Two of Habri’s men were holding the doors to the entrance hallway by the time Ravagin reached them. Though not designed for sky-plane usage, the doorway was fortunately wide enough for the carpet to pass through without trouble. Behind him, Ravagin could hear soft noises as the rest of Habri’s force fell in behind them. It was probably a good thing, he thought once as the parade trooped along the darkened corridors, that subduing the parasite spirit had taken as long as it had. The image of Habri trying to push his way past cleaning crews and the occasional butcher’s assistant brought an unexpected giggle welling up from his throat.
He choked the laughter down. Did direct spirit contact always leave a person this giddy? Like a narcotic drug, he thought, fighting against the oddly euphoric feeling. I wonder if that’s why some people seem to like doing this kind of thing.
I wonder if that’s how Melentha got started.
It took them only a few minutes to reach the top floor of the lower manor house and the great chamber into which the stairs from below led … and it took Ravagin even less time than that to realize his plan was going to need drastic revision.
It was the same place where he’d had his all too brief hearing before the castle-lord a few hours earlier, though having been brought up from the cells by a different route he hadn’t realized exactly where he was. As he’d noted then, it was a huge room … and the only ways into it were far from the fat pillar and ornate doors where four trolls stood motionless guard. Lying flat on the hovering sky-plane, his eyes barely above floor level, he tried to ignore the impatient rumblings from the men strung out down the stairs beneath him and made a quick estimate of both the horizontal distance and the height of the relatively low ceiling. The ballistic calculation was simple enough for him to do in his head … and there was absolutely no way he was going to reach any of the trolls with a thrown knife.
“Is that the way into the castle-lord’s tower?” he whispered to Habri.
Crouched on the stairs beside the sky-plane, the other nodded. “That pillar contains the staircase up. The doors open directly onto it—allows for very commanding entrances.” He shot Ravagin a frown. “You didn’t know? I was under the impression all manor houses were exactly alike.”
“Just checking,” Ravagin said, eyes searching for some way to get closer to the trolls. But between their stairway and the pillar the room was completely open, without anything that would serve for cover. “Anyway, I needed to see what the guard situation was like here,” he improvised. “So. Four trolls.”
“I could have told you the castle-lord had four trolls on guard,” Habri snorted. “The question now is how you intend to dispose of them.”
A damn good question it was, too. Ravagin gnawed at his lip for a second without coming up with any good answers to it. “You and your men stay here,” he told Habri at last. “I need to go back outside.”
“You’ll be back here for the attack, though, I presume?”
“If I’m not, you’ll know when to move,” Ravagin assured him.
For a long moment Habri’s dark eyes bored into his. “Very well,” he said at last. “I trust you aren’t planning anything foolish. Your woman companion will be here with us, and if anything untoward should happen she will be the first to die.”
“Understood,” Ravagin said tightly. “You just make damn sure she’s still in good shape when I deliver Simrahi’s chambers to you. Or you will be the second one to die.”
Habri nodded silently. Looking back down the stairs, he nodded to the man bringing up the rear. “You may go,” he told Ravagin. “Whatever you have planned, you had best complete it quickly.”
Ravagin licked his lips. “Sky-plane: follow my mark. Mark.”
He reached the cool darkness of the castle courtyard a few minutes later without the slightest idea of what he was going to do there. “Sky-plane: rise slowly,” he whispered. Perhaps as he looked over the castle grounds he would come up with some way to get rid of the trolls.
A spark of the parasite spirit’s natural maliciousness leaked through, and Ravagin found himself drifting upwards so slowly that if the side of the manor house hadn’t been right beside him to compare to, he would have sworn he was motionless. He felt a flash of annoyance, but said nothing. For the moment, anyway, speed was totally irrelevant.
