Bones of the Past (Arhel) (20 page)

A city
—Medwind thought. Her heart pounded wildly.
That’s quite a secret to hang onto
.

“Is it a city made of stone?” Nokar asked. “Does it have stone monsters in it? Some buildings shaped—like so?” He described a dome with his fingers—put into Sropt his descriptions of the only First Folk-artifacts anyone had ever found before.

The Wen kids stared at each other, then at the old man. They wore their shock on their faces.

That’s it!
Medwind thought and clenched her hands together under the table.

“It is exactly as you say.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl hung her head. “I didn’t know you knew the city. I thought only we knew it.”

Medwind Song and Nokar exchanged glances. In Hoos, he said, “They’ve found one, Med. They’ve found an actual First Folk city.” And to Fat Girl, he said, “Yes, we know this place. Tell me, how many other books you find there?”

Fat Girl looked at him and shrugged. “Tens of tens of tens. Too many to count. We were going to keep trading them. We would have been very rich.”

Medwind thought her heart was going to pound out of her chest. “A library, Nokar,” she whispered in Hoos. “They sound like they’ve found a library.”

Medwind saw Nokar’s fingers grip the table edge. His knuckles turned white, but his voice stayed calm. “I offer a different trade, then,” he said. His Sropt was slow and careful. “You take us to the city and show us the book place. In trade, we carry your trade goods to the city, and we teach you to work the dirt-trick to grow food. We stay in the city, and you stay in the city—there’s places enough for all of you and us. What do you say?”

For several moments, no one said anything. Fat Girl did not confer with the other Wen. She merely sat very still, staring at her hands. Then she took a deep breath, and looked up, and slowly nodded her agreement.

* * *

The airbox landed outside the massive log palisades of Omwimmee Trade. While Roba and Kirgen got out and stood ankle-deep in the mud and unloaded their supplies, Thirk started giving directions.

“We’re going to spread out and find out what we can about First Folk who’ve come in to trade. I’ll take the indoor market. Kirgen, you take the outdoor market. Roba, why don’t you come with me?” He gave her a broad, encouraging smile.

Roba noted the smile, and caught the deeper implications immediately. Thirk figured with Kirgen occupied elsewhere, he could cozy up to her. She shook her head. “I have a friend who lives here now—the Huong Hoos woman I told you about once. I’m going to stop in and visit her—”

“You want to waste our time paying social calls?” Thirk’s expression changed to disbelief, then became barely contained fury. “Praniksonne will beat us to the find!”

Roba glared him down. “We’ve discussed Praniksonne as much as I want to. Medwind Song lives here—maybe she’s heard something. Besides, I haven’t seen her in years. I’m not coming all this way and then not even stopping to say hello.”

Thirk snarled into his beard and turned his back on her.

From inside the palisade, a single bell began to ring, calling the hour before nondes.

Kirgen came up beside her and smiled. “Nothing compared to the pandemonium in Ariss, is it?”

Roba picked up her travel pack and slung it over her shoulder. With one finger, she activated the airfloat that carried the rest of her supplies and beckoned for it to follow her. “I’d prefer the pandemonium,” she remarked.

Kirgen looked surprised and a little hurt. “Don’t let him upset you. Go visit your friend—and cheer up. This could be fun.”

“This would be fun if somebody besides Praniksonne had ever made it out of the jungle alive.”

Kirgen shrugged. “I’ll bet people do it all the time—but nobody thinks to mention it.” He sighed. “Hell, Roba, it’s a forest. Trees, you know? What could possibly be so threatening about that?”

Tromping through the town on her own, trying to find either Fair Road or North Street, or especially the place where Fair Road met North Street, where Medwind said the house was, she decided Kirgen was probably right. It seemed ludicrous that people would live so close to a jungle—surely full of game animals and wild fruits—and never, ever, go in it. The tales of the inviolate Wennish jungles were probably distortions, like the unbelievable stories she’d heard spread about herself when she became one of the first mages to take a teaching position in a saje university. That exchange program had fostered some ludicrous tales—but experience had proven the truth to her doubting students. Things were rarely as strange as people made them out to be.

She smiled and relaxed a bit.

