The Wizard Hunters (37 page)

“Odd,” Gerard commented, keeping his voice low as he sat down near Giliead and Ilias. “The sphere seems to be getting more sensitive to the presence of the Gardier. It obviously felt that bomb blast before we did.”

Tremaine settled cross-legged on the clay tiles; still warm from the day’s sun, they felt good against her aching legs. She said, “It must know the airships pretty well now, after destroying the wards around that other one.”

Ilias glanced back at her but it was too dark to read his expression. Ander sat next to Gerard, saying, “You mean it has the airship’s scent?” His voice sounded thoughtful.

She nodded. “To attack something that big, with so many powerful spells and counterspells and who knows what else involved; that must have been a real treat after it was locked up alone in a cabinet for so long.” She turned the sphere over thoughtfully, looking at the play of light deep inside. “No wonder it wants to do it again.”

It was quiet while everyone thought that over. “Good,” Giliead said softly.

Abruptly the airship’s spot and running lights went out. There was just enough light left in the sky to see it turn south toward the forested hills. Tremaine shifted uneasily, but the house and the outbuildings were safely dark. Word had been passed to the inland villages and Nicanor had taken the information back with him to Cineth; the Gardier up in the airship might have been passing over uninhabited desert for all the signs of life they would see.

The Gardier might be reluctant to employ that searchlight again; they would know that something had destroyed their other airship. As if tracking its movements, the sphere rattled on the tiles like it was filled with angry bees.

“Where did Ixion come from?” Tremaine asked, suddenly wanting a distraction from the burning village she could see in her mind’s eye. She shook her head slightly. “I mean, who taught him? How did he become a wizard?”

Giliead shifted back to face her and she thought for a moment he was going to avoid the subject again, but he answered, “People who want to be wizards usually swear themselves to another wizard as a slave. When they learn enough, they break free and kill the master. Or die in the process. We weren’t sure where Ixion came from. He told us it was a village outside Renaie, but . . .” He shrugged, looking back toward the airship.

Ilias added, “He had three other wizards slaved to him that we killed.”

Ander and Gerard were quiet for a moment, absorbing that piece of information. It did explain why all the practicing wizards here seemed to be homicidal madmen. Tremaine thought you would have to be some sort of nut to want to participate in such an arrangement in the first place, and cunning and vicious to survive it. She nudged Gerard with her foot. “And you said the entrance examinations for the College of Etheric Philosophy at Lodun were harsh.”

He resolutely ignored her. He looked from Giliead to Ilias, saying, “Perhaps you should tell us as much about the wizards of this world as you can.”

T
he Gardier flew a search pattern over the hills and valleys, then came back to the village to drop two more bombs. After that the airship turned back out to sea. Everyone else seemed to want to stay up and continue the conference, but Tremaine found Florian asleep on a couch on the portico, woke her and shepherded her back to their room.

Stumbling with weariness, they changed into their borrowed shifts in the bathing room beside the hearth, then climbed into the big soft bed. Tremaine burrowed into blankets that smelled like summer grasses, ready to stop thinking for the day, but Florian woke up enough to want a report on what they had talked about up on the roof. As Tremaine told her about the conversation, Florian sat up in bed, frowning. She said, “The way Ilias was asking about transformation spells. The evil fay sorcerer Rogero casts a spell like that in your story in
Boulevard
. It reversed all by itself too.”

Tremaine sighed. “No.”

“No?”

“That story was in the
Bonicea Weekly Journal
!”

“Oh.” Florian was silent for a moment. Sounding worried, she said, “But that’s the second time something happened here that was very like one of your stories.”

“Third. There was another one while you were taking a bath.
The Vanishing Island
, the play that ran for two seasons at the Excelsior.”

“That’s . . . strange.”

Tremaine wiggled further under the covers and said, voice muffled, “That’s putting it mildly.”

“It’s like Ilias said on the way to the god’s cave today. You’ve had some kind of connection to this place, even before we knew it was here.”

“Six impossible things before breakfast.”

“What?”

“That’s all I can handle today. Good night, Florian.”

Florian sighed and reluctantly said, “Good night, Tremaine.”

