hey're going to try to return him to the throne!"
	"You should have killed him," Allia said in a calm tone.
	"I wanted him to suffer for everything he did to me and our homeland," she growled in reply.  "I can't believe that they did that!  I made it a crime punishable by death with no trial if anyone aided my father!"
	"Then punishing them will be a simple affair," Allia reasoned.
	"I don't know which house did it!" she raged.  "I know at least one house was involved, but even Jervis can't find out which one!  And they can't find my father!"
	"Someone has to have seen him," Tarrin said.
	"Not yet," Keritanima grunted.  "But the worse news is that I just can't leave Wikuna until I get this under control.  If my father regains the throne while we're away, the ships that may be escorting us in the steamship may turn around and fire on us!  It just won't be safe to do anything until I find my father and put him back in his cell."
	"Kerri, we have a schedule," Tarrin reminded her.
	"I know that!" she snapped at him in a very nasty tone.
	"How can your father get back the throne if the Vendari support you?" Tarrin asked curiously.
	"By force," she replied.  "But the navy will be split over it, Tarrin, and we may end up with escorting ships loyal to my father.  The last thing we need right now is a civil war in Wikuna."
	"What are you going to do?"
	"The simplest thing possible," she replied. "It starts and ends with my father.  If I can get him, I can stop anything from happening before it goes too far.  That's what it's going to take.  I already have Jervis and his men taking the city apart looking for him, and they have orders to bring him in dead or alive."
	"Dead would be the wiser choice," Tarrin told her.
	"Oh, he's going to die now," she hissed.  "Whether it's at the end of a musket or the end of a rope is the question.  I spared his life once.  I won't do it again."  Keritanima was almost shivering with fury. "Excuse me, I think I'll go back to my cabin and throw things for a while," she said in a tightly controlled voice.
	"Have fun," Tarrin told her, and the fox Wikuni stalked off in a tizzy.
	They watched her leave.  "Are you worried?" Allia asked curiously.
	"Not really," Tarrin replied absently.  "I have confidence in Kerri.  She'll fix everything."
	"Truly."

	Dolanna was well enough to move by that evening, but she didn't reappear on deck until the next day.  She looked as weak as he knew she felt.  She sat down in a chair that Keritanima had brought up for her, and spent most of the day in it, watching the coastline of Wikuna drift in and out of sight on a cloudless, glorious summer day, or reading a book, or listening carefully and intently as Tarrin taught Keritanima more of the spells he'd learned from Spyder.  Camara Tal drifted by occasionally to check on the Sorceress, and there was a stretch where the small Sorceress played hostess to all three drakes.
	That day was full of mystery.  Keritanima had some kind of plan, he realized when he looked her in the eyes, but she hadn't told him what it was yet.  Phandebrass and Kimmie had disappeared again, and nobody on the ship could find them.  Admiral Torm had even had the ship searched from crow's nest to the bilges, for his memory of what happened the last time those two had vanished for a long period of time was fresh in his mind.  The last thing he wanted was for the white-haired Wizard to wander into the powder magazine and accidentally blow the ship sky high.  But there was no sign of them.  It created quite a stir on board, among the sailors as well as the passengers, and Tarrin pondered for quite a while about what happened to them, long enough to get curious about it himself.  So around sunset, as the others went to dinner, Tarrin decided to track them down, or at least find where they had been last.  He started at Phandebrass' cabin and then tracked the man's scent, which wasn't easy given its age and the number of scents both under and over it.  But there was enough there to follow, even if he had to move very slowly to make sure he wasn't following an old trail, or lose the scent completely.  Step by careful step, Tarrin crept along the companionway, up the stairs, out onto the deck, down the other set of stairs leading to the sailor's portion of the below deck area, and into the galley.  Tarrin had to work around the cooks, who stared at him like he had lost his mind as he literally crawled along on all fours on the deck, following the scent trail carefully as it meandered around the galley.  Kimmie's scent joined his at that point, and he gave up following Phandebrass' scent for following Kimmie's, for hers was a much different scent, and was much easier to follow.  He followed the trail of both of them along a passageway and into one of the small holds near the bow of the ship, not far from the door marked with the large red letters that he knew was the powder magazine.  Just knowing that Phandebrass was that close to the magazine made Tarrin's fur stand on end.  The hold was one of the cargo holds, with four rows of stacked crates lashed to pinions nailed into the deck at regular intervals.  There was no light in the hold, but the light coming in from the companionway was more than enough for Tarrin's light-sensitive eyes as he entered the hold in pursuit of Phandebrass and Kimmie.
