The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) (25 page)

He dropped into the armchair opposite her, shrugging genially and pulling a sheaf of ragged paper out of his bag. “I don’t know.”

It occurred to Tremaine that she was supposed to be the head of this little family group. “What about everybody else?”

“I did. I don’t know about anyone else.” Arites arranged his ink bottle and pens on the smoking table.

Tremaine tasted the potato pie. Now she knew why the food at Port Rel had always been so terrible; all the good provisions must have been diverted onto the
Ravenna
. “Where are they? All the Andriens, I mean.”

“I don’t know where Ilias and Giliead went. Gyan is with Pasima and Ander, speaking to some of your people. I think one of them was named Avil-something.” Arites considered a moment. “Avil-er.”

Oh, goody,
Tremaine thought dryly, pouring herself coffee. At least Gyan was there to watch out for Andrien interests, anyway.

Arites smoothed a rough sheet of thick paper. “And Kias is with his girlfriend.”

Tremaine choked on her coffee. “His what?”

“He met a woman last night. I don’t know her name. She’s Rienish.”

Of course. That’s why he and Arites were roaming the ship all night
. It sounded like Ilias’s decision to marry a foreigner might not be as unpopular as Visolela had feared, especially with single men of poor families. “He can’t speak Rienish,” she pointed out.

“I know.” Arites nodded earnestly. “But it didn’t seem to matter.”

This…sounds like someone else’s problem
. “He’s a fast worker,” she commented with a lifted brow, setting her cup down.

After a moment she was aware of Arites watching her thoughtfully. Finally, he asked, “How did you know those men were thieves? To me, and to Florian too, they looked no different than anyone else passing through the hall.”

Tremaine hesitated, trying to think how to frame a response. She could put it down to a misspent youth in the poets and artists’ cafés and the theater world, which tended to share boundaries with the older, darker and poorer areas of the city where such men were common. But that wasn’t the truth. “After my mother died, my father took me on walks through the city, and then questioned me afterward on what I thought of the people we saw.” At the time she had been used to Arisilde’s undemanding guardianship, and it had seemed just an annoyance; later she realized that Nicholas had been showing her what danger signs to look for and how to listen to her instincts. “I didn’t know it at the time, but he was teaching me how to see the difference between men like that and men who are just minding their own business.”

Arites nodded slowly. “I think I see. Thank you for telling me that story.”

Tremaine had almost finished her meal when Ilias returned, planting himself at her feet. “Thank you for bringing me dinner,” she told him, self-consciousness returning.

He shrugged, shifting to lean comfortably against her knee and appropriating the last few scraps of potato. He was wearing her ring on a leather thong around his neck. She decided she could get used to this, and maybe it didn’t matter what anyone else thought.
Maybe Ander can stuff himself
. She noted Ilias’s hair was damp and he smelled like salt water. “Where did you take a bath?”

“We went to that bathing place we saw,” he told her.

Tremaine frowned thoughtfully at the top of his head. “The First Class swimming pool?” They had passed through the pool room earlier today to find that Lady Aviler’s group had had it opened as a way to try to keep the younger refugees occupied. The pool was filled with salt water from the ship’s unlimited supply and housed in a large tiled chamber with a mother-of-pearl ceiling. Ilias and Giliead had both been impressed. Tremaine just wished somebody would open the steam bath and other special services in the rooms off the pool’s gallery, but she supposed they couldn’t have everything.

“That’s it,” he agreed. She processed the fact that his clothes were perfectly dry. Syprians didn’t seem to have much in the way of nudity taboos, even in public.
I suspect I’ll hear about this tomorrow
.

Giliead came into the room and flung himself down on the bed. From his disgruntled expression, she suspected he had been prowling the suite looking for a relative to start a fight with and was bitter at coming up empty. It didn’t surprise her; he had been worked up all day to kill a wizard and been balked again and again. Ilias, either less bloodthirsty or just more easily distracted, poked at her dinner thoughtfully, asking, “What do you call this again?”

“The white part is potato, the red part is tomato.” The Syprians found most Rienish food palatable, if strange. The only thing they had refused to eat that she knew of was the cranberry pie the kitchens had produced for breakfast that morning, on the grounds that cranberries were reserved for offerings to the dead.

