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

by Martha Wells

  Poking at the fire, Ilias shrugged. “They could have been left over from the Gardier on the island and never had any big wizard crystals.”

  Right, that’s how this is going to go, Giliead thought, suppressing a sigh. He knew Ilias had been counting on hearing something, anything, in Cineth, but from what the trader had said, the two of them knew far more than anyone in the city.

  They spent a damp wakeful night, but by afternoon the next day they were walking into Cineth. It was a gray day again, and though the sun broke through the clouds sporadically, it did nothing to improve Ilias’s mood. They passed through the open gates without a challenge and went down the muddy road toward the plaza.

  Most people were down at the harbor or working in their homes or out in their fields. The white houses were quiet in their courtyards, though the smell of bread baking made Ilias’s stomach grumble. A few children played around a fountain house but didn’t bother to look at the two weary mud-spattered men trudging along the road.

  They reached the plaza, where the lawgiver’s house and the other city buildings were. The market under the tents was fairly active and people were startled to recognize Giliead; some pointed and a few called greetings. Ilias ignored them all. Giliead had to tell Visolela and Nicanor he was back, then they had to walk on to Andrien to reassure Karima and Halian, but after that they hadn’t decided what they were going to do or where they were going to go. They had discussed going back to the Isle of Storms, trying to find any Gardier left behind to see if they knew what had happened in Ile-Rien. Ilias knew in his gut that was a forlorn hope; even if there were any Gardier who had survived there this long, they would have no more idea what happened than Ilias had.

  They were walking under the god’s favorite oak tree when a voice shouted, “You back!”

  Ilias looked up, startled, just as Davret of the Aelin joyously flung herself on him. He staggered sideways as she released him and flung herself on Giliead. “Where you been? We heard nothing for days and days! And see, I speak your language now. Where is everybody else?” Her hair was longer than Ilias remembered and her skin tanned and freckled from the sun. She wore light pants and a red shirt, with strings of beads around her neck and woven through her hair. Except for her accent, there was nothing to tell she wasn’t Syprian.

  Giliead disentangled himself from her. “We were— It’s a long story,” he told her, with a glance at Ilias.

  Ilias knew Giliead was trying to spare his feelings, but there didn’t seem much point in it. Davret had dropped a basket filled with olives and a couple of small rounds of cheese and he sat on his heels to help her collect it. He said, “We ended up at the fortress again, and couldn’t use the circles to get back. We’ll tell you later. Where’s Gyan?”

  Davret looked from him to Giliead and back, brows drawing together. It must be fairly obvious this wasn’t exactly a happy homecoming. But instead of asking more questions, she just said, “At your house, where we live.”

  Giliead nodded, his lips pressed together. “At Andrien?”

  “No, no, your house, in town,” Davret explained, taking her basket back from Ilias. “The one Tremaine got for us.”

  “The what?” Ilias stared at her.

  “The one we came to when you first bring—brought—us to here. Gyan says Tremaine has it for us.” At their increasingly baffled expressions, she gestured helplessly, laughing. “Come and see then. Maybe I explain it wrong.”

  Ilias didn’t really believe it until they reached Visolela’s old house above the boat sheds and found Gyan and the Aelin there. Gyan had wept to see them, having nearly given them up for dead after so long, and sent one of the young Aelin men running off to take the word to Andrien.

