Giliead shook his head, unfolding his long legs and reaching for the bow. Ilias stored his knives in various places and pushed to his feet, drawing his sword. Though they didn’t hurry, they were already in position on either side of the door by the time Tremaine had finished her careful and silent creep to the shadows beneath the gallery. She swore mentally at them, sure they were doing it on purpose to annoy her.
She could clearly hear soft careful footsteps now and could tell there was more than one person, but fewer than the large group they had feared. Ilias held up three fingers. Tremaine eased down into a half crouch, drawing the pistol.
Then a form stepped out of the darkness into the open square of the doorway, the flickering light revealing him clearly. It was a man, older than Tremaine had expected, with gray hair and a seamed and lined face. He was dressed in dull-colored pants with ragged hems and an equally ragged shirt, with an incongruous patterned vest that glinted with silver and metallic blue in the firelight. His boots weren’t boots at all, just leather wrapped around his feet and calves and bound with cord. He wasn’t armed, though he wore a belt with little pouches hanging off it. What puzzled Tremaine was that his whole stance was tentative, not aggressive, as he squinted at the apparently blanket-wrapped forms on the far side of the fire. He didn’t look like somebody coming to attack them, and he didn’t look like a Gardier.
Giliead drew the bow smoothly, arrow already nocked. Tremaine said in Aelin, “Don’t move.”
She was so convinced by this point that he wasn’t Gardier that she hadn’t expected him to understand. But the man froze, his eyes alarmed, and there was a startled murmur from the corridor. Knowing he might just have been responding to a voice that came out of nowhere, she added, “Tell your friends to drop their weapons and no one will be hurt.”
He hesitated, but she could see comprehension in his eyes. He lifted a hand, turning his head slightly to address his companions out in the hall, and said in low-voiced, oddly accented Aelin, “You heard her. Drop your weapons.” Lifting his head, he addressed the room at large, “We mean no harm. We wish to talk.”
Tremaine found herself sort of almost willing to believe that. If you were planning a triple murder of sleeping people, she was fairly sure you didn’t send Grandpa in first, especially unarmed. She heard a clatter out in the hall, what sounded like something wooden being dropped, then the fainter noise of something metal—she was certain it was a gun— being carefully laid aside. She took a deep breath, ready to find out just who the hell these Aelin-speaking non-Gardier were. “Gerard.”
Light sprang from a dozen different sources in the gallery above, wisps of etheric illumination whispering out to hover around the room, some darting out into the hall. The old man flinched, looking back and forth from Giliead to Ilias, revealed in the white glow of the sorcerous light. Tremaine stepped out, wanting his attention on her and not them. “Tell your friends to step inside here, please.”
His hesitation was longer this time. Neither Ilias nor Giliead had moved. Ilias still stood with his back to the wall, sword held easily, watching the old man with his head cocked. His expression was very much that of a cat waiting patiently for a mouse to make a mistake. Giliead was still poised to let the arrow fly, calm as a rock. Impatiently, Tremaine said, “If they wanted to kill you, they’d kill you. Are we going to talk or fight?”
She could practically feel Gerard, still up on the gallery, glaring at her head, but it worked. The old man seemed to shake himself and stepped further into the room, gesturing for the two people she could now see out in the hall to follow him. They did, slowly and reluctantly, with wary glances at the two Syprians.
Once they were in the room, Tremaine heard rustling overhead as Gerard left the concealment of the gallery and started down. Both the newcomers were young, neither any older than Tremaine, dressed like the old man in an odd combination of dull-colored clothes that were almost rags supplemented with bright colorful fragments. The boy wore ragged brown trousers, though his shirt was in a little better condition. The sash around his waist was red with a gold sheen to it, fringed with beads. The girl wore a long skirt in a silky blue, her gray shirt obviously meant for a larger man, and a dull orange scarf over her hair. Both were dark-haired, too thin, though not to the point of starvation; both wary but with something almost eager about the way they looked around, as if they were also burningly curious. Craning her neck, Tremaine saw the weapons they had left on the dusty stone floor of the hall were a rifle with an oddly clunky trigger arrangement, a wooden spear with a metal head and a fish knife.
