THE WIZARD HUNTERS

by Martha Wells

  As they stared at him in blank surprise Gyan explained hastily, “That’s Arites. He’s a poet.”

  “Oh, right.” Tremaine turned to Florian for help. “Sort of a reddish yellow, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so.” Florian nodded, shaking out her stocking.

  “Ah . . .” Gerard must have seen the quelling look Gyan was trying to give Dyani because his voice was cautious as he asked, “What does it mean to be the god’s Chosen Vessel?”

  “Well, he, uh . ..” Dyani hesitated, uncertain.

  “He kills wizards,” Arites supplied helpfully, still scribbling away.

  Florian, trying to get her wet stocking back on, froze and stared at him, eyes wide.

  “Oh.” Gerard sat back, frowning.

  Ander folded his arms, muttering, “Wonderful.”

  Gyan rolled his eyes in annoyance and cleared his throat significantly. Arites looked up, suddenly recalling his audience. “No offense,” he added brightly.

  Tremaine propped her chin on her hand and yawned. Giliead had told her it would be all right and now she knew what he meant. All the noise Nicanor had made aside, it was Giliead’s job to kill them and his decision whether to do it or not, and she knew he wouldn’t. He would help them because they had helped Dias.

  A little desperately, Dyani asked, “How did you meet Giliead and Ilias on the island?”

  “Oh, yes,” Florian said, relieved to have a less controversial topic. “We—Tremaine and I—were captured by the Gardier and—”

  “You were what?” Gerard stared at them.

  “That’s right, we didn’t tell you that part.” Tremaine shifted to face him and her foot knocked against the sphere, which clanked. She picked it up, wondering what to do with it. She didn’t want it to go off accidentally again and frighten their hosts or attract more Gardier. She glanced up at Gyan. “Can I borrow that bucket?”

  “Consider it a gift,” Gyan assured her hastily. “Arites, give her the bucket.”

  “The Gardier shouldn’t be able to detect the sphere as long as it’s quiescent,” Gerard told her, brows drawing together in annoyance. “Besides, putting it in a bucket of water, where it’s in contact with the wooden side, doesn’t help block all the etheric vibrations.”

  “Yes, but it blocks it from me, and I’m not making etheric vibrations,” Tremaine told him with some asperity, getting up to collect the bucket from Arites. “Sometimes I do things for a reason. Not often, but sometimes.”

  As he listened to Giliead tell the story, Nicanor’s expression grew dark with worry and he interrupted only a few times with questions. Ilias kept out of it, speaking only when Giliead asked him to tell his part of what had happened after they were separated. Finally, Nicanor shook his head and said, “We’ve lost this village. If you’re right and there are more of those flying things on the island, they’ll be back.”

  “There’s more.” Giliead said, watching him narrowly. Ilias knew what he was thinking; there were those in Cineth who wouldn’t care that this village lived or died. Out of deference to Ranior’s memory, the headman Agis had always permitted people with curse marks to live here. There were three here now, living in the outskirts further up the hill.

  “Better the village than the people.” Halian was absently rubbing an old scar on his forearm, a memento from the last time Ixion had attacked the coast in force. “And you know who we have to thank for it.”

  Nicanor kneaded his forehead, reluctantly accepting that. He said grudgingly, “I see now why you owe them guest-right, but how do you know they understand what that means?”

  “We don’t.” Halian folded his hands on the table. “But they know far more about these Gardier wizards than we do. You saw how they killed that flying whale. And by our own sea treaties, if they’re fighting wizards, we owe them our help.”

  Nicanor shook his head. “Still...” He looked at Giliead and took a deep breath.

  Giliead’s eyes narrowed in anticipation of being reasoned with. Ilias pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking, Please be sensible, just the once. He wasn’t sure who he was thinking it at, maybe just the world in general.

  Nicanor said, “You don’t know that you can trust these people. It could be another trick.”

  Ilias gritted his teeth. Yes, it was a big mistake. But didn’t we pay for it? He caught the sour glint in Giliead’s eye and thought for a moment he was about to say just that. But Giliead said, “There is a way. We can go to the god.”

