“You go.” Melentha’s eyes turned to Ravagin, and he was startled to see anger building into genuine fury there. “I’m going to Gartanis—find out what spell he gave her. And then deal with him.”
“You—? Hey, wait!”
But Melentha was already galloping off through the narrow streets, oblivious to the pedestrians scattering frantically before her mad rush. “What the hell?” Ravagin muttered as he watched her go. Like a woman possessed … and come to think of it, how had she known Danae was back at the house? There hadn’t been any messengers, at least none he’d seen.
But there was no time to wonder now. Whatever Danae was up to this time, she was likely to get herself hurt in the process, and it was his job to get her out of it. Again.
Turning his horse savagely, he started back through Besak.
The sky was already growing dark as he passed under the post line archway at full gallop and reined to a halt in front of the mansion. The windows were also dark; if Danae was in fact back, she hadn’t put on any lights.
Or else was in Melentha’s windowless sanctum. Swallowing a curse, he slid off his horse and sprinted through the high doors.
Inside, it was pitch black. “Sa-minskisk tooboosn,” he snapped, throwing the placement gesture over his shoulder to set the invoked dazzler’s location back out of his eyes. The room blazed with light; his shadow a dark mass angling sharply off to the side, Ravagin headed toward the stairway.
She was there, all right, seated cross-legged in the middle of the sanctum’s large pentagram with tendrils of smoke curling up from a crucible set on the floor before her. “Danae?” Ravagin called tentatively.
There was no response. “Danae!” he called again, sharper this time. “Come on, snap out of it.”
No response. Gritting his teeth, Ravagin moved to the edge of the pentagram and sniffed cautiously. Incense, all right, presumably one of the many varieties spirithandlers sometimes used to help clear and focus their minds for particularly touchy invocations. Interfering with her invocation could get them both fried to crisps; but if she wasn’t too far along, there might yet be time to safely stop her. Certainly whatever spirit she was trying for hadn’t yet made an appearance.
And then his eyes fell on the floor beside her … and he bit down hard on his tongue.
Sitting full in the light from his dazzler, she had no shadow.
He thought about that for nearly a minute. Then, with a sigh, he moved back and sat down against the wall near the door. Well, she’s done it, he thought wearily. She’s finally managed to get herself into a situation I haven’t a snowflake’s chance of getting her out of. Great job, Danae. All he could do for her now was wait. And hope like hell that the spirit she was working on didn’t eat her alive.
The wait seemed to go on forever, but it was probably no more than twenty minutes. His first warning was the quiet fading in of her shadow; a moment later she suddenly shook and began gasping for breath. Her eyes fluttered open, squeezed shut again against the dazzler’s light. “Who—?” she breathed.
“It’s Ravagin,” he told her, rolling back to his feet and hurrying to her side. The smell of the incense, he noted peripherally, had disappeared; a quick glance into the crucible showed it to be as empty as if it had been scoured. “You all right?”
She took another few deep breaths and allowed him to help her to her feet before replying. “I think so. I guess—I think I got off easy.”
“Got off easy doing what?” Ravagin asked.
She raised a hand to shade her eyes and squinted back in the dazzler’s general direction. “Is there any way to turn that thing down? I don’t think my eyes have come all the way back yet.”
Suppressing his impatience with an effort, Ravagin released the dazzler. The darkness closed in, and he felt Danae stiffen beside him. “Wait a second,” he grunted, guiding her to the wall and sitting her down against it. Groping around in the dark, he located the flat dish of a fireplate on Melentha’s table and invoked a firebrat over it. The gentler reddish light flickered into existence, and he made his way back to Danae.
“Thanks,” she said, taking a shuddering breath. “I guess I wasn’t ready for total darkness, either.”
“That’s okay,” Ravagin said, squatting beside her and giving her face a quick once-over. Tight, strained, but with no signs of injury or serious trauma. “What happened?” he asked, taking one of her hands between his. It was, he noted uneasily, icy cold.
She licked her lips. “I invoked a demogorgon.”
He felt his stomach tighten. “You what?”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t snap at me! All right, so it was stupid—” She broke off and closed her eyes. “Ravagin … you have no idea what it was like.”
“Can’t argue with that one. So tell me.”
She opened her eyes and looked around the room. “An entire world, in its own little universe—that’s what Karyx is, isn’t it? And Shamsheer too, of course. Triplet: three worlds for the price of one. Only it’s not.”
“What do you mean?” Ravagin asked cautiously.
She gave him a brittle smile. “There are actually four worlds here. The fourth one populated only by spirits. And I was there.”
And abruptly, the smile vanished, and she turned her face into Ravagin’s shirt and began sobbing.
Chapter 21
THE CRYING JAG LASTED only a few minutes, and Ravagin’s faint discomfort was more than matched by Danae’s own embarrassment over the incident. “I’m sorry,” she said for the third or fourth time as he found her a handkerchief to wipe her nose with. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Just forget it,” he told her. Also for the third or fourth time. “Your psyche’s been through one hell of a shock, and you can’t just shrug that sort of thing off. Burying it wouldn’t do you any good in the long run.”
