Triplet

Chapter 16

It was, at first, easier going than Ravagin had expected. The trees were large and well packed, with wide skirts of branches reaching out to pluck at the casual traveler, but whether by design or accident Danae had entered at a spot where a trail of sorts formed a twisted path around the worst of it. With the light from his torch pushing the darkness back a few meters, Ravagin was able to keep pretty much to the trail. Even with that mysterious djinn along to show her the way Danae was unlikely to make much better time, and urging his horse along at a fast walk Ravagin almost began to hope he'd catch up with her before they reached Coven.

Half an hour into the forest, the trail petered out.

"Damn," Ravagin muttered to himself. Drawing the sword Melentha had given him, he reluctantly dismounted, wishing like hell he could afford the time and risk of invoking a lar to encircle him.

Karyx horses could be nasty fighters, and even a forest predator might think twice before tackling a man astride one. But a man down at ground level was something else again, and Ravagin had to force himself to wrench his eyes from the surrounding shadows to study the ground.

It was, fortunately, a quick job that took only a few seconds of his attention. Danae's horse had kicked up identifiable chunks of the forest mat on its way, and discerning the direction it had taken was practically child's play. A minute later Ravagin was back in pursuit, at a necessarily reduced pace.

He kept on steadily, stopping every few minutes to make sure he hadn't lost the spoor, and about two hours later came to a small clearing that was nevertheless large enough to have a circle of moonlight at its center. A safer spot for a break he wasn't likely to find for a long time. Reining up, he stopped his horse in the center of the pool of light and, with a careful look around, dismounted. Holding his dazzler sword low where its shimmer couldn't affect his night vision, he worked a stick of cured meat out of the survival pack and wearily took a bite.

"Good evening."

Ravagin jerked around, dropping the meat stick and reflexively bringing his sword into low guard position. Halfway across the clearing from him a dark human figure stood, its figure swathed in a long cloak, its face hidden from the moonlight by a wide-brimmed hat.

Ravagin swallowed, hard. The other didn't seem to be armed; but under the circumstances, that didn't mean a hell of a lot. For starters, there was no way he could have simply walked in here without Ravagin hearing him, and that implied damn good spirithandling. Or worse. "Hello," he managed.

"What brings you to Morax Forest at this time of night?" the other asked, ignoring the sword pointed in his direction.

"I'm following a friend." Ravagin told him, wishing he knew just who—or what—he was facing here. It could be a human, a doppelganger, or even a major spirit like a demon or peri. "She was brought into the forest against her will."

"What will you do when you find her?"

Ravagin licked his lips. "That depends partly on why she was brought here," he said cautiously. "Are you one who knows what that purpose is?"

"What will you do when you find her?" the figure repeated.

There was no way out of it. Not knowing which side—if any—the other was on, Ravagin couldn't guess what sort of answer would be safe and what sort would mean trouble. "I need to make sure she's safe," he said, trying to stay as neutral as possible. "She's my companion and partner—I can't just abandon her to whatever purpose she's been brought here for."

The floppy hat tilted slightly in the moonlight. "Her partner?" the figure asked. "Explain what you mean by that."

A response at last. "We travel together, she and I," Ravagin said carefully. "Uh... we work side by side—"

"You work with her? You aid in the creation of her goods?"

Did he know Danae had been showing her composite bow around Besak? A faint suspicion began to glimmer at the edge of Ravagin's mind. "We create our stock in trade together, yes. Why?—is Coven interested in buying our bow-making technique?"

The figure stood in silence a long moment... and then suddenly the hat and cloak were gone, and in the moonlight Ravagin saw the hazy figure of an impossibly perfect man. "The masters of Coven will wish to speak with you," he said, striding forward. His feet, Ravagin noted without surprise, made no noise against the fallen leaves beneath them. "You will accompany me to the village."

Ravagin swallowed. "The woman and I really wouldn't be very useful to you," he said. The glowing sword in his hand twitched around to track the peri's approach...

The peri smiled. "Ahlahspereojihezrahilkma beriosparath—"

The rest of the spell was cut off by Ravagin's gasp as a blaze of light erupted directly in front of his eyes.

Instinctively, he threw himself to the side, dimly aware that the light moved with him and that the sword in his hand had suddenly become icy cold. Twisting aside again, he hurled the weapon toward where he remembered the peri standing—

The light cut off abruptly, leaving not a trace of afterimage on his retinas to obscure his sight. The peri hadn't moved; the sword, its now dulled blade broken in two, lay at the spirit's feet. Both pieces were already thickly covered with frost, and a fog of cold air was swirling lazily around them.

