City of Bones (20 page)

“The best thing about this is that the price doesn’t matter. It’s all Riathen’s coin, anyway.”

“Yes, there is something oddly satisfying about that. You really think to find a trace of our big ugly block here?” Sagai’s gesture took in the shops lining the wide Fourth Tier street, with their expensive bleached white awnings and upper-tier goods.

“No,” Khat admitted. “There’s something else I have to take care of. But I have got an idea about that block. I’ll tell you later.”

They parted, and Khat went down through the maze of streets where the relic shops clustered.

The shops here were better quality than the cavelike affairs like Arnot’s on the lower tiers. Curtains of sheer gauze suspended from the awnings let in moving air, deflected dust, and screened the wealthy and the Patricians who shopped here from casual view. Under the awnings there would be piles of colored matting and inlaid stools, desert flowers in copper pots, and servants to exhibit the relics to interested customers and serve them watered date wine and honey melons. Dealers from the lower tiers, though they supplied the relics that brought in all this wealth, would enter through the back alley doors, if at all.

But it wasn’t relics Khat was looking for today.

If the ugly block was going to be found at all, it was not going to be found in the upper-tier relic shops of the Fourth Tier. The scholars of the Academia regularly combed those shops searching for rare pieces overlooked by dealers, and those scholars would all have had a chance to view the Miracle, and would immediately recognize the similarity. Sonet Riathen, with his interest in the Ancients, had undoubtedly seen the Miracle, but he might not have recognized the block for what it was because he had never been taught to categorize relics into groups, to explore their differences by finding the similarities to better-known relics. Or he had recognized it, and said nothing, for some reason of his own.

Khat took a position up one of the alleys, winding his way past the usual crowd of peddlers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers. He found a shady spot along the wall where he could watch the door of one shop in particular.

He sat on his heels there, so settled and quiet that within a short time the busy inhabitants of the alley forgot about him.

The back entrance he was watching belonged to Lushan, as did the shop it was attached to, though Lushan himself had nothing to do with the day-to-day running of the business and was unlikely to be there.

A squabble broke out among the peddlers, a cloud of gnats moved down the alley, the faded brown curtain on the door swayed occasionally as someone within the shop passed close to it, and time crept slowly by. Khat turned over the various aspects of his current difficulties, but he didn’t find this kind of waiting onerous. This wasn’t waiting, really; this was hunting.

Finally a figure in red pants and shirt with a dingy brown over-mantle came down the alley and entered the back door as if it owned the place. Khat had recognized Harim immediately, from seeing him standing guard at Lushan’s back when the broker held court. He had greasy dark hair and smelled worse than most city dwellers, and seemed to enjoy his job of beating people when Lushan told him to. He hadn’t seen Khat, immobile as a statue against the shaded part of the wall.

Khat knew Harim came down to this shop of Lushan’s every day in the afternoon, to deliver messages or threats as needed, and he knew today would be no different. Harim was too stupid to expect the expected.

It was not long before Harim emerged from the shop. He passed the krismen again without seeing him, and Khat stood up, stretched, and followed him.

Up the alley, away from the crowded streets, into a nearby residential quarter where many of the shop workers lived. The Fourth Tier was not a good place to do this. Many of the inhabitants were well off, so their houses were better kept, better watched. Khat was unwilling to wait until a more opportune moment on a lower tier; retaliation had to be immediate or the point of the lesson would be lost. And next time instead of Ris it could be one of Sagai’s children, or Netta’s.

They reached a street that was quiet, still. Bright paint and carving decorated the overhung balconies. Khat closed the distance between them, and Harim turned, perhaps warned by some ponderous sense of approaching doom.

But Harim watched the krismen walk up the street toward him with amusement, not alarm. He was thick-set, solid, and tall for a lower-tier city dweller, with a head rumored to be as hard as a rock. His eyes were on a level with Khat’s. With a grimace that was probably supposed to be a sneer, he asked, “What do you want?”

