by Martha Wells
The Heir asked, "And you are certain you can find these mythical relics?"
"No," Khat said. He shifted the ball back to the Master Warder without compunction. "He is."
But Riathen smiled as the Heir turned to him. He said, "I suggest a test."
She hesitated a beat. "Very well." She raised a finger, and a robed female servant materialized from a curtained doorway and, after a low-voiced instruction from the Heir vanished back through it. The Heir turned an amused gaze on Riathen. "It isn't a good idea to wager against me, you know. I'm a noted gamester."
If it was an attempt to lighten the heavy air of tension in the room, it didn't succeed. But Riathen bowed, smiling self-deprecatingly. "As am I, Great Lady."
These people smile too much, Khat thought. All this teeth-showing would not be reckoned polite where he came from, not that the Master Warder and the Heir meant it to be taken for courtesy anyway. At best, they were uneasy allies. He made the mistake of glancing at Elen, who communicated her feelings on the matter by allowing her eyes to glaze over and cross, as if the courtly sniping was causing her to drift into catatonia. Khat looked away quickly. It would take less effort to maintain the proper paranoia toward Warders if it wasn't so easy to like Elen.
The servant entered again, this time carrying a lacquered paper tray with a scattered collection of relics on it.
All were worked mythenin fragments. Some were rounded lumps incised with leaves or the long-dead fauna that had once inhabited the Waste; some were formed into the shapes of birds, strange human faces, fish and other sea creatures, not unlike the one the woman in the marketplace had shown them. They might be jewelry, gaming tokens, ornaments.
The Heir said, "One of these is not a relic but a clever fake. Choose it."
A careful and dedicated forger could do just about anything, even hide an unlicensed forge equipped to attain the high, even heat necessary to form an unworked lump of mythenin into a more valuable relic. The servant placed the tray on a low table of jade, and Khat knelt next to it and picked up each relic, rubbing it gently between his fingers and trying not to think. Whoever kept that unlicensed forge in operation would be very clever indeed, but there was a place where knowledge and guile left off and instinct took over. When he came to the one that didn't feel right, a flat, round piece with a delicate carving of a flowing fountain, he set it aside, not thinking twice about it. "That one."
He sensed Riathen shift position; undoubtedly the Master Warder was smiling his carefully respectful triumph at the Heir again. Still, Khat checked the remaining three pieces and found the catch: the last one, a bird with a loop for a chain to be run through, felt wrong as well. "And this one."
He held it up to the Heir, and she took the graceful piece and turned it over in her fingers. "Very good," she said, looking down at him. "Those are excellent forgeries. Not one relic expert in the shops of long and august reputation on the Fourth Tier could have made the choice. Where did you come by your knowledge?"
At the moment, Khat didn't care whether she actually wanted to know or was merely sparring again. He had decided some time ago not to tell her anything. "Not on the Fourth Tier."
Her lips twitched in amusement. Of course, she would enjoy an occasional rebuff; it happened so seldom. And she would especially enjoy it from someone as effectively helpless as he was. When it became apparent that that was all the answer she was going to get, she turned back to Riathen, and said, "Very mysterious. I suppose you knew this business would pique my curiosity? Well, I agree to give you the time you need. I will keep my beloved father the Elector from naming Constans Master Warder in your place, at least until you can produce these relics. Then you must fend for yourself, because I will need all my resources to defend my own position. Will that suit?"
"It will suit most excellently, Great Lady."
She nodded in dismissal, already moving away to the window. Riathen had bowed and turned for the door, and Khat had had time for the first breath of relief, when she said suddenly, "One thing more. I would like to speak to your relic expert in private. Perhaps you could leave him here."
Riathen turned to regard his relic expert thoughtfully, and Khat felt something lodge in his throat. It was panic. In a low whisper he said to the old Warder, "You leave me here and you can make plans to burn my bones to tell fortunes, because that's the last help you'll get from me."
"You are overreacting," Riathen said, and took a step nearer, his voice cautiously low.
Probably. Even Khat didn't know what he was afraid of. He raised his voice just a trifle. "You heard me. Do you want her to hear me?"
