by Martha Wells
For some reason Tremaine hadn’t thought there would be this many people here. She was glad she had put on what passed for her best outfit: a dark tweed jacket and skirt. Unfortunately, the stout walking boots didn’t exactly go with it. But then the “dowdy old maid” look never goes out of style, she thought in resignation.
A tall slim young man with short straw blond hair hurried up to them, demanding, “Did you get it?”
Unperturbed, Gerard touched her elbow to bring her forward. “Tremaine Valiarde, this is my colleague, Breidan Niles.”
“An Arisilde Damal sphere,” Niles said, ignoring Tremaine in favor of the device she was holding. He touched the metal reverently. “The other prototypes were before my time.”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me of that.” Gerard sighed and took the sphere from Tremaine. “The sphere will let me manipulate it, but it’s still keyed to Tremaine.”
Niles stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time. With his well-tailored suit, narrow features and slicked-back hair, he looked exactly like the kind of man who should be decorating a cafe society party or a court reception, but if he was here, he was either a sorcerer or a philosopher or both. Light brows drawn together in consternation, he turned back to Gerard. “Have you considered the possible consequences?”
Gerard lifted an ironic brow. “I assure you, I’ve thought of nothing else for the past few hours.”
“Is she aware—”
“She’s just spent six months in the Aid Society,” Gerard informed him dryly, “I assure you she is perfectly aware.”
Yes, I’m a bloody heroine, Tremaine thought, stepping past them. It made her wonder how many of history’s favorite heroes were just incompetent suicides.
About midway down the length of the building was a wooden platform and she strolled toward it, Gerard and Niles still arguing behind her. She stepped up on it and leaned on the railing. Below was an open area of packed dirt, dug several feet down below the level of the floor. The cold air rising up from it touched her cheeks. Resting on the bare earth was a round narrow band of dull-colored metal, enclosing an open space perhaps ten feet wide. There was nothing inside the band but more dirt, disturbed by footprints and the marks of what looked like a garden rake. Tremaine caught the slaughterhouse scent of blood and suspected they hadn’t cleaned up quite well enough after Riardin’s accident. This would be where it happened, then. This was Arisilde Damal’s last Great Spell.
There were alchemical symbols that she couldn’t read roughly scratched or etched onto the metal band. Around the outside, pieces of paper, scribbled over with notes and sections of sorcerous adjurations, were tacked down with various makeshift paperweights—small stones, pencils, cups and saucers, walnuts, a woman’s shoe. Representing three years of work by teams of sorcerers and philosophers and sorcerer-philosophers of the Viller Institute, desperately trying to re-create Uncle Ari’s work.
Nicholas Valiarde had caught the first hints of the Gardier’s presence in Adera, nearly four years before they had appeared so devastatingly in the sky over Lodun. Nicholas had never committed anything to paper, never wrote letters or took notes that involved his work, even when it was legal, so the details of how he had discovered them were largely unknown. His only close confidant in his self-appointed mission had been Arisilde Damal. Damal had been a force to be reckoned with when he was a young man half dead and drugged to the gills on opium; then he had been older, sober and mostly sane. If you were going to pit yourself against an organization of mysterious and deadly sorcerers, he was the man to have at your back. It had been then that Arisilde began to work on this spell ring.
Tremaine rubbed her eyes. Since conventional spells had little effect on the Gardier, whatever Arisilde had been building here, it had to be something special. It had certainly killed him and Nicholas during its first test seven years ago, vaporizing them utterly, without leaving any unpleasant remains for the bystanders to deal with. This evidently had not been the case with Riardin.
Nicholas and Arisilde had died still thinking they were dealing with a criminal organization of sorcerers and not the first scouts of an invading army. Now three years after the first strike that isolated Lodun under its wards, Adera had fallen and Bisra and Parscia had come under heavy attack.
“When can we get this over with?” Tremaine asked, turning back to Gerard and Niles. Seeing their expressions, she corrected herself hastily: “I mean, when can we, ah, start the test.” She gestured vaguely back at the ring.
