The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) (40 page)

It was wide, the leather cover soft enough to be able to roll up or fold. The paper bound into it with heavy cord was thick and soft, more like cloth than parchment. The characters were too regular to be handwritten, the lines too rigidly formal. The pages had been printed in a press. She stared at those characters, trying to think why they looked familiar. She realized she still had her pack, with Arites’s bag tucked inside it. Ignoring the bugs and the mushy debris, she crouched down on the floor to fish it out, thinking,
this was a library
. The stuff underfoot was composed of pages that had fallen or been washed out of the shelves and soaked in water. It turned her cold to imagine the Albaran Library at Lodun or the city libraries in Vienne reduced to this state.

She found the last page of Arites’s chronicle and twisted around to let the dim light from the window fall on it. She saw at first glance the Syprian characters were completely different, but as her eyes drifted down the page…“Well. That’s a kick in the ass for you,” she said under her breath.

“What?” Ilias asked.

She looked up to find him and Giliead leaning over her, trying to see what she was so intent on. “The flying whale is gone,” Giliead explained. “What’s that?”

“This is Arites’s writing.” She flattened it on her knee so they could see, and Ilias knelt at her side for a better look. “This is where he copied the markings on the Gardier buildings when he drew a map of the outpost. Now look at the printing in this book.”

Ilias leaned closer. “It’s the same. This squiggle here, and all those. It’s Gardier writing?”

Giliead pulled another one from the shelves, flipping it open. Tremaine shied away from the rain of beetles and got to her feet. “I think they’re all filled with Gardier writing,” she told them, pulling another book out at random.

Ilias watched for a moment, then threw a worried glance at the door. “We need to keep moving.”

He was right, they couldn’t spare the time for this. Tremaine tucked away Arites’s page, then on impulse shoved in three of the Gardier books, bending them to make them fit. “Let’s go.”

She followed both men outside, casting a nervous glance up at the now empty sky. Giliead picked the path again, finding a winding way through the houses, taking advantage of all the cover the overhanging roofs offered. “These people have the same language as the Gardier? Or they attacked their own people?” Ilias asked her over his shoulder. “Why?”

“I don’t know why, but I think they did.” Tremaine looked at the houses they passed, seeing them with different eyes. She had assumed this was a society as primitive as those in the Syrnai or the Wall Port. But the glass windows, the printed books and the dredged canal all painted a different picture. The barge marooned there must have belonged to the town like the sailboats, not the town’s conquerors. If this town had been conquered at all, and not simply abandoned for some reason.

Taking quick looks through each open door they passed, she spotted something on a wall and stepped in to look. It was a carved wooden box with a glass dial in the center marked with the Gardier characters. It had five hands, but it looked a lot like a clock face. Tremaine brushed dust off the carving. It was delicate work, the fine lines incised into the wood, then somehow filled with pigment. The design was of various hot-air balloons, some far more elaborate than it seemed possible to construct. One looked like a Gardier airship, but in this depiction the spiked fins seemed fanciful rather than intimidating. “That’s what I thought,” she said to herself.

“Will you come on?” Ilias hissed at her from the doorway.

As they reached the edge of town, Tremaine could tell Ilias and Giliead were relieved to return to the relative security of the trees. That light green canopy looked delicate, but it was just enough to mask them from any view from above. She followed them without really seeing where they were going, too lost in thought to pay attention.

Then Ilias stopped suddenly and Tremaine walked right into him. Feeling lucky that his sword hilt hadn’t given her a black eye, she saw he was studying the ground. Whatever it was, Giliead’s attention was caught by it too. He turned, circled wide through the brush, then came back to the same spot. Giving in, Tremaine asked impatiently, “What is it?”

“Someone crossed our path,” Ilias reported, pacing to the side, eyes still on the ground. “Not one of our people. The feet are too small and the boot print is wrong.”

