by Martha Wells
“Ander’s asked for the maps we found, or at least two of them,” Giliead added as he leaned down to dig through the clothes chest. “He can’t read them either, except for the part that looks like the coast of their country, but he thinks his people can figure them out.”
Ilias nodded absently. “They’re useless to us.”
“I just have to see if Nicanor and Visolela will agree.” Giliead pulled out a shirt and started to dress.
Ilias shook his head, trying to get his mind off Ixion and think about something else. “They weren’t worried about seeing the god.” Years ago, the first time Giliead had taken Ilias to see it, he had nearly had to drag him into the cave. Most Syprians, unless they were crazy or strange or Chosen Vessels, would have been equally reluctant. It wasn’t exactly fear, just a combination of respect and a reluctance to be noticed by something so undefinable and so important. People of other lands looked at it differently, but Ilias didn’t know of anybody he had ever met who would have walked into that cave with such unconcern, not for a first-time encounter with a god. “They didn’t think it was real, did they?”
Giliead straightened up, thinking it over. He had been taken to the cave when he was only a few years old so the god could confirm him as a Chosen Vessel, so Ilias knew it was hard for him to understand others’ fear of it. “I’m trying to imagine a world without gods.” With a rueful smile, he added, “It’s strange enough to have wizards as allies, though they’re much easier to deal with than the Chaeans.”
“Gil—” Ilias hesitated, sitting back against the window frame. His expression would betray him and he didn’t like to say it was nothing. Giliead wouldn’t believe it, for one thing. Of course, he’s not going to believe this either. He said reluctantly, “I thought I saw Ixion.” He looked up to see Giliead staring at him blankly. He shook his head with a grimace. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you’d look at me like that.”
“When?” Giliead demanded, taking a step forward.
“The way you’re looking at me right now.”
Giliead took a sharp breath and planted his hands on his hips, staring at the ceiling and obviously striving for calm. Speaking deliberately, he clarified, “When did you think you saw Ixion?”
“Oh.” Ilias shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t as calm about this as he thought. “On the island, right before we flooded the tunnel. He was with the wizards, the Gardier.”
He chewed his lip, trying to think of the right words to describe it. “They were coming up the passage and I saw his face in a flash of light from one of those curse lamps.” He shrugged helplessly, annoyed at himself. “Something about him wasn’t the same, so maybe it was just a wizard who looked like him.”
Giliead was silent, thinking, still absently holding the shirt he was about to put on. Ilias felt a flush of relief and realized he had been half expecting to be told he was crazy, with the strong implication that the last encounter with Ixion had marked his mind worse than it had marked his body. But Gil was Gil and he would consider it calmly and carefully, like he did everything. It might have been a tendency he had gotten from the god, but that was the way Ilias remembered Ranior, Karima’s first husband.
Still, they had never talked about that last encounter with Ixion. Ilias had tried not to think about it, but returning to the caves had brought it back. They had both seen a lot of strange things over the years and Giliead had read all the journals with the accumulated knowledge of the other Chosen Vessels. Ilias was the only person they knew of who had been transformed into something else and come back to what he was before. Of course, the journals didn’t know everything; they had found that out the hard way. In the end Giliead had come to the conclusion that Ixion’s death, coming not long after he had cast the curse, had caused it to fail. I don’t feel any different, Ilias had told him at the time, and it was still true. As far as he could tell.
Finally Giliead shrugged on the shirt and said slowly, “If you think it was just someone who looked like him, why did you feel you should tell me about it?”
That was a hard question. But Ilias knew a couple of harder ones. “If Ixion’s not dead, why did the curse he put on me go away? And for that matter, how’d he grow his head back?”
There had been some kind of commotion about the curse, and Tremaine had gone out into the hall and found Ander on the way to a bath. He had told her only that everything was all right. Tremaine had given up on him and resolved to ask Gerard later.
After Karima had left, she and Florian had explored the room, finding a little cubby next to the fireplace with a hip bath set into the stone-flagged floor, a chamber pot, and a second smaller hearth built into the wall for heating water. “It’s not as bad as a cold-water flat,” Florian pointed out.