The houses had ceased to be rush-walled slums a block or so back. Now, trudging through heavy drizzle along the ludicrously named Fish Street, she noticed that the buildings were becoming distinctly good. They were large and sturdy, and looked warm and inviting with the yellow glow of lamps and a few ghostlights spilling out onto the streets. She found Fair Road, figured out which way north would be, and turned to her right, hoping that whoever had named the streets had a practical mind.

He had. North Street was the last one before the town backed up against the palisade again. The house directly in front of her, a colossal white one-story with tall, gabled, thatched roofs, had two massive, carved, wood gates. On one of them hung a sign painted in six languages.

The sign said:

“Qualified, Certified-Safe Magics—Guarding, Transporting, and Livestock Our Specialties. Also Historical Research. We Buy Books! Private and Group Lessons Watterdaes. NO LOVE SPELLS!!!”

“Livestock?” Roba muttered. “What by the gods have they come to, mucking about with livestock?” She rapped on the carved stone knocker and listened to the crash that echoed inside.
That doorknocker would drive me insane,
she thought.
I don’t know how Medwind stands it.

She waited, with the rain pissing merrily on her head. It was picking up force; she half-suspected this was because the bloody weather knew she was stuck out in it. She gritted her teeth and stuck her hands into the pockets of her travel cape and determined not to notice.

After a moment, she heard footsteps coming toward her. “Coming, coming,” someone yelled, and then a small door inside the gate flew open, and Roba confronted the oldest living human being she’d ever seen. He was a saje, with fabulous long white braids bound in gold. He wore his official robes—evidently he’d been working. She looked at his chest for the visual ribbon-salad of awards, guilds and other frippery the sajes loved to confer on each other and was surprised to discover the busy mess wasn’t there. Where it would have been, the old man wore a single featureless onyx sphere, circled with a narrow rim of smooth yellow gold.

Roba had been in the saje side of Ariss long enough to recognize
that
award. It was the
Eye of the Infinite
—the highest, and rarest, award the sajerie offered. Roba had been given to understand that the only plane of existence higher than “Wearer of the Eye” was god— and not one of the minor demi-gods, either.

The old man grinned at her. “You’re wet,” he said.

“It’s raining.”

“Yes, it is. But you’re a mage—why the hell are you wet?” He was still grinning—and standing in the rain, she was still getting wetter.

“I’m wet because it’s raining.”

The old man laughed, and did something, and suddenly, standing there in the pouring, rapidly-becoming-sheeting rain, she wasn’t wet anymore. “See?” he asked. “If you don’t want to be wet, just think dry.” He moved out of her path and beckoned her inside.

He looked up at her from under his bushy brows, and his expression became mysterious. The pitch of his voice rose, while he stared through and beyond Roba, and his eyes half-closed, and he began to rock slightly from side to side. “Roba, mage, you have come to visit Medwind Song. Your mission takes you far from your home. Your two friends should have come with you, though. I suspect we could have found for them the things they sought.”

Roba felt chillbumps rising on her body—neither from the rain nor the weather nor from anything else of the sort. The old man was scary.

“Ummm, yes,” she agreed. “So, ah, is Medwind here?”

She stepped past him, into the huge public room, and realized that one solitary room was bigger than her entire apartment. The whitewashed plaster walls and soaring ceiling that rose into a dark tangle of mortise-and-tenoned beams and roof thatching would have been cozy in a smaller place.
Like home
, she thought and shook her head. But in this place, they were rather grand. Primitive, but grand.

Then she heard other, faster footsteps in the passage.
Good
, she thought.
Maybe somebody normal
—A moment later, she confronted an ageless, fierce-looking Hoos woman with ice-blue eyes and glossy white hair. Roba thought,
Her face is so young, but…

A trick of the stranger’s movement caught her attention, and Roba gasped. “Medwind?”

The Hoos woman grinned. “None other. But you needn’t look so surprised. You’ve changed as well, Roba Morgasdotte.”

“If I’ve changed so much, why did you recognize me?”

“I know only two women with your height. The other lives here. With those odds, I had a fair chance of being right. So, what brings you to the backwater hells of Omwimmee Trade? I thought you’d sworn never to leave the comforts of civilization again.”

Roba laughed. “I fell among evil companions who led me astray.”

