Fighting is out of character for women here, and we don't want to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves. Understood?"
"I suppose so." She gestured to the black glove with its tightly coiled spiral hanging beside the dagger on his belt. "Though if we're going to talk about attracting attention, isn't that scorpion glove a little out of place in this part of Shamsheer?"
"It's somewhat rare, but perfectly acceptable," he shrugged. "They're underused mainly because it takes less training to learn how to hack at someone with a sword and people here have no more patience than any other human beings you're likely to meet. Translation: don't grab for the glove if something happens to me and you need to defend yourself. You're more likely to gift-wrap yourself than to damage your opponent."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said icily.
Ravagin nodded and turned back toward the front of the sky-plane, apparently missing the sarcasm completely. Danae scowled at his back, feeling her already ebbing excitement toward this trip sink a point or two further. Here she'd finally escaped from her father and Hart, only to find another man who wanted to run her life for her—worse, one who was apparently determined to treat her like a child in the process.
Damn him. Damn them all.
Still...
Shaking her head, she put the irritation firmly out of her mind. She was here to do some work, and to do some study, and Ravagin was an unavoidable part of that project. She would ignore his patronizing attitude as much as she could, recognizing that she would be having the last laugh in the end. And she would remember that there was always one final resort available to her here, one that would put her beyond reach of them all, forever.
Taking a calming breath, she directed her gaze at the landscape passing beneath them, studying the world that would be her home for two months. Or perhaps longer.
Chapter 6
They passed over the edge of the Numant Protectorate about half an hour later and entered the hundred-fifty-kilometer-wide strip of territory between Numant and the Ordarl Protectorate to the east. The edge of the Numant Protectorate was more sharply defined than Danae had expected it to be, with villages and even sections of farmland breaking off abruptly at the border.
"Seems rather extreme," she commented to Ravagin. "Are the Tweens really that dangerous?"
"Some of them are, certainly," he shrugged. "You have to remember that a castle-lord's trolls can't go even a meter outside their protectorate and most of the robber gangs take full advantage of that. But a village like the one back there on the border probably doesn't see a troll more than twice a year unless there's trouble. Mostly I suspect that it's psychological, that if you choose to live under a castle-lord's rule and laws you do so whole-heartedly, without any fence straddling."
"And there aren't any corresponding villages just outside the border because it's not safe to live in anything that small in the Tweens?"
"Partly that; partly that if you're going to live in this part of the Tweens anyway, you might as well be closer to the Giantsword in Kelaine City."
Danae digested that. "I thought the power broadcast from the Giantsword network reached everywhere on Shamsheer. What does living near one do for you?"
"You're thinking about it like someone from a technological culture," Ravagin said. "Why don't you try pretending all this stuff is pure magic instead and see if you can come up with anything."
Danae gritted her teeth. Just when she'd started feeling more relaxed in Ravagin's presence, here he was being condescending again. "I presume it has something to do with the fact that Giantswords are associated with the castle-lords and are therefore a symbol of authority?"
"Basically," he nodded. "That's presumably why the major Tween cities got started around them, anyway. That and the belief that Giantswords were where a castle's troll protectors lived."
Danae frowned. "I thought there aren't any trolls outside the protectorates."
"There aren't. But that doesn't stop people from believing that they're safer in the shadow of a Giantsword—any Giantsword—than they would be elsewhere. Pure sympathetic magic."
Danae shook her head, caught somewhere between disbelief and contempt. To live in a world fairly dripping with technology and yet have no concept of how or why any of it worked—it seemed incomprehensible.
And yet....
Her eyes fell on the scorpion glove at Ravagin's belt... traced the tightly coiled four-meter whip attached to its back... drifted to the wide wrist strap and the incredibly sophisticated neural sensors it somehow contained... and an old, old saying quoted in the Triplet information packet came to mind: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Perhaps, she decided, the people of Shamsheer could be forgiven for their ignorance, after all.
Castle Numanteal and the surrounding villages had been solidly locked into the hexagonal pattern that dominated every protectorate Ravagin had ever seen. Kelaine City, situated dead center in the Tween strip between Numant and Ordarl, had no such built-in constraints. The city was a sprawling mass of houses, shops, small industries, stables, and even scatterings of cultivated land, all of it clustered around the only hexagon in the place, the plot of land around the Giantsword's base.
"Is that Kelaine City?" Danae asked from behind him. "It's bigger than I was expecting."
"That's it," he nodded. "It's actually only about the twentieth largest city on Shamsheer, but it's got a lot of cottage industries and that spreads it out more than some of the others that have a larger population." They were over the city's westward edge now, and Ravagin leaned as close to the skyplane's edge barrier as he could to peer at the ground below. An oversized gap between buildings caught his eye, and he thought he could see the tiny rectangles of other sky-planes there. "Sky-plane: stop," he ordered. "Sky-plane: descend."
"Can you see the way house from here?" Danae asked, leaning uncomfortably close as she tried to follow his gaze.
"It's actually a couple of kilometers north of here," he told her, easing back from her a few centimeters. "But these cities are continually changing, and when you find a good place to set down, you're usually smart to go ahead and take it."
"Why—? Oh, right. The sky-planes can't fly closer than ten meters or so to buildings, can they?"
"That's it," Ravagin nodded, vaguely surprised she'd picked up on that so quickly. "And they can't hover directly over one, either. Anti-burglar protection, presumably, though with the edge barrier always running it'd be hard to use for second-story work anyway. Sky-plane: forward slowly."
It was a little tricky to pinpoint a sky-plane onto so small a plot of ground, but Ravagin had had lots of practice and within a couple of minutes they were safely down. Danae, he noticed, poked a hand over the edge before standing up and stepping off the carpet. "Unh," she grunted, stretching carefully. "Left foot's gone to sleep. Do we walk or ride?"
"Up to you," he told her, easing his own stiff leg muscles as he took a careful look around them.
"Most of the local people would walk such a short in-city distance, but I can call a carriage if you want."
"No, let's walk," she said, her voice almost dreamy.
He glanced back. She was gazing around her at the colorfully dressed people filling the streets, head turning this way and that as one thing or another caught her eye or ear. It was, he realized, the same way she'd reacted to her first look at Shamsheer. An almost sad twinge of cynicism tugged at him, and he hoped she wouldn't have to run into the darker side of the storybook city before her. "Let's go, then," he said. "This way. And stay close to me."
They headed off, threading their way through the bustling crowds. Shamsheer had often been described as a society of contradictions, and the contrasts were nowhere more strongly in evidence than in cities like Kelaine. They passed a smoking armorer's shop and a sweating smith tending the fires of a computerized Forge Beast metal-working machine while, right across the narrow street, a skinner sewed his animal-hide garments together by hand. Danae had to sidestep at one point to avoid a fruit grower and his ox-like beast of burden as they carried their oranges to market—oranges, Ravagin knew, that would be protected from the early frosts of this part of Shamsheer by a small obelisk that somehow kept the entire grove at a safe temperature until the fruit was completely harvested. Further along, they passed a baker whose oven consisted of simple fire-heated rock and iron, just as a customer called via prayer stick for a carriage to help carry away her purchase. Simple people, casually using technology totally beyond their comprehension... or, for that matter, the comprehension of anyone in the Twenty Worlds.