The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (26 page)

Ilias hastily deposited his burdens on the steps and she followed suit, starting down the stairs after him as quietly as she could. They were about two landings from the bottom and Ilias made it in near silence, taking two or three steps at a time. Tremaine hurried after him, pulling the rifle off her shoulder and cradling it.
I really need to find a pistol,
she thought, her heart pounding.

Tremaine reached the corridor several steps behind Ilias. It looked undisturbed to her unpracticed eye, dust motes drifting in the shafts of sunlight, but Ilias crouched to examine the floor. “Someone’s been here,” he said quietly.

Tremaine’s mouth twisted in rueful acknowledgment. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

He pointed to various scuff marks in the dust. “There’s where Gil and I came and went when we found these steps, where Gil showed Gerard and Aras, then where you and I just came. Then there’s that.” He tapped the floor thoughtfully.

“That wasn’t here earlier?” Tremaine tried to keep one eye on the now ominously empty corridor while trying to see what he was pointing at.

He shook his head, grimly certain, and carefully followed the track a few paces down the corridor. “He came after us, stopped just at the stairs—he must have heard us talking—then ran away.” He crouched to look at the tracks again and lifted his brows. “It’s not the kind of boot the Gardier wear, or like you wear. It’s flat on the bottom, like our boots.”

“That’s something.” Tremaine felt the tightness in her chest ease. If it was a native to this area who had been frightened off by unfamiliar voices in a place he had expected to find deserted…
That would be nice.
But somehow she didn’t think so. “If you were out somewhere around Cineth, hunting or whatever, and you heard a man and a woman talking, even in a language you didn’t understand, would you run away?”

“No.” Ilias pushed to his feet, throwing her an ironic look. “Not unless I didn’t want them to see me because I was planning to kill them.”

Tremaine sighed. “That’s what I thought.”

G
erard frowned in concern, looking down the dark corridor into the unexplored wing. “Are you certain you don’t want me to accompany you?”

“Yes, because getting our only sorcerer killed and spending the rest of our lives stuck here sounds like such a good idea,” Tremaine told him, exasperated. “Now will you go back?” She adjusted the Gardier ammunition pouch on her belt and found herself checking the rifle yet again to make sure it was loaded.

At the intersection of the other passages, Ilias had found footprints in the dust where the intruder had turned into the other wing. Now Tremaine, Ilias and Giliead were going after him. Tremaine felt it would be at least as much fun as searching the
Ravenna;
in other words, dangerous and exhausting.

Aras had been sent back to watch Balin, Cletia to keep watch in the circle chamber and Cimarus had been moved to the corridor intersection, so he could watch for anyone attempting to enter their wing. He was armed with one of the bows and was uneasily surveying the dark corridors.

“I’ll try not to let any strangers in, no matter how persuasive their arguments,” Gerard told Tremaine, still repressively. “Just don’t get hurt.”

Tremaine snorted in derision as they started down the corridor. She kept behind Ilias and Giliead, who were walking a little apart, Giliead keeping his eyes on the corridor ahead and Ilias scanning the ground, following the tracks the intruder had left.

They had decided that the bows were better left to guard their camp, since Tremaine had the rifle. Both men distrusted the rifle on principle, but were willing to admit it was a necessary evil. And it might actually be useful, since the chances were that the intruder was not a Gardier.

Besides the distinct difference in boot soles Ilias had noted, Tremaine thought that if a Gardier had heard them he would have been back by now with more men to investigate. And the Gardier would have posted guards in this circle chamber.

They came to a little rotunda that formed an intersection of three corridors, two of them with lower ceilings and fewer louvers, leading off into shadowy depths. The third opened into a larger hall, lined with a double row of columns in an elegant hourglass shape that must be more to ornament the space rather than support the ceiling.

Ilias stooped to check a patch of dusty floor that to Tremaine’s eyes looked no different from any other, and jerked his head toward the large hall. “That way.” He kept his voice low.

“This looks like a main entrance,” Tremaine put in quietly. The back of her neck was prickling, but in these long stretches with no debris to hide behind, she knew no one could be watching them. At least, she hoped so.

