"I guess not."
"So, why are you in here?" Jula asked. "You should be in class."
"My instructor had to talk to the Council, so I was given the rest of the day off," he replied. "She told me to come up here and read instead. But she didn't tell me what to read."
"I suggest that you start with Studies On Efficiently Spinning Weaves," she told him. "It was written by a Sorcerer named Walina about a thousand years ago, but her techniques on weaving spells are still fundamental principles taught to all our students. She was a real trailblazer."
"Where can I find that book?"
"It's that big book they keep on the pedestal in the entrance hall," she smiled. "But you can get another copy over there. Nobody's allowed to touch the original." She pointed to a shelf across from the Lorefinders, just behind the circular desk that served as the main station for the librarians. "You should just ask the librarians, Tarrin. Tell them what you're interested in, and they'll send you right to it."
"I wasn't sure they'd let me have important books, since I'm just an Initiate."
"Tarrin, this library is for any who can touch the Weave," she told him. "You have as much right to be here as the Keeper herself." She glanced around. "Well, it's about time for me to get back to what I was doing. I'll see you later."
"Later," Tarrin mirrored, standing up with her.
Walina's book was very interesting. She described the raw forces that the Sorcerer was working with when they were touching the Weave, and then went on to discuss techniques of weaving flows that expanded on simple spellcraft. Techniques like knotting a weave so it would sustain itself for a while without having to be maintained, and layering one so that a second weave would activate after the first unravelled. Sorcery was limited in that there was no such thing as permanent spells for them, except when using Ritual Sorcery. All their magic lasted only as long as the Sorcerer concentrating on it. The effects of that magic could be permanent, like healing, but the magic itself was not. Knotting a weave made it draw on its own magic for a while, depending on the complexity of the weave and how well the knot was made. But even a knot only lasted a while before the weaves naturally untied themselves. Layering, Walina wrote, required tremendous skill to use, because placing one weave inside another without them interacting took considerable skill. Tarrin could see why. His own knowledge of Sorcery was somewhat limited, but his own short experience with it told him that flows loved to interact. To weave them in such a way that they wouldn't interact wouldn't be easy.
He was interrupted by someone knocking on the table, and he immediately scented Allia and Dar. He looked up in surprise, and realized that he'd been reading, totally absorbed, for the entire afternoon. "I wondered if you were awake," Dar said with a chuckle. "That must be some book."
"Actually, it is," Tarrin replied. "How did it go for you?"
"Boring," he grunted.
"How was your day, sister?" he asked Allia.
"They have started teaching me weaves," she replied. "I still cannot touch the Weave half the time, but they seem to be rushing me."
He only gave her a terse nod. He already had a good idea why. "Wait here a second," he told them, standing up. He went over to the librarian's station, where two small, older women busily sorted through a large number of books. They were sisters, from their scent, and had similar brownish, leathery skin and graying brown hair. They wore dresses of a pearly gray, made of a good wool by the smell of them, and were both well made and well maintained. "Excuse me, but can I borrow this?" he asked, holding up the book he was reading. The woman looked up at him, and to her credit, didn't so much as flinch when she realized who was talking to her.
"Let me see it," one of them said, holding out her hand. Tarrin gave her the book, and she glanced at the cover and opened it. "Yes, you can take this one with you," she told him. "Just write your name down on this sheet of parchment," she instructed, hastily scribbling the name of the book in a column on the right. There were alot of names and alot of book titles on that sheet of parchment. She turned it around and offerred the quill pen she was using to him.
Tarrin took the small pen between two large fingers, struggling with it a bit. His body was very handy and he felt comfortable in it, but his oversized paws were simply incapable of some things. One was handling the tiny quill pen with enough delicacy to be able to write legibly. He had the agility and dexterity, but to try would probably break the pen. Such a delicate thing put between his fingers would most likely break, no matter how gentle he was trying to be. He solved the problem by taking on his human hands, feeling the ache instantly shoot through his knuckles and fingers as soon as claws were replaced by nails, and he quickly scrawled his name down on the page. It wasn't very pretty, because the shooting pain made it difficult to write with elegance, or even efficiency.
"You need to work on your penmanship, Initiate," she said in distaste, looking at the writing.
