Triplet

  If she ever did. Gartanis hadn’t done so.

  Unbidden, tears came to her eyes. Child, she flung the word at herself like an epithet. So, you wanted a chance to make the hard decisions, huh? Well, great, because here’s a beaut of one all ready for you.

  And there really wasn’t any question as to which way the decision should go. Ravagin knew as much as she did about what the spirits were up to … and Ravagin stood a far better chance of getting back through the Tunnel on his own. Hart had made his own sacrifice to get the word through. Now it was her turn.

  And if she was going to desert Ravagin, she would never have a better chance than right now.

  Rolling off the bed and onto her feet, she stepped to the window, squinting against the light coming in around the worn shutters. Theoretically, the inn’s lar defined her boundaries for her … but there was nothing that said a lar would or even could block anything it couldn’t detect. And there was certainly nothing to be lost by trying.

  Except perhaps their only weapon against the searching spirits.

  She stopped, hand on the window sash, and swore under her breath. But there was no way around it. Half the advantage of being invisible was the fact that the searching spirits didn’t yet know about it. If the lar couldn’t detect her, it would surely notice that something had passed through its protective ring … and when it reported that fact, either Melentha or someone else would surely come to the proper conclusion.

  She couldn’t risk it, not even to give Ravagin a clear shot at the Tunnel.

  Or in other words, she was in the clear. She didn’t have to sacrifice herself. Didn’t have to make the hard decision.

  As, somehow, things had always seemed to work out for her. How many of the hard decisions along the way, she wondered suddenly, had yielded to that same kind of logic? And how much of that logic had been little more than rationalization? She opened her mouth again, searching her memory for the most vile word in her vocabulary … and paused.

  Somewhere, she could hear a feint hissing.

  The lar, was her first, hopeful thought. But that hum had been different, and she could in fact still hear it beneath this louder and closer sound.

  Louder and closer …

  Carefully, she lowered her hands from the window back to her sides and turned around. Nothing was visible … but facing this direction, the hiss was definitely louder. She licked her lips, heart beginning to beat loudly in her ears. An uncomfortable tingle raised the hairs on her arms …

  And through the thick wooden door a red shape floated.

  Danae bit down hard on her tongue. A djinn, a small bit of rationality in her brain seemed to whisper. Only a djinn. But the rest of her brain wanted to scream.

  She’d never seen a djinn like this. Never seen any spirit with the sheer and horrible detail with which she was seeing this one. The spindly physique, like an emaciated mockery of the human form; the grotesquely misshapen head with its pointed jaw and gaunt cheekbones; the eyes—

  The eyes. Redder than the rest of the creature, they sparkled with intelligence and hatred as they swept the room. Danae watched it drift slowly through the air, hardly daring to breathe as those terrible eyes swept the room. It couldn’t see her—somehow, even in the rising swell of panic, there was never even a shadow of doubt in her mind about that. But the spirit was indeed searching for something—that much, too, was certain. And if it happened to touch her … or even heard her …

  She bit down on her tongue again … and as the djinn circled over toward the bed a glint of reflected light there caught her eye. The short sword Ravagin had left her.

  Carefully, eyes on the djinn, she moved slowly toward the bed. Djinns were about the most powerful spirits that could be permanently trapped in a tool or weapon, and the necessary spell was correspondingly tricky. But once bound in the sword, the creature should be incapable of hurting them.

  Would it still be able to communicate with the rest of the spirit world? There was no way to know.

  The djinn moved away from the bed, and Danae froze in mid-step. It drifted toward her … not quite on a direct line … she held her breath …

  Concentrating on the djinn, she didn’t notice the approaching footsteps until it was too late to do anything. The door came open; and as she threw her arm up to shield her eyes, she caught just a glimpse of a figure silhouetted against the glare from the hallway.

