Triplet

Chapter 6

They passed over the edge of the Numant Protectorate about half an hour later and entered the hundred-fifty-kilometer-wide strip of territory between Numant and the Ordarl Protectorate to the east. The edge of the Numant Protectorate was more sharply defined than Danae had expected it to be, with villages and even sections of farmland breaking off abruptly at the border.

"Seems rather extreme," she commented to Ravagin. "Are the Tweens really that dangerous?"

"Some of them are, certainly," he shrugged. "You have to remember that a castle-lord's trolls can't go even a meter outside their protectorate and most of the robber gangs take full advantage of that. But a village like the one back there on the border probably doesn't see a troll more than twice a year unless there's trouble. Mostly I suspect that it's psychological, that if you choose to live under a castle-lord's rule and laws you do so whole-heartedly, without any fence straddling."

"And there aren't any corresponding villages just outside the border because it's not safe to live in anything that small in the Tweens?"

"Partly that; partly that if you're going to live in this part of the Tweens anyway, you might as well be closer to the Giantsword in Kelaine City."

Danae digested that. "I thought the power broadcast from the Giantsword network reached everywhere on Shamsheer. What does living near one do for you?"

"You're thinking about it like someone from a technological culture," Ravagin said. "Why don't you try pretending all this stuff is pure magic instead and see if you can come up with anything."

Danae gritted her teeth. Just when she'd started feeling more relaxed in Ravagin's presence, here he was being condescending again. "I presume it has something to do with the fact that Giantswords are associated with the castle-lords and are therefore a symbol of authority?"

"Basically," he nodded. "That's presumably why the major Tween cities got started around them, anyway. That and the belief that Giantswords were where a castle's troll protectors lived."

Danae frowned. "I thought there aren't any trolls outside the protectorates."

"There aren't. But that doesn't stop people from believing that they're safer in the shadow of a Giantsword—any Giantsword—than they would be elsewhere. Pure sympathetic magic."

Danae shook her head, caught somewhere between disbelief and contempt. To live in a world fairly dripping with technology and yet have no concept of how or why any of it worked—it seemed incomprehensible.

And yet....

Her eyes fell on the scorpion glove at Ravagin's belt... traced the tightly coiled four-meter whip attached to its back... drifted to the wide wrist strap and the incredibly sophisticated neural sensors it somehow contained... and an old, old saying quoted in the Triplet information packet came to mind: A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Perhaps, she decided, the people of Shamsheer could be forgiven for their ignorance, after all.

Castle Numanteal and the surrounding villages had been solidly locked into the hexagonal pattern that dominated every protectorate Ravagin had ever seen. Kelaine City, situated dead center in the Tween strip between Numant and Ordarl, had no such built-in constraints. The city was a sprawling mass of houses, shops, small industries, stables, and even scatterings of cultivated land, all of it clustered around the only hexagon in the place, the plot of land around the Giantsword's base.

"Is that Kelaine City?" Danae asked from behind him. "It's bigger than I was expecting."

"That's it," he nodded. "It's actually only about the twentieth largest city on Shamsheer, but it's got a lot of cottage industries and that spreads it out more than some of the others that have a larger population." They were over the city's westward edge now, and Ravagin leaned as close to the skyplane's edge barrier as he could to peer at the ground below. An oversized gap between buildings caught his eye, and he thought he could see the tiny rectangles of other sky-planes there. "Sky-plane: stop," he ordered. "Sky-plane: descend."

"Can you see the way house from here?" Danae asked, leaning uncomfortably close as she tried to follow his gaze.

"It's actually a couple of kilometers north of here," he told her, easing back from her a few centimeters. "But these cities are continually changing, and when you find a good place to set down, you're usually smart to go ahead and take it."

"Why—? Oh, right. The sky-planes can't fly closer than ten meters or so to buildings, can they?"

"That's it," Ravagin nodded, vaguely surprised she'd picked up on that so quickly. "And they can't hover directly over one, either. Anti-burglar protection, presumably, though with the edge barrier always running it'd be hard to use for second-story work anyway. Sky-plane: forward slowly."

