through it, coming from the Conduit in which it had been placed.

        "Is that maimed Aeradalla dead?" Sarraya whispered.  "He hasn't moved an inch since I saw him."

        Tarrin didn't answer.  He slid inside the archway, and then he boldly padded right into the chamber, towards the crown.  There were no other scents or sounds in the chamber, which meant that it truly was as empty as it appeared to be.  The Conduit seemed to shimmer and vibrate, and it became more and more pronounced as he approached it; the Conduit was reacting to him just as strands did.  He doubted it would bend in, as strands did, for Conduits were much larger and more fixed in their positions than strands, so he deemed it safe to advance.  He came around the chair and looked down at the Aeradalla seated there.

        If he wasn't dead, he certainly looked it.  It was a middle-aged Aeradalla, though his appearance looked to be one much older than he truly was, with only one wing that looked to be atrophied from lack of exercise.  His eyes were closed, and his whitish-blond hair was dirty and matted from lack of grooming.  He wore a simple robe made of velvet, black and tied with a silken cord.  Raiment more suited for a noble than a crippled, shrivelled Aeradalla.

        "He's not dead," Sarraya noted.  "He may as well be, though.  I guess Aeradalla wings don't grow back.  Without his wings, he can't get down from here."

        Tarrin turned away from the unconscious Aeradalla and stared at the crown.  It was indeed the magical object he had sensed, and that close to it, he could feel its power rippling through the air around them.  It was the crown that sustained the city, but how it did that was quite beyond him.  Its weaves were so unbelievably vast and intricate that he could spend his entire life studying it, and only understand half of what he was seeing.  The only thing of which he was certain while he stared at that unassuming crown was that no mortal had the ability to make such a thing.  It had to be a product of the gods.

        Such power.  He had never felt anything like it.  It was almost intoxicating, trying to seduce him with promises of holding high a power unrivalled in the world, filling his subconscious with images of adoration and the fulfillment of his every wish and desire.  But Tarrin wasn't like others.  He found the power of it to be enticing, but Tarrin's motivations were not human.  Wealth and power and might meant less to him than security and contentment and well-being.  He already had some of those things.  He didn't need power to make himself feel any better, or give to him what he could get on his own without its help.  He could see the magic of the crown, and he understood that what it offered was not power, but enslavement.  And he would never be a slave to anyone or anything ever again.  Not a person, not a god, not that crown.  Its power had tried to reach into him, but found that it had no effect on his alien mind.

        But that power had had its effect on this one.  He could feel it now.  He had become totally enslaved to the power of the crown, had become like an object himself, devoted to the intoxicating aura the crown emanated.  He could feel it infuse the wretch, infuse and corrupt the harmony of his body with its power.  Such power could not help but corrupt the weak, or those with motivations that weren't grounded in the real world.  He would waste away and die sitting there being close to the object of his obsession.

        "Is that crown it?" Sarraya asked.

        Tarrin nodded.  "It supports the city somehow.  That's what it was made to do, but it's too complicated for me to figure out.  In any event, we'd better go.  The crown radiates a power that can entice the weak, and though I don't much care for what it offers, I'm not so certain about you."

        "I'm a Druid, Tarrin," she said with a teasing grin.  "If I need something, I can just make it.  The crown can't offer me anything I don't already have, or can't get."

        He nodded calmly.  That was the exact attitude she needed to be immune from the crown's enticing allure.  "This one wasn't so lucky," he said, motioning at the wasted figure.

        "I almost pity him," Sarraya sighed.  "Should we leave him here?"

        "What else can we do?" he asked her.  "If we heal him, he'll just come right back here and waste away again.  The only way to cure him is to free him of the influence of the crown, and that would take Sorcery."

        "Well, could you...?" Sarraya asked, wiggling her fingers.

        "You know very well I can't use my power, Sarraya," he told her bluntly.

        "Well, it just seems wrong to leave him here like this," she said helplessly.  "As a fellow flier, I fully understand what brought him here."

        "What do you mean?"

        "Losing the ability to fly is like a living death, Tarrin," she said earnestly.  "Those months I was landbound was a living hell.  When this one lost his wing, he probably craved something to fill the void that was left in his life, and that may have led him up here, to that crown.  Who knows, maybe he thought it could heal him, and he was willing to risk having this happen to him to get back the one thing in his life he couldn't live without."

        Looking at it like that, he could understand her point of view.  It would be like him becoming human again.  There would always be something missing from inside him, a part of him that had been ripped away, and it would leave a void in him that nothing could fill.  Instead of dying, instead of simply accepting it, he very well may have had them bring him up here to see if he could somehow use the crown to restore his lost wing.  But he had failed, and now a slow death by starvation and dehydration loomed in his future.  He almost felt sorry for the man.  Almost.  He was still a stranger, and the man's fate was of no concern of his.

        And yet....

        She was right.  It was wrong to just leave him here.  He should at least try to use Sorcery.  If he tried and failed, then he could leave without feeling bad over not trying.  At least he would have tried, and there was no dishonor in trying your hardest and not succeeding.  The struggle was more important than the result.

        Besides, as it had been before, Tarrin's human half simply could not turn its back on someone in pain, someone in need.  As it had reacted to Sheba, so it reacted to this wasted wretch.

        He blinked, shaking his head.  Those damned Selani had made him soft.

        Roughly, he reached out and grabbed the man by the head.  It was not a gentle grip.  Then he emptied his mind and opened his senses, feeling the Weave, sensing it, opening himself to the sensations it inspired inside.  He could sense the crown and the Conduit, could sense the strands that spun off the Conduit.  Once he fully felt them, could hear the pulsing of the magic through them, he reached out to them, seeking a contact on the Weave....

        And found nothing.

        Maybe you're already in contact with the Weave, Sarraya had told him, not so very long ago.  He remembered that, remembered that he'd failed because he was trying to find something he already possessed.  He had been trying to touch the Weave when he already was connected with it, in ways that extended beyond a simple touch.  He was a part of the Weave now, a living extension of it, an extension strong enough to alter it with his very presence.  He didn't have to touch the Weave, for he had already found his connection with it.

        You've been growing stronger and stronger, even without trying to use your magic, she had said.  Could she be right?  Could he be ready to regain his powers?  He thought that he understood the mistake he had been making before.  This time, instead of trying to touch the Weave, he should try to simply use his magic.  But with no magic inside him, how would he affect the magic of the Weave?  He would have nothing to exert force against it, nothing to push it out of the strands to do as he needed it to do.

        The