Triplet

  “Then tell me why you used your black arts to bring your sky-plane into my house!” he thundered.

  “My lord—” Ravagin spread his hands out helplessly. “I tell you again, it was none of my doing.”

  Beside the castle-lord, a hard-looking man in the tunic of a guard officer cleared his throat. “My lord,” he said quietly, “even if there was such a message, he could hardly have drawn more attention to himself this way. Would he not have done better to wait until the day was fully born and then to arrive by horse or sky-plane in a lawful manner?”

  “Perhaps.” Simrahi’s voice was controlled again, but his eyes still smoldered. “Perhaps this was simply part of the plot, though. Perhaps the black sorcerer’s arrival was the signal to act—and what better way for the news to be spread quickly to any and all conspirators throughout the protectorate?” He glared up at the guard officer, then turned his eyes back to Ravagin. “You see, my innocent traveler, there is much about yourself you have failed to mention,” he said, his voice calm but with an edge of iron to it. “I have spent part of the past few hours in the Shrine of Knowledge, seeking information of you through the crystal eye. Shall I tell the court that you were detained in Ordarl Protectorate less than a month ago on suspicion of being a black sorcerer?—and with the same companion that you travel with now, who claimed then to be on her way home? Or that you and this same companion attacked three men in Kelaine City shortly before that with weapons that bordered on the black arts? Or that the sky-plane you claim you were innocently riding had in fact come directly from the Dark Tower near Missia City?—which no normal person has ever entered?”

  Ravagin had to work to get moisture back into his mouth. “My lord … all of those seemingly bizarre events can indeed be explained. The incident in Kelaine City—”

  “Enough.”

  Ravagin swallowed hard. Simrahi’s voice, barely louder than a purr, was infinitely more frightening than even his earlier shouting had been. It was the voice of a man who had already made his decision.

  “You are accused of being a black sorcerer,” Simrahi continued in the same soft voice, “possibly in league with forces attempting to overthrow my rule. In any case, you are a threat and a danger to the Numant Protectorate, and indeed all of Shamsheer, and you will remain in the cells of Castle Numanteal until I decide how to deal with you.”

  He rose to his feet, the signal that the hearing was over. The guards on either side of him took Ravagin’s arms—“My lord!” he called over the buzz of conversation that had begun. “What about my companion? Surely she is blameless and can be released—”

  “Your companion will remain in the cells with you,” Simrahi said. “She who has shared in your activities will surely share in their consequences.”

  “But—”

  “For that matter, I have not yet determined which of you is the actual wielder of the black sorcery.” Simrahi shifted his eyes to Ravagin’s guards. “Remove him.”

  They did so, none too gently. Apparently, Ravagin realized dimly as the blows began to fall about his face, speaking to a castle-lord out of turn was frowned upon.

  Chapter 37

  “THERE,” DANAE SAID, WRINGING out her cloth one final time into the cell’s small washbasin. “How does that feel?”

  “Probably about like it looks,” Ravagin grunted, giving his fingertips a gingerly tour of his face. The largest cuts were still oozing blood; the bruises felt like they would like to.

  “That bad, huh?” An attempt at a smile played briefly around Danae’s lips as she came over and knelt down in front of the cot where he was half lying, half slouching. But even a show of humor was clearly too much of an effort, and the smile vanished quickly into the fear and tension lines that had been there since his unceremonious arrival back at the cell. “You don’t look very good,” she admitted. “I wish there was some way we could get you into the House of Healing and let a Dreya’s Womb check you over.”

  “Fat chance,” Ravagin said, peering at the traces of blood on his fingers before wiping them on his pants. “Unless you can convince someone that I’m going to die of infection before they get the chance to execute me.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” she said, her voice trembling. “It scares me.”

  He sighed; but she was right. There was no point in tearing down what little morale they had left. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Look, my natural pessimism notwithstanding, there really is a chance that Simrahi will eventually let us go. Provided I can prove we are not involved either in black sorcery or any conspiracy his fevered mind has cooked up.”

