The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (44 page)

They walked for some time, Gerard’s soft wizard light drifting along, revealing the dusty bricks and the dark cross passages, the trail signs Ilias wished he could read. He recognized many of the same symbols from the trail signs on the
Ravenna,
but frustratingly these were all arranged in different patterns. Nicholas, still leading the way with Giliead beside him, would stop occasionally to consult one of the signs, then take another passage. They also passed a great many metal doors, set back into the walls and touched with rust, though the locks looked heavy and strong. Tremaine explained in a whisper that they were the doors into the train tunnels. Ilias still had only a vague idea of what a train was, but it didn’t sound as impressive as the
Ravenna
. From what she had said, they should be able to hear the things moving in the adjacent tunnels, but there was nothing. The Gardier didn’t seem to be using them, and Ilias found himself wondering if they would have any more idea of how to make a train work than he would. For all their pretensions to superiority, the Gardier city he had seen from a distance had seemed much inferior to this one, and even to Capistown.

They came to a junction of three passages, one curving smoothly away, and Giliead flung out an arm to stop Nicholas.

Brow lifted, Nicholas asked, “A spell?”

Giliead nodded, sitting on his heels, holding one hand over the dirty brick floor. “A curse trap, right through here. I can’t tell what it’s meant to do.”

As Gerard moved up beside them, Tremaine said in disgust, “Well, that’s great. So the Gardier know about these tunnels?”

“It’s not Gardier,” Giliead said, shaking his head. “It smells like your curses. Rienish curses.”

Gerard lifted his brows, studying the innocuous stretch of brick thoughtfully. “Let’s see.” Taking out the bulky contraption with glass lenses that he used for seeing curses, he fit it into place over the smaller lenses he normally wore, then put a hand inside the sphere’s bag.

He muttered some words Ilias couldn’t understand and couldn’t really hear well enough to tell if they were in Rienish or not. But Giliead pulled back a little from the cursed spot, frowning. Startled, he said, “Can you read those symbols?” Ilias craned his neck to look, but to his eyes, there was nothing there. He leaned against the wall, a little disgruntled, but not much. It would have made things easier on occasion to be able to see curses as Giliead did, but he knew it just wasn’t worth all the trouble the ability brought with it.
At least Herias wasn’t accusing you of doing something to the god.
Ilias had always had enough trouble all on his own.

“Yes. This is a ward, cast by a Rienish sorcerer, within the past month. It’s very subtle, obviously in an attempt to avoid Gardier attention.” Gerard pulled off the bulky glass thing, blinking, and put it away. “It’s designed to alert the casting sorcerer if anyone passes this way, specifically down this left-hand passage, which appears to lead to—” He gestured for Ilias to move. Ilias shifted sideways, realizing he had been leaning on the painted trail sign. “The west end of the Street of Courts. There’s an addition to the standard ward structure that’s attempting to set another alarm if the person who breaks the ward is Gardier. But it’s a bit clumsy and I’m not sure if it works.” He tapped the sphere absently, his brows drawing together. “You know who this structure reminds me of?” he asked Nicholas. “Old Berganmot. His spells were very idiosyncratic. But he died two years ago, on the Aderassi front.”

Nicholas lifted his brows. “Interesting. You realize what’s on the west end of the Street of Courts?”

Gerard nodded, intrigued. “One of your safe houses was down there, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Nicholas’s eyes narrowed in thought. Tremaine sighed, took the little round gold case out of Gerard’s pocket that the Rienish used for measuring time and studied it impatiently. Gerard recaptured it from her with an annoyed frown. “Can you disarm the ward without alerting the sorcerer?” Nicholas asked, ignoring the whole performance.

Gerard touched the sphere again and gestured with his other hand. “Did that work, Giliead?”

Giliead pushed to his feet, nodding. “There’s a path through it now.”

“Very good.” Nicholas gestured for Giliead to proceed down the passage to the Street of Courts. A little warily, Giliead led the way, showing them where the curse was so they could avoid it.

“Who was Berganmot?” Ilias asked as he fell in behind Tremaine, still keeping an eye on the passages behind them.

“He was a Rienish sorcerer who came to our house sometimes, so he must have done things for Nicholas,” she told him. She raised her voice to ask the others, “We know Berganmot is actually dead? There’s no chance that he’s—” She gestured vaguely, indicating something about the size of one of the big Gardier crystals.

