City of Bones (12 page)

Shaking his head, Seul rose and muttered, “I didn’t realize how powerful he was.”

Gandin came back up the ramp and reported breathlessly, “He’s gone, as far as I can tell. I lost him at the door of the Remnant. And none of the others were harmed. They didn’t even know he was here.” He was a young man under his loose veil, and the hair escaping from his headcloth was as blond as Elen’s.

Seul glanced at Khat, then asked Riathen, “If he had dropped the book, what would have happened?”

Riathen rubbed his forehead, looking like any other old man who had had a trying day. Khat almost liked him for a moment. The Master Warder said, “Constans might have simply bowed to the inevitable and left, or…”

He hesitated and Khat supplied, “Or killed all of us in a fit of pique.”

“There was that possibility,” Riathen admitted ruefully. “You’ve fallen in with dangerous companions, I’m afraid.”

Khat handed him the book, thinking of all the things Riathen didn’t know. “Well,” he told him, “so have you.”

The sun flooded the Waste with red light, the dust in the evening air adding the colors of gold, orange, and amber, as the Warders’ large steamwagon rattled and clanked and shook its way back to Charisat. Watching the sunset, Khat thought of the cult in Kenniliar Free City that worshiped the sun’s nightly descent as a ritual death by wearing red mourning robes and holding an elaborate funeral every evening. He supposed he could understand their need to somehow mark the passage of beauty, and it did give them something to do.

Elen leaned next to him on the railing of the wagon’s back platform, the lictors ranged around, watchful for pirates and other dangers in the fading light. Seul and the other Warders were up at the front or on top of the housing, except for Gandin, who stood against the railing near Khat and Elen. The body of the dead lictor had been wrapped in its own mantle and laid inside the housing. It had surprised Khat a little that they had bothered. He hadn’t expected either Patricians or Warders to have so much care for the corpses of their servants. But no one had spoken of the man who had killed him. “Who is Constans, Elen?” he asked, just loud enough to be heard over the wagon’s rattle.

The wind whipped her man’s robes around her, and her lips were set grimly. “A madman,” she said.

“Besides that.”

“His name is Aristai Constans.” Riathen’s voice answered from the vicinity of the housing behind them, and Khat managed not to start too obviously; he hadn’t known the old man was back there. Riathen continued, “There have always been Warders who press their abilities past their learning, despite the danger. Perhaps because of the danger. He is one of them.”

“When he killed Esar, the lictor … that act alone would have been enough to drive any one of us over the edge,” Elen added, and shivered.

Khat waited until Riathen moved away toward the front of the wagon. The old man had been stalking back and forth as if he expected trouble. Gandin moved a little closer, watchful. Probably he had been set to guard the unwilling guest. Ignoring him, Khat said, “Tell me about Constans.”

Elen glanced at him, frowning, perhaps puzzled by his persistence, but she said, “He was with Riathen from the time he was a boy. He came from Alsea, near the coast. Riathen brought him back when he went there on an embassy. ”Everything I know is hearsay, of course.“ She shrugged uneasily. ”He was always powerful, always Riathen’s best student. He became friends with the Elector, and I suppose Riathen was glad.“ She lowered her voice. ”Riathen never has gotten on with the Elector, as far as I can tell. That’s not very good. The Elector’s safety is the Master Warder’s most important duty.

“But when Constans was my age, he went too far. The way I heard it, he was only doing a future-seeing—”

“Is that different from fortune-telling?”

“No, it’s just a different term for it,” Elen explained, a little exasperated. “But he must have pressed his power too far, because he went mad. He killed another young Warder.” She shook her head. “The Elector wouldn’t let Riathen put him to death. He didn’t understand what had happened to Constans, I suppose. Or he wanted to use him for his own ends.”

Or he didn’t want to see a friend die
, Khat thought. But maybe they didn’t have that kind of loyalty on the upper tiers. “Is that who Riathen and Constans meant, when they talked about their ‘master’? The Elector?”