Giliead nodded, turning to scan the area again. Tremaine had noticed one of them was always on watch when the other’s attention was distracted. When Ilias searched for faint footmarks on the dirty stone, Giliead was watching the corridor; when Giliead paused to look for curse traps, Ilias made sure nothing crept up on him from behind. They seemed to do it by habit, automatically, with never any need to discuss it. Giliead said thoughtfully, “Funny that it’s here and not back where the outside doorway is. But they must have used the curse circles to come and go.”

Tremaine, who was still hoping for a better outside exit, had to reluctantly agree. It did look as if visitors had been meant to enter the fortress through the circles, then proceed down here to the formal entrance hall. “So where did our mysterious stranger come from? Did he climb down the cliffs to get in here? The only thing we’ve seen so far that a scavenger could use is the loose stone, and he couldn’t haul that up the cliff without a lot of help. Besides, with all these mountains around, it’s not as if there’s a stone shortage.”

“We don’t know he’s alone,” Ilias told her, taking the first cautious step into the hourglass hall, looking up to make sure nothing was about to drop on them from above. “And we don’t know he didn’t come through a curse gate like we did.”

“But—” Tremaine was about to say that the man wasn’t a Gardier, so couldn’t have come through the gates.
Circular thinking like that is not going to help.
Following Ilias, she said, “You mean people besides the Gardier and us, who have the gate spell and a way to make it work without killing themselves.”

Giliead threw her a wry look. “Why not?”

Tremaine protested, “Because it’s complicated enough the way it is.” But she could too easily see it. This place, like the Wall Port and the city under the Isle of Storms, was so old there wasn’t a stick of furniture, a scrap of fabric or paper left behind. The people who built it had to be long dead, vanished into the past. The only attraction the place had was the circles.

They reached the end of the hourglass hall and Ilias followed the tracks through a maze of smaller corridors. Tremaine noted that at first she had found the fortress’s large empty spaces grand and airy, but now they seemed ominous and menacing. Her nerves jumped at every whisper of wind.

The tracks finally led into a passage that was littered knee deep in rubble from a collapsed loft or gallery. Down its length, Tremaine could see entrances to several other branching corridors. As Ilias surveyed the expanse of track-concealing debris in disgust and Giliead watched the corridor, Tremaine asked, “So did he know we’d follow him like this? Did he come this way deliberately to try to lose us? Am I asking too many questions? Don’t answer that one.” She was half suspecting an ambush but the corridor was well lit by sunlight falling through the louvers and unless someone had buried himself under the heavy rubble, it was unoccupied.

“It’s the natural thing to do,” Ilias admitted, glancing back at her.

“Natural for you.” Someone who wasn’t an expert in tracking might not realize his passage could be read from the dusty stone floor almost as easily as in dirt or mud; Tremaine didn’t think she would have thought of it, but she made a mental note now.

Tremaine ended up sitting on a rock in the middle of the corridor, keeping watch with the rifle across her knees while Ilias and Giliead cast back and forth, checking the branching corridors for revealing tracks. Her stomach was starting to grumble and she wondered how long this was going to take. If it turned out their intruder was just a Hisian who lived in the area and liked to explore the fortress, and who had lit out for home at being startled by strangers, this was all an appalling waste of time. But they had to make certain.

Finally, both men returned; Giliead with a thoughtful expression and Ilias frowning. “So you couldn’t find his tracks?” Tremaine asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

Ilias shook his head, sharing a grim look with Giliead. “We found too many tracks.”

Tremaine stared. “What?”

“People, a lot of people, have been passing through here, back and forth, for a long time,” Giliead clarified. He glanced around again, brows drawn together as he considered the situation. “Their tracks are everywhere. You can even see paths in all this broken stone, once you know where to look.”

“That’s wonderful,” Tremaine muttered. She couldn’t see paths through the rubble, even when she looked. “But we didn’t see any sign of them back in the gate chamber.”

“They must get their food and water and wood somewhere else. There has to be another entrance,” Ilias pointed out. “They probably don’t go to our half of the fortress often; there isn’t anything useful there but those fountains.”

