The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein)

  She continued on, pausing at the raised threshold of the bathroom. It was the only room nobody was sleeping in. You could have a bath, she thought, tempted. With hot water and soap. She didn’t think she was awake enough yet to make that serious a decision. She stepped in to get a drink of water from the tap, finding one of the small china tumblers still there though someone had carried off the matching carafe. Several pairs of boots were drying on the black-and-white tiles, the patched leather dyed in soft colors or stamped with fanciful designs. She leaned on the sink, looking into the mirror. Her mousy brown hair was getting shaggy and she pulled it back for an unobstructed view of her face. No, still don’t recognize that person, she thought, resigned. Especially now, when she should be pale from the Vienne winter. Whoever that was in the mirror, her cheeks had a sprinkle of freckles and red patches from riding and sailing under this world’s bright summer sun, as well as a nice patchwork of greenish yellow bruises. Giving up the unproductive self-scrutiny, she went back out into the main room.

  In the sitting area Halian was stretched out on the couch, his face buried in a pillow. Giliead was still awake, sitting on the floor with his back propped against one of the chairs. His face drawn and thoughtful, he was staring absently into the foyer where the door to the corridor stood open. As he glanced up at her, Tremaine asked, “This is going to seem like an odd question, but is it day or night?”

  “It’s night,” he told her, his voice low to keep from waking the others. “The storm is starting to die down.”

  She settled on the floor, cross-legged, and yawned. She wasn’t sure how he knew that about the storm, unless he could tell it from the sound of the wind. She propped her chin on her hand, watching him. His long braided hair, the soft sun-faded colors of his worn clothes, made an interesting contrast with the smooth yellow upholstery and elegant lines of the armchair behind him. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “I did for a while. Too much to think about.” He looked at the door again as two Rienish sailors passed in agitated conversation. “I was wondering what your people are like.”

  That was too abstract a concept to be discussing at this hour. But Tremaine found herself saying, “I don’t know what my people are like anymore. I used to know, before the war. When it started, it seemed like the cities, the country just…stopped.” Like Lodun, trapped inside its defenses by the Gardier’s spells, perhaps not even realizing yet that Ile-Rien had fallen. “Things that were important to us just stopped.”

  Giliead accepted that with a nod, without demanding further explanation. This was probably the longest private conversation she had had with him so far. From his expression he was turning her words over thoughtfully. Did all Syprians accept people at face value or was it just the Andrien family, she wondered. They all acted as if not understanding you was their problem, not yours. She looked around, distracted. “Where’s Ilias?”

  “He’s with the others guarding Ixion. He’s worried about what we’re going to do about him.” Giliead shook his head uneasily and it was obvious Ilias wasn’t the only one who was worried. “Even if we take Ixion far from the island before we kill him, we won’t know if it’s worked or not. Not until he comes back again.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Tremaine felt a little chill settle in her stomach. It was the kind of problem Arisilde had been excellent at solving. But all they had left of Arisilde was what remained in the sphere. The other powerful sorcerers who might have helped were trapped or dead at Lodun, trapped or dead at the overrun Aderassi front, and if the Gardier had reached Vienne by now, trapped or dead there too. “Couldn’t Gerard think of anything?”

  Giliead’s expression grew a little less distant. He shrugged slightly and said, “He’s offered to take Ixion along when you go back to your land. And we appreciate the offer, but it would be better if we could get rid of him ourselves. If Ilias could see it was done and over.” He hesitated, then added a touch stiffly, “He has nightmares.”

  And again, Ilias isn’t the only one who’d like to see it done and over, Tremaine thought, watching his face. Under the worry, Giliead looked guilty. That had never been something her father had suffered from. If you don’t care for the consequences then don’t commit the crime, Nicholas had said once, years ago when she was too young to understand that he meant it literally. But not everybody understood what the consequences were likely to be. And not everybody had a choice. And you don’t know how he felt after your mother was killed, some traitor voice said. She shook herself, pushing the uncomfortable thoughts away. “I have nightmares too, sometimes,” she said, though her dream of the Ravenna sinking seemed far away now.

  Giliead shook his head, ready to change the subject. “Gerard also said as soon as the storm clears and the Gardier leave the area, the ship will turn inland and they’ll put us ashore where we can reach Cineth easily. Then you’ll leave.”

  Tremaine frowned, rubbing her eyes. I was afraid of that. “Without stopping at Cineth?”

  “Maybe.” He looked at her, his face serious. “We told him we want an alliance, your people with ours.”

  Tremaine nodded slowly. As the Gardier had used the island as a staging area for raids on the Ile-Rien coast, it would make an excellent spot for Rienish troops to prepare to retake the country. They could use both spheres, Arisilde’s and the one Niles had built, to open gateways to the coast or further inland, slipping spies, ships, armies through the etheric world-gates. If any Rienish armies had survived. They could still do it without Cineth’s cooperation, but Tremaine didn’t want to break that tenuous tie. “You think Nicanor and the others would go for this? An alliance with a world of wizards?”

