City of Bones (23 page)

A breeze moved over the roof, stirring dust and loose bits of brick and plaster, and Khat stepped back against the wall. Nothing else moved, and he reminded himself not to let his imagination get the better of him. Even in the Waste, ghosts and air spirits were rare.

He went back into the main room, where Elen had emptied the contents of the hidden compartments onto the table. “Nothing in here but junk—props, I suppose, for fortune-telling,” she reported. “Seeing what he has here, I’m beginning to doubt whether that was a true vision he had or just a trick to get rid of me.”

“Maybe it was,” Khat admitted. “But it’s funny, then, that he didn’t make you pay for his time.”

The curtained door at the back of the room hid the interior stairwell that led to the house’s upper rooms. Khat took one of the candle bowls from its niche and started up.

The fortune-teller’s sleeping room was at the top. He had one of the cheaper upper-tier styles of bed: a bronze frame set up a few inches off the floor and piled with cushions. And there was Radu.

He lay half on the bed, his arms stretched across it and his legs sprawled on the matting-covered floor. He was still dressed in the gray robes he had worn for Elen’s fortune-telling. He probably hadn’t been awakened, but had run into this room in blind panic and been caught when he tripped on the bed. There was no blood that Khat could see or smell, and Radu’s eyes were still open, staring fixedly at the far wall.

“It must have been Constans,” Elen whispered. “Or Shiskan son Karadon.”

“Can she kill somebody just by looking at him, like he did at the Remnant?” Khat asked. He realized with some irritation that he was whispering too.

“I wouldn’t think so. It takes many years to acquire that kind of power.” She leaned over the body, peering at the head. “I suppose this might have been done with a painrod. It looks like he died of fright.”

There was nothing for them here. Khat went through the small door that opened off the bedroom and made a pleasant discovery. Shelves had been carved out of the walls in the long room to hold Radu’s collection of relics.

He went down the room, looking, pausing occasionally to pick something up. Radu had only a few glazed tiles, two in very poor condition with cracks that made their designs difficult to make out. There were some
mythenin
ornaments, several set with rather nice stones of Ancient cut, and many of the more unusual type of relic:
mythenin
, glass, or stone shaped into animals, stylized faces, or sea creatures. Suspicious, Khat picked up the best of the stylized faces, and rubbed it thoughtfully. The weight was a little wrong, and there was something funny about the texture.
A fake
, he thought. None of the relics looked disturbed by the night’s intruders.

In the corner was a metal box, the brocaded cloth that must have covered it pulled to one side. In the candlelight Khat examined the front cautiously. There was no sign that it had been opened. Elen came in from Radu’s sleeping room. “Found anything?” she asked, looking over the collection speculatively.

“This.” The box was covered with scrollwork and incised figures of dancing skeletons—a warning to potential robbers. He handed Elen the lamp and said, “Don’t get too close. It’s a trick-lock box. There are poisoned needles in the catches. I’ve seen this a hundred times.”

Since there was no need to worry obsessively about noise, he used the hilt of his knife to thump each catch, then to break off the tip of the needle that protruded at the pressure of the blow. The first time he had opened a box like this he had caught his hand on the needles. The poison, which had probably been harvested from a Waste predator, had made him a little ill the next day, but that had been the only effect. It was possible to poison a krismen; it just wasn’t easy.

The compartment within contained a small amount of minted gold and silver bits, probably fees from Patrician clients, and what looked like an empty cloth bag. Khat lifted it out, and the remaining contents clinked. From the size of it and the strain on the seams, it must have once been full to bursting.
If this was all minted gold, why is he living in this quarter
? He opened the sack and emptied it onto the matting.

“Trade tokens,” Elen said, frowning.

There was a handful of trade tokens, each worth about five days of artisan’s labor. Khat smiled to himself. “Because he was telling you the truth about our relic. He did sell it. And now we know where.”

He held up one of the tokens for her, and she peered at it. It was stamped with the Imperial symbol of the sun, but centered on it was a loose spiral, the Survivor symbol for a book.

“The Academia,” Elen gasped in sudden understanding. “These tokens were stamped in the Academia.”

