The man bellowed as Tarrin slowly twisted his paw, digging the claws in deeper. "It was a Wizard!" he said in a high-pitched voice. "I don't know his name! Belleth knew it!" Tarrin twisted his claws. "Kravon!" he shrieked. "I work for Kravon!"
Then Tarrin felt a coldness at his back. He turned around, ignoring the many Novices that had opened their doors to see what the commotion was about. The shadows behind him seemed to coalesce, and then two slits of pure green radiance appeared. The unearthly cold told him all he needed to know.
It was a Wraith.
The man looked over Tarrin's hip at the apparition, and then he screamed a scream of such terror that it chilled Tarrin's blood. He did himself grievous injury as he suddenly thrashed against the Were-cat, whose claws were still sunk in his belly, but in his wild panic he felt not a whit of pain. The Wraith advanced with shocking speed on them and reached out. Tarrin knew that the touch of a Wraith was the cold of the grave, and it meant death. Even in his rage, he was still lucid enough to know when to bolt. He sprang away from the conjured creature, trampling the man under him in his flight. The man, bleeding freely from his ripped stomach, stared at the Wraith in terror, his body paralyzed by fear, watching that insubstantial hand.
Even as it sank into his chest.
The man made a single gurgling sound and arched his back, and then he moved no more. He remained in that hideously twisted position even after the Wraith withdrew its hand from his chest. The Wraith took one look at Tarrin, and then it simply vanished.
Control returning to him, Tarrin and a few other Novices warily approached the dead man as others screamed hysterically, and more than one Novice cried out or was noisily sick. The man's skin was blue, and the eyes were open and glazed.
The man's body was frozen solid.
Tarrin shivered when he felt the cold radiating from the frozen corpse, then he heard Dar moan and start retching. Tarrin had not left the other one in very presentable condition. Elsa charged out of her door wearing only a nightshirt and brandishing her axe, then stopped when she saw the nude Were-cat standing over the frozen corpse. "What happened?" she demanded hotly.
"This one and the one in my room tried to kill me," Tarrin said in a cold fury, panting to keep control of himself. The Cat was howling for blood, and it wanted to punish the ones who had dared try to take his life. It just wanted to destroy things at the moment, to vent its rage on whatever was handy, but Tarrin's rational mind wouldn't allow that. Such a mindless display of violence would solve nothing. But it still wasn't easy.
Elsa glanced into his room, which now had no door. She shivered a bit. "What did you do to him?" she asked, then she glanced at the blood and flesh still hanging from Tarrin's right paw. "Nevermind, I think I know," she said in a bit of a weak voice. "Tarrin, go down to the baths and wash off all that blood. Take Dar with you."
"Alright," he said tightly. Dar still coughed a great deal as they left for the baths, Tarrin stalking the halls unclad in a fury as Dar followed behind carrying Tarrin's robe. Down in the bathing chamber, Tarrin dropped into the pool and started cleaning off his arms and paws. He was a bit surprised at the amount of blood he had on him; it was even spattered on his face and chest, and smeared over his torso. He'd stepped through a pool of it, and bloody footprints. Dar sat on a chair with his head in his hands, leaned over and still coughing a bit here and there.
"Are you alright?" Tarrin asked as he climbed out of the pool.
"Yeah," he said weakly. "Just imagine waking up to see something like that," he said with a weak chuckle. "I don't think I'll ever eat meat again."
"Sorry, but he tried to kill me," Tarrin said. "And I doubt they would have left you alive either."
"I know," he said. "But why did you have to-do that?"
"It seemed appropriate at the time," he said. "I didn't even think about it."
"Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, Dar," he said. "I thought I was dead when I saw that Wraith. I'm just lucky it wasn't after me."
"What does that mean?"