Tremaine thought about Coldcourt, with gas and noisy but efficient plumbing and the newly installed electricity. Every modern convenience. But lonely. And cold. She looked around the bedchamber, where the windows were open to a warm breeze and a view of the fields and the forested hills beyond. A blooming wisteria had draped itself around the supports of the porch on this side. “It’s much better than a cold-water flat.”
The same extremely bashful young man brought several buckets of water for them, then fled. Tremaine helped Florian fill the cauldron to heat it and then the bath; the fact that they enjoyed this process like a couple of little girls playing house Tremaine put down to shock and exhaustion.
While Florian was finishing her bath Tremaine took the wooden comb they had found and wandered across the hall and out onto the atrium’s portico. Down at this end there were several carved couches piled with cushions, but she sat on the stone flags to try to restore her wet hair to some sort of order. The water hadn’t been very hot but it had helped soothe the aches and scrapes and bruises. She was wearing a loose blue tunic printed along the hem with green and gold curlicues and pants of a thicker tanned material so soft it was hard to tell if it was doeskin or some kind of woven cloth. She was barefoot but had washed out her stockings and planned to wear her own boots. There was no mirror in the bathing room, but that was just as well; Tremaine had taken so many punches she knew she looked like a retired prizefighter.
The scent of the flowers was heavy in the late afternoon sun. Through the open doors into the main foyer, she could see the men outside the front of the house herding a last few red cows to the safety of the pens under the trees. Some of the women from the village were standing near them talking, bundles of belongings piled around their feet. The place had a “still before the storm” feel though she was surprised everyone was taking it all so calmly. The Gardier are going to bomb that village, she thought, and maybe others besides. It hurt to think that the little houses with the painted shutters and Gyan’s garden wouldn’t be there tomorrow. It had happened so often in Ile-Rien, she should be immune to it by now.
Tremaine paused, the comb caught in a tangle. The old house surrounded by fields of flowers and shade trees should have felt unreal; it didn’t. It felt vividly real while the horrors of the island, and even the horrors of what the Gardier had done to Ile-Rien, faded away into hazy memory.
She heard Ilias’s voice and looked up. He was sitting on a windowsill across the atrium, talking to someone in the room behind him. She almost didn’t recognize him. He had just knocked the mud off his old pants and boots, but he wore a sleeveless blue shirt trimmed with leather braid and leather armbands set with copper disks. He was occupied with tying his hair back, giving the queue a practiced twist with a leather thong then tossing it back over his shoulder and shaking his head vigorously to make sure it held. Tremaine wished the camera wasn’t with the Pilot Boat at the bottom of the bay. His hair was still a mane but with the queue rebraided and the long loose curls clean and free of mats, the effect was exotic rather than savage.
She found herself wondering if a Syprian wizard-killer would be interested in a dowdy ex-playwright with a past. The enforced closeness down in the caves made it hard to tell. A lit
tle observation today had told her that Syprian body language included casual touching; they made even the fairly relaxed Rienish look as stiff as Bisrans. But surely Florian, younger, prettier and less peculiar, had the ingénue role in this story. Though they really don’t like sorcerers, she reminded herself. Had Ilias touched Florian since he had found out she was learning to be a sorcerer? Tremaine didn’t think so. Karima had, but Karima was different too.
Giliead stepped up to the opposite side of the window and leaned against the sill, a thoughtful expression on his face that probably meant he was deeply worried. Without the mud, his hair was chestnut-colored. Another man walked up the portico to speak to them and Tremaine did a double take as she realized it was Gerard. He wore dark-colored pants tucked into his own boots and a light-colored shirt open across the chest, with a dark green printed sash. She grinned, momentarily diverted; he looked ten years younger at least. She got up to join them, picking her way down the stone-lined path across the garden.
As she approached she heard Gerard asking more questions about the god. With a thoughtful expression, he was saying, “So the people who founded Cineth actually chose to settle here because of the proximity of the god?”
