The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) Read online

  Finally, both men returned; Giliead with a thoughtful expression and Ilias frowning. “So you couldn’t find his tracks?” Tremaine asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

  Ilias shook his head, sharing a grim look with Giliead. “We found too many tracks.”

  Tremaine stared. “What?”

  “People, a lot of people, have been passing through here, back and forth, for a long time,” Giliead clarified. He glanced around again, brows drawn together as he considered the situation. “Their tracks are everywhere. You can even see paths in all this broken stone, once you know where to look.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Tremaine muttered. She couldn’t see paths through the rubble, even when she looked. “But we didn’t see any sign of them back in the gate chamber.”

  “They must get their food and water and wood somewhere else. There has to be another entrance,” Ilias pointed out. “They probably don’t go to our half of the fortress often; there isn’t anything useful there but those fountains.”

  “And those are probably all over the building….” Tremaine suppressed a groan. “But they don’t come to the gate chamber, so they must not use the spell—”

  “Unless there’s curse circles all over the building too.” Ilias shook his head, distracted. He grimaced. “This makes it different.”

  “It could be a wizard,” Giliead told Tremaine before she could ask. “Our kind of wizard. They find places like this to take over, like Ixion did on the island. These people that go back and forth through here, they could be slaves, apprentices. And if it is a wizard, there could be curselings.”

  Tremaine nodded slowly, getting to her feet, her palms sweaty on the rifle stock. He was right. They knew this place was in the Syrnai. And the Syrnai meant Syprian wizards. “And I don’t suppose there’s a god around here.”

  Giliead shook his head, still grim. “No. I’d feel it if there was one here. They don’t conceal themselves like the god-sphere. There’s nothing.”

  “That other tall section, which Gerard thought was another gate chamber, should be that way.” Ilias jerked his chin toward one of the branching corridors. “If they use curses, that’s where we’ll find them.”

  Nicholas strolled along the Ravenna’s top deck, taking in the early-morning air and waiting for a chance to make trouble. He knew he wouldn’t have to wait long.

  One of the quicker ways to bypass the ship’s long internal corridors was to walk along the outer deck and take the outside stairs, and on such a fine warm day as this, there was no reason not to. From his vantage point on the rail, Nicholas watched people pass back and forth on the open decks below. Lord Chandre had been assigned a suite on the Sun Deck in the Ravenna’s forecastle, where the officers and officials were quartered. Another sign that his influence was growing unpleasantly fast.

  The cabin corridors in the forecastle would be crowded at this time, with Averi’s staff, the Capidarans and ship’s officers heading off for breakfast and preparing for the day’s meetings. The meetings were mostly useless attempts to make the best of the small amount of reliable information on what was happening in Ile-Rien; Nicholas wasn’t bothering to attend most of them.

  As the morning activity gradually calmed down, he saw Ixion walk out onto the deck below, accompanied by a token pair of Capidaran guardsmen, the Capidaran sorcerer Kressein, and a Rienish man known to be a political ally to Lord Chandre. Yes, that’s charming, he thought with a wry grimace. Let’s post two useless guards, an octogenarian sorcerer and a trained bootlicker to guard the dangerous prisoner. Colonel Averi was probably about to go mad with exasperation.

  Watching the group carefully, Nicholas decided Kressein did not look entirely happy with the situation either. The old man moved stiffly, both with age and with affront at his companion. That’s interesting. Nicholas had never been too sure of Kressein, one way or the other, and there hadn’t been much time in Capistown to remedy that. The Capidaran sorcerer might not like being forced to work with Ixion—and who would? Nicholas thought, suppressing a smile. The man brings new meaning to the word odious. And also the word obvious, for that matter. But Kressein’s dislike for the Syprian sorcerer might not prevent him from siding with him if he thought it would help him defend Capidara. Personally, Nicholas would rather see Ile-Rien vanish from the earth than see it in the hands of men like Chandre. He lifted a sardonic brow, mostly at himself. You, an idealist? Tremaine would be shocked.

  Wherever she was.

