The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) (22 page)

Ilias snorted, and Giliead growled something under his breath.

Riand was still matching cold stares with Averi. Considering that Averi was the cold stare champion of the ship, Tremaine didn’t give much for Riand’s chances. The Bisran said finally, “Let us speak in private.”

“We are in private,” Averi snapped. “There isn’t anyone here who is not directly concerned in this investigation.”

Tremaine knew Riand could have probably gotten a private conversation with Averi if he hadn’t been aggressive enough to trip the Rienish “if a Bisran asks for it say no” reflex. From his expression, Riand might have realized it too. He struggled with himself for a long moment, then said stiffly, “It is true, my son is a sorcerer. But all he did was cast a ward, and that only to protect our quarters while we were gone.”

Averi’s frown deepened. “It wasn’t terribly effective. We searched your quarters while you were in the dining room.”

“The ward was not meant to bar admittance to corporeal visitors.”

Gerard came alert, staring skeptically at Riand. “Corporeal visitors? What do you mean?” He threw a glance at Giliead, and Tremaine realized he was thinking of the Syprian god. Though she didn’t think it would leave the vicinity of Cineth, it was the only incorporeal visitor the ship had had.
As far as we know,
she thought suddenly, uneasy.

Riand’s eyes moved from Averi to Gerard. He said, “My son was approached by something that did not show itself. It came to him while he was alone in the sitting room of our quarters, last night. It offered him…an unspecified reward if he would assist it.”

Florian translated for Giliead and Ilias, keeping her voice low. Giliead’s brows drew together as he listened. Ilias met his eyes with a frown and mouthed the word, “Shades?” Giliead shook his head slightly, but more as if he wasn’t sure rather than discounting the suggestion.

“Assist it in what?” Averi demanded.

Riand hesitated, then admitted, “Stopping the ship from reaching Capidara.”

Gerard cleaned his spectacles on a handkerchief, his eyes never leaving Riand. “But he refused.”

“We have no quarrel with the people on this ship.” For a moment Riand looked human, weary and exasperated. “Should we destroy the very thing that our safety depends on? To trust ourselves to a…a man, if it is a man and not some fay or creature, we know nothing of? We aren’t mad.”

“He had no idea what the identity of this…being was?” Averi’s face was immobile, impossible to read. “If it was human, if it was male or female?”

“No.” Riand shook his head, taking out a cloth to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead. All these admissions were costing him something, at least. “Its spells of concealment were impenetrable. He could tell nothing about it except presumably what it wished him to know.”

“It didn’t occur to him to play along for a time?” Gerard asked, still watching him sharply but betraying some exasperation. “To try to discover its identity or what it planned for the ship?”

Riand’s expression hardened. “Our children are taught to refuse the temptations offered them by demons and devils. To ‘play along’ with such a creature would only endanger his soul.”

Oh, please,
Tremaine thought, rolling her eyes. She thought she had done well to keep her incredulity subvocal, but Riand caught her expression, and his face reddened. He looked pointedly to Averi, his temper tightly controlled. “May my son be released now?”

The colonel’s expression was still inscrutable, giving Riand no credit and nothing to appeal to. “I’m afraid not.”

Riand pressed his lips together, his eyes coldly angry. He turned and walked out of the office, one of the guards moving to follow him at Averi’s gesture. The colonel frowned at the doorway. “He isn’t telling us everything.”

“He didn’t want to say what it offered, or what it specifically wanted the boy to do.” Gerard paced a few steps, lost in thought. He lifted his brows. “In his position, it’s a wise move.”

“Could that story be true?” Florian asked a little reluctantly. “If this sorcerer or whatever he is wants to destroy the ship, why does he need help from a Bisran church sorcerer? Even a saboteur with no magic could cause us a lot of trouble.”

“He doesn’t want to destroy the ship.” Tremaine’s eyes narrowed as she considered the problem. “He was just feeling Bain out, seeing how far he could go with him. If Bain would agree to sink a ship filled with refugees, including his own family, he’d agree to anything.” She shrugged slightly. “It’s a bit crude. It makes me think Riand is right, and the thing that approached Bain wasn’t human.” It might even be why Riand believed it wasn’t human, but he just didn’t want to discuss his reasoning with people he still thought of as enemies.