  Nicanor hesitated. Whatever problems he had with Giliead, he knew the god was to be trusted. Nicanor said finally, “It will know if they’re lying?”

  “If they are what they say they are, it will know.”

  “It didn’t know Ixion,” Nicanor pointed out.

  Giliead nodded. “It would have—if I had had the sense to ask it.”

  Nicanor watched him for a long moment, then looked away. “All right. It will depend on what Visolela decides, but if the god says they aren’t a danger, she will have to agree.”

  Ilias let out his breath in relief. Halian tapped the table thoughtfully and said, “So then. Let’s go tell them.”

  Tremaine eased the sphere into the full bucket and sat down next to Gerard. Arites, sitting at her feet, was rapidly taking notes on the sphere’s appearance, bracing his parchments on a flat piece of stone. “This is going to make a great ballad,” he told Tremaine earnestly.

  She leaned over to look at what he was writing. The marks didn’t make any sense to her and she wished the spell had included being able to read Syrnaic as well as speak it.

  “You’re saying there are different groups of these Gardier wizards and they attack your land from here?” Gyan was asking with a troubled frown.

  “Yes.” Gerard nodded. “They launch airship attacks from at least seven distinct points, from every direction except the east. They have their foothold in Adera for that.”

  “Here that would be—” Ander looked thoughtful. “That way.” He pointed. Ander had done his best to stay suspicious, but the conversation, once it had shifted back to the Gardier, had drawn him in. “What’s in that direction?”

  “Cineth,” Gyan told him. “The port city.”

  “Past that?”

  “The sea.” He looked up and Tremaine realized Ilias, Giliead, Nicanor and Halian were back. Tremaine’s eyes went to Ilias. One corner of his mouth twitched in a smile and she sat back, relieved.

  Nicanor studied them for a moment, his expression still forbidding, then asked Gerard, “Would you be willing to go to our local god, to prove you are what you say you are?”

  Tremaine looked at Ilias. He inclined his head slightly and she said, “Sure.”

  Gerard, who had his mouth open to reply, turned to stare at her. She nodded and gave him a nudge on the arm. He sighed, turned back to Nicanor, and said, “Of course we will.”

  “Sorry about all this,” Tremaine told Ilias, feeling inadequate. The path they took led up the forested hills behind the village. The trail itself was barely visible in the tall grass and Tremaine had lost sight of it several times; apparently the god didn’t get many visitors. It was cool in the shade of the tall birches and pines; the green scent of damp earth and foliage came from the bracken and waist-high ferns covering the forest floor.

  “It’s all right,” Ilias said with a distracted shrug. His eyes were on Giliead where he walked ahead with Gerard and Ander. Halian had stayed behind to help organize the evacuation of the village and to sail the Swift to the port of Cineth. Then he glanced at her and laughed. “You can stop apologizing. It’s not your fault.”

  “Well...” She thought about the sphere and exchanged a rueful look with Florian. “Yes it is, actually.”

  Ander glanced back at them, brows drawn, as if he suspected Tremaine and Florian of telling Ilias all about Ile-Rien’s secrets, as if they knew any to tell. He was carrying the bucket with the sphere, as they had all agreed it was probably safer if Tremaine had as little contact with it as pos
sible.

  “Is Ander your husband?” Ilias asked suddenly, eyeing the byplay.

  “God, no.” Tremaine startled herself with her own vehemence. Florian made a choking noise she managed to turn into a cough and Ander glanced suspiciously back at them again. Tremaine lowered her voice. “He’s not married. I’m not married. None of us are married.”

  Just ahead Gerard had asked about the island and Giliead was replying, “It’s been used by wizards for a long time.”

  “Did the wizards construct the harbor cave and the city? It looked very old.”

  “The stories say that it was all there before the wizards came. That people who lived here long before we came built it. At low tide, you can see pillars and walls in the sea around it.”

  “Fascinating. I wonder how the Gardier knew about it,” Gerard murmured, half to himself.

