Triplet

  A blast of hot air hit her square in the face, burningly hot even through the streaming bodice. Dimly, she felt her entire body blistering where she stood; but even as she took her first step, she found herself flying through the burning hallway. Her arms felt like they were being pulled out of their sockets; she stumbled once, her feet striking what felt like liquid lead—

  And abruptly she slammed into something solid that caught her and half dragged, half led her into sudden coolness.

  “Ravagin,” she gasped, clutching him tightly.

  His hand slid over her face, pulled the bodice free. “It’s okay, Danae—you’re safe now,” he soothed her.

  She took a shuddering breath, blinking enough of the tears out of her eyes to see that they were in another bedroom. Across the room a broken window was blowing a stiff breeze toward them. “I thought Shamsheer houses were more fireproof than this,” she gasped.

  “They also come with built-in detectors and fire-fighting systems,” Ravagin growled. “Our little friends apparently figured out a way to shut them down.”

  “Our—?” Danae’s stomach tightened into a knot. With the fire driving all other thoughts from her mind she hadn’t even made the connection. “The spirits?” she whispered.

  “Who else? Come on—let’s get out of here before they come up with something else to try.”

  Together they headed over to the broken window, and Ravagin took a careful look outside. “Looks clear. I’ll go first, you come down after me. Watch the broken glass.”

  It was indeed clear outside, and a moment later they were hurrying around toward the front of the house, keeping to the middle of the narrow grass strip between the house and the edge of the forest. Above them the roof of the house was beginning to crackle though there was remarkably little smoke and as yet no visible flame. “How did they do it?” she asked Ravagin. “I mean, even if they could knock out the anti-fire system, how did they get enough heat to start a fire in the first place?”

  “They must have gotten into the central control system and found a way to overload the wiring throughout the house,” he replied grimly. “Damn them, anyway. I never even thought they might do something like this.”

  They rounded the corner—and skidded to a halt.

  Resting up against the front of the house was a huge, spindly circle sitting vertically on a wheeled base. A white haze filled its circumference, a haze that mixed with a billowing mass of black smoke streaming out its far end. “My God,” Danae gasped. “What in the worlds is that?”

  “It’s a giant fan,” Ravagin growled. “It’s pulling the smoke out of the hallway, probably so as to give the fire a good head start before we smelled anything and woke up. Gives the fire a good air flow, too, of course.”

  Danae stared at the huge device. “But where did it come from? You’re not going to tell me they had something like that in storage here, are you?”

  “Not hardly,” he said grimly. “There’s a Forge Beast out back. I guess they got into that, too.”

  Forge Beast: a computerized forge capable of designing and making any desired metal object, the definition from her orientation came back to her. “They must have been in the house for hours—maybe even since before we got here.”

  “Maybe,” Ravagin said slowly. “On the other hand … well, it should be easy enough to test.”

  She watched, frowning, as he stepped to the nearest tree and sliced a thick branch off with his sword. “What are you going to do with that?” she asked.

  “See just how strong this fan really is. Stay here.”

  “Ravagin—” She bit down on the protest. He surely knew what he was doing. …

  Carefully, he moved to within a few meters of the fan and stood there for a moment studying it. Then, taking hold of his branch with the whip of his scorpion glove, he extended it as close to the fan as it would go—flipped it into the blades—

  And with a horrendous grinding of broken metal, the blades shattered into shrapnel.

  “Well, that settles that,” Ravagin said as he walked back to where Danae stood. “Extremely cheap construction, probably thrown together in less than an hour. Which means that it took them—” he glanced at the sun, glinting now between the trees to the west—“eight or nine hours to find us, get into the various systems and learn how to use them, build the fan and get it into position, and actually start the fire.”

  “That’s pretty fast,” Danae said, a sinking feeling tightening her stomach.

  “Yeah,” Ravagin nodded heavily. “But it could have been worse. Such as if you hadn’t woken up and taken that shower.”

