The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein) Read Online Free PDF Page A

to haul the boat up to the deck where they uh…keep boats.” She knew about the procedure in principle but had never gone through it herself.
    Giliead and Halian exchanged a dubious look, and Ilias leaned back on the rail, craning his neck to stare up at the height above them.
    Halian nodded in resignation, squeezed her arm, and said, “Don’t tell anyone else.”
    Finally one of the seamen signaled to those waiting above and the lifeboat started to lift, moving a little in the wind. Some men shifted and called out in alarm, but Halian snapped at them to be quiet. It seemed to take forever, and Tremaine tightened her grip on the bench, reminding herself that if the Rienish woman who was supposed to be blasé about all this got hysterical, everybody else was bound to do it too. She saw portholes in the Ravenna ’s side, then larger windows streaked with water from the spray, then suddenly the boat swayed in toward an open deck, bumping against the ship’s railing.
    Tremaine stumbled as she stood and Giliead caught her arm to help her. A seaman held a gate in the ship’s railing open and she stepped up on a bench and climbed through it, finding herself on the Ravenna’s polished wooden deck in a milling confusion of sailors, freed prisoners and people she vaguely recognized from the Viller Institute. The deck was rolling, but it was nothing after being thrown around in the little launch. The wind was still harsh, but the other stowed lifeboats, their canopies flattened down, hung overhead in their curved davits, forming a sheltering partial roof for the deck.
    A little dazed, Tremaine noticed some of the sailors were women, their hair cropped short or tightly bound back under their caps. Early losses at the beginning of the war meant there were now more women serving in the army and the fragments left of the navy than ever before in Rienish history. It didn’t surprise Tremaine that the Ravenna, designated as a last-ditch evacuation transport when the Pilot Boat had failed to return with the sphere, had ended up with a lot of female crew. It also meant they would all have only a few years experience at most and that none had ever worked on a ship like this before.
    Tremaine watched the others clamber off the boat, then Gerard appeared at her side, guiding her to an open hatch. A seaman stood beside it, motioning for them to hurry. Tremaine dragged her feet, looking back to make sure the Syprians were following, then ducked inside.
    Getting out of the wind was an immediate relief; with everyone else, Tremaine jostled down a narrow wood-paneled stairwell that opened abruptly into a large area, brightly lit and teeming with refugees from the Gardier base, more Viller Institute staff and crew members trying to get them all to go somewhere. Voices spoke urgently in Rienish, Maiutan, Parscian; freed slaves who had held together throughout the battle and the trek across the island were falling down on the tiled floor and weeping with relief. Tremaine stumbled and leaned on a wall of finely polished cherrywood. Over the heads of the crowd, she spotted green marble pillars and the top of a glassed-in kiosk. “Promenade deck,” she said to herself, relieved. Now she had her bearings; they had come down a full level from the boat deck above and were in the ship’s main hall and shopping arcade. Past the people clustering around she could see that the glass cabinets for the shops along the walls were dark and empty.
    “Gerard!” Someone forced his way through the crowd. “There you are,” he said, as if Gerard had been deliberately concealing himself. It was Breidan Niles, the sorcerer who had brought the Queen Ravenna through the etheric world-gate to this temporary safety. He had narrow features, fair hair slicked back and wore an exquisitely tailored country walking suit. Despite the appearance of a man who should be lounging decoratively at one of the expensive and fashionable cafés along the Boulevard of Flowers, Niles