Riathen turned back to the Heir, unruffled. "I'm afraid that isn't possible now. Time is too precious to us. You understand."
The Heir didn't answer, leaning against the stone window casement, all languid ease. Then she said, "I suppose I do. Very well, you may go."
***
Khat held his peace until they were outside the palace and between the high double-tiered arcades of the processional avenue. Then he asked Riathen, "What was that about?"
Gandin hissed at him to lower his voice, glancing worriedly at the passersby.
"The Heir is an avid collector of relics," Riathen replied, imperturbable.
"I think she collects other things, too."
Riathen glanced at him briefly, eyes measuring. "Even if she had refused to allow you to leave with us, no harm would have come to you. Surely your own experience would tell you so."
Khat couldn't argue with that, low blow though it was. He couldn't even explain to himself why he had panicked.
That long direct stare would have meant only one thing if it had come from a woman on the street. Riathen had thought so too, obviously, and so had Elen, if her blush had been any indication. The Heir knew he was kris, and she undoubtedly knew the traditional use Patrician women had for krismen men; she could have simply wanted a lover for the long afternoon whom she could use and throw away without having to worry over consequences. The using part was all right, but in her case he couldn't be sure that she really would throw him away afterward instead of having him killed to stop him telling anyone that she had age tracks at the corners of her eyes.
Maybe her request wouldn't have worried him so much if Constans hadn't warned him first-as if Constans wasn't a liar and mad as well.
But Riathen had been willing to use him as a bribe, maybe trusting to Khat's stubbornness to avoid any of the Heir's difficult questions about the search for the relics. And really, he knew nothing that could hurt Riathen. Maybe the old man had wanted the Heir to question him, wanted him to tell her all he knew.
"She also dislikes, and fears, her father," Riathen added. "Which is a great help to me."
"Really?" Khat said, putting a little acid in his voice. "I would never have guessed, except for the bit of foam at her mouth whenever she mentioned him."
"She thinks he killed her mother," Elen informed him reprovingly.
Riathen frowned down at her. "That is hearsay, and not to be repeated. The primary cause of their disagreement is that she believes he favors the three children of his second wife. The poor woman died only last year, and the Elector's preference for her children may be merely sentimental. But the Heir feels it greatly, and was disturbed when her father sent them out of the city to their mother's family in Kirace."
Khat remembered the funeral rites for the Elector's last wife. They had gone on and on for days, far longer than custom required. In his wife's honor, the Elector had free grain and cakes distributed on the lower tiers, and there had been a release of waste water from the First Tier into the sewers, greatly relieving the usual problems of blockages and sickening stench. He winced, suddenly imagining how Sagai would feel if Miram died. He grumbled, "Can't they talk? Why doesn't she just go and ask him if he still wants her to be his heir?"
Gandin snorted derisively, and even Elen lifted an eyebrow at him.
Riathen said, "There will be no more discussion of this. He is still th
e Elector."
The Master Warder didn't add "for the moment" aloud, but Khat wondered if the thought had crossed his mind.
"Khat, nothing is going to happen to you. I swear it," Elen said patiently.
The afternoon sun was hot in the blue and gold court with its stair down to the Second Tier, and Khat was back in his own clothes and very ready to leave. She added, "And Riathen would not have left you there."
She was saying it to convince herself. "It didn't seem that way from where I was standing."
"You're always thinking things like that." Elen's patience evaporated rapidly, possibly due to her recent overexposure to the lower tiers, but more likely to her fear that he was right. "You think everyone is after you for some reason. You're as mad as Constans."
And speaking of Constans . . . But the words didn't come. The Elector's mad Warder had him in a very neat trap. Telling Elen about Constans's presence in the Miracle's chamber would lead to difficult questions about their prior meeting out in the Waste, and perhaps even more difficult questions from Riathen about Elen's missing painrod and why he hadn't spoken up before. And besides, he was too angry to hand out free information.
He looked up at a squeak from the house's gate and saw Gandin coming toward them across the court. Khat watched his approach without enthusiasm; the young Warder had not been a bringer of good news.