  Giliead looked away with a resigned expression. “I’ve given up trying to guess what Nicanor and Visolela will or won’t do. But Halian seems to think so.”

  Tremaine frowned, trying to read his expression. “But we think Halian’s an optimist.”

  At first the Rienish guards tried to talk to Ilias, but realizing that was impossible, they fell to talking among themselves. He suspected they would like to ask about what they were guarding; he was just as glad they couldn’t.

  He had taken a seat on a wooden bench bolted to the wall and leaned back, stretching his legs out. He was beginning to get used to the feel of being underground, the metal walls, the strange noises and acrid scents in the air, though combined with the roll of a ship at sea it was passing strange. But as tired as he was, he didn’t feel like dozing off. Not with that thing only one wall away, he thought, eyeing the door to Ixion’s prison. One of the guards, studying him thoughtfully and perhaps too accurately reading his expression, went to the glass window to check on the wizard’s sprawled body.

  For years Ilias and Giliead had never known what Ixion looked like. The wizard had been too canny to ever face Giliead directly, sending creatures or laying subtle curse traps for him instead. Then the search had led them to a mountain village stalked by a curseling; the instant the survivors had described it they had known it was something Ixion was responsible for. It had fur and claws like an animal, but metal and wooden parts had been meshed with its flesh. It had killed the family of a man named Licias, one of the few who had been trying to hunt it. With his help they had destroyed the creature but Licias had been wounded. He was still suffering the loss of his family, alone in the village and not seeming to have many friends there. So they had taken him back to Cineth and Andrien House.

  And he had been Ixion in disguise.

  We should have asked more questions, Ilias thought, not for the first time, as he stared at the floor. We should have found out he was new to the village, that no one saw the family he said the curseling killed. But even if they had, would it have really made them suspicious of Licias? He had lived at Andrien in apparent friendship for months before he had finally revealed what and who he was.

  Thinking about it, Ilias was beginning to wonder if the things the Rienish did, the way they used curses to build and cure and protect, was the way it wa
s supposed to be. If Syprian wizards like Ixion had somehow looked at those things through a distorted glass, twisting them out of their original purpose into something terrible. It wasn’t an idea he wanted to share with anybody but Giliead. Even Halian might think it was too extreme.

  He glanced up as Gerard and Niles turned into the room, arguing animatedly in Rienish. Niles carried a leather-bound case over to the metal door that sealed Ixion’s prison. Sitting on his heels to open the case, he took out several little glass pots and jars. Ilias sat up, feeling uneasy, but the containers seemed to hold various colored powders rather than anything disgusting. “What’s he doing?” he asked Gerard.

  Gerard sat next to him, holding the sphere in his lap and watching the other wizard critically. “If Niles is right—and of course he insists that he is—the chamber we’ve warded for Ixion will need to be excluded from this spell. Channeling the sphere’s protective ability throughout the ship may interfere with the wards already in place. Those that shield the ship from view from overhead won’t matter at a moment like that, but I’d rather not have the containment wards tampered with.”

  “Me neither.” Ilias still didn’t understand all the different Rienish words for curses, but he thought he had the idea. Niles took a sheaf of papers from his jacket and began drawing lines and circles at the base of the door, using the colored powders from the jars. As he added something from another container that looked like gold filings, Gerard made a critical comment in Rienish and got a sharp reply back.

  Ilias eyed the sphere a little warily. “Is it really true there’s somebody in there? Somebody you knew—know.”

  Gerard regarded the copper-colored ball with a kind of rueful resignation. “It seems so, unfortunately.” He adjusted the glass pieces he wore over his eyes. “Arisilde was a very powerful sorcerer in Ile-Rien. He and Tremaine’s father had been friends since they both attended the University of Lodun—that’s a place for education, in history, law and medicine and many other things as well as for sorcery. He built this sphere after the design invented by Tremaine’s foster grandfather, Edouard Viller.” He took a deep breath, turning the tarnished metal ball over thoughtfully. Inside it something clunked. “Viller wasn’t a sorcerer himself. He intended the spheres to allow a person with no magical ability to perform simple spells. But each sphere had to be charged by a sorcerer before it would work properly. The metal even seems to retain something of that sorcerer’s essence. In the end Viller was never able to construct a sphere that would work unless the wielder had some small magical talent, no matter how slight.” He shook his head, preoccupied. “Arisilde was the only one who could successfully duplicate the design, until Niles managed it with the sphere he constructed.”

  Ilias wet his lips. He was still trying to cope with the idea of wizards having friends, and presumably families, like normal people. “So he built it. How did he get inside it?”

  Gerard absently rubbed at the tarnish with his sleeve. There was pain etched on his face as he contemplated the fate of the man he had known. “Arisilde might have been attempting to return from here to our world. Perhaps something happened during the transition, such as an attack by the Gardier, and the sphere he was using was destroyed. In an attempt to save himself, Arisilde somehow sent his soul and his consciousness into this sphere, which was stored at the Valiarde family home. This is Tremaine’s theory, based on the sphere’s responses toward her and its increasing abilities. It is just a theory.” He glanced up, shaking his head grimly. “But after Gervas’s revelation that the Gardier’s crystal devices actually contain the souls of imprisoned sorcerers, it seems all too likely.”

