The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (50 page)

The young woman blinked at the sudden appearance of the gun. She accepted the sphere meekly. “Yes, madam. I’m Alissa, madam.”

Giliead nodded and slipped around the corner. Tremaine followed with Ilias, the students hurriedly moving after them. Alissa took a couple of long steps, catching up to Tremaine. She was wearing pumps, and the half sleeves of her dress were frayed and grubby, not that that was necessarily a by-product of Lodun’s captivity; every young woman student Tremaine had ever met had been a little grubby.

Giliead led them through the court, using the drying sheets moving gently in the breeze as cover.
Why can’t I hear gunfire? Where the hell are they?
Tremaine wondered, gritting her teeth. On the far side of the court they found a rambling old house made of fieldstone, with delicate leaded windows and tiny little cupolas. Giliead jerked his head, telling Ilias to go around the far side. Ilias motioned for four of the students to follow him and ran around the side of the house. His soft leather boots were silent on the grass and paving but the students’ shoes made noise and Tremaine’s nerves jumped. Giliead led them rapidly along the other side, through an untended flower bed. Ahead high garden walls cut off the view. Above them more college buildings loomed, heavy stonework blocking the light. “This is a lodging house for tutors—there’s another quadrangle behind it,” Alissa whispered. “Is that where they are?”

Tremaine flicked a look at Giliead’s intent face. “Yes.”

“Isn’t that gun useless against them? Can’t they blow it up?” one of the young men behind Tremaine asked.

She tapped the sphere in Alissa’s hands. “Not while we have that.”

Footsteps on grass gave them an instant of warning. Tremaine pulled Alissa back and Giliead surged forward, reaching the corner just as two Gardier came barreling around it. He slammed one in the head with his sword hilt but the second dodged sideways, lifting his rifle.

Tremaine aimed for his forehead but Alissa muttered and gestured, the sphere sparked and the man dropped the rifle with a cry, stumbling away, his hands knotted in pain. Two of the students tackled him, another grabbing up the weapon. “Damn,” Alissa muttered in awe, looking down at the sphere. “You lot weren’t kidding.”

“Do that again!” Tremaine told her, pointing to the garden wall. Giliead was already around the corner and she plunged after him.

On the other side of the wall was an open paved court, surrounded by a grass verge and shaded by two large oak trees. A dozen or more Gardier stood there. Alissa’s spell hit and most of them threw their rifles down, crying out in pain. One had been just out of range of the spell and Giliead slammed that one’s rifle away with his sword. Tremaine heard Ilias shout as his group burst into the court from the far end. She dodged past Giliead, her eyes finding the man with the sorcerer crystal, standing in the center of the court. She fired as the first shots rang out, diving to the ground and hoping the students had the sense to duck.

Nothing changed and, swearing, she rolled over and fired again, mindful of how many shots she had left. This time she saw the flash of light near the crystal as it deflected the bullet. The man holding it was a Liaison, light glinting off the two crystals pocking his face, and he didn’t even bother to look in Tremaine’s direction. Alissa had come out from behind the wall, talking to the sphere in a low steady voice. The Liaison wasn’t talking to his crystal, just holding it and glaring at Alissa as the air seemed to thicken and twist between them, the ether within so agitated it was almost visible to the naked eye.

Alissa winced and set her jaw as some part of what the Liaison was directing the crystal to do leaked through to her. Peripherally aware of fighting, yelling, of the two students with captured rifles shouting at the Gardier to surrender, of Ilias blocking the escape of several others, Tremaine shoved to her feet, willing the thought toward Alissa:
Just let the damn thing help you, don’t force it!

Then Giliead left his sword in a Gardier’s chest and charged forward, tackling the Liaison to the ground. The sorcerer crystal tumbled in the grass, a few feet from the Liaison’s outstretched hand. Tremaine scrabbled forward but Ilias got there first with a rock from one of the flower beds. He smashed it into the crystal, hastily backing away from the flood of liquid light pouring out of the scattered shards.