	This was where the mystery deepened.  Their scents entered the hold, but they did not leave.  Tarrin triple checked this fact, thinking that they may have tracked directly back over their own scents, but they had not.  Tarrin followed their scents between two stacks of boxes, and then it simply stopped.  He checked the boxes for their scent, then the walls, and even the low-beamed ceiling, thinking that maybe Phandebrass taught Kimmie some kind of spell that caused them to defy gravity.  But there was no trace of their scents anywhere.
	Tarrin realized that he'd done all that creeping about for nothing.  Standing erect and muttering to himself, the wove together the Mind weave that would sweep out and locate any mind similar to his own, responding to the spell and revealing its location to him.  Kimmie was a Were-cat, just like him, and he would get a response from her mind.  And then the mystery deepened even more.
	According to the spell, Kimmie could not be more than six or seven spans from where he stood.  She was literally right on top of him, so close he should have heard her heart beating.  How could this be?  She was in the room, but she was nowhere to be found!  There was no scent, no sight of her, but the spell wasn't woven wrong, and it couldn't lie.  Kimmie was in the room.  Somewhere.
	Tarrin kept the spell going, moving towards it slowly, cautiously now as his suspicious mind began to consider the possibility of foul play.  But he smelled no blood, and no Wikuni on the ship could hurt Kimmie.  He stepped in the direction of the spell, having to climb over a stack of boxes and into another small pathway between where they were lashed to the deck, sensing the spell's information.  According to the spell, he should be able to reach out and touch Kimmie.  She was that close to him.  But still, there was no sign of her.
	Wait...not quite.  He wasn't reading the spell correctly.  Figuratively speaking, he was within reach of her, but his confusion over what he was sensing was keeping him from reading its outcome properly.  In a figurative sense, he was within reach of Kimmie, but the spell said that she was below him.  She wasn't right on top of him, he was on top of her!
	He looked down at the deck.  It was a standard stretch of deck, wooden boards, and he tried to remember if there was another deck below that one, or if it was the bilges.
	That was when he saw it.  It was a tiny speck of motion against the deck, up against one of the wooden crates lashed to the deck in the hold.  It was a slight motion, like the movement of a small insect, but Tarrin's very sensitive eyes, which were extrememely keyed to detecting motion, picked it up in the gloom.  It was a strange motion, a rhythmic kind of swaying, and it was not a way that your standard insect moved.  Tarrin split his attention to weave together a spell to create a small, softly glowing ball of light over this paw, and then he knelt and lowered it towards the motion.
	He was almost bowled over.  That tiny motion was Phandebrass!
	He had shrunk himself!  He was the size of a large bug, not even two fingers tall!  And as soon as he lowered the light down, the indescribably minute form of Kimmie darted out from between two crates on the other side, jumping up and down and waving her arms frantically.  She too was exceptionally tiny, so small that he couldn't even hear the sounds coming out of her mouth.  Given that her lungs and her vocal chords were just as tiny as she was, it was no surprise he couldn't hear any sounds she made.
	"What in the nine hells happened to you two?" he asked in a quiet tone, unsure whether a loud voice would hurt them.
	Tarrin couldn't understand the response, but the sudden ugly look that Kimmie shot in Phandebrass' direction explained everything.  He suppressed the urge to chuckle.  "I take it you can't get back to normal?" he asked.  Kimmie shook her head vigorously, pointing at Phandebrass with the claws on her paws out.  That was not a good sign.  Kimmie was livid, and he realized that he'd better do something to fix this before Kimmie lost her composure and decided to take her frustration out on her mentor.  "Calm down," he told her, looking at her as he raised his awareness into the Weave, then stared down at her with eyes more attuned to magic than to light.  He could see the spell, a Wizard spell, infusing the both of them, causing them to be the size they were.  He could tell that, like most Wizard spells, it was operational only as long as it was intact.  If he broke the spell, the magic that changed their sizes would be disrupted, and they would return to normal.  Wizard magic was like that; where Transmutation was permanent--one of the very few forms of permanent magic a Sorcerer could employ--some transformation spells that were used in Wizardry were permanent only so long as the magic that fueled them was uninterrupted.  This was probably one of them.
