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

by Martha Wells

  “But it was mad at Herias, it made that kind of obvious.” Tremaine thought that was the important point. She hesitated. “It wasn’t upset about the whole spell thing?”

  “No.” Giliead brushed one of Ilias’s braids off his shoulder and Tremaine thought for a moment that that was all he would say. “It knows. As soon as it sees me, it knows everything I know. But it didn’t… seem to care.” He grimaced. “Herias …I can’t imagine what he thought. He could smell the curses on me. He had to really believe that I’d done something terrible, because he knows as well as I do that the gods hate it when Chosen Vessels fight. We’re the only people besides wizards they can really see clearly.”

  Tremaine frowned, thinking it all over. Gerard had to be right, the connection between the gods, the Chosen Vessels and the wizards was magic, whether any of them wanted to admit it or not. “Why was it looking for the Ravenna? If they left Capistown after the attack, they should be here soon, but how does it know that?”

  Giliead squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, concentrating, then gave up with a helpless gesture. “I can’t tell. It thought the Ravenna would be here soon, and that there was trouble aboard.”

  “Great.” Tremaine didn’t know how to take that. Did gods worry needlessly like people? Or did it know something?

  Ilias groaned and rolled onto his back, then flung out an arm, nearly managing to smack Tremaine in the head. She shifted to the top of the couch, a slightly safer vantage point, as he blinked and opened his eyes. “What… Where are we?” He had a dark greenish spot on his forehead that was developing into a really horrendous bruise and dark circles under his eyes.

  “The lawgiver’s house,” Giliead told him, one hand on his chest to keep him from sitting up, which Ilias immediately tried to do.

  “What?” Ilias struggled to push himself up on his elbows and Giliead leaned in, using his greater weight to prevent him. “What are we doing here? Are you crazy?”

  “The god showed up and kicked Herias out of town. We won,” Tremaine said hastily. “Will you relax?”

  “No. I don’t care. I don’t want to be here.” Ilias subsided with a snarl. He touched the bruise and winced, squeezing his eyes shut. “What did you do to Herias?”

  “We had a fight,” Giliead admitted. “The god stopped it.”

  Tremaine knew Herias must have thought Giliead was either under a spell or had somehow been corrupted by wizards; he had obviously knocked Ilias out to remove him from the conflict. She could understand the necessity, even if it made rage simmer. Ilias wouldn’t have stood by while Herias attacked Giliead, and Herias wouldn’t have had a chance against the two of them together. “Doesn’t Herias have anybody with him?” she asked.

  Giliead shook his head, still absently holding Ilias down, his face pensive. “He did. His younger sister and brother. But they were killed a few years ago.”

  “Will you get off me?” Ilias demanded.

  “Fine.” Exasperated, Giliead released him, and Ilias sat up with a lurch, nearly falling off the couch. Tremaine lunged forward in time to catch him, steadying him and plopping down on the couch next to him as Giliead shifted over to make room.

  Ilias wrapped an arm around her and buried his face against her shoulder. Tremaine felt a surge of emotion powerful enough to make her grit her teeth, love and affection mixed with a strong anger at Herias, at the stupidity of the Syprians’ prejudice, at the wizards that made the prejudice necessary for survival. Until Ilias made an oof noise in protest she didn’t realize she was squeezing him around the ribs. She swallowed, took a deep breath and said over his head to Giliead, “Visolela said that Karima should be here soon. Nicanor is up the coast, checking out reports of another Gardier bombing at a gleaners’ village.”

  Giliead rubbed his eyes. “I doubt Mother will come here. I told Halian we weren’t going back to Andrien.”

  Tremaine felt Ilias go still. She held her breath and bit her tongue. This wasn’t the time for questions. After a moment, Ilias muttered into her shoulder, “Good.”

  Giliead nodded, looking weary. He added, “We need to talk to a poet.”

  Tremaine stared, her brows drawing together. “We need to do what?” Either he’s lost his mind or I have.

  But Ilias lifted his head long enough to ask, “About Castines?”

