THE WIZARD HUNTERS

  “So did I, for a while there,” Ander admitted, pressing a hand to his side. “What did you mean when you said you were captured by the Gardier?”

  While Florian tried to explain, Tremaine turned to Ilias, who was still watching the conversation with a disgruntled air. He caught her eye and one brow quirked as his lips twitched in a smile. He knew Ander wasn’t happy to see him. Guiltily, she avoided his eyes, rubbing her forehead. “God, he’s not going to like this. All right.” Smiling apologetically at Ilias, she pointed to herself, Florian and Ander in turn, then held up four fingers.

  His jaw dropped. His expression eloquently said You’ve got to be kidding me.

  “I know, I know,” Tremaine said hurriedly, trying to convey what she was saying by shrugs, gestures and expressions. She pointed to Ander and mimed her head flopping over, tongue hanging out, staring eyes. “We thought he was dead. But our other friend, Gerard, is still down here somewhere.” She tugged her ear, wondering if Ilias was getting any of this or just thought she was insane. “He, Ander, heard him before the grend came.”

  Ilias made a gesture half in appeal, half in frustration, then shook his head, muttering under his breath. He turned and scrambled down the crevice.

  “Where’s he going?” Ander demanded, stepping forward to watch him.

  “To look for Gerard’s tracks.” Tremaine ran a hand through her hair, still feeling guilty. “Or he’s leaving us. If he does, we’re dead.”

  Her face etched with concern, Florian told Ander, “He has a friend lost down here. He put off looking for him to help us.” She took the medical kit out of the bag, gesturing for Ander to sit. “Are you hurt? And how did you get here? We thought you’d drowned.”

  Ander shook his head vaguely as he eased down to sit on the rock. “I was washed off the deck— I got swept into a kind of cave harbor, full of old wrecks.” He gasped as Florian pulled back his shirt, tears in his singlet revealing bloody scrapes along his ribs.

  “Sorry.” Florian glanced up at him, biting her lip.

  “It’s all right.” Ander looked toward Tremaine, then shook his head. Whether the incredulity was at her naiveté in trusting a stranger or just at her in general, she couldn’t tell. “He lives on this island? Why is he helping you?”

  “We don’t know where he lives.” Tremaine rubbed the bridge of her nose. Her eyes hurt from the bad light and her back ached from all the walking. If the grend got Gerard . . . Ilias hadn’t taken the torch with him. God, I hope he doesn‘t need it. I hope— She shook her head. It would be better if he left; if they were caught again, the Gardier would surely kill him this time.

  “He was helping us before we helped him,” Florian said pointedly.

  “So he just showed up?” Ander snorted, then grimaced, his hand going to his ribs again. He looked urgently from Florian to Tremaine. “You can’t trust him. He could be a Gardier spy.”

  “He’s not,” Tremaine said shortly. She could go into detail about why this was unlikely but she felt like being disagreeable.

  “The Gardier caught all three of us, Ander, we know he’s not a spy,” Florian told him, frowning.

  A faint scrape on stone made Tremaine’s head whip around. Ilias scrambled up the crevice, grabbed the torch from her and ground it out against the rock. Tremaine, opening her mouth to say something, snapped it shut. She heard Florian draw breath to speak and a muffled snort as Ander must have clapped a hand over her mouth.

  In the sudden darkness in the crevice Ilias took Tremaine’s arm and tugged her back toward the spot where the rock dropped away and the faint light allowed a view down on the ruins of the city. For a moment she thought she was seeing things. There was a light moving along the walkway between the double row of dark columns. She could just make out that it was carried by a human figure, with others trailing in its wake. Her imagination conjured a ritual procession, the old owners of this city or their ghosts making a tour of inspection of their ruined homes. Then the group turned off the walkway and made their way through the collapsed buildings, nearing the plaza where they had fought the grend. Then she saw the color of their uniforms in their lamplight.

  Gardier again. She ducked reflexively, though there was no way they could see up here in the shadows.

  The group paused in the plaza and the Gardier in the lead held what looked like field glasses to his eyes, studying the cave wall. What is he doing? she wondered. Field glasses wouldn’t help in this dim light and the wall wasn’t that far. Not field glasses, aether-glasses, you idiot. He was looking for spells.

