Triplet

Chapter 12

The village of Besak, or at least the part Danae saw as they rode toward the way house, was exactly as the Triplet information packet had painted it... which was, in Danae's opinion, a bad sign.

Her overwhelming first impression of the place was that it was filthy. The narrow streets that wound between the cottages were lined with piles of garbage, through which small half-seen animals burrowed. Some of the larger and fancier buildings had outhouses out back—or front—for their occupants' sanitary needs; how those in the smaller cottages managed she tried not to think about.

Above it, a variety of odors rose and mingled to become a truly memorable stench.

The info packet had been right about the filth. It had also said Besak's inhabitants were rough, conniving, superstitious even by Karyx standards, and occasionally extremely violent.

For the moment, though, those more dangerous aspects of village life seemed to be dormant. All around them the main activity seemed to be the bustle of commerce, with no more violence in sight than occasional overloud haggling. Children ran and played in the streets, much as children anywhere in small towns in the Twenty Worlds would, their game shifting to a race around the newcomers' horses as Melentha led them along at a brisk walk. Adults, passing by them on various unknown errands, paused to bow their heads to Melentha, their eyes flicking briefly over Ravagin and Danae with obvious curiosity but no apparent hostility. No one seemed particularly clean... but as Danae got used to the grime, she noticed that no one seemed particularly unwell, either. All the sick people are indoors, maybe? But that was unlikely—people in primitive cultures could seldom afford to stay away from their work for the complete duration of an illness. Spirit healing, then, she concluded, the thought sending a shiver up her back. It was one thing to lie in a diagnostic chair in a spotless room with tailored biochips circulating through your body; it was something else entirely to have a living entity doing the probing.

She started abruptly as something hazily bright flashed past her face. "What—?"

"Just a sprite," Ravagin reassured her, bringing his horse up alongside hers.

She licked her lips and exhaled a ragged breath. "Good thing I wasn't galloping," she growled.

"Running practically into my face like that—I could have fallen and broken my neck."

He eyed her oddly. "Yeah. Well... like I said, the spirits don't especially like us—"

"Nonsense," Melentha said, half turning. "There was no malace there—sprites just aren't smart enough to realize when they're doing something dangerous, that's all."

Danae looked back at Ravagin, saw the other's brief grimace, and decided to change the subject.

"Strange how all these houses are built so close to each other," she commented, waving a hand toward them. "I'd think that with all the open space around for expansion they'd spread out a little more."

"You'll find most villages on Karyx are this tightly packed," he grunted. "There's a limit on how much area a single lar can protect."

"I know that, but what stops them from using more than one lar?"

"I really don't know," he frowned. "Tradition would be my first guess. Melentha, you have any ideas?"

"No," the dark-haired woman said. "But then, I haven't had all that much direct experience with lares on a village-sized scale. I know that some of the other classes of spirits don't get along well with each other—peris, especially, don't work well with other peris. Maybe that's part of it."

They passed by the edge of the village center a minute later, Melentha veering them west then onto the road that would eventually end at the riverport village of Findral some thirty kilometers away.

Danae got only a brief look at Besak's central marketplace as they passed along its perimeter, but it seemed remarkably well stocked with everything from spirit-enhanced tools and weapons to the more mundane items of everyday life. Except that spirit-enhanced items are part of everyday life here, she had to remind herself. Though come to think of it—"Why is there a market here for boundspirit items?" she called ahead to Melentha. "Can't the villagers do the binding part themselves and save the expense?"

"Binding any but the simplest spirits isn't as easy as your teachers probably implied," Melentha answered tartly. "Really binding one, I mean. Anyone can do a temporary lock, but that hardly counts."

"Actually, you'll see a lot more enhanced tools here than in most villages," Ravagin added. "There's a settlement about forty-five kilometers from here in the Morax Forest that specializes in them."

"Yes: Coven," Danae nodded. "I've heard of the place, though no one would say much about it."

"Mainly because we don't know much about it," Ravagin said dryly. "Coven guards its privacy closely."

