The Wizard Hunters (7 page)

You could stop it
, a traitor voice whispered in her head.
Just say no
. Maybe it was the Voice of Reason, but that had never had much power over her. Tremaine shrugged. “Let’s go.”

Gerard took a deep breath, then touched the sphere.

Her stomach lurched and a rush of cool air struck her, passing through her without impact, as if her body were made of gauze. There was nothing under her feet and her hair streamed up and she just had time to realize that this bizarre sensation was vertigo from falling when she hit something.

The first lungful of salt water clarified the situation completely. Tremaine surfaced, thrashing and gasping for air. It was day, bright blue sky laced with white clouds arched above and this was the ocean. Choppy blue water lay in every direction. In the distance was a rocky cliff-lined coast. Closer there was an island that seemed to be nothing but several peaks of graduated heights, all wreathed in dense mist. “Gerard!” Tremaine yelled, and went under again. She fought her way back up and remembered to tread water. Shrugging out of her jacket helped. She took a deep breath, went under, and wrestled off one boot; that helped too. She surfaced, her throat burning from inhaled salt water. “Gerard!” she shouted again.

“Here!”

She saw him swimming toward her and thrashed awkwardly to him. “What the hell happened?”

“I... I don’t know.” He had lost his spectacles and his dark hair was plastered to his head. “Do you have the sphere?”

The sphere . . . Oh, God
. Tremaine looked around as if it would be floating nearby. “I must have let go of it!”

“All right. It’s all right.” He sounded as if he was reassuring himself as well as her. “Give me your hand, we can call it.”

Tremaine nodded and reached for him, lacing their fingers together as Gerard whispered the words of the brief charm. They bobbed in the water, Tremaine turning her face away as the low waves crashed into her. “Did it work?”

“I’m not—” The sphere surfaced a few feet away with a splash. “Thank God!” Gerard let go of Tremaine and grabbed for it before it could go under again.

Watching him, Tremaine asked, “There’s an island that way, should we swim?” It seemed the thing to do, though she had never swum that far in her life.

Gerard twisted to look. “Island? It could be a promontory.”

“Whatever. Shouldn’t we start—”

He shook his head. “No, now that we have the sphere, we need to give the spell a chance to reverse. I timed it precisely—”

“Precisely? Gerard, what happened? This was supposed to be a weapon, not a transportation—thing!” Tremaine demanded, keeping her head above water with difficulty. “Hold on.” She went under again to get rid of the other boot.

As she surfaced, Gerard asked anxiously, “Are you all right?”

“Boots,” she explained succinctly. “What happened to the spell?”

“Ah, yes. Well, something ... something unexpected has happened.”

“You think?”

“Yes, sarcasm always helps a situation like—” His face went deathly still. “Tremaine, look.”

Her head whipped around, following his gaze. “The Gardier.”

The airship hadn’t been there a moment ago. It hung low, heading away from them, its black mass silhouetted sharply against the blue sky. The ridge and fins made jagged outlines and the long square cabin hung low underneath the swollen belly of the hull. “Where did it come from?” Tremaine realized she had whispered. It wasn’t likely to spot two heads bobbing in the waves, as high as it was and pointed away from them, but she had instinctively tried to sink as low as she could in the water and still keep breathing. The thing moved slowly but something made her think of a wasp, heavy with venom and searching for prey.

“It just appeared. I saw it.” Gerard stared after it. “There was a flash of light and it popped into existence. . . . Just like we did.”

“Like we did?”

Gerard was muttering, “Gardier attacking the coast always come out of the west and return that way. If that’s west— Wait!” He floundered, splashing her, frantically digging something out of a pants pocket. He produced a compass, shook it to get the water out, and examined it avidly. “That is west!”

“The spell sent us to Chaire? Except that isn’t Chaire.” Tremaine frowned at the island, the distant rocky coastline. The country around the port city of Chaire was flat. Then Tremaine’s startled brain put two and two together. “The spell sent us to where the Gardier come from.”

“Wait, look!” Gerard pointed.