For a long moment the clearing was silent. Then the peri turned and started off in the direction Ravagin had originally been going. "Come," it called back over its shoulder. "The masters of Coven will be anxious to see you."

"Yeah," Ravagin muttered under his breath. Fighting shaky knees, he climbed back onto his horse and twitched the reins to follow.

"Awaken," a disembodied voice said; and at its command, Danae did so.

Her first thought was that it was Melentha leaning over her bed; Melentha, wearing the Coven robe.

An instant later her brain came more fully on track and she realized that this woman was someone else entirely, someone she'd never seen before. But the robe still looked like the one from—

Her stomach knotted in abrupt horror. Sitting bolt upright in bed, she sent her eyes flicking around the sunlit room.

Carved wood... textured glass in the windows... cured animal skin quilt-rug on the floor... she herself dressed in a copy of the other woman's Coven robe... Biting down hard on her lip, Danae looked again at the woman seated beside her bed. "So," she croaked. "I'm in Coven. Aren't I?"

The other nodded, a flicker of mild surprise crossing her face. "You're quick," she said, getting to her feet. "That's good. The others will be here soon to talk to you." Turning, she walked toward the door.

"Wait!" Danae called after her. "What do they want me for—?"

The firm closing of the door cut her off. "Well, damn it, then," Danae muttered to herself. Swinging her legs off the bed, she stood up, pausing as the abrupt change in position made her momentarily dizzy. Stepping to the window, she peered out.

Coven, without a doubt. A score or so of buildings in neat rows could be seen from her angle, most of them single-story houses of the Besak type but a few larger structures visible as well. Beyond the buildings she could see a solid wall of forest pushing in on the clearing in which the town was built.

Pressing her face against the glass, she could see more of the town to either side, with the same wall of trees at the edge. The area immediately around her was deserted, but around the buildings near the edge of the clearing she could see a dozen identically robed people milling about.

Easing back from the view, she gnawed at her lip some more and tried to get her brain working. The last thing she remembered was going to bed after Melentha's failed attempts to find evidence of spirits in this robe she was wearing; right after that awkward scene with Ravagin...

Her stomach twisted with the memory of that argument. Ravagin had been furious with her... and looking at it from his point of view, she could hardly blame him. The big question now was whether he was so mad he wouldn't even bother to come after her once he found out she was missing.

No. The real question was whether he would be able to figure out where to start looking in the first place.

Easy, Danae, take it easy, she forced down the sudden burst of panic. Ravagin was smart—surely he and Melentha together would be able to piece two and two together and come to the logical conclusion. She was wearing the Coven robe, so they'd have the missing robe as a clue to her disappearance. So if they could just make it through Morax Forest, find Coven, and get her out from under the villagers' noses...

She took a deep, shuddering breath, trying without much success to force calm into her mind. For all intents and purposes, she could consider herself to be on her own.

Daddy Dear, if you could see me now, she thought sardonically. Where are you, Hart, when I really need you?

Stepping back from the window, she made a quick scan of the room and then walked over to the door. The first job in getting out of Coven, clearly, would be to get out of this room.

She'd expected to have to do a careful search of the room in hopes of finding some way out... and it was therefore something of an anticlimax to discover the door wasn't locked. Gritting her teeth, she opened it and peeked out. No one was in sight. There has to be a catch to this, the thought occurred to her; but there was no point standing around wondering what that catch might be. Taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the hallway— And froze.

Insofar as sheer power was concerned, peris were generally placed above lares and one step below demons; and for that reason Ravagin made it a practice to have as little to do with them as possible.

For every person like Melentha who professed perfect and casual command over the higher spirits, he'd heard a flipside story of someone who'd tried it and lost control. For him the odds weren't worth playing with.

He'd had enough interaction, though, to confirm the common belief that peris were as knowledgeable as they were powerful—knowledgable about both the spirit and the physical worlds—and it was therefore something of a disappointment to discover how dull a traveling companion this particular peri was.

Presumably on purpose, of course. Whoever in Coven had set the peri up as a forest watchdog had clearly added a geas against talking too much. Ravagin's gentle probings about Coven and the Morax Forest in general were totally ignored, and eventually he gave up and concentrated instead on getting through the densely packed trees with a minimum of scratches.

