Triplet

Chapter 9

They'd been flying two more hours when Ravagin called her attention to a dark, irregular mass of buildings spreading across the landscape to the southeast. "Missia City," he identified it. "Probably the largest city in this section of Shamsheer, though genuine population records aren't really kept.

Look straight past it and you'll be able to see Forj Tower."

Danae squinted against the sunlight. Beyond the city was a section of open space—desert, she remembered from the maps—and beyond that a clump of something that could have been the dense forest she knew was also there. And rising out of the center of the forest—

"My God," she murmured. "That thing is big."

"Nearly a kilometer high," Ravagin agreed. "And something like seven hundred meters in circumference at the base."

"I've seen the numbers, thank you," Danae told him shortly. "It just looks bigger than that, somehow."

"Optical illusion, probably—most of the comparable buildings you've seen in the Twenty Worlds are surrounded by other buildings of similar height. Here it's just standing out there on its own."

Danae shaded her eyes. Details were impossible to pick out at this distance, but superimposed in her mind's eye were the drawings she'd seen: the secondary spires poking skyward from halfway up the main tower body; the intricate and unexplained relief patterns climbing like stone ivy from top to bottom; the windows in the upper third through which every bit of portable technology in this part of Shamsheer would eventually make its way. "I used to read fantasy books with Dark Towers in them when I was a girl," she commented, half to herself. "It was always where the chief villain lived."

"Here it's more like where the shoemaker's elves live," Ravagin said dryly. "Anyway, that's where it is. I thought you might like to see it."

She nodded silently, still looking at the dark mass of buildings of the city below. All those people, in Missia and other cities nearby, clustered around the Tower as if around a wizard's abode... "They really don't understand, do they?" she murmured.

Ravagin half turned. "You mean how all this operates? No, of course not. I thought we'd discussed that."

"Well, yes, but... oh, never mind."

"The scientific method isn't a basic component of the human psyche, Danae," Ravagin shrugged.

"It's a relatively recent development, and it only caught on because it happens to work. On Shamsheer, it's not needed."

Danae grimaced. "So in exchange for all their marvelous voodoo technology they get locked into a totally stagnant society."

"Basically. Probably on purpose."

She looked at him sharply. "You're talking Vernescu's theory, aren't you? That Triplet was set up as a deliberate test of whether humans function best with magic, science, or a mixture of the two."

He glanced back at her. "I take it you disagree with him."

"I hate the whole idea," she snorted. "It's internally inconsistent, for one thing. Any beings so advanced they could build two entire worlds and possibly even the dimensions to hold them and the Tunnels to get between them surely would have had enough ethical sense not to play games like this with other sentient beings."

"Why?" Ravagin countered. "What makes you think the Builders even saw us as sentient beings, let alone cared about us? Maybe the human race started its existence as the white rats for their experiments and we just got out of hand after they went off and left us."

"I hate that theory, too."

He shrugged. "You're the one who was grousing about the lack of scientific curiosity on Shamsheer a minute ago. Why are you so upset by the possibility that Triplet itself is a massive monument to scientific curiosity?"

She glared at him for a moment, then turned away and glowered toward the Dark Tower fading into the horizon in their wake. There was no answer for that, unfortunately, which galled her to no end.

She hated Vernescu's theory—hated the way it reduced human beings to pawns on someone else's chessboard—but she had no viable alternative to offer in its place.

Not yet, anyway. But that didn't mean there wasn't one... and if there was, she was damn well going to be the one to find it.

Pursing her lips, she glanced over her shoulder. Ravagin was again sitting facing front, his back to her. Nothing in his stance or posture indicated anger or hostility—almost certainly, the argument had been little more than a game to him. A way to slide salt under her skin without doing anything he could be reprimanded for. Cynical; perhaps more than a little bitter, she decided, playing back that last conversation in her mind. A function of all his years of running people through here? Or is it just the way he's expressing the frustration he said everyone eventually suffers in Shamsheer?

She didn't know. And for the moment, anyway, she didn't really care.

The sun had just passed zenith when they reached the western edge of Darcane Forest.

The forest was huge, and perhaps more than anything else Danae had seen it served to drive home on a viscereal level the strangeness of this world. All other forests she'd ever seen—whether on developed or relatively undeveloped worlds—had somehow carried about them a noticeable and in many ways comfortable aura of civilization. Not here. The trees stretching to the horizon below carpeted the ground completely, with no roadways or monolines cutting artificially straight lines through the greenery. No roadways, no watchtowers, no tethered guidelights; nothing down there but untouched, untamed, uncaring wilderness. Abruptly, she shivered.

