by Martha Wells
Cletia folded her arms, eyeing them with disfavor. “I should go too. I’ve done nothing but watch that door all night and nothing has come through it.”
“Then you must be doing a good job,” Tremaine told her brightly. Giliead gave Cletia an ironic eye as he stepped past her into the stairwell. “Keep it up,” Tremaine added.
She followed Giliead, Ilias bringing up the rear. The stairs curved down in a spiral and the rock walls were streaked with moss, fractured sunlight from the cracks in the rock above lighting the way. Tremaine noted the steps were a little too tall for her and Ilias, but seemed exactly right for Giliead’s longer legs, like the steps in the Wall Port and the deserted city under the Isle of Storms. A random thought reminded her and she looked back up at Ilias to ask, “What does daiha mean?”
Ilias cocked his head. “Dai— You mean daehan?”
“Yes, Cimarus called me that.”
“Huh.” He nodded to himself, his expression hard to read.
“What does it mean?” She poked him in the stomach, but she might as well have poked the wall.
He seemed to take the question as a challenge. “I can’t tell you what it means if you don’t have a word for it.”
“Don’t be difficult.”
Giliead sighed, apparently seeing his hope for peace and quiet quickly vanishing. “It’s what you call a woman warleader, but only when you’re in battle.”
“Oh.” Tremaine wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Cimarus didn’t strike her as being as unyielding in his attitudes as Pasima. Syprians didn’t like to be alone, and Cimarus might find that Ilias’s curse mark and Giliead’s recent experience with magic didn’t matter much when the other choice was near isolation. But Cletia was an unknown quantity. She had chosen to leave Pasima’s company, but Tremaine wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.
As they continued down, she saw there were also square niches cut into the walls, some high enough for lamps, some at waist height or only a few inches above the steps. She tapped one as they passed. “These are just like the ones in some of the walls in the old city on the Isle of Storms.”
“All the dead cities we find look alike,” Ilias said from behind her, pausing to examine a niche. He sounded like he thought it was a conspiracy. “What does that mean?”
They were the only unifying characteristics of three fairly dissimilar places, but that didn’t tell them much about the original inhabitants. “Beats me.”
“You’re not supposed to say you don’t know,” Giliead told her, his voice echoing faintly in the well. “You’re supposed to come up with a bad idea and then argue about how you’re right all day.”
“Hey,” Ilias protested, obviously the one the comment had been aimed at. “I don’t do that, you’re the one who—”
“Fellows, don’t start…” Tremaine trailed to a halt, staring at the wall. This step was wider than the others, turning it into a small landing. On the inside wall, at about her eye level, was an arrow scratched faintly into the stone, pointing up the stairs. She touched it, deciding it had been made with the edge of a coin. Or a coat button, she thought, nodding to herself. Arisilde. Lost in thought, she became aware that Ilias and Giliead were standing on either side of her, having seen the arrow and obviously expecting elucidation.
She shrugged, irritated that she couldn’t give them an explanation. “We’re still in the right place?” she suggested.
Ilias snorted in annoyance. “He could have left a more revealing trail sign. He doesn’t want us to go down this way? Why?”
Giliead turned, starting down the steps more slowly, saying with grim emphasis, “I’m almost afraid to find out.”
“Almost?” Ilias said under his breath, as Tremaine followed.
The stairs took one more turn, the light from above growing dim with distance. Giliead stopped and Tremaine leaned around him to see, brows lifting at this new discovery. Shade-dappled sunlight shone in from gaps in the rock, illuminating another big domed room, a mirror of the circle chamber above.
The gray-veined walls had the same square columns, narrowing as they arched up to meet in the dome overhead, the same bands of carving, broken by the cracks in the stone. And where the other chamber had been cut in half by the rockfall that had sent a portion of it down the cliff into the river, this one was bisected by a wall of cut masonry blocks. “What the hell?” Tremaine said aloud.
Ilias stepped past her to follow Giliead out into the chamber, scanning the area cautiously. “At least we found the way out.”
