Triplet (30 page)

She found the grace not to say anything sarcastic. Hart's single-minded concern for her safety—and its consequences—were too fresh in her mind for her to find fault with Ravagin's version of that same concern. “No, I'll be fine. Get going, I'm starving.”

“Okay.” He groped in the—for him—darkness for her hand, gave her the short sword Hart had left them before he took off on his own. “Remember, if anyone should come in, you've only got the advantage until he gets a light started. If it's not me or the innkeeper with a tray, kill him fast.”

“I understand.”

The tension was back on his face, but he rose and left without another word. She remembered to shade her eyes as he opened the door, but whatever the inn was using for hallway illumination wasn't too bad and it was no more than a few seconds before the feint purple blob faded completely from before her eyes.

With a sigh, she put the sword down on the bed beside her and stretched out, closing her eyes.
So here we are,
she thought tiredly.
The ones who are going to shatter whatever the hell the demons are up to on Karyx and beyond. One aging Courier, and one complete and total dead weight.

Dead weight.

The words echoed painfully around her head.
Dead weight.
Worse even than just useless. With her eyes and other senses like this she couldn't run or fight or do anything else to help get them through Melentha's gauntlet and back to the Tunnel. Ravagin would have to lead, guide, or carry her everywhere they went until she recovered from the effects of that demogorgon contact.

If she ever did. Gartanis hadn't done so.

Unbidden, tears came to her eyes.
Child,
she flung the word at herself like an epithet.
So, you wanted a chance to make the hard decisions, huh? Well, great, because here's a beaut of one all ready for you.

And there really wasn't any question as to which way the decision should go. Ravagin knew as much as she did about what the spirits were up to … and Ravagin stood a far better chance of getting back through the Tunnel on his own. Hart had made his own sacrifice to get the word through. Now it was her turn.

And if she was going to desert Ravagin, she would never have a better chance than right now.

Rolling off the bed and onto her feet, she stepped to the window, squinting against the light coming in around the worn shutters. Theoretically, the inn's lar defined her boundaries for her … but there was nothing that said a lar would or even could block anything it couldn't detect. And there was certainly nothing to be lost by trying.

Except perhaps their only weapon against the searching spirits.

She stopped, hand on the window sash, and swore under her breath. But there was no way around it. Half the advantage of being invisible was the fact that the searching spirits didn't yet know about it. If the lar couldn't detect her, it would surely notice that
something
had passed through its protective ring … and when it reported that fact, either Melentha or someone else would surely come to the proper conclusion.

She couldn't risk it, not even to give Ravagin a clear shot at the Tunnel.

Or in other words, she was in the clear. She didn't have to sacrifice herself. Didn't have to make the hard decision.

As, somehow, things had always seemed to work out for her. How many of the hard decisions along the way, she wondered suddenly, had yielded to that same kind of logic? And how much of that logic had been little more than rationalization? She opened her mouth again, searching her memory for the most vile word in her vocabulary … and paused.

Somewhere, she could hear a feint hissing.

The lar,
was her first, hopeful thought. But that hum had been different, and she could in fact still hear it beneath this louder and closer sound.

Louder and closer …

Carefully, she lowered her hands from the window back to her sides and turned around. Nothing was visible … but facing this direction, the hiss was definitely louder. She licked her lips, heart beginning to beat loudly in her ears. An uncomfortable tingle raised the hairs on her arms …

And through the thick wooden door a red shape floated.

Danae bit down hard on her tongue.
A djinn,
a small bit of rationality in her brain seemed to whisper.
Only a djinn.
But the rest of her brain wanted to scream.

She'd never seen a djinn like this. Never seen
any
spirit with the sheer and horrible detail with which she was seeing this one. The spindly physique, like an emaciated mockery of the human form; the grotesquely misshapen head with its pointed jaw and gaunt cheekbones; the eyes—

The eyes. Redder than the rest of the creature, they sparkled with intelligence and hatred as they swept the room. Danae watched it drift slowly through the air, hardly daring to breathe as those terrible eyes swept the room. It couldn't see her—somehow, even in the rising swell of panic, there was never even a shadow of doubt in her mind about that. But the spirit was indeed searching for something—that much, too, was certain. And if it happened to touch her … or even heard her …

She bit down on her tongue again … and as the djinn circled over toward the bed a glint of reflected light there caught her eye. The short sword Ravagin had left her.

Carefully, eyes on the djinn, she moved slowly toward the bed. Djinns were about the most powerful spirits that could be permanently trapped in a tool or weapon, and the necessary spell was correspondingly tricky. But once bound in the sword, the creature should be incapable of hurting them.

Would it still be able to communicate with the rest of the spirit world? There was no way to know.

The djinn moved away from the bed, and Danae froze in mid-step. It drifted toward her … not quite on a direct line … she held her breath …

Concentrating on the djinn, she didn't notice the approaching footsteps until it was too late to do anything. The door came open; and as she threw her arm up to shield her eyes, she caught just a glimpse of a figure silhouetted against the glare from the hallway.

S
HE TENSED AS THE
footsteps continued on into the room, One long step would take her to the bed—get her to the sword lying there—but with the light from the hall blinding her, using the weapon competently would be another matter entirely: But if her attacker didn't notice her standing here by the window before he closed the door …

The door swung to a crack. Another second or two—

“Danae?” Ravagin called tentatively. “Where are you?”

Relief flooded into her—and was followed instantly by more tension. “Shh!” she hissed. “A
djinn.
”

The door seemed to her ears to slam shut. “What?” he hissed. “Where?”

She lowered her arm and looked around. The djinn was nowhere in sight. “But … it was here a second ago,” she whispered. “Searching around for us—I'm sure of it.”