Peering hopefully into the near-empty coffeepot, Tremaine heard Pasima’s voice out in the sitting room. “Oh goody, she’s back,” she sighed.

Giliead pushed up off the bed, his face set in grim lines, headed for the door.
And the ring keeper strikes the bell for round two,
Tremaine thought, eyeing his expression. Arites was still engrossed in his writing, but she saw him wince in anticipation. Hopefully it would cut up Pasima’s peace as much as it would everyone else’s. Obviously thinking the same thing, Ilias watched his progress, his brows drawn together in concern. Then as Giliead strode past he stretched out a foot and tripped him.

Giliead stumbled forward and slammed his shoulder into the doorframe, barely catching himself. He glared down at Ilias incredulously. Ilias grinned up at him. “Got you.”

Giliead grabbed for him, but Ilias was already shoulder-rolling away, Arites having quick-wittedly snatched his feet out of his path.

After a brief struggle Giliead had his friend in a headlock, and Tremaine was watching wryly, wondering if Ilias had developed that instinct for deflecting possible family arguments before or after he had come to Andrien. Then behind her, someone cleared his throat. Tremaine twisted around to find herself looking at Captain Marais, standing in the doorway. “Miss Valiarde,” he greeted her calmly. “The cabin door was open.”

“Oh, yes. It got broken.” She sat up hastily, putting her cup aside and gesturing to a chair. “Captain Marais, won’t you sit down?”
And why in God’s name are you here?
She wasn’t aware he ever left the wheelhouse, and if he wanted to talk to any of them, he could have had them summoned there.

Giliead released Ilias and both eyed the male interloper in their territory with wary cordiality. Businesslike, Marais nodded to them, as if finding them rolling around on the floor like oversized puppies was an everyday occurrence. He took the straight-backed chair at the desk, turning it around and taking a seat. Giliead dropped down onto the bed again, but Ilias stayed sprawled on the floor, propping himself up on an elbow. Arites shifted around to face Marais, attentively prepared to take notes. Marais glanced at their Syprian stenographer with mild curiosity, and explained to Tremaine, “I wanted to ask your friends some questions.”

“Ah.” She managed not to look immediately suspicious and defensive. “About what?”

He lifted a brow at her, and she wasn’t sure she had succeeded. But he said only, “Just a possible problem with our course.” He sat forward, frowning and pressing his fingers together. “You may know that the
Ravenna
was fitted with a wireless detection system before the war.” He saw her blank look and elaborated, “It’s an experimental system to detect icebergs in the path of ships by sending out a wireless signal. If the signal strikes a large solid mass, it bounces back and is picked up by the detection device. It was under study at Lodun before the war started.”

Ilias sat up, demanding impatiently, “What’s he saying?” Giliead was regarding her with lifted brows and Arites had his pen poised impatiently.

“I don’t know yet, just wait,” she told them in Syrnaic. Gesturing for Marais to continue, she switched to Rienish to say, “Sorry, just try to ignore them.”

The captain cleared his throat and forged ahead. “We’ve been using the device throughout the voyage. This morning it returned a signal to us.”

Tremaine frowned. “So we’re nearing land? But it’s not Capidara?”

“No, not yet.”

“Huh. I’ll ask them, but you know they don’t sail too far from the coast of the Syrnai.” She paraphrased Marais’s account in Syrnaic.

It took a while to get them past the explanation of the wireless detection system, but once there, Ilias scratched his chin thoughtfully and said, “It could be the Walls.”

“The Walls?” Tremaine repeated, having to hold on to her patience. “And that would be?”

“The Walls of the World,” Arites elaborated eagerly. “You don’t have that where you come from? It’s mountains that stick up out of the sea. Like islands, but they’re all connected. And there are old cities there, like the ones on the Isle of Storms. I hope that’s what it is. It’ll make a wonderful story.”

“Damn.” Worried now, Tremaine tried to visualize the scene Arites described. “That could pose a problem. To put it mildly.”

She translated for Marais. The lines in the captain’s brow deepened, and he looked very much as if this information was not what he had been hoping for. Controlling his frustration well, he said finally, “If they knew this was here, why didn’t they mention it?”

