r closed, Tarrin padded back out towards the edge of the tier, looking at the building.  He saw the door now, which was a set of double-doors that, when taken together, were significantly taller and wider than normal doors.  To give room for the wings, he realized.
	He stopped at the edge of the tier and looked down.  It was about forty spans to the next tier, but some of the roofs of the houses and buildings below were close to the level of the floor of the tier he was currently occupying.  The effect wasn't one of blocky descent as one looked out over the city, but rather one of gradual sloping towards the edges of the magical city.  There were a few holes in that sloping regularity, but they were too far away for his cat's eyes to see much.  Tarrin's vision wasn't very sharp in cat form, more geared for seeing motion than making out details.  Seeing at distance required vision able to pick out details.  He could see to the end of the city, but that far away was little more than a blur of different colors against the continual sky.  Those empty areas were dark splotches against the tan backdrop of the city.
	"What are those empty places?" Tarrin asked Sarraya.
	"Looks like marketplaces," Sarraya replied.  "I see alot of Aeradalla in them.  I can only guess they're buying things."  There was a pause.  "I wonder how they keep from running into each other in the air," she mused.  "There are alot of them, and only so much airspace overhead."
	"Who knows?" he asked, turning around.  The magical object was up, and from the sense of it, it was in the Conduit at the heart of the spire.  That would place it more or less in the exact center of the city itself.  "We have to go that way," he told her, looking back towards the wall of the next tier up, which was about half a longspan away.  As far as he could judge.  "We'll have to move at night.  I'll have to change to get up the tier walls, and I can't do that in the daytime without getting spotted."
	"Good plan," Sarraya agreed.  "Let's go find some dark, quiet place that can't be seen from above, and we'll rest."
	"Why so it can't be seen?"
	"Aeradalla are probably related to hunting birds, Tarrin, and if you didn't know, raptors have eyesight that rivals Allia's.  They can see a mouse in high grass from a longspan away."
	"You have a point," he acceded.  "Alright, but I'm not going to spend the rest of the day hiding in that tunnel.  We'll just have to find some other place."
	"I think we can find something," she assured him.  "If worse comes to worst, I'll just conjure up something to hide us until nightfall."
	"Good enough," he said calmly as he padded back into the alley.
 
Chapter 15

	The night was a different time of day, to be certain, but it was also an entirely different state of mind. It was a time of mystery, a time for things to occur that had no place under the light of the sun, a dark time for dark creatures, carrying out dark deeds.
	But just as many things were, the dark was often misunderstood by those who were not governed by it.  Tarrin stood on the edge of the selfsame ledge he had occupied during the daytime, standing between those same two buildings with a surprisingly warm, gentle wind pulling at his braid and tail.  He was wearing his body for the dark, his natural form, standing on that ledge and looking out on the city with eyes much better suited for taking in the landscape.  To any Aeradalla that may happen to see him, he looked a mysterious, ominous figure, a creature out of bedtime stories--or nightmares, as the case may be--a decidedly unnatural being that was clearly invading the home territory of that avian race.  But such conclusions were incorrect, for the Were-cat had not come as a baby-stealer or an inciter of chaos, but merely as a curious tourist of sorts, who was there for one reason and one reason only.
	Now that he could see the city, he better understood how it probably operated.  What he had seen as empty holes in the regularity of the landscape were indeed open patches on the tiers, but what he hadn't seen before was that they weren't the last tiers in the vast rings.  There were many more past them, and they all glowed greenish in the soft light of the Skybands and the full White Moon, Domammon.  They were farm fields, and they occupied the outside rings of the city's land.  The Aeradalla weren't just hunters and gatherers, they had found a way to farm up on this skyborne city.  The effort required to haul dirt suitable for farming up to this city was quite staggering to consider, and it increased his respect for the winged race by many degrees.  Especially when considering that the open land devoted to farming took up over a third, but not quite nearly half of the available land that existed up on the city's platform.  On a platform that ran about ten longspans from center to outside edge, three or four longspans of that radius was given over to farmland.
	Since they did farm, that meant that water had to be plentiful here.  He hadn't seen any indications of it yet, but he had a ways to go, and he was pretty sure he'd find the answer to that question on his way up.
