City of Bones (19 page)

He looked up at a squeak from the house’s gate and saw Gandin coming toward them across the court. Khat watched his approach without enthusiasm; the young Warder had not been a bringer of good news.

Gandin stopped and nodded briskly to Elen, then held out something wrapped in cheap cloth to Khat. The krismen hesitated and Elen, her eyes round and ingenuous, asked, “Do you think it will explode?”

Gandin frowned at her, puzzled. Khat gave her a sour look and took the package.

It was his knife and flea glass that the Warders’ lictors had taken the day before.

“One of my men took them. That was poor discipline,” Gandin said. It was an apology.

Khat said nothing, not having anything to say and knowing a direct stare was a good substitute for a verbal rejoinder when your mind was blank. Gandin hesitated, then turned and went back across the court.

Softly, Elen said, “Well, we’re not all bad, are we?”

Are you
? Khat thought. “Come at dawn again tomorrow,” he told her. “We’ll get an early start.”

Back down on the Sixth Tier, Khat went again to the street market, hoping to see Caster there. He talked to a few other Silent Market dealers he knew, and gave up on seeing Caster again that day when twilight fell.

No matter how hard Sonet Riathen pressed, no matter how ready Khat was to be rid of the whole thing, all would have to happen in its own time.

It was near full dark when he made his way toward home, through the narrow streets past the fading dinner smells of bread and corn gruel. He was tired, tense, and still angry at Riathen, and worse, Constans’s warning kept flitting through his thoughts.

Much as he might like to, he couldn’t dismiss that warning as gibberish. Constans wasn’t mad in that way. Possibly he was trying to earn Khat’s trust so he could trick him into betraying the Master Warder.
Earn my trust
, Khat thought.
That’s funny
.

When he turned down the alley that led to his court, caution slowed his steps; there was more noise than usual for this time of night coming from the cluster of houses.

He stopped at the end of the alley. There was a small crowd around Netta’s house and the one immediately next door on the right, where Ris and his family lived. The doors were open, and the bottom levels glowed with lamplight, a bad sign. Lamps were never used inside at night on the lower tiers unless there was some emergency. They wasted oil and overheated rooms that would have to be used for sleeping. There was just enough light to show him that it was their neighbors gathered there and that Netta was coming out of Ris’s house with a bowl of darkly stained cloth.

In another moment Khat was shoving his way through the crowd. He almost ran down Senace at the door. “What happened?”

“It’s Ris. Someone beat him. He looks awful…” The young man stepped aside for Khat to enter. The house Ris’s large family inhabited was smaller than Netta’s and crowded with a near-hysterical collection of relatives and siblings of all ages. Ris lay on the floor on a matting pad, with his father Raka holding the boy’s head still while Miram wiped the blood away from his face. “Why so much blood?” Raka asked, anguished.

“It’s mostly from his nose, I think,” Miram said calmly. Ris stirred a little, moaning, and she said, “I know it hurts, pet, but I have to find the cuts.”

“What happened?” Khat asked again.

Netta shouldered him aside, bringing Miram a bowl of clean cloths, muttering, “Street thugs. No one’s safe.”

Sagai had followed her in, and answered Khat in a low voice.

“Two men caught him when he was coming back from the Garden Market. He had nothing to steal, and they wanted nothing from him but to beat him as if they meant to teach him a lesson. Or teach someone a lesson.”

Sagai was looking at him speculatively, but at the moment Khat didn’t care. “Did he recognize them?”

“Oh yes. It was Harim and Akai.”

Two thugs who hired out to Fourth and Fifth Tier debt collectors, but Khat knew that Lushan really paid most of their water money. The broker had been paid his tokens by one of Elen’s lictors early this afternoon, long before Ris must have been attacked. Khat was certain about that. Elen had checked for him when they had returned to Riathen’s house.

The anger was startling, burning cold right down to his bones: the same anger he had felt when he found out that the idlers in the court were habitually rude to Netta’s daughter, and thought themselves safe because she had no male relatives to defend her. He had disabused them of that notion quickly enough.

Maybe everything the city dwellers said was true, and at heart kris were just territorial animals. But Harim and Akai should have been sent after Khat, if Lushan was still so angry.
All Ris does is carry messages
, he thought.
The vindictive bastard knows that
.

