The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (12 page)

Her brain ground into gear and she stood on tiptoe, looking over Ilias’s shoulder to see smoke rising above the buildings across the street.
It hit two— Three streets away,
she realized, judging it with senses honed in the bombings of Vienne. The Capidaran style of public building wasn’t as elaborate as the Rienish and the Gardier might have trouble picking out the Port Authority from the air. She knew they were aiming for it. If Gardier spies in Capidara had scouted the targets for this force, they would be aiming for the refugee hostel, the Port Authority, the Magistrates’ Court, the Ministry, anywhere the new spheres might be.

Another booming crash, and another, echoing from behind them…. “The harbor,” she breathed. The
Ravenna
. “Oh no.” She pounded Ilias’s shoulder and he stepped back. Keeping hold of his sleeve she pushed out of their inadequate shelter and ran down the walk back toward the Port Authority. Instinct said to take the opposite direction, away from a potential target, but the side street was the shortest path to the harbor front.

People were running, screaming, motorcars speeding past as smoke from the bomb bursts belched into the sky. A siren belatedly started to howl as Tremaine reached the corner and ran toward the harbor. She stopped at the end of the short side street, where it opened onto a raised promenade that ran alongside the waterfront. Ilias jolted to a halt beside her.

The view opened up from here into the curve of Capistown’s harbor, framed by the mountains that bordered the town on the left and the long arm of land that reached out into the bay on the right. Over the masts of the small fishing boats and pleasure craft that were docked along here, she could see the larger ships that lay farther out at anchor. One of them was the
Ravenna
.

The great liner, painted gray for camouflage in the open sea, dwarfed the military ships and the smaller
Queen Falaise
moored nearby. The abstract outline of an eye was still visible on this side of her prow, painted there to make her more acceptable to the Syprians when she had been docked outside Cineth harbor. There were three huge smokestacks on the topmost deck, and Tremaine couldn’t see any sign of steam from even one. “Go, go, go,” she muttered. “What are you waiting for?”

Then a black airship blinked into existence above the liner.

Tremaine felt her gorge rise. “Oh, God.”
This can’t be happening.
She couldn’t remember who was on the ship, Niles and Gyan for certain, maybe Kias and Calit…. She saw the dark shapes fall from the airship and held her breath.

The moment stretched forever, long enough for her heart to start beating again. The bombs must have missed.

Then fire blossomed up from the liner’s upper decks and the ship shuddered, heeling sideways as it started to vanish under the surface. Tremaine made a strangled noise in her throat.

“No.” Ilias shook his head, his expression baffled. “There’s something— She’s not going down like— And there’s no sound!” Then he caught her arm, pointing urgently. “Look at the water.”

“What?” Tremaine shook her head, sick.

“There’s a bow wave, over there.” He was bouncing on his toes in anxiety, pointing toward a churning V of white froth midway across the harbor.

Tremaine squinted. It did look like a bow wave. A large one just like a giant liner should produce.
What the hell….
The water the
Ravenna
was sinking into was flat, undisturbed. “God, you’re right!” She pounded Ilias on the shoulder, bouncing up and down herself. Now that she knew what to look for she could see a haze of steam in the air far above the apparently shipless bow wave. “It’s an illusion.” That explained the hesitation after the bombs dropped; the sorcerer controlling the illusion had had to rapidly adjust it to make it look as if they had struck a solid target. It was Niles, of course.
It’s sneaky and subtle,
Tremaine thought, jubilant. It had Niles written all over it.

Distant pops sounded as a Capidaran battery on the far side of the harbor fired at the airship. Its wards deflecting the shots, the airship dropped more bombs. But the
Ravenna
illusion wavered; Tremaine could see water through it now, the tremendous splash as the bombs hit the water, a cloud of rapidly vanishing fire and smoke. She looked again at the empty bow wave to see the real
Ravenna
’s stern shimmer into existence as the illusion cloaking it dropped away.

The Gardier aboard the airship must have realized their mistake as the illusory vessel beneath them faded. The airship turned, angling toward its real target. But fiery orange lines crept over the black surface of the balloon, flowing over it like liquid light; Tremaine knew it was the gas inside the hydrogen cells, ignited by a sphere. “Niles can’t take much more,” she said, thinking aloud. “Those two illusions— some of that he could do in advance but—”

The real
Ravenna
released another cloud of steam, then disappeared, turbulent waves radiating out from the spot it had just occupied. Niles had made a world-gate for the ship, probably right before he collapsed. Ilias swore, startled. “It’s different when you see it from outside,” he said under his breath. He had gone through world-gates several times but Tremaine didn’t think he had ever seen the
Ravenna
perform this feat from a distance.