	The buildings immediately inside the ring bordering the farms was filled with large buildings of open construction.  Odds were that they were buildings supporting the farming efforts, holding harvests, tools, and other implements required to farm the land brought up here.  Instead of building their barns and sheds on the precious land, they had moved them up to the next tier, so every available inch of farming land was made available.  That was a very smart move, he recognized.
	The buildings inside the barn tier were somewhat large, and those few tiers were where the openings in the skyline were located.  Those had to be shops and taverns; a merchant district of sorts.  The buildings above those tiers were occupied by a slew of smallish buildings that had to be homes, and he saw as he looked that the further up one looked, the larger and more ornate the houses became.  Altitude was a measure of wealth and influence in this strange city, he reasoned.  The higher one lived, the higher one's station.  He had come out on a tier that had relatively nice homes--something of a middle class of sorts--and he realized that he was just inside that tenuous border.  Smaller, cruder houses were on the tier just below the one on which he stood.  At the edge of each tier, located symmetrically, were block-and-tackle platforms built off the tier's edge.  Loading platforms, he realized, to move items too heavy to carry in flight from one tier to the next.
	That seemed all well and good, but it made him curious as to how they got all those goods up here in the first place.  If they were too heavy to carry up the tiers, how did they get them up into the city?  It was a puzzle, a curiosity, and he would probably skulk around for an answer while travelling to his destination.  There were too many things about this city that didn't add up, and his curiosity as to how things worked was starting to override his duty to simply take a look at the object and leave.  He'd probably never get another chance to find out, and those things would nag at him for the rest of his life if he didn't find the answers.
	He concluded that the platform had not been magically created.  The lava tube had brought him out here, and by doing a little surveying, he realized that he was outside of the perimiter of the Rock Spire.  The tube had sloped up and out, all the way across the spire.  He had entered on the eastern side, and he could tell that he was now on the western side of the city.  It had spiralled a little at first, then settled into a long, straight angle that obviously went west.  That meant that the platform had to be part of the original stone, and the rest of it had been either worn away by weather or removed.  The magic had made it in a sense that it only protected so much stone, and then the rest of it was removed.
	That staggered his imagination.  This had to have been a mountain at some time, but magic had somehow removed the rest of the mountain, leaving only this behind.
	They had always joked that magic could move mountains.  Now he was sure that it was no jestful exaggeration.
	He couldn't see too much of the buildings above, since the tiers were rather deep, and other buildings got in the way, but he could see all the way to the center of the city.  It was on a raised tower of natural rock that was elevated over the highest tier by several hundred spans, and atop it stood a curious black obelisk of sorts, a very large one.  His inner senses told him that that was the exact center of the city, and the exact center of the Rock Spire.  It was also where the Conduit ran through the spire, and his sense of that object told him that it was located within that curious obelisk.
	Of course.  They couldn't have made it easy and put it somewhere where he could get to it.  No, they had to go and stick it on a pinnacle in the very center of a city designed for creatures with the ability to fly.  What would take an Aeradalla about five minutes of flight would take him nearly half the night in gruelling ascent of tier after tier, then a murderous climb up that towering rock tower to the obelisk at its peak.
	"What do you see?" Sarraya asked.  She knew that in the night and in humanoid form, Tarrin's sight far outstripped hers.  He enjoyed the best of both worlds in that regard, gaining both the cat's night vision and the human's clarity of vision.
	He quickly explained the layout of the city to her, then turned and looked back to the farmland below.  "This isn't going to be easy, Sarraya," he grunted.  "I'm going to have to do alot of climbing."
	"I noticed.  Strange that nobody seems to be out," she said.  "I could fly by this light."
	"You can hover and go slow, too," Tarrin told her.  "It'd probably be alot more dangerous for them."
	There were Aeradalla out.  He knew that.  His sensitive ears had picked them up all around them, but he could tell that they were walking instead of flying.  That explained the streets.  They didn't fly at night, so they had made streets so they could move around on the tiers during the night.  That also meant that the general layout of the city wasn't absolute, as well.  There had to be shops, inns, festhalls and taverns on every tier, since moving from tier to tier would require flying.  But they were probably small affairs, open only during the night for those land-bound Aeradalla that wanted to go out, while the ones on the tiers below were probably much larger and better stocked.
