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

by Martha Wells

  They stepped in the circle, Gerard used the sphere, and sunlight abruptly gave way to darkness. It was night, as they had expected, but they stood in a damp cold forest clearing, the winter-dead trees just looming shapes in the dark. Tremaine squinted, trying to make her eyes adjust faster. Something’s wrong, she thought. Beside her Ilias pivoted slowly, whispering, “We’re not at the port. I can’t smell the sea.”

  “No, this isn’t Rel,” Gerard agreed slowly. Tremaine heard dead leaves scrunch underfoot as he took a step forward. Not Rel, she thought grimly. Well, we’re off to the usual bang-up start.

  “But these were the parameters Arisilde gave you?” Nicholas asked quietly.

  “Yes.” Gerard added ruefully, “Of course, he never did confirm that he would actually send us to Rel.”

  Nicholas sighed in weary annoyance and Tremaine heard Giliead snort with disbelief. But this place had an oddly familiar feel, and Niles had said that the modified circle could take them anywhere as long as it had the parameters. Arisilde must know the parameters for all the places the sphere had previously opened a gate. She had a bad feeling about this. “Ilias, Giliead, can you smell a city?” she asked.

  It sounded daft, but they knew what she meant. The diesel and coal smoke odors were as distinctive to them as good perfume was to her. “Yes,” Ilias said immediately. “There’s one all around us.”

  Uh-huh. That’s what I was afraid of. Tremaine rubbed her forehead with a silent groan. “Nicholas, when you and Arisilde opened a gate circle for the first time, you were in Vienne, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, bloody hell.” Silhouetted by starlight, she saw Nicholas clap a hand over his eyes.

  “I take it that was a yes.” Gerard sounded grimly resigned. “We’re in Vienne?”

  Tremaine felt Giliead standing at her elbow. “Where’s that?” he asked quietly.

  “It’s our capital city,” Tremaine explained, biting her lip in thought. “We could have gone cross-country to Lodun from Port Rel and mostly avoided occupied territory. But now we’ll have to get out of Vienne first.” She looked around, squinting into the dark. This is going to be a problem. She was starting to feel glad that Nicholas had half a dozen explosives in his coat pockets. “I think we’re in a park.”

  “We’re in the Count Castillion Gardens,” Nicholas said, still sounding disgusted. He stepped past her, finding a path between the trees. “The first time Arisilde and I tried the gate spell, it was in one of the houses I own on Ivory Street.” He hesitated. “Yes, I think I know what we can do.”

  Tremaine hurried to follow him, stumbling as a fallen branch trapped her feet. “And what’s that?”

  “There’s a manhole a few streets over—”

  “Oh God, not the sewers.” She could hear the others following, a faint clink of metal as Giliead shouldered the pack with the spheres.

  Nicholas said repressively, “No, not the sewers. The maintenance tunnels for the underground rail system.”

  Tremaine nodded, trying not to feel disgruntled at Nicholas’s typical omniscience regarding Vienne’s public works. The maintenance tunnels had been built parallel to all the underground train lines, so workers could easily repair the rails. They were entered by manholes in the streets that looked nearly identical to the sewer manholes, but the train tunnels were dry, mostly safe and easily navigated, at least compared with the sewers. Vienne’s sewers made the passages under the Isle of Storms look safe and easily navigated.

  Following Nicholas, they reached the edge of the park so abruptly Tremaine walked into the waist-high wall that bordered it. She hopped back, rubbing the knee that had collided with the stone. The street before them was dark, the buildings tall shapes etched against the lighter darkness of the sky. No streetlights, no noise, she thought uneasily. It wasn’t unlike Vienne’s normal blackout conditions, but there was a quality to this silence that made the back of Tremaine’s neck prickle. Those shapes across the street were old town houses and blocks of flats. There should be some feel of movement, people returning home late, artists staying up to work or drink. She realized they had all come to a halt and heard Ilias ask Giliead quietly, “Curses?”

  “No.” But he added, “It feels like… people have been hunted with curses.”

  Tremaine felt that cold chill go right down her spine. “Thanks,” she murmured, “I feel very confident now. Let’s go get them, hurrah.”

