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

by Martha Wells

  The woman’s expression hovered between suspicious and dubious. “I didn’t know there were places with different rules, not anymore.”

  Tremaine spread her hands helplessly, trying to look innocuous rather than dangerously annoyed. “Neither did I.”

  “Why aren’t those men with you in the Service?” the boy asked suddenly. “They didn’t look like Labor.”

  That was the word Gardier used for slaves. The woman threw him a quelling glare. Making a hasty change of subject, she said quickly, “The rules say we can’t live in Devara, or any of the other old places.”

  “Devara is the town? The only town nearby?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “It’s the only one before the Maton.”

  Tremaine nodded, trying to think of a way to ask what the hell a Maton was without arousing their suspicions. She decided to just assume it was a place to live. “Does the Maton have a harbor?”

  “Yes, it was built where the port was.” The woman looked honestly curious for a moment. “You really come from somewhere else?”

  “Yes. Uh…how is the war going?”

  She shook her head wearily. “I don’t know. They used to announce about it in the Maton, but since we left…” She made a throwaway gesture.

  Right, Tremaine seethed inwardly. Who cares? We destroy so many places. But this woman didn’t exactly look like she was reaping the benefits of a conquering army. “Which way is the Maton again?”

  Giliead stepped out of the brush suddenly. The children scattered in terror and the woman backed away in alarm. The boy turned to her triumphantly. “I told you I saw—”

  “Gardier are coming down the streambed, eight, maybe more,” Giliead said urgently.

  “Boring conversation anyway,” Tremaine said under her breath, turning to run. Just as she reached the brush she heard a man shout in Gardier. She looked back to see the woman’s face twist with fear and anger. She shoved the boy away. “You led them down on us!” Calling to the other children to follow her, she grabbed the youngest and ran away down the sandy bank of the stream.

  “Wait—” Tremaine started automatically, then snarled, “Oh, forget it.” Ilias caught her arm, propelling her toward the woods and she took the hint and ran.

  A scatter of shots sounded behind her and Tremaine staggered into a tree, looking back. She saw Ilias only a few steps from the safety of the trees, staring out at the creek bed. The woman had made it across the shallow stream but lay sprawled in the mud just beyond it. The three children were huddled in confusion beside the body.

  Tremaine saw Ilias take a step toward them and drew breath to yell at him. Then brown uniforms appeared through the screen of leaves and she heard men running down the bank, splashing in the water. Ilias ducked into cover and Tremaine turned and ran.

  Ducking low branches and stumbling over the rough uneven ground, Tremaine suddenly realized the boy was running with her. They came out into a small clearing and the boy looked around wildly and started to bolt to the left. Tremaine lunged and caught his hand, jerking him to a halt. “Not that way!” she snapped, then had to repeat it in Gardier when he stared at her blankly. Running wildly, he would lead the patrol right down on them like that stupid woman probably had.

  Tremaine pulled him with her, taking as straight a path as possible away from the streambed at a rapid walk. If Ilias and Giliead didn’t catch up with her soon…The boy, unexpectedly, kept a tight grip on her hand. So he’s not as feral as all that, she thought cynically. “Just keep moving,” she told him, keeping her voice quiet.

  She heard branches stir behind them and spun around, free hand on her pistol grip. It was Giliead, pushing quietly through the brush to join them, his face set in grim lines. “Where’s Ilias?” she demanded.

  “He’s covering our trail.” He glanced at the boy. “The woman was dead. They took the other children away.”

  She looked at the boy too. He was staring wide-eyed at Giliead. And he had a bag of rough cloth slung over his shoulder. She said in Gardier, “Give me the bag.” If he had a weapon in it, she didn’t want to get stabbed in the back.

  He glared at her. “I didn’t steal it. I was going to follow her, until I saw—”

  Tremaine felt a surge of cold rage that had nothing to do with the boy’s refusal. Stupid woman ran into them and got herself killed right in front of me. The Gardier patrol must have assumed she was a fleeing Rienish spy. Instead of me. And left the children to be picked up by the soldiers. She didn’t suppose that Gardier foundling houses would be any better than their slave camps. She repeated, “Give me the bag.”

