City of Bones (34 page)

The door servant unlocked the gate for her without argument, and she walked in through a low arch. There was a long court to one side, with a square fountain and two ranks of potted fig trees, and a trellised veranda with tiled benches to the other. A second gate and another pair of vigils barred entry into the rest of the house, which towered over the entrance courts, heavy and graceless.

Elen raised an eyebrow at this evidence of overcaution. She supposed High Justices made enemies, even ones that could come after them on the First Tier; Rasan evidently thought so.

The servant tried to bow her into the trellised waiting area, but she held her ground. “I won’t wait. I will see the High Justice immediately.”

The servant hesitated, wetting his lips nervously. “I will try, Honored.”

It wasn’t her he was afraid of, Elen knew. She nodded, and he unlocked the inner gate and disappeared into the cool depths of the house.

Elen waited, standing stubbornly in the sunlit corridor between the court and the veranda until it became apparent that she was meant to wait a long time. She approached the gate and grabbed one of the bars. The vigil on the other side shifted uncertainly, avoiding her eyes. She said, “Open this in the name of the Master Warder.” It had worked at the prison, and if everything she suspected was true, this Justice would not dare complain about her high-handedness to Riathen.

The vigil hesitated, looking at the others for help. Elen knew of Warders who could open locks with their power; Seul claimed to be able to though she had never actually witnessed it. Elen turned her inner eye on the lock, tentatively, and almost started back in surprise. For an instant she had been able to “feel” the inside of the lock, sense the position of the tumblers, the oil and dust where they touched. This had never happened to her before. She was lucky to be able to sense the presence of breathing, thinking people, let alone inanimate objects.

Something in her expression must have convinced the vigil, because he was hastily fumbling for a key. Somewhat dazed, she stepped back to let him open the gate, then brushed past him into the house.

The long arched corridor was blessedly cool, with reception rooms on either side. A low voice droning in the distance led her to the back of the house.

It was a large chamber just off the main corridor, with fans moving jerkily in the vaults of the high ceiling and the back wall opening into another inner court, this one far more lush than the one meant for visitors’ eyes. The voice she had heard was the High Justice himself, pacing as he dictated to an aged archivist, who was scribbling frantically to keep up. The servant who had let her in was huddled on the floor in a position of abject obeisance that had been outmoded for several generations. Even the Elector’s servants weren’t expected to abase themselves that way. Elen rather thought some enlightened Elector of the past had issued a decree against it, in fact. She cleared her throat.

Justice Rasan turned with a startled oath. He wore a brief indoor veil, without his bronze mask, but Elen recognized him immediately. His height and build, the way he moved, the rather disquieting sense she had of his soul, all were the same as the man she had confronted in the Trade Inspectors’ prison. She smiled and inclined her head politely.

The only sound was the whir of the fans’ clockwork and the scratch of pen on paper as the archivist used the pause to catch up. Then Rasan said, “Warder, I don’t recall inviting you into my home.” His voice was as she remembered it, cold, mocking, and abrasive to the nerves.

“I considered my business too urgent to wait.” Elen came further into the room. Perhaps it was euphoria over her success with the lock, but she suddenly found herself enjoying this confrontation. The servant hadn’t moved, and she decided she would have a formal denouncement of Rasan written up over the incident. He should appreciate the gesture, since Trade Inspectors were sticklers for every rule of law.

Justice Rasan growled a dismissal, and the servant bolted for the door, the archivist quickly gathering up his pens and inkpots and following. “The Master Warder has sent you here, I suppose?” he said.

Elen decided not to answer that one. She said, “Some time ago the Master Warder came to see you on another matter, and found in your possession a relic of rare beauty, a
mythenin
plaque inlaid with crystal pieces that turned color in the light. You gave it to him. My question is, who gave it to you?”

“Is it the Master Warder who is so interested in this, or is it you?” Rasan went to the stone wine cabinet standing against the wall and drew a cup from the clay jar cooling inside it. “I allowed you to get your creature out of prison—something I would have done for any Patrician lady, no matter what my feelings on her … habits—but using the Master Warder’s name to satisfy idle curiosity is another matter.” He eyed her coldly, obviously expecting some sort of outburst.

