THE WIZARD HUNTERS

by Martha Wells

  “Good enough.” Ander handed one to him and knelt beside the case with the torches and other equipment. “It’s what we used on the Aderassi front. The Gardier’s spells for disrupting machinery and electrical equipment won’t work on them.” He shook his head suddenly, wincing at some memory, and looked around to make sure the other men weren’t having trouble arming themselves. “Didn’t help much against firearms, but it was something.”

  Basimi came over, wearing one of the coveralls over his wet clothes and checking the set of his equipment. His eyes moved over their little group and Tremaine wondered what he saw: one Intelligence captain recently wounded and still laboring under a burden of exhaustion, one wild native guide, plus one half-trained underage witch and one dilettante flake. Then Basimi said, “Are we sure we can trust him, the native?”

  Rulan, sitting nearby checking the batteries of the torches, glanced up, frowning a little.

  Ander flicked a grim glance at Basimi. “The native’s killed more Gardier than all of us put together,” he said. Startled, Basimi gave Ilias another searching look.

  Tremaine was a little surprised at how correctly she had guessed Basimi’s estimation of them. Surprised, but not particularly gratified. She shifted over to Ilias, trying to look as if she was asking about the crossbow, and said in Syrnaic, “Are we sure we can trust them?”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Florian said in the same language. “If Colonel Averi thinks he didn’t find all the spies—”

  Loading bolts into a quiver, Ander said flatly, “No, we aren’t sure we can trust them.”

  Ilias lifted a brow at this information, then rolled the shoulder he had injured and glanced uneasily back at the cave entrance. “I wish I had my sword.”

  Tremaine looked at the other men, most of whom were busy arming themselves. “I wish you had your sword too,” she said under her breath.

  “What about the disappearing curse?” one of the men demanded.

  “The what?” Gerard asked, baffled. “The one you did to the Swift, that didn’t work,” Dyani interpreted, shifting around to find a more comfortable spot in their crowded cell.

  It had been a long timeless interval and they had no idea if it was day or night. The Gardier hadn’t provided any food and their source of water was a trickle of foul-tasting liquid leaking down the rock walls. That may have been just as well; the sanitary facilities consisted of the back corner of the cell. The chains, not comfortable to begin with, had painfully abraded everyone’s wrists. The crowded conditions would have been intolerable, except that most Sypri-ans were apparently sociably inclined individuals with the body modesty of cats. And this group had obviously already been through trying circumstances together in the past. Giliead was really the only withdrawn one, set apart more by his reticence than his status as the god’s Chosen Vessel.

  “The disappearing curse did work,” Arites protested. “There’s no leviathans here, so maybe—”

  Gerard shook his head. “No, I don’t have the materials to create that ward again.” The Syprians were taking their enforced proximity to a sorcerer fairly well, though Gerard was still glad Giliead and Halian were his allies.

  There had been one awkward incident not long after Ixion left. At some muttered commentary near the back of the group, Halian had lifted his head, singled out the ringleader by eye, and demanded, “What did you say, Darien?”

  Darien had shrugged uneasily. “He’s a wizard too.”

  “He’s killed wizards.” Giliead hadn’t bothered to turn his head, but his voice was as hard as steel. “Haven’t you?”

  “I have.” Gerard eyed his audience thoughtfully. “I can describe the occasion if it would help.”

  To his surprise nearly everyone had nodded. After relating the time he had fought a rogue Bisran sorcerer-priest, he followed it up with a couple of Nicholas and Arisilde’s more violent adventures. He had noticed that some of the men still avoided his eyes and had shifted to the back of the cell to avoid any accidental contact, but others were obviously hoping he could help.

  Gerard had been racking his brain for something that might get them out of here, but the Gardier were proof against any direct attempts at offensive spells. He added, “The cell door and the corridor are too small; if one of you tried to slip out, even warded, the Gardier would be aware of it. They can detect wards at close quarters.”

  Halian grunted thoughtfully. He hadn’t asked the frantic questions that the others had, but Gerard sensed he was just as eager to take any weapon that lay to hand.