It was suddenly too crowded, too noisy in the room, with the family carrying on, the boy’s moans, Miram’s and Netta’s reassurances. Khat pushed his way out to stand in the still hot air of the court.

Sagai followed him, and after a moment asked, “You know why the boy was attacked?”

“No,” Khat answered honestly.
But I’ll find out. After I cripple Harim just a bit
.

Sagai accepted the answer without comment. They stood in the relative calm as the neighbors began to drift back to their own homes and all the lamps except those Miram still needed were extinguished, one by one.

Sagai started suddenly. “Ah, in all the confusion I almost forgot. Caster came by the Arcade. He said he would have a name for you tomorrow, if you still wanted it.”

Khat closed his eyes in relief. “I don’t want it, but I need it.”

Sagai shook his head. “The sooner this Warder business is over with the better. You take care. You can’t trust those people. They’re different.”

“I’m different,” Khat reminded him.

Sagai gestured that away. “You know what I mean.”

Khat leaned back against the pillar. “Remember to tell her about the greater weight with the rougher texture.”

Sagai was showing Elen how to judge the difference between various lumps of Ancient worked metals and modern trash. He stopped his lesson to fix his partner with a deadly eye. “Are you doing this or am I?”

Khat shrugged and looked away. He had to admit Sagai was the better teacher; Khat got testy if he had to explain anything more than once.

They were at the Fifth Tier Arcade in their customary trading spot, a nook formed by two massive broken columns long ago scavenged out of the remains of some Ancient structure. The columns were covered with little faded human figures in stylized poses-dancing, fighting, lovemaking—that were too shallow and crumbled to make good rubbings from, and too common to bother cutting out and carrying away.

The Arcade itself was a maze of overhung galleries and twisty covered walkways more than five floors high in some places, supported more by the buildings around it than by its own buttresses. The spot Khat and Sagai had long claimed for their own was near the edge of the open central well on the third floor. Two floors above them the sun came slanting down through the holes and old air shafts in the aging roof, and occasionally a stone dislodged from one of the walkways above would drop and crack against the busy gallery below.

Loud talk from the merchants and artisans at work echoed off the cracked and chipped stone facings, complemented by the constant banging from the coppersmiths’ alley on the bottommost level. The mat makers worked on the floor just above them where the light was better, and further down the row were the olive oil millers, candle makers, charcoal sellers, and the dealers in henna, malachite powders, eyeblack, and agents to purify the blood. All spent most of the working day complaining about the other inhabitants of the Arcade.

Business had been sparse today. A few other dealers had come sniffing around, and some scavengers from the Seventh Tier had shown up with a basket of junk for them to sift through—Sagai was using the results of that labor for Elen’s lesson. No shady dealers with valuable and mysterious relics from unspecified sources had appeared. Khat let his head loll back against the stone in boredom and scratched his pouch, wishing, as he always wished when the eternal waiting-for-something-to-happen became too much to bear, that he had taken up some other occupation.

Sonet Riathen’s Survivor text: now there was a mysterious relic, with all its talk of the souls of the people of the west, and the western doors of the sky. An intriguing relic, and not at all like the only other Ancient Script text he had been able to read in the original, which was the one kept in the archive of the krismen Enclave, said to be the only existing record of the Ancient Mage-Philosophers who had created the krismen during the formation of the Waste. It told little about the Mages themselves, and spoke mainly of how there had been many nervous days spent in preparation of the magical essences that were needed to make the transformation and long hours of work on the gigantic arcane engine that would distill them.

Khat knew some of that text was accurate, because he had seen the engine, or at least what was left of it—hulks of dead
mythenin
metal, covered with indecipherable Ancient script and still-beautiful scrolling, the silver and gold brightwork in melted lumps or tarnished past saving, the whole surrounded by heavy shards of Ancient glass. The remains were scattered throughout most of the caves and passages of the deepest level of the Enclave. The text had said the arcane engine had destroyed itself in the completion of the last essence, killing many of the Ancient Mages in the process. The Survivors who had agreed to test the essence hadn’t really believed it would work— until their children were born.

After that the text had turned dull as dust, going on forever about breeding lines and the importance of continuing the Ancient Mages’ work, and how their magic couldn’t govern all, it was up to the descendants of those first newborn kris children to finish their work, and on and on and on. The writer had become obsessive on the subject, but that should be no surprise, Khat decided, considering the poor bastard had been trapped in the Enclave as the Waste spewed fire outside, with no one for company but terrified Survivor parents, mewling infants, and a pack of muttering Mage-Philosophers who probably thought of themselves as gods.