She nodded rapidly. All the boats along the dock rocked madly as the waves from the ship’s abrupt disappearance reached them. “Let’s hope there was nothing waiting for them on the other side.” Then another bomb burst from inland made her reflexively cover her head.

Ilias pulled her back to the shadow of the warehouse behind them, saying, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Yes, we have to get back to the— Shit.” Seeing the
Ravenna
escape seemed to have freed her stunned thought processes. She went cold with dread, realizing what the airship’s exact targeting of the
Ravenna
meant. “They knew exactly where she was. They gated right on top of her. Or what they thought was her.”

Ilias nodded, flinching as another explosion sounded. Tremaine could smell smoke on the wind now. He said, “Right, there’s spies here too.”

She turned back to the side street, making for the main road again despite the danger. “We have to get to the house. The Gardier will be heading there, that’s what all this is for.” No one had known about the house and the experiment with Arisilde’s sphere except themselves, until this morning when Gerard and Ander had informed the Capidarans. The timing of the attack might be coincidence, but Tremaine didn’t much believe in coincidence anymore.

She was halfway down the side street when she heard the distinctive whoosh-thump of a falling bomb. She hit the cracked pavement, instinctively covering her head as Ilias threw himself on top of her. The explosion reverberated through the street and she heard the dull roar of fire. Ilias rolled off her and she pushed herself up, realizing she and Ilias were covered with dust and plaster flakes. The bomb had struck the Port Authority.

“Damn,” Ilias muttered, sitting up on his knees, looking up at the building. Tremaine could see that the brick wall looming over them didn’t look damaged but smoke streamed up from the roof.

There was an airship nearly right above them, moving off now but it would be coming around for another pass. Tremaine grabbed Ilias’s arm, hauling herself up. “It’ll be back. We’ve got—” She inhaled a lungful of acrid smoke and doubled over, coughing.

Ilias pulled her onward, glancing up to keep track of the airship’s progress. They reached the street to see a building had collapsed less than a block away and the air was filled with dust and smoke. The street was empty of fleeing pedestrians but a motorcar and a truck had been trapped in the debris, the motorcar crushed under a fall of bricks and the truck trapped by a beam across its steaming engine.

Ilias hesitated, scanning the street, then started toward the collapse. Tremaine had been hacking up dust trying to clear her throat enough to tell him to do just that; the airship was targeting the larger public building behind them and wouldn’t waste another bomb on the far end of the street. She just hoped Averi and the others had had time to get to safety.

They made their way through fallen bricks and abandoned motorcars, coming within a few paces of the back of the trapped truck. Tremaine had just realized it was a Capidaran government vehicle when a gunshot, loud and close, made her jump nearly out of her skin. It had come from the truck, from the cabin over the back bed.

Ilias stopped, throwing her an inquiring look. Tremaine shook her head, baffled. The Gardier didn’t land troops during bombings. At least, they hadn’t in the bombings of Ile-Rien. Then the cabin door started to swing open and Ilias dived to one side and Tremaine scrambled to the other.

The opening door blocked Tremaine’s view but she saw a lean form jump out. The door nearly thumped her in the head as Ilias hit whoever it was from the side, knocking him to the pavement.

Tremaine stepped around the door, saw the struggling figure on the bottom had a pistol in its hand and stamped on it, pinning the weapon and the hand to the pavement. A sharp cry of pain told her who this was and she swore bitterly.

As Tremaine stooped to grab the pistol, Ilias sat up, still pinning the struggling figure. It was the Gardier woman, Balin. “Guess who?” he told Tremaine, grimacing as the woman tried to knee him.

Tremaine stepped past him to look into the back of the covered truck. Two people in the red-and-gray Capidaran military uniform lay inside, the man in a crumpled heap against the front wall of the cab, the woman sprawled across the bench, a bloody wound in her chest, the silly little cap that the Capidaran Women’s Auxiliary members wore knocked askew, still held to her head by hairpins.

Tremaine felt her lips draw back in a snarl. They must have been moving Balin back to her cell in the Magistrates’ Court. From their positions, the man had been thrown forward and possibly died in the crash; Balin must have gotten his gun and shot the woman after a struggle.

