Chapter 6

        All in all, it had been a most satisfactory trip to the desert.

        The night of Sapphire's visit, she absolutely dominated the entire evening.  That in itself wasn't that unusual, given who she was, but she overwhelmed Kallan and Allia's tribe with more than her physical presence.  Like everyone who dealt with the dragon to any degree, the fear and awe of her majestic size was quickly overshadowed by absolute amazement at both her incredible presence and her formidable mind.  Sapphire easily invoked awe and terror on any who looked upon her, but those who talked to her found themselves in awe of her because of her intelligence and her commanding personality.  Triana was the feeblest of shadows of what Sapphire was, one who utterly dominated everyone and everything around herself with the merest raising of an eyebrow.  Kallan had to shake off the initial terror that almost anyone felt at coming face to face with a dragon, but his awe and fear of the dragon didn't wane over the night.  It simply shifted its focus.  Kallan learned very fast that Sapphire was vastly intelligent, as well as being exceptionally wise.  The tribe's shaman tried to meet the dragon on philosophical ground, but was sent packing, literally, in little under three minutes.  Dulai actually lasted a little longer, since as an obe she had a much more open mind than a Priest, who was taught one doctrine and way above all others.

        Sapphire came to know Allia's tribe, and Allia's tribe came to be as much in awe of Allia and Allyn as they were of Sapphire.  That they would actually converse with her, and she acknowledged them as if they actually existed, seated itself heavily in their minds.  She was peremptory with all other Selani, except perhaps Kallan, but she dealt with him more or less because he was the leader.  But Allia talked to her, even made her laugh once, and the dragon asked personal questions concerning Allia's adjustment back into her old life.  A few of her questions went right to the matter of Allyn, and that terrified many of Allia's tribe.  Allia and Allyn would not lie to her--they weren't that crazy--and their answers made one of those dark eyebrows raise, and a malevolent, soul-chilling gaze swept over the large gathering around a bonfire in the center of the encampment which never failed to make the Selani cringe.  She never said a word, but every Selani in the camp instantly understood that Allia and Allyn's well being was very much a personal interest for her, and nobody had better get on her bad side.

        Sapphire confused the Selani a little, since they saw two aspects of her that few saw.  They saw her in her full terrible majesty and came face to face with the full power of her arrogant personality, but they also saw her playing with Tarrin's children, talking to the adult Were-cat with compassion and care in her voice, touching him and treating him as a favored son, showing a much different side of herself.  Of course, that gentler aspect of her evaporated the instant she dealt with one of the Selani, but it did show them that the dragon was much more than she seemed.  The Selani seemed to understand that only the privileged few were beneficiaries of her gentler demeanor, and that the rest of them had better stay on their toes around her.

        The Selani got used to Sapphire, in a way, by the end of the feast.  Numb was a better term for it, as the power of Sapphire's presence among them had started to numb the Selani to her, to where if they couldn't accept her, at least they didn't gawk like mice watching the owl swoop down on them.  They started at least talking a little with one another, and food that was either blackened from being forgotten in the fire or cold from being forgotten after it was pulled from the fire was finally eaten, but only a handful of the Selani there could even remember eating that night.  The dragon dominated every thought and memory in the entire tribe from the instant she was spotted until nearly a month after she was gone. But by the end of the night, when Sapphire announced that she was tired and was ready to withdraw, at least the Selani could bow to her without nearly falling over.

        It was an educational experience for Tarrin, and once again a powerful reminder of the unusual circumstances of his life.  To him, Sapphire was just Sapphire.  He knew he had to be very respectful towards her, and he knew that she was a dragon, but she just didn't have that kind of an effect on him.  It was like that with several other unusual people in his life, he realized.  He didn't consider having friends like Triana or Shiika or Sathon or Lord General Darvon to be too outrageous, but it had been so long since he'd had a normal life that they did seem normal to him.  That sense of inclusion seemed to infect all of them, for his friends had little trouble dealing with Sapphire, up to a point anyway, and the highly unusual mix of beings that formed the core of Tarrin's life had evolved to the point where their rarity or unusual natures seemed to be forgotten.  Seeing outsiders dealing with them, with Sapphire or Sarraya or Darvon or Dar, that was when the unusual bonds of friendship that existed among their most diverse group seemed to be most noticable.  Even the most common of them, Dolanna and Dar, were now so different, so unique, so unusual, that they too were held with some strange regard by others, something that really annoyed Dar.  His association with Tarrin, being a member of the group that had retrieved the Firestaff and destroyed Val, made him larger than life.  Dar was now just as famous as Tarrin was, a fame spread like wildfire from the walls of Suld to circle half the world.

        Strange that the sense of inclusion that existed among them wasn't noticable until he saw others trying to deal with them.  What Tarrin could easily accept, considered normal, was so radically abnormal for others that they simply couldn't deal with it.

        Sapphire's visit was both welcome and educational.  By morning she was again in dragon form and preparing to fly away, saying her farewells and promising to come and visit him at home soon.  Her visit had reinforced several lessons in his mind about his friends and family, and it had all but terrorized the Selani into accepting Allyn...or else.  That or else seemed to be frozen in their minds, and as Tarrin bid goodbye to her that morning, several Selani had already begun to make tentative overtures to Allia and Allyn, offers to take Allyn hunting or show him how to weave cloth, and the shaman had visited before sunrise that morning and informed Allyn that he would take lessons with her during the midday heat.  What Tarrin probably would have had to ram down the throats of the Selani with several messy object lessons, Sapphire accomplished with the raising of a single brow and a withering glare cast about a camp that promised unspeakable punishment for any who defied her will.

        Because Allia and Allyn's place in the tribe was more or less secure now, Tarrin was ready to leave right after Sapphire.  The other reason he was ready to leave was Kaila.  Though she wasn't healed yet, he had every confidence that she'd be whole again within two days.  Kallan still had a slightly contrite look on his face after the moral lesson his wife and Tarrin had taught him the day before, and Tarrin knew that Kallan had learned what Fara'Nae had wanted him to learn.  That was the only thing standing in the way of Kaila's healing.

        And so, some hour after Sapphire took to the air and disappeared over the eastern horizon, Tarrin gathered up his children, spent long moments in emotional farewell with his sister and her betrothed, shared a firm, knowing handshake with Kallan, and then he too departed.  He heard the clan-king announce to the tribe that Tarrin was a true child of the Holy Mother, and that he was welcome in Selani lands whenever he so desired to visit them.  Kallan officially made Tarrin a member of the clan, which Tarrin accepted rather absently, since the clan wasn't half as important to him as Allia.  He said his curt farewell, gave Allia one final hug, clapped Allyn on the shoulder, patted Kedaira on the snout, and then Teleported home.

        What chaos awaited him there was enough to make him want to go back to Allia.

        There weren't any overt signs of the carnage awaiting him.  The house was as he remembered it, as he had Teleported into the yard to prevent any chance that someone might possibly be standing in the space he would have chosen to appear--a fatal stroke of ill fortune for both parties involved when it happened--and started towards the door.  The fact that neither Kimmie nor Jesmind had tried to talk to him since they'd left for the desert hadn't really registered to him, since he'd been so busy with Allia and Jasana and trying to keep Eron from picking up anything that could kill with a single bite or sting.  It was a misty morning, though the air around the house was as comfortably warm and dry as it always was, thanks to the magic spell the Goddess had woven around it.  The house looked inviting and welcoming to him, a respite from the days in the desert and a return to the normalcy of home.

        One look through the open door dispelled all thoughts that he was returning to a quiet, happy home.

        The entire parlor looked like it had been ransacked.  Furniture, clothes, dishes, and even pieces of walls, ceiling, and floor were torn up, laying in dishevelled jumbled piles scattered randomly across the floor.  The smell of blood was heavy in the air, as was the smell of old, drying meat, withering vegetables, and clay jars of spices shattered, their contents scattered all over the entire house.

        Eron gaped, Jasana gasped, the fox sneezed, and Tarrin simply stared.

        "Papa!" Jasana gaped.  "What happened to our house?!"

        That was a good question, and it was a question that had no quick answer.  The blood he smelled was Were-cat blood, exclusively so, and a quick look around showed him that everything that was destroyed had been torn apart by a Were-cat's claws.  Tarrin took a couple of steps in and knelt by what had once been his favorite chair, its wooden skeleton shattered and puffy stuffing ripped out of the upholstery covering and flung around the room.  The chair was a good ten spans from where it usually sat, by the fireplace, and it had been both clawed up and physically thrown.  There was a dried bloodstain on the chair, what part of it Tarrin could not identify, and it was Were-cat blood by scent.  He leaned a little closer, and found that it was Jesmind's blood.

        "Papa, I smell Mama's blood," Eron told him.  "And Aunt Jesmind's."

        "Anyone else's?" he asked, trusting to Eron's incredibly sensitive nose to immediately detect what Tarrin would have to search to discover.

        "No, Papa.  Well, I smell Aunt Jula's blood a little, but not much, and it smells old."

        "Whatever happened involved them, then," he said, not sure whether or not to feel any fear.  After all, what could possibly harm them when they were inside the house?  The house itself would defend them if it came down to a fight, and besides, nothing would come anywhere near the house that would want to harm them.  Few even knew where the house was.  So what happened?

        The answer came flying down the stairs by the kitchen.  It was Jula.  She had a torn shirt on and her leather breeches were ripped from the left thigh down, and she looked totally exhausted.  "Father!" she said breathlessly, jumping over the gouged, clawed, partially broken bannister, landing lightly, and then charging right into him.   Tarrin felt significant relief at seeing his bond-daughter alive, well, and looking to be unharmed.  He gave her a harried squeeze and then pushed her out to arm's length, looking down at her.  "What in the blazes happened here?" he demanded.

