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

by Martha Wells

  He put the memories aside as they searched the area rapidly but carefully, working their way up catwalk by catwalk. The places where the curse lights weren’t lit were the worst, preventing them from checking whole stretches of the catwalk and the lengths of the ladders at once. The delay made Ilias grit his teeth; he was anxious to get back to Tremaine. He knew she was badly upset by Arites’s death and that she would hide her grief like she did everything else, packing it all away until it ate her from the inside out.

  They found no Gardier by the time they reached the top level, and Giliead turned for the ladder, saying, “There’s nobody up here. We need to go back down and…” He trailed off, probably because he had no idea how to finish the sentence. Ilias sure didn’t.

  “Can we get back down?” Cimarus interrupted, his voice rough. “Can the Rien make it go down?”

  “Maybe, if nobody asks them stupid questions,” Ilias told him.

  “What do you know about it?” Cimarus shot back. “You’re the ones who brought us here. Visolela said this was mad—”

  Giliead, one hand on the ladder, turned suddenly and caught the boy by the shirt, yanking him forward. “Listen to me.” Giliead’s voice was still quiet, but a muscle jumped above his jaw.

  Ilias let out his breath, shaking his head in frustration. When Giliead lost his temper it tended to be all at once, with no warning, at least to the people who didn’t know him well. Cimarus was stupid to push old grievances at a time like this.

  Giliead said deliberately, “What brought you here is Pasima’s distrust of anything that she can’t give orders to. That’s not my problem. Now keep your mouth shut, or—”

  Ilias felt the jolt through the metal underfoot and grabbed one of the support bars. Falling, his gut said in panic, but it was over before he could draw breath to yell. Giliead dropped Cimarus and staggered back, shaking his head as if he had taken a blow. Ilias lurched forward and caught his arm, steadying him before he stumbled into the ladder’s opening. “What happened?” he demanded, dreading the answer.

  Giliead shook his head unsteadily. “We just went somewhere.”

  Tremaine made a faint noise of protest that froze in her throat. A cloudy gray sky now filled the port in front of her. She flinched back in pure shock. “I didn’t do that!”

  “Do what?” Cletia stared from her to the port and back again. “It’s day. How is it day?”

  “Oh. Oh. Oh, damn,” Tremaine said weakly. Cletia and the other Syprians would have been in the cabin when the Ravenna had moved between worlds to trap the other airship; she wouldn’t have seen…. Sick realization set in, and Tremaine wished she was lying next to Arites in the cargo hold. The sphere is on the Ravenna. We don’t have a sphere, any sphere. We have a dead Gardier wizard in a crystal who hates us. “Oh, this did not happen—”

  “Stop that!” Cletia snapped, a shrill edge in her voice. “It doesn’t help when you say that!”

  “Sorry.” Tremaine took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes, hoping maybe it would just go away. She looked again. No such luck.

  “What is it?” Cletia demanded, strained. “What happened?”

  “We—it made a portal. It went through an etheric world-gate.” Cletia shook her head, confused, and Tremaine forced herself to explain, “It’s how we travel from world to world. How we took the Ravenna from Ile-Rien to your world, how the Gardier go from your world to Ile-Rien. Except there are more than two worlds.” She had sent Gervas to another world with Arisilde’s help, stranding the Gardier in a hellish landscape. Oh, so this is how poetic justice feels.

  “But you can make it go back,” Cletia protested. “If that’s how your people travel—”

  Tremaine shook her head, pointing at the crystal, glinting dully now in the daylight. Perched in the metal holder, the yellowish tint and dull patches on its facets made it look more like a malignant growth than a piece of rock. “It took us, and it’s Gardier. It’s not going to listen to me. Oh, wait!” Tremaine grabbed Cletia’s arm, staring at the sky. It was gray, too thick with clouds to really see any color. The sky of the world she had sent Gervas to had been red. “Maybe—Maybe it took us back to Ile-Rien. Not Ile-Rien, the distance is all wrong. But our world. In which case, we’d be a few days sail from Capidara.” She stepped to the panel and tried to look down to the ground below, something she had been reluctant to do so far. As if seeing what was below them would make it real and put the final nail in the coffin.

