City of Bones (44 page)

“How did you get that?” Khat had asked when she pulled it out of her mantle.

“Riathen left it in the antechamber, with some other things, as if it wasn’t part of the ritual. Did the text say anything about it?”

“No, but I didn’t have time to study it that closely. Arad might know. Too bad we can’t ask him.”

She rubbed her thumb over the figure of the faceless winged man. “It still feels warm. It felt alive when I picked it up, but so did every other part of the Remnant I touched. See if you feel anything.”

Khat had held it, but it felt like nothing other than inert
mythenin
. Elen had told him something of what she had experienced last night in the gradually awakening Remnant, and though he thought most of it sounded like a dream, he was still willing to believe her. In light of their current predicament, he would have to be a fool not to. And he really didn’t know why they bothered to ask each other these questions.
Habit
, he supposed. They had no water, no food, and no hope of getting any, and he couldn’t even close his eyes to sleep. They were not going to last long in this strange, empty place.

Khat scrambled over the edge of the next projection, and reached down to help Elen. As he pulled her up beside him she stared at something over his shoulder and gasped, “Look at that!”

He twisted around, reaching for his knife. He had been checking each projection carefully before crawling up onto it, but the repetition and the lack of any sign of anything alive but them had made him careless. But Elen was pointing up at something about a man’s height up the wall.

After a moment his tired eyes found it. It was a glyph, the size of his outstretched hand, carved into the wall. Elen must have seen it purely by accident. Khat stood, one hand on the wall for balance, and traced its outline.

Elen demanded, “What does it say?”

There were only a few characters of Ancient Script, but as weary as he was it took him some moments to translate it. “It says ‘Aventine-denan, twenty-seventh dynasty, day seventy-one.’” He wished he could copy it; he didn’t have anything like paper to do a rubbing or to trace it. He stared hard at it, carefully memorizing the lines; just in case they did survive this, he wanted to be able to reproduce it. “That’s in Ancient reckoning. The twenty-seventh dynasty was the last one before the Waste rose. I don’t know what ‘day seventy-one’ is unless he was keeping track of how long he had been here.”

“So there were people here,” Elen said softly. “Mages, perhaps. Though if Aventine-denan was a Mage, his name wasn’t passed down to the Warders. Maybe he found a way out.”

They might have passed dozens of glyphs like this one; traveling with their noses to the stone, trying to defeat that paralyzing sensation of falling, they could have missed any number of them. “Maybe,” Khat agreed. “But the text said the Inhabitants stole hundreds of people. Maybe they dropped him along the way, like our Inhabitant dropped us, and he stayed here until he decided to see what happened if he jumped.”

“You dropped that rock chip to see what would happen and it fell, just like I said it would. If we jumped, we would fall. No one is jumping.”

“All right, all right, I said I wouldn’t jump. But …” Khat stopped, holding up a hand to keep Elen from replying. Somewhere above them he heard a faint thump, as if something had struck one of the rocks. He thought his hearing was almost back to normal now, though it was hard to tell. The only thing to hear had been their own voices and a distant rushing like wind through a wadi, as if the gale that had carried them here still raged somewhere far away. He wondered if he had imagined the thump.

Then it came again. Khat glanced at Elen and saw from her startled expression that she had heard it too this time. He motioned for her to come toward the wall, and she scrambled to his side.

The next thump was on the ledge directly above them, and they both pressed back against the wall. Khat drew his knife, though he didn’t know how much good it would do. An Inhabitant would hardly need to jump from ledge to ledge, but if some of the nastier creatures of the Waste had originally come there through these Doors there was no telling what might live here.

Something dark swung down from the ledge above, and Elen gasped just as Khat realized it was Constans. The Warder landed on their ledge and didn’t even have the grace to look surprised to see them. He demanded, “What is taking you so long?”

Khat slumped back against the wall and let out his breath. It was a sure sign your situation was desperate when you were relieved to see Aristai Constans.

Elen stepped forward, confronting the older Warder defiantly. “I hoped you were dead.”

“And it’s lovely to see you, my dear.”

Khat put his knife away. “Where have you been?” He was glad to know the old bastard was alive, but he supposed he would get over that in a moment or two. Hopefully it was only relief at seeing another human face.