What could he do? Off to his left, just inside the wall, the light from the castle Giantsword bathed the sky-plane landing area and the half dozen spare carpets scattered around it. Nothing there he could use. Over the top of the long entrance hallway extending out from the manor house the Shrine of Knowledge was coming into view; beyond that, the glowing knob at the top of the Giantsword itself was already visible. Send a message for help via the crystal eye in the Shrine? Or sabotage the Giantsword somehow to cut off the power broadcast? That would certainly incapacitate the trolls, if he could manage it, as well as knocking out the lights and every other bit of apparatus in the entire castle. On the other hand, he had no idea how to do such a thing … and there were probably few actions more guaranteed to bring trolls down on him than poking around the protectorate’s power source.
Something above him caught his eye: the outward-curving manor house wall was coming down like a frozen wave toward him as he continued to rise. “Sky-plane: move ten varna away from the building and continue upward,” he murmured. A slight hesitation as he sensed the parasite spirit repositioning itself amid the sky-plane’s picocircuitry. Then it caught, and his slow vertical drift acquired an equally slow horizontal component. He watched for a moment to confirm he would miss the overhang, then turned his attention back to the problem at hand.
The House of Healing, directly behind the manor house, would be of no more use than the sky-plane landing area, though the thought of it made his bruises and cuts throb with new pain. The trolls had no need of the Dreya’s Womb and other medical equipment there. Could he somehow persuade the guards that Castle-Lord Simrahi was ill and had to be taken down? If they at least had to send someone in to check on Simrahi’s condition, it would mean opening the door … but Habri wouldn’t be stupid enough to consider that a practical opening for his attack.
And he wouldn’t wait on that stairway forever.
Ravagin felt his stomach muscles tighten with the fresh reminder that he was on a dangerously tight schedule here. Danae was still Habri’s prisoner … and whether the usurper really meant to release her after all this was over, it was a cinch that if Ravagin didn’t come through he would kill her without a second thought.
The sky-plane reached the level of the lower manor house roof now, and the frozen breaker beside him gave abrupt way to a circular flatness. Ravagin’s eyes moved to the darkened tower rising out of the center of the roof, and even preoccupied as he was he felt a surge of awe at the sight. He’d never seen a castle-lord’s private section this close up, and he was struck by its resemblance to the Dark Tower he and Danae had spent the previous night in. Got to hand it to the Builders, he thought distantly as he took in the sight. They sure knew how to keep thematic unity in this world of theirs. The basic shape of the Dark Tower was there; so were the relief patterns climbing its lower part and the windows not limited to but concentrated in the upper third. Only the dome of the sky room at the very top made it more than just a miniature version of the Dark Tower—
He froze, sending his eyes searching frantically for what he thought he’d just seen. Imagination? Trick of lighting?
No. It was there. Almost exactly halfway up the tower.
An open window.
Chapter 40
FOR A LONG MOMENT he just stared at the open window, mind whirring with possibilities while at the same time half afraid it would all turn into a false alarm and evaporate before his eyes. The window hadn’t simply been flung wide open, he could see now: there was a clearly visible gap between the two pieces of glass, but the gap was narrow and there was no guarantee that he could force them any further open. If they opened outward, in fact, as they almost certainly did,
nudging the sky-plane up against the window would do nothing but push it shut. And if there were any alarms—or if whoever was nearest that window were even a light sleeper …
But all the caveats didn’t really mean anything. If he didn’t do something, Danae was dead. Pure and simple.
Carefully, he reached out to the side until he found the familiar wall of the sky-plane’s edge barrier. “All right, spirit,” he said, gritting his teeth unconsciously. “Remove the edge barrier.”
Again he felt the sensation of the spirit shifting within the sky-plane … but this time nothing happened in response to that activity. “Remove the edge barrier,” he repeated, sharpening his voice and mind against the spirit’s unwillingness. Nothing. Apparently, even with a spirit in control, it really was impossible for a sky-plane to fly without an operating edge barrier. Ravagin thought back to all the cases of spirit animal control he’d seen on Karyx—So they’re not just weaker in their contacts with humans, he thought. Something to be grateful for, in general; in this particular case it was going to be damned awkward.
