Timothy Zahn - Triplet

And if she was going to desert Ravagin, she would never have a better chance than right now.

Rolling off the bed and onto her feet, she stepped to the window, squinting against the light coming in around the worn shutters. Theoretically, the inn's lar defined her boundaries for her... but there was nothing that said a lar would or even could block anything it couldn't detect. And there was certainly nothing to be lost by trying.

Except perhaps their only weapon against the searching spirits.

She stopped, hand on the window sash, and swore under her breath. But there was no way around it.

Half the advantage of being invisible was the fact that the searching spirits didn't yet know about it.

If the lar couldn't detect her, it would surely notice that something had passed through its protective ring... and when it reported that fact, either Melentha or someone else would surely come to the proper conclusion.

She couldn't risk it, not even to give Ravagin a clear shot at the Tunnel.

Or in other words, she was in the clear. She didn't have to sacrifice herself. Didn't have to make the hard decision.

As, somehow, things had always seemed to work out for her. How many of the hard decisions along the way, she wondered suddenly, had yielded to that same kind of logic? And how much of that logic had been little more than rationalization? She opened her mouth again, searching her memory for the most vile word in her vocabulary... and paused.

Somewhere, she could hear a faint hissing.

The lar, was her first, hopeful thought. But that hum had been different, and she could in fact still hear it beneath this louder and closer sound.

Louder and closer...

Carefully, she lowered her hands from the window back to her sides and turned around. Nothing was visible... but facing this direction, the hiss was definitely louder. She licked her lips, heart beginning to beat loudly in her ears. An uncomfortable tingle raised the hairs on her arms...

And through the thick wooden door a red shape floated.

Danae bit down hard on her tongue. A djinn, a small bit of rationality in her brain seemed to whisper. Only a djinn. But the rest of her brain wanted to scream.

She'd never seen a djinn like this. Never seen any spirit with the sheer and horrible detail with which she was seeing this one. The spindly physique, like an emaciated mockery of the human form; the grotesquely misshapen head with its pointed jaw and gaunt cheekbones; the eyes—

The eyes. Redder than the rest of the creature, they sparkled with intelligence and hatred as they swept the room. Danae watched it drift slowly through the air, hardly daring to breathe as those terrible eyes swept the room. It couldn't see her—somehow, even in the rising swell of panic, there was never even a shadow of doubt in her mind about that. But the spirit was indeed searching for something—that much, too, was certain. And if it happened to touch her... or even heard her...

She bit down on her tongue again... and as the djinn circled over toward the bed a glint of reflected light there caught her eye. The short sword Ravagin had left her.

Carefully, eyes on the djinn, she moved slowly toward the bed. Djinns were about the most powerful spirits that could be permanently trapped in a tool or weapon, and the necessary spell was correspondingly tricky. But once bound in the sword, the creature should be incapable of hurting them.

Would it still be able to communicate with the rest of the spirit world? There was no way to know.

The djinn moved away from the bed, and Danae froze in mid-step. It drifted toward her... not quite on a direct line... she held her breath...

Concentrating on the djinn, she didn't notice the approaching footsteps until it was too late to do anything. The door came open; and as she threw her arm up to shield her eyes, she caught just a glimpse of a figure silhouetted against the glare from the hallway.

She tensed as the footsteps continued on into the room. One long step would take her to the bed—get her to the sword lying there—but with the light from the hall blinding her, using the weapon competently would be another matter entirely. But if her attacker didn't notice her standing here by the window before he closed the door...

The door swung to a crack. Another second or two—

"Danae?" Ravagin called tentatively. "Where are you?"

Relief flooded into her—and was followed instantly by more tension. "Shh!" she hissed. "A djinn."

The door seemed to her ears to slam shut. "What?" he hissed. "Where?"

She lowered her arm and looked around. The djinn was nowhere in sight. "But... it was here a second ago," she whispered. "Searching around for us—I'm sure of it."

"Great. Just what we needed." Carefully, Ravagin groped his way to the bed, set down the covered tray he was carrying, and picked up the sword. "Was it moving quickly, like sprites when they've got a message to deliver?" he asked, buckling the weapon around his waist.

"No, it was going pretty slowly. Sort of like a bee hunting around a clover field for the best flower to go for."

Ravagin grunted. "Hmm. Well, it could be worse, I suppose. Did you hear anyone poking around out in the hallway while the djinn was here?"

"Uh... no, I don't think so. Should I have?"

"If you didn't then, you probably will eventually. The djinn almost certainly means one of Melentha's agents is around somewhere."

Danae felt her stomach knot up. "You mean here? In the inn?"

"Uh-huh. The lar out there's been in place too long for an unbound djinn to have been floating around since before it was invoked, and we'd sure as hell have known if someone had sent it through the lar from the outside. QED, and all that."

"Oh, that's just terrific news. How in the worlds did Melentha track us here?"

"I don't think she did, actually," Ravagin shook his head. "My guess is that when we didn't make a mad run for the Tunnel, she just got all the people together that she could beg, borrow, or steal and scattered them around in hopes of spotting us whenever we finally surfaced."

"So when whoever it is spotted us, he invoked the djinn to check us out?"

Ravagin was silent a moment. "My guess is that he isn't actually on to us yet. If he was, the djinn ought to have been flying more purposefully, and have left right away when it didn't find you here."

"But we're now stuck here with him until dawn," Danae pointed out, suppressing a shudder.

"Right." Ravagin drew the short sword, checked its edge, and resheathed it. "Which means we've got to identify him before he identifies us. And eliminate him."

Danae's heart skipped a beat. "You mean... kill him? But if he's not on to us—"

She stopped abruptly at the expression on his face. "Look, Danae," he said quietly, "in the first place, if I could be sure he wouldn't identify us, I'd be more than happy to leave him alone. But we don't have any such guarantee. And if there's going to be any confrontation, I want it to be on my terms and timing, not his. Understand?"

"Yes," she said, bending the truth only a little. "All right. What can I do to help?"

"Stay here," he said promptly, moving toward the door. "You'll be as safe here as anywhere else. Use that chair there to wedge the door and don't open it to anyone but me. I'll identify myself by calling you the name with which we were first introduced. Got that?"

Danae Panya. It almost startled her to remember. The name seemed to come from a distant past, or from a life not her own. "Got it," she told him. "Please be careful, Ravagin."

"You bet," he grunted. "Watch your eyes..."

She shielded them, and in a flare of light from the hall he was gone.

Pushing the heavy wooden chair over to the door and wedging it under the latch took only a couple of minutes—far more time, she thought grimly, than it would take a determined attacker to break it down. She spent a few minutes more searching for a better way to secure the door, but aside from the armchair, bed, a couple of blankets, and a fireplate, the room was totally devoid of furnishings. The ceiling was composed of rough-hewn boards, each thick enough to make a good brace, but they were solidly nailed in place and without tools there would be no chance of getting one loose.