by Martha Wells
With a shock Khat realized what that small pavilion must contain. The Miracle was a legend among relic dealers and collectors. It was a true arcane relic, as well as one of the handful of relics that actually had some function other than decoration. Not that anyone knew what that function was.
Elen tugged on his sleeve, and Khat realized he was staring like an idiot.
"The steward of the hall will ask us our business," she whispered.
The figure approaching them was short and squat and wearing a slitted mantle heavy with gold embroidery and brocade, earrings of heavy gold beads, granulated gold on his skullcap-enough gold to feed the Eighth Tier for a month.
"We are Warders," Elen announced formally, and unnecessarily, Khat thought, but apparently stating the obvious was called for. "We have been sent to attend the Master Warder."
The steward's hennaed brows went up in surprise, perhaps at being addressed by a female Warder. But he bowed smoothly and said, "Of course. Master Riathen apprised us of your arrival. He wished for those called Elen son Dia'riaden and Gandin Riat to attend him at once, and for the other to wait."
"Thank you." Elen bowed in return. As the steward withdrew, she said quietly to Khat, "Wait here."
Khat watched them leave, then looked around the hall, seeing Patricians and servants go back and forth and turning over the implications of Riathen wanting a private conversation with his Warders while he was trapped out here.
But the Miracle pulsed again, its light spilling out of the chamber built to contain it. Two Patrician women walked up to one of the doorways and peered in, until another pulse of light startled them. They turned away and went toward the outer arches, talking animatedly.
It isn't guarded, Khat thought. No more so than the palace itself was guarded. His heart was pounding, and not from fear. He had heard of the Miracle for years, seen drawings of it, but he had never expected to be this close.
No one was watching him, and nothing seemed to bar the way through any of the little pavilion's doors. Go carefully, Sagai had said this morning, and this was probably no time to sightsee. But it was a chance he was unlikely to have again.
He went to one of the doorways. Inside the pavilion, the Miracle sat atop a pedestal of plain brick. It was a stone of pyramidal shape, as tall as a man, of a material that was dark charcoal gray, with a sheen like steel and somehow also like dark marble. Light burst from it suddenly, and Khat winced away. A fire that brilliant should permanently scar the domed chamber's unadorned walls, not to mention kill anyone in its range, but the Miracle's light was apparently without heat.
He forced himself to look at it again. The dazzling illumination seemed to emanate directly out of the dark surface. It came in bursts, like a heartbeat, and the silence of it was uncanny; each pulse of light was so brilliant it should have been accompanied by an explosion, at least.
A waist-high barrier had been constructed around the pedestal. Without consciously making the decision to enter the chamber, Khat found himself standing at that barrier. The stone silently exploded again, dazzling his eyes and temporarily blinding him.
Then someone said, "A legend made reality. A magical relic." The slight pause seemed to hold a wealth of unvoiced irony. "Before they knew what it was, they kept it in the Elector's Garden."
Khat knew the voice immediately, and felt a sensation of cold that started at his skin and proceeded right down into his bone marrow. His vision returned gradually, and the next burst showed him Aristai Constans standing beside him. Khat's throat had suddenly gone dry, but he managed to say, "You turn up in the strangest places."
"Oh, I'm here a great deal." Constans leaned casually on the brick barrier, chatty and unconcerned and as dangerous as a sharp drop off a cliff. "I was here, in fact, twenty years ago on the day the Miracle first chose to call attention to itself. I remember it very well, It was the day I went mad."
The Miracle pulsed once more in the pause, blinding Khat again, "why did you go mad?" he heard himself asking. It surprised him that he really wanted to know, even though instinct and common sense were both saying Run.
"What a pity someone else has never thought to ask that question."
"You mean Sonet Riathen." Silence. Is he breathing? Khat wondered. It should have been audible in the stillness in the little chamber, but maybe the pounding of his own blood was masking the sound. He said, "But what's the answer?"
