Triplet (22 page)

But still she couldn't resist taking a quick look behind her as she started up toward the house … and so it was she saw the green patch of haze detach itself from the post line and skim off toward the southeast.

They had spent over an hour in Besak before they finally found someone who remembered seeing Danae.

“Yes—the traderess with the fancy bow, true?” the hunter asked. “Yes, I saw her some time ago over on the Hawkers' Way.”

“Was she talking to the weapons sellers?” Ravagin asked.

“Not when I saw her. She was already past most of their booths, heading toward the south.”

Ravagin looked at Melentha. “Anything down that way she might have been interested in? Or anyone?”

Melentha shook her head slowly, forehead furrowed in thought. “Not that I can think of. How long ago was this?”

The hunter glanced at the setting sun. “Three hours at the least. Possibly longer.”

“Well, whatever she wanted there shouldn't have taken this much time,” Ravagin growled, feeling his jaw tighten. He'd been right; Danae was in some sort of trouble again. “We'd better get down there and see if we can pick up her trail.”

“She could just be browse shopping,” Melentha suggested slowly.

“Or perhaps gone to see Gartanis,” the hunter suggested.

“Who is—?” Ravagin began.

“DAMN!” Melentha exploded. “Of
course
—that damn idiot's gone to Gartanis to buy a spell.”

“Who's Gartanis?” Ravagin asked, fighting against the infectious emotion almost visibly radiating from Melentha. “Is he a fraud or something?”

“He's a spiritmaster who came here from Torralane Village a few months ago,” Melentha bit out. “And, no, he's not a fraud. At least not a deliberate one.”

“Well, let's go talk to him, then,” Ravagin suggested, wheeling his horse around. “Danae might even still be there.”

“It may not do any—AHH!”

Ravagin twisted his head around. “What?” he snapped.

Melentha's eyes were wide and unfocused. “She's at the house,” she breathed. “She's … gone inside.”

Ravagin felt the tension beginning to drain from his muscles. “Well, great,” he sighed. “Then at least she's safe—”

“No, no, no. Don't you understand? She's been to
Gartanis.
She has the incense for a new spell—surely she's going to want to try it out.”

“Oh, hell.” An untried spell, from a spiritmaster … in the hands of an amateur. Would Danae really be foolish enough to try something like that alone?

Of course she would,
he thought viciously. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let's get back, try and stop her.”

“You go.” Melentha's eyes turned to Ravagin, and he was startled to see anger building into genuine fury there. “I'm going to Gartanis—find out what spell he gave her. And then deal with him.”

“You—? Hey,
wait!
”

But Melentha was already galloping off through the narrow streets, oblivious to the pedestrians scattering frantically before her mad rush. “What the hell?” Ravagin muttered as he watched her go. Like a woman possessed … and come to think of it, how had she known Danae was back at the house? There hadn't been any messengers, at least none he'd seen.

But there was no time to wonder now. Whatever Danae was up to this time, she was likely to get herself hurt in the process, and it was his job to get her out of it. Again.

Turning his horse savagely, he started back through Besak.

The sky was already growing dark as he passed under the post line archway at full gallop and reined to a halt in front of the mansion. The windows were also dark; if Danae was in fact back, she hadn't put on any lights.

Or else was in Melentha's windowless sanctum. Swallowing a curse, he slid off his horse and sprinted through the high doors.

Inside, it was pitch black. “
Sa-minskisk tooboosn,
” he snapped, throwing the placement gesture over his shoulder to set the invoked dazzler's location back out of his eyes. The room blazed with light; his shadow a dark mass angling sharply off to the side, Ravagin headed toward the stairway.

She was there, all right, seated cross-legged in the middle of the sanctum's large pentagram with tendrils of smoke curling up from a crucible set on the floor before her. “Danae?” Ravagin called tentatively.

There was no response. “Danae!” he called again, sharper this time. “Come on, snap out of it.”

