The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (35 page)

His shocked expression as it shot toward him made it all worthwhile.

The spell struck him with full force, slamming him into the table, jarring it backward on the floor, spilling and breaking bottles and jars, sending papers flying. The sphere shivered, spinning like a top. Ixion reeled across the table, gasping for air, red suffusing his face. He struggled, clawing at his throat, and Florian felt a confused surge of triumph and horror.
He did this to himself,
she thought.
He chose the spell, not—
Gathering himself, Ixion shook his head violently, pushing up off the table, taking deep breaths. The red color faded from his face as he leaned over, spitting out something dark that hit the floor and steamed like hot tar.

Ixion straightened up, wiped his mouth off on his sleeve. He smiled grimly at Florian. “Why, flower, I didn’t think you had it in you. Too bad I’ll have to rip it right out.”

Oh, hell.
Desperate, Florian looked around, spotting Nicholas’s pistol on the floor. Nicholas was just pushing himself up, shaking his head, still dazed. She stretched, grabbing for the gun.

Ixion turned and snatched up the sphere, lifted it even as it spun and threw off sparks in a paroxysm of rage. He whispered a word and cracks shot across the tarnished copper surface. It spun faster and Florian could see light streaming through the metal. She cried out, lurching forward, but light and sound coalesced into an ear-shattering crack and Ixion’s hand suddenly held a steaming collection of metal fragments, broken wheels and gears.

Breathing hard, Ixion turned his hand, letting the fragments trickle out and fall scattered to the floor. He looked at her, eyes still furious. “Now what will you do?”

Staring past him, Florian barely heard. There was a man standing framed in the doorway behind Ixion. He was tall and slender, dressed in a somewhat grubby brown sweater and light-colored canvas pants. He had white hair, long enough to just brush his collar and too wispy and soft to be the white of age. His eyes were a soft blue that looked violet in this light.

He caught her eye and winked. “Ack,” Florian managed, the most coherent noise she was capable of at the moment.

Ixion must have read her face. He twisted around, staring. The man fixed his gaze on him, his eyes hardening, his smile taking on an edge of contempt. He looked at the broken metal fragments still clutched in Ixion’s hand, and said, “Oh, it’s far too late for that.”

Ixion cocked his head, fascinated. “So you’ve come out of hiding.”

The man didn’t move. He said, “It’s the pettiness that always surprises me. You would think the powerful would have the luxury of not taking offense.”

Ixion grimaced. “You can’t—”

Florian felt a surge of etheric energy that sucked any remaining warmth out of the room and made the electric lights flicker. Ixion’s eyes rolled back and he dropped to the floor, banging his head on the table on the way down. He sprawled limply on the floor, unmoving.

Florian looked toward the doorway again, but Arisilde was gone. The dank cold in the room made her shiver. “Did I see— Was that really—”

Niles pushed a broken chair away, managing to struggle upright. A cut on his forehead was bleeding freely but he threw a sharp look at Nicholas, saying, “Was it him, Valiarde?”

“Yes.” Nicholas stumbled to his feet. “He looked exactly as I last saw him, when I left him on the island.” She could tell by the tightness in his face and the way he kept looking away that he was fighting an uncharacteristic surge of emotion. “I thought for a moment— But when he disappeared, it was obvious I was looking at a ghost.”

“A very powerful ghost,” Niles added grimly, going to help Giaren extricate himself from a shattered side table.

Florian cautiously approached Ixion, looking down at him. She had expected burns maybe, or some monumental alteration. But Ixion was only white and still, like any other dead man.
Huh?
She frowned, leaning over to look more closely. “He’s breathing.”

Nicholas moved to her side, gazing down at Ixion with lifted brows. “Of course. Arisilde isn’t a murderer. Unlike some of us.”

T
he next morning a galley arrived at Dead Tree Point, the nearest safe anchorage on the island. Tremaine stood on the bluff with Obelin, watching with arms folded as Ilias swam out to the ship. They quickly lost sight of him; the headlands and the sea were obscured by mist, the galley seeming to float in a pool of white vapor.