"Hardly surprising when you consider that their binding spells are the local equivalent of trade secrets," Melentha said. "But that brings up another point. When you start browsing around the Besak marketplace you'll find two or three shops selling spells. Avoid them like the plague."

"Frauds?" Danae asked.

"Borderline incompetent. You're not going to get more than an eighty percent accuracy rate out of them, especially on anything really complicated, and I presume I don't have to tell you what that can mean. If you need to find a particular spell, ignore the locals—come to me and I'll get it for you."

"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."

They were through the main part of town now, and within a few minutes the tight clustering of houses Danae had already noted gave abrupt way to farmland and wilderness. A few houses were visible outside the city limits, but they were far between and somehow gave Danae the feeling of small beleaguered fortresses. The bandit who'd accosted them the previous evening came to mind; surreptitiously, her hand drifted to her waist and the dagger sheathed there. "Why so far out of town?" she called ahead to Melentha.

"It's quieter," the other woman said. "Also more private—I have a lot of visitors, you know, and a single woman in this culture who has strange men dropping in on her for a few days at a time gains a poor name for herself."

Danae thought back to the reactions of the villagers they'd passed. "The townspeople seem to think highly enough of you," she pointed out.

Melentha threw her a vaguely annoyed look. "Like I said, they don't know too much about me."

Danae glanced at Ravagin, to see her own frown mirrored in his face. A small village whose inhabitants didn't know everything about everyone was almost a contradiction in terms. "I'd say they seemed more respectful than just—"

"Just drop it," Melentha cut her off. "Here we are—right through the trees here."

The trees mentioned were a double hedgerow sort of arrangement paralleling the road on their right, the rear line set into the spaces left by the first so that the view from the road was completely blocked. Melentha led them between two of the trees in the first line and around to a gap in the second... and Danae felt her mouth fall open.

After the unassuming way house in Kelaine City on Shamsheer she'd expected something equally modest here. It was a shock to find Melentha's "house" built more along the lines of a mansion.

Three stories high, with a gleaming white exterior, it was surrounded by a large lawn in which squat green bushes and patches of brightly colored flowers had been laid out in a careful arrangement.

More trees blocked the views from north and east; other trees grew in clumps elsewhere on the grounds. Surrounding the house and most of the lawn was a rough square of posts set into the ground perhaps five meters apart.

Danae had seen far larger and more impressive homes before... but in the richer sections of her home world of Arcadia they hadn't looked at all out of place. This one, in the middle of Karyx, most emphatically did. "Nice place," she said cautiously. "A little—uh—ostentatious, though, isn't it? I'd think it would draw bandits like moths."

"It can attract them all it wants," she said blandly. "Actually, it's rather fun to watch a band of them trying to get in."

Beside Danae, Ravagin swore under his breath. "The post line. Esporla-meenay."

Danae's teeth clamped tightly together. For just a second each post had been sheathed in green light... "Bound demons," she breathed. "One in each post."

"Actually there's only a single demon," Melentha said, pointing to the free-standing archway toward which they were heading. "The ones in the rest of the pillars are his parasite spirits. It's why I used a demon in the first place—you can get a whole legion for the price of one entrapment," she added, looking at Ravagin as if expecting another lecture on the dangers of demon-binding.

But Ravagin merely nodded, his eyes on the archway. Danae followed his gaze... and as they neared it she saw what he'd already spotted: an evil caricature of a human face carved into the keystone, its deep-set eyes watching them with unnatural alertness.

Or perhaps it wasn't a carving at all. Perhaps it was the actual visage of the trapped demon, impressed into the stone as a side effect of the spell binding the spirit there.

Shuddering, Danae averted her eyes, and watched the ground beneath them as they rode single file through the arch. The unpleasant tingle she felt was almost certainly just her imagination.

They left the horses at a small stable hidden within one of the groups of trees and walked across the lawn toward the main house. The flowers, Danae noted in passing, were extremely delicate things, alive with buzzing insects, while the squat bushes were rich in oddly shaped berries. She wondered briefly if they were edible, decided that since the info packet hadn't mentioned them they probably weren't.