  Then she stopped breathing, grabbing Ilias’s arm in reflex. The leader wore a makeshift sling over one shoulder. It was the sling Gerard had carried the sphere in and she could tell it held something the right size. “Dammit,” she said under her breath. The sight of the Gardier with the sphere made her sick with rage. “Oh, I can’t believe this.”

  “What is it?” Florian whispered at the same time Ander demanded, low-voiced, “What’s down there?”

  “Gardier, they’ve got the sphere,” she reported. “They must have Gerard too.” We should have moved faster, caught up sooner. This is all my fault. “Goddammit.”

  “No. Oh no.” Florian scrambled forward over the loose scree, putting her hands on Ilias’s shoulders to peer past him.

  Ander followed her, crouching behind the rock on the other side of the opening. “They’re Gardier, all right. What is that he’s . .. Those have got to be aether-glasses.”

  Tremaine grimaced, glancing at him. “And he’s not using them to look for the local grend sorcerer.”

  Ilias nudged Tremaine with his elbow, pointed down at the Gardier and held up four fingers. Tremaine stared. “What? Yes, there’s four of them.”

  “No, wait, four,” Florian interrupted, thumping her on the arm. “The fourth person. He means Gerard.”

  “Oh, right! Yes.” Tremaine nodded rapidly. “Yes, they have something of ours, that bag.” She shook the satchel hanging over Florian’s shoulder and pointed at the Gardier leader to explain. “They must have him too.”

  “Where is he?” Florian muttered. “They’d want to question him.” The leader seemed to be staring right at them, the etheric lenses pointing directly at their hiding spot as the man scanned the cave wall. She sank down behind Ilias, who shifted uneasily.

  “They can’t see us,” Tremaine said, more hopeful than certain. The shadows under the heavy shelf of rock were too dark. They were just lucky Ilias had seen them in time to douse the torch. “They must have found Gerard and the sphere using those lenses, and they’re looking for more.”

  “We can’t let them have the sphere,” Ander said with grim purpose.

  “No kidding,” Tremaine snarled. We can’t let them have Gerard either. The Gardier leader lowered the lenses, staring up at the cave wall. The moment stretched as Tremaine’s nerves jittered. Then he motioned for the others to follow and the group moved off, working their way through the tumbled remains of the buildings.

  Ilias shifted impatiently and spoke, jerking his head down toward the retreating Gardier. Tremaine nodded sharply, not bothering to consult Ander. He was the Intelligence expert and probably better at this but some stubborn voice in her head didn’t want him running the show. “Yes, we’re going after them.”

  Ilias was able to track the Gardier’s passage through the leaf loam and decay collected on the paving stones and this let them hang back far enough to avoid being seen. The Gardier took a path that wound deeper into the sunken city, past another curving colonnade of stone-log pillars and a fantastic screen of stalagmites and stalactites that looked as if it would be at home in some elaborate cathedral. Ilias paused to make quick marks on the stone a couple of times, though Ander eyed this process with suspicion. “Why is he doing that?”

  Ilias might not understand the words but he correctly interpreted the tone, and the look he cast back at Ander as he stood up and tucked his knife away was definitely piqued. Tremaine rolled her eyes. The last thin
g they needed was to insult Ilias. After all this she didn’t think he would abandon them down here, but he didn’t have to help them find Gerard, either. “He does that so we can find our way back,” Tremaine said, picking a possibility at random. Florian nodded helpfully. Faced with this logic, Ander let it drop.

  Peering cautiously over the rocks, they glimpsed the Gardier climbing an uneven set of steps up to a large plaza elevated atop bundled piles of the long stones. Tremaine snarled under her breath, knowing there was no way they could follow them across the plaza without being spotted. But Ilias led them to one side of it, around a ruined structure where the shadows were deep. A narrow channel ran between the plaza and the rough rock of the cave wall and they traversed this cavity with difficulty, slipping in the dark. Tremaine had many bruising encounters with sharp rocks. At one point Ilias stopped abruptly and gestured for them to climb along the rock wall to avoid an apparently innocuous muddy flat.

