The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein)

by Martha Wells

  That’s it, I’ve got to see what’s going on, Tremaine thought, determined. “This way.” She headed for the side doors, pushing through them and stepping onto the Promenade deck. The enclosed deck had a panoramic view of the sea and night sky through its large windows, stretching most of the length of the ship. Ilias and Giliead reached the windows first, looking for the airship, both nearly bonking their heads on the glass trying to see straight up.

  No one else was on the Promenade; Tremaine thought they were not technically violating the order to stay inside, since the deck was enclosed, but she pushed the heavy door shut just in case, making sure the latches clicked. She went to join the men at the railing, studying the clear and for the moment empty moonlit sky. “The damn thing must be behind us.” She tapped her fingers on the railing, impatient and anxious. “So what the hell are we—”

  Giliead stepped back, swearing and clasping a hand to his head as if something had struck him. Then between one blink and the next the deck was brilliant with daylight, the sea outside choppy under a cloud-streaked blue sky. The ship’s expansion joints creaked, a massive bass groan of complaint thrumming up through her metallic bones as the deck rolled violently; Tremaine bounced off the glass and banged into Ilias.

  Holding the rail to keep her and himself upright, Ilias asked Giliead uneasily, “Are you all right? Was it the curse?”

  “Yes.” Giliead caught the rail as the ship swayed back over, then began to roll into a turn. He was grimacing from the pain. “It caught me by surprise,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “So you can feel an etheric gate open,” Tremaine said, holding on to Ilias and nervously watching the sea draw nearer as the ship leaned into its turn. “That might come in handy. If we live through the next five minutes,” she added tightly.

  The deck tilted more sharply under their feet as the turn continued and Tremaine spared one hand for the rail, her palm sweaty on the polished wood, and Ilias tightened his hold around her waist. Her stomach informed her that she really should have had more dinner, or something besides wine to settle it.

  The Ravenna swayed upright as the ship came about, strained metal emitting another heartfelt groan, the ship’s own voice protesting this abrupt handling. Ilias hissed between his teeth. Pressed against him, Tremaine could feel his heart pound. His hair brushed her cheek as he turned his head to say to Giliead, “That’s taking an awful chance. Remember when—”

  “We capsized Agis’s fishing boat,” Giliead finished, sounding a little unnerved. “Vividly.”

  “I don’t think that would happen,” Tremaine muttered, but her imagination had already taken flight. At least you closed that door. All those outer doors on the passenger decks were heavy and thick, functioning as watertight hatches. But even if Gerard and Niles and Arisilde somehow managed to right a capsized Ravenna with sorcery before the ship sank, she didn’t think the Promenade’s windows would survive that first deadly roll. Ilias’s thoughts must have been along the same lines; he squeezed her waist and kissed her on the back of the head in a combination of reassurance and relief.

  Tremaine forced her brain past the image of imminent disaster. The ship was steaming through the daylit sea now, roughly back the way they had come. We’re home, she thought, realizing it with surprise. Sort of. They were back in the ocean that lay between Ile-Rien and Capidara and not the strange foreign seas the Syprians sailed. “I wonder how long it will take—” The loudspeaker interrupted her with a brief warning. She translated it as, “Here we go again.” Giliead swore succinctly.

  Tremaine felt the ship jerk and roll, as if the entire weight of it had skipped sideways. The Promenade was suddenly plunged into darkness. They were back in the Syprians’ world.

  Giliead had a hand pressed against his temple, wincing. Ilias said grimly, “There it is.”

  Tremaine followed his gaze, blinking as her eyes adjusted. A short distance off their bow the airship was outlined in sharp black silhouette against the moonlit sky. Giliead took a sharp breath. “Your god is about to—”

  Red and orange blossomed under the black shape of the balloon. Tremaine heard the distant rattle of machine-gun fire, as the airship reacted to their sudden appearance, but it was too little and too late. She felt a certain savage satisfaction; she wished the Gardier woman locked up in the hospital or the Isolation Ward or wherever she was now could have seen it. So it’s too late for us to win, but we can hurt you. We can hurt you almost as bad as you’ve hurt us. “That’s another one down,” she said, mostly to herself. “How many to go?”