  Somebody, probably Giliead, thumped her in the back of the head. But her comment seemed to have broken the spell cast by the silent city, and Nicholas said, “An illusion charm, Gerard? Or not?”

  Gerard shook his head, still studying the street intently. “I’d rather not risk it, unless it’s absolutely necessary. There’s too much of a chance of detection.”

  Tremaine nodded to herself. They had crossed the Gardier’s home territory without illusion charms. Of course, that hadn’t been by choice. “Very well.” Nicholas swung over the low wall. Gerard tucked the sphere into the bag under his coat and Ilias and Giliead returned their swords to their scabbards. Tremaine doubted that would help much if they were seen; there was probably a curfew, if the Gardier hadn’t simply killed all the civilians who hadn’t been able to escape the city.

  They made it across the dark canyon of the street and found an alley through to the next safely, but had to go down to the end of the next block to take the cross street. At the corner, Ilias hissed a sudden warning. An instant later, Tremaine saw the glow of electric torches down the block and heard boot steps on the cobbled street.

  Tremaine swore mentally, flattening herself back against a gritty stone wall, Ilias beside her. There was no shelter, not even a nearby door to force. Running would just draw attention. “Gerard, I think it’s absolutely necessary,” she whispered.

  “I concur,” he muttered. He didn’t say or do anything, but she knew he didn’t have to cast a concealment charm.

  Tremaine held her breath as the patrol approached, trotting down the street. She caught flashes of brown Gardier uniforms in the torchlight and heard someone give a breathless order in Aelin, but the words were too distorted by distance for her to understand.

  A torch flashed across them and Tremaine winced, but there was no outcry. The patrol continued down the street and she heard Ilias take a deep breath of relief. As the light vanished at the corner of the next cross street, Giliead said quietly, “They didn’t have a sorcerer crystal.”

  “They obviously detected the gate opening, and sent the nearest patrol to investigate,” Nicholas said grimly, pushing off from the wall. “The next group will be considerably larger and will have a crystal.”

  Ilias and Giliead were already moving ahead and Tremaine hurried after them. Behind her, Gerard said with some asperity, “Yes, that was why Rel would have been a better choice. But obviously Arisilde didn’t agree.”

  They crossed the next old cobbled street to the promenade, where the houses were bordered by ornate wrought-iron railings and empty flower beds. Nicholas led the way swiftly down the walk to a break in the houses. He opened the gate and they passed rapidly through another little park attached to one of the sets of flats. Even in the dark, Tremaine could tell it had gone untended. The fountain was still and no one had cut away the dry winter growth to prepare the beds for spring. Following Nicholas’s back, Tremaine didn’t realize they were being watched until Ilias stopped abruptly, his sword half-drawn. Tremaine saw movement in a doorway, heard a faint noise, and Giliead said, quietly, “Stop.” The command had been for Ilias, who returned the blade to the scabbard without hesitation.

  Tremaine peered uncertainly at the shape in the doorway, her hand on the pistol in her pocket, but she trusted Giliead’s indication that a weapon wasn’t necessary. Both Syprians could see in the dark far better than she could. Gerard was beside her, hand half lifted to cast a spell. Nicholas stepped forward to look, flashing a pocket torch on the figure.

  It was a woman, wrapped in a dark green shawl, her face smudged and dirty. She
winced away from the light and Nicholas switched it off.

  “It’s all right,” Gerard said quietly. “We’re not Gardier.”

  Tremaine heard the woman take a sharp breath, almost a sob. Sounding dazed, she said in a Vienne accent, “I can’t get in. I’ve lost my key.”

  Tremaine recognized that tone; the woman was a little mad. Maybe she had been driven that way by circumstance, but she was no longer quite connected to reality. She would have said the same thing to the Gardier if a patrol had caught her here.

  Tremaine looked at Nicholas, barely able to see him in the dark. She half expected him to argue that there wasn’t time to help random survivors, especially slightly demented ones. But he must have anticipated her argument that it would take less time to just do it than it would to argue about it; he stepped forward swiftly, pulling something out of his coat pocket. The woman edged away to give him room and he worked at the doorknob. Before Tremaine could even gather her wits to offer to hold a pocket torch for him, the knob clicked and the door swung open. The woman pushed to her feet, breathing fervently, “Thank you.”

