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

by Martha Wells

  Giliead was looking into the open crate with an air of dissatisfaction. Ilias came over to peer at the script, running a finger along one of the lines of text. “That’s just what happened since we reached the Walls. He probably left the rest back with his other things.”

  Tremaine pulled out a page that had two columns of words on it. “What’s this?” It was more neatly lettered than the other sections, but she thought it was the same handwriting.

  “Those are words in Syrnaic.” Ilias pointed to one column, then the other. “And those are the same words spelled out the way they sound in Rienish, or as close as he could come.”

  Tremaine stared at the neat columns, flabbergasted. “He was making a Syrnaic-Rienish dictionary?”

  Ilias frowned. “What’s a dictionary?”

  “It’s a list of words, and what they mean.” He was making a Syrnaic-Rienish dictionary and he didn’t know what a dictionary was. And Arites had been a young man; if he had lived, what else would he have contributed to Syrnaic letters? For some reason this thought made tears sting.

  Then someone coughed in the doorway, and Tremaine looked up, hastily wiping her eyes. Cimarus stood there, holding a small metal crate. He offered diffidently, “I’ve found something that will hold water.”

  Tremaine rolled the pages up hurriedly, tucking them back into the bag and setting it aside. “Let’s see it.”

  He carried the crate over, depositing it on the deck with a grunt. “It’s heavy, but it’s the right size.” He opened the lid. The sides were of some heavy dull-colored metal and the inside was padded and lined with a slick brown cloth. Tremaine thought it looked rather like a case for a delicate philosophical instrument. Or a delicate sorcerous instrument. Oh-ho.

  Ilias leaned in to inspect it, lifting his brows. “It’s exactly the right size.”

  “It smells like the crystal.” Giliead came over to crouch next to them, examining the box carefully. He glanced at Cimarus. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the bow, the third little room to the right, in a cabinet.” Cimarus eyed the box dubiously. “It’s a curse box?”

  Giliead exchanged a thoughtful look with Ilias. “In the flying whale we found on the Isle of Storms, there was a crystal in that room. It wasn’t in a case like this.”

  “That’s where we found the maps,” Ilias elaborated.

  “Maybe they use the crystals for navigation.” Tremaine nodded to herself. The Gardier used crystals for their wireless; they might rely on spells instead of navigational instruments as well. She gave Cimarus a rather twisted smile. “Good job. This is exactly what we need.”

  Cimarus was looking at them all as if he suspected their sanity. He said carefully, “I don’t understand. If the crystal is in water, it can’t make curses?”

  “Etheric vibrations—curses—can’t travel through water,” Tremaine told him.

  “So why don’t they drown wizards?” Cimarus wanted to know.

  Giliead made a faint derisive snort. Ilias rolled his eyes, and said, “Because they have plenty of time to kill you.”

  “And in Ile-Rien it’s murder and somewhat illegal, but the point is”—Tremaine dragged the conversation back to the topic—“etheric vibrations also can’t travel through certain metals, like iron. Like this box is made of.” Feeling a lecture coming on about how something as simple as the laying of train tracks had relegated the fay, once a major threat in Ile-Rien, to a mere nuisance, she sat back. “So it’s perfect.”

  Cimarus accepted that with a nod, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell Cletia to stop looking.”

  Tremaine agreed absently, tapping her fingers on the box. Ilias nudged her. “Let’s go try it.”

  She bit her lip, considering. “No. Not yet.”

  Giliead frowned. “Why not?”

  Before Tremaine could think of an answer, she heard a slight scuffle in the passage as Cimarus met someone coming this way, and they must have had to squeeze around in the narrow space to get past each other. This gave Tremaine a chance to shut the lid of the box, scramble up and assume a demure seat on it with Arites’s bag in her lap by the time Molin stepped into the room. He glanced guardedly at Ilias and Giliead, who were both watching him with nearly identical suspicious expressions. He told Tremaine, “Basimi wants you to come up and show him how to stop that crystal without breaking it.”