The waves lapped on the tumbled black rocks sheltering the cove and the ship rolled gently. It was a big galley, bigger than the
Swift
had been, with a double bank of oars and olive green sails currently rolled up against the spars. It also had a much more prominent prow, painted with the stylized eyes that graced every Syprian ship. Tremaine thought she was looking at a war galley, though she had only seen them beached and lying in their sheds at Cineth harbor. There was something low and dangerous about its shape that the Syprian merchant and fishing ships lacked. She hadn’t been able to pick out Halian, but other Syprians milled on the deck, waiting impatiently for Ilias to arrive.

Beside her, Obelin shifted and scratched the gray stubble on his chin, asking, “These people will accept us, you think?”

Tremaine took a deep breath, considering. That was another problem to add to the increasing list. The Aelin had been torn out of their time and place, so isolated they might as well have been trapped in one of the Gardier crystals for the past twenty years. They would need a place where they could find a home, and if the Syprians wouldn’t accept them, then they would probably end up in Capistown, just in time for the next big Gardier invasion. Obelin had learned enough by now that she suspected he might be thinking along similar lines. She said wearily, “I think they’ll at least give us lunch, and that’s about as far ahead as I’m willing to plan for right now.”

When told earlier that the galley had arrived, Giliead had pointed out that the waterpeople must have managed to deliver the message late last night and been lucky enough to actually catch Halian in Cineth.
Lucky is a good word for it,
Tremaine thought wryly. Despite rationing, they had run out of food that morning and Tremaine and Ilias and Gerard had been debating the notion of how palatable roast howler would be and could they separate one from a pack and get its body to the surface without being eaten themselves instead. Tremaine was mostly relieved they had been able to table that idea. She was deliberately not thinking about anything else. The galley, even as fast as it looked, would take most of the remaining morning and the afternoon to reach Cineth, and she didn’t plan to get there nearly hysterical with worry.

Obelin nodded. “Perhaps you’re right. Our luck has brought us this far, we can trust it a little further.”

Ilias was climbing a net up the galley’s side. Tremaine grimaced. Ilias had said once that she lived on luck.
But luck runs out….

F
lorian sat in a chair in the office area of the ship’s hospital, one hand on her roiling stomach. “Are you sure?” she asked a little desperately. “You can’t use a spell to fix it?”

The hospital was a small maze of green-painted metal-walled wardrooms with a dispensary, operating theater and tiny cabin-offices for the doctor and nurses, with the office area in the center. It had been fairly empty so far this trip, occupied only with the usual minor ailments and injuries caused by sea travel and people going up and down unfamiliar stairways on a rolling ship. Now Nicholas was leaning against one of the wooden filing cabinets along the wall, holding an ice pack to his head, and Giaren was in one of the wardrooms having a broken wrist tended.

“No.” Niles, rather bruised and bedraggled himself, gave her a forbidding look. “It’s the nature of the turnback, Florian, I can’t use a spell on it. I’m afraid it has to come up the same way it went down. I assure you, if left to its own devices, it will choose a far more painful method of exit.”

“Right.” Reluctantly, Florian took the basin and the bottle of ipecac he handed her. She still felt gratified over how well the turnback had worked, though it had been Arisilde who had dealt the final blow to Ixion. They just weren’t sure exactly what that final blow was.

“So Arisilde Damal is no longer in the sphere, he’s in the ship itself.” Colonel Averi rubbed a hand over his face. He was gray with fatigue. “How is that possible?”

“I’ve been asking myself that question over and over again, and I have no idea,” Niles told him wearily. The cut on his forehead had been closed with sorcerous healing, but Niles was still in his shirtsleeves, his hair disarrayed, and he looked angry and out of sorts.

Averi’s brows drew together in consternation. “He’s made no attempt to communicate?”