She sniffed one final time and handed the handkerchief back. “I’m okay now,” she said.
“Good. Look, if you feel up to it, it might help to run through the whole contact out loud. Sort of—you know—flush the emotion out of it.”
A tentative smile played at the corners of her lips. “Besides which, you’re curious?”
“Of course I am. If what you saw was real, this is something none of us has ever stumbled on before.”
For a moment he held his breath, cursing his verbal slip and wondering if she’d take offense at the implication that she might have been hallucinating. But she merely nodded. “It sure felt real. But I suppose you’re right. Anyway. I got this spell from a spiritmaster in Besak named Gartanis—”
“Yeah, we heard. I thought Melentha warned you not to buy spells from the locals.”
Danae snorted. “Oh, sure. I was supposed to go to her to ask for help proving what happened in Coven wasn’t an illusion?”
Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. “Is that what all this was over? Pardon the bluntness, but that was a damn fool thing to risk your neck over.”
“Yeah, I know.” She shivered. “And I was going to back out, too, until Gartanis suddenly seemed to think it was very important that I go through with it.”
“I’m sure he did,” Ravagin growled. “Especially at the overinflated prices he probably charged you—”
“He gave me the spell for free.”
Ravagin’s tongue froze in midsentence. “He did—he gave you a demogorgon invocation for free?”
“That’s unusual?”
“A spell like that ought to go for half the price of this house,” Ravagin told her bluntly.
She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, I sort of got that impression. But he wouldn’t take anything for it. Anyway. I tried the invocation, but it didn’t work out the way I expected. Instead of bringing the demogorgon here, it seemed like he took me there. Sounds crazy, but that’s the only way I can describe it.”
Ravagin thought about her shadowless form in the center of the pentagram. “No, I think you can assume you really were taken off somewhere. What gave you the imp
ression it was a separate world, though?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Lots of little things, I suppose. The terrain—well, no, it wasn’t really terrain, at least not in the usual sense. Call it background, maybe—the background had a completeness about it that seemed to go with a complete world rather than just a different way of looking at Karyx. There was even a sky of sorts. And there were lots of spirits.”
“Doing what?”
“Moving around, mostly, on whatever business spirits have in their own world. But I also saw several of them disappear; that was the part that interested me the most.”
“Disappear … as in being invoked by people in Karyx?” Ravagin hazarded.
“That’s the feeling I got at the time.” She shivered again. “And I saw a—well, it was a fight. Pure and simple. I saw a demon attack a lar.”
“And …?” he prompted.
“And destroy it.”
A bad taste rose into Ravagin’s mouth. “You realize,” he said slowly, “that what you’re implying is a level of spirit-spirit interaction no one’s ever seen before.”
“In other words, I’m going to be accused of having hallucinations?” she snorted. “I’ve already heard that argument once today, and I’m getting tired of it.”
“Take it easy—I’m not the one you’re going to have to defend this against. Any idea where this fight might have taken place?”
“I told you: in the fourth world—”
“I mean did it have any relationship to Karyx? Did any part of the fight take place here, in other words?”
She pondered. “I don’t know. Distances didn’t seem to be the same as they are in a physical world. And there weren’t really any reference points I could hold onto.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it thoughtfully with a glance toward the pentagram. “Well … if you’re right, the scholars are going to hate you. Just think of the trouble they’re going to have to go through, changing every Triplet in the literature to Quadruplet.”
There was no response, and he looked back to find her frowning off into space. “Danae? You still there?”
“More or less. Ravagin … why would the demogorgon have shown me all that? I mean, why me specifically? Other people have invoked great powers before—Gartanis, for one. Why didn’t any of them see this?”
“Maybe they did,” Ravagin shrugged. “You have to remember that everyone else who’s tried this has been a Karyx native, and none of them know about Triplet’s nature.”
“No, it’s more than that,” she shook her head slowly. “Gartanis seemed to think the demogorgon wanted to talk to me; that he’d even foreseen some of this a hundred years ago. Though maybe it wasn’t about me specifically …”
“Look, Danae, you have to remember not to take everything you hear on Karyx at a hundred percent face value.”
“This is different.” She looked at him sharply. “The demogorgon was trying to tell me something—I can feel it. Maybe if I do the invocation again and ask more directly—”
“Whoa!” he said, grabbing her shoulders as she started to get to her feet. “You are not going to try that again, Danae: period, lockdown.”
“But—”
“No buts about it. You want an interesting form of suicide, you can do it back in the Twenty Worlds on someone else’s responsibility.”
Her eyes flashed. “You just saw me invoke the demogorgon and not get hurt—”
“And if your friend Gartanis wasn’t a total fraud he must have warned you that the great powers are totally unpredictable,” Ravagin shot back. “At any rate, you’re not going to do it.”
“Ravagin—”
“Besides which, you’re not going to have time. Tomorrow we’re heading back to the Tunnel and home.”
Her jaw dropped as utter astonishment pushed all other emotion from her face. “We’re what?” she whispered.