  The house looked the same on the outside, but in the court Ilias could see the difference. Couches and benches with brightly woven cushions were set out on the previously empty portico and the flower beds were now carefully tended. The center one had been replanted as a vegetable garden. After recovering himself a little, Gyan had led them into the dining room, which opened off the atrium. It was now clean and lit with new clay oil lamps, and there was fresh red paint on the walls and columns. Ilias recognized the dining table and the benches from the waterbirds carved on the legs; they were an old set from Andrien House. There was a small fire in the center hearth to drive the damp out of the room before everyone came back for dinner. “Not that we all fit in here,” Gyan explained, lowering himself to one of the benches with a grunt. “But the young ones eat at all hours anyway.” On the walk here, Davret had explained that the young Aelin had been finding work at the harbor, loading and unloading cargo, or helping the local merchants, while they considered whether they could establish themselves as traders again. “It’s mostly me, the children and the elders that keep regular hours. Dyani will be back from the harbor soon. And Kias should hear that you’re back and turn up tonight too.” He gave Ilias a searching look. “You didn’t know Tremaine bought this place? She got it from Visolela the morning before you left. She came here to leave Calit with me, and said she wanted the house for you and Giliead, to have a place to stay in town, and invited us all to live here.”

  Sitting on the opposite bench, Ilias made a gesture midway between a shake of the head and a shrug, unable to form a coherent reply.

  After they had had a cup of warmed wine and taken off their muddy boots, Ilias left so that Giliead could tell Gyan the full story. He wandered around the house, barefoot on the cool tiles. The Aelin were taking up most of the rooms but they had saved a set for Ilias and Giliead, and Halian had brought over their belongings from Andrien House.

  Ilias sat down on the bedstead in one of the rooms left for their use. The mattress was still rolled up and tied from when it had been carted here, with folded blankets, linens and wall hangings piled atop it. Their clothes chests were set against the wall, along with Ranior’s old sword rack and the long wooden cases for bows and javelins, holding the weapons they had decided to leave behind. The only thing he could think was that a woman didn’t buy a house for a husband she was planning to discard. Not here, and surely not in Ile-Rien either, where men were expected to own their own property and shift for themselves.

  Vienne, Ile-Rien

  Light would help, but Tremaine didn’t think Vienne would ever look the same. She stood at the big bay windows of the third-floor lounge of the Hotel Galvaz, looking down into the dark street. The blackout conditions had been lifted last week, but electricity and gas had yet to be restored to most sections of the city.

  The lounge she stood in was softly lit by candles in shielded glass lamps, rescued from the old hotel’s copious attics. Below in the dark cavern of the street, a party of men with oil lamps and pocket torches were guiding a rumbling truck and a convoy of farm carts, bringing supplies into the city for the growing number of returning refugees and troops.

  The Gardier had been unable to hold Vienne without sorcerer crystals, and with several Lodun sorcerers and a combined force of Rienish and Parscian troops landed near Chaire by the Falaise and the Ravenna, the occupying army had been driven out only two weeks after Lodun’s liberation. Adera and anything to the east of Vienne and Lodun was still considered occupied territory, but Rienish and Aderassi refugees, the scattered remnants of the Rienish armies and allied Parscian troops were pouring back in over the southern borders. The Ravenna, the Falaise and a dozen or so Capidaran transports had been carrying supplies from Capidara, landing at Chaire, Rel and Portier without incident. With the Gardier supply lines through the staging world completely cut off, the invaders were relying on Adera’s resources and the bases they had established there and in the Low Countries. But Adera had always been a poor nation, without much in the way of resources to be had. And word had recently spread that Aderassi rebels were committing violent acts of sabotage at every turn.

  It wasn’t surprising; the Gardier had relied heavily on the crystals, to protect their airships, to make their wireless sets work, for attack, for
communication, for defense, for coordination. Without them, they were left with inadequate stolen machinery they didn’t quite understand and captive populations who could smell their invaders’ new weakness.

  “Tremaine, are you all right?”

  She rolled her eyes in annoyance, still facing the dark window. “You have to put a real in the bowl.”

