"Who is that woman you sent the message to?" Danae asked as they started off through the mounds.
"Melentha's the mistress of the Besak way house, like Essen was in Kelaine City," Ravagin explained. "It's standard procedure on Karyx to inform one of them when you're coming—travel here's a bit riskier than on Shamsheer and it's a good idea to have someone making sure you don't just disappear out in the wild somewhere."
He glanced at Danae, saw her swallow visibly. "I see," she said with forced calmness. "A shame we don't have sprites on call back home—seems a pretty efficient way to send messages."
"The novelty fades after a while," Ravagin told her dryly.
"I suppose so."
They walked in silence for several minutes more, and after a bit Ravagin noticed her throwing frowning glances at the sky and the landscape around them. "Anything wrong?" he prompted.
"I'm not sure," she said slowly. "The light seems... funny, somehow. Not bright enough or something."
He nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Most visitors noticed the anomaly eventually, but few picked up on it this quickly. "Karyx's sunlight is about ten percent dimmer than that of Shamsheer, which in turn is that much dimmer than sunlight on Threshold. Have you ever been to Earth or Ankh during a partial solar eclipse?"
"Ah—yes," she said, understanding flickering across her face. "You're right; that is what it's like—
the sunlight's the right color and all, but not the right intensity."
"Yeah. Only it's not an eclipse in this case—the sun's just dimmer. Just one of the sizeable collection of things we don't understand about this place."
"But the stars are the same as you see from Threshold, aren't they?"
"As far as we can tell, bearing in mind we can't bring in the necessary instruments for an exact check. No, all three worlds are in the same place in the universe—every study anyone's ever invented has come to that tentative conclusion. But remember that there's no particular reason why the suns of the three have to be the same. Certainly the terrains of the worlds are different, so we're not just experiencing different dimensional manifestations of the same planet."
"How do you know?" she countered. "I mean, the equivalent spot on Shamsheer is covered with dense forest—how do you know it didn't have all these mounds, too, before the tree roots wore them down? And who knows what Threshold's landscape looked like before the original inhabitants blew it into the stratosphere?"
A pat answer rose to Ravagin's lips... and stayed there unvoiced. How had the savants and investigators come to that conclusion, come to think of it? "Well... there's a good-sized ocean inlet about seventy kilometers west of here at Citadel that definitely doesn't show up in either of the other worlds," he said slowly. "On the other hand... there've been some tremendously powerful spiritmasters in Citadel's history, and if one of them had decided he wanted the city to have ocean access, he might very well have been able to force an elemental to dig that inlet for him."
Danae shivered suddenly. "With an elemental he could probably have gotten the whole ocean dug for him. Unless their power's been exaggerated."
"It's hard to exaggerate elementals' power," Ravagin said, feeling his stomach tighten. "Almost as hard as imagining the kind of damn fool who would try invoking one of them in the first place. I don't even like working with demons and peris, personally." With an effort he forced his mind back to the original question. Could the worlds in fact be more identical than was generally conceded?
With some difficulty he tried to imagine a superposition of the Shamsheer and Karyx maps...
"The Morax Forest east of here could be the same as the Darcane back on Shamsheer," Danae murmured. "Just receded to the east a hundred kilometers or so—maybe by whatever made the Cairn Waste. The South Fey River in Shamsheer would be somewhere in Citadel's inlet—that doesn't help us any. The North Fey River...?"
"There is a river up there somewhere," Ravagin nodded. "But I'm not sure precisely where. Part of the problem is that we don't know all that much about Karyx's landscape—travel is by foot or horseback, and we rarely wind up going more than fifty or sixty kilometers from the Tunnel. Funny no one's thought of this before."
"Oh, they probably have," Danae shrugged. "And then rejected it for some perfectly good reason."
She sighed. "Doesn't really matter, I suppose. Just theoretical brain-gaming."
"So what else is there here?" he said dryly. "It's not like studies of Karyx have any application to the real universe."
"You sound like Essen," she snorted. "I don't suppose it's occurred to you that the spirits we find here may not be unique to this place."
"If you're talking about all the Earth legends and stories—"
"And most religions, too," she cut in. "Virtually all of them make provision for spiritual beings."
"But spiritual beings that are different from those of Karyx."
"Who says?" she said hotly.
"Just take a minute and look at the facts," Ravagin said, feeling his temper beginning to slide out from under his control. He'd never much cared for people who couldn't have a discussion without turning it into an argument. "The spirits here are easy to invoke, easy to control, interact directly with the physical universe, and their presence is very apparent. Contrast that to all the legends—or the religious stories, if you'd prefer—that you remember."
She clamped her jaw tightly, but he could see in her eyes that she was indeed thinking about it. "You think the legends are just that—legends?"
"I have no idea—I'm not a theologian. All I'm saying is that anything you learn about spirit characteristics and control here will have no direct application to life off Karyx because spirits like these don't seem to exist off Karyx."
"So you do agree with Essen's philosophy."
"There's no agreeing or disagreeing, damn it," Ravagin snarled. "There are no sides to be taken here
—it isn't a contest or war or something. In many ways I happen to prefer Karyx to Shamsheer; so what? All Essen was saying is that Shamsheer's technology is at least based on scientific principles, and that if we can find out how it works there we can make it work in the Twenty Worlds, too."
"If science really is a universal." She held up her hand before he could reply. "Sorry—I'm not really trying to start any arguments."
"Could've fooled me," Ravagin muttered under his breath.
"What'd you say?"
"Nothing," he growled. "Let's step up the pace a little—I want to try for one of the inns a few kilometers down the road."
They kept on, but within another hour it was clear they weren't going to make it. Danae was trying—
he could grudgingly admit that much—but her preparation for the trip had clearly not included building up her leg muscles for this kind of continual up-down climbing, and he was forced again and again to reduce the pace or risk leaving her behind. The latter idea had a certain nasty appeal—
he could invoke a djinn to watch over her progress, after all—but it wasn't really a serious option.
Keeping most of his attention on their surroundings, he began working on the problem.
They reached the last row of mounds about an hour before sunset, and there Ravagin called a halt.
"There's no way we're going to make any of the inns tonight," he said, studying the strip of dirt and gravel through the lengthening shadows of the mounds that were slowly but steadily creeping over it.
"We might as well find a good spot around here and set up a camp. Are you hungry?"
"A little," she admitted, gazing out over the road. "There's not much cover out here, though.
Wouldn't we do better to head for that little grove of trees?" She pointed south along the road.
"The lack of cover isn't all that important," Ravagin told her. "The presence or absence of bandits is much more of a consideration, and I'd just as soon avoid such blatantly obvious places for travelers to stop."