"And we leave you with a warning: Habri's treason may not be the last such attempt on your rule.
You had best be on your guard."
Simrahi's expression turned to flint. "I do not need outlanders to tell me how to defend the Numant Protectorate," he bit out. "Depart—now—and do not forget you are barred from ever returning to this castle. Do not forget; for the trolls will certainly not." Turning his back, he strode away from them, all but one of the trolls falling into a loose defensive pattern around him.
"You will go to the sky-plane landing area," the remaining troll said, taking another step forward.
"No argument," Ravagin sighed. Letting go of Danae's hand, he stepped closer to slip his arm around her waist, holding her tightly to him as they headed down the bloodstained stairway.
Fifteen minutes later they were seated on a sky-plane, soaring over the castle wall and heading southwest toward the Tunnel. Ten kilometers as the birdine flew, Danae remembered; perhaps ten or fifteen minutes by sky-plane. We're going to make it, she thought. This time we're realty going to make it.
Five minutes later, Ravagin brought them down in the middle of the Harrian Hills.
"All I know," Danae growled as he sent the carpet away, "is that you'd better have one damn good reason for this."
"I hope I don't, actually," he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. "I hope like hell I'm being overcautious. But after everything that's happened, I'd rather err that way than the other. Come on—
the Tunnel's this direction. We should be there in an hour or so."
"We'd better be," she said, setting off with a sigh. "In case you haven't noticed, we haven't had a lot of sleep in the past few days. I'm about dead on my feet—and we might get that way permanently if Simrahi catches us out here."
"He only told us not to come back to the castle," Ravagin reminded her.
"I somehow doubt he's going to be worried about the strict letter of the law," she shot back. "And we were getting along so well with him there at the end—why did you have to go out of your way to irritate him, anyway?"
"I didn't 'go out of my way,' " he growled, "and I don't think a little irritation really stacks up against life and death, do you?"
"Life and—?" She broke off. "You mean... the spirits?"
He shrugged uncomfortably. "It's one of the things I had in mind," he said. "What better place for them to take control of than the protectorate containing the Tunnel to Threshold?"
"Oh, God," she murmured. "You think Simrahi will be able to keep them back? He doesn't even know what it is he's up against."
"He can't stop them," he admitted. "Not for long, anyway. It's going to be up to us, Danae—us and whatever the Twenty Worlds can gather together to throw at the problem."
"Great." Something he'd said a minute ago... "Were there any other reasons you gave Simrahi that warning?"
"Yes. One."
"Care to enlighten me?"
"No. Not now, anyway. Suffice it to say that if what I was trying to do works, we'll hopefully never know it." She had to be content with that.
An hour later they carefully topped the last hill and came within view of the Tunnel... to find four trolls standing guard at the entrance.
"Damn, damn, damn," Danae snarled, pressing her chin harder into the rocky ground of the hill as they lay there side by side. "Damn him. I thought he seemed to know too much about us, Ravagin—
the way he called us outlanders and all. And now he's blocked the Tunnel—"
"I'm afraid it's worse than that," Ravagin interrupted her tightly. "Those trolls down there aren't Simrahi's."
"They're not—?" She caught her breath and took another look... and felt her hands curl into fists in front of her. The trolls' color scheme was green/white/violet, not Numant Protectorate's red/silver/
black. Which meant—
Which meant the spirits had found the Tunnel... and after all they'd already been through, there was going to be yet one more battle to fight.
A battle she suddenly knew she couldn't face.
"God," she whispered, closing her eyes against it all. "I can't handle any more, Ravagin—I just can't."
Ravagin reached over to squeeze her hand. "I don't want to, either. But it looks like we won't have to."
"What?" she asked dully.
"Take a look."
Frowning, she opened her eyes and peered off in the direction he was pointing. In the distance, riding through a gap in the hills and clearly making for the Tunnel, were a half dozen men in the red/
silver/black of Castle Numanteal. Accompanied by a half-dozen trolls. "I don't understand," she muttered. "What are they doing here?"
"Searching for trouble near the castle, of course," Ravagin said. Danae glanced at him, taken aback by the grim smile on his lips. "The other part of my reason for dropping veiled threats on Simrahi.
Don't you see?—he's got his soldiers out sweeping the territory for possible trouble."
"And just happening to clear out our path for us in the process." Danae looked back at the interloping trolls and shook her head, almost afraid to believe it. "I just hope this is going to be as one-sided as it looks."
It was even more so. Again, the trolls' complex and heavily layered battle/control/decision circuitry proved more than the spirits within them could handle efficiently under combat conditions. Within minutes of the Numant soldiers' first challenge, all four interlopers were laid out on the ground, frozen into immobility. A few minutes after that four sky-planes arrived and they were loaded aboard, presumably to be taken back to the castle. The sky-planes rose and vanished behind the hills to the east, the patrol continued on its way—
And Ravagin cautiously rose to his feet. "Let's go," he said, head turning back and forth as he made one final scan of the area. "Straight to the Tunnel, but remember not to go in right away. It's possible there might be someone skulking further in where the patrol couldn't see them, and we'll want to check things out carefully."
"If anyone's in there," Danae said grimly, "we'll kill him. Pure and simple."
There was; and they didn't.
He loomed out of the darkness just where the Tunnel began its curve toward the telefold, and for a moment they all stared at each other. "I was starting to think," the other said at last, "that I was going to have to tackle that reception committee out there all by myself."
Danae took a deep breath. "And you would have, wouldn't you. You blithering idiot."
Hart merely smiled. "Part of my job," he said. "Welcome home, Ms. mal ce Taeger."
Chapter 42
"Ah; Ravagin," Corah Lea said, looking up as he came in. "Sit down, please."
He took the proffered chair, noting with a sinking feeling that her face was a study in inscrutability.
A bad sign.
"So." She arranged her forearms across her desk and tried without much success to smile. "Well. I have to say, first of all, that your report is the damnedest bit of high adventure I've ever seen come out of the Hidden Worlds. I hear the thing's been called up over eighty times in the past week alone—
twenty of those requests coming from the the folks upstairs. You've really made a stir."
"It's nice to be noticed," he said. "You call me in here to get an autograph before the rush starts?"
She made another attempt at a smile, with even worse results. "I wish it was something that easy.
Actually, you're here because—well, I've just gotten word down from the Directors' Council about your request to speak to them."
Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. "They turned me down?"
"Cold. I'm sorry, Ravagin. I can see how much this means to you."
"What it means to me isn't important—" He broke off, struggling to get his temper back under control. None of this was her fault, after all. "Did they read the petition? All of it?"
"Ravagin—" Lea spread her hands helplessly. "Look, I read your petition, too, and even knowing you as well as I do I can't really blame them. You offer not a single shred of objective proof that anything's seriously wrong on Karyx or Shamsheer, and yet you want them to summarily close down both Tunnels—"