Free The Gate of Gods (Fall of the Ile-Rien) by Martha Wells

you.”
    Ilias rubbed his face, looking as if his annoyance was suddenly spent and he was just tired again. “Will that help you?”
    Giliead seemed surprised, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to him. “I don’t see how it could,” he said honestly.
    Ilias swore, hopped off the sideboard and walked out, banging the door on his way. Giliead watched him go, his face troubled, and Tremaine grimaced in sympathy. “Is it really going to be that bad?” she asked, giving up on the coffee grinder.
    He leaned against the sideboard, taking a deep breath. “It will either be that bad, or it will be nothing. It’s impossible to tell until we get there.” He looked down at her, smiling ruefully. “If the waiting doesn’t kill us first.”
    Tremaine nodded. “Waiting is what makes me… crazy.” The beings the Syprians called gods didn’t have many rules, as far as she could tell. They didn’t make moral judgments or hand down pronouncements; they didn’t answer questions, except those posed by the Chosen Vessels relating to magic or sorcerers. Their presence in a cave or a hollow tree would drive off the most dangerous of the etheric entities the Syprians were troubled by and seemed to lessen the effect of inimical spells. They didn’t seem to attack sorcerers directly but in the few historical cases that Giliead had spoken of where sorcerers had ventured to attack a god, the sorcerers had reputedly not fared well.
    Gerard’s theory, which Giliead was coming around to, was that the gods only objected to hostile spells. That that was why Giliead had found it difficult at first to see wards and other protective Rienish spells; the god ignored those and so Giliead had never learned how to spot them. And the god must have communicated with Arisilde at some point, before he had gotten into whatever situation it was that had led to his being trapped in the sphere.
    Tremaine had pointed it out before, but she felt obliged to say again, “But the god didn’t object to Gerard or Florian, and it acted sort of friendly to Arisilde in the sphere. And it didn’t interfere with any of the spells they cast in Cineth. So maybe…”
    “Maybe,” Giliead agreed quietly.
    Tremaine could tell he was humoring her now. “But Gerard’s not a Chosen Vessel. I know, I know,” she snapped. She seized the recalcitrant coffee grinder again. “You two just be pessimists; I’m going to be an optimist from now on.”
    Giliead actually snorted in amusement. “That will be a change.” He took the coffee grinder away from her. “What are you trying to do with this thing?”
     
     
     
    G iliead was much better at making the coffee than Tremaine, once she had explained the principle. This did not help her mood any.
    There wasn’t much else to do after that than sit around and watch Gerard work on the spell circle. A dusty sofa and a couple of chairs hauled in from another room made the waiting a little more comfortable. Tremaine had taken a seat there with Ilias sprawled next to her. Florian was still sitting cross-legged on the floor near the developing circle, taking notes for Gerard, though she looked more than half-asleep. Giliead sat on the floor, watching thoughtfully, and Ander was pacing. Giaren had finished developing the photos and had taken over Nicholas’s task of talking to Niles on the telephone, leaving Nicholas free to stalk the upstairs hall in what was probably an unconsciously sinister manner. Cletia and Cimarus had retired to elsewhere in the house, and Kias was supposed to be keeping an eye on them and on Calit, who was asleep.
    Ilias was dozing on Tremaine’s shoulder, though this was probably the most uncomfortable place in the house to sleep. Dust floated in the air from all the floor cleaning and the room was still uncomfortably cold and damp. But Ilias was very warm against her side and Tremaine was on the verge of drifting off herself, when Gerard got to his feet with a grunt of effort. She sat forward,