THE WIZARD HUNTERS

by Martha Wells

  Ilias led the way back through a different passage in case Gervas had brought friends. It narrowed to nearly a crack before opening into the main cavern. At least Tremaine thought it was the main cavern; it was a great dark empty space where lights flashed at random, illuminating running figures. Noise made it more confusing as people shouted in a variety of languages and rifle fire echoed from down the rocky passages. “Oh, great,” she said sourly, propping her weary body against the cool stone. “How are we going to find the others?” She didn’t hear anyone yelling in Gardier; that was promising.

  Ilias paused, another shadow-shape in the dark, one hand on her arm to keep track of her. The sphere had tried to make light for them back in the passage, but Tremaine had desperately convinced it/him not to so they could move around with a little more circumspection. Ilias tugged her back into the passage impatiently. “Most of the fighting is back this way.”

  “Oh, good,” Tremaine muttered, taking his word for it.

  After a long scramble through the dark, Tremaine dimly heard gunfire and Ander’s voice yelling, “Cease fire, cease fire! Shooting at it doesn’t help!” The passage abruptly opened into a ledge looking down on a view of a huge dark cavern, or a different branch of the one they had just come from. In the erratic light of a few battery lamps, torches and several balls of sorcerous light, Tremaine could see a large wooden platform not far below them with moving figures, stacked crates and big metal tanks. Then in midair a huge patch of the darkness seemed to shift. The light caught it and she realized it was the black skin of a Gardier airship, turning away from the platform and moving slowly down the cavern. The hollow rushing sound of its engine reverberated through the enormous space, rising to a roar as it glided further away.

  Ilias stepped to the lip of the rocky ledge, swearing under his breath. “They’re running. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Running,” Tremaine repeated almost absently, watching the jagged tail fins as they vanished into the shadows. “I don’t think they can use the portal anymore. They can’t get to Ile-Rien. But they can fly to another base. If they’ve already sent a message— But only if they’re using magic to communicate. They can’t get a conventional radio signal out of these caves.”

  Ilias stared at her, then eyed the sphere suspiciously. “Who are you arguing with?”

  “Myself.” But the ruthless bitch and the twitchy poet were in agreement on this one. Tremaine addressed the ball of metal and wheels and sorcerous power softly. “We can’t let them go, Arisilde. Stop the airship.”

  A sort of rushing thump, like a giant gas stove being lit, echoed off the cavern walls. The airship had moved perhaps three hundred yards away down the huge passage, out of reach of any of the lights. But spots of red blossomed in the dark, apparently in midair, throwing orange reflections on the rock; fire growing inside the dirigible’s membrane, traveling from cell to cell through the hull. Tremaine nodded to herself, satisfied with her deductions and the result. “The wards were already gone. All the spells on this base, all the other crystals in their gadgets, must have been tied into that big one.”

  The orange glow grew and uneasily, Ilias pulled her back from the opening. Tremaine hesitated, wanting to watch, but let him draw her away.

  Back down the passage they found a dark corridor now chaotically lit by firelight and battery lamps and crowded with freed slaves in Gardier worker coveralls. Tremaine was relieved to recognize some of the Syprians and a couple of Ander’s men among the unfamiliar faces. Everyone was filthy and flushed from the heat.

  “Gil!” Ilias shouted suddenly and bolted past, shouldering a path through the press and sending people staggering out of his way.

  One of the bigger figures turned. Tremaine had a glimpse of Giliead’s face—startled, relieved—before Ilias flung himself into his arms.

  “Tremaine!” Florian called from behind her. Tremaine turned and saw Gerard striding toward her. As he reached her, she automatically tried to hand him the sphere. He took it, passed it off to Florian behind him and pulled Tremaine into a tight hug. He released her and she couldn’t think of anything to say. “You smell funny,” she blurted.

  He smiled, raising his voice to be heard over the babble. “It’s one of Niles’s old college charms. I used it to confuse the howlers. Hopefully it will wear off eventually.”

  “Did you get the portal?” Ander demanded, appearing next to them.