“He says that a word of warning might have been helpful,” Tremaine translated.

“We didn’t know it was really here.” Giliead sat up, propping his folded arms on his knees. The fight and the discussion had distracted him, and he seemed in a better mood. “We don’t know where here is, except east and more ship’s lengths from Cineth than anyone can count. And I’ve never talked to anybody who ever saw it, except Hisians.”

“They lie a lot,” Ilias clarified.

Tremaine absorbed that for a moment. “Not about this, evidently.” Hopefully, she asked, “When you say ‘Walls of the World,’ you don’t mean all the way across?”

Giliead and Ilias exchanged one of those looks. Giliead said, “The stories say there are ways through, but I don’t know whether we should go north or south to find one.”

Tremaine passed this along to Marais. He reflected on it for a moment, staring absently at nothing, then got to his feet. “Please thank them for me, Miss Valiarde.”

Ilias watched him leave, frowning, then glanced up at Tremaine. “We’re not going to get to Capidara in three days, are we?”

She rubbed her face wearily. “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

T
remaine had trouble sleeping. The ship’s roll seemed worse than it had at any point in the voyage so far, and dim thoughts of storms and sinking kept her out of deep sleep and in a half-conscious doze. Once she was certain she felt the ship sway over and back upright, as if it was making one of its high-speed turns. She finally woke to Pasima standing over her, shadowed by the light from the open door. “What?” she managed to croak.

After one last sweep of the interior crew areas, they had ended up in the maid’s room of the cabin. Ilias was a warm presence against Tremaine’s side, sleeping on his stomach, arms wrapped around a pillow. Despite the mane of tousled hair, she could see one open eye regarding their visitor with hostility. Tremaine wished she could share wholeheartedly in the hostility, but she felt Pasima would rather have stabbed herself with a hot poker than come in here unless it was an emergency. Pasima confirmed this by saying, “A man is here for you. I don’t understand what he wants, but it seems important.”

Tremaine heaved up on one elbow, by habit fumbling for the bedside lamp. As she pressed the switch and the red-shaded light came to life, everybody flinched, and Ilias vanished under the blanket. “What the hell…” she muttered. The rumpled shape on the floor was Kias, sleeping between the beds in a nest of pillows and bedding. “Sorry.” She switched the lamp off again. She had seen enough to know that Giliead was in the other bed, now accompanied by Arites. She vaguely recalled Arites coming in late in the evening and a minor scuffle as he had climbed over Giliead. She remembered Ilias saying something about Syprians not liking to sleep alone, especially in strange places.
God, they must not have wanted to sleep in the other rooms with Pasima’s little band
. Either Gyan was being a diplomat again, or there just hadn’t been room for him.

Tremaine clambered out of bed, managing not to step on Kias, glad she had elected to sleep in her cotton nightgown. She didn’t mind the half-naked and entirely naked Syprians wandering the cabin at night, but she saw no reason to join the parade, especially if they were going to have visitors this early in the morning. She recovered her dressing gown from the floor and pulled it on, stumbling after Pasima as the other woman led the way out and into the main room.

Everyone else seemed to be awake and dressed. Cletia, Gyan and Danias were sitting in the main room, watching their visitor curiously. It was a naval officer, his uniform cap tucked correctly under his arm, though his tie was rumpled and there was a coffee stain on his shirt. He took in her appearance and winced sympathetically. “Sorry to disturb you, madam.”

“Right. I mean, that’s all right.” Tremaine pushed her hair back, trying to see past the bleary film that seemed to be clouding her eyes. She found herself listing to the right. She grabbed the doorframe for balance, realizing it wasn’t because she was drunk or hungover but because the boat was leaning. “What’s wrong?” she demanded, suddenly more awake. She recalled the earlier turn clearly now; it hadn’t been a dream.

The officer just shifted his balance to accommodate the new angle of the deck, as did Pasima. “We’re coming about, madam. The captain requests your presence in the wheelhouse, along with any of the Syprians who might be able to advise him on our course.” He added uncertainly, “We tried to ring you, but no one answered.”