  “There’s got to be something.” The quiet voice was Giliead’s. He leaned against the bars, staring toward the cell door.

  The others went silent. Respect or fear? Gerard wondered. Looking at the other men’s faces, he thought it was mostly respect, but the fear was there too. He said slowly, “This may be a ridiculous question, but there’s no possibility that Ixion might be trusted, in this one instance?” He shifted uncomfortably, leaning back against the damp wall. “He knows what I am. Even if he’s holding that fact back as insurance, a way to bribe the Gardier for his safety . . .”

  Giliead shook his head, brows drawn together almost in pain. For a moment he looked young and uncertain. “I can’t . . . he’s done this before. When he tricked his way into our house, he didn’t just pretend to be someone else. He made himself our friend, he kept it up for months when he could have killed us at any time.” He turned urgently toward Gerard, as if willing him to understand. “Just telling them who you are is too easy for him.”

  “He’s right,” Halian put in with grim resignation. “This could just be a game to him.”

  “And he’s drawing it out for his own amusement,” Gerard finished thoughtfully, rubbing his aching shoulder again. He found himself wishing Ixion could encounter Nicholas Valiarde. Tremaine’s father had disliked men who used other people as playthings, whether they were sorcerers or not, and his response to them had tended to be fatally efficient. They always have a weakness . . . Now there’s a thought. He wondered if perhaps he was looking at Ixion’s weakness, or at least one of them. “He didn’t kill you because he didn’t want to,” Gerard told Giliead.

  Giliead looked at him, not understanding. “The game is more important to him than winning,” Gerard clarified. “It makes him vulnerable. We, on the other hand, are only interested in winning.”

  He watched Giliead turn that thought over. Halian said doubtfully, “You think we should make a deal with him.”

  “Then kill him?” Gyan put in, hopeful.

  “Exactly. If we can.” Gerard saw they all seemed a little startled, and he added honestly, “As I said, we have mad sorcerers in Ile-Rien also, and they have to be dealt with without mercy; they’re too dangerous for honorable means.”

  Giliead actually cracked a smile. “I know.”

  Thinking about Nicholas Valiarde had led Gerard’s mind back to the old days before the Viller Institute. He wasn’t sure he had ever been in this tight a situation before, though there had been some interesting times. “That’s it.” Gerard sat up suddenly. He had been trying to think of a complicated spell, but perhaps the answer lay in something simple. If Ixion could be persuaded to get them, or at least Giliead, out of this cell even as a cruel trick, they might just be able to play a cruel trick on him. “I haven’t used this in years—it wouldn’t work against the Gardier. It’s a charm that can disarm a sorcerer, or a Rienish sorcerer at any rate, temporarily. It may work on Ixion as well. It’s certainly worth a try.”

  “How temporarily?” Halian demanded.

  “Very temporarily, only a few moments, but if you’re quick—”

  “—That’s all I’ll need,” Giliead finished, watching him intently.

  Distracted, Gerard looked around, absently patting his non-existent pockets. “The spell requires a few simple ingredients.” Spittle, a bit of thread, those were accessible enough. “I need some strands of hair from a virgin.”

  He hadn’t realized the i
mplications of that until he had said it aloud. Before the sudden silence could become embarrassing, someone in the back said, “Well, Arites?”

  “Very funny.” Arites twisted around to glare at the offender.

  “Hah.” Dyani gave them a determined smile, sitting up in the circle of Gyan’s arm and picking at one of her braids. “Now you lot can’t say I wasn’t useful for something.”

  With the battery torches and the carbide lantern, the cavern passages weren’t as dark—at least Tremaine kept telling herself that. These tunnels were definitely more cramped and narrow than those nearer to the underground city.

  Ilias led the way with Ander, Tremaine stumbled along not far behind, and Florian followed with the sphere, the other men behind her. They had all put on the coveralls and Tremaine was sweating under hers. She had had to roll up the arms and legs to keep from tripping and the extra rolls of bulky fabric didn’t help.

