The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien)

by Martha Wells

  Tremaine snorted. She thought this was wishful thinking on Nicholas’s part. “Ilias isn’t in love with me.”

  He lifted a brow, not looking up from the paper. “As I said, their society is run on different principles than ours.”

  Tremaine flung her arms in the air, aware she wanted to argue but having nothing rational to say. She stomped out into the cold hallway, feeling about twelve years old and angry at herself for it. The clunky ring of the front door’s bellpull stopped her.

  Picking up a rickety chair near the door to the parlor, she dragged it over so she could stand on it and peek through the dusty fanlight. In the dim illumination of the streetlamp, she saw it was Florian and Gerard.

  She hopped down and shot back the door’s bolt, pulling it open. “Ah,” Gerard said in relief as he saw her. “So this is the right place.”

  “Who else would live here?” As she stepped back to let them in, Nicholas appeared in the doorway to the salon, demanding, “Did you look to see who it was first?”

  “Yes,” Tremaine snarled. God, does he think I’m that stupid? “Somehow I failed to let Gardier spies with guns into Coldcourt the entire time you were gone.”

  Nicholas narrowed his eyes at her and vanished back into the salon.

  “I see everything is as usual. Everyone here?” Gerard said briskly, helping Florian off with her coat. Florian, not having had a worthless meeting to attend, was dressed comfortably in canvas pants and a faded brown sweater, her red hair tucked up under a man’s cap.

  “Yes. Oh, and Ander’s here,” Tremaine added. She saw that Gerard had a leather bag over his shoulder that had been hidden by his coat. The sphere, Arisilde’s sphere.

  “I see.” Gerard pressed his lips together briefly, then shook his head. “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  “Colonel Averi is the only other one who knows about this, isn’t he?” Florian asked, looking around the foyer with a distracted expression. “The house is …Uh…”

  “Ugly, and it smells bad,” Tremaine supplied, taking the wet coats from Gerard and draping them over the battered hall bench. “It’s also violently haunted, though apparently Giliead’s monumental bad temper scared whatever it was into temporary submission.”

  “Niles knows as well,” Gerard answered Florian, ignoring the rest as they stepped into the salon.

  Nicholas was moving chairs up to the round table in the other half of the room. “Any trouble?” he asked, flicking an opaque glance at Gerard.

  “No, we weren’t followed.” Gerard answered the question that had actually been asked, setting the sphere down on the scratched surface of the table.

  Nicholas nodded, looking down at the little device. It was about the size of a croquet ball, formed of copper-colored metal strips, filled with tiny wheels and gears. He reached to brush a droplet of water off the somewhat tarnished surface, and a blue light sparked deep inside the copper depths. Nicholas lifted his brows. “Does it do that often?”

  Gerard watched Nicholas’s face. “Yes. He often responds to people he knows.”

  Nicholas didn’t react to the “he,” at least not visibly. He regarded the sphere a moment more, then turned away. Speaking in Aelin, the language of the Gardier, he said, “Calit, go up to your room now.”

  The boy looked up. Calit was slowly learning a few words of Rienish and Syrnaic, with Kias and the other Syprians’ help, but he couldn’t understand much of either language yet. Gardier believed that learning other languages was somehow beneath them, and even if Calit overcame that, he hadn’t had any formal schooling. “Can I take these things with me?”

  “Of course you may take your things with you.” Nicholas placed a slight emphasis on the your. It had also been hard to convince Calit that when they gave him anything, whether it was clothing, a toy, or even food, it was his to keep.

  Tremaine watched the boy carefully gather the cards and trinkets. “How is he doing?” she asked Nicholas in Rienish.

  “As well as can be expected.” Nicholas watched the boy leave the room. “I’m going to have Kias take him back to the Ravenna tomorrow. For his own good, I don’t want him to see too much of what we do here.”

  Though he hadn’t had any noticeable problems aboard ship, in the refugee shelter Calit had persisted in sleeping under his bed. Tremaine said only, “He likes the Ravenna.”