“That, and it’s a natural harbor,” Ilias told him, “but you can’t have a city anywhere there isn’t a god.”
“Why?”
“The wizards.” Giliead looked a little reluctant to bring the subject up again. “There was a city in the Inari Mountain pass, built there for the gold mines. It was out of reach of the nearest god but the man who was lawgiver convinced everyone that it wouldn’t matter as long as they were careful. It was a very rich city because of the mines, but they must have gotten careless. One month the supply caravan arrived and it was empty except for the guls.”
“What are guls?” Tremaine asked, thinking she probably didn’t want to know but it was better to get it over with now.
“Shape-changers. They lure travelers away to eat them.” Giliead’s expression hardened, as if the image recalled an unpleasant memory.
Ilias shook his head. “They couldn’t have killed everyone in the city though, there weren’t that many of them. And there were no bodies, no signs of fighting. There was food left on the tables, like the people had just gotten up and left. The animals—cattle, mules, chickens, everything—were all alive, untouched, unhurt except for being hungry.”
Tremaine froze, the comb caught in a tangle. Not noticing, Gerard shook his head a little, deep in thought. “Was this reported to you by a reliable source? There’s no chance the story simply grew in the telling?”
Giliead smiled suddenly, looking down at Ilias and cocking an eyebrow. Ilias grinned back and said, “We saw it ourselves.” He looked at Gerard. “We went there, back when we were younger and more stupid.”
Oh, God, Tremaine thought wearily. It was happening again. They were describing a story from one of her plays. Of course the culprits had been fay in her script and there had been no guls and nothing about the lack of sufficient godly protection, but the detail about the animals was exact. She couldn’t explain it and she didn’t want to think about it. Changing the subject firmly, she asked, “Did you ever meet any wizards who weren’t evil?”
Gerard gave her a look of mild consternation and she realized he must have been purposefully avoiding the topic.
“There was that old man in Kani.” Ilias looked thoughtful. “He kept saying he was cursing people, but nothing ever happened.”
“What did you do?” Tremaine persisted, ignoring Gerard.
Giliead shrugged and smiled faintly. “Told them to send for me if he ever actually managed to curse anybody.” He fixed his eyes on a bright-plumaged bird that was bathing in the cistern and said, apparently absently, “I like to know for certain.”
As the other men retired to finish dressing, Gerard led Tremaine off the portico and a few paces into the garden. “Did you find the curse?” she asked, looking around. Someone had been digging violently in the flower beds.
“I’ll explain about that in a moment.” He stopped, facing her. “Right now I want to talk to you about Ander.”
Tremaine looked up at him, blinking innocently. “Who?”
“Yes, very humorous.” Gerard folded his arms, regarding her seriously. “He thinks you’re a spy. Have you done anything, perhaps intentionally, to give him that false impression?”
“He doesn’t think I’m a spy. Are you out of your mind? He thinks I’m a ...” Lunatic, useless idiot, something along those lines. “Never mind, but he doesn’t think I’m a spy. And why the hell would I do something like that intentionally?”
“I know your sense of humor. Granted you’ve been so ...”—Gerard fumbled for a word—“out of sorts for the past few years that you haven’t been your usual self, but you’ve been improving rapidly.” He sighed, contemplating the blue sky. “If he came up with that idea on his own, I don’t know why.”
Tremaine stared at him. Out of sorts? She had thought she had kept her feelings from Gerard, mostly by avoiding him. She shook it off and tried to focus on what he was trying to tell her. “We escaped from the Gardier base, Florian and I. Maybe he thinks ...” That we‘re lying, that it was too easy. She was willing to admit to lucky but not easy. If the base hadn’t been still reeling from the airship explosion in the hangar, if the Gardier hadn’t dismissed then as little better than children, they would never have gotten out of that first locked room. But no, that couldn’t be what Ander was on about. She shook her head, baffled. “He said I was a spy?”
“Nothing so overt. He asked me if I trusted you.”
“There you go, he thinks I’m crazy.” She didn’t want to bring it up but she had to correct Gerard’s mistaken impression. Uncomfortable, she admitted, “He knows about the asylum.”