But there might be a way around it. Maybe. “All right. Sky-plane: land on the roof there, next to the central tower.”
The carpet came smoothly to rest as ordered. Steeling himself against whatever the hell reaction this might cause, Ravagin let his scorpion glove whip uncoil until it extended beyond the sky-plane’s fringe. “Sky-plane: go straight up,” he said.
And without any fuss or argument the carpet rose into the air alongside the tower. Leaving the scorpion glove whip free outside the edge barrier.
They were at the open window a moment later; and as Ravagin had suspected, the two panes of glass did indeed open outward. The scorpion glove, he quickly discovered, had a markedly slower response time when operated through the edge barrier; but by forcing himself to take things slowly, he managed to swing both panes fully open without causing any noise.
Fully open, the window was about half the width of the sky-plane.
Ravagin swore viciously under his breath. Sky-planes on the ground could be rolled up just like ordinary carpets; once in the air, they were absolutely rigid. They also flew level to the combined gravitational and centrifugal vectors, which meant he couldn’t bring up one side of the thing and slide in at an angle. For a minute he tried to come up with a way to make a tight banking curve that might do the trick … but even if he didn’t smash both himself and the sky-plane flat against the room’s far wall once he was inside, the kind of maneuver he’d need to accomplish it would almost certainly alert every guard and troll in the castle. And with the sky-plane’s edge barrier in place, there was no way for Ravagin to simply climb in the window himself.
With the edge barrier in place …
Ravagin gritted his teeth. The scorpion glove whip was still hanging limply inside the open window; carefully, he wrapped it as tightly as possible around one of the small pillars supporting the edges of the window. To the best of his knowledge, scorpion gloves hadn’t been designed to handle the kind of stress he’d been putting this one through for the past couple of days, and it occurred to him that eventually he was going to push it too far. But he’d pretty well run out of options. Looping the whip slightly to get a solid grip on it with his gloved right hand, he drew the knife Habri had given him with his left—
And with a convulsive motion jabbed it deeply into the carpet material at his knees.
The sky-plane dropped like a lasered bird. For an instant Ravagin fell with it; then the whip caught, and he found himself dangling along the wall with a twenty-meter drop beneath his feet.
There was no time to waste, and he wasted precious little of it. Even before the muffled thud of the sky-plane’s crash reached his ears he’d jammed the knife back into its sheath and was holding on with both hands as the scorpion glove labored to pull him up. With what little of his concentration he could spare from the operation he listened tensely for signs that the movement or noise had attracted someone’s attention. But there were no hooting alarms—no shouts or sudden lights—and a minute later he was sprawled on the floor inside the window.
He lay there quietly for a minute, waiting until the worst of the adrenaline reaction had passed and his arms were merely trembling instead of shaking. Then, licking his lips, he eased cautiously to his feet and looked around him. With the faint starlight filtering in from outside he could see that he was in a large bedroom … and as his eyes adjusted he discovered, to his complete lack of surprise, whose bedroom it was.
Fortunately, Simrahi and the woman in bed with him did not seem to be light sleepers. Both lay motionless beneath the blankets, their breathing steady and slow, neither giving the slightest impression that they’d been disturbed by Ravagin’s unorthodox entrance to their room. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, Ravagin quoted to himself; but of course that hadn’t been written about Shamsheer castle-lords with trolls guarding their bedrooms.
Trolls.
Ravagin gritted his teeth. He’d worked so damn hard getting into the tower he’d almost forgotten that getting behind the trolls downstairs was only the first step. A sneak attack at the back of a single troll might give him enough surprise advantage to beat out the machine’s electronic reflexes … but with four of them down there that approach was an invitation to suicide. What he needed was a way to simultaneously take out all the trolls; to set a bomb off at the foot of the staircase, perhaps? But if there were any real explosives on Shamsheer, he’d never heard of them. What he needed was something heavy to push down the stairs …
What he needed was his sky-plane.