“Waiting for you. We can only hold them off so long, and there’s something of a language barrier.” Constans stepped back, showing a complete disregard for the drop-off behind him, then reached up and caught the rim of the rock overhead. Pulling himself up without apparent effort, he added, “I suggest you hurry.”

“We?” Elen repeated, glancing at Khat. “Is … is Riathen up there?”

“We’re not going anywhere with you until you tell us what’s going on,” Khat said, folding his arms. He had never been in a position to demand information from Constans before, and he wanted to make the most of it while he had the chance.

Constans appeared again, head hanging down off the ledge. “Riathen is there. Why do you think this corridor hasn’t been flooded with Inhabitants, heading for our world? The Doorway we came through is still open.”

“What about Seul and the Heir, and the lictors?” Elen persisted.

“They had no resistance to the Inhabitant. They were drawn all the way up, and probably over to the other side.”

The other side. Khat felt a cold prickle travel up his spine. Curiosity had always been the bane of his life, but he felt not the slightest urge to see the other side of this Doorway.

Suspicious, Elen said, “I had no resistance to the Inhabitant. Why didn’t it draw us all the way up?”

“Elen, you continually underestimate yourself, and I find it intolerable. You haven’t even tried to use your power since we came here, have you?”

Elen flushed, caught off guard. “I didn’t think it wise, I—”

He cut her off. “Riathen cannot hold the Inhabitants back for long, so I suggest you get over your reluctance and come along.”

“Riathen is holding them back?” Elen glanced at Khat, then asked Constans, “You’re cooperating with him, and not trying to kill him?”

“There hasn’t been time for that.” Constans was impatient. “My dear, if I had ever wanted to kill Sonet Riathen, I have had far better opportunities than this.”

“I’m not your dear anything. Stop calling me that. And Riathen told me …” Elen stopped, wet her lips uncertainly.

“Yes,” Constans said. “He told you a great many things, and some of them were true.” He pulled his head back, and they heard, “Hurry.”

Elen turned away, her hands knotting up into fists. “Damn him,” she muttered, “to the highest level of Hell.”

“Better make it a little lower,” Khat told her, sourly. “He could probably tunnel out of that one.”
What did he mean by language barrier
? Khat wondered. Were Constans and Riathen up there trying to reason with the Inhabitants? It would be a strange thing to see if true, considering that Constans and Riathen could barely speak to each other without violence.

They climbed again, moving as fast as they could, not stopping to rest. Khat felt as if they had been doing this forever, but eventually they reached the outcroppings just beneath the platform they had seen from below.

It was an unbroken ring, circling the tower but open in the center. It didn’t jut out that much farther than the ledges around them, but the one- or two-foot difference seemed to make the task of climbing up to it almost impossible. Khat didn’t see how Constans had made it, except that the Warder was taller than he was and had a complete disregard for his personal survival. He was turning to Elen, about to suggest going from ledge to ledge beneath it, searching for an easier way up, when Constans appeared again, hanging his head down over the edge of the platform.

They both flinched at his sudden appearance, but Constans said, “Finally. Give me your hand, Elen.”

Elen looked stubborn. Khat nudged her, gently. “Go on. We don’t really have a choice.”

Muttering under her breath, Elen approached the edge gingerly, and stretched out her arms. Constans adjusted his position, and said, “Just lean forward.”

“Wait.” Khat moved up behind her and braced his feet, and put an arm around her waist.

Elen glanced back at him, murmured, “The positions we get into,” then leaned forward over empty space. Constans caught her wrist before she could overbalance and Khat let go, and the Warder pulled her up over the edge. In another moment he appeared again.

“Now you.”

“I know,” Khat said. He could just reach the underside of the platform above, and steadied himself on it. He was considerably heavier than Elen. “You could end up dragging us both over the side, you know.”

“I could, but what would be the point of it?”

“Uh, never mind,” Khat muttered. He leaned forward and caught Constans’s forearm. For an instant, strong as the Mad Warder was, Khat didn’t think he would be able to do it. Then Constans’s other hand caught the back of his belt and hauled him up and over.