	Tarrin turned and looked up.  By his count, he had to go up about ten or so tiers to reach the tier surrounding that rock tower.  Some tiers were only twenty spans or so high, but others were around forty or fifty spans high.  Those had to be major boundaries, with a significance to the Aeradalla who lived here.  He stood on the edge of one such major tier, so perhaps he stood at the border of, say, another district of the city.  There were three major tiers above him, but he couldn't tell how many were below him, because of the sloping of the city and the buildings that were in his way.
	Ariana.  She had to be up here somewhere, the tall woman with blue hair, chiselled, muscular features, and a generous nature.  He had warm memories of her, of their brief conversation with her, how he had uncharacteristically opened up to her, when she was a complete stranger.  If he could somehow find Ariana, it would make all of this much, much easier.  She owed him a debt, and she could repay it by flying him up to that obelisk and let him take a look, then fly him back down to the ground.
	He remembered her scent.  He never forgot a scent.  He could wander around and try to find it...
	Or he could arrange it so she came to him.
	It wouldn't be that hard.  He had no doubt that Ariana remembered him, remembered him very clearly.  If rumor began to drift across the city that he'd been seen, he might be able to lure her out to where she could find him.  She knew he was a Were-cat, so if she saw him as a cat, it was a good bet that she'd make the connection.  It would cost him a couple of days, though.  That was the drawback.  He'd have to get himself noticed and then hide until those rumors reached Ariana.  It would only take him a night to get to the obelisk...but if he did it that way, all his questions about the city would probably go unanswered.  He was starting to waver between doing what he came to do and exploring a little bit.
	Regardless, the idea of climbing back down didn't sit well with him, not when a much faster and easier way down was at hand.  His impulsive climb up hadn't taken into consideration the long, gruelling ordeal of getting down.  Ariana could fly him down in a matter of moments, where it would take him an entire day of exhaustive work to get down on his own.  He knew he was on something of a schedule, but delaying a day or two wouldn't be that great a layover.
	"Sarraya, what would you say if I said we were going to delay a little?"
	"What's on your mind?"
	Tarrin glossed over his sketchy plan.  He didn't want to get halfway through this one before blundering into it.  For once, he was going to think through a plan before rushing headlong into it.  "It'll cost us some time, but Ariana could fly us down easily.  I really don't want to climb down, and I don't think you do either."
	"It's got possibilities, but how are we going to find her without giving ourselves away?"
	"Easy," he said.  "This is a closed city, and in a place like this, I'll bet that rumors fly.  If I let myself be seen here and there, by just enough people, the rumors of it are going to spread all over the city like wildfire.  Ariana probably remembers me, and she knows I'm a Were-cat.  She'll hear the description, know it's either me or a relative, and her curiosity should bring her right to me.  All I have to do is stay in one area without getting caught until she wanders over."
	"We can't do that here," Sarraya said.  "These houses are too large and too far apart.  We need an area congested with buildings and with lots of places to hide."
	Tarrin nodded.  "One of those areas down there would suit us perfectly," Tarrin said, pointing to the areas of small houses on the tiers below.
	"It sounds workable, but from the sound of it, you want to do it now," she said.  "Why?"
	"Why not?"
	"Simple, silly," she laughed.  "We still want to see what's up there, don't we?  What if we find this Ariana, and she won't let us go there?  Maybe it's a holy place, and it's against her religion to allow us in there."
	Tarrin hadn't considered that.
	"So, let's go up there now, and then, after we've seen what we wanted to see, we can find your Aeradalla and get a ride down.  That way we don't have to tell her why we're up here."
	"That's clever, Sarraya."
	"Of course it is.  I thought of it, didn't I?" she said imperiously.
	"Save it," he told her cooly.  "I was hoping that Ariana would fly us up there, but you're right.  If she won't agree, I'll go anyway, and that may cost us a ride down.  Better to do this now, when she can't say anything about it, then find her when we're done."
	"Alright then.  Saved again by my superior intellect.  You're such a lucky Were-cat," she said grandly.
	"Cursed is more like it," he said in a grumbling tone, turning from the tier and moving back between the two buildings, starting the long, highly vertical journey to the center of the city.
