The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein)

by Martha Wells

  “But there’s a backlash, right?” Tremaine prompted. Nicholas had made an extensive study of forcible entrance wards, and had always said there were ways around those that weren’t perfectly cast. But that involved tricking the ward into reacting the wrong way, not just applying more brute force. “If something hits a ward like that too hard, it bounces back.”

  “Correct.” Gerard stepped forward, stooping to run his hand over the lower section of the abused metal. A silvery metallic substance came off on his fingers and Ilias and Giliead both leaned in to look more closely. “This is incinerated ether. Whatever struck this door caused the ward to respond so violently it destroyed itself in the process.” He straightened up, dusting his hand off. “Fortunately, the ward must have wounded its adversary in the process and the…entity retreated, without trying to enter or harm anyone inside.”

  Giliead’s face set. “I’ll try to pick up a trail.” He turned away, pacing slowly toward the stairs up to the deck.

  Deciding to get out of the way, Tremaine went through the door into the office area, Ilias following her. Niles and Florian were already in the bare whitewashed room, both red-eyed from lack of sleep, and Dr. Divies was leaning on a file cabinet, his dark face drawn with exhaustion. The guards were in the other room, talking over the situation in worried mutters.

  On the desk was one of the ship’s large elegant silver coffee services, with a plate of buns. Tremaine seized the coffeepot, relieved to find it still warm and more than half-full. “So, any idea what could do this?” she asked, pouring a cup and resting one hip on the desk. She had to admit, the idea that something could attack that violently in total silence was making her nerves jump. Ilias settled next to her, taking one of the buns and breaking it open to sniff suspiciously at the jam filling.

  Niles shook his head, pacing the room. “Offhand, I’d say it looks like the work of an elemental, but it would be impossible for a creature of the fay to be aboard a ship composed mostly of iron.”

  “And an elemental would make noise,” Florian pointed out. “And besides, aren’t they fairly harmless?”

  Ilias reached for another bun, his bare arm warm against Tremaine’s shoulder in the cool morning air, distracting her from Niles’s answer. The conversation was in Rienish since most of the people in the room didn’t speak Syrnaic, but she could tell he was trying to follow it. And if her hyperawareness of his presence didn’t abate soon, she wasn’t going to be worth anything. She shook herself. “It could be something that sneaked aboard from the island,” she admitted. It was a sobering thought, especially since she and Ilias had been only a few decks up from this spot, protected by nothing but the Veranda’s lighter unwarded door.

  Florian nodded, looking as if the idea didn’t appeal much to her either. “I told Niles about some of the things we saw there.”

  Tremaine nudged Ilias with an elbow, saying in Syrnaic, “Did you ever see anything on the island that could do this?”

  “Sure. Ixion.” Ilias wiped his fingers on his pants and studied the tray of buns for the next victim.

  Florian shook her head, thoughtful. “Niles said the barrier around him hasn’t been penetrated.”

  Leaning against the wooden filing cabinet, Divies stirred, saying, “Miss Valiarde, I wanted to ask the Syprians if there was any chance that the Gardier were put under some spell by this Ixion while still on the island?”

  Tremaine passed the question on to Ilias, who turned to the Parscian doctor, and said in careful Rienish, “I do not know. Why?”

  Tremaine blinked, surprised he could speak that much Rienish. She was also surprised at how erotic she found it. Divies shifted to face him, explaining, “We asked one of the Gardier what he did before he became a soldier, just to keep him talking. He seemed startled and frightened, as if it was a question of great importance, and refused to answer. Considering the man had just told us where some of the prisoners who were acting as slave labor had been taken from, and how many had died en route to the island, it seemed nonsensical. We tried the question with all the others, and they behaved in the same way. They refused to tell us anything about a childhood, a home, growing up.”

  “That’s…very strange.” Tremaine stared at the smudged linoleum floor, thinking it over.

