"Why?" he asked. "You have to remember, Danae, that Shamsheer's only partly a feudalistic society, and that that part isn't really like the Earth types you're probably thinking about. There's no interprotectorate warfare here, for starters, and correspondingly no regal paranoia."
"I understand all that," Danae gritted. The castle was close enough now for her to make out the individual bushes lining the roadway from gate to manor house... and to see that the faces of the troll guards were also lifted in their direction. "I would still like to get out of here."
"If you insist. Sky-plane: stop. Sky-plane: to Kelaine City."
The carpet's descent reversed, and as it rose back into the sky and headed eastward again Danae took a deep breath. Her hands were beginning to tremble with reaction to what she still considered to have been a close call. She turned to glare at Ravagin... and found he was already watching her. Watching her entirely too closely....
"You did that on purpose," she accused him coldly. "Didn't you? You wanted to see how easily I got rattled."
His expression remained calm. "I like to know what sort of person I'm going to be traveling with.
The Hidden Worlds can be dangerous at times."
"Isn't that your job?—to protect me?" she retorted. "I noticed I wasn't offered any weapons back at the Tunnel."
"Women of your station in life don't carry weapons."
Something cold tickled her back. "What do you mean, my station in life?"
He gestured at her clothing. "You're dressed as a minor noblelady. Nobleladies don't carry weapons
—they have men like me to fight for them if and when necessary."
Danae grimaced, a sour taste rising into her mouth. "I'm perfectly capable of fighting on my own if I have to," she told him stiffly. "I've had training in both armed and unarmed combat styles—"
"Wonderful," Ravagin interrupted. "If you have to fight for your life and I'm not around, you have my permission to rip his ears off. Otherwise yell for help and let someone else take care of him.
Fighting is out of character for women here, and we don't want to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves. Understood?"
"I suppose so." She gestured to the black glove with its tightly coiled spiral hanging beside the dagger on his belt. "Though if we're going to talk about attracting attention, isn't that scorpion glove a little out of place in this part of Shamsheer?"
"It's somewhat rare, but perfectly acceptable," he shrugged. "They're underused mainly because it takes less training to learn how to hack at someone with a sword and people here have no more patience than any other human beings you're likely to meet. Translation: don't grab for the glove if something happens to me and you need to defend yourself. You're more likely to gift-wrap yourself than to damage your opponent."
"I'll keep that in mind," she said icily.
Ravagin nodded and turned back toward the front of the sky-plane, apparently missing the sarcasm completely. Danae scowled at his back, feeling her already ebbing excitement toward this trip sink a point or two further. Here she'd finally escaped from her father and Hart, only to find another man who wanted to run her life for her—worse, one who was apparently determined to treat her like a child in the process.
Damn him. Damn them all.
Still...
Shaking her head, she put the irritation firmly out of her mind. She was here to do some work, and to do some study, and Ravagin was an unavoidable part of that project. She would ignore his patronizing attitude as much as she could, recognizing that she would be having the last laugh in the end. And she would remember that there was always one final resort available to her here, one that would put her beyond reach of them all, forever.
Taking a calming breath, she directed her gaze at the landscape passing beneath them, studying the world that would be her home for two months. Or perhaps longer.
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."