  “Oh.” Tremaine shook her head at herself. Right, I’ve lost my mind. “About whether Castines was a Syprian? The poets would know?”

  Giliead nodded, distracted and thoughtful. “If he was a Syprian wizard, his name might be in the Journals. I don’t remember it, but there are so many names, and it’s been a long time since I read the earlier accounts.” He glanced at Tremaine. “You’ll stay here?”

  “I will. Go ahead,” she told him. He pushed wearily to his feet and she watched him as he stepped out of the room.

  Ilias watched him too, worried. “You can go with him,” he told Tremaine. His eyes were focused but he still sounded a little vague. “I’ll be fine.”

  Tremaine shook her head. She had realized that no matter how eager she was to pursue the mystery of Castines, this was where she wanted to be.

  “Good,” he admitted, and slumped over to rest his head in her lap. Absently she picked at one of his braids, thinking of when Nicholas had said Ilias might do something to Ander out of jealousy. But Nicholas had been wrong. Ilias came from a society where polygamy was normal; he didn’t see Ander as a threat, except possibly to Tremaine’s sanity and temper. No, I’m the one who comes from the place where people kill for jealousy, Tremaine thought.

  She could see why. It did seem the most expedient method of dealing with the situation. She buried her face in her hands.

  Stop that.

  Chapter 14

  You sure it’s here, miss?” The big Parscian sailor was actually one of the engineering officers, but he wasn’t wearing his uniform jacket and his white undershirt was as covered with boiler room grime as that of any of the ordinary seamen. Florian wouldn’t have known he was an officer at all, if the woman sailor following behind her, armed with a large heavy wrench, hadn’t called him “sir.” He flashed a torch up into the dark maze of pipes overhead, raising his voice to be heard over the constant hum of machinery. “The others jumped out at us as soon as we were close enough.”

  Dark machine shapes rose up around them on all sides, hemming in the narrow walkway, and Florian wasn’t even sure where they were anymore. Circulating pumps, condensers, turbines, switchboards, it was all the same to her. Florian found the Ravenna’s engine rooms and other inner workings more unnerving than the long empty corridors; they were all either too hot or too cold, and with all the noise, something could easily creep up behind you. There were also infinitely more crannies to hide in.

  She held a small metal bowl with a fragment of wood floating in it, a quick locator spell that Niles had made for all the searchers. The wood held a drop of the gooey substance that had been all that was left of the contents of Ixion’s vat. That is, the contents that hadn’t escaped and were now rampaging around the ship. Her attention split between the floating splinter and the heavy pipes above them, Florian said, “This one’s been out longer than the others, I think, and I’m a little afraid they get smarter the longer they’re—” The wood spun, twirling into the center of its own little waterspout in the bowl; she yelped, “Look out!”

  They had an instant to brace themselves as something gray and scaly with three eyes and a profusion of teeth leapt silently out of the shadows above. The water slopping on her hands, Florian flung herself out of the way, muttering the illusion charm she had prepared. Fortunately the creatures were as susceptible to illusions as people, and a lot less likely to see through the deception. The creature huddled on the walkway for a startled moment, believing itself inexplicably trapped by metal walls, giving the officer a chance to throw a canvas bag over it and the sailor to leap forward and pound it with a wrench.

  Prior experience had taught them to wait until green flui
d actually leaked out through the canvas. The officer found a prybar and poked the bag over, until they could see that the thing’s head had been smashed. Then he gathered it up with a sigh.

  “Join the Rienish navy,” the woman sailor remarked, watching this process with distaste. “See unusual sights. Never sleep with the lights out again.”

  “This is nothing,” the officer told the woman wryly, holding the bag out at arm’s length. “You should have seen the man-thing with the crystals all over it. They’re still finding bits of him.”

  Florian grimaced. “Sorry about that.” She consulted the locator spell again, frowning absently. “I think that’s it for this area. I guess we can go back up now and see how the others are doing.”

