City of Bones (9 page)

After a few moments she took a deep breath and said reproachfully, “There’s blood running all down my leg.”

“That’s what’s left of the poison, love. Don’t touch it.”

“You could’ve warned me.” He snorted. She said, “All right, I would have reacted badly, I admit that, but still… And if they come back, how can I fight like this?”

“Try to walk on it.”

She struggled upright awkwardly, and hopped on her good foot, putting her weight gingerly on the other. “It’s better,” she reported after a moment, sounding surprised. “Sore, but I don’t feel as if I’m being stabbed every time I move.”

Khat left her to recover and found his robe still on the roof where she had left it. He took out the bloater and used the knife to make a few strategic cuts, turning the thing’s guts inside out and freeing the membrane. His nose was bleeding, and the cut he had taken in his earlier fight had torn open again; they were lucky to be so far above the Waste floor, where the predators would’ve been driven mad to reach them by the smell of blood.

“What are you doing now?” Elen hobbled over to stand next to him.

“Going to get some water‘.”

“You can’t go down there. What if they come back?”

“Can’t let them trap us up here without water.” In the morning, under the sun with the roof like a baking pan. “And I have to get the offal out of the cistern.”

Elen couldn’t argue with that. Every instinct dictated that a water supply should be preserved.

She waited on the edge for him as he hauled the dead pirate out of the cistern and filled the membrane from the opposite end. There was no sound from the Remnant’s interior, but Khat resisted the urge to press his luck and check it for himself. Elen let the rope down for him, and he climbed up again without incident.

She seemed surprised by the idea of searching the two pirates’ bodies, but did it with only the mild protest, “They stink.” The results were disappointing; the pirates carried two long knives, but no painrods, broken or otherwise, and no other belongings.
As if they knew they might be caught or killed, and wanted to leave nothing to help us
, Khat thought. But that seemed too complex a notion for disorganized pirates.

They waited and watched and listened, and after what felt like an hour, Khat said, “A trick. They never meant the others to come back.”

“Strange.” Elen lay down and pillowed her head on her arm.

“And how did they know we were still up here? A lucky guess?” He was thinking aloud, and was surprised when Elen answered.

She said hesitantly, “There are ways to tell if living beings are near, and where they are, what their intentions might be …”

He waited for her to say more, but she was silent. He had seen her move through pitch dark as if it were broad daylight, so he supposed there might be something in what she said. “Can you do it? Can you tell me where the other pirates are?”

“No.” Her voice was flat.

In a tone of false pity, he said, “Oh.”

Elen’s quick intake of breath suggested frustration and a bitten lip. “It wouldn’t be safe for me to do so.”

“I see.”

“No, you do not.” She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees. “We know the Ancient Mages had power that would make Warders children in their eyes, but so little of what they knew was passed down to us. We can’t make their arcane engines, or do any of the great magics they could accomplish. The farther we reach to understand, the greater the risk of damage to the soul. If I had the Ancients’ skill I could make the Waste around us an image inside my head and see every spark of life in it and tell which sparks were only living creatures, which were thinking beings. But if I tried that without the right teaching it would put me one step closer to the day when inevitably my power will make me insane, and the others in my household will send me away. Do you want me to go insane?”

“If you did, how would I be able to tell?” Khat retorted, almost automatically. He knew Warders went mad, but in Elen’s case it was hard to take the possibility seriously. She was so sane she was annoying.

But the maniac out on the Waste had found him in the midlevel maze quickly enough.

He could hear Elen tapping her fingers on the pitted stone of the roof. In a cold voice she said, “Might we change the subject?”

“Seeing in the dark is one of these Ancient skills?”

Khat didn’t think she was going to answer, but the desire to discourse on one’s favorite subject, whether the listener wanted to hear it or not, was not a fault confined to scholars and relic collectors. She relented, and said, “It’s not really seeing in the dark. It’s a sign of the Sight, of the ability to see with the Eye of the Mind. The Sight is what allows us to glimpse the future.” She looked away toward the west and the limitless stretch of the Waste. “It’s nothing special. It’s the first sign of potential Warder talent.”

