by Martha Wells
After that the text had turned dull as dust, going on forever about breeding lines and the importance of continuing the Ancient Mages' work, and how their magic couldn't govern all, it was up to the descendants of those first newborn kris children to finish their work, and on and on and on. The writer had become obsessive on the subject, but that should be no surprise, Khat decided, considering the poor bastard had been trapped in the Enclave as the Waste spewed fire outside, with no one for company but terrified Survivor parents, mewling infants, and a pack of muttering Mage-Philosophers who probably thought of themselves as gods.
Sagai's voice called him back to the present. His partner was ending Elen's lesson, saying, "That is all I can show you from this poor collection." He pushed the scraps over to Khat, who started to separate out the raw mythenin lumps again, which could be sold to certain individuals on the Sixth Tier who claimed to be collectors but who in actuality made the same type of fakes the Elector's Heir owned.
Elen leaned back against the rock, looking hot and dust-covered. No sweepers worked here, so the dust formed choking clouds above the better-traveled walkways. After only a short time she had broken down and bought a small jar of water from a passing water seller. There were no fountains selling drinking water in the Arcade, though on the bottom level a trench had been cut into the rock floor, and possibly it had originally been meant to provide running water for the inhabitants. It was dry now, and served only as a latrine. Elen checked the edges of her plain cap to make sure her close-cropped hair was safely tucked within, then said idly, "Did you know the kris-men Enclave has sent an embassy to the Elector?"
Khat realized he hadn't answered her, that she was watching him curiously, when the edge of the dull shard of Ancient glass he was holding broke the skin on his palm. He said, "No, I didn't know that."
"Really? Have they been here long?" Sagai said, regaining Elen's attention while Khat put the piece of glass down and thoughtfully licked the blood off his hand.
"A few days," Elen said. She picked up one of the mythenin fragments and rolled it between her fingers, probably trying to duplicate Sagai's ability to detect the minute differences in texture which could reveal what type of relic the piece had come from. "There are going to be at least three meetings with the Elector, which is rare. The embassies from the other Fringe Cities are allowed only one. I think they're going to talk about the trade roads that run through the deep Waste, and the pirate attacks."
Khat asked, "Which lineage are they from?"
"I don't know. I didn't know there were any." Elen looked surprised, then thoughtful. Too thoughtful. "I can find out."
Alarmed, Khat shrugged and looked away. "It doesn't matter."
Sagai coughed to get their attention, and Khat glanced up to see Caster coming down the walkway, passing the mosaic makers and idly inspecting the examples of their art they had set out to draw trade.
The Silent Market dealer reached them and sat down next to Khat, nodding courteously to Sagai and Elen. "Well?" Khat asked him, feigning more interest in the bits of mythenin and Ancient glass the scavengers had brought. It was important not to appear too anxious. He needed the information Caster had very badly, but he had no intention of being overcharged for it.
Caster considered the question thoughtfully, his opaque eyes going from Khat to Sagai. "Ten days," he said.
Sagai laughed indulgently and shook his head. Elen drew breath to speak, but Khat kicked her foot, and said, "Ten days! For what?"
"I had to use a favor from someone high up in the Market to get this name," Caster protested. "Ten days is the least-"
"Five," Khat said.
"Nine."
"Six."
"Seven."
Khat exchanged a look with Sagai, then said, "Not seven."
Elen bit her lip and looked desperate. Fortunately Caster was studying his sandaled feet at the moment, considering. Finally the dealer shrugged, and said, "Six it is. A small faceted oval mythenin piece with a winged figure in the center was bought a year ago by a man named Radu, who lives on the Fourth Tier in a house in the Court of Painted Glass in the ghostcallers' quarter."
Sagai rummaged in his robe for trade tokens and counted them into Caster's palm, frowning at the unfamiliar name. "He's not a collector?"
Caster shook his head. "He buys, though not as much as he used to. He's a foreseer."
"A fortune-teller?" Khat asked, startled.
"A very upper-tier fortune-teller, for Patricians. They even come to him sometimes. He claims to have an oracle."
"Who sold the relic to him?" Elen asked.
Khat gave her an annoyed look, but Caster considered the question, then shrugged. "You don't want to buy those names. There were three of them, but they're all dead men now."
Since the dealer was giving out free information, Khat asked, "How did they die?"
