"Don't you think you ought to stay in bed a little longer?"
"You sound like Daddy Dear," she snorted. "I'm fine—and I want to watch Melentha run the bow and robe through that rinse cycle of hers. Look, either get me some clothes or turn your back and let me do it, huh?"
Ravagin considered pointing out he'd already seen her naked, decided that she probably wouldn't appreciate the reminder. Wordlessly, he stepped to the window and leaned his elbows on the sill.
"Help yourself," he called over his shoulder.
A moment of silence, followed by the sounds of her getting off the bed and padding over to the closet. Outside, the sun was nearing the horizon, throwing long shadows from the trees and post line surrounding the house. Ravagin's eyes flicked to the free-standing gateway, his memory bringing up the unwelcome image of the trapped demon's face frozen into the keystone there. Why the hell does she have to play around so much with demons? he wondered blackly. If she'd at least treat them like touchy high-explosives instead of household pets—
"You've noticed the pentagram out there, I suppose," Danae commented from behind him.
"Pentagram?" he asked, almost turning around but catching himself in time. "Where?"
"Around the whole house," she said, her voice frowning. "At least, I thought it was a pentagram. It starts at the gateway, goes in to those bushes flanking the entryroad, then out to the clumps of trees to left and right—"
"Yeah, wait a second." He frowned, tracing the subtle lines she'd described and locating the others within his field of view. Keeping his back to the room's interior, he moved over to the east-facing window to see if the pattern continued to that side... and damned if she wasn't right. "Now that really takes first prize," he muttered. "What the hell does she think she'd doing?"
"It is a pentagram, then?"
"Oh, it's a pentagram, all right—the lines are too symmetrical to be accidental. Though I've never heard of one made using trees and shrubs this way."
"Could she have trapped spirits in them or something?"
"Who knows what she could have done?" he growled. "Personally, I'm more concerned at the moment about the why of it. Pentagrams don't play the same role on Karyx that they do in Earth mythology—they're more of a mental focuser than anything with real power. But you usually don't use them at all unless you're working a really complex spell—invoking a peri or better or binding something permanently."
"Well... there's the demon in the post line," Danae pointed out, coming up beside him to frown out the window herself. She'd put on a pale blue gown with attached cloak, a sideways glance showed him, and was working on getting its accompanying sash tied properly. "There're also the nixies and firebrats of her plumbing system, remember."
"She'll have bound them using the smaller pentagrams in her sanctum," he shook his head. "And once they're bound you don't need anything external to contain them." For a moment he thought hard, trying to come up with something else. But the effort drew him a complete blank. Melentha knew far more about spirithandling than he did, and the only way he was likely to find out what she was up to would be to ask her.
If he could then be sure he could believe her answer.
"Damn," he muttered under his breath. "I wish we'd gone to Torralane Village instead of here."
"You knew her well before, didn't you?" Danae asked quietly.
"Reasonably well. She's been here—I don't know how long now. We always got along together—"
He cut off that line of thought abruptly. The past was the past, and not something to dwell on. "She was always highly competent at dealing with the oddities of this world," he said instead, "and no matter what happened she never lost an underlying sense of humor about it all. And she was never this flip about the dangers of using and binding demons. That's what bothers me the most."
Danae was silent for a moment. "So what happened?"
"I wish I knew. Most of my trips the last couple of years have been to either the Torralane region or Citadel. I guess that somehow, while my back was turned, something happened to change her."
"She scares me a little," Danae admitted. "I don't know why, exactly. There's a hard edge beneath the surface that never seems to let go—and there's no sense of humor anywhere in her that I can find, either." She hunched her shoulders as if with sudden chill. "I expected to find changes in people who'd been living here, but I think with her I got more than I bargained for."
"Hmm." Ravagin sighed and turned away from the window. "Well, we'd better get downstairs if we're going to watch her go through her paces—" He broke off suddenly as Danae's words seemed to sink in and trip just the right set of synapses. "Just a second. What did you mean about seeing changes in people who'd been living here?"
Danae's face suddenly went rigid. "Uh... well, you know—I told you I was here to study the psychological effects of Karyx on the people here—"
"On the inhabitants is what you told me." The faint suspicion was rapidly becoming a full-blown certainty... and he didn't like it a damn bit. "You're primarily here to study those of us from the Twenty Worlds, aren't you? Melentha, and me—damn you, anyway," he interrupted himself as the last bit fell into place. "That's why you asked for the Courier who'd spent the most time on Karyx, isn't it? I'm your chief laboratory rat, the one you've got time to do a leisurely dissection of. Aren't I?" In a rush all of it came back to him, to be seen anew in this freshly kindled light: her probing questions into his feelings and thoughts, her tendency to pick unnecessary arguments, even her infuriating habit of questioning the judgment of the man whose specific expertise she'd supposedly asked for. "Is that why you were always questioning my decisions?—because you assumed fifteen years in the Hidden Worlds had singed my faculties?"
"Ravagin, listen—"
"You deny it?" He was almost trembling with anger now, hands aching with the desire to slap her across the room. "Go ahead—tell me I'm wrong. Go ahead."
Her face was twisted with anguish, her eyes bright with tears. "Ravagin, I didn't mean—yes, yes, that's why I asked for the most experienced Courier. But it's not the way you make it sound—"
"Of course not—my logic center's been damaged, too, hasn't it?" he snarled, perversely pleased at the way his words deepened the pain on her face. "Well, good luck to you and the trusty old scientific method. I hope you've got plenty of data tucked away, because it's all you're going to get."
Without waiting for a reply he shouldered past her and strode out of the room, resisting the urge to slam the door behind him. The way Melentha was acting these days she'd probably find his fury a source of private amusement, and he was damned if she was going to get any more of that out of him than she already had. Everyone around me, people I've known and trusted—it's like a damn conspiracy. Breathing deeply as he stomped down the hall, he headed for the stairs and Melentha's sanctum-cum-laboratory on the floor above.
She was waiting when he arrived, the composite bow centered in a blood-red pentagram inscribed on the floor. "I thought I was going to have to start without you," she said.
"Sorry I'm late," he said briefly. "Let's get to it."
She gave his face a speculative look, but turned back to the pentagram without comment and began the first spell. A few minutes later Danae quietly joined them, her face pale but otherwise composed.
Ravagin ignored her, and she took the hint; and standing together they watched in silence as Melentha ran through her repertoire of detection spells, first on the bow and then on the Coven robe.
And in both cases found nothing.
Chapter 15
The way house had been quiet for over an hour by the time Karyx's moon rose that night, its fingernail-clipping crescent adding only token assistance to the dim starlight already illuminating the grounds. Sitting on the mansion's garret-floor widow's walk, his back against the door, Ravagin watched the moon drift above the trees to the east and listened to the silence of the night. And tried to decide what in blazes he was going to do.