"It was the best of several bad alternatives." From his voice, Khat thought Constans had turned away from the Miracle and toward him. The Warder asked, "Why are you here?"
"I didn't have a choice." Khat made his voice sound light instead of bitter. There was something he should be noticing about the Miracle, and he kept his eyes on it despite the near possibility of being killed by the Elector's mad friend.
"Oh, I think you did. Everyone has a choice."
"Are you going to call the lictors?" He sensed Constans moving behind him and didn't react. "There's probably a law against a kris-men profaning the sacred halls where the Elector walks."
"Don't be ridiculous," Constans said from his other side. "The Elector never ventures down here."
The Miracle pulsed again, a heartbeat of living, heatless light. This time Khat had been looking directly at it during the pulse, and the image of it was burned into his memory. If he were to describe the Miracle he would call it a large pyramidal stone etched with a fading web of lines, and if Riathen's second lost relic, the unlovely square block, wasn't its twin brother, it was at least its second cousin.
"Besides, that is not the tone I want to set for our relationship," Constans was saying.
"We don't have a relationship," Khat said, irritated despite the danger.
"Didn't you chastise someone recently for claiming to know everything?"
Someone spoke sharply out in the central chamber, and without thinking Khat turned his head toward the noise. He realized his mistake when Constans grabbed him by the back of the neck. That voice hissed in his ear, "Riathen knows nothing. They don't know what we are, what happened to us, what the danger is. My advice is to agree with everything they say and don't let them bring you here again."
The shove sent him stumbling, and Khat caught his balance against the edge of the doorway and turned back. An abrupt burst of light from the Miracle showed him an empty chamber.
Outside in the entrance hall Elen was looking for him, peering at the robed figures clustered at the opposite end. Khat managed to be right next to her when she turned, and she started. "Where were you?"
"I was right here. Didn't you see me?"
Elen's expression was skeptical, but obviously she had no time to pursue the issue. "Never mind. This way."
They went down long halls, up wide staircases, past more lictors. The twistings and turnings might have been meant to confuse, but Khat knew which direction was north with the same certainty that he knew up from down, and to him the way was simple. The difficulty was in not thinking about Aristai Constans.
Elen took what might be a shortcut through a curving corridor, its walls inset with squares of somber indigo stone. Every few feet was a waist-high pillar plated with gold electrum, each supporting a jar of the most delicate ceramic. The lids were sculpted into detailed busts of different people. They were crematory jars, and Khat had heard of this hallway. Each jar held the ashes of some dead Elector.
Elen stopped abruptly, and Khat just managed not to walk into her. Some distance ahead a young man moved across the corridor. His robes and veil were black, melding into the dark stone lining the walls. In a low voice, Elen explained, "That was Asan Siamis of the Warder household of Gian, who is Riathen's cousin. I grew up with Asan. He went to Constans only a few months ago."
Black was the color condemned criminals were forced to wear. If all the mad Warders who followed Constans affected it, it said odd things about their status, even though the Elector was supposed to support Constans completely. Curious, Khat asked, "Would you rather see him dead?"
Elen pressed her lips together, and didn't answer.
After a few more turnings of the corridor they came to a long room filled with the sound and smell of running water. The inside wall had a gentle curve and wide windows looking down on an interior court a level or so below that was filled with a noisy gathering of People. Servants disappeared unobtrusively as Elen led Khat through, and the opulence was incredible. The carved marble of the high ceiling was touched with gold leaf, the painted tiles on walls and floor glistened, and drapes of light silk and gauze framed the windows. When they passed the source of the water Khat involuntarily stopped to stare. One wall was set at a slight angle, and water from some invisible source within a recess in the ceiling ran down it over a slab of multihued jasper. The water was collected in a shallow trough at the bottom of the wall, running away out of sight again.
Elen caught his sleeve and pulled until he recollected himself and followed her. They came to another arch guarded by a servant who bowed as he opened one of the tall doors of copper mesh for them.