Medwind linked arms with her. “As have I. This is my husband, Nokar Feldosonne, once Chief Librarian of Faulea University, now out in the sticks hedge-wizarding for love of me. He seduced and corrupted me.”

Roba had barely enough time to nod politely before Medwind was dragging her back through the house. Her old roommate’s last line finally registered on her ear when the two of them were halfway along an enormous breezeway. She stopped and looked at her one-time roommate and snorted. “
He
seduced and corrupted
you
? What about those nine young husbands you were forever going on about when we roomed together—and the men you used to sneak into the room, and—?”

Medwind waved Roba’s objections away with a delicate sweep of her hand. “
I
seduced and corrupted
them
. There is a difference. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

Roba laughed. “Ah, Medwind, yours is like the tale of the randy bellmaker seduced by the village virgin—very little rings true.” She chuckled and leaned on her friend’s arm. “You are as full of bilge as you ever were.”

“Very possibly,” Medwind agreed, and grinned, and opened a door. “This is the workroom. Best room in the house for just visiting, as far as I’m concerned. Have a seat.”

Roba dropped herself cross-legged onto a large, soft cushion, and sighed. “So what in the hells happened to your hair? I swear you look younger now than you did when we roomed together—but last I saw you, your hair was black as the inside of a demon’s heart.”

Medwind arched an eyebrow at her. “Interesting analogy—I’ll try not to take it personally.” She sat on another cushion, and shrugged. “I went Timeriding—it has some side effects. This,” she brushed a hand through her hair, “was one of them. A bit of physical un-aging was another.”

Roba was fascinated. “I heard a rumor of your Timeride. You were involved in the Second Mage/Saje War. You went over to the saje side of the city… there was some talk at the time of you being a traitor.”

Medwind leaned back on several extra pillows. “Indeed. To some of my colleagues, feelings ran deeper than talk. After that brief war was over, I found it easier to leave Ariss. I feared the Council might decide to try and sentence me—it was easier to go voluntarily into unofficial exile. I didn’t mind too much. Unlike you, I never had any great love for the City of Fogs and Bogs.” She gave Roba a bemused smile. “That’s why I never understood why you left after you took your master’s. I know the mages would have found a teaching spot for you—probably even reserved you a room in their tower.”

Roba smiled and stroked a cat that climbed up on her lap. “I stayed with city life. I didn’t want to teach; I didn’t want that responsibility. I wanted to be free to spend all my time learning—so I accepted a position as a civic mage down in Braxille. I lived in the archives at night.”

“Gods, Braxille’s not a city. It’s an iceberg!”

“If you spend all your time indoors, it doesn’t matter.”

Medwind gave her friend a disbelieving laugh. “I suppose not. Still, I think I’d rather be dead than in Braxille.”

“Ah, yes.” Roba nodded wisely. “The motto of the Fisher Province. I think they’ve even stamped it on the money now.” She grinned and shrugged. “Anyway, I did get tired of the cold and the dark. For about the last year, I’ve worked on the saje side of Ariss, teaching mage history and historical mage-applications of magic. I’ve pulled a lot from the Fishers, and a lot from Daane University—and besides, it’s one mighty library that old man of yours left behind in Faulea.”

Medwind leaned forward, curiosity stamped on her face. “And that brings us to what you’re doing here, in the far reaches of hot, steaming nowhere.”

“Ask your husband. He knew my name, how I got here, why I’d come—he’s very, very good at farsight. And very spooky.”

Medwind sputtered and inexplicably threw herself back on her pile of pillows. She was laughing, Roba realized—silent convulsions that became big, gasping roars of laughter. Tears rolled down the Hoos woman’s cheeks. “Nokar good at farsight!” she howled. “Nokar—good—at farsight!”

Roba leaned forward and told her old friend, crisply and with cold precision, “That was what I said. Would you mind letting me in on the joke?”

Medwind caught her breath and made herself quit laughing. Wiping tears from her eyes, she said, “Nokar couldn’t farsee past the end of his nose. He bribes the town urchins to bring him news—pays them in sweets and the occasional copper rit. They come running up to the window of his workroom and tell him anything they think he’ll be interested in—every once in a while, they even bring something he can use. But then, when he thinks he’ll get away with it, he does this big farcical mystical act—”