The Wizard Hunters by Martha Wells Read Free Book Online

but so was everyone else. She probably didn’t look like a Gardier spy, at least. There were warnings in the papers constantly that there were Gardier spies in the cities, there to get information on defense plans and troop movements on the Aderassi border, and to kill sorcerers.
    The soldier carried their papers over to the truck parked off under the trees and she heard the voice of the corporal as he checked their documents again. “They’ve hit the coast too, Chaire again. It’s likely they’ll take another run at Vienne before midnight.”
    “No, not again.” The soldier sounded as resigned and weary as Tremaine felt.
    “Yes, just came in on the wireless.”
    The bombings on the seaport of Chaire had started only a few months ago. The two things that had most puzzled the Institute’s researchers since the war began was where the Gardier had come from and how they were concealing their bases. Airships now also came from the captured territory of Adera, but at first they had always come from over the Western Ocean. They still made their attacks on the Western Coast that way, but as far as their allies in Capidara could tell, the dirigibles were not passing over their territory at any point. Speculation in the newspapers had covered everything from a secret undiscovered island, an underwater city and a hitherto-unnoticed continent that submerged at will. If the Gardier came from further away, from some hidden city, then that still left the fact that they appeared to be supplying and launching many of their airships from the middle of the open sea. After three years of fighting, Ile-Rien still knew little about them, not even what they called themselves; the name Gardier had been given to them by the newspapers and was a Rienish corruption of an Aderassi slang word for “enemy.”
    Ile-Rien had been invaded before. During the Bisran Wars, troops had crossed the borders and pushed inward as far as Lodun, overrunning towns and villages, burning witches and priests. She had read the history, seen the ancient great houses pockmarked by cannonballs. But nothing prepared you for this.
    Many of the standards of the Ile-Rien sorcerer’s arsenal, like the charm that ignited gunpowder, were useless against the Gardier. Only illusions or defensive wards seemed to succeed against the airships and attempts to work magic often drew their attention. And one of the Gardier’s most devastating spells caused engines, gun mechanisms and electrical equipment to spontaneously explode. Now traveling the shipping lanes to and from allied nations was suicidal and the few surviving factories were hard-pressed to provide new munitions.
    The soldier returned and handed over the papers. “Thank you, madam. Careful now. It’s a good night for a bombing.”
    It might have been the soldier’s warning or Tremaine’s inherited paranoia, but as the road left the woods and hedgerows behind for an open down, she switched the headlamps off. The sloping field ahead, bleached of any color by the moonlight, led down to another shadowy curtain of trees, the dark sky chased with clouds stretching above it. Tremaine’s foot slammed onto the brake before her brain processed what her eyes had just recorded; outlined against a stray cloud was a long cylindrical shape, the jagged ridge down its back tapering into knifelike tail fins. Gerard jolted awake. “What is it?”
    “Airship, dammit.” Tremaine craned her neck to look out the windscreen. It was low, perhaps only a hundred feet above them. She wished she hadn’t stopped so abruptly; surely a sudden motion was more likely to attract attention than a slow one. She was very glad Gerard’s car had a silver-gray body and a dingy gray bonnet; it should blend in with the grassy field.
    Please no firebombs , Tremaine thought, watching the airship draw closer. After so much time in the Aid Society she should be used to air raids, to the noise and the smoke and the smell of death, but maybe that was