Triplet

Chapter 35

A second sky-plane arrived shortly after sundown and proceeded to work its way underneath the one Ravagin had damaged. It was, Danae would have thought, a rather tricky maneuver, but the skyplanes carried it out deftly and with an almost miserly efficiency of movement. Barely a minute after the second sky-plane's arrival the piggybacked carpets rose into the sky, apparently oblivious to their two unscheduled passengers, and headed southwest toward Forj Tower. Slowly, the ground vanished into the deepening darkness beneath them; and as stars and distant village lights came out together, Danae found herself lapsing into the hazy illusion that they were traveling out in deep space, far from unpredictable spirits and magical technology. Far from danger and trouble and decisions...

"That's the Tower ahead," Ravagin murmured.

She started, the warm sense of almost-security vanishing. Ahead, visible only as it blocked stars and distant lights, the Tower was a brooding shadow looming in their path. "That's it, all right," she agreed, feeling the tension begin to rise again within her. Ravagin had said once that there were trolls guarding the Dark Towers.... "We going to just ride it on in?"

"We don't have any choice," he said. "Sky-planes bringing in repair work are pre-programmed by our hypothetical central dispatch."

"I wish there was at least some way to knock first," she sighed. "Sneaking in like this makes me nervous."

"Yeah. Well... if it makes you feel any better, we've collected six or seven stories of people who got inside one or the other of the Towers, and none of them end with the person being killed."

She pursed her lips. "Though if someone just disappeared inside, you aren't nearly that likely to have heard about it."

"Point," he admitted. "Still, all the stories we do have agree that as long as we don't interfere with the Tower's work we should be okay."

The dark mass ahead of them rapidly grew larger, and within a few minutes they were close enough for Danae to pick out some of its details in the starlight. The secondary spires were well below them, the sky-plane clearly aiming for the windows near the structure's top. "A shame we can't take this tour in the daytime," she commented, striving for a light tone amid the tight silence. "I'd like to see the relief stone patterns further down."

"Maybe some day we can come back," Ravagin said. "Though if you want to see the patterns you'll do about as well to just stand at the bottom and look up. The internal programming that keeps skyplanes ten meters away from buildings also applies to the Towers. In fact, as far as I know these repair flights are the only exceptions to that rule."

The Tower filled the entire sky ahead of them now, and for the first time Danae could see the rows of windows as slightly lighter chunks of gray against the black background. She held her breath as one of the windows in the bottom row loomed straight ahead... instinctively ducked her head... and without any pause or hesitation the sky-plane slid neatly in through its center.

"Be light," Ravagin murmured, and the firefly ring on his hand began giving off its gentle glow.

Danae had just enough time to notice that they were passing through what looked like a short hallway with gridded mesh for walls, ceiling, and floor when Ravagin suddenly grabbed her arm.

"Come on!" he snapped, and half dragging her, rolled off the carpet.

He landed on his feet, throwing his free hand to the mesh wall on one side for balance. Danae wasn't nearly so graceful, losing her balance despite his steadying hand on her arm and dropping onto one knee. The mesh jammed painfully into her kneecap and she bit back an exclamation. "What is it?" she whispered tensely.

"Get a good grip on yourself," he said. "Be more lighted."

The firefly's glow brightened. Danae saw that they were barely two meters from the end of the mesh hallway... and beyond it—

Was nothing.

She gasped, clamping her teeth tightly together as the acrophobia from her first sky-plane ride suddenly flooded into her. Nothing—just black, empty space—as far as the light from the firefly could penetrate.

Dimly, she noticed that Ravagin, his hand still gripping her arm, was peering closely at her face. "I'm okay," she said with an effort.

"You sure?" he asked.

"Yeah," she breathed. "It just took me by surprise, that's all."

"Good. I'm going to go to the edge and see what we've got to work with here. You stay put, okay?"

She managed a nod. Releasing her arm, he straightened up and took a careful step toward the edge of the abyss. "Be full lighted," he ordered the firefly... and as its glow became searchlight-bright, she forced herself to look.

