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

by Martha Wells

  Gerard glanced up, straightening his spectacles. “I don’t know. But the original spell circle opens etheric gateways between worlds. This one…might open something else.”

  Chapter 3

  Several hours later, Tremaine sat in one of the spindly chairs at the door to the second-floor ballroom, yawning profusely. She had finally been able to wash her hands once Giaren had arrived with the camera and careful photographs had been take to supplement Gerard’s notes. The Syprians had all retreated out of the room as the first flashbulb popped; despite the explanation, she didn’t think they quite understood what the camera was doing. She remembered she hadn’t shown them the photographs from the Ravenna yet; that might be an interesting experience.

  After that, while Gerard and Florian studied the symbols and Giaren turned the pantry into a temporary darkroom, she and the others had worked at sweeping and scrubbing the ballroom floor to get it ready for the circle’s inscription. It was a big room, suffering from water leaks down through the walls and rather horribly lit with pink crystal sconces. The ceiling was coffered and figured with plaster and the pink-and-cream flowered wallpaper was coming off the mildewed walls in long shroudlike strips, making the room look as if it had a skin disease. The once-fine parquet floor had been cleaned about as well as any of the others in the house to prepare it for sale, but for the glyphs to be properly inscribed the old coats of wax had had to be removed. Tremaine tiredly pushed her hair out of her eyes, wondering if she could get the large kitchen range to heat water for coffee again without setting anything on fire. It would probably be easier to use the hearth in the salon.

  Gerard was now crouched on the floor, carefully painting in the chalk-marked symbols with Florian’s help, being observed by Ilias, Ander, Giliead and Giaren. Kias hadn’t objected to the magic but didn’t want to be a part of it or witness to it; he was downstairs, tending the fire in the salon and dozing. Coffee, she reminded herself, getting wearily to her feet.

  As she went down the stairs, she heard Nicholas in one of the rooms off the hall, and paused long enough to ascertain that he was talking to Niles on the telephone. Again. Niles, who had to remain on the Ravenna with his sphere so the ship could world-gate if there was an attack, had been telephoning using the ship-to-shore line every half hour. He was attempting to supply Gerard with all the assistance that Gerard didn’t require and giving the impression that he felt they were all having fun without him.

  In the hallway she heard a hesitant knock at the door. It was the middle of the night. And we aren’t expecting anyone, she thought grimly. Fantastic. As she dragged a chair back to the door, she heard Nicholas hanging up on Niles. Taking a cautious peek through the fanlight, she stared at the two people standing on the stoop, visible in the light from the street lamp. Recognizing them, she grimaced in resignation.

  She turned to find Nicholas and Kias in the hall, Kias with his sword drawn. “It’s Cletia and Cimarus,” she reported.

  Kias muttered something inaudible, sheathed his sword and retreated down the hall. Tremaine jumped down, setting the chair aside. “Kias,” she asked sharply, “how did they know where we were?”

  “I told Gyan,” he admitted from the doorway to the salon.

  Nicholas regarded him sourly. Tremaine pinched the bridge of her nose, thinking, Gyan must be out of his mind. She told Kias, “Why don’t you go up and tell Giliead they’re here.”

  Kias winced but headed for the stairs. Resigned, Tremaine drew the bolt and opened the door.

  Both Syprians were standing back from the threshold as if they expected something unpleasant to leap out at them. They were sister and brother, and Pasima’s cousins. Cletia was slight and had a deceptively delicate appearance, with long blond curls that fell past her shoulders. Cimarus was tall and dark-haired, with long braids neatly tied back, and had some resemblance to Pasima in the handsome cast of his features. Water dripped off their hair and the dark-colored wool wraps they wore over the more colorful fabric and leather of their Syprian clothes. Tremaine sighed. “Well, come in.”

  They stepped into the hall cautiously and Tremaine shut the door on the rainy night. She saw they both had their swords tucked under their wraps, which didn’t surprise her, but as Cletia let the wet wool slip off her shoulder she saw the other woman also had the leather packs and bags they carried their belongings in. They came to stay? she wondered, startled. She had thought they had just come to argue.