“And those are probably all over the building….” Tremaine suppressed a groan. “But they don’t come to the gate chamber, so they must not use the spell—”

“Unless there’s curse circles all over the building too.” Ilias shook his head, distracted. He grimaced. “This makes it different.”

“It could be a wizard,” Giliead told Tremaine before she could ask. “Our kind of wizard. They find places like this to take over, like Ixion did on the island. These people that go back and forth through here, they could be slaves, apprentices. And if it is a wizard, there could be curselings.”

Tremaine nodded slowly, getting to her feet, her palms sweaty on the rifle stock. He was right. They knew this place was in the Syrnai. And the Syrnai meant Syprian wizards. “And I don’t suppose there’s a god around here.”

Giliead shook his head, still grim. “No. I’d feel it if there was one here. They don’t conceal themselves like the god-sphere. There’s nothing.”

“That other tall section, which Gerard thought was another gate chamber, should be that way.” Ilias jerked his chin toward one of the branching corridors. “If they use curses, that’s where we’ll find them.”

N
icholas strolled along the
Ravenna
’s top deck, taking in the early-morning air and waiting for a chance to make trouble. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait long.

One of the quicker ways to bypass the ship’s long internal corridors was to walk along the outer deck and take the outside stairs, and on such a fine warm day as this, there was no reason not to. From his vantage point on the rail, Nicholas watched people pass back and forth on the open decks below. Lord Chandre had been assigned a suite on the Sun Deck in the
Ravenna
’s forecastle, where the officers and officials were quartered. Another sign that his influence was growing unpleasantly fast.

The cabin corridors in the forecastle would be crowded at this time, with Averi’s staff, the Capidarans and ship’s officers heading off for breakfast and preparing for the day’s meetings. The meetings were mostly useless attempts to make the best of the small amount of reliable information on what was happening in Ile-Rien; Nicholas wasn’t bothering to attend most of them.

As the morning activity gradually calmed down, he saw Ixion walk out onto the deck below, accompanied by a token pair of Capidaran guardsmen, the Capidaran sorcerer Kressein, and a Rienish man known to be a political ally to Lord Chandre.
Yes, that’s charming,
he thought with a wry grimace.
Let’s post two useless guards, an octogenarian sorcerer and a trained bootlicker to guard the dangerous prisoner.
Colonel Averi was probably about to go mad with exasperation.

Watching the group carefully, Nicholas decided Kressein did not look entirely happy with the situation either. The old man moved stiffly, both with age and with affront at his companion.
That’s interesting.
Nicholas had never been too sure of Kressein, one way or the other, and there hadn’t been much time in Capistown to remedy that. The Capidaran sorcerer might not like being forced to work with Ixion—
and who would?
Nicholas thought, suppressing a smile.
The man brings new meaning to the word
odious
. And also the word
obvious,
for that matter.
But Kressein’s dislike for the Syprian sorcerer might not prevent him from siding with him if he thought it would help him defend Capidara. Personally, Nicholas would rather see Ile-Rien vanish from the earth than see it in the hands of men like Chandre. He lifted a sardonic brow, mostly at himself.
You, an idealist? Tremaine would be shocked.

Wherever she was.

Waiting until the group disappeared into one of the doorways further down the deck, Nicholas took the outside passenger stairs down to the Sun Deck. He stepped in through the outer hatch into the corridor, dark after the bright morning outside. He nodded politely to a couple of harried Viller Institute secretaries carrying armloads of files. As soon as the two women turned the corner, he stepped into the steward’s alcove, drawing the door shut behind him.

It was a small dusty recess, with a water tap in the counter, a gas ring and lights that were attached to call buttons for all the suites. Nicholas leaned back so he could look through the grille in the door, placed so that the steward could see most of the length of the special suite corridor. He didn’t have to wait long before Chandre left his room and strode down the corridor, with two aides in tow to make certain no one mistook him for a lesser personage, like the captain or the chief engineer. He didn’t pause to lock the door. Nicholas lifted a brow, waiting.
Yes, I thought the man would be vain enough to bring a valet.