“Do you think your brothers will still ride the sky-worms when you tell them what you have seen here? Will anyone?”
“Why should I tell them?” she said. “If I do, they will know that I defied the shaman. Some will want to kill me for invading this holy space.”
They sat in silence for a while, until the sound of worms chewing meat came drifting into the tunnel’s mouth. “We need to climb,” she said. “Now, while they’re still feeding. If they turn on us, we’ll never survive.”
“Don’t worry,” Magtone said. “I’m hard to kill and impossible to digest. I have the power to drive them away if I need to. But without my carpet I cannot fly.”
“Then climb,” she said. “You can have your rug back after I kill the shaman.”
Now she had another reason to keep that promise. She knew the shaman’s pact with