Automatically chambering a round in the pistol, Tremaine looked down at the Gardier woman. Balin’s face set but her eyes were afraid; she had a trickle of blood from a scalp wound running down her cheek. Ilias, keeping a wary eye on the woman, hadn’t looked up. “What do we do with her?” he asked, breathing hard. “Take her with us?”

If I had to shoot someone in cold blood, I’d rather it be her than that idiot I killed for the truck in Maton-devara,
Tremaine thought. Not that her blood felt particularly cold at the moment. If she could trade Balin for that poor dead Gardier man she had left to grow cold in a ditch, she wouldn’t hesitate.
Unfortunately, it’s not a trade.

“We’ll take her with us,” she said. “Get her up.”

G
iliead had given up counting explosions. The distant blasts were punctuated by the eerie wail of what Gerard said were warning sirens, though they sounded further away now. Sick with anxiety about the others, Giliead paced the front hall, where Gerard was trying to use the talking curse box to reach Niles on the
Ravenna,
or Averi at the Rienish headquarters, but the thing wasn’t working properly.

Kressein, with the assistant who carried his sphere and the two Capidaran warriors, had left already, going off to try to do what they could to repel the attack. At least they could do something; Giliead felt trapped and useless.

Gerard spoke into the curse box with more agitation, then slammed the listening part down. “I’ve lost the operator.” He loosened his collar, swearing. The sphere was still tucked under his arm. Giliead had noticed it never clicked and sparked to itself the way the god-sphere did. “The lines must be down.”

Giliead didn’t know what that meant but it couldn’t be good. He looked away, gritting his teeth to keep from asking useless questions.
Fire is falling from the sky and Ilias and Tremaine are out in it.

Gerard must have read the thought from his expression. He took a deep breath, saying, “Tremaine is …more than experienced with bombings. She was in Vienne through most of the worst— They should be fine.”

“I know, but—” The crash of glass breaking from upstairs interrupted him. Giliead traded a startled look with Gerard, then beat the wizard to the stairs, taking them two at a time. He couldn’t smell a new curse. As he reached the ballroom doorway he saw the remaining Capidarans were still in the big room, the two women, the other man, all of them looking around in a puzzled way for the source of the crash. Frowning, Giliead felt a draft of fresh damp air that shouldn’t exist in the enclosed chamber. From here he could see straight through to the archway at the back, where a small room with glass windows looked down into the dead garden. He started forward; it had to be the source of the noise and the sudden draft. The Capidaran man, much closer to that end of the room than Giliead, was already moving that way. Giliead glanced over his shoulder, telling Gerard, “Something came through back there—”

From behind him, Nicholas shoved into the doorway, shouting, “Stop! Gerard, it’s—” An explosion shuddered the floor. Giliead staggered, shocked, covering his ears and wincing away from the light and sound.

He saw fire roil out of the far end of the ballroom, enveloping the Capidaran man. Giliead started forward in instinctive reaction with no idea what he meant to do, but Gerard ran past him, flinging up a hand and speaking a spate of unintelligible words.

Giliead felt the curse grow outward from Gerard, saw it as a haze of yellow light spreading toward the back of the room, passing the two women who had fallen to the floor under the force of the blast. The fire met the curse, washing up against its fragile barrier. Then the flames and heat vanished.

Giliead fell forward a step, staring. The wall that separated the little glass room was singed and blackened, a hole blasted through it revealing broken wood, shredded paper and smashed plaster. Shattered glass and wood fragments lay in an uneven pile just at the foot of the nearly invisible curse barrier, as if they had been washed there by a flood. Beyond it the Capidaran man sprawled, his clothes half burned away, his skin bloodred.

Giliead gasped a breath, choked at the stench of burned human flesh, and ran toward the injured man. He passed through the barrier, feeling it pluck at his clothes and hair, and fell to his knees beside the Capidaran. He was breathing, but with a liquid rasp that meant burned insides. Behind him, Nicholas reached the curse barrier and bounced off as he tried to pass through. Stumbling back, he swore in frustration. “Quickly, they may throw another explosive any moment. Gerard—”

Giliead hadn’t thought of that, but of course the Gardier would have more of the things. He gathered up the wounded man as carefully as he could, grimacing at the close view of burned skin showing through the gaping holes in his shirt and jacket. He said hurriedly, “Wait, don’t take away the curse, I may be able to bring him through.”

