Triplet

He was almost finished when the glow-fire reappeared. "There are no other humans, beasts, or spirits within the region," the squeaky voice reported.

Ravagin nodded. The exit into Karyx was usually clear, but it never hurt to make sure. "Good. Then I want you to take a message to a woman named Melentha living in a large house just to the west of Besak: that Ravagin and one other have come and will be arriving tomorrow. Carash-mahst."

Again the sprite flared its understanding and vanished. "Whenever you're ready," Ravagin told Danae, fastening his last buckle and locating a short sword on the locker's weapons shelf. "I'd like to try and get a few kilometers toward Besak before nightfall."

"All set," Danae grunted, and he sensed her come to his side. "Do I get any weapons here, or don't women carry blades on Karyx either?"

"Many of them do," he said. Groping for her hand, he placed a sheathed dagger into it. "Your profile said you'd had some knife training, but just the same don't draw it unless you absolutely have to.

Stick with your spirithandling spells, or better still just stand back and let me handle any trouble."

She snorted, but fastened the weapon to her side without comment. Ravagin debated invoking a dazzler, decided against it, and started along the Tu

They walked the rest of the way to the Tu

"Huh," Danae grunted, looking around. "Hardly worth invoking a sprite to check this place out."

Ravagin shrugged. She had a point—no animal in its right mind would live in the hilly wasteland that surrounded them on all sides. "It's worse just a few kilometers northwest of here," he commented. "The Cairn Waste is about as desolate as any place could be."

"So I'd heard. Site of some long-ago battle or something, wasn't it?"

"That's the legend. No one knows for sure."

"Couldn't you ask a spirit?"

"There are some things even a geas spell won't make them talk about," he shook his head. "The Illid ruins and Cairn Waste are one of them." He glanced around one last time, pointed toward the east.

"The road between Besak and Torralane is about ten kilometers that way."

"Who is that woman you sent the message to?" Danae asked as they started off through the mounds.

"Melentha's the mistress of the Besak way house, like Essen was in Kelaine City," Ravagin explained. "It's standard procedure on Karyx to inform one of them when you're coming—travel here's a bit riskier than on Shamsheer and it's a good idea to have someone making sure you don't just disappear out in the wild somewhere."

He glanced at Danae, saw her swallow visibly. "I see," she said with forced calmness. "A shame we don't have sprites on call back home—seems a pretty efficient way to send messages."

"The novelty fades after a while," Ravagin told her dryly.

"I suppose so."

They walked in silence for several minutes more, and after a bit Ravagin noticed her throwing frowning glances at the sky and the landscape around them. "Anything wrong?" he prompted.

"I'm not sure," she said slowly. "The light seems... fu

He nodded, impressed in spite of himself. Most visitors noticed the anomaly eventually, but few picked up on it this quickly. "Karyx's sunlight is about ten percent dimmer than that of Shamsheer, which in turn is that much dimmer than sunlight on Threshold. Have you ever been to Earth or Ankh during a partial solar eclipse?"

"Ah—yes," she said, understanding flickering across her face. "You're right; that is what it's like—

the sunlight's the right color and all, but not the right intensity."

"Yeah. Only it's not an eclipse in this case—the sun's just dimmer. Just one of the sizeable collection of things we don't understand about this place."

"But the stars are the same as you see from Threshold, aren't they?"

"As far as we can tell, bearing in mind we can't bring in the necessary instruments for an exact check. No, all three worlds are in the same place in the universe—every study anyone's ever invented has come to that tentative conclusion. But remember that there's no particular reason why the suns of the three have to be the same. Certainly the terrains of the worlds are different, so we're not just experiencing different dimensional manifestations of the same planet."

"How do you know?" she countered. "I mean, the equivalent spot on Shamsheer is covered with dense forest—how do you know it didn't have all these mounds, too, before the tree roots wore them down? And who knows what Threshold's landscape looked like before the original inhabitants blew it into the stratosphere?"

A pat answer rose to Ravagin's lips... and stayed there unvoiced. How had the savants and investigators come to that conclusion, come to think of it? "Well... there's a good-sized ocean inlet about seventy kilometers west of here at Citadel that definitely doesn't show up in either of the other worlds," he said slowly. "On the other hand... there've been some tremendously powerful spiritmasters in Citadel's history, and if one of them had decided he wanted the city to have ocean access, he might very well have been able to force an elemental to dig that inlet for him."

Danae shivered suddenly. "With an elemental he could probably have gotten the whole ocean dug for him. Unless their power's been exaggerated."

"It's hard to exaggerate elementals' power," Ravagin said, feeling his stomach tighten. "Almost as hard as imagining the kind of damn fool who would try invoking one of them in the first place. I don't even like working with demons and peris, personally." With an effort he forced his mind back to the original question. Could the worlds in fact be more identical than was generally conceded?

With some difficulty he tried to imagine a superposition of the Shamsheer and Karyx maps...

"The Morax Forest east of here could be the same as the Darcane back on Shamsheer," Danae murmured. "Just receded to the east a hundred kilometers or so—maybe by whatever made the Cairn Waste. The South Fey River in Shamsheer would be somewhere in Citadel's inlet—that doesn't help us any. The North Fey River...?"

"There is a river up there somewhere," Ravagin nodded. "But I'm not sure precisely where. Part of the problem is that we don't know all that much about Karyx's landscape—travel is by foot or horseback, and we rarely wind up going more than fifty or sixty kilometers from the Tu

"Oh, they probably have," Danae shrugged. "And then rejected it for some perfectly good reason."

She sighed. "Doesn't really matter, I suppose. Just theoretical brain-gaming."

"So what else is there here?" he said dryly. "It's not like studies of Karyx have any application to the real universe."

"You sound like Essen," she snorted. "I don't suppose it's occurred to you that the spirits we find here may not be unique to this place."

"If you're talking about all the Earth legends and stories—"

"And most religions, too," she cut in. "Virtually all of them make provision for spiritual beings."

"But spiritual beings that are different from those of Karyx."