  Ilias had listened carefully but obviously hadn’t gotten all the words. Divies waited for Florian to finish translating before the doctor commented, “Strange indeed.” He nodded to Niles. “Niles suspected it was some sort of spell affecting their memories, but I’m not sure I agree. And I wonder why this information is so important. If I was captured by the Gardier, and they discovered I was born in the Bisheni Valley of Parscia, came to Ile-Rien with my family when I was a child and grew up in the Marches, what possible use could that be to them?”

  Niles folded his arms, lips pursed. “But they obviously think it would be of use to us.”

  “Or they believe that forcing their men to forswear any past civilian life makes for a better soldier,” Divies added with a thoughtful frown. “A man undistracted by thoughts of home or family. I suppose they judge the efficacy of it by their results, but I can’t believe they could make all their people conform.”

  “I don’t know.” Niles took a deep breath. “Gerard and I are going to attempt to get the sphere to teach one of us the Gardier language. It should have…ingested it the way it did Syrnaic, and it should be able to impart it to us in the same way. Perhaps being able to communicate in their own language without the translator crystals will help us understand them.”

  Giliead walked into the office, followed by Gerard and Colonel Averi. Obviously ready for action, Ilias dropped the last bun back on the tray and hopped down off the desk. “You’ve got it?”

  Giliead shook his head. “I can’t see a trail.” He tapped his fingers on his belt thoughtfully, then glanced at Gerard. “But if it wasn’t a curse on the door, but a curseling hitting the door with its body, there might be no trail to see.”

  Gerard didn’t look surprised. “I was afraid of that.”

  “That was useless,” Averi growled, taking the desk chair and sitting down with a thump. “We don’t have time to waste on native superstitions.”

  He had spoken of course in Rienish, and Giliead and Ilias both looked to Tremaine for a translation. She obliged with, “He said, ‘It didn’t work, blah blah blah, my ulcers make me difficult.’” Florian winced.

  From their expressions she might as well have told them exactly what Averi had said. Ilias snorted derisively, and Giliead lifted a brow, eyeing the colonel coolly. He said, “I could find all the wizards on the ship. That ought to narrow it down for him.”

  Gerard passed this along to Averi before Tremaine could. The colonel sat up straight, regarding Giliead with sudden alertness. “He can do that?”

  “That’s what they do,” Florian interposed, again before Tremaine could open her mouth. She hopped down off the desk, saying briskly, “What do we need? A map, keys for all the rooms?”

  Armed with the ship’s map booklet and the set of master keys, Tremaine trailed after Florian, Giliead and Ilias. The Ravenna had passenger accommodation on six decks, some of it running nearly the length of the ship, from Third Class in the bow to the Second Class area toward the stern. In assigning rooms the First Class space in the center of the ship had been filled up first. Those rooms were larger and more comfortable and also closer to the First Class dining room, lounges and the main hall, where most of the ship’s community activity was centered.

  Now they were moving down a corridor on C deck. The cabin doors were set back in little vestibules, two or three doors opening into each, meant to reduce noise and give a little more privacy. It struck Tremaine how dramatic the change had been since she, Florian and Ilias had first set foot on the dark quiet ship in Port Rel. The Ravenna had been a thing of arrested power then, occupied by ghosts and dust, with the feel, and the odor, of a disused hotel.

  Now freed prisoners who had been chained in the dark for endl
ess months kept their cabin doors open and all the lights on—even the Maiutans, most of whom would have lived in little clapboard houses not that much different from Syprian dwellings. Military wives, the families of Viller Institute workers, and the smattering of refugees from Rel and Chaire who had chosen to take the risk had come accompanied with children and pets; they kept their doors open too and hung their laundry to dry in the corridor. Tremaine could hear the tinny music of a gramophone record playing somewhere. The ship’s loudspeaker system underlined the contrast by suddenly announcing, “All passengers please take heed: When on deck, stand clear of the funnels. Funnels may vent sooty water without warning.”

  As the announcement was repeated in Parscian, Giliead glanced inquiringly back at Florian. She translated, “It was ‘beware of funnels’ again.” The loudspeaker also delivered exhortations concerning keeping the dead-lights on the portholes, closing outer hatches and staying off the open decks unless it was absolutely necessary. Tremaine couldn’t tell if they chose them randomly or by whatever the inexperienced crew was most paranoid about at that moment.

