The Wizard Hunters (31 page)

“Yes. I know it sounds insane, but yes.” Ilias pushed his hair back, frustrated, and looked back at their guests. They were gathered in an uneasy group near the corner of the house, with an equally uneasy Gyan standing by. The decision was simple in Tremaine and Florian’s case; even if Ilias hadn’t grown to trust them through shared danger, they had saved his life and he was obligated to defend them. Ander he trusted less, but then the young man wasn’t a wizard. And Gerard . . . They had never met a wizard who behaved in such a civilized fashion; even if he hadn’t obligated them by saving the village, it would have been an impossible decision. Ilias looked up at Giliead in appeal. “Are you?”

Giliead nodded with a grimace, his expression saying that he wished he wasn’t. “Yes, I’m sure. We don’t just owe them hospitality, we owe them our lives; it doesn’t matter what the rest of their people are like in— How did they say it? Rien?”

“Rien,” Ilias repeated thoughtfully. “One of the Gardier”—that name was an awkward mouthful—“said it to me.” He nodded to himself. “They must have thought we were Rien’s allies because we burned that flying whale.”

Giliead rubbed his forehead as if trying to chase away an incipient headache. “We’ll worry about that later. Let’s just concentrate on trying to keep Nicanor from killing them.”

They went on into the small main room of Gyan’s home, Ilias stepping aside to lean against the wall and fold his arms. Nicanor was ignoring him, something that most people might have attributed to Ilias bearing a curse mark. But Nicanor had avoided speaking directly to Ilias for years, mostly in retaliation for slights delivered by Giliead, whom he couldn’t afford to ignore. Ilias took a deep breath, reminding himself
just keep your mouth shut and let Halian handle it
.

“Where did these people come from?” Nicanor demanded, taking a seat at the carefully scrubbed table. He was obviously still fuming. He had grown up in Cineth with his mother’s family while Halian was at sea or at war and was as different from his father as he could be. His younger sister Delphi had fled to Halian as soon as she had been able to manage it.

Halian sat on the bench across from him. “They were shipwrecked on the island, by the other wizards. That’s the simple part of the story. The rest is . . .” He glanced at Giliead. “Complicated.”

Giliead stopped at the far end of the table, as if he was going to stand instead of taking the other seat. Ilias knew Giliead didn’t want to make it look as if he was putting himself forward as Nicanor’s equal, a guilty reflex after the way he had spoken to him in front of everybody. But he also knew after that little altercation Nicanor would take it as Giliead refusing to sit down with his brother by marriage. Ilias caught Giliead’s eye and glared, jerking his head slightly toward the table. After a moment of stubborn refusal, Giliead sighed faintly, hooked a stool out from under the table, and sat.

The stiff set of Nicanor’s shoulders eased a little and he said dryly, “Complicated? That’s an interesting word to use. I take it that flying thing was what’s been attacking our villages and the trade ships?”

“Yes, but it’s not the only one,” Halian told him.

“There’s an army of wizards on the island,” Giliead said bluntly, and started to explain.

W
hile Nicanor, Halian, Giliead and Ilias went into a house to talk in private, Tremaine and the others waited outside with the owner Gyan, one of the men who had helped them aboard the ship.

Tremaine rubbed the sweat off her forehead and looked around. The air was fresher here, up off the beach and away from the smoking ruins. The little tile-roofed houses were all close together, separated only by small gardens or goat pens and muddy pathways. The place was shaded by large trees that had been left to stand between the buildings. There was painting and carving everywhere, around the windows and doors, under the eaves. They liked variety, as evidenced by the different geometric patterns, leaves and flowers, animals, sun and moon designs. Florian nudged her with an elbow and pointed between the houses. Tremaine leaned to look and saw a fountain under a wooden pavilion not far away, the water falling from spouts carved into the shape of spritelike faces. She wondered if they had fay here too.

The armed men who had come with Nicanor were gathered loosely around this part of the village, leaning on their long spears, staring at the newcomers and talking in low voices. The rest of the place’s inhabitants were too occupied with tending the wounded or rounding up goats and chickens and hauling bundles out of their homes in preparation for the evacuation to pay much attention. Though Tremaine caught sight of eyes peering at them through the cracks in the carved shutters of the nearby houses.