Niles glanced at Gerard and said guardedly, “We can be ready in an hour.”
It was more like three hours. Gerard and Niles weren’t quite as in charge of all aspects of the experiment as they would have liked to be. There was a long argument with Colonel Averi, the army liaison, who had the extremely valid point that all sorcerers were desperately needed for the defense of the population and the support of the troops on the Aderassi front, and if this spell was going to use them up like matches, then maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. But the beleaguered Crown had given a carte blanche to the Institute three years ago at the start of the war, and revoking that would mean a long drive into the city, talking a way past the security provided by the Prefecture at the Defense Department, a visit to the palace, talking a way past the Queen’s Guard, and a discussion with the Queen. Everyone seemed to know Gerard and Niles were going to win, but the colonel felt compelled to make the argument anyway.
Tremaine drank black terribly bitter coffee to stay awake and sat near the side room that housed the wireless, where a group had gathered to listen to the reports of the Gardier’s bombing of Chaire, Bel Garde and the eastern side of Vienne. There were more rumors of the royal family’s evacuation to Parscia, more reports of the number of people leaving the capital.
Tremaine wandered away from the group around the wireless, tired of listening to it. Niles was the only one who seemed excited about the sphere. The Institute smelled of failure and dying hopes.
Nearby at one of the worktables a young woman was examining what looked like a small chunk of crystal. Her bobbed hair was dark red and she was dressed even more drably than Tremaine in a dull-colored skirt and jacket and clunky shoes. Tremaine wandered close, looking at the crystal. The girl glanced up, startled, and dropped it.
“I’m sorry!” Tremaine dived to recover the object just as the girl pushed her chair back and bent forward. They bonked heads.
Tremaine sat back with an embarrassed smile. “I think I’ll just get out of your way.”
Rubbing her forehead and smiling back, the girl picked up the crystal and dropped it on the desk. “It’s all right. If we did break it, it would at least tell me something.”
Tremaine picked up the blue-veined crystal, holding it to the light. “What is it?”
“It’s a piece of one of the crystals they found in the wreckage of that Gardier airship that went down a few months ago.” The girl pushed loose strands of hair back with a weary sigh. “Everyone thought it would be the big breakthrough to finding out how they resist our magic, but nobody can tell how the crystals are used or what they do. I guess when it shattered in the crash any spells it had just vanished without a trace. They’ve gotten so desperate, they’ve even let me take a look at it.” Her rueful expression turned self-conscious and she added, “I’m training to be a sorceress. I’m Florian.”
“Tremaine Valiarde.” It was just a shard of crystal. It could even have been a chunk of glass, as far as she could tell. You‘d think the Gardier would have something complicated, like the spheres. “I didn’t even know any airships had ever been captured. But I haven’t been paying much attention to the news lately.”
“There wasn’t much left of it. There was a big storm over the mountains in Adera and its protective spells must have failed; it was torn apart. An Intelligence patrol found it and they grabbed everything that looked important.” Florian picked up the notebook that lay nearby and scratched out a couple of words. “The mechanical bits were pr
etty ordinary. The crystal shards are the only unusual thing.” Depressed, she added, “We don’t even know if they’re dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Tremaine repeated thoughtfully. She brought the crystal to her eye and peered through it at the lightbulb overhead.
“It hasn’t done anything to me,” Florian admitted, sounding disappointed.
“Tremaine?”
She turned, startled at the familiar voice, and found herself staring up at Ander Destan. “Ander, what are you doing here?” she demanded, getting to her feet hastily.
“I work here.” He grinned at her. He was a tall handsome man, only a few years older than Tremaine, with dark hair and laughing eyes. “You sound shocked.”
