"Tarrin, you know some of the most unusual people," Mist laughed. "A Demon, a dragon, and everything in between."

"Normal people are boring," he replied with no humor.

"I think I'd like to meet this Demon," Mist said.

"You'll get your chance," he answered, pushing Jesmind out from him a little. "I'll warn you now, though, they smell worse than anything you could ever imagine. I've built up something or a resistance to it." He looked to his mate. "I want you to stay here," he told her. "And when Jula gets here and as soon as I track down Kimmie, I'm sending them up here too. I want all of you together, so you can protect each other in case they try this again."

"I'll do it for now," she said. "But don't make me stay here too long."

"We won't be here very long, Jesmind," he told her. "As soon as I tell Jenna what I'm going to need from them, we'll be on our way."

"Where are we going?"

"North," he said. "And we'll be travelling a long time. We have to go quite a distance."

"Why not just fly us there, like you did when we came to Suld?"

He shook his head. "This time, I want to go slow," he told her. "I have to arrive at our destination on a very specific day. If I'm too early or too late, the plan will fail. It's important, Jesmind. So if I slow us down or speed us up on the road, I don't want you to argue. Alright?"

"If we have to be there on this specific day, why not wait here and just magic ourselves there?"

"I don't want to be where people can find me," he told her. "I need to be travelling, on the road. I need to be looking like I'm on the way, not lounging around here looking like I'm planning something sneaky. Do you understand?"

"I, no, but I'll trust you," she said uncertainly, then she gave him a wan smile.

"I trust you, but I would like to know why it's so important," Mist said.

He looked at her. "Val wants the Firestaff, that much you should know," he told her. "But the Firestaff can only be used at a particular time on a particular day every five thousand years. We absolutely have to be there on that day, not a day sooner or a day later, because the immediacy of the situation will make Val desperate enough to give me the chance to get Jasana and get her out of there alive. You know that he'll have no intention of letting any of us leave him alive. I have to have a powerful bargaining chip when I do come for her, or else he won't do what we need him to do to get Jasana back alive. That chip is going to be the fact that if he doesn't do as I demand, he'll have to wait another five thousand years before he'll be freed. He knows that not even he can take the Firestaff away from me, Mist. It's locked in the elsewhere in my amulet, and any attempt to take it by force will cause it to be sealed up there forever, out of reach of everyone and everything. I have to give it to him, and that will give us the opportunity we need to get Jasana back."

Mist turned it over in her mind, and then nodded. "That's clever," she complemented.

"It's just luck that circumstances fell as they did," he snorted. "If Mother had never given me this amulet, and the amulet's magic wouldn't actively defend itself from attempts to defeat it or get the amulet away from me, I'd have no way to get Jasana back."

"Perhaps what you call luck someone else calls a plan," Mist told him, which made him start. She had a point, but to hear Mist talking like that was very odd. He'd never thought that she had much of a mind. Then again, he made the same mistake about her that so many others made about him. They saw nothing but his outwardly violent personality, thinking that someone who acted so brutish could not possibly also be rather intelligent.

"Maybe," he admitted.

"Did I ever tell you about when your Goddess visited us?" she asked, reaching under her shirt and pulling out a black shaeram. "She gave me and Eron these amulets."

Tarrin was a bit surprised. "No, she never told me, and neither did anyone else," he said honestly. He suddenly felt a little foolish. He'd seen the one Eron wore many times, but it had never crossed his mind as to where and how he got it. He'd been human then and had no memory, and it didn't seem odd to him at the time that Eron had one. Everyone seemed to have one, even him. But he had no excuse for not sensing the amulets after he regained his memory and his Were stature. In all the confusion and worry about what happened to him and his need to get out of the Tower quickly, he guessed he had never had the mind to realize what he was feeling from Eron's amulet. Then again, with all the background magic in the Tower, sometimes it was hard to sense things unless he was actively concentrating on it, or it was very, very close to him.

Accepting it as merely one of the many things that went on without his knowledge, Tarrin recalled his pack from the elsewhere, taking it off and setting it on the ground, then kneeling before it and rooting through it absently. He'd almost forgotten about what was inside it, and he had the feeling that it would be vitally useful. If Val was going to summon Demons, magical juggernauts and powerhouses of destruction, then it was only fair that their side call up similarly dreadful assets to challenge them.

Val had his Demons. Tarrin had dragons.

He pulled a small crystal bell, plain and unadorned, but the crystalline object almost pulsed with magic under his fingers. It was an object that Sapphire had made to allow him to contact her if he had an emergency. Well, this was an emergency.

Holding it by its top, he used a claw to sound the bell. It made a sweet, clear ring, a ring that reverberated in the air and seemed to increase in both its volume and the choral harmonics it emanated steadily. Then it suddenly stopped.

"What is that, Papa?" Eron asked, slinking forward to look at the small object.

"A means to call a friend," he answered, feeling the Wizard magic in the bell flare into life, feel it reaching across a vast distance, searching for something… searching… and then it found it.

"What is it, my little one?" Sapphire's voice called through the bell, replacing its crystal chime.

"Sapphire, I need your help," he said immediately. "In fact, we may need the help of every dragon you can find."

"What is so serious as to need that?" she asked.

"Val has raised an army of Goblinoids and Demons, my friend," he told her. "An army large enough to conquer everything on this side of the Desert of Swirling Sands." He blew out his breath. "And they've kidnapped Jasana."

"WHAT?" she demanded hotly.

"Demons working for Val attacked the Tower and took Jasana," he told her. "They've done it to force me to give them the Firestaff."

"We will see about that!" her voice was hot, almost infuriated. There was a long pause. "It is an attack on clan, Cyrus! Clan comes first! Tarrin, where are you now?"

"We're in the Tower. Our Goddess is organizing a massing of forces to face Val's army, but I'll be leaving soon to recover my daughter before the fighting makes it impossible for me to get to her."

"Where in the Tower?"

That question took him a little aback. "We're in a guest apartment," he replied. "Jesmind's was destroyed in the attack."

"What level? Which side?"

A little confused, he looked at the others. He honestly didn't know the answers to those questions. "Where are we?" he asked them.

"Ninth level, north side," Allia answered.

He repeated that to Sapphire dutifully. "Alright. Put the bell down, my little one, and back away from it. I'm coming right now."

Not sure what was going to happen, Tarrin put the bell on the floor and backed away from it. Mist grabbed Eron by the tail and dragged the curious cub away as they did the same, giving the little crystal bell a very wide berth. Jesmind looked at him in confusion, but he could only shrug and look at the bell. He had no idea what was going to happen either.