The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) (20 page)

Now they were moving down a corridor on C deck. The cabin doors were set back in little vestibules, two or three doors opening into each, meant to reduce noise and give a little more privacy. It struck Tremaine how dramatic the change had been since she, Florian and Ilias had first set foot on the dark quiet ship in Port Rel. The
Ravenna
had been a thing of arrested power then, occupied by ghosts and dust, with the feel, and the odor, of a disused hotel.

Now freed prisoners who had been chained in the dark for endless months kept their cabin doors open and all the lights on—even the Maiutans, most of whom would have lived in little clapboard houses not that much different from Syprian dwellings. Military wives, the families of Viller Institute workers, and the smattering of refugees from Rel and Chaire who had chosen to take the risk had come accompanied with children and pets; they kept their doors open too and hung their laundry to dry in the corridor. Tremaine could hear the tinny music of a gramophone record playing somewhere. The ship’s loudspeaker system underlined the contrast by suddenly announcing, “All passengers please take heed: When on deck, stand clear of the funnels. Funnels may vent sooty water without warning.”

As the announcement was repeated in Parscian, Giliead glanced inquiringly back at Florian. She translated, “It was ‘beware of funnels’ again.” The loudspeaker also delivered exhortations concerning keeping the dead-lights on the portholes, closing outer hatches and staying off the open decks unless it was absolutely necessary. Tremaine couldn’t tell if they chose them randomly or by whatever the inexperienced crew was most paranoid about at that moment.

Their passage didn’t go unremarked as all the Syprians were minor celebrities on the ship, with Ilias and Giliead being the most recognized by the prisoners released from the Gardier base. People stepped out of their cabins to watch them pass, or stopped in the corridor to give them room to get by. The fact that both Syprians were wearing swords strapped across their backs probably helped attract attention as well.

It was less easy now to tell the freed slaves from the refugees, since they had gotten rid of their filthy Gardier coveralls and were all dressed in a hodgepodge of borrowed clothing: navy and army fatigues with the sleeves and pant legs rolled up or mismatched blouses, skirts and trousers donated by the other passengers. Shoes must have been in short supply because most of them seemed to be in socks or barefoot.

Giliead stopped in the corridor, turning into one of the vestibules. “There’s something here. Just a trace.” He hesitated, touching the dark-paneled wall lightly.

The door he had chosen stood open, and Tremaine could hear Rienish voices inside. She stepped past him and knocked on the open door. “Hello? Could we have a word?”

“Yes? Oh, hello.” It was a young girl in a jumper, two little boys playing with wooden blocks on the floor at her feet. There was an old woman sitting on the couch, humming to herself and working on a stretch of cloth with thread and needle. She didn’t stop working, but her cloudy blue eyes lifted to study Tremaine, then Florian and the two Syprians.

“Hello.” Florian glanced at Tremaine, correctly interpreted her blank expression, and managed, “We’re just…oh, taking a survey. Who’s staying in your cabin, and where are they now, and that sort of thing.”

“Oh.” The girl managed to tear her eyes off the exotic sight of Giliead and Ilias in her doorway and gestured to the old woman. “It’s just me and Grandmother and the boys. Lady Aviler came asking for volunteers, and my mother went.”

“In the laundry?” Tremaine asked, eyeing the grandmother. According to the patrols, most of the civilian activity aboard the ship last night had centered in the hospital and the laundry. If the attempt on the Isolation Ward had been made by a sorcerer and not something that had managed to get aboard from the island, then chances were it was a refugee with a good excuse for wandering the ship at night.

The girl assured her, “No, the kitchens.”

“Ah.” Tremaine glanced at Giliead, asking in Syrnaic, “Is it Grandma there?”

“Yes, but…” He shrugged slightly, meeting the old woman’s cloudy blue gaze. “She doesn’t feel dangerous.”

Ilias leaned against the doorframe, explaining, “When they’re real old like that and not doing any harm, we usually just pretend we didn’t find them.”

Tremaine nodded, not sure if that said something about Syprians in general or Ilias and Giliead in particular. She turned to the young girl again and mentally switched back to Rienish. “Ah…”
Might as well be direct
. “Is your grandmother a sorceress or a witch by any chance?”