  Danae swallowed, remembering. “It was a bad dream that woke me up. One where trolls had the green glow of demon possession.”

  Ravagin cocked an eyebrow at her. “Interesting. You may still have some spirit sensitivity left over from your demogorgon contact. Could prove useful.”

  “If we can get to civilization in one piece, you mean—” She jumped as a sudden crash came from the house beside them. “What—?”

  “Part of the roof caving in, probably,” Ravagin said.

  She glared at him. “How can you be so damned calm about it?” she growled.

  “Only because anger and panic won’t gain us anything,” he told her. “Like it or not, Danae, we’ve gotten ourselves tangled up in another battle of wits with spirits; and just like it was on Karyx, we’re not going to be able to outfight them. So we’re just going to have to outthink them.”

  Danae took a deep breath, fighting for some calm herself. She was only partially successful. “All right. So how do we outthink ourselves away from here without them catching on?”

  “I’ve got an idea.” Pulling the prayer stick from his belt, he raised it to his lips. “I pray thee, deliver unto me a sky-plane.”

  “You think that’s wise?” she asked as he returned the stick to its place. “The way this whole prayer stick network works implies there’s a central dispatch somewhere. If they’ve gotten into that—”

  “Actually, I think that network probably was the way they traced us here before,” he admitted. “But our only other choice is to walk out, and with night coming on in a few hours I’d personally rather take my chances with the spirits. Besides, I’ve got an idea that might shake them off our trail, at least temporarily. Meanwhile—” he glanced over to the house, where flames were starting to flicker on the roof—“I tossed your crossbow and other stuff out the window earlier. I suggest we collect them and move a little further into the forest.”

  The sky-plane was nearly an hour in arriving, which Ravagin took to be a good sign. “It means the spirits didn’t have a gimmicked one standing by near here,” he explained, “which implies this one is clean.”

  To Danae it didn’t imply nearly that much. “Suppose they just held it over behind the trees somewhere for fifty minutes and then let it come?”

  “Because any sky-plane that sat on the ground in response to a send-order would automatically be classified as damaged and power to it cut off until it was time for it to go to a Dark Tower for repair,” he told her. “Sky-planes are notorious for being grounded when anything seems out of order.”

  She eyed the fringed carpet dubiously. “Well … maybe. It still doesn’t get us out of here without the spirits knowing where we’ve gone.”

  “No,” Ravagin agreed. “But this might.” Stepping over to the sky-plane, he drew his sword and drove it straight down into the carpet’s center.

  “Ravagin!” Danae yelped. “What—?”

  And suddenly she understood. “You’ve damaged it,” she breathed. “That means … it’ll have to go to the Dark Tower.”

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “And it’ll go there without a prayer-stick call or anything else from us that can be traced. I hope.”

  Danae looked down at the carpet. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  Chapter 35

  A SECOND SKY-PLANE ARRIVED shortly after sundown and proceeded to work its way und
erneath the one Ravagin had damaged. It was, Danae would have thought, a rather tricky maneuver, but the sky-planes carried it out deftly and with an almost miserly efficiency of movement. Barely a minute after the second sky-plane’s arrival the piggybacked carpets rose into the sky, apparently oblivious to their two unscheduled passengers, and headed southwest toward Forj Tower. Slowly, the ground vanished into the deepening darkness beneath them; and as stars and distant village lights came out together, Danae found herself lapsing into the hazy illusion that they were traveling out in deep space, far from unpredictable spirits and magical technology. Far from danger and trouble and decisions …

  “That’s the Tower ahead,” Ravagin murmured.

  She started, the warm sense of almost-security vanishing. Ahead, visible only as it blocked stars and distant lights, the Tower was a brooding shadow looming in their path. “That’s it, all right,” she agreed, feeling the tension begin to rise again within her. Ravagin had said once that there were trolls guarding the Dark Towers. … “We going to just ride it on in?”