  Tremaine nodded, not really sure where to start. “We destroyed their sorcerer and Arisilde got the airship—”

  Florian was pounding her on the back. “I knew you could do it.”

  “Wait, what?” Ander stepped closer, frowning. “Their what?”

  A deep-throated roar rolled down the tunnel, bringing an acrid cloud of smoke. There was a general instinctive surge back toward the main cavern, away from the wash of reflected light and heat.

  An arm still around her shoulders, Gerard urged her after the others. Sounding puzzled, he asked, “Who did you say got the airship?”

  Tremaine took a sharp breath. This wasn’t going to be easy to explain. “I found Arisilde.”

  Chapter 22

  With the Gardier gone, the caves were silent again. The light from his torch throwing twitching shadows over the rock, Ilias picked his way through the big cavern to where Giliead stood by the skeleton of the half-completed flying whale. No thumping, no buzzing lights; it was obvious all the Gardier’s magic had fled. It was a relief to hear nothing but the whisper of wind through the air shafts far above, the soft voices of the Rienish and an occasional clank as someone tripped over debris in the dark. The lines that connected the wizard lights, the artificial walls, were just lifeless trappings, so much litter cluttering the ancient stone.

  Giliead held his torch high, the warm light striking coppery sparks off the metal ribs arching up into darkness. “How many more of those do you think they have?” Ilias asked him softly.

  Giliead shook his head, his gaze still caught by the metal beast. “If Ander is right about those markings on the maps, that they represent more Gardier strongholds—”

  “Too many.” Ilias answered his own question, wishing he hadn’t asked it. He was just trying to avoid what they had to do next anyway. “Come on, we’re putting it off.” He turned away brusquely, but Giliead caught up with him in a few steps, dropping an arm around his shoulders.

  They went down the narrow tunnel that led through the Gardier’s quarters, threading their way through the slapdash barricades already pulled down by the Rienish. The howlers had hauled off most of the bodies as they escaped into the tunnels, Gardier and freed slave. A door in one of the fake walls stood open and Ilias saw Ander and his men inside, tearing open cabinets and drawers in their haste to search. Ilias noted with approval that they were destroying some of the strange Gardier devices too; Gerard had said the crystal boxes didn’t all hold captured wizards, that some of them must only be useful for specific curses and that they might not work now that the main crystal was destroyed. But he was glad to see them in shattered pieces.

  Ander, studying a sheaf of paper he had just pulled out of a drawer, looked up and spotted them in the doorway. “Don’t stay down here too long. We’re almost done here and we need to evacuate the area soon.”

  Ilias cocked a brow and glanced up at Giliead. Like we need him to tell us that. Giliead just said imperturbably, “We’ll be right behind you.”

  They moved on, making their way back through to the dark warren of the prison area. When they were out of earshot, Giliead said, “I wish I was that young again.”

  Ilias snorted. “No, you don’t.”

  They found a few more Gardier dead, the bodies torn apart by howlers. There were also a few dead slaves in similar condition, huddled in the back corners of open cells or sprawled across the doorways; stragglers who had been reluctant to trust their Syprian rescuers or just too afraid of the Gardier to attempt escape.

  Still they made sure all the cells in the prison area were
empty. Halian was leading the Swift’s crew on a similar search in the other parts of the wizards’ caves. Once they left for the surface, anyone who remained behind would end up howler food.

  Finally there was only one more place to look. Giliead pushed open the heavy metal door to the chamber where he and the others had been held. The torchlight flickered and for an instant Ilias couldn’t see anything on the other side of the wall of bars. Then he made out the sprawled form and took a deep breath to slow his pounding heart. Ilias held the torches as Giliead knelt and cautiously reached through to touch the wizard’s body.

  “He still feels dead.” Frowning, Giliead stood, brushing his hands off on his pants. “He’s cold, but not as cold as he should be.”

  “He doesn’t look as dead as he did last time,” Ilias pointed out, watching Ixion’s unmoving form uneasily.

  Giliead lifted his brows. “Good point.”