  “Why were you there on the island if you didn’t know about the Gardier?” Ander asked, eyeing Giliead with skepticism. He shifted the sphere’s bucket to his other hand.

  Giliead looked thoughtfully into the distance. “When ships started to disappear again, we knew another wizard had taken Ixion’s place.”

  “It started out with missing ships in our world also,” Gerard said. “Tremaine’s father . . . often looked into mysterious occurrences and he was intrigued by the disappearances when others were still attributing them to accident or unusually bad weather. He investigated and uncovered a Gardier group operating in Adera, a small country on our eastern border. At first he thought he was dealing with a scheme for profit, not an invasion. Now we believe that when they started by attacking commercial shipping, they were feeling us out, testing for weakness.” He glanced at Ander, who was maintaining a stone-faced expression. “Perhaps testing to see how effective their offensive spells were.”

  “And taking slaves,” Giliead added bluntly. “Those were your people imprisoned on the island, then?”

  “From Maiuta and the other Southern Seas islands,” Tremaine put in. “Did the government know about that, Ander?”

  Ander confirmed that supposition by refusing to answer it. Instead, he asked Giliead, “Who’s Ixion?”

  Giliead flicked a glance at him. “The wizard who used to live on the island.”

  Ander didn’t look satisfied with this elliptical reply and Gerard was too lost in thought to pursue it.

  “What did Nicanor mean when he said you’d done it again?” Florian asked Ilias tentatively.

  Tremaine watched Ilias look away into the green shadows of the woods. She hadn’t thought to ask the question.

  Finally he said, “Ixion . . . We didn’t know what he looked like. We fought him for years, but we’d never seen him, just the people he paid or forced to work for him, or the curselings he made. Then two years ago we met a man who called himself Licias. One of Ixion’s curselings was attacking his village and he was trying to fight it. We helped him drive it away, then he came with us to where it had laired, up in the mountains, to finish it off. He was wounded and he said his family had been killed by the curseling, so we brought him back home with us.”

  Tremaine had an odd feeling about this. “And it was Ixion,” she said.

  Florian frowned in surprise. “Was it?” she asked Ilias.

  He nodded, glancing sideways at Tremaine. Lost in thought, she stared at the ground, her hands shoved into her pockets. She said, “He hid what he was and became your friend, part of your family. He made it last for months before he struck. Because it was the worst thing he could think of to do to you.”

  Ilias watched her with a troubled expression. “How did you know?”

  She lifted her shoulders in a slight shrug. “I guessed. Something similar happened in one of my plays.”

  “Your what?”

  Florian explained, “Her stories. She’s a writer, like Arites. Where we come from they take stories and act them out, and call them ‘plays.’ ” She glanced thoughtfully at Tremaine. “Now that I think of it, that’s awfully close to what happened to the characters in Varnecia, isn’t it?”

  “So . . .” Ilias said slowly, “you made up a poet’s tale about something that happened to us before you ever came here, or knew that here was here?”

  Tremaine’s brows quirked as she considered it. “It looks that way.”

  “That’s strange,” Florian commented, frowning.

  “No kidding,” Ilias muttered.

  They walked a while in mutual nonplussed silence, while birds sang in the trees and the breeze stirred the high grasses. Florian kept saying “Well.. .” as if she was arriving at and then discarding possible explanations. Giliead glanced back once and gave them an odd look, probably puzzled by the similar expressions of bafflement they must all be wearing.

  Tremaine was expecting some sort of temple, but as they passed through a grove of trees with fernlike fronds, Giliead said, “That’s it.”

  They walked out into a grassy clearing drenched in afternoon sun. On the edge of the open area was a rocky outcrop and at its base the dark hole of a cave.

  There was nothing to indicate it was a special place until they drew near. There was a small carving in the rock above the entrance, just a ring of intertwined circles, very crudely done in comparison to the artwork Tremaine had noticed at the village. On the packed dirt around the cave mouth were little piles of fruit and nuts, pieces of bread and cooked meat. It was all in various stages of rot and flies buzzed over it.

