The Wizard Hunters (36 page)

Giliead stepped up to the opposite side of the window and leaned against the sill, a thoughtful expression on his face that probably meant he was deeply worried. Without the mud, his hair was chestnut-colored. Another man walked up the portico to speak to them and Tremaine did a double take as she realized it was Gerard. He wore dark-colored pants tucked into his own boots and a light-colored shirt open across the chest, with a dark green printed sash. She grinned, momentarily diverted; he looked ten years younger at least. She got up to join them, picking her way down the stone-lined path across the garden.

As she approached she heard Gerard asking more questions about the god. With a thoughtful expression, he was saying, “So the people who founded Cineth actually chose to settle here because of the proximity of the god?”

“That, and it’s a natural harbor,” Ilias told him, “but you can’t have a city anywhere there isn’t a god.”

“Why?”

“The wizards.” Giliead looked a little reluctant to bring the subject up again. “There was a city in the Inari Mountain pass, built there for the gold mines. It was out of reach of the nearest god but the man who was lawgiver convinced everyone that it wouldn’t matter as long as they were careful. It was a very rich city because of the mines, but they must have gotten careless. One month the supply caravan arrived and it was empty except for the guls.”

“What are guls?” Tremaine asked, thinking she probably didn’t want to know but it was better to get it over with now.

“Shape-changers. They lure travelers away to eat them.” Giliead’s expression hardened, as if the image recalled an unpleasant memory.

Ilias shook his head. “They couldn’t have killed everyone in the city though, there weren’t that many of them. And there were no bodies, no signs of fighting. There was food left on the tables, like the people had just gotten up and left. The animals—cattle, mules, chickens, everything—were all alive, untouched, unhurt except for being hungry.”

Tremaine froze, the comb caught in a tangle. Not noticing, Gerard shook his head a little, deep in thought. “Was this reported to you by a reliable source? There’s no chance the story simply grew in the telling?”

Giliead smiled suddenly, looking down at Ilias and cocking an eyebrow. Ilias grinned back and said, “We saw it ourselves.” He looked at Gerard. “We went there, back when we were younger and more stupid.”

Oh, God
, Tremaine thought wearily. It was happening again. They were describing a story from one of her plays. Of course the culprits had been fay in her script and there had been no guls and nothing about the lack of sufficient godly protection, but the detail about the animals was exact. She couldn’t explain it and she didn’t want to think about it. Changing the subject firmly, she asked, “Did you ever meet any wizards who weren’t evil?”

Gerard gave her a look of mild consternation and she realized he must have been purposefully avoiding the topic.

“There was that old man in Kani.” Ilias looked thoughtful. “He kept saying he was cursing people, but nothing ever happened.”

“What did you do?” Tremaine persisted, ignoring Gerard.

Giliead shrugged and smiled faintly. “Told them to send for me if he ever actually managed to curse anybody.” He fixed his eyes on a bright-plumaged bird that was bathing in the cistern and said, apparently absently, “I like to know for certain.”

A
s the other men retired to finish dressing, Gerard led Tremaine off the portico and a few paces into the garden. “Did you find the curse?” she asked, looking around. Someone had been digging violently in the flower beds.

“I’ll explain about that in a moment.” He stopped, facing her. “Right now I want to talk to you about Ander.”

Tremaine looked up at him, blinking innocently. “Who?”

“Yes, very humorous.” Gerard folded his arms, regarding her seriously. “He thinks you’re a spy. Have you done anything, perhaps intentionally, to give him that false impression?”

“He doesn’t think I’m a spy. Are you out of your mind? He thinks I’m a ...” Lunatic, useless idiot, something along those lines. “Never mind, but he doesn’t think I’m a spy. And why the hell would I do something like that intentionally?”

“I know your sense of humor. Granted you’ve been so ...”—Gerard fumbled for a word—“out of sorts for the past few years that you haven’t been your usual self, but you’ve been improving rapidly.” He sighed, contemplating the blue sky. “If he came up with that idea on his own, I don’t know why.”

