"Yes: Coven," Danae nodded. "I've heard of the place, though no one would say much about it."
"Mainly because we don't know much about it," Ravagin said dryly. "Coven guards its privacy closely."
"Hardly surprising when you consider that their binding spells are the local equivalent of trade secrets," Melentha said. "But that brings up another point. When you start browsing around the Besak marketplace you'll find two or three shops selling spells. Avoid them like the plague."
"Frauds?" Danae asked.
"Borderline incompetent. You're not going to get more than an eighty percent accuracy rate out of them, especially on anything really complicated, and I presume I don't have to tell you what that can mean. If you need to find a particular spell, ignore the locals—come to me and I'll get it for you."
"Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."
They were through the main part of town now, and within a few minutes the tight clustering of houses Danae had already noted gave abrupt way to farmland and wilderness. A few houses were visible outside the city limits, but they were far between and somehow gave Danae the feeling of small beleaguered fortresses. The bandit who'd accosted them the previous evening came to mind; surreptitiously, her hand drifted to her waist and the dagger sheathed there. "Why so far out of town?" she called ahead to Melentha.
"It's quieter," the other woman said. "Also more private—I have a lot of visitors, you know, and a single woman in this culture who has strange men dropping in on her for a few days at a time gains a poor name for herself."
Danae thought back to the reactions of the villagers they'd passed. "The townspeople seem to think highly enough of you," she pointed out.
Melentha threw her a vaguely annoyed look. "Like I said, they don't know too much about me."
Danae glanced at Ravagin, to see her own frown mirrored in his face. A small village whose inhabitants didn't know everything about everyone was almost a contradiction in terms. "I'd say they seemed more respectful than just—"
"Just drop it," Melentha cut her off. "Here we are—right through the trees here."
The trees mentioned were a double hedgerow sort of arrangement paralleling the road on their right, the rear line set into the spaces left by the first so that the view from the road was completely blocked. Melentha led them between two of the trees in the first line and around to a gap in the second... and Danae felt her mouth fall open.
After the unassuming way house in Kelaine City on Shamsheer she'd expected something equally modest here. It was a shock to find Melentha's "house" built more along the lines of a mansion.
Three stories high, with a gleaming white exterior, it was surrounded by a large lawn in which squat green bushes and patches of brightly colored flowers had been laid out in a careful arrangement.
More trees blocked the views from north and east; other trees grew in clumps elsewhere on the grounds. Surrounding the house and most of the lawn was a rough square of posts set into the ground perhaps five meters apart.
Danae had seen far larger and more impressive homes before... but in the richer sections of her home world of Arcadia they hadn't looked at all out of place. This one, in the middle of Karyx, most emphatically did. "Nice place," she said cautiously. "A little—uh—ostentatious, though, isn't it? I'd think it would draw bandits like moths."
"It can attract them all it wants," she said blandly. "Actually, it's rather fun to watch a band of them trying to get in."
Beside Danae, Ravagin swore under his breath. "The post line. Esporla-meenay."
Danae's teeth clamped tightly together. For just a second each post had been sheathed in green light... "Bound demons," she breathed. "One in each post."
"Actually there's only a single demon," Melentha said, pointing to the free-standing archway toward which they were heading. "The ones in the rest of the pillars are his parasite spirits. It's why I used a demon in the first place—you can get a whole legion for the price of one entrapment," she added, looking at Ravagin as if expecting another lecture on the dangers of demon-binding.
But Ravagin merely nodded, his eyes on the archway. Danae followed his gaze... and as they neared it she saw what he'd already spotted: an evil caricature of a human face carved into the keystone, its deep-set eyes watching them with unnatural alertness.
Or perhaps it wasn't a carving at all. Perhaps it was the actual visage of the trapped demon, impressed into the stone as a side effect of the spell binding the spirit there.
Shuddering, Danae averted her eyes, and watched the ground beneath them as they rode single file through the arch. The unpleasant tingle she felt was almost certainly just her imagination.
They left the horses at a small stable hidden within one of the groups of trees and walked across the lawn toward the main house. The flowers, Danae noted in passing, were extremely delicate things, alive with buzzing insects, while the squat bushes were rich in oddly shaped berries. She wondered briefly if they were edible, decided that since the info packet hadn't mentioned them they probably weren't.
The interior of the house did nothing to spoil the majestic effect of its exterior. Here again Danae had seen better, but it was no less impressive even held against those memories. The main floor contained a library filled with rough leather-bound volumes, a kitchen that was spotless despite the primitive cooking implements, two large conversation rooms where scattered cushions seemed to serve as chairs, and—surely an oddity on Karyx—an inside bathroom. Another chamber, down the hall from the conversation rooms, was closed off. Melentha didn't offer to show that one; taking the hint, Danae didn't ask.
The guest bedrooms and a double bathroom were on the second floor. "This will be your room,"
Melentha told Danae, leading the way into an airy room on one of the front corners of the house.
"I'm sorry I can't offer you one with a private bathroom, but I decided against building the house like that. You have to remember that even having the things indoors is somewhat radical here, and I can't afford to be too far out of step."
"Sure," Danae nodded, stepping to one of the south-facing windows and moving aside the gauze curtain. The lawn, with all its splashes of color, was visible below... as was the archway with the trapped demon. "This is fine—much nicer than I was expecting from Karyx, certainly. If I may ask, how in the worlds do you handle the, uh, mechanics of the bathrooms?"
"It's perfectly simple," Melentha shrugged. "I've got a couple of large water tanks on the third floor that feed into the showers—a bound nixie keeps them filled for me and there's a firebrat in one to heat it. I don't suppose you've ever seen an old-style flush toilet?—well, trust me, they're noisy but perfectly adequate. Another tank holds water for that purpose; the wastes run down pipes to an underground chamber where three firebrats under a djinn's control disintegrate it all into component atoms and dump everything into the ground water."
"Clever," Danae murmured.
"Straightforward, really," Melentha said. "There's a lot you can accomplish on Karyx if you have even a vague conception of science to complement your spirithandling."
"As long as you don't let it run away with you," Ravagin spoke up from the other side of the room, where he was peering out one of the windows facing east. "Too much and you'll attract attention from the locals. How many of them are you employing here, incidentally?"
"Just four," Melentha said, face hardening again. "All but one leave at night, and the fourth has a small room off the kitchen. The rules do permit me to hire locals, you know."