THE WIZARD HUNTERS

by Martha Wells

  Panting, Ilias curled around the pain as best he could, his arms stretched back and over his head by the chains, his legs still paralyzed. He was glad there wasn’t anything in his stomach to throw up. When he could finally lift his head, he saw just a small bare room, the walls scarred stained metal except for the rocky one behind him, the sickly yellow light coming from a single wizard lamp set high in the ceiling. He eyed it nervously, but at least it wasn’t anywhere near him. There was a narrow grille in the door, but too small and too high to see out of. The dirty stone floor smelled of piss and vomit.

  Ilias leaned against the wall gingerly, shifting to hold his injured shoulder away from the rock. The struggle had reopened the wound and he could feel blood trickle down his back. Now that more urgent pains were fading, he realized his legs were starting to hurt, prickling with sharp needle pricks, but it was better than that frightening numbness. Gritting his teeth and putting all his effort into it, he managed to wriggle his toes. Relief made him slump back against the rock, taking a deep breath. The curse isn‘t permanent.

  He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he had come to dazed and bleeding in the impenetrable dark of the underground city or how long he had searched for Giliead. The river had swept him down one of the small passages and washed him aground while he was still half conscious. The metal that had struck him had sliced through his baldric; his sword and scabbard had ended up somewhere on the river bottom. He had been lucky to land where he had; if the water had carried him further along into the lower caves, he would have been eaten by something before he woke.

  When he had recovered enough to walk he had worked his way back up to the wizards’ tunnels, searching for Gil, hoping his friend had made it out of the flying whale’s cave. Chances were the curse that had knocked Ilias into the river wouldn’t have affected Giliead; Ilias just hoped he hadn’t gotten himself captured while searching the river for him.

  If the wizards did have Gil, he might be in one of the other cells. Ilias sat up, spit to clear his throat, and yelled, “Gil! Are you here?”

  No answer.

  Frustrated, he leaned back against the rock. It didn’t tell him anything; Giliead could still be here, held in another area. But if he had been here and the wizards had already killed him . . . Trying to put that uncomfortable thought aside, he wondered about the two women captured with him.

  When he had first seen the howlers hunting them he had thought they were escaped slaves, but after getting a good look at them he decided that couldn’t be possible. Their clothes were different from what the slaves and wizards wore and they just hadn’t acted like cowed captives. Especially the one with the light brown hair, the one who had looked more annoyed by the wizards than frightened. He let his breath out, shifting uncomfortably as his shoulder burned and his bruises ached. Whoever they are, I hope they’re better off than I am.

  Looking around the cavern, Tremaine weighed their options and decided they didn’t have any. It was too far to any of the tunnels even to contemplate making a break for it. Then Florian nudged her and she looked around to see people coming out of an opening under the overhang, gathering in the area on the other side of the wire mesh. They moved slowly, the brown coveralls they wore stained with sweat and greasy dirt, many of them carrying welding goggles or wearing baggy caps covering their hair. Men, women, young, old. Tremaine’s eyes narrowed as she realized none of them were armed. Were they Gardier? The older man with the dark skin and the hooked nose looked distinctly Parscian. Then a man leaned on the mesh and spoke to a woman with him. Tremaine didn’t catch the words but his accent sounded Lowlands.

  Florian nudged her more urgently. Tremaine nodded, motioning her to stop, and sneaked a look at their two guards. They were talking together, most of their attention on the half-completed dirigible. She sidled a couple of steps closer to the mesh near the couple and said in a low voice, “Where are you from?”

  The man looked up at her, startled, then darted a look at the guards. “We can’t help you,” he whispered.

  She had been right, his accent was Lowlands, but that covered a lot of territory. More, if you counted colonies and independent ex-colonies. “We don’t need help,” Tremaine said firmly, keeping her voice low. That was anything but the truth, but what the hell. “Just tell us where you’re from, how they captured you, how you got here.”