“He died in an airship bombing,” Gerard replied repressively, as they passed a cross corridor. “I doubt there would have been any opportunity—”

Ilias heard a faint sound and sensed movement in the corner of his eye. He clicked his tongue to alert the others, stepped to the wall beside the opening and flattened himself against it. Tremaine and Giliead both stepped to the wall, Tremaine ducking down beside Ilias, her shooting weapon suddenly in her hand. It was a little tight in the passage to draw his sword; Ilias slipped the knife out of the back of his belt. Nicholas threw them a glance and drew Gerard further down the passage, continuing to speak in the same quiet tone, “Of course, it’s quite out of the question…”

When the figure peeped cautiously around the corner Ilias slammed him in the head with his knife hilt. The intruder made a strangled noise and staggered, but Ilias had already seized him by the shirt and jacket. He knocked the shooting weapon out of his hand and flung him against the far wall, pinning him and setting the blade at his throat.

The man was young, dressed in rough gray and brown, with narrow features and greasy dark hair. Ilias felt him reach for another weapon in his belt and growled, “Don’t,” pressing the knife in a little harder. Tremaine had already collected the shooting weapon from the floor, and now reached under Ilias’s arm to pull a second one from the man’s belt.

Nicholas stepped up beside her, scrutinizing the man carefully. The captive’s eyes flicked from Ilias to Tremaine, to Nicholas, to Giliead and Gerard standing behind them. He saw the carved horn handle of Ilias’s sword hilt where it poked up through his coat above the shoulder. His wary expression turned a little incredulous. He said in Rienish, “You’re not Gardier.”

“You should realize by now that that isn’t an assumption you can safely make,” Nicholas told him deliberately. “You’re using the hidden cellar at number 12, Street of Courts?”

Now the man’s eyes widened. He was sweating in the chill air. “Who are you?”

Giliead had slipped past them to investigate the passage the man had come down, one of Gerard’s curse lights drifting along after him. Now he ducked back to report softly, “There’s another Rienish curse down here, a big one, not so subtle. I think it’s hiding something. And the ground shows recent signs of people coming and going through here.”

Giliead had spoken Syrnaic so the man couldn’t understand him, but his face tightened with suspicion at hearing an unfamiliar language.

Nicholas stepped back from the captive, his eyes hooded. “Bring him.”

Ilias threw an inquiring look at Tremaine, who rolled her eyes and gestured for him to follow Nicholas.

Giliead and Nicholas went down the passage first, cautiously, with Giliead checking for curse traps. Gerard and Tremaine followed. Ilias hauled the captive along, still keeping the knife to his throat, as they continued down the passage. He couldn’t tell whether Nicholas meant to kill the man or not, so he knew the prisoner himself couldn’t have a clue. Personally, Ilias hoped not; unless the man had one of those implanted crystals, his gut said this was a Rienish survivor and not a Gardier spy.

Within only a short distance the soft white curse light fell on smashed blocks of stone and broken beams, some charred by fire and still stinking of smoke. Then the passage ended abruptly in a wall of broken brick and rock, as if a Gardier bomb had caved in the buildings above.
As if,
Ilias thought, watching Giliead carefully. But these were the people who had curses strong enough to make the
Ravenna
look like a stretch of empty water.

Giliead stared at the wall, his expression tight with concentration. “Is it an illusion?” Gerard asked quietly.

“Part of it. There was a cave-in here.” Giliead’s arm lifted as if he was in a daze and he pointed to a section of the collapsed wall. “But there’s also a door …there.”

Nicholas stepped forward, reaching for where the handle should be, even as Gerard and Tremaine both drew breath to protest. Ilias had just enough time to clap a hand over the captive’s mouth.

Between one blink and the next there was a wooden door in the wall, the brick framing it rough and broken. Nicholas produced a shooting weapon out of nowhere, giving the door a hard shove.

Ilias nearly had his arm wrenched out of the socket by the young man’s attempt to struggle free, and missed what happened next. Occupied by restraining his captive and muffling his attempt to cry out without either strangling or stabbing him, Ilias was only peripherally aware of the door swinging open and the startled shouts of those inside. Giliead reached back and caught the captive’s arm, helping Ilias haul him forward as hostage.