  Giliead came down the stairs, his face set and angry. “What do you want?” he said, not sounding as if he was particularly interested in the answer. Ilias trailed behind him, watching the two visitors with suspicion.

  Cimarus looked up, shaking his hair back, and Tremaine saw his cheeks were red from embarrassment. “We quarreled with Pasima.”

  Giliead hesitated. That obviously wasn’t the answer he had expected. But he said, “And why should we care?”

  “We quarreled over you, you arrogant ass,” Cletia snapped.

  Silence stretched. Giliead glanced down at Ilias, who shook his head slightly in response, as if he wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not. Giliead advanced another few steps down the stairs. “Did she tell you to leave?”

  “No. We left on our own,” Cletia answered. She looked at Tremaine pointedly and, with the air of someone performing an unpleasant but necessary duty, said, “It’s our right to ask for lodging at another Andrien household.”

  So much for staying out of the middle. Tremaine looked at Ilias, lifting her brows, though she knew Cletia wouldn’t lie when there were others present to contradict her. He gave her a reluctant nod. “Oh, good.” She looked at Nicholas. “Well, do we have the room?”

  He eyed the two newcomers thoughtfully. Cletia weathered his gaze but Cimarus shifted uneasily. In Rienish, he asked Tremaine, “I assume they can be trusted?”

  “They won’t betray us to the Gardier,” she replied in the same language. Unlike the others, Cletia and Cimarus never made attempts to speak Rienish, though she suspected they knew enough to understand most conversations. Nicholas almost certainly knew that too, and his question had been more of a warning to them than anything else. But I don’t want them here. She let out her breath and rubbed her eyes. “But they’ll fight with the others and argue about everything.”

  “Ah. Then I should feel quite at home,” Nicholas said pleasantly, and with that left the hall.

  Tremaine stared after him, feeling her face heat. She took a deep calming breath. I don’t want him here either. In fact, I think I’m going to go to the mountains, find a cave and become a hermit. No relatives allowed. “Kias, why don’t you show them to a room.” She turned to a frowning Cletia, saying brightly, “By the way, the attic is haunted, and Gerard is about to do a curse in the ballroom. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Tremaine found the coffee beans in a cabinet and a grinder, and proceeded to take her frustration out in manual labor. Ilias appeared after a short time, boosting himself up to sit on the sideboard next to where she was working. He watched her for a moment, then picked up one of the beans, sniffing it thoughtfully. “And how are they settling in?” she asked him.

  He shrugged, apparently indifferent. “I don’t know.” He bit into the bean, winced and spit it out.

  Giliead wandered in at that point and leaned on the sideboard, watching Tremaine. After a moment of stiff silence, he said, “We owe them hospitality. There’s nothing I can do about that.” There was a definite chill in the air. Tremaine felt the urge to intervene and managed to squash it, pretending to give the awkward coffee grinder her full attention. She knew both men well enough by now to realize that they would either get over it immediately or have a fistfight and then get over it immediately.

  Ilias gave him a sharp stare. “Did I say there was?”

  Giliead glared back. “No.” He appeared to wrestle with himself for a long moment, then admitted, “When we go back, it might help with the council if they’re honest about what happened. It would make it easie
r on Mother and Halian. And you.”

  Ilias rubbed his face, looking as if his annoyance was suddenly spent and he was just tired again. “Will that help you?”

  Giliead seemed surprised, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I don’t see how it could,” he said honestly.

  Ilias swore, hopped off the sideboard and walked out, banging the door on his way. Giliead watched him go, his face troubled, and Tremaine grimaced in sympathy. “Is it really going to be that bad?” she asked, giving up on the coffee grinder.

  He leaned against the sideboard, taking a deep breath. “It will either be that bad, or it will be nothing. It’s impossible to tell until we get there.” He looked down at her, smiling ruefully. “If the waiting doesn’t kill us first.”