“Not a Gardier, then. At least not—” Tremaine didn’t hear anything, but she caught the way Ilias’s face went still and the sudden look he threw at Giliead. Giliead didn’t acknowledge it but turned away, moving with apparent idleness toward a thicker stand of trees obscured by brush and reeds. Ilias started casually in that direction too, his eyes still on the ground. But something about the way he held himself told Tremaine that his attention was elsewhere. Scratching her head and looking anywhere but at the brush, she continued randomly, “At least not so that we could tell, since really, just the feet. But—”

Whatever was in hiding abruptly woke to the fact that it was being stalked. It burst from cover on the far side of the stand of trees. As it ran further into the woods, Tremaine caught a glimpse of a small figure, possibly a boy, dressed in dark clothes. Both men bolted after him and Tremaine bolted after them.

Running full out, she could just keep Ilias in sight as he dodged through the trees. Then he stopped abruptly and darted in another direction. Stumbling to a halt and listening hard, Tremaine thought he had stopped running. Picking her way cautiously, she spotted him standing back against a tree trunk, watching something through a screen of brush. Trying to make her steps silent, she carefully edged up to his side. He took her arm, showing her the gap in the leaves to look through.

Their prey had led them to the edge of a nearly dry riverbed that cut through the forest, its wide sandy banks sloping gently down to a shallow stream of water that trickled over rocks and gravel down the center. As she watched, the boy trotted up to a small camp under the overhanging trees near the bank. A little fire smoldered and a woman was kneeling next to it, using a rock to scrape the skin off a grubby yellow root vegetable. The boy was apparently telling her about his encounter, pointing back toward the woods. Three younger children gathered around, wide-eyed. A jury-rigged tent had been made from a gray blanket and a rope stretched between two saplings; a couple of battered canvas bags seemed to be their only possessions. “He tried to double back on us, but he led us right to them,” Ilias commented in a whisper. “How stupid was that?”

“Suicidally stupid,” Tremaine agreed softly. But maybe the boy wasn’t used to being tracked by Syprians. The boy, the woman and the children were all dark-haired, pale-skinned, lean and bony, though that might be from lack of food. Their clothes were grubby gray or brown, pants and loose shirts, all the same except the woman seemed to be wearing a tabard over hers.

Ilias looked around as Giliead ghosted up through the trees. Ducking to stay out of sight of the camp, Giliead whispered, “There’s no one else nearby.”

Ilias nodded. “Well?” he asked Tremaine.

She bit her lip, considering it carefully. It was a chance to get some information. These people didn’t exactly look like a Gardier patrol, but if they raised an alarm…
We’d have to
kill them. I’d have to kill them.
She was suddenly very aware of the weight of the pistol tucked into the back of her belt.
Well, probably not the kids.
They looked too young to give coherent reports. But the woman and the older boy. She let out her breath. Oddly enough, it was harder risking other people’s lives than it was to risk your own. “I’ll go talk to them. You two stay back.”

“Wait.” Ilias stopped her as Giliead cut back through the trees again and Tremaine realized he was working his way around behind the little camp. She adjusted the set of the pistol, making sure the tail of her shirt hid it. Ilias nodded at some invisible signal, though Tremaine couldn’t see Giliead at all now. “Careful,” he told her.

“Right.” Tremaine couldn’t look at him when she needed to concentrate. With one hand behind her back resting on the pistol’s grip, she stepped out of the brush.

The woman stared at her, then scrambled to her feet. The boy pointed, saying urgently, “I told you!”

He spoke in Gardier, though his accent was thick and different from the prisoners aboard the
Ravenna
. Again, it was disorienting to hear the language without the translator. The woman snapped a word at him Tremaine didn’t catch, then glared at her suspiciously. “Who are you?” Her face was set in hard lines but her voice trembled just a little. The other children, so young and dressed in such baggy clothes they might have been boys or girls, stared too, the youngest one sucking on a finger.

At least she hadn’t started screaming about Rienish invaders. Tremaine had to focus a moment to make sure she spoke Gardier and not Rienish or Syrnaic. She had spoken it to Ander and Gerard for practice, but this was different. “I’m a traveler.” The woman’s frown deepened. Tremaine restrained herself from shouting “Where’s a damn boat?” It would be better to work up to that. “Do you live in the town?” she asked.

The boy stared past her, obviously trying to see if Ilias or Giliead were with her. He said, “No, the
Domileh
don’t let anyone live there.”

