The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (9 page)

Ilias drew breath to suggest they explore it now, then thought of how Tremaine and Giliead would feel, waiting and worrying. “We should get back, tell the others what we found. And that we’re not dead.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” Reluctantly, Gerard moved back toward the main chamber. As they came out into the wan daylight, he made the wizard light vanish with a distracted wave of his hand. “We’ll need to come back with a larger group, and—”

“Wait, wait. I saw something.” Ilias crossed to the side wall, studying the half column there intently. “Something flashed in the light, like metal.”

“Where?” Gerard demanded, hastily following him over.

It was too dark in the corner formed by the column to see it, whatever it was. Wary of curse traps, Ilias didn’t want to feel around for it. He stepped back, motioning to Gerard. “Make the light again.”

Gerard made a preoccupied gesture and the light sprang into existence above his head, banishing the shadows from the dark corner. Ilias spotted it immediately, pointing. “There.”

Gerard stepped close, squinting, lifting the glass pieces over his eyes to peer at it. “Good God,” he whispered, startled.

It was a squiggle of what Ilias could now recognize as Rienish writing, marked on the stone with some white substance. Near it, wedged into a small crack in the carving, was a round metallic disk, like an ornament or a game counter. “What does it say?” he asked impatiently.

“It says ‘The Scribe’ in Rienish.” Gerard sounded incredulous. “And this…” He scraped at the object with his thumb and managed to push it free. He turned it over on his palm and Ilias leaned to look, seeing it was of a light-colored metal incised with the delicate little figure of a flower. “Is a button.”

Ilias nodded, seeing it was like those on Gerard’s coat, though the design was different.

“But why back in this corner and not in a more obvious place?” Gerard said, half to himself.

Ilias jerked his head toward the opening. “Rain and dust gets blown in here and might have worn the writing away, if it was any closer to the opening. It’s sheltered back here.” He cautiously dabbed at one of the strokes forming the words, figuring Gerard would have warned him if it was a curse trap. A white powdery substance came away on his finger.

“Yes. Yes, that must be it. It’s written with chalk. I suppose we’re lucky it lasted this long.” Gerard shook his head slowly. “ ‘The Scribe’ is vaguely familiar. I think it’s the title of something, a book or a play.” He lifted a brow ironically. “I strongly suspect Nicholas will be able to tell us.”

“Why?” Ilias demanded.

“Because this button is made of white gold, a metal that can’t be used to conduct etheric activity, unlike silver. It’s a sorcerer’s coat button.” Gerard closed his hand around it, his expression intent. “And it can only belong to one person.”

Y
es.” Nicholas studied the button, turning it over on his palm. “Arisilde must have left it there.”

Tremaine had shouldered her way in between him and Gerard to see. She picked up the button. “So he was there.” It only made sense.
Why else give us the circle to go there? But what did he want us to see?
Whatever it was, it didn’t seem as if Ilias and Gerard had found it.

She hadn’t known just how worried she had been until both men had appeared in the circle again, no worse for wear. A gust of cool outdoor air from the other world had accompanied them, with a scatter of dead leaves that had drifted to the ballroom floor like torn paper fragments. She had seen Giliead rub his face to conceal his expression and look away, and Florian fan herself with a sheaf of notes, and knew she hadn’t been the only one. The initial experiments at the Viller Institute with the spell circle had had immediately fatal consequences for the sorcerer involved, but that had been without Arisilde’s help and without a correctly assembled sphere. She hadn’t worried about that.
Well, not much anyway,
she admitted to herself. But there had been no telling where this circle was meant to go and what they would find waiting for them.

“How can you be certain?” Florian asked, standing on tiptoe to look over Tremaine’s shoulder. She sounded a little skeptical. “I can’t remember what Gerard’s coat buttons look like and I’m standing right next to him.”

“Because it comes from one of my old coats, the one Arisilde was wearing when I sent him back,” Nicholas told her.

Tremaine nodded, remembering. “He never bought clothes. He just wore whatever he could find.”

Ander lifted a brow. “He sounds like he was a little…” He glanced at the sphere, sitting nearby on the table, and obviously decided to choose another word. “Unique, for a sorcerer. I wish I’d met him.”

Nicholas slanted him an opaque look, but Tremaine was willing to concede that compared with Gerard and Niles, Arisilde had looked like a mad ragpicker. And in his case, it wasn’t for an intentional effect, as it was when Nicholas assumed that guise.

“What did the writing mean?” Ilias asked, watching Nicholas. “ ‘The Scribe’? It was a message to you?”