"That's the best I can do," he told her bluntly, letting his paws come back. He cracked his knuckles and flexed his fingers, working out the pain. "At least until you have a pen that fits in these paws."
"Alright, I can accept that," she said with a straight face. "You have to either bring the book back or check it out again in three days. Don't be late."
"I won't," he said, putting the book under his arm and then going back to his friends.
Lounging in his room, Allia sitting on the bed behind him, playing idly with his tail as she read from a book given to her by her instructor, Tarrin puzzled through the book written by this Walina. Even though he'd had so little practical instruction in Sorcery, alot of what the woman wrote made alot of sense, and it went beyond the tricks she wrote about. The woman seemed to have a fundamental understanding of the Weave that went quite beyond that of the normal Sorcerer. She explained the flows and their power, the act of using Sorcery, even the mysterious seventh sphere in terms that Tarrin could easily understand.
Though Dolanna had already told him, Walina's writing drove home the very significant point that Sorcery was the magic of life. It represented the six basic forces that affected mankind: earth, air, fire, water, the power of the gods, and the human mind's intelligence and drive, and in a more esoteric way, the human will. It also encompassed the seventh sphere, that which held all the others together, and the power of this seventh sphere was limited only by the ability of those who tried to use it. Where the other six spheres represented single forces, the seventh was both its own unique power and a power that comprised the other six, at the same time. It was all six, and none of them. That didn't make much sense to him, and Walina didn't explain it. She wrote that it was a paradox, a living representation of the mysterious ways in which the world worked, ways incomprehensible to mortal minds.
Because it was the magic of the world, it was limited to the world. That meant that Sorcery had no effect on things and creatures that existed outside of Sennadar's natural order. Tarrin already knew what that meant; the creatures conjured up by Wizards. They weren't of this world, they were brought in from somewhere else. Sorcery existed in a balance between the other four orders of magic, where each was checked by another's power, and itself held yet another in balance. Walina explained that there were no physical or magical rules for why this was the case, only that it had to be something set forth by the Elder Gods, the ten gods of creation who represented the primal forces of the universe. Sorcerers could disrupt the magical spells of Wizards and Priests by cutting them off from the Weave, for the magic they utilized had to travel through the Weave to reach them, despite the fact that it originated from a place not of the Weave. Sorcerers could also create Illusions, something which only they could do. Sorcerers, in turn, could be choked off from the Weave by Druids, who had the power to alter nature itself, and the Weave was a natural part of the world. Wizards could Conjure creatures from beyond Sennadar, and had the most versatile type of magic. There were thousands of researched magical spells for use by the Wizards, waiting to be learned and used by them. And since Arcane magic, the magic of the Wizards, was a learned skill and not a natural ability, anyone with sufficient intelligence could learn its secrets. This made the Wizard both the most common form of magic-user, and the most versatile. Priests could perform true healing and cure diseases, something that Sorcerers couldn't even come close to matching, and they could disrupt Druidic magic by using their power to call on their patron God to isolate the Druid from the power of nature which was at his command. A Sorcerer's healing was a very limited and crude form of healing when compared to the granted power of the priest. There was a bit of overlapping. Both Sorcerers and Priests had healing capability, and Wizards could casts spells called phantasms that made people believe that something was real when it was not, which was a shortcut to the power of Illusion. And though only Wizards could conjure beings from outside the world, which were the most powerful of creatures, all four orders of magic had the capability to summon types of beings and creatures particular to their orders. Priests could summon forth spiritual forces called Avatars which were minor physical manifestations of the God's power in the world, and therefore would help the priest, and the priests of the twin gods of death, Dakki and Dakku, could speak to the souls of the dead to gain information. Both Sorcerers and Druids had the power to call forth beings called Elementals, creatures comprised entirely of one of the four elements that existed in nature. They would obey Druids without question, but they did not like Sorcerers, and would resist any orders given to them by a calling Sorcerer. Druids could also directly summon forth beings of nature to act in the defense of the Druid. Tarrin himself fell into that category; if a Druid made such a summons, and he was in range to hear the call, he would be compelled magically to respond. Tarrin was human-born, but Were-cats were Were, and all Were were creatures of the land.