  Waiting until the group disappeared into one of the doorways further down the deck, Nicholas took the outside passenger stairs down to the Sun Deck. He stepped in through the outer hatch into the corridor, dark after the bright morning outside. He nodded politely to a couple of harried Viller Institute secretaries carrying armloads of files. As soon as the two women turned the corner, he stepped into the steward’s alcove, drawing the door shut behind him.

  It was a small dusty recess, with a water tap in the counter, a gas ring and lights that were attached to call buttons for all the suites. Nicholas leaned back so he could look through the grille in the door, placed so that the steward could see most of the length of the special suite corridor. He didn’t have to wait long before Chandre left his room and strode down the corridor, with two aides in tow to make certain no one mistook him for a lesser personage, like the captain or the chief engineer. He didn’t pause to lock the door. Nicholas lifted a brow, waiting. Yes, I thought the man would be vain enough to bring a valet.

  After another few moments, a young Aderassi man, wearing a very correct suit and with his long hair slicked back, stepped out of the suite, locking the door carefully behind him. He hurried away, probably to grab a hasty breakfast before returning to the room.

  Nicholas waited until the valet had turned the corner, then slipped out of the alcove. A few moments with his lockpicks had the door to Chandre’s suite open, and once inside he moved swiftly to the main bedroom, ignoring the dispatch cases and letter files lying about. He found the tortoiseshell brush set on the marble-topped dressing table in the bedroom, removed a few strands of graying hair from the brush, slipped the hair into an envelope and pocketed it.

  He left the suite rapidly, pausing only to manipulate the lock until the tumblers clicked, so the valet would notice nothing wrong when he returned. Then he went down the hall to the room on the end, where Ixion was quartered.

  There were no guards now and no one inside, though if there was that hardly mattered. This time Nicholas meant to be noticed.

  He took a short prybar out of the inside pocket of his coat and used it to clumsily—though not too clumsily—jimmy the lock. Once he had the door open he stepped inside, but he only waited a few moments, long enough to make sure any ward the sorcerer had set would register his presence. He didn’t bother to search, knowing Ixion would be too clever to keep anything incriminating where his captors, especially Kressein, might find it. The scent hanging in the air made Nicholas wrinkle his nose in disapproval. But not too clever to experiment with an inferior variety of hair oil.

  He stepped outside, pulled the door until the latch clicked, then headed away down the corridor, humming an old music hall tune.

  Huh. I’m not sure what that was about, Florian thought, from her position scrunched up in the corner of the corridor. Her concealment charm was carefully cast, but she hadn’t dared to move once Nicholas had entered the corridor, barely breathing as he had moved from Chandre’s room down to Ixion’s. Nicholas was just too alert, too suspicious for anyone trying to use magic to sneak up on him.

  Florian had no idea what he had done in Chandre’s room; he had only been in there a few moments. And in Ixion’s room he had done nothing but make it obvious that… Oh, I see. At least partly. He was drawing Ixion’s attention away from her by provoking him deliberately. Still deep in thought, she slipped along the corridor, passing Chandre’s valet unseen as the man hurried back, carrying a mug of coffee and a couple of breakfast rolls.

  She had the feeling Ni
cholas’s plan would work. Her mouth twisted ruefully. I just hope it doesn’t get him killed.

  Chapter 10

  All the tracks had given Ilias a vision of a wizard and a clutch of curselings, squatting in a second circle chamber like a nest of goat spiders, drawn by the curses in the symbols whether they knew how to use them or not. The wizards of the Syrnai usually preferred to kill each other rather than work together, but this place might well have drawn two or more to cooperate in order to exploit it. If it was only one wizard, there would still be a number of slaves cursed to obey him.

  Giliead led the way through broad corridors that seemed too airy and full of sunlight to make a habitation for anything so dark. Ilias could tell he was listening and looking carefully for curse traps, from the way he held his head and paused frequently. But there was nothing so far, which might only mean the curse traps were outside the fortress.

  Giliead paused at the next corner, making a sharp gesture. Ilias stopped, then leaned back to tell Tremaine in a bare whisper, “Stay here.”

  She nodded, lifting her brows and mouthing the words “Don’t get killed.”

