The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (5 page)

Tremaine nodded slowly. “So we’re living here, then?”

Nicholas gave her a raised eyebrow. “Temporarily.”

“Right. Did anyone tell Gerard and Florian?”

“They’ll be along later tonight, once they finish at the Port Authority.”

“I can go pick them up, if you like,” Ander offered blandly.

Nicholas regarded him with equal blandness and apparently decided to take his relationship with Ander to a new level by actually speaking to him. “I suspect Gerard is capable of making his way here unescorted.”

Considering that Gerard was capable of world-gating an eighty-eight-thousand-ton passenger liner, he was probably right. Leaving them to it, Tremaine went down the hall and started up the stairs. The second-floor landing gave on to another hallway with a sitting area at the far end beneath a curtained bay window. There were four doors off the hall, all open, and all the lights were on. She looked into rooms until she spotted her carpetbag, a couple of Syprian leather packs, Ilias’s sword in its scabbard and one of the wooden carved cases that held arrows and a goathorn bow, all piled on a dark bureau.

She wandered inside. The carpets and upholstery were all dark, the furniture of a heavy wood in a bulky style out of fashion even for Capidara, and there was a fire in the hearth. There was also a radiator in the corner, but it was cold. She supposed she should feel lucky for the electricity, such as it was.
God, I wonder what the plumbing is like.
She buried her face in her hands. Best not to find out just at the moment. But it was better than being one of the poor bastards at the refugee hostel, with nowhere to go.

Needing to distract herself, she checked the carpetbag to make sure her journal and the folder with Arites’s papers were all there, but someone, probably Ilias, had packed it carefully. She had left most of Arites’s writing stored on the
Ravenna,
since it would need to return to Cineth, but she was using his partially complete dictionary to teach herself to read Syrnaic. She shut the door and quickly changed out of the new but uncomfortable dress suit and into Syprian clothing. The shirt she pulled out of her bag was a faded gold and the pants a soft dark blue, each with block-printed designs along the hem and with seams reinforced by braided leather. It was the first time she had worn this shirt and she discovered it had ties to allow the sleeves to be looped up and secured at the shoulder, leaving the arms bare. A sensible arrangement for a garment that might be worn on a fishing boat, but it was too cool to wear like that now. She pulled a Rienish wool sweater on over it, put on her comfortable old boots and sighed with relief.

She took the back stairs down to the kitchen to discover actual food being delivered through the service door under Kias’s supervision. The kitchen walls were dingy brick, the room furnished with a long plank table and a few chairs. A couple of old wooden dressers held a random assortment of cracked china plates and stained copper pots, all probably judged too worn for the former owners to haul away. Distracted by the sight of a bag of coffee beans and two bottles of wine on the sideboard, Tremaine almost didn’t recognize the white-jacketed man placing warming pans on the old-fashioned monster of a range. He nodded to her affably and she squinted at him, racking her memory. “Were you on the
Ravenna
?”

“Yes, I volunteered in the kitchens,” he answered with a smile and an Aderassi accent. “I am Derathi, late of the Hotel Silve. I have been hired as chef in a restaurant a few streets over, and your father has made arrangements with us to feed you.”

Tremaine lifted the lid of the warming pan, her stomach contracting at the appetizing scents. “This looks wonderful,” she murmured.

“If you need anything, please send to us, at any time.” Derathi paused at the kitchen doorway. “This is a good city, but …I would like to return to Ile-Rien, and then Adera again someday.”

Tremaine looked up, meeting his solemn gaze.
We both know, but let’s not say it.
“Someday.”

Derathi took his leave and Kias stepped out of the pantry, asking without much hope, “Any news?” Kias was Giliead’s father Ranior’s sister’s son. He was big like Giliead, olive-skinned, with frizzy dark hair falling past his shoulders.

“Nothing good,” Tremaine told him. She supposed he already knew the news about Ixion from Ilias.

With a resigned shake of his head, he filled a couple of plates and carried them out of the kitchen, calling for Calit. Not feeling sociable, Tremaine sat down to eat at the battered kitchen table; the old range still radiated heat, making this the most comfortable room in the house. Ilias wandered in when she was nearly finished, standing in front of the still-warm range, with his arms tightly folded across his chest. He looked worn down and tired, more so than he had this morning. She knew that dealing with Giliead, who had been shuttling between rage and despair over what he saw as Ixion’s release, wasn’t easy. Tremaine had been on the verge of asking about it several times, but she was reluctant to broach the topic. She asked instead, “House still haunted?”