	It was not easy going.  The buildings on the tier--and the ones above, he was certain--were spaced widely apart, and that meant a considerable amount of distance to traverse with no cover.  That meant going in cat form, which slowed down his progress significantly.  In a matter of moments, Tarrin adopted a strategy of moving through such open areas in cat form, often in direct view of the Aeradalla who were out, and then shifting back to his humanoid form and eating up any distance he could from covered or concealed alleys.  Using that tactic, he was able to travel the half a span or so that made up the tier in a matter of several moments, until he reached the tier wall.
	This was where it would be the most dangerous, but at least at the smaller tiers, it wasn't a great danger.  He'd have to expose himself in humanoid form to the supposedly sharp eyes of the Aeradalla, so it was a matter of being lucky enough that nobody was looking in his direction when he ascended the tier walls.  The smaller tiers were easy--they were within the limits of his jumping ability.  A little running start was enough to vault him up to the tops of those tiers.  He sailed up into the air, almost looking like he was flying against the black stone backdrop of the tier before him, and then he crested the ledge and landed lightly on the top.  He found himself facing a large open area with even larger buildings than the ones on the tier below, and was forced to shapeshift immediately and dart across that large expanse of paved stone to reach the shelter of a low, whitewashed wall that surrounded one of those buildings.  These were large houses, with courtyards and gardens, houses of the rich or important.
	Why they built a wall around it, when everyone in the city could fly, was quite beyond him.  Maybe the Aeradalla were descended from landbound beings, and certain landbound peculiarities bred true in them.  Or then again, maybe the wall was merely a physical demonstration of ownership of the land upon which the manor house rested.
	"That was easy," Sarraya said from her invisible position.
	"The little ones will be," he told her in the manner of the Cat.  "It's the big ones I'm worried about.  I can't jump those."
	"It's dark, and so are you," she said with a chuckle.  "You look like an Arakite now."
	"Blame the sun," he shrugged.  "At least for the skin."
	"No doubt.  That rope hanging off your head is almost white now.  You've been sun-dyed."
	"When my fur starts turning white, I'll start to worry," he said mildly.
	Moving among the buildings on that tier was unexpectedly easy.  They all had walls surrounding them, and those formed shadowed passageways that ran for considerable distances.  He could move a long way in humanoid form before being forced to shapeshift into cat form to traverse the open areas between the walls.  What made it even easier was that there were many voices on that tier, but they all emanated from within the walls themselves.  There was almost no one walking outside the walled manors, giving him free reign of those dark, paved streets that seemed slightly like a maze, were it not for the fact that all the walls were straight, and he had a direct line of sight to the tier wall ahead.  He managed to navigate the tier in a matter or moments rather than the near hour it took for the tier below, thanks to those long walls enclosing large manors.  A running vault brought him up to the next level, and from the short look he got before darting against the safety of a wall, it was much the same as the tier below him.
	"This is easy," Sarraya said lightly as he made the wall.
	"Then let's trade places," he said quietly.  "I'll fly and be invisible, and you skulk in the shadows."
	This tier was much the same as the one below, except for the large fountain he encountered about halfway along to the next wall.  It was a very large fountain, filled with clear water, with water gurgling lightly from a statue in the center of it.  It was a nude humanoid female holding a pitcher, from which water poured into the pool below.  The statue did not have wings, he noticed, and the image of the female looked more Selani than human.  The hands were four-fingered, the figure too slender, and the ears had those distinctive points.  The face held that same ethereal quality of loveliness as a Selani, but the face was much softer and inviting than a Selani female.
	Selani?  No.  That was a Sha'Kar.  The figure was too soft, too human to be a desert-raised Selani.  This was a female that looked more like a human woman than a Selani woman.  She was thin and shapely, very curvaceous, but lacked that corded definition that would have denoted a Selani.  Allia was both voluptuous and muscularly defined.  This figure was not.
	"Selani?" Sarraya asked in curiosity.
