by Martha Wells
Oh, right. Tremaine stumbled to her feet, putting up her hands. That’s it for us.
Chapter 7
Making sharp gestures with their pistols, the Gardier directed Tremaine and Florian to move a short distance up the curving tunnel to a wider cave. Stumbling in the dimness with her hands up, Tremaine saw a jagged tear in the wall that opened into the large chamber they had just come through. The things that had chased them were still there, gathered on the far side of the stream. They were eerily quiet except for an occasional low hiss, ducking their heads and peering up at the Gardier. Caught in the electric lamplight, their eyes looked greedy, hungry and hostile.
The Gardier in charge stepped to the edge of the opening, unclipping one of the devices from his belt and fumbling with it. He had several to choose from, all little metal boxes with triggers on them, like fancy cigar lighters. Reluctantly, growling, the creatures left their meal and moved away down the other tunnel. Joining the hunt. God, they work for the Gardier, Tremaine thought, exchanging an appalled look with Florian. They drove us right toward them.
In the blaze of light from the lamps the leader took the satchel of supplies and searched Tremaine and Florian’s pockets. Tremaine had a few men’s handkerchiefs, a penknife and the latchkeys to Coldcourt’s front door and her room at the conscripted hotel in Port Rel. Gerard, she remembered, had kept her compass. Florian had small embroidered handkerchiefs, an empty notebook, a pencil, some cough lozenges, her hotel latchkey and a letter. “It’s from my mother,” Florian murmured, reassuring Tremaine that it didn’t contain any Institute secrets.
The leader barked another unintelligible order, which Tremaine supposed was Gardier for “shut up.” She could see he had a bad burn on his face, with blisters on his cheek and reddened skin leading down his neck under his uniform collar. It certainly wasn’t improving his temper. The burn had been slathered with some kind of medical cream, but it seemed odd that a wounded man would be sent to search for them.
As she watched he suddenly flinched and grabbed for another device on his belt. The other two Gardier backed up uneasily, their weapons still trained on the prisoners. The leader looked from Florian to Tremaine, then back to Florian. With an angry comment, he stepped up to loom threateningly over her.
“All right, all right,” Florian said, wincing away from him.
“What happened?” Tremaine asked, baffled.
“I tried an illusion charm,” Horian admitted, giving the patrol leader a rebellious look as she backed away. The man again barked the order that probably meant “shut up.”
Tremaine pressed her lips together, annoyed. It had happened so quickly she couldn’t tell now which device had warned him. She wished Horian hadn’t played that card just yet; now the Gardier were wary. And now they know she’s a witch.
She heard angry shouting and scuffling from the tunnel behind them and looked to see five Gardier dragging a fighting, yelling figure. Florian gasped in dismay and Tremaine winced as she recognized the mud-splattered man who had helped them escape the hunter-things. They caught him too, dammit. This is not going well.
There were manacles on his wrists, connected with a length of chain, but it was still taking three Gardier to force him along. He was shorter than the men who were struggling with him, but under the mud she could see he had a muscular build. He was ignoring both their weapons and their shouting. He doesn’t care if they shoot him, she thought, impressed. Maybe he was even hoping they would.
They had almost wrestled their prisoner to the ground when suddenly he was on his feet again, knocking two Gardier sprawling. The prisoner whipped his chains around the neck of a third, driving the Gardier to his knees. The others surged forward, but the man put his back against the cave wall, bracing a knee against his hostage’s back as the trapped Gardier choked and struggled.
The leader barked an order that the prisoner ignored and the other Gardier were too occupied to follow. Then the leader grabbed Florian’s arm and jerked her toward him, drawing his pistol and pressing it to her head.
Florian yelped involuntarily and Tremaine took a half step toward her, with no idea what she meant to do. Her brain caught up to her a moment later and told her there was no hope; they were unarmed, outnumbered. She turned, yelling, “Hey! This isn’t helping!”
Maybe it was the female voice that caught the prisoner’s attention. He looked up, blue eyes startled, furious. He saw the threat to Florian and for a long heartbeat no one moved.