  Danae licked her lips, her eyes flicking toward the massive door. “Perhaps you shouldn’t, uh …”

  “Insult the castle-lord in the hearing of his faithful cell-wardens?” Ravagin snorted. She was right, of course—the only reason for them to have been put into a common cell was in hopes that hidden listeners would glean something useful from their conversation. But for the moment he didn’t give a damn about what anyone heard—or even what they made of it. Keeping Danae where he could watch over her was the all-important consideration now, and as long as they kept talking chances were fair that the cell-wardens would leave them together. “I don’t care what they think, frankly. If he really believes someone’s out to overthrow him he ought to be locked up in a Dreya’s Womb under heavy sedation. Period.”

  “Why is it so hard to believe?” Danae demanded, eyes glinting with a spark of her old fire. “Palace revolutions are a great human tradition.”

  “Sure, but seldom work unless you can subvert or outfight the castle-lord’s personal bodyguard. In this case, you can’t.”

  “Why—? Oh. Trolls?”

  “You got it. A special cadre of them, programmed directly to the castle-lord’s personal defense.”

  “Yes, but … there has to be a way to reprogram them. When the old castle-lord turns over control to his successor, for instance.”

  Ravagin shrugged, wincing as the movement sent a flash of pain up his side where one of the guards had kicked him. “I’m sure there is,” he said, rubbing the spot carefully. “But I can practically guarantee that however it works you have to either be the outgoing castle-lord or else have free access to the castle-lord’s private rooms to do it. There would be a whole layer cake of safeguards built in to keep anyone else from doing it.”

  “Like the safeguards built into sky-planes that keep them out of buildings?” Danae asked pointedly.

  Ravagin gritted his teeth. “Damn. Yeah, just about exactly like that.”

  For a long moment there was silence. Then Danae stirred, looking down at the wet cloth still in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. Standing up again, she laid the cloth carefully over the edge of the sink. “Do you suppose,” she said slowly, “that that’s how they’re planning to go about it? To cause or help with revolutions?”

  Ravagin pursed his lips. “No, I don’t think so. It would require them to work through people again—conspirators or whoever. Aside from the obvious difficulties they’d have in recruiting such a group, I doubt they really want to bother with people more than they absolutely have to. No, I think they came up with this sky-plane trick solely to get us in trouble with a castle-lord and just happened to find one who was certifiably paranoid already. An extra bonus.” He shook his head. “The really frightening thing is how fast they’re learning how to do combat on this side of the Tunnel. The head-on approach—with the bewitched trolls—didn’t work, and they immediately switched to using the technology in a more indirect way, to try to burn us to death. When that one sank, too, they did an almost complete about-face and decided that the best ones to deal with humans were other humans. Ergo, they drop us in Castle Numanteal in a way guaranteed to scare the bejabbers out of the locals.”

  “You can call it intelligence if you want; I call it dumb luck,” Danae said. Turning away from the basin, she stepped back over to him. Her eyes met his for a second, and with just the barest hesita
tion she lay down on the cot beside him, facing into his chest and pillowing her head on his left upper arm. “It seems to me that they’re just flailing around and happened to get lucky.”

  Ravagin eased his left arm around her shoulder, pulling her comfortably against him. “Why do you say that?” he asked. Keep her talking, a small voice whispered inside his brain. Keep her arguing; it’ll help distract her from the mess you’re in. …

  “Because they continue to do stupid things. Look at the trolls—they lost control of the things in a simple fight and couldn’t figure out how to get it back. And at the way house they never even got around to shutting off the water to the shower.”

  Ravagin frowned. Now that she mentioned it, that did seem rather odd. The climate control electronics the spirits had overloaded were supposed to handle the water system, too. “You’re sure that wasn’t just so you would stay in the shower until the fire got going?”