“How do you know all this, Elen? Is there a Survivor text that talks about the Ancients’ magic?” If there was one, it had been kept hidden from the Academia.

“No. All the teaching we have is passed from master to student; it’s forbidden to write any of it down. Not that there’s much to write down.” Elen shrugged. “But the words of the Oldest Master, the Ancient Mage who Survived and taught the first Warders, were ‘Man was given magic to repel the thunderbolt of what is to come.’ That’s reason enough for me to keep learning. He also said, ‘What magic does is to open the mind to the world, and sometimes the world isn’t what we think it is.’ He didn’t say it in quite those words, but that’s what he meant. At least I think so.” She sighed. “There’s much that will be revealed to me later. I’m young in the ways of power, so they tell me.”

There was that amorphous “they” again. They who owned the relic, who were going to be waiting for her, and possibly for him, back in the city. Khat didn’t enjoy being reminded of that.

Elen asked suddenly, “Why don’t you live in the Waste? Why did you come to Charisat?”

“Why are you a Warder?”

“No, I’m serious. I let you bite me in the leg; you ought to answer a simple question for me.”

Khat watched a vagary of the wind sweep a curtain of sand off the far edge of the roof; it sparkled in the moonlight like gem dust, then vanished in darkness. A decade ago the Enclave had become overcrowded, and some families had moved to the caves and tunnels in the outer walls. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time; the warrens in the inner walls of the massive bowl-shaped rock formation that formed the Enclave were growing cramped and unhealthy, and so many had moved to the outer perimeter that they must have felt safety in their numbers. But the pirates had been experiencing an increase in their ranks too, and when the attack came it had been swift, unexpected, and devastating. The Mages had made only forty-one original kris lineages, with forty-one lines of descent requiring careful mating practices. Bad luck, and maybe hereditary foolishness, had always kept Khat’s lineage from branching often. The pirate attack had nearly destroyed it. He didn’t mean to tell Elen any of that. He said, “If I was back at the Enclave, I’d be somebody’s secondary husband with six babies to look after. And the archive manages to get a new book just about every twenty years; I couldn’t stand that.” Neither statement was an exaggeration. Kris mated in threes, and the attitude everyone had held toward Khat just before he left the Enclave would have kept him from being anyone’s first choice. The idea that the third partner in a marriage was the one who did all the work and took all the trouble was outmoded, but Khat felt that it would have been true in his case, since anyone who took him on would have seen it only as a sacrifice and a duty to the Enclave.

He looked over at Elen. Knowing that she could probably see his expression, though her own face was unreadable in the dark, was somewhat unnerving. “So why are you a Warder?”

Her voice was matter-of-fact. “My family were Third Tier Patricians. One day when I was a little girl, the Warders came and said that I had power, that I could be one of them, and they took me away. My father was dead, and my mother didn’t object. I was her fourth daughter, and she had trouble enough arranging advantageous marriages for my sisters; there’s not much use for fourth daughters.” Judiciously she added, “If I had to be married and have six babies I think I’d move to a foreign city, too.”

Khat wasn’t sure what was prompting him to attempt to lay Elen’s soul bare and reveal nothing of his own in the process. Maybe he was afraid of her, even if she couldn’t use her magic for dread of what it would do to her. He asked, “Do you trust me?”

A few heartbeats of silence passed. She said, “I suppose I do trust you. I’ve been in more compromising situations with you today than I would have ever dreamed possible, and you’ve never made me feel afraid.”

Khat struggled to find something in that statement he could construe as an insult and failed. He started to say that her beauty left him underwhelmed, and that since he was disinclined to murder her at the end of their little adventure, rape would’ve been rather awkward. He reconsidered at the last moment and said, “Forgive me for not being more romantic. I’m too worried about being killed and eaten by pirates.”

“They really eat people?” Elen asked, distracted. “That’s not just a myth?”

“They really eat people. But to them, I’m not people.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “Then we’re both in the same rank. I’m a woman, so I imagine I’m not people to them either. Out here I’m just a thing to be used.”