“Yes.” Nicholas glanced at him. “It’s the title of a painting in my collection, one of my favorites. Years ago Arisilde constructed a spell for me, using the painting to…keep an eye on an acquaintance of mine.”

Gerard was nodding, lost in thought. “I thought it sounded familiar. But did he mean it to suggest that he was spying on someone? That he had followed someone there?”

Nicholas was staring at the coat button, his brows drawn together. “I think it may mean… that he felt he was being followed, or watched. By some method he couldn’t discover.”

Tremaine looked from Gerard to Nicholas. “Was it me?” she demanded. “Were you using the painting to spy on me?”

“What? No!” Nicholas stared at her, startled into showing honest affront. “For the love of God, Tremaine, it was years before you were born.”

“Oh.” Tremaine subsided, aware she was being a little overwrought. “Maybe he just wanted you to be sure it was he who left the message.”

Ignoring them, Gerard continued, “Nevertheless, this is an important discovery. These new symbols, compared with the original circle, can tell us so much more about how the individual elements that make up the spell actually work. It could allow us to manipulate them, to choose our destination, so we could construct another circle that could transport us to Lodun from any point in the staging world, or even from our own world—”

Ander nodded. “It means we can get inside Lodun and get the people out, without the Gardier knowing until it’s too late.”

“If we can devise the right circle,” Gerard added, giving Ander a repressive look. “I’ll report to Colonel Averi, and I suggest the rest of you get some sleep.”

T
he next morning dawned far too soon, at least for Tremaine. It had been well past midnight when she went to bed but she woke after only a few hours, her mind retracing yesterday’s events in exhausting detail. Seeing the gray line of daylight under the door didn’t help.

She crawled out of the still–faintly musty bed, cursing as her bare feet touched the cold boards. Fumbling along the wall, she found the switch for the wall sconce and pushed it, blinking at the dim glow of the shaded electric light. She gathered her clothes up from the chair where she had left them but the cold was funneling right up her cotton nightgown as if it was a chimney, and she made a run back for the bed.

Ilias was lying on his stomach, arms curled around a pillow, watching her blearily. “What are you doing?”

“It’s cold,” she said through chattering teeth, pushing her feet under the blankets to warm them against his side. He gasped and woke up a little more. His queue was unraveling and his hair was a mass of frayed tangles and curls, spreading out over the muscles of his shoulders, the two long lines of scar tissue showing through the strands. The scars were a souvenir of Ixion, of a transformation spell that had reversed when Giliead had cut Ixion’s head off. The spell was the reason Ilias had gotten the curse mark. Absently she picked up one of his smaller braids, picking it apart to redo it.

He eyed her a moment. “Are you nervous about something?”

“No,” she said firmly, deciding to ignore the hint. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” He buried his face in the pillow again. But after a moment, he asked, “We’re going back to the cave with the circle today?”

We? Hah!
Tremaine thought, her mouth twisting bitterly. She didn’t think she was likely to be included.
And if you were, what could you do?
“They have to have a meeting about it first. Before I came up last night Gerard had telephoned Averi, who said the Capidarans want a piece of it too.” She tried to keep her annoyed snarl subvocal. “I don’t know how much use we’re going to get out of it. We already knew the Gardier steal everything they can find and use it for their own purposes. And we already knew they must have found the spell circle somewhere else; so we found one of the places where they could have stumbled on it. In your world. Somehow.”

“Yes,” Ilias said dryly into the pillow. “They stumbled on it, and they thought, Here’s gibberish scratched on the ground, let’s pop a wizard into a piece of pretty rock and see if it takes us to another world.”

Tremaine lifted her brows, giving the braid a deliberate tug. “Damn, you are a sarcastic bastard. No wonder Giliead is so intimidated by you.”

Ilias turned his head just enough to regard her with one eye and an air of deeply affronted suspicion. She clarified, “Yes, I am making fun of you.” She took the point, though. They did have much more to find out and the new circle and its destination were just a single piece of the puzzle.
You’re being a pessimist again,
she reminded herself with asperity,
you gave that up, remember?

She finished the braid, retying the end and reaching for the next. But he pushed himself up on his elbows, tossing the other braids out of her immediate reach. He took her hand, absently running his thumb over her bitten nails. “Why did you bring Ander here?”