Giliead’s mouth twisted wryly. “I wouldn’t say ‘found.’ There’s nothing else down here.” He moved toward the largest crack in the rock, an irregular opening just wide enough for a man his size to squeeze through. Just past it Tremaine could see green-shaded sunlight and a flat stretch of ground with tufts of dry grass.
Slowly, Tremaine looked around the big chamber, then followed Ilias and Giliead outside, climbing through the rough-edged opening to see an evergreen forest glade. The trees were some kind of giant pine, stretching up tall enough to easily tower over a sizable two-story house. Fallen needles made a soft carpet underfoot and the ground sloped down to a shallow winding ravine where a stream played over tumbled rocks and gravel. The air was fresh and clean and cold with the early-morning chill.
Giliead was already down by the stream, pacing along it, looking for signs of human occupation, or possibly curse traps. Ilias had taken up a position on a slight rise in the ground, keeping watch.
Tremaine climbed the slope to stand beside him, pine needles scrunching underfoot. She looked vaguely around for any more signs from Arisilde, but without any idea of what she was looking for, it was a fruitless search. “You think it’s dangerous here?”
“Could be.” Ilias jerked his chin down toward the stream. Tremaine looked, then looked again, her eyes widening. What she had taken at first for a collection of sun-bleached white rocks was actually a pile of bones, the carcass of some large animal. Very large, she realized, spotting the skull, which was a good two feet across the raised browridge. It had large eye sockets and teeth that were at least as long as Tremaine’s forearm. “But maybe those only come up here in the winter, for the caves,” Ilias added with a half shrug. “If we can catch one, that’s a lot of meat.”
“Right.” Catch one. Occasionally I forget that Syprians are crazy. Tremaine found herself losing the urge to wander. At least the cave entrance was too small for anything like that to get inside. “I think I’ll go back in,” she told Ilias, and headed down to climb back through the gap into the cave again.
Dusting off her hands, she went toward the wall, staring at it. “I don’t understand this,” she said aloud. The chamber up on the cliff looked as if it had simply given way to time or some weakness in the rock face. This wall… didn’t make any sense.
She studied the floor, scraping at the accumulated dirt with her boot heel in several places, but there was no sign of the symbols of a circle, or anything else, etched into the smooth stone. Turning back to the wall, she thought it looked just as old, but she was no stonemason. She scraped away at the dirt that coated the mortar between the blocks, then stopped, frowning. Mortar? The rest of this place had been carved right out of the rock. The city under the Isle of Storms had been constructed without mortar; she was sure of that. The long log-shaped stone blocks had been distinctive, piled together and attached to each other in ways that were inexplicable to her untrained eyes. Did the Wall Port city use mortar? The quality and color of the stone had been different, which made sense, as far away from the island as it was, but she couldn’t remember if she had seen mortar or not. She thought not. So it looks like somebody else put this wall here.
Lost in thought, Tremaine became aware that Ilias was standing at her side, trying to hand her a grubby green-stripey object covered with dirt and dangling bulbous roots. “What? No.” She fended it off with an elbow. “What is that?”
“A sava. You don’t have those?” He brushed off so
me dirt and took a bite. It made a crunching noise, like a very ripe apple. As Tremaine eyed it skeptically, he added, “They grow all through these kinds of woods.” Still chewing, he frowned at the wall. “Why is that here? It doesn’t look like the rest of the room.”
“I don’t know.” She gestured helplessly. “Nothing makes sense.”
He lifted an ironic brow. “You just noticed that?”
“A little help here,” Giliead grumbled from the opening as he tossed in an armload of fallen branches and kindling, and Tremaine, distracted by the idea of a fire and hot food, mentally put the wall aside for the moment.
While Ilias helped Giliead carry up several loads of wood, the others used the first bundle to get a fire started in the raised hearth in the main room. On the second trip Ilias saw that Cletia had unloaded the contents of her pack, producing a small cooking pot, a folded-up waterskin, some dried herbs rolled up in a leather pouch and what was left of her packet of boiling grain, which was almost enough for him to be glad she was here. Almost.