	"I can break the spell," he told them.  "Both of you, move out into the middle of the aisle."  It took them a few moments to trek out into the center of the aisle, quite a walk for the two of them, and then Tarrin stood up and backed up step.  He looked down at them, not looking at them, but at the magical spell that was causing them to be that size.  He couldn't attack the spell directly--it was a different form of magic, after all--but he could attack the link that connected the spell to the source of its power, that other place from which Wizard magic flowed.  Spyder had specifically taught him how to do it, how to defeat Wizard spells already cast as well as how to prevent them from casting any spells in the first place.  He rose a little higher into the Weave, and once he felt comfortable, he exerted his will against it, causing the Weave itself to pull away from the Wizard spell causing the two of them to be so small.  The spell seemed to shudder, resisting the removal of its power, and it actively tried to seek to reestablish that contact.  But when the Weave was pulled away from it, the spell could not reach far enough to regain its power.  It shuddered as the link it had with that other place was broken, and then the spell dissolved.
	In a sudden shimmer, the two exceedingly tiny forms blurred, and then were replaced by two normal-sized figures.  Tarrin returned his conscsiousness to the real world and stood up as Kimmie shook herself, almost as if she were shaking off water, and then glared at Phandebrass.  "Don't ever do that to me again!" she shouted at him.
	"I say, I have no idea what went wrong," Phandebrass said absently.  "That's never happened before, it hasn't.  The spell should have ended hours ago.  I say, I've never seen a spell manage to hang on beyond its duration like that, I haven't.  How odd.  I really must study this!"
	"Graaoooh!" Kimmie shouted, sounding like either an attempt to say something that ended in a growl, or a growl that tried to end in some kind of word.  Whatever it was, it was certainly an unusual sound.  Phandebrass ambled away, not even paying attention to either of them.  "If I could duplicate the effect, I could make any spell permanent, I could!  What a discovery!  I say, I really must study this."  He then pattered out of the hold, turning in the wrong direction and walking into a wall with an audible thud, before reappearing in the doorway going in the other direction.
	"I'm going to kill him!" Kimmie raged, holding her paws out with claws extended.  "I'll skin him and use his hide to upholster my chair!"
	"Calm down, Kimmie," Tarrin said, then the situation got the best of him.  Kimmie glared death at him as he began to laugh helplessly, so hard he actually got tears in his eyes.  "How long were you stuck like that?" he managed to ask.
	"All day!" Kimmie replied in a furious tone.  "We thought about trying to get up on deck, but then I realized that someone would come looking for us, and our scent trails ended in here.  You almost stepped on me, Tarrin!" she accused.
	"I couldn't see you," he told her.
	"How did you find us?" she asked.  "Once you got in here, that is."
	"I used a spell to locate you.  It took me a while to make sense of what it was telling me, though.  I couldn't see what it was saying, because I didn't think it was possible."  He suppressed the urge to laugh again. "While I was trying to make sense of it, I saw Phandebrass moving."
	"At least he was good for something!" Kimmie hissed.
	"You looked cute like that, Kimmie.  Almost like a little doll," he teased.
	"Oh, shut up!" she snapped at him, then stalked out of the room with his laughter chasing her.
	Kimmie didn't speak to Phandebrass until they reached Wikuna, but the mage probably never noticed.  He spent the next two days with his nose buried in this book or that, trying to discover the reason why the spell didn't expire when it was supposed to do so.  The two days that they travelled went by quickly for Tarrin, as he continued his lessons with Camara Tal and also trained Keritanima in Weavespinner magic.  He had a new pupil now, and Dolanna watched on, even taking notes in a blank book she had gotten from somewhere as he showed Keritanima new spells, and taught her more and more about joining the Weave and using it for various tasks.