        "Jesmind and Mist had a fight!" she said quickly.  "A real fight, father!  It's a miracle they didn't kill each other!"

        "A fight?  Are they alright?" he asked as Jasana and Eron gasped, then gave each other wary looks.  "Where are Kimmie and the twins?"

        "They're with your parents," she answered.  "I sent Kimmie out of here with the cubs to get them out of harm's way, while I stayed and tried to pull them apart.  It was a nightmare!" she said with a frenzied look.

        "Why didn't you just use Sorcery?" he demanded.

        "I tried, father!" she shouted.  "Jesmind's Druidic powers seem to have manifested, or maybe Mist's, or maybe both of them.  Every time I tried to use Sorcery to stop them, something killed my spell!  And I wasn't about to wade in between those two and try to pull them apart with my bare paws!"  She gave him an anguished look.  "Everything I tried failed, father, and they destroyed the house!  I couldn't stop them, and I really tried!"

        "Calm down, kitten," he said quickly but gently, putting his paws on her shoulders.  "I'm not blaming you.  If you say you tried your hardest, then you did just what you said you did."

        Jula's look of relief was overwhelming, as she gazed up at him with those vulnerable green eyes.  "Umm, Papa?  Where's Mama?" Eron asked in a small voice.

        "I finally managed to pull them apart, after they were about half dead," Jula told him quickly.  "I guess whoever was stopping my magic got too tired to keep it up, and I took them both firmly in hand.  I've got them trapped in cells of Air in rooms upstairs.  I have them on opposite sides of the house, and I have magic working so they can't even scent each other.  They're both still totally keyed up, father.  Every time you open the door, they go berzerk.  Whatever caused this, it hasn't even started to work itself out of them yet."

        Tarrin frowned.  Fights between Were-cats weren't uncommon, even fights with this kind of evident ferocity.  Whatever happened, it had caused them to both go totally insane with rage.  Tarrin looked around, at his precious house, and knew that all things being equal, they got lucky to stop them while the house was still standing.  Jesmind and Mist alone were very powerful, formidable Were-cats.  Them fighting one another was like a natural disaster.  And his house certainly looked like a tornado had raged through it, then turned around and came back to rage some more.

        A glance up told him how far it had went.  A soft paper playing card had been driven through the ceiling.  It was stuck up there, the King of Swords, with half of its soft length sticking out of the ceiling.  Just what it took to drive that card through the ceiling made Tarrin cringe.

        "Is Mama alright?" Jasana asked fearfully.

        "They're both fine, cubs," Jula said, looking down at them.  "They're fully healed.  The only reason I'm using magic on them is because they're both still trying to get into another fight with each other."

        Eron was quiet a moment.  "Who won?" he asked.

        "Eron!" Jula said in surprise, gaping at him.

        "Save it," Tarrin told her, patting her arm lightly.  "Who did win?" he asked curiously.

        "Not you too, father!" Jula said with a surprised look, then she laughed ruefully.  "Am I the only one here who doesn't care?"

        "Bet you my Mama whooped your Mama," Eron said immediately to Jasana.

        "Never happen," she retorted.  "My Mama can kick your Mama's butt."

        "Their butts were equally kicked," Jula said tartly.  "Because I did the kicking, at least after Sorcery started working again."

        Tarrin looked around.  Given what he knew of Mist and Jesmind, Jesmind was damn lucky she got out of it alive.  Mist wasn't very tall, but she was awesomely powerful, even for a Were-cat, insanely fast, highly experienced, and she had a mean streak in her that Jesmind would never be able to match.  Stone for stone, Mist was the most ferocious and dangerous Were-cat there was, even over him.  No other Were-cat, not even Tarrin, ever wanted to get into a fight with her.  If Jesmind fought Mist to a draw, then his opinion of his mate would increase significantly.

        Odds were, it was a simple fight over dominance.  Mist was physically superior to Jesmind, and they both knew it.  But Jesmind was Tarrin's mate, and that social boost put them more or less on even ground as far as the pecking order was concerned.  But when Tarrin left and the calming influence of Eron was removed from her, it destabilized the delicate balance that existed in the house, and Mist probably reverted very quickly into her old habits.  And the first time Jesmind said or did something that Mist felt was a threat to her superiority, she would attack.  Which was probably exactly what happened.  Mist was either simply seeking to put Jesmind down and assert her dominance, or perhaps she was fighting to take Jesmind's place, seeking to drive her away and take her place as Tarrin's mate, and Jesmind was fighting to retain her position.  If that were true, then that was probably the only reason Jesmind had managed to fight Mist to a draw.  Where Tarrin was concerned, Jesmind was capable of some incredible feats.  Like standing toe to toe with the most ferocious Were-cat alive, and giving back as good as she got.

        But did they have to do it in the house?

        "You don't seem too surprised!" Jula said accusingly.

        "Were-cats fight sometimes, cub," Tarrin shrugged.  "You know that.  If they're both alright, then that's all that matters.  I do want to find out what set this off, though," he frowned.

        "Mist attacked Jesmind," Jula said with a somewhat disapproving look at her bond-father.  "Ever since you and the cubs left, Mist has been getting more and more unsettled.  She was getting more and more cranky and out of sorts, and her temper was getting shorter and shorter.  Jesmind said something to her that she didn't like yesterday, I have no idea what, and it was like lighting the fuse of a cannon.  Mist hit Jesmind, Jesmind snapped, Mist snapped, and they had at it for nearly an hour.  They tore up every room in the house!"

        "An hour?" Tarrin said in surprised.  Then again, the house certainly looked like they'd been at it for an entire hour.  More like ten.  "They trashed everything?" he said quickly, a sick feeling growing in his stomach at the thought of all his precious possessions in his room had been destroyed.

        "Well, they couldn't get into your room, because Kimmie blocked it with magic," she said.  "She also blocked off the room holding her magical laboratory, since if they'd have gotten in there, they would have blown up the house.  At least me and Kimmie got alot of stuff out of the house before they could tear it up, so most of our things are safe.  What those two destroyed was mainly furniture and stuff we didn't have time to get out of the house."

        "Well, that's something, at least," he said, blowing out his breath.  What a mess!  It was going to take them a month to clean it all up!

        But what had set Mist off?  That was a good place to start, he guessed.  At least after he got them calm enough to talk.  If Jula was right, they were both still raging.

        Where was Triana?  He needed her to help him sort this out!  She said she was coming back here!

        "Has Triana got here yet?" he asked.

        "She came and went," Jula answered.  "She got another summons from the Hierarchs."

        Tarrin frowned again, looking down.  Of course.  That would snap Mist out of her rage faster than anything.  "Jula, take Eron up to his mother," he said.  "Cub, give me Sandy.  You don't want to take her up there with you.  Mist can see her later, once she calms down."

        "Alright.  Is she alright, Aunt Jula?"

        "She's fine, cub, she's just being held behind a wall of solid air, so she can't get loose and try to attack Jesmind again, that's all," she answered.  "I think father has a good idea.  She always calms down when you're with her.  She should calm right down as soon as she sees you."

        "Come right back down," he told Jula as she took Eron's paw and led him towards the stairs.  Tarrin cradled Sandy a little bit in his arm and looked down at Jasana, who had a strange expression on her face.  "What?" he asked her.

        "I'm just glad I'm not in trouble over this," she answered.  "Are you gonna punish Mama and Aunt Mist like you did Mama when she tore up your room, when you were human?"

        Tarrin looked at her, then smiled ruefully.  "No," he told her.  "But they won't like what I have to say about it."

        Jula came back down as Tarrin and Jasana were trying to identify a mangled piece of metal and shattered wood.  Tarrin thought it was the panrack from the kitchen, but Jasana thought it was the poker set from the fireplace--which was literally just there for show--twisted up with the remains of the china cabinet.  Eventually Jasana just used Sorcery on it, then declared with some smugness that it was the poker set.  At least what was left of it.  "How is she?" Tarrin asked.

        "Calmer," Jula answered.  "She seemed to calm right down the instant she saw Eron, but I still have her shut up in the cell I made.  I just let Eron into it."

        "Alright.  Do me a favor and contact Jenna," he told her.  "Have her come here.  I'm going to need her help straightening this place out.  I'm taking Jasana up to see Jesmind."

        "Alright."

        When he got upstairs, he found Jesmind in the furthest room from where he could tell Mist was being kept.  She was trapped behind a wall of solid air, a construction of Sorcery, pacing in tight circles.  She was wearing a very old pair of leather breeches--Tarrin's own--and one of his old shirts, neither of which fit her very well.  The leather breeches looked like they were threatening to slide off of her hips at any moment, her tail was the only thing keeping them up.  "Tarrin, cub!" she said in relief, rushing over and putting her paws against the boundary of her cell.  "Thank the trees you're back!  Now let me out of here!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, smashing a fist against the magical wall of her prison.

        "That's a fine welcome home," Tarrin told her with cool amusement, looking down at her.  "What happened?"

        "How should I know?" she said acidly.  "One moment I was telling Mist that it was her turn to cook, and the next she was trying to kill me!"  She banged her paw against the invisible wall.  "Now let me out!"

        "To do what?"

        "To pay that bitch back for what she did to me!" she said vehemently.

        "No, I'd like to have a house," he said calmly.  "Cub, stay with your mother.  I'm going to go find out what happened from Mist."

        "Alright, Papa."