Tremaine squinted against the sun. There was a dark blot moving out of the mist around the island’s peak. “It’s another airship—”

Tremaine hit the ground with a jarring thump, drenched by gallons of seawater. The downpour ended abruptly and she looked around, dazed. They were back in the Institute’s building, in the center of the spell circle. Gerard was sprawled a few feet away, dripping wet, still holding the sphere. They stared at each other, stunned.

There was a whoop of joy from somewhere above and Breidan Niles vaulted the railing, slipped in the mud caused by the deluge of seawater and landed beside them with a splat. “What happened?” he demanded. “Where—”

Gerard dropped the sphere, grabbing the other man’s shoulders to shake him. “It’s a translocation spell!”

“I gathered that, but where—”

From the railing, Tiamarc burst out, “That’s impossible!” Both Gerard and Tremaine stared up at him blankly. Tiamarc added, “But isn’t it?”

“Where did you go?” Niles demanded.

Tremaine saw the salt water had soaked the notes tamped down around the outside of the circle and that the ink was running. She gasped and grabbed Gerard’s shoulder. “Oh, no! The spell— The water—”

Shaking his head, Gerard told her, “Those are only the working notes. We have several typescript copies of everything.”

“Oh.” Tremaine sat back, shoving her dripping hair out of her eyes. “Never mind.”

“Where did you go?” Niles demanded again.

Tremaine’s dazed brain was still trying to catch up. She shook Gerard’s sleeve again. “Arisilde did a translocation spell before. He told me about it—”

Gerard nodded, his face intent. “I remember his description of that. I thought he used an old fayre ring—”

“And a sphere. The spell destroyed the sphere but—”

“They could still be alive.” Gerard met her eyes. “Nicholas and Arisilde.”

Tremaine opened her mouth but no words came.

“WHERE DID YOU GO?” Niles shouted, shaking Gerard.

“I don’t know.” Gerard let go of him, sitting back and shaking his head in amazement. “Niles, it was broad daylight.”

Niles rubbed his brow, trying to comprehend it. “My God.”

“We saw two Gardier airships, one coming from an island, one going toward it,” Gerard told him. “It could have been returning from Chaire. One of their bases, Niles.” He shook his head, smiling in wonder. “It wasn’t a weapon. Arisilde Damal was creating a translocation spell to take us to a Gardier base.”

Arisilde never wanted to make weapons
, Tremaine thought, remembering her own words.

F
  Chapter 4  
F

Isle of Storms

“
I
still think it’s alive,” Ilias said thoughtfully. He was stretched out on a shelf of rock, head propped on his arms, watching the scene below. This was another branch of the great cavern that wound through the mountain and their vantage point was a small tunnel opening about fifty paces up the wall. Below was a ledge, part natural and part augmented by wooden platforms, lit by wizard lights. One of the flying whales was anchored to the edge, enormous and silent, floating like a tethered thunderhead in the damp air. About thirty paces or so below the makeshift dock and mostly lost in shadow, a dark river cut through the cavern floor. “I think it’s breathing.”

Lying next to him, Giliead lifted his brows skeptically. “I think that’s your imagination.” From this angle they could see the flying whale didn’t have any legs, that the edged tail fins seemed to be how it moved itself through the air. The purpose of it was easier to discern now too: There were places in its body that the wizards rode in. They got aboard it with a gangplank that stretched from the cliff to an opening in the squarish belly that hung along the lower part of it.

For some time several wizards had been going in and out and now the slaves were carrying aboard wooden boxes and metal containers from stacks on the platforms. Giliead shook his head, studying the creature with a frown. “They put this thing together somehow.”

“They fed it,” Ilias argued, scratching his head vigorously. They had rolled in mud to kill any scent that might attract the attention of the captive howlers and it itched like mad, especially in hair. “From those vats.” The large metal vats, each as big around as a decent-sized hut, stood against the cavern wall not far below their ledge.

After two days of carefully creeping through the tunnels and passages to spy on the wizards’ mostly incomprehensible activities, they still didn’t know much about them. They had found the place where the wizards had cut through into the tunnels of the lower city, perhaps to reach the old harbor cave, but they hadn’t been able to get a look at the smaller passages on the west side of the main cavern. It was the place where the wizards seemed to have their living quarters and it had to yield more clues than these large work areas. It was also where the slave quarters must be, so there had been no hope yet of releasing any of them.