It was a little tricky to pinpoint a sky-plane onto so small a plot of ground, but Ravagin had had lots of practice and within a couple of minutes they were safely down. Danae, he noticed, poked a hand over the edge before standing up and stepping off the carpet. "Unh," she grunted, stretching carefully. "Left foot's gone to sleep. Do we walk or ride?"

"Up to you," he told her, easing his own stiff leg muscles as he took a careful look around them.

"Most of the local people would walk such a short in-city distance, but I can call a carriage if you want."

"No, let's walk," she said, her voice almost dreamy.

He glanced back. She was gazing around her at the colorfully dressed people filling the streets, head turning this way and that as one thing or another caught her eye or ear. It was, he realized, the same way she'd reacted to her first look at Shamsheer. An almost sad twinge of cynicism tugged at him, and he hoped she wouldn't have to run into the darker side of the storybook city before her. "Let's go, then," he said. "This way. And stay close to me."

They headed off, threading their way through the bustling crowds. Shamsheer had often been described as a society of contradictions, and the contrasts were nowhere more strongly in evidence than in cities like Kelaine. They passed a smoking armorer's shop and a sweating smith tending the fires of a computerized Forge Beast metal-working machine while, right across the narrow street, a skinner sewed his animal-hide garments together by hand. Danae had to sidestep at one point to avoid a fruit grower and his ox-like beast of burden as they carried their oranges to market—oranges, Ravagin knew, that would be protected from the early frosts of this part of Shamsheer by a small obelisk that somehow kept the entire grove at a safe temperature until the fruit was completely harvested. Further along, they passed a baker whose oven consisted of simple fire-heated rock and iron, just as a customer called via prayer stick for a carriage to help carry away her purchase. Simple people, casually using technology totally beyond their comprehension... or, for that matter, the comprehension of anyone in the Twenty Worlds.

Magic, by any other name. Small wonder that visitors so often treated Shamsheer as a storybook kingdom... at least until the harsher realities came crashing down onto the facade.

For this trip the expected crash came all too quickly.

They were barely halfway to the way house and had just left the market place for a residential area when Danae suddenly gripped his arm. "Look—over there," she hissed, nodding across the street.

Ravagin followed her gaze to see a veiled woman backed up against a building by three fairly grubby-looking men. "What of it?" he asked.

"What do you mean, what of it?" Danae snapped back. "She's being assaulted—shouldn't we do something about it?"

"No," he told her flatly, keeping his voice low, his eyes flicking around to make sure none of the passers-by were listening in.

"Ravagin—"

"We leave them alone," he insisted. A portly man looked curiously in his direction; Ravagin glared back and the other gulped and looked quickly away. "They won't hurt her out in the open, and defending her honor's the job of her men—"

He looked back to find Danae gone.

"Damn!" he spat. "Danae!—get back here!"

He was too late. Already she had made it through the streams of pedestrians ignoring the situation and glided up behind one of the three men... and even as Ravagin belatedly set off after her she jabbed her fist hard beneath the man's shoulderblade.

He bellowed and spun around, and Ravagin snarled a curse under his breath. There was no way to avoid it now; he'd either have to fight, risking the wrath of Kelaine City law, or else stand by and watch his client get herself carved into fish bait. Shoving through the crowd that was already beginning to form, he snatched the scorpion glove from his belt and jabbed it onto his right hand, fastening the wrist strap snugly as he moved. The familiar tingle told him the neural sensors were functioning, but there would be no time to double-check their positioning. Against three armed men, he was going to need whatever advantages surprise could give him.

The man Danae had hit had his sword out now and Ravagin gritted his teeth hard enough to hurt as the blade slashed out at her abdomen. But she had already dropped into a crouch beneath the arc, her foot snapping out toward his knee. The kick missed, her foot caught up short by the unfamiliar length of her Shamsheer dress. The man raised his sword over his head—

"Halt!" Ravagin shouted, stepping into view behind Danae.

The man paused, his companions drawing their own swords and stepping up to flank him. "You protect this carhrat?" the first man growled the insult, his left hand twisting up behind him to rub his back.

Ravagin fought down a flush of anger. "I protect this noblelady, yes," he returned evenly. "Do you in turn make your livelihood assaulting helpless women like the one yonder?"

