They waited in grim silence for nearly half an hour, and then Arren mounted his horse deliberately. "Give me five minutes," he told them. "Five minutes, and then go. Remember, be quick, be careful, and be true. We only get one chance at this."
"One chance is one more than what's necessary, Duke Arren," Ariana said confidently. "What you're asking is child's play."
"Let's hope you're right, my lady," Arren grunted. "I suddenly have a bad feeling about this." And then he urged his horse to a slow walk, disappearing into the trees on the left side of the road.
"Worryer," Ariana snorted, shivering her wings. "When will it be five minutes?"
"You'd think that people who have to navigate by air had a sense of time," Tarrin muttered, looking at her.
"Tell me what a minute is, and I'll gladly tell you how many have gone by since he left," she said sharply.
Tarrin glanced at her, then chuckled ruefully. "Nevermind. By the time we talk about what we'll do, it'll be ready to go."
"Oh, alright then. I already know which house we should hit. It's a really big one right by the gate, with one of those rooves made of straw. It should make a nicely distracting fire."
"I think I remember that building," he said, remembering back to his first and only visit to Torrian. "Big place with a stable in the back?"
"The building surrounded by the fence?" Ariana asked. Tarrin nodded. "That's the one," she agreed with a grin. "How close do you need to be?"
"The closer the better, but you won't have to get within bow range of the city," he assured her. "Five hundred paces over the building is close enough. I know a way to weave the spell that will allow me to drop it from the air and have it land on the building, then ignite the thatch."
"Alright then," she said, looking around. "You have that basket handy? It's about time to go."
Tarrin conjured up the basket to ride in, and she belted it to her waist. He shifted into cat form, she picked him up, settled him inside, and then they were off.
Tarrin still had a silent exuberance about flying. It was a wonderfully strange feeling, a feeling of utter freedom that appealed to his nature and his instincts. Tarrin looked out of the basket as the ground slowly became a blur of dark, green trees, as his cat's eyes lost the ability to make out fine detail about the ground below him, but he could see enough to know where they were. Ariana was flying in a wide circle as she gained height, flying away from the city at first, but had now turned back towards the city now that she had enough altitude. He could make out the lights of the city and could discern the city wall because it was a different color, a border between the green of the fields surrounding Torrian and the browns and blacks of the city itself.
Again, he felt a wave of… something. He looked down at the city, and for the first time, he began to slowly comprehend why he had had such a nagging feeling. He had been feeling the edges of a strong magic, and now that they were nearing the city, he was feeling it again, and it was markedly noticable. He looked down, trying to puzzle out what he was feeling. It was a spell, a woven spell, and it was big . It was impressive how large it was, how it had been created, and he realized that it had to take a circle of seven very good Sorcerers to create and maintain it. He couldn't see the spell, though, he could only sense it, and that worried him. What he could make out, however, was that the spell was laid over Torrian itself, filling its volume within the walls completely, and that it was not a spell meant to interact with the physical world.
Tarrin looked down, trying to make something out. Torrian wasn't a large city by any standard, more of a large town than a small city, with about five hundred buildings safely located within the log walls. But that was still an impressive amount of area to cover with a weave, a weave that he couldn't make out because of the difficulties of trying to see it through cat's eyes and being in cat form, which did impact his ability to use and sense Sorcery. Were there katzh-dashi in Torrian? Was this some part of Arren's plan that had been made when he wasn't there to hear it? His fahter had never said anything about katzh-dashi being assigned to the Rangers before.
No, wait. If they were making the spell, and it was such a large one, they had to be at its center. It would be the only way they could maintain something so large. They had to be at the center of it, so that the power that sustained it flowed as quickly as possible from the Sorcerers and into the weave's every woven edge. Tarrin looked down, swinging his head from one side to the other, fixing the middle of the weave in his mind. He found its center, and it was in a place that looked a little different from the others, a place with lots of torches and a blurry grayish color that made it separate from the rest of the city.
Gray. The only large gray thing in Torrian, a town made of wood and wattle buildings, was the castle.
Sorcerers in the castle, using a large spell that covered the entire city? Arren said that the Dals occupied his castle.
Something wasn't right. Very not right. Tarrin started squirming out of the basket as they crossed over the wall, as Ariana began a tight banking turn to keep Tarrin over the target. She didn't seem to notice that he was trying to squirm free of the basket-
– -but he did end up free of it when he heard Ariana curse loudly and suddenly veer off in the other direction, dropping about fifty spans in a heartbeat, which caused Tarrin to get wrenched free of the basket. He began to fall immediately, but caught himself on a hastily woven platform of Air, and used it as a base from which to change form and regain his better eyes. He needed them right now.
It was chaos. Three black, scaly things were banking behind the Aeradalla, who was turning again to try to shake off the pursuers. One of them screeched, and he recognized it immediately as the cry of a Wyvern. He had been right in one's face as it screeched like that, the one that had capsized Rennae's little riverboat on his first journey to Suld. Wyverns! He looked carefully, and saw that all three had riders. They all had crossbows, wearing black armor, taking shots at the Aeradalla as their Wyverns tried to bite at her wings when they managed to get close to their faster, more agile target.
Wyverns chasing Ariana. But only the ki'zadun used Wyverns as mounts. Jula had told him that.
Jula. Jula had been a Sorceress, and she had been in the ki'zadun .
Sudden horror rising up in him, Tarrin absently smashed the nearest Wyvern with a weave of Air, killing it and sending its rider plummeting to his death below, shrieking all the way down. His paws rose up, and a weave of Air, Water, and Fire spun together between them, causing a vicious blast of bright lightning to lash out from them, striking the rider of the next closest Wyvern squarely in the back, blasting the slight figure from the saddle. Maintaining the core of the spell, he recharged it and unleashed it again, striking the Wyvern with the last rider in the head with it, causing its beaked head to suddenly explode as blood and fluids boiled instantly from the incredible heat of the lightning, rupturing its head in a spectacular fashion. Gore and ichor splattered the rider just as he aimed his crossbow at Ariana, and it made him flinch as the bolt was loosed, just before the Wyvern dropped from the sky and carried the man to his doom. But instead of making him miss, the flinch actually corrected his aim, and the bolt struck his Aeradalla friend in the lower side, in her back. Tarrin knew immediately that it wasn't a mortal wound, but it did cause her to wobble in the air and drop some altitude, then dive towards the trees. She knew not to stay in the air when she was wounded.
The injury to Ariana only made him angry. Where did the Wyverns come from? They were so big, Ariana couldn't have missed them when she flew over the city on her scout! He looked down, and with his humanoid eyes, the nature of the massive weave covering Torrian became clear. He could see a town with empty streets, with torches at intersections, spaced through the streets, but it wasn't real.