Tremaine had sounded aghast. Ander had been a fixture in the cafe society of artists, actors and writers that Tremaine had inhabited before the war, though his family had been a little too beau monde to approve of his pastime. In Ander’s social set, associating with the people of cafes, salons and theaters was slumming; for Tremaine it had been a part of her career, and for her father part of his protective coloration. Though she and Ander had been almost close at one point, that seemed a lifetime ago now. It was nice to know he was still alive and well, but he knew a little too much about her past for comfort.
Years ago before her father had disappeared, Tremaine had been kidnapped and held in a private institution for the mad. She had been there for nearly a week, until she had stabbed an attendant in the neck with a hypodermic needle and escaped by jumping out a window. She had recovered from her ordeal at Coldcourt, only to discover that the story that she had been voluntarily committed was making the rounds of society. The Prefecture could do nothing, since the institution had the forged documents to prove their version of the story and she had nothing but her word. Her father had been out of the country at the time; when he had returned he had heard her adventures without a great deal of visible sympathy. But this time Tremaine was old enough to recognize the newspaper reports for what they were, to know that it was no coincidence when the institution burned down and several key members of the staff were found floating in the river, minus vital body parts. A surviving employee was found to be guilty of arson and murder and subsequently hanged for it. Arisilde had made a “tsk tsk” noise and said that Nicholas had always liked things neat and tidy.
She had never told any of her friends the truth and Ander had, of course, always treated the matter with a civilized delicacy. Tremaine would have preferred it if he had flat out asked her if she was insane. She managed to say, “I thought you were in the army.” Ander was dressed as a civilian, in a tan pullover sweater and a leather jacket.
“Well, I am. I’m in the Intelligence Corps, attached to the Institute to keep an eye on the sorcerers. Like Tiamarc here.” Smiling, he turned to the man who had stepped up beside him. “Tiamarc, this is Tremaine Valiarde, the playwright.”
“Oh, really?” Tiamarc smiled. He was sandy-haired and handsome under his spectacles, though he didn’t have Ander’s air of Ducal Court Street polish. “Anything recent?”
“Nothing you would have heard of,” Ander told him with a grin before Tremaine could gather her wits enough to answer. “The old-fashioned blood and thunder stuff for those old ex-music hall theaters.”
“Yep, that’s me,” Tremaine managed, feeling as though Ander had just identified her as a leper. She cursed herself for being oversensitive. Ander had sat in many of those old ex-music hall theaters watching her blood and thunder stuff, so he didn’t mean anything by it.
Tiamarc’s polite expression didn’t alter but Tremaine could tell he had lost interest. Florian, on the other hand, tugged on Tremaine’s sleeve and whispered excitedly, “Really? Which ones?”
Before Tremaine could answer, Niles strode up from the other end of the building, bellowing, “Tremaine, we’re ready!”
“Nice meeting you,” Tremaine told Florian, absently setting the crystal back on the desk. “Got to go do this thing.”
“Thing?” Ander asked, lifting his brows.
“The experiment.”
Holding the sphere, Tremaine stood with Gerard in the metal circle. Niles moved around the circumference, making a few last checks of the notes tacked down around the outside, and everyone else was crowded up to the railing. Tremaine saw Florian had managed to fight her way to a spot in the front and was watching with her brow creased in concern. Ander stood nearby with a deeply worried expression. Tremaine felt horribly awkward and self-conscious under all those combined gazes, especially Ander’s. She couldn’t tell if he was worried that she would die or that she would do something stupid, or a combination of both. She just wished they could get on with it.
Finally Niles nodded to Gerard and climbed back up to the wooden platform. “Ready?” Gerard asked Tremaine, watching her gravely. Sweat was beading on his brow and he looked more nervous than she felt.
You could stop it, a traitor voice whispered in her head. Just say no. Maybe it was the Voice of Reason, but that had never had much power over her. Tremaine shrugged. “Let’s go.”
Gerard took a deep breath, then touched the sphere.
Her stomach lurched and a rush of cool air struck her, passing through her without impact, as if her body were made of gauze. There was nothing under her feet and her hair streamed up and she just had time to realize that this bizarre sensation was vertigo from falling when she hit something.