Like the crew of the ship, many people were tall, with brown or reddish hair and olive skin, though there were enough shorter blondes and dark brunettes mixed in to show the population was fairly cosmopolitan. She saw quite a few young men wearing their hair in long braids too, so that must be the current fashion, though many of the older men seemed to cut it off at the shoulders or crop it short. The women seemed to wear whatever they wanted, loose comfortable skirts or dresses dyed in colorful swirls or block-printed with designs, or cotton pants and shirts like the men. Some people, maybe those who had been interrupted while at work on the boats or the fishing nets, weren’t wearing much more than a twist of cloth wrapped around their waists.
And a lot of them are injured, or were injured
, she realized suddenly. She saw old scars, limps, a patch covering an eye, an occasional missing limb. Granted she wasn’t seeing everybody in the village parade by, but a disproportionate number seemed to have old injuries, especially considering most of them seemed in good health otherwise.
And they had that catapult all ready to go. They’ve had practice with sudden attacks. Not from airships maybe, but something
.

“Those devices you found,” Gerard was saying thoughtfully, “must work something like the sphere, but perhaps in a more limited fashion. We know the Gardier can detect the presence of magic with them, but if they can also cast certain predetermined spells like the one that was used on me—”

“Never mind that now.” Ander swore. Speaking Rienish, he told Gerard in a low voice, “We should make a break for it—”

“No,” Gerard said, his voice sharp but quiet. “Let them try to handle it first.”

“Gerard—”

“Ander, we need their help to get back to the target area. At the moment they don’t seem hostile toward us. Just... give them some time to work it out.”

Ander pressed his lips together, looking mutinous. Florian glanced worriedly at Tremaine, who rolled her eyes. The sphere’s activity and all the arguing had left her tired and cranky. She looked at Gyan, who stood politely just out of earshot, pretending he was interested in a crack in the corner of the house’s stone foundation. She remembered he had been the one to help them into the boat and that he had seemed fairly friendly. She cleared her throat, remembering to speak Syrnaic. “Excuse me?”

He looked up, startled. He was an older man with a heavy build and a good-humored face, balding with a long fringe of gray hair.

“Is there someplace we could sit down?” Tremaine nudged Florian, who immediately assumed a wan and pitiful expression.

“Oh.” Gyan blinked. Tremaine hadn’t planned this, at least not consciously, but she could practically see his attitude change. Suddenly they were people again and he was their host. “Oh, yes, right back here in the garden.” He motioned around the side of the house.

It was a little area of cropped grass surrounded by ferns and flowering bushes and clay pots of herbs. Tremaine took a seat on one of the rough wooden benches and put the sphere at her feet. Florian sank down gratefully beside her and began to work her boot off. Ander, tense as an overwound watch, stayed on his feet.

Gyan sat on the little stone wall opposite them. “Ah .. . You folks been here long?” he asked, with a game effort at polite conversation. Dyani slipped in through the gate and sat next to him, apparently to offer moral support.

“Not really,” Gerard replied with a smile, taking the other bench. He asked carefully, “Nicanor is a figure of authority here?”

“He’s lawgiver of Cineth,” Gyan explained, looking relieved to have an easy topic. “He’s Halian’s son from his first household, before he married into Andrien. Halian was lawgiver for a while, then warleader, last time we had a war.”

“I see.” Gerard nodded encouragingly.

Gyan warmed to the topic. “When the war was over— under Cineth’s law once you’ve been warleader, you can’t go back to being lawgiver—Halian retired and married Karima, Giliead’s mother, of the house of Andrien. This was all a few years ago.”

Tremaine tried to look like she was following this. She had enough trouble trying to keep track of her own relatives.

“Giliead’s the god’s Chosen Vessel,” Dyani volunteered, looking as if she was trying to be helpful.

Someone else Tremaine recognized from the boat, a young man with wild brown hair, hurried up and stepped over the garden wall, plopping down on the ground. He pulled out a pen that was little more than a sharpened stick with a groove in it, a little clay pot of ink and a handful of scraps of rough brown paper. Pulling over an overturned wooden bucket to use as a desk, he set up his materials and demanded without preamble, “What color was the fire that destroyed the flying whale?”

As they stared at him in blank surprise Gyan explained hastily, “That’s Arites. He’s a poet.”