“The
Domileh
?” Tremaine inquired cautiously.

“We don’t use that word anymore,” the woman said hastily. “He means the Command.”

Scientist, Command and Service were the classes or ranks the Gardier were organized into.
So far, so good
. “Why don’t they want anyone to live in the town?”

“They said it was dangerous, too vulnerable.”

The woman was staring at her as if she was insane. Tremaine wasn’t sure if that was because her questions were strange or the woman was just uncannily perceptive. “Too vulnerable to what?”

“To attack.”

This was beginning to resemble the interrogation of their late unlamented prisoners. Nothing but short vague annoying answers. “Attack by who?” she persisted.

“Is this a trick?” the woman demanded suddenly. “We follow the rules, we don’t go there.”

Tremaine pressed her lips together.
I’m inclining toward violence again
. “Look. We don’t come from here.” Belated inspiration struck, and she added, “We’ve been traveling a long way, we don’t know the rules for this area. Could you tell us what they are?”

The woman’s expression hovered between suspicious and dubious. “I didn’t know there were places with different rules, not anymore.”

Tremaine spread her hands helplessly, trying to look innocuous rather than dangerously annoyed. “Neither did I.”

“Why aren’t those men with you in the Service?” the boy asked suddenly. “They didn’t look like Labor.”

That was the word Gardier used for slaves. The woman threw him a quelling glare. Making a hasty change of subject, she said quickly, “The rules say we can’t live in Devara, or any of the other old places.”

“Devara is the town? The only town nearby?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “It’s the only one before the Maton.”

Tremaine nodded, trying to think of a way to ask what the hell a Maton was without arousing their suspicions. She decided to just assume it was a place to live. “Does the Maton have a harbor?”

“Yes, it was built where the port was.” The woman looked honestly curious for a moment. “You really come from somewhere else?”

“Yes. Uh…how is the war going?”

She shook her head wearily. “I don’t know. They used to announce about it in the Maton, but since we left…” She made a throwaway gesture.

Right,
Tremaine seethed inwardly.
Who cares? We destroy so many places.
But this woman didn’t exactly look like she was reaping the benefits of a conquering army. “Which way is the Maton again?”

Giliead stepped out of the brush suddenly. The children scattered in terror and the woman backed away in alarm. The boy turned to her triumphantly. “I told you I saw—”

“Gardier are coming down the streambed, eight, maybe more,” Giliead said urgently.

“Boring conversation anyway,” Tremaine said under her breath, turning to run. Just as she reached the brush she heard a man shout in Gardier. She looked back to see the woman’s face twist with fear and anger. She shoved the boy away. “You led them down on us!” Calling to the other children to follow her, she grabbed the youngest and ran away down the sandy bank of the stream.

“Wait—” Tremaine started automatically, then snarled, “Oh, forget it.” Ilias caught her arm, propelling her toward the woods and she took the hint and ran.

A scatter of shots sounded behind her and Tremaine staggered into a tree, looking back. She saw Ilias only a few steps from the safety of the trees, staring out at the creek bed. The woman had made it across the shallow stream but lay sprawled in the mud just beyond it. The three children were huddled in confusion beside the body.

Tremaine saw Ilias take a step toward them and drew breath to yell at him. Then brown uniforms appeared through the screen of leaves and she heard men running down the bank, splashing in the water. Ilias ducked into cover and Tremaine turned and ran.

Ducking low branches and stumbling over the rough uneven ground, Tremaine suddenly realized the boy was running with her. They came out into a small clearing and the boy looked around wildly and started to bolt to the left. Tremaine lunged and caught his hand, jerking him to a halt. “Not that way!” she snapped, then had to repeat it in Gardier when he stared at her blankly. Running wildly, he would lead the patrol right down on them like that stupid woman probably had.

Tremaine pulled him with her, taking as straight a path as possible away from the streambed at a rapid walk. If Ilias and Giliead didn’t catch up with her soon…The boy, unexpectedly, kept a tight grip on her hand.
So he’s not as feral as all that,
she thought cynically. “Just keep moving,” she told him, keeping her voice quiet.