“Not… coherently.” Niles gestured helplessly. “He was in the sphere for a long time and never made direct attempts to talk to us. I’m not sure his situation in the ship would change that. It may be that he’s simply forgotten how to speak on our level.”

Nicholas cleared his throat. “That may or may not be the case. Before all this, Arisilde did go through prolonged periods where he was very difficult to communicate with. On any level.”

Averi stared at him. “But he isn’t dangerous, correct?” At Nicholas’s faintly incredulous expression he amended, “Not dangerous to us, I meant. He’s still in his right mind.”

Nicholas sighed, set the ice pack atop the cabinet and dropped into a chair. “I’ve known Arisilde Damal most of my life. He hasn’t been in his right mind since his early twenties, and thinking back on it, I have my doubts about him before that. But while his behavior has occasionally been disturbing, he has never been violent. Even when he was being attacked by someone or even some creature, he never seemed to take it personally.”

Florian lifted her brows, startled.
Tremaine said he was eccentric, but…
To Florian
eccentric
meant a rather absentminded scholarly sort of person who perhaps dressed unfashionably. She liked eccentric people. Or at least those kinds of eccentric people.
I should know by now that Tremaine’s definition of eccentric is… eccentric.

Niles frowned, considering this. “When he was in the sphere, he did seem to be rather… ferocious in our attacks against Gardier ships.” He shook his head, admitting, “Though that could just be the way it appears to us, because the sphere itself increases the speed at which spells are performed.”

Nicholas leaned back in the chair and lifted a brow. “Or that considering what the Gardier did to him, he does take them personally.”

“Valiarde, for God’s sake, decide which side of the argument you’re on.” Averi shook his head wearily, turning back to Niles. “What about Ixion? Do you know yet what Arisilde did to him?”

“Not really.” Niles looked toward the closed door of the wardroom where Ixion now lay. “The etheric signatures I can detect are complicated, and all center around his brain, his nerves.” He shook his head, annoyed. “The fact that Lord Chandre returned to normal after it was done—”

“Yes.” Nicholas interrupted with a dry comment. “Pity that.”

Niles frowned at Nicholas as if he suspected him of ill-timed levity, but Florian knew by now that he was serious. Ixion hadn’t been the only one Nicholas had meant to eliminate with his little trick. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Niles continued resolutely, “It makes me think whatever it was, it was something fairly… devastating.”

“Ilias said that after Giliead killed Ixion the first time, the transformation spell Ixion put on him just stopped, and Ilias went back to normal,” Florian put in, absently tucking her basin under her arm. “Just because Ixion’s still breathing doesn’t mean …you know, that he’s still in there.”

Niles lifted his brows. “True.”

Averi frowned. “I don’t think any of us believe for a moment that whatever Ixion was doing with that vat was actually meant to create a body for the sorceress trapped in the Gardier crystal.”

Niles nodded, lost in thought. “I’ll be very interested to see what Kressein finds when he examines the contents, and—”

The ship’s alarm went off, startling Florian so much that she dropped her basin.
Oh, no,
she thought wearily. She had been about to point out that the howlers and the grend and all the other curselings created by Ixion hadn’t died or vanished with the sorcerer’s first “death,” and that whatever was in the vat probably wouldn’t either.
That’s got to be—

Nicholas pushed away from the cabinet with a tired grimace. “I think your curiosity is about to be satisfied, Niles.”

I
still can’t believe the Gardier came from these people,” Halian said thoughtfully, leaning back on the rail and looking across the deck. He was a big man, weathered by sun and sea, his long graying hair tied back in a simple knot. He had married Giliead’s mother, Karima, some years ago, a second marriage for both of them, for love rather than land or family influence.