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  Giliead grimaced, planting his hands on his hips and looking away. “I think he moved.”

  Ilias fell back a step in pure reflex, then glared at his friend. “That’s not funny.”

  Giliead shook his head, frustrated. “No, no, from when we first put him in there. I think he’s moved.”

  “Oh.” Ilias eyed the inert form again warily. It might be Giliead’s imagination, but he wasn’t willing to count on that.

  “He could do it again.” Giliead wearily rubbed his forehead as if his head hurt. “He could have bodies growing all over this place we’d never find, not before the Gardier come back.”

  They regarded each other with glum resignation. Ilias took a deep breath. “We’ll have to take him with us.”

  “Are you sure?” Gerard asked again. He and Tremaine were seated on a dark stone block on a bluff overlooking the sea. This had been a plaza or meeting area about the time the underwater city had been built. Dark flat-roofed stone buildings formed two sides of it, one concealing a shaft leading to the caves and the other a rough set of stairs down the rocky overgrown hill to one of the canals. The twisted trees and thick vegetation had eaten away much of the stone paving but the outline of the plaza was still visible. The misty sky was a heavy gray and waves washed against the rocks below, twisted into fantastic shapes by wind and water. Tremaine sighed. “No. For the last time, no. If you want to be sure, ask it. ‘Are you Arisilde? One click for yes, two clicks for no.’ ” She knew she was hovering on the edge of exhausted collapse, but she couldn’t seem to manage it. All she could do was sit here being dimly surprised her aching body was still upright and argue with Gerard.

  Nearby some of Ander’s men had set up the small portable wireless brought with the other supplies from Ile-Rien. Earlier, Deric had climbed on top of the taller stone building to string up the wire that worked as an antenna. If the Ravenna managed to successfully cross through the portal, she would signal them, but so far they had heard nothing but dead air. The wounded Arites, his arm in a sling to keep him from moving his injured shoulder, had been pressed into service as a radio operator. He sat cross-legged in front of the little device, studying it with wary curiosity.

  The freed prisoners roamed over the plaza, some gathered in groups talking excitedly, others sitting alone or staring dully into the distance. They came mainly from the Southern Seas, from Maiuta, Khiuai, the other islands, though there were people of all nationalities mixed in. There were a number of Parscians and citizens of the Low Countries who could speak Rienish well and translate for the others. They hadn’t seen the sun since they had been brought to the Gardier base and even the misty glow through the island’s fog must have been a relief. Florian and Dyani were moving among them, calming them, looking for wounded, offering water.

  There were also eleven Gardier prisoners, captured by a force led by Halian and Ander. Their hands bound with their own chains, they sat in a little group, guarded by Basimi and a group of freed slaves. Their faces were closed and still; it was hard to tell how they were taking their captivity. Only one seemed to be an officer.

  Tremaine wasn’t keen on having them here. After discovering Arisilde’s fate, she would have rather left them underground for the howlers and grend to find. Or just shot them.

  Before she and Gerard had left the caves, Ilias and a few others had gone back to look for Rulan, but he hadn’t been in the portal chamber. They had found howlers feeding on a body that might have been his in one of the other tunnels, but they couldn’t be sure.

  “I don’t want to ask it if it’s Arisilde,” Gerard said, eyeing the sphere almost warily. “This explains so much. Its ability to construct new spells of incredible complexity, to initiate attacks.” He shook his head slowly. “It must be a living hell. The Gardier have certainly proved themselves to be callous in the extreme of human life, but to use this as the entire basis for their magical craft...”

  Tremaine didn’t want to talk about it, though she could see why Gerard was unwillingly fascinated by the subject. It was undoubtedly what the Gardier would have done to him eventually. There was no telling how many captured sorcerers from Ile-Rien, Adera, Parscia and everywhere else had already shared that fate. “I don’t know. I mean, yes, I’m sure it’s horrible for the Gardier sorcerers, especially, you know, right when they put them in the crystal. But I don’t think Arisilde remembers being a person.” At least she hoped he didn’t. She didn’t want to think about the gentle, kind man she had known trapped in a metal prison. “If he did, wouldn’t he have tried to communicate with us, warn us about what he found here?” She ran a hand through her hair, grimacing at the gritty feel of the sand and dirt in it. “I think he’s been asleep and using the sphere just started to gradually wake him up.”

