Triplet

"No, you don't," Ravagin shook his head. "Think about it a minute. The Ordarl soldiers said the malfunctions had been going on for—how long did they say?"

"Several weeks."

"Right. So if the spirits' human dupe were actively participating in a bid to conquer Shamsheer, he surely would have brought over enough of them to take control of every bit of machinery on the planet. Right?"

"Well... okay, I guess so."

"But they haven't done that—if they had, we would never have gotten this far. And several weeks should have given them enough time to make their move." Ravagin paused, forehead wrinkled in thought. "So they haven't got a whole army here. Which means their dupe very likely only brought over a limited number of them, for whatever damnfool reason of his own. In fact, he may not even realize yet that they've gotten out of his control."

It sounded reasonable enough, at least to Danae's increasingly foggy mind. "Okay. So then what?"

Ravagin hissed out a breath. "I don't know," he admitted. "If I were bringing over a spirit to test spells on, I wouldn't use anything more powerful than a sprite... but those trolls sure as hell weren't being controlled by something that limited. We could be dealing with dji

Danae closed her eyes again. "I don't think I even care at the moment what we're up against. As long as they let us get some sleep."

"Point," he grunted with a tired sigh of his own, easing down onto the mesh beside her. "We've got at least a couple of hours before the sky-plane exodus starts. A little sleep'll do both of us good."

Not quite close enough to touch her... "Ravagin?" she asked tentatively. "If the spirits have gotten into the Tower with us... do you think they could send a sky-plane or a castle-lord's bubble in here to push us out?"

"I doubt it," he answered. "Towers seem to work under their own very specialized rules. If a spirit started monkeying with them, I think it would find itself pretty quickly cut out of whatever circuit it was in."

"Oh."

For another moment the faint background hum of the Tower was the only sound in Danae's ears.

Then, with a rustle of clothing, Ravagin moved right up next to her. His arm slid across her stomach; his several-day growth of beard tickled lightly at her ear. "This what you wanted?" he murmured.

She felt blood rushing to her cheeks... but she'd gone through too much with Ravagin to hold onto false dignity now. "Yes," she admitted. "I'm not feeling all that brave at the moment."

His arm tightened comfortingly. "If it helps," he murmured, "neither am I."

Two hours later, they were again flying beneath the night sky, sharing their sky-plane with an oddly shaped piece of ribbed metal that Ravagin guessed was part of a rainstopper mechanism.

It was crowded aboard the carpet, but with reliable edge barriers between her and the rest of the universe, Danae almost didn't even care how close to the edge she had to sit. For a while she watched the stars overhead, but shortly after they passed over Castle Ordarleal the fatigue tugging at her eyelids again proved too much to handle. Stretching out as best she could, she again fell asleep.

"Danae!"

She snapped awake in an instant at his hiss, heart thudding as the horrible dream images faded reluctantly from before her eyes. "Ravagin?" she hissed back, twisting up into a sitting position and looking wildly around. Dawn was just begi

"We're coming down," he murmured over his shoulder. "Damn it all—we're coming down right inside Castle Numanteal."

"What?" she gasped, crawling over to his side. Sure enough, they were losing altitude... and the sixsided castle wall was directly ahead. "We can't land there. Can we?"

"Not without causing a stir," he said grimly. "No one's supposed to fly into a castle enclosure without permission. Damn. I hope Castle-lord Simrahi is in a good mood today."

Danae licked at dry lips. They were close enough now to see the trolls standing watch at the top of the wall. Automatically, her fingers sought the crossbow pistol at her side. If these trolls chose to shoot first and debrief later...

But the machines stood passively, giving no indication that they even saw the intruders, let alone cared about them. Of course the trolls weren't worried, she realized: in a few seconds the sky-plane would make a tight left-hand semicircle and settle down into the castle's landing area, and then the trolls could come down and examine them at their leisure. She braced herself; the sky-plane began to turn—

But to the right, not the left. Directly toward—

Danae gasped. "The manor house?"

"Damn!" Ravagin snarled. "Sky-plane: follow my mark. Mark. Mark, damn it, mark!"

It was no use. The sky-plane continued on unperturbed, straight toward the manor house. At least, Danae thought wildly, we'll still be outside when we land. The ten-meter approach distance will keep it from taking us inside—

And suddenly she knew what was about to happen. And why. "Ravagin!" she said. "My dream! I had another dream about demon-controlled trolls."

"Hell," he said, very quietly.

And as Danae watched with frozen impotence, the sky-plane slid neatly and impossibly through an open window and glided into the manor house.

Chapter 36

It was quite probably the most unusual sight the employees of Castle Numanteal had ever seen. And possibly, Ravagin thought grimly, one of the most subtly terrifying.

Certainly if the expressions of those setting out places at the long table were anything to go by.

Frozen in place, some with the gilt-edged plates they were holding suspended above the table in motionless hands, the servitors all stared wide-eyed at the sky-plane as it slid through the window into the high-ceilinged dining room and floated across it. In the room's sudden silence the faint clatter of pots and pans and conversation from the kitchen beyond could be clearly heard, and Ravagin abruptly realized it was toward that noise that their rogue sky-plane was making a leisurely turn. Behind him, he could hear a hooting from the walls outside as the trolls there sounded the alarm; beside him, Danae's fingernails were digging into his arm. Do something! the grip seemed to say; but for the first time since their escape from Melentha he felt totally helpless. The sky-plane ducked down toward the floor as it aimed for the kitchen door—

Beside the table, someone screamed... and the frozen disbelief broke into total pandemonium.

"Keep down!" he snapped automatically to Danae as a handful of silverware flew up at them and scattered harmlessly away at the sky-plane's edge barrier. All around them, the servitors were making up for their earlier inactivity, either scurrying madly to get out of the sky-plane's path or else ru

"You think we look peaceful the way we—"

She broke off with a gasp as, with a sudden jerk, the sky-plane came to a midair halt.

What the—? A horrible suspicion rose up into Ravagin's throat— "Sky-plane: follow my mark.

Mark."

And without any hesitation whatsoever, the machine curved smoothly away from the kitchen doors toward the direction he'd indicated.