The interior of the house did nothing to spoil the majestic effect of its exterior. Here again Danae had seen better, but it was no less impressive even held against those memories. The main floor contained a library filled with rough leather-bound volumes, a kitchen that was spotless despite the primitive cooking implements, two large conversation rooms where scattered cushions seemed to serve as chairs, and—surely an oddity on Karyx—an inside bathroom. Another chamber, down the hall from the conversation rooms, was closed off. Melentha didn't offer to show that one; taking the hint, Danae didn't ask.

The guest bedrooms and a double bathroom were on the second floor. "This will be your room,"

Melentha told Danae, leading the way into an airy room on one of the front corners of the house.

"I'm sorry I can't offer you one with a private bathroom, but I decided against building the house like that. You have to remember that even having the things indoors is somewhat radical here, and I can't afford to be too far out of step."

"Sure," Danae nodded, stepping to one of the south-facing windows and moving aside the gauze curtain. The lawn, with all its splashes of color, was visible below... as was the archway with the trapped demon. "This is fine—much nicer than I was expecting from Karyx, certainly. If I may ask, how in the worlds do you handle the, uh, mechanics of the bathrooms?"

"It's perfectly simple," Melentha shrugged. "I've got a couple of large water tanks on the third floor that feed into the showers—a bound nixie keeps them filled for me and there's a firebrat in one to heat it. I don't suppose you've ever seen an old-style flush toilet?—well, trust me, they're noisy but perfectly adequate. Another tank holds water for that purpose; the wastes run down pipes to an underground chamber where three firebrats under a djinn's control disintegrate it all into component atoms and dump everything into the ground water."

"Clever," Danae murmured.

"Straightforward, really," Melentha said. "There's a lot you can accomplish on Karyx if you have even a vague conception of science to complement your spirithandling."

"As long as you don't let it run away with you," Ravagin spoke up from the other side of the room, where he was peering out one of the windows facing east. "Too much and you'll attract attention from the locals. How many of them are you employing here, incidentally?"

"Just four," Melentha said, face hardening again. "All but one leave at night, and the fourth has a small room off the kitchen. The rules do permit me to hire locals, you know."

Ravagin turned back to her. "I'm aware of that," he said mildly. "How many other visitors do you have at the moment?"

"One group; five men, two women. They're out at Findral at the moment, not due back until tomorrow, and then they're due to leave. No one else, though of course I can't ever be sure when someone will drop in."

Ravagin nodded and shifted his attention to Danae. "Will you be wanting to do your studies here in Besak, or would you prefer to pick a different village?"

It was surprisingly difficult for Danae to force her mind back onto what was by now a very familiar track. Such esoteric concepts as statistics and psychological comp/correlation seemed jarringly out of place in such a setting. "No, Besak will be fine," she managed. "Though I'd like to try working up a correlation of attitudes in Findral or Torralane Village, too, if we have the time."

"Thought about how you're going to go about it?" he asked.

"More or less." She looked at Melentha. "I plan to offer either a brand-new item or an improvement on an existing one to the merchants and people of Besak—I'll want to discuss with you later which of my possibilities would be best received."

Melentha frowned. "What do you expect to prove?"

"It should give me a measure of their receptiveness to new things; and since I'll also be offering a spirit-enhanced version of the same item, I'll get at least a preliminary reading on their feelings toward the use of bound spirits. I'll need your help for the binding spells, of course."

"Um," Melentha grunted, clearly not impressed. "Sure, all right, I'll give you whatever help you need."

"Thanks," Danae said, giving the other a tentative smile. Getting on better terms with the woman couldn't hurt, and would probably help in the long run. "When do you want to sit down and discuss it?"

"Tonight," Melentha said promptly. "I have some things that need to be done before sundown, and you ought to take some time to orient yourself anyway. Maybe go into Besak and have a look around

—I can give you one of my people as a guide if you want."

Danae glanced at Ravagin. "You know the way around Besak, don't you?"

"Well enough," he replied. "Though we might need one of Melentha's employees to get back in through the post line."

"Oh. Right." Danae shivered at the memory of that inhuman face.