  “Why does he want us to go that way?” Ander objected. Tremaine suspected he was still smarting over the encounter in the crevice. “What does—”

  With a gasp, Florian tugged his sleeve and pointed. Tremaine leaned to look and saw the ground was rippling. She edged back hurriedly. Whatever was digging there just below the surface, it was much larger than a badger.

  “Never mind,” Ander said, low-voiced.

  Already climbing the rock to avoid whatever it was, Ilias glanced back with a disgusted snort.

  Not far past the danger spot, Ilias motioned for them to wait and scrambled up the ruins of a stone staircase that cut upward through the base of the plaza. They waited impatiently until he reappeared and gestured for them to follow.

  Tremaine managed to shove in ahead of Ander and climbed up the narrow rocky trench after Ilias. He stopped at a spot where a gap between the stones revealed the glow of electric lamplight, crouching down to look through. Tremaine eased in beside him, looked, and felt her stomach clench in a knot.

  The four Gardier they had followed had joined two others at what had to be their temporary base camp, set up in an open area ringed by the remains of a large building, tumbled and broken pillars marking the boundaries. And they had Gerard.

  The sorcerer sat on the ground, cross-legged, his hands bound behind him. Tremaine could make out his disgruntled expression from here. He didn’t seem to be injured. His shirt and vest were open at the throat and his coat was missing. “Right,” she muttered, keeping her voice low. Now what? Ander crouched beside her and swore softly under his breath and she heard Florian scramble up behind her.

  Two of the Gardier held rifles and stood guard on either side of the little camp. They had a few large battery lamps to light the area and what looked like a portable wireless stood on a handy flat rock. Tremaine could hear the squeal of static occasionally as one of the Gardier fiddled with the dials. Ander leaned over to whisper, “They can’t be using ordinary radio signals in these caves; that set’s got to have some kind of magical booster.”

  “I knew that,” she whispered back, annoyed.

  The one with the sphere sat on a rock a few feet away from Gerard. Tossing the sling away, he examined the sphere curiously, occasionally addressing a question to Gerard, which the sorcerer stolidly ignored.

  “He’s got one of those translator crystals,” Florian leaned over Tremaine’s shoulder to whisper. “See, he touches it when he tries to talk to Gerard.”

  “What?” Ander frowned.

  Tremaine shook her head impatiently. “They have some kind of magical translators for our language. They don’t work that well.”

  Ilias nudged her and motioned for them all to move back from the opening. “You’ve got an idea?” Tremaine asked him hopefully.

  “How can you tell?” Ander murmured as he shifted back to make room.

  “He’s got that look.” Tremaine watched as Ilias found a patch of damp earth in the light from the opening and started to draw. She studied the diagram thoughtfully. Communication would be much more difficult if we didn’t have one plan: distract it/them and then throw rocks. “That’s where we are now, that’s the Gardier . . . but what’s that?”

  Ilias sighed, rubbed his forehead wearily as if tired of pantomiming every sentence, and then mimed digging, and pointed vigorously back down the way they had come.

  “The digging thing,” Florian guessed, thumping Tremaine’s arm excitedly. “He means we get the digging thing to come out and attack the Gardier. Caertah, that was the word he used with the grend.”

  “Bait.” Tremaine nodded thoughtfully. “All right, but not you,” she told Ilias. She tapped herself in the chest. “Me.”

  Nobody else liked the idea.

  They retired further back down the broken stair to have the argument, with Ilias torn between returning to the opening to watch the Gardier and coming back to use various sign language techniques to tell Tremaine she was crazy.

  “Tremaine, it’s ridiculous, you can’t,” Ander told her firmly, in as no-nonsense a tone as he could manage in a whisper.

  “Look, there’s six of them, you have to be ready to jump them,” she replied in a hushed voice, adding an aside to Ilias, “And don’t think I don’t know exactly what you’re saying because there are some attitudes that don’t need translation.”

  He planted his hands on his hips and glared, but the effect was ruined by the fringe of fluffy hair where the mud had washed off. Ander’s glare was perfectly functional. He said, “You are going to get yourself killed.”

