"What was that about?" Jesmind asked as the Goddess withdrew from him.

He told her quickly. "As long as we stay underground, the Elder god of the earth will hide us from Val," he concluded. "So we'll be safe until we leave the caves."

"Too bad we can't take caves all the way there," she fretted.

"I know, but since when are things ever that easy for us?"

She laughed. "No doubt there." Then she frowned deeply, glancing at him. "If the Goddess is worried about this Val frying the dragons in the army, what's going to stop him from frying the army?" she asked. "Are the other gods going to protect them?"

"They won't interfere directly," he said grimly. "They're too afraid."

"Then who's going to stop Val from killing our army?"

"The gods won't interfere directly," he told her. "They won't attack. But as long as Val doesn't directly attack them, they will defend the army against his power. They can do that much without inciting a direct confrontation. You know, one of those things that may destroy the world."

Jesmind glanced at him, her eyes suspicious, then she seemed to understand. She snorted, putting her paws on her hips. "A silly way to have a war," she said. "Where half the people on our side are too afraid to do what they have to do."

"Well said," he nodded. "Now, if I'm going to do this, I'd better rest a while."

"Why don't you take a bath with me?" she invited, grabbing the end of his tail and tugging lightly. "That will relax you."

"And we'll end up doing something more strenuous than what I'll be doing when I'm making the objects," he said dryly.

"Well, at least you'll sleep soundly afterward," she said with a naughty smirk, pulling on his tail more insistently. "Come on, my mate. Let me pamper you a little before you have to wear yourself out with your magic."

"How can I refuse a naked woman?" he asked with a smile.

"Why do you think I took off my clothes?"

He laughed and let her lead him to her favorite bathing pool by his tail.

It was, by far, one of the hardest things he had ever had to do.

It had cost him two days of sleepless, continuous effort, but now, two days and alot of energy later, he held the final result of his toil in his paws. It was an unassuming-looking leather belt with a gold buckle shaped in the fashion of a cat's head. The leather was as supple as silk but as strong as steel, leather of the highest quality, and the gold pure, alloyed with other metals just enough to allow it to retain its shape-in its purest state, gold was a very soft, malleable metal.

It had certainly been worth the effort. After Jesmind had indeed pampered him a little bit, massaging him, paying him very gentle and loving attention, he slept a while and got to work. He decided on using a belt because it was a rather mundane item, not the kind of thing that one would identify as a rare magical object. And besides, the phsyical characteristics of his race made a belt more practical than other things. He already wore a necklace, earrings and rings were impractical for a Were-cat, and they couldn't wear boots. Their claws made any kind of magical garment a dangerous proposition, since an errant claw may tear the garment and disrupt its magical properties, and some kind of token or object that wasn't worn could conceivably be lost or dropped by accident. A belt wouldn't come off unless it was taken off, it served a useful purpose other than that of its magic, and it was the last thing someone would suspect was a magical device. It was safely out of the way of a Were-cat's claws, and its sturdy leather would resist any incidental claw that may brush across it.

After he decided on using a belt, he bent to the task of Creating one. He tried several times until he got one that he felt was good enough to accept a magical enchantment. After that was done, he then proceeded with the very difficult task of infusing it with magical power. He had never done it before, but the knowledge of how it was done was solidly in his mind, part of what he'd learned when he was turned. He went very carefully nonetheless, not wanting to waste precious time by messing it up and having to start all over again from scratch.

It was alot harder than he thought it would be. He had to use High Sorcery to start the process, preparing the object to receive a magical enchantment, and that was alot more critical to the process than he first realized. The better he did with the preparation, the more magic the object could accept, and therefore the greater its potential. Preparing an object was purely a function of art, not spellweaving, for he had to pattern his preparing weaves carefully to take the material and feel of the object into account. The preparing weave had to fuse with the belt's leather and gold seamlessly, flawlessly, becoming so united with it that it was as if it had always been there. Since every object was different, that made every attempt to prepare an object a unique exercise in being able to bring out the utmost potential of the object in question. This was why the object had to be of the utmost quality, he realized after he had begun. If the object was shabbily made, its impure nature would taint the process of preparing it to receive a permanent magical enchantment. An object of quality would be much more receptive to the preparing spell, more attuned to the purity of the magic it was being prepared to contain.

This was where Tarrin ran into his first problem. The belt he had Created was an object of quality, but it had a certain sterility to it that the magic had trouble overcoming. A normal object made by the hands of a master craftsman showed in its very nature the effort the craftsman had expended to make it, but Tarrin's Created belt had no such sense in it. It made it unusual, and magical spells as delicate as the one he was using did not like unusual. But the mutable nature of the spell allowed him to work around this little problem, and as such it served more as an educational tool that would better prepare him when he made the second belt.

After he solved that problem, he finished with the preparation of the belt, infusing it with a weave that would bind to the magic that was put into it afterwards, and render them permanent. Once that was done, he began on the work of placing the magic itself. He had to do it flow by flow, carefully, painstakingly, interlacing his work with the binding weave, carefully placing it, then checking it, then double-checking it. He had to maintain the flows he was setting the entire time, every flow, and the effort of keeping a steadily growing and more complicated weave organized was part of the exhausting effort of doing what he was doing. The flows did not set, the flows did not hold themselves. He had to place each one and hold it right where it was as he started with the next.

The binding weave that would make the whole thing permanent did help in that regard. By altering it in a very slight way, he caused a portion of its binding effect to become active, which held the flows he already set down where they were and give him a chance to rest. But the binding was very temporary, rarely lasting more than an hour, and the flows tended to drift a little bit while they were being artificially maintained by the binding weave. Every time he paused to eat or rest, he had to go back over all the work he'd already done and correct minor shifts in the flows that, had he not fixed them, would have caused the whole thing to be ruined if he tried to activate the object. After he finished that, a process that could take anywhere up to two hours by itself, he could continue the slow, painstaking process of weaving the spell flow by careful flow.

It took him nearly a day and a half of constant effort to complete the three weaves. They would have been very easy to weave on their own, but the demands and requirements of putting them into the belt were very, very different from usual Sorcery. He had to interlace the weaves so they could work together, yet be separate. He also had to very carefully overlay the weave of non-detection so the magic of the belt wouldn't be apparent to anyone but someone with as much power and skill as he, who was the creator of the item, had. It would take a sui'kun to get around the powerful weave of non-detection in the belt and recognize it for what it really was. He also had to carefully program in the triggers that would give the wearer the power to command the magic the belt made available. Tarrin had already decided that the only triggers needed were the ability to activate or deactivate both the Illusion and the ability to walk over water-like surfaces like they were solid ground. The non-detection would never deactivate, forever defending the belt and its wearer from magical detection of the magic the belt contained, but only the magic that was contained within the belt. He had to very carefully find where in the structure of the weaves to place those two triggers, which would cause the magic to activate and deactivate without disturbing the function of the belt or the operation of its other two functions. That was not easy. If he put it in the wrong place, a trigger to deactivate one function could cause all the belt's magic to stop working. If he really messed up, he could set the trigger in a place that would permanently disrupt the magic he'd placed in it, rendering it nonmagical. The setting of triggers was a very delicate operation, which was why magical devices like the Cat's Claws, which had many functions and also had the ability to change its operation depending on a great many possibilites, were so incredibly rare. His respect for his sister reached new heights when he realized how staggering the effort to make those bracers had to have been. The many layers of triggers concerning the operation of the blades was eclipsed only by the raw power of the magic she'd placed into them to make them serve as magical armor. It had to have taken her rides to make those things, rides of constant effort and no sleep.