Giliead lifted the man and stood, mentally gathered himself, and stepped into the curse barrier. He felt it pull at him again, at the man in his arms, but after an instant it gave way and he stumbled through to the other side.

Cletia stood in the doorway, staring, a horrified Cimarus behind her. “Take him out in the hall,” Nicholas ordered, just as glass crashed again from the windows behind them. “Excellent timing,” Nicholas added under his breath.

Giliead agreed, feeling his stomach clench at the nearness of their escape. He carried the man out to the hallway, deliberately not looking back at the curse barrier, knowing the other weapon would explode any moment. The other two Capidarans were already out in the hall, the older woman collapsed on a chair, her face chalky with shock. “Get some wet towels,” Gerard told the other woman sharply. “There’s a bathroom just up one floor. Stay away from the windows.” He had spoken by habit in Syrnaic and had to repeat himself in Rienish as the woman stared at him blankly.

Giliead laid the man down on a couch at Gerard’s urging, just as the second blast went off, muffled behind the protective curse barrier. If someone needed better evidence that Rienish curses could protect people rather than hurt them, Giliead couldn’t think what it would be. He threw a glance at Gerard, asking, “Those are the same weapons from the Gardier world, the ones that made the fire in the building?”

“Yes, an incendiary,” Nicholas answered him, striding toward the stairs. “You, Cimarus? Get upstairs, see if you can spot them from the window on the floor above this one. Try not to open the shutters far enough to let them fire in.”

Giliead looked at Cletia, opening his mouth to reinforce the order but she jerked her chin at Cimarus, telling him to follow Nicholas’s instructions. As Cimarus bounded up the stairs, Cletia ducked back into their room and came out with her scabbarded sword, hurrying after Nicholas.

“Yes, careful,” Gerard called after him. “They’re sure to keep trying. Is the door to the back secure?”

“It was the last time I checked,” Nicholas said grimly, starting down the stairs.

Gerard had knelt beside the couch to listen to the wounded Capidaran’s labored breathing, trying to touch his ruined skin as little as possible. He sat up, taking a sharp breath, sweat staining his collar. “This man’s going to die unless I do a healing.”

“You can fix this?” Giliead asked, trying to keep the incredulity out of his tone.

Gerard gestured, distracted. “Burns aren’t difficult to heal. It’s simply a matter of encouraging the skin to grow back, something it’s already inclined to do on its own.” He shook his head slightly. “But it’s a complicated spell, I don’t know if I can hold the wards….” His jawset. “I have to try.”

Giliead got to his feet, realizing he couldn’t help here. As he started up the stairs, the younger Capidaran woman appeared again, her arms full of dripping wet cloth, passing him on the steps. The older woman staggered to her feet and came over to help her lay the towels on the wounded man.

Giliead heard Gerard ask urgently in Rienish, “Meretrisa, do you have any experience with major healing spells?”

She shook her head, her face anguished. “No, I’ve never— I don’t think I can.”

Giliead moved quickly up the stairs, going to the room where he had stored their bowcases, selecting one hurriedly and taking a handful of hunting arrows. He found Cimarus struggling to open the window at the end of the hall. “Move that metal clip over, then you can push the top part up,” Giliead told him, tossing the arrows on a handy chair and pausing to string the bow. It was a fine one made for him in Cineth, of polished goathorn, wood and bone.

Swearing in frustration, Cimarus got the glass window pushed up out of the way and cautiously eased the shutter open. “There they are,” he murmured. “Down in the garden.” Giliead looked over his shoulder and saw three men in the brown Gardier clothing confidently crossing the winter-dead garden court toward the back of the house. All carried the long black shooting weapons. “Go get a bow,” Giliead told Cimarus grimly, shouldering him aside and nocking an arrow. He drew, taking careful aim on the Gardier in the lead. These men might not be wizards but he had never felt any regret in killing those who used fire as a weapon. And it would help clear Ilias and Tremaine’s way back to the house. “There’s going to be more of them.”

T
remaine brought the taxicab to a halt, cursing. The end of their street was blocked by an automobile jammed into an ancient horse-drawn omnibus. Someone had cut the horses loose and taken them away but no attempt had been made to clear the blocked street. “Idiots,” she muttered, throwing the motorcar into reverse and only belatedly remembering to look behind her.

Braced in the back, keeping a hold on Balin, Ilias pointed out rather desperately, “We can walk from here.”

