The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (52 page)

The outer edge of the spiral started just at the bottom. Giliead reached it, eyeing it and the writing scrawled across it with distaste, then stepped cautiously out onto it. Beside her, Tremaine felt Ilias shift nervously.

“Hurry,” Florian said, anxious. “The sphere is all twitchy, I’m not sure if it’s the—” As she stepped forward, something leapt on her from the roof of the ledge above them.

Tremaine had just enough time to realize it was another Liaison. She yelled in alarm, plunging forward, but the force of the man’s leap knocked Florian down the stairs and onto the edge of the gate spiral. Florian hit the ground hard, letting go of the sphere. It rolled across the spiral, sparking madly. Ilias dropped his sword to fling himself on the man’s back, dragging him off Florian. Giliead spun around, running back to help.

Tremaine flung herself across the floor, reaching for the rolling sphere.

The floor lurched underfoot again and Tremaine fell to her knees, just managing to catch hold of the sphere. The metal was burning hot and as she grabbed it she felt it jerk and shudder as the gears inside spun wildly.
Oh, shit,
she thought. Even she could tell that it had just deflected a spell. Clutching it to her side, she twisted around.

Florian lay crumpled on the floor, Ilias sprawled next to her. The Liaison who had knocked Florian down lay nearby in a spreading pool of blood, Ilias’s knife hilt protruding from his neck, but another Liaison stood over them, aiming a pistol at Ilias. It had so many crystals pinpricking its face its features were nearly unrecognizable as human; it looked like some weird fay horror. Giliead stood helplessly, watching the Liaison with the intensity of a thwarted predator. There was no way he could reach it before it shot Ilias. And there was no way Tremaine could drag her pistol out from where it was tucked into her belt, aim and fire before it shot Ilias.

S
prawled on the stone and unable to move, the curse sapping his strength, Ilias swore at his own stupidity. The Gardier must have used Rienish illusions, one of the few curses that could fool Giliead. And fool the sphere. Ilias knew he had looked at the ledge above their heads and seen nothing, and the second Liaison with the shooting weapon must have been crouched below them next to the stairs, concealed by a curse.

He could just see that Florian’s eyes were open and aware, glaring at the Gardier. She struggled to move, gritting her teeth, but couldn’t lift her head. The curse holding them both immobile wouldn’t work on Giliead and must have been deflected from Tremaine by the sphere. But he didn’t think she could make it do anything else to help them. Tremaine must have come to that conclusion herself. “Hey there,” she said to the Liaison, her voice even but her eyes flat and angry. “Can we talk about this? I don’t see any—”

Ilias couldn’t see what happened but there was a flurry of movement, then something grabbed his hair and dragged him half-upright. He felt the cold muzzle of the shooting weapon shoved against his temple and saw Giliead jerk to a halt a few paces away, breathing hard.

Shit, this is …bad.
Giliead must have tried to take advantage of an instant of distraction on the Liaison’s part. Ilias couldn’t even make himself wince away from the weapon, couldn’t even make his throat move to speak. He didn’t know why the thing hadn’t just killed them already.
Because it hasn’t been told to yet?

He saw Tremaine eye the Liaison narrowly and wet her lips, though she didn’t betray any other hint of nerves. She tried again, “Where’s Castines? You know, he’s really the one we came to see….”

She let the words trail off as the air shivered and a man stepped into existence near Giliead. He was tall, with the olive skin of coastal Syprians, his hair a matted mane that might have been any color beneath the dirt. He wore the ragged remnants of a filthy Gardier uniform, and there were little crystals pocked all over his face, though the skin around them wasn’t infected and discolored, the way it always was with the other Liaisons. Ilias could smell him from here, an odor rank enough to make his stomach want to turn.
And I think we’ve just found Castines.
In a low rough voice, the man said in Syrnaic, “I told you, that’s not him either. That’s the Chosen Vessel they brought with them from Cineth.”

Giliead stared at him, startled. Ilias supposed the man was talking to the surviving Liaison.

“Hey!” Tremaine said loudly, trying to distract him away from Giliead. “Glad you’ve finally got that figured out.”