“Oh God, good question.” She shook her head. “Because I hate myself.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, unimpressed. Tremaine gave in and explained, “He still sees me the same way he saw me five years ago, as a silly little girl. Oh, maybe he’s condescended to elevate me to plucky little girl. And I have enough problems with trying to figure out who I am.” She shrugged helplessly. “I can’t help wanting to give him opportunities to—I don’t know, prove me wrong. Or prove himself right. It might be nice to be the plucky little girl who is absolutely sure what’s right, who doesn’t have blood on her hands, who’s never made decisions that got people killed.”

Ilias shook his head. “Maybe he just wants something to stay the same as it used to be,” he said, sounding intensely reluctant to make this concession. Then he looked up at her through the tangled fringe of his hair. “I like grown women.”

Tremaine eyed him for a moment. “All right, I take back the sarcastic bastard remark,” she conceded. “It was true, but I take it back.”

L
ater, Ilias sat at the big table in the kitchen with Tremaine and Giliead. He was having trouble deciding if he was still angry at Giliead, but the food Derathi had brought that morning was rapidly improving his mood. Gerard and Florian had gone to meet with the Capidaran wizards at the port, Ander accompanying them, Giaren had gone to report to Niles, and Kias had taken Calit back to the
Ravenna
. Cletia and Cimarus hadn’t made an appearance yet this morning, a situation Ilias hoped would continue. He felt he could get along fine without ever seeing them during their entire stay in the house.

The talking curse box kept ringing shrilly from the front room and Tremaine kept getting up to answer it, returning in a state of increasing annoyance. Nicholas was here somewhere, but apparently he was no longer bothering to respond to the box’s incessant demands.

She returned yet again, muttering, “No, no one’s here. No, that hasn’t changed in the past five minutes. Yes, I do believe they are perfectly capable of placing a call once they do get back here, if they want to talk to you, which frankly, I can’t imagine why they would.” She dropped into a chair, rubbing her face.

Giliead winced sympathetically. Ilias picked up one of the heavy little buns filled with sweet cream, asking Tremaine, “So has anybody said when we go back yet?”

“No.” She propped her chin on her hand, sounding resigned. “I’m betting it will be this afternoon when the Capidarans come. Gerard can get a look at the night sky in the other world then, if it’s not cloudy.” She lifted a brow ironically, turning her cup around on the table. “You can imagine how thrilled Nicholas is about the Capidarans.”

Ilias nodded, lifting his brows. To say Nicholas was somewhat protective of his privacy was a vast understatement. It was like saying Pasima was somewhat worried about her status in Cineth.

Giliead leaned forward, poking at one of the buns. “We need to decide what to take.” He glanced a little self-consciously at Ilias. “You said it was cold there?”

That trace of hesitancy, and the sign that Giliead meant to help them after all, got Ilias over the last of his pique. He shrugged, feeling guilty over letting it drag out this long. “It wasn’t bad while we were there, but it would be much worse at night. We’d need warm clothes, blankets if we stay there any time. And water. There should be a way down to the river from those passages, but we didn’t see one. I’d rather not take the chance.”

“Yes, it would be nice to be prepared this time,” Tremaine put in, picking up her cup. “Like with a sphere and a sorcerer.” The curse box shrieked again and she swore, thumped the cup back down and stamped off to answer it.

Giliead picked up a cloth, absently mopping up the liquid that had slopped out of her cup. He said slowly, “You know I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Ilias interrupted. He wasn’t exactly happy with how he had reacted. It was a stupid thing to do in the middle of a battle, and even if they weren’t fighting right at the moment, this was still the middle of a battle.

Tremaine returned, but though she was frowning, she looked considerably less irritated. “That was Colonel Averi. He wants me to come down there. It’s something about that damned Gardier woman they’ve been questioning forever.”

“I’ll go with you.” Ilias got to his feet. Since there was nothing more to do here at the moment, he might as well.

S
ince she was going to talk to a Gardier prisoner, Tremaine didn’t change out of the Syprian clothes she had put on earlier, the dark pair of pants and the gold shirt with the sleeves that tied back. Her battered boots, an overcoat and a cap made it a comfortable and convenient outfit for tramping through the cold and muddy streets. She knew from speaking to Balin before that the Gardier woman found the signs of alliance between the Syprians and the Rienish disconcerting. Not disconcerting in a “my enemies are allying with each other” way, but disconcerting in a “my enemies are intimate with animals” way. The Gardier had never seen the Syprians as people.

Tremaine briefly considered a taxicab but automobiles made Ilias ill, so she decided to walk to the Port Authority. It wasn’t a long way and would give her a chance to work off her excess energy.