  Their passage didn’t go unremarked as all the Syprians were minor celebrities on the ship, with Ilias and Giliead being the most recognized by the prisoners released from the Gardier base. People stepped out of their cabins to watch them pass, or stopped in the corridor to give them room to get by. The fact that both Syprians were wearing swords strapped across their backs probably helped attract attention as well.

  It was less easy now to tell the freed slaves from the refugees, since they had gotten rid of their filthy Gardier coveralls and were all dressed in a hodgepodge of borrowed clothing: navy and army fatigues with the sleeves and pant legs rolled up or mismatched blouses, skirts and trousers donated by the other passengers. Shoes must have been in short supply because most of them seemed to be in socks or barefoot.

  Giliead stopped in the corridor, turning into one of the vestibules. “There’s something here. Just a trace.” He hesitated, touching the dark-paneled wall lightly.

  The door he had chosen stood open, and Tremaine could hear Rienish voices inside. She stepped past him and knocked on the open door. “Hello? Could we have a word?”

  “Yes? Oh, hello.” It was a young girl in a jumper, two little boys playing with wooden blocks on the floor at her feet. There was an old woman sitting on the couch, humming to herself and working on a stretch of cloth with thread and needle. She didn’t stop working, but her cloudy blue eyes lifted to study Tremaine, then Florian and the two Syprians.

  “Hello.” Florian glanced at Tremaine, correctly interpreted her blank expression, and managed, “We’re just…oh, taking a survey. Who’s staying in your cabin, and where are they now, and that sort of thing.”

  “Oh.” The girl managed to tear her eyes off the exotic sight of Giliead and Ilias in her doorway and gestured to the old woman. “It’s just me and Grandmother and the boys. Lady Aviler came asking for volunteers, and my mother went.”

  “In the laundry?” Tremaine asked, eyeing the grandmother. According to the patrols, most of the civilian activity aboard the ship last night had centered in the hospital and the laundry. If the attempt on the Isolation Ward had been made by a sorcerer and not something that had managed to get aboard from the island, then chances were it was a refugee with a good excuse for wandering the ship at night.

  The girl assured her, “No, the kitchens.”

  “Ah.” Tremaine glanced at Giliead, asking in Syrnaic, “Is it Grandma there?”

  “Yes, but…” He shrugged slightly, meeting the old woman’s cloudy blue gaze. “She doesn’t feel dangerous.”

  Ilias leaned against the doorframe, explaining, “When they’re real old like that and not doing any harm, we usually just pretend we didn’t find them.”

  Tremaine nodded, not sure if that said something about Syprians in general or Ilias and Giliead in particular. She turned to the young girl again and mentally switched back to Rienish. “Ah…” Might as well be direct. “Is your grandmother a sorceress or a witch by any chance?”

  Either the girl was an excellent actress or was genuinely surprised at the question. “Oh, no, madam.”

  “So she can’t cast?” Florian clarified, glancing at the imperturbable old woman.

  “Oh, she can cast and heal, but she can’t fly or anything.” The girl made an extravagant gesture, apparently indicating Great Spells, major wards and raising fayre islands.

  “I see.” Tremaine bit her lip in thought. “Has she been in the laundry lately?”

  The girl seemed bewildered by Tremaine’s fixation on the laundry. “No, do they need help there?”

  “I’ll mention her to Dr. Divies,” Florian put in hastily, taking Tremaine’s arm to steer her out of the room. “If she can heal, they might need her down in the hospital.”

  “Oh, she’d like that.”

  As they returned to the corridor, Tremaine explained in Syrnaic, “Anybody with any real magical talent got recruited for something like the army or the Institute or trapped behind the barrier at Lodun. The ones who are left are going to be either a hundred years old like that woman or completely untrained children.”

  Giliead looked down the corridor with a preoccupied expression, not seeing their curious audience. “If it’s a Rienish wizard, this isn’t going to be easy.”

  Ilias nodded, his face resigned. “And if it’s a Gardier wizard, there’s a lot of places to hide on this ship.”