  But what lay below wasn’t that revealing. Tremaine could see only more clouds, as if they were traveling over puffy bundles of cotton wool. I’m looking down on clouds, she thought, distracted. How many people now except for Gardier got to see what clouds looked like from above?

  Behind her, Cletia said slowly, “Capidara is the land we were going to on the ship.”

  “Yes. We were going to get near where it would be in your world, then go through a portal to get to it,” Tremaine told her impatiently.

  “I know, Pasima told us. I meant why would an enemy take us somewhere we were going in the first place?”

  “Uh.” Tremaine felt a headache coming on. She eased back from the control panel. “Good question.” She looked over the dials and other things again, her brows knit. They weren’t going up anymore, she realized. The airship was moving forward. That’s not good.

  She heard a noise behind her and turned to see Basimi, his expression aghast, staring past Cletia out the port. “What the hell—”

  For some reason his shock galvanized Tremaine. Maybe because she didn’t trust him. “We gated,” she told him succinctly, eyes narrowing. “Maybe to Ile-Rien. Probably not. Can you or Molin fly this thing?”

  His aghast stare switched to her. “Are you—” she had the feeling he was veering away from the word “crazy.” “Serious?”

  Tremaine lifted her brows, saying acidly, “Does the situation look serious?”

  He moved past Cletia as the other woman looked worriedly from him to Tremaine, unable to understand the Rienish conversation. He studied the controls a moment, his face fixed in a grimace. He pointed to one of the boxes suspended from the support girder, one that had a round dial with a pointer surrounded by squiggly Gardier characters. “I bet that’s a compass, though I don’t know if that symbol at the top is north or not.” He looked hopefully at Tremaine.

  She shook her head, chewing her lip. “They were studying this stuff at the Viller Institute. Some of them would probably know.” Too bad they weren’t here. She glanced up at him. “Did you send the message?”

  He nodded. “I got an acknowledgment from the Ravenna, then it was cut off. That’s when I realized the window in the wireless room was showing daylight.” He said helplessly, “Ma’am, at most, I was supposed to fly this thing to the Ravenna. This is a little beyond me. Before the war I was a shipping clerk for Martine-Viendo. I don’t know—”

  “Just try, that’s all we can do. Look, why is it flying by itself? Is it the crystal? I know you don’t know, I just want an opinion.”

  Putting it that way seemed to help him organize his thoughts. He looked over the controls again, tapped another dial cautiously, muttering, “That might be an altimeter.” He shook his head finally. “My opinion is yes, it is flying by itself. Look at the wheel there.” He pointed and Cletia, whose face said she was desperately trying to follow the conversation whether she understood a word of Rienish or not, leaned around him to look. “It’s moving by itself, correcting our course against the wind. I don’t see what else could be doing that but some kind of spell.”

  Tremaine peered at the wheel. After a moment she spotted the slight motion as the wheel turned to the right, then back. Her stomach clenched. “Oh, great,” she said under her breath, glaring at the crystal. Where are you taking us, you little bastard? And had it formed the portal on its own, with the spell circle on the outpost, or had it somehow been called back by the Gardier in this world?

  “Let me try this—” Basimi touched the wheel gingerly, then wit
h one hand tried to turn it. After a moment, he gripped it with the other hand, shifting his weight to get better leverage. Heart sinking even further, Tremaine watched him apply his full strength to it, until his face reddened and he grunted with effort. He gave up with a gasp, stepping back. “No good.” He shook his head, gesturing helplessly toward the wheel. “It’s like it wasn’t meant to move at all. But I can see that thing steering it.”

  She heard Ilias’s voice in the passage. Cletia turned, ducking out the doorway with a rapid Syrnaic explanation.

  Basimi was still looking at her. Tremaine wet her lips, weighing precipitate action versus the chance of making the situation even worse. Picking the lock and the appearance of strangers in the control cabin might have caused the crystal to form the portal.

