The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) (53 page)

“He’s afraid of the gods,” Orelis said without looking at him. “I am superior to the gods.”

“The gods aren’t trapped in a crystal shell,” Castines pointed out, saving Tremaine the trouble. Tremaine suspected Castines was no longer happy with the body-sharing arrangement. Even if he had originally gloried in Orelis’s power, he didn’t sound as if the years together had bred anything but hatred and contempt.
Of course, he’s a Syprian wizard. He probably started out with hatred and contempt.

Orelis was silent a moment, then added softly to Tremaine, “It’s not working, is it? I’m not remaking my world.”

Lying to her wouldn’t help. And Tremaine might need her to believe a lie later, so the truth was best for now. She told Orelis gently, “No, it’s not working.”

Castines turned away in disgust, then took a few steps toward Florian and Ilias. Giliead tensed but Tremaine didn’t want him to move yet. She had to keep Orelis talking, find out if there was another way out of this. Tremaine told Castines sharply, “Hey, shithead. We’re talking over here.”

He turned back toward her, glaring, but Orelis kept speaking as if nothing had happened. The dead Liaison said, “Arisilde left his body here, but we thought he had found another. He left the pieces of one of your metal balls, but we looked at it and looked at it and could not understand. We traced his progress through the gates. He had seen our great spiral here, the controller, and used his memory of it to make different gates that could reach other worlds, that broke all of our rules. He learned to hide from us, but he had always been with you before.” Orelis stared at her with the Liaison’s eyes, fixed and dull. “Bring Arisilde to us. Tell him I want him to finish, I want him to pull us apart. I didn’t understand that he was trying to help me.”

Castines snarled, “He wasn’t trying to help us, you stupid bitch. He was killing us.”

“He was doing what was best for you,” Tremaine said, holding that dead gaze, putting every ounce of sincerity she had into it.

“Best for me,” Orelis repeated.

Tremaine nodded. “To help you.”

“Yes. Bring him,” Orelis agreed. “He can pull us apart. And then he can help me finish the new world.”

Oh, hell. We’re back to that.
“Right.” Tremaine dropped the sincerity, fairly sure she had heard enough. “I guess I can’t talk you out of the new world thing, can I?”

“Where will I live if not in my world?” Orelis sounded utterly puzzled by this question.

“There’s the other option.” Tremaine pulled her hand out from under the satchel’s flap, showing them the incendiary. She had pushed the detonator down against the floor, when Castines had first spoken to her, and her thumb was on the strike lever. “It’s called death.”

Giliead made a faint noise, a sharp intake of breath, and Florian blinked in alarm. Ilias actually looked relieved, which Tremaine thought showed either a mistaken level of confidence in her or a high awareness of just what Castines could do to them all.

Castines frowned and took a step toward her. Orelis said, “Stop. No. Look at her hand.”

Just to make certain they knew their danger, Tremaine explained carefully, “If I let go, it blows up. If you grab me, it blows up. If you hurt them, it blows up. If you move, it blows up. Do I really have to elaborate further?”

Watching her carefully, Castines said, “We have a curse, to destroy weapons such as that.”

Tremaine had to laugh. “Yes, by making them blow up. There are three more of these in the bag, by the way. You must remember what that did to your workshops at Maton-devara.” She looked into the dead Liaison’s eyes, into Orelis’s eyes. “So curse away.” The sphere should deflect that spell, but there was no harm in emphasizing the point.

Castines laughed at her, but it wasn’t very convincing. “I could turn you into—”

Tremaine widened her eyes at him. She felt a faint shiver from the sphere, and knew he had tried something. “Go ahead. Whatever it is, it better have a thumb to hold this lever down.”

“It would kill these others, as well as us,” Orelis pointed out.

“They trust my judgment.” She deliberately avoided looking in that direction. “You could use this spiral—your master gate?—to take yourselves out of here, but—” She nodded to the big crystal that sat on the plinth at the center of the spiral, yellowed with age. “—I’m guessing that can’t leave the spiral. Not if you want to hold on to your control over the gates.”

“You don’t want to die,” Orelis said, blank-eyed, blank-faced. “No one wants to die.”

