The activity in the Tower was as heavy as outside. Tarrin heard about it from Keritanima as she took a rare break and walked with him in the gardens. The generals were tweaking their strategy constantly as scouting reports came in from the Aeradalla, many of whom were now visible flying over the city in wide, lazy circles. Shiika, whom he was still avoiding, was having almost constant arguments with the Keeper over exactly what should be protected. Shiika wanted to stop them at the walls, so she wanted all the troops there. The Keeper wanted to protect the Tower, so she kept trying to pull men off the walls and put them on the Tower grounds. The generals that were doing the real planning kept having to separate the two of them during their staff meetings.
But he couldn't avoid the Demoness forever. As the sun set on that fateful day, the beginning of the time when the ki'zadun could arrive, she tracked him down in one of the hallways near the kitchen. The unnaturalness of her scent warned him too late that she was approaching, and he found himself trying to avoid breathing in that ghastly smell when she cornered him against a doorway. She looked very unhappy, glaring at him, wearing the form she had used to appear in public back in Dala Yar Arak, the dusky-skinned, beautiful Arakite woman with the unusual reddish hair. "It's about time!" she snorted. "Why have you been avoiding me, Tarrin? Aren't I good enough to talk to you anymore?"
He knew exactly why he'd been avoiding her, but he didn't want to say anything.
"Oh, is that all?" she scoffed. "I learned about that not a day after you did," she told him. "You may have had a good idea, but some of the others aren't quite as clever as you. I've kept it a secret, and I intend to go right on keeping it a secret. You forget, Tarrin, it's in my best interest to not pass that information along. We may not be trustworthy, but when my comfort is at stake, you can always depend on where I'm going to go."
Tarrin felt a bit abashed. He had been avoiding her, and not telling her why. It seemed sort of silly that he'd been stubbornly refusing to get anywhere near her when it was obvious that it was a fruitless exercise. "All right, I'm sorry," he apologized. "But I'm sure you can understand my position."
"Of course I can," she said, raising one of her elegantly shaped, reddish eyebrows.
"Are you ready for them?" he asked pointedly.
"As ready as we're going to get," she replied. "I've found out who's on which side, and already arranged for certain old friends to arrive and engage them before they can cause too much trouble. I've called in about every favor owed to me for this. I hope you appreciate it," she snorted.
"You're doing this for you, Shiika," he said mildly. "Remember?"
She looked at him, then laughed ruefully. "I hate clever mortals," she told him. "That reminds me, I have a bone to pick with you, Tarrin."
"What did I do now?"
"It's what you did a while ago," she told him. "Remember when you got the book from me? Well, you rendered my entire palace non-magical in the process. When all this is over, I fully expect you to go back to Dala Yar Arak and fix that!"
"I did?" he asked in surprise, trying to remember that little adventure. Then he remembered that he did shift the Weave, to rob his opponent of his magical advantage. He didn't realize that it stayed that way.
"Yes, you did!" she accused. "You owe me, Tarrin, so I want that fixed!"
"I can't make any promises, Shiika," he told her. "But if I live through this, I'll try."
"Well… alright," she huffed. "Now that we're friends again, want to take a walk with me? I want to hear about what happened after you left Arak."
"You already know."
"True, but I want to hear it from you," she said with an inviting smile. "Besides, you owe me for avoiding me for so long. I think a little bit of your time won't kill you."
Tarrin found the idea a bit disconcerting-he still didn't absolutely trust Shiika-but in her defense, she had been forthright so far. "Alright," he agreed. "But I don't have long. My mate will come looking for me in a while."
"I'll take what time I can get," she assured him.
They went out into the gardens, and walked the brick pathways as Tarrin related some of the tale of what happened to him after he left Arak. He was frank with her, mainly because her telepathic ability would allow her to tell when he was covering something up. Despite the vile repulsiveness of her scent, Tarrin found that just talking to Shiika was a rather pleasurable experience. The Demoness was intelligent and quite engaging, asking questions that piqued his mind, forced him to expand himself to answer her. He very nearly began enjoying their time together when Shiika suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, her dusky skin sallowing a bit.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
She looked at him, and then she changed her form, taking on her wings, the form in which he always envisioned her when he thought of her. "It's time," she announced in a grim voice. "Zabelle just spotted the advance scouts."
She looked at Tarrin, her eyes dark and foreboding. "They're here, Tarrin. Now, things get ugly."
To: Title EoF
Chapter 35
It was a sea of seething sentient animosity.
Tarrin stood at the top of the main Tower in the darkness of the night, staring down over the city with sight augmented by Sorcery, one of the weaves that Spyder taught him, and his heart sank every time he moved his head. There were thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Humans, Trolls, Bruga, Waern, Dargu, and things Tarrin had never seen before. Strange horse-like creatures with fanged mouths. Horse-like creatures that breathed fire. Massive moving piles of what looked like rotting vegetable matter. Strange creaturs with the upper bodies of humans, but the lower bodies of snakes. Centaur-like creatures with lower bodies of assorted quadruped carnivores and the upper torsos and heads of human women. Rank upon rank upon rank of fetid corpses or dry skeletons, animated by powerful dark magic. Human-like beings that were obviously not as human as they appeared. What looked like pictures of the old Dwarves, but with fire for hair. Ugly bird-like creatures with the lower bodies and talons of a vulture, but the upper torso and head of exceptionally ugly human females. Some of them were proudly wearing Aeradalla feathers in their hair. And many more, some beyond description.
And those were the natives. It was easy to tell the Demons from the natives, and there were many kinds of them. The most abundant were these small, four-span tall bipedal creatures with naked, mottled bodies and small claws on their emaciated hands, with utter mindlessness showing in their eyes. There was an army of those to themselves, being supervised by creatures he had seen before, much like the male offspring of Shiika, the ones he had killed. Cambisi, half-Demon offspring that served their full-blooded masters in jobs probably too menial for them. There were many of those vulture-like Demons that had attacked him on the plains of Saranam, as well as quite a few of those four-armed monstrosities like the one he had fought to gain the Book of Ages. There were tall, rugged looking bipedals ones with the heads of some kind of carnivorous toad, and fat ones with tiny wings that had the heads of boars. There were ones that looked like human skeletons, with a tight sheath of skin stretched over their frames and a large horn on the top of their head. But the most numerous of those others were large winged ones that could only be called hideous, not resembling anything he'd ever seen before, with massive tusks jutting out of their lower jaws. He had no idea of the names of those assorted kinds of Demons, but it was apparent that there were a lot of them.