Wine, at this time of day
, Elen thought. She hoped it made him ill. Really, in the stinking depths of the prison she had thought him menacing. Now she was finding him merely coarse. She sighed a little, as if the only feeling he roused in her was fatigue, and said, “That hardly answers my question. I know that if you aren’t a thief yourself, you certainly benefit from their crimes. Your possession of a stolen relic proves that.”

He slammed the wine cup down on the cabinet, snarling at her, “I don’t believe the Master Warder sent you, child.”

“Then let’s go and ask him, shall we?” Elen sharpened her voice. Insults hadn’t worked, so now he tried anger. He was desperate to be rid of her, perhaps even afraid, and she could have danced for joy. She must be on the right trail. “I already know it was a bribe from relic thieves, but I’m not really interested in your petty greeds and crimes. I want to know who sent you to the Academia last night, I want to know who told you to find another relic, this one a tiny
mythenin
plaque with a winged figure on it, and most of all I want to know who snaps his fingers and makes a High Justice of the Trade Inspectors jump to his bidding!”

Rasan turned away from her, one hand clutching the carved top of the wine cabinet as if to support himself. His other hand was trembling. He said, “You don’t know it was a bribe.”

He is afraid
, Elen thought. There was some satisfaction in hearing that rusty voice convey uncertainty instead of threat or mockery, but there was no time to gloat now. She moved closer, to the low table where the archivist had been working, and glanced down at the scattered papers. Travel orders. Rasan had been making arrangements to leave the city. She smiled tightly to herself. “If you tell us the truth, we can protect you.”

“Protect me?” The sneer was back, though she knew it masked fear now. “From your own kind?”

Elen frowned, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“The one she sends with her orders.” He turned to face her. “Don’t think I don’t know who he is, though it’s his conceit not to give me his name. I know he’s a Warder, I know who his Master is, or one of his masters.” His laugh was without a vestige of humor. “She hired the thieves to steal a relic collection from some fool of a court flunky on the Second Tier, and they betrayed her. The idiots didn’t realize who she was.” He pounded his fist on the cabinet again. “I should have known, I should have known when the fools gave me the plaque and bragged of the Patrician woman they had cheated … Then your Master Warder found the plaque, and she learned of my involvement. I had to do as she asked. I found the thieves, but it was too late, the collection had been dispersed. I had to search for the other relics for her. And now …” He stared at nothing, his eyes hunted. “Now the relics are found, and my assistance is unnecessary.

Elen thought he was drunker than she had supposed, that he was babbling or having heat visions. The “he” who refused to use his name must be Aristai Constans, but … She muttered, “She? Who is—” She caught the image from the surface of Rasan’s thoughts. “Oh, no,” she said aloud.

“Oh, yes.” The Justice nodded.

“We can protect you, I swear it. We’ll take you out of the city, tonight, now. Come with me and tell—” A cool breeze scattered the papers on the little table, interrupting her. She glanced at the wall opening into the garden court, then looked again. The flowers and plants were motionless in the hot heavy air. The breeze was inside the room.

Justice Rasan was staring around, fear in his bloodshot eyes. Distracted, Elen hadn’t tasted the growing power in the air, but now she realized what was happening. The air spirit that had stalked them at the Academia was here. In the afternoon light it was invisible, but it must have moved just in front of her to stir the papers.

Elen shook back her sleeves and held her hands out, clearing her mind to construct the guard that she had tried to use that night at the Academia. It hadn’t held Constans off that well, but there had been no chance to try it on the air spirit. She told Rasan, “Get behind me. I’ll try to—”

The Justice cried out suddenly, staggering backward. He must have felt the cold edge of the creature’s presence. Elen shouted, “No!” and started toward him, stopping as the deathly cold of the thing enveloped her.

She stumbled back, trying to get her breath, her throat aching with the freezing air she had inhaled. This had happened to her at the fortune-teller’s house, when she had unknowingly walked into the ghost. And Radu, who must have had some presentiment of death when he burned bones for her, who had looked as if he had died of fear … Rasan was struggling, caught in the thing’s invisible grip. He choked, gasping for air, and she watched in shock as his skin turned gray.

Elen backed away. It was happening so quickly. Rasan’s terrified eyes were turning dull, his skin chalky. He collapsed, and Elen held up her hands to weave the guard again, fear and desperation giving her faulty power a strength she ordinarily couldn’t tap.