	"Sha'Kar," Tarrin replied.  He stood in the shadow of a wall, staring at the fountain in its large courtyard.  It inspired a memory of the fountain in the center of the hedge maze, back in the Tower.  The figure there, however, absolutely put this figure to shame.  The Sha'Kar figure was but a statue.  It lacked that awesome detail and exacting perfection that made the statue at the Tower so striking.  This statue looked like a statue.  The statue in Suld looked alive.  And, he had to admit, the face and body of the statue in the Tower were much lovelier than this one.  "So we know who lived here at one time."
	"Maybe.  Or perhaps the Sha'Kar were used to make alot of statues," Sarraya noted.  "If all Sha'Kar women looked like her, no wonder men would want statues of them everywhere."
	"Feeling a little jealous, Sarraya?" Tarrin noted.
	"Of course not," she snorted.  "For my size, I'm very well proportioned."
	"For a doll, yes," he agreed mildly.
	"Dolls don't fill out their dresses like me," she challenged.
	"Unless the dollmaker was perverted," he said quietly, which earned him a smack on the back of the neck from his invisible companion.
	"Men!" she hissed.
	"I'm sure the sculptor enjoyed his work," Tarrin added as an afterthought.
	"What do you mean?"
	"He had to have a model."
	She smacked him again.  "Perhaps you should ask her out?" she said venemously.
	"I don't get excited at the thought of masonry, Sarraya," he replied calmly.  "Sight isn't half as exciting as scent."
	"Let's not go any further," she said quickly.
	"You asked," he shrugged, then shifted into cat form.  "And you are jealous, aren't you?" he added in the manner of the Cat as he padded towards the fountain.
	"Grrrohh!" Sarraya growled in furious embarassment, then flitted after him.
	He paused to take a drink of the water, and found it to be very, very cold.  That was strange.  The air was brisk, but the water was much colder, when it should have retained at least a little heat from the day.  It was so cold that little wisps of fog had formed on its surface, condensing what little moisture there was in the air.  It poured from the pitcher at a steady pace, meaning that there was no interruption in the water supply that fed it.  The water smelled of rock and minerals, and he realized that the water came from underground.
	The water was from a well!  But how did they get it up the Rock Spire?  To make it travel against gravity such a tremendous distance, it was astounding!
	Magic.  It had to be magic.  No conventional wellpump could move so much water straight up, over such a distance.  Magic had to draw the water from the ground.
	He'd bet that that lava tube he climbed wasn't the only tunnel piercing the spire.  There had to be one big wellshaft in there as well, drawing up water from the ground so far below.
	After drinking his fill, he looked up at the statue one more time, studying it.  So that was what a regular, run-of-the-mill, Sha'Kar looked like.  Well, there was absolutely no doubt now that the Selani and the Sha'Kar were related.  He knew that from meeting that Sha'Kar woman, but now there was absolutely no room for error in that assumption.  That woman may have been a fluke among her kind, but now he'd seen two examples of Sha'Kar, and they both matched Selani physiology.  His eyes drifted down to the base of the statue, and he saw that spidery script that he'd become so familiar with back at the Tower, the written language of the Sha'Kar.  The letters were carved into the stone, and were large enough for his eyes to make out, despite his inability to make out fine details.  He had no idea what it said--
	--at least until he looked at the line below.  That was written in Sulasian, albeit a very archaic form of it.  It took him a while to decipher it.  That line, he could read.  It read May happiness and good fortune find you.
	Curious.  That line was considerably longer than the Sha'Kar script.  The Sha'Kar writing was only eight characters long.  Did it say something different?  No.  Something told him that it said the same thing.  He didn't know why he knew that, but he did.  Almost like it was something that he had always known, yet hadn't realized until that moment.
	Almost like a memory long submerged, coming back up to the surface.
	That made something click in his head.  No wonder nobody could read it!  Every character in the Sha'Kar language represented a word instead of a letter!  It explained why there were so very many different characters.  He'd looked through the books and realized that often, he didn't see the same character in the same paragraph.  He'd never thought to think about why it was that way, but now he did, and the reasoning made sense.  He would bet that Keritanima already knew what he just realized, but Keritanima was much smarter than he was.  He wasn't too proud to admit that.
	No wonder.  If every character was a word, it would be next to impossible to break the language without some kind of written translation to go on as a base.
