"Well, you wouldn't be the only one walking around alone," the barkeep noted. "They got all them fool adventurers running around, looking for something. What did they call it? The staff of fire? Something like that. About all they're doing is driving down the price of slaves at the auction block."

"They're being enslaved?"

"The ones that don't know to stay in the merchant sectors of the city," the barkeep replied. "Ain't nobody allowed to catch foreigners in those places, because of the Festival of the Sun and all. It's when they leave the protected areas that they get in trouble."

He had eliminated another lead. The sword was impressive, but it wasn't the book. "My thanks, barkeep," Tarrin said, resettling the sheath and handing it back to him. The man put it back on the wall, and Tarrin finished the last of the sandtree ale. While he was drinking, he noticed a shift in things behind him. Things got a little quiet, and he could hear the shuffling movements of someone moving quickly. In the act of upending the mug, he turned the corner of his eye behind him, where he saw three indistinct figures holding something between them.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Tarrin warned after he set the mug down, in a reasonable tone. "I'm alot more trouble than I'm worth."

"If that's true, then you'd make one hell of a gladiator," a smug voice sneered from behind. Tarrin turned around, and found himself besieged by three men. Two held a rope between them, and the third had his sword readied.

"I'm only going to say this once," Tarrin said in a merciless tone that made the other men at the bar shrink back from him, "turn around and go back to your table now, and you may live to see tomorrow. You don't want to fight with me. You can't even imagine what I can do to you."

"I think you don't have enough teeth to back that up, kid," the tallest of the three smirked.

"Then let's take this outside," Tarrin said in a grim tone. "I promised the barkeep I wouldn't bust up his tavern. I'm a man of my word. I'm not going to kill you in his common room"

"The only way you're going out is trussed up, boy," the man said with an evil laugh. "You ain't got no weapon. Just give up now, and you won't get hurt."

Tarrin took one step away from the bar, closer to them, a move that made them all tense up in anticipation. "Why are humans such fools?" Tarrin asked with a slight sigh. That he said human made the barkeep's eyes widen. Tarrin released himself from his human form, his body lengthening as he returned to his Were-cat height, his tail and ears and paws returning to what was sweetly normal. His shapeshifting froze everyone in a moment of shock, and he used that to lash out with his arm, grabbing the tallest man by the neck and hauling him off his feet to look the Were-cat in the eye. "The next time someone hands you your life, you should take it," he hissed, then he crushed the man's neck in his grip. The body shuddered horribly, then went eerily limp. Tarrin threw it aside like a sack of meal, which was enough of a slap in the face to the other two men for them to shake off their momentary paralysis and turn to flee.

They managed two steps. Tarrin hit them from behind, driving one to the floor as his tail whipped around the ankles of the other. The one under his knee died soundlessly as a single claw sliced through the back of his neck, severing the spinal cord. The other tried to crawl away wildly, but a paw on the ankle arrested his motion. "No, no no no no no!" the man blubbered in terror as Tarrin dragged him back to where he could get his claws on him, a blubber that turned into a scream when the claws on his other paw drove into his side, giving him a deathgrip on the squirming man that could not be broken. The squealing cries were cut short when Tarrin's paw grabbed the man's head from behind, claws digging into his face, then he jerked his paw back with a snap, forcing the man's head further than it was designed to go. The body jumped, then sagged lifeless to the floor with the head laying at an unnatural angle, and four deep gashes dug into his face.

Tarrin stood up and looked at the stunned patrons of the inn. "Anyone else want to try to catch me?" Tarrin asked in a dangerous tone, pointing at them with a bloodstained claw. "No? Good." He reached into his belt pouch and pinched a couple of coins out between the tips of his claws, and lobbed them at the surprised barkeeper. "For the mess," he said politely, then he stalked towards the door. They melted away before him, and stayed as far from him as they could manage.

He gave it not another thought once he was outside. He vaulted up to the rooftops and was out of sight before the first man could get to the door. On top of the inn's roof, he took out the medallion and held it up. Maybe this time would be lucky. The medallion was pointing due west, a distance of about a longspan.

Soaring over the street, the Were-cat's profile was visible against the moon for just a second, and then he was gone. Leaving behind him a firestorm of rumor and gossip.

"By the Cloudspire, boy!" Camara Tal grunted irritably at Dar, putting a hand to her chest in a display of surprise, "would you stop doing that?"

Dar had literally appeared right in front of her. Intrigued by the Faerie's magical power to turn invisible, Dar had been experimenting with finding a way to do it with Sorcery. What he got as a result wasn't exactly true invisibility, but it was a very close substitute. He simply projected an Illusory image of whatever was behind him. It only worked against those who faced a single direction, but he could move the effect to hide himself from someone looking in a direction other than into the Illusion. The nature of the weave caused whatever was behind him in relation to the onlooker to appear in the Illusion, whether he could see it or not. The result was a wall of Illusory invisibility that, though it only worked in one direction, was still a very formidable magical effect. He was quite proud of his weave, and Dolanna had been impressed by the intricate nuances of the spell's weaving.

He blushed slightly. "Sorry," he apologized. "I thought you knew I was there."

"How do you think I'd know?" she asked waspishly as the scaly drake landed on the Arkisian's shoulder. "Did you find it?"

"No," he sighed. "It was an old mirror, not a book."

"Well, at least we ruled another one out," she told him evenly, unrolling her map. She marked off the location of the house the young man had just invaded with a curt stroke of a charcoal writing stick. For most of the night, they had crisscrossed large patches of ground, having to travel longspans to reach the next indicated object, and through it all the Amazon had bristled. She was a proud woman, proud and strong, and she took exception to the simple deception they were using to get around. Dar was Arkisian, which meant that he was a cousin to the Arakites. He looked exactly like an average Arakite, and he spoke the language, so it made perfect sense for him to pose as an Arakite, with Camara Tal pretending to be his slave. It had saved them a great deal of trouble, but Camara Tal stiffened every time Dar pretended to command her in front of people they met on the street. "That makes five. This would go faster if we didn't have to travel longspans from place to place. What insanity possessed these people to all live together like this?"

"They probably don't know anything different," Dar replied sagely. He held up the medallion, watching as it began to glow with a faint reddish light, and tugged him towards the south. "That's right, Turnkey, we're going that way," Dar told the green drake as it looked past the medallion.

The drake chirped lightly, settling more on his shoulder.

"I'm surprised," Camara Tal grunted. "I thought only the Selani could make them fawn like that."