City of Bones (31 page)

Time passed; Khat was too interested in the outcome of Ecazar’s search to be too bored, though he found himself having to suppress yawns from time to time. Finally Ecazar shut the book with an irritated frown, and got to his feet, massaging the back of his neck. He carried the little relic over to one of the cabinets, placed it in a small compartment, and locked it carefully away, pocketing the key. Picking up one of the candle bowls and blowing out the others on his way, he went out through the doorway at the far end of the room.

After his eyes adjusted to the room’s darkness Khat eased himself off the ledge and over the sill. He crossed the room to the cabinet and felt for the compartment, examining the lock hole by touch. He took out his knife to break the mechanism, feeling a pang of guilt. He had never stolen from the Academia before. He snapped the lock and took out the relic, scrupulously ignoring the other contents. The
mythenin
was still warm from Ecazar’s hand.

Then, just at the edge of his vision, something moved.

Darkness solidifying, a faint trace of red light. Instinct made him freeze.

Whether by accident or design it had cut him off from the door.
This
, Khat thought, nerves jumping from the nearness of the thing,
is no coincidence
. First trapping them when they were escaping from Constans, and now following him here. Khat eyed the nearest window and knew he wouldn’t make it. It could move fast when it wanted to, and the ledge wasn’t nearly wide enough to run on.

It was fully formed now, drifting in front of the doorway, as if trying to make up its mind. Ecazar had sat here fondling the relic for more than an hour, and it hadn’t bothered him. Arad hadn’t mentioned being haunted either. But Khat remembered the ghost that had appeared so suddenly in Radu’s court. It hadn’t seemed odd at the time—a ghost in the ghostcallers’ quarter—but now… And the ghostlamps in the court had still been lit, perhaps preventing them from seeing the telltale traces of red light that he could see now just at the corners of his eyes. Comforting to know just how ineffective ghostlamps really were…

It shifted sideways, drifting nearer to him, still not leaving a clear path to the door. Perhaps this was what Radu had seen in the bones when he sent Elen away. Perhaps this was what had killed him. Khat hoped so. Because the other explanation was that it hadn’t bothered Ecazar or Arad because it was following him, just as Constans had … Whether Khat’s presence helped it find the relic or the relic helped it find him, the outcome was depressingly the same.
Look at this logically
, he told himself. It could see you when you moved; it had tracked Elen and him easily in the court near Arad’s house. It couldn’t seem to see him now, when he was frozen still. If he moved very slowly, could it follow him?

It was worth a try. Slowly and with utmost care he moved, one foot an inch or so toward the window. It didn’t veer toward him, still drifting vaguely toward the cabinet that had held the winged relic. One more deadly slow, careful step, and no reaction. He was about ten paces from the nearest window.

Suddenly the door curtain was flung aside, and lamplight filled the room, the telltale traces of the ghost vanishing in its intensity. Khat nearly jumped out of his skin and swung around.

Red robes, Trade Inspectors. One filling the doorway, others behind him.

Khat dove for the window, tearing through the gauze curtains and scrambling out onto the ledge.

Bullets struck the stone near him, and he didn’t bother to look for the marksman in the courtyard, swinging down and dropping to the ledge of the level below. He clawed at the wall to keep his balance, and fell through the nearest window.

The room was dark, but as he jumped to the floor, someone squawked in alarm, obviously startled out of sleep. He darted out the door and into the oil-lamp-lit passage again. Shouting from the stairs. He went to one of the windows overlooking the garden, but ducked back from it immediately. Lamps lit the normally quiet area below. The Trade Inspectors must be surrounding the place.
Did Ecazar tell them we were making off with the whole Academia
? he wondered desperately. Footsteps pounded from the other end of the passage, and he dived into another room.

It was dark and blessedly, temporarily empty. Khat paused, leaning against the wall near the door, breathing hard with exertion and fear. They had him trapped, and there was no way out. He knew what he had to do: trust Elen, and worse, trust Riathen to buy him out. But if the Trade Inspectors found the stolen relic on him, even the Master Warder might not be able to get him out of their hands. He couldn’t hide it here; he knew Trade Inspectors, and knew they would tear the place apart searching for it.