        "And don't let her out, not unless I say you can," he warned.

        "Don't you order my cub around!" Jesmind said hotly.  "That's my cub, Tarrin!  You have no business telling her what to do!"

        "Only because you're going to tell her to let you out," he said bluntly.  "I mean it, cub.  If you let her out, you and me are going to have words."

        "That's not fair," she sulked.  "Mama's going to get mad if I don't let her out, and you're going to get mad if I do.  Are you still punishing me for what happened in the desert?"

        "No."

        "But I'm going to get punished, no matter what I do!" she objected.

        "Then you'd better ask yourself whose punishment you fear more," he told her with steady eyes.  "Hers, or mine."

        Jasana looked at him, then at an incensed Jesmind, then she swallowed visibly.  "You're being totally unfair," she complained, crossing her arms and stamping a foot.

        "Welcome to maturity," he said absently as he turned his back on her and stalked out of the room.

        Tarrin left as Jesmind promised all sorts of ugly punishments for Jasana if she didn't let her out of the cell right now to march across the second floor and into the room holding Mist.  She was wearing one of Kimmie's bathrobes, and had Eron gathered up in her arms, welcoming him home after several days absence.  "Mist," he called as he came into the room.

        "Tarrin," she said with a nod, much more calmly than Jesmind, nuzzling her son.  "How was the desert?"

        "Hot," he answered.  "Care to explain what happened?"

        "Jesmind's been ordering me around since the moment you left.  I got sick of it and showed her how much I disapprove," she said with remarkable nonchalance.  "Is that Sandy?"

        Tarrin glanced down at the desert fox, still in his arm, and chuckled ruefully.  "It is," he said.  "Did you have to do it in the house?" he complained.  "The downstairs is an absolute disaster."

        "Blame Jesmind," she said in an icy tone.  "Let Eron out, Tarrin.  He has to pack his room."

        "Pack?"

        "I'm not staying in this house with Jesmind another second," she said flatly.  "The instant you let me out of here, I'll just go kill her.  I know how much you'd disapprove, so I'm going back to my own house."

        "Are you sure?  It won't be the same without you and Eron," he said.

        "Trust me, Tarrin.  If you want to keep Jesmind alive, you won't argue," she said in a tightly controlled voice, her eyes glowing with cold fury.

        Tarrin sighed, and nodded.  She was right.  If Mist was that mad, and Jesmind was that mad, then nothing short of time apart was going to cool their tempers.  They had been together too long, and just like Were-cat mates, they had had enough of one another.  Mist's Were-cat mentality was much stronger than the other females, and it was first to reassert its need for isolation.  Simply put, Mist had had enough of company.  If it wouldn't have been Jesmind, it would have been Kimmie, or Jula, or even Tarrin.  Mist needed to get away from other Were-cats for a while.

        "I'm sorry to see you go, Mist," he told her honestly.

        "I'm not sorry to leave," she said bluntly.  "You can come visit, Tarrin," she added.  "But don't come anytime soon."

        "I'll keep that in mind."

        Tarrin used Sorcery to let Eron out of Mist's cell, then he knelt before him and handed him Sandy.  "Go gather up your things, cub.  If you can find them," he added.  "Your mother's taking you back to the house where you lived before you went to the Tower."

        "Aww, I want to stay!" he complained.

        "That's too bad," Mist hissed at him.  "Now go!  If you're not ready in five minutes, you lose everything you leave behind!"

        Tarrin went with him, and explained things to Eron as they gathered up what wasn't destroyed in his room.  "It won't be forever, cub," he assured him.  "Your mother just needs to spend some time away from the rest of us.  It's something all Were-cats need to do from time to time.  As soon as she feels up to it, you'll be back."

        "I hope so," he said in a sulky tone, stuffing some clothes into a small backpack Tarrin gave him last month.

        "Don't worry at it too much, Eron," he told him, handing him the toy soldiers he had found in Mala Myrr.  "Your mother's going to need your company for a while, so do me a favor and be extra good for her.  She needs your attention, not your troublemaking."

        Tarrin helped Eron pack up what he wanted to take with him, then returned to where Mist was being held and let her out.  She stalked up to him tightly, her muscles twitching, as he could tell she was fighting not to rush across the house and try to get at Jesmind again.  Eron stepped up to her and offered her his paw, his little pack slung over his shoulder and Sandy the desert fox cradled in his other arm.  "I hope you'll be back soon," he told her.

        "I don't know," she told him stiffly.  "You will come visit?" she asked.

        "Just let me know when you're ready," he said, tapping the amulet she wore around her neck.

        "I will," she nodded.  "Come on, cub.  We have to go."

        "Aww," he sighed.  "Bye, Papa," he said, hugging Tarrin's legs.

        "I'll be over the moment you tell me to come," he promised both of them, putting a huge paw on Eron's back, having to bend over to do so, then leaning down and kissing Mist on the cheek.  "You need any help?"

        "Please," she said with a roll of her eyes, then she almost dragged Eron after her as she moved towards the door.

        Tarrin watched her go, amused at her parting remark and a bit wistful at seeing her go.  But it was for the best.  And besides, she wasn't very far away.  Nobody ever was for him.  So it wasn't a goodbye, it was just until tomorrow.

        It took almost ten days for life to return to something approaching normalcy in the Kael household.

        The first thing that happened was that Jesmind was released from her cell and immediately thrashed Jasana for not letting her out.  The cub endured this unfair bit of retaliation nobly, and afterwards Jesmind was a bit contrite at having done it.  But Jesmind's contrite mood didn't last long, when she heard about what had happened with Eron out in the desert, and Jasana ended up going through another round of thrashing, which she did not suffer quite so nobly as the first.  After that, they summoned Kimmie back from his parents' house, who was accompanied by Tarrin's parents, and Jenna arrived from Suld with Ianelle in tow.  Tarrin explained what had happened to them all, then told them that Mist had left, needing time by herself.  They all understood her need for it, and it was accepted with very little regret.  Except for Jasana, anyway, who had just lost her playmate and the victim of all her conniving little schemes.  They knew that as soon as Mist recovered her composure and had some time away from everyone else, she'd be ready to come back.  The only thing they didn't really know was how long it would take.

        After that bit of sobering news, the cleanup began.  Ianelle tried to take command of the cleanup efforts, but as soon as she realized that Tarrin and Jenna knew spells that would reassemble destroyed objects, she went from commandant to willing pupil.  The requirement for the spell was that a majority of the pieces of the object be at hand.  This at first seemed a bit daunting, as pieces of one object could quite literally be scattered throughout five rooms on three floors, except for the fact that Tarrin and Jenna also knew a spell that caused all the remaining pieces of a broken object to gather around the one used as the focus of the spell, conveniently gathering up all the pieces of an object, no matter how widely scattered they were across the house.  Tarrin found Ianelle's almost instinctive need to order people around to be slightly amusing, but it was definitely a part of her personality.  She was a very domineering woman, which explained why Auli rebelled against her so much.

        The reconstruction of the house took four days, because of the sheer number of objects that Jenna, Tarrin, and later Ianelle, after she learned the spells, had to rebuild.  They had managed to recover everything that was destroyed, and it took another day for them to finish putting everything back where it belonged.

        When it was done, they all stood in the parlor and looked around.  They were all tired, dirty, sweaty, and very, very glad it was over.  Ianelle took in the room and blew out her breath.  "And I thought Auli had temper tantrums," she related, which caused all the others to collapse into helpless laughter.

        After the recovery of the house, they all had to get used to the fact that Mist was no longer there.  Kimmie usually had Jula helping her with her twins, so there was little loss in that regard.  Kimmie and Jula were the very best of best friends, like two sisters themselves, and Jula had all but become a second mother to Tara and Rina.  Mist rarely cooked, so there was little loss there.  The biggest loss to Tarrin just seemed to be her presence.  Mist was a very quiet, withdrawn, moody Were-cat who rarely spoke, but always seemed to be around.  He found that he missed looking up and seeing her sitting on her favorite sofa over nearer to the big dining table by the kitchen, usually keeping an eye on Eron as she attended to other things or practiced reading Sha'Kar.  She didn't like anyone who came to visit except Auli, for some odd reason--Auli was the reason she had learned Sha'Kar--and the house was actually quite a bit calmer and quieter without her and Eron's crashing around.  But he still missed her, and missed his son.  They belonged in the house, and their absence struck at the very sense of his concept of home.  Without Mist's endless arguing with Jesmind and Eron's careening around, it seemed less like home and more like...just a house.  Tarrin could accept why she had to leave, but he still felt a little empty that they were gone.

        Tarrin distracted himself by immersing himself back in his favorite thing to do, and that was study.  His current realm of study, as it usually was, was the Dwarves, but now he had something new to examine.  He still had the axe he'd taken from Mala Myrr, and that became his object of study.  He had Kimmie give him a blank book and he started writing things down that he noticed about his studies or conclusions he made and the axe started it out.  It was made of a metal Tarrin had never seen before, but a metal that did exist naturally within the world.  Tarrin had been forced to ask Sapphire to identify it for him, for she was the only one old enough which he felt comfortable contacting on the spur of the moment.  It was made of a metal called Mythril, a metal that, he discovered from Sapphire, only existed in the deepest bowels of the earth, so deep that only the Dwarves and their advanced mining techniques could reach it.  It was a metal of unparalelled hardness and resilience, and only the Dwarves had known the secrets of smelting, refining, and shaping the metal into weapons and armor.  It was such a rare and strong metal that the Dwarves never used it for anything other than weapons or armor.  It was very rare and dreadfully expensive, even when the Dwarves were at the pinnacle of their civilization, and only the richest or most powerful Dwarves had weapons or armor made of it.  Sapphire said that the histories she read remarked that most of the other metals and gems the Dwarves found were just happenstance as they searched for the ultra-rare prize of Mythril.  A single bar of Mythril was worth a thousand times its weight in gold, but in a kind of twisted logic, it really only had worth to the Dwarves, since they were the only ones who could do anything with it.

