The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein)

T
remaine picked her way along the ledge, green stinking canal on one hand, rocky outcrop sprouting dense dark foliage on the other. She was exhausted and footsore and at the moment profoundly irritated. She said in exasperation, “All they have to do is get on the damn ship. Is that really going to be so hard?”

“It’s the eyes,” Giliead told her obliquely. He and Ilias were just ahead of her on the narrow shelf of rock, both men having a far easier time of traversing it than she was. The mossy water a few feet below was foul-smelling and stagnant, inhabited only by weeds and the occasional brightly colored snake. These canals cut through the rocky island in several directions, leading to and from the stone buildings that housed entrances to the deserted waterlogged city that wove through the caves below. The builders, whoever they were, had used black stones twenty or thirty feet long to line the watercourse, stacking them like tree trunks in the same way they built their underground walls and bridges.

“The ship doesn’t have eyes.” Tremaine struggled along, sweating in the damp air. The canal was overhung by the twisted dark-leaved trees; the overcast sky made it even more dim. For years the island had been a trap for seagoing vessels and the crews who sailed them; the whole place felt as if the corruption in the caves below had crept up through the roots of the stunted jungle.

“That’s the problem,” Giliead said, glancing back at her as he brushed a branch aside. “She just looks like—”

“A big blind giant,” Ilias supplied, balancing agilely on the slick stones. They were both Syprians, natives of this world on the other side of the etheric gateway from Ile-Rien. They were brothers, though only by adoption, and they looked nothing alike. Ilias had a stocky muscular build and a wild mane of blond hair, some of it tied into a queue that hung down his back. He wore battered dark pants and boots with a sleeveless blue shirt trimmed with leather braid. Giliead was built on a bigger scale, nearly a head taller than Ilias, with chestnut braids and olive skin, dressed in a dark brown shirt under a leather jerkin. Both wore more jewelry than had been fashionable for men in Ile-Rien for many years—copper earrings, armbands with copper disks. Ilias also had a silver mark on his cheek in the shape of a half-moon, but that wasn’t meant to be decorative.

Tremaine let out a frustrated breath as she ducked under a heavy screen of pungent leaves. She was the odd woman out, with short mousy brown hair and sunburned skin. She was wearing Syprian clothing too, a loose blue tunic block-printed with green-and-gold designs and breeches of a soft doeskin. Her clothes were a little the worse for wear but in better shape than the unlamented tweed outfits she had left behind in Ile-Rien.

At the moment all three of them were covered with bruises, howler scratches and patches of mud and slime from the walls of the underground passages. The last few days had been nothing but fighting and running and swimming and falling, and Tremaine just wanted everyone to quietly get on the ship so they could get the hell away from here. She had also gone to a great deal of trouble to steal the
Queen Ravenna
for just this purpose and she wanted her new friends to like it. So far they had stubbornly refused to share her enthusiasm. Even Ilias, who had actually sailed on the ship briefly.

“It won’t matter how big the ship is as long as she sails by curses,” Giliead continued frankly. “They’re never going to get used to that.”

Tremaine knew he was probably right, though she wasn’t ready to admit it aloud. Syprian civilization was considerably more primitive than Ile-Rien’s, and they regarded any mechanical object, from electric lights to clocks, as magical. Worse, Syprians hated magic, since all their sorcerers were murdering lunatics. It was a minor miracle that they had managed to get to this point, where a woman from Ile-Rien who was a friend of sorcerers could talk about this subject with Syprians at all. It helped that they were a sea people and fairly cosmopolitan, despite their prejudices. “But the
Ravenna
doesn’t use magic,” she pointed out. “The steam engines—” She stopped when she realized the words were coming out in Rienish. If there was a Syrnaic word for “steam engine” the translation spell that had given Tremaine the knowledge of the language hadn’t seen fit to include it. “There’s boilers, and you put water in them, and burn coal or oil or something, and the steam makes it go. It’s not magic,” she finished lamely.