He shook his head, casting an annoyed glance up at the ceiling. “I think Gil scared it away.”

Tremaine hesitated. “Because he’s a Chosen Vessel or because he was really angry?”

He snorted wryly. “Guess.”

Tremaine winced. She thought for a moment he would go back to rapt contemplation of the rusting iron range but he turned to the table, hooked a chair out and sat down. He pulled her plate over, investigating it for scraps.

Tremaine rescued the last hunk of bread. She eyed Ilias for a long moment. “Homesick?” she asked him finally.

He glanced at her with a lifted brow, not understanding.

She was surprised Syrnaic didn’t have a word for it. She gestured with the bread, clarifying, “You miss being home.”

He shrugged, but looked away. “It’s summer there. We’d sleep outside in the atrium at night, or out in the fields.”

As opposed to being stuck in this moldy cold house, or the crowded cold refugee hostel. Watching him crack the leftover bone and render it free of any shred of edible material as methodically as a wolf, she said, “We’re not going to be here that long.”

He frowned down at the plate and started to speak. Then Ander walked in. Searching for an uncracked cup on the sideboard, he nodded politely. “Ilias.”

Ilias looked up sideways, regarding Ander for a moment in silence, then looked at Tremaine. She could tell from his expression that this was about the cap to his day. She said brightly, “Ander’s here.”

Ander poured coffee from the enamelware pot resting on the stove, giving Ilias a thoughtful look. “I hope you and Giliead don’t still blame me for Ixion.”

Ilias let out his breath. “We don’t blame you.” He glanced up at Ander again, his expression just this side of irony. “All you did was let him out.”

Ander’s mouth twisted in annoyance. Tremaine took a sip of coffee and pointed out mildly, “If you didn’t know, Ixion has managed to convince the Capidarans that he can help them against the Gardier.”

Ander stared at her, his brows drawing together. “You’re joking…. You’re not joking. What do they think they’re doing?”

She watched him over the rim of her cup, trying to decide if she thought he was telling the truth. It had suddenly and belatedly occurred to her that that might have been why Ander had sought her out, that Gerard’s open hostility during the meeting had worried the Rienish command enough to send someone to keep an eye on him.

Ander was shaking his head. “I wonder what they think Ixion can do for them? He doesn’t have a sphere. They’ll have to…” He hesitated.

“Get Niles or one of the others to make one for him, unless they’re stupid enough to let him learn how to do it himself,” Tremaine finished his thought impatiently. The new spheres weren’t as powerful as Arisilde’s, not being inhabited by the living soul of a sorcerer, but they did allow Niles and the other Rienish and Capidaran sorcerers here to use the gate spell, fight the Gardier crystals and cast far more elaborate spells of their own. If Ixion got a sphere, he would probably kill all of them. “The new spheres actually work, unlike—” She stopped, blinking. “Oh, that’s perfect.”

“What?” Ilias demanded, sitting up, suddenly alert. “You’ve got that look.”

Ander regarded her suspiciously. Maybe he recognized the look too. “You can’t mean—”

“Before they found out how the world-gate spell worked,” she explained to Ilias, “several sorcerers tried to build spheres to use it. The spheres couldn’t take it and destroyed themselves—and the sorcerers using them.”

“So Niles could build him a trap god-sphere?” Ilias asked, rubbing his chin speculatively. “Would Niles do that?”

“Mm. Good point.” Tremaine tapped her fingers on the table, thinking it over. “To save our lives, yes.” She shook her head, disappointed. “But when Ixion hasn’t done anything yet …I don’t think so. We could broach the idea, but if we got caught by the Capidarans…” She looked thoughtfully at Ander, who had his arms folded.

Ilias jerked his head toward the other man, his expression sour. “He’d tell everyone it was our idea—”

Ander frowned at him, “Hey, I know as well as anyone that—”

“And if Ixion gets a god-sphere and dies of it, everyone will think it was our doing even if it wasn’t,” Ilias finished.

Tremaine stared at him. She could recognize that brand of logic anywhere. “You’ve been talking to Nicholas.”