After they had brought up enough firewood, Ilias went back outside to cut some fresh branches, hauled them back up and used some leather cord from Giliead’s pack to make a windscreen for the door into the cliff chamber. It took him a while to make it both easily movable and heavy enough to block the strong wind, but after it was done he wandered back into the main room, shaking pine needles out of his hair and clothes, to find the place seemed almost homey now.
The fire had nicely warmed the chill stone room and from the smell someone had made tea. Cletia was tending the fire now and keeping an eye on the Gardier woman Balin, and Cimarus had gone to watch the outer entrance. The Capidaran women were asleep; not surprising, as they had been up most of the night watching over the still-unconscious wounded man. Several of the sava had been washed and peeled and were now cooking in the coals. His stomach rumbled at the smell, reminding him he hadn’t eaten since this morning. Which had been late last night, here. Realizing it was afternoon now, which meant it was deep into the night back in Capidara, he went back out to the cliff chamber, shifting the screen aside to pass through the door.
Tremaine, Giliead and Gerard were all seated on the floor, staring at the curse circle with varying degrees of consternation. “So it’s been too long,” Ilias said, uneasily considering the consequences.
Tremaine pushed to her feet, throwing an arm in the air. “It seems like a long time to us, because we’ve just been sitting around staring at it. Niles had to redraw the circle somewhere else from your notes—”
Gerard removed the glass pieces over his eyes to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. “My notes were very clear.” He sounded testy about it. “It shouldn’t take as long as it did to draw it for the first time. And a Gardier bombing has never lasted this long. With the spheres allowing an active resistance—” He stopped, shaking his head.
“We can go back to see what’s happened,” Giliead suggested quietly. “Or one of us can.”
Ilias eyed him. It was true one of them would have to go, but he didn’t want Giliead to volunteer. When they had been captured near the Gardier city, the wizard with the crystal stuck in his head had seemed far too interested in Giliead. They knew now that the Gardier had some way to take wizards out of their bodies and put them in their crystals, that they had done that with Rienish wizards they had captured, that Arisilde might have lost his body through the same process. If the Gardier thought a Chosen Vessel was the same thing as a wizard, they might have meant to try it with Giliead. Ilias would just rather not give them the chance.
“That sounds like a very bad idea,” Tremaine said, unconsciously echoing his thought. “If they haven’t come after us, there’s a good reason.”
Gerard paced away a few steps, thinking it over. “If Niles and Kressein were both killed. If Nicholas didn’t make it—” He threw a look at Tremaine but her expression didn’t change. Ilias knew she would never betray herself that way, not even in front of her family. “There may be no one who knows where we went.” He took a deep breath. “Even if Florian survived, it may not occur to her that we fled through the gate.”
Tremaine shook her head, frowning at the carved dome over their heads. “Niles, Kressein, Florian and Nicholas? Especially since we saw the Ravenna go through a gate. We might as well say the whole city’s in ruins and everybody’s dead.”
Gerard stared at her in exasperation. “Tremaine, how many sides of this discussion are you on?”
She gestured erratically. “I’m just being the… devil’s advocate. I don’t know.” She scratched her head, looking at the circle of symbols. “And we know we can’t make a regular circle, because that would just take us to Kathbad and we know we don’t want to go there.”
Ilias nodded. He had been through enough curse circles by now to get the hang of it. “Besides, we’re high up in the mountains. If we make the regular curse circle here, we could come out up in the air in the other place.”
Gerard held up a hand for silence, saying carefully, “I’m aware of the difficulties of the situation.” He rubbed his forehead, his frustration showing. “We’ll have to try to go back through this circle.”
Giliead shook his head, pushing to his feet. “We’re all tired. We need to eat and sleep first. And if the worst did happen and the city’s been destroyed, then it won’t hurt to wait a little longer.”
Tremaine watched Gerard thoughtfully. “He’s right.” Ilias knew it was mostly Gerard Giliead was thinking of. The wizard hadn’t had any sleep in the last two days, and not much in the way of real meals. Gerard’s eyes were hollow and he looked more exhausted than he had since the Ravenna had reached port.