Past the door was a big stone-walled room, large beams overhead, with a faint odor of damp earth and the bitter scent of the oils the Rienish burned for fuel. There were no curse lights here, just a couple of glass-shielded lamps giving off a warm glow of firelight. There were five men inside and one woman, all dressed roughly in drab Rienish clothes. One of them had a shooting weapon pointed at Nicholas, but he hadn’t fired because Nicholas and Tremaine were both pointing their shooting weapons at him.

For a moment no one said anything and Ilias felt his skin prickle with tension. Their captive had stopped struggling, breathing hard with exertion, and the silence was taut with expectation. Then the woman stepped forward into the light, and Ilias saw Tremaine twitch with the effort not to fire at the abrupt movement. He felt a flush of relief; if Tremaine had fired her weapon, they would have all killed each other in the next few heartbeats.

The woman had gray hair pulled back from a strong-featured handsome face, and wore a gray-blue dress with a brown shawl over it. Ilias could tell from the way she held her arm that she had a weapon concealed under the shawl, but she was staring incredulously at them. No, not at them. At Nicholas.

Giliead flinched suddenly, turning to face another door half-hidden in a shadowy corner. “Gerard!”

Gerard turned sharply, gesturing, one hand on the sphere’s bag. Light burst for an instant, scourging shadows. Ilias caught sight of a man in the doorway before the brightness forced him to wince away. Something banged and an odor like burned air, as if lightning had struck nearby, came to him in a puff of breeze. Ilias looked back to see a man, short and sharp-featured, stagger out of the other doorway and fall to his knees, coughing. “That’s enough, young man,” Gerard said sharply. “I could have killed you. And you should realize that genre of attack adjuration is useless against the Gardier. Save your strength for illusions and charms.”

The man looked up, his face white in the blending of firelight and curse light, and Ilias realized he was barely out of boyhood. Staring at Gerard, he choked out, “Who the hell are you?”

But the woman was still regarding Nicholas with an almost reverent expression. She said slowly, “God above, is it your ghost?”

Ilias heard Tremaine swear under her breath, and mutter, “I knew it.”

“I’m all too solid, and ghosts don’t age.” Nicholas smiled slightly, though it was a smile that gave nothing away. He nodded toward their baffled hostage. “Your son, Madame Cusard?”

“My nephew, Ricard,” she said, then urgently, “But how—”

Nicholas interrupted, “I recognized him. He has his grandfather’s nose.” Though Ilias didn’t think that was the question the woman meant to ask, and he thought Nicholas knew that as well.

The woman blinked. “God, it is you.” She told the men with her, “Put the guns away, boys.” More sharply, as they hesitated, “Now.”

As the wary men complied, Nicholas pocketed his shooting weapon and said in Syrnaic, “Release him.”

Tremaine didn’t object, though she hadn’t put her weapon away. Ilias glanced at Giliead, who gave him a resigned shrug. Ilias turned the young man loose, propelling him forward just enough to keep him from grabbing a weapon from any of the others.

Ricard stumbled, caught his balance, and joined the woman, demanding, “Who is he?”

She threw a look at him, her mouth a tight line, but something about her spoke more of elation than dread. “Who do you think it is, turning up here, back from the dead, with a real Rienish sorcerer—”

“Hey!” the young wizard, still on the floor, objected.

“You’re one of Berganmot’s apprentices, aren’t you?” Gerard said to him, still sternly. “Found and trained on the battlefield?”

“Yes.” The wizard studied him suspiciously. “What have you got in the bag?”

“Take care or you’ll find out,” Nicholas told him, with a lifted brow. The words could have been a joke but Ilias was sure they weren’t. These people might know him, but Nicholas was only trusting them so far.
I hope,
Ilias thought worriedly. Nicholas eyed the woman again. “We need reliable transportation, a safe distance outside the Cabellard Gate. Tonight.”

She nodded, businesslike. “You’ll have it. At the old mews on Vintner’s Row, in two hours.”

Nicholas inclined his head to her. Tremaine, obviously having had enough of this, said tightly, “We need to go.”

Nicholas nodded. He told the woman, “The Gardier will be concentrating on Castillion Gardens tonight. Avoid it for the next few days,” and swept out of the room. Gerard, with one more severe look at the young wizard, followed. Ilias and Giliead backed out with Tremaine. Ilias tried to keep an eye on the door as they retreated down the passage, but the shadows closed in and he couldn’t see if the illusory part of the cave-in had returned or not.