        Tarrin studied the weapon for five days, and didn't get very far.  It had Duthak runes on both sides of its double axehead, engraved vertically along the central spine of the axe's two heads, and encroaching into the widening head blades in a triangular manner.  The dominant rune was that same odd symbol that was so much larger than all other other writing engrave into the axe, that of the pyramid-like symbol with its top cut off and its bottom open, with the three horizontal lines within it.  That rune was on both sides of the axe's heads, right in the center of symmetry, where the haft extended from the bottom of the axehead, and exactly in the center between the thrusting spike and the haft.  The axe was surprisingly light, as this Mythril metal was lighter than steel, and its Mythril haft was surprisingly long for a race as squat in stature as Dwarves.  Perhaps the Dwarf whose body from whom Tarrin had take the axe had used it as a two-handed weapon.  The haft was even long enough for him to use, if somewhat awkwardly, since his entire paw would take up the haft of the weapon, putting his thumb right under the axehead.  The average Dwarf's head would just barely come up to his hips, judging by the skeletons he'd examined and the information he'd read in the books on Dwarves he'd managed to gather up.  Given that his paws were oversized for his frame, and that made the size difference in the weapon between how a Dwarf would use it and how he used it an extreme one.

        Though the axe kept its secrets, Tarrin did manage to figure out a few things.  Since Tarrin suspected that that Dwarf had also had Mythril armor--at least he thought it was, since the magical enchantment in it had survived the Breaking...perhaps Mythril was so tough it could even survive that--he had to have been either very rich or very powerful, or perhaps both.  A king, or some kind of Dwarven noble.  The craftsmanship of the weapon was what originally made him think that, but now that he knew that it was Mythril, he was sure of it.  A nobleman of some kind, using his precious axe and armor to defend his people to the very end.  He had been in a large group of other dead Dwarves, hinting that they had made a stand there, possibly delaying the Demons while others escaped, or giving allies a chance to get into position to attack.

        Again Tarrin was swept up in his admiration for the long-dead race, who had sacrficed themselves to the very last man, woman, and child in order to save the world from the Demonic invasion.  In his eyes, that was courage.  Total, raw, unmitigated,and unmatched courage.

        But there was only so much he could learn from the axe before it became more an object of aggravation than it was an object of interest.  He put it aside, a little annoyed that he couldn't read duthak, half-expecting to see Eron come crashing out of the kitchen or see Jesmind and Mist coming downstairs, engaged in yet another argument, and he sighed.  He missed Mist, and he definitely didn't like being separated from his son.  Mist hadn't contacted him yet to tell him it was alright to visit, and he was getting a little worried about her.  Her house had to be in disrepair, and he didn't like the idea of her and Eron doing all that work.  And there was the fact that they were alone, but that thought didn't last long.  There was nothing in the entire Heartwood that was any kind of danger to Mist.  She was the queen of the mountain, and no one in Fae-da'Nar would dare interfere with her.

        Mist's absence had affected everyone else as well.  Kimmie looked a little depressed, and Jasana sulked almost all the time, moping around the house and sighing quite a bit.  Tara and Rina were too young to understand what was going on, but even they seemed to sense that there was something missing from the house.  Rina didn't smile as much as usual, and Tara's constant tempestuous outbursts lacked their usual keening edge.  Jesmind was still rather embarassed about the whole thing, enduring spiteful glares from her daughter for both punishing her for doing what her father told her to do and being the reason she had lost her playmate.  Jula was the only one that seemed unmoved by Mist's departure, but then again, she was always too busy either with lessons from Tarrin or helping Kimmie take care of the twins to show much emotion about it.

        Eron's departure left Tarrin as the only male in the house.  That fact didn't really impact him very much until he sat at the breakfast table and mused over his friends...and discovered that more of them were female than male.  That, he decided, was a bit unusual, given that many of them weren't Were-cats.  He remembered a time when he had plaintively wondered how all these unusual women kept finding him.  Dolanna wasn't that unusual, but she was about the only one.  His mate, Mist, Kimmie, Jula, Triana, Camara Tal, Keritanima, Allia, Sarraya, Ariana, and Sapphire definitely were unusual.  The Goddess had teased him that it was his fault, and in a way, he guessed that it was.  His sisters were his sisters, and his closeness with Triana and his females needed no real explanation.  Camara Tal was sent because Tarrin identified more with his mother than his father, and it meant that the Goddess needed a protector that came close to his concept of his mother, so as to give her a fighting chance when dealing with his unpredictable, violent, feral nature.  Females that reminded him of Elke Kael had a much better chance of avoiding injury or death should Tarrin get angry with them.  That was the sole reason that Camara Tal had been sent to help him, because she had personality traits that were very similar to his mother, and that would afford her an extra level of protection from him should he turn violent on her.  Over time, he couldn't help but like her, and come to discover that she was really much different from Elke Kael than he first thought.  Other females, like Sarraya or Auli, were just bad luck, he guessed.  They just grew on him, the way Jeri did, ingratiating themselves on him until he just couldn't help but like them.

        Tarrin made a mental note to himself to never let those two meet.  Either by herself was a potential disaster, but together they would be a catastrophe of monumental proportions.

        That wasn't to say that he didn't have male friends.  He liked Thean tremendously, and he also had been close friends with Faalken before he died.  He was still very close friends with Dar and Azakar, and was still friends with Sevren.  He had to admit that he liked Jeri, the youngling Were-cat male who had fought with him at Suld, and Phandebrass was a devoted friend as well as a source of trepidation, amusement, and a good dose of healthy fear.  Phandebrass the Unusual, as he was now known in Suld, was a dead-on description of him, and the stories flew every day of what he'd blown up last ride or what magical terror he'd conjured up from the darkest pits of the Nine Hells.  Tarrin's idea of a good male friend was much different from a female, and their personalities were a great deal wider in scope.  From the fatherly Thean to the totally unhinged Phandebrass, Tarrin's male friends were as different from one another as they were from him.  He hadn't really heard anything about Walten in a while--he needed to ask Jenna what was going on with him.  Last he heard, Walten was still in the Initiate, which wasn't a bad mark against him.  Tiella had had more magical aptitude than Walten, and that meant that he was having a slightly harder time of it than Tiella had.  Then again, Tiella probably got all sorts of private instruction from Dar, at least between kisses traded in dark corners.

        Another male acquaintance he'd thought about a few times was Haley.  He really wasn't sure why, since he'd only met him once, but Haley had been instrumental in swaying Fae-da'Nar in aiding in the battle at Suld.  He'd just wondered how he'd been doing.  Since he'd been such a help, it was unseemly to Tarrin to not at least think about him from time to time, and though he hadn't exactly liked Haley when he met him, he'd respected him.  Given that Tarrin had been very feral when he met Haley, it was no surprise that he hadn't liked him then.

        But they didn't belong in the house the way Eron and Mist did, and every day they were gone made him notice their absence more and more, which irritated Jesmind to no end.  She suspected that he was pining over Mist, when actually he was more keenly feeling the absence of his son than Mist's departure.  He certainly missed her, but Tarrin was very attached to his children, and not having one of them in the house seemed....unnatural to him.

        After ten days of feeling the emptiness of his missing child and friend, he felt the need to go visit the one person that never failed to put in him a sense of contentment, and that was his little mother.  He visited Janette every time he went to Suld to see Jenna, which was about once every ten days or so.  When he visited her, he always did so without the other Were-cats.  Jasana had visited once, but when she offered to bite Janette when she wondered aloud what it would like to be a Were-cat, Tarrin, Jesmind, Tomas, and Janine all agreed unanimously that Tarrin's dangerous little daughter shouldn't be visiting.  At least not until she was a little more mature.  The fact that, back then, Tarrin wouldn't trust his daughter alone with Janette was all that had to be said.  Jesmind harbored a deep resentment of Janette, an aspect of the very un-Were-cat jealousy she had over him, so Tarrin didn't really like her visiting with him either.  To Jesmind, Janette's affection was just as much a threat to her hold on him as Mist or Kimmie was, which was utterly silly, since Janette was an eleven year old human girl.  But irrational jealousy was just that, irrational.  She was a very poor guest, so Tarrin wouldn't let her come along.  Eron was too hyper to stay in their house more than two minutes without breaking something, and Mist was too hostile to outsiders.  Jula and Kimmie were probably the only Were-cats he'd take with him to visit, but Kimmie wasn't ready to travel with her daughters being so young, and Jula stayed with her to help her take care of them.

        He usually did, however, bring his parents.  Eron and Elke Kael were very, very good friends with Tomas and Janine, and they would spend all day talking and catching up while Tarrin and Janette visited, which never failed to become a game of Tarrin chasing around that battered old wooden doll around the house as Janette dragged it on a string behind her.  Any time he was feeling depressed or out of sorts, a good visit with Janette never failed to brighten his mood considerably, and a little snuggle therapy with his adored little mother was exactly what he needed to adjust to his son and friend not being around anymore.