Tremaine looked around, seeing most of the Gardier captured by the students, the ones unlucky enough to encounter Ilias and Giliead lying bleeding on the ground. One of the students had managed to get shot despite the various spells, but he was sitting up and cradling his arm.

She stepped toward the Liaison, looking down at him. Giliead had him pinned to the ground, and the man was glaring up at them with a grimace of rage. He was the same one who had come to the ruin in the mountain. Tremaine said, “Remember me?”

His eyes went blank, his face transforming from that of an angry young man’s into an expressionless mask. His voice distant, he said, “You’re too late.”

“Probably,” Tremaine agreed, knowing she was talking to it, whatever it was, the thing that spoke through the Liaisons. “But I’m used to that.”

“Why aren’t they sending more men?” Ilias asked quietly from beside her. “If they were finally able to make a circle in our world to come here, why send this few? Why not a hundred?”

He had a point. Tremaine shook her head, thinking furiously. “The wards must be down—”

Giliead turned his head to say, “They aren’t. I can still feel them. They’re weak, but they’re still there.”

“Madam, come and look at this, please,” Alissa said, as if Tremaine was her tutor and she was calling her attention to a bad citation in a text. The sphere tucked under her arm, a lock of stray hair falling across her forehead, she pointed at something on the paving stones.

Tremaine moved to her side. Faintly etched on the paving stones in lines and strokes of ash were the symbols of a circle. Tremaine followed the curve of it with her eyes, trying not to see it. “This is our circle. The one we used to get in.”

“No.” Ilias shook his head, pacing along the line of symbols. “These runes are different. But it burned itself into the ground, just like ours did. Does that mean it came from this world, from outside the city, like we did?” He looked up at her, stricken. “But how could they? Only Gerard and Niles knew the new curse.”

He was right again. Gerard hadn’t finished the spell to make the gate to enter Lodun until yesterday.
Oh. No. The more we used the circles in the mountain and the fortress, the easier it was for the Gardier to find us.
Tremaine shook her head, in horror, not denial.
What if it isn’t the circles the Gardier were somehow tapping into, but the spheres themselves?

They had known the Liaison crystals somehow communicated with each other. In Maton-devara the Liaison had found Giliead through the captured sorcerer crystal, even though it had only been out of its lead-lined box for a few moments.
Arisilde broke the crystals we found,
she thought, mentally kicking herself. When they had first come to Cineth in the
Swift,
they had put Arisilde’s sphere and the small Gardier crystals they had captured in a bucket of water, to try to block the etheric vibrations. And the crystals had come out of the bucket broken and cracked and yellow.
Nicholas thought that Arisilde broke the first sorcerer crystal they found because he was trying to free the soul trapped inside. Did Arisilde know then?
Arisilde had always known things without quite knowing them, done things that turned out to be important later without knowing why he had done them. “Arisilde said the crystals see everything. What if they see the spheres too? Or if Arisilde’s sphere was the only one they couldn’t see, and when we started using the others…” The regular Viller spheres were just tools, without personalities inside them to detect and prevent that kind of spying.
If they can hear the spheres, they know all our new gate spells
. And no matter what adjustments were made to it, no matter how Arisilde or Gerard or Niles manipulated it, the world-gate circle was still a Gardier spell. They had had it the longest, maybe they were the only ones who truly understood it.

Alissa was looking down at the sphere, her nose wrinkled dubiously. Tremaine paced back toward the Liaison. He still wore that blank mask, the face of whatever controlled him.
You’re too late.
Her heart was starting to pound, and she was surprised her voice came out even when she asked, “Giliead, did you feel any other circles, in the past few minutes?”

“Yes, but it was our circle, that Gerard made.” Giliead looked up at her, suddenly appalled. “I thought it was our circle.”

Ilias swore softly, clapping a hand to his head. Tremaine lifted the pistol, telling Giliead, “Move.”