  “He may be of some help in questioning the prisoners,” Gerard put in. “The woman Balin seems to know a good deal more than she should, as a member of the Service caste. Not that she’s revealed any of it voluntarily.” As Ilias and Ander came in from the hallway, he told Nicholas, “Colonel Averi is beginning to think you’re right about her.”

  “Right about what?” Tremaine took the chair next to the fire, trying to ignore the musty puff the upholstery exuded. Ilias settled on the floor at her feet, a gesture she suspected was solely for Ander’s benefit.

  Giliead entered, throwing a disgruntled glance at Ander. He consulted Ilias with a look. Ilias responded with an eye roll. Capistown hadn’t seemed to affect Giliead’s health the way it had Ilias’s, but maybe that was just because he had concealed it better. And since he spent most of his time angry or simply not talking, it was harder to tell.

  “That Balin is not Service caste, but an observer posted either by Command or Science,” Nicholas was explaining, “Meant to evaluate the performance of those officers on the base.”

  “So they spy on their own people?” Florian took a seat on a footstool near the hearth, folding her arms and huddling into her sweater for warmth. “That makes sense, considering what else we’ve heard. But she doesn’t have one of those little crystals?” A tiny crystal fragment implanted in someone’s body could allow the Gardier to temporarily take control of that person’s mind, without his or her knowledge. It was nearly impossible to detect, as they had discovered on the voyage here.

  “No, none of our prisoners were Liaisons, either voluntary or involuntary ones.” Gerard looked around the room, gathering everyone’s attention. He spoke in Syrnaic, since there was no one here who couldn’t understand it. It also meant their conversation was private, whether it was overheard or not, since as far as they knew the Gardier couldn’t translate the Syprians’ language. “There are various plans for freeing Lodun, most of them involving landing troops, either by sea or by using a world-gate. But I feel we can use a world-gate to still greater advantage.”

  “You want to use one to go from the staging world to Lodun, to inside the barrier?” Ander asked, frowning. “I thought Command decided that wasn’t feasible.”

  Gerard frowned back. “It isn’t feasible with the mobile circle, the one the Ravenna and the Gardier airships use. But I think more can be done with the circle symbols.” He glanced at the sphere, sitting quiescent on the table. “We need to find out more about the inner workings of the spheres and the circles. To do that, I feel we need to find out what happened to Arisilde, how he became trapped inside this sphere. We know Arisilde left Nicholas on the Isle of Storms, intending to return to carry the word that the Gardier were preparing a massive assault.”

  Tremaine grimaced. Nicholas had told them he and Arisilde had stolen the gate spell from Gardier agents in this world and used it to follow them to the staging world, the world the Syprians came from. The first time they had tried it they had ended up in the ocean, with the Isle of Storms distant on the horizon, much the way she and Gerard had. Arisilde had been able to sense the etheric activity around the island so they had returned to Ile-Rien and obtained a small sailboat for their next trip. With it they had managed to reach the island. They encountered the Gardier, who were scouting with the intention of turning the old abandoned city there into one of their bases of operations against Ile-Rien. Nicholas had decided to infiltrate the Gardier, talking his way into joining them.

  “If we had gotten that word, if we had had Arisilde’s knowledge of the world-gate spell from the beginning …I think we can assume that the course of events would have unfo
lded in a very different fashion.” Gerard cleared his throat and continued more briskly, “We also know that Arisilde had resolved to discover the origin of the Gardier gate spell. He believed, even before Nicholas had discovered the …acquisitive nature of the Gardier’s explorations, that the spell had been created by someone else.”

  “He said the gate spell had a different flavor,” Nicholas contributed, leaning against the mantel and watching with opaque eyes. “He said that it had a weight and an elegance of design that gave the impression of a different mind than the one who had created the crystal he accidentally destroyed.” Years ago, before he had disappeared from Ile-Rien, Nicholas had discovered Gardier agents and stolen the gate spell and a crystal avatar, though he had had no idea at the time that he was dealing with anything other than a criminal organization of sorcerers. Arisilde had killed the avatar, but discovered his sphere could substitute for it and make the spell work.

  “He destroyed it accidentally?” Giliead asked quietly. It was the first time since arriving in Capistown that he had revealed any interest in their situation, and Tremaine found herself staring blankly at him, along with Florian and Gerard.

