Obediently, the carpet glided to a halt and sat hovering in midair. "Sky-plane: to Castle Numanteal,"
Ravagin said, and they turned and headed downward.
"We're going to land in the castle?" Danae asked uneasily, the descriptions of Shamsheer's guardian trolls flashing through her mind.
"No, I'll cancel the course again before we get there," he assured her. "This is the best way to see the place, though."
She pursed her lips, acrophobia evaporating as she studied the stronghold they were approaching.
"Are all those houses clustered around the wall inside the troll perimeter?" she asked.
"The inner perimeter, yes. You can see that they form a rough hexagon, too, like the castle wall and the outer protectorate boundary."
Danae nodded again. "The info packet seemed to talk a lot about hexagons when describing the Shamsheer landscape."
"Oh, the obsession is definitely there. The Dark Towers are also six-sided, as are the forest and desert areas surrounding them. No one knows why."
"Sounds like a giant game board," Danae said, only half jokingly.
"Don't laugh—there are people who take that theory seriously," Ravagin said, an oddly grim note to his voice. "Someone built the Tunnels, after all—why couldn't they have built both of the Hidden Worlds, too? And made Shamsheer into a giant game?"
Danae shivered. "I don't like that idea at all. Two complete worlds, just for a game?"
"I don't buy it myself," Ravagin shrugged. "Where's the gamemaster, for instance, if that's what's happening? And if Shamsheer's a game, what's Karyx supposed to be? There are other theories that make more sense." He leaned over toward the sky-plane's side. "We're coming up on the castle."
Danae followed his gaze. They were no more than half a kilometer from the outer wall now and perhaps two hundred meters above it. A half-dozen buildings were visible inside the wall, and she tried to match them up with the sketches she'd seen. The manor house itself was easy—looking vaguely like a huge inverted mushroom with four rocket fin-shaped entrance halls anchoring it to the ground, it dominated the space near the center of the enclosure. In one corner of the hexagon was a smaller hex-shaped building that was probably the local House of Healing; in another corner was the Giantsword power generator/broadcaster. Near the manor house, in the exact center of the enclosure, was a small geodesic dome. "The Shrine of Knowledge?" she asked, pointing to it.
"Right," Ravagin nodded. "It'll be where the castle-lord's crystal eye is kept."
"I'd think he'd put it inside the house where he could get at it more easily."
He shrugged. "The villagers can petition the castle-lord to use the eye for information on what's happening elsewhere on Shamsheer, and this way he doesn't have to let them into the manor house itself. And you have to remember that none of these people understand these gadgets, not even the ones they use every day. Once tradition has the crystal eye in a shrine of knowledge, who's going to risk moving it into the manor house?"
Danae grimaced. "No one, I suppose." They were starting to come around in a wide circle now, and she could see another building and a flat area set against the closer parts of the castle walclass="underline" the horse/
vehicle stable and the sky-plane landing area, respectively.
And they were aiming directly toward the latter. "Shouldn't we be getting out of here?" she asked, starting to feel a bit nervous. Trying to explain an unauthorized landing inside a castle enclosure wasn't the way she really wanted to start her trip.
"In a minute," Ravagin said calmly. "Castle-lord Simrahi's used to people buzzing his castle—half the visitors through the Tunnel come by here and want to take a look."
"I'm sure he loves the attention," Danae retorted. "Don't you think it's possible he might get tired of it one of these days?"
"And do what? As long as we're not actually bothering anyone he's not going to have his soldiers or trolls try and shoot us down." He pointed ahead and upward. "Besides, it doesn't look like he's even home at the moment."
Danae followed his finger. Moving against a mottling of high cirrus clouds she could see a tiny golden ball. "A bubble?" she hazarded, though there wasn't much else it could be.
Ravagin nodded anyway. "Sure is. Take a good look—you probably won't see one of these things again. Most of the visitors I've brought in here never even get this close."
Danae reached a hand up to shade her eyes. A crystal throne surrounded by a translucent, goldenhued force-field sphere was the way the Triplet information packet had described the thing. It had further added that, seen close up, bubbles were possibly the most dramatic piece of technology on Shamsheer. "How do you know it's Simrahi's bubble, though?" she asked. "I mean, it could be any castle-lord up there, couldn't it?"
"Sure; but after all we are right in the center of the Numant Protectorate. For all the pomp and relative plushness bubbles allow them, castle-lords really don't travel all that much outside their own territories."
The bubble disappeared behind the clouds, and Danae returned her attention to the castle enclosure, her eyes flicking to the tower rising from the wide circular roof of the lower manor house. At the tower's top a crystalline dome glittered in the sunlight... "How does the bubble get out of the sky room?" she asked. "Does the dome split or what?"
"No idea," Ravagin said. "I've never been invited aboard one for a ride. Ah, look—there's someone wearing the livery of the castle-lord's guard: red, silver, and black."
And the man in question was looking directly up at them. Danae's mouth went dry; in her interest over the bubble she'd almost forgotten they were still headed straight for a castle landing. "Hadn't we better be changing course?" she asked, as calmly as possible. "Even if the castle-lord's gone, there are still a lot of people down there who might take exception to our flying over them."
"Why?" he asked. "You have to remember, Danae, that Shamsheer's only partly a feudalistic society, and that that part isn't really like the Earth types you're probably thinking about. There's no interprotectorate warfare here, for starters, and correspondingly no regal paranoia."
"I understand all that," Danae gritted. The castle was close enough now for her to make out the individual bushes lining the roadway from gate to manor house... and to see that the faces of the troll guards were also lifted in their direction. "I would still like to get out of here."
"If you insist. Sky-plane: stop. Sky-plane: to Kelaine City."
The carpet's descent reversed, and as it rose back into the sky and headed eastward again Danae took a deep breath. Her hands were beginning to tremble with reaction to what she still considered to have been a close call. She turned to glare at Ravagin... and found he was already watching her. Watching her entirely too closely....
"You did that on purpose," she accused him coldly. "Didn't you? You wanted to see how easily I got rattled."
His expression remained calm. "I like to know what sort of person I'm going to be traveling with.
The Hidden Worlds can be dangerous at times."
"Isn't that your job?—to protect me?" she retorted. "I noticed I wasn't offered any weapons back at the Tunnel."
"Women of your station in life don't carry weapons."
Something cold tickled her back. "What do you mean, my station in life?"
He gestured at her clothing. "You're dressed as a minor noblelady. Nobleladies don't carry weapons
—they have men like me to fight for them if and when necessary."
Danae grimaced, a sour taste rising into her mouth. "I'm perfectly capable of fighting on my own if I have to," she told him stiffly. "I've had training in both armed and unarmed combat styles—"
"Wonderful," Ravagin interrupted. "If you have to fight for your life and I'm not around, you have my permission to rip his ears off. Otherwise yell for help and let someone else take care of him.