But Melentha shook her head. "There'll be no problem with that. I'll just instruct the demon that you're my guests and have free access to the house and grounds. It's as simple as that." Stepping across the room, she opened a sliding panel to reveal a well-stocked closet. "If you're going to pass yourself off as a trader in bound-spirit goods, you'll need to change into something more appropriate to your station," she said, locating an intricately embroidered robe and holding it out for Danae's inspection. "This one will give you instant attention—I got it from a traderess from Coven, and it bears their emblem." She indicated a series of golden threads weaving in and out of the metallic redand- blue pattern tracking diagonally across the robe's front.

Ravagin stepped to Melentha's side to take a closer look at the thread pattern. "That's Coven, all right," he agreed slowly. "Where did you get this, Melentha?"

She smiled slyly. "Suffice it to say no one's going to miss it."

"Uh-huh. And you want Danae to go walking around in broad daylight dressed in it? Forgive the bluntness, but that strikes me as rather stupid."

"Why?" Melentha countered. "Don't you think it would guarantee that no one in Besak would give her any trouble?"

"No one except possibly another Coven trader."

Melentha's expression turned patient. "Ravagin, you've become a real worlds-class worrier—anyone ever mention that to you? Why would a Coven trader care if she was dressed in a robe from his town?"

"Maybe because they don't like unauthorized people claiming Coven quality for their merchandise,"

Ravagin gritted. "That ever occur to you?"

"But this isn't an official trader's robe," Melentha said blandly. "It was part of the traderess's sale stock. Didn't I mention that?"

No you certainly did not, Danae thought, eyes flicking between the other two. Short-term memory damage? Or was she just baiting him?

The latter, obviously. Melentha's expression—wide-eyed innocent, but with more than a hint of amusement showing through—made that clear. She'd planned to trap Ravagin into an argument and then pull the floor out from under him, and she'd succeeded.

And it was clear from his expression that he didn't like it at all. Danae didn't blame him; her own disagreements with him aside, the trick struck her as childish. "Thanks anyway, Melentha," she said into the brittle silence, "but if Ravagin doesn't think I should wear the robe—"

"When did I say that?" Ravagin snapped, shifting his glare to her. "You want to wear the damn thing, go ahead and wear it." With a last look at Melentha, he spun around and stalked toward the hallway door. "Let me know when you want to head out, Danae," he called over his shoulder as he disappeared down the hall. A moment later the floor vibrated slightly in time with the slamming of his door.

For a long moment the two women eyed each other in silence. "Any particular reason you did that to him?" Danae asked at last.

A flicker of something almost painful-looking passed over Melentha's face... but before Danae could read anything from it an almost arrogant calm had taken its place. "Not really," she said coolly.

"Though perhaps he'll be less likely to criticize my methods now that he's aware he doesn't know everything." She walked forward and laid the robe across one edge of Danae's bed. "Why don't you take an hour or two to rest and then try the robe on. If Ravagin's still sulking after that, I'll have one of my people take you into Besak." Without pausing for an answer, she turned and glided out into the hall, shutting the door behind her.

Grimacing, Danae sat down on the other side of the bed, feeling the firmness of the mattress beneath the quilt. So much for appealing to her better instincts, she thought, a mild taste of disgust staining her tongue. An effect of Karyx, or was she just that kind of malicious personality to begin with?

Hard to tell... and at the moment she almost didn't care. It was slowly becoming apparent that they weren't especially wanted here, and for a minute she considered going to Ravagin and telling him she'd changed her mind, that she'd decided to move their operation to Torralane Village after all.

Her eyes fell on the robe. It was made of a soft, velvety material that promised its wearer comfort as the woven red and gold promised her elegance. A lovely garment... and if Melentha thought that sparking friction over it could force her guests to move out, she'd damn well better call for a recount.

Pushing the robe over, Danae stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes. Melentha had been right about one thing, anyway—a quick nap was just what she needed. An hour's sleep, no more, and she'd be ready to take on Besak and everyone in it.

And not until she was fully rested would she decide whether or not to wear the damn robe.

Moments later, she fell asleep, her fingers gradually ceasing their idle caressing of the robe as they came to rest on the almost too-soft material.