  Chapter 29

  SHE TENSED AS THE footsteps continued on into the room, One long step would take her to the bed—get her to the sword lying there—but with the light from the hall blinding her, using the weapon competently would be another matter entirely: But if her attacker didn’t notice her standing here by the window before he closed the door …

  The door swung to a crack. Another second or two—

  “Danae?” Ravagin called tentatively. “Where are you?”

  Relief flooded into her—and was followed instantly by more tension. “Shh!” she hissed. “A djinn.”

  The door seemed to her ears to slam shut. “What?” he hissed. “Where?”

  She lowered her arm and looked around. The djinn was nowhere in sight. “But … it was here a second ago,” she whispered. “Searching around for us—I’m sure of it.”

  “Great. Just what we needed.” Carefully, Ravagin groped his way to the bed, set down the covered tray he was carrying, and picked up the sword. “Was it moving quickly, like sprites when they’ve got a message to deliver?” he asked, buckling the weapon around his waist.

  “No, it was going pretty slowly. Sort of like a bee hunting around a clover field for the best flower to go for.”

  Ravagin grunted. “Hmm. Well, it could be worse, I suppose. Did you hear anyone poking around out in the hallway while the djinn was here?”

  “Uh … no, I don’t think so. Should I have?”

  “If you didn’t then, you probably will eventually. The djinn almost certainly means one of Melentha’s agents is around somewhere.”

  Danae felt her stomach knot up. “You mean here? In the inn?”

  “Uh-huh. The lar out there’s been in place too long for an unbound djinn to have been floating around since before it was invoked, and we’d sure as hell have known if someone had sent it through the lar from the outside. QED, and all that.”

  “Oh, that’s just terrific news. How in the worlds did Melentha track us here?”

  “I don’t think she did, actually,” Ravagin shook his head. “My guess is that when we didn’t make a mad run for the Tunnel, she just got all the people together that she could beg, borrow, or steal and scattered them around in hopes of spotting us whenever we finally surfaced.”

  “So when whoever it is spotted us, he invoked the djinn to check us out?”

  Ravagin was silent a moment. “My guess is that he isn’t actually on to us yet. If he was, the djinn ought to have been flying more purposefully, and have left right away when it didn’t find you here.”

  “But we’re now stuck here with him until dawn,” Danae pointed out, suppressing a shudder.

  “Right.” Ravagin drew the short sword, checked its edge, and resheathed it. “Which means we’ve got to identify him before he identifies us. And eliminate him.”

  Danae’s heart skipped a beat. “You mean … kill him? But if he’s not on to us—”

  She stopped abruptly at the expression on his face. “Look, Danae,” he said quietly, “in the first place, if I could be sure he wouldn’t identify us, I’d be more than happy to leave him alone. But we don’t have any such guarantee. And if there’s going to be any confrontation, I want it to be on my terms and timing, not his. Understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, bending the truth only a little. “All right. What can I do to help?”

  “Stay here,” he said promptly, moving toward the door. “You’ll be as safe here as anywhere else. Use that chair there to wedge the door and don’t open it to anyone but me. I’ll identify myself by calling you the name with which we were first int
roduced. Got that?”

  Danae Panya. It almost startled her to remember. The name seemed to come from a distant past, or from a life not her own. “Got it,” she told him. “Please be careful, Ravagin.”

  “You bet,” he grunted. “Watch your eyes …”

  She shielded them, and in a flare of light from the hall he was gone.

  Pushing the heavy wooden chair over to the door and wedging it under the latch took only a couple of minutes—far more time, she thought grimly, than it would take a determined attacker to break it down. She spent a few minutes more searching for a better way to secure the door, but aside from the armchair, bed, a couple of blankets, and a fireplate, the room was totally devoid of furnishings. The ceiling was composed of rough-hewn boards, each thick enough to make a good brace, but they were solidly nailed in place and without tools there would be no chance of getting one loose.

  Eventually, she gave up and sat back down on the bed. The sight of the food Ravagin had brought made her stomach growl, reminding her that even with this new threat having shot her appetite all to hell, her body still needed to eat. Sighing, she tore off a piece of meat and began gnawing at it. And tried to think.