“Yes,” Ilias answered warily. “How did you know?”

“It was a lucky guess.” She rolled her eyes in irritation, whether at herself, Ilias or Nicholas she wasn’t sure, pushed her chair back and left the kitchen.

The service corridor was dark and Tremaine blundered through a couple of traditional baize servants’ doors and ended up in the salon. Nicholas was sitting in one of the armchairs, reading the Capistown newspaper, and Calit was still playing with the wooden animals on the hearth rug. Before she could form an ironic observation on the domesticity of this scene, Nicholas said dryly, “You should be more careful.”

“What?” Tremaine said, startled. She realized a moment too late she should have said “Undoubtedly” and walked out of the room. Whatever he had to say, it wasn’t going to do her any good.

“As civilized as the Syprians’ behavior is, you have to remember that their society is run on different principles than ours.” Nicholas turned a page of the paper, rustling it into a better position. “If Ilias continues to see Ander as a threat to his relationship with you, he may act to remove the threat. And he may not feel the need to announce his intention first.”

Tremaine snorted. She thought this was wishful thinking on Nicholas’s part. “Ilias isn’t in love with me.”

He lifted a brow, not looking up from the paper. “As I said, their society is run on different principles than ours.”

Tremaine flung her arms in the air, aware she wanted to argue but having nothing rational to say. She stomped out into the cold hallway, feeling about twelve years old and angry at herself for it. The clunky ring of the front door’s bellpull stopped her.

Picking up a rickety chair near the door to the parlor, she dragged it over so she could stand on it and peek through the dusty fanlight. In the dim illumination of the streetlamp, she saw it was Florian and Gerard.

She hopped down and shot back the door’s bolt, pulling it open. “Ah,” Gerard said in relief as he saw her. “So this is the right place.”

“Who else would live here?” As she stepped back to let them in, Nicholas appeared in the doorway to the salon, demanding, “Did you look to see who it was first?”

“Yes,” Tremaine snarled.
God, does he think I’m that stupid?
“Somehow I failed to let Gardier spies with guns into Coldcourt the entire time you were gone.”

Nicholas narrowed his eyes at her and vanished back into the salon.

“I see everything is as usual. Everyone here?” Gerard said briskly, helping Florian off with her coat. Florian, not having had a worthless meeting to attend, was dressed comfortably in canvas pants and a faded brown sweater, her red hair tucked up under a man’s cap.

“Yes. Oh, and Ander’s here,” Tremaine added. She saw that Gerard had a leather bag over his shoulder that had been hidden by his coat. The sphere, Arisilde’s sphere.

“I see.” Gerard pressed his lips together briefly, then shook his head. “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt.”

“Colonel Averi is the only other one who knows about this, isn’t he?” Florian asked, looking around the foyer with a distracted expression. “The house is …Uh…”

“Ugly, and it smells bad,” Tremaine supplied, taking the wet coats from Gerard and draping them over the battered hall bench. “It’s also violently haunted, though apparently Giliead’s monumental bad temper scared whatever it was into temporary submission.”

“Niles knows as well,” Gerard answered Florian, ignoring the rest as they stepped into the salon.

Nicholas was moving chairs up to the round table in the other half of the room. “Any trouble?” he asked, flicking an opaque glance at Gerard.

“No, we weren’t followed.” Gerard answered the question that had actually been asked, setting the sphere down on the scratched surface of the table.

Nicholas nodded, looking down at the little device. It was about the size of a croquet ball, formed of copper-colored metal strips, filled with tiny wheels and gears. He reached to brush a droplet of water off the somewhat tarnished surface, and a blue light sparked deep inside the copper depths. Nicholas lifted his brows. “Does it do that often?”

Gerard watched Nicholas’s face. “Yes. He often responds to people he knows.”

Nicholas didn’t react to the “he,” at least not visibly. He regarded the sphere a moment more, then turned away. Speaking in Aelin, the language of the Gardier, he said, “Calit, go up to your room now.”

The boy looked up. Calit was slowly learning a few words of Rienish and Syrnaic, with Kias and the other Syprians’ help, but he couldn’t understand much of either language yet. Gardier believed that learning other languages was somehow beneath them, and even if Calit overcame that, he hadn’t had any formal schooling. “Can I take these things with me?”