The Wizard Hunters (16 page)

Ilias felt the ground snatched out from under him then struck it hard, the breath knocked out of him. He tried to scramble up and realized his legs were numb, that he couldn’t move them at all.
Another damned curse
. He spit at the wizard, trying to push himself up with his chained arms, angry and terrified.

Two of the men grabbed his arms, dragging him up and slamming him down facefirst onto the metal table. He struggled to push himself up but two of them bore down on him, shoving him against the cold surface. He twisted his head, managing to get a breath, then someone grabbed his hair again, pinning his head down and putting a painful pressure on his neck.

Ilias waited for death but they just stood over him, talking angrily.
They’re arguing
, he realized. He would have liked to know if it was about when to kill him or just how. He squinted, pushing up against the bodies holding him down. He could just see the leader of the group who had captured him confronting the new wizard. The leader was holding a folded water-damaged paper packet.

Oh
, Ilias thought, nonplussed,
the maps
. They had searched him when they had caught him running from the howlers. One of them had tackled him, slamming him into the rock wall, and he had been half conscious for a few moments. Long enough for them to find his hunting knife, the smaller spare blade tucked into his boot and the maps Giliead had found on the flying whale and stuffed under his belt.

So it was the maps that were causing all the angry arguing. Maybe he should have cached them somewhere but he couldn’t see how it mattered. They were wizards; they were already going to kill him just for existing. Burning their flying whale and stealing from them couldn’t make it any worse. At least he hoped it couldn’t.

The leader suddenly reached across him, pulling roughly at his shirt and jerkin, ripping it down to bare his wounded shoulder. Ilias flinched and involuntarily tried to writhe away, thinking they had finally gotten to the torture part. But the leader didn’t touch him again. The arguing continued and he wondered if the man had bared the wound as proof that Ilias had been near the flying whale when it burned.
Of course I was
, he thought in exasperation.
How many other people are running around these caves trying to kill wizards
?

Then the men pinning him suddenly wrenched him up off the table and threw him against the wall. He collapsed at the base of it, pushing himself up into an awkward sitting position with his chained hands. He shook the hair out of his face, looking up as the leader knelt in front of him. The man held up the maps, asking an urgent question. The other wizard stood behind him, shaking his head, his narrow face disgusted.

Ilias looked from one to the other, half wishing they would just kill him and get it over with. If the curse making his legs useless was permanent, he couldn’t escape anyway and he didn’t want Giliead risking himself trying to come after him. If Giliead was even still alive and not a prisoner here somewhere.

The leader gripped his chin, forcing his head around to face him, and said carefully, “Rien. Rien?”

Ilias stared at him, truly baffled, too startled to wrench his head away or try to bite the man. He realized he had heard the wizards say the word before, all during their argument, but it meant nothing to him.

His belief that they were out of their minds, or at least his complete incomprehension, must have shown on his face. The other wizard made a derisive snort and turned away. The leader let go of him and stood, his face frustrated, rubbing his hand on his pants as if it had been contaminated by the physical contact. He gestured at the other men. Ilias squirmed to avoid them, swinging his chain and managing to catch one in the face. But they grabbed his arms, dragging him upright, and hauled him back toward the tunnel.

He fought as best he could but with his legs mostly useless there wasn’t much he could do except annoy them. They dragged him to a large, shadowy high-ceilinged room with heavy doors in the rusted metal walls. Opening one, they hauled him into a small cell, dumping him against the stone that formed the back of it. Two of them sat on him while the third attached his chains to a ring anchored into the rock at waist height. The same one kicked him in the stomach as they left, slamming the door behind them.

Panting, Ilias curled around the pain as best he could, his arms stretched back and over his head by the chains, his legs still paralyzed. He was glad there wasn’t anything in his stomach to throw up. When he could finally lift his head, he saw just a small bare room, the walls scarred stained metal except for the rocky one behind him, the sickly yellow light coming from a single wizard lamp set high in the ceiling. He eyed it nervously, but at least it wasn’t anywhere near him. There was a narrow grille in the door, but too small and too high to see out of. The dirty stone floor smelled of piss and vomit.