  Ilias just grimaced in reply. He stepped quietly to Giliead’s side, leaning out cautiously until he could see around the corner.

  There was a foyer with a broad archway, revealing another giant chamber, at least as large as the one with the curse circles. But framed in that archway, lit by shafts of sunlight from the louvers in the tall arched ceiling and outlined against the pale blue-white stone, there was a ship. Ilias blinked, staring, too caught by the sight for a heartbeat to even look for human inhabitants.

  The ship rested on the stone floor, nearly the size of a war galley, but the prow and stern both curved up to points and the gray wood looked too thin to weather any storm. The tilted deck was nearly covered by cabins of different sizes, so there was little or no open space to move around, and Ilias couldn’t see the mast or the tiller either. There was floral carving along the rail, not too different from something you would see in the Syrnai, but it wasn’t painted like a Syprian vessel and there were no eyes. He spotted a long diagonal crack in the hull, probably made when it had struck the hard stone floor. But how?

  Then he saw the square outline of a door, below where the waterline would be. Ilias bit his tongue to keep from swearing aloud. It’s a flying whale, a flying whale made out of wood. The soft part, the great billowy body that caught fire so easily was gone, that was why it was so hard to recognize. And this body of wood looked more like something rational people might build than the bare metal bodies of the other flying whales. Near it, set out on the floor, he could see blankets, rough clay pots, other household goods.

  Giliead thumped him on the back urgently, pointing at something on the other side of the chamber.

  Slightly dreading the thought of what would be more worth staring at than a wooden flying whale locked inside this giant room like a beetle in amber, Ilias eased further out, trying to see what Giliead was pointing at.

  He found himself swallowing in a suddenly dry throat. Oh. Oh, no. From this angle he had a limited view of the far wall of the chamber. It was covered with small alcoves, each barely large enough to accommodate a lamp or a jar. But inside each one was a hefty piece of rock covered with crystal. Just like the crystals the Gardier used to make the curse circles work, to protect their flying whales, to destroy the Rienish weapons, to kill. The crystals that contained the captive souls of wizards.

  Ilias looked up to exchange an appalled expression with Giliead, then they both quietly retreated from the corner.

  They moved back to where Tremaine waited impatiently. Keeping his voice to an urgent whisper, Ilias asked Giliead, “You think there’s a Gardier wizard in every one of those crystals?”

  Tremaine stared. “What?”

  Giliead shook his head, lips pursed, deeply worried. “I can’t tell. I have to get in there, I have to get close.”

  Tremaine was poking Ilias with increasing urgency. He told her, “There’s a wrecked flying whale and a wall full of crystals in there, and a place where people have been living, but no circles.”

  She clapped a hand to her forehead, baffled and horrified. “That’s… Here? I don’t know what that means.”

  Giliead shook his head with a grimace. “It could be an ambush, but—”

  “But let’s do it anyway,” Ilias finished, ready to get it over with. He knew what Giliead was thinking. They had to find out if those crystals were occupied or not. Ilias didn’t think he could turn his back on them and walk away without knowing; he knew Giliead couldn’t.

  Tremaine nodded. “I’ll cover you.”

  Ilias looked at her worriedly. If the long shooting weapon came apart like the small one had… “If they’re Gardier—”

  She grimaced, motioning for him to get moving. “I know.”

  Ilias went forward with Giliead, staying close to the wall, then he darted across to take the opposite side of the archway. Tremaine waited just at the shelter of their corner. From his position, Ilias had a better view of the crystal alcoves; he could also see that this half of the chamber was empty of human or Gardier occupants. He looked a question at Giliead and got a nod in return; Gil could see the opposite side of the chamber from his vantage point and it was empty as well. There still might be Gardier hiding behind the bulk of the whale, or inside it, but they had already decided to take that chance.

  As Giliead drew his sword and stepped into the room, Ilias followed. He took a few paces forward, every nerve alert for any sound, any movement, the back of his neck prickling with the feel of being watched. Wasting no time, Giliead moved purposefully toward the wall of crystals.