        But Janette wasn't the darling little girl that he'd first met so long ago.  She was thirteen now, just starting to fill out, and her interest in her lessons had increased significantly now that she'd started noticing boys.  Those lessons made boys notice her when she played the lute or sang or spoke in other languages, showing them how educated and cultured and interesting she was, so now she attacked her lessons with great eagerness each day, which pleased Janine like a crow with an entire melon field to itself.

        His little mother was growing up.  Soon she would be married and have children of her own.  It reminded him about the marching of the years, and the rather poignant reminder that while time would affect those around him, it wouldn't affect him.  Janette would grow up, have children, grow old, and then she would die, while Tarrin remained.  Thinking about that made him truly understand the pain that Triana had gone through after a thousand years, to have friends, good friends, and be forced to watch time take them away.  It was quite sobering, and it put him in a pensive mood for almost the entire day after realizing it.

        No wonder the katzh-dashi had a reputation of being standoffish.  They weren't being anti-social, they were just associating with people who were like them, who wouldn't die on them thirty or forty years down the road.  They were an order of all but immortals, people who would not die until something killed them, and that would give them exceptionally long life spans.  Ianelle was nearly fifteen hundred years old, and she was at a point where it would take something truly exceptional to kill her, since she was such a powerful Sorceress.

        But the idea of looking so far into the future couldn't hold itself in his mind for long, a mind more attuned to the present instead of the past or future.  The day after his epiphany, he told the females he was going to see Jenna, collected up his parents, and Teleported to Suld.  They avoided everyone at the Tower and went straight to Tomas' house.  Nanna the maid was quite surprised to see them, letting them in quickly and calling Tomas and Janine in from the study, where she was helping Tomas go over some accounting figures.  All other plans went right out the window when they realized that the Kaels were visiting, and it became a day off for everyone in the house except poor Deris, the family's cook.

        While Tarrin's parents caught up with Janette's parents, Tarrin and Janette caught up.  He listened attentively as she told him all about her new lessons with the harpsichord, a strange instrument from Telluria that had keys that caused little hammers to strike taut wires inside it, which produced surprisingly melodious and pleasant sound.  He found out all about one of Janette's new friends, a Tykarthian girl who moved in up the street named Shelly, and how much she was noticing the boys up and down the street and at parties her parents took her to were starting to smile at her and talk to her, and how much she liked the attention.  He found out that she had mastered the flute and didn't take lessons in that anymore, but she still hated the flute, but had started learning the math that her father used to do the books in its place until her mother found something else for her to learn.  She'd just started taking interest in her father's business, for Tomas was a successful merchant.  Tarrin mused that this might cause a problem, for Janine was grooming Janette to be a wife, not a merchant.  He sensed a showdown looming on the horizon, if the light in Janette's eyes didn't dim a little whenever she talked about the family business.

        Mostly it was the self-important events of a thirteen year old girl, but he did find out one bit of rather important news during his visit.  He found out that Janette was going to enter the Novitiate at the end of the year, not for Sorcery, but for the high-quality education that the Tower would provide.  Girls and boys educated through the Novitiate, the Tower's school, had quite a jump on everyone else.  Though the Noviate was used primarily to find children with the potential to be Sorcerers, they still had highly qualified teachers and had a school curriculum that rivalled even Wikuna in its bredth and scope.  Students of the Novitiate learned history and mathematics, and could also take courses in science, architecture, smithing, foreign languages (as far as Sulasia was concerned, since many students arrived that spoke Sulasian as a second language), etiquette, politics, public speaking, courses about the customs of other peoples and other races, and training opportunities in the basics of merchantcraft that would make them good speakers, excellent negotiators, accomplished accountants, wily politicians, and learned conversationalists.  Those were traits that many noble houses prized in their younger generation.  Most nobles sent their children to the Tower for five years of education, and when they came out, they were intellectually ready for to take up their places in their noble houses.  Arren himself was a product of the Novitiate, as was almost every Sulasian king or queen for nearly three thousand years.

        Since Janette was Sulasian, it meant that her parents would get a break on the cost of sending Janette to school.  On the other hand, since this was Janette, it meant that she'd get the education for free.  When one was personal friends with the Keeper, one got certain boons of preferential treatment.  The cost reduction for natives was what allowed so many craftsmen to send their children to the Novitiate, so they could be educated and become an asset to the kingdom.  Sulasia's population was probably the best educated in all of the West because of the Tower.  Almost everyone could read and do simple math, skills that weren't quite as prevalent in Shacè, Ungardt, Tykarthia, Draconia, Daltochan, Arkis, the Stormhavens, or the Free Duchies.  Not all of them were taught at the Tower, but most had an aunt or grandfather or some relative who did, and the knowledge of reading and simple math were often taught to the rest of the family.  Over the centuries, the Tower had caused the proliferation of literacy in Sulasia, until teaching children how to read and do numbers were basic skills taught long before they reached adolescence.

        Tarrin saw what was coming.  He hoped Janine would be content with Janette being both a wife and a merchant.  Janine had to know what the Tower was going to teach her daughter, so it made him wonder if she really would be opposed to the idea of Janette going into the family business.  After all, if she found a good husband, he'd be in the business too.

        But, as they always did, their visits turned into a simple game of chase.  Tarrin spent almost two hours chasing that battered wooden doll around the house, and despite the fact that she was growing up, Janette still delighted in the game.  He knew that they wouldn't be able to act like children much longer, but then again, he found the idea of that to be rather promising.  The little girl would be replaced by an intelligent young woman, and he'd enjoy conversation with her then as much as he enjoyed playing games with her now.

        The visit did everything Tarrin wanted it to do.  It put him in a much better mood, and by afternoon, after a delicious meal and engaging conversation, Tarrin and his parents bid them farewell and took the opportunity to go see Jenna.  Jenna was well and happy to see them, and Tarrin caught up a little with Ianelle while they were there, getting the latest updated reports about what was going on in the world and finding out what was happening with Auli.  She was still in the Tower in Sharadar, and still getting into trouble almost every other day.  He found out from Jenna that Dar was about ready to murder his parents and come home, because his mother was contesting his attempts to be married in Arkis.  Dar's mother had gone from disapproval of Tiella to abject hatred of Tiella, and was beseeching the High Priest of Mikaras himself to deny Dar the right to marry, as well as trying to have Tiella ejected from Arkis as an illegal settler; Arkis had strict laws about outlanders entering the kingdom and taking up residence.  Only those who married Arkisians could legally live in Arkis.  Jenna had fired off a rather terse letter to High Priest Rasham that if he rejected Dar's marriage application, the Tower was going to have very unpleasant things to say about it.  And she went on to say that if Tiella, a fully recognized member of the katzh-dashi, was thrown out of Arkis, then there would be an ugly international incident.  She all but ordered him to put a hand into the seething cesspool of the Arkisian governmental bureaucracy and put a stop to the nonsense of having Tiella ejected from Arkis.  Or else.

        Jenna certainly didn't help by stirring up that hornet's nest, as Dar's mother would have a conniption when she found out that Jenna was interfering, but he understood her irritation.  Dar and Tiella were in love, and they were already married.  It would be silly for Rasham to refuse to allow them to marry, because the ceremony was only a technical formality to establish legal marriage under Arkisian law.  For Rasham to deny Dar permission was just like saying he wasn't married, and any children he and Tiella had would be illegitimate in Arkisian law.  Dar's mother couldn't do anything about that, so she was doing everything she could to make Dar and Tiella as miserable as possible, to force them to split up.  That really angered Jenna.  So Jenna, being Jenna, hung several very nasty rocks over Rasham's head as dire warning of the trouble that would befall him and Arkis if he didn't do what Jenna wanted him to do.

        That never ceased to amuse Tarrin.  His little sister, sweet little Jenna, who had the capacity to be an absolute tyrant when things didn't go her way.  The knowledge Spyder had bestowed upon Jenna had truly changed her, but he had to admit that they were not bad changes.  She was assertive, authoritative, decisive, and she was also compassionate and honestly concerned for the katzh-dashi.  She was a very good ruler, and the katzh-dashi and just about everyone in Suld absolutely adored her.

        Tarrin wasn't too worried.  Rasham and Arkis didn't want to irritate Jenna.  That was a very bad idea.  Jenna's power may not extend too far beyond the boundaries of Sulasia, but what Jenna lacked in official power, she more than made up for in friends.  She was related by blood to the Ungardt and Fae-da'Nar, was a sister to the Wikuni Queen, was very close, personal friends with the Queen of Sharadar, had strong ties with the Amazons, was well liked by the Wizards, and happened to be friends with the Empress of Yar Arak--sort of.  She didn't have the official authority to back many of her demands, but the society that was the rulers of the kingdoms of the Known World knew that Jenna didn't need official power when she had so many friends around who would be more than happy to lend her a hand.  There were many kinds of power, and the power of Jenna's friendships more than made up for her lack of political or military power.

        They talked well into the night, until Jenna's head was nodding off, and then they sent her to bed and Tarrin and his parents returned home.

        The short vacation did wonders for Tarrin's mood, but the simple fact that Mist and Eron were gone still bothered him every time he looked around the house.  He managed to distract himself with his studies and his teaching of Jasana and Jula and the presence of his other three children, but a thousand friends and family couldn't cover the hole left by the departure of only two.

