Triplet

Chapter 14

She lay quietly on the bed with her eyes closed, arms and legs spread slightly away from her body, a somewhat gauzy sheet from armpits to thighs her only covering. Under other circumstances, Ravagin thought vaguely, he might have had a hard time keeping his eyes and thoughts at professional levels.

But as it was, he had far more serious things than Danae's body on his mind.

"Esporla-meenay!" Melentha intoned, her hands tracing out intricate contrapuntal patterns in front of her. "Askhalon-mistoonla. Olratohin kailistahk!"

Nothing. No momentary aura, no sparks or shimmers anywhere on or near Danae's body. Ravagin pursed his lips, stole a glance away from her across the bed to where Melentha stood. "Well?" he prompted.

Melentha shrugged, an annoyed frown creasing her forehead. "I'm afraid that's my whole repertoire of spirit-detection spells. If something's in there playing games with her, I can't coax it out."

"Are there any spiritmasters in Besak these days?" he asked, looking back at Danae. Her eyes were open now, looking up at him... and while she was putting on a good front, it was obvious she was still scared. "He'd know other spells to try, maybe even a general exorcism we wouldn't need a full identification for."

"We don't have anyone of that caliber in Besak," Melentha shook her head. "The nearest would probably be in Citadel, and there's no guarantee he'd have the time or inclination to look at her."

"What about Coven?" Danae asked. "Surely they have spiritmasters there—they make all those bound-spirit gadgets, after all."

Ravagin cocked an eyebrow at Melentha, though he was pretty sure he knew what her response would be. "Feasible?"

"I'd rather take my chances with Citadel," she said shortly. "I don't know anyone who's ever been to Coven—rumor has it that visitors are intensely discouraged."

"So what do we do?" Danae asked, a slight tremor creeping into her voice.

Melentha sat down on the edge of the bed and took Danae's wrist. "How do you feel?" she asked, fingers locating the pulse and resting there a moment.

Danae's eyes unfocused briefly, and for a second Ravagin thought she was fading out again. But then she shook her head and shrugged. "I feel fine, I guess. Nothing hurts anywhere, and I'm not lightheaded or dizzy. Vision hasn't slipped lately, either."

"Any family history of epilepsy?" Melentha asked.

"They wouldn't have let her come in with something like that," Ravagin put in.

"And there isn't any in my family, anyway," Danae confirmed.

"Just eliminating the obvious." Melentha paused, frowning. "I don't know what else to try. I'll check the bow, see if one of the spirits we used to help assemble the thing somehow got left in it. But the chances of that are really too small to worry about."

"While you're at it, you might also check out that robe," Ravagin told her, jerking his thumb at the garment hanging over a nearby chair.

"Oh, come on, Ravagin," Melentha snorted. "Let's at least be reasonable about this."

"What's unreasonable? The damn thing comes from Coven—who knows what they might have done to it?"

"But—oh, all right. If it'll make you happy." Standing up, Melentha circled the bed and scooped up the robe. "I'll be doing both of them up in my lab, where I can have them in a pentagram. Just in case. You'll want to watch, I presume?"

"Yeah." Ravagin eyed Danae, noted the tightness around her mouth. "Go ahead and get set up; I'll be up in a minute."

Melentha nodded and left the room. "How're you doing?" Ravagin asked, taking a step toward the bed.

"How many times are you two going to ask me that?" Danae said irritably. "When something changes I'll let you know. Would you get me some clothes?"

"Don't you think you ought to stay in bed a little longer?"

"You sound like Daddy Dear," she snorted. "I'm fine—and I want to watch Melentha run the bow and robe through that rinse cycle of hers. Look, either get me some clothes or turn your back and let me do it, huh?"

Ravagin considered pointing out he'd already seen her naked, decided that she probably wouldn't appreciate the reminder. Wordlessly, he stepped to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill.

"Help yourself," he called over his shoulder.

A moment of silence, followed by the sounds of her getting off the bed and padding over to the closet. Outside, the sun was nearing the horizon, throwing long shadows from the trees and post line surrounding the house. Ravagin's eyes flicked to the free-standing gateway, his memory bringing up the unwelcome image of the trapped demon's face frozen into the keystone there. Why the hell does she have to play around so much with demons? he wondered blackly. If she'd at least treat them like touchy high-explosives instead of household pets—

"You've noticed the pentagram out there, I suppose," Danae commented from behind him.

"Pentagram?" he asked, almost turning around but catching himself in time. "Where?"

"Around the whole house," she said, her voice frowning. "At least, I thought it was a pentagram. It starts at the gateway, goes in to those bushes flanking the entryroad, then out to the clumps of trees to left and right—"

"Yeah, wait a second." He frowned, tracing the subtle lines she'd described and locating the others within his field of view. Keeping his back to the room's interior, he moved over to the east-facing window to see if the pattern continued to that side... and damned if she wasn't right. "Now that really takes first prize," he muttered. "What the hell does she think she'd doing?"