  He heard a faint step behind him and knew it was Tremaine, moving to the side of the archway to cover them with the shooting weapon. I’m going to have to teach her to use a bow. He would start as soon as they got out of there alive.

  Scanning the chamber, he kept track of Giliead out of the corner of his eye, watching him cautiously approach the crystals. When he saw Giliead retreat, he fell back and they both reached the archway together. Tremaine lowered her weapon as they retreated back around the corner. “Well?” she demanded in a harsh whisper.

  Giliead shook his head sharply. “All the crystals are dead, empty.”

  Still looking toward the silent chamber, Ilias frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Why are the crystals here? In our world? And how come the whale is made of wood?”

  “Good questions,” Tremaine muttered. “That looked like one of the old flying wha—airships—the Gardier had, like the ones we saw on that clock in Devara, in the books we found in the library.” Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Was anyone in there? People, I mean, somewhere out of sight.”

  Ilias considered it, trading a look with Giliead, then said, “Yes. There’s somebody watching in there, hiding. Probably more than one.”

  “The Gardier are hiding from us,” Tremaine repeated. She propped the shooting weapon on her shoulder, gesturing in frustration. “Does that sound odd to anybody?”

  “Well, yes,” Ilias admitted. “They aren’t cowards.”

  “And we know there’s more than one of them,” Giliead agreed. “Those tracks were recent.” He looked thoughtful. “Going in after them is no good—they can pick us off easily. We need to lure them out.”

  Tremaine nodded, biting her lip. “Right. Let’s leave them a message.” She glanced around at the floor, finding a clear spot. Shifting the shooting weapon to her other hand, she crouched down and drew some symbols in the dirt with her finger.

  “Is that a trail sign?” Ilias asked, frowning, then realized what it had to be. “Something in their language?”

  She nodded, leaning forward to finish the string of symbols. “The spell only taught me how to speak Aelin, not read it. But if I’m remembering right, that says ‘Paths of the Sky.’ According to Nicholas, that was the title of one of the books we found. I’m probably not getting all the letters right, but if these peo
ple are Gardier, it should be close enough to make them curious.”

  “But that would make sense.” Giliead looked back toward the enigmatic chamber. “And so far nothing else about this does.”

  That afternoon, Florian first made sure Nicholas wasn’t doing anything more than consulting with the Capidaran officers about the Gardier. Then she went to the First Class smoking room, meaning to take some precautions of her own. The door was shut and locked and she knocked impatiently. She was certain Niles was in there; he had barely left the room since the ship had departed Capistown.

  After a moment, Giaren eased the door open cautiously, lifted his brows as he saw her, and glanced back to say, “It’s Florian.”

  She heard Niles grunt an answer and Giaren stepped back, opening the door and shutting it carefully again as soon as she stepped in.

  Niles was seated at the table, looking into a china bowl half filled with water. A scrying bowl, Florian thought, intrigued. She moved to his side as Giaren locked the door again. Gerard had had dozens of these bowls on the voyage to Capidara, allowing him to keep track of individuals or to watch certain areas of the ship, wherever there was a reflective surface for the spell to exploit. And on the Ravenna, with all the glass, crystal and polished metal, there were more than enough reflective surfaces.

  “What are you watching?” she asked quietly.

  Niles reached out and took her hand. “Ixion’s little experiment,” he said, sounding preoccupied. Giaren, who didn’t have enough magical talent to see into the bowl, even with assistance, settled his hip on the table at Niles’s other side.

  Florian leaned over, peering into the bowl. With Niles’s help, she could now see a blurred convex image of one of the Ravenna’s service corridors, a doorway, then a brief glimpse of a room.

  Niles whispered something and the image of the room became larger, clearer. Florian could see metal walls painted yellow, so it could be any one of a hundred storerooms aboard the ship. There was a large drum or container that looked as if it had started life as something from the ship’s innards somewhere. Steam rose out of it and Florian caught a bare glimpse of a hand tossing something in. The view retreated so abruptly it gave Florian a twinge of vertigo. She blinked, lifting her head. Looking carefully at the bowl, she saw a blue thread settled in the bottom. “Who are you following? Not Ixion, surely.”