The Wizard Hunters (35 page)

A very bashful young boy brought a basket of clothing and Karima took it and shooed him away. “These should be more comfortable,” she said, eyeing their torn and mud-splattered tweed. She pulled out a couple of long-sleeved shirts of tough cotton. “Try that for size.”

Tremaine picked out a shirt and held it up. The hems and open neckline were decorated with block-printed geometric designs. No buttons, just lacings. She bet they were hand-me-downs from the young men in the household.

As Karima turned out the rest of the basket onto the bed, she said, “Your people are really wizards?” She was carefully not looking up at them.

Florian glanced at Tremaine, then plunged in, “They are. But we’re not like the ones here. We don’t treat people like that.”

“I know Giliead—and the god—wouldn’t have brought you here if you did.” Karima nodded slowly, then looked up and gave them a rueful smile. “It’s just very strange.”

Deciding this was a good time for a change of subject, Tremaine asked, “Is Ilias your son too?”

“No, he came to us when he was very young.” She countered with, “Is Gerard your father?”

“No, none of us are related. Gerard was my guardian when I was younger.” At Karima’s questioning look Tremaine found herself explaining awkwardly, “My father disappeared—he was fighting the Gardier—and he appointed Gerard to take care of me and the estate in case anything happened.”

“In Syrnaic cities women own the property.” Karima cocked her head. “I know it’s not that way among the Chaeans and the Argoti.”

Horian sat down on the bed, curiously poking through the colorful clothes. “It’s not like that with us.”

Karima frowned. “It’s not?”

“No, it’s both. I mean, anybody can own it,” Florian explained hastily. Tremaine knew she must have realized that Karima had wanted to make sure they weren’t oppressed.
This is a matriarchy
. Men could still hold positions of authority, like Nicanor did now and Halian had before his retirement, but if they couldn’t own property that still left the women with a great deal of power. It gave her an insight into why Ilias had objected so immediately to Ander’s tone of voice when he had been arguing with her on the island.

“Ah, I see.” Karima held up a shirt, measured it against Florian, ascertained that it would fit her like a three-man survival tent, and tossed it back in the basket. “I wish it was that way with us, then I wouldn’t have to worry about what happens to my family when I die.” She paused, absently smoothing the fabric under her hands. “Chosen Vessels don’t marry. People are afraid of wizards and curses and they’re afraid of the ones who have to fight them too, and that’s just the way it is. But I had a daughter called Irisa and she wasn’t the kind of girl to turn her brothers out, so I wasn’t worried about the boys. But Ixion’s curse killed my Irisa and Ilias’s cousin Amari, then it killed Halian’s daughter Delphi.”

Despite her matter-of-fact tone the pain that crossed Karima’s face aged her. Tremaine, who never knew what to say in such situations, stood tongue-tied, but Florian winced in sympathy and said, “I’m sorry.”

Karima sighed and patted Florian’s shoulder. “So if your friend can make the curse leave, you’ll have our gratitude.”

Tremaine found herself running a rapid calculation. She wondered if they were certain Ixion had cast the curse. It wasn’t as if they could verify the curse’s origin. And it was suspicious that it had apparently eliminated Karima’s direct heirs, since Giliead couldn’t inherit anything. This house and land had to be worth quite a lot. Holding a pair of pants up to her waist to check the length and lost in thought, she said, “Who does the house go to now?”

“It will all belong to Nicanor’s wife Visolela, Halian’s daughter by marriage, which is not her fault, but there it is.” Karima regarded Tremaine thoughtfully for a moment, her hands planted on her hips, the sparkle coming back into her hazel eyes. Her lips twitched in a rueful smile and she said softly, “I thought of that too.”

Tremaine felt her cheeks go hot. It probably wasn’t a good idea to introduce herself to the family by hinting that even a distant relative was a murderer. “Sorry. I can’t help it.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Karima stepped up to her and put her hands on Tremaine’s shoulders. “It doesn’t hurt to be clever and careful and have eyes in the back of your head. Now hurry with your baths so you can come and eat.”