Tremaine could see Florian looking at her, glaring at her really. She was trying to mouth the word “master.” Arisilde had said,
If you destroy the master, you free the slaves. But the whole structure will collapse as well, all the gates, all falling down like a house of cards. I shouldn’t have minded it, you know. Being stuck there,
and
if I survived the fall. Certainly would have saved us all a lot of trouble. But I didn’t realize it was the crystal that was important, and not the bodies, until it was too late.
It made more sense, once you saw this stolen jury-rigged master circle, and knew that Castines and Orelis could trace the spheres whenever they were used to travel through a gate. It sounded as if Arisilde was saying that if the master circle, or maybe the master crystal, or both, were destroyed, it would destroy all the others.
Other what? Crystals and gates?
“This spiral makes all the circles work, doesn’t it? You had to bring it here to the Aelin world, alter it to make the circles go from here to your world to our world.”

“Yes,” Orelis said. “Castines feared the gods. We had to come here. It is our essence that powers all the gates from here. It is our presence in the great spiral that makes them work.” Castines stared at Orelis, brows drawing together suspiciously.

“That was your great work,” Tremaine said gently. “The gates were the only way for the others to leave the fortress. They broke the other crystals to let the avatars out, but you volunteered to stay, so the gate would still work and the people could escape.”

Orelis tilted the dead man’s head. “Yes. That is exactly what happened. Alone, with no one in this spiral, I could only make those nearest to me work. Castines had to bring me here before I could make all the others work.”

Tremaine nodded.
That’s what I thought.
Orelis died, the gates stopped working.
It’s not as if I have anything better to do
. She said, “Nobody wants to die, do they.”
That’s not true, but we’ll leave it for now.
And with so many incendiaries in her lap, Tremaine doubted she would feel a thing. “I can bring Arisilde to you, but only if you send them home—”
Wait. Damn.
If this did work, and the gates stopped functioning, she didn’t want Ilias and Giliead trapped forever in Ile-Rien. But they had ordered Gyan to break the new circle in Cineth and Gerard had broken the one on the Isle of Storms. That left the fortress with the only working circles close to the Syrnai. She grimaced to herself, thinking
I hope Ilias was right when he said they could climb down the cliff and walk home from there.
“Send Florian and Gerard back to the
Ravenna
’s circle, and the Syprians to the place we call the fortress, where Castines found you.” She added, “Arisilde will check on them first, and if you send them anywhere else, he’ll be very, very angry.”

Florian made a huge effort and twitched. Giliead looked at her and silently mouthed the words, “Don’t send us away. You shouldn’t do this alone.” He was wrong about that; alone was the only way to do this. Tremaine didn’t want to look at Ilias, but did anyway. He was making a tremendous effort to speak. He settled for glaring at her.

Castines snarled in frustration, stalking a few paces away. Orelis turned the dead Liaison’s head to watch him. A long moment passed while Tremaine counted her heartbeats. Then Castines gestured sharply.

The sphere sparked in sympathy as the crystal on the plinth pulsed a sick yellow. Florian and Gerard vanished, then Ilias and Giliead. The other Liaison still stood frozen where Orelis or Castines had left him, pointing the pistol at empty air.

That’s done,
Tremaine thought, relieved and cold all at once. Orelis had turned the dead Liaison to face her again. Orelis said, “You aren’t going to bring Arisilde, are you?”

Tremaine let out a breath. “No.”

Castines spun around, staring incredulously at Tremaine. “You knew!”

“Knew what?” Tremaine started to ask, but Orelis replied calmly, “I suspected.”

Castines lunged at Tremaine and with a yelp she scrambled backward, trying to hold on to the sphere and the incendiary.
Let go, let go, let go,
her mind ordered frantically but some other part of her refused, and she kept her hold on the incendiary’s strike lever. She thought Castines would grab for her but instead he snatched the bag of explosives. He flung it away, making another grab for her. Tremaine yelled in pure reaction and flung the incendiary away from her, toward the spiral and the crystal in its center.

Nearby the Liaison’s body jerked with Orelis’s startled reaction. Tremaine had one breath of a moment to roll over, curling into a protective ball around the sphere. The blast shattered sound; heat washed over her. She felt the sphere hum in her hands; either Castines had tried a last-second spell or it was reacting to the blast, protecting itself and her. Then something struck her, landing heavily atop her and slamming the breath out of her lungs.