Giliead jerked back and she shot the Liaison in the head. Everyone in the court flinched as his body convulsed once and went still. Giliead pushed to his feet, stepping away from the corpse. Tremaine had already turned to Alissa. “Those crystals report everything they see. If you find any Gardier like him, with these things in his face, kill them. Don’t touch the crystals. Burn the bodies.” She leaned down, grabbed up one of the belt devices the Gardier used, this one a metal canister with something like a clock face, with a small crystal fused to the back. She dropped the device, ground the crystal to powder under her heel. “Break all of these.” She didn’t wait for an assent, already striding across the court.

F
lorian paced the
Ravenna
’s First Class lounge impatiently, holding one of the extra spheres, torn between excitement that Lodun refugees were about to arrive and guilt over a lingering resentment that she hadn’t been allowed to participate in the mission. That Ixion had somehow sensed her feelings before and tried to exploit them just made it all the worse.
Really,
she thought,
I would have to be completely out of my mind to go along with him on anything. Or just stupidly blind to reality.
But from what Giliead had told them, those were exactly the traits Syprian wizards looked for in their apprentice slaves.

The whole outside wall of the lounge had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the Promenade deck, filling the long room with shaded daylight. Niles had gated the ship to Ile-Rien perhaps half an hour ago, and Gerard’s message had arrived not long after that. Right now Viller Institute volunteers, Capidaran Ministry staff, and nurses and soldier-orderlies from the ship’s hospital were standing or sitting around on the couches and chairs, talking excitedly and waiting for the first group of Lodun evacuees to arrive so they could hurry them off for medical treatment or new quarters as needed. The double doors behind Florian were open to the ship’s smaller ballroom, where Niles had built his new circle.

Glancing back, she could see that all the lights were on, from the crystal prisms overhead to the milky white glass panels in the walls, etched with garden scenes. The chairs and tables had been stacked up atop the bandstands on each end of the room or pushed back into the adjoining lounge and the movie theater. The open expanse of floor was painted with the symbols of the new circle. And at least now they knew it worked, that the others were safe in Lodun.

On the Promenade outside Florian saw Colonel Averi walking past, with Kressein, several Rienish and Capidaran officers, and Balin, the Gardier woman prisoner.
I wonder if she told them anything more about this Maton-First place and Castines.
Hurrying, she went to the end of the lounge and through the doors, then out onto the Promenade. She walked quickly to catch up to the group. Averi had a map out, and was saying something to Kressein.

Florian felt the sphere in her hands flash with heat. Startled, she stopped, looking down to see it sparking, its insides spinning.

She looked up and her jaw dropped. Hanging in the air, low and threatening over the calm sea, was the massive black shape of a Gardier airship. Instinct made her throw herself to the deck an instant before the guns fired.

Glass shattered, wood splintered as the airship’s gun sprayed the ship, someone screamed. Huddled against the wall, Florian looked up. She saw bodies sprawled on the deck, blood. Several of the officers, Averi, Balin… Kressein was on his knees, braced against the ship’s metal wall, holding his sphere and shouting. Florian saw the airship’s nose tip up as it tried to turn away from the ship, red-orange stripes of fire already outlining the shape of the balloon.
He got it,
she thought, starting to crawl toward the injured and the dead.

But above the railing she saw another airship, and another. And another. She made a strangled noise, pointing.

Feet pounded on the deck behind her and crewmen ran past to help the injured.

“Avrain!” Florian yelled to the other sorcerer back in the ballroom. She shoved to her feet and bolted back toward the inside doorway, twisting and ducking to avoid being trampled by the officers and crewmen running out.
They found us, like they kept finding Tremaine and Gerard and the others whenever they used the point-to-point circles.
“Avrain, it’s an attack, get out there!”

She almost slammed into him at the doorway to the ballroom. “God, no,” he gasped, staring past her out the broad windows. He looked down, saw the sphere she was holding. “Go to Lodun, tell them to wait, don’t send anyone through yet!”

The ship’s Klaxon belatedly began to sound an alarm. Florian nodded rapidly. “I will.” Avrain ran for the lounge doorway and Florian hurried into the empty ballroom. The Gardier already knew about them, using the circle again couldn’t hurt. Putting aside her fear of what had happened the last time she had tried to use a world-gate without any help, she stepped into the circle.