Tremaine stared at him.
Out of sorts
? She had thought she had kept her feelings from Gerard, mostly by avoiding him. She shook it off and tried to focus on what he was trying to tell her. “We escaped from the Gardier base, Florian and I. Maybe he thinks ...”
That we‘re lying, that it was too easy
. She was willing to admit to lucky but not easy. If the base hadn’t been still reeling from the airship explosion in the hangar, if the Gardier hadn’t dismissed then as little better than children, they would never have gotten out of that first locked room. But no, that couldn’t be what Ander was on about. She shook her head, baffled. “He said I was a spy?”

“Nothing so overt. He asked me if I trusted you.”

“There you go, he thinks I’m crazy.” She didn’t want to bring it up but she had to correct Gerard’s mistaken impression. Uncomfortable, she admitted, “He knows about the asylum.”

Gerard pushed his glasses down to rub the bridge of his nose. He knew she didn’t like to talk about it. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder just who had helped her father wreak so much havoc on that place. It hadn’t been Arisilde; he had been with her that night. Nicholas had had any number of people he could call on for assistance in such things. But in the different clothes, Gerard looked less like a scholarly sorcerer and more like someone who would cast a glamour to distract guards while someone else burnt a building down. And Nicholas had made him her guardian. He adjusted his glasses and let out his breath, saying finally, “Just take care.”

D
usk was falling as they sat out on the atrium portico and had a dinner of round loaves of flat dark bread, fruit and nuts, and grilled fish with little bowls of spicy sauces. During and afterward Ander continued to interrogate Giliead and Ilias for details of the Gardier base. After only a little of this Tremaine stopped paying attention; she was comfortably full and having trouble staying awake.

She sat on the stone porch looking out at the dark garden, hugging her knees. The stars were coming out and the sky was still glowing a deep purple from the last remnants of sunset; because of the Gardier threat, only two small bowl-shaped oil lamps had been lit in the sitting area, attracting suicidal moths. A chorus of insects sang in the trees around the house, a counterpoint to the distant roar of the surf. The evening breeze was pleasantly cool and perfumed with pine and cedar and an occasional whiff of goat from the pens. Karima had gone back inside to supervise the two young men who did the cleaning up. Tremaine could hear other voices occasionally from the front of the house; people had been coming and going most of the evening. They were all evacuees from the village who had questions or needed help or just wanted reassurance.

Ander, sitting forward on one of the low couches, asked, “And you didn’t see any markings on the bomb canisters?” He had changed into a loose dark brown shirt and trousers and looked even more rakish than Gerard.

Giliead was half lying on one of the couches, Ilias sitting on the floor and leaning back against the side. “It was dark,” Ilias pointed out, unconcerned. He stretched extravagantly. “And how would we know it was writing if we couldn’t read it?”

Ander, caught in the middle of drawing breath to pursue the point, hesitated, stymied by this logic. Gerard cleared his throat significantly, as if he thought Ander was pressing their hosts too hard. Tremaine wasn’t concerned; she had the feeling that when they were tired of answering questions they would just stop.

While Ander was trying to regroup, Giliead led the conversation back to the topic he had been pursuing just as relentlessly as Ander had the Gardier base: how sorcerers were treated, or how they treated everyone else, in Ile-Rien.

Listening to Gerard talk about instances of criminal sorcerers and how they were dealt with, one name stirred Tremaine’s interest enough for her to say, “Wasn’t Urbain Grandier a Bisran?”

Sitting on the other couch with Gerard, Florian corrected around a yawn, “I think he was half Rienish. Or was that half Aderassi?”

“It hardly matters,” Gerard put in, forestalling the tangent. “And if it does, it’s certainly outweighed by Constant Macob, who had a fine Rienish pedigree and was a murderous lunatic.” He shrugged slightly. “There is the occasional mad or criminal sorcerer, and has been all through Ile-Rien’s history. But for the most part a demonstrable magical talent means, at the very least, the guarantee of a lifelong profession. Even for the mercenary-minded, there isn’t much motivation to injure people when helping them is so much more profitable. Also, it’s a self-policing profession. There’s always someone more powerful—or more cunning—to watch out for.”

“What happened to Constant Macob?” Giliead asked, leaning forward, intently interested.

“Tremaine’s father—” Gerard hesitated, searching for the right word. “Disposed of him.”