  Somewhere along the line, she knew, she was almost certain to be attacked. Ravagin could probably not identify and kill the spy without the other catching on as to who he was, as well, and even a dying invocation could spell trouble for them. And if Ravagin wasn’t able to kill him right away, the spy might even come up here in person to try and find her.

  She shivered at the thought. She’d been attacked by spirits before, and had no interest whatsoever in repeating the experience. But at least she had the partial protection of invisibility where the spirits were concerned. She had no such advantage over the spy … and the chance that she might wind up being used as a shield or bargaining chip by a demon-influenced human was about as horrible a situation as she could imagine.

  Which meant that that was the situation she should concentrate on resisting.

  Slowly, she swept her eyes around the room, trying to think. If the spy identified them, he would surely remember the bandages around her face. Would he correctly guess their purpose and realize that even moderate light was a weapon he could use against her? Or would he think she was simply trying to disguise her features?

  The latter, almost certainly. Gartanis had implied that contacts with demogorgons were rare, and that the physical effects in each of those cases were different. Ravagin had seemed taken aback by the sensory enhancement she’d suffered; she could take that as an indication that the spy wouldn’t expect it, either.

  So as far as he was concerned, she was a normal person hiding out in a darkened inn room. Given that, what sort of attack would he be likely to use?

  She thought it through several times, but unfortunately the same answer kept coming up. When attacking someone whose eyes had grown accustomed to darkness, the first and most obvious thing to do would be to turn on the lights.

  All right, she told herself fiercely. So that’s exactly what you don’t want. So figure out a way to take advantage of it.

  Her eyes fell on the tray beside her … on the blankets lying rumpled next to it. Would he invoke a dazzler or a firebrat? Dazzler, most likely; there shouldn’t be any need for him to burn down the inn. And if he weren’t a complete idiot, he would invoke it somewhere behind him where the light wouldn’t get in his own eyes. But not too far behind him, or he would have to come a few steps into the room on his own before the spirit made it in, too. So just behind him. Practically right there on his shoulder …

  Slowly, an idea came to her. Undoubtedly the stupidest idea she’d ever heard in her life … but for now it was all she had.

  Getting the necessary splinters from the window shutter was the hardest part, especially with nothing but the edge of the fireplate to pry them out with. But eventually she had enough. The blankets were single-thread woven; working with one of the splinters at the edge, she managed to unravel several meters of the yarn. Gathering it up with the other blanket and the splinters, she got to work.

  It took her nearly half an hour, but at last she was finished. Then, picking up the heavy chair by its arms, she moved it a couple of meters back from the door and sat down nervously to wait.

  She waited a long time, through many false alarms as the inn’s other guests began to leave the common room below and tromp down the hallway in search of their beds. Once, she thought she heard the hissing of a spirit again, but if that was indeed what it was, it didn’t enter her room.

  The minutes dragged by, and as her adrenaline-fueled alertness began to yield to fatigue, she began to wonder if she’d been perhaps a bit premature in this … and to wonder what Ravagin would say if he walked into her trap first …

  And abruptly her back stiffened. From out in the hall came the spirit-hiss again … but this time it was accompanied by a set of unnaturally quiet footsteps. Accompanied by, and coming nearer at the same pace as the footsteps …

  She was out of the chair in an instant, stepping around behind it and grabbing for its arms. Lifting it up, holding it like a shield in front of her, she held her breath … and then the door was flung open to slam against the wall, and everything happened at once.

  “Sa-trahist rassh!” the man bellowed as he leaped into the room. Danae moved at the same time, ramming forward toward the silhouetted intruder with the chair. Through her narrowed eyes she caught just a glimpse of the sword in his hand—and of the ceiling falling in on him—and then the chair caught him squarely in the chest to jerk him backwards—

  Directly into the firebrat that erupted into existence behind him.

  His scream of rage and pain seemed to explode inside Danae’s skull as she dropped the chair and fell back into the room, arms and hands trying to protect both her ears and eyes from the agonizing assaults on them.