  Tremaine decided to take that bath, then realized once she had wrestled her boots off that she hadn’t yet retrieved her bag of belongings from the steward’s office. The lure of clean underwear was too seductive to ignore, so she padded barefoot down the quiet corridor and up the stairs to the office. There she found it under the control of several women, some Institute personnel and some from the Chaire group of refugees, all apparently having signed on as Lady Aviler’s minions. They offered to take the bag of Gerard’s belongings to his cabin and Tremaine accepted, thinking that it would be interesting to see if Lady Aviler ended up leading a faction or being the power behind one. And Tremaine was certain there would be factions.

  Walking back to the suite, listening to the quiet thrum of the ship, she decided grandly not to declare allegiance with any of them; it would be far more instructive to play them all against each other. She grinned to herself, giving up the fantasy. Attempting it in practice rather than theory sounded like a good way to get thrown off the boat.

  As she passed one of the narrow cross corridors that connected the larger bow-to-stern passages, movement out of the corner of her eye startled her. Midway down the cross corridor stood two men, one in a civilian suit and the other in dark blue naval fatigues. Reflexes common to anyone who walked the less reputable parts of Vienne kept Tremaine moving with only a slight jerk of her head to betray she had noticed them; the set of their shoulders and the way they stood conveyed furtive activity, and she was fairly sure she had seen some object change hands. It might be nothing, and it was none of her business. War profiteering, the opium trade and other criminal pursuits had flourished in Ile-Rien since so many Prefecture officers and the sorcerers who had once assisted in investigations had been either killed in the bombings or gone into the military. It would be the same on this ship, which was going to be near impossible for anyone to police. She kept an ear cocked in case either man was foolish enough to pursue a potential witness, but neither came after her.

  Back in the bathroom she started the water, then realized she had also forgotten to get soap. It didn’t matter; the hot saltwater bath in the enameled tub felt incredibly luxurious. Her various cuts, scrapes and blisters stung a bit but it was worth it. By the time she got out and dressed again, Giliead had gone down to take his turn at watching Ixion and Ilias was back.

  “How did it go?” she asked him, using one of their few precious towels to dry her hair.

  “He didn’t come back to life and kill us all,” Ilias replied laconically.

  Tremaine decided not to prod that sore point any further. The others were stirring and food was suddenly a priority.

  In search of it, she and Ilias followed the map booklet back to the grand stair and down one deck, then through an elegant foyer to the giant First Class dining area. Dyani, who had loudly declared, “I’m not afraid. I want to see it,” trailed along after them.

  The room was huge with mellow gold wood broken along the base and top of the walls by silver and bronze bands. Silvered glass panels were set above the columns that separated the main area from the private dining salons along the sides. The light from the overheads was warm and the people sitting or wandering about were far more calm than the chaotic crowd in the main hall earlier. What must have been about half the room’s original chairs and tables remained, and about a third of those were in use. The only reminder of the danger was the blackout cloth tightly tacked over the outside windows.

  Lady Aviler was right and the volunteers had managed to produce food; trolleys were lined up near the baize serving doors and several women and a few older children were dispensing bread, soup, tea and coffee. Tremaine turned to Ilias to comment only to find he wasn’t there. He and Dyani were absorbed in the set of embossed wall panels at the side of the big chamber. Going to join them, she saw the theme was “A History of Shipbuilding from Classical to Modern Times” and understood the attraction. She nudged Ilias with an elbow. “You think we can get the others down here to eat?”

  “If they don’t, they can go hungry.” Engrossed in the images, Ilias didn’t sound sympathetic to their plight.

  “Did Dannor make any more trouble?” Tremaine started to ask, when someone shouted, “It’s you!”

  She looked wildly around, thinking oh no, but the woman who had jumped up from one of the tables and now hurried toward her didn’t lo
ok hostile. She had dark hair tied back and wore men’s pants and an oversized Rienish army fatigue shirt. As the woman reached her she caught Tremaine’s hands and said in a Lowlands accent, “I thought it was you! You’re the Ile-Rien spy.”

  “Oh, no, not really—” Tremaine managed. She did know this woman; she was a Lowlands missionary who had been taken by the Gardier on Maiuta. Tremaine and Florian had spoken to her briefly when they had been captured on the island with Ilias. She hadn’t recognized the woman at first because the brilliant smile she wore now transformed her face and made her look years younger.

  “I want to thank you.” She wrung Tremaine’s hands gratefully. “I thought we would never see the sun again. And you.” She looked at Ilias. “I saw his people fight for us. Who are they?” she asked Tremaine, “I don’t recognize their language.”

  “They’re Syprians. The Gardier base was in their territory,” Tremaine explained vaguely. “But I’m not really—”

  The group at the woman’s table was standing up to leave and one of the other women called to her. The missionary glanced over her shoulder. “I must go back, but thank you.” She kissed Tremaine’s cheek quickly and darted away.