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

by Martha Wells

  The houses were built of some kind of gold-veined wood, with round chimneys of the same small gray stones that formed the cobbled street surface. The windows were round as well and the tops of the doors curved to match, and the sills seemed to be molded of clay. Unlike Syprian dwellings, there were remnants of glass in the windows.

  “The Gardier must have driven these people away when they built their stronghold here,” Giliead said softly, as they picked their way down the street. Broken glass crunched under the litter of leaves and dirt. “Or killed them all.”

  “Or took them for slaves.” Ilias gave the ruined town a dark look. “How many people can they war against at once?”

  “More than we thought, apparently.” Tremaine stepped close to a wall, picking at the metallic glitter buried in the board, thinking it was gilding. But it was part of the wood, another texture woven in with the grain.

  It was all so picturesque that Tremaine wondered for a moment if it was fake, not really meant to be lived in. In Ile-Rien before the war, romantic little villages were often temporarily constructed in the Palace park and the Deval Forest, as part of the winter and summer festivals. But this was too big, there were too many houses. She peered through a shattered window to see broken bits of furniture, rotted drapes of faded fabric clinging to the walls. The wind had covered the floor with a carpet of sand and dirt and some animal had carried in bones and what looked like cracked crab shells. She shook her head, making herself focus on the problem at hand. “No sign of a harbor?”

  “I don’t think there is one, just the beach and the marsh,” Giliead told her, his brow creased.

  “We should go that way and look for boat sheds.” Ilias jerked his chin toward the end of town. “But if their boats were just drawn up on the beach, they’d be washed away in the first storm after the place was abandoned.”

  “Right.” Tremaine grimaced. She had assumed that a seaside town automatically meant a harbor, but with this marshy coastline there might not be any deep-water boats at all. Her stomach clenched. Just a little boat, just enough to get back to where the Walls would be and make a gate to get to them. That’s all we need. “How far is it? Should we get the others or leave them in hiding until we find something?”

  Ilias looked up at Giliead, consulting him, and Giliead shook his head, saying, “Let them stay there for now. Until we went up in that thing, I never realized how much they can see from above. It’s better if fewer of us are moving around.”

  He was right. Tremaine groaned under her breath. “Come on.”

  Ilias slipped ahead of her, leading the way between the houses, staying close to the gold-veined walls. The ground here was uneven, covered with weeds and high yellow grass, and Tremaine tripped over half-buried stones that might have marked the borders of garden plots, and once a battered iron pot. The houses here had fared worse; some roofs had given way, and one or two whole structures swayed over in the midst of complete collapse. Then the houses stopped at another wide cobbled walkway with nothing beyond it but the dunes tumbling down to the edge of the wide beach. Ilias threw a grim glance back at her. “I think we found their harbor.”

  “Shit,” Tremaine said succinctly. Sometime in the past a channel had been dug from the beach up through the sand to the cobbled walkway, which must have served as a dock. Now the channel was empty of water and silted up nearly to the level of the houses. It would have been harder to tell what it was, if there hadn’t been several sailboats all bigger than the Ravenna’s launches and the even larger shape of a barge half-buried in the silt.

  Tremaine rubbed her eyes, remaining on the walkway as Ilias and Giliead jumped down to investigate. Chunks of driftwood, dried seaweed and a few bright orange crabs bore witness that the sea must still fill the silted channel during high tides. The buried boats must have been inundated every day, and their sails were just ghostly tatters, the hulls battered gray wood. Digging the channel had been an enormous job; it was all such a lot of work to go to waste.

  Ilias looked into one sailboat, kicked the broken hull of the other and came back to scramble up onto the walkway beside Tremaine. He didn’t say anything, just threw her a worried look. Yes, Tremaine thought, suppressing a groan, we’re dead. Now the only source of transportation they knew of was the Gardier stronghold their airship had been heading for. Wherever it was.

  Ilias reached over and took her hand, squeezing it reassuringly. He was still watching Giliead, who had climbed up into the wrecked barge and was poking around inside. “We just have to keep moving. Gil and I have been in worse places.”