Khat glanced down at her, wondering if all women Warders were this bloody minded, or if it was just her.

The first herald of the sun’s return was a gentle glow along the eastern horizon. As it rose higher, Khat knew, it would turn the top level of the Waste to molten gold, re-creating for a time how it must have appeared so long ago when it first rose up from hell to destroy the seas. But instead of morning light running like water over the ground it would have been liquid rock, killing everything in its path, forming lakes of fire, spewing gas that choked everyone it didn’t burn. Or so the stories said. The stories had never said what caused it.

Elen had fallen asleep, finally, curled up in her robes like a child. The gathering heat was already spotting her forehead with perspiration. They would need to be off the roof before the sun rose much higher.

Since the pirates had never returned, Khat saw no reason not to stick to his original plan and start the walk back to the city. Once they were away from the Remnant, hypothetical pursuers would be unable to track them through the midlevel. It was what might happen after they reached Charisat that worried him.

You’ve gone soft
, he told himself. Living in the city with Sagai and the others, relying on them, had made him weak and careless. Something made him glance away from the sunrise, and he thought he saw a puff of white smoke in the distance near the trade road. In another moment the wind brought him the smell of overheated metal and burning coal—a steamwagon. Khat leaned over and shook Elen. “Get up. More company.”

She came awake all at once, alert and wide-eyed. “Where?”

“There’s a steamwagon down on the road. Come on.”

She followed him to the outside edge of the Remnant above the door slab, both of them crouching close to the roof to make it harder for observers to pick them out against the hazy predawn sky. From here Khat could see at least twenty figures moving openly over the top level, coming up from the road and obviously making for the Remnant.

“Oh, it’s them.” Elen started to stand, and he yanked her down by the edge of her robe. “They’re Warders,” she explained, a little breathlessly. “My master must have sent them. He must have sensed I needed help.” She shook her head ruefully. “Explaining this is going to be interesting. I’ve caused him more trouble than I’m worth.”

Khat looked back at the approaching party. None of them were robed in pure Warder white, though, like Elen, they wouldn’t want to advertise their identity. He felt sweat that had little to do with the early morning heat trickling between his shoulder blades. “Are you certain?”

Elen’s expression was confident, and she wasn’t dreaming, or crazy. “Yes. I know it’s them. It’s difficult to explain, but—”

“Then explain it later.” He rolled away from the edge, came to his feet, and started back to the well chamber’s pit. She scrambled after him and caught up just as he tossed the rope down for her. “You’d better get to them before they tear the place apart looking for you.”

Elen hesitated, watching him.

“What’s wrong?” Khat asked. She could hardly help but note that he hadn’t lowered the entire length of the rope, only the forty or so feet needed to reach the well chamber’s floor.

Finally she said, “You don’t have to run away. They won’t hurt you.”

Khat stared at her, incredulous. “Run away? What gave you that idea?”

“Oh, come now.” Elen made an exasperated gesture. “You can’t wait to bolt. You’ll be gone as soon as I turn my back.”

“I’m not saying that’s true, but if it was, why do you care?”

“You could help us,” she said, real urgency in her voice. She really believed she was telling the truth. “We need the advice of someone who has experience with the relics. When I tell you what we’re up against—”

“Don’t tell me anything else,” Khat interrupted. “Will you just climb down and go to your friends?”

“But what will you do?”

He was running out of time, that’s what he was doing. “All right. I won’t leave. But I want you to go down first and tell them what happened. I wouldn’t want them to overreact before you could explain what I’m doing here. Make sense?”

“Yes, but…”

“Just do it, Elen.”

Her expression said she didn’t believe him, but she seemed to realize further argument was useless. She took the rope that he held steady for her and slipped over the edge. As soon as she reached the well chamber floor and let go he dragged it back up.

Khat went back for a last quick look over the outside edge. The group had almost reached the base of the Remnant.
No leisurely walk back to Charisat today
. He was going to have to go to ground somewhere out in the Waste.