  The fire encompassed the airship’s shape and it rolled, fragments of the undercarriage tumbling down toward the water.

  Despite heavy limbs and a fuzzy brain, Tremaine had trouble sleeping. She was half-expecting Arisilde to appear again, but if he did, she didn’t remember it. She woke, groggily, to Arites leaning over her, saying, “The ringing thing is trying to speak to you.”

  “What?” she demanded blearily, glad she hadn’t bothered to undress. They had ended up in the maid’s room again, Ilias curled up next to her, Giliead sprawled in the other bed. At some point Ilias had shifted over, flung an arm around her waist and pillowed his head on her shoulder; she was so exhausted it hadn’t even woken her.

  “It speaks only in Rienish, and very fast,” Arites explained apologetically. “I can’t understand anything it says except your name.”

  Neither Ilias nor Giliead had moved, probably the result of wine that contained considerably more alcohol than they were used to. “You mean the telephone?” Tremaine elbowed Ilias until he groaned and rolled over so she could sit up and struggle free of the sheet. Standing barefoot on the carpet, she was unprepared for the roll of the ship, and it nearly pitched her on her face. It seemed even worse than usual; she wondered if they had hit bad weather following the Walls.

  She recovered, gripping the bedpost, and made it across the room. Kias wasn’t on the floor this time. Either he had gotten up early or had set up housekeeping with his new girlfriend. “You actually answered the telephone?”

  Arites was already at the door. In the light from the other room he looked chagrined. “The noise it made was piercing. And it wouldn’t stop. And,” he added a little defensively as she followed him out into the main room, “I don’t see how listening to a speaking curse box speak is any different from using the light from curse lights to see.”

  No one else seemed to be in the suite, possibly due to the piercing noise of the speaking curse box. “It’s not, except they aren’t curses.” Luckily, he had left the receiver off the cradle, and she picked it up, yawning. “Yes?”

  The connection crackled, and a male voice, sounding annoyed and relieved, said, “This is the ship’s operator speaking. Is that Miss Valiarde?”

  “Yes.” Tremaine massaged her forehead. She had expected to have time this morning for a leisurely bath; she had the feeling that just wasn’t going to happen. “This is me—she.”

  “Colonel Averi needs to speak to you immediately.”

  It was a meeting again, in the Third Class drawing room with the wall-sized mural of Parscian fishing boats, and Tremaine was obviously late for it. Gerard, Ander, Colonel Averi, Captain Marais, Count Delphane and Lady Aviler, and some of the navy and army officers were present. Everyone seemed to be in various intense conversations, except for Averi, grimly standing sentinel at the front of the room, and Captain Marais, seated with his arms folded and his face resigned. One of the Gardier maps had been tacked up to a carved wooden screen above the marble hearth.

  Tremaine slid into the back of the room where Gerard was standing and eased up to his side. She had changed her shirt hurriedly and splashed water on her face; she felt bleary and barely awake, and everyone else looked as if they had been up for hours and had access to coffee and breakfast and a bath. Even Gerard looked less drawn and exhausted. “Did you and Niles release each other from that no-sleep adjuration?” she asked around a yawn.

  “Yes, last night, a
fter we destroyed the airship,” he admitted, sounding relieved. “In fact, Niles is still asleep. He was so confused when Giaren woke him this morning we decided to let him rest.” He added ruefully, “Of course, he’s going to need it.”

  “Why? What is this?” she asked, frowning. She had assumed this was about their little Walls problem or the attack on the airship. Either that or Averi had summoned her to give an in-person account of what had happened in the hospital.

  Gerard’s expression of consternation didn’t enlighten her. “There have been some developments—”

  At the front of the room, Averi abruptly took the floor, slamming his hand down on the writing desk. “Gentlemen, quiet! We’ve spoken about this all morning, and the best option we have is to destroy the Gardier outpost.”

  “The what?” Tremaine blurted.