As far as they could tell, there were at least fifty wizards and more than sixty slaves here, scattered all through this section of the caverns. It was hard to estimate their numbers when it was so difficult to tell the wizards apart, but right now there were five working on the platforms below, two supervising the slaves and the other three going in and out of the flying whale. There was at least one other whale, the one they had seen swimming in the air through the big cavern, and they had found two other large caves with platforms like this.

All those wizards working together
, Ilias thought again, still overwhelmed. He and Giliead had been killing them for fifteen years now and they had never come across wizards cooperating before, not real ones. They always hated each other even more than they hated normal people. He would have been sick with the thought of it if there hadn’t been so many other things to be horrified about.

He told Giliead, “And Ixion put things together too. Never that big, but still.” It was the vats that made Ilias doubt. They were too much like the ones that Ixion had used to make his curselings, though they hadn’t been able to see what was in these yet.

“I know, but this is ... different.” Giliead let out his breath in frustration. “We’re not going to have much to tell Halian and Nicanor.”

“There’s an army of wizards ready to overrun the coast with giant flying whale monsters. I think that’s all the telling they can handle.”

Giliead lifted a brow at him. “You know what I mean. We should know where they come from, why they’re here.” He shook his head a little, frowning. “Or at least where they’re going to attack first.”

Ilias scratched the stubble on his chin, dislodging a few flakes of dried mud. They had overheard plenty of conversations, not that any of it had been intelligible. If the wizards were calling Cineth or Pirae or any of the other coastal cities by their names, they hadn’t heard it. “If we could just get closer—” He started at a sudden crash from below, wincing as he saw what it was. “Oh, not again.” A few years ago he and Giliead had killed a wizard near Ancyra who had cursed people to dance themselves to death, a fairly horrible way to go; at least these wizards took their victims quickly, though that didn’t make it any easier to watch.

The crash had been one of the slaves dropping a crate. Now he backed away from the furious wizard advancing on him.

Then the slave stumbled back into the metal stand supporting a curse light. It swayed over and both wizard overseers shouted in alarm. The slave made a wild grab for it but the heavy light tipped. As the white part smashed against the stone, the curse escaped in an abrupt burst of sparks. A little fire leapt to life on a bundle of tarps piled near the crates.

The platform suddenly boiled with confusion. The slaves retreated in terror while the two wizards pressed forward, ripping off their jackets to beat at the small fire. The other three wizards ran out of the flying whale, shouting at each other, frantic, panicked. The howlers screamed, probably because everyone else was.

Completely baffled, Ilias stared at Giliead. “They’re afraid of fire?”

“I’ll say.” Giliead watched in amazement. “I almost took a burning arrow in the chest once and it didn’t scare me that much.”

Ilias shook his head. It was such a small fire. “How do they cook?”

“Very carefully?”

The little fire died under the wizards’ frantic efforts. Abruptly all the lights on the platform went out, the buzzing hum they emitted dying away. In the dimness figures still milled in confusion but at least the yelling stopped. Tiny lights sprang to life, held in the hands of the wizards.

Without the buzzing, their speaking voices were audible. As others herded the slaves and howlers away, three of them held a brief agitated conversation, playing the lights over the heavy metal cylinders stacked waiting on the far side of the platform. Then they followed the others, leaving the cave in darkness.

Except for the glow of light from the open door in the flying whale’s belly.

Giliead sat up, nudging Ilias excitedly. “This is our chance.”

Ilias let his breath out in resignation as he pushed himself up off the rock. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

W
hile Giliead cached their pack and waterskin in the bottom of the vertical shaft, Ilias crept out to scout the cavern floor. The shadows were deep and there was cover along the rocky bank of the narrow river, mostly old rockfalls and some boulders that might have been recently dislodged by the wizards’ construction efforts. The whale hung over the cavern, impossibly huge for something so quiet; its presence made the back of Ilias’s neck prickle. They would have to cross under its shadow to get to the platform, like coneys trying to sneak past a hawk; that would be a terrible time to find out it really was alive.