  Tremaine looked up at him quizzically. “I imagine he does.” She added with a shrug, “Do you happen to know how close we have to be to an etheric spell circle to make the gate open?”

  Molin, unexpectedly, buried his face in his hands. “We don’t have time for this.”

  “Funny, that’s what I was thinking,” Tremaine agreed sincerely.

  He shook his head wearily. “I’ll go talk to them.”

  Ilias watched him go, frowning. “What was that about?”

  Tremaine let out her breath, trying to think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t get anybody killed. “Dubos wants to take over.”

  “Take over?” Ilias stared, affronted. “Take over us? Like Ander?”

  “Not like Ander. Ander has qualifications for the job.” Ander, personal conflicts aside, she would have trusted. He knew enough about the spheres and the Gardier crystals to listen to her, and he was experienced with etheric gateways. He might be an ass at times, but he was an ass who got his men out of tight situations mostly alive. Whether Giliead would have seen it that way or not, she couldn’t tell. “But, yes.”

  Ilias’s face went still and he consulted Giliead with a glance and a lifted brow. Giliead thought for a moment, eyes narrowing. Then they both started to stand.

  “Hold it,” Tremaine said sharply. “Not yet.”

  Ilias stared pointedly at her. Tremaine stared pointedly back. Then Ilias muttered something in exasperation and threw his arms in the air. Giliead made an annoyed huffing noise and returned to the box he had been digging through.

  Tremaine rubbed her eyes. Maybe she shouldn’t have pushed it to this point. Maybe she should have just stood aside and offered advice in a loud voice until somebody listened to her. But if Giliead thought another man, any man other than Ilias or maybe Halian, was behind the idea to get him to speak to the crystal, there was no way he would entertain it for an instant.

  It wouldn’t work with an ordinary sphere, like the one Niles had made. But the Gardier crystals, the large ones anyway, had to store a sorcerer’s consciousness the same way the Damal sphere had somehow come to store Arisilde’s. That was the theory, at least. An ordinary sphere needed a sorcerer who knew the etheric gateway spell in order to make it work. Arisilde’s sphere already knew the spell; it just needed access to the spell circle and to be asked nicely, the way Tremaine had asked it when she had dumped Gervas in another world. The Gardier crystals had to work the same way, considering she and Cletia had seen this one make a gate for the airship with no assistance whatsoever. She just had to hope that the crystal could hear and respond to Giliead, the way Arisilde could. And that it could be bribed. The bribe wasn’t a problem; Tremaine was fairly sure a Gardier sorcerer crystal that decided to switch sides could write its own ticket once they returned to the Ravenna. Up to and including the spell for one of Ixion’s makeshift bodies, no matter what they had to do to Ixion to get it.

  If this bit of blackmail with Dubos didn’t work…She hoped that maybe she would only have to kill him. She found, amazingly enough, that she didn’t want to kill anybody. She propped her chin on her hand, looking at Ilias. “So you’d throw someone off this thing if I asked you to?”

  Prying open another crate, Ilias paused to consider this, staring thoughtfully into the distance. “I don’t know. Do you have any of those chocolates with you?”

  Tremaine felt herself smiling. There was no word for “chocolate” in Syrnaic and Ilias had used the Rienish word, slurring his way through the pronunciation. “Yes, but I was saving those to bribe you for sex.”

  “Oh.” Ilias gave her a crooked smile, apparently liking
the implication that he could be had for a handful of pastilles. If she persuaded Giliead to make the crystal work for them and it somehow changed what Giliead was, or how he thought of himself, Ilias would hate her.

  Wrestling down another crate, Giliead paused to give them both a withering look from under lowered brows, but Tremaine saw amusement there too. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to talk him into it. Surely he would see reason. Watching his faintly disgusted expression at finding the crate packed with pistols, she felt a distinct sinking sensation. And then there was Ilias.

  Pulling out brown parcels that looked like folded Gardier coveralls from his crate, Ilias asked seriously, “Do you really have some?”