Giliead and Ilias paused to exchange a look; Giliead’s half of it was dubious and Ilias’s was ironic. “They always say that,” Ilias put in. He had spent nearly one whole day in Ile-Rien and now qualified as the local expert. “Wagons without horses, wizard lights, wizard weapons, there’s an explanation for everything.”

Giliead shook his head as he started forward again. “If that’s our only way off the island, we’re going to have trouble.”

Ilias nodded. “It doesn’t matter about me, I’m marked anyway,” he said matter-of-factly. The mark he spoke of was the little half-moon of silver branded into his cheek. It was what Syprian law said anyone who had ever fallen under a sorcerer’s curse should wear. “And Gil’s exempt from the law because he’s a Chosen Vessel, but it’s the others I’m worried about. If the people in Cineth harbor see them come off that ship, they could all end up ostracized or worse. And some of the younger ones come from pretty good families, they could still have a chance of getting married.”

Tremaine considered that, frowning. There were a lot of things she didn’t understand about the Syprians yet. In many ways their society was a matriarchy; men seemed to hold the public offices like warleader and lawgiver but weren’t allowed to own property, and family status was important. The Andrien, the family Giliead had been born into and Ilias adopted by, had had its ups and downs, mostly due to Giliead’s being the local god’s Chosen Vessel. The three female heirs to Andrien had all been killed by the sorcerer Ixion, leaving the family in danger of losing their land when Giliead’s mother Karima died.

“They could end up ostracized,” Giliead agreed. “But that’s if we can get them aboard her in the first place.” He didn’t sound sanguine about the prospect.

It was the only way off the island at the moment and Tremaine didn’t want to contemplate leaving anyone behind. “So you’re not even curious to see the inside?” she prompted, trying a different tack. “Ilias did.”

Giliead just looked back at her, not the least bit impressed by this technique.

Ilias snorted, swinging surefootedly over a gap in the stone. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Tremaine knew what he meant; the
Ravenna
had been the only way for him to return with the rescue party, to get back to his own world. She had been hoping the Syprians would like the
Ravenna
or at least get used to her. The way they acted toward their own vessels seemed to suggest ships were fairly important in their society. Ilias had become somewhat accustomed to the
Ravenna
, but he and Giliead were much more used to strange sights and magic than most Syprians. She said dryly, “I failed to notice your helplessness.”

Instead of retaliating verbally, Ilias just grinned and deftly caught her when her foot slipped.

Recovering her balance with his help, Tremaine was glad she hadn’t gone headfirst into the canal; once her clothes were soaked with water she didn’t think she would have had the strength to climb out again, and that would have been embarrassing. She said reluctantly, “Nobody would necessarily have to see them get off the ship. We could send all of you ashore in one of the launches someplace nearby but out of sight.” Tremaine was a little hesitant to suggest this idea, considering what she thought Ilias’s feelings on the subject were. She knew that when he had been cursed by Ixion, no one but he and Giliead had known, and Ilias had still insisted on turning himself in to receive the curse mark. “Then you could warn the city that we were coming before we sail into the harbor.”

“That might be best.” Giliead had to crouch to duck under some dark trailing vines. Pausing to hold them up for Tremaine, he threw Ilias a thoughtful look, as if he had had the same qualm.

But Ilias just said, “There would be less trouble that way.”

Ducking under the vines, Tremaine absently watched the display of flexed muscle as Ilias hauled himself up on a heavier branch to swing across another gap in the stone. She wasn’t sure “less trouble” was a realistic expectation. But whatever happened, the
Ravenna
would be leaving this area soon, steaming through the unfamiliar waters of this world until it was safe to open the etheric world-gate again and bring the ship to port in Capidara, one of Ile-Rien’s only surviving allies.

They still knew little about their enemies, except that they came from somewhere in this world. The Gardier used the etheric gate spell to reach their targets in Ile-Rien and Adera, something no one had realized until Arisilde Damal and Tremaine’s father Nicholas Valiarde had somehow stolen the spell from them. After both men had disappeared, it had taken the Viller Institute sorcerers years to discover what the gate spell was and where the Gardier were coming from.