Khat stopped just out of easy reach, casually aggressive, his hands on his hips. He was wearing his knife at his back, where his shirt and the drape of his robe hid it, because Harim would know that he normally kept it in a boot sheath. “Lushan was paid. Why did he send you after the boy?”

“Just sending you a message. You’ll work for him until he tells you to stop. That’s all.” Harim grinned, glad to tell the news.

There was a scar on the right side of his face that ran along the cheekbone up to his ear. Khat decided that whoever had put it there had had the right idea. He stepped forward so Harim couldn’t possibly mistake his intent, his right hand coming up in a fist for a swing.

Harim jerked his head back so Khat’s blow would barely graze him, braced to instantly retaliate. He didn’t see that Khat was holding his knife, the pommel in his fist and the blade pointing down and held tight against his forearm, didn’t feel it until the line of pain opened across his face just below the old scar. Harim staggered back, mouth open in shock, dripping blood onto the dusty stone and showing bone in the gaping cut.

Khat stepped back. Harim usually depended on his not inconsiderable muscle and a club; another knife fighter would never have let him come so close. “This message is for you,” he told him. “The next time somebody wants to teach me a lesson, don’t help.”

Harim sat down hard, his hand pressed to his face, still in shock. Shutters swung open somewhere above, and there was a cry of alarm from up the street. Khat walked unhurriedly away.

The dust and heat were harder to ignore in the mostly enclosed space of the Arcade than in the open street, but Elen was still enjoying herself. There were people to watch in plenty, an amazing variety of them. Some men wore veils, but most didn’t bother. The tradition of Patrician men wearing veils went back to the Survivor Time, when they had needed the extra protection from the sun’s glare and the harmful airs hanging over the new Waste rock when they went out to forage for food. When Charisat had been only a city and not the capital of the Fringe Trade Empire, the veil had been only a sign that one came from an old family. Now it was a rigid symbol of status. Status was also why Patrician women still followed the old custom of close-cropping their hair; something that had once been a measure against the heat was now a strict rule. Lower-tier women seldom bothered with it.

But in many ways, living on a lower tier meant far more freedom for a woman, Elen knew. Lower-tier women might do everything from becoming street entertainers to running market stalls or traveling with caravans, and no one thought anything of it. If Elen had never been selected by the Warders, she would be married by now to as high-ranking a Patrician as her mother could secure for her, to establish an advantageous family connection. And she would be bored to distraction. By custom Patrician ladies couldn’t seek employment, even with their family trading interests. A daughter of a wealthy Fourth Tier merchant family had it better; she at least would be expected to involve herself in her family’s business matters up to the elbows.

Time passed quickly, and no one tried to sell Elen anything, much to her disappointment, though several people of disreputable appearance came by and eyed her warily. She had just begun to settle down for a long dull wait when she saw Sagai returning along the walkway.

“You haven’t been gone very long. No good news?” she asked him as he sat down across from her.

“He wouldn’t see me. The servant I spoke to said he occasionally sells relics, but he ‘does not deal with intermediaries,’ and by that I suppose he means the fortune-teller only sells to his Patrician clients.” Sagai regarded Elen thoughtfully. “I have an idea how we might get around that. We’ll discuss it when Khat returns.”

Elen nodded, willing to wait. Sagai seemed lost in thought, but whatever those thoughts were, she wasn’t able to sense them. Sometimes Sagai was almost as hard to read as another Warder. She hadn’t forgotten Riathen’s order to find out more about Khat, and this seemed a good opportunity. Though she didn’t think she would ever discover anything that would be of any importance to the Master Warder. But Khat had been oddly unwilling to talk about the kris embassy; that bore looking into.

She knew Sagai wasn’t the sort to be fooled by any attempt at approaching the subject obliquely, and Elen suspected it would ruin any chance she had to speak freely with him. She asked, “Where did Khat live before he came to Charisat? Was it at the krismen Enclave?”

Sagai eyed her for what began to seem a long moment, then said, “Is this Elen the Warder who asks the question, or is it Elen the young woman?”

“I’m not so young. I have friends younger than I who have had their third child.” Elen smiled, knowing he was trying to lead her off the subject.