  Sometime later, Tremaine followed Arites’s directions and found Ilias and Giliead in the First Class swimming pool, deep in the interior of the ship on D deck. She walked down the tiled stairs into the large chamber, all tiled in cream and green, the splashing and yelling in Syrnaic telling her she was in the right spot. A gallery running all along the top of the room had doors that led into steam and massage rooms, now locked, and the vaulted mother-of-pearl ceiling stretched up through the deck above to make a gentle arch. The pool was filled with salt water, accessed from tanks that were topped off from the unlimited supply outside, like the saltwater plumbing available in all the bathrooms.

  There were a few people sitting on deck chairs down at the far end, an older woman and two men, all well dressed and chatting comfortably despite the two naked Syprians trying to drown each other.

  Tremaine walked along the side to the far end, past the two piles of clothes and boots. The tiled walls threw back distorting echoes, and she couldn’t hear the spectators’ conversation, so she knew it should be safe to talk here. She knelt at the edge of the water, and called, “Hey!”

  Ilias, who had just shoved Giliead under with a seal-like leaping tackle, surfaced and shook the hair out of his eyes. He spotted her and swam over, grabbing one of the handrails to pull himself up to the curved tile edge. He grinned up at her, his hair streaming water. “Come on in.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so.” Tremaine eased back out of arm’s reach. “I need to talk to you two.”

  Giliead swam up, looking a little abashed to be caught having a good time. He asked, “Did you find out why we’ve stopped?”

  Tremaine hadn’t realized that the ship’s roll felt odd because it had stopped moving forward until Averi had mentioned it at the meeting. She took a deep breath. “Partly. Last night, after they destroyed the airship, they figured out that we were fairly close to the place where Gyan thought the Wall Port might be. So they stopped to send out a boat to find it. The boat had illusion charms to keep it from being seen, which was a good thing, since the Gardier are definitely there.”

  She paused, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Both men were watching her gravely now. “The boat came back a little while ago. They found the port at a big break in the Walls. The break is large enough for the Ravenna to get through, and the launch couldn’t find any sign of rocks or reefs. But the problem is that the Gardier have some kind of outpost above the port, with a scaffold tower that another airship was docked at. The one we took out must have been heading for the same place. Anyway, the boat couldn’t go too far into the harbor, but it looked like the people who live there were going crazy, with a lot of the native ships leaving. They—meaning Averi, Captain Marais and Count Delphane—want to destroy the Gardier outpost and capture the airship.” It had surprised her at first that Count Delphane had been in favor of an attack, but maybe their success against the gunship at Cineth and the airship last night had convinced him.

  Ilias was nodding, and Giliead said, “It only makes sense. If this is the closest break in the Walls—and the only one we can find that the ship can fit through—you need to secure it.”

  “That’s what they said.” Tremaine hesitated. “And the thing is, they want your help. Our help. To scout the native port.”

  Ilias had to admit to an excitement that had nothing to do with the prospect of battle with the Gardier. He had heard tales of the Walls for years, and seeing them from the Ravenna’s deck had been wonderful enough. Actually setting foot on them and visiting a Wall Port was incredible.

  In the second bedroom of their cabin, Tremaine went through her belongings, storing away a number of items in the bag Karima had given her, including the set of metal instruments she used to open locked doors and the small shooting weapon she had taken to carrying with her. “I need a different pair of boots,” she told him, looking genuinely worried about it. “It would be all I need for someone to see through my Syprian disguise because like an idiot I’m wearing rubber-soled boots made in Vienne.”

  Ilias, repairing a broken thong on Giliead’s baldric while Giliead sharpened their swords, looked up with a frown. “You could ask Cletia,” he said doubtfully. “She might loan you hers.”

  Giliead snorted. “But that would be helpful on her part.”

  Tremaine put her bag down on the table with a thump. “Let’s throw caution to the winds and ask her.”

  As she went into the main room, Ilias followed out of curiosity. He was surprised to see Cletia seated in one of the chairs, sharpening her sword. Cimarus and Danias were crouched on the floor in front of the couch, sorting through a provision pack. Gyan stood with arms folded, surveying the scene critically. “What’s this?” Ilias demanded, fearing the worst.

