Free The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) by Martha Wells

meshed with its flesh. It had killed the family of a man named Licias, one of the few who had been trying to hunt it. With his help they had destroyed the creature but Licias had been wounded. He was still suffering the loss of his family, alone in the village and not seeming to have many friends there. So they had taken him back to Cineth and Andrien House.
    And he had been Ixion in disguise.
    We should have asked more questions, Ilias thought, not for the first time, as he stared at the floor. We should have found out he was new to the village, that no one saw the family he said the curseling killed. But even if they had, would it have really made them suspicious of Licias? He had lived at Andrien in apparent friendship for months before he had finally revealed what and who he was.
    Thinking about it, Ilias was beginning to wonder if the things the Rienish did, the way they used curses to build and cure and protect, was the way it was supposed to be. If Syprian wizards like Ixion had somehow looked at those things through a distorted glass, twisting them out of their original purpose into something terrible. It wasn’t an idea he wanted to share with anybody but Giliead. Even Halian might think it was too extreme.
    He glanced up as Gerard and Niles turned into the room, arguing animatedly in Rienish. Niles carried a leather-bound case over to the metal door that sealed Ixion’s prison. Sitting on his heels to open the case, he took out several little glass pots and jars. Ilias sat up, feeling uneasy, but the containers seemed to hold various colored powders rather than anything disgusting. “What’s he doing?” he asked Gerard.
    Gerard sat next to him, holding the sphere in his lap and watching the other wizard critically. “If Niles is right—and of course he insists that he is—the chamber we’ve warded for Ixion will need to be excluded from this spell. Channeling the sphere’s protective ability throughout the ship may interfere with the wards already in place. Those that shield the ship from view from overhead won’t matter at a moment like that, but I’d rather not have the containment wards tampered with.”
    “Me neither.” Ilias still didn’t understand all the different Rienish words for curses, but he thought he had the idea. Niles took a sheaf of papers from his jacket and began drawing lines and circles at the base of the door, using the colored powders from the jars. As he added something from another container that looked like gold filings, Gerard made a critical comment in Rienish and got a sharp reply back.
    Ilias eyed the sphere a little warily. “Is it really true there’s somebody in there? Somebody you knew—know.”
    Gerard regarded the copper-colored ball with a kind of rueful resignation. “It seems so, unfortunately.” He adjusted the glass pieces he wore over his eyes. “Arisilde was a very powerful sorcerer in Ile-Rien. He and Tremaine’s father had been friends since they both attended the University of Lodun—that’s a place for education, in history, law and medicine and many other things as well as for sorcery. He built this sphere after the design invented by Tremaine’s foster grandfather, Edouard Viller.” He took a deep breath, turning the tarnished metal ball over thoughtfully. Inside it something clunked. “Viller wasn’t a sorcerer himself. He intended the spheres to allow a person with no magical ability to perform simple spells. But each sphere had to be charged by a sorcerer before it would work properly. The metal even seems to retain something of that sorcerer’s essence. In the end Viller was never able to construct a sphere that would work unless the wielder had some small magical talent, no matter how slight.” He shook his head, preoccupied. “Arisilde was the only one who could successfully duplicate the design, until Niles managed it with the sphere he constructed.”
    Ilias wet his lips. He was still trying to cope with the idea of wizards