"Nonsense," Melentha said, half turning. "There was no malace there—sprites just aren't smart enough to realize when they're doing something dangerous, that's all."
Danae looked back at Ravagin, saw the other's brief grimace, and decided to change the subject.
"Strange how all these houses are built so close to each other," she commented, waving a hand toward them. "I'd think that with all the open space around for expansion they'd spread out a little more."
"You'll find most villages on Karyx are this tightly packed," he grunted. "There's a limit on how much area a single lar can protect."
"I know that, but what stops them from using more than one lar?"
"I really don't know," he frowned. "Tradition would be my first guess. Melentha, you have any ideas?"
"No," the dark-haired woman said. "But then, I haven't had all that much direct experience with lares on a village-sized scale. I know that some of the other classes of spirits don't get along well with each other—peris, especially, don't work well with other peris. Maybe that's part of it."
They passed by the edge of the village center a minute later, Melentha veering them west then onto the road that would eventually end at the riverport village of Findral some thirty kilometers away.
Danae got only a brief look at Besak's central marketplace as they passed along its perimeter, but it seemed remarkably well stocked with everything from spirit-enhanced tools and weapons to the more mundane items of everyday life. Except that spirit-enhanced items are part of everyday life here, she had to remind herself. Though come to think of it—"Why is there a market here for boundspirit items?" she called ahead to Melentha. "Can't the villagers do the binding part themselves and save the expense?"
"Binding any but the simplest spirits isn't as easy as your teachers probably implied," Melentha answered tartly. "Really binding one, I mean. Anyone can do a temporary lock, but that hardly counts."
"Actually, you'll see a lot more enhanced tools here than in most villages," Ravagin added. "There's a settlement about forty-five kilometers from here in the Morax Forest that specializes in them."
"Yes: Coven," Danae nodded. "I've heard of the place, though no one would say much about it."
"Mainly because we don't know much about it," Ravagin said dryly. "Coven guards its privacy closely."
"Hardly surprising when you consider that their binding spells are the local equivalent of trade secrets," Melentha said. "But that brings up another point. When you start browsing around the Besak marketplace you'll find two or three shops selling spells. Avoid them like the plague."
"Frauds?" Danae asked.
"Borderline incompetent. You're not going to get more than an eighty percent accuracy rate out of them, especially on anything really complicated, and I presume I don't have to tell you what that can mean. If you need to find a particular spell, ignore the locals—come to me and I'll get it for you."
"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."
They were through the main part of town now, and within a few minutes the tight clustering of houses Danae had already noted gave abrupt way to farmland and wilderness. A few houses were visible outside the city limits, but they were far between and somehow gave Danae the feeling of small beleaguered fortresses. The bandit who'd accosted them the previous evening came to mind; surreptitiously, her hand drifted to her waist and the dagger sheathed there. "Why so far out of town?" she called ahead to Melentha.
"It's quieter," the other woman said. "Also more private—I have a lot of visitors, you know, and a single woman in this culture who has strange men dropping in on her for a few days at a time gains a poor name for herself."
Danae thought back to the reactions of the villagers they'd passed. "The townspeople seem to think highly enough of you," she pointed out.
Melentha threw her a vaguely annoyed look. "Like I said, they don't know too much about me."
Danae glanced at Ravagin, to see her own frown mirrored in his face. A small village whose inhabitants didn't know everything about everyone was almost a contradiction in terms. "I'd say they seemed more respectful than just—"
"Just drop it," Melentha cut her off. "Here we are—right through the trees here."
The trees mentioned were a double hedgerow sort of arrangement paralleling the road on their right, the rear line set into the spaces left by the first so that the view from the road was completely blocked. Melentha led them between two of the trees in the first line and around to a gap in the second... and Danae felt her mouth fall open.
After the unassuming way house in Kelaine City on Shamsheer she'd expected something equally modest here. It was a shock to find Melentha's "house" built more along the lines of a mansion.
Three stories high, with a gleaming white exterior, it was surrounded by a large lawn in which squat green bushes and patches of brightly colored flowers had been laid out in a careful arrangement.
More trees blocked the views from north and east; other trees grew in clumps elsewhere on the grounds. Surrounding the house and most of the lawn was a rough square of posts set into the ground perhaps five meters apart.
Danae had seen far larger and more impressive homes before... but in the richer sections of her home world of Arcadia they hadn't looked at all out of place. This one, in the middle of Karyx, most emphatically did. "Nice place," she said cautiously. "A little—uh—ostentatious, though, isn't it? I'd think it would draw bandits like moths."
"It can attract them all it wants," she said blandly. "Actually, it's rather fun to watch a band of them trying to get in."
Beside Danae, Ravagin swore under his breath. "The post line. Esporla-meenay."
Danae's teeth clamped tightly together. For just a second each post had been sheathed in green light... "Bound demons," she breathed. "One in each post."
"Actually there's only a single demon," Melentha said, pointing to the free-standing archway toward which they were heading. "The ones in the rest of the pillars are his parasite spirits. It's why I used a demon in the first place—you can get a whole legion for the price of one entrapment," she added, looking at Ravagin as if expecting another lecture on the dangers of demon-binding.
But Ravagin merely nodded, his eyes on the archway. Danae followed his gaze... and as they neared it she saw what he'd already spotted: an evil caricature of a human face carved into the keystone, its deep-set eyes watching them with unnatural alertness.
Or perhaps it wasn't a carving at all. Perhaps it was the actual visage of the trapped demon, impressed into the stone as a side effect of the spell binding the spirit there.
Shuddering, Danae averted her eyes, and watched the ground beneath them as they rode single file through the arch. The unpleasant tingle she felt was almost certainly just her imagination.
They left the horses at a small stable hidden within one of the groups of trees and walked across the lawn toward the main house. The flowers, Danae noted in passing, were extremely delicate things, alive with buzzing insects, while the squat bushes were rich in oddly shaped berries. She wondered briefly if they were edible, decided that since the info packet hadn't mentioned them they probably weren't.
The interior of the house did nothing to spoil the majestic effect of its exterior. Here again Danae had seen better, but it was no less impressive even held against those memories. The main floor contained a library filled with rough leather-bound volumes, a kitchen that was spotless despite the primitive cooking implements, two large conversation rooms where scattered cushions seemed to serve as chairs, and—surely an oddity on Karyx—an inside bathroom. Another chamber, down the hall from the conversation rooms, was closed off. Melentha didn't offer to show that one; taking the hint, Danae didn't ask.
The guest bedrooms and a double bathroom were on the second floor. "This will be your room,"
Melentha told Danae, leading the way into an airy room on one of the front corners of the house.