“Exactly. He must have had debts to pay, so he sold his best relic to the Academia. The Silent Market loves to get their tokens—they look so nice and legal, nobody ever questions them.” He scooped the tokens back into the sack and handed it to her. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Elen was so excited by their find that she didn’t even notice he had lifted one of the better tiles and a
mythenin
mirror frame on the way out.

They reached the foyer with its shallow pool and its copies of Ancient mosaics. The outer door stood open as well as the front gate, and the candles in the red pot lamps burned low. This wasn’t surprising; they hadn’t found the bodies of either of Radu’s servants, who must have taken the sensible course and run away in the confusion, most likely followed by the oracle.
An oracle loose in the ghostcallers’ quarter
, Khat thought.
But it’s probably not so bad as some other things that are loose in this place
. He wondered how it had gotten free of its cage. Possibly Shiskan and her friends had released it out of sheer perversity.

The court was empty, the other houses quiet. Khat started forward, but Elen caught his arm suddenly, hissing, “Stop. There’s something out there.”

He froze, studying the open gate, the empty expanse of the court beyond. If it had startled her into overcoming her Patrician training and grabbing his arm, he was willing to believe it was dangerous. “Where?”

“It’s very close, right around here.” She slipped in front of him, holding out one hand as if she could sense something in the hot night air. “I don’t know what it is …”

Then he felt the cold, sudden as a slap on the face, bone-chilling, lung-crushing cold.

He grabbed Elen’s arm and dragged her toward the gate. She stumbled against him but managed to stay upright. Freezing mist enveloped them, and he realized the thing had shifted to block the gate. Momentum carried them through it before the cold could stop their breath, and they bolted across the empty court and down the first alley. He didn’t let her stop until they had crossed two more courts and put several clusters of buildings between themselves and Radu’s ill-fated house.

He let Elen go, and she leaned back against the dirty wall of an empty house. She was breathing hard, but not from the run.

“You all right?” he asked her. He couldn’t see her expression in the dim moonlight. He had only felt the very edge of the thing, but by stepping in front of him she must have been completely enveloped in it.

Elen nodded, cleared her throat, and said, “Yes. I couldn’t breathe. Was that a ghost?”

“It was,” he told her, relieved. If she could still talk, then it hadn’t had time to work much damage on her. “Think you’ll know that if you run into one again?”

“Oh yes, I think so.” She looked back down the narrow alleyway. “What would have happened if we hadn’t run?”

“If it caught us?” He slid down the wall to sit on the crumbling edge of its foundation, arms resting on his knees. After the sepulchral cold of the ghost, the leftover warmth of the day’s heat radiating from the stone felt strange on his skin. Elen sat next to him. He said, “Ghosts take your breath, and make your skin turn blue and then white, and it feels funny, not like skin anymore, but like wax. At least that’s what the bodies look like after you find them. It’s never happened to me personally.”

“That’s horrible.” Elen rubbed her arms briskly, as if trying to warm herself.

“It happens to people who are lost in the Waste and make the mistake of falling asleep on the top level at night. Sometimes it’s ghosts roaming the surface, sometimes it’s air spirits that come down from the wind and fall on them.”

From here they could hear more street noise from the theater area and the forums. It was a reassuring counterpoint to the quiet of the quarter and the looming darkness of the houses around them. Footsteps crossed the court at the alley’s end, and after they had faded away Elen said, “Maybe that’s why Shiskan son Karadon and her people left in such a hurry. But…” She shook her head. “I really can’t see them running, even from a ghost.”

“Neither can I.I think that they were in a hurry because they’d done what they came to do. They made Radu tell them who he sold the winged relic to at the Academia. That’s where we’re stuck. We can’t find that out in a hurry.”

Thoughtfully, Elen said, “Not necessarily. The Academia must keep records of the relics it buys, and what scholar buys them, how much he pays. We could look at those records and see which scholar recently paid a huge amount of tokens for only one relic. There can’t be that many of them.”

“We can do that?” It was a novel idea.

“Of course. Or Riathen can. I could probably get the records released to me on my own authority as a Warder; I just don’t know who I go to for them. We can do it tomorrow morning. I wish we could do it tonight, but Riathen is attending the Elector in the palace, and it would cause trouble to disturb him.”