        The only thing that brought him out of it was when Mist finally contacted him and told him he could visit.  He did so immediately, leaving in the middle of teaching Jasana and Jula a weave that transmuted water into acid.  Mist had returned to the house she'd built for herself after getting pregnant, a small cabin on top of a very gentle rise that was contained in a shallow valley not far from the mountains.  It was crude by Tarrin's standards, but then again, he'd become totally spoiled by the amenities of his wonderful house.  But like Tarrin had in the desert, Mist quickly reverted to living without the luxuries his house provided, and actually seemed a little more comfortable in her little three room cabin, being again on her own and in the wild, mistress of her domain rather than being a guest of another.  She was much calmer, much more open than she had been in the house, and actually seemed happier.  Tarrin felt a little guilty when he realized that Mist hadn't really been happy in his house, that the only reason she had stayed there was to keep Tarrin close to his son, and to keep Eron close to Jasana.  He was the reason Mist had been unhappy.

        It reminded him of the powerful bond that existed between him and the diminutive, feral female.  Mist would do anything if she thought it would make Tarrin happy, even if she hated doing it.  Triana was probably the only adult Were-cat that could force Mist to act against her will, but Tarrin was the only adult that could make Mist act against her own wishes of her own volition.  The trust and loyalty that she had in him was unbelievable, and he suddenly felt a massive responsiblity towards her, much as he had for Kimmie when he found out how she felt about him.  Mist didn't love him like Kimmie did, but she was very, very fond of him, and she considered him her truest friend.  That meant that he had to honor that, as well as understand that he had to make sure that Mist did things that she did for herself, and not just to make him happy.  Mist had done a great deal because she had thought it would make him happy, despite the fact that it put her in a perpetual bad mood, and got his house trashed when she finally couldn't take it anymore.

        Tarrin spent the rest of the day with Mist and Eron, seeing Mist come out of the shell she had kept around herself in the house, seeing her actually smile for a change, and he knew that Mist's leaving the house was best for everyone involved.  And she and Eron weren't more than a thought away for him.

        After grounding himself in her home so he could Teleport back there whenever he pleased, he left early the next morning.  When he got back, Jesmind had a fit that he'd spent the night with Mist, but he brushed her off in that manner that never failed to drive his mate absolutely wild.  Jesmind was being silly, being too jealous, and he made sure she knew exactly how he felt.  This kind of behavior annoyed Tarrin, but he knew that to get the good out of his mate, sometimes he had to deal with her bad side.  Those times when Jesmind was happy and affectionate more than made up for these stormy fits.  His mate was very moody and temperamental...in other words, a typical Were-cat.  But Jesmind had a very hot temper, one of the hottest among them, so Tarrin knew that he was never going to go a full ride without setting her off one way or another.  So he'd simply learned how to ride out those explosions of ire.  When one lived with someone with such an explosive temper, one had to learn how to live in the eye of the hurricane, to not to stray too far from the calm center, else be lashed by the winds of howling fury that lurked just away from that calm eye.

        Tarrin retreated to the sanctity of his private study, where he kept his books and the little bits of Dwarven art and artifacts that he liked to study, one place Jesmind knew that she was not welcome when she was in a bad mood.  He returned to studying the axe, but it wasn't long before he was in a bad mood, since he really couldn't get any further with it.  He again pored through his books, trying to find some clues to the duthak writing on the axehead, but again came up empty.

        Jasana opened his door and peeked in.  "Mama's looking for you," she told him.  "She's really zonkers today."

        "I visited Mist and Eron yesterday."

        "I know.  Why did you stay all night?"

        "I had to ground myself so I can Teleport there."

        "Oh.  Why didn't you tell Mama?  She thinks you and Mist were--"

        "Because she's being silly," he said abruptly, cutting her off.  He didn't really like hearing Jasana use the kind of language that he knew was coming, but she was a Were-cat, and his say in her upbringing only went so far.  Were-cats were educated in ways that would make humans think they were all depraved, but it was a simple difference of culture, nothing more.  Were-cats didn't hide their children from those kinds of things, since they'd be partaking of them when they grew up.  Despite that, the human-raised Tarrin still didn't really like knowing that his daughter was not only perfectly allowed to use that kind of language, but she knew what it all meant.  It was one of the few areas where Tarrin was still more human than Were.  Kimmie had been totally subjugated to the Were ideal, because she'd been turned for more than a hundred years, but at least Jula shared his shock at some of the things that Mist and Jesmind taught their cubs.  Like him, Jula totally embraced her Were nature, but still had strong remnants of her human mentality lurking in her personality.  More so than him, probably because she'd been human much longer than Tarrin or Kimmie had been before they were turned.

        "No need to snap at me," Jasana huffed.

        "Sorry, cub, I guess I'm getting annoyed again," he said, tossing the book on the table moodily.

        "I told you, Papa," she said chidingly, "just use the Book of Ages.  It's got to have Dwarven writing in it.  It can teach it to you easy, just like you learned Sha'Kar."

        Tarrin looked at his daughter, about to rebuke her, then he laughed ruefully.  "I totally forgot about that," he admitted, scrubbing the back of his head with his paw.

        "Again," she teased.  "You're too easily distracted, Papa."

        "Don't push it, cub," he told her with insincere parental authority, waggling a finger at her.

        "I'll tell Mama the real reason you were there," she told him.  "Since you're afraid to."

        Jasana laughed and shut the door when Tarrin threw a small paperweight at the door half-heartedly, then chuckled and leaned back in the chair.  Jasana's behavior had improved since returning to the desert.  She had been very well-behaved, still stinging from the poignant lesson Fara'Nae taught to her, and he had hope that she finally would get reigned in somewhat.  He was glad that she had learned where the line was without it affecting her base personality, which was optomistic, bubbly, fun-loving, adorably mischievious, and quite charming.  His daughter was a total charmer, but always before they were always too wary of her charm, fearing that ulterior motives lurked in her charismatic behavior.

        But in this instance she was more than right.  The Book of Ages would end his fruitless searching through musty old books for information that would certainly be in that book.  It would teach him Duthak, as well as the Dwarven language, though it would do nothing to help him with pronunciation.  More than that, the history of the Dwarves would be in that book, an accounting he wouldn't find in any other tome of history, which would give him a background no other scholar could match.

        The good part was that the Book of Ages wouldn't teach him everything.  It would certainly be very thorough, but as he'd learned reading through it before, its lore dealt mainly with major events and generalities, not things like customs, daily life, and so on.  The Book of Ages would tell him where and when cities were built, it would teach him their language, show him exhaustive geneology trees showing the roots of the Dwarven kings, and would teach him about the basics of Dwarven culture as it pertained to history, but that was it.  The book was vague about culture, customs, and the simple day-to-day activities which interested Tarrin much more than a history of their race.  It dealt in hard facts, not the minutia of small details that would turn the book into a vast compilation so endlessly huge that it would take a massive library to hold it all.  Even the Book of Ages had limits, and that limit was space.  So the book would quickly teach him the basics, the core education that would allow him to learn about the Dwarves the way in which he wanted to, which was to understand their culture and society as much as know how they had risen and fallen with the sands of time.

        Tarrin wanted to learn, but he didn't want to learn it all from the Book of Ages.  It would make his victory in that regard seem cheaply gained.  Tarrin still believed that one had to work for goals that one would prize and treasure, and getting to his goal simply by cheating using the Book of Ages would make it a hollow victory.  Tarrin wanted to learn more than just the history of the Dwarves, he wanted to learn what made them tick, wanted to understand their society, their culture, and their customs.  He wanted to see through the eyes of one of the ancient Dwarves and understand what motivated him, and what a typical day in his life might be like.  And he wouldn't learn that from the Book of Ages.

        And that suited him just fine.

        Getting the book was a matter of simplicity.  Tarrin had once owned it, and that allowed him to Summon it to him.   That was done without any thought in the matter, though he was suprised at how much energy the spell had taken for it to work.  He wondered at that for a moment as he ran the pad of his forefinger along the book's elaborately designed front cover, his mind drifting back to the savage battle with the glabrezu to obtain it, and the many adventures and experiences he had had while carrying it back to Suld.  He wondered if those adventures had managed to find a way into the book; the book wrote itself, new pages appearing in the very back of it as events of modern history significant enough to capture its attention were recorded into it, to be saved for posterity.  The book was very large, even for Tarrin's oversized body, and he knew from experience that though it looked like it only had about a thousand pages, it actually had tens of thousands of pages.  Each page was made of a strange, very thin paper, but was still remarkably tough, and they seemed to magically compress into the binding so they would all fit.  The book itself was an item of great magical power, and the magic that allowed a ream of paper to fit into the bindings of a single book was but one aspect of its magical ability.

        With a start, he realized that it had taken so much energy to retrieve because Jenna had placed magical safeguards around it to keep it from being stolen.  It also occured to him that he never asked Jenna to borrow the book, he just took it.  Jenna would be furious if she found out, but having it right there in his paws was enough to keep him from sending it back and asking her.  It also wouldn't be a good idea to ask her if he could borrow it after he took it.  Jenna was very serene and sedate, but she was half Ungardt, and that gave her a very nasty temper.  It was also something of a pet peeve of hers when people bothered her things without asking, a trait that Tarrin had probably instilled in her when they were children, teasing her by taking her dolls and other possessions and hiding them around the house and farm.  It just took quite a bit to set her off.  Tarrin had seen one of Jenna's fits, and he had no desire to endure one of those.  When she was really mad, she could give Jesmind a run for her money.

        Tarrin decided on a rather simple solution that should hold up until he was done with the book.  He Created an exact duplicate of the Book of Ages, that looked absolutely convincing so long as someone didn't open it and look inside, and sent it back to occupy the space from which he had taken the Book of Ages.  He put his name on the inside cover, so if Jenna did open it, she'd know who had it, and thus hopefully deflect some of her anger.  When he was done with the book for tonight, he would trade the real for the fake, and swap them again whenever he needed the book.  That way he could use the book whenever he needed to do so, and he wouldn't have to bother Jenna every time he needed it.