"Impressive, isn't it?"

She grimaced, annoyed that Ravagin had noticed her reaction. "It's nice," she told him shortly. "Not a place I'd want to spend the night."

"I don't blame you," he grunted. "There are some particularly nasty animals living down there—most of them, fortunately, nocturnal. Sky-plane: follow my mark." He pointed about forty-five degrees to the right of their current direction. "Mark."

The sky-plane obediently took up the new course, and Ravagin glanced up at the sun. "We'll be at the way house in about an hour. Do you want to wait until we get there, or eat the lunch Essen packed us now?"

Danae hadn't even thought about food. "I'm not really hungry at the moment. As a matter of fact, why do we even have to stop at the way house? I thought you wanted to get us to Karyx as soon as possible."

"Well..." Ravagin scratched thoughtfully at his cheek. "It's occurred to me since we last talked about it that I might be pushing things a bit much." He waved a hand back toward the way they'd come.

"After all, there's been absolutely no indication that your pal Hart has even managed to get through to Shamsheer, let alone that he's right behind us. I think it might be a good idea to spend one more night here before tackling Karyx."

Danae frowned, visualizing the maps of Karyx she'd learned. "I don't see the problem. We wouldn't be able to get to Besak or Torralane Village before nightfall if we went through now, but so what?

There are supposed to be inns along the road, or we could even camp out overnight."

He cocked an eyebrow. "You really are eager to get to Karyx, aren't you? Has it occurred to you that the culture shock you experienced in Shamsheer will be even worse on the far side of this Tunnel?"

"Maybe not as bad as you'd think," she retorted coolly. "At least there I won't have to worry about offending someone without any way to defend myself."

"Oh, really?" Ravagin snorted. "All right, let's take a quick for-instance. We step out of the Tunnel, and you turn to find a cintah crouched to spring. What do you do?"

"I say sa-trahist rassh with the proper placement gesture and invoke a firebrat between us and him," she said promptly.

"And if that particular spot happens to be where a clump of dried leaves has collected...?"

"Then they catch on fire, I suppose."

"Right. So how do you put the fire out?"

Danae glared at him. "What's this supposed to prove, anyway?"

"I'm just trying to show that all you've got at the moment is tape-learning," Ravagin sighed. "Fine stuff, very useful, but hardly the full preparation you think it is. So either tell me how to put out that fire or we stay overnight at the way house here. It's up to you."

Danae gritted her teeth, stifling the urge to argue. Once again, damn him, he was right.... "All right," she growled. "I release the firebrat by saying carash-carsheen and then say sakhe-khe fatvkh to invoke a nixie."

"Who will have a hell of a time bringing water to a fire in the Cairn Mounds," Ravagin cut in. "The nearest stream is over a kilometer from the Tunnel, and it's hardly a trickle at the best of times."

"So she can pull the water up from underground," Danae snapped. "Or condense it from the air if she has to. I know she can do both, so quit trying to mislead me."

"Agreed; but if you set her too hard a task you could wind up with a premature spontaneous release,"

Ravagin warned. "I don't suppose anyone thought to mention those to you?"

"No, I know about them, thank you," Danae ground out. "All right, then—let's hear how you would handle it."

"Oh, about the way you described," he shrugged. "But knowing how dry the Cairn Mounds are, I would have added a geas onto the nixie's invocation to put it more firmly under my control."

"I was told not to use a geas unless absolutely necessary," Danae said stiffly. "They said the spirits don't react well to them."

"No, they don't," Ravagin nodded. "But premature releases are usually worse—the damn thing can sometimes take a swipe at you before it vanishes."

"So how do you know which is the better risk?"

"Experience, of course. Which was the point I was trying to make in the first place."

She bristled. "Are you telling me that I'm not to use any spells unless you clear them in advance?

Because if you are, you can just—"

"Whoa, Danae—take it easy," he cut in, holding his hands palm outward toward her. "I never said anything of the sort. All I'm trying to do is let you know that things on Karyx aren't nearly as laser cut as those little six-week fact-stuffing courses pretend. Karyx's spirit magic is every bit as layered and complex as Shamsheer's technological magic, with the added danger of the spirits turning on you if you aren't careful. You've already shown yourself willing to disobey orders you don't especially want to follow—I'm trying to impress upon you the fact that pulling that stunt here could literally get you burned alive."

"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; we'll 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.