  Tremaine flipped through the map book again, thinking it over. The assigned living areas had been colored in with a pencil, not that that told her much. Lady Aviler and her minions had been keeping a rough list of cabin assignments; they would have to get a look at that too. Some of Second and all of Third Class should be uninhabited. Though, she supposed, there was nothing to keep people from taking those rooms except that they were smaller and less nicely appointed. Some of those rescued from the Gardier might very well have chosen to move there, if after months of crowded confinement underground they craved privacy and quiet more than anything else. “There’s still tons of empty cabin space. We should check that first.”

  Giliead’s brows quirked. “You mean there are more rooms?”

  “Bunches.” Tremaine showed him the map, pointing to a spot. “We’re about here.”

  As they started down the corridor, Florian asked slowly, “So what if it’s not a Gardier, or a creature from the island? What if it is someone trying to kill the prisoners for revenge?”

  Tremaine shrugged slightly, still occupied with the map. “Then we just pretend we didn’t find them.”

  After a time, Florian was called away to help the healers again, and Ilias, Tremaine and Giliead carried the search into the bow.

  Ilias could feel the tension between himself and Tremaine but it was a good kind of tension, a new awareness of scent, voice, of every casual contact. He hadn’t felt that with a woman since before the curse mark. It made it harder to concentrate on the search, but he liked making the effort; it had been far too long since he had been distracted like this.

  Tremaine was being Tremaine, shifting from speculating with ruthless unconcern about what kind of havoc a wizard or curseling hiding on the ship might wreak to becoming girlishly flustered when he brushed against her in a narrow doorway, to catching his eye and making a deliberate innuendo. Giliead’s quiet amusement grew through the afternoon, until Ilias figured he was probably going to have to punch him sometime before evening.

  The bow area was more of a maze, with rooms branching off the blue-carpeted cross corridors connecting the two main bow-to-stern passages. The deck started to slope upward here, and he saw Tremaine grip the ivory-colored rail more often from the sway of the ship. The cabin doors were set back in little cubbies in this section too, four to each, but without the noisy occupation of the center section, it was creepy rather than cozy.

  With that faintly distracted air he always wore when he was hunting, Giliead prowled into an open room that turned ou
t to be another sitting area. It was a long chamber, the chairs and tables pushed back against the wood-lined walls and covered with white drapes. There was a painting on the far wall of a metal ship like the Ravenna, the hull streaked with rust, the paint faded, limping into port apparently with the help of two smaller craft. An odd choice of art for the ship, Ilias decided. “Why did they put this here?” he asked Tremaine. “It’s bad luck.”

  “I don’t know.” She contemplated it a moment. “It could be a sort of warning about what might be the Ravenna’s future.” Then she snorted derisively. “We should be so lucky.”

  And there’s mood four, fatalism, Ilias thought wryly. Done prowling, Giliead turned into the main corridor again, and Ilias asked, “Why is this place called ‘Third’?” He glanced back at Tremaine. “What’s third about it?”

  “The rooms are smaller and less expensive,” Tremaine explained, grabbing for the rail again as the deck moved underfoot. “The public rooms aren’t as nice either. Before the war, Bisra had passenger ships like this, only not nearly as big, and the class areas were horizontal, with Third being on the bottom. They had locked gates between the decks, and when a couple of the ships sank, nobody was able to unlock the gates in time and half the passengers drowned inside the ship.”

  Ilias winced at the image that conjured. Giliead, his attention caught, glanced back at her with an incredulous expression, saying, “That’s insane.”

  “That’s Bisra.” Tremaine shrugged, unconcerned.

  Ilias shook his head, fighting off a vision of a ship like this going to the bottom to become a metal tomb. He remembered that “Bisrans” were the arrogant pair of men they had run into near the healer’s area yesterday. “They had these ships before the war, but not now?”

  “The Gardier sank them all.” She gestured to the open corridor. “Anyway, it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d think, considering people only stayed in these rooms for a few days at a time,” she said, looking around. “There must be communal bathrooms somewhere along the corridor.”