  Nicholas shifted to face him, explaining, “He was horrified at finding a living mind inside it. I think he meant to release it but didn’t stop to consider the consequences.” He shrugged slightly. “I suspect if he had stopped to consider, he would have done the same.”

  Tremaine could believe that. They knew now the living minds imprisoned in the crystal were captured sorcerers, Rienish, Aderassi, Maiutan and whatever others the Gardier had managed to seize.

  “That aside,” Gerard interposed, “I think—I hope—that if we can discover how Arisilde’s consciousness was transferred into the sphere, it will contribute another piece of the puzzle. To that end, we’re going to attempt to directly contact Arisilde.”

  “You can’t just ask him?” Ilias wanted to know. Tremaine was glad he had asked, since she was thinking the same thing.

  “I tried that,” Gerard admitted. “Without result. But his attempts to communicate have all been through etheric means. He allowed Giliead to see the etheric traces of his spells, he spoke to Tremaine in a dream, and before that he conveyed to her some details of events that had occurred to Ilias and Giliead in the Syprian’s world, implying that he had contact at some point with the Syprian god of Cineth.”

  Tremaine saw Ander frowning thoughtfully and grimaced, glad no one knew the outcome of Arisilde’s empathic communications to her at Coldcourt. She had been unaware of them, but they had fed her own melancholy and depression to the point of suicide. If she hadn’t been such a lousy planner, she would have done away with herself long before Gerard had come to ask her for the sphere for the Viller Institute’s experiment.

  “So we’re going to try a method commonly used to speak to etheric beings,” Gerard finished, adjusting his spectacles and clearing his throat.

  Ilias twisted around to look up at Tremaine, brows lifted inquiringly. She didn’t get it either, but before she could ask, Florian said tentatively, “A séance?”

  Gerard frowned at her. Apparently he had hoped to get through this without anyone using that word. “I wouldn’t describe it as that, though the underlying principle is the same.”

  Ander snorted and said dubiously, “Using spiritualism? Isn’t that a little… odd?” Contacting the dead through spiritualism had most often been used in Ile-Rien as either a confidence game or a pastime of people who should know better.

  Gerard eyed Ander in a way that should have dropped him dead on the spot. Remembering what kind of day Gerard had had, Tremaine interposed in Rienish, “My uncle lives in a metal croquet ball and I’m married to a man from another world—maybe you should consider redefining ‘odd.’ ”

  Ander took the point with a wry smile and Gerard managed to take a calming breath. Florian said hastily, “Don’t we need a medium? How does that work?”

  “A medium isn’t necessary,” Gerard said with some asperity. “We have here the people whom Arisilde was closest to.”

  While Gerard set up a few precautionary wards, Tremaine borrowed a couple of table knives from the pantry and demonstrated table rocking and other tricks of the spiritualism trade. Nicholas was pacing with his hands in his pockets, watching with an imperturbable expression. She supposed he would correct her if she got anything wrong. Crouching to watch how she was making the table move, Ilias said, “So… no one just looks under there?”

  “It’s misdirection,” Florian tried to explain. “They think they have looked under the table.”

  “But they look at the wrong time,” Tremaine added, though her mind wasn’t really on it. Her palms were sweating, though she wasn’t sure why she should be nervous. What are you afraid Arisilde will say? She remembered Colonel Averi’s not-so-subtle suggestion that Arisilde might be dangerous, that he might have gone mad inside the sphere. She didn’t believe that. But maybe I don’t want to be proved wrong.

  Gerard came back into the room, carried the sphere to the table and carefully set it down again. “Very well. The wards I’ve placed around the house should prevent any outside influences from intruding. This doesn’t include the etheric entities that are currently inhabiting the place, but they should be easy to discourage.”

  Tremaine put the knives on a side table and rather self-consciously took her seat. Nicholas took the chair opposite her and Gerard gestured Florian to the other seat, saying, “We need at least four people to make the circle.”

  Tremaine noticed he wasn’t inviting Ander. She almost expected Ander to make an arch comment but he just said, “So the holding-hands part isn’t just stage dressing?”