	It started getting apparent that they were close to their destination early in the morning on the third day, as Tarrin got up before dawn and decided to walk around to watch the sunrise.  The sailors were all on deck, tacking to the wind and executing a turn that would bring them on a heading for the mainland.  All the sailors seemed a little anxious but excited, probably happy that another voyage was about to come to a peaceful and unexciting end.  The only time a true sailor was happier than when he put out to sea was when he was about to come into port.  The drinking and the carousing and the ladies were all waiting for them at port, and that was almost as exciting as the open sea for a sailor.  Tarrin moved towards the bow as the sun came up behind them, illuminating a coastline that was getting closer and closer, and the first signs that they were approaching a city were becoming apparent.  He could see towers and a large coastal fortress.
	And he saw smoke.
	Tarrin peered into the gloom, unsure of what he was seeing.  He waited long moments as the light became brighter and brighter, and then, when the edge of the sun began coming over the horizon, illuminating the sky above the land before travelling down to touch the land itself, he was sure of it.  There were three distinct columns of thick smoke rising up from a very large city.  One was coming from deep in the city, one was coming from the docks, and the third was coming from just behind one of the coastal fortresses that stood on a rise just before the shallow, bay-like harbor of the city, on the south side.  There were three of those fortresses, one on each side of the island that split the entrance of the harbor, and the third that stood on the island itself.  They'd built walls out from the island and sides facing it to narrow those entrances even more, making getting into the harbor while being attacked by the cannons in those fortresses a very risky proposition.
	This was serious.  One column of smoke, Tarrin would explain away as a fire.  But three?  That was no coincidence.  Keritanima said that the noble houses were up to something...this could quite possibly be it.  Tarrin wasn't the only one to notice the smoke, as the sailors stopped chattering animatedly and became more sober, more grim.  They all stopped what they were doing and paused to stare at the smoke, and they were probably thinking the same thing that Tarrin was thinking.  What was going on?
	Torm began shouting orders at the men in Wikuni, and Tarrin, who was now completely fluent in Wikuni, could undertand them.  He rode them about having a voyage to complete, and they'd find out what was going on when they got there, and to get back to work.  They did so, but now there was a jerkiness to their usually smooth actions, as they tried to watch the smoke and do their jobs at the same time.  One Wikuni, a dog-like Wikuni, nearly fell out of the rigging in his inattention to his duties.
	They sailed closer and closer, and the ships surrounding the Queen's ship tightened their formation, moving into a much more defensive posture.  The sun rose from the eastern horizon and cast the morning light on the city before them, which seemed almost ominous now.  Tarrin's suspicious nature automatically assumed the worst, that this was indeed some kind of attempt by the nobility to dethrone Keritanima.  It didn't seem to make much sense to him, though.  The Vendari supported Keritanima, and that literally meant that there was no way they were going to take the throne from her.  They couldn't defeat the Vendari, not even if they had all the Wikuni on their side.  So why cause trouble?  They must realize that the Vendari were just going to march out and crush them!
	Tarrin blinked, shifting his thinking from the big picture to the core of the matter.  He remembered what Keritanima said about her father and the danger he posed, that it started and ended with him.  Well, the same could be said of Keritanima.  If the nobility could kill her, they wouldn't have to fight the Vendari for the throne.  If they already had Damon Eram, Keritanima's father, and they killed Keritanima, they could just trot him out and let him reclaim his throne.  Then things could go back to the way they wanted them.
	Tarrin held out an arm, stopping a sailor in his tracks as he rushed towards the lines running from the bowsprit.  "I think you should go wake up her Majesty," Tarrin told the Wikuni seriously, a short ferret-like Wikuni with a long, narrow snout and a pink button-nose on the end.  "Tell her to come see me, and don't take no for an answer."
	"Me, wake up her Majesty?" the man said in a nervous, high-pitched, nasal tone. "I don't have a deathwish!"
	"You can get killed by her for waking her up, or you can be killed by me for not obeying me," Tarrin said in an ominous tone, showing the Wikuni his claws in a very direct manner.  "Make your choice."
	The man blanched at the sight of those claws, which were nearly as long as the Wikuni's fingers, then nodded emphatically.  "Go wake up her Majesty, yes sir!  I'll go right now!"
	"Do that," Tarrin growled, feeling his feral instincts rise up even at the same time that his need to assert his dominance strengthened.  The little rodent rushed away, literally running for the stairs below decks, and Tarrin gave him no more mind as he turned back towards the coast, watching the smoke carefully.
	Keritanima, Miranda, and Szath joined him several moments later, and Tarrin didn't really have to say anything to her.  Keritanima took one look at the smoke, and her eyes flashed dangerously.  "I'll have someone's head for this," she growled in a deadly tone.
