Triplet (10 page)

“Consider me suitably impressed,” Danae growled. “I suppose this means we're going to have to spend the night in the way house?”

“Oh, for—” Ravagin exhaled in thinly veiled disgust. “All right—the hell with it. You want to hit Karyx tonight, fine; well hit Karyx tonight. It'd serve you right if you had to go back to Threshold with a withered arm and explain how you asked for the most experienced Courier and then argued every damn decision with him.”

Without waiting for a reply, he twisted back around. “Sky-plane: follow my mark.
Mark.
”

Behind him, Danae closed her eyes and let her mouth twist with some disgust of her own. He was right—she
was
giving him far too much of a hard time … and knowing
why
she was doing so was unfortunately no excuse. She was an adult, and was supposed to be able to suppress such childish reactions.

Still, the whole thing had shown her something new about Ravagin, too. He did indeed know he'd been specifically asked for … and it was abundantly clear that he wasn't feeling overly flattered by the request.
Well, then, to hell with him, too,
she grumbled to herself. If she had to show her father, Hart,
and
Ravagin too that she was capable of taking care of herself, then that was exactly what she would do.

And if they didn't like the consequences, then that was their hard luck.

An hour later, they reached the Tunnel.

From the outside it looked virtually the same as both the Threshold and Shamsheer ends of the first Tunnel had: a small leaf-carpeted clearing with several small hills grouped around a longer one containing the Tunnel. Grasses and small bushes grew on the secondary mounds, and the surrounding trees were tall enough to hide the clearing until one was almost on top of it. Fleetingly, Danae wondered how the early explorers to Shamsheer had ever managed to find the thing.

At Ravagin's command the sky-plane dropped down to hover a meter off the ground in front of the Tunnel mouth. “Want to make sure there's nothing nasty prowling around before we give up the edge barrier,” he explained, eyes giving the forest a careful sweep. Palming his firefly carefully away from them, he pointed it into the Tunnel and ordered it to full power. Danae caught a glimpse of the familiar sloping floor and rough walls before Ravagin shut off the light with a satisfied grunt. With one last scan of the forest, he brought the sky-plane down.

Danae took a deep breath as she carefully stood up and eased the kinks out of her legs. The forest breezes—no longer held back now by the sky-plane's edge barrier—played about her hair, bringing along with them an unusual and tantalizing mixture of aromas. She sniffed cautiously, trying without success to identify them.

“Let's get moving,” Ravagin said, and she turned to see him already a meter or so inside the Tunnel mouth. On his left hand his firefly was giving off a gentle glow; on his right, his scorpion glove was mute testimony to the fact that even on the threshold of another world Darcane Forest could be a dangerous place. Swallowing, she went to join him, fighting back the urge to look over her shoulder as she did so.

But no animals had taken up lodging in the Tunnel, and they reached the familiar set of camouflaged lockers without incident. “Okay, get those clothes off and let's get across,” Ravagin said briskly as he laid his weapons on the top locker shelf and started unfastening his tunic.

“I know the routine,” Danae growled. Her bodice's top fastener had broken that morning while she was dressing, and now her jury-rigged replacement was refusing to come loose. Gritting her teeth, she tugged at it, first gently, then with more and more force—

“Need any help?”

“I'll get it,” she snapped. “It's just—
stuck
—a little …”

“Move your hands,” he sighed. “Come on—move them.”

She obeyed, a hot flush of embarrassment flooding her face as he brought the firefly near her chin and examined her handiwork. With a grunt, he retrieved his knife from the locker. “Hold real still,” he said, teasing the knot delicately with the tip … and a moment later she felt it come open.

“Thanks,” she muttered, turning her back on him and starting on the rest of the fastenings.

They finished the rest of their disrobing in silence. “Give me your hand,” Ravagin said as he shut off the firefly's glow and closed the locker. “Come on, come on—it's not getting any earlier out there.”

“I want to try it by myself this time,” Danae told him shortly.

