City of Bones (14 page)

Curious to see how she would react, Khat made no comment. As if needing to make conversation, Elen looked up at Sagai, still watching from the doorway, and asked, “What did you tell your partner?”

“Everything.” She finally met his eyes then, worried, and he said, “If you think I can do this without his help, you’re wrong.”

Elen hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “I can understand that.” She looked at Khat more carefully and added, “You look awful.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Is that what you came down here to tell me?” He knew he didn’t look that bad. The swelling had gone down, leaving the livid bruise on his jaw the most visible damage.

“No.” She took a deep breath. “Riathen wants me to work with you.”

Wants you to spy on me
, Khat thought. “I can’t do this with a Warder hanging around my neck.”

The stubborn line between her brows appeared. “He wanted to send Seul, or one of the others. I convinced him I would be a better choice.”

“Then maybe he should find someone else to run his errands. I may have to talk to some dealers on the Silent Market. I’m not going to do that in front of a Warder.”

Her voice rose. “You think I’ll report them? I don’t care what the Silent Market does. I’m not a Trade Inspector. I don’t even like Trade Inspectors. Can’t you get that through your thick head?”

It was a treat to make Elen lose her temper. He said, “No.”

She fumed silently. They were still drawing no undue attention from the neighbors. A man and a woman arguing, especially this early in the morning, wouldn’t produce a flicker of interest unless someone drew a weapon. Finally Elen said, “You could take me as your apprentice.”

Khat hadn’t been prepared for this line of attack. “My what?”

“Dealers take apprentices too, don’t they? That way anything I saw would be a secret between master and student, and I’d be breaking the trade law if I repeated it to anyone.”

“Since when does trade law apply to the upper tiers?”

Elen jumped to her feet. “You either trust me or you don’t. Should I go and tell Riathen to look for someone else?” She threw up her hands, exasperated. “I know you don’t believe these relics will be what Riathen thinks they are, but you said they were rare. Don’t you want to find them just on that count?”

It was Khat’s turn to look away. Yesterday, surrounded by hostile Warders, the decision had been easy. Valuable relics were thin on the ground, and that Sonet Riathen had special knowledge of their location and was willing to pay tokens to see them found was a powerful motivation. But the fact remained that dealing with Warders was dangerous. The Elector’s patronage gave them authority even over the Trade Inspectors, and the situation today was really no different from yesterday. He glanced back toward the doorway where Sagai still waited, and raised his voice to ask him, “Well, should I take an apprentice?”

Sagai came forward to eye Elen critically. “She’s a little small. I suppose she isn’t afraid of hard work?”

“No,” Elen said firmly. “And I want to learn.”

“Good.” Sagai nodded to Khat. “I accept her. I hope she is as wealthy as you think.”

“What?” Elen asked, startled.

“Relic dealing is a trade, and you know that trade apprentices have to support their masters during the time of their teaching,” Khat reminded her.

Elen eyed them both warily. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Support to the best of their ability, of course,” Sagai explained. “If you were a potter’s daughter, we would not expect you to contribute much. But you are not a potter’s daughter, and our household has many children.”

Walking with his new apprentice down the winding narrow streets of the Sixth Tier, Khat rubbed his face tiredly. “Why is Riathen so sure those relics are in Charisat?” Sagai had gone on to the Arcade to keep up business and make a few inquiries of his own. Too many absences from their regular trading spot would cause excitement among the other relic dealers, all of whom would decide that it meant that Khat and Sagai were on the track of some important deal. They could find themselves badgered constantly. But Khat had often pursued other business while Sagai kept up their usual trading; holding to that system as much as possible would keep the other dealers from nosing around.

“He found the crystal-inlaid plaque here in Charisat. And he’s seen one of the others,” Elen replied. She was none too happy with the financial burden her apprenticeship represented, and not satisfied by Khat’s answer that it was her own fault for being so rich. “The small one, with the winged figure carved into it. He saw it last year, in the house of a Patrician on the Second Tier. He loaned Riathen the Survivor book, and said there was much there to interest the Master Warder. He’d studied the book himself, and traveled everywhere in search of the kinds of relics mentioned in it.”