The man lifted his head, looking toward her, and Ilias saw he had a crystal about the size of a child’s fist sticking out of his temple, half-hidden by his hair. Ilias felt bile rise in his throat. The man’s face was blank, as if he was concentrating entirely on something else. Looking at the sphere Tremaine was cradling against her side, he said, “You can’t use that. It wants curses, and all your curses are dead.”

T
his is not going to end well,
Tremaine thought, feeling cold creep down her spine. He was right that she couldn’t use the sphere. It wasn’t Arisilde, and she just didn’t have enough magic to talk to it. Under the flap of the satchel, she put her hand on something that she would be able to use, but there was no point in revealing it yet. Giliead must have seen her stealthy movement. Watching the man with contempt, he said, “So you’re Castines,” bringing the man’s attention back to him. “You don’t look as if this place agrees with you.”

Castines’s expression changed, coming alive, and his lips curled in a sneer. “Don’t speak, Vessel, or I’ll kill him. Not a word. You Vessels make this so easy. You think you’re so superior because a filthy ball of light gives you orders. Always bringing others with you, afraid to travel alone outside the gods’ reach. It makes you so easy to—” Then his face went blank again, and he said more softly in Aelin, “Castines wants to kill the Rien sorcerer. But he’s the wrong one, isn’t he?”

Giliead pressed his lips together, torn between anger and confusion. Tremaine tried to keep the consternation off her face, wondering if Castines was as barking mad as he looked and sounded or was switching languages to confuse them. In this situation she couldn’t see why he would bother.
Right, just… keep him talking.
Trying to sort out the sense from the madness, she thought,
He was looking for the Rien sorcerer, someone he mistook Gerard for.
She took a not-so-wild guess. “You were looking for Arisilde.” Her voice came out even and conversational, which was a nice surprise.

Castines turned slowly back to face her. Still in Aelin, still with that oddly empty look on his face, he said, “We found him traveling the gates. We see all the gates through the avatars, as well as through the master gate. All the avatars are of the same material, they are all one. But we found we could also see into the metal avatars, whenever they were used to make the gates. So we called to him, showed him how to find the gate to bring him here. He was powerful, and we thought we could use him, make him an avatar and get more of his kind, power our ships and our gates. But he grew angry. He did that.” He pointed to the far wall of the dome, and Tremaine saw a spiderweb of cracks that branched through the old stone. “Before he fled, he pulled us apart a little. Castines doesn’t like it.”

Tremaine bit her lip, trying to follow it. He was talking about himself in the third person, with something innocent and almost earnest about his manner, completely at odds with how he had spoken to Giliead in Syrnaic. Giliead was looking at her with a desperate expression; Ilias still looked angry and Florian just confused.
All right, I just have to clarify this.
She asked him carefully, “You are Castines, right?”

His eyes focused on her. Still in Aelin, he said, “I’m Orelis. Castines found me in Delvan Teal. The High City. The place you call the fortress.”

The fortress. The crystal Castines took with him. But this man is Syprian.
Tremaine nodded, trying to look sympathetic and understanding. “You were in a crystal?”

“I can hear you talking,” Castines said in Syrnaic suddenly, his eyes turning angry, contemptuous. He laughed harshly. “Talking behind my back.”

Understanding hit Tremaine in the pit of the stomach. “Oh, hell, there’s two of you in there.” That was Castines and the crystal, or whoever had been in the crystal, both inhabiting that body, both talking to her. She had spoken Rienish by habit and Giliead, realizing what she meant, looked startled and sick.

The other Liaison, the dead one sprawled on the floor, sat up so suddenly Tremaine flinched. He turned toward her, Ilias’s horn-handled knife still jammed to the hilt in his neck, the brown cloth of his uniform soaked with blood. He spoke in Aelin, in a flat even voice, in Orelis’s voice, “Listen, listen. I was trapped there longer than I can remember, and I can remember forever. Castines came, running from the gods who were trying to kill him. He found me and tried to use my essence, my power, and I went into him. All the other vessels in the chamber were broken, all but mine, my people were gone, dead, fled. They left me behind.”