  The temporary headquarters for the search was one of the crew dining rooms. The whitewashed compartment was much smaller than the passenger dining areas, low-ceilinged, with little in the way of decoration, but it had chairs to sit in and tables to spread out maps of the ship, and it was near the storage room where Ixion had been allowed to set up his vat. Now it was more than half full of crewmen in various stages of dishevelment from killing Ixion’s creatures.

  Florian left her team to dispose of the creature’s body and to grab a quick drink from the serving counter—Captain Marais had doubled the wine-and-spirits ration for the duration of the search—while she took a seat at the table with Niles. “Another one?” he asked her, marking it off on his chart. “Very good. I think we must have gotten most of them. There can’t be more than three or four left. Once Kressein finishes his examination of the vat, we should know exactly how many were released.”

  “Good.” Florian pushed sweat-soaked hair out of her eyes. It felt as if they had been doing this forever; she had no idea if it was day or night outside.

  Nicholas, a long trail of green slime on the shoulder of his dark coat, took a seat opposite them. “Two,” he told Niles, pulling one of the maps over to indicate the spot. “In the Number 5 Boiler Room. The engineering mate tells me we should do the tunnels that house the engine shafts next, and that that will be, in his words, a nightmare.” He lifted a brow at Florian. “Florian, I believe you wanted more responsibility?”

  She nodded, her mouth twisted ruefully. “I’ll take the engine shafts.”

  Niles frowned at her. “Have you still got that turnback in your stomach? Do you have the ipecac I gave you?”

  Florian grimaced at the memory. That, at least, was one problem she didn’t have anymore. “No, the first time I saw one of the vat-things close-up, I got ill and it came up without help.” She looked up as Kressein, the Capidaran Ministry sorcerer, entered the room, wiping his hands off on a towel. The old man was coatless, his gray hair tied back and his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing thin arms corded with long stringy muscles and marked by scars from what were probably old alchemy experiments. Florian caught a whiff of carbolic as he walked up to the table. “There were thirty-two of them.” Kressein handed the towel off to the quiet apprentice who followed him, then leaned wearily on the back of a chair. “He obviously meant to set them loose on the ship. What I don’t understand is why.”

  “Because that is one of the things that Syprian sorcerers do,” Nicholas answered, a little impatiently. “Giliead described the process in detail. The sorcerer approaches some small community on the outer edges of a god’s protection, either in hiding or in disguise. He creates curselings to reduce the population to an acceptable level, casts spells on the rest to enslave them, then takes them away out of any god’s reach before help can arrive. Eventually they all die or he tires of the game and kills them, then he goes off to look for trouble somewhere else.” He made a careless gesture. “Syprian sorcerers learn their craft by apprenticing themselves to madmen. Presumably the ones who survive the process without losing their sanity escape to take up some more sensible occupation.”

  “Yes, Gerard had explained that, and Florian had already indicated some earlier suspicions of Ixion as well,” Niles said, going back to his chart.

  Kressein, turning to go, added dryly, “It’s too bad Lord Chandre chose not to listen.”

  Contemplating another cup of coffee before she collected her crew and went out hunting again, Florian watched Niles cross off sections on the map. But maybe it was better to get it over with as quickly as possible. Nicholas was just getting up to leave when a crewman, his coat torn and his hat missing, hurried over to their table, telling Niles, “Sir, they want you to come down to the hospital immediately. A Capidaran soldier got mauled by one of those things on D deck.” He wiped at the blood on his neck, wincing. “Almost got all of us.”

  “D deck?” Niles pushed to his feet, brow furrowed. “It must have gotten past our barrier. Did you kill the creature?”

  The man nodded. “Yes, the sorcerer there got it.”

  Niles accepted that with a nod, preoccupied with gathering up his bag, but Nicholas frowned, looking around the room. A moment later Florian realized what he was looking for. “Sorcerer?” she asked, worried. Niles, Avrain, Kevari, Kressein and his apprentice…. “What sorcerer? They’re all here.”

  Niles stopped, blinked and faced the crewman, demanding, “What did this sorcerer look like?”