Gandin stopped and nodded briskly to Elen, then held out something wrapped in cheap cloth to Khat. The krismen hesitated and Elen, her eyes round and ingenuous, asked, "Do you think it will explode?"
Gandin frowned at her, puzzled. Khat gave her a sour look and took the package.
It was his knife and flea glass that the Warders' lictors had taken the day before.
"One of my men took them. That was poor discipline," Gandin said. It was an apology.
Khat said nothing, not having anything to say and knowing a direct stare was a good substitute for a verbal rejoinder when your mind was blank. Gandin hesitated, then turned and went back across the court.
Softly, Elen said, "Well, we're not all bad, are we?"
Are you? Khat thought. "Come at dawn again tomorrow," he told her. "We'll get an early start."
***
Back down on the Sixth Tier, Khat went again to the street market, hoping to see Caster there. He talked to a few other Silent Market dealers he knew, and gave up on seeing Caster again that day when twilight fell.
No matter how hard Sonet Riathen pressed, no matter how ready Khat was to be rid of the whole thing, all would have to happen in its own time.
It was near full dark when he made his way toward home, through the narrow streets past the fading dinner smells of bread and corn gruel. He was tired, tense, and still angry at Riathen, and worse, Constans's warning kept flitting through his thoughts.
Much as he might like to, he couldn't dismiss that warning as gibberish. Constans wasn't mad in that way. Possibly he was trying to earn Khat's trust so he could trick him into betraying the Master Warder. Earn my trust, Khat thought. That's funny.
When he turned down the alley that led to his court, caution slowed his steps; there was more noise than usual for this time of night coming from the cluster of houses.
He stopped at the end of the alley. There was a small crowd around Netta's house and the one immediately next door on the right, where Ris and his family lived. The doors were open, and the bottom levels glowed with lamplight, a bad sign. Lamps were never used inside at night on the lower tiers unless there was some emergency. They wasted oil and overheated rooms that would have to be used for sleeping. There was just enough light to show him that it was their neighbors gathered there and that Netta was coming out of Ris's house with a bowl of darkly stained cloth.
In another moment Khat was shoving his way through the crowd. He almost ran down Senace at the door. "What happened?"
"It's Ris. Someone beat him. He looks awful..." The young man stepped aside for Khat to enter. The house Ris's large family inhabited was smaller than Netta's and crowded with a near-hysterical collection of relatives and siblings of all ages. Ris lay on the floor on a matting pad, with his father Raka holding the boy's head still while Miram wiped the blood away from his face. "Why so much blood?" Raka asked, anguished.
"It's mostly from his nose, I think," Miram said calmly. Ris stirred a little, moaning, and she said, "I know it hurts, pet, but I have to find the cuts."
"What happened?" Khat asked again.
Netta shouldered him aside, bringing Miram a bowl of clean cloths, muttering, "Street thugs. No one's safe."
Sagai had followed her in, and answered Khat in a low voice.
"Two men caught him when he was coming back from the Garden Market. He had nothing to steal, and they wanted nothing from him but to beat him as if they meant to teach him a lesson. Or teach someone a lesson."
Sagai was looking at him speculatively, but at the moment Khat didn't care. "Did he recognize them?"
"Oh yes. It was Harim and Akai."
Two thugs who hired out to Fourth and Fifth Tier debt collectors, but Khat knew that Lushan really paid most of their water money. The broker had been paid his tokens by one of Elen's lictors early this afternoon, long before Ris must have been attacked. Khat was certain about that. Elen had checked for him when they had returned to Riathen's house.
The anger was startling, burning cold right down to his bones: the same anger he had felt when he found out that the idlers in the court were habitually rude to Netta's daughter, and thought themselves safe because she had no male relatives to defend her. He had disabused them of that notion quickly enough.
Maybe everything the city dwellers said was true, and at heart kris were just territorial animals. But Harim and Akai should have been sent after Khat, if Lushan was still so angry. All Ris does is carry messages, he thought. The vindictive bastard knows that.