  “I do not,” Gerard said patiently. “The arrangement was that I have to contribute a copper real every time I ask you if you’re all right for no reason. I’ve been sitting here trying to ask you if you want any coffee for a full—” She heard a rustle as he consulted his watch. “Two minutes without a response. Therefore, I’m allowed a bonus ‘are you all right?’ ”

  Tremaine turned to glare at him. He was sitting in an upholstered armchair, his feet propped on a stool, reading by candlelight. The book was a novel with a singed cloth cover, salvaged from the mess the Gardier occupation had made of the lending library the next street over. Dr. Divies had absolutely forbidden Gerard to perform spells, read anything pertaining to sorcery or even be in the same room as a Viller sphere for another six months. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Yes, it’s such a great distance to the window.” He closed the book with a sigh, adjusting his spectacles. He still looked too thin and too tired, but he was no longer sleeping through most of the days, and his voice had life in it again. “Do you want any coffee? If you don’t get downstairs, there won’t be any left.”

  “Not really.” She paced away from the window. The hotel had become the temporary headquarters of the Viller Institute, though the opposite wing had suffered fire damage. The lounge was a long room, with bay windows draped with heavy gold curtains looking down onto what had been one of the most fashionable avenues in the city. The hotel was determined to reestablish itself as quickly as possible, and unless you knew, it would have been hard to tell that the couches and chairs in this lounge and the downstairs dining rooms had been scavenged from all over the building. It did leave the small number of usable rooms sparsely furnished. Tremaine would rather have been at Coldcourt, but a stray artillery shell had hit one of the towers, rendering most of the house uninhabitable until it could be rebuilt.

  Gerard was eyeing her thoughtfully. “You will be going to the memorial service for Colonel Averi, won’t you?”

  Tremaine dropped into the other armchair, sighing in annoyance. She had gone to the private memorial, where Florian, Gerard, Niles, Captain Marais, Dr. Divies and several of Averi’s officers had locked themselves in the Observation Bar aboard the Ravenna and drunk all of the ship’s small remaining supply of liquor. Tremaine hadn’t known until then that Averi had actually retired from service before the war because of a wasting disease. It wasn’t something that could be cured either by surgeons or sorcerer-healers, though Niles had been keeping him supplied with charms and healing stones to keep the pain at bay. In some ways, it had been a mercy that he had been killed instantly when airships had fired on the Ravenna during the Lodun evacuation. Balin had died in that attack too, but there had been no memorial for her. She was just one of the dead people Tremaine hadn’t been able to keep a promise to.

  The memorial being held at Aviler House tomorrow night would be a big public display, more of a demonstration that all was under control in the city than anything else. But there was no point in staying away. It would just elicit more unwelcome inquiries as to her health and state of mind. “Sure, I’ll go. Florian will be there too.”

  “I see.” Gerard was still watching her with a faint frown. “I was rather surprised that you agreed to give Arites’s papers to Barshion. I thought you’d like to work on the translation for yourself.”

  Tremaine leaned her head back against the upholstery that still smelled faintly of smoke, despite the hotel’s best efforts. She was getting really tired of being treated like an invalid. First, they had assigned her the duty of taking care of Gerard while he recuperated, as if Gerard wasn’t perfectly capable of sitting around in the hotel himself, as if there weren’t any number of Viller Institute workers within shouting distance at all times.

  No matter how much time Niles and the other remaining sorcerers devoted to it, no one knew how Orelis had managed to power the gate spiral. No one knew how Arisilde had managed to power his copy long enough to send Florian there and bring her and Tremaine back, though the fact that it had caused even him to give up his tenuous hold on life implied that it wasn’t something an ordinary human sorcerer could do. And considering the small number of sorcerers left in Ile-Rien, it would be a very long time before anyone managed to figure it out.

  Still looking at the water- and smoke-stained plaster overhead, she said, “All I had to read the papers with was the Syrnaic-Rienish word list Arites started. Barshion knows people who can do a much better job of translating them than me. And it was Arites’s version of what happened on the Ravenna. It’s a historical document. Who better to have it than the History College at Lodun?” She looked at him directly, tired of dancing around the real issue. “You were the one who told me that shared danger was no basis for building a relationship.”

  “I remember it clearly,” Gerard said dryly. “I do wish I hadn’t said it.”

  Tremaine looked away. The real issue, of course, was that she would never see Ilias, or any of the other Syprians, again.