The first lungful of salt water clarified the situation completely. Tremaine surfaced, thrashing and gasping for air. It was day, bright blue sky laced with white clouds arched above and this was the ocean. Choppy blue water lay in every direction. In the distance was a rocky cliff-lined coast. Closer there was an island that seemed to be nothing but several peaks of graduated heights, all wreathed in dense mist. “Gerard!” Tremaine yelled, and went under again. She fought her way back up and remembered to tread water. Shrugging out of her jacket helped. She took a deep breath, went under, and wrestled off one boot; that helped too. She surfaced, her throat burning from inhaled salt water. “Gerard!” she shouted again.
“Here!”
She saw him swimming toward her and thrashed awkwardly to him. “What the hell happened?”
“I... I don’t know.” He had lost his spectacles and his dark hair was plastered to his head. “Do you have the sphere?”
The sphere . . . Oh, God. Tremaine looked around as if it would be floating nearby. “I must have let go of it!”
“All right. It’s all right.” He sounded as if he was reassuring himself as well as her. “Give me your hand, we can call it.”
Tremaine nodded and reached for him, lacing their fingers together as Gerard whispered the words of the brief charm. They bobbed in the water, Tremaine turning her face away as the low waves crashed into her. “Did it work?”
“I’m not—” The sphere surfaced a few feet away with a splash. “Thank God!” Gerard let go of Tremaine and grabbed for it before it could go under again.
Watching him, Tremaine asked, “There’s an island that way, should we swim?” It seemed the thing to do, though she had never swum that far in her life.
Gerard twisted to look. “Island? It could be a promontory.”
“Whatever. Shouldn’t we start—”
He shook his head. “No, now that we have the sphere, we need to give the spell a chance to reverse. I timed it precisely—”
“Precisely? Gerard, what happened? This was supposed to be a weapon, not a transportation—thing!” Tremaine demanded, keeping her head above water with difficulty. “Hold on.” She went under again to get rid of the other boot.
As she surfaced, Gerard asked anxiously, “Are you all right?”
“Boots,” she explained succinctly. “What happened to the spell?”
“Ah, yes. Well, something ... something unexpected has happened.”
“You think?”
“Yes, sarcasm always helps a situation like—” His face went deathly still. “Tremaine, look.”
Her head whipped around, following his gaze. “The Gardier.”
The airship hadn’t been there a moment ago. It hung low, heading away from them, its black mass silhouetted sharply against the blue sky. The ridge and fins made jagged outlines and the long square cabin hung low underneath the swollen belly of the hull. “Where did it come from?” Tremaine realized she had whispered. It wasn’t likely to spot two heads bobbing in the waves, as high as it was and pointed away from them, but she had instinctively tried to sink as low as she could in the water and still keep breathing. The thing moved slowly but something made her think of a wasp, heavy with venom and searching for prey.
“It just appeared. I saw it.” Gerard stared after it. “There was a flash of light and it popped into existence. . . . Just like we did.”
“Like we did?”
Gerard was muttering, “Gardier attacking the coast always come out of the west and return that way. If that’s west— Wait!” He floundered, splashing her, frantically digging something out of a pants pocket. He produced a compass, shook it to get the water out, and examined it avidly. “That is west!”
“The spell sent us to Chaire? Except that isn’t Chaire.” Tremaine frowned at the island, the distant rocky coastline. The country around the port city of Chaire was flat. Then Tremaine’s startled brain put two and two together. “The spell sent us to where the Gardier come from.”
“Wait, look!” Gerard pointed.
Tremaine squinted against the sun. There was a dark blot moving out of the mist around the island’s peak. “It’s another airship—”
Tremaine hit the ground with a jarring thump, drenched by gallons of seawater. The downpour ended abruptly and she looked around, dazed. They were back in the Institute’s building, in the center of the spell circle. Gerard was sprawled a few feet away, dripping wet, still holding the sphere. They stared at each other, stunned.