Her head hurt terribly and there was a moment of darkness; Tremaine came out of it abruptly when the heavy hot thing atop her moved and she realized it was Castines. He gripped her hair, yanking her up. With a snarl of pain and terror, Tremaine cradled the sphere in one hand and reached up to shove it against his head.

The sphere touched the big crystal in his temple and blazed red-hot. His scream was weirdly muffled and it took Tremaine a moment to realize it was her hearing at fault. She could feel moisture around her right ear and she didn’t want to know if it was blood. Grimacing, she pushed the sphere against him, not breaking contact until he rolled off her.

Gritting her teeth, Tremaine moved with him, struggling around, keeping the sphere in contact with the crystal. Something shoved against her and a flaring light blinded her; she shied away from a terrible heat.

Then she was pushing herself up off the floor, the broken remnants of copper and gears caught on her hand. The sphere had shattered. She looked for Castines, shaking the hot metal off her fingers and reaching for her pistol.

But Castines lay nearby and he looked shattered too. The crystal in his forehead was just a blackened hole. His eyes were open but fixed on nothing, and he lay like a broken puppet. Tremaine poked him cautiously with her foot, then eased away.

The nearest crystals were in pieces, or shattered to powder. Tremaine unsteadily climbed to her feet, looking around. The big crystal on the plinth in the center of the spiral was blown to bits, white light puddled around it. As she watched in wary fascination, the light seeped into the stone, gradually fading.

The Liaison who had held the gun lay sprawled against the wall, what was left of his uniform and the skin beneath blackened and burned. The one Orelis had spoken through lay farther away in a tumbled heap. The sphere or Castines or both must have protected Tremaine from the blast.

The place was weirdly quiet, but that must be her damaged hearing.
Nothing’s happening. So did it work?
She looked around vaguely for the satchel with the other explosives. Something moved in the corner of her eye, and she flinched away with a gasp. A long dark line was forming in the stone floor, creeping across it. Tremaine stared at it, utterly baffled. It spread out, forming more lines, a spiderweb stretching out…. Cracks. They were cracks.

I don’t think I’m going to need more explosives.

I
lias rolled over, struggling to sit up as the paralyzing curse faded away. He could see the fall of moon- and starlight through the openings in the high ceiling and it gave shape to the dim outlines of the giant circle chamber. “We’re really back here, the fortress,” he said incredulously. They were near the spot where they had left the Gardier who had survived the attack; someone must have come for them because both the living and the dead were gone, only bloodstains and the scattered remnants of the ropes they had been tied with were left behind.

Giliead grabbed his arm, demanding, “Are you all right?”

“No. Yes.” Ilias shook him off. He was still trembling with rage and an urgent need to kill Castines or Orelis or whatever that thing called itself. “We don’t have a sphere, a crystal. We can’t go back. She’s going to kill herself to kill them, she’d never bring Arisilde there.”

Giliead just looked at him, shaking his head helplessly. “Maybe not. Maybe she meant to—”

“Maybe,” Ilias snarled, and slammed his hand against the stone floor. “Was Tremaine right? Would breaking that spiral really break all the curses?” If it was for nothing, if it was all for a lie…

Giliead gestured in frustration, started to speak. Then his face went still and he slowly turned to look out over the shadowy room, the dusty carvings half-visible in the blue-white shafts of cold moonlight.

Ilias felt his anger freeze, sinking into sick dread. “What is it?”

“The curses are fading away, the curses in the circles.” Ilias could barely see him in the dimness but he knew Giliead’s eyes were fixed on that distance that no one but Chosen Vessels could see. “They’re fading away, dying.”

O
h, no.” Florian struggled to her feet, dazed. Her knees and elbows had been scraped in the fall and for a moment refused to bend right. She was in the
Ravenna
’s empty second ballroom, in the circle they had drawn to reach Lodun. Gerard lay nearby, unconscious, his face pale and bruised, his breathing shallow. Sense caught up with her. Gerard was out, Ilias and Giliead were stuck back in their world with no sorcerer and no sphere, it would take too long to explain the situation to Kressein or Avrain or Kevari, who must all be occupied defending the ship, Colonel Averi was injured or dead, it would take too long to get Niles. She bolted for the doors.