  He met her eyes, his glare wavering, and handed over the bag.

  She slung it over her own shoulder and started away. Giliead gave the boy a gentle push to get him moving again. She said in Gardier, “The patrol killed that woman. Was she your mother?”

  He shook his head. “My mother died in the Labor pens in the Maton. That was Besta.”

  “Why were you with her?”

  “Someone told the Proctors about things my mother said and they put her in Labor, and gave me to Besta. Besta’s man died in Service and she was going to have to go into the Labor if she couldn’t find another place. So she left the Maton, and I went with her.”

  Tremaine frowned. “And they shoot people who leave the Maton?”

  He hesitated, throwing a wary look at her. “She stole from the town, Devara, the one we’re not supposed to go into. She thought they might come after her.”

  Ilias caught up with them before they reached the others. The boy flinched at his appearance, then carefully peered around Tremaine to stare at him. “They lost our trail and went back to the stream,” Ilias reported. “We need to get out of here.” He glanced at the boy, concerned. “Did you tell him about the woman?”

  “Yes.” Tremaine asked the boy, “Do you know the way to the Maton?”

  He looked wary again. “Yes.”

  Cimarus or Cletia must have heard them returning; they entered the clearing to find the others already on their feet and collecting their belongings. Giliead moved immediately to pick up the crystal’s box. “We heard the shots,” Basimi told her. Frowning in confusion, he nodded to the boy. “Who the hell is that?”

  Tremaine grabbed one of the supply bags Cletia had packed, slinging it over her shoulder. “That’s our native guide.”

  When it was nearly too dark to see, Cimarus appeared next to Tremaine to say, “Ilias says we should stop now.”

  Tremaine halted, leaning against a sapling, and wiped the sweat from her brow. They had walked for the past few hours, finding their way along the edge of the salt marsh. There were thick stands of trees and boggy patches of mud, and ponds choked with reeds and water lilies with unexpectedly beautiful purple and white flowers. The Gardier boy knew the general direction of the Maton, but he admitted that he had always traveled on the roads. It was the Syprians who were finding the way and keeping them moving through the dense woods at close to a run.

  Tremaine had a stitch in her side and wet feet, so she said, “Oh, so we’re saying his name now, are we?”

  Cimarus shifted uncomfortably. He had always been carefully polite to her, either out of Syprian respect for women in authority or fear of reprisals from Ilias and Giliead. But it hadn’t escaped her that he tried his best to treat Ilias as a nonperson. Tremaine rubbed at her sore foot through the damp leather of her boot, letting him stew for a moment, then said, “We’ll stop now.”

  Basimi, Dubos and Molin weren’t far behind her, burdened with the packs from the airship. “What are we doing?” Molin asked as they came to a squelching halt in the muddy grass.

  “Stopping for the night,” Tremaine reported, starting to pick her way in the direction she thought Cimarus had taken.

  “Good, can’t see a damn thing.” Basimi sounded weary.

  After a few moments of picking their way through the damp darkness under the trees, Giliead’s voice said quietly, “In here.”

  “Here�
�� turned out to be a stand of larger trees with denser canopies, set up on a little island of dry ground. It was choked with vines and saplings and Tremaine had to fight her way through until she stumbled into a cleared space, lit by a small fire half-buried behind a bank of dirt. Ilias was crouched next to it, carefully feeding it twigs. The fallen branches had been used to make a second canopy, shielding the fire’s light from above. Cletia and Cimarus were sorting through the contents of a pack, and the Gardier boy sat nearby, hugging his knees and staring at the fire. The crystal’s box was planted in the middle of the makeshift camp.

  Tremaine let her bag fall and wearily eased herself to the ground. The place didn’t look easy to stumble on and the fire’s light was invisible from any distance away. No one would spot this as a campsite. Except for the fire, it didn’t look like a campsite even when you were sitting in it. In Ile-Rien, this was the kind of country where you carried a pocketful of old iron nails in case you stumbled on a hungry fay. Tremaine just hoped that if this world had the equivalent, their pistols would discourage it.