She nodded. “Now it pleases him to pit Constans against Riathen. I suppose he thinks the Master Warder is too powerful. Perhaps he’s right. It’s a game to him. It’s life and death to us.” She stared back at the glowing rock of the Waste, turned to dying coals by the sun’s departure. “Riathen thinks the relics, the one we have now and the other two in the book, provide the key to the Ancients’ power. That if we could find them, learn their secrets, perhaps even use the knowledge they give us to build an arcane engine, we would know why our magic drives us mad, and perhaps how to stop it from happening. The Elector doesn’t want to take that chance. The free use of our skills would make us all as powerful as Constans, and the Elector would have to give us equal weight in his councils.”

“And everybody would be happy,” Khat said, in an attitude of mild skepticism. His thoughts were more serious. For a group that was supposed to do the Elector’s will without question, the Warders’ relationship with him seemed downright adversarial. He wondered if it was that way in all the Warder households on the First Tier, or just the Master Warder’s.

“You don’t believe it, of course,” Elen said, irritated at his tone.

Khat’s head still hurt, and he was weary from tension. “Elen, I’ve heard this story a hundred times. Maybe not this variation with Warders, but it was this story just the same. The only arcane engines ever found that still work and aren’t in a hundred-hundred pieces are the painrods, and the only magical relic is the Miracle, but you’d know more about it than me, because it’s kept up on the First Tier where nobody can see it.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Did I say it was?” He noticed Gandin was moving closer to them along the railing, perhaps to make sure Khat didn’t savage Elen in the course of the argument. Khat said, “The point is, if you’re waiting for somebody to dig up an arcane engine to solve your problems, you have a few dozen long decades ahead of you.”

Elen glared at him. “I am not waiting for any arcane engine to solve my problems for me. I am perfectly capable …” she began, then ran out of steam.

“Of…” Khat prompted, tired enough to be more malicious than usual.

At that point, Gandin chuckled.

Elen leaned around Khat to stare coldly at her fellow Warder, until he wisely retreated back to the corner of the platform. She returned to her position at the railing and glared out at the steadily fading glow on the rock. Finally she said, “You certainly aren’t being much of a help.”

“No, I’m not. So let me go.”

Elen’s sigh had an air of long suffering to it. “You are not a prisoner.”

He looked at her. “Really?”

“Really.”

In an instant he was perched up on the railing, ready to go over, off the back of the wagon and into the endless maze of the Waste.

A startled Gandin took a step forward, and there was a rattle as the nearest lictor swung his rifle up to aim, but Elen held up her hand. Unlike Riathen’s confrontation with Constans, there was more irritation at the unwarranted interference than theatricality in the gesture. The lictors hovered uncertainly, and Gandin stared at her as if she had gone mad, but she didn’t take her eyes off Khat.

He looked down at her. Her face was calm. The hot evening wind ruffled his hair, and tore at her ridiculously frayed cap, but she didn’t move. Then Khat slipped off the railing to casually lean on it again. The lictors gradually relaxed, and even Gandin backed away.

This time Elen’s sigh was from relief. She said, “I had to trust you. Can’t you at least try to trust me?”

Khat looked away, not answering her. His ribs were aching from the too-quick movement, and she didn’t know what she was asking.

It was full dark by the time the wagon rolled into the docks at the base of Charisat.

Made strange by lamplight, the wagon docks were labyrinthine, crowded, and extensive, as befit their status as trade gateway to all the cities stubborn enough to exist on the Fringe of the Waste. Piled stone piers extended out into the sand for the loading of the tall steamwagons. Metal scaffolds stretched overhead so the handcarts that were used to transport goods could pass over the confusion below to the multistoried warehouses that clung precariously to the rocky faces of the crags. The piers were crowded with workers, crew, and beggars, even at this time of night, and the whole was watched over by the towering colossus of the First Elector, its upper half lost in shadow as it loomed over a hundred feet above the docks. During the day it would be visible as a masked figure carrying a torch, cast entirely of black iron. It had been painted and gilded once, but wind-borne sand had scoured the colors away.

From here you could also see the high-walled corridor that started from the top level of the wagon docks and went winding up around the tiers until it reached all the way to the First. The corridor had once been used only by handcarts and human labor; recently a new type of steamwagon that ran on two metal rails had been installed. It hauled more weight, moved faster, and rumor said that almost a hundred hand-carters had been driven to beggary because of it. It also carried Patrician passengers who needed to go to the wagon docks but wanted to avoid traipsing through the lower tiers with everybody else. All Khat knew about it was that it made a lot of noise, and if the vigils caught you jumping from the wall down to its top deck, they shot at you.

