"What's the matter, Tarrin?" Keritanima asked, putting her hand on his shoulder.

"Just thinking about Aldreth," he sighed. "If Daltochan did invade Sulasia, then it's probably being occupied. I hope everyone's alright."

"I wouldn't worry about it too much," she assured him. "If your villagers are anything like you described them, they're all probably hiding in the Frontier. I don't even think the Dals would dare to go in there after them."

"I hope so," he said.

The ship suddenly lurched slightly to the side, and Tarrin felt someone-three someones-using Sorcery above decks. They had joined in a circle, and Dolanna was using weaves of air to move the ship. "Sometimes Sorcery can come in handy," Keritanima chuckled. "I wish I could be helping."

"They can handle it, Kerri," he told her.

"It's still not the same."

"You just want an excuse to use your power."

"Well, you didn't have to put it that way," she said, slapping him lightly on the shoulder. "You make me sound like a braggart."

"I'm so sorry that you can't handle the truth," he said absently.

Keritanima stuck her tongue out at him.

"Brat," he said to her.

"Count on it," she replied.

With the help of Dolanna and her pupils, the Star of Jerod slid out into the narrow harbor and through the inlet, and out into the open sea. The ship's departure was very much noticed by Roulet, both in that a ship was somehow sailing out to the sea directly into a headwind, and that it was the Star of Jerod that was doing it. The ship turned southward as soon as it cleared the shallows around the head of the inlet fortresses, angling on a southerly track that would take it out to the horizon. As soon as the ship passed sight of the fortresses of Roulet, the non-humans and Azakar were allowed to come back up on deck, come back up to a rather dark night. A cloud bank had moved in, and was concealing the light of the Skybands and the moons. Yet Kern continued on his southerly course confidently, using a device called a compass, that pointed towards magnetic north all the time. Tarrin was rather intrigued by the device, and Kern explained how it was done to him after he followed the captain into the navigation room.

"It's easy, Tarrin," the captain said in his raspy voice. "As long as we know what direction we go in and how long we go that way, we can figure out where we are on this map. Then we can change our heading so we can travel to specific spots."

Tarrin nodded. "My mother taught me all about that, but the Ungardt don't use that little compass device. They use the stars."

"Any navigator worth his salt can navigate by the stars, but the compass makes it much more precise," Kern told him.

"I don't know, Kern. Some Ungardt navigators can put you within spans of where you want to go."

"That's because they're experienced," Kern said. "You can say that about anyone, if he has enough time doing it."

"I guess. How does this thing work?" he asked, pointing to a second compass that was mounted beside the map table.

"Well, near as I can figure, that little needle was exposed to lodestone," he said. "Lodestone sticks to metal, I'm sure you've heard, but it also always points to the north if you hang it from something. Metal that's been stuck to a lodestone for a while can make other metal stick to it, just like a lodestone. Well, it passes on that point to north trick too."

"So, they make a needle, then stick it onto a lodestone, then when it's absorbed the lodestone's magic, they put it on that axle," Tarrin said.

"Just about," Kern said. "I ain't never seen them make a compass before, but that sounds like the way someone would go about it."

Tarrin touched the compass' protective glass with the tip of a claw, tapping on the glass gently to see if the needle would react. But it didn't. "Be careful," Kern warned. "That compass cost me five hundred gold."

Tarrin watched the navigator, a slim man with gray hair named Luke, make some notes on a chart. The map was a map of the coastline of Shace, from Den Gauche to the town of Roulet, all the way down to the southwestern tip of the western continent, where the large island just off the Cape of the Horn held the island-city of Dayise, one of the largest and best known port cities in the world. Dayise was utterly devoted to ships, trade, and cargo, from shipping companies to the famed shipbuilders on the north side of the island to the independent captains that called Dayise their home port. No ship that sailed the Sea of Storms of the Sea of Glass, to the south of the continent, had missed docking in Dayise. It was said that all roads led to Suld, which sat at the hub of an ancient road system built long before any of the modern kingdoms were forged, but it could also be said that all ships sailed to Dayise. The coastline of Shace, it seemed, was rather irregular and jagged, with a multitude of tiny inlets and bays and coves, as well as innumerable small barrier and shore-hugging islands. Those islands were the reason that the Star of Jerod was sailing so far out to sea. That, and those islands were reputed to be the haunting places of some of the smaller bandit and pirate operations in Shace. Only the small ones. The Pirate Isles, some two hundred leagues southwest of Dayise, were infamous as the home base of many a famous pirate.

Shace was something of a lawless place, his father had told him once. Because of the weakness of the king, the local Marquis, what Tarrin would call a Baron, actually ran the kingdom. Because of that decentralized government, bandit gangs and organized crime were rampant all over the kingdom. That lawlessness occasionally spilled over into other kingdoms, which was why Sulasia maintained the Line of the Hawk, a series of forts along the border of Shace that discouraged armed parties from trying to slip into Sulasia. Shace also had trouble with the Free Duchies to the east, the remnants of what was once the kingdom of Tor, as well as a few desmenses of former Shacean Marquis. That was one of the most dangerous areas in the west, which was nothing more than a series of independent city-states, which controlled only the land around them. The land between the city-states was often a no-man's land ruled by whatever warlord had the upper hand at the time. More than once, a warlord had tried to reunite the Free Duchies, but the intense enmity between the city-states made that almost impossible. The Free Duchies had been embroiled in a series of wars over the centuries that would have done Tykarthia and Draconia proud. The only reason that the place didn't explode into all-out war was because that region of the Western Kingdoms was the richest, most fertile farmland to be found. The Free Duchies were often called the bread basket of the west. There was war and struggle, to be sure, but it always happened to occur after a harvest. Not even the most maniacal ruler of a free city would march his army over the food that ran his city. That huge production of food also tended to keep the citizens of the city-states content, and content citizenry rarely found the energy to support a war with some other city.

"What is this place?" Tarrin asked, pointing to a strange triangular symbol on the map. It was on the coastline, probably about twenty leagues from Roulet.

"That? Oh, that's Bajra Myrr," Luke replied, looking at the map. "One of the Seven Cities of the Ancients."

That was a name that he recognized, because they had talked about it in the Novitiate classes. The Seven Cities were cities built and abandoned long before Suld was built. Nobody knew who built them, why, or what happened to them, they just knew their names. They were so ancient that even those that Tarrin referred to as the Ancients had no idea who they had been. Though the old katzh-dashi were considered the Ancients, the peoples who built those seven cities were also called the Ancients. But the two peoples shared nothing in common more than that term, because the true Ancients disappeared long before the katzh-dashi Ancients had settled in Suld. To a Sorcerer it may seem confusing, but when one considered that only the katzh-dashi and those who had studied them called the old Sorcerers the Ancients, it made more sense. Sorcerers called their ancestors the Ancients, but often called the denizens of those forgotten cities the Old Ones to separate them.