“Oh, right.” Tremaine turned to Florian for help. “Sort of a reddish yellow, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.” Florian nodded, shaking out her stocking.

“Ah . . .” Gerard must have seen the quelling look Gyan was trying to give Dyani because his voice was cautious as he asked, “What does it mean to be the god’s Chosen Vessel?”

“Well, he, uh . ..” Dyani hesitated, uncertain.

“He kills wizards,” Arites supplied helpfully, still scribbling away.

Florian, trying to get her wet stocking back on, froze and stared at him, eyes wide.

“Oh.” Gerard sat back, frowning.

Ander folded his arms, muttering, “Wonderful.”

Gyan rolled his eyes in annoyance and cleared his throat significantly. Arites looked up, suddenly recalling his audience. “No offense,” he added brightly.

Tremaine propped her chin on her hand and yawned. Giliead had told her it would be all right and now she knew what he meant. All the noise Nicanor had made aside, it was Giliead’s job to kill them and his decision whether to do it or not, and she knew he wouldn’t. He would help them because they had helped Dias.

A little desperately, Dyani asked, “How did you meet Giliead and Ilias on the island?”

“Oh, yes,” Florian said, relieved to have a less controversial topic. “We—Tremaine and I—were captured by the Gardier and—”

“You were what?” Gerard stared at them.

“That’s right, we didn’t tell you that part.” Tremaine shifted to face him and her foot knocked against the sphere, which clanked. She picked it up, wondering what to do with it. She didn’t want it to go off accidentally again and frighten their hosts or attract more Gardier. She glanced up at Gyan. “Can I borrow that bucket?”

“Consider it a gift,” Gyan assured her hastily. “Arites, give her the bucket.”

“The Gardier shouldn’t be able to detect the sphere as long as it’s quiescent,” Gerard told her, brows drawing together in annoyance. “Besides, putting it in a bucket of water, where it’s in contact with the wooden side, doesn’t help block all the etheric vibrations.”

“Yes, but it blocks it from me, and I’m not making etheric vibrations,” Tremaine told him with some asperity, getting up to collect the bucket from Arites. “Sometimes I do things for a reason. Not often, but sometimes.”

A
s he listened to Giliead tell the story, Nicanor’s expression grew dark with worry and he interrupted only a few times with questions. Ilias kept out of it, speaking only when Giliead asked him to tell his part of what had happened after they were separated. Finally, Nicanor shook his head and said, “We’ve lost this village. If you’re right and there are more of those flying things on the island, they’ll be back.”

“There’s more.” Giliead said, watching him narrowly. Ilias knew what he was thinking; there were those in Cineth who wouldn’t care that this village lived or died. Out of deference to Ranior’s memory, the headman Agis had always permitted people with curse marks to live here. There were three here now, living in the outskirts further up the hill.

“Better the village than the people.” Halian was absently rubbing an old scar on his forearm, a memento from the last time Ixion had attacked the coast in force. “And you know who we have to thank for it.”

Nicanor kneaded his forehead, reluctantly accepting that. He said grudgingly, “I see now why you owe them guest-right, but how do you know they understand what that means?”

“We don’t.” Halian folded his hands on the table. “But they know far more about these Gardier wizards than we do. You saw how they killed that flying whale. And by our own sea treaties, if they’re fighting wizards, we owe them our help.”

Nicanor shook his head. “Still...” He looked at Giliead and took a deep breath.

Giliead’s eyes narrowed in anticipation of being reasoned with. Ilias pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking,
Please be sensible, just the once
. He wasn’t sure who he was thinking it at, maybe just the world in general.

Nicanor said, “You don’t know that you can trust these people. It could be another trick.”

Ilias gritted his teeth.
Yes, it was a big mistake. But didn’t we pay for it
? He caught the sour glint in Giliead’s eye and thought for a moment he was about to say just that. But Giliead said, “There is a way. We can go to the god.”

Nicanor hesitated. Whatever problems he had with Giliead, he knew the god was to be trusted. Nicanor said finally, “It will know if they’re lying?”

“If they are what they say they are, it will know.”

“It didn’t know Ixion,” Nicanor pointed out.

Giliead nodded. “It would have—if I had had the sense to ask it.”