The guard formed in front of the doorway to the corridor, a solidification of the air barely visible in the daylight. She felt the air spirit turn toward her; she bit her lip and held her ground as it came closer. Then lines of red light flared briefly as it encountered the guard and retreated.

Elen stumbled back through the door, knowing it was the best she could do. She was trembling with exhaustion, and the edges of her vision were darkening alarmingly, the penalty for having constructed so powerful a working. There was simply no way she could form a guard around the entire room and trap the thing. But this would give her the time to warn the house’s other occupants and flee the doomed place herself. She had to tell Riathen what she had learned. She had to warn him.

She darted blindly down the corridor, not seeing the veiled Patrician man waiting for her until she ran right into him. Then it was too late.

They left the house for the last time an hour or so before dawn, packing the children and the few wicker chests that held all their belongings into a handcart full of bronze pots that its owner was taking down to the docks. The street the carters used was well patrolled, but the man said he would be glad for the company on the long early-morning trip down through the Eighth Tier, and only asked them to pay a few copper bits for the privilege. In the confusion of making arrangements, packing, and herding children, Khat thought to avoid Sagai, but wasn’t quite so lucky.

His partner caught him out in the court, when the others were inside and the water keeper was still asleep in his wall cubby. “You do intend to meet us either on the trade road or in Kenniliar, don’t you?” Sagai asked without preamble.

“Of course I do.” Caught unprepared, Khat couldn’t put the casual innocence into that statement that it needed.

“Then why do I have such difficulty believing it?”

Khat shook his head, apparently amazed at this obtuse persistence. His eyes were still dark from the fever yesterday and would not be easily read, even by Sagai. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Sagai said mildly. The mildness meant that he wouldn’t be drawn into a fight, but he wouldn’t back down, either. “What is it you have to do that keeps you from fleeing for your life with the rest of us?”

With real frustration, Khat demanded, “Do you have to know everything I do? What am I, your pet?”

This also failed to distract Sagai. He said, “No, I don’t have to know everything you do. But I mean to know if you intend to meet us in Kenniliar, and remember, I can keep this up as long as you can.”

Khat looked away, disgusted with himself. And Sagai could keep this up, too. That was how they trained scholars in Kenniliar, standing in the sun arguing a point until someone fainted. It was similar to the debates that went on in the krismen Enclave councils, except they did it in the shade, so the arguing could go on longer. Khat didn’t have the strength for it now. He let his breath out, and said, “If there’s any way I can, I will.”

Sagai studied him for a time, then turned away. “I suppose that will have to be good enough.”

They said good-bye only to Ris, who was recognizable now that the swelling and bruises on his face had diminished, and his father and aunt, who were volubly grateful for the gift of the house and sad to see their best neighbors leave. Khat was surprised to feel the parting himself. He hadn’t realized how firmly entrenched he had been here, how many ties of friendship had been woven in with the mutually defensive alliances he had formed with the people in this court.

They hadn’t gone a few steps down the street when the old water keeper caught up with them. He had been wakened by the commotion and had come to give Khat the tokens he had held for him, water payments that wouldn’t be needed now. After a moment’s thought, Khat told him to give them to the old woman who lived in the bottom corner of the end house, who wove braid for a living and was always late with her water money.

Khat waited until they were at the docks and Sagai was making the last arrangements with the caravan driver before he faded into the growing crowd. He made his way up to the best vantage point at the top of the docks, where he could sit on the marble base of the First Elector’s colossus. He pulled his hood up to make it more difficult to recognize him from below, and watched for over an hour.

He was the one the Trade Inspectors would be after, the one whose silence Riathen would desire the most. The Master Warder had seen Sagai only once, at Arad-edelk’s quarters, and if Sagai was out of the city he would discount him. Khat was the one he would want to find, and if the Trade Inspectors might hesitate to leave the city, the Warders would not.

The docks grew gradually more crowded with crewmen, passengers, and street vendors all shouting or trying to get somewhere, with carters unloading goods on the overhead ramps from the warehouses or hauling them into the streets for the long journey up the tiers, while mad beggars gabbled pleas or abuse at everyone. Finally the sun broke over the city, and the shadows fled through the crumbling levels of multistoried warehouses down to the stone piers and finally past the caravan wagons as they rolled out onto the flat expanse of the trade road. It was a relief, really; now Khat had only himself to worry about.

