"Maybe not as bad as you'd think," she retorted coolly. "At least there I won't have to worry about offending someone without any way to defend myself."
"Oh, really?" Ravagin snorted. "All right, let's take a quick for-instance. We step out of the Tunnel, and you turn to find a cintah crouched to spring. What do you do?"
"I say sa-trahist rassh with the proper placement gesture and invoke a firebrat between us and him," she said promptly.
"And if that particular spot happens to be where a clump of dried leaves has collected...?"
"Then they catch on fire, I suppose."
"Right. So how do you put the fire out?"
Danae glared at him. "What's this supposed to prove, anyway?"
"I'm just trying to show that all you've got at the moment is tape-learning," Ravagin sighed. "Fine stuff, very useful, but hardly the full preparation you think it is. So either tell me how to put out that fire or we stay overnight at the way house here. It's up to you."
Danae gritted her teeth, stifling the urge to argue. Once again, damn him, he was right.... "All right," she growled. "I release the firebrat by saying carash-carsheen and then say sakhe-khe fatvkh to invoke a nixie."
"Who will have a hell of a time bringing water to a fire in the Cairn Mounds," Ravagin cut in. "The nearest stream is over a kilometer from the Tunnel, and it's hardly a trickle at the best of times."
"So she can pull the water up from underground," Danae snapped. "Or condense it from the air if she has to. I know she can do both, so quit trying to mislead me."
"Agreed; but if you set her too hard a task you could wind up with a premature spontaneous release,"
Ravagin warned. "I don't suppose anyone thought to mention those to you?"
"No, I know about them, thank you," Danae ground out. "All right, then—let's hear how you would handle it."
"Oh, about the way you described," he shrugged. "But knowing how dry the Cairn Mounds are, I would have added a geas onto the nixie's invocation to put it more firmly under my control."
"I was told not to use a geas unless absolutely necessary," Danae said stiffly. "They said the spirits don't react well to them."
"No, they don't," Ravagin nodded. "But premature releases are usually worse—the damn thing can sometimes take a swipe at you before it vanishes."
"So how do you know which is the better risk?"
"Experience, of course. Which was the point I was trying to make in the first place."
She bristled. "Are you telling me that I'm not to use any spells unless you clear them in advance?
Because if you are, you can just—"
"Whoa, Danae—take it easy," he cut in, holding his hands palm outward toward her. "I never said anything of the sort. All I'm trying to do is let you know that things on Karyx aren't nearly as laser cut as those little six-week fact-stuffing courses pretend. Karyx's spirit magic is every bit as layered and complex as Shamsheer's technological magic, with the added danger of the spirits turning on you if you aren't careful. You've already shown yourself willing to disobey orders you don't especially want to follow—I'm trying to impress upon you the fact that pulling that stunt here could literally get you burned alive."
"Consider me suitably impressed," Danae growled. "I suppose this means we're going to have to spend the night in the way house?"
"Oh, for—" Ravagin exhaled in thinly veiled disgust. "All right—the hell with it. You want to hit Karyx tonight, fine; we'll hit Karyx tonight. It'd serve you right if you had to go back to Threshold with a withered arm and explain how you asked for the most experienced Courier and then argued every damn decision with him."
Without waiting for a reply, he twisted back around. "Sky-plane: follow my mark. Mark."
Behind him, Danae closed her eyes and let her mouth twist with some disgust of her own. He was right—she was giving him far too much of a hard time... and knowing why she was doing so was unfortunately no excuse. She was an adult, and was supposed to be able to suppress such childish reactions.
Still, the whole thing had shown her something new about Ravagin, too. He did indeed know he'd been specifically asked for... and it was abundantly clear that he wasn't feeling overly flattered by the request. Well, then, to hell with him, too, she grumbled to herself. If she had to show her father, Hart, and Ravagin too that she was capable of taking care of herself, then that was exactly what she would do.
And if they didn't like the consequences, then that was their hard luck.
An hour later, they reached the Tunnel.
From the outside it looked virtually the same as both the Threshold and Shamsheer ends of the first Tunnel had: a small leaf-carpeted clearing with several small hills grouped around a longer one containing the Tunnel. Grasses and small bushes grew on the secondary mounds, and the surrounding trees were tall enough to hide the clearing until one was almost on top of it. Fleetingly, Danae wondered how the early explorers to Shamsheer had ever managed to find the thing.
At Ravagin's command the sky-plane dropped down to hover a meter off the ground in front of the Tunnel mouth. "Want to make sure there's nothing nasty prowling around before we give up the edge barrier," he explained, eyes giving the forest a careful sweep. Palming his firefly carefully away from them, he pointed it into the Tunnel and ordered it to full power. Danae caught a glimpse of the familiar sloping floor and rough walls before Ravagin shut off the light with a satisfied grunt. With one last scan of the forest, he brought the sky-plane down.
Danae took a deep breath as she carefully stood up and eased the kinks out of her legs. The forest breezes—no longer held back now by the sky-plane's edge barrier—played about her hair, bringing along with them an unusual and tantalizing mixture of aromas. She sniffed cautiously, trying without success to identify them.
"Let's get moving," Ravagin said, and she turned to see him already a meter or so inside the Tunnel mouth. On his left hand his firefly was giving off a gentle glow; on his right, his scorpion glove was mute testimony to the fact that even on the threshold of another world Darcane Forest could be a dangerous place. Swallowing, she went to join him, fighting back the urge to look over her shoulder as she did so.
But no animals had taken up lodging in the Tunnel, and they reached the familiar set of camouflaged lockers without incident. "Okay, get those clothes off and let's get across," Ravagin said briskly as he laid his weapons on the top locker shelf and started unfastening his tunic.
"I know the routine," Danae growled. Her bodice's top fastener had broken that morning while she was dressing, and now her jury-rigged replacement was refusing to come loose. Gritting her teeth, she tugged at it, first gently, then with more and more force—
"Need any help?"
"I'll get it," she snapped. "It's just—stuck—a little..."
"Move your hands," he sighed. "Come on—move them."
She obeyed, a hot flush of embarrassment flooding her face as he brought the firefly near her chin and examined her handiwork. With a grunt, he retrieved his knife from the locker. "Hold real still," he said, teasing the knot delicately with the tip... and a moment later she felt it come open.
"Thanks," she muttered, turning her back on him and starting on the rest of the fastenings.
They finished the rest of their disrobing in silence. "Give me your hand," Ravagin said as he shut off the firefly's glow and closed the locker. "Come on, come on—it's not getting any earlier out there."
"I want to try it by myself this time," Danae told him shortly.