  “Where?” Tremaine started to ask, but Giliead jumped down from the barge and ran back across the channel.

  “What is it?” Ilias demanded as Giliead boosted himself up onto the walkway.

  Giliead drew them both back into the shelter of a battered wooden awning. “That was a Gardier ship,” he said grimly.

  Tremaine looked at the dark hull, intrigued. “How can you tell?”

  “It was metal, and it had the same kind of moving thing your boats have down inside it.”

  “An engine? Did it look usable? By us?” By people who don’t know what they’re doing? was what she meant. Though Molin was an engineer, maybe he could…

  He shook his head. “It was full of sand. It’s been here at least as long as the others.”

  “Maybe we could—” Dig it out, conjure spare parts to fix the engine, drag it out to the water, borrow fuel oil from the Gardier. “Never mind.” She clapped a hand over her eyes. “Let’s go back to the others, figure out where to look next.” Tell them I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

  Taking a careful look up at the sky, Giliead started back through the town. “We’ll find something,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s not enough fishing boats for a village this size. There’s got to be more somewhere. There might be better anchorage on the far side of the marsh.”

  Following, Tremaine knew that wasn’t necessarily true. She looked back at the barge, cursing it for being useless. “The Gardier must have left that here when they attacked. Does that make sense?”

  “No.” Ilias glanced back at her, frowning thoughtfully. “Why not take it away to fix it?”

  She had to agree there. It was the losers who left wrecks behind, not the winners. Not when they had bothered to build an outpost on the captured territory.

  Giliead stopped abruptly, head tilted to look up. “Flying whale.”

  Tremaine saw the dark predatory shape dropping out of the clouds and swore. Ilias must have been keeping an eye out for likely places to hide; he caught Tremaine’s arm and they bolted for a shadowed doorway in the next house.

  Inside the door Tremaine stumbled on the debris-covered floor, feeling something mushy and soft through the thinner soles of Pasima’s boots. Grimacing, she placed her feet gingerly. This house had a number of large windows and the broken glass was mixed with the softer rubble. “Did they see us?” she demanded.

  “I doubt it, not from that angle.” Giliead remained by the door, flattening himself to the wall to see out.

  Ilias leaned around him. “I think they’re going back toward the flying whale fire.”

  Wanting to distract herself from a situation she could do nothing about, Tremaine looked around, squinting to see. Even with all the windows, the cloudy sky wasn’t allowing much light in. The one windowless wall was lined with shelves built into little cubbies. Some of the little cubbies were still stuffed with objects that she couldn’t quite make out in the dimness.

  She moved cautiously toward it, hearing glass crunch underfoot. At closer inspection, the contents of the cubbies looked like rolled-up sheaths of leather. So this was a shoemaker’s shop? she wondered. She poked at one, shook it by the end to frighten away a score or so of large beetles, then pulled it out. It wasn’t until she unrolled it that she realized it was a book.

  It was wide, the leather cover soft enough to be able to roll up or fold. The paper bound into it with heavy cord was t
hick and soft, more like cloth than parchment. The characters were too regular to be handwritten, the lines too rigidly formal. The pages had been printed in a press. She stared at those characters, trying to think why they looked familiar. She realized she still had her pack, with Arites’s bag tucked inside it. Ignoring the bugs and the mushy debris, she crouched down on the floor to fish it out, thinking, this was a library. The stuff underfoot was composed of pages that had fallen or been washed out of the shelves and soaked in water. It turned her cold to imagine the Albaran Library at Lodun or the city libraries in Vienne reduced to this state.

  She found the last page of Arites’s chronicle and twisted around to let the dim light from the window fall on it. She saw at first glance the Syprian characters were completely different, but as her eyes drifted down the page…“Well. That’s a kick in the ass for you,” she said under her breath.

  “What?” Ilias asked.

  She looked up to find him and Giliead leaning over her, trying to see what she was so intent on. “The flying whale is gone,” Giliead explained. “What’s that?”

