your endurance. Otherwise, you could become trapped in another time or overtax your system, possibly resulting in serious injury."
"You don't say?" I started down the corridor, my feet feeling like they were encased in cement. "I'd have never figured that out on my own."
"I am serious." Pritkin grabbed my arm, in his favorite spot, right over the bicep. I was probably going to have the permanent indentation of his fingers there someday. "You must begin experimentation, to discover your limits. How many times can you shift before you reach exhaustion? Does going farther back in time cause more of a drain than more recent shifts? What other powers over time do you possess?"
"If I'm not letting someone piggyback along, three or four, depending on how tired I am to start with; hell, yes; and I don't really want to know," I answered him, in order. "Now, can we deal with the current crisis, please, and leave the twenty questions for later?"
Pritkin shut up, but with a meaningful silence that said this wasn't over. I let him brood while I concentrated on not falling on my face. We felt our way down another dark, dusty corridor.
We finally found the storeroom by the simple method of running into it. Or, to be more accurate, into the rusty iron-work gate that blocked the entrance. I backed up a few steps while Pritkin scuffled around. I heard a match strike and suddenly I could see. Watery yellow light filtered outward from a small lantern set in a niche, allowing him to check the area for booby traps. He didn't find any, which seemed to worry him more than the reverse.
"What's wrong? Manassier said this place was abandoned."
Pritkin ran a hand over his hair, which despite the water and the sweat and the limestone dust was still acting like an independent entity. "Can you shift yet?"
"Maybe."
"If anything goes wrong, you are to shift away immediately. Do you understand?"
"Sure."
Pritkin shot me a suspicious look, and I gave him my best bland expression right back. He'd asked if I understood, and I'd said yes. I hadn't agreed to anything.
He smeared his finger across the door mechanism, cutting through an inch of dust and grime. Something clicked and he pulled back before cautiously nudging the door with his toe. It swung inward obligingly, but he hesitated on the threshold. "I don't like it. This is too easy."
I personally thought easy was just fine. In fact, it was about damn time easy showed up. "Maybe our luck is chang—"
Pritkin stepped into the room and disappeared with a strangled sort of sound. "Pritkin!" There was no answer. I knelt by the threshold, but there was nothing to see—only a small, empty cave, with no exit, and no mage.
I got a death grip on the iron bars of the door and reached out. My hand encountered nothing but dusty limestone for about two feet, then disappeared into the floor. I snatched my arm back, but there didn't appear to be any damage. An illusion, then.
I stretched out on the floor, closed my eyes and leaned over, to the point that my forehead would have hit stone if there really had been a floor there. When it didn't, I opened my eyes in blackness. After a moment, my sight adjusted to show me dirty fingers, white with strain, clinging to a shard of limestone three or four yards down. They were human, and below them, almost out of sight, was a familiar, spiky head.
"Grab my hand and I'll shift us out," I called, hoping I could actually do it. The head snapped up.
"What did I just tell you?!" Pritkin demanded.
"Hi, I'm Cassie Palmer. Have we met?"
Steel entered the suddenly soft tones. "Miss Palmer. Move away from the edge. Now."
"I'm not going to fall in," I told him irritably.
"Neither did I! There's something down here." I couldn't see Pritkin's face very well, just a pale blur against the shadows, but he didn't sound happy. Some people thought he had only one mode—pissed off. In reality, he had plenty of them. Over the past few weeks, I'd learned to tell the difference between real pissed off, impatient pissed off and scared pissed off. I suspected that this was the last kind. If so, that made two of us.
That feeling amped up a few notches when he cursed and fired several rounds at something out in the darkness. The faint, acrid smell of gunpowder floated up to me as I wiggled forward, keeping my legs