Heaven's Bones (13 page)

“Here,” said the scholar, holding out the paper with a negligent gesture. “It's bit of trash, nothing more. But there might be a scrap of use to it, so take it as a gift. I'll have the owner put it to my account.”

Slowly, Tibor reached out and took the document by the corner, so as to avoid touching the man's strangely jointed fingers. He held his prize awkwardly, feeling foolish.

Suddenly the old man thrust his face forward, and Tibor flinched back, feeling wooden shelves at his back.

“I know you have questions, and needs unsatisfied you don't yet understand,” said the scholar, his breath reeking of raw mint. “If it suits you, you'll find me round the corner from the Headless Dog—you know the place?”

Tibor nodded, and the old man grinned. “Ivy Lane, though that's a pretty name for the spot. There's a bottle seller, a bone man, then me, but good enough for this place. If you've an inclination and a talent, I have some things for you to see that might interest a Vadoma boy with a talent for …”

His pale eyes unfocused for a second before he turned back to Tibor.

“… with a talent—with a prodigious talent—for cursing, I think.”

He straightened and flicked the edge of the paper, and a crumbling chunk fell to the floor.

“Get on, then. Take it and go, and remember what I said.”

Tibor ran out of the bookseller's, away from the sour smell of decaying books. At the encampment, he tucked the manuscript away in his bedroll for safekeeping, but when he took it out again it disintegrated into pieces.

He swore at the old man and his useless gift, but he did remember and when next the clan passed through Grayhalme he made his way past the tavern with the sign of the headless mastiff, down the alley where the bottle seller washed her used wares in a bucket on the stoop and the bone man stared out his window with dead white eyes. He knocked on the heavy, unadorned door and when it opened the old man looked as if he'd been expecting him, and moved aside without a word to let him in.

Tibor's education began in earnest that day. He returned, again and again, during that season, and while his clan sold the women's dyed cloth at market he read the books the old man placed before him and memorized the strange, forbidden alphabet of the Black Histories. When his uncle's caravans rolled away at the end of the season Tibor went with them because he was not yet of age, and whenever he closed his eyes he saw the blasphemous letters flickering behind his lids.

The next spring he ran away from his uncle's wagons and the running of the wild horses and stayed a month in that alley with the clink of bottles echoing down the cobbles and laundry hanging from the upper windows instead of ivy, sleeping on the floor of the old man's crooked study. When he returned to the Vadoma encampment at the foot of the mountains in Kartakass, his uncle whipped him with a willow switch, because hands were short that year and they'd lost three mares they could have taken with his help. Tibor stood through his punishment unfeeling, indifferent to the blows Serge Vadoma rained harder and harder on his shoulders, until flesh bruised purple and the blood started to come. Finally his uncle threw down the switch and walked away in disgust, muttering that it was foolish of his people to allow a boy with the Sight to live past babyhood.

Still Tibor stood, his eyes glazed, reading and rereading in his mind the strange tomes the old man had placed before him, hearing nothing but the clink of old bottles being washed and stacked across the way. Finally his sister came and led him to her tent, where she washed his cuts and bathed them in sweet smelling, stinging ointment. He lay still under her ministrations, not talking to her, thinking of the bone man's ceaseless, blind vigil, the smell of crumbling leather, the glyphs, at first meaningless, that the scholar had coaxed into coherency beneath his eyes until the strange figures began to sing to him.

Jaelle pulled a blanket gently over his bruised shoulders.

“He shouldn't have done it,” she said, her low voice at once bitter and saddened. “Mind, you must understand—the hill stallion took back three of the best mares—one was the black spot mare, and uncle's wanted her for two years. The lord's man was less than understanding. But this went too far.”

“It doesn't matter, Jaelle,” he croaked. “It was worth every blow.”

He rolled on his side, wincing because he did feel his torn flesh now, despite Jaelle's ministrations.

“You should see it, sister,” he said, looking up at her with his liquid dark eyes, so similar to her own. “The books, the writings, the possibilities, the power. All there for the taking—all in our hands, if we would only reach out and take it.”

Jaelle sat cross-legged beside him and folded her hands in her lap. “Don't ask me to follow your path; nothing good can come of it. I have always wished I could find a way to deter you, although I know I can't. Nothing good will come of it.”

“You don't know that.”

“Yes,” she returned. “I wish I didn't, but I do.”

She reached out to stroke his forehead and he grasped her wrist.

“We know so little,” he said. “Even the Tribes, who think they understand the Mists, who travel where no others can go—they are blind. Did you know, Jaelle, that there are other worlds than this one?”

“Of course, Tibor.” She let her hand rest in his. “I know about the Mistrealms. We are not ignorant, like the
Gadjikane.”

“No,” he squeezed her hand until she winced. “No, I said other worlds—worlds beyond the domains we know. Worlds that don't know the Mists.

“There's a world where men are considered little more than embryos until they die, and then they can begin to learn. There's another where machines are being born—like watches and music boxes, but enormous, that tunnel through the ground like worms and gallop over the land and even fly. Engines that explode in one man's hand and kill another. There's a world where men have destroyed themselves, and only the insects and the rats remain. There's worlds, and pieces of worlds, that the Mists steal and bring here, and hide away. Maybe that's where we all come from—some nameless world
that might not even exist anymore.”

Jaelle twisted her hand free of her brother's and watched him, rubbing her wrist.

“You've heard the old men tell the story of a land that lies inside an emerald, and that emerald around the neck of a king's consort, and that kingdom nestled beside a country that one can only reach through that same consort's hand mirror—the worlds I've seen are like that, Jaelle. The Mistrealms are a small fragment in a mosaic of worlds, and we've the key to them all, if only you'd listen!”

