"Alright," he said, looking towards the opening that led to the passage beyond. It was there, alright, a huge armored monstrosity waiting patiently for Tarrin to permit it entry. Though it was ugly, Tarrin rather liked the big brute. It was surprisingly intelligent, and had exquisite manners. Jesmind kept wanting to throw it in one of the boiling springs and cook it-she adored seafood-but he had to remind her again and again that a Druid just didn't do such a thing. As Triana had said about talking to animals, it was very bad form to talk to an animal, then turn around and eat it. As soon as he opened communications with the animal, it was his word and bond that he would do it no harm. The fact that the big lobster-creature was an armored juggernaut and had no fear of predators was why it was so polite and willing to engage the obvious carnivore in conversation. This beast was on the top of the food chain, too large for any normal cave predator to kill without seriously risking its own life. Those huge pincers could tear through solid rock; in fact, it used them to burrow into the rock to make dens and widen constricting chokepoints to gain entry to the tunnels beyond them. It too engaged in the occasional hunt, being omnivorous, but tended to prefer the blind cave fish found in some of the larger underground lakes over hunting down other landwalkers.
It took only a thought to lower the Ward. "It's clear," he called in a strong voice, and the huge beast scrabbled in, its legs making a tik-tik-tik sound on the rock as it passed. Tarrin raised the Ward again after it cleared its boudary. It ambled along the edge of the wall, its antennae flicking out to touch the bare stone it had stripped of the luminescent moss two days before. It moved along until the antennae struck the glowing plant, and then stopped and immediately began to feed. Jesmind turned to watch it, her eyes intent. Her tail twitched peculiarly as she regarded the animal, and he could tell that she was thinking of trying to cook it again.
"Leave it alone," he warned her. "Even if it didn't have passage, I wouldn't want to try to catch it."
"I'll bet it tastes like lobster," she said musingly, her tail slashing back and forth, slapping him in the side of the head a couple of times.
"Get your tail out of my face, woman," he told her irritably, slapping at the offending appendage, then finally grabbing it and pulling it to the side. Jesmind was forced to back up to keep the tail attached to her backside. She glared at him for a moment, then slid down to sit on her feet beside him.
"Any luck?" she asked.
He snorted shortly, giving her all the answer she needed. "No matter what I think of, it uses too much magic," he told her. "Hiding us from the air won't be easy, because I can't think of anything easy to do that will hide our tracks. Using Illusion to hide will be easy enough, they don't use much magical energy, but the tracks we leave behind have me stumped. Trying to hide a trail like that or wipe it out by any means other than magic will take too much magic for us to avoid being noticed."
"It'd be nice if we didn't leave tracks," she grunted. "Like those white-furred foxes I saw before we got here. They walked on top of the snow."
It was like a light appeared in his mind. "Jesmind!" he said suddenly. "That's brilliant!"
"What is?" she asked.
"That solves the big problem!" he said enthusiastically, "and I think it won't leave too much of a mark!"
"What?" she demanded irritably.
"Walking on top of the snow!" he told her excitedly. "And it'll make travelling up there alot easier to boot!" He considered it. It was possible, a weave or Air, Earth, and Water, that would make the snow like solid ground, like firm soil to them. There was a weave for walking on water like it was a solid surface, and it would be easy to alter that weave to suit his purposes. It couldn't just be a weave, though; he'd have to, for the first time, create a permanent magical object. Two of them, actually.
He rifled through his store of magical knowlege, granted in his turning, and found what he was looking for. He'd need items of exceptional craftsmanship, but the creation of those objects was not a demanding issue. He only needed items of exceptional quality. If he Created suitable items with Druidic magic, they would serve his purposes, so long as they were items of exceptional quality. He had to prepare the items, infuse them with magic of the Weave that would then turn and cause any subsequent spells cast into them to become permanent. That required High Sorcery. That worried him a bit, since that would be serious magic, but it was worth the risk. He'd also have to figure out and program in the triggers, the variables that would give them the ability to control the magical operation of the items. That was going to be the tricky part, he saw as he studied the problem. That meant he'd have to adjust the weaves he placed in the objects by the feel of them. If he got it wrong, the spells would fizzle, the fizzling would destroy his preparing weave, and they would stain the objects with an magical residue that would make them unusable until he purged them of it and prepared them again.
The more complicated he made things, the harder it was going to be to make it work. He pondered what he needed the items to do, and then pondered how he would want to control that operation. The items would need to do two things. Firstly, it would need to hide them in some fashion. An Illusion would work best, a very special kind of Illusion that picked up the background and projected it forward, that curious trick that Dar had thought up that was as good as being invisible. The Illusion would have to be form-fitting, with only their eyes not covered by the Illusion so they could see. The non-detection aspect of their amulets would subsequently cover over the magic of the Illusion, providing even more protection by hiding the magic of the spell itself. The only control he'd need over that Illusion would be the ability to activate it and deactivate it.
The second thing he needed was Jesmind's clever idea to walk on top of the snow. That wouldn't be a completely internal weave, but the field of its effect would be limited only to whatever it was that had contact with their feet, or whatever parts of them were in active contact with the surface. To make the weave simpler to use, and subsequently simpler to alter, he'd have to restrict its operation to only working against water or water-based substances, like water, thin ice, snow, and mud. The weave would function in such a way that their weight did not change, but their weight over the watery substance would barely register to the substance upon which they stood. It was very easy to do, and the magical imprint it left would be greatly subdued by the amulets. What little that would be left over would probably be hidden by the background power of the Weave. The only control he'd need over that was the same as the Illusion, the ability to activate it or deactivate it as necessary.
No, he'd need it to do three things. The non-detection aspect of his amulet was a spell, and he could cast that into the items he created, interlacing it with the other weaves. He could tailor it specifically to masking the magical imprint that the Illusion and the water-walking power would make when they were being used. Restricting it like that, making it function in a very specific manner, would make it much easier to weave into the device without it causing the device's magical matrix to collapse or malfunction. The more targeted a spell was, the easier it was to implant into a permanent device. That spell needed no triggers or alteration, but it too would be rather tricky because it had to interlace very tightly with the other magic, covering it over and hiding it behind a mask of nondescript background energy, much the same as the weaves in the amulets that Grand Syllis made, weaves that cleverly hid what they protected by making them appear to be something else. That was how the non-detection worked. Syllis had used the weaves in the amulets. Tarrin could make them appear to be nothing more than just strands in the Weave.