They rode through the remainder of the night, and the early morning sunlight was filtering through the trees as they reached a huge clearing in the forest. "You may dismount," the peri announced.

Frowning, Ravagin reined in just past the last line of trees and looked around. A perfectly empty clearing, from the looks of it, with not even a stream or hillock to break up the flat-grass matting.

"This is it?" he asked. "Coven? Where is it, underground?"

The peri turned to look at him, and for an instant Ravagin thought he could see surprise in the spirit's eyes. "Only soil and the dead are underground," the peri said. "Coven is here... but not yet for your eyes to perceive."

"Ah," Ravagin nodded. "We have a little blindness spell operating here, do we? Are your masters going to lift it, or do they expect me to find the buildings by walking into them?"

"Why not try lifting it yourself?" a voice came from Ravagin's right.

Ravagin started, spinning to look at the young man gazing up at him from no more than ten meters away. Another spirit, was his immediate guess; but hard on the heels of that thought another possibility hit him: that the man had simply become visible by emerging from an invisible house.

Certainly the figure was no peri—that much was evident from his pockmarked skin and slightly bent nose. "I greet you, sir," Ravagin said, bowing from his seat. "Do you represent the masters of Coven?"

"I am one of many," the other said with a shrug. "And you are...?"

"I'm called Ravagin. Friend and co-worker of a woman named Danae, whom one of your enchanted robes brought here last night."

"Oh?" The man glanced at the silent peri. "I didn't realize we had newcomers. Well. Come with me, then. Your friend will have been taken to the center of Coven; let us go and see just what skills you possess that you have been chosen to join our community."

Ravagin paused halfway through the act of dismounting. "To... join you?"

"Of course. Why else do you think you've been brought here?"

Slowly, Ravagin finished his dismount. It wasn't exactly an unexpected development, but he'd rather hoped the man would at least be a bit more circumspect about it. Such an open and casual admission that he and Danae were prisoners was the sign of a great deal of power. "I don't suppose we get a choice in this?" he asked.

"Not really." The man looked at the peri. "He and the woman were the only ones?"

"I was told another human arrived with this one but left without entering the forest," the spirit replied. "I leave him in your charge, now, and will return." Without waiting for a reply, it turned and glided away, disappearing among the trees.

Ravagin watched him go and then returned his attention to the clearing. "I'm surprised you bother with blindness spells with guards like that peri all around you," he said.

"We like to be careful. Did you want to try lifting the blindness spell yourself?"

For a long moment Ravagin was tempted. He hadn't the faintest idea how to handle a blindness spell, of course... but with the man essentially offering him the chance to get one free spell out without being stopped...

He resisted the temptation. The man couldn't be that naive, and if this was a test of some kind he'd do better in the long run to establish himself as being as harmless as possible. "I don't know much about spells," he said instead. "Just enough to protect us on the road against bandits, really."

"I see. Well, no matter." The man took a deep breath. "Myorlaineoul-meeklorestra!" he shouted.

And with the barest flicker of light the clearing was suddenly no longer empty.

Ravagin clamped down hard on the expletive that tried to come out. Knowing what to expect hadn't entirely prepared him for the gut impact of the blindness spell's removal, but he was damned if he was going to ooh and aah for his captor's amusement. "Impressive," he said instead. "Redundant, as I said, but still impressive."

"We like it," the other shrugged. "This way."

They passed between several rows of buildings—houses, Ravagin decided, for the most part, though there were more than a normal village's share of craft shops intermixed as well. A few people were visible near the center of town, near a larger and more elaborate structure. "Town hall?" he hazarded.

"Or is it a temple?"

"Neither," his guide told him. "Or both, depending on your point of view."

"Ah." Must have learned his conversational technique from peris and demons, Ravagin thought sardonically. None of them can give straight answers, either.

The passersby had all disappeared by the time he and the other man reached the building a few minutes later. Up close, Ravagin decided, the temple part of the design definitely won out. The high and elaborate multi-wood main doors alone put the place beyond the village hall classification, and the matching window frames meant someone had gone to a great deal more effort than was usual in such cases.

Which probably meant that some very high-ranking spirits were routinely being invoked in the place.

Elementals, perhaps? Or even the highest of the spirit hierarchy, a demogorgon? The thought made him shiver.

"Come," the other man said, gesturing toward the doors. "The others will be waiting."

"Right." No one else was in sight near them... but across the way near the far edge of town more of the familiar robes could be seen going about their business. Grimacing, Ravagin squared his shoulders and pulled open the doors.