  “Danae!”

  The voice was Ravagin’s, coinciding with the sprinting footsteps coming down the hallway toward the room. Dimly, through the screams, she could hear the fury and fear in the voice—

  “I’m all right!” she shouted back, knowing in that instant that if her attacker was not in fact incapacitated the sound of her voice would bring him instantly down on her.

  But the other’s screams had turned from rage to terror … and even as Ravagin’s footsteps arrived she could hear a new sound adding to the mixture. The sound of burning cloth …

  “Danae!”

  “Over here, Ravagin,” she called. A horrible smell was beginning to flood into her nose … “Help me!”

  A strong hand closed around her free arm, and she caught a suddenly strong whiff of scorched hair. “The door’s blocked—we’ll have to use the window,” he panted. “Come on—”

  She stumbled along behind him. The screams from the doorway had faded to silence now, but the nauseating smell of burning meat was getting stronger. As were the light and heat …

  From ahead of her came the sound of a window being flung open, followed by that of stressed wood as he slammed open the shutters. “Come on—I’ll give you a hand—”

  “Wait a second,” she protested as he pulled her toward the sudden breeze. “Shouldn’t we do something about that firebrat?”

  “Like what?—the guy who invoked it is already dead or on his way there.”

  “But the inn will burn do—”

  “Oh, all right. Sa-khe-khe fawkh; simar-kaia! Now come on!”

  She had just enough time to identify the new sound as that of water gushing across the burning floor; and then she was being pushed to a sitting position on the sill, Ravagin was squeezing through beside her and jumping to the ground below—

  “Okay—jump!” he called up.

  Gritting her teeth, she pushed off the sill, and a heart-stopping second later landed in his arms. “Okay,” he said, the frantic tension in his voice fading into a trembling relief. “It’s okay. We’re safe now.”

  And for the first time in minutes Danae fou
nd she was able to breathe again. And able to cry.

  Chapter 30

  “I DIDN’T MEAN TO kill him,” Danae sniffed from Ravagin’s arms when she was able to talk again. “Not that way. I thought he would invoke a dazzler, not a firebrat. I really did.”

  Ravagin nodded silently, wincing a bit as the movement rubbed his singed cheek against Danae’s hair. They’d been sitting here together by this shed near the stable for nearly a quarter hour now, and if there were any words that would help her work through the horror and guilt she was feeling, he’d about given up finding them. At least she never actually had to see him burning to death, he thought. Unfortunately, he had, and the memory made him shudder.

  “Ravagin?” Danae asked, holding him a bit closer. “You okay? You shivered.”

  “I’m fine. Look, Danae … it wasn’t your fault. It really wasn’t. You had no way of knowing I was only half a hallway behind him and that he would put that firebrat in the doorway to try and block my approach.”

  She inhaled suddenly. “You—it was right in the doorway? You didn’t tell me that before.”

  “It’s okay,” he hastened to assure her. “I only got a little scorched. Probably got off a lot easier than I would have in a straight fight with him. Try remembering that, if it helps—he didn’t just come in for a friendly chat. He was there to kill us.”

  “I know, and I’ll be all right in a minute. It’s just that … I’ve never had a hand in killing anyone before.”

  He nodded understanding. “Just keep remembering that everything you did was in self-defense. You’re damned lucky he didn’t skewer you when you threw that blanket over his head.”

  “I didn’t throw it.” She sniffed again, but her trembling had eased and it was clear she was starting to regain control of herself. “I wedged its corners into cracks in the ceiling with splinters from the window shutters, with threads from the other blanket set to pull it down when the door opened. Sort of like a homeowner’s security tangler net, you know? I thought he’d invoke a dazzler behind him, and that when I pushed him back with the chair he’d wind up with it under the blanket and right in his eyes and then he’d be as blind as I was—” She broke off, took a deep breath. “We’ve been through all this, haven’t we? Sorry. What’s happening out there? It sounds like the crowd’s breaking up.”