Carefully, with an eye on the sleepers in the bed, he moved back to the window and looked down. Below, the sky-plane was a slightly darker rectangle against the roof. Spirit, I order you to rise, he sent the mental command, trying to project the thought to the sky-plane. He hadn’t felt the spirit’s presence since knifing the carpet, and had no idea whether it could even hear him, let alone whether it was still obliged to follow his orders. Spirit, I order you to rise, he repeated. Nothing. Either the spirit was ignoring him, couldn’t hear him, or simply couldn’t move the damaged sky-plane. For Ravagin, it didn’t much matter which.
Damn, he thought, turning back into the room as fresh sweat began to form on his forehead. Even in the dead of night, Habri’s motley army couldn’t hang around the stairs down there forever without being discovered. Think, Ravagin, think. Here you are, right in the middle of a castle-lord’s private chambers, with all the best of Sham-sheer’s magic machinery to draw on. There must be something you can use to take out a few trolls.
Beneath the blanket, Simrahi moved in his sleep … and Ravagin smiled tightly.
There was something he could use.
He half expected to find a pair of trolls standing guard outside the royal bedroom, but apparently even Simrahi’s suspicions hadn’t pushed him that far. The hallway outside was deserted; quickly, Ravagin moved along it, searching for the stairway up. He found it, and began climbing, and a few minutes later reached the dome at the top of the tower. The sky room, it was called … and even after sixteen years of travel in the Hidden Worlds it was like a punch in the gut to discover there was still something on Shamsheer that could take his breath away.
Through the crystal dome arching over his head the stars blazed down.
Not the stars as seen from the middle of a Shamsheer castle surrounded by villages and lights; not even the stars as seen from a lonely field somewhere out in the Tweens. These stars were incredibly brilliant, shining with an intensity that seemed unnatural … and Ravagin stared in awe at them for several heartbeats before he finally realized why.
Around the edges of the dome, the top of the castle wall could be seen, as well as the tall hilt-shape of the Giantsword within it and the rolling Harrian Hills far beyond it to the west … but each of the shapes was a black shadow, lit only by the glow from the starlight above. None of the lights that had been shining anywhere outside were visible. On sudden impulse, he
took a careful scan across the sky. The scattered clouds had apparently been filtered out, too.
He licked his lips and took a deep breath. The sheer technological ability the sky room implied … and yet, for those first few seconds, he was aware only of what the room said about its creators’ souls. To have built something this sophisticated with no purpose except the enjoyment of beauty … For the first time in his life, Ravagin felt a flicker of true kinship with the Builders. Perhaps, for all their incredible power, they hadn’t been all that different from human beings after all.
The moment faded, and the real world crowded back into Ravagin’s mind, and he lowered his eyes and thoughts from the glorious display. The sky room was sparsely furnished—some comfortable chairs, a desk, a large bed in the room’s center—and it took only a minute to find the crystalline throne he was seeking. The throne, he realized now, that Simrahi had been seated on during Ravagin’s brief hearing.
The castle-lord’s bubble.
The chair was large, clearly designed to accommodate heftier men than Ravagin. As solid-looking as glass, it nevertheless yielded like a soft cushion as he sank gingerly down into it. There was no reaction—no audible alarm, no attempt by the chair to throw him out—and Ravagin let out the breath he’d been holding. So far, so good. Now came the tricky part. He had no idea at all how the bubble worked, or even whether someone who wasn’t a castle-lord could operate it, and there was no way to find out except the hard way. Taking a deep breath, he ran through the most obvious possibilities and chose one. “Bubble: rise,” he said.
No response. “Bubble: ascend,” he tried. “Bubble: activate. Bubble: be raised. Chair: rise. Chair: ascend. Throne: rise—”
The chair rose smoothly toward the dome above, Ravagin almost falling off the thing in surprise. “Throne: stop and hover,” he managed, gripping the arms tightly.
The chair did so. Carefully, he reached out a hand, following it a minute later by the scorpion glove’s whip … but both confirmed what his eyes had already told him: the bubble’s spherical force-field was still off.