"It shouldn't have," he said, shaking his head slowly. "With a manifold geas you're either in control or you aren't, and if you aren't the spirit's just supposed to ignore you. Certainly not attack you."
"If you're implying I said the spell wrong—"
"No, no, I'm sure you did it right." He exhaled thoughtfully between his teeth. "Damn. This gets worse and worse, Danae."
She twisted her head to look at him. "What do you mean? You said we were probably dealing with a new set of spells and spirit behavior here."
For a long moment he was silent. Then, reaching around behind her, he carefully pushed the door closed. "You don't want to try the release again?" she asked.
"I don't want to try any spells for a while," he said quietly. "There's something wrong here—
something very wrong—only I can't put my finger on it."
Danae licked her lips. The most experienced Courier in the Corps, she reminded herself. If he thinks something's off-key... "You want to give me a for instance? Besides the overzealous lar in the hallway, I mean?"
Ravagin stepped over to the window and stood looking out, hands clasped behind his back. "It's just feelings so far," he said. "Something about Coven feels... empty, somehow. I mean aside from the two people we've talked to, everyone else in town's been keeping their distance." He nodded toward the glass. "There are some people over there now near where I left my horse, but they weren't there when I rode up."
Danae came up behind him and peered out. "Yes, I saw them earlier—or another group; you can't really tell them apart with those robes."
"But why are they all over there?" he persisted. "When I was being escorted here I saw people milling around this building, too, but by the time I got here they were gone."
"Maybe they don't want us to get too good a look at them," she suggested. Now that he mentioned it, it did sound a little odd. "If they're all victims of this same recruitment scheme, it could be the village leaders don't want us to identify any of them."
"Which could mean they aren't yet sure they can keep us here," Ravagin said slowly. "If we were stuck in Coven for the duration, without any possibility of a way out, they shouldn't care if we know who they've snatched."
"Pretty flimsy logic," Danae muttered.
"I'll take what I can get at this stage," he shrugged, running his fingers experimentally along the window frame. "Probably a waste of time to try and get out this way, but for the moment it's about all we've got available." Reaching to the back of his belt, he pulled a dagger from beneath his tunic and dug the point in between the frame and glass.
"They didn't bother to disarm you?" Danae frowned.
"Oh, the peri in the forest disarmed me, but good," he grunted, working the knife back and forth.
"Released the dazzler from the sword Melentha lent me. Lot of fireworks and frost—you'd have loved it. Melentha'll probably kill me for losing it."
"Why'd the peri do that? Couldn't it have handled you even with a bound-spirit sword?"
"Hell, it could have handled me with two bound-spirit swords," he told her frankly. "You have to remember that spirits aren't like a pack of idiot dogs or something panting eagerly for the chance to be dumped on by humans. Being entrapped is the equivalent of slavery for them, and they'll do practically anything to get out of it. It's probably the main reason that getting a binding spell wrong is so dangerous; the spirit knows what you were trying to do and lashes out in self-defense..."
He trailed off, and the knife in his hand came to a halt. "What is it?" Danae asked, feeling the hairs rising on the back of her neck.
"Coven," he said slowly. "Danae... what is Coven's claim to fame on Karyx?"
She frowned, thinking. "You told me it was their trade goods. Well crafted, many of them spiritenhanced—"
"Spirit-enhanced," he nodded. "Is it just me... or is there something wrong about a peri who's able to release spirits working for a place that routinely binds those same spirits?"
She opened her mouth, closed it again. "Maybe... could the peri be under a geas of some kind?"
Ravagin shook his head. "I don't think so. But there's more. When we got to the village itself... yes.
The peri told the man that it was heading back to the forest. Told him. Didn't ask permission, didn't wait for orders of any kind. And the man accepted this as apparently normal behavior."
Danae gnawed thoughtfully at her lip. "Well, it at least indicates that that particular man isn't in control of that particular peri."
"Maybe," Ravagin said slowly, "it indicates that there aren't any men in control of the spirits here."
Danae moved up to where she could see Ravagin's face. If he'd been making a joke, it didn't show in his tight expression. "Are you suggesting the spirits could be in charge of Coven themselves?" she asked. "May I remind you that you just got done saying spirits don't like being bound?"
"I also said we're a long way from knowing what the rules are that govern them," he reminded her.
"There could be a whole set of power struggles underway we know nothing about. Maybe the—I don't know—the demons, maybe, are perfectly willing to trap the weaker spirits in the hierarchy for their own purposes, while the peris generally release them whenever they can get away with it.
Something like that."
"Or maybe all of the spirits in Coven are united against the rest of Karyx," Danae said quietly. "With the bound-spirit goods they sell as their version of a fifth column."
Ravagin turned away from the window to face her. "Are you suggesting there might be a way for bound spirits to release themselves when they wanted to?"
"Or else that one of the great powers could release them all at once," Danae said, speaking slowly as it gradually crystallized in her mind. "Neither elementals nor demogorgons are supposed to be particularly localized. But even if the bound spirits never get out it might still pay an aggressor spirit to give them as wide a distribution as possible. Economically, bound-spirit items are the heart of what passes for technology on Karyx. The more the people here grow dependent on them, the more power the spirits have."
"The wolf hunter method," Ravagin nodded grimly. "Makes sense."
"The what?"
"Old story I once heard about a man who trapped a particularly cunning pack of wolves by setting out food for them every night for a few weeks while during the day he slowly built a fence around the area. By the time the fence was completed the wolves had become so accustomed to coming there for food they walked right into the enclosure and he simply closed the gate behind them. Moral was that you're vulnerable to the same extent that you're dependent. If this is what the spirits—or any subset of them—are doing, we've definitely got to get out of here and blow the whistle."
Danae looked at the spot where Ravagin had been digging with his dagger. It was hardly marked.
"We're not going to break any speed records going at it this way."
"Yeah." Ravagin scowled at the window frame and jammed his knife back into its sheath. "The whole building's probably crawling with bound spirits. I wish to hell you'd been out there in the forest with me when that peri released the dazzler—with that high-retention memory treatment of yours you might have been able to remember the spell it used."
"I'm not sure I'd care to have a whole swarm of freshly released and possibly hostile spirits buzzing around me, anyway," Danae said, shivering. "Looks to me like all we have left is the direct approach.