“I know, but—” But the neighborhood was too empty. She didn’t want to hurry down that street under the gaze of all those windows. And the bomb blasts were getting closer, following them the whole distance from the harbor.

She jolted the motorcar back into gear, turning down the street that ran behind their house, remembering that Mr. Derathi had made his deliveries through the back door so there had to be a passage through to it. This street was much like the other, lined with brown brick town houses, some with shops in the bottom floors. It was empty, quiet, as everyone huddled in terror indoors. She braked at about the spot where their house was in the opposite street. Craning her neck, she was rewarded with the sight of a narrow alley running between the two brown brick buildings into the center of the block.

Tremaine bailed out, pausing as Ilias dragged a struggling Balin out of the back. The smell of smoke was strong here, but the breeze must be coming from the harbor. Balin glared at her, spitting a curse, but Tremaine was too occupied to surrender to the impulse to kill her. She led the way down the narrow alley, carrying her pistol down at her side, concealed by a fold of her coat. Dirt had drifted over the paving and weeds and determined flowers had taken root, but there was a flattened path down the center. At the end was a battered wooden gate in their house’s garden wall, standing open. She was willing to bet Derathi hadn’t left that open this morning.

She waved for Ilias to wait and he pulled Balin to a halt, covering her mouth when she tried to shout. Tremaine turned back to her to put the pistol’s muzzle right under her nose, saying quietly in Aelin, “If you bite him, three guesses what I’ll do to you.”

Ilias lifted a brow in appreciation. Balin looked convinced, so Tremaine turned back to the gate, carefully peering inside. There was no real spot for anyone to hide in the small walled yard. She spotted the first brown-clad body crumpled in the weedy dry flower bed and twitched, raising her pistol. An instant later she saw the feathered arrow shaft standing out of the man’s back and knew he wouldn’t be causing trouble anytime soon. She eased a little further through the gate and spotted another Gardier floating in the stagnant green water of the fountain, and several more sprawled on the dirty stone flags.
Looks like we had company, and company regretted it,
she thought, grimly pleased.

She glanced up at the house, grimacing as she saw the second-floor windows in the conservatory had been broken out. She looked down again, realizing that broken glass littered the paving. “That’s not good,” she muttered, stepping forward. The windows must have been blown out in an explosion. Glass cracked under her boot and she held out her free hand, in case there was a—

“Dammit!” Tremaine leapt back, gritting her teeth, shaking her numb hand. Her fingers pricked and tingled from even brief contact with the ward. She glared at the house, hoping the ward had also announced her presence as well as zapping her with what felt like an electric shock, but no one appeared at the door or windows.

“Tremaine,” Ilias said quietly.

“It was a—” She turned, saw he had his hand clapped tightly over Balin’s mouth, that he was looking at the far wall of the garden. Not the wall, she realized a moment later, but the three sets of bootprints in the dirt beside it.
Illusion,
she realized with a sick sensation,
they can’t get past a ward set with a sphere’s help, so they’re waiting for Gerard to drop it to let us in.
“—a ward, right, you know how we always—”
Say the leader’s the one in the middle, say he’s holding the crystal maintaining the illusion about chest level—
She twitched her pistol free of her coat, raised it and fired.

The report rang out as the illusion shattered between one blink and the next. Two Gardier flung themselves away and one fell to the ground, crystal shards spattered with blood scattered around him. The telltale remnants of liquid light pooled on the ground, all that was left of the sorcerer who had been trapped inside the crystal.
Guessed right,
Tremaine thought, already scrambling for cover behind the raised edge of the fountain. A shot into the coping sprayed her with stone chips and she rolled away, feeling gravel and broken glass grit under her back. With the crystal broken the Gardier couldn’t destroy her pistol with their mechanical disruption spell, but that didn’t stop them from shooting.

Ilias had flung Balin aside and tackled the nearest Gardier, taking the man to the ground before he could bring up his rifle. Tremaine popped up to take a shot at the other, missed as he fired at her. The bullet hit the dead man in the fountain, making the corpse jerk horrifically. Two more Gardier vaulted over the wall. Ilias had killed the one he had tackled and now crouched behind the gate, taking cover from the gunfire. Balin, knowing the Gardier might not realize she was one of them, had flattened herself into the weeds across the court. Or she might just remember what had happened to some of the other Gardier prisoners, killed by a Liaison to keep them from talking.