Tremaine held her breath; he had no reason to help Florian. He had distracted the hunter-things away from them, but this might be different. Then the man made a succinct but unintelligible comment. He pulled the chains off the Gardier’s neck and shoved him away, then spit on him.
Two of the Gardier grabbed the prisoner, flinging him down at base of the wall. The leader shoved Florian down next to him and then, apparently out of a sense of fairness, grabbed Tremaine’s arm and threw her down too.
“Ow,” Tremaine muttered, sitting up cautiously. The Gardier had gathered in front of them, the leader asking angry questions, the disheveled and bloody ones who had captured the man making defensive explanations. “Are you all right?” she whispered to Florian.
Florian nodded, eyeing the Gardier resentfully. “Yes, I’m fine.” She looked at their new ally, slumped against the wall and watching the Gardier with wary contempt.
He glanced at them with a quizzical expression, very at odds with the earlier violence of his demeanor. Tremaine gave Florian an encouraging nudge and the girl edged closer to whisper, “Hello. Who are you?”
As the man listened to her his shoulders slumped a little and he shook his head slightly, then replied softly in a language Tremaine didn’t know. This close she saw he did seem to be wearing clothes under the mud, except on his bare arms and mostly bare chest: low boots and dark-colored trousers, a jerkin of braided leather over a faded, frayed shirt that was so torn it was barely intact. She saw the mud-plastered mane of hair fell past his shoulders and he had a thick queue that hung to midway down his back. He also had a cut on his forehead under the fringe of mud-coated hair; the Gardier must have knocked him senseless just long enough to get the chains on him.
It didn’t sound like he was speaking the same language as the Gardier, unless he just had a completely different accent. His speech wasn’t as hard and guttural as theirs and it sounded a bit like Aderassi, but Tremaine could speak Aderassi and this wasn’t it. She looked at Florian hopefully, but the other girl shook her head to show she was stumped too.
Tremaine felt obligated to say something, though it didn’t look like he expected much. “We don’t understand,” she told him, keeping her voice low, miming a baffled shrug.
He said something, looking away with a glum expression. Tremaine had the feeling what he had said was “no kidding.”
She reached across Florian to pick up the lock on his chains, examining it speculatively. It was a squarish padlock with an oddly shaped keyhole. When Tremaine had been traveling with her father she had carried a set of handcuff keys that fit all the standard restraints used by the Prefecture of Ile-Rien, but this lock looked far too large for any of those keys even if she had still owned them. She didn’t carry her picks anymore either. The man watched her curiously, lifting his brows. There was quick intelligence in those eyes, as well as humor and kindness. We’re lucky he has a more developed sense of chivalry than the Gardier, she thought ruefully.
Florian glanced at their captors. They were still arguing and checking various devices. Keeping her voice to a bare whisper, she said, “I hope Gerard is all right. I think all of those things chased us.” She gingerly touched a bruise on her forehead. “What did the sphere do?”
Tremaine bit her lip, trying to remember exactly what had happened. “I think it was trying to drive them off, but it got me and Gerard too. Maybe it was because I touched it. I thought I had to so Gerard could use it for whatever spell he was about to try.”
“That’s how it�
�s always worked before.” Florian read Tremaine’s expression and added sharply, “Isn’t it?”
“Well, the night I first came to the Institute it destroyed a ward all by itself,” Tremaine admitted reluctantly. “I was holding it but I didn’t tell it to do anything.”
“So maybe it was already reacting to the danger at the same time Gerard tried to use it for a defensive spell, and it just. . . backfired?” Florian frowned. “I don’t think any of the test spheres ever just did things on their own.”
Arisilde’s first sphere had acted on its own whenever it had the urge, needing only to be held by someone with a little magical talent. Fortunately, the urge had moved it only when it was confronted by a magical force acting in a hostile manner. Tremaine wasn’t sure if Gerard had mentioned that little fact about Arisilde’s spheres to the other Institute sorcerers or not.