T
remaine woke suddenly from a dream of anti-aircraft batteries firing along the city wall. She reluctantly dragged herself out of sleep, feeling as if she was packed in cotton wool. The bed was warm and the mattress stuffed with feathers; it seemed to be trying to pull her back down and she wasn’t convinced of the need to fight it. Sitting up with a groan, she looked around vaguely, blinking, trying to see what had woken her. The room was dark except for the red glow of dying coals in the hearth and dim moonlight falling through the window. The air was just cool enough to make the clinging mattress and the heavy cover comfortable. In the other half of the bed Florian was an unmoving lump buried under the blanket.

On the low table near the wall something emitted a metallic cluck.
Oh, wonderful
. Tremaine rubbed her forehead and sighed. It was the sphere.

Damn Gardier
. She climbed reluctantly out of bed. Stumbling, she found her clothes draped over a stool and pulled the cotton shirt on over her shift. Picking her way across the dark room, the tiles cool under her feet, she found the sphere on the table. It clucked more rapidly as she picked it up.

“All right, all right,” she whispered to it. “I hear you.” While she was trying to make her sleep-muddled brain work, she thought she heard Gerard’s voice. She went to the window and peered out.

Past the shade trees the field was silver in the moonlight. The ruins of the other house were just dark lumps under the trees at the far end. She couldn’t see any movement but after a moment she thought she heard Ilias’s voice, then Gerard again.

Shoes, shoes
. Tremaine pulled her boots on without her stockings and stepped over the low windowsill. Crunching across the dry grasses and a scatter of acorn shells, she became very aware of all the sore spots and new calluses on her feet. She didn’t see a Gardier airship overhead anywhere but caution made her keep to the shadows under the trees, making her way from one to the other as she followed the voices.

She found the men in a stand of pines, the last cover before an open area that surrounded the rumbled foundation of the other house. “—no one’s done anything with it since the fire,” Ilias was saying. “Hello, Tremaine.”

“Hello.” Tremaine hadn’t thought she was sneaking up on them; they would have heard her swishing through the grass and crushing acorns all the way from the window. But he must be able to practically see in the dark to know who it was. “Gardier back?”

“The airship hasn’t returned,” the dark shape that was Gerard said, keeping his voice low. “Ander’s on the roof, keeping watch.”

“Gerard thinks he found where the curse lives,” Ilias told her.

“Oh.” The tree trunk next to her moved suddenly and Tremaine yelped.

“Sorry,” Giliead’s voice said.

“That’s all right.” Tremaine stumbled, clutching the sphere to her chest. She supposed it would have warned her if she had been standing next to something dangerous. At least she hoped so.

As the men moved off, Gerard said in annoyance, “Tremaine, try to be quiet.”

Picking her way after him, she said, “Is the curse going to hear me and hide?”

Sounding exasperated, he replied, “It might.”

“Are you sure it’s there?” Giliead asked, preoccupied. “I still don’t understand how we could have missed it.”

Gerard answered, “It probably goes dormant for long periods of time to avoid discovery. Also, it may have had difficulty manifesting in the presence of the protective influence—the god, as it were.”

“So the god kept it from doing anything worse?” Ilias asked, moving noiselessly through the grass somewhere ahead.

“Apparently so.”

Tremaine stumbled on a stone block and recovered with difficulty, clutching the sphere. She picked her way more carefully forward, knowing she would have broken toes now if not for her stout boots. The tumbled blocks of masonry were sun-bleached white and in the silver moonlight they were almost invisible against the tawny grass. She caught up with the men at the remnants of a knee-high wall and stepped over it. “What are we looking for?” she asked. Gerard had told her about the curse traveling underground, more like a fay than a product of human sorcery. “I thought Ixion cast it before this house burned down.” The fire would have eliminated most run-of-the-mill cursable objects, unless Ixion had tied his spell to a building block or a beam.

Gerard turned toward her and the moonlight flashed off the bulky aether-glasses. “I think we’re looking for a solid object, not just an etheric focal point. Whatever it is, it’s somewhere in these ruins.” He paused in front of a lump that resolved into the remains of a hearth as Tremaine caught up with him. “Once the moon rose, I was able to bring up the tracks in the ground, crossing the field toward the main house.”