“Yes, that’s the way of it in Charisat. In Kenniliar early marriage is considered improper. But Kenniliar doesn’t have Patricians, and doesn’t force out its beggars, and has too many people as it is. But I wouldn’t like my own daughters to marry so young anyway. They have no sense now, and I don’t expect that to change for some years.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps I don’t want them to marry in Charisat.”

Elen had heard that food and water were much cheaper in Kenniliar Free City, which had its own trade route directly to the coast. “But if you don’t like it here, why did you leave Kenniliar?”

“My uncle is an artisan there, one among many. When the Fringe Cities closed the trade routes to crafted goods coming from Kenniliar, he found himself hard-put to support all of us. There was no work for me, and though I had been educated in the Scholars’ Guild, I could not afford the fee to buy a position there. The only other trade I was fit for was the relic trade, and Kenniliar has few relics in the market, and they are far more expensive to buy. Charisat seemed the best opportunity, especially as the relic trade is one of the few I could engage in without buying citizenship.”

So Sagai would discuss his past as much as she liked, but he wouldn’t talk about Khat’s. Elen tried to come at the problem from a different direction. “And did you meet Khat here in Charisat?”

Sagai’s gaze could be as penetrating as Sonet Riathen’s, but it was still kinder. “No,” he said finally, and for a moment she thought that was all he meant to say. “We met on the trade road, when I was bringing my family here.

“This was seven years ago. The trade roads we had to travel were more dangerous then, and the wagons we had in the caravan were powered only by our own sweat and labor. Steamwagons were still too expensive for ordinary folk. It was slow going, and some miles outside the Fringe Cities boundary we were attacked by pirates. They were a small band, though of course we didn’t know that at the time. They knew they were too few to take the caravan, which was seventeen wagons strong, but they meant to take some of the defenders.

“I was one of those sent to flush the pirates out of the loose rock at the edges of the road, after we had turned back the first attack. I carried a borrowed rifle, and I thought I had hit one of them. I made my way through the rocks, ignorant enough to think I was stalking him, when something struck me from behind and I was unconscious.

“I woke with a bloody scalp and the feeling that my head had been split open. When I saw where I was I wished that it had been.

“The pirates had made camp in a narrow gorge with a rocky floor. I was tied securely out of the sun on a ledge in the wall of it, and the ropes were attached to an iron stake driven into the rock. I counted twenty of the creatures, as if knowing their number did me any good in my present situation. They were filthy and stunk like beggars, and I thought two were women, though that was difficult to tell. They spoke such a guttural pidgin of Tradetongue that I could hardly understand them, as if the Waste had worn away at their minds the way it had worn away at their bodies.

“They had taken two others from the caravan with me. One was dead, and they had built a fire down in the gorge and begun to butcher his body. I had known what pirates did to captives, of course, but seeing it… My other companion was trussed up as I was on the same ledge, but he was badly wounded, stabbed in the belly, and he was dying. Later in the day they took him down to the floor of the gorge and amused themselves with him, then killed him and did as they had with the first man.

“I knew I had been left to last because I was the least wounded, and I cursed myself for condemning Miram to care for our small children alone in a city completely strange to her, all by my stupidity in allowing myself to be caught.

“But nightfall came, and I still lived. There was a gap in the wall of the gorge above my ledge, but the stake prevented me from trying to reach it. And I had worked all day to loosen my bonds, without success. The pirates slept on the floor of the gorge, and I saw they had posted at least one sentry on the top level. I was sure it was hopeless.

“Then suddenly I did not see the sentry anymore. I thought perhaps I had dozed off, but I watched and he did not reappear.

“Then I heard the faint sound of shifting rock from the tunnel behind me, and something tugged at my bonds. I held still, afraid to alert the pirates. The ropes fell away, and I looked. I saw a crouching figure in desert robe wrapped around dusty clothes. I wondered if he was sent by the caravan—perhaps someone had seen us taken and followed—but I was too grateful to ask questions.

“I followed him down the tunnel away into the midlevel, saw the body there of the sentry I had missed.