"It's not going well," Elen whispered to Khat, and moved on before he could ask why. Everyone has a choice, Constans had said. Everyone but me, Khat thought, and followed her.
The Heir to the Elector's throne was reclining on a low couch, looking up at Sonet Riathen with an attentive smile that still seemed to convey a gentle skepticism. Khat hadn't expected her to be as beautiful as the portraits on the minted coins implied. Everyone knew the Elector was short and fat, and singularly unprepossessing, though his image on the coins left out those defects; it followed that the Heir's portraits would be altered as well. But her features were finely formed, her eyes large and dark and knowing, without benefit of kohl or malachite or any other powder. Her skin was the warm color of cinnamon, and her kaftan and mantle were wisps of gold and amber silks, with strings of gold and amber drops draping her lithe form and decorating her cap.
Riathen, wearing the white robes of office, a headcloth with gold chains twisted through it, and the brief veil his age and station allowed him, was pacing in front of her silk-draped couch, saying, "The two relics that are still missing are the keys to unlock the knowledge we need to survive." He had glanced up as Elen and Khat entered, but didn't stop to acknowledge them. Gandin was waiting for them near one of the windows, and exchanged a nod with Elen. "Without it," the Master Warder continued, "we are no better than the street fakirs."
There was a long waist-high table made of what looked to be cedar, another shocking extravagance, and near one of the wide windows was a large bronze armillary sphere, an astronomical instrument that was forbidden to private citizens. The chairs were cedar and ebony, with gold and ivory inlay, delicate as flowers.
Khat particularly noticed a large cabinet of glass reinforced by bronze that held gorgeous floral tiles of all the different sizes. There was also an Ancient bowl of thick milky glass etched with a pattern of flowing waves perhaps meant to symbolize the water that had once surrounded Charisat, a score of mythenin ornaments and vessels set with gems and precious stones, carnelian intaglios, etched fragments of polished silver mirrors, and rarest of all, there were jewelry, mirrors, and boxes all set with the soft, round white stones that were said to be the hardened excrement of some long-dead sea animal. The Heir owns enough relics to set up in business on the Fourth Tier, Khat thought in bone-deep envy.
The Heir idly smoothed the brocaded fabric covering the couch cushions. Her attitude of indolence was very much at odds with Riathen's worried pacing, and Khat felt sure the old man was the one getting the worst of the dispute. She looked up at Riathen now and said, "When you say 'we,' I assume you mean the Warders, Sonet." Her voice was deep but rasped agreeably on the ears, like rough silk.
Next to Khat, Elen shifted uneasily. Riathen's pacing had taken him to the cedar table, and he leaned on it wearily. His hands, resting lightly on the polished surface, were trembling. Khat looked up at him, startled, but the Master Warder was staring into space. He said, "You will simply have to trust me, Great Lady."
"I do trust you, Riathen. It's Constans that worries me." She stood, the silk of her robes flowing like water, and went to one of the broad windows to look at the crowd below. "His support is growing." Her mouth thinned with distaste. "My beloved father the Elector is surrounded by his lackeys. That's one of them now."
The court was decorated as a garden, with trees and flowers in marble tubs and a carved stream in the stone floor which wandered through shallow pools with fountain jets. Finely robed courtiers gathered there, talking over the music of the water and the spirit bells tied in the stunted trees. Moving through the elegant throng in the court below was a tall woman, dressed in black flowing garments with her head covered only by a hood so loose the sun glinted off her light hair. The crowd parted for her with a shade too much alacrity for courtesy. "That's Shiskan son Karadon, the daughter of the Judge of the Elector's court. It's bad enough that Constans and his ilk forswear Patrician customs, but to corrupt the daughter of a Judge ..."
When the Heir had spoken her name, the woman below had stopped, and now her head tilted deliberately up toward the window, as if she had heard the other woman thirty yards away and over the noise of the gathering.