  She didn’t even know if they had been able to get out of the fortress. She hadn’t ever voiced this fear aloud, but Gerard and Florian and even Nicholas had all seemed to guess its presence. They had pointed out that the teenage Aelin had been able to get in and out several times, and that they had left a large amount of rope, food and other supplies behind. There was every reason to think the two men had made it back to Cineth easily. But it still wore on her and always would. Along with everything else that wore on her and always would.

  Watching her as if he could read her thoughts, Gerard sighed. “Tremaine—”

  Tremaine was almost relieved when the door opened and Nicholas entered. He greeted them with a nod, taking his coat off and hanging it on the rack beside the door.

  “Well?” Tremaine demanded. She had spotted a rolled sheaf of gray paper sticking out of his coat pocket. One of the big printing companies had begun issuing a newspaper again, mostly to help people locate missing or wounded relatives and identify the dead. But it also carried news of the war.

  Nicholas directed an opaque glance at her, but didn’t pretend he didn’t know what she meant. “The War Department won’t direct more troops into the Marches. There simply aren’t enough men available yet to waste them in police duties.”

  Gerard made a noise of disgust. Tremaine looked at the dark window, locking her jaw.

  The Rienish government was offering amnesty for Gardier Service or Labor caste who surrendered, on the grounds that most of them had probably been forced into the conflict. But that wasn’t working out so well. Many Gardier troops near Lodun, caught flat-footed by the sudden retreat from Vienne, had surrendered. An inadequate number of Rienish troops had been holding them in the town of Charven in the Marches, but local rioters had broken into the makeshift camp and burned it, killing many of the unarmed and wounded men and women. Others had escaped and were being killed by the local people, despite the Rienish military’s attempt to stop them. Paranoia about Gardier mixing with the population was rampant, despite the fact that the Aelin had never been allowed to learn the languages of the lands they had invaded so that blending in would have been next to impossible. There had been incidents where refugees or freed Gardier slaves from obscure countries who spoke Rienish poorly had been badly beaten or killed by panicked crowds.

  For a long moment the only sound was the faint rustle as Nicholas removed the paper from his pocket, leaving it on the sideboard. Tremaine was a little startled when he broke down enough to say, “I agree that it’s regrettable, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Tremaine snorted derisively. So all these people who surrendered on good faith are ju
st going to be murdered. Along with whoever else gets in the way. Regardless of how difficult it’s going to make convincing the Gardier troops to the south to trust us. They had nowhere to go, and offering them an option other than fighting or dying had been the only solution. And it’s not going to work. “Who said it was regrettable?” she said, hearing the acid tinge in her own voice. “I just don’t like having our record for murdering Aelin broken by a bunch of hysterical shopkeepers. We’re professionals, after all.”

  Nicholas shook his head, giving her a dry look. “We’re not murderers, Tremaine. We’re killers. There’s a difference. A small difference, but a difference nonetheless.”

  Tremaine rolled her eyes. Yes, that was comforting. “I’m sure it matters to the dead people. I think I’ll go downstairs for coffee after all.”

  After the door had closed behind Tremaine, Nicholas threw himself into a chair, the first betrayal of irritation Gerard had witnessed.

  Standing on the beach at Cineth with Tremaine, when she had all but told him she meant to make the place her home someday, Gerard had thought of all the reasons she shouldn’t. The primitive conditions, the danger, the prejudices of the inhabitants. But Ile-Rien was no less dangerous, the war would go on for years and the Rienish were currently giving the Syprians a run for their money where irrational prejudices were concerned. And Tremaine had already done more than her part. And it had simply come down to the fact that this was a chance she would have to take, that she couldn’t know it was the right thing until she tried it. Now that chance had been snatched away. Watching Nicholas, Gerard said carefully, “It’s very frustrating as a friend, and especially I suppose as a parent, to know the exact solution to a problem, yet be unable to provide it.”