No response. Gritting his teeth, Ravagin moved to the edge of the pentagram and sniffed cautiously. Incense, all right, presumably one of the many varieties spirithandlers sometimes used to help clear and focus their minds for particularly touchy invocations. Interfering with her invocation could get them both fried to crisps; but if she wasn't too far along, there might yet be time to safely stop her. Certainly whatever spirit she was trying for hadn't yet made an appearance.

And then his eyes fell on the floor beside her … and he bit down hard on his tongue.

Sitting full in the light from his dazzler, she had no shadow.

He thought about that for nearly a minute. Then, with a sigh, he moved back and sat down against the wall near the door.
Well, she's done it,
he thought wearily.
She's finally managed to get herself into a situation I haven't a snowflake's chance of getting her out of. Great job, Danae.
All he could do for her now was wait. And hope like hell that the spirit she was working on didn't eat her alive.

The wait seemed to go on forever, but it was probably no more than twenty minutes. His first warning was the quiet fading in of her shadow; a moment later she suddenly shook and began gasping for breath. Her eyes fluttered open, squeezed shut again against the dazzler's light. “Who—?” she breathed.

“It's Ravagin,” he told her, rolling back to his feet and hurrying to her side. The smell of the incense, he noted peripherally, had disappeared; a quick glance into the crucible showed it to be as empty as if it had been scoured. “You all right?”

She took another few deep breaths and allowed him to help her to her feet before replying. “I think so. I guess—I think I got off easy.”

“Got off easy doing what?” Ravagin asked.

She raised a hand to shade her eyes and squinted back in the dazzler's general direction. “Is there any way to turn that thing down? I don't think my eyes have come all the way back yet.”

Suppressing his impatience with an effort, Ravagin released the dazzler. The darkness closed in, and he felt Danae stiffen beside him. “Wait a second,” he grunted, guiding her to the wall and sitting her down against it. Groping around in the dark, he located the flat dish of a fireplate on Melentha's table and invoked a firebrat over it. The gentler reddish light flickered into existence, and he made his way back to Danae.

“Thanks,” she said, taking a shuddering breath. “I guess I wasn't ready for total darkness, either.”

“That's okay,” Ravagin said, squatting beside her and giving her face a quick once-over. Tight, strained, but with no signs of injury or serious trauma. “What happened?” he asked, taking one of her hands between his. It was, he noted uneasily, icy cold.

She licked her lips. “I invoked a demogorgon.”

He felt his stomach tighten. “You
what
?”

Her eyes flashed. “Don't snap at me! All right, so it was stupid—” She broke off and closed her eyes. “Ravagin … you have no idea what it was like.”

“Can't argue with that one. So tell me.”

She opened her eyes and looked around the room. “An entire world, in its own little universe—that's what Karyx is, isn't it? And Shamsheer too, of course. Triplet: three worlds for the price of one. Only it's not.”

“What do you mean?” Ravagin asked cautiously.

She gave him a brittle smile. “There are actually
four
worlds here. The fourth one populated only by spirits. And I was there.”

And abruptly, the smile vanished, and she turned her face into Ravagin's shirt and began sobbing.

T
HE CRYING JAG LASTED
only a few minutes, and Ravagin's faint discomfort was more than matched by Danae's own embarrassment over the incident. “I'm sorry,” she said for the third or fourth time as he found her a handkerchief to wipe her nose with. “I don't know what happened.”

“Just forget it,” he told her. Also for the third or fourth time. “Your psyche's been through one hell of a shock, and you can't just shrug that sort of thing off. Burying it wouldn't do you any good in the long run.”

She sniffed one final time and handed the handkerchief back. “I'm okay now,” she said.

“Good. Look, if you feel up to it, it might help to run through the whole contact out loud. Sort of—you know—flush the emotion out of it.”

A tentative smile played at the corners of her lips. “Besides which, you're curious?”

“Of course I am. If what you saw was real, this is something none of us has ever stumbled on before.”