Gerard nodded grimly, but Averi gave her an oddly assessing look. It wasn’t as bad as his “who the hell are you” stare, but it worried her. He turned his gaze to the sphere, saying bluntly, “There is an incorporeal being on the ship.”

Everyone looked at the sphere, resting innocuously on the desk where Gerard had set it when he came in. It wasn’t even spinning or clicking.

Tremaine shook her head, startled. “No. Arisilde wouldn’t do that, not unless he went insane.” It crossed her mind suddenly that that was a very real possibility. Arisilde’s consciousness was trapped in the sphere; if anybody had a right to go mad, it was he.

Before they had left Ile-Rien on the ill-fated Pilot Boat, Tremaine had been planning to kill herself. It was only after discovering that Arisilde was in the sphere that she had realized some of those feelings of despair had come from him.

The images of the Syprians that had worked their way into her play and a few magazine stories had been his attempts to communicate with her. But she hadn’t responded, and the sphere had been left alone and dusty, and Arisilde, left without hope, had unintentionally transferred his despair to her. She had been despondent and probably shell-shocked enough on her own, and that couldn’t have helped him either; they must have just fed each other’s melancholy. It was a pointed reminder that Arisilde might not be in total control of his powers, that he might cause things to happen without conscious volition. But she wasn’t going to point that out to Averi. “If he’s crazy, we’re all dead, so there’s no point in discussing it,” she said curtly.

Averi eyed her for a thoughtful moment. “I’m going to speak to Niles. Perhaps if Bain’s story doesn’t match his father’s, we won’t have to discuss it at all.”

Tremaine watched him go, eyes narrowed, then said in Syrnaic, “Did that sound like a threat to anybody else?”

“No,” Gerard told her firmly. “He has to consider all possibilities. But I don’t think it’s the sphere—Arisilde—either. For one thing, he wouldn’t need Bain’s help to disrupt activity on the ship.”

Wanting off the subject, Tremaine asked Ilias, “What did you say you thought it was?”

“Shades sometimes make trouble by whispering in dreams.” Ilias jerked his chin toward the sphere. “But your god there should keep the dangerous ones away from the ship.”

Tremaine glanced at Gerard, frowning. “Is the ship haunted?” As if they needed that too.

Gerard lifted a brow, considering the question. “There’s some natural etheric activity. There were a few accidents during the early voyages, and I’d be surprised if there weren’t still lingering impressions. But I doubt we have any true entities, particularly any hostile ones.” He glanced up, frowning. “It’s more likely Bain Riand was tricked by another sorcerer, fooled into believing the offer came from some sort of etheric being.”

Ilias shook his head with a grimace. “It’s hard to believe Ixion is on this ship and he didn’t do this.”

Giliead had been listening in thoughtful silence. “It’s always been him before,” he admitted grimly. “But Gerard is right. He can’t get out of that room with their god keeping him in or he’d be out of it now. And besides, it doesn’t have his…touch about it.” He pushed to his feet. “But…”

“But it won’t hurt to make sure,” Gerard finished.

O
nce out of the Isolation Ward and up on the open deck, Ilias stopped Tremaine with a hand on her arm. “I don’t want you to go with us.”

She lifted a brow at him. “What?” The afternoon sun was bright on the sea and the salt wind tore at their hair. Already across the deck, Giliead glanced back in annoyance to see what was keeping them. He took in the situation and suddenly found something intensely interesting off the starboard rail.

“He knows things. If he knows we’re together—” Ilias made a complex gesture.

Ah.
This was about the Andrien women Ixion had cursed to death. Giliead’s older sister, a cousin of Ilias’s who had followed him to Andrien, and Halian’s daughter, who had come to live with her father. Tremaine bit a nail thoughtfully, and pointed out, “Florian’s going.”

“I don’t want Florian to go either.”

It was Florian’s turn to glare at him. “What?” she demanded defensively. “You think I’m going to be within ten feet of him and suddenly succumb to his will?”

Ilias shook his head in exasperation. “Of course not.”

Tremaine couldn’t help herself. “Florian had high marks in will-withstanding at the Lodun entrance examinations.”

Florian transferred the glare to her.

Ilias planted his hands on his hips, and said firmly, “He kills women. I don’t want him to see more of you—either of you—than he already has.”