  “No, unfortunately.” Tremaine heard someone coming down the corridor and pretended to be engrossed in searching through Arites’s bag again, only looking up with an inquiring expression when Dubos stood over her. Grim-faced, he said, “We’re nearing land.” Ilias and Giliead had both gone still, watching him with concentrated intensity.

  “Then you better do something about it, hadn’t you?” Tremaine shouted at him, suddenly fed up. She dropped the bag and surged to her feet, ignoring the warning twinge from her back. “This thing is taking us straight to the Gardier and I could stop it, but I can’t do it with you lot that can’t tell an etheric gateway from your own assholes second-guessing and arguing with me. I’ll listen to you about explosives and whatever else it is you do, but this is what I do, and you can damn well listen to me!”

  Dubos stared at her, breathing hard. Tremaine was peripherally aware that Ilias had come up on the balls of his feet, near enough for comfort but not close enough to take Dubos’s attention off her. The man said angrily, “We’re dead if you’re not right.”

  Tremaine rolled her eyes. “Oh please, we’re dead now. We died the moment that crystal gated us. You want me to do something about it?” She met his hard gaze, adding persuasively, “You can always kill me if I mess it up.”

  Dubos swore, scrubbed the sheen of sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. “God help us, you are crazy. You’re in charge.”

  Tremaine gave him an ironic nod. “Thank you.” She told Ilias in Syrnaic, “We win. Grab the box.”

  She managed to stride purposefully rather than run toward the control cabin, Ilias behind her with the metal box, Giliead following him and a desperate Dubos bringing up the rear. She wished she hadn’t told Dubos that he could kill her if she failed. His eyes hadn’t even flicked to Ilias or Giliead looming behind her, which meant that getting rid of her that way hadn’t crossed his mind the way it had more than crossed hers. And if that was the case, then maybe he was just trying to do what he thought was best, and she didn’t want to know that.

  They passed Cletia and Cimarus in the main room, both looking up from prying open a recalcitrant cabinet. They had bundled the Gardier corpses out of the way, and apparently wrenched open every locked container in the room. An assortment of ration packages and canteens were piled on the floor.

  “I’m a wireless operator, I don’t know how the hell I got elected to drive this damn thing—” a sweating Basimi was saying as she reached the control cabin. He broke off, staring hopefully from Tremaine to Dubos as they all crowded in. “Did you work it out?”

  “You were right,” Dubos told him grimly, gesturing to Tremaine.

  She was too busy staring out the port to mind the byplay. The sky was still misty and patchy gray with clouds, but the airship seemed much lower now and a wide stretch of beach, dotted with clumps of seaweed and driftwood, lay beneath them.

  Ilias put the box on the floor, opening the lid. He looked up at Tremaine, tossing his hair out of his eyes. “Ready?”

  Tremaine nodded tensely, looking at Giliead. “Let’s try it.”

  Giliead gazed firmly at the crystal as if challenging it. Then he pressed his lips together and seized it, lifting it out of the holder. God, I think he can hear it, Tremaine thought, her stomach clenching. And if putting it in the container didn’t work…

  Giliead placed it carefully in the nest of padding and Ilias closed the lid, pressing it down until the catch snapped into place. Everyone looked to Basimi, who rubbed his hands off on his pants and took hold of the wheel. He yelped, “That’s it!”

  The relieved swearing and enthusiastic back-patting from Dubos and Molin made translation into Syrnaic unnecessary. Giliead picked up the container, saying, “I’ll put this somewhere out of the way.”

  “Wait.” She took a deep breath. Time to broach the idea of communicating with the crystal to Giliead. “The next thing we need to do—”

  “The hell—” Molin stared out the port, his face aghast. “Airships! Two of them!”

  Tremaine stepped to the port, bile rising in her throat. No. Not now. A dark shape dropped out of the clouds, the jagged fins etched against the sky, some distance off this airship’s bow. She didn’t see the second one, but Basimi pointed, and there it was, angling up toward them from inland.

  “They’re firing!” Dubos yelled, starting back. “Get down!”

