Triplet

"I hope I don't, actually," he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. "I hope like hell I'm being overcautious. But after everything that's happened, I'd rather err that way than the other. Come on—

the Tu

"We'd better be," she said, setting off with a sigh. "In case you haven't noticed, we haven't had a lot of sleep in the past few days. I'm about dead on my feet—and we might get that way permanently if Simrahi catches us out here."

"He only told us not to come back to the castle," Ravagin reminded her.

"I somehow doubt he's going to be worried about the strict letter of the law," she shot back. "And we were getting along so well with him there at the end—why did you have to go out of your way to irritate him, anyway?"

"I didn't 'go out of my way,' " he growled, "and I don't think a little irritation really stacks up against life and death, do you?"

"Life and—?" She broke off. "You mean... the spirits?"

He shrugged uncomfortably. "It's one of the things I had in mind," he said. "What better place for them to take control of than the protectorate containing the Tu

"Oh, God," she murmured. "You think Simrahi will be able to keep them back? He doesn't even know what it is he's up against."

"He can't stop them," he admitted. "Not for long, anyway. It's going to be up to us, Danae—us and whatever the Twenty Worlds can gather together to throw at the problem."

"Great." Something he'd said a minute ago... "Were there any other reasons you gave Simrahi that warning?"

"Yes. One."

"Care to enlighten me?"

"No. Not now, anyway. Suffice it to say that if what I was trying to do works, we'll hopefully never know it." She had to be content with that.

An hour later they carefully topped the last hill and came within view of the Tu

"Damn, damn, damn," Danae snarled, pressing her chin harder into the rocky ground of the hill as they lay there side by side. "Damn him. I thought he seemed to know too much about us, Ravagin—

the way he called us outlanders and all. And now he's blocked the Tu

"I'm afraid it's worse than that," Ravagin interrupted her tightly. "Those trolls down there aren't Simrahi's."

"They're not—?" She caught her breath and took another look... and felt her hands curl into fists in front of her. The trolls' color scheme was green/white/violet, not Numant Protectorate's red/silver/

black. Which meant—

Which meant the spirits had found the Tu

A battle she suddenly knew she couldn't face.

"God," she whispered, closing her eyes against it all. "I can't handle any more, Ravagin—I just can't."

Ravagin reached over to squeeze her hand. "I don't want to, either. But it looks like we won't have to."

"What?" she asked dully.

"Take a look."

Frowning, she opened her eyes and peered off in the direction he was pointing. In the distance, riding through a gap in the hills and clearly making for the Tu

silver/black of Castle Numanteal. Accompanied by a half-dozen trolls. "I don't understand," she muttered. "What are they doing here?"

"Searching for trouble near the castle, of course," Ravagin said. Danae glanced at him, taken aback by the grim smile on his lips. "The other part of my reason for dropping veiled threats on Simrahi.

Don't you see?—he's got his soldiers out sweeping the territory for possible trouble."

"And just happening to clear out our path for us in the process." Danae looked back at the interloping trolls and shook her head, almost afraid to believe it. "I just hope this is going to be as one-sided as it looks."

It was even more so. Again, the trolls' complex and heavily layered battle/control/decision circuitry proved more than the spirits within them could handle efficiently under combat conditions. Within minutes of the Numant soldiers' first challenge, all four interlopers were laid out on the ground, frozen into immobility. A few minutes after that four sky-planes arrived and they were loaded aboard, presumably to be taken back to the castle. The sky-planes rose and vanished behind the hills to the east, the patrol continued on its way—

And Ravagin cautiously rose to his feet. "Let's go," he said, head turning back and forth as he made one final scan of the area. "Straight to the Tu

"If anyone's in there," Danae said grimly, "we'll kill him. Pure and simple."

There was; and they didn't.

He loomed out of the darkness just where the Tu

Danae took a deep breath. "And you would have, wouldn't you. You blithering idiot."

Hart merely smiled. "Part of my job," he said. "Welcome home, Ms. mal ce Taeger."

Chapter 42

"Ah; Ravagin," Corah Lea said, looking up as he came in. "Sit down, please."

He took the proffered chair, noting with a sinking feeling that her face was a study in inscrutability.

A bad sign.

"So." She arranged her forearms across her desk and tried without much success to smile. "Well. I have to say, first of all, that your report is the damnedest bit of high adventure I've ever seen come out of the Hidden Worlds. I hear the thing's been called up over eighty times in the past week alone—

twenty of those requests coming from the the folks upstairs. You've really made a stir."

"It's nice to be noticed," he said. "You call me in here to get an autograph before the rush starts?"

She made another attempt at a smile, with even worse results. "I wish it was something that easy.

Actually, you're here because—well, I've just gotten word down from the Directors' Council about your request to speak to them."

Ravagin felt his jaw tighten. "They turned me down?"

"Cold. I'm sorry, Ravagin. I can see how much this means to you."

"What it means to me isn't important—" He broke off, struggling to get his temper back under control. None of this was her fault, after all. "Did they read the petition? All of it?"

"Ravagin—" Lea spread her hands helplessly. "Look, I read your petition, too, and even knowing you as well as I do I can't really blame them. You offer not a single shred of objective proof that anything's seriously wrong on Karyx or Shamsheer, and yet you want them to summarily close down both Tu

"No proof? my God, Corah, just what the hell do they think that report of mine is? Spirits openly attacking us on Karyx, spirit-controlled machinery on Shamsheer—"

"Nordis's report disputes your version of whatever it was happened on Karyx," Lea cut him off.

"And as to Shamsheer, there's no direct, objective proof there were spirits involved in any of that."

"What About my contact with the sky-plane? Using a Karyx spell, I might add?"

"That could have been a psychological illusion," Lea shrugged. "Or maybe it was a real contact, but with the sky-plane itself—after all, the stuff could be semi-sentient."

"Oh, come on Corah—"

"I'm sorry, Ravagin, but you have to remember that the kind of spirit intrusion you're talking about is supposed to be impossible. You're bucking a hundred years of theory and experiment here, and with that kind of inertia behind it you need more than just a packet of fuzzy speculation."