F
  Chapter 14  
F

F
inally getting rid of the last remnants of the mud and the stink of the caves was a relief, but Ilias was too preoccupied to enjoy it. He sat in the window embrasure that looked into the atrium, rebraiding his queue and trying to gather his thoughts.

Maybe the curse’s dramatic appearance had brought it back to him, but he kept seeing that image, that heartbeat’s flash of Ixion’s face among the Gardier in the tunnel. He couldn’t put it out of his mind.
It was just your imagination. That was where he caught you before, so it’s natural you’d imagine . . . all right, that’s not working
. He let his breath out, frustrated.

Giliead wandered in from the bathing room, saying, “I talked to Mother about the village.”

Ilias glanced up, his mouth twisted ruefully. He meant what was about to happen to it, that the wizards would destroy it tonight when they came to find out what had happened to their other flying whale. “How did she take it?”

Giliead shrugged one shoulder, looking away. “She understands.”

That there was nothing they could do about it. At least not now. Ilias looked out the window again. It hadn’t been so long since Ixion; they had all thought the big battles were over.

“Ander’s asked for the maps we found, or at least two of them,” Giliead added as he leaned down to dig through the clothes chest. “He can’t read them either, except for the part that looks like the coast of their country, but he thinks his people can figure them out.”

Ilias nodded absently. “They’re useless to us.”

“I just have to see if Nicanor and Visolela will agree.” Giliead pulled out a shirt and started to dress.

Ilias shook his head, trying to get his mind off Ixion and think about something else. “They weren’t worried about seeing the god.” Years ago, the first time Giliead had taken Ilias to see it, he had nearly had to drag him into the cave. Most Syprians, unless they were crazy or strange or Chosen Vessels, would have been equally reluctant. It wasn’t exactly fear, just a combination of respect and a reluctance to be noticed by something so undefinable and so important. People of other lands looked at it differently, but Ilias didn’t know of anybody he had ever met who would have walked into that cave with such unconcern, not for a first-time encounter with a god. “They didn’t think it was real, did they?”

Giliead straightened up, thinking it over. He had been taken to the cave when he was only a few years old so the god could confirm him as a Chosen Vessel, so Ilias knew it was hard for him to understand others’ fear of it. “I’m trying to imagine a world without gods.” With a rueful smile, he added, “It’s strange enough to have wizards as allies, though they’re much easier to deal with than the Chaeans.”

“Gil—” Ilias hesitated, sitting back against the window frame. His expression would betray him and he didn’t like to say it was nothing. Giliead wouldn’t believe it, for one thing.
Of course, he’s not going to believe this either
. He said reluctantly, “I thought I saw Ixion.” He looked up to see Giliead staring at him blankly. He shook his head with a grimace. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d look at me like that.”

“When?” Giliead demanded, taking a step forward.

“The way you’re looking at me right now.”

Giliead took a sharp breath and planted his hands on his hips, staring at the ceiling and obviously striving for calm. Speaking deliberately, he clarified, “When did you think you saw Ixion?”

“Oh.” Ilias shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t as calm about this as he thought. “On the island, right before we flooded the tunnel. He was with the wizards, the Gardier.”

He chewed his lip, trying to think of the right words to describe it. “They were coming up the passage and I saw his face in a flash of light from one of those curse lamps.” He shrugged helplessly, annoyed at himself. “Something about him wasn’t the same, so maybe it was just a wizard who looked like him.”

Giliead was silent, thinking, still absently holding the shirt he was about to put on. Ilias felt a flush of relief and realized he had been half expecting to be told he was crazy, with the strong implication that the last encounter with Ixion had marked his mind worse than it had marked his body. But Gil was Gil and he would consider it calmly and carefully, like he did everything. It might have been a tendency he had gotten from the god, but that was the way Ilias remembered Ranior, Karima’s first husband.

Still, they had never talked about that last encounter with Ixion. Ilias had tried not to think about it, but returning to the caves had brought it back. They had both seen a lot of strange things over the years and Giliead had read all the journals with the accumulated knowledge of the other Chosen Vessels. Ilias was the only person they knew of who had been transformed into something else and come back to what he was before. Of course, the journals didn’t know everything; they had found that out the hard way. In the end Giliead had come to the conclusion that Ixion’s death, coming not long after he had cast the curse, had caused it to fail.
I don’t feel any different
, Ilias had told him at the time, and it was still true. As far as he could tell.