Maybe Gerard realized it too. He gave in with a sigh. “Yes. Yes, he’s right. We’ll wait a little longer. At least it’s giving me time to work on the problem of trying to get into Lodun.”
Florian sat on the deck, rubbing her arms through her rumpled sweater. I feel like I just did this, she thought tiredly. They were in one of the Ravenna’s Second Class lounges, and the electric lights were too bright for her tired eyes. Blackout cloth had been tacked into the fine wood veneer on the walls to stretch across windows that looked out onto the open deck. The blue and gold carpets had been rolled up and the couches, chairs and cocktail tables pushed back to the walls to clear the tile floor so that Niles could draw the symbols of the new circle.
He had been at it for some time now, the faint rasp of paper as he consulted his notes the only sound. Arisilde’s sphere sat nearby on the floor, clicking occasionally as Niles drew the symbols.
Florian yawned. Her clothes still stank of smoke from the fires in the city and she longed to take a hot bath and collapse in one of the cabins, but she wanted to see the others back safe first. And Niles had needed her to confirm his reading of some of Gerard’s notes, and later to help keep him awake and check his work. After all his efforts during the battle, he was still deeply exhausted. Giaren, who had made forays throughout the evening to the kitchens to obtain coffee and rolls, was sitting in an armchair on the far side of the circle, half-asleep himself. He had reported earlier that a detachment of Capidaran troops was coming aboard the Ravenna as planned, that Colonel Averi and Captain Marais had received word that the Ravenna could leave as soon as the supplies meant for the Rienish forces in Parscia were loaded, but that there was some problem that Averi was angry about. One of the officers had said he thought that the Capidarans had cut the number of troops they had promised at the last moment. In the quiet of this lounge at the ship’s stern, it all seemed very far away.
The Queen Falaise, headed directly through the staging world for Parscia, had already left and Florian had watched from the Promenade deck as it had steamed out of the harbor, saluting the Ravenna with a blast of its horn as it passed. Ander was aboard, along with some of the other Rienish officers she had gotten to know here. With two Aderassi sorcerers and their newly made spheres, the Falaise had every chance of making the crossing safely and running the block
ade to reach Parcia. That was what Florian kept telling herself, anyway.
Florian jerked awake as Niles sat back on his heels with a sharp intake of breath, rubbing his eyes. “That’s it.”
“That’s it?” Florian straightened up. “We can get them back now?”
Niles got to his feet with a groan, one hand on the small of his back. “Yes. Just give me a moment.” Giaren hurriedly stood, pouring a cup of coffee from the tray and carrying it over to Niles, who took it with a gasp of gratitude.
Florian pushed to her feet. “I can do it, if you’re too tired. I mean, you must be too tired.”
Wincing at the taste of the coffee, he glanced at her. “Are you certain? You haven’t used this particular circle before.”
“No, but I’ve done the other one, and I’ll have… help.” She gestured at the sphere. It clicked back at her, a blue light flickering briefly from inside. “He’s done it before.”
Niles hesitated but a voice from the furniture crowded against the far wall said, “She’s right.” Florian looked, startled, to see Nicholas sitting up from where he had been lying out of sight on one of the couches. He climbed over a chair, his black coat making him a rather graphic figure against the softer golds and creams of the upholstery. He reached the floor, shaking out his coat. “From what I understand, with Arisilde’s help, I could attempt it as well.”
Florian turned back to Niles, glad for the support. “Yes, so there’s no need for you to—”
“Yes, yes.” Niles waved her to silence. “Go ahead. But be sure to let the sphere set the parameters for you.”
“I know.” Florian hurried to grab the sphere before he changed his mind or recalled what had happened the first time she had tried to use the sphere by herself. It clunked as she stepped into the circle. Shaking her hair back, she looked down at its tarnished surface.
“It’s different from working with an inert device,” Niles continued, carrying his coffee over to a chair and easing himself down into it as if his back still pained him. “Just give it a prompt with the first few phrases of the adjuration and let it do the rest.”
