"Take it easy—I'm not the one you're going to have to defend this against. Any idea where this fight might have taken place?"
"I told you: in the fourth world—"
"I mean did it have any relationship to Karyx? Did any part of the fight take place here, in other words?"
She pondered. "I don't know. Distances didn't seem to be the same as they are in a physical world.
And there weren't really any reference points I could hold onto."
"Yeah." He took a deep breath, exhaled it thoughtfully with a glance toward the pentagram. "Well...
if you're right, the scholars are going to hate you. Just think of the trouble they're going to have to go through, changing every Triplet in the literature to Quadruplet."
There was no response, and he looked back to find her frowning off into space. "Danae? You still there?"
"More or less. Ravagin... why would the demogorgon have shown me all that? I mean, why me specifically? Other people have invoked great powers before—Gartanis, for one. Why didn't any of them see this?"
"Maybe they did," Ravagin shrugged. "You have to remember that everyone else who's tried this has been a Karyx native, and none of them know about Triplet's nature."
"No, it's more than that," she shook her head slowly. "Gartanis seemed to think the demogorgon wanted to talk to me; that he'd even foreseen some of this a hundred years ago. Though maybe it wasn't about me specifically..."
"Look, Danae, you have to remember not to take everything you hear on Karyx at a hundred percent face value."
"This is different." She looked at him sharply. "The demogorgon was trying to tell me something—I can feel it. Maybe if I do the invocation again and ask more directly—"
"Whoa!" he said, grabbing her shoulders as she started to get to her feet. "You are not going to try that again, Danae: period, lockdown."
"But—"
"No buts about it. You want an interesting form of suicide, you can do it back in the Twenty Worlds on someone else's responsibility."
Her eyes flashed. "You just saw me invoke the demogorgon and not get hurt—"
"And if your friend Gartanis wasn't a total fraud he must have warned you that the great powers are totally unpredictable," Ravagin shot back. "At any rate, you're not going to do it."
"Ravagin—"
"Besides which, you're not going to have time. Tomorrow we're heading back to the Tunnel and home."
Her jaw dropped as utter astonishment pushed all other emotion from her face. "We're what?" she whispered.
"You heard me: we're heading home," he said doggedly, ignoring with an effort the look of betrayal on her face. "Doing something as insane as invoking a great power without my knowledge is perfectly adequate grounds for me to abort the trip. We'll leave at sunup; I suggest you get to sleep early tonight." Ignoring the protests from his knees, he straightened back to a standing position and offered her a hand up. "And we'd better get out of here before Melentha gets back—she'd be furious to find you'd fiddled around with her stuff."
For a minute Danae just stared up at him. Then, ignoring the proffered hand, she got awkwardly to her feet. Turning her back, she strode unsteadily over to the door and left the sanctum.
Ignore it, Ravagin told himself, glaring at the empty doorway. It's just another of her little tantrums.
I'm right on this one; and for once we're going to do things around here my way.
Turning his head, he snarled the release spell for the firebrat, and walked in darkness to the door.
And tried to blot out the strange ache her expression had left in his chest.
"A demogorgon?" Melentha shook her head. "Crazy child. She could have gotten herself killed."
"I think we're all agreed on that," Ravagin said shortly. "We're also agreed—you and I are, anyway—
that we can't give her another chance to do it again. Tomorrow at dawn we're heading for the Tunnel."
"And you'll be wanting an escort, I suppose?"
"Not necessarily," Ravagin told her, forcing down his annoyance at the breezy condescension in her tone. "Actually, all I need from you is a strengthening of your post line so that Danae won't be able to sneak out tonight if she gets the urge to do so."
Melentha's eyebrows raised slightly. "Yes, I suppose you ought to expect something like that from her."
"Under similar circumstances, I'd expect something like that from you, too," he said.
Her face seemed to harden. "I do my job," she bit out. "And I obey orders."
Ravagin sighed. He was getting sick and tired of constantly finding himself swimming upstream. "I meant it as a compliment to your spirit," he told her. "If you want to take it as an insult, that's your business. So can you seal this place up a little more or not?"
She nodded. "Oh, yes," she said softly. "Don't worry, Ravagin; no one will be getting out of here tonight."
Chapter 22
Damn him. Damn her. For that matter, damn this whole stupid planet. Flopping over under her blanket onto her back, her brain fighting stubbornly against the sleep the rest of her body wanted, Danae stared at the starlight filtering through the curtains onto her ceiling. It wasn't fair for Ravagin to pull the rug out from under her like this—it just wasn't fair.
It wasn't her fault. None of it. Not the demogorgon invocation—Gartanis had all but pushed that on her, what with his talk of fated contacts and future apocalypses and all. Not the friction with Melentha, either, which she suspected was a factor in Ravagin's decision—it had been Melentha who'd been riding her all this time, not the other way around. And certainly not the whole mess with Coven—it had been the demons there who'd been pulling all of those strings. Damn the demons, too.
The demons.
Danae frowned at the ceiling, her mind jumping back to her evening arrival from Besak and the confrontation with Melentha's pet demon. There hadn't been anything like that before today, not in all the trips she'd made in and out of that gateway since arriving on Karyx.
What had made that one trip different? The fact that she'd been to Coven and dealt with the powers there? No—the demon hadn't even twitched when she and Ravagin had returned together from Coven that morning. Alternatively, could it be the fact that she'd just learned the demogorgoninvocation spell and was carrying Gartanis's incense focuser? That was probably more reasonable...
except how had the demon known about it?
Communication with all those other spirits, perhaps? The Twenty Worlds' sketchy understanding of spirithandling seemed to take as a basic assumption that each spirit operated basically as a free agent, interacting little except where ordered to do so. But her experience with Triplet's fourth world now put that assumption on extremely shaky ground. Was there, in fact, an entire spirit society, operating perhaps along hierarchical lines, that included such lines of communication as the post line demon's knowledge had implied? Then that green patch she'd seen leave the post line after she'd passed it could have been one of the demon's parasite spirits, sent by the demon himself to alert Melentha that Danae was back at the house. Ravagin had implied he knew she'd been to Gartanis before she told him about the trip. Presumably Melentha's demon had learned about it from another spirit from Besak, perhaps another parasite spirit under his control but not trapped into the post line. It opened up all sorts of new possibilities; if spirits were in fact being summoned from a separate world instead of from some vague sort of limbo, an information exchange would be almost inevitable once they were released back into their own world.
Into their own world...
Danae stared at the ceiling, almost feeling the blood draining out of her face as a horrible thought struck her. Into their own world...