It was suddenly too crowded, too noisy in the room, with the family carrying on, the boy's moans, Miram's and Netta's reassurances. Khat pushed his way out to stand in the still hot air of the court.
Sagai followed him, and after a moment asked, "You know why the boy was attacked?"
"No," Khat answered honestly. But I'll find out. After I cripple Harim just a bit.
Sagai accepted the answer without comment. They stood in the relative calm as the neighbors began to drift back to their own homes and all the lamps except those Miram still needed were extinguished, one by one.
Sagai started suddenly. "Ah, in all the confusion I almost forgot. Caster came by the Arcade. He said he would have a name for you tomorrow, if you still wanted it."
Khat closed his eyes in relief. "I don't want it, but I need it."
Sagai shook his head. "The sooner this Warder business is over with the better. You take care. You can't trust those people. They're different."
"I'm different," Khat reminded him.
Sagai gestured that away. "You know what I mean."
Chapter Eight
Khat leaned back against the pillar. "Remember to tell her about the greater weight with the rougher texture."
Sagai was showing Elen how to judge the difference between various lumps of Ancient worked metals and modern trash. He stopped his lesson to fix his partner with a deadly eye. "Are you doing this or am I?"
Khat shrugged and looked away. He had to admit Sagai was the better teacher; Khat got testy if he had to explain anything more than once.
They were at the Fifth Tier Arcade in their customary trading spot, a nook formed by two massive broken columns long ago scavenged out of the remains of some Ancient structure. The columns were covered with little faded human figures in stylized poses-dancing, fighting, lovemaking-that were too shallow and crumbled to make good rubbings from, and too common to bother cutting out and carrying away.
The Arcade itself was a maze of overhung galleries and twisty covered walkways more than five floors high in some places, supported more by the buildings around it than by its own buttresses. The spot Kh
at and Sagai had long claimed for their own was near the edge of the open central well on the third floor. Two floors above them the sun came slanting down through the holes and old air shafts in the aging roof, and occasionally a stone dislodged from one of the walkways above would drop and crack against the busy gallery below.
Loud talk from the merchants and artisans at work echoed off the cracked and chipped stone facings, complemented by the constant banging from the coppersmiths' alley on the bottommost level. The mat makers worked on the floor just above them where the light was better, and further down the row were the olive oil millers, candle makers, charcoal sellers, and the dealers in henna, malachite powders, eyeblack, and agents to purify the blood. All spent most of the working day complaining about the other inhabitants of the Arcade.
Business had been sparse today. A few other dealers had come sniffing around, and some scavengers from the Seventh Tier had shown up with a basket of junk for them to sift through-Sagai was using the results of that labor for Elen's lesson. No shady dealers with valuable and mysterious relics from unspecified sources had appeared. Khat let his head loll back against the stone in boredom and scratched his pouch, wishing, as he always wished when the eternal waiting-for-something-to-happen became too much to bear, that he had taken up some other occupation.
Sonet Riathen's Survivor text: now there was a mysterious relic, with all its talk of the souls of the people of the west, and the western doors of the sky. An intriguing relic, and not at all like the only other Ancient Script text he had been able to read in the original, which was the one kept in the archive of the krismen Enclave, said to be the only existing record of the Ancient Mage-Philosophers who had created the krismen during the formation of the Waste. It told little about the Mages themselves, and spoke mainly of how there had been many nervous days spent in preparation of the magical essences that were needed to make the transformation and long hours of work on the gigantic arcane engine that would distill them.
Khat knew some of that text was accurate, because he had seen the engine, or at least what was left of it-hulks of dead mythenin metal, covered with indecipherable Ancient script and still-beautiful scrolling, the silver and gold brightwork in melted lumps or tarnished past saving, the whole surrounded by heavy shards of Ancient glass. The remains were scattered throughout most of the caves and passages of the deepest level of the Enclave. The text had said the arcane engine had destroyed itself in the completion of the last essence, killing many of the Ancient Mages in the process. The Survivors who had agreed to test the essence hadn't really believed it would work- until their children were born.