“Who are you?” the girl asked suddenly, looking from Tremaine to the Syprians. “How did you get here?”
They were honest questions and Tremaine found herself stumped for how to answer the first one without a lengthy explanation. She settled on “We’re explorers. And we came here through one of the circles.”
Tremaine had seen Gerard out in the hall, apparently signaling an instruction to Aras to keep his position on guard at the entrance to the circle chamber. Now the sorcerer stepped in, adding in Aelin, “As you did, I assume?” He had prudently tucked the sphere away in its bag; Tremaine agreed, there was no reason to advertise the fact that they had it, even though she was beginning to think it was unlikely that these people would have seen one before.
The old man exchanged a guarded look with the boy. “We did,” he said reluctantly. “But it was not of our doing.”
“Ask them why they came here,” Giliead said suddenly, speaking Syrnaic. He hadn’t lowered the bow, though he had eased the tension on the string. All three of their visitors looked at him, startled, as if they hadn’t expected him to be able to talk. “Not to this place, but to us, tonight.”
“Right,” Tremaine answered in the same language, thinking she knew what he meant. He wanted her to find out their intent, what they had wanted to gain in coming here. “Are any of them wizards?”
“I don’t think so. Not like our wizards. There’re no curses around them at all that I can see.” Tremaine caught the slight emphasis on the “that I can see.”
Gerard had listened carefully. He looked at the old man again and said in Aelin, “Our friend would like to know why you came here tonight.”
The old man spread his hands, his expression suggesting that he wasn’t terribly clear on that himself. “We have spoken to no living souls—no one but ourselves—for many years. When we saw the writing in our language that you left, we knew we must find out who you were, even if you meant to kill us.”
That’s… not what I expected, Tremaine thought, her brows drawing together in consternation. There was one more thing she needed to know immediately. “Have you heard of the Gardier, then?” She tried not to make the question particularly pointed, but she watched all three of them carefully.
The girl was staring in uneasy fascination at Ilias and didn’t even glance up. The boy was looking from Tremaine to Gerard, and didn’t show any sign of recognition either. The old man, regarding Tremaine as carefully as she was watching him, shook his head. “No, I don’t know that word.”
She was a little shocked at herself to realize she believed him. It was one of the few foreign words, the word their enemies called them, that all the Gardier should recognize. Trying the other one, she added, “Or the Rien?”
Same response, or lack of response. The old man shook his head.
Tremaine let out her breath, looked at Gerard and shrugged. You’ve got me. I don’t have a clue.
He nodded thoughtfully, then addressed the Aelin, “Let’s sit down, shall we?”
Giliead slowly lowered the bow.
Tremaine sat on her heels, poking the fire up with a handy branch as the Aelin took somewhat uneasy seats around it. The drifting balls of spell light arrayed themselves in a circle around the room as Gerard maneuvered himself down to sit next to her, grunting as if his back hurt. Giliead and Ilias stayed beside the door, though Ilias had sheathed his sword.
The old man s
tirred, saying, “My name is Obelin.” He indicated the girl and the boy, “This is Davret and Elon. We’re of the Lehirin line, of the clans of Etara.”
Gerard shifted the sphere’s bag so it was behind him. “This is Tremaine, Ilias and Giliead, and I’m Gerard. First, I’d like to ask why one of your people ran from us earlier today, and why did you hide when we tried to find you?”