Habitually cautious, Khat scanned the street, the narrow alleys that led into back courts, the balconies, and the edges of rooftops even as he was turning over Elen’s story. Now he knew why Riathen was so sure the relics pictured in the text existed; the original owner had done all the footwork. “Did he say where the text came from?”

“No. And Riathen didn’t ask, of course, since he didn’t know then what it was. The Patrician showed Riathen the relic with the winged figure on it, and the drawing of it in the book. Then a day or so later he died, and thieves entered the house and stole most of his collection. Fortunately, Riathen still had the book.” She looked down at her feet, already darkened by the black dust of the roadway. “The old man was probably poisoned, but we never discovered who was responsible. Riathen searched for the relics that were in his collection, and he finally found the crystal plaque in the home of a man … Well, he was a High Justice of the Trade Inspectors.”

Khat looked at her sharply.

“You don’t have to glare at me like that. I don’t socialize with the man. Anyway, he told Riathen that he bought the plaque legally, of course, but Riathen knew he must have gotten it from the thieves, or whoever they originally sold it to. The High Justice gave it to Riathen as a gift. Or, really, I suppose as a bribe, so Riathen wouldn’t say a High Justice of the Trade Inspectors was a buyer of stolen relics.” She looked up at him. “Will you go up to see Riathen with me sometime today?”

“Maybe.” Khat was reluctant to put himself in the Master Warder’s hands again, though he supposed if he were really going to go through with all this he would have to. But it would do Elen good to wait and wonder. “Does he know how many stolen relics leave the city every day?”

“He looked into the future through the burning bones and saw both the relics still in Charisat.”

“Saw them where?” Hopefully Warder fortune-telling was more accurate than the common street variety. Sonet Riathen was undoubtedly wealthy enough to afford krismen bones, sold into the city by pirates who raided the kris Enclave. The practice wasn’t smiled on by the First Tier, since there were agreements going back almost to the Survivor Time with the kris to keep the trade roads clear of pirates, but no one ever did anything to stop it.

“That isn’t so easy. He saw that both relics will be in his possession, and that he will obtain them from somewhere in Charisat, but as to where they are now, and how they will get to him …” She shrugged.

For many, the day was well advanced, and people were everywhere, arguing with water keepers, baking bread in the small ovens outside the doors of their houses, hanging clothes out to air from the balconies and rooftops, and hurrying on errands. Everything taken into account, Khat hadn’t found the Sixth Tier a bad place to live. If you learned to survive the smell, the crowding, and the low quality of the water, it was paradise. The Seventh Tier was between it and the Eighth, so for the others the fear of dropping a tier and being forced out was less, and the danger from the bonetakers who haunted the alleys and closed courts on the levels below was not quite so immediate. There was a comfortable mix of foreigners, many from outside the Fringe Cities, so few objected to Sagai and Miram for the minor crime of being from Kenniliar.

And even Khat was well accepted in the general area of their court. There were thieves who preyed even on houses as poor as these, and others who preyed on the people who lived in them, knowing the vigils seldom bothered to patrol here. Both these types of predators now tended to avoid the area after discovering that the resident kris slept lightly and often prowled the surrounding courts at unpredictable times during the night.

Khat said, “If they’re still in the city, stolen relics will be easier to find. I don’t know about the block. If something that unusual hasn’t turned up yet, it’s not likely to.”

“A stolen relic is easier to find?”

“Unless a relic is offered for sale, or is in the Academia, it sits on a shelf in someone’s house and gathers dust, and no one ever sees it. If it’s stolen, it’s handled by a dozen people at least and goes on the Silent Market. Much easier to get word of it.”

They turned a corner, and abruptly the narrow street opened into a broad square housing the Sixth Tier marketplace.

“We’re going to hear of it in this place?” Elen asked in disbelief.

The market was noisy chaos to untrained eyes. Portable awnings of sun-faded colors sheltered tinsmiths, rope makers, basket weavers, coppersmiths, tailors, and cap makers, all vying for the crowd’s attention, their barkers shrieking at the tops of their lungs. The poorest vendors squatted in the sun in the winding alleyways off the forum, their goods laid out on the dirty paving stones. But the alcoves carved into the alley walls were where the real business took place, where the wagonloads of coal and grain brought down the trade roads changed hands.