  Nicholas stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Where are the Gardier?”

  The woman spoke in a hurried hush, and Tremaine got the impression of information learned by rote and passed swiftly to strangers encountered in alleys. “They’re in the palace, that’s their headquarters, I think. They’re all along Saints Procession Boulevard, the Street of Flowers. They’re staying in the center part of the city, where the streetlights work. The army broke the others in the rest of the city and cut the telephone and telegraph wires, but the Gardier fixed the ones in the palace quarter.”

  “Is the Rienish army still here?” Gerard demanded, startled.

  “Some, for a while.” The woman shook her head a shade too rapidly. “Not anymore.” Tremaine grimaced. That must have been the remnants of the troops forced to retreat from the Aderassi border. They had been too far from the coast to make it to the mostly doomed evacuation ships and too late to get on the last trains across Bisra to Parscia. And some at least must have tried to make some kind of half-assed defense of Vienne. Stupid, crazy… Tremaine gritted her teeth, fighting the well of emotion that made her want to cry or kill somebody. Mostly kill somebody. The woman was still talking. “Garbardin and Riverside and Redroyal Hill are a little safer. They don’t like narrow streets or the big tenements. It’s too easy for people to shoot or throw things and run away.”

  Nicholas nodded, and held the door for her as she slipped inside. “Not everybody in the city is dead,” Tremaine said, not realizing she had spoken until she heard the words. Ilias squeezed her shoulder.

  “I suspect there’s still thousands of people here,” Gerard said slowly. “The survivors are simply hiding very carefully.”

  They found the hole in the next street and Ilias was never more relieved to be climbing down into a black pit underground. Even though he knew it would be nearly impossible to see anyone moving through the dark street from one of the looming buildings, it still made him mortally uncomfortable to be in the open.

  Giliead and Nicholas went down first, just in case something lay in wait below. Tremaine and Gerard followed, and Ilias climbed down last, planting his feet on the narrow metal ladder and bracing against the rock-lined wall to nudge the heavy cover back over the hole.

  This shut out what little light there was, and Ilias fumbled down the ladder. He heard the others below, their voices distorted by stone and metal. As he reached the bottom, one of Gerard’s curse lights formed in the air, the little wisp of illumination revealing a narrow tunnel just wide enough for two men to stand abreast. The walls were lined with brick and he saw there were even Rienish trail signs painted beside the ladder. It was cold and damp, colder than it had been up on the street, and the air was full of strange metallic odors. But the tunnel seemed empty of anything bigger than vermin that fled squeaking from Gerard’s curse light.

  “Well?” Tremaine demanded, looking at Nicholas.

  “We can take these tunnels all the way over to the north end of Cabellard Street,” he said. “That’s as far north as the underground rail extends. At that point we’ll have to return to the surface, but we’ll be fairly near the city gate.”

  “The Gardier have to be guarding the gates. Granted, most of the city is outside the old wall, but still,” Tremaine persisted.

  Nicholas eyed her. “There are a number of houses and business establishments built up to the wall at the Cabellard Gate. With Giliead to find the Gardier wards, we should be able to get over the wall easily. I did choose this way for a reason.”

  “If you share the reason with us,” Tremaine pointed out, mock-innocently, “then the rest of us would understand it too.”

  I could have told him that one was coming. Ilias exchanged a dry look with Giliead. At least Tremaine was turning her ire on her father rather than him.

  “Tremaine, Nicholas,” Gerard said sharply. “That’s enough. Nicholas, when you make a decision, please briefly indicate how you arrived at it. Tremaine, please exercise your considerable self-restraint. Agreed? Then let’s go.”

  Nicholas said, “This way,” and strode off down the tunnel as though he knew exactly where he was going. Of course, he always does, Ilias thought wearily. Tremaine let her breath out in annoyance, exchanged a jaundiced look with Gerard, and followed. Giliead, already concentrating to listen for curses and curselings, moved after them and Ilias fell in behind to guard their backs. He couldn’t help saying under his breath, “I got married to get away from family fights.”