Obelin snorted, as if it was self-evident. Tremaine had to admit neither Ilias nor Giliead looked terribly friendly at the moment. They stood just at the edge of the firelight, which struck reflections off their armbands, the earrings buried in their hair and the cold glint of the curse mark on Ilias’s cheek. Ilias had his arms folded over his scabbarded sword, the curved-horn hilt resting against his forearm. It didn’t look like a position he could quickly draw it from. Then she realized he was holding it in such a way that Giliead, standing next to him, the bow propped on his shoulder, could draw it in a heartbeat. Obelin added, “It was one of the boys who came here today, to collect fruit from the patch just outside the staircase. He was afraid. It had been so long. And they didn’t look… We had seen other people, something like them, from a distance. There is a place you can look down into the river valley, though the cliff is too steep to climb. We had seen them fighting with primitive weapons, like savages—” He hesitated, then gestured apologetically. “We were afraid.”
Tremaine translated this for the Syprians, and Ilias didn’t seem particularly perturbed by it. “If we’re as far south as I think we are, they might have seen Hisians,” he told her.
“They were right to be afraid,” Giliead put in with a sardonic glint in his eye.
Gerard nodded, accepting Obelin’s answer. “But why have you been here so long? How did you get here?”
Obelin shook his head, pushing a hank of graying hair out of his face. His hands were badly callused, reminding Tremaine of the hands of someone who had done hard labor in prison. “I don’t know how much you have seen of this place, but there is no way to leave it on foot. There are various outside doorways, but all lead to small areas, once gardens perhaps, that are surrounded by sheer cliffs. We have ropes, and many of the younger ones have managed to climb down to the valley and back up, but the older people couldn’t make it, and we were reluctant to separate. Then we saw the savages….” He shook his head again. “As to how we got here, my people are explorers also, traders.” He hesitated, glancing again from Tremaine to Gerard. “You may realize, this is not our world. The stars in this sky are different from ours—”
Tremaine cut off the attempt to explain. “Yes, we knew that.”
He nodded, a little relieved. “So you know this. Before we came here, we didn’t know such a thing was possible. In our own world, we were a trading clan, traveling out from our home in Etara across the seas, to trade with other peoples. We had traveled to the very distant reaches of our trade routes. In a small village, we encountered a man who called himself Castines.”
Obelin’s eyes turned bitter with memory, and he took Davret’s hand. Tremaine sensed suddenly that telling this story to strangers was giving him a kind of emotional release that he had been denied a long time. “He had come out of the hills perhaps a month before we arrived, badly injured, and been tended by the people there, who were farmers. He had learned to speak our trade language somewhat, and told us that if we took him back to his land, he would show us a place of great interest, a hidden city, long abandoned by its builders.” His mouth twisted ruefully. “It’s the way of our people to compete for better routes, better trading goods, new and exciting things—luxuries, inventions—to bring home to the other clans. We were greedy for success at this, too greedy. So we went with him.”
He shook his head at himself again. Davret squeezed his hand, and Elon looked grim. Obelin continued, “He boarded our craft and we followed his directions, traveling off our route and into the wilderness. At the point he had promised that we would see the city, there was nothing but empty forest. We challenged him. Then he showed us a crystal.” He looked up, gesturing with his free hand. “It was about the size of a child’s ball, like the ones in the wall of the room where we live.” He nodded to Tremaine. “You saw them?”
“Yes, we saw those.” Tremaine felt her skin start to creep; she had an idea where this story was going.
Obelin nodded. “He drew symbols on our craft, then used arcana.” He glanced up at the wisps of spell light. “I see you know of this as well.”
Gerard, listening intently, wet his lips. “We call it magic.”
“It’s not something our clan had much experience with,” Obelin explained. “Those who are best at it tend to stay at home, in the clan strongholds, and don’t travel the routes with the traders. Castines made the crystal do something with arcana.”
“And you were here.” Tremaine had to fight to keep her mouth shut, to not shout questions, to let the old man tell the story.
“Yes.” Obelin laughed a little bitterly, and Elon winced. Davret patted the older man’s hand. “Our craft was ruined as you saw, but we thought that this find was truly worth it. Castines showed us the crystal wall, and said they could be used for arcana that we had never heard the like of before. For us, arcana was just for simple tricks, or for controlling the winds. He said there were uses that we couldn’t imagine.”