Ilias leaned against the wall gingerly, shifting to hold his injured shoulder away from the rock. The struggle had reopened the wound and he could feel blood trickle down his back. Now that more urgent pains were fading, he realized his legs were starting to hurt, prickling with sharp needle pricks, but it was better than that frightening numbness. Gritting his teeth and putting all his effort into it, he managed to wriggle his toes. Relief made him slump back against the rock, taking a deep breath.
The curse isn‘t permanent
.

He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he had come to dazed and bleeding in the impenetrable dark of the underground city or how long he had searched for Giliead. The river had swept him down one of the small passages and washed him aground while he was still half conscious. The metal that had struck him had sliced through his baldric; his sword and scabbard had ended up somewhere on the river bottom. He had been lucky to land where he had; if the water had carried him further along into the lower caves, he would have been eaten by something before he woke.

When he had recovered enough to walk he had worked his way back up to the wizards’ tunnels, searching for Gil, hoping his friend had made it out of the flying whale’s cave. Chances were the curse that had knocked Ilias into the river wouldn’t have affected Giliead; Ilias just hoped he hadn’t gotten himself captured while searching the river for him.

If the wizards did have Gil, he might be in one of the other cells. Ilias sat up, spit to clear his throat, and yelled, “Gil! Are you here?”

No answer.

Frustrated, he leaned back against the rock. It didn’t tell him anything; Giliead could still be here, held in another area. But if he had been here and the wizards had already killed him . . . Trying to put that uncomfortable thought aside, he wondered about the two women captured with him.

When he had first seen the howlers hunting them he had thought they were escaped slaves, but after getting a good look at them he decided that couldn’t be possible. Their clothes were different from what the slaves and wizards wore and they just hadn’t acted like cowed captives. Especially the one with the light brown hair, the one who had looked more annoyed by the wizards than frightened. He let his breath out, shifting uncomfortably as his shoulder burned and his bruises ached.
Whoever they are, I hope they’re better off than I am
.

L
ooking around the cavern, Tremaine weighed their options and decided they didn’t have any. It was too far to any of the tunnels even to contemplate making a break for it. Then Florian nudged her and she looked around to see people coming out of an opening under the overhang, gathering in the area on the other side of the wire mesh. They moved slowly, the brown coveralls they wore stained with sweat and greasy dirt, many of them carrying welding goggles or wearing baggy caps covering their hair. Men, women, young, old. Tremaine’s eyes narrowed as she realized none of them were armed. Were they Gardier? The older man with the dark skin and the hooked nose looked distinctly Parscian. Then a man leaned on the mesh and spoke to a woman with him. Tremaine didn’t catch the words but his accent sounded Lowlands.

Florian nudged her more urgently. Tremaine nodded, motioning her to stop, and sneaked a look at their two guards. They were talking together, most of their attention on the half-completed dirigible. She sidled a couple of steps closer to the mesh near the couple and said in a low voice, “Where are you from?”

The man looked up at her, startled, then darted a look at the guards. “We can’t help you,” he whispered.

She had been right, his accent was Lowlands, but that covered a lot of territory. More, if you counted colonies and independent ex-colonies. “We don’t need help,” Tremaine said firmly, keeping her voice low. That was anything but the truth, but what the hell. “Just tell us where you’re from, how they captured you, how you got here.”

The man just stared but the woman with him flicked a glance from Tremaine’s face to Florian’s and wet her lips. “You’re Ile-Rien.” Her accent was thicker than his.

Florian nodded. “Yes.” The others were beginning to notice, some turning to look and some just edging close to listen. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to alert the guards.

The woman leaned forward. “We live on Maiuta, we’re missionaries of the Benevolent Order of Dane.” The man caught her arm but she shook him off impatiently.