  The man just stared but the woman with him flicked a glance from Tremaine’s face to Florian’s and wet her lips. “You’re Ile-Rien.” Her accent was thicker than his.

  Florian nodded. “Yes.” The others were beginning to notice, some turning to look and some just edging close to listen. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to alert the guards.

  The woman leaned forward. “We live on Maiuta, we’re missionaries of the Benevolent Order of Dane.” The man caught her arm but she shook him off impatiently.

  Tremaine nodded rapidly. Maiuta was in the Southern Seas, a large island that was mostly jungle with only a few ports and towns, but with a substantial population of warring tribes who had long been the target of exploitation by more modern nations. Aberdon, a Lowland state to the north of Ile-Rien, had a colony there.

  The woman whispered rapidly, “The Gardier came, captured the ports and killed anyone who tried to resist. We were in the interior and had some warning. Most of the villages in our area escaped up into the hills, but we stayed at our infirmary with some of the older people who were too sick to move. We didn’t think . . . But they took us to the port and put us on a ship with some of the townspeople and many others.” She nodded around at the people clustered nearby, watching anxiously. “We had only gone a little distance when we felt— Ah, I don’t know how to explain—a great crash—”

  Florian gave Tremaine a grave look and supplied, “Like the ship suddenly dropped a few feet and hit the water again.”

  “Yes, yes. We didn’t see it, but some of the others were chained up on deck because there was no more room below, and they said they saw a circle of light appear just above the waves and the ship sailed into it. They said the land disappeared and the sky turned more blue, and it was morning instead of evening. We sailed for many days, then they unloaded us in these caves and they make us work for them. There are others here from the south islands, from Venais and Khiatu.” The woman shifted closer. “Something went wrong here a few days ago. There was an explosion in one of the caves they use as a hangar—”

  Someone on the other side hissed a warning and they sprang away from each other like guilty children talking out of turn in a schoolroom. On the other side of the mesh two Gardier came out of a tunnel entrance and moved through the group, gesturing with short clubs, forcing the prisoners to move along.

  Tremaine saw their two guards suddenly look alert again and glanced up to see the leader coming down the steps near the wire mesh fence with another man. The new Gardier wore the same sort of uniform as the others, except that he had a small silver medallion with an inset crystal around his neck. His features were thin and hard, his dark hair cut so close it was barely a fuzz over his skull.

  He walked up to them, eyeing them with a cold familiarity, fiddling with his medallion. Tremaine dropped her eyes, trying to look helpless and pathetic. Stalling, she thought, stalling is an option. It might give Gerard more time to get away.

  “Who are you?” he demanded in accented Rienish.

  Tremaine threw a tremulous, uncertain look at Florian and said softly, “We’re missionaries, from Maiuta.”

  Florian’s eyes widened, but she managed to suppress any other response.

  He let go of the medallion and addressed a couple of sharp comments to the patrol leader in their language. Tremaine hadn’t had any plan in mind, but it looked as if she had derailed any prepared questions. The patrol leader planted his hands on his hips and replied tartly. Tremaine sensed dissension in the ranks.

  The interrogator turned back, grasped the medallion again and said, “When did you come here?”

  Th
e medallion is the key to some kind of translator spell. Tremaine hadn’t heard of anything like it before. She said earnestly, “We don’t know. We’ve been underground, we can’t tell how many days and nights it’s been.”

  The interrogator turned back to the patrol leader, saying with exasperation, “We recovered all the labor who escaped yesterday. They can’t be—” before he dropped the medallion.

  The discussion continued for a moment more, with both men appearing increasingly annoyed with each other, then the interrogator touched the medallion briefly to say, “Come with me.”

  He started back up the stairs to the tunnels above. As the patrol leader turned to call the two guards to follow, Tremaine exchanged a brief glance with Florian. The other girl looked somewhat taken aback, but this was the best chance they had. If the Gardier hadn’t found the Pilot Boat yet, or had found it after it had drifted further off the rocks, they might think the entire crew had drowned. That was good for Gerard, at least.

