"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.
Chapter 36
It was quite probably the most unusual sight the employees of Castle Numanteal had ever seen. And possibly, Ravagin thought grimly, one of the most subtly terrifying.
Certainly if the expressions of those setting out places at the long table were anything to go by.
Frozen in place, some with the gilt-edged plates they were holding suspended above the table in motionless hands, the servitors all stared wide-eyed at the sky-plane as it slid through the window into the high-ceilinged dining room and floated across it. In the room's sudden silence the faint clatter of pots and pans and conversation from the kitchen beyond could be clearly heard, and Ravagin abruptly realized it was toward that noise that their rogue sky-plane was making a leisurely turn. Behind him, he could hear a hooting from the walls outside as the trolls there sounded the alarm; beside him, Danae's fingernails were digging into his arm. Do something! the grip seemed to say; but for the first time since their escape from Melentha he felt totally helpless. The sky-plane ducked down toward the floor as it aimed for the kitchen door—
Beside the table, someone screamed... and the frozen disbelief broke into total pandemonium.
"Keep down!" he snapped automatically to Danae as a handful of silverware flew up at them and scattered harmlessly away at the sky-plane's edge barrier. All around them, the servitors were making up for their earlier inactivity, either scurrying madly to get out of the sky-plane's path or else running toward it in an attempt to stop it; mixed in with the angry shouts and screams were calls for weapons and trolls. Another flight of silverware ricocheted off the barrier directly in front of Ravagin's face, making him flinch. From the corner of his eye he saw Danae unlimbering her crossbow— "Put that down!" he barked at her. "You can't use it anyway—you want us to look hostile to them?"
"You think we look peaceful the way we—"
She broke off with a gasp as, with a sudden jerk, the sky-plane came to a midair halt.
What the—? A horrible suspicion rose up into Ravagin's throat— "Sky-plane: follow my mark.
Mark."
And without any hesitation whatsoever, the machine curved smoothly away from the kitchen doors toward the direction he'd indicated.
"What are you doing?" Danae shouted in his ear.
"Trying to get us the hell out of here!" he snapped back. "The spirit's gone; I've got control again.
Sky-plane: follow my mark, mark."
The carpet swung around in a one-eighty-degree curve back toward the window they'd entered by...
but even as it did so, Ravagin realized with a sinking feeling the spirit's sudden departure hadn't been a mistake. The window was directly ahead, perhaps fifteen meters away... and abruptly the sky-plane slowed and came to a gentle halt.
Ten meters from the wall.
"Ravagin!"
"Shut up, Danae," he snarled back, all his fury and tension and suffocating sense of helplessness welling up his throat and flooding out toward her. "I can't do anything, damn it all—the sky-plane thinks it's outside approaching a building."
The shouts around them had taken on a tone of triumph as the servitors saw the intruders apparently at a loss. A hundred plans flashed through Ravagin's mind... a hundred plans, each of which stood a good chance of getting them killed before they could even get out of the dining room. The precise fate, no doubt, that the spirit had planned for them.
There was no way out. Which meant there was only one chance left for survival.
He took a deep breath. "Sky-plane: land," he said, fumbling his sword and scorpion glove from his belt and pushing them up against the edge barrier. "Danae; get your hands away from that crossbow and put them on your head. We're surrendering."
The sky-plane landed, and in a moment they were surrounded by a ring of knife-wielding servitors who stood there menacingly, clearly at a loss as to what to do next. They were still sitting there quietly on their sky-plane when the trolls and human guards finally arrived.
For Ravagin, Castle-Lord Simrahi was something of a surprise.
He was young, for one thing, as castle-lords went: no more than forty-five, though in the full trappings of his rank he looked perhaps ten years older. The full trappings were a surprise all by themselves; they were seldom used except for formal protectorate events or when a castle-lord would be meeting with his peers. To see Simrahi dressed that way for what boiled down to a simple indictment hearing was more than a little unnerving.
As it was no doubt meant to be. Scanning the huge room as his flanking guards brought him forward, Ravagin noted with a sinking feeling that what appeared to be the full senior court were also present, including advisors, minor nobles of the protectorate, and even commoner observers. Clearly, Simrahi was determined to start his investigation with all the psychological weight on his side.
Making Ravagin and Danae sweat in the cells beneath the manor house for four hours while the event was being staged hadn't hurt, either.
The stir that had accompanied Ravagin's appearance had died down by the time he finished the long walk to the bar set a few meters before the castle-lord's chair. Probably staged that, too, he decided, giving the faces an unobtrusive once-over. The faces stared back, either blankly or with carefully measured hostility. A rubber-stamp crowd, almost certainly—here to applaud the castle-lord's decision.
Which was to be expected from a Shamsheer protectorate, of course; and to some extent it actually made Ravagin's task easier. It meant there was only one man in this entire forbidding crowd whom he had to convince of his innocence.
A bearded advisor type standing beside Simrahi took a pace forward. "The court of Castle-lord Simrahi is now seated," he intoned. "The prisoner will first state his name and home."
So Simrahi wasn't much for flowery pronouncements, despite his fondness for the other trappings of office. Doesn't want his time wasted unnecessarily? Ravagin wondered. "I am called Ravagin," he said, keeping his voice respectful yet firm. "I call no land but Shamsheer my home."
The advisor wasn't to be put off. "Then state the land and village of your birth," he said.
"I was born somewhere inside the borders of the Trassp Protectorate, to parents who were also wanderers," Ravagin replied evenly. It was a story he'd used more than once before, and while a bit unusual it was also almost impossible to disprove. "Whether or not my parents registered my birth I do not know."