“He was right about that,” Gerard said dryly.
The man’s brow furrowed, but he continued, “We stayed here for several days, exploring, then we decided to go back and report our find to our clan. Castines said he would take us back closer to Sivari, our trading center. That he could use one of the arcana spirals in the other big room to take us there. He took one of the crystals, a large one from the niche in the center of the wall, as proof of our find. But we decided some of us should remain, in case someone else came while we were gone to challenge our claim. We sent five others with him, to represent our clan’s interest. Castines promised he would be back soon, within a few days, and bring the High Trader Clan’s peers with him.” He gestured helplessly. “We never saw him, or our companions, again.”
Tremaine nodded slowly. “How long ago was this?”
He looked at Davret for help. She said, “My mother said the years don’t seem the same here. But she’s counted twenty-one rainy seasons.”
Twenty-one years, more or less. Tremaine sat back, staring at nothing. In the Gardier world, Calit’s mother had told him that before he was born, things were different. That the attack that the Gardier used for their rationale for invasion had not happened the way they said it had. So whatever happened, happened when Calit’s mother was a young woman who could remember the world the way it was.
“But who are you?” Davret asked suddenly. “You use arcana to travel through the circles like Castines; was he one of your people?” She looked at Ilias and Giliead again, gesturing toward them with a baffled expression. “Are they your people too? They look so different.”
“We’re from—” Tremaine threw a look at Gerard, making sure it was a mutual decision to release this information. He gave her a barely perceptible nod. “—a place called Ile-Rien. We do use magic to travel through the circles. We’re exploring them, sort of. We’re trying to follow the path of a friend of ours, who we think came through here a few years ago.”
“This is the first we’ve heard of Castines,” Gerard put in, leaning forward. “As far as we know, he isn’t one of our people. In fact, we’d very much like to know exactly who and what he is. I think that would help answer some questions we’ve had about the circles, and who uses them, where they originally came from.”
Tremaine nodded toward Ilias and Giliead. “And you’re right, they are different—they’re Syprians. They come from this world, somewhere to the north of here, we think.”
Obelin nodded, listening to all this intently. The old man seemed to have lost a great deal of his reserve. “We’ve seen no one, so I don’t think your friend could have come here. If he had, we would have been glad to
see him, I tell you.”
“Tremaine.” Ilias sounded impatient. Giliead was glaring at her. “What is he saying? What are you saying?”
“Sorry.” She repeated the story briefly in Syrnaic, finishing with, “So twenty-one years ago a sorcerer returned to their world from here, with five of their people, taking one of those crystals with him.”
Giliead winced and Ilias looked appalled at the probable fate of Obelin’s friends. He said, “Tremaine, Castines could be a Syprian name. Are they sure he was one of their people?”
“No, they aren’t sure. They said he had to learn their language.” Tremaine chewed her lip, considering it. “If Castines was Syprian… Then how did he know about the circles?”
Frowning, Giliead prompted, “Ask him about crystals. The small ones, that they put into people.”
“Yes,” Gerard said grimly, speaking Syrnaic. “I was wondering about that myself.”
Tremaine lifted her brows. “You think this Castines character was infected, like the Gardier Liaisons, and what they tried with Niles? But if he was Syprian, who or what infected him? Before they came, there was no one here but the crystals.” She stared, thinking that through. “Are we saying it’s not the Gardier who control the crystals, but the crystals who control the Gardier?”
“I’d rather not speculate on that without further information,” Gerard told her firmly. “Frankly, this situation is terrifying enough.” In Aelin, he asked Obelin, “Did Castines have anything odd about his face? Did he appear to have a piece of crystal embedded in his skin? I know it sounds odd, but it’s something we’ve encountered before.”
Obelin shook his head. “No, no, we saw nothing like that.” He added grimly, “And I recall his face very well.”
Tremaine translated the answer for the others and Ilias shook his head, saying, “That doesn’t mean anything. We didn’t know about the one they put on Niles until Nicholas found it.”