  Giliead eyed the collection with annoyance before saying, “I’m going to see if it’s home.” He handed Ilias his scabbarded sword and ducked under the low-hanging rock, stepping down into the cave.

  Ilias waited with them, scuffing one boot in the dirt. Gerard looked around at the piles of food. “Are these offerings for the god?” he asked, puzzled.

  Bias nodded. “People leave food for it.” He shrugged. “But it doesn’t eat.”

  Gerard lifted his brows. “I see. How long has the god been here?”

  Ilias looked at the cave entrance, his brow furrowed thoughtfully as if he had never considered the question before. “Forever, I guess.”

  “Are there many gods?”

  “This is the only one in Cineth. Most places have just one but Teypria, to the south, has two.” With another shrug he added, “They have two Chosen Vessels too; I’m not sure how that works.”

  From inside Giliead called, “It’s here. You can come in now.”

  Ilias smiled at them and stepped down into the cave. With the muttered comment, “Casual attitude toward religion here,” Gerard followed him.

  “Well, after you, ladies,” Ander said with a sweeping gesture and an ironic expression. Tremaine and Florian trailed after Gerard, Ander following.

  After the bright afternoon sun, the dark seemed impenetrable and Tremaine thought, Not again. But this cave smelled dry and clean and after a moment her eyes adjusted and she saw it was lit through rents in the rock overhead. It wasn’t very big, not much more than twenty or thirty feet across. Vines and tree roots from the forest above grew down the walls from the cracks and it was cool and pleasant. It was quiet also, the sound of the birdsong and breeze deadened by the thick stone.

  Giliead stood in the center of the chamber, hands on his hips, just waiting. Ilias stood back against the wall, shifting the sword off his shoulder and leaning on it.

  Nothing happened. A warm breeze moved over the rocks above, bringing the scent of greenery and wet loam into the cave. Giliead blew out a breath and gave Ilias a wry glance.

  “Is something wrong?” Gerard asked carefully.

  Giliead gave him a faint smile and explained, “Sometimes it’s shy.”

  Gerard and Ander exchanged a guarded look and Tremaine knew they were both thinking the god was going to be imaginary, or swamp gas, whatever swamp gas was, or something else natural. She looked at Ilias; he winked at her and she smiled. I bet it’s real.

  Something sparked against the cave roof above Giliead’s head, moving among the vines trai
ling in from the cracks and making the leaves rustle. Firefly, Tremaine thought, then firefly?

  More fireflies appeared among the leaves, each surrounded by a blue-tinged mist. Ander swore softly and Gerard studied it in amazement. Florian drew in a breath in admiration.

  The blue light grew, sparkling and dancing over the rough cracks in the ceiling. It darted down to Ilias, a light touch that sent a spark through his hair and made him shake his head and sneeze.

  “What do you think that is?” Ander asked Gerard, his voice hushed.

  “Some sort of fay, a localized elemental perhaps or ...” Gerard blinked, shaking his head. “Or I haven’t a clue.”

  “It’s not very big,” Ilias said apologetically. “The Chaeans have a god that can make the whole roof of a big cave turn gold.”

  Giliead turned to regard him with lowered brows. “What?” Ilias demanded. “It’s true.”

  The light played down the wall, toward the bucket. “It’s going to want to look at the sphere,” Tremaine said thoughtfully.

  Ander stared at her. “How do you know?”

  “If I was whatever that is, I would,” Florian put in, watching the light get closer to the bucket. She glanced worriedly at Tremaine. “You think it’ll be all right?”

  Tremaine shook her head. Good question. “Don’t know.”

  “But the sphere’s not sentient,” Ander said, looking at them in confusion. “That. . . god ... is something alive. How does that work?”

  “Yes, well.. .” Gerard watched the light play across the rock. “The spheres Riardin and the others created aren’t what we’d consider sentient, but this one ... It isn’t supposed to be able to instigate spells but that’s exactly what it’s done today.” His expression was troubled. “It certainly isn’t supposed to be able to extract a spell from a foreign object like the Gardier translator, modify it and cast it, all the while stripping the protective wards off a Gardier airship.”