Triplet

Chapter 39

He gasped... or, rather, sensed dimly that his body had gasped. Just as he sensed dimly that he was no longer attached to that same body.

He'd heard stories from others who'd done this, but none of them had prepared him for the sensations now flooding his mind. Or rather, for the lack of sensations. Being buried alive in cotton with a flaming torch in your face... drowning in spices, unable to breathe and yet with sharp odors jabbing into nose and brain... drifting on an intangible sky-plane with a drastically ingrown edge barrier locking all muscles in place—he'd heard all of those metaphors and others over the years. None of them even came close. All of mankind's most basic fears—falling, drowning, blindness—seemed to explode on him at once... and even as he fought to gain balance, to be able to think clearly amid the sudden panic, a flame seemed to burst beneath his unfelt feet, sweeping over him, burning his skin to a crisp blackness as the parasite spirit attacked and burned and fought to either control or destroy him

—

Wait a second. I'm not even attached to my body at the moment—how can I feel like I'm on fire?

And with that single rational thought, the whole thing unraveled.

Ravagin took a shuddering breath—and then another, savoring the sense of being whole again.

Illusion—the whole thing was illusion. Wasn't it, my little companion?

The parasite spirit didn't answer. Ravagin wasn't sure a parasite spirit even had enough intelligence to communicate... but whatever it lacked in intellectual capacity it more than made up in raw emotion. He could feel the hatred and rage of the creature as it swirled like a ghostly and impotent tornado through his mind—rage at being defeated and under Ravagin's control, hatred at some more basic and permanent level. It was the first time Ravagin had ever touched a spirit this deeply... the first time he'd ever realized how truly alien the spirit world was. A trickle of sweat ran down between his shoulderblades, and he was dimly aware that he was shivering violently. And not just because of the chilly night air.

Presently, the dark introspection faded, and the world around him began to reappear before his eyes.

He was still kneeling on the sky-plane, his hands curled into fists pressed tightly against his abdomen. His shirt was soaked with sweat, his head ached fiercely, and there was oozing blood where his fingernails had dug into his palms; but all in all, it hadn't been as bad as he'd expected, even from something as relatively simple as a parasite spirit. Lesson number one: spirits aren't nearly as strong on Shamsheer as they are on Karyx. A damn good thing, too...

"Sky-plane—" He broke off, worked moisture into his mouth, and tried again. "Sky-plane: rise one varn and follow my mark: mark."

He could feel the spirit resist... but for the moment, at least, it had no choice but to obey him. The sky-plane rose a meter and floated gently toward the entrance hallway Ravagin was pointing to.

"I was starting to think you had fallen asleep," a soft voice came from behind him.

Ravagin jerked as Habri stepped up to pace the sky-plane. "No one ever tell you not to sneak up behind people?" he growled.

Habri shrugged casually... but as Ravagin's sky-plane hesitated only a moment before crossing the ten-meter limit a touch of awe added brittleness to his features. "You were a long time casting your spell," he said after a brief pause. "But I can see that the results were worth the wait. If your other sorcerous powers are as potent—"

"What do you mean, a long time?" Ravagin interrupted him. "What was it, five minutes? Ten?"

Habri threw him an odd look. "Half an hour at the least. Perhaps a few minutes more."

Ravagin felt a new chill run up his sweat-soaked back as, for the first time, he noticed that the manor house was almost entirely dark now. The servants had finished their chores and retired for the night... and he'd lost thirty minutes of his life during that battle. "It took longer than I expected," he said to Habri through dry lips. Even to him the excuse sounded lame.

"Your companion seemed to think so, too," Habri said. "I think that fact was more worrisome to my men than the delay itself."

"She's never actually watched me do this spell before," he improvised. So Danae was being held nearby, somewhere where she could see the courtyard. He tucked the fact away for possible future reference.

Two of Habri's men were holding the doors to the entrance hallway by the time Ravagin reached them. Though not designed for sky-plane usage, the doorway was fortunately wide enough for the carpet to pass through without trouble. Behind him, Ravagin could hear soft noises as the rest of Habri's force fell in behind them. It was probably a good thing, he thought once as the parade trooped along the darkened corridors, that subduing the parasite spirit had taken as long as it had.

The image of Habri trying to push his way past cleaning crews and the occasional butcher's assistant brought an unexpected giggle welling up from his throat.

He choked the laughter down. Did direct spirit contact always leave a person this giddy? Like a narcotic drug, he thought, fighting against the oddly euphoric feeling. I wonder if that's why some people seem to like doing this kind of thing.

I wonder if that's how Melentha got started.

It took them only a few minutes to reach the top floor of the lower manor house and the great chamber into which the stairs from below led... and it took Ravagin even less time than that to realize his plan was going to need drastic revision.

It was the same place where he'd had his all too brief hearing before the castle-lord a few hours earlier, though having been brought up from the cells by a different route he hadn't realized exactly where he was. As he'd noted then, it was a huge room... and the only ways into it were far from the fat pillar and ornate doors where four trolls stood motionless guard. Lying flat on the hovering skyplane, his eyes barely above floor level, he tried to ignore the impatient rumblings from the men strung out down the stairs beneath him and made a quick estimate of both the horizontal distance and the height of the relatively low ceiling. The ballistic calculation was simple enough for him to do in his head... and there was absolutely no way he was going to reach any of the trolls with a thrown knife.