  “Positive. Remember?—you had me block the drain so that the water would go out into the hallway? And then when the sky-plane got us into the manor house, why didn’t the spirits land it instead of just leaving the thing like it did? We were pretty invulnerable up there, with the edge barrier operating—wouldn’t it have been to the spirit’s advantage to get us killed or at least wounded in a kitchen riot instead of giving us the chance to surrender peacefully?”

  “You’re right,” Ravagin admitted. “Letting us try and reason with the castle-lord was probably a mistake on its part.” He bit gently at his lip. “Very interesting indeed. You see where this leads us, don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, think about it a second. What kind of spirit could behave as if it’s taking turns being brilliant and stupid? Or, I should say, what group of spirits?”

  She twisted suddenly to look up at him. “A demon!” she gasped. “A demon and his parasite spirits.”

  “That’s it,” he nodded. “And it furthermore means that we were right about the demon’s friend here being ignorant of what he’s really up to. If the demon himself had been attacking us, we probably would have been stopped in short order. But it’s clear that he’s having to stick close to home—wherever that is—and just sending his parasites out against us.” Ravagin felt a surge of excitement; for the first time in hours, it seemed, his brain was running at top speed again. The logical puzzle was unraveling right before his eyes. … “So the parasites come against us, can’t handle the unexpected things we throw at them, and fall on their ectoplasmic faces. They head back—sure, it all makes sense. They head back and report and the demon comes up with a new plan, which they launch in a few hours or whenever they can get to us. If we analyze the time periods involved, in fact, we might even be able to isolate their home base area.”

  “Great,” Danae said without noticeable enthusiasm. “So what does that mean for getting us out of here?”

  Ravagin’s growing excitement faded away. “Yeah,” he said heavily. “You’re right. How do we convince Simrahi that there are forces threatening all of Shamsheer, and further convince him that letting us go is the way to fight the attack?”

  “He believes in magic, doesn’t he? I mean, he has to believe in it, living on Shamsheer. And it sounds like he believes in black sorcery, too—”

  “Convincing him that there’s a threat wasn’t the part I was worried about,” Ravagin interrupted her gently. “He already believes that … and thinks we’re part of it.”

  She sighed. “So it’s up to us. Totally.”

  Ravagin eyed the bare walls around them. “I wish we were even that well off. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way we can get ourselves out of this one. I’m afraid it’s all up to your father now.”

  She tensed in his arms. “You mean the threat we made to Melentha? That if I disappeared, Daddy Dear would come looking for me?”

  Something about the way she said that sent a quiet shiver up his back. “Yes,” he said cautiously. “Why?—isn’t it true?”

  She took a deep breath. “Not really. In fact … I think he’s probably already resigned himself to never seeing me again.”

  Ravagin felt his neck muscles tighten. “Are you suggesting,” he said slowly, “that he poured money all over various Triplet officials … expecting you to die here?”

  “No, of course not. I don’t think he realized until the last minute what I was really up to.”

  “Which was …?”

  She sighed. “Ravagin, I’ve been trying to run away from Daddy Dear for a long time. I’ve hated his money, hated the way everyone automatically fawned over me for no reason except the accident of history that I was his daughter. Hated the way they all treated me as if I was a cute little girl without any brains. Here—Triplet—was the only place I could find where his influence didn’t penetrate. The only place where I could prove myself on my own, without Hart or someone like him showing up to grease my path. I started this trip eighty percent certain that I would run away from you at some point, to settle down and possibly spend the rest of my life here.”

  She stopped, and for a long minute there was silence. In his arms he could feel her body trembling, but he couldn’t tell whether she was actually crying or just struggling hard to hold back the tears. Not that it mattered. “Well,” he said at last, “it looks like you’ve done it. Proven yourself, I mean.”

  She sniffed. “Oh, sure. It takes a real capable adult to get both herself and a friend into a death cell.”

  “You’re missing my point,” he shook his head. “You know, Danae, you had the kind of life in front of you that most of the people I’ve known would have jumped at with all four feet. You could have allowed yourself to become a pampered parasite—let yourself be that little girl forever. But you didn’t. You came to Triplet instead.”