        It seemed to work.  For a good ten days, Tarrin borrowed the Book of Ages without incident, and used it.  It took him the first day just to find where the Dwarven language appeared in the book, and after he located it, he began the process of trying to learn it.  It taught Dwarven from Sha'Kar, since the majority of the book was written in Sha'Kar--it didn't switch over to a human language, Sulasian, until after the Breaking, when the Sha'Kar were thought to be extinct--and that proved to make it rather tricky.  He did use the memory enhancing spell to accelerate his learning, but it didn't help as much as learning Sha'Kar had.  Dwarven wasn't a complicated language, but he had already known how to speak Sha'Kar, when he had no idea how to speak Dwarven.  The Book of Ages did not teach how to speak Dwarven, it simply provided the key to learning how to write in Dwarven, and it also provided a Dwarven dictionary of words in another section, which took him about seven hours to find.  It was up to him to take that base of knowledge, the key of the Dwarven writing system, and a dictionary of Dwarven words, and decipher Duthak into the spoken language.  The dictionary did teach proper pronunciation of the Duthak words, so it would allow him to get the pronunciation right when he unlocked the mystery of the Dwarven tongue.

        Learning Duthak took about an hour.  After that, Tarrin had to use the Book of Ages' sections that were written in Dwarven and the dictionary, which he used Sorcery to transcribe into a blank book so he wouldn't have to constantly turn back to it, and he started the lengthy process of deciphering the spoken and written language using the tools he had provided.  Remembering the book that Keritanima had Miranda make when they were learning Sha'Kar, he used Sorcery to keep a written record of what he did, so that whoever read the book after him would have the ability to learn Dwarven from his book, instead of having to do what he was doing.

        During this time, he pulled away from the others, closing himself off in the study he kept on the second floor in one of the spare bedrooms, which had been reconstructed after Jesmind and Mist's battle, the only place he could go in the house to study where he didn't have to worry about being interrupted.  After ten days of constant work, he had managed to master Duthak and begin work on the words and rules of grammar of the Dwarven tongue.  Its pronunciation was harsh, growling in a way, with lots of consonants, probably an insight into the Dwarven personality.  Sha'Kar was lilting, musical, with plenty of vowels, and it was a good indication of the gentle natures of the Sha'Kar people.  A language was quite often an insight into the cultural personality of the peoples who had created it.

        It was precisely ten days after he started that he got in trouble.  Someone knocked on his door with enough force to break the lock, and he whirled in his chair to see a furious Jenna standing in the doorway.  "Tarrin!" she shouted vociferously.  "Do you have my book?"

        She looked like a rabid wolverine.  Tarrin leaned back in his chair and quickly fell back on habits that had allowed him to deal with Demons, monsters, and gods, for at that moment, Jenna looked almost as intimidating.  "Where else would it be?" he asked in a mild tone, tapping it with a claw.

        "Do you have any idea how hard I've been looking for that book?" she shouted at him, stomping into his room.  "I thought one of the Zakkites stole it!"

        "As if they could ever pull that off," he snorted, doing his best to seem mild and unassuming.  "I figured you'd know I had it, since my name was on the inside cover of the replica."  He looked at her.  "I put it there so you'd know I had it."  He stared at her, an eyebrow raising mildly.  "You never opened it, did you?"

        Her eyes blazed for a moment, her shoulders heaving as she panted in fury, and he was momentarily worried that she was going to use Sorcery against him.  But then she pointed a finger at him.  "Why didn't you ask to borrow it?" she raged at him.

        "Because you're busy," he told her in the most complacent manner he could manage, trying to sound both considerate and logical at the same time.  "I've been studying from it for about a ride now, and I didn't want to bother you with asking for it and sending it back to you every day."

        She made several strangled noises, interrupted by "You--I--Why--That--" and then she slammed her hands down at her sides, clenched into fists, and managed some kind of sound that sounded like "Rrrrraooaahhh!!!" before whirling and stomping out of his study.

        Tarrin blew out his breath, relief flowing through him.  At least she wasn't going to throw things.  He jumped up and followed after her, with the intent of trying to calm her down before she went back to Suld, or even worse, jumped over to their parent's house and told them.

        Tarrin had to work for nearly an hour to calm Jenna down, but all in all, he knew he'd gotten off relatively easily in the scope of things.  She'd probably had her fit at the Tower when she realized it was gone.  But that was Ianelle's problem, not his.

        It was not half as easy as Keritanima had made it seem.

        For well over two months, Tarrin labored exhaustively in order to learn the Dwarven language.  At first, he thought it would take little more than two rides, but he had been sorely mistaken.  What made it different was that before, when they learned Sha'Kar from those scrolls, they were learning it from writing that was specifically designed to do so.  But Tarrin was doing it from scratch, armed with little more than a dictionary and a key for knowing the letters of the Dwarven writing system, Duthak.  What that meant was that Tarrin could make out the spelling of the words he saw in his old books and on his Dwarven art, but they did not in any way help him sort out the grammar or rules of language that existed in the Dwarven language.  Those, he had to puzzle out for himself.

        He could learn easily enough, given that he used the memory spell liberally, but what it didn't take into account was that he often had to compile enough examples of grammar from many different pieces of Dwarven writing, and cross-reference them with word definitions, that it made it very slow going in understanding the language.  None of the languages he knew was in any way similar to Dwarven, so that wasn't any help.  In Selani and Sha'Kar, the verb was always at the end of the sentence or clause.  In the human languages he knew, the verb was followed by the predicate.  But Dwarven was totally backwards.  The verb often came first, the predicate next, and then the subject, usually but not always followed by a linking verb that connected it to the action of the remainder of the clause or sentence.  So what would be I went down to the inn for a tankard of ale in Sulasian ended up being went down to the inn for a tankard of ale, I did.  That seemed quite odd to him, but Tarrin had a gift for languages, so he was able to wrap his mind around it much quicker than most others would have, even with the use of the memory spell.

        The need to research was what slowed him down so greatly.  Had he had all the information he needed laid out for him as it had been in the Sha'Kar scrolls, he would have been done in twenty days.  But for every hour of actual learning he accomplished, it was accompanied by about three hours of careful research.  And what made matters worse, he needed many different examples of Duthak to find similar words, phrases, and clauses that would allow him to identify and understand Dwarven grammar, as well as idioms and sayings that often made no sense to a neophyte speaker without a base of context grounded in the society that created the language, idioms that had a habit of creeping into any language that was even moderately old.  Dwarves were miners and builders, so much of their idioms revolved around the earth, tools, mining, and smithing.  The word aroga, Dwarven for hammer, seemed to show up in almost every phrase, as if they had some religious obligation to say aroga fifty times a minute.  That made it maddening to try to figure out just which context in which the saying was being used, whether it was an idiom or a saying, or they really just discussed hammers that often.

        During that time, Tarrin became quite a common sight in both Suld and Dala Yar Arak.  He had need of extensive libraries holding ancient tomes, and those were two of the three best places to find them.  He scoured the library in the Tower like a maid obsessed with cleanliness, going through virtually any book that had examples or passages of Duthak inscribed within them.  The Tower's librarian, a weedy little Sorcerer with thin brown hair and spectacles named Erlo, got quite upset with the Were-cat as he would simply appear within the library, scoop up dozens of books at a time and root through them.  He left a terrible mess behind him every time he visited, and he simply took books out of the library without telling anyone he was taking them.  The high-strung little man had quite a fit every time Tarrin appeared in the doorway, waggling an accusatory finger in the direction of his face and trying to be as inconvenient as possible whenever Tarrin needed questions answered.  The Were-cat endured the treatment for all of two days before he simply hung Erlo in midair in the center of the library and spun him like a top whenever the man didn't immediately and thoroughly answer any question he asked.  The Initiates in the library at that moment thought that to be quite funny until Erlo vomited from the severe spinning, spraying the contents of his stomach all over the library, including all over them.  After that bit of abuse, the Tower's head librarian promptly vanished whenever Tarrin appeared in the library.

        After wringing the Tower's library dry, he turned to the Imperial Library of Dala Yar Arak.  They were quite shocked to see him there, and even more shocked to discover that the flat-eyed Were-cat wasn't about to listen to them when they told him that only nobles, permitted scholars, and staff were allowed entry into the library.  It took them nearly four hours to find and get down the thirty librarians who had tried to get in the Were-cat's way, for he had scattered them all over the library in various states of indisposition when they made the mistake of putting their hands on him.  One unfortunate young woman got hung by her ankles off the ceiling, her feet sunk into the polished marble by Sorcery.  Nobles and scholars gathered under her and gaped, staring the thirty spans up at the hysterical woman who struggled to keep her robe from falling over her hips between very loud screams for help.

        Tarrin was fully intent on leaving that woman up there until they found some way to get her feet out of the stone, but Shiika had arrived personally when word of his visit reached her in her palace.  The guards who were shadowing the resolute Were-cat bowed and melted away when the Empress of Yar Arak, resplendent in a glowing gold robe and her crown, today gracing the public with her alluringly beautiful human appearance (everyone in the entire Empire knew she was a Demon, but they rightly didn't care, for she was running the Empire better than any human Emperor had for almost two hundred years), her long hair done in loosely tumbled curls that billowed out over her shoulders and down her shapely back.

        He never looked up when he caught her foul, inhuman scent, a scent that, over the years and with repeated exposure, he had built up something of a resistance to it.  "What do you want, Shiika?" he asked without looking back at her, taking down another book that had Duthak writing on its spine in the Nonhuman Studies section of the vast library, then turning and seating himself at the table which was between them.