"Is that the way into the castle-lord's tower?" he whispered to Habri.

Crouched on the stairs beside the sky-plane, the other nodded. "That pillar contains the staircase up.

The doors open directly onto it—allows for very commanding entrances." He shot Ravagin a frown.

"You didn't know? I was under the impression all manor houses were exactly alike."

"Just checking," Ravagin said, eyes searching for some way to get closer to the trolls. But between their stairway and the pillar the room was completely open, without anything that would serve for cover. "Anyway, I needed to see what the guard situation was like here," he improvised. "So. Four trolls."

"I could have told you the castle-lord had four trolls on guard," Habri snorted. "The question now is how you intend to dispose of them."

A damn good question it was, too. Ravagin gnawed at his lip for a second without coming up with any good answers to it. "You and your men stay here," he told Habri at last. "I need to go back outside."

"You'll be back here for the attack, though, I presume?"

"If I'm not, you'll know when to move," Ravagin assured him.

For a long moment Habri's dark eyes bored into his. "Very well," he said at last. "I trust you aren't planning anything foolish. Your woman companion will be here with us, and if anything untoward should happen she will be the first to die."

"Understood," Ravagin said tightly. "You just make damn sure she's still in good shape when I deliver Simrahi's chambers to you. Or you will be the second one to die."

Habri nodded silently. Looking back down the stairs, he nodded to the man bringing up the rear.

"You may go," he told Ravagin. "Whatever you have planned, you had best complete it quickly."

Ravagin licked his lips. "Sky-plane: follow my mark. Mark."

He reached the cool darkness of the castle courtyard a few minutes later without the slightest idea of what he was going to do there. "Sky-plane: rise slowly," he whispered. Perhaps as he looked over the castle grounds he would come up with some way to get rid of the trolls.

A spark of the parasite spirit's natural maliciousness leaked through, and Ravagin found himself drifting upwards so slowly that if the side of the manor house hadn't been right beside him to compare to, he would have sworn he was motionless. He felt a flash of annoyance, but said nothing.

For the moment, anyway, speed was totally irrelevant.

What could he do? Off to his left, just inside the wall, the light from the castle Giantsword bathed the sky-plane landing area and the half dozen spare carpets scattered around it. Nothing there he could use. Over the top of the long entrance hallway extending out from the manor house the Shrine of Knowledge was coming into view; beyond that, the glowing knob at the top of the Giantsword itself was already visible. Send a message for help via the crystal eye in the Shrine? Or sabotage the Giantsword somehow to cut off the power broadcast? That would certainly incapacitate the trolls, if he could manage it, as well as knocking out the lights and every other bit of apparatus in the entire castle. On the other hand, he had no idea how to do such a thing... and there were probably few actions more guaranteed to bring trolls down on him than poking around the protectorate's power source.

Something above him caught his eye: the outward-curving manor house wall was coming down like a frozen wave toward him as he continued to rise. "Sky-plane: move ten varna away from the building and continue upward," he murmured. A slight hesitation as he sensed the parasite spirit repositioning itself amid the sky-plane's picocircuitry. Then it caught, and his slow vertical drift acquired an equally slow horizontal component. He watched for a moment to confirm he would miss the overhang, then turned his attention back to the problem at hand.

The House of Healing, directly behind the manor house, would be of no more use than the sky-plane landing area, though the thought of it made his bruises and cuts throb with new pain. The trolls had no need of the Dreya's Womb and other medical equipment there. Could he somehow persuade the guards that Castle-lord Simrahi was ill and had to be taken down? If they at least had to send someone in to check on Simrahi's condition, it would mean opening the door... but Habri wouldn't be stupid enough to consider that a practical opening for his attack.

And he wouldn't wait on that stairway forever.

Ravagin felt his stomach muscles tighten with the fresh reminder that he was on a dangerously tight schedule here. Danae was still Habri's prisoner... and whether the usurper really meant to release her after all this was over, it was a cinch that if Ravagin didn't come through he would kill her without a second thought.

The sky-plane reached the level of the lower manor house roof now, and the frozen breaker beside him gave abrupt way to a circular flatness. Ravagin's eyes moved to the darkened tower rising out of the center of the roof, and even preoccupied as he was he felt a surge of awe at the sight. He'd never seen a castle-lord's private section this close up, and he was struck by its resemblance to the Dark Tower he and Danae had spent the previous night in. Got to hand it to the Builders, he thought distantly as he took in the sight. They sure knew how to keep thematic unity in this world of theirs.

The basic shape of the Dark Tower was there; so were the relief patterns climbing its lower part and the windows not limited to but concentrated in the upper third. Only the dome of the sky room at the very top made it more than just a miniature version of the Dark Tower—

He froze, sending his eyes searching frantically for what he thought he'd just seen. Imagination?

Trick of lighting?

No. It was there. Almost exactly halfway up the tower.

An open window.