  “We don’t have any choice,” he said. “Sky-planes bringing in repair work are pre-programmed by our hypothetical central dispatch.”

  “I wish there was at least some way to knock first,” she sighed. “Sneaking in like this makes me nervous.”

  “Yeah. Well … if it makes you feel any better, we’ve collected six or seven stories of people who got inside one or the other of the Towers, and none of them end with the person being killed.”

  She pursed her lips. “Though if someone just disappeared inside, you aren’t nearly that likely to have heard about it.”

  “Point,” he admitted. “Still, all the stories we do have agree that as long as we don’t interfere with the Tower’s work we should be okay.”

  The dark mass ahead of them rapidly grew larger, and within a few minutes they were close enough for Danae to pick out some of its details in the starlight. The secondary spires were well below them, the sky-plane clearly aiming for the windows near the structure’s top. “A shame we can’t take this tour in the daytime,” she commented, striving for a light tone amid the tight silence. “I’d like to see the relief stone patterns further down.”

  “Maybe some day we can come back,” Ravagin said. “Though if you want to see the patterns you’ll do about as well to just stand at the bottom and look up. The internal programming that keeps sky-planes ten meters away from buildings also applies to the Towers. In fact, as far as I know these repair flights are the only exceptions to that rule.”

  The Tower filled the entire sky ahead of them now, and for the first time Danae could see the rows of windows as slightly lighter chunks of gray against the black background. She held her breath as one of the windows in the bottom row loomed straight ahead … instinctively ducked her head … and without any pause or hesitation the sky-plane slid neatly in through its center.

  “Be light,” Ravagin murmured, and the firefly ring on his hand began giving off its gentle glow. Danae had just enough time to notice that they were passing through what looked like a short hallway with gridded mesh for walls, ceiling, and floor when Ravagin suddenly grabbed her arm. “Come on!” he snapped, and half dragging her, rolled off the carpet.

  He landed on his feet, throwing his free hand to the mesh wall on one side for balance. Danae wasn’t nearly so graceful, losing her balance despite his steadying hand on her arm and dropping onto one knee. The mesh jammed painfully into her kneecap and she bit back an exclamation. “What is it?” she whispered tensely.

  “Get a good grip on yourself,” he said. “Be more lighted.”

  The firefly’s glow brightened. Danae saw that they were barely two meters from the end of the mesh hallway … and beyond it—

  Was nothing.

  She gasped, clamping her teeth tightly together as the acrophobia from her first sky-plane ride suddenly flooded into her. Nothing—just black, empty space—as far as the light from the firefly could penetrate.

  Dimly, she noticed that Ravagin, his hand still gripping her arm, was peering closely at her face. “I’m okay,” she said with an effort.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all.”

  “Good. I’m going to go to the edge and see what we’ve got to work with here. You stay put, okay?”

  She managed a nod. Releasing her arm, he straightened up and took a careful step toward the edge of the abyss. “Be full lighted,” he ordered the firefly … and as its glow became searchlight-bright, she forced herself to look.

  It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. In the brighter light the far side of the Tower was visible, perhaps fifty meters away, and she could see that it, too, had the same sort of short mesh corridors extending out from each window. Just beneath the meshwork, and continuing down the Tower as far as the light could show, were a series of hexagonal boxes that reminded her instantly of a giant honeycomb made up of private rooms. One of the hexes caught her eye as its door slid open, and she looked over in time to see their piggybacked sky-planes vanish inside. Once, Ravagin shined the light directly down; steeling herself, Danae looked through the mesh beneath her. To her vast relief the pattern of boxes across the way apparently repeated itself on this side of the Tower, too, and she could see the top of the nearest barely three meters away.