Tremaine sighed. She supposed it didn’t matter; she didn’t have anything to say to the bastard anyway. And she could hear real fear under Ilias’s no-nonsense tone. “Oh, fine. We’ll be in the main hall.”

Ilias lost some of the tension in his shoulders, and took her hand. “I’ll make it up to you.” He lifted it to his lips, and she thought he was going to kiss the back like a conventional Rienish gentleman. But instead he bit her gently in the knuckle and lifted his brows suggestively.

Tremaine freed her hand, patted him on the cheek, and said, “That’s a start.” She wasn’t going to admit just how good a start it was.

Florian muttered, “Somebody could offer to make it up to me,” but followed her without protest up the steps to the Promenade deck.

They went through the doors to the roofed and glassed-in portion of the deck that ran along the ship’s side, but Tremaine sensed foot-dragging. “Did you really want to see Ixion that much?” she asked. “He’s not that exciting.”

“No,” Florian admitted. “But I’m doing the work of a trained sorceress. If I’m going to have the responsibilities, I’d like to have a chance at the authority too.”

They reached the doors that led into the main hall and the shopping arcade. The doors on either side of the hall opened to the Promenade deck, and the big room was airy without being exposed to the wind. The daylight reflected off the warm yellow woods and the mellow cream tiles. Tremaine chose a couch at the far end of the room from where the other refugees were gathered and dropped down on it, glad to rest her back and stretch her legs out. Her feet hurt already, but after all the walking on the island, it was probably just a reflex. “You’re the only student Gerard and Niles have,” she pointed out, not realizing it was true until she said it. “They may never have another. Maybe they just don’t want to get you killed.”

Florian shrugged an acknowledgment as she sat down on the couch. In a deliberate change of subject, she said, “Well, how is it so far?”

Tremaine lifted a brow at her. “What?”

Florian eyed her back. “Being married. To Ilias.”

By which she meant, whether she realized it or not,
Tremaine, have you managed to mess it up yet?
Tremaine smiled thinly. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“A real answer,” Florian specified.

Tremaine leaned back on the soft cushion, making herself think it over. She had become friends with Ilias almost before she had been aware of it, the shared danger and the intimacy of having to communicate without words creating a closeness that she would never have sought under normal circumstances. Frustrated because she had no idea how it was going, she said impatiently, “So far so good? It’s only been a day. Really, between Ixion and this thing with the Gardier, there hasn’t been any time.”

Fortunately, Arites walked up then, plopping down on the floor in front of them with an annoyed sigh. Tremaine could interpret that expression with no problem. “Giliead wouldn’t let you stay in the room and write down the conversation with Ixion, would he?”

Arites looked disgruntled. “My history of Ixion is missing important details.” He gestured in frustration. “Somebody has to write these things down!”

As Tremaine had hoped, Florian gave up on discussing the marriage. Folding her arms and resting her head back against the gold-striped upholstery, the other girl said, “I wonder if Dr. Divies is right, and they do make the Gardier soldiers forget their past.” She frowned. “If it isn’t a spell like Niles thinks, then they’d have to have terrible punishments to enforce it. Could that be worth it?”

Tremaine took a deep breath. She was absently people-watching, scanning the faces of the passersby. Most of them were refugees, with a few crew members mixed in. Refugees tended to wander in groups and crewmen to trot. “You can’t fault their record of success so far,” she said, realizing she was echoing Divies’s words.

Florian nodded glumly. “The more we learn about them, the more confusing it gets.” She looked at Tremaine for a moment. “Giaren told me that the ship hasn’t picked up any radio traffic since we sank the Gardier gunship.”

Tremaine frowned. “That’s not normal?”

“No. On a voyage to Capidara in our world, they could make ship-to-shore connections for almost the whole trip. We should be able to hear the Gardier talking to each other, or the other people advanced enough to have wireless, but there’s nothing. It’s like they’re communicating only with sorcery, like that radio set they had in the caves on the island.”

Tremaine shook her head. “That is bizarre.” Why bother to use sorcery when a normal wireless would do the job most of the time? In Ile-Rien—or the Ile-Rien of the past—there had been a great many people born with some talent for magic, but the number of sorcerers who could do Great Spells, or whose talent enabled them to do more than charms and simple healing and small wards, was a bare fraction. “But it might be just empty territory all around us.” She gave Arites a poke with her foot. “You’d never heard of the Gardier before this.”