	"I'm sure they want yours too," Tarrin told her.  "Did Jervis say anything about this?"
	"No, he didn't," she replied.  "But I'll go find out what's going on from him right now," she announced. "Stay here, Miranda.  If you see anything happening, come tell me."
	"Alright," Miranda acknowledged as Keritanima and Szath hurried back to her cabin.
	Tarrin and Miranda watched the smoke as they approached, getting closer and closer to the city.  They watched in relative silence, only answering questions as the others came up on deck after realizing that something was going on.  Camara Tal, who had a background in military matters, seemed to understand the danger immediately.  "If they took that fortress, they're going to fire on us as we pass it," she told them, pointing to the approaching fort standing on the rise over the inlet to the harbor.
	That made things more nervous, and they waited in almost grim anticipation as they got within what he thought was the range of the fortress.  And there was no firing.  They got closer and closer, then passed by it as they entered the harbor, and still no firing.  They were close enough to see that the smoke was coming from the back of the fortress, but on the outside.  Someone had indeed assaulted the fortress during the night, but they had been repelled.  That made Tarrin breathe a sigh of relief.
	They pulled in to the quay with no difficulty, a quay where a very large complement of Vendari warriors and three carriages were waiting for them.  As soon as the hawsers were tied down, the Vendari warriors marched out and flanked where the gangplank would be lowered.
	Tarrin, still standing at the bow, stopped worrying about the situation long enough to look at the capital city of Wikuna.  It was indeeed a very large city, bigger than Suld, and its buidings were made of wattle-and daub or red brick.  Occasionally, there was a building made of wood, and the larger buildings were made of a strange stone that looked like whitewash.  Those were the new buildings, the old ones were obviously made with defense in mind, large, ominous constructions of gray stone interspersed with the newer, less war-minded buildings.  There were more old buildings than new, but the old buildings seemed to blur together with one another and making the new buildings stand out.  In the center of the city was a hint of gold, and when he looked closely he saw that it was some kind of building that stood higher than the others, with some sort of gold-painted face that made it stand out.  They drifted into the harbor, forced to enter the harbor single-file with half of the escorting ships ahead and half behind, which was jam packed with ships and wharves extending out into the dark water.  Some of those crane-like constructions he remembered from Den Gauche were also here, loading and unloading huge amounts of cargo from ships with their ropes and their nets.  The formation around them opened to let the Royal ship out, dropping anchors and letting Keritanima's ship pass.  They then turned towards the far side of the harbor, moving towards an empy wharf at the extreme southern side of the harbor, the wharf closest to the coastal fortress they had passed.  The ship drifted in, threw out its lines, and men on the dock tied them to huge hawsers on the dock.  The quay to which they had tied themselves was made of stone also, but it was the strangest stone he had ever seen.  They were made of long, long blocks of it, cut thin, and it didn't look like any stone he had ever seen.  He didn't see any Wikuni close by, but then again, they had landed at what had to be a private wharf, with no buildings standing at the end of it as they did for the wharves he could see further down the line.  There were Wikuni on those other wharves, dock workers loading or unloading ships, sailors on the ships themselves or moving to or from them, and well-dressed men and women standing at the feet of the docks or among the workers, either supervising or observing them.  This was the strength of the Wikuni, the trade and commerce that financed their massive fleets, and Tarrin paused to watch it in action.  Sapphire flapped up from the side of the ship and landed on his shoulder, and he petted her absently as he watched the mighty Wikuni economy in operation, going on despite the smoke rising from the north side of the harbor, just behind the buildings facing the water, and the smoke rising from the coastal fortress and the area deep inside the city's heart.
	Keritanima gathered them all together, and then they left the ship quickly and without ceremony.  She didn't explain what was going on, and Tarrin couldn't tell if she was happy or angry as she got in the first carriage with Miranda.  Tarrin squeezed into the second carriage with Allia, Kimmie, and Camara Tal, and Dar, Dolanna, Phandebrass, and Azakar packed into the last one.  The carriage had lavish cushions, covered with red velvet, but the roof was way too close to his head.  He banged his head into that roof more than once as he tried to scrunch his legs so Camara Tal, who sat opposite him, would have enough room for her own.  The carriage was never designed for such a large person.  Tarrin only wondered how much fun Azakar was having in the other carriage.
