Triplet by Timothy Zahn Page B

so—maybe by whatever made the Cairn Waste. The South Fey River in Shamsheer would be somewhere in Citadel’s inlet—that doesn’t help us any. The North Fey River …?”
    â€œThere is a river up there somewhere,” Ravagin nodded. “But I’m not sure precisely where. Part of the problem is that we don’t know all that much about Karyx’s landscape—travel is by foot or horseback, and we rarely wind up going more than fifty or sixty kilometers from the Tunnel. Funny no one’s thought of this before.”
    â€œOh, they probably have,” Danae shrugged. “And then rejected it for some perfectly good reason.” She sighed. “Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Just theoretical brain-gaming.”
    â€œSo what else is there here?” he said dryly. “It’s not like studies of Karyx have any application to the real universe.”
    â€œYou sound like Essen,” she snorted. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that the spirits we find here may not be unique to this place.”
    â€œIf you’re talking about all the Earth legends and stories—”
    â€œ And most religions, too,” she cut in. “Virtually all of them make provision for spiritual beings.”
    â€œBut spiritual beings that are different from those of Karyx.”
    â€œWho says?” she said hotly.
    â€œJust take a minute and look at the facts,” Ravagin said, feeling his temper beginning to slide out from under his control. He’d never much cared for people who couldn’t have a discussion without turning it into an argument. “The spirits here are easy to invoke, easy to control, interact directly with the physical universe, and their presence is very apparent. Contrast that to all the legends— or the religious stories, if you’d prefer—that you remember.”
    She clamped her jaw tightly, but he could see in her eyes that she was indeed thinking about it. “You think the legends are just that—legends?”
    â€œI have no idea—I’m not a theologian. All I’m saying is that anything you learn about spirit characteristics and control here will have no direct application to life off Karyx because spirits like these don’t seem to exist off Karyx.”
    â€œSo you do agree with Essen’s philosophy.”
    â€œThere’s no agreeing or disagreeing, damn it,” Ravagin snarled. “There are no sides to be taken here—it isn’t a contest or war or something. In many ways I happen to prefer Karyx to Shamsheer; so what? All Essen was saying is that Shamsheer’s technology is at least based on scientific principles, and that if we can find out how it works there we can make it work in the Twenty Worlds, too.”
    â€œIf science really is a universal.” She held up her hand before he could reply. “Sorry—I’m not really trying to start any arguments.”
    â€œCould’ve fooled me,” Ravagin muttered under his breath.
    â€œWhat’d you say?”
    â€œNothing,” he growled. “Let’s step up the pace a little—I want to try for one of the inns a few kilometers down the road.”
    They kept on, but within another hour it was clear they weren’t going to make it. Danae was trying—he could grudgingly admit that much—but her preparation for the trip had clearly not included building up her leg muscles for this kind of continual up-down climbing, and he was forced again and again to reduce the pace or risk leaving her behind. The latter idea had a certain nasty appeal—he could invoke a djinn to watch over her progress, after all—but it wasn’t really a serious option. Keeping most of his attention on their surroundings, he began working on the problem.
    They reached the last row of mounds about an hour before sunset, and there Ravagin called a halt. “There’s no way