  “This is Arites’s writing.” She flattened it on her knee so they could see, and Ilias knelt at her side for a better look. “This is where he copied the markings on the Gardier buildings when he drew a map of the outpost. Now look at the printing in this book.”

  Ilias leaned closer. “It’s the same. This squiggle here, and all those. It’s Gardier writing?”

  Giliead pulled another one from the shelves, flipping it open. Tremaine shied away from the rain of beetles and got to her feet. “I think they’re all filled with Gardier writing,” she told them, pulling another book out at random.

  Ilias watched for a moment, then threw a worried glance at the door. “We need to keep moving.”

  He was right, they couldn’t spare the time for this. Tremaine tucked away Arites’s page, then on impulse shoved in three of the Gardier books, bending them to make them fit. “Let’s go.”

  She followed both men outside, casting a nervous glance up at the now empty sky. Giliead picked the path again, finding a winding way through the houses, taking advantage of all the cover the overhanging roofs offered. “These people have the same language as the Gardier? Or they attacked their own people?” Ilias asked her over his shoulder. “Why?”

  “I don’t know why, but I think they did.” Tremaine looked at the houses they passed, seeing them with different eyes. She had assumed this was a society as primitive as those in the Syrnai or the Wall Port. But the glass windows, the printed books and the dredged canal all painted a different picture. The barge marooned there must have belonged to the town like the sailboats, not the town’s conquerors. If this town had been conquered at all, and not simply abandoned for some reason.

  Taking quick looks through each open door they passed, she spotted something on a wall and stepped in to look. It was a carved wooden box with a glass dial in the center marked with the Gardier characters. It had five hands, but it looked a lot like a clock face. Tremaine brushed dust off the carving. It was delicate work, the fine lines incised into the wood, then somehow filled with pigment. The design was of various hot-air balloons, some far more elaborate than it seemed possible to construct. One looked like a Gardier airship, but in this depiction the spiked fins seemed fanciful rather than intimidating. “That’s what I thought,” she said to herself.

  “Will you come on?” Ilias hissed at her from the doorway.

  As they reached the edge of town, Tremaine could tell Ilias and Giliead were relieved to return to the relative security of the trees. That light green canopy looked delicate, but it was just enough to mask them from any view from above. She followed them without really seeing where they were going, too lost in thought to pay attention.

  Then Ilias stopped suddenly and Tremaine walked right into him. Feeling lucky that his sword hilt hadn’t given her a black eye, she saw he was studying the ground. Whatever it was, Giliead’s attention was caught by it too. He turned, circled wide through the brush, then came back to the same spot. Giving in, Tremaine asked impatiently, “What is it?”

  “Someone crossed our path,” Ilias reported, pacing to the side, eyes still on the ground. “Not one of our people. The feet are too small and the boot print is wrong.”

  “Not a Gardier, then. At least not—” Tremaine didn’t hear anything, but she caught the way Ilias’s face went still and the sudden look he threw at Giliead. Giliead didn’t acknowledge it but turned away, moving with apparent idleness toward a thicker stand of trees obscured by brush and reeds. Ilias started casually in that direction too, his eyes still on the ground. But something about the way he held himself told Tremaine that his attention was elsewhere. Scratching her head and looking anywhere but at the brush, she continued randomly, “At least not so that we could tell, since really, just the feet. But—”

  Whatever was in hiding abruptly woke to the fact that it was being stalked. It burst from cover on the far side of the stand of trees. As it ran further into the woods, Tremaine caught a glimpse of a small figure, possibly a boy, dressed in dark clothes. Both men bolted after him and Tremaine bolted after them.

  Running full out, she could just keep Ilias in sight as he dodged through the trees. Then he stopped abruptly and darted in another direction. Stumbling to a halt and listening hard, Tremaine thought he had stopped running. Picking her way cautiously, she spotted him standing back against a tree trunk, watching something through a screen of brush. Trying to make her steps silent, she carefully edged up to his side. He took her arm, showing her the gap in the leaves to look through.