“That was careless of them.” Tremaine wet her lips again. Her throat was dry and she willed herself not to cough.
This is Orelis talking. The crystal. The person who was in the crystal.
“Why did they put you in there in the first place?” She spoke in Syrnaic so Giliead and Ilias could at least understand her side of the conversation.

The Liaison stared at her with blank clouded eyes, as if whatever inhabited that dead body didn’t understand the question. Then it said, “It was a great experiment.”

Castines laughed, stepping away from Giliead to move toward Tremaine. She could tell it was just him in there now, because his face was alive with hate and his eyes too bright. He said in Syrnaic, “She was a prisoner. That’s what I’ve always thought. Why did they let all the others go but her, if she wasn’t the worst of them?” He lifted a brow, the crystals in his face catching the light, except for the big dull one jammed so horribly into his forehead. “Would you like me to tell you what I’m going to do to you all? Shall we start with the little girl?”

“Oh, I think I can probably tell you,” Tremaine said dryly. Orelis made her skin creep, but this kind of thug she could handle, crystals or not. “None of you people ever show any real imagination.”

Castines frowned, startled. That shut him up long enough for Orelis to take up her tale again. The dead Liaison said, “I was not a prisoner.” The words had a certain earnest patience even though there was no inflection in the dead man’s voice. “It was a way of extending life, of giving service to others past death. But I did not wake as I was supposed to.”

Tremaine considered that, wondering if Orelis actually had some emotions that she could appeal to. “Giving service to others past death” didn’t sound too bad. In fact, it sounded almost noble. Surely someone who had volunteered for that, even if it had gone terribly wrong in the end, could be reasoned with. Maybe the war was all Castines’s influence. “Orelis, what are you trying to do here? What do you want?”

Instead, Castines answered with a sneer, “She wants to rebuild her world. Remake it. She makes this master gate transport wizards out of their bodies, into the avatars that we make here from hers. Then we throw the bodies away.”

“We both wanted that,” Orelis corrected him, the Liaison’s head turning stiffly to face him. “My world was ruined. We will make it again.”

There goes the “reasoning with her” plan,
Tremaine thought, inwardly grimacing. “Why Ile-Rien?” she demanded. “Why there, and not here, in the Aelin world, or in the Syprian world?”

Orelis turned the Liaison’s head back to face her, to fix the dead eyes on her. With that same hint of earnestness, she explained, “There are no gods in your world. And there are not enough Aelin wizards in this one.”

“I see.” Tremaine thought she understood what had happened now, at least, or part of it. Fleeing from Chosen Vessels twenty or so years ago, Castines had found Orelis in the fortress, where she had been left behind by the ancient inhabitants, either because she was a prisoner or because it was the only way for the last of her people to escape whatever they had been escaping. She had attached herself to Castines, sharing his body, and sent him to the Aelin world to scout a new home for them. And it had been perfect for them, with just enough people with a talent for magic to be useful, but no advanced sorcery, no defenses. And no Syprian gods to fight them.

Castines had used Obelin and his family to get him close enough to the corresponding location of the fortress so he could use the world-gate to return. Then he had tricked the few members of the family who had enough magical talent for him to use into returning with him to the Aelin world. He had gone on to take over the place with a magic more powerful than anything those unlucky people had ever seen before. Killing their potential sorcerers and putting their souls and power into the crystals, turning people into Liaisons, and eventually convincing their leaders they had been attacked by a place called Ile-Rien, which happened to have a stockpile of sorcerers to place in crystals. At some point he and Orelis must have gone to the mountain ruin and gated these chambers with this master circle to the Aelin world, and established Maton-first.

Castines was staring at the Liaison with bored contempt, as if he had heard this story too many times before. “Your world was ruined because of you,” Castines told her. “Once she had me she saw the Syrnai was no good for her purposes. Primitive.” Castines pronounced the word deliberately, stressing the vowels. “Too few wizards and all those mad as me, and she was afraid of the gods. She thinks they’re her own people, forgotten who they are, but still hating her. She’s a god of wizards, a failed god—”