Triplet

Chapter 21

The crying jag lasted only a few minutes, and Ravagin's faint discomfort was more than matched by Danae's own embarrassment over the incident. "I'm sorry," she said for the third or fourth time as he found her a handkerchief to wipe her nose with. "I don't know what happened."

"Just forget it," he told her. Also for the third or fourth time. "Your psyche's been through one hell of a shock, and you can't just shrug that sort of thing off. Burying it wouldn't do you any good in the long run."

She sniffed one final time and handed the handkerchief back. "I'm okay now," she said.

"Good. Look, if you feel up to it, it might help to run through the whole contact out loud. Sort of—

you know—flush the emotion out of it."

A tentative smile played at the corners of her lips. "Besides which, you're curious?"

"Of course I am. If what you saw was real, this is something none of us has ever stumbled on before."

For a moment he held his breath, cursing his verbal slip and wondering if she'd take offense at the implication that she might have been hallucinating. But she merely nodded. "It sure felt real. But I suppose you're right. Anyway. I got this spell from a spiritmaster in Besak named Gartanis—"

"Yeah, we heard. I thought Melentha warned you not to buy spells from the locals."

Danae snorted. "Oh, sure. I was supposed to go to her to ask for help proving what happened in Coven wasn't an illusion?"

Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. "Is that what all this was over? Pardon the bluntness, but that was a damn fool thing to risk your neck over."

"Yeah, I know." She shivered. "And I was going to back out, too, until Gartanis suddenly seemed to think it was very important that I go through with it."

"I'm sure he did," Ravagin growled. "Especially at the overinflated prices he probably charged you

—"

"He gave me the spell for free."

Ravagin's tongue froze in midsentence. "He did—he gave you a demogorgon invocation for free?"

"That's unusual?"

"A spell like that ought to go for half the price of this house," Ravagin told her bluntly.

She rubbed her forehead. "Yeah, I sort of got that impression. But he wouldn't take anything for it.

Anyway. I tried the invocation, but it didn't work out the way I expected. Instead of bringing the demogorgon here, it seemed like he took me there. Sounds crazy, but that's the only way I can describe it."

Ravagin thought about her shadowless form in the center of the pentagram. "No, I think you can assume you really were taken off somewhere. What gave you the impression it was a separate world, though?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Lots of little things, I suppose. The terrain—well, no, it wasn't really terrain, at least not in the usual sense. Call it background, maybe—the background had a completeness about it that seemed to go with a complete world rather than just a different way of looking at Karyx. There was even a sky of sorts. And there were lots of spirits."

"Doing what?"

"Moving around, mostly, on whatever business spirits have in their own world. But I also saw several of them disappear; that was the part that interested me the most."

"Disappear... as to being invoked by people in Karyx?" Ravagin hazarded.

"That's the feeling I got at the time." She shivered again. "And I saw a—well, it was a fight. Pure and simple. I saw a demon attack a lar."

"And...?" he prompted.

"And destroy it."

A bad taste rose into Ravagin's mouth. "You realize," he said slowly, "that what you're implying is a level of spirit-spirit interaction no one's ever seen before."

"In other words, I'm going to be accused of having hallucinations?" she snorted. "I've already heard that argument once today, and I'm getting tired of it."

"Take it easy—I'm not the one you're going to have to defend this against. Any idea where this fight might have taken place?"

"I told you: in the fourth world—"

"I mean did it have any relationship to Karyx? Did any part of the fight take place here, in other words?"

She pondered. "I don't know. Distances didn't seem to be the same as they are in a physical world.

And there weren't really any reference points I could hold onto."

"Yeah." He took a deep breath, exhaled it thoughtfully with a glance toward the pentagram. "Well...

if you're right, the scholars are going to hate you. Just think of the trouble they're going to have to go through, changing every Triplet in the literature to Quadruplet."

There was no response, and he looked back to find her frowning off into space. "Danae? You still there?"

"More or less. Ravagin... why would the demogorgon have shown me all that? I mean, why me specifically? Other people have invoked great powers before—Gartanis, for one. Why didn't any of them see this?"

"Maybe they did," Ravagin shrugged. "You have to remember that everyone else who's tried this has been a Karyx native, and none of them know about Triplet's nature."

"No, it's more than that," she shook her head slowly. "Gartanis seemed to think the demogorgon wanted to talk to me; that he'd even foreseen some of this a hundred years ago. Though maybe it wasn't about me specifically..."

"Look, Danae, you have to remember not to take everything you hear on Karyx at a hundred percent face value."

"This is different." She looked at him sharply. "The demogorgon was trying to tell me something—I can feel it. Maybe if I do the invocation again and ask more directly—"

"Whoa!" he said, grabbing her shoulders as she started to get to her feet. "You are not going to try that again, Danae: period, lockdown."

"But—"

"No buts about it. You want an interesting form of suicide, you can do it back in the Twenty Worlds on someone else's responsibility."

Her eyes flashed. "You just saw me invoke the demogorgon and not get hurt—"

"And if your friend Gartanis wasn't a total fraud he must have warned you that the great powers are totally unpredictable," Ravagin shot back. "At any rate, you're not going to do it."

"Ravagin—"

"Besides which, you're not going to have time. Tomorrow we're heading back to the Tunnel and home."

Her jaw dropped as utter astonishment pushed all other emotion from her face. "We're what?" she whispered.

"You heard me: we're heading home," he said doggedly, ignoring with an effort the look of betrayal on her face. "Doing something as insane as invoking a great power without my knowledge is perfectly adequate grounds for me to abort the trip. We'll leave at sunup; I suggest you get to sleep early tonight." Ignoring the protests from his knees, he straightened back to a standing position and offered her a hand up. "And we'd better get out of here before Melentha gets back—she'd be furious to find you'd fiddled around with her stuff."

For a minute Danae just stared up at him. Then, ignoring the proffered hand, she got awkwardly to her feet. Turning her back, she strode unsteadily over to the door and left the sanctum.

Ignore it, Ravagin told himself, glaring at the empty doorway. It's just another of her little tantrums.

I'm right on this one; and for once we're going to do things around here my way.

Turning his head, he snarled the release spell for the firebrat, and walked in darkness to the door.

And tried to blot out the strange ache her expression had left in his chest.

"A demogorgon?" Melentha shook her head. "Crazy child. She could have gotten herself killed."

"I think we're all agreed on that," Ravagin said shortly. "We're also agreed—you and I are, anyway—

that we can't give her another chance to do it again. Tomorrow at dawn we're heading for the Tunnel."

"And you'll be wanting an escort, I suppose?"

"Not necessarily," Ravagin told her, forcing down his annoyance at the breezy condescension in her tone. "Actually, all I need from you is a strengthening of your post line so that Danae won't be able to sneak out tonight if she gets the urge to do so."

Melentha's eyebrows raised slightly. "Yes, I suppose you ought to expect something like that from her."

"Under similar circumstances, I'd expect something like that from you, too," he said.

Her face seemed to harden. "I do my job," she bit out. "And I obey orders."

Ravagin sighed. He was getting sick and tired of constantly finding himself swimming upstream. "I meant it as a compliment to your spirit," he told her. "If you want to take it as an insult, that's your business. So can you seal this place up a little more or not?"

She nodded. "Oh, yes," she said softly. "Don't worry, Ravagin; no one will be getting out of here tonight."