“You heard me: we’re heading home,” he said doggedly, ignoring with an effort the look of betrayal on her face. “Doing something as insane as invoking a great power without my knowledge is perfectly adequate grounds for me to abort the trip. We’ll leave at sunup; I suggest you get to sleep early tonight.” Ignoring the protests from his knees, he straightened back to a standing position and offered her a hand up. “And we’d better get out of here before Melentha gets back—she’d be furious to find you’d fiddled around with her stuff.”
For a minute Danae just stared up at him. Then, ignoring the proffered hand, she got awkwardly to her feet. Turning her back, she strode unsteadily over to the door and left the sanctum.
Ignore it, Ravagin told himself, glaring at the empty doorway. It’s just another of her little tantrums. I’m right on this one; and for once we’re going to do things around here my way.
Turning his head, he snarled the release spell for the firebrat, and walked in darkness to the door. And tried to blot out the strange ache her expression had left in his chest.
“A demogorgon?” Melentha shook her head. “Crazy child. She could have gotten herself killed.”
“I think we’re all agreed on that,” Ravagin said shortly. “We’re also agreed—you and I are, anyway—that we can’t give her another chance to do it again. Tomorrow at dawn we’re heading for the Tunnel.”
“And you’ll be wanting an escort, I suppose?”
“Not necessarily,” Ravagin told her, forcing down his annoyance at the breezy condescension in her tone. “Actually, all I need from you is a strengthening of your post line so that Danae won’t be able to sneak out tonight if she gets the urge to do so.”
Melentha’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Yes, I suppose you ought to expect something like that from her.”
“Under similar circumstances, I’d expect something like that from you, too,” he said.
Her face seemed to harden. “I do my job,” she bit out. “And I obey orders.”
Ravagin sighed. He was getting sick and tired of constantly finding himself swimming upstream. “I meant it as a compliment to your spirit,” he told her. “If you want to take it as an insult, that’s your business. So can you seal this place up a little more or not?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said softly. “Don’t worry, Ravagin; no one will be getting out of here tonight.”
Chapter 22
DAMN HIM. DAMN HER. For that matter, damn this whole stupid planet. Flopping over under her blanket onto her back, her brain fighting stubbornly against the sleep the rest of her body wanted, Danae stared at the starlight filtering through the curtains onto her ceiling. It wasn’t fair for Ravagin to pull the rug out from under her like this—it just wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t her fault. None of it. Not the demogorgon invocation—Gartanis had all but pushed that on her, what with his talk of fated contacts and future apocalypses and all. Not the friction with Melentha, either, which she suspected was a factor in Ravagin’s decision—it had been Melentha who’d been riding her all this time, not the other way around. And certainly not the whole mess with Coven—it had been the demons there who’d been pulling all of those strings. Damn the demons, too.
The demons.
Danae frowned at the ceiling, her mind jumping back to her evening arrival from Besak and the confrontation with Melentha’s pet demon. There hadn’t been anything like that before today, not in all the trips she’d made in and out of that gateway since arriving on Karyx.
What had made that one trip different? The fact that she’d been to Coven and dealt with the powers there? No—the demon hadn’t even twitched when she and Ravagin had returned together from Coven that morning. Alternatively, could it be the fact that she’d just learned the demogorgon-invocation spell and was carrying Gartanis’s incense focuser? That was probably more reasonable … except how had the demon known about it?
Communication with all those other spirits, perhaps? The Twenty Worlds’ sketchy understanding of spirithandling seemed to take as a basic assumption that each spirit operated basically as
a free agent, interacting little except where ordered to do so. But her experience with Triplet’s fourth world now put that assumption on extremely shaky ground. Was there, in fact, an entire spirit society, operating perhaps along hierarchical lines, that included such lines of communication as the post line demon’s knowledge had implied? Then that green patch she’d seen leave the post line after she’d passed it could have been one of the demon’s parasite spirits, sent by the demon himself to alert Melentha that Danae was back at the house. Ravagin had implied he knew she’d been to Gartanis before she told him about the trip. Presumably Melentha’s demon had learned about it from another spirit from Besak, perhaps another parasite spirit under his control but not trapped into the post line. It opened up all sorts of new possibilities; if spirits were in fact being summoned from a separate world instead of from some vague sort of limbo, an information exchange would be almost inevitable once they were released back into their own world.
Into their own world …
Danae stared at the ceiling, almost feeling the blood draining out of her face as a horrible thought struck her. Into their own world …
Quietly, she rolled out of bed and fumbled for her clothes, hands shaking with sudden dread as she fought in the dark to get dressed. It abruptly made sense now: their sudden expulsion from Coven, the vision that Gartanis had tried to describe to her—
And why the demon in the post line had tried to stop her from finding out about the fourth world’s existence.
The hallway was dark and silent as Danae slipped out of her room. Hardly daring to breathe, she hugged the wall as she tiptoed to the next door and carefully opened it. Inside, she made her way toward the bed, a vague shape in the starlight. “Ravagin?” she whispered tentatively.
“What is it?” his soft voice answered instantly. “Danae?”
“Yes,” she whispered back, finding the edge of the bed and sitting down on it. “I’ve got to talk to you right away. I think I know why we were thrown out of Coven.”