Gerard pushed his glasses down to rub the bridge of his nose. He knew she didn’t like to talk about it. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder just who had helped her father wreak so much havoc on that place. It hadn’t been Arisilde; he had been with her that night. Nicholas had had any number of people he could call on for assistance in such things. But in the different clothes, Gerard looked less like a scholarly sorcerer and more like someone who would cast a glamour to distract guards while someone else burnt a building down. And Nicholas had made him her guardian. He adjusted his glasses and let out his breath, saying finally, “Just take care.”
Dusk was falling as they sat out on the atrium portico and had a dinner of round loaves of flat dark bread, fruit and nuts, and grilled fish with little bowls of spicy sauces. During and afterward Ander continued to interrogate Giliead and Ilias for details of the Gardier base. After only a little of this Tremaine stopped paying attention; she was comfortably full and having trouble staying awake.
She sat on the stone porch looking out at the dark garden, hugging her knees. The stars were coming out and the sky was still glowing a deep purple from the last remnants of sunset; because of the Gardier threat, only two small bowl-shaped oil lamps had been lit in the sitting area, attracting suicidal moths. A chorus of insects sang in the trees around the house, a counterpoint to the distant roar of the surf. The evening breeze was pleasantly cool and perfumed with pine and cedar and an occasional whiff of goat from the pens. Karima had gone back inside to supervise the two young men who did the cleaning up. Tremaine could hear other voices occasionally from the front of the house; people had been coming and going most of the evening. They were all evacuees from the village who had questions or needed help or just wanted reassurance.
Ander, sitting forward on one of the low couches, asked, “And you didn’t see any markings on the bomb canisters?” He had changed into a loose dark brown shirt and trousers and looked even more rakish than Gerard.
Giliead was half lying on one of the couches, Ilias sitting on the floor and leaning back against the side. “It was dark,” Ilias pointed out, unconcerned. He stretched extravagantly. “And how would we know it was writing if we couldn
’t read it?”
Ander, caught in the middle of drawing breath to pursue the point, hesitated, stymied by this logic. Gerard cleared his throat significantly, as if he thought Ander was pressing their hosts too hard. Tremaine wasn’t concerned; she had the feeling that when they were tired of answering questions they would just stop.
While Ander was trying to regroup, Giliead led the conversation back to the topic he had been pursuing just as relentlessly as Ander had the Gardier base: how sorcerers were treated, or how they treated everyone else, in Ile-Rien.
Listening to Gerard talk about instances of criminal sorcerers and how they were dealt with, one name stirred Tremaine’s interest enough for her to say, “Wasn’t Urbain Grandier a Bisran?”
Sitting on the other couch with Gerard, Florian corrected around a yawn, “I think he was half Rienish. Or was that half Aderassi?”
“It hardly matters,” Gerard put in, forestalling the tangent. “And if it does, it’s certainly outweighed by Constant Macob, who had a fine Rienish pedigree and was a murderous lunatic.” He shrugged slightly. “There is the occasional mad or criminal sorcerer, and has been all through Ile-Rien’s history. But for the most part a demonstrable magical talent means, at the very least, the guarantee of a lifelong profession. Even for the mercenary-minded, there isn’t much motivation to injure people when helping them is so much more profitable. Also, it’s a self-policing profession. There’s always someone more powerful—or more cunning—to watch out for.”
“What happened to Constant Macob?” Giliead asked, leaning forward, intently interested.
“Tremaine’s father—” Gerard hesitated, searching for the right word. “Disposed of him.”
Ander, mouth open to wedge an interruption in at the first opportunity, turned to stare at Tremaine, brows drawing together. Florian, apprised of Valiarde family history, widened her eyes in surprise, then nodded thoughtfully to herself. Giliead turned his enigmatic look on Tremaine, but it was tinged with approval. Ilias nudged her with a foot and gave her a smile. Suddenly self-conscious and feeling undeserving, Tremaine shifted uneasily. “Uncle Ari and my mother helped.”