The Gardier leader shouted again, making all three of them jump. Their new friend recovered by baring his teeth at the Gardier and saying something that Tremaine was fairly sure wasn’t complimentary.
The leader backed up a step but motioned sharply for them to get to their feet.
Tremaine tried to keep track of where they were but she had never been good at directions and all the tunnels were uniformly dark, slimy and full of sharp rocks and debris. All she could tell was that they were going up. It did give her time to get used to her fear and focus on her overwhelming feeling of embarrassment at being caught. The Gardier didn’t insist on making her and Florian keep their hands on their heads; most of their attention was focused on the male prisoner. It was doubly humiliating not only to be caught but to be obviously filed away as harmless. If you could think faster, we wouldn‘t be in this mess, she told herself bitterly.
Finally, they came to a tunnel where electric bulbs had been haphazardly strung along the rough walls. Tremaine exchanged a look with Florian. This had to mean they were almost there, wherever there was.
The tunnel opened into a huge cavern, lit with buzzing arc lights, the smell of burned oil hanging in the damp air. As they drew closer she could see the floor had been roughly leveled and was crisscrossed with electric cables and hoses. The thrum of a massive generator, or several massive generators, made the air hum like it was itself electrified and Tremaine’s head started to pound in sympathy. She saw their new friend wince away from the lights.
As they came out from behind the last tumble of rocks, they saw the center of the cavern was filled with an enormous jumbled mess of latticework girders and wires. For a moment Tremaine’s brain insisted this was a modern sculpture, a larger version of the sort that the Palace of Arts had been exhibiting before the start of the war. But then her eyes found the conical shape of the nose and she realized it was a half-completed dirigible, some of its giant ring frames lying flat atop scaffolds for construction. Great, we ‘re at their base, she thought. If I knew what I was doing, this could actually be a good thing. She wished Ander or Gerard were here to help. The rest of the cavern curved away out of sight, lost in darkness past the range of the arc lights.
There were people in brown uniform coveralls, some moving around near the scaffolds, but the place looked ... understaffed, Tremaine decided after a moment. Maybe that was why the wounded man was still on duty. Only a few people were working on the new airship’s frame, surely not enough to finish it anytime this century.
The Gardier led them toward the side of the cave. There were a couple of tunnel entrances there under an overhang, separated from the rest of the cave by a wire mesh fence that looked as if it had been hastily erected. There were other, smaller tunnels opening higher up in the wall. Metal scaffolds with steps and catwalks had been erected to reach them.
The patrol leader called to two more armed Gardier stationed at the stairs to come over. The group of Gardier tightened around them suddenly and Tremaine hesitated, confused. Their new friend muttered something, throwing the two women a rueful look. The leader grabbed Tremaine and Florian by their jackets, dragging them out of the way as the circle closed around the man.
He slammed his shoulder into the nearest Gardier, sending him staggering away, but three others hit him from the side, grabbing him by his chained arms and hauling him forward. He planted his feet, throwing his weight backward, but one of them caught his hair, yanking him off-balance. The others moved in, and despite his struggles, they dragged him into the tunnel entrance next to the wire mesh. The next moment the whole group had vanished around the bend.
Tremaine felt her flesh creep. They hadn’t treated him like a prisoner. They had acted as if he was a dangerous animal they were hauling off to slaughter. “That didn’t look good,” she said under her breath.
Florian looked bleak. “Surely they wouldn’t just kill him. ... If they were going to do that, why bring him all the way back here?”
Tremaine just shook her head. I bet we find out, but I’m not looking forward to it. Their remaining guards held a brief discussion, then the leader went up a set of metal steps to one of the smaller tunnels, leaving the other two behind to watch Tremaine and Florian.