  All right, think. The clouds prevented any view of the ground now below them, but if the airship had been called back to a Gardier base that was occupying the same space in this world that the Wall Port had in the other, surely the airship would be landing at it by now. So the airship was probably traveling toward another Gardier stronghold. “We can try to stop it by taking the crystal out of that holder. Then we’d have control over the airship, at least.”

  Basimi nodded. “That’s about it, ma’am.”

  “Right.” Tremaine stepped to the doorway. She nearly ran into Molin and Dubos, who must have heard everything she and Basimi had said; both men looked grim. Giliead and Ilias were in the passage just behind them, listening to Cletia. Giliead’s expression was incredulous, but Ilias just looked dismayed. He was the only Syprian who had been to Ile-Rien and back, with a brief unscheduled stop in Hell when Florian had tried to change the parameters of the reverse adjuration. In the open doorway of one of the side cabins, Cimarus stared horrified toward the window. “And we don’t know if we’re in the Rien place or not,” Cletia was saying nervously. “And—”

  “There’s a big sorcerer crystal in here and it made the portal and is now flying the airship all by itself,” Tremaine interrupted hurriedly in Syrnaic. “I’ve touched one before, and it didn’t hurt me, but I want Giliead to see if he thinks it’s booby-trapped.”

  He was already moving forward, pushing between Molin and Dubos. As he stepped through the doorway he halted abruptly, his eyes caught by the view through the port.

  “We’re not at that other place, are we?” Ilias asked, coming in behind him. He sidled up to the port as if worried he might fall out through the glass, looking warily down at the clouds below. “The red sky place?”

  “No. No, I’m sure…not.” Tremaine saw Giliead looked a little green. Being suspended in midair had to be a startling experience for the Syprians; she had been in hot-air balloons before, at summer fêtes before the war. Though certainly none of those had ever gone this high. She suddenly didn’t want Giliead to exhibit any weakness in front of Basimi, and to distract him said hastily, “Did you feel it happen like before? When we went through the portal?”

  He shook himself a little, glancing down at her, and she knew there was no way in hell he was going to show weakness in front of anybody at the moment. “Yes, it felt like—Being pulled through a weir. But fast.” He focused on the crystal, taking a step toward it. “I can’t tell if there’s a curse trap or not. I can tell there are curses on it, or inside it. It’s not like your god-sphere, it can’t hide itself when it wants to.”

  “Right.” She took a deep breath. “Take it out of the holder.”

  Giliead brushed the back of his hand against the crystal’s milky facets first; Tremaine was reminded of an electrician testing a possibly faulty switch. Then he gripped it carefully and lifted it out of its metal cage.

  Basimi slipped past him, sharply eyeing the wheel. He gripped it, leaning on it again with all his strength. He let go, swearing. “Didn’t work.”

  Tremaine squeezed the bridge of her nose. It had been a forlorn hope, anyway. She turned to Ilias and Giliead, saying in Syrnaic, “I need you to look for something. A bucket or container we can fill with water.”

  Giliead nodded understanding, carefully setting the crystal back into its holder. “You want to put the crystal in water, like you did with the god-sphere?”

  “That’s it.” They had stored Arisilde’s sphere in a bucket of water at one point, trying to keep the Gardier from tracing it through the etheric vibrations it emitted.

  “Didn’t Gerard say that didn’t work?” Ilias pointed out, sounding dubious.

  Tremaine pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Because we put the Gardier crystals in there with it. And probably because the sphere was touching the side of the bucket. The idea is to insulate it, so we’ll have to suspend the crystal inside it somehow.”

  Ilias lifted his brows. “Without letting it touch anything but water.”

  “Right.” Tremaine was aware she was starting to look desperate.

  Ilias threw a worried glance at Giliead, but promised her, “We’ll work on it.”

  Ilias didn’t quite shove Cletia and Cimarus down the passage in front of him, but he wanted to. They reached the big room with the wall cabinets and the tables and chairs. “We need to search this thing again, this time looking for water, and something that will hold it, about this big,” Giliead told them, holding his hands about a foot apart.

  “They must have water and containers for it where they keep their provisions,” Cletia suggested.