Tremaine nodded rapidly. Maiuta was in the Southern Seas, a large island that was mostly jungle with only a few ports and towns, but with a substantial population of warring tribes who had long been the target of exploitation by more modern nations. Aberdon, a Lowland state to the north of Ile-Rien, had a colony there.

The woman whispered rapidly, “The Gardier came, captured the ports and killed anyone who tried to resist. We were in the interior and had some warning. Most of the villages in our area escaped up into the hills, but we stayed at our infirmary with some of the older people who were too sick to move. We didn’t think . . . But they took us to the port and put us on a ship with some of the townspeople and many others.” She nodded around at the people clustered nearby, watching anxiously. “We had only gone a little distance when we felt— Ah, I don’t know how to explain—a great crash—”

Florian gave Tremaine a grave look and supplied, “Like the ship suddenly dropped a few feet and hit the water again.”

“Yes, yes. We didn’t see it, but some of the others were chained up on deck because there was no more room below, and they said they saw a circle of light appear just above the waves and the ship sailed into it. They said the land disappeared and the sky turned more blue, and it was morning instead of evening. We sailed for many days, then they unloaded us in these caves and they make us work for them. There are others here from the south islands, from Venais and Khiatu.” The woman shifted closer. “Something went wrong here a few days ago. There was an explosion in one of the caves they use as a hangar—”

Someone on the other side hissed a warning and they sprang away from each other like guilty children talking out of turn in a schoolroom. On the other side of the mesh two Gardier came out of a tunnel entrance and moved through the group, gesturing with short clubs, forcing the prisoners to move along.

Tremaine saw their two guards suddenly look alert again and glanced up to see the leader coming down the steps near the wire mesh fence with another man. The new Gardier wore the same sort of uniform as the others, except that he had a small silver medallion with an inset crystal around his neck. His features were thin and hard, his dark hair cut so close it was barely a fuzz over his skull.

He walked up to them, eyeing them with a cold familiarity, fiddling with his medallion. Tremaine dropped her eyes, trying to look helpless and pathetic.
Stalling
, she thought,
stalling is an option
. It might give Gerard more time to get away.

“Who are you?” he demanded in accented Rienish.

Tremaine threw a tremulous, uncertain look at Florian and said softly, “We’re missionaries, from Maiuta.”

Florian’s eyes widened, but she managed to suppress any other response.

He let go of the medallion and addressed a couple of sharp comments to the patrol leader in their language. Tremaine hadn’t had any plan in mind, but it looked as if she had derailed any prepared questions. The patrol leader planted his hands on his hips and replied tartly. Tremaine sensed dissension in the ranks.

The interrogator turned back, grasped the medallion again and said, “When did you come here?”

The medallion is the key to some kind of translator spell
. Tremaine hadn’t heard of anything like it before. She said earnestly, “We don’t know. We’ve been underground, we can’t tell how many days and nights it’s been.”

The interrogator turned back to the patrol leader, saying with exasperation, “We recovered all the labor who escaped yesterday. They can’t be—” before he dropped the medallion.

The discussion continued for a moment more, with both men appearing increasingly annoyed with each other, then the interrogator touched the medallion briefly to say, “Come with me.”

He started back up the stairs to the tunnels above. As the patrol leader turned to call the two guards to follow, Tremaine exchanged a brief glance with Florian. The other girl looked somewhat taken aback, but this was the best chance they had. If the Gardier hadn’t found the Pilot Boat yet, or had found it after it had drifted further off the rocks, they might think the entire crew had drowned. That was good for Gerard, at least.

The door opened onto a catwalk overlooking a larger chamber, lit by a few bare electric bulbs suspended from a network of wires crossing the ceiling. The far wall was raw stone, cracked and pitted, and the other two were stained metal partitions fixed against it. In the partitions there were heavy metal doors with small barred grates to look through.
Cells
, Tremaine thought.
Uh oh
. There wouldn’t be any options once they were in a cell. As the interrogator led the way along the catwalk, a door banged open in the room below. She glanced down to see two disheveled Gardier crossing the floor; she was sure they had been in the group who had hauled off the other prisoner.