The sun glinted off the marble and polished iron of the colossus and warmed the dirty paving of the steep, narrow walkways below, and Khat felt his fever returning.
So everyone’s right, you’re sick
, he told himself. There was always some illness sweeping the lower tiers, though none had ever affected him before. It was bound to pass off soon enough.

It was pure luck he saw Ris. The gateway behind the colossus was the main entrance to this section of the dock area, and he saw the boy dodge through the crowd and fight his way to the edge of the street, where he leapt to the top of the stone pediment and shielded his eyes to scan the levels below. Khat swore, and hopped down from the statue’s base. Darkness hovered at the edges of his vision, and he had to steady himself before he could cross the street and drag Ris down off the pediment.

Bustling people jostled them, and Khat pulled the boy to a clear space before he shook him and said, “I told you not to come to the Eighth Tier alone. I haven’t been gone a quarter day yet and you’re already down here?”

“You didn’t leave,” Ris protested, nonplussed.

“That’s not the point.”

“But it was important. An Academia scholar came looking for you. We didn’t tell him anything, but he said his name was Arad-something and he gave me a whole one-day token—look, here, see?” Ris felt obliged to prove this statement, digging through his grubby robe until he produced the token. “To find you and tell you he had to see you and Sagai right away, it was very important, and to come to the Academia as soon as you could.”

Khat looked off across the docks, distracted. Someone had discovered the copy of the text, maybe? It could hardly be anything too bad, or Arad wouldn’t have been free to search for him. A trap, maybe? “What did he look like?”

“This tall.” Ris held out a hand to indicate an average-sized lower-tier city dweller. “Dark skin, dark eyes, umm …”

“Never mind.” That described Arad, as well as most of the other inhabitants of Charisat. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me, all right? And go home.”

Khat stepped back into the crowd, and didn’t answer when Ris called after him, “Does this mean you’re not leaving?”

The streets up through the tiers had never been so long. The ramps up to the gates had never been so steep. Khat managed to make it past the Seventh Tier to the relative safety of the Sixth without looking too much like someone who was ripe to be murdered. He thought of stopping to rest there in familiar territory, but he didn’t want to risk meeting anyone else he knew. Seeing Ris at the docks had been bad enough. He had tried to live on the fringes of the Enclave for a time, after leaving his uncle’s guardianship. That had taught him to make clean breaks, if nothing else.

The fever had reached the dangerous point where he wasn’t sweating anymore, and his muscles ached as if he had had a thorough beating from an expert at the trade. It made the pain from the cuts on his back seem like a negligible twinge. He was beginning to admit that he knew what caused it.

Hiding the winged relic in his pouch had been a bad idea. If he hadn’t done it, he would still be in the Trade Inspectors’ prison, but that didn’t change what was happening now. People had died this way, most often when something went wrong with the embryo implanted in their pouch and the baby died, and its death poisoned them before they realized what had happened. Kris were just as prone to that kind of danger as the city people, with their far more difficult method of birth.

Later Khat remembered reaching the Academia and arguing with the gate vigil about getting in. He had the feeling the man had already been ordered to admit him, and that he was only delaying to puff up his own importance. The gate was in full sun at this time of day, and Khat was too stubborn to show off his weakness by leaning against the wall or simply sitting down in the street. So when he finally collapsed, it was just inside the gate on the hot flagstones of the entrance court.

He came to in a hazy way when he was being carried into the shade of the gatehouse’s porch. The old scholar who had let them in the first time they came to see Arad and who could never keep his veil in place was leaning over him, saying, “Bring water, quickly. Soak a cloth in it.”

They had treated it like it was heat sickness, which had probably saved his life. He was surprised they bothered. But it took a certain character to devote your life to collecting old knowledge and searching for new; evidently having that character made it difficult to stand idly by while a life expired on your doorstep.

“This is that krismen the Trade Inspectors came for,” someone else said. “Fetch Master Ecazar. He wanted to know when he came back.”

No, don’t do that
, Khat thought. He tried to sit up then, and the inside of his head quietly exploded.

