Poor Phandebrass. Tarrin saw the Imperial Library earlier that night, for it was in his sector. Phandebrass had waived him off, because the mage was searching the library during the day. That building was huge. And it was completely full of books! There had to be millions of books in that vault of paper! And Phandebrass was running in there and tackling it day after day, trying to find the one thing everyone else was also trying to find. From what Tarrin overheard while dozing, it was nearly militant inside the Library. Tarrin's group wasn't the only one to realize that the Firestaff's history had to be written down somewhere. Most of them didn't know it was in the Book of Ages. They thought if they read through enough history books, they'd find the clues they needed to find the artifact. Tarrin had to admit, it was a very smart plan. And if someone wanted to read alot of books, the Imperial Library was just about the best place to go. According to Phandebrass' telling, men were fighting each other between bookshelves to read certain books first. There had even been a few murders inside the Library. Everyone going in now went in with bodyguards, and that made the place look more like an exercise yard than the largest collection of knowledge in the world.

He looked down at the men and turned his ears in their direction. "We really should head for bed, captain," Scholar said with a yawn. "It's going to be another hard day tomorrow."

"Are ye so sure ye'll find the thing in there?" the seaman asked, in a gravelly voice that many sailors seemed to acquire after years of plying the waves. Perhaps the salt air had a degrading effect on the vocal chords.

"Not the Firestaff itself, Dunleary," Scholar answered. "But someone had to put it wherever it is, and odds are either he or someone with him, or someone he spoke to, wrote it down. It's just a matter of finding the right book."

Tarrin was impressed. Scholar was a sharp thinker.

"I still say it's in the Western Frontier," the Mahuut said. "It's unexplored, and the forest spirits defend it a bit too strictly for them not to be hiding something."

"Half the world is unexpored, Tas," Scholar chuckled. "Do you have any idea how large our world is?"

"Ever think them fairy folk just want to keep people out of their homes?" the seaman, Dunleary, asked the Mahuut bluntly. "I'd not be takin' too kindly to an armed party setting camp in my back yard, that's for damn sure."

"I still think I'm right."

"We'll find out, Tas," Scholar said with a slight grin. "One way or another."

They didn't know where the book was, but Tarrin found Scholar to be a bit too clever. The man was good, and in his mind, the man was a direct threat to his mission, a competitor. In this jungle, there could be no competition. The prize was too great.

They never knew what hit them.

Tarrin killed the Mahuut bodyguard instantly, breaking his neck as he literally landed on top of him from the roof. A single swipe of his claws ripped four deep gouges through the ship captain's neck and upper chest, spraying blood over Tarrin and the stunned scholar as the man fell backwards. The scholar managed to open his mouth, as if to say something, before the Were-cat reached him, grabbing him by the neck and closing his fist, crushing the throat and major blood vessels, and shattering the vertebrae in his neck. He tossed the limp body aside casually, wiping at blood that had spattered his face. He felt nothing at killing the men. They were adversaries, enemies, people who were directly opposing Tarrin's mission. In this matter, there would be no quarter, no mercy, and there would be no prisoners. By killing this one man, the pack seeking the prize was lessened, and that increased Tarrin's own chances of success. He would find that book, be it by luck, searching, or eliminating absolutely everyone else that could stand in his way. It didn't matter.

The scholar wasn't the first competitor Tarrin had killed that night. He'd left no more than ten bodies in the streets behind him, all men who proclaimed themselves Questors in his hearing. All ten of them were immediately killed. Just the idea that one of them could beat him to the book was enough to justify it in his own mind. He wouldn't risk that Faalken's death would be in vain, just because he had passed up the chance to kill a rival when he had the chance.

Tarrin was the king of this jungle, and he enforced his rule in the practical, occasionally violent ways of the animal within him. There would be no challenge to his reign.

He climbed back up onto the roof and held out the medallion. He'd been led by it six times so far tonight, all of them failures. It was strange what the medallion considered an ancient artifact. One took him over an hour to find, a small gold coin buried in a basement, probably dropped when Dala Yar Arak was the size of Suld. It had been nearly two spans down, a lost relic of long ago, buried in the sands of time. He had that coin in his litle belt pouch. Phandebrass liked old things, so he'd let the doddering mage inspect it. Fortunately for him, the house had been empty, so his digging didn't wake anyone up. But he was sure they'd be shocked to find a deep hole in their basement the next time they went in there.

Northwest. The next target was northwest, and it wasn't that far away.

Along the way, Tarrin saw the one thing that could probably still move him. His search took him from the middle class neighborhood where he had been and into an area of poverty, where people wearing dirty, worn clothes milled about on the darkened streets. This section of the city had no lanterns. It wasn't the worst place he'd seen so far, though. The buildings were in bad disrepair, but there were some parts of the city that could only be called garbage dumps, where the houses were either falling down or had already fallen down. This area's buildings still stood, but most were a hair's bredth from collapse. The homeless and the predators of the night collected in areas like these, the homeless because the city's patrols wouldn't bother them here, and the predators for the same reason. Dala Yar Arak's police force was corrupt and selective as a group, protecting the rich at the expense of the poor. It wasn't the state of the city's politics that bothered him, it was seeing the children starve.

They were down there. He could see them, children who were either homeless or had nowhere to go, wearing dirty clothes and with dirt on their faces. And they looked so afraid. The young were easy targets for the city's predators, and they lived in a state of constant fear and anxiety. It amazed him that seeing humans suffer could move him so, but it did. He could look at the homeless men and women and not bat an eye, but the homeless, cast away child stirred him in ways he didn't think he could be stirred anymore. It made him so angry that things could come to this, that children were cast away like the night's garbage and nobody would help them. The thought of seeing Janette out there like that, or Jenna, or his unborn son, filled him with an irrational need to hit those responsible for it, and hit everyone else that wouldn't help them. He knew that some of them were out there because they chose to be, but nobody chose to live in misery. That they considered life on the streets better than living at home seemed just as bad.

But there were just too many. He couldn't help them all, and that made him keep his distance. If he helped one, he would feel guilty that he couldn't do the same for the others. It hurt to make that decision, but it was a decision of ruthless pragmatism. He had a mission to accomplish, and even if he stopped to help a few of them, it was time he couldn't afford to waste. There was no gain in it. It wasn't eliminating false leads, and it wasn't reducing the numbers of his competition. There was one little girl out there that he did know, that had saved his life, and he wasn't going to destroy her future. No matter how much it bothered him, he had to turn his back to what he was seeing.