  The door opened onto a catwalk overlooking a larger chamber, lit by a few bare electric bulbs suspended from a network of wires crossing the ceiling. The far wall was raw stone, cracked and pitted, and the other two were stained metal partitions fixed against it. In the partitions there were heavy metal doors with small barred grates to look through. Cells, Tremaine thought. Uh oh. There wouldn’t be any options once they were in a cell. As the interrogator led the way along the catwalk, a door banged open in the room below. She glanced down to see two disheveled Gardier crossing the floor; she was sure they had been in the group who had hauled off the other prisoner.

  The interrogator said, “You were with a native, one of the dangerous primitives that infest the mainland.”

  Tremaine saw Florian lift a brow at that comment and privately agreed. If anybody’s doing the, infesting here, it’s the Gardier. But it was odd that the man had said “native.” So the Gardier must come from some other part of this world. They must have invaded this area because the island made such a good staging ground for their attacks on the coast of Ile-Rien.

  Without glancing back, the interrogator said, “If you aren’t truthful with me, perhaps we’ll put you in the same cage with him.”

  The words better him than you came to mind and Tremaine managed to lock her throat against them. It sounded like the man was still alive, at least for now. Like they were still alive, at least for now.

  Tremaine had read in one of the government pamphlets that not speaking at all if captured was the only sure way to avoid revealing any information. That was undoubtedly true; she also remembered her father’s late-night lecture to Gerard and some of his other cronies, about how it was possible to tell one simple lie and stick to it at all costs; it was the unnecessary elaboration that would ruin you. It didn’t apply to Nicholas, of course, who had been able to tell very elaborate lies by adopting other personas. Tremaine already knew she couldn’t pull that off.

  The interrogator opened the door at the far end of the catwalk and led them into a bare room with two more doors and a table. At a comment from him the guard who had been carrying their satchel dumped it out on the table and began to sift through the contents. The interrogator gave them a cold smile, touched the medallion and said, “I am Gervas. I command here.” Tremaine saw the patrol leader’s eyes go hooded. Dissension, oh yes. She wondered if the explosion the Lowlands woman had mentioned had taken out part of the command structure. He continued, “Where do you get these things?”

  Tremaine looked up at him, trying to hold the mental image of a meek little missionary woman. She knew she couldn’t stall much longer but every moment of delay counted. “We’ve been hiding them,” she said.

  Gervas dropped the medallion and lifted his hand. Tremaine had time to see it was going to be an open-handed slap before the blow spun her around into the table. She caught herself awkwardly, heard Florian give an involuntary cry of protest. Blinking, carefully putting a hand to her aching jaw, she looked up. Florian must have started forward because one of the guards had her by the arm, twisting it painfully. Gervas’s expression hadn’t changed. He lifted the medallion again and said calmly, “You lie.”

  “About what?” Tremaine asked, still trying to look innocent and wishing she had thought of a different plan.

  “You—” Gervas caught himself. He stared at her, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “You are not a missionary.”

  Stalling is over, Tremaine thought. Oh, well. “Give me a chance to prove it.” She carefully wiped blood away from her mouth, trying to ignore the fact that her hand was shaking, and grinned at him. “Why don’t you ask me some questions about religion?”

  Gervas smiled thinly, dropped the medallion and turned to speak in his own language to the patrol leader. This is over and we’re dead, whatever happens, Tremaine thought, sick. She found herself staring at the holstered pistol of the guard standing near her, almost within her reach. Might as well go out with a bang. She had actually swayed toward the weapon when running footsteps sounded outside one of the other doors. It banged open and another Gardier leaned in, speaking urgently.

  The patrol leader tensed, looking toward Gervas, who muttered in frustration and snapped an order to one of the guards. The man strode over to the other door and opened it.