Even in total darkness she could practically see him grimacing. “All right,” he sighed. “But stay close.”

They set off around the curve, Danae following the slap of Ravagin's footsteps. The telefold, when they passed it, wasn't the surprise it had been the first time and she managed to keep her feet and most of her balance. “Well, that wasn't so bad—” she began.

And abruptly, a loud voice split the silence of the Tunnel. “
HAKLARAST!
” it shouted.

I
T WASN'T UNTIL THE
echoes of his shout were beginning to fade away and Ravagin heard Danae's startled gasp that he realized he'd forgotten to warn her he would be invoking a sprite as soon as they'd crossed the telefold into Karyx. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder. “I didn't mean to scare—”

He broke off as a flicker of glow-fire appeared in front of him. “I am here, as you summoned,” it said in a squeaky, almost unintelligible voice.

“Scout down the Tunnel—that direction,” Ravagin ordered the sprite, pointing ahead. “Examine both the Tunnel and the area for a hundred
varna
around its exit for other humans, wild beasts, or trapped spirits, and then return to me.”

The glow-fire flared momentarily and vanished. “The lockers are over here,” Ravagin told Danae, turning around and reaching out a hand to find her.

“You could have warned me before you shouted like that,” her voice came from his right. Oddly enough, she didn't seem upset.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Stepping to the Tunnel wall, he found the lockers and got one open. “You need some light?” he asked as he chose some clothing by feel and held hers out into the darkness.

“No,” she said, almost too quickly. Her hand found his, took the clothes, and retreated. Keeping an eye out for the sprite's return, Ravagin shook out the tunic and trousers to make sure no insects had taken up residence there and began to dress.

He was almost finished when the glow-fire reappeared. “There are no other humans, beasts, or spirits within the region,” the squeaky voice reported.

Ravagin nodded. The exit into Karyx was usually clear, but it never hurt to make sure. “Good. Then I want you to take a message to a woman named Melentha living in a large house just to the west of Besak: that Ravagin and one other have come and will be arriving tomorrow.
Carash-mahst.
”

Again the sprite flared its understanding and vanished. “Whenever you're ready,” Ravagin told Danae, fastening his last buckle and locating a short sword on the locker's weapons shelf. “I'd like to try and get a few kilometers toward Besak before nightfall.”

“All set,” Danae grunted, and he sensed her come to his side. “Do I get any weapons here, or don't women carry blades on Karyx either?”

“Many of them do,” he said. Groping for her hand, he placed a sheathed dagger into it. “Your profile said you'd had some knife training, but just the same don't draw it unless you absolutely have to. Stick with your spirithandling spells, or better still just stand back and let me handle any trouble.”

She snorted, but fastened the weapon to her side without comment. Ravagin debated invoking a dazzler, decided against it, and started along the Tunnel. They could make it through well enough without light, and once outside he could be a shade more discreet about making sure she had her outfit on straight, anyway. He'd stomped her toes enough this trip—though why he should give a damn about that he didn't know. After the shoddy way she'd pressured him into this trip in the first place he didn't owe her anything but guidance and protection and the most basic of courtesies.

They walked the rest of the way to the Tunnel mouth in silence. Ravagin gave Danae's garb a quick once-over as they started up the last ramp-like section, found she'd indeed managed to get all the primitive buckles and ties fastened properly. They stepped out into Karyx's more muted sunlight—

“Huh,” Danae grunted, looking around. “Hardly worth invoking a sprite to check this place out.”

Ravagin shrugged. She had a point—no animal in its right mind would live in the hilly wasteland that surrounded them on all sides. “It's worse just a few kilometers northwest of here,” he commented. “The Cairn Waste is about as desolate as any place could be.”

“So I'd heard. Site of some long-ago battle or something, wasn't it?”

“That's the legend. No one knows for sure.”

“Couldn't you ask a spirit?”

“There are some things even a geas spell won't make them talk about,” he shook his head. “The Illid ruins and Cairn Waste are one of them.” He glanced around one last time, pointed toward the east. “The road between Besak and Torralane is about ten kilometers that way.”