  Working his way to the front of the group to look for curse traps, Giliead threw him a darkly amused look.

  They walked for some time, Gerard’s soft wizard light drifting along, revealing the dusty bricks and the dark cross passages, the trail signs Ilias wished he could read. He recognized many of the same symbols from the trail signs on the Ravenna, but frustratingly these were all arranged in different patterns. Nicholas, still leading the way with Giliead beside him, would stop occasionally to consult one of the signs, then take another passage. They also passed a great many metal doors, set back into the walls and touched with rust, though the locks looked heavy and strong. Tremaine explained in a whisper that they were the doors into the train tunnels. Ilias still had only a vague idea of what a train was, but it didn’t sound as impressive as the Ravenna. From what she had said, they should be able to hear the things moving in the adjacent tunnels, but there was nothing. The Gardier didn’t seem to be using them, and Ilias found himself wondering if they would have any more idea of how to make a train work than he would. For all their pretensions to superiority, the Gardier city he had seen from a distance had seemed much inferior to this one, and even to Capistown.

  They came to a junction of three passages, one curving smoothly away, and Giliead flung out an arm to stop Nicholas.

  Brow lifted, Nicholas asked, “A spell?”

  Giliead nodded, sitting on his heels, holding one hand over the dirty brick floor. “A curse trap, right through here. I can’t tell what it’s meant to do.”

  As Gerard moved up beside them, Tremaine said in disgust, “Well, that’s great. So the Gardier know about these tunnels?”

  “It’s not Gardier,” Giliead said, shaking his head. “It smells like your curses. Rienish curses.”

  Gerard lifted his brows, studying the innocuous stretch of brick thoughtfully. “Let’s see.” Taking out the bulky contraption with glass lenses that he used for seeing curses, he fit it into place over the smaller lenses he normally wore, then put a hand inside the sphere’s bag.

  He muttered some words Ilias couldn’t understand and couldn’t really hear well enough to tell if they were in Rienish or not. But Giliead pulled back a little from the cursed spot, frowning. Startled, he said, “Can you read those symbols?” Ilias craned his neck to look, but to his eyes, there was nothing there. He leaned against the wall, a little disgruntled, but not much. It would have made things easier
on occasion to be able to see curses as Giliead did, but he knew it just wasn’t worth all the trouble the ability brought with it. At least Herias wasn’t accusing you of doing something to the god. Ilias had always had enough trouble all on his own.

  “Yes. This is a ward, cast by a Rienish sorcerer, within the past month. It’s very subtle, obviously in an attempt to avoid Gardier attention.” Gerard pulled off the bulky glass thing, blinking, and put it away. “It’s designed to alert the casting sorcerer if anyone passes this way, specifically down this left-hand passage, which appears to lead to—” He gestured for Ilias to move. Ilias shifted sideways, realizing he had been leaning on the painted trail sign. “The west end of the Street of Courts. There’s an addition to the standard ward structure that’s attempting to set another alarm if the person who breaks the ward is Gardier. But it’s a bit clumsy and I’m not sure if it works.” He tapped the sphere absently, his brows drawing together. “You know who this structure reminds me of?” he asked Nicholas. “Old Berganmot. His spells were very idiosyncratic. But he died two years ago, on the Aderassi front.”

  Nicholas lifted his brows. “Interesting. You realize what’s on the west end of the Street of Courts?”

  Gerard nodded, intrigued. “One of your safe houses was down there, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Nicholas’s eyes narrowed in thought. Tremaine sighed, took the little round gold case out of Gerard’s pocket that the Rienish used for measuring time and studied it impatiently. Gerard recaptured it from her with an annoyed frown. “Can you disarm the ward without alerting the sorcerer?” Nicholas asked, ignoring the whole performance.

  Gerard touched the sphere again and gestured with his other hand. “Did that work, Giliead?”

  Giliead pushed to his feet, nodding. “There’s a path through it now.”

  “Very good.” Nicholas gestured for Giliead to proceed down the passage to the Street of Courts. A little warily, Giliead led the way, showing them where the curse was so they could avoid it.