Ander, mouth open to wedge an interruption in at the first opportunity, turned to stare at Tremaine, brows drawing together. Florian, apprised of Valiarde family history, widened her eyes in surprise, then nodded thoughtfully to herself. Giliead turned his enigmatic look on Tremaine, but it was tinged with approval. Ilias nudged her with a foot and gave her a smile. Suddenly selfconscious and feeling undeserving, Tremaine shifted uneasily. “Uncle Ari and my mother helped.”

Before Giliead could ask another question or Ander seize control of the floor again, Ilias said suddenly, “Gerard, do you know about curses to turn people into other things?”

Giliead’s head turned sharply toward him; Tremaine couldn’t read his closed expression, but the sudden tension in the set of his shoulders was obvious. Ilias sounded, if anything, just curious.

“I know about them,” Gerard said mildly. He was looking off into the dark garden and she didn’t think he had noticed Giliead’s reaction. “It’s not something I could do myself.”

Still sounding as if he was just making conversation, Ilias asked, “Why?”

“That kind of transformation is a very powerful act. It’s also a violation against nature.” Gerard shifted to face him, warming to the subject. “In our world, it’s a power the fay have, but the fay aren’t human; they aren’t composed of the same sort of material as we are. It would take a human sorcerer an enormous amount of power to alter the state of an object—even something like turning a pebble into a bit of wood. And the transformation wouldn’t be permanent; the sorcerer would have to keep the spell active to maintain the bit of wood. The effort would be incredible.”

Florian didn’t add anything but was nodding along with the explanation. Ilias cocked his head thoughtfully. “So... If a wizard did curse somebody to turn into something, they might just turn back all on their own.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what could happen, if it could even be managed in the first place,” Gerard answered. “And the backlash against the sorcerer who tried to keep the transformation spell active would be intense, possibly fatal.”

Ilias’s expression was distant as he listened. Giliead stirred uneasily, but said nothing.

Gerard continued, “This is all hypothetical, you understand, since I’m not sure such an action would be at all possible for a ...” He hesitated, perhaps recalling that in this world the physical laws governing magic might be different. “For a human sorcerer in our world, at any rate.”

Watching them thoughtfully, Ander said, “Why do you ask?”

Ilias rubbed the back of his neck, looking as if he was still turning over Gerard’s words. “Ixion could do it.”

“He could?” Gerard sounded mortally offended. “You’re certain?”

Ilias glanced up with a slightly twisted smile. “Very,” he assured him.

It was Giliead’s turn to clear his throat. “Is it dark enough now to look for the rest of the curse?” Tremaine lifted a brow as private commentary to herself, thinking that it couldn’t be more obvious if he had simply said that he wanted them to drop the subject.

Gerard stood, taking a step to the edge of the portico to examine the darkening sky. Tremaine looked up at him as he nodded to himself and said, “Yes, the stars are—” He hesitated, glancing down and frowning, and Tremaine realized the sphere was clicking, the gears inside beginning to spin.

A distant rumble rolled over the little valley like thunder. Tremaine sat bolt upright, suddenly wide-awake. That sound was all too familiar.

They were all on their feet. “What was that?” Giliead demanded.

“The village.” Ander said grimly. “The Gardier are back.”

Giliead and Ilias exchanged a bleak look, then Giliead said, “We can see it from the roof.”

They started away down the portico, Ander and Gerard right behind them. Karima stepped out of the doorway, her face drawn in concern. “Was that— Was that it?”

Giliead stopped to speak to her as Tremaine grabbed the sphere and turned to follow. “You coming?” she asked Florian.

The other girl was standing, hugging herself and rubbing her arms as if she was cold. “No, I’ve seen enough bombings.” She nodded toward the sphere. “You want me to hold that for you?”

“No, I’ll take it with me.”
Just in case
.

They went up the outside stairs to the second floor of the house, from there taking a narrow ladder up to the flat tile roof.

Giliead and Ilias had made it up first and were both crouched tensely near the edge. From there they could see the airship as it drifted away from the ruined village, playing its searchlight over the beach, a silent deadly shape that caught the reflected glow of the fire it left behind. Everybody had agreed that they had to sacrifice the village to keep the Gardier from designating the entire coast as a target, but it still wasn’t easy to watch.