When he opened his eyes again he was in a dark room, lit only by lamplight from the passage outside, all its shadows at unfamiliar angles. It smelled faintly of ink and old paper, and more strongly of someone who had been terribly ill recently. His throat felt raw and dry, though his body remembered being given water only a few moments ago. He lay on something so soft it was difficult to move, tangled up in a heavy blanket. He was shivering from a chill that seemed to come from within, unabated by the hot still air in the room. It had made him dream confusedly of ghosts; that’s what had woken him.

Before that he had been dreaming of the Waste and the pirates, of being stretched spread-eagle on the exposed stone of the top level while the heat of it burned into his back and somebody’s knife burned a line down his thigh. That was after they had gotten tired of the game of let-him-escape-then-catch-him-again, after the others were dead. Worse dreams had mixed what they had done to him with the vivid images his imagination constructed of what they had done to the others, creating a false memory of seeing the things that in reality he had only been able to hear in the distance. Footsteps were approaching down the passage, but he was drifting off again.

There was another gap of missing time, then suddenly the shadows of three men fell across the band of yellow light in the passage. An unfamiliar voice said, “He has any number of recent wounds, but none appear infected. The tincture of poppies should bring down the fever, but it isn’t having any effect. All I can think of is increasing the dosage.”

“There is no evidence poppy decreases fever,” Arad said, sounding harassed. “As far as I can see, all it does is slow the heart and put the patient into a drugged stupor.”

“He is krismen. That’s why it isn’t working on him. If you would confine yourself to your area of study and let me practice mine—”

“Don’t be idiots.” Ecazar’s dry voice, cutting through the quarrel like a sharp knife. “It’s obvious it is no simple fever, and even you, Physician, must admit that you’ve never treated a kris before. Meddling with tinctures is only going to make it worse. He will either get over it himself or die.”

Blunt but probably true. Yes, the Ancient Mages had wrought well. Remnants that still towered over the Waste, roads that cut through it, and kris to live in it. The Waste couldn’t poison him, and he couldn’t get their dirty little city diseases, either. But he could poison himself.

It was some time later that Khat opened his eyes again. He lay on his side, on a pad of heavy cotton batting, much thicker than anything he normally slept on. A few feet away was a clay jar, water beading on its rounded sides. It looked inviting, and he considered sitting up.
Maybe later
, he thought after a moment. He managed to lift his head enough to look around, and saw this was a bare room, swept clean, and the light coming through the vents high in the wall was the early morning sun. There were some chests in the corner, the expensive kind used to store books. The doorway opened into a passage, unbarred even with so much as a curtain. That was reassuring.
But I’m supposed to be dying
, he remembered. He didn’t feel like going anywhere, but he didn’t feel like dying, either.

Footsteps in the passage again. This time he stayed awake long enough to see who it was. An old woman, with a plain face above a plain gray kaftan, peered at him through the doorway, then turned back to call out to someone, “He’s awake again.”

Khat made an effort to push himself up, and everything faded out.

The next time he woke he did sit up, ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair, and knew this time he really was awake. It was the same room, and still morning. Stiff and sore, Khat stretched carefully. He was weak but not light-headed, and not so utterly drained of strength as he had been on his last waking. The fever was blessedly gone. He laid a hand on his pouch, wondering if he had been lucky or if he really had done something permanent to himself. Everything felt all right, and still seemed to work, though when he looked there was a faint trace of redness around the pouch lip.

Noticing that he wore a light cotton robe and nothing else, Khat struggled out of the pallet and found his clothes and boots atop one of the book chests. Even his knife was there.

Dressing, he discovered the cuts on his back had scabbed over. He rubbed his chin and realized he had more than one day’s growth of beard. There had been more than one morning, at least.

Arad-edelk appeared in the doorway as he pulled his shirt over his head, saying, “At last. We didn’t think you would ever wake.”

“How long has it been?”

“You were unconscious three full days. This is the morning of the fourth day since you collapsed,” Arad said, watching him worriedly.

“Three days?” Khat stopped to stare at him.

“It was a terrible fever. You’re lucky to be alive at all,” Arad told him. He didn’t look too well either. He wasn’t wearing a veil, and his face was tired and worn and his eyes were red, as if he had spent the past few nights working by lamplight. “Where is Sagai? I felt sure he would come to look for you, even if he didn’t get my messages.”