She bent toward him and spoke sharply. “You've
seen
these worlds?”

He rolled back on his stomach.

“In books. I've seen them in books.”

“Books do not make wisdom, Tibor.”

“That's what Serge and the rest of them would have us believe. But I've seen what they hold, sister. I've read the Black Histories.”

She didn't reply; Jaelle had nothing to say to that. She closed her eyes and breathed a prayer for her brother's soul.

“I have to go back. I will go back, and learn more, and I'll show it to you, Jaelle.” His voice was growing thick with sleep. “You'll see. You'll stand with me at the threshold between worlds.”

He muttered something indistinguishable and was still.

Jaelle was trained by skilled healers, so she sat by her sleeping brother into the night, watching for signs of fever.

But she also considered the place where the spine met the back of his head. Touch it with a long, thin, steel blade, pause to brace yourself, and push it in with a strong, sure motion.
Don't flinch or else you'll wake him
.

For Jaelle had glanced into the future, and what she saw made her shudder, and her mother-wisdom told her that the worlds that Tibor spoke of would be made to suffer if he was allowed to live.

But sister-love is stronger than mother-wisdom, and it is a delicate
matter to interpret the future, so Tibor woke safe, although sore through the shoulders. He apologized to his uncle, made himself useful in camp amongst the horses, and as soon as he adjudged himself to be of age he vanished from his family's caravans, and Jaelle didn't see her brother for many years.

Before he returned to the Vadoma he visited once more the alley around the corner from the Headless Dog in Grayhalme.

He saw a flicker at the window of the bottle seller, behind the rows of cataract white and green bottles, racked one on top of the other. He didn't see the bone man.

He paused before the familiar door. It looked more weathered, and a new crack fissured the thick oak. When he gave it a slight push with the tips of his fingers, it swung silently open on well-oiled hinges.

The scholar sat with his back to him, a blob of lit candles that had melted together his only illumination. He was bent over a manuscript that lay open on the desk before him, quill ready in his hand. As Tibor watched, he made a note in the margins and the scratch of the pen seemed loud in the quiet room.

Tibor slipped inside, quiet as a snake, and nudged the door shut behind him.

The old man didn't turn around—not yet. He placed his quill carefully beside his manuscript, unhurriedly blotted his notes, and sat up straight, shadow-gray hair falling down his back.

“I wondered when you'd return,” he said.

Now he turned on the backless stool to face Tibor. The Vistana had grown lean and tall in the past few years. His dark eyes glittered in his thin face, but his lips were compressed and immobile. He stared at the old scholar as a serpent stares at a sparrow.

His mentor studied him a long moment. A slow grin spread across his face.

“You've found the Voyna Codex,” he said. “It's left its mark on your face. You need to learn how to hide that; some will recognize what it's done to you.”

“I'll work on it,” said Tibor, and his hand moved slowly to the knife at his belt.

“It's rare to find one like you,” the old man continued, conversationally. “Once in a lifetime, if I'm lucky. And then so often, no matter how well I've taught them, no matter their innate talent, they just can't take that last step and enter greatness.”

“What step?” Tibor's voice was as gentle as the breeze.

“You know very well. You came back for nothing else.”

Somewhere far away a bottle broke, and there was a muttered curse, then silence. Through all of it young man and old watched each other, each suspended in the other's regard as if on a circus wire.

Then they both moved at once. With a swiftness that belied his years the scholar reached behind him, under the table. Tibor simultaneously drew his blade, long and thin like a stiletto, and moved across the room without seeming to touch the ground.

He seized the old man's hair and forced his head back, almost touching the tabletop, at the same time pressing the point of the blade beneath the scholar's chin. He saw the weapon in the other's hand blur toward his own neck and without hesitation slid his own long, sharp blade up, slanting back through jaw and throat and into the base of the brain.

For a second they were locked together. Tibor felt the edge of a circular, saw-toothed blade brush the base of his throat. Then the old man's eyes glazed over and he relaxed in Tibor's grip.

He waited a moment to make sure, then withdrew the knife swiftly. The dead man sagged against the table, twisted upon the stool. No blood had come before, but now it gushed across the manuscript, obliterating both the new-inked notes in the margins and the ancient, faded, spidery writing of the text.

Still the clump of candles burned, though guttering now, and the smell of smoke and wax filled the chamber.

Tibor worked quickly. Still holding the knife, he lowered the old man's body to the stone floor, straightening the limbs so he lay decorously on his back. The sharp blade razored through his garments easily, laying bare his belly and his right side.

Barely pausing, Tibor flicked his blade against the yellowed skin. It parted as easily as the fabric had, peeling back, showing a trace layer of fat and the muscular wall of the diaphragm. With a few more deft movements of the stiletto and a wet plunge of the fingers and a twist of the wrist he held the liver, still warm, in his hand.

It only took a few gulps to get it down. It was spongy, and tasted like damp flakes of iron in his mouth. He swallowed the last morsel and paused, fighting an urge to vomit. He breathed deeply and the feeling faded.

Tibor wiped his mouth, then cleaned his hand and his knife on the shredded garments. Beside his crouching form, thick trickles of blood crept to the edge of the table and a fat drop hit the floor, into the black pool that widened beneath the body.

He felt something moving inside him, something warm and alien that stirred and settled, becoming entangled in him, becoming one with him. It faded, yet he was still aware of it—power, his to call and control. Not enough, not yet, but a start.