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they just looked about them, Danae moving a few steps away from the Tunnel mouth at one point to peer northward at the Maiandros River wending its twisted path across the landscape. “Beautiful,” she repeated, turning in a slow circle with almost child-wide eyes taking it all in. “Is all of Shamsheer like this?”
    â€œMost of the countryside sections are,” he said absently, doing his own three-sixty turn with something other than sightseeing in mind. To the south and east, the Harrian Hills rose up in a half-circle around the Tunnel mouth—good visual protection from the villages around Castle Numanteal to the east, but also ideal hiding places for anyone bent on ambush.
    But if anyone was up there, he wasn’t giving his presence away. “I’m sorry,” Ravagin said, suddenly realizing Danae was speaking again. “What did you say?”
    â€œI was asking how far away Castle Numanteal was,” she repeated.
    â€œIt’s about ten kilometers east-northeast as the birdine flies,” he told her.
    â€œOver all those hills?”
    He snorted gently. “Don’t worry—no one has to walk anywhere on Shamsheer that they don’t want to. And you’re right; let’s get moving.”
    Taking one last look around, he pulled the prayer stick from his belt and raised it to his lips. “I pray thee, deliver unto me a sky-plane.”

Chapter 5
    F OR A LONG MINUTE nothing happened. Danae kept her eyes on the eastern sky, watching for the transport Ravagin had just ordered. But aside from a sprinkling of birds, nothing seemed to be moving over that way. Might not have any available at the castle just now, she thought. Reconstructing the map of this part of Shamsheer in her mind, she searched it for the next nearest place a sky-plane might be kept.
    â€œHere it comes,” Ravagin announced, pointing northward.
    Danae turned and shaded her eyes. Sure enough, a tiny rectangular shape was skimming the treetops directly toward them. Visualizing her map again … “From the village of Phamyr?” she asked, frowning.
    â€œProbably,” Ravagin nodded. “It’s closer than Castle Numanteal.”
    â€œPretty small place to have any extra sky-planes on hand, isn’t it? I thought it only had a population of—”
    â€œSize doesn’t make any difference,” he interrupted with the same forced patience she’d heard in the Tunnel. “A sky-plane sitting idle is available for use by anyone—pure and simple. They’re one item of property no one owns.”
    The sky-plane was a lot faster than Danae had expected it to be, and barely two minutes later it settled to the ground in front of them … and she found that the drawings and descriptions she’d seen of this machine had indeed been completely accurate.
    It was the spitting image of a flying carpet.
    Two meters by perhaps three, its upper surface apparently rough-woven and decorated by intricate designs and arabesques, its edge sporting a delicate fringe, it could have come straight out of the old Earth myths. And just like those flying carpets, it had nothing remotely resembling safety restraints. Or, for that matter, any kind of control mechanism.
    Ravagin had already seated himself cross-legged near the sky-plane’s center. “Any time you’re ready,” he said, cocking an eyebrow up at her.
    Swallowing, she stepped gingerly onto the carpet and sat down behind him. It yielded to her weight just like ordinary cloth would have, and she had to force herself to remember that visitors to Shamsheer had been using these things safely for over a century. To say nothing of the world’s inhabitants themselves, of course, who’d been using them a lot longer.
    â€œSky-plane: to Kelaine City,” Ravagin said … and without so much as a lurch, the carpet stiffened around her and lifted smoothly into the sky.
    Carefully, Danae let out the