Either the girl was an excellent actress or was genuinely surprised at the question. “Oh, no, madam.”

“So she can’t cast?” Florian clarified, glancing at the imperturbable old woman.

“Oh, she can cast and heal, but she can’t fly or anything.” The girl made an extravagant gesture, apparently indicating Great Spells, major wards and raising fayre islands.

“I see.” Tremaine bit her lip in thought. “Has she been in the laundry lately?”

The girl seemed bewildered by Tremaine’s fixation on the laundry. “No, do they need help there?”

“I’ll mention her to Dr. Divies,” Florian put in hastily, taking Tremaine’s arm to steer her out of the room. “If she can heal, they might need her down in the hospital.”

“Oh, she’d like that.”

As they returned to the corridor, Tremaine explained in Syrnaic, “Anybody with any real magical talent got recruited for something like the army or the Institute or trapped behind the barrier at Lodun. The ones who are left are going to be either a hundred years old like that woman or completely untrained children.”

Giliead looked down the corridor with a preoccupied expression, not seeing their curious audience. “If it’s a Rienish wizard, this isn’t going to be easy.”

Ilias nodded, his face resigned. “And if it’s a Gardier wizard, there’s a lot of places to hide on this ship.”

Tremaine flipped through the map book again, thinking it over. The assigned living areas had been colored in with a pencil, not that that told her much. Lady Aviler and her minions had been keeping a rough list of cabin assignments; they would have to get a look at that too. Some of Second and all of Third Class should be uninhabited. Though, she supposed, there was nothing to keep people from taking those rooms except that they were smaller and less nicely appointed. Some of those rescued from the Gardier might very well have chosen to move there, if after months of crowded confinement underground they craved privacy and quiet more than anything else. “There’s still tons of empty cabin space. We should check that first.”

Giliead’s brows quirked. “You mean there are more rooms?”

“Bunches.” Tremaine showed him the map, pointing to a spot. “We’re about here.”

As they started down the corridor, Florian asked slowly, “So what if it’s not a Gardier, or a creature from the island? What if it is someone trying to kill the prisoners for revenge?”

Tremaine shrugged slightly, still occupied with the map. “Then we just pretend we didn’t find them.”

A
fter a time, Florian was called away to help the healers again, and Ilias, Tremaine and Giliead carried the search into the bow.

Ilias could feel the tension between himself and Tremaine but it was a good kind of tension, a new awareness of scent, voice, of every casual contact. He hadn’t felt that with a woman since before the curse mark. It made it harder to concentrate on the search, but he liked making the effort; it had been far too long since he had been distracted like this.

Tremaine was being Tremaine, shifting from speculating with ruthless unconcern about what kind of havoc a wizard or curseling hiding on the ship might wreak to becoming girlishly flustered when he brushed against her in a narrow doorway, to catching his eye and making a deliberate innuendo. Giliead’s quiet amusement grew through the afternoon, until Ilias figured he was probably going to have to punch him sometime before evening.

The bow area was more of a maze, with rooms branching off the blue-carpeted cross corridors connecting the two main bow-to-stern passages. The deck started to slope upward here, and he saw Tremaine grip the ivory-colored rail more often from the sway of the ship. The cabin doors were set back in little cubbies in this section too, four to each, but without the noisy occupation of the center section, it was creepy rather than cozy.

With that faintly distracted air he always wore when he was hunting, Giliead prowled into an open room that turned out to be another sitting area. It was a long chamber, the chairs and tables pushed back against the wood-lined walls and covered with white drapes. There was a painting on the far wall of a metal ship like the
Ravenna,
the hull streaked with rust, the paint faded, limping into port apparently with the help of two smaller craft. An odd choice of art for the ship, Ilias decided. “Why did they put this here?” he asked Tremaine. “It’s bad luck.”

“I don’t know.” She contemplated it a moment. “It could be a sort of warning about what might be the
Ravenna
’s future.” Then she snorted derisively. “We should be so lucky.”

And there’s mood four, fatalism,
Ilias thought wryly. Done prowling, Giliead turned into the main corridor again, and Ilias asked, “Why is this place called ‘Third’?” He glanced back at Tremaine. “What’s third about it?”