There was one hiding place where they might not find it. If they did … He would worry about that later. Khat lifted his shirt and felt for the pouch lip on his lower stomach, pressing gently on just the right spot and … nothing happened. He swore, and tried to calm himself, to ignore the blood pounding in his ears. He pressed again and felt a brief, unfocused surge of sexual desire that made him catch his breath; then the lip parted, and he slipped the relic inside. The resulting sting of pain, as the metal slid against the delicate tissues, cleared his head nicely. He hastily tucked his shirt in again and pushed away from the wall, making for the window. They might have left the square unguarded, concentrated all their men on the house, and he didn’t intend to be caught unless it was unavoidable. He had just clambered up on the sill when the first red-robed Trade Inspector burst in through the door curtain.

* * *

Moving with care, Khat rubbed his face against the inside of his arm, trying to keep the sweat from burning his eyes. His hands were chained over his head to a hook suspended from the rocky ceiling, just high enough that he could barely support his weight.

The Trade Inspectors’ prison had been roughly gouged out of the tier’s bedrock beneath the High Trade Authority, the dark walls mostly smooth now from the years of sweat on human hands. The place where he was being held was not so much a cell but a landing on a wide stairwell, lit by smoky oil lamps in wall niches, with one set of stone-cut steps going up to the passages above and the other curving away down, leading to someplace where someone had screamed for an hour late last night.

Khat had discovered early on that the chain was set so solidly into the bedrock overhead that even putting all his weight on it and swinging back and forth was insufficient to pull it loose. Now the strain had begun to tell, and he didn’t have the strength to try that anymore. His hands and arms were mostly numb; it was his shoulders that hurt the worst. Lately he was so exhausted that he kept losing consciousness, only to be jerked awake when his weight came down on his much-abused muscles. His back ached for other reasons.

Khat had remembered not to fight when they took him prisoner, but in the suffocating confines of the prison that resolution had fled, and he had fought like a madman all the way down to this level. Wondering when he would be taken further down had occupied a good deal of his time, but he was at the point now where he felt fairly sure they meant to let him die right here.

Khat tried to shift his wrists in the manacles, and winced at the result. There was no air moving at all, and the heat was like the inside of a bread oven; sweat that had that special scent of fear was stinging in the cuts and sticking what was left of his shirt to his chest and back. It didn’t help that behind the nearest wall he could hear rushing water, which could be from one of the city sewers. This theory was supported by the fact that in the greasy light of the oil lamps he could see moisture of a thick and unhealthy consistency beading on that particular wall. The rest of the place seemed to be bone dry, just like his throat.

Even after all these long hours, panic was still close, so close he could almost smell it over the choking smoke of the lamps.
Elen will get you out of here
, he kept telling himself,
Elen just fucking better get you out of here, or you’ll come back as a ghost that will make that thing following you look like a dust devil
, and never mind that in the cosmology of the Fringe Cities kris had no souls and couldn’t return as ghosts.

These thoughts had been close companions all night. Then he would think that the reason Elen hadn’t come yet was that her trick at the gate had failed, and the vigils had shot her. He pushed that specter away again. If Elen wasn’t coming then that was it. Even if Sagai had escaped, there was simply no way his partner could come after him in here. And Sonet Riathen would certainly not bother to lift a finger.

He tried to shake the hair out of his eyes, and lines of fire went down his shoulder blades. Gritting his teeth at the pain, he tried to make himself relax. And what if he had badly misjudged Elen? She knew where the ugly block relic was now, with the added bonus of Arad’s copy of Riathen’s book. The Trade Inspectors would tell her that no relic had been found on him; she might think it still in the Academia somewhere, that she could search for it without him …
No, not that either
, he told himself, again.
Think about something else
.

If the Trade Inspectors did find out where he had hidden the little relic, their method of removing it would be fatal at best. The flap of skin that formed the outer layer of his pouch was not very thick; if anyone pressed down on his abdomen, the small, hard lump of the relic was there to be felt. The Trade Inspectors had searched him thoroughly, but they had been certain he had hidden it somewhere in the Porta. And the city dwellers mentally associated kris pouches with babies, and therefore with women, and never thought of men having them too. He just hoped no one punched him in the stomach.