For a moment he held his breath, cursing his verbal slip and wondering if she'd take offense at the implication that she might have been hallucinating. But she merely nodded. “It sure
felt
real. But I suppose you're right. Anyway. I got this spell from a spiritmaster in Besak named Gartanis—”

“Yeah, we heard. I thought Melentha warned you not to buy spells from the locals.”

Danae snorted. “Oh, sure. I was supposed to go to her to ask for help proving what happened in Coven wasn't an illusion?”

Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. “Is
that
what all this was over? Pardon the bluntness, but that was a damn fool thing to risk your neck over.”

“Yeah, I know.” She shivered. “And I was going to back out, too, until Gartanis suddenly seemed to think it was very important that I go through with it.”

“I'm sure he did,” Ravagin growled. “Especially at the overinflated prices he probably charged you—”

“He gave me the spell for free.”

Ravagin's tongue froze in midsentence. “He did—he gave you a demogorgon invocation
for free
?”

“That's unusual?”

“A spell like that ought to go for half the price of this house,” Ravagin told her bluntly.

She rubbed her forehead. “Yeah, I sort of got that impression. But he wouldn't take anything for it. Anyway. I tried the invocation, but it didn't work out the way I expected. Instead of bringing the demogorgon here, it seemed like he took me
there.
Sounds crazy, but that's the only way I can describe it.”

Ravagin thought about her shadowless form in the center of the pentagram. “No, I think you can assume you really were taken off somewhere. What gave you the impression it was a separate world, though?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. Lots of little things, I suppose. The terrain—well, no, it wasn't really
terrain,
at least not in the usual sense. Call it
background,
maybe—the background had a completeness about it that seemed to go with a complete world rather than just a different way of looking at Karyx. There was even a sky of sorts. And there were
lots
of spirits.”

“Doing what?”

“Moving around, mostly, on whatever business spirits have in their own world. But I also saw several of them disappear; that was the part that interested me the most.”

“Disappear … as in being invoked by people in Karyx?” Ravagin hazarded.

“That's the feeling I got at the time.” She shivered again. “And I saw a—well, it was a fight. Pure and simple. I saw a demon attack a lar.”

“And …?” he prompted.

“And destroy it.”

A bad taste rose into Ravagin's mouth. “You realize,” he said slowly, “that what you're implying is a level of spirit-spirit interaction no one's ever seen before.”

“In other words, I'm going to be accused of having hallucinations?” she snorted. “I've already heard that argument once today, and I'm getting tired of it.”

“Take it easy—
I'm
not the one you're going to have to defend this against. Any idea where this fight might have taken place?”

“I told you: in the fourth world—”

“I mean did it have any relationship to Karyx? Did any part of the fight take place here, in other words?”

She pondered. “I don't know. Distances didn't seem to be the same as they are in a physical world. And there weren't really any reference points I could hold onto.”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it thoughtfully with a glance toward the pentagram. “Well … if you're right, the scholars are going to hate you. Just think of the trouble they're going to have to go through, changing every
Triplet
in the literature to
Quadruplet.
”

There was no response, and he looked back to find her frowning off into space. “Danae? You still there?”

“More or less. Ravagin … why would the demogorgon have shown me all that? I mean, why
me
specifically? Other people have invoked great powers before—Gartanis, for one. Why didn't any of
them
see this?”

“Maybe they did,” Ravagin shrugged. “You have to remember that everyone else who's tried this has been a Karyx native, and none of them know about Triplet's nature.”

“No, it's more than that,” she shook her head slowly. “Gartanis seemed to think the demogorgon
wanted
to talk to me; that he'd even foreseen some of this a hundred years ago. Though maybe it wasn't about me specifically …”

“Look, Danae, you have to remember not to take everything you hear on Karyx at a hundred percent face value.”

“This is different.” She looked at him sharply. “The demogorgon
was
trying to tell me something—I can feel it. Maybe if I do the invocation again and ask more directly—”