Khat sprawled on the stone, catching his breath, then propped himself up. The platform was smooth, the same cream color and texture as the inside walls of the Remnant. Carved on it was a dizzying pattern of spiraling lines, the same sort of pattern that covered the big ugly block and the Miracle. “The Ancients built this, they must have built the ramps,” Khat said, not aware he had said it aloud until he heard his own voice. “How did they get up here?”

“With great difficulty, one assumes,” Constans said. “Look up.”

Khat did, and had to fight the urge to flatten himself back against the platform. Not more than thirty feet over their heads, if he was gauging the distance properly, the air was thick with the presence of the Inhabitants.

Lines of light marked them, sparking as they struck each other or the walls of the tower in their constant swarming motion. He could feel the freezing cold of the wind that formed their bodies, sense their wish to rush down and destroy. Then Khat saw Riathen, standing perhaps ten feet away near the wall, holding up his hands toward the death in the air above. His face was rapt, and he was motionless, like a statue carved from obsidian. It seemed he might be holding the mass of raging creatures back by will alone, but once Khat looked for it he could see the telltale thickening of the air just below the swirling Inhabitants, the bending of it as if it were heavy with heat.

Elen was standing near Riathen, one hand out as if she didn’t quite dare to touch him, for fear she would break that terrible concentration.

Khat turned back to Constans. “How long can he do that?”

“Not long,” the Warder said. He was still sitting on the edge of the platform, watching Riathen, his light eyes unreadable. “He isn’t the Master Warder by accident, and his power was aided by the Remnant’s awakening. But the effort is sure to kill him. I could help him, but he won’t allow it. Whether it’s an issue of trust, I don’t know, but I do know he depends on me to solve this puzzle, and I have been quite unable to do so.”

“Solve what puzzle?”

“The puzzle of this place!” Showing real irritation for once, Constans took a swing at him. Khat rolled out of reach. “Obviously this is another part of the Remnant, perhaps meant to close the Door permanently, but just as obviously it isn’t working.”

“Nothing’s obvious when you’re dealing with the Ancients,”

Khat snapped. But it was the first time he had seen Aristai Constans agitated by any of this, and it shocked him out of his daze. “That could be why they left the relics to open the Door over this Remnant—they never finished what they were trying to do up here. But they were able to close the Door at the other end… . This must do something else.” Something important, something worth fighting their way up here, holding back the Inhabitants while they built the ramps and the platform. Whether they used tools and labor or Mages who melted the ramps right out of the walls of the Doorway, it had been no light task.
Aventine-denan, twenty-seventh dynasty, day seventy-one
, he thought, remembering the glyph.

Constans was saying, “I’ve tried touching his mind, but I can see all the way down into the bottom of his soul, and it’s as if there’s nothing there, no thought, no feelings. I refuse to believe he’s only a shell; I suspect it’s some method to keep the Inhabitants from noticing his presence. He’s opened his eyes twice, but he doesn’t understand a word I’ve said …”

Neither do I
, Khat thought. Constans was facing away, looking across the platform toward the opposite side from where Riathen and Elen stood. Khat followed his gaze.

At first he saw nothing but the platform, the cream color of its stone blending seamlessly into the tan and gold of the Doorway’s walls. Then his eyes found the figure of a man, seated near the wall.

Khat got to his feet, then stopped abruptly, looking up at the Inhabitants massed overhead. They felt too close for comfort, but standing wasn’t really bringing them any closer. He went toward the figure, not quite believing what he saw.

It was a man, seated cross-legged on the platform, covered in dust the same color as the Doorway’s walls. He sat so still he might have been a statue. Or a corpse. Khat didn’t think he was breathing.

Khat stopped within a few feet of him, and sat on his heels to look more closely. He was a big man, even seated, and Khat thought he might be about his own height or a little taller when standing. His face was finely made, his nose aquiline, and he had the bone structure most people in Charisat thought of as Patrician, though it turned up in the kris Enclave often enough. Khat thought the man was old; the dust coated his face so thickly it obscured even his skin color, but it also marked the hairline tracks of age at the corners of his eyes and the sides of his mouth. He wore robes of an unusual cut, and a headcloth in a strange fashion, wound around his head with the ends tucked in, leaving his neck unprotected.