  Gervas turned to them. Touching the medallion around his neck, he said, “Get in there,” punctuating the order with a shove to Florian’s shoulder. Florian turned, glaring at him, but moved into the room. Tremaine got a shove too and stumbled after her.

  He slammed the door shut and Tremaine heard the lock click. She turned around to see another bare room with a long metal table and chairs, lit by three bulbs suspended from the ceiling. There was a large sheet of paper tacked to the wall, covered with writing in an incomprehensible script. Florian shoved her hair back and started to speak but Tremaine hastily motioned her to be silent.

  She stepped to the door to press her ear against it, listening. She heard the men speaking in their own language again in some urgency, then their boots on the stone as they walked away.

  Tremaine turned to ask in a whisper, “They have a translator spell; have you ever heard of a translator spell before?”

  Florian shook her head. “I’ve seen one that translates documents; you can make the writing appear in a mirror in another language. But it only works when the person casting it knows both the languages so there’s really not much point to it.”

  Tremaine nodded. The translator was something else Gerard and Niles and the others at the Institute would give a great deal to know about. She frowned. “And the Gardier are capturing civilians as slave labor. Did we know that?” She could see why the government would have concealed that little detail; people were panicked enough already.

  “I didn’t.” Florian grimaced. “If we can just get home, the invasion troop can rescue them.” She looked over the room. “Strange. There’s no switches or pull cords for the lights. We can’t turn them off.”

  Tremaine’s face was going numb and to distract herself she moved to the far wall to study the paper tacked there. It was mounted on a wooden board, with long pins topped with different-colored beads stuck in it to mark various paragraphs. It was obviously a checklist or an agenda or something similar. “Why do you want to turn the lights out?”

  “So we could lure them in and...” Florian’s brows drew together as she considered the variables in that plan.

  “Get beaten up?”

  “Something like that.” She added abruptly, “You didn’t flinch.”

  Busy working one of the long pins out of the wall, Tremaine glanced up, confused. “What?”

  Florian pushed her hair back, looking confused too. “When he was about to hit you. You just... watched him. It was creepy.”

  “Well, yes,” Tremaine had to admit. “I should have flinched. It made him more suspicious when I didn’t.” Thinking that hindsight was a wonderful thing, she stepped back to the door to listen at it again. Still nothing. All four men must have left in
response to whatever the urgent summons had been.

  “And we got that poor man caught, whoever he is,” Florian added, pacing back and forth in agitation. “I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just us. I don’t mean exactly that but—”

  “I know.” Tremaine nodded glumly. “Did you catch it when Gervas called him a native?”

  “Yes! He said he came from the mainland.”

  Now they knew there were people in this world fighting the Gardier, potential allies for Ile-Rien. More information they should take back home. “If he hadn’t stopped to help us, they would never have caught him.” Tremaine tried the handle carefully, then stooped to look through the keyhole. If they were caught trying to escape, could the Gardier possibly do anything worse to them than they undoubtedly already planned to do? Sure, she answered her own question. Lots worse.

  “It’s a metal door—we can’t break it down,” Florian said from behind her. She hesitated. “Can we?”

  Tremaine looked at her. The other girl was trembling, her arms folded tightly and her hands tucked into her jacket. Tremaine thought of the contempt in Gervas’s eyes, the scorn evident in locking them in here like a couple of truant children. We should do this. She turned, looking around the room. “I think . . .” She stepped past Florian to the papers tacked onto the wall and plucked another one of the pins out. “. .. this might work.”

  Florian stared as Tremaine knelt by the door. “You can—” She lowered her voice even further. “You can pick the lock?”

  “Maybe. I’m out of practice.” Tremaine held her breath, probing at the lock and trying to visualize the tumblers. It had been a long time.

  The moment stretched until her lungs started to hurt. Then the lock clicked and she felt the door move.

  Florian gave an excited bounce. Heart pounding, Tremaine edged the door open enough to peer out. The room was empty.