It wasn't as bad as she'd feared. In the brighter light the far side of the Tower was visible, perhaps fifty meters away, and she could see that it, too, had the same sort of short mesh corridors extending out from each window. Just beneath the meshwork, and continuing down the Tower as for as the light could show, were a series of hexagonal boxes that reminded her instantly of a giant honeycomb made up of private rooms. One of the hexes caught her eye as its door slid open, and she looked over in time to see their piggybacked sky-planes vanish inside. Once, Ravagin shined the light directly down; steeling herself, Danae looked through the mesh beneath her. To her vast relief the pattern of boxes across the way apparently repeated itself on this side of the Tower, too, and she could see the top of the nearest barely three meters away.

Ravagin stood motionless for several minutes, the firefly's light throwing sharp moire patterns around their end of the Tower whenever it happened to intersect part of the mesh. Finally, he shut the light back down to a dim glow and stepped back to her. "Okay, here's the deal," he said, his voice oddly tight. "These little individual corridors—" he waved a hand around at the mesh—"seem to be around every window in the place, all the way around the circumference of the Tower and all the way up. I don't know what they're for, but if this one is any indication, they seem sturdy enough to easily hold our weight. Also, since it looks like all the sky-planes bringing damaged merchandise come in through these windows, we should be able to hitch a ride out as easily as we got in."

"Sometime before dawn, right?" Danae put in.

"Several hours before, probably." He hesitated. "Now for the bad news. If ours was representative, it looks like the incoming sky-planes travel in pretty much a straight line from wherever they've come from through the windows and into their repair cubicles. If that pattern holds in reverse for the outgoing flights, it means we're going to have to get almost halfway around the circle if we want to pick up a sky-plane that's headed the direction we want to go."

Danae's mouth went dry. "Get across how?" she asked carefully, something deep in her stomach warning her she wasn't going to like the answer.

She didn't. "We go to the end of this corridor," Ravagin said, pointing, "hold onto the side mesh, and swing one leg at a time around into the next corridor. Cross the corridor and repeat."

She thought about that for a long moment, her memory bringing up the view across the Tower she'd had a minute ago... "The repair cubicles don't extend as far out toward the middle as these corridors do. Do they?"

He shook his head. "Afraid not."

"Which means... we'll be nearly a kilometer up over absolutely nothing when we do this."

"It won't be quite as bad as you're thinking," he assured her. "We've got a safety strap available—the scorpion glove—and as I said before the mesh seems pretty sturdy."

"And very sharp," she said heavily. "I should know—I banged my knee on it a minute ago."

"Umm." Ravagin squatted down, felt the mesh gingerly, then repeated with the mesh of the walls.

"Maybe a little. Remember you won't be hitting it with all your weight, either."

Danae took a deep breath. "There's no other way to do this?" she asked, just to make sure.

"I don't think so." He pursed his lips. "Look, Danae... I remember your trouble with the sky-planes.

If you honestly don't think you can make it, we could probably stay here and try to pick up a skyplane going back the way we came."

She snorted. "Back where?—toward Darcane Forest? We'd wind up at least five hundred kilometers from the Tunnel." Abruptly, she got to her feet. "Give me a little more light, will you?" He complied, and she turned toward the end of the hallway. After all, she told herself sternly, you've been chased by demons, intruded into a world where you didn't belong, and gotten out of a burning house alive.

What's a little gravity after that?

The first one was the hardest. Gripping the mesh with her right hand, she leaned out just far enough to get her left hand around the wall and wedged into the mesh from that side. Then, concentrating on the reassuring pressure of the scorpion glove's whip against her back, she swung her left leg around and onto the floor of the next hallway over. A careful shift of weight... reaching over to get a grip further down... an easing of the other foot across... She took a deep breath, moving automatically another step away from the edge before turning. "Well, come on," she told Ravagin. "We haven't got all night. Let's get this over with."

The hallways measured roughly three meters across each, and they wound up crossing twenty-one of them before Ravagin called a halt. "We're just past the southern edge of Missia City now—see the lights?" he said, pointing, as he knelt near the window. "That means we should be facing due west now."