  Giliead nodded, gesturing around the main room. “They have places to sleep aboard this thing, they must have food and water, probably in one of these cabinets somewhere. But before anything else happens—” He glanced down at Ilias, his brows knit with concern. “We need to do the rites for Arites.”

  Ilias took a sharp breath, looking away briefly. “You’re right.”

  “But should we do it now?” Cletia said, frowning. “We don’t know if this is the Rien place, but we know we aren’t…where we’re supposed to be. If we release his soul here, will it be able to find the right place?”

  Ilias stared blankly at her, startled, then looked hopefully up at Giliead. “Do you know?”

  Giliead frowned slowly, staring into space. “When did he die? I know it was before the daylight came.”

  Cimarus nodded, glancing at Cletia for confirmation. “I think he died before the flying whale came off the ground.”

  A brief look of relief crossed Giliead’s face. “Then it shouldn’t matter. His shade will be back where he died. We can always do the rites again once we get back, just in case, but…”

  Ilias didn’t need to hear that thought aloud. If we don’t get back, we need to do the rites now. “I’ll see if Tremaine can be the third.”

  Giliead nodded agreement, resting his hand on Ilias’s shoulder. “Try to persuade her. I think she needs it.”

  Cletia half reached toward him, as if she had meant to touch his arm and reconsidered. “She didn’t…take his death well. I don’t think we should—”

  “I don’t care what you think,” Ilias interrupted sharply.

  Giliead just eyed her coolly, then jerked his head at Ilias. “We need to get Arites ready.”

  Cimarus bristled but didn’t quite dare to react as Ilias deliberately thumped him with his shoulder as he pushed past.

  Ma’am, there’s a problem.”

  Tremaine glanced up, blinking. She had stepped out into the passage to rest her aching head against the metal wall for a moment. She thought the headache might be from the altitude, but it could also be from her brain trying to climb out of her skull through sheer terror. Dubos and Molin were talking quietly in the map room, but the steady thrum of the airship’s engine made the words unintelligible no matter how close to the open door she edged. She had wanted to sit down, but Arites’s presence in the cargo hold had made her allergic to the entire back half of the airship. She pushed off from the wall, following Basimi back into the control cabin. “You can call me Tremaine,” she pointed out.

  “If you’re going to be in charge, I’d rather call you ma’am,�
� he told her, stepping into the cabin. He didn’t need to point out what the problem was. They had left the clouds behind.

  She moved closer to the streaky glass of the port. The late-afternoon sun shone out of a reassuringly blue sky smudged with gray rain clouds, but it wasn’t the brilliant azure of the Syrnai or the winter blue of Ile-Rien and Capidara.

  Some distance below the airship, patchy sunlight glinted off water. Shallow water, tinged brown with sand or dirt, with wavelets washing up on small irregular patches of land crested with grass. A tidal flat? she wondered. In the distance was the darker outline of more solid land, but much of it was obscured by a bank of mist and rain. It fit in with her theory of a nearby Gardier base terribly well. With the accent on terrible. She wet her lips. “It still might be—”

  “Look up.” Basimi leaned passed her to point, the sleeve of his fatigues smelling of grease and fear sweat. “There.”

  She looked. In a patch of open sky she could see the outline of the moon, faded as it always looked in a daylit summer sky. Basimi showed her a smudged scrap of paper where he had worked out dates and the phases of the moon. “It’s full. It was waning when we were at the Wall Port, and I worked out that it should be half-full at home.” He met her eyes, his face bleak. “We aren’t home, and we aren’t in the Syprians’ world.”

  Tremaine rubbed her forehead. I think I’m going to be sick. “Shit.” We need a sorcerer. What they had was a Chosen Vessel.

  “And that thing is taking us straight to the Gardier,” Basimi added, glaring at the crystal.

  That at least she could do something about now. “I know how we can get that thing to let go of the controls.”

  He stared at her worriedly. “Without breaking it? We need it to get back.”

  “Without breaking it. The others are looking for the things we need. I’ll go see if they’ve found them yet.”