  “Almost asleep.” Gerard glanced at her. “It was undoubtedly his influence that allowed events from this world to appear in your writing.”

  Tremaine shook her head. There were still so many things she didn’t understand. “But how did he know things about Ilias and Giliead? They never met him.”

  “Arisilde was—is?—an extraordinarily powerful sorcerer,” Gerard said slowly. “He obviously maintained some sort of connection with this world, even from a sphere locked in a dusty cabinet at Coldcourt. The Syprian god did greet him rather readily, if you remember. And the god, whether it’s an elemental or a spirit that was at one time human, would know about the events you described, from communicating with Giliead.” Gerard winced, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I can’t think what it must be like. Trapped inside a metal prison, drifting in and out of awareness, trying, perhaps unconsciously, to reach your mind. It’s a wonder you didn’t receive any more impressions from him. Anything worse, I mean.”

  It hit Tremaine like a punch in the stomach. “He was giving up.” She stared at nothing. The images that had come to her, working their way into her play and the smattering of magazine stories, that had been the attempts to communicate. But she hadn’t responded and the sphere had been left in the cabinet, untouched. Arisilde, left without hope in whatever part of his consciousness that was still functioning, had started to die.

  And you wanted to die. Her feelings of overwhelming resignation, of being trapped, useless, hopeless. It wasn’t all him. She had been despondent enough on her own, probably with a borderline case of shell shock. That probably hadn’t helped either, when the only connection Arisilde had had was with someone who just fed his own despair.

  “This is all speculation,” Gerard was saying, “and it doesn’t tell us what happened to your father.” He looked at her gravely. “Nicholas could still be alive. He may have sent Arisilde back for help and to warn us about the Gardier. But something happened during the spell and Arisilde ended up in the sphere at Coldcourt.”

  Tremaine swallowed in a dry throat. She didn’t want to talk about this to Gerard yet. Maybe later, when she was sure. She looked out at the mist hanging above the sea, trying to focus on the here and now. Across the plaza, Florian and Dyani were trying to convince a woman with a stunn
ed expression to drink some water. “Or the Gardier captured them, killed Nicholas and tried to make Arisilde ... Tried to put him into one of their crystals. And Arisilde escaped. The hard way.”

  Gerard pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Why didn’t he warn you about Rulan?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know how.” Tremaine lifted her brows as another thought occurred. “Or maybe Arisilde wanted to see Gervas. One last time.” I know I would’ve done that, but would Arisilde?

  As Gerard mulled that over, Ander, Halian and Gyan, with the other Syprians and Rienish, emerged from the stone building that concealed the surface shaft. The Syprians stopped to douse their torches and Ander came wearily toward Tremaine and Gerard. He rested one foot on the block, leaning on his knee. “Anything on the wireless?”

  Gerard shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

  “Why don’t you sit down before you fall down?” Tremaine told Ander. Before they had evacuated the caves, she and Ander had taken the buoy back out through the passage to the little cove they had landed in. The sphere had been able to send the buoy back through the portal from there, so at least the Ravenna had still been intact and roughly where she was supposed to be at that point. They had all expected the ship to come through immediately, but that had been hours ago.

  He smiled, lifting his brows. “Why, Tremaine, it’s as if you care.”

  “Put the accent on the ‘as if.’ ” She saw Gerard staring at her and explained, “Ander and I are developing a new relationship where we’re completely honest with each other.”

  “I see.” Gerard’s glance at her was dry. “That should make the time just speed by.”

  Ilias and Giliead came out of the stone building, both dragging along something wrapped up in a tarp. Knowing Syprian reluctance to touch anything that had belonged to the Gardier, Tremaine stared in surprise. She couldn’t think what they had found down there that they actually wanted to keep.