"It is a pentagram, then?"

"Oh, it's a pentagram, all right—the lines are too symmetrical to be accidental. Though I've never heard of one made using trees and shrubs this way."

"Could she have trapped spirits in them or something?"

"Who knows what she could have done?" he growled. "Personally, I'm more concerned at the moment about the why of it. Pentagrams don't play the same role on Karyx that they do in Earth mythology—they're more of a mental focuser than anything with real power. But you usually don't use them at all unless you're working a really complex spell—invoking a peri or better or binding something permanently."

"Well... there's the demon in the post line," Danae pointed out, coming up beside him to frown out the window herself. She'd put on a pale blue gown with attached cloak, a sideways glance showed him, and was working on getting its accompanying sash tied properly. "There're also the nixies and firebrats of her plumbing system, remember."

"She'll have bound them using the smaller pentagrams in her sanctum," he shook his head. "And once they're bound you don't need anything external to contain them." For a moment he thought hard, trying to come up with something else. But the effort drew him a complete blank. Melentha knew far more about spirithandling than he did, and the only way he was likely to find out what she was up to would be to ask her.

If he could then be sure he could believe her answer.

"Damn," he muttered under his breath. "I wish we'd gone to Torralane Village instead of here."

"You knew her well before, didn't you?" Danae asked quietly.

"Reasonably well. She's been here—I don't know how long now. We always got along together—"

He cut off that line of thought abruptly. The past was the past, and not something to dwell on. "She was always highly competent at dealing with the oddities of this world," he said instead, "and no matter what happened she never lost an underlying sense of humor about it all. And she was never this flip about the dangers of using and binding demons. That's what bothers me the most."

Danae was silent for a moment. "So what happened?"

"I wish I knew. Most of my trips the last couple of years have been to either the Torralane region or Citadel. I guess that somehow, while my back was turned, something happened to change her."

"She scares me a little," Danae admitted. "I don't know why, exactly. There's a hard edge beneath the surface that never seems to let go—and there's no sense of humor anywhere in her that I can find, either." She hunched her shoulders as if with sudden chill. "I expected to find changes in people who'd been living here, but I think with her I got more than I bargained for."

"Hmm." Ravagin sighed and turned away from the window. "Well, we'd better get downstairs if we're going to watch her go through her paces—" He broke off suddenly as Danae's words seemed to sink in and trip just the right set of synapses. "Just a second. What did you mean about seeing changes in people who'd been living here?"

Danae's face suddenly went rigid. "Uh... well, you know—I told you I was here to study the psychological effects of Karyx on the people here—"

"On the inhabitants is what you told me." The faint suspicion was rapidly becoming a full-blown certainty... and he didn't like it a damn bit. "You're primarily here to study those of us from the Twenty Worlds, aren't you? Melentha, and me—damn you, anyway," he interrupted himself as the last bit fell into place. "That's why you asked for the Courier who'd spent the most time on Karyx, isn't it? I'm your chief laboratory rat, the one you've got time to do a leisurely dissection of. Aren't I?" In a rush all of it came back to him, to be seen anew in this freshly kindled light: her probing questions into his feelings and thoughts, her tendency to pick unnecessary arguments, even her infuriating habit of questioning the judgment of the man whose specific expertise she'd supposedly asked for. "Is that why you were always questioning my decisions?—because you assumed fifteen years in the Hidden Worlds had singed my faculties?"

"Ravagin, listen—"

"You deny it?" He was almost trembling with anger now, hands aching with the desire to slap her across the room. "Go ahead—tell me I'm wrong. Go ahead."

Her face was twisted with anguish, her eyes bright with tears. "Ravagin, I didn't mean—yes, yes, that's why I asked for the most experienced Courier. But it's not the way you make it sound—"

"Of course not—my logic center's been damaged, too, hasn't it?" he snarled, perversely pleased at the way his words deepened the pain on her face. "Well, good luck to you and the trusty old scientific method. I hope you've got plenty of data tucked away, because it's all you're going to get."

Without waiting for a reply he shouldered past her and strode out of the room, resisting the urge to slam the door behind him. The way Melentha was acting these days she'd probably find his fury a source of private amusement, and he was damned if she was going to get any more of that out of him than she already had. Everyone around me, people I've known and trusted—it's like a damn conspiracy. Breathing deeply as he stomped down the hall, he headed for the stairs and Melentha's sanctum-cum-laboratory on the floor above.

She was waiting when he arrived, the composite bow centered in a blood-red pentagram inscribed on the floor. "I thought I was going to have to start without you," she said.

"Sorry I'm late," he said briefly. "Let's get to it."

She gave his face a speculative look, but turned back to the pentagram without comment and began the first spell. A few minutes later Danae quietly joined them, her face pale but otherwise composed.

Ravagin ignored her, and she took the hint; and standing together they watched in silence as Melentha ran through her repertoire of detection spells, first on the bow and then on the Coven robe.

And in both cases found nothing.