  Tremaine nodded. “Waiting is what makes me… crazy.” The beings the Syprians called gods didn’t have many rules, as far as she could tell. They didn’t make moral judgments or hand down pronouncements; they didn’t answer questions, except those posed by the Chosen Vessels relating to magic or sorcerers. Their presence in a cave or a hollow tree would drive off the most dangerous of the etheric entities the Syprians were troubled by and seemed to lessen the effect of inimical spells. They didn’t seem to attack sorcerers directly but in the few historical cases that Giliead had spoken of where sorcerers had ventured to attack a god, the sorcerers had reputedly not fared well.

  Gerard’s theory, which Giliead was coming around to, was that the gods only objected to hostile spells. That that was why Giliead had found it difficult at first to see wards and other protective Rienish spells; the god ignored those and so Giliead had never learned how to spot them. And the god must have communicated with Arisilde at some point, before he had gotten into whatever situation it was that had led to his being trapped in the sphere.

  Tremaine had pointed it out before, but she felt obliged to say again, “But the god didn’t object to Gerard or Florian, and it acted sort of friendly to Arisilde in the sphere. And it didn’t interfere with any of the spells they cast in Cineth. So maybe…”

  “Maybe,” Giliead agreed quietly.

  Tremaine could tell he was humoring her now. “But Gerard’s not a Chosen Vessel. I know, I know,” she snapped. She seized the recalcitrant coffee grinder again. “You two just be pessimists; I’m going to be an optimist from now on.”

  Giliead actually snorted in amusement. “That will be a change.” He took the coffee grinder away from her. “What are you trying to do with this thing?”

  Giliead was much better at making the coffee than Tremaine, once she had explained the principle. This did not help her mood any.

  There wasn’t much else to do after that than sit around and watch Gerard work on the spell circle. A dusty sofa and a couple of chairs hauled in from another room made the waiting a little more comfortable. Tremaine had taken a seat there with Ilias sprawled next to her. Florian was still sitting cross-legged on the floor near the developing circle, taking notes for Gerard, though she looked more than half-asleep. Giliead sat on the floor, watching thoughtfully, and Ander was pacing. Giaren had finished developing the photos and had taken over Nicholas’s task of talking to Niles on the telephone, leaving Nicholas free to stalk the upstairs hall in what was probably an unconsciously sinister manner. Cletia and Cimarus had retired to elsewhere in the house, and Kias was supposed to be keeping an eye on them and on Calit, who was asleep.

  Ilias was dozing on Tremaine’s shoulder, though this was probably the most uncomfortable place in the house to sleep. Dust floated in the air from all the floor cleaning and the room was still uncomfortably cold and damp. But Ilias was very warm against her side and Tremaine was on the verge of drifting off herself, when Gerard got to his feet with a grunt of effort. She sat forward, waking Ilias with an elbow. “Is it done?” she demanded.

  “Yes.” Gerard massaged his lower back with a grimace. He glanced up, saw everyone watching him expectantly and sighed. “I can tell it’s meant to take us to the Syprians’ world, but I have no idea where. It’s not like the circles we’ve used before, that can only take us to our current location in the next world over. It has many of the same characteristics of the original spell circle, though many of the key figures and glyphs are different.” He bent down again to collect his scattered notes.

  “But we know Arisilde wanted us to go there,” Tremaine pointed out, getting to her feet. She went to the edge of the circle, standing next to Florian. It didn’t look much different from the other circle to her, but then she didn’t know the symbols well enough to recognize most of them, or even to know if they were in the right order. Ilias had followed her, pacing along the edge of the circle thoughtfully. Giliead came over to sit on his heels near the edge, examining the symbols. Tremaine noted nobody touched it, or stepped inside, though it would take the sphere to make it work.

  “But we don’t know why,” Florian put in around a yawn. “It might be because there’s something incredibly dangerous there that he wants us to know about.”

  Nicholas stepped up behind Giliead, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think the danger or lack of it is worth debating; it’s obviously something he felt it was vital for us to know.”