Their wagon chugged toward one of the middle piers, releasing a long blast of steam as it slowed, and the others automatically moved up to the front. As Elen turned to follow, Khat went over the railing and landed lightly on the packed dirt below.

He circled behind the wagon, out of the reach of the lamps. Tying the skirts of his robe around his waist, he went past the hard-packed wagon tracks down to the lesser-used piers near the end of the docks. The day’s heat was starting to break, and this section of the docks was cooler, having been under the shadow of the crags above for much of the day.

There was a group of beggars perched on the pilings of the last pier. The docks were usually the last refuge of those so poor they could no longer afford even the Eighth Tier slums and were about to be forced out of the city altogether, where they would either join a pirate band or feed one. Most of this lot were already showing signs of heat sickness and sun poisoning, and would probably suffer the latter fate.

The Fringe Cities forced their poor out into the Waste, to become pirates; the kris killed the pirates to keep them from raiding the Enclave and the trade roads.
The Elector should take care of his own dirty work
, Khat thought. As he came within range of the torches and lamps, the sight of a man slogging through the deep sand drew curious stares from the beggars. Most city dwellers were wary of walking on loose sand, even though Waste predators never ventured this close to the city.

Khat climbed the pilings and stood on the pier, looking down to where the Master Warder’s steamwagon was coming in to dock. Recognizing he was kris, the beggars drew away a little, making superstitious signs against ghosts and the evil eye. There had been other kris in Charisat when Khat had first come here; all had been loners or exiles, and most had moved on or died since then. He might be the only one left in the city now.

The Warders didn’t seem to be raising an alarm, and Khat hadn’t thought they would. They hadn’t seemed anxious to let anyone know their business, and wouldn’t want to draw that kind of attention. And if he was really going to work for Sonet Riathen, a show of independence at this juncture couldn’t hurt. If he was really going to work for Riathen.
As if I had a choice
. Disgusted with himself, Khat shook his head and started down the pier.

Khat dropped down onto the cracked sandy brick of his home roof from a projecting ledge on the next house. He had hoped to make an inconspicuous return, but Ris was climbing up the ladder through the roof trap and immediately called down one of the vents, “It’s Khat, and he’s been beaten up again.”

Ignoring him, the krismen found a pile of old matting and flopped down onto it. He didn’t want to go down into the house until exposure to the city deadened his sense of smell again. His own odor was bad enough, but the nearest bathhouse was several courts away, and he didn’t feel like walking that far, even to get rid of the dried blood.

Ris came over and peered curiously down at him, taking care not to come too close. “What happened?”

An arm flung over his eyes, Khat said, “Go away,” in a tone that didn’t invite argument.

The ladder rattled, and Sagai’s voice seconded him. “Go home, Ris.”

Khat lowered his arm to look up at his partner, who winced at the damage. He was lucky Sagai was not the kind of person who said “I told you so.”

Disregarding Khat’s protests and threats, Sagai examined the knot on the back of his head. “Not so bad,” he pronounced finally. “Better than usual, I think.”

“What’s wrong down there?” an irritated neighbor asked suddenly from the overhanging window of the next house.

“Nothing,” Sagai called back, a growl in his voice. “The day’s excitement is over. Go to bed.”

The neighbor withdrew, grumbling.

“Now,” Sagai said in a softer tone. “What happened?”

Khat sat up on one elbow and told him all of it, leaving out nothing except his first encounter with Constans. He wanted to think about that a bit more before he talked about it, and told himself he would mention it to Sagai later.

Sagai was far more interested in relics than in Warders, anyway. “A new Survivor text in Ancient Script? Intact?” he asked, his eyes gleaming with the light of discovery. Finally someone was giving the find the attention it deserved. Relics weren’t a trade, they were a passion.
It makes us unique
, Khat thought. Did peddlers get passionate over pots? Sagai said, “What I would give to see it, to handle it … You read much of it? What was it called?”