“Who is that woman you sent the message to?” Danae asked as they started off through the mounds.

“Melentha's the mistress of the Besak way house, like Essen was in Kelaine City,” Ravagin explained. “It's standard procedure on Karyx to inform one of them when you're coming—travel here's a bit riskier than on Shamsheer and it's a good idea to have someone making sure you don't just disappear out in the wild somewhere.”

He glanced at Danae, saw her swallow visibly. “I see,” she said with forced calmness. “A shame we don't have sprites on call back home—seems a pretty efficient way to send messages.”

“The novelty fades after a while,” Ravagin told her dryly.

“I suppose so.”

They walked in silence for several minutes more, and after a bit Ravagin noticed her throwing frowning glances at the sky and the landscape around them. “Anything wrong?” he prompted.

“I'm not sure,” she said slowly. “The light seems … funny, somehow. Not bright enough or something.”

He nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Most visitors noticed the anomaly eventually, but few picked up on it this quickly. “Karyx's sunlight is about ten percent dimmer than that of Shamsheer, which in turn is that much dimmer than sunlight on Threshold. Have you ever been to Earth or Ankh during a partial solar eclipse?”

“Ah—yes,” she said, understanding flickering across her face. “You're right; that
is
what it's like—the sunlight's the right color and all, but not the right intensity.”

“Yeah. Only it's not an eclipse in this case—the sun's just dimmer. Just one of the sizeable collection of things we don't understand about this place.”

“But the stars
are
the same as you see from Threshold, aren't they?”

“As far as we can tell, bearing in mind we can't bring in the necessary instruments for an exact check. No, all three worlds
are
in the same place in the universe—every study anyone's ever invented has come to that tentative conclusion. But remember that there's no particular reason why the suns of the three have to be the same. Certainly the terrains of the worlds are different, so we're not just experiencing different dimensional manifestations of the same planet.”

“How do you know?” she countered. “I mean, the equivalent spot on Shamsheer is covered with dense forest—how do you know it didn't have all these mounds, too, before the tree roots wore them down? And who knows
what
Threshold's landscape looked like before the original inhabitants blew it into the stratosphere?”

A pat answer rose to Ravagin's lips … and stayed there unvoiced. How
had
the savants and investigators come to that conclusion, come to think of it? “Well … there's a good-sized ocean inlet about seventy kilometers west of here at Citadel that definitely doesn't show up in either of the other worlds,” he said slowly. “On the other hand … there've been some tremendously powerful spiritmasters in Citadel's history, and if one of them had decided he wanted the city to have ocean access, he might very well have been able to force an elemental to dig that inlet for him.”

Danae shivered suddenly. “With an elemental he could probably have gotten the whole
ocean
dug for him. Unless their power's been exaggerated.”

“It's hard to exaggerate elementals' power,” Ravagin said, feeling his stomach tighten. “Almost as hard as imagining the kind of damn fool who would try invoking one of them in the first place. I don't even like working with demons and peris, personally.” With an effort he forced his mind back to the original question.
Could
the worlds in fact be more identical than was generally conceded? With some difficulty he tried to imagine a superposition of the Shamsheer and Karyx maps …

“The Morax Forest east of here could be the same as the Darcane back on Shamsheer,” Danae murmured. “Just receded to the east a hundred kilometers or so—maybe by whatever made the Cairn Waste. The South Fey River in Shamsheer would be somewhere in Citadel's inlet—that doesn't help us any. The North Fey River …?”

“There
is
a river up there somewhere,” Ravagin nodded. “But I'm not sure precisely where. Part of the problem is that we don't know all that much about Karyx's landscape—travel is by foot or horseback, and we rarely wind up going more than fifty or sixty kilometers from the Tunnel. Funny no one's thought of this before.”

“Oh, they probably have,” Danae shrugged. “And then rejected it for some perfectly good reason.” She sighed. “Doesn't really matter, I suppose. Just theoretical brain-gaming.”