Triplet

With the edge barrier in place...

Ravagin gritted his teeth. The scorpion glove whip was still hanging limply inside the open window; carefully, he wrapped it as tightly as possible around one of the small pillars supporting the edges of the window. To the best of his knowledge, scorpion gloves hadn't been designed to handle the kind of stress he'd been putting this one through for the past couple of days, and it occurred to him that eventually he was going to push it too far. But he'd pretty well run out of options. Looping the whip slightly to get a solid grip on it with his gloved right hand, he drew the knife Habri had given him with his left—

And with a convulsive motion jabbed it deeply into the carpet material at his knees.

The sky-plane dropped like a lasered bird. For an instant Ravagin fell with it; then the whip caught, and he found himself dangling along the wall with a twenty-meter drop beneath his feet.

There was no time to waste, and he wasted precious little of it. Even before the muffled thud of the sky-plane's crash reached his ears he'd jammed the knife back into its sheath and was holding on with both hands as the scorpion glove labored to pull him up. With what little of his concentration he could spare from the operation he listened tensely for signs that the movement or noise had attracted someone's attention. But there were no hooting alarms—no shouts or sudden lights—and a minute later he was sprawled on the floor inside the window.

He lay there quietly for a minute, waiting until the worst of the adrenaline reaction had passed and his arms were merely trembling instead of shaking. Then, licking his lips, he eased cautiously to his feet and looked around him. With the faint starlight filtering in from outside he could see that he was in a large bedroom... and as his eyes adjusted he discovered, to his complete lack of surprise, whose bedroom it was.

Fortunately, Simrahi and the woman in bed with him did not seem to be light sleepers. Both lay motionless beneath the blankets, their breathing steady and slow, neither giving the slightest impression that they'd been disturbed by Ravagin's unorthodox entrance to their room. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, Ravagin quoted to himself; but of course that hadn't been written about Shamsheer castle-lords with trolls guarding their bedrooms.

Trolls.

Ravagin gritted his teeth. He'd worked so damn hard getting into the tower he'd almost forgotten that getting behind the trolls downstairs was only the first step. A sneak attack at the back of a single troll might give him enough surprise advantage to beat out the machine's electronic reflexes... but with four of them down there that approach was an invitation to suicide. What he needed was a way to simultaneously take out all the trolls; to set a bomb off at the foot of the staircase, perhaps? But if there were any real explosives on Shamsheer, he'd never heard of them. What he needed was something heavy to push down the stairs...

What he needed was his sky-plane.

Carefully, with an eye on the sleepers in the bed, he moved back to the window and looked down.

Below, the sky-plane was a slightly darker rectangle against the roof. Spirit, I order you to rise, he sent the mental command, trying to project the thought to the sky-plane. He hadn't felt the spirit's presence since knifing the carpet, and had no idea whether it could even hear him, let alone whether it was still obliged to follow his orders. Spirit, I order you to rise, he repeated. Nothing. Either the spirit was ignoring him, couldn't hear him, or simply couldn't move the damaged sky-plane. For Ravagin, it didn't much matter which.

Damn, he thought, turning back into the room as fresh sweat began to form on his forehead. Even in the dead of night, Habri's motley army couldn't hang around the stairs down there forever without being discovered. Think, Ravagin, think. Here you are, right in the middle of a castle-lord's private chambers, with all the best of Shamsheer's magic machinery to draw on. There must be something you can use to take out a few trolls.

Beneath the blanket, Simrahi moved in his sleep... and Ravagin smiled tightly.

There was something he could use.

He half expected to find a pair of trolls standing guard outside the royal bedroom, but apparently even Simrahi's suspicions hadn't pushed him that far. The hallway outside was deserted; quickly, Ravagin moved along it, searching for the stairway up. He found it, and began climbing, and a few minutes later reached the dome at the top of the tower. The sky room, it was called... and even after sixteen years of travel in the Hidden Worlds it was like a punch in the gut to discover there was still something on Shamsheer that could take his breath away.

Through the crystal dome arching over his head the stars blazed down.

Not the stars as seen from the middle of a Shamsheer castle surrounded by villages and lights; not even the stars as seen from a lonely field somewhere out in the Tweens. These stars were incredibly brilliant, shining with an intensity that seemed u

Around the edges of the dome, the top of the castle wall could be seen, as well as the tall hilt-shape of the Giantsword within it and the rolling Harrian Hills far beyond it to the west... but each of the shapes was a black shadow, lit only by the glow from the starlight above. None of the lights that had been shining anywhere outside were visible. On sudden impulse, he took a careful scan across the sky. The scattered clouds had apparently been filtered out, too.

He licked his lips and took a deep breath. The sheer technological ability the sky room implied... and yet, for those first few seconds, he was aware only of what the room said about its creators' souls. To have built something this sophisticated with no purpose except the enjoyment of beauty... For the first time in his life, Ravagin felt a flicker of true kinship with the Builders. Perhaps, for all their incredible power, they hadn't been all that different from human beings after all.

The moment faded, and the real world crowded back into Ravagin's mind, and he lowered his eyes and thoughts from the glorious display. The sky room was sparsely furnished—some comfortable chairs, a desk, a large bed in the room's center—and it took only a minute to find the crystalline throne he was seeking. The throne, he realized now, that Simrahi had been seated on during Ravagin's brief hearing.

The castle-lord's bubble.

The chair was large, clearly designed to accommodate heftier men than Ravagin. As solid-looking as glass, it nevertheless yielded like a soft cushion as he sank gingerly down into it. There was no reaction—no audible alarm, no attempt by the chair to throw him out—and Ravagin let out the breath he'd been holding. So far, so good. Now came the tricky part. He had no idea at all how the bubble worked, or even whether someone who wasn't a castle-lord could operate it, and there was no way to find out except the hard way. Taking a deep breath, he ran through the most obvious possibilities and chose one. "Bubble: rise," he said.

No response. "Bubble: ascend," he tried. "Bubble: activate. Bubble: be raised. Chair: rise. Chair: ascend. Throne: rise—"

The chair rose smoothly toward the dome above, Ravagin almost falling off the thing in surprise.

"Throne: stop and hover," he managed, gripping the arms tightly.

The chair did so. Carefully, he reached out a hand, following it a minute later by the scorpion glove's whip... but both confirmed what his eyes had already told him: the bubble's spherical force-field was still off.

All right, don't panic, Ravagin ordered himself sternly. Let's try thinking, instead.

For starters, unlike the more proletarian sky-plane, the bubble had clearly been designed to be functionable indoors. A quick experiment showed it had none of the sky-plane's aversion to walls, either, which meant Ravagin should have no trouble getting it downstairs. But ramming doors and trolls without the force-field going wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind when he'd come up here.