  Dubos, Molin and Basimi dropped their packs and sat down, Dubos nodding approval of the camp’s concealment. “They’d have to land right on top of us to find us.”

  Molin shook his head wearily. “Don’t give fate any ideas.”

  Giliead appeared with an armload of wood for the fire, depositing it and shouldering Ilias aside. Ilias gave way, shifting over to sit next to Tremaine, then lying down to rest his head in her lap. She ruffled the warm weight of his hair. His queue was loose again and he had leaves stuck in the tangles. Cletia threw a look at them but dropped her eyes rather than get into a staring contest with Tremaine, who was in no mood to lose. Basimi had gotten out one of the maps from the airship and was trying to read it by the dim firelight, Molin already seemed to be asleep and Dubos was repairing a broken muddy bootlace.

  “Any problem with junior there?” Tremaine asked Ilias, idly rubbing the back of his neck. The Gardier boy was still glaring sullenly at the fire, but there was just enough light to see his eyes flicking around restlessly. She had gone through the bag earlier, finding it contained spare clothes, some for Besta and some that must be for the children, stale bread and some printed papers that looked like identity documents. There were also a number of trinkets, like nails with gilded heads and a tarnished metal plate with decorative etching that might have been pried off a clock like the one Tremaine had found in the town.

  “He ran away twice,” Ilias said around a yawn. “Fell in a pond. Twisted his ankle in a hole.”

  “Three times,” Giliead amended, a wry smile in his voice. “The last time we ignored him and he came back on his own.”

  Tremaine sighed. I’m glad I didn’t know about that. She was also glad she had left him to their care; she would have shot him by now. Questioning this afternoon had allowed her to figure out that Matons were communities of workers built up around mines, farms, factories and any other necessary places. The Maton they were heading for was built around a port and a major airship landing field, and was one of the most important in this region. Or so the boy thought, anyway.

  Cletia took a small metal pot out of her pack and moved over to the fire. Giliead made way for her, cautioning, “Nothing that anyone will be able to smell.”

  Cletia rolled her eyes. “I know that.” She poured water from a canteen into the pot and put it at the edge of the fire to heat. With Cimarus to hand her things, she got out another bowl and began to put together the contents of various leather bags and packets.

  Tremaine watched this process, puzzled. “You brought your own rations?”

  Cletia shrugged slightly. “You people eat cranberries. Pasima was worried.”

  It was Tremaine’s turn to roll her eyes. She knew she was just distracting herself from what she had to do. Maybe later, after we eat. Dubos stirred himself and dug something out of his pack. “Is she making dinner? Here’s something to go with it.” He tossed over a package of bread wafers. Cletia picked it up, examined it cautiously, then nodded her thanks to him.

  “Why do they keep calling me thala?” the Gardier boy demanded suddenly. “What does that mean?”

  Tremaine had to think a moment, massaging her temple, the other hand still tangled in Ilias’s hair. Speaking Gardier was giving her a headache, and mentally translating Gardier mispronunciations of Syrnaic into Rienish and back didn’t help. “Talae. It’s Syrnaic for boy.”

  “Oh.” He still looked disgruntled, as if displeased it wasn’t an insult. “What’s Syrnaic?”

  Tremaine closed her eyes briefly. I don’t need this. “It’s the name of the language they speak.”

  His brow furrowed as he tried to digest what was apparently an entirely new concept. “Speaking other languages lowers us.”

  Tremaine lifted a brow at him. “Lowers us to where?”

  He eyed her warily, failing to fall for the bait. Yes, I’m so good with children. Any moment, someone was going to use the word Rien and he would probably start screaming. But she needed a guide for the damn Maton. “If you told them your name, they could call you that.”

  The boy didn’t reply.

  Deciding she might as well try to get some more information out of him, Tremaine asked, “Besta said someone attacked. Who attacked?”

  He shook his head, shrugging. “It was before I was born. They used arcana and killed a lot of people.”