  The crewman gestured in confusion, obviously not expecting this question. “Tall, thin, white-haired, nice enough fellow but a little vague—” He stared as Niles and Nicholas bolted for the door. Florian shoved her chair back and hurried after them.

  Giliead left the lawgiver’s house through the dining portico at the back of the atrium, which opened into a small outer court facing the street behind the house. He wanted to avoid meeting anyone but after the fight in the plaza it was impossible; everyone who hadn’t participated was now out in the streets trying to find out what had happened. He nodded to polite greetings but didn’t stop for questions, making his way through the dusty streets to a white clay-walled house at the base of the nearest granary hill.

  Bythia’s younger son opened the door, stepping back and smiling, wiping his hands on the tail of his shirt. “Giliead. We heard you were back. But the big ship isn’t in the harbor?”

  “No, she’s not here yet.” Giliead stepped inside, glad to avoid any more difficult questions. Bythia’s house was far enough from the plaza that the noise of the fight wouldn’t have reached it, but the news would have been carried here immediately.

  The front room was cool, the walls painted dark green, with an archway opening into a small atrium with a crowded vegetable patch. Giliead could smell baking bread and suddenly remembered they had been short enough of food this morning to consider howler meat. It seemed a world away.

  The boy led him along the narrow portico, to an open room where Bythia sat beside a low table spread with scrolls and parchments, littered with pens and ink cups. On top of the pile of scrolls was a drawing someone had done of the Ravenna, trying to show how large she was by contrasting her with the lighthouse and one of the war galleys. It looked oddly flat to his eyes, after having seen the way the Rienish drew such things.

  Bythia was a small neat woman with long white hair, dressed in a blue cotton shift, her still-handsome face lined with age. She held out a hand to him, smiling a greeting. “Giliead. I’m hearing the strangest stories of a fight in the plaza. Is Ilias all right?”

  “He’s fine.” Knowing poets, he suspected Bythia knew far more about what had happened than just rumors. He took a seat as she sent the boy away to bring wine and some of the fresh bread. As she faced Giliead again, her eyes bright with anticipation of hearing his adventures, he knew what he had really come for. He took her hand and said, “Bythia, Arites is dead.”

  Bythia had been Arites’s teacher when he had first decided to be a poet. When Giliead had told her the story and she had wiped her tears away, she said, “He saw the Walls of the World, Gil. If you had asked him if he would give up his life for that, he would have said yes.”

  I would have made sure not to ask him if I’d had the choice, Giliead thou
ght. He just shook his head, looking away, and told her about the Aelin they had found, and the fortress and what he had come here for.

  “Castines,” she repeated thoughtfully when he had finished. “Twenty or so years ago. That would have been when Aricadia was Matriarch in Syrneth and Doliead was her poet. But we don’t know where he was from?”

  “We don’t know if he was even Syprian or not.”

  “Yes. And you know the wizards don’t all end up mentioned in the Journals. Well, having a rough idea of the time helps.” She sat back in her chair, studying the wall of scrolls thoughtfully. “I’ll start looking for it now.”

  “Thank you.” Giliead pushed reluctantly to his feet.

  Bythia stretched out a hand, halting him. Looking up at him with concern, her eyes still red from weeping, she said, “Careful, Giliead. There’s a story Arites and I always dreaded to tell, and I know I’d rather put it off as long as possible.”

  He nodded, though he couldn’t help the slight twist in his smile. “I’d rather put it off too, believe me.”

  The boy walked out with him, pausing on the door stoop to wave.

  Walking down the street, distracted, Giliead took moments to realize the god was trailing along after him, a haze of pinpoint lights stirring a flurry of dust in its wake. He stopped abruptly, staring at it in consternation, as it climbed the grape arbor framing the doorway of the nearest house and clung to the shadows under the vines. Startled, he said, “What’s wrong?” then glanced up and down the street self-consciously. Only very new Chosen Vessels spoke to the gods aloud, but fortunately nobody was in earshot.