The relic was an unspecific ache in his abdomen, like something caught in a tooth that you couldn’t quite get out. A minor discomfort compared to all the others, but its presence probably wasn’t doing him any good. He remembered one of his maternal-line aunts practically beating him into the ground for doing something like this as a boy, even though it was a common enough trick among kris children. Well, he had never meant to help perpetuate his proud but fatally foolhardy lineage anyway.

Not that that was an option anymore. It was one small consolation that no one would find the relic until after his body had been rendered down.

There was a sharp crack from overhead, and Khat flinched, unable to help himself. Two Trade Inspectors in dull red robes were coming down the steps, the second one tapping his rod of office against the stone. It was a long staff of rare hardwood, banded with copper and iron. The two vigils following them were lower-tier, and they both looked uncomfortable with their surroundings. The Trade Inspectors could conscript lower-tier vigils at will, and not all of the conscripts were pleased by this fact.

The Trade Inspectors stopped within a pace of Khat, who had to fight to keep from trying to draw back, his spine prickling in anticipation of pain. Before this night he had never seen them in their full formal attire; the ones that patrolled the streets usually dressed as ordinary folk. Both these men had the heavy bronze breastplates over their robes, but instead of a veil and headcloth one man wore a bronze half-mask covering his eyes and nose, its brows sculpted into a beetled shape better suited to a rock demon than a human, and a gold skullcap. Khat racked his memory for his carefully acquired knowledge of Charisat’s bureaucratic hierarchy and realized this was a High Justice.

The lesser Trade Inspector said, “A krismen Waste rat, as you can see. It has refused to tell us anything so far.”

That one had come before; Khat recognized his voice and mannerisms. The other was an unpleasant novelty.

The High Justice’s eyes, dark through the sculpted holes of the mask, were intent on him. He leaned on his rod of office, and nodded to the other Trade Inspector. That one moved behind Khat, who forced himself not to try to turn his head to follow him.

The High Justice nodded again, and with no more warning than that the other’s rod of office snapped across Khat’s back. He gasped, feeling another line of fire open across his flesh. His knees went weak, and he held on to the chain, supporting himself on it. That had been a surprise; usually they asked the questions first.

In a voice sounding rusty with disuse, the High Justice said, “Where is the relic?”

Usually the one behind him wielding the rod did the asking, but they had been through this over and over again, the same questions, the same penalty for unsatisfactory answers, all through the night.

Sometimes Khat wondered if they knew what relic they meant at all, if these were the same questions they asked everyone. Still breathless from the suddenness of the blow, he said, “I don’t know what you want. I didn’t steal anything.” He tried not to listen for the one waiting behind him with the rod. He didn’t know why they wanted an admission of guilt so badly. He wasn’t so naive as to think that they couldn’t make him tell them; the screaming from the lower levels would have convinced him thoroughly if he hadn’t already known it. For some reason they had held off on the more serious torture. Possibly this waiting was part of it, though why they didn’t simply get down to business was beyond him.

This High Justice was shorter than Khat, but stocky and strong. Despite all the gold finery, the shoulders of his robe were stained from contact with the greasy walls. Now the man’s thin lips twisted in a sneer, half disgust, half irritation. If he gave some kind of a signal this time, Khat didn’t see it, but the rod of office snapped across his back again, sharp as fire on muscles already strained to the breaking point. He cried out, not making any attempt to restrain it. (“Yell loud,” an old relic dealer had once advised him, years ago. “They like that.”) Again he felt the skin break. One of the vigils, waiting back against the wall, actually winced.

“You’ve hidden it,” the High Justice said. “Where?” Khat let his head fall back wearily, feeling the blood trickle down his back. They hadn’t even bothered to ask why he had been in the Academia, what he had been doing in the Porta. Perhaps they had questioned Ecazar; perhaps they just didn’t care. “I didn’t have anything, I didn’t steal anything.”