  A hiss from Ilias abruptly silenced them and they waited, tense and expectant. Then he poked his head around the turn and whispered, “Douse the lights!”

  Ander hurriedly translated for the others and the lights winked out along the line. Still keeping his voice low, Ilias explained, “There’s a new break in the wall ahead, leading into a room or a passage I didn’t know about, and there’s wizard light.”

  As he spoke Tremaine’s eyes adjusted and she could see the dim white glow ahead.

  “Let’s take a look.” Ander eased forward after Ilias.

  Tremaine started to follow when a hand on her arm stopped her, and Ander said, “No, you and Florian stay back here.”

  “Why?” Tremaine demanded. If he said “because it’s dangerous” she was going to laugh hysterically.

  “Because I don’t want the sphere deciding it doesn’t like what we see,” Ander told her in a tense whisper. “I don’t want to announce us to the whole island just yet.”

  “Oh.” Well, that makes sense. Tremaine settled back against the rock.

  She waited impatiently, listening to the tense breathing of the men and her own pounding heartbeat. The faint white radiance grew a little brighter, but it wasn’t enough to make out anyone’s face. Muffled clicking from the sphere was accompanied by the sound of Florian shaking the bag and murmuring, “Stop that, right now.”

  “Is it moving?” Tremaine asked quietly.

  “A little,” Florian admitted, shifting around for a more comfortable position. “It’s not whirring, you know, like it does right before it”—Tremaine could almost hear her veer off the words “blows things up”—“does something.”

  “Does it do that a lot?” one of the men asked softly, sounding both amused and worried.

  Tremaine recognized Rulan’s deep voice. Florian explained, “It reacts to the Gardier and to anything it considers hostile.”

  We won’t raise the point that it’s making those decisions on its own, Tremaine thought, and has decided it can practice sorcery without benefit of human intervention. The sphere was their best weapon; they couldn’t stop using it just because it had developed a mind of its own.

  Then Ander’s voice, rough with suppressed excitement, sounded from just ahead. “You’ve got to see this.”

  Tremaine got hastily to her feet and threaded her way through a narrow stretch of jagged rock, the others behind her. “What is it?” she demanded, remembering to keep her voice low.

  Ducking under a low knob of rock, Ander said, “You remember—Florian, you worked on this at the Institute, didn’t you?—in the airship that went down in Adera, there was no sign of any magical objects except those crystals in the control area. No hint of how they managed the trip between this world and ours?”

  “Yes, but—” Florian began.

  Following them around a boulder, Tremaine saw a large crack in the rock with a white light shining up through it. In its radiance she could see Ilias crouching near it, looking just as puzzled as she was.

  “Look in there.” Ander motioned for them to move ahead.

  Florian knelt beside Ilias and looked. “Hot damn,” she breathed.

  Frustrated, Tremaine nudged her aside to see a large cave, strung with bare bulbs like the other sections of the cavern the Gardier had turned into their base. But etched into the smooth stone of the floor was a rough circle of symbols. Many of them were incomprehensible but she recognized a few—they were the same symbols as in Arisilde’s spell circle.

  Tremaine opened her mouth but couldn’t say anything. Too many pieces were falling into place. In the center of the circle was a metal tripod that was obviously meant to hold something about half the size of the sphere.

  Florian gripped her elbow. “This is what they found, Tremaine. Your father and Arisilde Damal. Not this room, not here in this world, but somewhere. This is how Arisilde got the underlying symbols for the spell circle.”

  “They must have found one in Adera.” Ander was nodding, the light casting half his face into shadow. “And Damal used the sphere in place of whatever goes there, in that stand.”

  Florian sat back, looking urgently up at Ander. “We have to destroy it. Somehow this is letting their airships go through portals to the coast of Ile-Rien.”

  Tremaine stared at her. They could still complete their interrupted mission. She knew it was important, but she didn’t want it to derail the rescue.

  Basimi and the other men had been listening, fascinated. One of the navy men Deric, put in, “That crack is wide enough to drop a stick of explosive through.”