"Careful," Riathen murmured. Moving to the window, he drew the Heir gently away. "Don't speak her name again." Meeting her puzzled stare, he only said, "I'm aware of her . . . conversion. I had offered her a Warder's robes last year, offered to make her one of my personal apprentices even, and she refused me. I was not surprised when I learned she had sworn herself to Constans. Do you know how many others there are? Men and women with the spark of the Old Knowledge in them who could have taken their places as Warders? And some do not declare themselves as openly as she."
They don't know what we are, what happened to us, Constans had said. The woman below moved on, cutting a path through the crowd.
Frowning, Riathen said, "She isn't wearing a painrod, at least. I have reason to suspect Constans has found a cache of them, though I thought I knew of all the rods left intact in the city. He is evidently using them for the lowest purposes, even as bribes for pirates. Where has he gotten them?"
The Heir shook her head, her mouth set in a grim line. "Perhaps my beloved father the Elector procured them for him, somehow. Would that surprise you? Do you think my father would refuse him anything?"
No one answered this rhetorical question aloud. Khat wondered if the Heir realized that whenever she said "My beloved father the Elector" the venom in her voice was so intense she might be in danger of poisoning herself with her own saliva. Once they were out of here he should probably tell Riathen about his meetings with Constans, or at least the first encounter out in the Waste. Aristai Constans was mad, all right, but not mad enough to bribe pirates with rare painrods and then hunt them down through the Waste. Or at least Khat didn't think so.
The Heir turned back to Riathen. "If you find these relics, you will support me when the time comes for my acclamation?"
"I have sworn it." If Riathen had repeated that as many times now as Khat thought he might have, the old man didn't show it.
The Heir's dark eyes regarded the Master Warder intently, and Khat was sure she was on the verge of giving him whatever permission or blessing he needed from her and they would all be able to go.
But then she shook her head and said, "How can I know you will find these relics after they have been missing so long? And have you not tried to look for them before?"
Riathen nodded to Khat, who felt the lowering of doom. "I have other resources now. This man has experience with the lower-tier relic markets, which have previously been closed to my inquiries."
"Really." The Heir turned her intent stare on Khat. Normally that kind of concentrated attention from such a beautiful woman would have been gratifying, but Khat suddenly realized he didn't like her much. Then she said, "Lower the veil."
Khat hesitated, and hated himself for it. Veils were uncomfortable and unnatural, he had never had one on be
fore today, and now suddenly he was reluctant to remove it. And simply knowing what it meant as a symbol in Charisat's bizarre social scale had nothing to do with it. It was the way the Heir had said it: possessively.
In a way she did own Khat and everyone else in Charisat, or she would when she was Elector, since having absolute power over something was equal to ownership. But usually there were buffers between someone in Khat's lowly position and that ownership; powerful Patricians, Trade Inspectors, even Warders, all had to be gotten over or around or through before the word of command actually got down to noncitizen krismen relic dealers on the Sixth Tier. Hearing it so plainly now, so personally, was like feeling the tug of a leash.
Uneasy that his slight hesitation had revealed his thoughts, Khat jerked his veil down. The Heir studied him, her slight smile never wavering. If she was hoping to see Khat blush from self-consciousness, she would be disappointed. Even if he did it would probably be impossible to detect past brown skin and yesterday's bruises, and anyway Elen, waiting forgotten against the wall like a piece of furniture, was doing enough blushing for both of them.
Over her shoulder to Riathen, the Heir observed, "He's krismen. How extraordinary."
Of course she could tell. He had met her eyes. He could have kicked Gandin for being right. After another long, warm stare, she asked, "And who are you?"
He couldn't tell if she was asking for his name or his importance in Riathen's quest. He said, "Nobody important."
"Oh?" One perfect brow lifted at the challenge.
Gandin started to speak, perhaps to answer the Heir's question, but Riathen silenced him with a look. So that's how it is, Khat thought. Let the lady play with the new toy without interference.