“Is that it?” Giliead asked from somewhere to the left.

Gerard was silent a moment and Tremaine knew he must be staring at the whitened stone. It was barely visible in the night’s soft coat of moonlight and shadow. Just the sad, innocuous remains of what had once been the center of a home. “Yes,” Gerard said softly, his voice taking on an almost trancelike quality. “It’s under the hearthstone, in some kind of clay container. When the conditions are right it creates the creature we saw and sends it out to spread disease. I can also make out sparks around it which must be indications of the salamander characteristics that allowed it to cause the fire.”

The sphere clucked rapidly, as if it was antagonized by Gerard’s description of the thing under the hearth. “Stop that,” Tremaine muttered to it.
You got me out of bed so you could have a midnight snack? I don’t think so
.

Gerard stepped back and finished briskly, “You were fortunate that the protective influence kept it from causing even more damage.”

The shape that was Giliead knelt beside the white oblong of the hearthstone. Ilias slipped past Tremaine to lean over his shoulder. “I can’t see a thing,” Giliead confessed.

“If I understand your abilities, you wouldn’t, not while the curse is dormant. Ixion probably chose this method specifically to circumvent you,” Gerard explained, blunt but kind.

Ilias snorted. “I could have told you that— Ow.” He backed out of elbow range.

Giliead blames himself for everything
, Tremaine thought, and this curse had been like a wound that wouldn’t heal. Ilias, more practical and without the onus of being the Chosen Vessel, was less affected by it, but it still had to hurt. Ixion had left a legacy of guilt and pain as well as death. Gerard was doing more here than rooting out a particularly nasty curse and he knew it.

Gerard rubbed his hands together. “We need to lift the stone and destroy the container. Then a sharp implement with a high percentage of iron—” Tremaine heard the snick of a sword clearing leather. “Like that. That should do the trick.”

F
  Chapter 15  
F

“
W
hen you drove off the grend, how did— Wait.” Arites, trying to ride while scribbling on a fragment of parchment with his thigh as a desk, wasn’t having much luck at either. He had his ink bottle tucked into a pocket of his jerkin, but his horse kept veering off the trail toward the trees.

“It’s really all a blur,” Tremaine put in while she had the opportunity. “We don’t really remember that much.”

“That’s right,” Florian seconded from her seat behind Tremaine. Fortunately one of the sturdy dun-coated horses provided for them was a calm even-tempered beast both large and placid enough that both women could ride together. This was just as well, as Tremaine hadn’t ridden in ages and Florian’s experience had been confined to ponies that could be rented for a turn around the park. Gerard had confessed to being an adequate rider and Ander, of course, was an expert. “You could just make up the exciting details.”

Ilias laughed and Giliead, riding ahead with Gerard and Ander, glanced back with a smile, saying, “Arites, enough.”

After waking at an appallingly early hour and eating a breakfast of a thick grainy porridge sweetened with honeycomb, they had started on the trail across the hills for Cineth. Scratchy tweed and wool would have been hard to face after the soft simple native garments, so Tremaine was just as glad to stick with those. Karima had found an old battered leather bag with a shoulder strap that was perfect for the sphere. It was lined with pale silk that had been treated with oil, so they could even fill it with water temporarily if they had to. Gerard was carrying it now.

Gyan and Dyani had come along also and would be going out on the
Swift
with them once they rendezvoused with Halian and the rest of the crew in the city. Neither had gone back to the village yet to see what remained of their house. No one had commented on that at all, at least not in her hearing; perhaps they were too used to wizards appearing to wreak havoc. Or they were just too courteous to talk about it in front of their guests, who had brought all this trouble down on them.

The ride through the forested hills was actually pleasant, though Tremaine knew she at least would be paying for the unaccustomed activity with sore muscles tomorrow. Especially since the saddle, while made of beautifully dyed and detailed leatherwork, had no padding whatsoever.

It was lovely country, the rich green hills carpeted with pines and fern trees, mountain streams trickling down the rocks and turning into small waterfalls. Dyani and Ilias took turns pointing out the best views and Gyan swatted Arites whenever he tried to press for more details about the Isle of Storms for the epic he was writing.