Finally Giliead shrugged on the shirt and said slowly, “If you think it was just someone who looked like him, why did you feel you should tell me about it?”

That was a hard question. But Ilias knew a couple of harder ones. “If Ixion’s not dead, why did the curse he put on me go away? And for that matter, how’d he grow his head back?”

T
here had been some kind of commotion about the curse, and Tremaine had gone out into the hall and found Ander on the way to a bath. He had told her only that everything was all right. Tremaine had given up on him and resolved to ask Gerard later.

After Karima had left, she and Florian had explored the room, finding a little cubby next to the fireplace with a hip bath set into the stone-flagged floor, a chamber pot, and a second smaller hearth built into the wall for heating water. “It’s not as bad as a cold-water flat,” Florian pointed out.

Tremaine thought about Coldcourt, with gas and noisy but efficient plumbing and the newly installed electricity. Every modern convenience. But lonely. And cold. She looked around the bedchamber, where the windows were open to a warm breeze and a view of the fields and the forested hills beyond. A blooming wisteria had draped itself around the supports of the porch on this side. “It’s much better than a cold-water flat.”

The same extremely bashful young man brought several buckets of water for them, then fled. Tremaine helped Florian fill the cauldron to heat it and then the bath; the fact that they enjoyed this process like a couple of little girls playing house Tremaine put down to shock and exhaustion.

While Florian was finishing her bath Tremaine took the wooden comb they had found and wandered across the hall and out onto the atrium’s portico. Down at this end there were several carved couches piled with cushions, but she sat on the stone flags to try to restore her wet hair to some sort of order. The water hadn’t been very hot but it had helped soothe the aches and scrapes and bruises. She was wearing a loose blue tunic printed along the hem with green and gold curlicues and pants of a thicker tanned material so soft it was hard to tell if it was doeskin or some kind of woven cloth. She was barefoot but had washed out her stockings and planned to wear her own boots. There was no mirror in the bathing room, but that was just as well; Tremaine had taken so many punches she knew she looked like a retired prizefighter.

The scent of the flowers was heavy in the late afternoon sun. Through the open doors into the main foyer, she could see the men outside the front of the house herding a last few red cows to the safety of the pens under the trees. Some of the women from the village were standing near them talking, bundles of belongings piled around their feet. The place had a “still before the storm” feel though she was surprised everyone was taking it all so calmly.
The Gardier are going to bomb that village
, she thought,
and maybe others besides
. It hurt to think that the little houses with the painted shutters and Gyan’s garden wouldn’t be there tomorrow. It had happened so often in Ile-Rien, she should be immune to it by now.

Tremaine paused, the comb caught in a tangle. The old house surrounded by fields of flowers and shade trees should have felt unreal; it didn’t. It felt vividly real while the horrors of the island, and even the horrors of what the Gardier had done to Ile-Rien, faded away into hazy memory.

She heard Ilias’s voice and looked up. He was sitting on a windowsill across the atrium, talking to someone in the room behind him. She almost didn’t recognize him. He had just knocked the mud off his old pants and boots, but he wore a sleeveless blue shirt trimmed with leather braid and leather armbands set with copper disks. He was occupied with tying his hair back, giving the queue a practiced twist with a leather thong then tossing it back over his shoulder and shaking his head vigorously to make sure it held. Tremaine wished the camera wasn’t with the Pilot Boat at the bottom of the bay. His hair was still a mane but with the queue rebraided and the long loose curls clean and free of mats, the effect was exotic rather than savage.

She found herself wondering if a Syprian wizard-killer would be interested in a dowdy ex-playwright with a past. The enforced closeness down in the caves made it hard to tell. A little observation today had told her that Syprian body language included casual touching; they made even the fairly relaxed Rienish look as stiff as Bisrans. But surely Florian, younger, prettier and less peculiar, had the ingénue role in this story.
Though they really don’t like sorcerers
, she reminded herself. Had Ilias touched Florian since he had found out she was learning to be a sorcerer? Tremaine didn’t think so. Karima had, but Karima was different too.