Khat was glad she saw the need for haste. An Academia scholar wouldn’t be as easily disposed of as Radu the fortune-teller, but sooner or later one of them was sure to get a visit from Aristai Constans.

* * *

Miram opened the door as Khat fumbled with it and said, “Finally. We were worried.”

“Why?”

“Running all over the ghostcallers’ quarter? At night?” Netta’s voice answered from somewhere across the darkened room. “Wait, I’ll light a lamp.”

“Only one,” Miram cautioned as she shut the door behind them. “Or we’ll have all the neighbors over here again.”

A flame bloomed in the small room, in the clay bowl of an oil lamp. Netta set it down on the shelf, and in its light she and Miram stared expectantly at Elen, who hovered uncertainly by the door.

“That’s Elen, that’s Miram, that’s Netta,” Khat said. “Is there anything left from dinner?”

“Hello,” Elen said, tentatively.

The other two women nodded a greeting, then exchanged a look that held a wealth of silent communication. Miram said, “There’s a little bread. Sagai’s waiting for you on the roof. I’ll bring it up.”

“Up there,” Khat told Elen, pointing her toward the narrow steps that led up to the top level and the roof ladder. “Don’t step on Libra and Senace.” The two street entertainers were sleeping next to the wall, curled up together like children.

Elen stepped over the pair carefully and went up the steps, one hand on the clay-patched wall to steady herself.

Before Khat could follow her, Miram caught his robe and yanked on it, nearly strangling him. He grabbed the wall to keep from being pulled off-balance and almost stepped on Senace himself. “Hey!”

“That’s not a Warder,” Miram hissed at him. “That’s somebody’s daughter!”

“So?”

“So be careful with her.” She punctuated this with another yank, then let him go.

When he climbed up through the vent Elen was already telling Sagai about Radu’s house and what they had found there. Khat took a seat near the edge of the roof that looked down into the court. The encounter with Shiskan son Karadon had made him restless in the worst way, and he considered going out to look for company. There were two sisters he knew who kept a street food stall a couple of courts over, who would just be closing up about now… No, best to stay here. If he left he would only worry that someone or something had followed them from the Fourth Tier. He slumped down against the crumbling pediment, unaccountably depressed.

Sagai sat tailor-fashion, listening to Elen’s account thoughtfully, his clay pipe slowly going out. When Elen had finished he said, “This Shiskan and her companions could have easily killed you both, if they had the same unnatural powers that Constans demonstrated for you at the Remnant.”

“Why should they bother?” Khat shrugged one shoulder and looked out toward the edge of the tier, not bothering to conceal the bitterness in his voice. “We led them to Radu, right where they needed to go. And now they’re ahead of us.”

“That was no one’s fault,” Elen said quietly.

Sagai smiled at her, but said, “Yes, we must find the scholar Radu dealt with as quickly as possible. And once we find him we must take the winged relic to Riathen as fast as we value our lives, because if we are caught by these people with it there is no doubt what will happen.” He looked to Khat again, and asked, “What of our big ugly block? You said you had thought of something concerning it?”

Khat had wanted to consider his idea more carefully, but the day and a half since he had seen the thing hadn’t changed his mind. “Have you seen the Miracle?” he asked Elen.

“In the palace? Well, yes, I’ve stepped in to look at it once or twice, out of curiosity…” She looked from Khat to Sagai and back again. “What?”

Sagai sighed. “She has one of the few truly arcane relics ever found intact at her fingertips, and steps in to glance at it once or twice, out of curiosity.”

“Yes, well…”

Khat shook his head over Elen’s single-mindedness, then said, “I think it’s part of an arcane engine.”

Sagai’s eyebrows lifted in surprise and speculation.

“But it can’t be,” Elen protested. “The arcane engines were made of metal with glass balls and crystals and pipes carrying quicksilver. They looked like giant orreries.”

“And that’s why they’re found only in painrods, or in pieces,” Khat told her, exasperated. Leave it to a Warder to think she knew what every arcane engine ever made looked like. “But the Miracle is part of an arcane engine, just like the crystal plaque.”