  Gyan cocked a brow at him. “Pasima has told the Rienish that Cletia and Cimarus are going with you.”

  Ilias stared at him, then pressed his lips together to keep in the first comment that came to mind. He looked helplessly at Tremaine, who folded her arms, and said, “Oh, joy.”

  Cletia’s shoulders hunched stubbornly, but she ignored them. Giliead stepped into the doorway behind him, and Ilias didn’t need to look at him to know what his expression was. In a tight voice, Giliead pointed out, “This is a scouting mission for a war party. The more people we send, the more likely it is the Gardier will notice us.”

  Cimarus bristled at the implied insult, and Cletia began, “Pasima has said—”

  Pasima stepped into the room with Sanior trailing her. “Pasima can speak for herself,” she said, smiling a little, as if she meant to settle an argument between quarrelsome children. “What’s wrong?”

  Ilias exchanged a sour look with Giliead. They both knew that Pasima was just making sure her bed cushions were feathered on both sides. If she could prove the Rienish false, her side of the family would have the credit for it; but if the Rienish proved to be valuable allies, she wanted to make sure they were beholden to her as well as to Giliead. It wasn’t worth the argument.

  Tremaine evidently thought so too. She eyed Pasima for a long moment with that disconcertingly direct and calculating stare she was capable of. Then she said, “Fine. Now give me your boots.”

  The Rienish preparations for battle took longer than Ilias had expected. He and Giliead had debated over which weapons to take, assembled some provisions and were ready to go. Since their duty for the war party would be to scout the Gardier post from within the Wall Port, it was more than enough. But the Rienish took longer to assemble their men and weapons and still seemed to be running around collecting things. And having curses put on themselves by god-spheres. “I don’t understand why you have to do this,” he told Tremaine as they walked down the passage to Gerard’s quarters.

  “Yes, you do, you’re just being difficult,” Tremaine replied.

  Since grumbling “I am not” would tend to prove her point, he rolled his eyes and said nothing.

  Gerard’s door stood open, and Tremaine knocked on it and stepped inside. She didn’t halt suddenly, but Ilias registered the tightening of her shoulders. He followed her in, spotting the cause almost immediately. Ander was sitting in the armchair across the room.


  Gerard, standing at the desk paging through one of the Rienish flat books, glanced up. “There you are. Ready for the spell? Ander’s just had it.” The god-sphere sat on the little table in front of the couch; as Tremaine walked in, it clicked loudly at her. There were still curse bowls filled with water cluttering up every available surface.

  “Of course.” Tremaine favored Ander with a smile so sharp it could have cut leather.

  Ander got to his feet, saying something to Tremaine in Rienish that Ilias wasn’t meant to understand, except that he caught the words “how” and “husband” and guessed the rest. “I’m fine, thank you for asking,” he replied in Syrnaic, leaning his shoulder against the wall and folding his arms.

  Ander inclined his head, acknowledging the hit. He wore the same gray garments that the other Rienish soldiers did when they fought. “So you don’t mind Tremaine having a curse put on her?”

  Ilias eyed him acerbically. Of course he did. Gerard had convinced the god-sphere to teach Niles the Gardier language so they could better question their one remaining prisoner. But the Rienish had decided that some members of the war party should learn it too, in case they got the opportunity to overhear or question any Gardier in the Wall Port. It made sense in a way, as the Gardier seemed never to bother learning the languages of the people they fought, and this was one of the few things the Rienish could do that the Gardier couldn’t. Tremaine had immediately volunteered.

  Ilias knew she had had the curse put on her before; it was how she, Gerard, Florian and Ander had all learned Syrnaic. But the idea still made him uncomfortable. Tremaine had her back to him, poking at one of Gerard’s curse bowls on the cabinet across the room. Ander was still regarding him with that expression of pleasant inquiry that was somehow adding up to an aggressive challenge in Ilias’s head. Repressing the urge to just hit him, Ilias said pointedly, “No, I don’t mind.”