Triplet

Ravagin stood motionless for several minutes, the firefly's light throwing sharp moire patterns around their end of the Tower whenever it happened to intersect part of the mesh. Finally, he shut the light back down to a dim glow and stepped back to her. "Okay, here's the deal," he said, his voice oddly tight. "These little individual corridors—" he waved a hand around at the mesh—"seem to be around every window in the place, all the way around the circumference of the Tower and all the way up. I don't know what they're for, but if this one is any indication, they seem sturdy enough to easily hold our weight. Also, since it looks like all the sky-planes bringing damaged merchandise come in through these windows, we should be able to hitch a ride out as easily as we got in."

"Sometime before dawn, right?" Danae put in.

"Several hours before, probably." He hesitated. "Now for the bad news. If ours was representative, it looks like the incoming sky-planes travel in pretty much a straight line from wherever they've come from through the windows and into their repair cubicles. If that pattern holds in reverse for the outgoing flights, it means we're going to have to get almost halfway around the circle if we want to pick up a sky-plane that's headed the direction we want to go."

Danae's mouth went dry. "Get across how?" she asked carefully, something deep in her stomach warning her she wasn't going to like the answer.

She didn't. "We go to the end of this corridor," Ravagin said, pointing, "hold onto the side mesh, and swing one leg at a time around into the next corridor. Cross the corridor and repeat."

She thought about that for a long moment, her memory bringing up the view across the Tower she'd had a minute ago... "The repair cubicles don't extend as far out toward the middle as these corridors do. Do they?"

He shook his head. "Afraid not."

"Which means... we'll be nearly a kilometer up over absolutely nothing when we do this."

"It won't be quite as bad as you're thinking," he assured her. "We've got a safety strap available—the scorpion glove—and as I said before the mesh seems pretty sturdy."

"And very sharp," she said heavily. "I should know—I banged my knee on it a minute ago."

"Umm." Ravagin squatted down, felt the mesh gingerly, then repeated with the mesh of the walls.

"Maybe a little. Remember you won't be hitting it with all your weight, either."

Danae took a deep breath. "There's no other way to do this?" she asked, just to make sure.

"I don't think so." He pursed his lips. "Look, Danae... I remember your trouble with the sky-planes.

If you honestly don't think you can make it, we could probably stay here and try to pick up a skyplane going back the way we came."

She snorted. "Back where?—toward Darcane Forest? We'd wind up at least five hundred kilometers from the Tu

What's a little gravity after that?

The first one was the hardest. Gripping the mesh with her right hand, she leaned out just far enough to get her left hand around the wall and wedged into the mesh from that side. Then, concentrating on the reassuring pressure of the scorpion glove's whip against her back, she swung her left leg around and onto the floor of the next hallway over. A careful shift of weight... reaching over to get a grip further down... an easing of the other foot across... She took a deep breath, moving automatically another step away from the edge before turning. "Well, come on," she told Ravagin. "We haven't got all night. Let's get this over with."

The hallways measured roughly three meters across each, and they wound up crossing twenty-one of them before Ravagin called a halt. "We're just past the southern edge of Missia City now—see the lights?" he said, pointing, as he knelt near the window. "That means we should be facing due west now."

"Uh-huh," Danae nodded, staying as close to the center of the hallway as she could. The window had no lip or sill, and had another equally long drop beyond it... Gritting her teeth, she concentrated on her mental map of Shamsheer. "Picking up a sky-plane here is as likely to get us to Ordarl Protectorate as it is to Numant, though, isn't it?"

"Or it could take us to Kelaine City or anything else in the Tweens," he agreed, backing away carefully from the window. "Or even some distance beyond the Tu

"That wasn't what I meant," she said. "Ordarl was where we were stopped on our way to Karyx, remember?"

"Oh, well, that won't be any problem. They released us, after all, so there aren't going to be any official grudges or anything being kept."

"That still isn't what I meant. Don't you remember?—they stopped us because they were having trouble with black sorcery and equipment malfunctions?"

"Yes—and I told you at the time that black sor—" He broke off abruptly. "Oh, bloody hell," he said, very softly.

She nodded, feeling a shiver go up her back. She'd just made the correlation a few minutes ago herself. "Which means the spirits have been in Shamsheer at least that long. And if their influence is centered in Ordarl..."

"We could wind up back in the hot seat again if we land there," Ravagin said heavily. "Or maybe even if we just fly over the place. Damn it all—we need to know more about what we're up against here."

"Couldn't we try some spirit-detection spells—?" She bit at her lip. "No, of course not—they need a demogorgon around to function."

Ravagin nodded "Right. Which is where the real crunch comes: we're having to fight these spirits without knowing which of the usual rules apply. If any of them."

"All right, then. In the absence of rules, let's try logic." Easing down carefully onto her back on the sharp mesh, Danae stared at the gridwork above her for a minute and then closed her eyes. She was considerably more tired than she'd realized, and it was an effort to try and think. "They were waiting for us the minute we got back to Shamsheer, and they challenged us without even stopping to ask who we were. Which implies—" They're ready for an all-out war? She shivered suddenly.

"Which implies," Ravagin picked up the thread, "that they knew we were coming and had to be stopped. Which means there's some sort of communication between Karyx and Shamsheer. Oh, sure

—the spirit that cried out when we escaped across the telefold. Sound travels perfectly well across the thing; the Shamsheer contingent just has a messenger standing by in the Tu

"My God—that's it!" Danae interrupted, jerking bolt upright as it suddenly struck her. "That's it, Ravagin—that's how the spirits got here. All you need to do is bring a spirit into the Tu

"But an invocation—" Ravagin broke off and swore viciously under his breath. "An invocation brings a spirit from the fourth world to Karyx. Across a world boundary. No wonder they tried to stop us—as soon as you know there's an entirely separate fourth world to Triplet, the rest follows immediately."

Danae swallowed as another thought occurred to her. "It also means that they've got at least one human ally here. The person who brought them across."

Ravagin rubbed thoughtfully at his cheek. "Yeah. Well... at least they're still not able to get across on their own. I guess that's something."

Danae shivered as images of Melentha's face, twisted by hatred and fury, floated up from her memory. To have to face something like that again... "I almost wish it were the other way around," she muttered.