"It's dark, and so are you," she said with a chuckle. "You look like an Arakite now."
"Blame the sun," he shrugged. "At least for the skin."
"No doubt. That rope hanging off your head is almost white now. You've been sun-dyed."
"When my fur starts turning white, I'll start to worry," he said mildly.
Moving among the buildings on that tier was unexpectedly easy. They all had walls surrounding them, and those formed shadowed passageways that ran for considerable distances. He could move a long way in humanoid form before being forced to shapeshift into cat form to traverse the open areas between the walls. What made it even easier was that there were many voices on that tier, but they all emanated from within the walls themselves. There was almost no one walking outside the walled manors, giving him free reign of those dark, paved streets that seemed slightly like a maze, were it not for the fact that all the walls were straight, and he had a direct line of sight to the tier wall ahead. He managed to navigate the tier in a matter or moments rather than the near hour it took for the tier below, thanks to those long walls enclosing large manors. A running vault brought him up to the next level, and from the short look he got before darting against the safety of a wall, it was much the same as the tier below him.
"This is easy," Sarraya said lightly as he made the wall.
"Then let's trade places," he said quietly. "I'll fly and be invisible, and you skulk in the shadows."
This tier was much the same as the one below, except for the large fountain he encountered about halfway along to the next wall. It was a very large fountain, filled with clear water, with water gurgling lightly from a statue in the center of it. It was a nude humanoid female holding a pitcher, from which water poured into the pool below. The statue did not have wings, he noticed, and the image of the female looked more Selani than human. The hands were four-fingered, the figure too slender, and the ears had those distinctive points. The face held that same ethereal quality of loveliness as a Selani, but the face was much softer and inviting than a Selani female.
Selani? No. That was a Sha'Kar. The figure was too soft, too human to be a desert-raised Selani. This was a female that looked more like a human woman than a Selani woman. She was thin and shapely, very curvaceous, but lacked that corded definition that would have denoted a Selani. Allia was both voluptuous and muscularly defined. This figure was not.
"Selani?" Sarraya asked in curiosity.
"Sha'Kar," Tarrin replied. He stood in the shadow of a wall, staring at the fountain in its large courtyard. It inspired a memory of the fountain in the center of the hedge maze, back in the Tower. The figure there, however, absolutely put this figure to shame. The Sha'Kar figure was but a statue. It lacked that awesome detail and exacting perfection that made the statue at the Tower so striking. This statue looked like a statue. The statue in Suld looked alive. And, he had to admit, the face and body of the statue in the Tower were much lovelier than this one. "So we know who lived here at one time."
"Maybe. Or perhaps the Sha'Kar were used to make alot of statues," Sarraya noted. "If all Sha'Kar women looked like her, no wonder men would want statues of them everywhere."
"Feeling a little jealous, Sarraya?" Tarrin noted.
"Of course not," she snorted. "For my size, I'm very well proportioned."
"For a doll, yes," he agreed mildly.
"Dolls don't fill out their dresses like me," she challenged.
"Unless the dollmaker was perverted," he said quietly, which earned him a smack on the back of the neck from his invisible companion.
" Men!" she hissed.
"I'm sure the sculptor enjoyed his work," Tarrin added as an afterthought.
"What do you mean?"
"He had to have a model."
She smacked him again. "Perhaps you should ask her out?" she said venemously.
"I don't get excited at the thought of masonry, Sarraya," he replied calmly. "Sight isn't half as exciting as scent."
"Let's not go any further," she said quickly.
"You asked," he shrugged, then shifted into cat form. "And you are jealous, aren't you?" he added in the manner of the Cat as he padded towards the fountain.
"Grrrohh!" Sarraya growled in furious embarassment, then flitted after him.
He paused to take a drink of the water, and found it to be very, very cold. That was strange. The air was brisk, but the water was much colder, when it should have retained at least a little heat from the day. It was so cold that little wisps of fog had formed on its surface, condensing what little moisture there was in the air. It poured from the pitcher at a steady pace, meaning that there was no interruption in the water supply that fed it. The water smelled of rock and minerals, and he realized that the water came from underground.
The water was from a well! But how did they get it up the Rock Spire? To make it travel against gravity such a tremendous distance, it was astounding!
Magic. It had to be magic. No conventional wellpump could move so much water straight up, over such a distance. Magic had to draw the water from the ground.
He'd bet that that lava tube he climbed wasn't the only tunnel piercing the spire. There had to be one big wellshaft in there as well, drawing up water from the ground so far below.
After drinking his fill, he looked up at the statue one more time, studying it. So that was what a regular, run-of-the-mill, Sha'Kar looked like. Well, there was absolutely no doubt now that the Selani and the Sha'Kar were related. He knew that from meeting that Sha'Kar woman, but now there was absolutely no room for error in that assumption. That woman may have been a fluke among her kind, but now he'd seen two examples of Sha'Kar, and they both matched Selani physiology. His eyes drifted down to the base of the statue, and he saw that spidery script that he'd become so familiar with back at the Tower, the written language of the Sha'Kar. The letters were carved into the stone, and were large enough for his eyes to make out, despite his inability to make out fine details. He had no idea what it said-
– -at least until he looked at the line below. That was written in Sulasian, albeit a very archaic form of it. It took him a while to decipher it. That line, he could read. It read May happiness and good fortune find you.
Curious. That line was considerably longer than the Sha'Kar script. The Sha'Kar writing was only eight characters long. Did it say something different? No. Something told him that it said the same thing. He didn't know why he knew that, but he did. Almost like it was something that he had always known, yet hadn't realized until that moment.
Almost like a memory long submerged, coming back up to the surface.
That made something click in his head. No wonder nobody could read it! Every character in the Sha'Kar language represented a word instead of a letter! It explained why there were so very many different characters. He'd looked through the books and realized that often, he didn't see the same character in the same paragraph. He'd never thought to think about why it was that way, but now he did, and the reasoning made sense. He would bet that Keritanima already knew what he just realized, but Keritanima was much smarter than he was. He wasn't too proud to admit that.
No wonder. If every character was a word, it would be next to impossible to break the language without some kind of written translation to go on as a base.
But how did he know that they said the same thing? He looked at the Sha'Kar script, and it… tickled at him. He didn't have any other way to describe it. Something about it seemed very familiar to him now, when he hadn't felt that way before. Somehow, he knew exactly which characters represented which words in Sulasian, though their order was different. What was may happiness and good fortune find you in Sulasian roughly equated to to-you happiness and good fortune may yet come.