  Their prey had led them to the edge of a nearly dry riverbed that cut through the forest, its wide sandy banks sloping gently down to a shallow stream of water that trickled over rocks and gravel down the center. As she watched, the boy trotted up to a small camp under the overhanging trees near the bank. A little fire smoldered and a woman was kneeling next to it, using a rock to scrape the skin off a grubby yellow root vegetable. The boy was apparently telling her about his encounter, pointing back toward the woods. Three younger children gathered around, wide-eyed. A jury-rigged tent had been made from a gray blanket and a rope stretched between two saplings; a couple of battered canvas bags seemed to be their only possessions. “He tried to double back on us, but he led us right to them,” Ilias commented in a whisper. “How stupid was that?”

  “Suicidally stupid,” Tremaine agreed softly. But maybe the boy wasn’t used to being tracked by Syprians. The boy, the woman and the children were all dark-haired, pale-skinned, lean and bony, though that might be from lack of food. Their clothes were grubby gray or brown, pants and loose shirts, all the same except the woman seemed to be wearing a tabard over hers.

  Ilias looked around as Giliead ghosted up through the trees. Ducking to stay out of sight of the camp, Giliead whispered, “There’s no one else nearby.”

  Ilias nodded. “Well?” he asked Tremaine.

  She bit her lip, considering it carefully. It was a chance to get some information. These people didn’t exactly look like a Gardier patrol, but if they raised an alarm…We’d have to kill them. I’d have to kill them. She was suddenly very aware of the weight of the pistol tucked into the back of her belt. Well, probably not the kids. They looked too young to give coherent reports. But the woman and the older boy. She let out her breath. Oddly enough, it was harder risking other people’s lives than it was to risk your own. “I’ll go talk to them. You two stay back.”

  “Wait.” Ilias stopped her as Giliead cut back through the trees again and Tremaine realized he was working his way around behind the little camp. She adjusted the set of the pistol, making sure the tail of her shirt hid it. Ilias nodded at some invisible signal, though Tremaine couldn’t see Giliead at all now. “Careful,” he told her.

  “Right.” Tremaine couldn’t look at him when she needed to concentrate. With one hand behind her back resting on the pistol’s grip, she stepped out of the brush.

  The w
oman stared at her, then scrambled to her feet. The boy pointed, saying urgently, “I told you!”

  He spoke in Gardier, though his accent was thick and different from the prisoners aboard the Ravenna. Again, it was disorienting to hear the language without the translator. The woman snapped a word at him Tremaine didn’t catch, then glared at her suspiciously. “Who are you?” Her face was set in hard lines but her voice trembled just a little. The other children, so young and dressed in such baggy clothes they might have been boys or girls, stared too, the youngest one sucking on a finger.

  At least she hadn’t started screaming about Rienish invaders. Tremaine had to focus a moment to make sure she spoke Gardier and not Rienish or Syrnaic. She had spoken it to Ander and Gerard for practice, but this was different. “I’m a traveler.” The woman’s frown deepened. Tremaine restrained herself from shouting “Where’s a damn boat?” It would be better to work up to that. “Do you live in the town?” she asked.

  The boy stared past her, obviously trying to see if Ilias or Giliead were with her. He said, “No, the Domileh don’t let anyone live there.”

  “The Domileh?” Tremaine inquired cautiously.

  “We don’t use that word anymore,” the woman said hastily. “He means the Command.”

  Scientist, Command and Service were the classes or ranks the Gardier were organized into. So far, so good. “Why don’t they want anyone to live in the town?”

  “They said it was dangerous, too vulnerable.”

  The woman was staring at her as if she was insane. Tremaine wasn’t sure if that was because her questions were strange or the woman was just uncannily perceptive. “Too vulnerable to what?”

  “To attack.”

  This was beginning to resemble the interrogation of their late unlamented prisoners. Nothing but short vague annoying answers. “Attack by who?” she persisted.

  “Is this a trick?” the woman demanded suddenly. “We follow the rules, we don’t go there.”

  Tremaine pressed her lips together. I’m inclining toward violence again. “Look. We don’t come from here.” Belated inspiration struck, and she added, “We’ve been traveling a long way, we don’t know the rules for this area. Could you tell us what they are?”