"Uh-huh," Danae nodded, staying as close to the center of the hallway as she could. The window had no lip or sill, and had another equally long drop beyond it... Gritting her teeth, she concentrated on her mental map of Shamsheer. "Picking up a sky-plane here is as likely to get us to Ordarl Protectorate as it is to Numant, though, isn't it?"

"Or it could take us to Kelaine City or anything else in the Tweens," he agreed, backing away carefully from the window. "Or even some distance beyond the Tunnel. We aren't going to get a whole lot of choice."

"That wasn't what I meant," she said. "Ordarl was where we were stopped on our way to Karyx, remember?"

"Oh, well, that won't be any problem. They released us, after all, so there aren't going to be any official grudges or anything being kept."

"That still isn't what I meant. Don't you remember?—they stopped us because they were having trouble with black sorcery and equipment malfunctions?"

"Yes—and I told you at the time that black sor—" He broke off abruptly. "Oh, bloody hell," he said, very softly.

She nodded, feeling a shiver go up her back. She'd just made the correlation a few minutes ago herself. "Which means the spirits have been in Shamsheer at least that long. And if their influence is centered in Ordarl..."

"We could wind up back in the hot seat again if we land there," Ravagin said heavily. "Or maybe even if we just fly over the place. Damn it all—we need to know more about what we're up against here."

"Couldn't we try some spirit-detection spells—?" She bit at her lip. "No, of course not—they need a demogorgon around to function."

Ravagin nodded "Right. Which is where the real crunch comes: we're having to fight these spirits without knowing which of the usual rules apply. If any of them."

"All right, then. In the absence of rules, let's try logic." Easing down carefully onto her back on the sharp mesh, Danae stared at the gridwork above her for a minute and then closed her eyes. She was considerably more tired than she'd realized, and it was an effort to try and think. "They were waiting for us the minute we got back to Shamsheer, and they challenged us without even stopping to ask who we were. Which implies—" They're ready for an all-out war? She shivered suddenly.

"Which implies," Ravagin picked up the thread, "that they knew we were coming and had to be stopped. Which means there's some sort of communication between Karyx and Shamsheer. Oh, sure

—the spirit that cried out when we escaped across the telefold. Sound travels perfectly well across the thing; the Shamsheer contingent just has a messenger standing by in the Tunnel—"

"My God—that's it!" Danae interrupted, jerking bolt upright as it suddenly struck her. "That's it, Ravagin—that's how the spirits got here. All you need to do is bring a spirit into the Tunnel, leave him there while you cross the telefold, and then do a standard specific-name invocation. That affects only the called spirit, without the need for any demogorgon influence."

"But an invocation—" Ravagin broke off and swore viciously under his breath. "An invocation brings a spirit from the fourth world to Karyx. Across a world boundary. No wonder they tried to stop us—as soon as you know there's an entirely separate fourth world to Triplet, the rest follows immediately."

Danae swallowed as another thought occurred to her. "It also means that they've got at least one human ally here. The person who brought them across."

Ravagin rubbed thoughtfully at his cheek. "Yeah. Well... at least they're still not able to get across on their own. I guess that's something."

Danae shivered as images of Melentha's face, twisted by hatred and fury, floated up from her memory. To have to face something like that again... "I almost wish it were the other way around," she muttered.

"No, you don't," Ravagin shook his head. "Think about it a minute. The Ordarl soldiers said the malfunctions had been going on for—how long did they say?"

"Several weeks."

"Right. So if the spirits' human dupe were actively participating in a bid to conquer Shamsheer, he surely would have brought over enough of them to take control of every bit of machinery on the planet. Right?"

"Well... okay, I guess so."

"But they haven't done that—if they had, we would never have gotten this far. And several weeks should have given them enough time to make their move." Ravagin paused, forehead wrinkled in thought. "So they haven't got a whole army here. Which means their dupe very likely only brought over a limited number of them, for whatever damnfool reason of his own. In fact, he may not even realize yet that they've gotten out of his control."