  Ravagin stood motionless for several minutes, the firefly’s light throwing sharp moire patterns around their end of the Tower whenever it happened to intersect part of the mesh. Finally, he shut the light back down to a dim glow and stepped back to her. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said, his voice oddly tight. “These little individual corridors—” he waved a hand around at the mesh—“seem to be around every window in the place, all the way around the circumference of the Tower and all the way up. I don’t know what they’re for, but if this one is any indication, they seem sturdy enough to easily hold our weight. Also, since it looks like all the sky-planes bringing damaged merchandise come in through these windows, we should be able to hitch a ride out as easily as we got in.”

  “Sometime before dawn, right?” Danae put in.

  “Several hours before, probably.” He hesitated. “Now for the bad news. If ours was representative, it looks like the incoming sky-planes travel in pretty much a straight line from wherever they’ve come from through the windows and into their repair cubicles. If that pattern holds in reverse for the outgoing flights, it means we’re going to have to get almost halfway around the circle if we want to pick up a sky-plane that’s headed the direction we want to go.”

  Danae’s mouth went dry. “Get across how?” she asked carefully, something deep in her stomach warning her she wasn’t going to like the answer.

  She didn’t. “We go to the end of this corridor,” Ravagin said, pointing, “hold onto the side mesh, and swing one leg at a time around into the next corridor. Cross the corridor and repeat.”

  She thought about that for a long moment, her memory bringing up the view across the Tower she’d had a minute ago … “The repair cubicles don’t extend as far out toward the middle as these corridors do. Do they?”

  He shook his head. “Afraid not.”

  “Which means … we’ll be nearly a kilometer up over absolutely nothing when we do this.”

  “It won’t be quite as bad as you’re thinking,” he assured her. “We’ve got a safety strap available—the scorpion glove—and as I said before the mesh seems pretty sturdy.”

  “And very sharp,” she said heavily. “I should know—I banged my knee on it a minute ago.”

  “Umm.” Ravagin squatted down, felt the mesh gingerly, then repeated with the mesh of the walls. “Maybe a little. Remember you won’t be hitting it with all your weight, either.”

  Danae took a deep breath. “There’s no other way to do this?” she asked, just to make sure.

  “I don’t think so.” He pursed his lips. “Look, Danae … I remember your trouble with the sky-planes. If
you honestly don’t think you can make it, we could probably stay here and try to pick up a sky-plane going back the way we came.”

  She snorted. “Back where?—toward Darcane Forest? We’d wind up at least five hundred kilometers from the Tunnel.” Abruptly, she got to her feet. “Give me a little more light, will you?” He complied, and she turned toward the end of the hallway. After all, she told herself sternly, you’ve been chased by demons, intruded into a world where you didn’t belong, and gotten out of a burning house alive. What’s a little gravity after that?

  The first one was the hardest. Gripping the mesh with her right hand, she leaned out just far enough to get her left hand around the wall and wedged into the mesh from that side. Then, concentrating on the reassuring pressure of the scorpion glove’s whip against her back, she swung her left leg around and onto the floor of the next hallway over. A careful shift of weight … reaching over to get a grip further down … an easing of the other foot across …

  She took a deep breath, moving automatically another step away from the edge before turning. “Well, come on,” she told Ravagin. “We haven’t got all night. Let’s get this over with.”

  The hallways measured roughly three meters across each, and they wound up crossing twenty-one of them before Ravagin called a halt. “We’re just past the southern edge of Missia City now—see the lights?” he said, pointing, as he knelt near the window. “That means we should be facing due west now.”

  “Uh-huh,” Danae nodded, staying as close to the center of the hallway as she could. The window had no lip or sill, and had another equally long drop beyond it … Gritting her teeth, she concentrated on her mental map of Shamsheer. “Picking up a sky-plane here is as likely to get us to Ordarl Protectorate as it is to Numant, though, isn’t it?”

  “Or it could take us to Kelaine City or anything else in the Tweens,” he agreed, backing away carefully from the window. “Or even some distance beyond the Tunnel. We aren’t going to get a whole lot of choice.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “Ordarl was where we were stopped on our way to Karyx, remember?”