Ilias turned to look, the wind tossing his hair. They had gotten everyone bundled onto the ship and escaped the haze of mist surrounding the island. Now the older Aelin were up in the bow, drinking in the limitless blue vault of the sky, the warm sun and the sea. It made Ilias remember what Obelin had told them, that before the Aelin were trapped they had lived a wandering life, traveling long distances from their home. They had been imprisoned in the fortress so long they must have forgotten what it was like to move. “I don’t think they believe it yet either,” he said ruefully. After their time in Capistown, Ilias had missed the open sea himself. Sailing on the
Ravenna
had been very fine, standing at mountain height above the water, but being close enough to catch the spray was good too. It was almost enough to let him forget what they were heading into.

Halian had told them the waterpeople had climbed up on the dock at Cineth and practiced their usual method of passing on a message, which was to tell everyone in earshot until someone took action. The word had reached Halian quickly, and he had borrowed this ship, the
Importune,
to come after them. It also meant that everyone would know they were back.

The younger Aelin were everywhere, down in the hold trying to talk to the rowers despite the language barrier, up in the bow, atop the steering platform. Halian had had to pull a few crewmen off the oars over the objections of their rowing mates and give them the job of making sure no one fell overboard. Aras was trying to help at this task, and Vervane was sitting with Meretrisa and Elon in the stern cabin. Tremaine and Gerard were both asleep back there as well, which Ilias was glad of, as they both looked as if they needed it. One of the crew was guarding Balin, giving Cimarus a respite.

“They truly have nowhere to go?” Halian asked, watching Davret catch one of the younger boys and swing him around in pure glee, her skirt twirling around her.

“Not that we know of,” Giliead told him, looking out over the waves. They were making for Cineth, following the forested hills of the shoreline. “The Gardier who came after us were ready to kill them all, even the children. There’s something about this man, this Castines, the one who trapped them in the fortress. If he’s as important as we think, the Gardier would probably kill them just for knowing he ever existed.”

Halian nodded grimly, looking out over the sea. After a moment he shot a look at Giliead. “You want to tell me now what’s wrong?”

Ilias took a deep breath. They had already told Halian briefly about the
Ravenna
’s voyage to Capidara, about Arites’s fate and their discoveries on their odd journey back. They hadn’t told him what had happened during their escape from the Gardier world.

Giliead hesitated, his eyes still on the not-so-distant shore. He shifted to face Halian. “I used curses.”

Ilias managed to keep himself from looking guiltily around to see if anyone else was in earshot.

Halian tilted his head, as if he hadn’t heard right, his brows drawing together. “What?”

“We were trapped in the Gardier world, with no Rienish wizard to get us out,” Giliead told him, his face bare of any emotion, as if all this meant nothing. “I could hear the dead Gardier wizard, trapped inside the crystal we had captured. She told me a curse to make the Gardier stop firing on us, so we could reach the flying whale tethered to the roof. I made it work. Then she gave me the curse to let us take the flying whale back to our world, so we could get back to the
Ravenna
. I made that work too. When the Gardier found us in the fortress, when Tremaine and Gerard were gone, I talked to their crystal and it told me the curse to make the Gardier weapons break, in exchange for killing it.”

Halian had said “But—” three times during that short speech. Now he shook his head, aghast, his expression sickened. “I don’t understand, how is that possible?” He looked at Ilias, who just looked away.
This is not going well.

Halian stared at Giliead for a long moment. “You know what they’re going to say, don’t you? That you’ve been too lenient in the past with people accused of cursing, that you let people go when you shouldn’t have, that that’s why Ixion tricked you into bringing him to Andrien. That it’s corrupted you.”

Ilias swore.
This again.
Angry past bearing, knowing he should keep his mouth shut, he said roughly, “We didn’t bring Ixion to Andrien, we brought a man named Licias whose family had been killed by a curseling. We were tricked, fine, but corruption had nothing to do with it. And we were right about the Rienish wizards, the god said so.”

Halian ignored him, still watching Giliead. He asked quietly, “What do you think the god is going to say about this?”

“I’ll find out.” Giliead faced him directly, his eyes giving nothing away, but the tension in his body belied his calm tone. “What do you say about it?”