  She sniffed again, reaching up with one hand to rub at her eyes, and when the hand came away he saw the moisture there. She had indeed been crying. “Nice to at least find it out before I die, isn’t it.”

  He bit at his lip. “Danae …”

  “No, please don’t talk. What I really need … Ravagin, would you hold me?”

  “I am holding you.”

  “No, I mean …” She took a ragged breath. “Hold me. Closer.”

  It took several heartbeats for him to finally realize what she meant … and several heartbeats after that to get his tongue unstuck. “Are you sure?” he asked awkwardly. “I mean … I’m hardly the sort of man … in, you know, normal circumstances, you wouldn’t choose—”

  She barked a laugh that was more than half sob. “You might be surprised. And since when are these normal circumstances, anyway? Unless you … don’t want to, I mean …”

  There was only one answer for that. Reaching over with his free hand, he turned her face gently upwards and kissed her. She twisted her body over toward him, arms snaking around his neck to press herself against him as she returned the kiss almost desperately. He let his hand drop lower, to her scorched, waterstained bodice …

  It was only afterward, as she lay sleeping in his arms and he was dozing off himself, that the possibility they’d been observed occurred to him. An odd lapse, for him; even odder the fact that such a thought didn’t even dent the sense of contentment filling him. It had been a long time since he’d felt this way …

  Looking up at the ceiling, he sent it a half smile. The hell with you, he thought toward the hidden watchers. Closing his eyes, he fell asleep.

  Chapter 38

  THE CLICK OF AN opening lock jerked Ravagin awake, and he opened his eyes just as a tall, hard-looking man in a tight half-cloak stepped across the threshold into the cell. His eyes met Ravagin’s, then flicked around the room, before he half turned to the shadowy figures waiting behind him in the corridor. “I will speak with them alone,” he said in a voice Ravagin could tell was accustomed to giving orders. “No one is to listen in—is that clear?”

  There was a muttered acknowledgment, and the man turned back and took a step into the cell. Behind h
im the door swung shut.

  For a moment he simply looked at them. Propped up on one elbow, Ravagin looked back, matching the other’s silence and—he hoped—his impassive expression. On her side in front of him, her back pressed against his chest, Danae was also motionless and silent, but Ravagin could feel the nervous twitches that told him she was also awake. Surreptitiously, he squeezed her hip, hoping she would take the gesture as one of reassurance. Though offhand, he couldn’t see any reason for either of them to be reassured.

  “Well,” the man said at last, coming another step toward the cot. “You two look very cozy. I trust you’ve found a way to pass the time?”

  Danae stiffened; Ravagin squeezed her hip again. “Indeed,” he said, keeping his voice cool. “You don’t need us to tell you that, of course.”

  The other smiled faintly. “Very good, Ravagin—you recognize me, then.”

  “You were dressed in a guard officer’s tunic earlier,” Ravagin told him. “Standing beside Castle-Lord Simrahi at that farce of a hearing. What else could you be but a high-ranking member of the household guard?”

  The other’s expression didn’t change. “You are indeed an observant man. Excellent. I am Habri; master of the Castle Numanteal guard. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Not really. Should it?”

  A flash of something—disappointment?—seemed to register briefly on Habri’s face. But he recovered quickly. “No matter. So. Tell me, what do you think Castle-Lord Simrahi is likely to do with you? You being black sorcerers and all, that is?”

  “We’re not black sorcerers,” Danae said tiredly. “Isn’t there any way we can convince you people of that?”

  Habri smiled slyly. “After all that talk of demons between you? No, my good traveler Danae, I think your reputation is firmly established. Which brings me to the really important question: Why are you here?”

  Ravagin opened his mouth … and closed it again as an icy shiver went up his back. A random, almost forgotten fact had clicked … “At the hearing,” he said slowly, “you went out of your way to downplay the suggestion that we were messengers to plotters. Which means … there really is something going on here. Isn’t there?”