  “Arcana is magic?” The sphere hadn’t known that word, or some of the words the woman had used. It had gotten its vocabulary from a Gardier translator crystal and they had assumed it was complete, but the Gardier might not have bothered to include old outmoded terms.

  The boy shrugged again. Tremaine thought that she was going to get very tired of that shrug before this was over. Then he added, “Everyone says now it was the Rien.”

  She scratched her nose to hide her expression, giving the idea serious consideration. Before he was born would be twelve or thirteen years ago. If the government and Crown of Ile-Rien had been carrying out a war of aggression on a foreign power in another world, they had managed to keep it a tight secret. With the political scandals that seemed to hit every few years, that seemed unlikely. Plus the fact that the sphere’s ability to open etheric gateways had come as a complete shock to the military men involved in the Viller Institute’s project. She just didn’t think Colonel Averi was that good an actor.

  The boy added unexpectedly, “But my mother said they didn’t start to say that until a few years ago. She also said she thought the attack didn’t happen like they said it did, that it was a lie.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. But afterward they said we were in danger, we had to be prepared, so it didn’t happen again. We have to attack the Rien before they attack us, we have to protect ourselves. And everybody who is able has to go into the Service.”

  Tremaine absently extracted another leaf from Ilias’s hair. She noticed peripherally that everyone else was quiet; though the Syprians couldn’t understand the conversation, they were well aware the boy could be telling her what they needed to know to survive. Basimi and Dubos were holding themselves in an uncomfortable stillness, and Molin’s eyes were open though he didn’t sit up. Cimarus was an unmoving lump near the fire, Cletia was leaning so far over her work that her hair came near to trailing in it. Giliead looked abstractly off into the night and she could feel Ilias’s tension through her hands. “Just the Service? How do they decide who gets to be in Command or the Scientists?”

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe my mother did.”

  Tremaine let out her breath. It sounded like the mother had been something of a rebel. It’s too bad she’s not the one sitting here now.

  Cletia caught her eye, and Tremaine realized she was telling her the food was ready. Tremaine nodded to her and gave Ilias’s shoulder a shake. He sat up and everyone seemed to stir a little in relief at the broken tension. Cletia began handing out pieces of the wafer bread with a lumpy mixture piled on it. Tremaine accepte
d hers reluctantly. Cletia was true to her word: It didn’t smell like anything. Giliead stepped over to drop one into the boy’s hands. The boy looked blank with surprise, as if no one had ever handed him food before in his life. He looked around at the others, saw they were eating it, then wolfed it down.

  Tremaine took a cautious bite. It tasted like very grainy porridge, with sweet spices mixed in, but it was warm and more filling than the dry rations.

  “My name is Calit,” the boy said suddenly.

  It was much later, when most of the others had gone to sleep, that Dubos said quietly, “This world, this is the one the Gardier come from, isn’t it? Not the one where the Syprians live, and not our world.”

  Tremaine shifted a little. Ilias and Giliead were off in the dark, taking the first watch, and Dubos had taken over keeping an eye on the fire to make sure it didn’t burn too brightly. Cletia and Cimarus slept close to each other a little distance from where Molin and Basimi had collapsed. She said, “I think it must be.”

  He nodded slowly. Apparently neither of them had to say how important it was to carry this information back to the Ravenna. He nodded to Calit, where the boy was curled up near the fire. “You think we can trust him?”

  She snorted derisively. “Do you?”

  He shrugged, surprising her. “Might be.” At her incredulous stare he smiled faintly. “I’ve read quite a bit about our wars with Bisra. Back in the early ones, a couple of hundred years ago, their Priest-Sorcerers used to make a big point to the peasant foot soldiers that if they didn’t fight to the death, God and the church and their family and everyone else would spit on them and they’d go straight to hell. But many of those who were captured alive or surrendered were cooperative. They talked about their commanders and what they knew of the troop movements, they helped dig trenches and build barricades. The thing was, they believed their Priests, and since they weren’t dead, they figured they weren’t Bisran anymore and they should join Ile-Rien, Church, Old Faith, and all.”