  Tremaine bit her lip, considering it. She glanced at Giliead. “What does it feel like to you? I mean, does it seem any different from the other spell circles?”

  She thought an instant later that that might not be the most politic question in the world, especially coming from her. She was the one who had talked Giliead into using his ability to speak to their captured Gardier crystal, leading to his working an actual spell with its help. But he just frowned in a preoccupied way, holding out a hand above the carefully written symbols. “I can tell it has power, that it’s …waiting for something. But that’s how the others feel.” He shook his head. “It’s a little different, but every one I’ve seen has been a little different; they never feel identical.”

  Florian was nodding, looking a little more alert. “That makes sense. I bet the circle on the Ravenna changes as the ship moves. That it would feel different to you here in Capistown harbor than it did when we looked at it on the voyage here, in your world.”

  “Right.” Tremaine folded her arms. “So we need to test it.” They all knew testing it meant using it, sending someone through. The Viller Institute had tried the first circle a few times before successfully making it work. Of course, it had been the badly constructed spheres that had killed the sorcerers involved, not the circle itself. Though somehow she didn’t find that very comforting at the moment.

  “Those experiments were a little expensive, if you recall,” Ander pointed out, his expression dry.

  “Yes, Ander, oddly enough I do recall Riardin’s dying before my eyes as his sphere destroyed itself in an etheric explosion,” Gerard said, still looking distractedly around for his scattered notes. “Nevertheless, I’ll be making the experiment myself.”

  “I’m not sure that’s wise,” Nicholas said, watching him with a trace of concern. “If Arisilde was trying to show us how he became trapped in the sphere, and this circle has something to do with that—”

  “Oh, hell.” Tremaine stared at Gerard, horrified. She hadn’t thought of that. “You shouldn’t go, Gerard.”

  Florian pushed to her feet, alarmed. “She’s right, Gerard. There’s dangerous and there’s… dangerous.”

  “I’ll go,” Ilias said suddenly.

  “No, you won’t,” Tremaine said, startled, at the same time as Giliead, sounding aghast, said, “What?”

  Ander stepped forward, as if no one had spoken. “I’m obviously the one to go.”

  “Why?” Ilias demanded, turning to glare at him. “I’ve done it more than you have.”

  Ander rounded on him impatiently. “You don’t understand the spell. You don’t have any idea what happens when—”

  Ilias snorted derisively. “And you do?” He flung an arm in the air. “Explain it to us, then.”

  Not sure which one of them s
he wanted to argue with, Tremaine pointed out, “Hey, I’ve done it more than both of you put together—”

  “Children, quiet,” Nicholas snapped. In the sudden startled silence he lifted a brow in ironic comment, and added, “Let’s listen to Gerard, shall we?”

  Gerard gazed at the ceiling as if asking it for patience. “I’m going because I’m the sorcerer and it would rather help to be able to return.”

  “But I could—” Florian began.

  “No.” Gerard told her, pausing to look at her over his spectacles. Florian could use a sphere to make a circle work, but her results hadn’t always been ideal. “I appreciate the offer, but no.”

  As Florian subsided reluctantly, Ander put in, “Of course, but you’ll need someone to—”

  Gerard interrupted, “And I accept Ilias’s offer to accompany me.”

  “And me,” Tremaine added, alarmed that she might actually be left out. It wasn’t fair. Going through strange circles was one of her few accomplishments.

  “No.” Gerard told her. “I want to keep the first expedition to a minimum.”

  First expedition? Now Gerard was being a rampant optimist, to assume there would be a second. “But I always go. It’s… lucky,” Tremaine finished self-consciously as everyone stared at her.

  “Not this time,” Gerard said firmly.

  Now that the decision was made, Ilias was impatient to get it over with. “Shouldn’t you take some more time?” Florian asked, looking over to where Gerard stood near the circle. The wizard was still going through his papers but he had put on his coat, apparently the only precaution he was going to take. The other men were waiting with him, except for Giaren, who was still using the talking curse box to speak to Niles. Florian turned a little hopelessly to Ilias. “To make more preparations?”