"Wraiths are conjured up for a specific purpose," Tarrin told him, repeating what Dolanna had told him so long ago. "That's all they'll do, what they were conjured to do. That one was conjured to kill that man before I could get him to talk," he said with a growl. "All I got was-"
Tarrin's heart seized in his chest when a faint trace of an old scent touched his nose. He bowed down and sniffed delicately at the stone, trying to block out the strong smells of the mineral-rich water. The scent of her passage was still on the stones. Jesmind had been in the bathing chamber. A whirlwind of conflicting emotion welled up in him at that scent, and most primary of them all was fear. He feared Jesmind more than anything else in the world, because he knew, beyond any doubt, that she was there to kill him. And unlike most in the Tower, she was very capable of doing it. It was almost an ironic twist that she would show up so soon after he'd nearly been killed. It was like an omen.
"Dar," he said in a hushed voice.
"What?"
"Get up. We have to get out of here."
Dar looked around. "What's wrong?"
"Jesmind is here," he said in a quiet, forboding voice. "We have to get back to where there's people."
Dar scrambled to his feet, his eyes darting in all directions, handing Tarrin the robe and rushing after him as Tarrin made quickly for the stairs. They mounted the base of the staircase, but Tarrin stopped dead when a silhouette came around a corner and stood at the top. A silhouette with a tail. His heart froze in his chest, and then it was replaced with a calm, almost unemotional void. He had nowhere to run, and that meant that he would have to fight.
She came down step by step, slowly coming into the light. She was wearing the same white tunic and canvas breeches, which were a bit frayed and torn, but they were clean, just like her. Her eyes were glowing from within with that greenish aura, two slits of pure evil in the shadows, which were a clear indication of her fury. "It's been a very long time, Tarrin," she said in a deceptively mild voice.
"Not long enough," Tarrin growled, his ears laying back and his own eyes igniting from within.
"I hope you enjoyed your time here," she said, her claws coming out, "because you're out of it!"
And with that, she dove off the steps and slammed shoulder first into the startled Tarrin's chest, driving them both back down the stairs.
Both of them were Were-cat, and they both had the same abilities. Tarrin and Jesmind both knew exactly where they were in relation to the ground, and the stairs, so while they tumbled down they both fought to put the other under when they hit the bottom. Tarrin lost that fight, coming down right on the back of his head, but he almost instinctively kicked up and out as hard as he could. With his back on the floor, it gave him a brace, and Jesmind was hurled up and over his head. He rolled to his feet as she tucked in midair, tumbling end over end several times before lightly landing on her feet some distance away. Tarrin had time to rip the rope holding the robe closed and yank it off before she got set again, shedding the constricting garment and not giving her anything to grab onto except his hair. He flung that robe in her face as she lunged at him, covering her head and upper torso, then he ducked down and let her sail past him. Her tail hooked his ankle as she passed, and it almost yanked his leg out from under him. He managed to keep his feet, but it instantly stopped her forward momentum, putting her in claw's reach of him. Even without seeing, she raked her wicked claws right across his chest, digging extremely deep furrows into him, furrows that went all the way to the bone. Had she hit him lower, he realized instantaneously, she'd have disemboweled him.
The pain was serious, but not more than he could withstand. He grabbed hold of her wrist before it could get out of reach, then reared back and slammed the sole of his foot into her cloak-clad head, yanking on her arm in the same instant to increase the force of it. She grunted in pain, and that turned to a yowl when Tarrin kept his foot up and pushed against her head as his grip on her arm pulled her into it, trying to break her neck. Her tail lashed around and up, right between the legs, sending a white-hot flash of excrutiating pain through him. He instantly let go of her, stumbling backwards against a chair as she stumbled back a few paces herself, tearing the robe from her face. Tarrin saw her eyes go completely wild, and she shrieked at him incoherently as she rushed forward. She'd lost control of herself, entering the rage that Tarrin had felt on the edges of his own consciousness many times, a rage that had suddenly boiled up in him in response to her own. Tarrin lost himself to the rage, and met the beast in her face to face.