The spell needed two things to create a gate to another world: a circle of arcane symbols that no one properly understood and a sorcerer using one of the Viller spheres. Carrying her circle with her gave the
Ravenna
great mobility in traveling back and forth between worlds. As far as they knew, the Gardier didn’t have circles on their ships or airships, and so could only create gates when they were close enough to one of their bases where a circle was located. Tremaine and the others had destroyed the Gardier spell circle on this island; hopefully that would keep the Gardier ships blockading the coast of Ile-Rien from coming through the gate after them. It would not stop attack by the Gardier already in this world.

A shout from above startled Tremaine. “Now what?” They were so close to temporary safety and she was so tired. The two men plunged ahead, splashing in the stagnant water. They were closer than she thought; only a few yards along was the break in the canal where a rough set of stairs led up the steep overgrown hill.

Tremaine reached the opening and scrambled up the steps after Giliead and Ilias, both almost at the top by now. The short scrubby trees and thorny vines clutched at her, and she clawed at the muddy rock to drag her weary body up. The stairs led into a flat-roofed stone building that was now filled with milling refugees, some whispering in anger or panic and others fearfully silent. She shouldered into the path through the crowd that the two men had already made, coming out of the square doorway into the plaza.

The little group of stone structures stood on a bluff looking out over the misty sea, all probably built about the same time as the underwater city; the stunted trees and thick carpet of vegetation had had time to eat away sections of the paving. Another flat-roofed building stood at a right angle to this one, concealing a shaft leading down to the caves.

Most of the freed prisoners had drawn back against the dark walls. They were all from Ile-Rien’s world on the other side of the etheric gateway, a mix of Maiutans and other Southern Seas Islanders, Parscians, with a few Rienish. They had been captured and brought to this world by the Gardier as slave labor for their base in the island’s caves.

Wrapped in a canvas tarp and lying on the pavement was the currently inert body of the former owner of those caves, the sorcerer Ixion. Tremaine stared warily at the bundle, wondering if Ixion had decided to rejoin the living and that was what had upset everyone. But Giliead and Ilias stood with Ander, Florian and the group of Rienish soldiers and Syprian sailors who had led the attack on the base, all looking out to sea. After a baffled moment Tremaine saw what had caught their attention: About three hundred yards from shore the low dark outline of a Gardier gunship moved silently through the mist.

Oh, no,
Tremaine thought, her stomach clenching as she moved to join the others. It wasn’t the gunship from the Gardier’s harbor on the far side of the island, even she could tell that. This boat was longer than that one and had a second gun on the stern. “How long—?”

Florian glanced at her, her expression desperate. “We just saw it a few moments ago.” She was younger than Tremaine, a slight girl with short red hair, dressed in stained khaki knickers and a dark pullover sweater. It had been Tremaine, Gerard, Florian and Ander who had first come through the etheric gateway, scouting the approach to the Gardier base, and been shipwrecked here. Gerard was back at the cove now where the
Ravenna
would be landing her launches in preparation for taking them all aboard.

Giliead must have already informed Ander of the situation because he turned impatiently to Tremaine, demanding, “It was the
Ravenna
? You saw it?”

Ander Destan was a tall dark-haired man, conventionally handsome. He was only a few years older than Tremaine but was already a captain in the Ile-Rien Army Intelligence Corps, or what was left of it. He had never quite trusted the Syprians the way she, Florian and Gerard had, but Tremaine could tell this wasn’t disbelief of Giliead’s truthfulness. It was pure relief; after seeing the gunship, a viable escape route probably seemed like too much to ask for. She nodded hurriedly. “Gerard’s there with Niles now, the launches will be waiting for us in that cove where we met the
Swift.
” She waved her arms. “We need to get moving!”

None of the Syprians gathered around could understand Rienish, and Tremaine heard Ilias rapidly briefing Halian on the situation. Halian was Giliead’s stepfather and had been captain of the
Swift;
he was an older man than any of the other Syprians except Gyan, with a weathered face and graying dark hair. Halian turned to the other Syprian crew members gathered worriedly around, saying, “Break them up into groups and start leading them down the canal. There’s boats waiting at Dead Tree Point.”