Ilias knew he was dead when the wizards wrestled him through the tunnel entrance, but he made them fight for every step. Then they shoved him forward and for a moment he was standing alone, the wizards gathered around him at a wary distance. This can’t be good, Ilias thought, twisting around, trying to keep an eye on all of them at once. He saw they were in a small cave-room, hollowed out of the rock, lit by wizard lights strung across the ceiling and empty except for a long metal table and metal cabinets against the wall. His head was pounding and his shoulder hurt like fire, but it didn’t matter; soon he would either be dead or wish he was. Past the men surrounding him he had a brief glimpse of another wizard, this one thin and spare, with a narrow grim face. This new one pulled something glassy and metallic off his belt and gestured sharply with it.
Ilias felt the ground snatched out from under him then struck it hard, the breath knocked out of him. He tried to scramble up and realized his legs were numb, that he couldn’t move them at all. Another damned curse. He spit at the wizard, trying to push himself up with his chained arms, angry and terrified.
Two of the men grabbed his arms, dragging him up and slamming him down facefirst onto the metal table. He struggled to push himself up but two of them bore down on him, shoving him against the cold surface. He twisted his head, managing to get a breath, then someone grabbed his hair again, pinning his head down and putting a painful pressure on his neck.
Ilias waited for death but they just stood over him, talking angrily. They’re arguing, he realized. He would have liked to know if it was about when to kill him or just how. He squinted, pushing up against the bodies holding him down. He could just see the leader of the group who had captured him confronting the new wizard. The leader was holding a folded water-damaged paper packet.
Oh, Ilias thought, nonplussed, the maps. They had searched him when they had caught him running from the howlers. One of them had tackled him, slamming him into the rock wall, and he had been half conscious for a few moments. Long enough for them to find his hunting knife, the smaller spare blade tucked into his boot and the maps Giliead had found on the flying whale and stuffed under his belt.
So it was the maps that were causing all the angry arguing. Maybe he should have cached them somewhere but he couldn’t see how it mattered. They were wizards; they were already going to kill him just for existing. Burning their flying whale and stealing from them couldn’t make it any worse. At least he hoped it couldn’t.
The leader suddenly reached across him, pulling roughly at his shirt and jerkin, ripping it down to bare his wounded shoulder. Ilias flinched and involuntarily tried to writhe away, thinking they had finally gotten to the torture part. But the leader didn’t touch him again. The arguing continued and he wondered if the man had bared the wound as proof that Ilias had been near the flying whale when it burned. Of course I was, he thought in exasperation. How many other people are running aro
und these caves trying to kill wizards?
Then the men pinning him suddenly wrenched him up off the table and threw him against the wall. He collapsed at the base of it, pushing himself up into an awkward sitting position with his chained hands. He shook the hair out of his face, looking up as the leader knelt in front of him. The man held up the maps, asking an urgent question. The other wizard stood behind him, shaking his head, his narrow face disgusted.
Ilias looked from one to the other, half wishing they would just kill him and get it over with. If the curse making his legs useless was permanent, he couldn’t escape anyway and he didn’t want Giliead risking himself trying to come after him. If Giliead was even still alive and not a prisoner here somewhere.
The leader gripped his chin, forcing his head around to face him, and said carefully, “Rien. Rien?”
Ilias stared at him, truly baffled, too startled to wrench his head away or try to bite the man. He realized he had heard the wizards say the word before, all during their argument, but it meant nothing to him.
His belief that they were out of their minds, or at least his complete incomprehension, must have shown on his face. The other wizard made a derisive snort and turned away. The leader let go of him and stood, his face frustrated, rubbing his hand on his pants as if it had been contaminated by the physical contact. He gestured at the other men. Ilias squirmed to avoid them, swinging his chain and managing to catch one in the face. But they grabbed his arms, dragging him upright, and hauled him back toward the tunnel.
He fought as best he could but with his legs mostly useless there wasn’t much he could do except annoy them. They dragged him to a large, shadowy high-ceilinged room with heavy doors in the rusted metal walls. Opening one, they hauled him into a small cell, dumping him against the stone that formed the back of it. Two of them sat on him while the third attached his chains to a ring anchored into the rock at waist height. The same one kicked him in the stomach as they left, slamming the door behind them.