“Didn’t you see it?” Tanda said. “There was something moving out there. Moving toward us.”
“I must have missed it,” Aahz said, and looked at me.
All I could do was shake my head and shrug. I hadn’t seen anything either, but Tanda seemed a bit spooked.
I got a pretty decent fire in the middle of the dirt floor, using nothing but my mind and a bunch of wood, as Tanda put a containment field around the room to keep out the wind.
As it turned out, both Tanda and Aahz had expected something to happen when we went into that tent. They were pretty much prepared. I just wish they had warned me to get ready.
After I finished the fire, Tanda hung a translation pendant around my neck, then another around Aahz’s neck, just in case we ran into someone we couldn’t understand when we jumped from here.
“So,” I said, holding my hands out to warm them over the fire, “could you please explain just what happened, who the shifting demon was, how we got here, and where ‘here’ is?”
“You know,” Aahz said to Tanda, ignoring me, “I think I liked him better with his mouth sealed.”
“Sealing a guy’s lips isn’t a nice thing to do,” I said. Then I thought back to what I had wanted to say while in the tent and luckily hadn’t been able to. “But I understand why you did it. A compulsion spell, right?”
Aahz now looked at me with a shocked expression as Tanda laughed.
“I think your apprentice is starting to learn,” she said, smiling at Aahz. “Might as well answer his questions.”
Aahz just sighed and sat down on the floor.