"Now make sure your eyes are covered, and then grab the whip with your other hand."
"Ready."
"Okay." He paused, and she could sense somehow that he was bracing himself. "On the count of three I want you to come around the corner and toward me like all of Melentha's demons were right on your tail. I'll help pull; you concentrate on keeping your feet under you. Ready? Okay: one, two, three."
Clamping her jaw tightly, Danae leaped out into the hallway—
A blast of hot air hit her square in the face, burningly hot even through the streaming bodice. Dimly, she felt her entire body blistering where she stood; but even as she took her first step, she found herself flying through the burning hallway. Her arms felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets; she stumbled once, her feet striking what felt like liquid lead—
And abruptly she slammed into something solid that caught her and half dragged, half led her into sudden coolness.
"Ravagin," she gasped, clutching him tightly.
His hand slid over her face, pulled the bodice free. "It's okay, Danae—you're safe now," he soothed her.
She took a shuddering breath, blinking enough of the tears out of her eyes to see that they were in another bedroom. Across the room a broken window was blowing a stiff breeze toward them. "I thought Shamsheer houses were more fireproof than this," she gasped.
"They also come with built-in detectors and fire-fighting systems," Ravagin growled. "Our little friends apparently figured out a way to shut them down."
"Our—?" Danae's stomach tightened into a knot. With the fire driving all other thoughts from her mind she hadn't even made the connection. "The spirits?" she whispered.
"Who else? Come on—let's get out of here before they come up with something else to try."
Together they headed over to the broken window, and Ravagin took a careful look outside. "Looks clear. I'll go first, you come down after me. Watch the broken glass."
It was indeed clear outside, and a moment later they were hurrying around toward the front of the house, keeping to the middle of the narrow grass strip between the house and the edge of the forest.
Above them the roof of the house was beginning to crackle though there was remarkably little smoke and as yet no visible flame. "How did they do it?" she asked Ravagin. "I mean, even if they could knock out the anti-fire system, how did they get enough heat to start a fire in the first place?"
"They must have gotten into the central control system and found a way to overload the wiring throughout the house," he replied grimly. "Damn them, anyway. I never even thought they might do something like this."
They rounded the corner—and skidded to a halt.
Resting up against the front of the house was a huge, spindly circle sitting vertically on a wheeled base. A white haze filled its circumference, a haze that mixed with a billowing mass of black smoke streaming out its for end. "My God," Danae gasped. "What in the worlds is that?"
"It's a giant fan," Ravagin growled. "It's pulling the smoke out of the hallway, probably so as to give the fire a good head start before we smelled anything and woke up. Gives the fire a good air flow, too, of course."
Danae stared at the huge device. "But where did it come from? You're not going to tell me they had something like that in storage here, are you?"
"Not hardly," he said grimly. "There's a Forge Beast out back. I guess they got into that, too."
Forge Beast: a computerized forge capable of designing and making any desired metal object, the definition from her orientation came back to her. "They must have been in the house for hours—
maybe even since before we got here."
"Maybe," Ravagin said slowly. "On the other hand... well, it should be easy enough to test."
She watched, frowning, as he stepped to the nearest tree and sliced a thick branch off with his sword.
"What are you going to do with that?" she asked.
"See just how strong this fan really is. Stay here."
"Ravagin—" She bit down on the protest. He surely knew what he was doing....
Carefully, he moved to within a few meters of the fan and stood there for a moment studying it.
Then, taking hold of his branch with the whip of his scorpion glove, he extended it as close to the fen as it would go—flipped it into the blades—
And with a horrendous grinding of broken metal, the blades shattered into shrapnel.
"Well, that settles that," Ravagin said as he walked back to where Danae stood. "Extremely cheap construction, probably thrown together in less than an hour. Which means that it took them—" he glanced at the sun, glinting now between the trees to the west—"eight or nine hours to find us, get into the various systems and learn how to use them, build the fan and get it into position, and actually start the fire."
"That's pretty fast," Danae said, a sinking feeling tightening her stomach.
"Yeah," Ravagin nodded heavily. "But it could have been worse. Such as if you hadn't woken up and taken that shower."
Danae swallowed, remembering. "It was a bad dream that woke me up. One where trolls had the green glow of demon possession."
Ravagin cocked an eyebrow at her. "Interesting. You may still have some spirit sensitivity left over from your demogorgon contact. Could prove useful."
"If we can get to civilization in one piece, you mean—" She jumped as a sudden crash came from the house beside them. "What—?"
"Part of the roof caving in, probably," Ravagin said.
She glared at him. "How can you be so damned calm about it?" she growled.
"Only because anger and panic won't gain us anything," he told her. "Like it or not, Danae, we've gotten ourselves tangled up in another battle of wits with spirits; and just like it was on Karyx, we're not going to be able to outfight them. So we're just going to have to outthink them."
Danae took a deep breath, fighting for some calm herself. She was only partially successful. "All right. So how do we outthink ourselves away from here without them catching on?"
"I've got an idea." Pulling the prayer stick from his belt, he raised it to his lips. "I pray thee, deliver unto me a sky-plane."
"You think that's wise?" she asked as he returned the stick to its place. "The way this whole prayer stick network works implies there's a central dispatch somewhere. If they've gotten into that—"
"Actually, I think that network probably was the way they traced us here before," he admitted. "But our only other choice is to walk out, and with night coming on in a few hours I'd personally rather take my chances with the spirits. Besides, I've got an idea that might shake them off our trail, at least temporarily. Meanwhile—" he glanced over to the house, where flames were starting to flicker on the roof—"I tossed your crossbow and other stuff out the window earlier. I suggest we collect them and move a little further into the forest."
The sky-plane was nearly an hour in arriving, which Ravagin took to be a good sign. "It means the spirits didn't have a gimmicked one standing by near here," he explained, "which implies this one is clean."
To Danae it didn't imply nearly that much. "Suppose they just held it over behind the trees somewhere for fifty minutes and then let it come?"
"Because any sky-plane that sat on the ground in response to a send-order would automatically be classified as damaged and power to it cut off until it was time for it to go to a Dark Tower for repair," he told her. "Sky-planes are notorious for being grounded when anything seems out of order."