He did manage that, around midday, but it wasn't quite what he had in mind. The forest simply stopped almost half a day's walk from the city walls, which were clearly visible well in the distance. The land sloped down gently towards the city walls, and it was covered with nothing but farmland and hedges separating them. He could see the fabled Tower of Sorcery even from here, its white stone soaring out over the distant walls of the city, and he could just barely make out a few of the six smaller towers that surrounded the main spire. He was within sight of his goal, and that simple realization swept a wave of relief and reassurance through him. The only problem was to get to it. He would have to do it at night. He had too much owned, organized land to cross to do it at any other time. Getting over the walls wouldn't be much of a problem. There wasn't a wall made that his claws couldn't help him climb. Once he was inside the city, it just became the simple task of reaching the Tower without Jesmind or any other interested party getting in his way.
Tarrin crept back from the treeline and found a nice crutch between a large limb and a trunk, then hunkered down to sleep out the rest of the day.
Orisen the guard stood on the high battlements of the impressive walls of the city of Suld. They were high walls, strong walls, and they had never fallen to an invading force. The job of guarding those walls fell to men like Orisen, but unlike most wall watchmen of Suld, Orisen took his duties very seriously. Every night, he prowled the city walls of the south sector like an impatient general, his eyes scanning the dark landscape for the slightest movement. His ears strained to hear any sound not normal for that sector of the city at that time of the night, since Suld was such a large city that it never truly went completely to sleep. In his illustrious ten year career on the South wall, he'd witnessed three robberies on the streets below, all of which had been solved and the perpetrator caught and convicted on his testimony. He'd also been privy to one murder, which was also solved. He'd even caught personally sixteen men that had tried to sneak either into or out of the city at different times of the night. Orisen was a good man, and he took his job as seriously as a surgeon did when he cut open a man. He stood at his favorite battlement, staring out over the farmland and small village outside the south wall, thinking how nice it was that the winter's chill was gone, and the early summer night was much preferable to prowling the walls wearing five cloaks and three pairs of breeches.
He never saw nor heard the ghostly shape that rose up from the wall not ten paces to his right, darted across the twenty spans that made up the top of the wall, and disappeared quickly over the other side.
He did perk up and rush to the city side of the wall when the sound of a roof tile hitting the street reached him. Many thieves liked to run the rooftops, and that sound was one of the most obvious that gave them away. He looked over the side of the wall. He could see the tile in the torchlight at the base of the wall, but there was nothing, and nobody, else to be seen. Longspan Street was deserted.
Reassured, Orisen the guard went back to his serious duty of defending the city of Suld from any and all threat, be it from inside or outside.
Tarrin stood in the shadow of a large manor house, near its fence, staring at the massive compound that was the Tower of Sorcery. He was a bit discouraged at what he saw. The obvious gates to the compound were guarded by men that frightened Tarrin not a little bit.
By the time he'd gotten to the huge towers, it dawned on him that the men guarding it would have no idea who he was. He didn't want to get into a fight with them, and he certainly didn't want them to go crazy at the sight of him, and more than once the thought that one of them would be happier turning him to the people looking for him crossed his mind. But he absolutely had to get inside. Jesmind could be behind any building, and the men that were obviously looking for him could be readying to slide a dagger in his back at any moment. The miasma smell of the large city, which was surprisingly clean for its size, effectively robbed him of his most powerful sense, his sense of smell, and the background noises prevelant in the city made it hard for him to lock in on the faint sounds of someone sneaking up on him. He had to get in, but he didn't want to risk trying to get in through the front gate. He wasn't going to feel safe until he was inside that tower, and in the presence of people that he felt he could trust. And that meant Dolanna, or Faalken, or Walten or Tiella.
That left doing it the other way. There was a fence surrounding the tower compound, an elegant structure of iron that rose up and ended in a tapered curl at the top. It was only about fifteen spans high, and it was much too elegant and showy to be very effective. It also had not one speck of rust anywhere on it. A one-eyed man with no legs could get over that fence in a very short amount of time, much faster than the regular patrols Tarrin saw roaming the fence perimeter to get there in time.
But it couldn't be that easy, and he knew it. That left only one solution. That fence had to be magic. This was the Tower of Sorcery. There were lots of people inside that could do magic. So if they were so lax about defending such a flimsy fence, then it only stood to reason that the fence was capable of defending itself.
A plan formed in his mind. He would get over that fence and get to those buildings across the open area, then use them as cover to sneak up to the overpowering presence of the central tower. Once he was there, he would find a way to sneak in. And after he was inside, he'd just surrender himself to the first person that walked by. They could find Dolanna, and Dolanna could set everything straight. And then he'd be safe.
Tarrin watched the movements of the patrolling guards closely. The men, dressed in white surcoats over a chain jack, moved in groups of four, with one man leading, two in the middle, and one man bringing up the rear. One man held a torch, the man in the back. That made sense, because it kept the glaring light out of the eyes of the men that were trying to see, while still illuminating their path. A group passed by about every ten minutes, but they didn't move at the same pace, so that amount of time changed randomly. Again, a good idea, because predictability was the first step down the road to defeat, when it came to anything military. He was just going to have to take his chances.
He waited almost another half hour, until one torch disappeared around a distant building, and he did not see another appear around the other corner. With a sudden lurch, he sprinted down the street that led up to the fence. He carefully gauged its height; he couldn't even so much as let an errant hair on his tail touch that iron. He glimpsed a spot of ruddy torch light just as he reached the point where he had to jump, because he was going too fast to turn aside. He sprang for all he was worth, clearing the fence clearly by nearly the length of his own tail, and he hit the ground at a dead run. He was across the two hundred space field in the same amount of time it took the average man to light a torch. He disappeared from sight just as the next patrol came around one of the buildings farther down the way.
With the stealth of the cat of which he was part, he slunk across the massive compound, around large buildings and small ones, across a sand-filled area that was obviously some sort of training area for military men, then between buildings where the sounds of sleeping men could be clearly heard. He ducked into a narrow gap between two small buildings to avoid another patrol, then he darted across an open area to another building that was right beside one of the six towers that surrounded the main spire. Even the surrounding towers were huge, hundreds of spans tall, and his neck craned as he looked up its dizzying height. The central tower was more than twice the height of the six surrounding ones, a massive cylinder that towered over the city the same way a lone tree towered over a meadow. The top of it had to be at least a thousand spans in the air, and the effort and engineering required to build it absolutely boggled his mind.