	But how did he know that they said the same thing?  He looked at the Sha'Kar script, and it...tickled at him.  He didn't have any other way to describe it.  Something about it seemed very familiar to him now, when he hadn't felt that way before.  Somehow, he knew exactly which characters represented which words in Sulasian, though their order was different.  What was may happiness and good fortune find you in Sulasian roughly equated to to-you happiness and good fortune may yet come.
	He blinked.  He could make that out?  How, for the Goddess' sake?  He didn't know the first thing about Sha'Kar outside the spoken tongue.
	Think, kitten, the voice of the Goddess came to his mind.  Think for a moment, and the answer will come to you.
	You did it? he asked within his mind.
	No, actually, I didn't, she admitted with a laugh.  What happened to you the last time you touched the Weave?
	The voices from the past, he thought.  Am I getting that again?
	In a way, she replied.  The memories of the Weave are beginning to reveal themselves to you, and among them is the memory of the written form of Sha'Kar.  It is an aspect of your power.  The Weave is much more than a simple source of magical power, as you have discovered.  It holds inside it the memory of many things, though most of them are connected with Sorcery in one way or another.  What's happening is that a part of you you don't even know is there is seeking out those memories, and making them a part of you.  You've been doing that for a while now, Tarrin, though you never knew it.
	"What do you mean?" he asked aloud in the manner of the Cat.
	How did you learn to do the things you do with High Sorcery? she asked.  You use magic unseen in the world for a thousand years, and you use it flawlessly, without anyone teaching you.  How do you do that?
	That brought him up short.  "I, I just knew," he replied uncertainly.
	Silly kitten, the Goddess laughed within his mind.  You knew because you could feel the memory of it in the Weave.  Before, only memories of spells and magic were finding you, because your need for them was so great that it caused you to extend past the boundaries of your own power.  Now the more mundane memories of the Weave are beginning to come to you.  Among them are the memories possessed by the Sha'Kar.  Including their written language.
	The ramifications of that were not lost to him.  The entirety of the knowledge of the katzh-dashi were not written in books.  They existed within the Weave itself!  The Weave served as the greatest library in the world!
	It meant that anyone who could read the memories of the Weave could see anything that anyone ever did that was related to Sorcery!  All the vast knowledge of the Ancients had been within his grasp the entire time!
	"Does that mean that I could find--"
	No.  The location of the Firestaff has been erased from the memory of the Weave, because Sorcerers aren't the only ones who can read the memories.  Long ago, the Wizards and Priests could cast spells that gave them a limited ability to extract knowledge from the Weave.  They called them spells of Augury.  Because they could find the Firestaff through the Weave, the Elder Gods all joined together and eradicated all traces of the Firestaff from the Weave, from the books of mortal kind, and from the memories of very nearly all.  Only a few maintained that knowledge, so they could put forth the clues necessary to lead you to the Firestaff now.
	That made sense to him, but something else bothered him.  "Is that why I'm remembering things I never knew?  Because I need to know Sha'Kar to read the Book of Ages?"
	No. I told you before, the location of the Firestaff is not in the book.  But you need the book to find your way.  Since you're starting to gain access to information that may confuse you, let me explain.  The Book of Ages contains the majority of the known history of mortal kind in its pages.  It contains lore of lost knowledge, even things that the Weave does not retain.  Among those things is a comprehensive guide to learning the written Sha'Kar language.
	That is why you need the book, Tarrin, she said bluntly.  The manner in which you're starting to decipher Sha'Kar isn't very comprehensive.  It's very fuzzy and prone to mistakes, and as you've noticed, learning things in that manner isn't very reliable.  The book holds everything you need to learn written Sha'Kar the right way.  My children did write everything down, kitten.  Not everything is held in the Weave, for the very reason I just gave you.  Trying to conjure memories from the Weave isn't as precise as sitting down and reading a book.
	Tarrin made the leap intuitively.  "Those books we took from the Cathedral!" he gasped.
	Yes, whatever happened to those books? she asked winsomely.  As I recall, you left them sitting in the middle of my courtyard.  Forgot all about them, didn't you?
	His heart about came out of his mouth.  They left them out in the open!  They were probably mildewed and disintigrated--
	Calm down, kitten, they're fine, the Goddess chuckled.  I'm watching over them even as we speak.  They're still as fresh and legible as the day you brought 