“The rooms are smaller and less expensive,” Tremaine explained, grabbing for the rail again as the deck moved underfoot. “The public rooms aren’t as nice either. Before the war, Bisra had passenger ships like this, only not nearly as big, and the class areas were horizontal, with Third being on the bottom. They had locked gates between the decks, and when a couple of the ships sank, nobody was able to unlock the gates in time and half the passengers drowned inside the ship.”

Ilias winced at the image that conjured. Giliead, his attention caught, glanced back at her with an incredulous expression, saying, “That’s insane.”

“That’s Bisra.” Tremaine shrugged, unconcerned.

Ilias shook his head, fighting off a vision of a ship like this going to the bottom to become a metal tomb. He remembered that “Bisrans” were the arrogant pair of men they had run into near the healer’s area yesterday. “They had these ships before the war, but not now?”

“The Gardier sank them all.” She gestured to the open corridor. “Anyway, it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d think, considering people only stayed in these rooms for a few days at a time,” she said, looking around. “There must be communal bathrooms somewhere along the corridor.”

Ilias hadn’t thought it looked uncomfortable at all; it was palatial compared to some of the dirt-floored huts he had stayed in.

Giliead stopped suddenly, head cocked. Tensing, Ilias looked at the walls, the ceiling overhead, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. Giliead stepped to the wall, brushing his fingers against it as he followed it to the next vestibule. He stopped there, Ilias beside him, Tremaine drawing up uneasily behind them. “How many doors?” Giliead asked thoughtfully.

“Three,” Ilias answered, studying the little cubby suspiciously. Tremaine leaned around him.

“The others all have four,” Giliead pointed out.

“Ah.” Ilias squinted hard at the blank space at the back of the narrow cubby where the fourth door should be. It might be missing because something essential to the ship occupied that spot rather than cabin space, but he really doubted it.

“Clever,” Tremaine muttered, backing into the corridor to give them room.

Giliead stepped to the bare spot on the wall, running his hand over it. Then he stepped back and kicked it.

The door was there between one heartbeat and the next, banging open against the inside cabin wall.

Ilias relaxed slightly as he looked past Giliead, relieved and disappointed. It was a small cabin with the walls painted yellow, with two narrow beds stacked one atop the other, and a basin set into the wall below one of the perfect Rienish glass mirrors. The carpet was blue with tiny white and yellow flowers. There were cabinets built into the other walls, but no place to hide.
It’s empty. Damm it
. It would have been good to get this over with.

They stepped inside and Tremaine followed, though there wasn’t much room left. “No curse traps,” Giliead reported, glancing around with a frown. “Doesn’t look like he’s spent much time here.”

“But we know it’s a wizard now, and not a curseling.” Ilias started opening cabinets and drawers, finding nothing but a little dust. “A curseling wouldn’t have the brains to hide this room.”

“We don’t know that the thing that tried to get into the Isolation Ward is the same thing—person—that hid this room,” Tremaine pointed out. Then she grimaced. “But whoever’s been staying here has been mixing with the refugees. That really bothers me.”

Stooping to check under the bed, Giliead threw a thoughtful glance at her. “How can you tell?”

“The blanket is red, and the brocade along the hem doesn’t match the carpet.” She nodded toward the blanket crumpled on the lower bunk. “The mattresses are stripped to the ticking covers, and it’s the only bedding in the room. And it wasn’t here, because it doesn’t go with the rest of the decor. It was handed out from the ship’s stores.”

Ilias felt a chill settle in his stomach. She was right; all the bedding and fabrics in their cabin were the same colors. Giliead picked up the blanket, running a hand over it. His face hardened.

“What?” Ilias asked, watching him worriedly.

Giliead dropped the blanket back on the bed, his mouth twisted. “I don’t think this one is harmless.”

A
s they came back up the corridor of D deck, Tremaine noted the First Class area was much quieter. Her grumbling stomach informed her that it was lunchtime; most people had probably gone to the dining area. She was about to suggest they do the same when Giliead stopped abruptly in a vestibule. “There’s something here.” He stepped up to one of the doors. “It’s faint. Not like that other room. But it doesn’t seem dangerous.”