  Either Ilias and Giliead understood that much Rienish or the man’s body language told them all they needed to know. Ilias stretched, grabbed Tremaine’s arm, and yanked her back through the doorway. She heard the distant crackle of machine-gun fire as Giliead ducked through after her and the other men hit the floor.

  Heart pounding, Tremaine flattened herself against the metal wall, Ilias tense beside her, and Giliead crouched in the hatch. There was no crash of breaking glass.

  Cautiously, Tremaine peered back inside the control cabin. “Nothing happened.”

  “They shot into the balloon.” Crouched on the floor, Basimi stared upward as if he could see through all the layers of duralumin and membrane. “Must have pierced some of the cells.” He sat up enough to see the controls, tapped one of the dials. “We’re losing altitude.” He added grimly, “They want us alive.”

  “Don’t these things have wards?” Molin demanded, kneeling on the floor.

  “Not anymore.” Tremaine grimaced. “They’re all tied in to the crystal. We got rid of them when we shut it up.”

  Everyone was staring at her. Angrily, Dubos said, “So it’s put it back and lose control, or try to run for it with no fuel and a holed balloon and get shot down?”

  “We can’t run,” Basimi said urgently. “Some of the hydrogen cells might already be on fire.”

  “Don’t we have guns?” Molin protested. “I found the bomb bay and it was empty but—”

  “I don’t know where the controls are.” Basimi gestured helplessly. “There’s nothing here—maybe in one of the other rooms—I don’t know if they’re even loaded—”

  Tremaine stared at the dark shapes outside the port. One was hanging off, the other coming rapidly closer. Giliead and Ilias were both watching her worriedly, Ilias glancing from her to the port. No time, and they were miles away from the spot where they had first gated, miles out of range of the Wall Port’s spell circle. She could feel the airship losing altitude, feel the deck sinking under her feet. The Gardier airship would be right on top of them as they went down. Yes. Yes, it will. “Can we blow this thing up?” she interrupted. “Set the fuel on fire, or something?”

  Dubos turned to her, his expression intrigued. “Of course. Without wards, these things are flying bombs.”

  She nodded to herself. “Then we let them force us down, then blow this thing up. If we’re lucky, we can take out one of them too.” The Gardier craft were warded, but wards might not hold against a burning airship slamming into them.

  “Uh.” Basimi stared at her. “With us on it?”

  “No, we’re jumping off.” She turned to tell Ilias and Giliead, saying in Syrnaic, “We’re going to get close to the ground and jump out, and we won’t be able to use the airship again because we’re setting it on fire. Tell everybody to get any supplies we need to the cargo hold, but only what we can carry. Oh, and that Gardier clothing you found. And the crystal in the box is the
most important, that goes before anything else.”

  Ilias tore down the passage, Giliead pausing to grab the crystal’s box before striding after him. The others were still staring at her. “Well?” she demanded. “Are we blowing this thing up or not?”

  Dubos drew a hand over his face, then suddenly grinned. “I guess we’re blowing this thing up.” He shoved to his feet and pushed out past her.

  Basimi waved Molin after him. “Get the maps and their codebooks!” Still in a crouch, he turned the airship’s wheel, aiming it further inland.

  Am I forgetting anything? Tremaine wanted to pace as she racked her brain, but there was no room for it, and she was still leery of gunfire through the port. Outside she could see they were moving over dunes tufted with long yellow grass, the detail growing sharper as the airship sank lower. “You’re doing that, right?” she demanded.

  Basimi nodded sharply. He was gripping the wheel tightly, guiding the airship closer to the ground in a tightening spiral. “I’m forcing it down, making us look like we’re dropping faster than we really are. When I leave the controls, it’ll drift back up a bit. Hopefully right into the Gardier.”

  Guns crackled again, somewhere behind them. Tremaine flinched but didn’t hear any kind of an impact; just a warning. Then she saw the roof of a wooden structure pass below them. Suddenly she and Basimi had a good view of steeply pitched roofs, battered by wind and storms, with round stone chimneys, then they were out of sight.

  Tremaine found herself meeting Basimi’s eyes. He licked his lips, brow furrowed, and said, “People. More Gardier.”