  Ander tapped his chin thoughtfully. “If that’s our only option. .. . But if it didn’t break the circle, it might just bring all the Gardier down on us without disrupting their spell.”

  “Even if it brought the cave roof down on it, it might not disrupt the circle,” Florian pointed out. “I did some reading up on it when I started learning the reverse adjuration. Spell circles, like fayre rings, can still work even if they’re buried underground.” She shook her head. “Burying it under rock might just make it impossible for us to get to. We can’t be sure it’s destroyed unless we actually break the circle itself.”

  Tremaine realized she was hogging the best view and moved back so the others could take a look. Basimi immediately stepped forward to take her place. Ilias shifted over next to her, asking in frustration, “Is it good or bad?”

  She realized they had been speaking in Rienish and explained, “Once we found that the Gardier were coming from here, we still didn’t know how they were doing it. I mean, we knew how we were doing it, but there didn’t seem to be anything comparable on the airships. No symbols like the ones we used, no spheres, just a few crystals mounted above the place they steer.” She took a deep breath. “Now it looks like they do use a spell circle, but those crystals must somehow connect their ships to it, so they can use the circle from a distance.” There was still so much they didn’t know.

  “So their crystals work like he does.” Ilias pointed to the sphere’s bag, which gave a muffled cluck.

  “Yes.” Tremaine eyed it thoughtfully. The bag had come open a little, revealing metal that gleamed faintly in the radiance of the reflected electric light. She reached to tug the bag closed. Yes, it’s definitely reacting to everybody. It knew Ilias pointed at it, for God’s sake. She looked at Ilias, frowning. “Why do you call it ‘he’?”

  “That’s what you call gods. That’s like a god, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t really know what it is. I thought I did, but. ..”

  “Come on,” Ander said, shouldering his pack again and grabbing the torch. “We’ve got to find a way down there to wreck that thing.”

  Giliead watched Gerard braid the broken strands of Dyani’s hair, moving deftly despite his chains. Gerard had used threads plucked from his own shirt, moistening each with spittle before plaiting it. Giliead had never seen Ixion or any other wizards do this, using a few simple things to make a curse come to life. He wondered if they knew how.

  “But wizards’ curses don’t work on the god’s Cho
sen Vessel,” Maceum said, craning his neck to look past Arites. “How is this different from what Gil normally does?”

  “Curses don’t work on him,” Gyan replied shortly. “But that doesn’t do him any good when the wizard curses a ship to fall on him.”

  Giliead lifted a brow at Halian, who smiled ruefully. They had lost the Seeker that way while she was in drydock in Calaide and Giliead had spent three days unconscious.

  “This is a very old charm,” Gerard said, in the tone of someone giving a lesson, an attitude he seemed to fall into unconsciously, “though it’s not generally known. It was developed by a court sorcerer called Morthekai Deroi for use by— But I suppose that’s not relevant now.” He tied the thread, bit off the end, and continued, “Now, what you must do is place this in Ixion’s hand so it’s in contact with his skin, and say the words Berea-deist-dei. It will immobilize him and prevent him from using his powers for a few moments.” Gerard glanced up as he held out the braided skein, noticing the other men were uneasy. He smiled. “Don’t worry, it only works on sorcerers.”

  Giliead took it, turning it over curiously. In Ixion’s hand. I can’t believe he’s not dead. He should have known, but he hadn’t wanted Ilias to be right. He hadn’t wanted to go through all this again. Seeing Ixion felt as if it had drained the life right out of him. Don’t think about it; at least Ilias isn’t here. Giliead repeated the phrase slowly, trying to get the odd accent right. He couldn’t feel any curses in it at all. Like their sphere. “What do the words mean?”

  Gerard met his eyes. “Blood stand still.”

  Giliead nodded slowly. He believed the man, and not just because the god had said he could, or because Gerard had kept faith with them so far. Gerard had looked at Ixion the way Ixion looked at rival wizards; as if something in Ixion woke the same killer instinct in Gerard. Giliead believed Gerard had fought wizards in his own land before. Fought them and won.