"It is a private family affair," one of the others snapped. "No concern of yours."

"Perhaps," Ravagin said. "Perhaps not. I had not heard it said that private family business was carried out on the streets of Kelaine City."

"For an outlander with no weapon," the first man said, eyes flicking to the empty glove on Ravagin's right hand, "you show amazing foolishness. Kelaine law permits an attacked citizen the right of equal response; and if you interfere you and she will both suffer worse."

"Equal response to a blow of a hand does not require the use of a sword," Ravagin pointed out, feeling beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. The man was right about the law, unfortunately, and Ravagin knew most of the crowd behind him would have a similar dislike for interfering strangers. On the other hand, he could sense that the three men weren't held in the highest esteem among their neighbors, either. It probably worked out to a fairly neutral audience—better than might be expected, worse than might be hoped. The men themselves were probably competent enough with their swords, but their clear unfamiliarity with his scorpion glove might balance that somewhat.

He had, in other words, an even chance of getting them out of this alive. Maybe. "If you wish to invoke the equal response law," he continued to the other, "you may strike the noblelady a single blow with your empty hand." Danae, still crouched in front of the man, threw him an astonished look; he ignored it, concentrating on the other's expression. It was beginning to waver—perhaps he'd cooled down enough to realize that Ravagin wouldn't be standing against three armed men without some kind of unseen and potentially lethal protection. The bluff was actually going to work....

"Are you mad, Maruch?" one of the man's companions snarled abruptly. "Are you going to let a stranger push your face into the dust?"

Maruch's face darkened, all traces of hesitation vanishing into freshly kindled pride-driven rage.

Eyes on Ravagin, he raised his sword high and took a step toward Danae—

Cursing under his breath, Ravagin leaped forward and to the side, raising his hands chest high with palms together. Maruch clearly expected the move; changing direction in mid step, he turned to face Ravagin, his blade beginning its downswing directly toward Ravagin's head—

And the coiled tentacle on the scorpion glove snapped out like a whip, slapping Maruch's wrist with a loud crack.

The other howled, his stroke going wild as he tried with limited success to hold onto his weapon.

Ravagin sidestepped with ease, coiling the tentacle again and then snapping it out a second time to strike at the blade itself. The sword went flying, barely missing one of Maruch's companions before it clattered to the paving stones.

Someone in the crowd gasped... but what Maruch's companions lacked in manners one of them, at least, made up in cunning. Even as Ravagin stepped back, coiling the whip again, the man on the left raised his own weapon and shouted, "Sorcerer! Black magic! Help us, citizens, against this Power of Darkness!"

The crowd stirred, clearly unsure of what to do. Ravagin gritted his teeth, his full attention by necessity on the two men cautiously moving in on him. Snapping the whip out again, he held it extended in a stiff z-shape between him and his attackers. One of them slashed at it; he pulled it back slightly and the blow missed. At least they've only got regular swords, he thought, counting one of the few blessings available at the moment. A spark-sword would cut through a scorpion glove whip with ease if it connected; with ordinary swords it would take half a dozen solid blows to do the same.

Which gave him an idea...

Easing the defensive line back toward himself, he took a slow couple of steps to the right. His opponents shifted in response, the sword tips easing closer toward him as the whip withdrew. Almost in position... and as one of them started to lunge, Ravagin braced his feet and snapped the whip out in a converging helix around both swords.

One of the men yelped as the tightening coil slammed the two blades—and their sword hands—

together, but it was already too late for either to fight back. Bracing his palms together, Ravagin yanked hard, and an instant later both swords stood at his feet, securely tangled in four meters of whip, their points grounded against the stones.

For a long minute all three of the disarmed men just stood or crouched there, looking dumbfounded at Ravagin. "Now," Ravagin said softly, "the noblelady and I will be on our way."

"Not quite yet, outlander," an authoritative voice came from the crowd. Ravagin turned to see an old man dressed in purple and gold step forward, the half-scepter of a justice official held before him.

Beside him, a similarly garbed younger man held a sword at the ready position, its vaguely indistinct blade pointed in Ravagin's direction.

A spark-sword.