“This place,” Khat said, and led Elen to a seat on a low wall between a group of women selling lengths of used cloth and braid and a rope maker’s pavilion. She reluctantly settled next to him. The market lay in the open area where the inside edge of the Sixth Tier met the base of the Fifth. Laws enforced by Trade Inspectors kept peddlers from building stalls up against the tier wall itself, so the area just at the base was occupied only by someone’s goat herd grazing on the garbage tossed down from above and the ungainly structure of a crane. It was a sheer leg tripod, towering above the black stone of the tier wall, lifting huge bales of goods up for the Fifth Tier markets by a complicated system of pulleys at the top, its heavy ropes drawn by a treadmill that was at least three times the height of the men who worked to turn it.

Khat said, “Anyone with real business comes here eventually.”

“They sell valuable relics here?”

He snorted with mild contempt. “No, nobody sells valuable relics here. They deal relics. It would be crass to produce the merchandise in public.”

Elen shaded her eyes and, not happily, surveyed the growing crowd, the rising dust, and the heat shimmers already bending the air above the pavement in the distance. “Seul still doesn’t trust you,” she said, with a hint of reproach.

“That sounds like his problem.” Khat wondered if Seul’s distrust could have led him to follow Elen, and if it would be wise to try to contact a Silent Market dealer while he was possibly under the other Warder’s observation. But no tokens would change hands today, and there should be nothing to tell anyone that the man was anything other than a market idler. Silent Market dealers were thorough professionals, or they were dead at the hands of the Trade Inspectors: there was no margin for error. “I don’t think much of Seul either. Somebody had to tell the pirates what wagon you and your relic were on.” And those same pirates had supposedly not only left the unconscious Warder for dead, but failed to return later for the body—not a mistake hungry pirates often made.

“That wasn’t Seul; he would never betray us like that.” Elen dismissed the whole idea of Seul as a traitor with an unconcerned shrug. “Surely it’s no mystery. It must have been Constans. He could have burned bones to see where the relic was going to be, and he gave the pirates that painrod in payment for their services.”

Khat thought she was relying a bit too much on fortune-telling, but he knew Constans hadn’t sent the pirates or given them the pain-rod. The Elector’s mad Warder had been out there that night killing pirates long before Khat had thought of it. And the only reason to kill the pirates was to distract them from the Remnant. But why hadn’t Constans entered the Remnant himself during the night and just taken the relic?
He could have been waiting for Riathen to bring the book
, Khat told himself.
If he’s so all-powerful, he would know Riathen would have it with him
.

“But Seul is just too … protective,” Elen was saying. “I’m not Riathen’s pet, or his child. If I wasn’t competent he would never have made me a Warder and given me duties and responsibilities.” She shook her head. “Who are we waiting to talk to?”

“Someone who knows something about relics.”

“Do we look for him?”

“No. If I wait here long enough, he’ll find me.” Seeing she had another question primed, he relented and explained, “He’s a dealer for people who don’t want their names known. You can’t just walk up to somebody like that; you have to coax him out. If Riathen’s right, and the pieces were stolen and sold on the Silent Market inside Charisat, he’ll know about it.”

The Silent Market had a presence in every civilized city. It dealt in a variety of goods, from air rifles, which were prohibited to noncitizens in Charisat, and mirage oil, a fragrant essence that gave the wearer the most wonderful waking dreams and with protracted use caused madness, to harmless textiles and incenses from the Ilacre Cities in the Low Desert, which had no agreements with the Fringe Cities and were banned from trade. But in Charisat the main commodity was relics.

The wait wasn’t uneventful. Khat was well known in this area, and people brought him relics to value for the bargain market price of a few copper bits. Some were fragments they had found in rubbish heaps or under the foundations of crumbling buildings on the Seventh or Eighth Tiers; some were treasures handed down through families for generations. In the time they waited, he identified four unworked chunks of
mythenin
, a tile fragment inlaid with a flower, and pointed out to one elderly man that the “Ancient wooden scribe’s palette” he possessed was only about a year old at the most and that he should sell it immediately before the price of teakwood dropped with the return of the Low Season caravans. Then he found one treasure.