Sagai’s voice called him back to the present. His partner was ending Elen’s lesson, saying, “That is all I can show you from this poor collection.” He pushed the scraps over to Khat, who started to separate out the raw
mythenin
lumps again, which could be sold to certain individuals on the Sixth Tier who claimed to be collectors but who in actuality made the same type of fakes the Elector’s Heir owned.

Elen leaned back against the rock, looking hot and dust-covered. No sweepers worked here, so the dust formed choking clouds above the better-traveled walkways. After only a short time she had broken down and bought a small jar of water from a passing water seller. There were no fountains selling drinking water in the Arcade, though on the bottom level a trench had been cut into the rock floor, and possibly it had originally been meant to provide running water for the inhabitants. It was dry now, and served only as a latrine. Elen checked the edges of her plain cap to make sure her close-cropped hair was safely tucked within, then said idly, “Did you know the kris-men Enclave has sent an embassy to the Elector?”

Khat realized he hadn’t answered her, that she was watching him curiously, when the edge of the dull shard of Ancient glass he was holding broke the skin on his palm. He said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Really? Have they been here long?” Sagai said, regaining Elen’s attention while Khat put the piece of glass down and thoughtfully licked the blood off his hand.

“A few days,” Elen said. She picked up one of the
mythenin
fragments and rolled it between her fingers, probably trying to duplicate Sagai’s ability to detect the minute differences in texture which could reveal what type of relic the piece had come from. “There are going to be at least three meetings with the Elector, which is rare. The embassies from the other Fringe Cities are allowed only one. I think they’re going to talk about the trade roads that run through the deep Waste, and the pirate attacks.”

Khat asked, “Which lineage are they from?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know there were any.” Elen looked surprised, then thoughtful. Too thoughtful. “I can find out.”

Alarmed, Khat shrugged and looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”

Sagai coughed to get their attention, and Khat glanced up to see Caster coming down the walkway, passing the mosaic makers and idly inspecting the examples of their art they had set out to draw trade.

The Silent Market dealer reached them and sat down next to Khat, nodding courteously to Sagai and Elen. “Well?” Khat asked him, feigning more interest in the bits of
mythenin
and Ancient glass the scavengers had brought. It was important not to appear too anxious. He needed the information Caster had very badly, but he had no intention of being overcharged for it.

Caster considered the question thoughtfully, his opaque eyes going from Khat to Sagai. “Ten days,” he said.

Sagai laughed indulgently and shook his head. Elen drew breath to speak, but Khat kicked her foot, and said, “Ten days! For what?”

“I had to use a favor from someone high up in the Market to get this name,” Caster protested. “Ten days is the least—”

“Five,” Khat said.

“Nine.”

“Six.”

“Seven.”

Khat exchanged a look with Sagai, then said, “Not seven.”

Elen bit her lip and looked desperate. Fortunately Caster was studying his sandaled feet at the moment, considering. Finally the dealer shrugged, and said, “Six it is. A small faceted oval
mythenin
piece with a winged figure in the center was bought a year ago by a man named Radu, who lives on the Fourth Tier in a house in the Court of Painted Glass in the ghostcallers’ quarter.”

Sagai rummaged in his robe for trade tokens and counted them into Caster’s palm, frowning at the unfamiliar name. “He’s not a collector?”

Caster shook his head. “He buys, though not as much as he used to. He’s a foreseer.”

“A fortune-teller?” Khat asked, startled.

“A very upper-tier fortune-teller, for Patricians. They even come to him sometimes. He claims to have an oracle.”

“Who sold the relic to him?” Elen asked.

Khat gave her an annoyed look, but Caster considered the question, then shrugged. “You don’t want to buy those names. There were three of them, but they’re all dead men now.”

Since the dealer was giving out free information, Khat asked, “How did they die?”

“Trade Inspectors, how else? Some High Justice went after them.” Caster got to his feet. “There it is, for all the good it does you.” Then he hesitated and said, “I heard about the boy, Ris …”

There was little that went on in the lives of those who practiced the relic trade, or who were even only peripherally involved in it, that Caster did not know. Khat looked up to meet his eyes, cool and deliberate. “Who?”

Caster grinned suddenly, and said, “That’s how I thought it was.” He nodded farewell to the others and walked away, humming to himself.