        "I think that's what I'm supposed to ask you," she asked with a winsome chuckle, coming up to the table and sitting on the edge of it, facing him.  He glanced up at her and saw her as he remembered first seeing her, as a breathtakingly lovely woman with red hair.  He knew that she didn't look that way to everyone; one of the aspects of her power as a Succubus was that she always appeared as whatever the onlooker considered to be most attractive.  Tarrin considered red hair to be the most lovely shade of hair on a woman, and so she appeared to his eyes to have red hair.  "Do you mind telling me what was so important that you had to waylay my librarians?"

        "They got in my way."

        She laughed.  "That's no reason to hang them off the ceiling," she said, pointing.  Tarrin glanced up, and saw the thin Arakite woman up there, having lost the battle to keep her robe up because all the blood ran to her head.  She'd been so adamant about keeping her robe down--or up, given her attitude towards the ground--because she hadn't had anything on underneath it.

        "Sorry," he said, absently weaving a spell of Earth.  The rock let go of her feet abruptly, and she screamed quite loudly as she dropped towards the floor.  She was caught by a weave of Air just before she hit the polished granite, and fainted dead away before realizing she was safely down and unharmed.

        "You know, all you had to do was ask to be allowed in," she said, putting a hand on the table and leaning on it.

        "Since when do I ask for anything, Shiika?" he told her, ignoring her and her horrific scent as he turned the page of the book holding Dwarven writing before him, as it had been copied from a wall in a ruin found in the mountains of eastern Yar Arak.

        "That's certainly true enough," she said with a slight frown.  "What's got you so interested, anyway?" she asked, looking at the book.  "Dwarven?  By the pit, Tarrin, why didn't you say something?  I speak Dwarven.  I can teach it to you."

        He looked up at her.  "No thanks," he said bluntly.  "I know better than to accept any kind of assistance from a Demon, Shiika.  I know where that road leads."

        "Oh, come now, Tarrin," she said sharply.  "You know I wouldn't do that."

        He gave her a flat stare.

        She chuckled ruefully.  "Okay, okay, so maybe I would," she admitted.  "But I'd never get you, and we'd both have fun for me trying."

        He gave her another flat look, then snorted and looked at the book again.

        "Since I do have you here, Tarrin, you're going to do something," she said, quite sternly.

        "Says you," he countered without looking up.

        "I'm quite serious about it," she said with sudden heat, putting her finger under her chin and raising his head so he was looking at her.  "You owe me, Tarrin, and I always collect on my debts!"

        "What debt would that be?"

        "Saving your ass!" she said hotly.  "Those Legions that happen to still be in Suld didn't come from the gratefulness of my heart!  I sent them there for my own reasons, I'll grant you that, but a Succubus never does anything for free!  Now then, since I can't seem to get satisfaction out of that miserable little stone wall of a sister of yours, I guess I'll have to take payment from you!"

        Tarrin was about to say something, but the Goddess interrupted in the recesses of him mind, very deeply, probably to keep the telepathic Demon from sensing her communication.  Drop it, she warned.  I know what she wants, and it's not an unreasonable request.  Give in.

        But--

        That was not a request! she snapped at him.  We're going to have a little talk about this impertinence of yours, kitten.  I gave you an order, now carry it out!

        Feeling quite abashed and contrite, his ears drooped a little before he caught himself and looked up at the suddenly hot-eyed Demoness.  "What were you trying to get out of Jenna?" he asked.

        "Someone, I don't care who, is going to fix my Palace!" she screamed at him.

        "Fix?  What's wrong with it?"

        "You are!" she shouted even louder, throwing a finger in his face.  "When you borrowed a certain object from me, Were-cat, you made my entire Palace magic-dead!  I'm sick and tired of not being able to use magic in my own house, so you're going to fix it, and you're going to fix it now!"

        She was actually panting.  Obviously, this was something quite serious to her, serious enough to get majorly worked up.  "Oh?  and just what, may I ask, will I get out of it?"

        She gave him a surprised look, and seemed to be completely at a loss for words.  Her mouth worked a few times with no sound coming from it, then she finally managed to find her voice.  "How dare you demand anything in return for fixing what you broke, and after you're already so far in debt to me!" she screamed emotionally.  For some odd reason, he was enjoying seeing the always-cool Shiika suddenly get all bent out of shape.  He'd never seen her mad before, and he found it to be strangely funny.

        Tarrin put his elbow on the table and put his chin in his palm, looking over at her.  "Do tell," he said mildly, his tail slashing behind him, betraying his mirth.  "Explain to me why I'm so indebted to you, and maybe we'll talk about it."

        She glared at him, then suddenly exploded into laughter.  "You're playing with me!" she realized, putting a delicate hand to her upper chest as she laughed.  "So you'll do it?  You'll fix it?"

        "Agree that it wipes the slate clean, and it's a deal," he countered.

        "Here now, it's not worth that," she suddenly flared.  "Your sister is in quite deeply to me."

        "It's entirely up to you, Shiika," he told her, "but I'm not budging.  Call it even-up, or continue to go outside to practice your magic."

        "Don't bargain with me, Tarrin," she said in a dangerously eager voice.  "You won't like what you get out of it."

        She's too right there, kitten.  Just say you'll do it, and do not say it like it's the completion of some kind of bargain.  Tell you you'll do what she asked as a favor, no more, no less.  You don't know what you're about to get into if you try to bargain with her.  That's how she works, and I worked too hard on you to lose you to her.

        Tarrin didn't reply, only gave Shiika a steady look and nodded.  "As a favor to you, I'll do what you ask," he said quickly and carefully.

        She gave him a sudden look, then frowned.  "I know you're around here somewhere, Niami!" she called towards the ceiling, smacking her palms on the table .  "He wouldn't have got out of that so neatly if you hadn't have had a hand in there somewhere!"

        I do so love it when she gets mad, the Goddess said with ultimate satisfaction.

        "I heard that!" Shiika shouted in an ugly tone.

        The Goddess' silvery laughter retreated from his mind as she withdrew from him, and Shiika gave Tarrin a dangerous look when she saw his narrow-eyed amusement.  "I hate it when she cheats!" she complained.  "She does that with Jenna all the time!"

        "She's just keeping us safe from you, Shiika," Tarrin told her.

        "You'd have more fun with me than with her, that's for sure," she told him, regaining her composure and standing up.

        "That's a matter of opinion," he answered.  "Let's go get this overwith.  I have things to do."

        Fixing the Palace was actually alot easier than he thought it might be, when he first surveyed the problem.  Tarrin had pulled the strands away from the Palace, and had never set them right.  He remembered doing that, doing it to rob the glabrezu of its magical powers, which levelled the battlefield between them.  It seemed a bit challenging at first, because of the number of strands he'd have to move around to get them all where they were supposed to be, but his powers as a sui'kun were more than up to the task.  It only took a couple of moments, as he quickly and expertly put every strand back where it belonged, being able to sense how they were orginally arrayed though some kind of innate understanding, probably tied up with his power.

        "There," he said absently, motioning towards the vast Palace.  "Can I go now?"

        "Yes!" she said happily, clapping her hands.  "In fact, I'll tell the librarians you're to be allowed access to the library!  Thank you!" she said with a great deal of actual sincerity as she rushed towards her monstrous home, laughing like a little girl chasing a puppy.

        Tarrin watched her go, her guards chasing after her in confusion, and blew out his breath.  Demons were weird.

        Having legal access to the Imperial Library helped him along quite a bit, at least after the librarians all lost their fear of him.  That took a few days.  But once they were willing to help him, they proved to be indispensible, finding the books he needed and arraying them before him.  He had asked for books holding the old Duthak language, and they had responded quite admirably, even going into their precious stores of truly ancient books and bringing him actual Dwarven books, all of them at least five thousand years old, written in Duthak.  They were very brittle and fragile, and the librarians apologized endlessly when they explained that he simply couldn't take them out of the library, that they were just too delicate to be carried around or banged about.  Usually he completely ignored it when people told him he couldn't do something, but one look at those books told him that in this case, they were more than right.  He wouldn't destroy those books, not when he needed what they held...and taking them out of the library would destroy them.  He thought they were going to kiss him whem he Conjured a few empty books and then used Sorcery to transcribe the entirety of one book into the new book.  It was the spell that Keritanima had invented, that copied the entirety of a book into a new book with such perfect precision that even the ink blots and stains were transcribed, creating a totally faithful reproduction.  He got mobbed by the librarians as they asked him to do that for some of their most ancient tomes, books so old that they feared to even move them, because they were all deathly afraid they would disintegrate and that what they held would be forever lost to posterity.  He could see the sincerity in their eyes when they begged for his help, but he simply didn't have time to do that for them, and it took him a while to explain that.  But he did promise to see if there wasn't something he could do.  After all, they had all been quite helpful to him, even though they didn't have to be, and he felt that a little reciprocation would only be fair.

        Tarrin's solution was a simple one.  The next day, when he arrived at the library at around noon, he had someone else with him.  It was Sevren, one of the few katzh-dashi from the Tower that Tarrin both liked and trusted, and the spectacled Sorcerer had already been briefed as to what Tarrin wanted him to do.  Sevren was more than happy to oblige, and he went with the librarians down into the basement, looking as if they would carry him if he asked it of them, as Tarrin returned to copy more books of Duthak for his personal use.  Tarrin had trained Sevren in the use of the spell, and he proved to be quite adept at it, being capable of casting it many, many times ove