	"I wonder what's going on," Camara Tal speculated.  "Kerri looked mad enough to bite the hooves off a horse."
	"I think something happened last night concerning her father," Tarrin replied.  "Something certainly happened, that's for sure."
	"Since that fortress didn't open up on us, I guess Kerri's forces won that fight," Camara Tal reasoned.
	"I hate Wikuni politics," Kimmie grunted.  "They're so murky."
	"As clear as pitch," Tarrin agreed.
	"The core of the matter is Keritanima," Allia said.  "We need that ship she can give us, and we cannot use it if she does not have the throne."
	"That's the short of it there," Camara Tal agreed, patting Sapphire on the flank when the little drake jumped onto her lap.
	Tarrin had to duck down to look out the window, as they travelled up streets made of either cobblestone, brick, or that same strange white stone that he'd seen on the docks, stone laid down in such large blocks that it must have taken ten horses to pull the wagon carrying it.  Some of them were as wide as the street itself!  The streets paved with that white stone were perfectly flat and smooth, very easy to disseminate from the rough cobblestone or brick streets they travelled.  How did they get such huge blocks of stone to the street and make it so flat?  There were many Wikuni on the street, going about their daily business, pausing to watch the procession pass by as small children chased after the carriages and the Vendari escorting it.  They were dressed very much like they dressed in the West, dresses, doublets, tunics, and breeches.  The architecture was also similar to Sulasian or Shacan architecture, so much so that if they'd put humans on the streets instead of Wikuni, he would have thought he was still on Sennadar.  The city smelled alot better than any city he'd ever been in; the putrid miasma of garbage, waste, and decay that permeated the cities he'd visited was very much reduced here.  There was still hints of it, but all in all, it had to be the cleanest city he'd ever visited.  There weren't piles of trash lining the streets as there were in other cities.  The streets were clean and neat, and people filed to and fro in an orderly fashion.  Wikuni wearing blue uniforms of some sort stood on a raised podium in the center of the busiest intersections, blowing a whistle and directing the many wagons that passed him by on the two crossing streets with hand gestures.
	As cities went, Wikuna was impressive.  Not for its size or its wealth, but for its orderly appearance.  Everything was clean, efficient, and well maintained.  People didn't stagger down the streets drunk--at least not where they were now--and everything seemed to be organized.  Sulasia could take some serious lessons from the Wikuni about how to run a city.
	They turned a corner, and after banging his head against the ceiling for the fifth time, Tarrin irritably leaned down as far as he could and put his head out the window to gaze up at the Royal Palace.  It stood within a large ornate fence, where Wikuni wearing the red uniforms of the military stood with muskets to their shoulders in defense of the main gate.  The Wikuni crest was on the gate, seemed to have been inlaid directly into the gate to become a part of it, a lion and a dragon done in etched silver facing one another across a brass chevron.  Tarrin looked at the dragon on the crest and then looked at Sapphire on Camara Tal's lap, and he saw the similarities immediately.  Sapphire was a perfect replica of a dragon, though she was much, much smaller.  Tarrin looked past the fence and to the palace itself.  It was absolutely massive, but it was not a castle-like building, as he always imagined it would appear.  It looked more like some kind of immense mansion, obviously hundreds and hundreds of years old, with a massive dome made of what looked like gold rising up from its center.  Tarrin realized that it was the same gold building he'd seen while approaching on the ship, since it stood on a hill in the center of the city, stood at the highest point in the city.  It was a truly immense building, much larger than any one family would ever need, but Tarrin knew that it was much more than that.  It also served as a central hub of the Wikuni government, populated by servants, courtiers, messengers, politicians, and the men and women that made the Wikuni system work.  It was a testament to the position of monarch, not the monarch him or herself, the home of this or that noble family that happened to hold the throne at any one time for over a thousand years.
	The carriages went around the building, to a side entrance, and then they stopped.  The Vendari marched off towards the back of the huge building as an absolute horde of servants rushed out of a pair of elaborately decorated double doors, two of them unrolling a red carpet out to Keritanima's carriage, which had stopped directly in front of the doors.  Tarrin recognized Jervis as one of the Wikuni at the front of that proce