It sounded reasonable enough, at least to Danae's increasingly foggy mind. "Okay. So then what?"

Ravagin hissed out a breath. "I don't know," he admitted. "If I were bringing over a spirit to test spells on, I wouldn't use anything more powerful than a sprite... but those trolls sure as hell weren't being controlled by something that limited. We could be dealing with djinns here—maybe even peris or demons. I just don't know."

Danae closed her eyes again. "I don't think I even care at the moment what we're up against. As long as they let us get some sleep."

"Point," he grunted with a tired sigh of his own, easing down onto the mesh beside her. "We've got at least a couple of hours before the sky-plane exodus starts. A little sleep'll do both of us good."

Not quite close enough to touch her... "Ravagin?" she asked tentatively. "If the spirits have gotten into the Tower with us... do you think they could send a sky-plane or a castle-lord's bubble in here to push us out?"

"I doubt it," he answered. "Towers seem to work under their own very specialized rules. If a spirit started monkeying with them, I think it would find itself pretty quickly cut out of whatever circuit it was in."

"Oh."

For another moment the faint background hum of the Tower was the only sound in Danae's ears.

Then, with a rustle of clothing, Ravagin moved right up next to her. His arm slid across her stomach; his several-day growth of beard tickled lightly at her ear. "This what you wanted?" he murmured.

She felt blood rushing to her cheeks... but she'd gone through too much with Ravagin to hold onto false dignity now. "Yes," she admitted. "I'm not feeling all that brave at the moment."

His arm tightened comfortingly. "If it helps," he murmured, "neither am I."

Two hours later, they were again flying beneath the night sky, sharing their sky-plane with an oddly shaped piece of ribbed metal that Ravagin guessed was part of a rainstopper mechanism.

It was crowded aboard the carpet, but with reliable edge barriers between her and the rest of the universe, Danae almost didn't even care how close to the edge she had to sit. For a while she watched the stars overhead, but shortly after they passed over Castle Ordarleal the fatigue tugging at her eyelids again proved too much to handle. Stretching out as best she could, she again fell asleep.

"Danae!"

She snapped awake in an instant at his hiss, heart thudding as the horrible dream images faded reluctantly from before her eyes. "Ravagin?" she hissed back, twisting up into a sitting position and looking wildly around. Dawn was just beginning to break behind them to the east; ahead, Ravagin was kneeling at the sky-plane's front edge, peering at the ground below. Even in the dim light she could see that his body was tensed. "What is it?" she repeated, louder this time.

"We're coming down," he murmured over his shoulder. "Damn it all—we're coming down right inside Castle Numanteal."

"What?" she gasped, crawling over to his side. Sure enough, they were losing altitude... and the sixsided castle wall was directly ahead. "We can't land there. Can we?"

"Not without causing a stir," he said grimly. "No one's supposed to fly into a castle enclosure without permission. Damn. I hope Castle-lord Simrahi is in a good mood today."

Danae licked at dry lips. They were close enough now to see the trolls standing watch at the top of the wall. Automatically, her fingers sought the crossbow pistol at her side. If these trolls chose to shoot first and debrief later...

But the machines stood passively, giving no indication that they even saw the intruders, let alone cared about them. Of course the trolls weren't worried, she realized: in a few seconds the sky-plane would make a tight left-hand semicircle and settle down into the castle's landing area, and then the trolls could come down and examine them at their leisure. She braced herself; the sky-plane began to turn—

But to the right, not the left. Directly toward—

Danae gasped. "The manor house?"

"Damn!" Ravagin snarled. "Sky-plane: follow my mark. Mark. Mark, damn it, mark!"

It was no use. The sky-plane continued on unperturbed, straight toward the manor house. At least, Danae thought wildly, we'll still be outside when we land. The ten-meter approach distance will keep it from taking us inside—

And suddenly she knew what was about to happen. And why. "Ravagin!" she said. "My dream! I had another dream about demon-controlled trolls."

"Hell," he said, very quietly.

And as Danae watched with frozen impotence, the sky-plane slid neatly and impossibly through an open window and glided into the manor house.