“Great. Just what we needed.” Carefully, Ravagin groped his way to the bed, set down the covered tray he was carrying, and picked up the sword. “Was it moving quickly, like sprites when they've got a message to deliver?” he asked, buckling the weapon around his waist.

“No, it was going pretty slowly. Sort of like a bee hunting around a clover field for the best flower to go for.”

Ravagin grunted. “Hmm. Well, it could be worse, I suppose. Did you hear anyone poking around out in the hallway while the djinn was here?”

“Uh … no, I don't think so. Should I have?”

“If you didn't then, you probably will eventually. The djinn almost certainly means one of Melentha's agents is around somewhere.”

Danae felt her stomach knot up. “You mean
here
? In the
inn
?”

“Uh-huh. The lar out there's been in place too long for an unbound djinn to have been floating around since before it was invoked, and we'd sure as hell have known if someone had sent it through the lar from the outside. QED, and all that.”

“Oh, that's just terrific news. How in the worlds did Melentha track us here?”

“I don't think she did, actually,” Ravagin shook his head. “My guess is that when we didn't make a mad run for the Tunnel, she just got all the people together that she could beg, borrow, or steal and scattered them around in hopes of spotting us whenever we finally surfaced.”

“So when whoever it is spotted us, he invoked the djinn to check us out?”

Ravagin was silent a moment. “My guess is that he isn't actually on to us yet. If he was, the djinn ought to have been flying more purposefully, and have left right away when it didn't find you here.”

“But we're now stuck here with him until dawn,” Danae pointed out, suppressing a shudder.

“Right.” Ravagin drew the short sword, checked its edge, and resheathed it. “Which means we've got to identify him before he identifies us. And eliminate him.”

Danae's heart skipped a beat. “You mean … kill him? But if he's not on to us—”

She stopped abruptly at the expression on his face. “Look, Danae,” he said quietly, “in the first place, if I could be sure he wouldn't identify us, I'd be more than happy to leave him alone. But we don't have any such guarantee. And if there's going to be any confrontation, I want it to be on my terms and timing, not his. Understand?”

“Yes,” she said, bending the truth only a little. “All right. What can I do to help?”

“Stay here,” he said promptly, moving toward the door. “You'll be as safe here as anywhere else. Use that chair there to wedge the door and don't open it to anyone but me. I'll identify myself by calling you the name with which we were first introduced. Got that?”

Danae Panya.
It almost startled her to remember. The name seemed to come from a distant past, or from a life not her own. “Got it,” she told him. “Please be careful, Ravagin.”

“You bet,” he grunted. “Watch your eyes …”

She shielded them, and in a flare of light from the hall he was gone.

Pushing the heavy wooden chair over to the door and wedging it under the latch took only a couple of minutes—far more time, she thought grimly, than it would take a determined attacker to break it down. She spent a few minutes more searching for a better way to secure the door, but aside from the armchair, bed, a couple of blankets, and a fireplate, the room was totally devoid of furnishings. The ceiling was composed of rough-hewn boards, each thick enough to make a good brace, but they were solidly nailed in place and without tools there would be no chance of getting one loose.

Eventually, she gave up and sat back down on the bed. The sight of the food Ravagin had brought made her stomach growl, reminding her that even with this new threat having shot her appetite all to hell, her body still needed to eat. Sighing, she tore off a piece of meat and began gnawing at it. And tried to think.

Somewhere along the line, she knew, she was almost certain to be attacked. Ravagin could probably not identify and kill the spy without the other catching on as to who he was, as well, and even a dying invocation could spell trouble for them. And if Ravagin wasn't able to kill him right away, the spy might even come up here in person to try and find her.

She shivered at the thought. She'd been attacked by spirits before, and had no interest whatsoever in repeating the experience. But at least she had the partial protection of invisibility where the spirits were concerned. She had no such advantage over the spy … and the chance that she might wind up being used as a shield or bargaining chip by a demon-influenced human was about as horrible a situation as she could imagine.

Which meant that that was the situation she should concentrate on resisting.

Slowly, she swept her eyes around the room, trying to think. If the spy identified them, he would surely remember the bandages around her face. Would he correctly guess their purpose and realize that even moderate light was a weapon he could use against her? Or would he think she was simply trying to disguise her features?

The latter, almost certainly. Gartanis had implied that contacts with demogorgons were rare, and that the physical effects in each of those cases were different. Ravagin had seemed taken aback by the sensory enhancement she'd suffered; she could take that as an indication that the spy wouldn't expect it, either.

So as far as he was concerned, she was a normal person hiding out in a darkened inn room. Given that, what sort of attack would he be likely to use?

She thought it through several times, but unfortunately the same answer kept coming up. When attacking someone whose eyes had grown accustomed to darkness, the first and most obvious thing to do would be to turn on the lights.

All right,
she told herself fiercely.
So that's exactly what you
don't
want. So figure out a way to take advantage of it.

Her eyes fell on the tray beside her … on the blankets lying rumpled next to it. Would he invoke a dazzler or a firebrat? Dazzler, most likely; there shouldn't be any need for him to burn down the inn. And if he weren't a complete idiot, he would invoke it somewhere behind him where the light wouldn't get in his own eyes. But not too far behind him, or he would have to come a few steps into the room on his own before the spirit made it in, too. So just behind him. Practically right there on his shoulder …

Slowly, an idea came to her. Undoubtedly the stupidest idea she'd ever heard in her life … but for now it was all she had.

Getting the necessary splinters from the window shutter was the hardest part, especially with nothing but the edge of the fireplate to pry them out with. But eventually she had enough. The blankets were single-thread woven; working with one of the splinters at the edge, she managed to unravel several meters of the yarn. Gathering it up with the other blanket and the splinters, she got to work.