“Why did you bargain with him?” Elen demanded, as soon as the Silent Market dealer was out of earshot. “I had more than enough tokens. He could have refused to tell you the name at all.”

“There’s no point in wasting money,” Sagai told her, his expression stern. “And besides, if we didn’t bargain he would have been suspicious, and he would have sold his suspicious thoughts to one of our competitors, just the way he sold us Radu’s name.”

“Which Radu must have wanted kept secret, or what’s the point in selling it?” Khat pointed out thoughtfully.

“But if he buys relics …” Elen began.

“When Caster said ‘he buys,’ he meant from the Silent Market dealers,” Khat corrected her. “Not from the shops on the Fourth Tier, or from independent dealers like us who have to stay on the legitimate side of the Trade Inspectors if they want to sell to the Academia.”

She frowned. “Is that odd, that he should only buy relics from the illegal market?”

“A little.” Sagai shrugged. “A genuine collector will buy from whatever source he can find. He may be buying the relics to sell again at a profit, which is a chancy proposition if he doesn’t have the right trade license.” When Sagai had first come to the city he hadn’t much liked the less than legal aspect of the relic business, the necessity for dealing with the Silent Market on occasion, but he had grown accustomed to it. Khat suspected he had come to enjoy it, even.

“I see. But perhaps it’s better that he’s not a genuine collector,” Elen said. “A collector wouldn’t want to sell anything to us, would he?”

“Do we have to buy it?” Khat asked her in turn. “Can’t Riathen go up to Radu’s gate, bang on it, and tell him to hand the piece over now or else?”

“I think that would tend to draw unwanted attention.” Elen’s voice was dry.

“Then I’ll go and see if I can speak to this Radu, and discover if he is perhaps willing to sell some of his less important pieces,” Sagai said thoughtfully. Glancing at Elen, he added, “Without mentioning a
mythenin
oval with a winged figure. You never tell them what you really want.”

“Especially if they’re amateurs,” Khat said, rolling the
mythenin
pieces around in his palm. “I’ll walk up to the Fourth Tier with you. I have some ideas about that second piece.”

“The big ugly block?”

“Maybe big, but maybe not so ugly.”

“I’ll go with you,” Elen said.

“No, somebody has to stay here and play trade as usual. Especially since Caster came by. If we all three run off, we could have every dealer on this tier trailing us.”

“And what is more natural than leaving our new apprentice to mind things while we take care of other business,” Sagai said.

“You just don’t want me to come along. You don’t trust me,” she accused.

“You did mention something about promising to behave as an ordinary apprentice,” Sagai reminded her, smiling. “And really, there is nothing else for you to do.”

Truly, Elen did a good job of pretending not to be a Patrician. She didn’t complain about the heat or the stench in the Arcade, and she was adept at avoiding casual physical contact without seeming to do so. “Oh, all right,” she said, giving in. “But what am I going to do if someone wants to sell me something?”

“Examine it carefully, using the methods I’ve shown you,” Sagai told her, getting to his feet. “Then look thoughtful and say you can’t make an offer without consulting one of us, and that we’ll be back later.”

“That won’t be suspicious?”

“It’s what everyone else’s apprentice does,” Khat said. “Good luck.”

They went along the walkway to the wide, cracked stone stair leading down, and Sagai said suddenly, “It’s a large city, and the kris embassy may spend their entire stay on the First Tier. There’s no reason to panic.”

“Panic?” Khat looked at him in disgust. “What makes you think I’m panicking?”

Sagai shrugged one shoulder. “You could always go and talk to them. See for yourself which lineage they come from. Unless you think they are going to drag you back to the Enclave against your will.”

Khat fixed his eyes on the glittering swirl of dust in a shaft of sunlight. “They might.”

“I’m not giving advice, I’m only stating facts.”

“Bad advice, bad facts, what’s the difference?”

Sagai snorted, but said no more. He didn’t have to. Khat had already thought of the reply that facts had to be faced whether they were bad or not.

They didn’t really speak again until they reached the Fourth Tier, and found the turning into the ghostcallers’ quarter that Sagai needed to take to reach the fortuneteller’s house. “You think you’re going to have any luck?” Khat asked his partner as they paused there.

“If I see the piece we want and hear whether he is willing to sell it or not, I’ll count myself lucky. But I doubt it will go so far.”