“We didn’t come this way before,” Ilias said, as the street she had chosen expanded into an open circular plaza. It wasn’t large by Ile-Rien’s standards, but it was almost palatial given Capistown’s lack of space. It was paved with a gray-veined stone that gleamed in the overcast light. In the center, surrounded by bright beds of early-spring flowers, was an oversize statue of a female figure swathed in robes and holding a sword.

“Nicholas likes back alleys,” Tremaine explained, turning onto the covered promenade that ran around the perimeter of the plaza. It was fronted by expensive shops, the local telegraph office and several cafés. The inclement weather had caused the café patrons to withdraw inside, but as she and Ilias passed an open set of double doors, Tremaine heard a mandolin chorus and smelled sweet bread. She sighed. She thought the Syprians would enjoy Capistown more if they had a chance to explore the places where people actually lived, and not just the refugee hostel and the government buildings they had been trapped in so long. She had heard of a confectionery somewhere in this district that sold chocolates shaped like seashells; maybe on the way back she could find it.

Ilias nudged her elbow, asking in a low voice, “Who are they?”

Craning her neck to get one last sniff of the café, Tremaine hadn’t seen the small group of people sitting on the paving stones just off the promenade, dangerously close to the motorcar and wagon traffic circling the plaza. They wore ragged cloaks over skirts of braided grasses and brief leather tabards, and both women and men had cropped dark hair with tribal scarring and tattoos decorating their sallow skin. None of them looked healthy, and the children and elders were close to emaciated. They had clay bowls set out on the pavement and were ostensibly selling jewelry made of polished stone and braided hair, though they were probably doing more begging.

“They’re Massian natives, they lived here before Capidara was colonized.”
And if we don’t stop the Gardier, that’s better than what will happen to the Syprians,
she reminded herself. The Gardier would simply exterminate the inhabitants of the Syrnai.
And if by some miracle we do win the war, are they any better off?
her self retorted. The rich forests around Cineth would tempt any number of land barons, eager for new territories to exploit, and the rest of the city-states were probably just as lush. The Capidarans already had the secret of building the spheres and what was left of the Rienish government couldn’t even protect its own people, let alone its otherworld native allies.

Ilias frowned, probably baffled at why the Massians were sitting in the street. “What’s colonized?” he asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar Rienish word.

She shook her head, tugging at the sleeve of his borrowed coat to get him to move along. “It’s not important.”
And I hope you need never find out.

A light rain had started by the time they reached the Port Authority. One of Averi’s corporals met them in the foyer, a large echoing space floored with dark marble and occupied by the usual contingent of Capidaran bureaucrats and businessmen hurrying back and forth. As was apparently standard for Capidaran public spaces, it was too cold in the building for Tremaine to bother leaving her coat at the cloakroom and Ilias kept his as well.

The corporal led them up the back stairs to the floor of the rather cramped and dingy offices given over to the Rienish authorities. Strangely dressed Rienish and Syprians were a more familiar sight here, and a couple of Capidaran naval officers and a woman secretary Tremaine recognized from the various meetings she had attended actually said hello to her. They reached Averi’s area, where there were more familiar faces and even a few officers Tremaine knew in passing from the
Ravenna,
most contemplating some naval charts and captured Gardier maps tacked up on the wall.

Averi appeared almost immediately out of the back room, greeting them brusquely with, “I heard about the experiment last night. You were lucky you didn’t kill yourselves, going through a gate into some unknown place.” Colonel Averi was the highest-ranking Rienish army officer in Capidara; if there were others who had taken evacuation transports, none had made it here. He was an older man, with a grim face and thinning dark hair. He and Tremaine had had their problems when they first met, but they had managed to achieve an almost accommodating working relationship. Capistown hadn’t improved Averi’s health any either; he still looked thin, pale and more like he should be lying in a hospital bed than planning an attack on Ile-Rien’s occupied coast.

Tremaine nudged Ilias, who was craning his neck to see the charts, saying pointedly, “He’s talking to you.”

“What?” He looked startled, then shrugged, telling Averi in Rienish, “We had to find where it went. It’s lucky every time we go through and don’t die.”

Averi didn’t seem satisfied with this answer, but he didn’t pursue it either, just shaking his head and gesturing for them to follow him back to the inner room.

It was more private but not any better appointed, with wooden filing cabinets and a table covered with papers, most weighed down by a large book of standard nautical charts. “I’ve had Balin brought here from the cells in the Magistrates’ Court,” he said. “There’s a room we use on this floor for questioning.”