Lowering her eyes, she gazed at and through the barely visible haze surrounding them. The lar Ravagin had invoked, circling their camp like a soundless, spectral whirlwind. Supposedly a powerful first line of defense against anything that should choose to attack them... Moving as quietly as possible, Danae got to her feet and began walking toward the haze. There was no resistance, no evidence of anything between her and the rest of Karyx but fog or imagination; nothing that could be remotely considered a defense—
Abruptly, the fog thickened in front of her, condensing in on itself like a reversed film of an explosion. She stopped, stomach tightening with sudden nervousness as a three-meter pillar of living smoke formed in her path. For a moment she looked at it, wondering what would happen if she tried to reach out and touch it. The lar was supposed to be on their side, after all... but on the other hand it was Ravagin, not her, who had invoked it. Carefully, she backed up toward her place on the hillside, watching as the lar gradually spread itself into a defensive circle again. By the time she lay back down there was again nothing between her and the rest of Karyx but a hazy fog.
Licking her lips, she closed her eyes. We're perfectly safe here, she told herself. Perfectly safe.
Eventually, she convinced herself enough to fall asleep.
But the vague feeling of dread refused to go completely away, and her dreams were troubled ones.
"We should be able to rent a couple of horses at one of the inns down the road," Ravagin told her as they finished their breakfast. "At that point the trip to Besak will only take a couple of hours."
Danae nodded silently, taking one last mouthful of aromatic meat and tossing the bone aside.
Ravagin had hunted down the small animal sometime before dawn, roasting it over a fire ignited by a firebrat he'd let her invoke. The fact that she'd done the spell flawlessly was a small nugget of satisfaction against the general malaise hanging over her this morning. The bad dreams and poor sleeping conditions of the previous night, she'd decided, perhaps coupled with a lingering remnant of culture shock. Once they reached Besak and she had a halfway-decent bed to sleep in this would all blow over.
"You haven't really told me what you're doing here," Ravagin commented as he got to his feet and wiped his hands on his pant legs. "What your project is, I mean. I can't very well advise you as to location and all if I don't know that."
"There was a complete writeup in my application," she told him, standing up herself and wincing as she followed his example on cleaning the oils from her hands. Fastidious cleanliness wasn't a major characteristic of Karyx's culture, and it wouldn't do to stand out too blatantly from the rest of the population.
"I'm sure there was, but no one showed it to me," he told her shortly as he led the way through the last line of mounds toward the road below. "Maybe you'd be good enough to give me a brief summary?"
She pursed her lips... but there really wasn't any reason he couldn't know most of it. "I want to study the psychology of the people here, both Karyx natives and those from the Twenty Worlds manning the way houses. Try and determine the effect such easy access to spirits has had on them."
"Sounds really interesting," he said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm "I presume you don't care that it's been done before?"
"As you were so careful to point out before, there aren't a whole lot of ways studies of Karyx can be related to the Twenty Worlds," she said tartly, annoyed despite the fact she'd half expected that reaction. "One of the few is to measure how this system of basically free wishes has affected the human psyche here. Assuming, of course, that the people here are true humans."
He threw her a sidelong glance. "Not going to let that one go, are you? So tell me how this is supposed to relate to the Twenty Worlds—or are you going to suggest that Karyx adult development has been arrested at the adolescent level because they can get everything done for them by spirits?"
"I'm not starting with any preconceptions," she said. "Though I have heard that theory."
"It's total nonsense," he said flatly. They'd reached the road now, and he paused to gaze both directions before turning them south. "There's a lot more raw wish fulfillment on Shamsheer—a lot more, for that matter, on the Twenty Worlds—than there is here. The spirits don't like us, Danae—if you always remember one thing about Karyx remember that. The spirits don't like us, they don't especially like running errands for us, and they hate like hell when one of us traps them into a sword or mill wheel or something. When you invoke a spirit you're almost literally taking the same chance as fiddling with an appliance without throwing the breaker first: the possibility you're going to get kicked across the room. Or worse."
She walked in silence for a few steps, digesting that. It sounded paranoid in the extreme... but after last night she wasn't inclined to dismiss such feelings out of hand. "You think the spirits are... well, out to get us somehow?"
"How could they?" he countered with a shrug. "The spells we've got have been used for centuries—if they weren't adequate, don't you think the spirits would have made some countermove long ago? The demons certainly would have done something—I think they hate us more than all the other types of spirits put together."
How do you know they haven't taken over? she thought, but resisted the urge to throw the question at him. Her penchant for argument had always been one of her weak points, and now that they were in Karyx she had to be more careful about not antagonizing people unnecessarily. "Well... how exactly would they go about fighting back, assuming they wanted to? Can they affect the physical universe, for example, on their own volition and without a direct human order to do so?"
Ravagin pondered for a moment. "I don't know," he admitted at last. "I've never seen one do so, but that doesn't mean a lot. I suppose if you forgot to release a spirit after you were done with him he might be able to fiddle around on his own for awhile, but why he'd want to is another question entirely. Our physical universe isn't really their environment, and rumor has it they aren't very comfortable here. They don't see things the same way we do, for one thing—they mostly just sense the presence of life. The only possible reason they could have for messing around here would be to keep us from ordering them around—and the only way to do that would be to keep us from voicing commands."
"Which we'd see as a rash of speech impairments," Danae nodded, picking up on his logic. "I understand."
Ravagin nodded. "Or unnatural deaths. Depending on how permanent they wanted to shut us up."
Danae shivered. The lar last night... "How effective is that spirit-protection spell that bandit used yesterday?"
"Reasonably so, but there are better ones. I could—" He stopped abruptly, frowning off toward the road ahead of them.
Danae held her breath, feeling her teeth clench as she heard the faint sounds of approaching hooves.
"Trouble?" she whispered.
"Probably not," he murmured, reaching down to loosen his sword in its sheath. "You get a little paranoid after you've traveled on Karyx enough. If any trouble starts, though, you're to get to the side of the road and invoke a lar around yourself—you remember the spell?"
She nodded. The dust of the approaching horses was visible now, obscuring any details of riders.
"Should we do something like that before they get here? Just in case?"
He smiled tightly. "It's a fine point of Karyx etiquette that you don't want to be the first one to invoke a spirit, especially a defensive one like a lar. It would either be construed as an insult—that we don't trust them—or, worse, that we have something devious in mind ourselves. Just stay sharp and there'll be no problem."
Danae swallowed hard. There were three horses approaching—that much could be seen now. Of riders, only the one on the center horse was visible. Danae caught glimpses of dark hair and a blue cloak through the dust...