  “Holding hands is not necessary,” Gerard said repressively, taking his seat. “You could make yourself useful and turn out the lights.”

  Ander dutifully pressed the wall switch and the room was left in the flicker of firelit darkness. “Put your hands flat on the table and focus your thoughts on Arisilde,” Gerard instructed.

  They sat in silence for a time. Tremaine slumped in her chair, stifling a yawn. Ilias, Giliead and Ander were standing a few feet behind her so she couldn’t see them, and it was a little too dark to make faces at Florian. Then the fire went out with a faint whoosh, as if someone had thrown a blanket over it. Tremaine flinched and shivered at a sudden cold draft of air, noticeable even in the none-too-warm atmosphere of the parlor. That was definitely something, she thought, a little unsettled. “Everyone all right?” Gerard asked sharply.

  There was a general murmur of agreement. “I didn’t see anything when it happened,” Giliead put in, sounding intrigued, “so it wasn’t one of the shades.”

  “Good,” Gerard muttered.

  Tremaine heard a chair creak and someone shift impatiently, someone else take a sharp breath. Time stretched and she was about to ask how much longer they had to wait when Giliead made a startled exclamation. “What is it?” Gerard demanded.

  “Something just brushed past me,” Giliead answered, sounding wary. Tremaine could sense him moving behind her, trying to find whatever it was, though he stepped so quietly he didn’t even make the floorboards creak.

  “Turn on the lights,” Nicholas ordered suddenly.

  Tremaine blinked at the sudden glare of electric light. She heard a startled curse from Gerard, and Nicholas said, “Tremaine, don’t move.”

  “What?” She looked down at her hands. Her jaw dropped. “Oh…”

  The table was covered with writing scrawled in black, spiraling out from the sphere in the center and crossing her hands where they still lay flat, crossing Nicholas’s hands. It had just missed Florian and Gerard. Ilias was at her side suddenly, tense with alarm, asking, “Does it hurt?”

  “No.” Her breath misted and she realized the room was still icy cold. “I didn’t feel it at all.”

  Ilias looked at Giliead, who stood back from the table, his expression fascinated as he watched something invisible drifting through the air. He
said, “I didn’t see it when it happened, but I can see it now; the whole room is filled with curses.”

  Florian pushed back from the table, fumbling a pair of aether-glasses out of her pocket and putting them on as Gerard shoved to his feet. “There’s ether everywhere.”

  Gerard circled the table, his expression rapt. “Those are the same symbols as on the circle— No, no, they’re similar, but different.”

  “This isn’t ink.” Nicholas leaned down to peer at the table’s surface, the writing scrawled across his own hands. “It’s soot from the fireplace.”

  Gerard was already digging a pen and a battered notebook out of his coat pocket to copy the symbols. “It would be better if we had a photographic record. I don’t suppose there’s a camera in the house—”

  “Giaren has one, he gave me some photos today,” Tremaine said, leaning down to study the marks scrawled across her hands. There was a sweeping curve on the back of her right hand, part of a circular symbol that had something like a curlicue on the top. On her left hand was half of a pair of lopsided triangles. Nicholas was right, the broad strokes had been drawn with a finger, dipped in soot from the hearth. “Do we have a telephone?”

  “Yes, but careful what you say. This isn’t something that could be trusted to an exchange. In fact, I’ll—” Nicholas looked around in annoyance, realizing he couldn’t move without disturbing the delicate writing. “Damn it.”

  Tremaine controlled a snarl, instead commenting to Ilias, “Yes, I was planning on confiding the entire episode to the operator while she was making the connection.”

  “I’ll telephone,” Florian said hastily, getting to her feet, “I’ll just tell him to come here, I won’t say why. Where is it?”

  As she hurried to place the call, Gerard started on Tremaine’s side first, copying enough of the design to allow her to leave the table. Standing up, she was able to see the roughly circular pattern of the markings. That, taken with the similarity in the symbols Gerard had noticed, meant only one thing. “So this is another spell circle.” She lifted her brows at Gerard. “Maybe he heard you, about wanting a circle that could take us from the staging world to Lodun safely.”