  Tremaine pressed her lips together. That was unfair, considering for once that wasn’t what she was planning at all. Telling him that wouldn’t exactly help her case.

  “All right, I see why one of them can’t do it,” Florian put in with some asperity, ignoring Ander, “but why not me?”

  “You fall down a lot,” Tremaine told her.

  “So do you!” she protested.

  “Not as much as you.”

  This stymied Florian, who obviously hadn’t been keeping track. Tremaine hadn’t been keeping track either but Florian didn’t know that.

  “You can’t do this,” Ander told her, shifting from no-nonsense-let’s-be-reasonable to anger. “I’m not going to let you.”

  “Sure you are,” Tremaine said, in a deliberately maddening tone. She knew Ander couldn’t argue worth a damn when he was angry. “We’re wasting time.” She stood up, turning to climb back down the jumbled steps.

  Ander swore, pushing to his feet to block her way. “Dammit, Tremaine, you are not—”

  Ilias shouldered in and forced Ander back a step. Annoyed, Ander shoved him in the chest but Ilias didn’t move. Ander was a few inches taller but Ilias suddenly seemed to be taking up a lot more room in the narrow passage.

  While Tremaine stood there stupidly, wondering who was going to win, Florian stepped forward, saying in a sharp whisper, “Don’t fight!” She clouted Ander in the ear and aimed a blow at Ilias. With faster reflexes Ilias ducked, giving her a reproachful glare.

  “Dammit, Florian.” Ander clutched his ear, glaring at her incredulously. Finding one thing they could agree on, he and Ilias exchanged mutually outraged expressions.

  “It was a reflex,” Florian explained, still ruffled. “I’ve got four younger brothers.”

  “We don’t have time to argue.” Seizing the opportunity, Tremaine pushed past everybody, leading the way down.

  “Wait.” Ander caught up with her, carefully not touching her arm. He glanced warily back at Ilias. “Let’s talk this over.”

  Frustrated, Tremaine let him draw her a little further down the crevice, just out of earshot of the others. Ilias watched this suspiciously and Florian put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

  It was hard to make out any expression in the dim light, but Ander asked softly, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Tremaine let out an exasperated breath. “Are you?”

  “You know what I mean.” He shook his head. “I know Gerard knows all about it, so
I didn’t tell Averi about the asylum, but—”

  Tremaine just stared at him. It was so unfair to bring that up right now. “I am not crazy.”

  “I know that. But—”

  “But—” There’s always a “but” when it comes to my sanity. It was taking a great deal of effort to keep her voice low and not explode. “You want to know the truth? I was kidnapped by an old enemy of my father’s and locked up in a mental asylum. My father found out about it and pieces of the people responsible were found floating in the river for a month. Only the Prefecture never could figure out how many people it was, because there were more right parts than left. That’s an old Valiarde family joke. But it ended up in the society column that Tremaine Valiarde spent a week in a nuthouse and that’s all the family enemies really wanted anyway, though they didn’t expect to have to give their lives for it. That’s the story of Tremaine and the asylum.”

  Ander stared at her. He shook his head, caught somewhere between fascination and shock. “If that’s true—I thought your father was—”

  “I’ll tell you what he was later.” Tremaine gestured helplessly. She hadn’t meant to get into this just at the moment. “If it’s not true, so what? I used to be crazy. You used to be a playboy that everybody thought would run as far from the war as possible, and you didn’t. You ran toward it. So why can’t I?”

  “All right, all right.” Ander looked away, shaking his head. “Your new friend doesn’t need to protect you from me.”

  She knew he didn’t mean Florian. “Why don’t you convince him of that?” She motioned for the others to come on and started back down the crevice herself.

  Behind her, Ander muttered under his breath, “Who put you in charge?”

  Tremaine was pretty certain it was a rhetorical question.

  “Yes, I know the way. Yes, I know what to do. Now go on, go, shoo.” Tremaine and Ilias were crouched down in the shadowy lower passage, near where the ground still rippled with the digging creature’s efforts. Ander and Florian had already gone to take their positions for the ambush.