"Trade Inspectors, how else? Some High Justice went after them." Caster got to his feet. "There it is, for all the good it does you." Then he hesitated and said, "I heard about the boy, Ris ..."
There was little that went on in the lives of those who practiced the relic trade, or who were even only peripherally involved in it, that Caster did not know. Khat looked up to meet his eyes, cool and deliberate. "Who?"
Caster grinned suddenly, and said, "That's how I thought it was." He nodded farewell to the others and walked away, humming to himself.
"Why did you bargain with him?" Elen demanded, as soon as the Silent Market dealer was out of earshot. "I had more than enough tokens. He could have refused to tell you the name at all."
"There's no point in wasting money," Sagai told her, his expression stern. "And besides, if we didn't bargain he would have been suspicious, and he would have sold his suspicious thoughts to one of our competitors, just the way he sold us Radu's name."
"Which Radu must have wanted kept secret, or what's the point in selling it?" Khat pointed out thoughtfully.
"But if he buys relics ..." Elen began.
"When Caster said 'he buys,' he meant from the Silent Market dealers," Khat corrected her. "Not from the shops on the Fourth Tier, or from independent dealers like us who have to stay on the legitimate side of the Trade Inspectors if they want to sell to the Academia."
She frowned. "Is that odd, that he should only buy relics from the illegal market?"
"A little." Sagai shrugged. "A genuine collector will buy from whatever source he can find. He may be buying the relics to sell again at a profit, which is a chancy proposition if he doesn't have the right trade license." When Sagai had first come to the city he hadn't much liked the less than legal aspect of the relic business, the necessity for dealing with the Silent Market on occasion, but he had grown accustomed to it. Khat suspected he had come to enjoy it, even.
"I see. But perhaps it's better that he's not a genuine collector," Elen said. "A collector wouldn't want to sell anything to us, would he?"
"Do we have to buy it?" Khat asked her in turn. "Can't Riathen go up to Radu's gate, bang on it, and tell him to hand the piece over now or else?"
"I think that would tend to draw unwanted attention." Elen's voice was dry.
"Then I'll go and see if I can speak to this Radu, and discover if he is perhaps willing to sell some of his less important pieces," Sagai said thoughtfully. Glancing at Elen, he added, "Without mentioning a mythenin oval with a winged figure. You never tell them what you really want."
"Especially if they're amateurs," Khat said, rolling the mythenin pieces around in his palm. "I'll walk up to the Fourth Tier with you. I have some ideas about that second piece."
"The big ugly block?"
"Maybe big, but maybe not so ugly."
"I'll go with you," Elen said.
"No, somebody has to stay here and play trade as usual. Especially since Caster came by. If we all three run off, we could have every dealer on this tier trailing us."
"And what is more natural than leaving our new apprentice to mind things while we take care of o
ther business," Sagai said.
"You just don't want me to come along. You don't trust me," she accused.
"You did mention something about promising to behave as an ordinary apprentice," Sagai reminded her, smiling. "And really, there is nothing else for you to do."
Truly, Elen did a good job of pretending not to be a Patrician. She didn't complain about the heat or the stench in the Arcade, and she was adept at avoiding casual physical contact without seeming to do so. "Oh, all right," she said, giving in. "But what am I going to do if someone wants to sell me something?"
"Examine it carefully, using the methods I've shown you," Sagai told her, getting to his feet. "Then look thoughtful and say you can't make an offer without consulting one of us, and that we'll be back later."
"That won't be suspicious?"
"It's what everyone else's apprentice does," Khat said. "Good luck."
They went along the walkway to the wide, cracked stone stair leading down, and Sagai said suddenly, "It's a large city, and the kris embassy may spend their entire stay on the First Tier. There's no reason to panic."
"Panic?" Khat looked at him in disgust. "What makes you think I'm panicking?"
Sagai shrugged one shoulder. "You could always go and talk to them. See for yourself which lineage they come from. Unless you think they are going to drag you back to the Enclave against your will."
Khat fixed his eyes on the glittering swirl of dust in a shaft of sunlight. "They might."
"I'm not giving advice, I'm only stating facts."
"Bad advice, bad facts, what's the difference?"
Sagai snorted, but said no more. He didn't have to. Khat had already thought of the reply that facts had to be faced whether they were bad or not.
They didn't really speak again until they reached the Fourth Tier, and found the turning into the ghostcallers' quarter that Sagai needed to take to reach the fortuneteller's house. "You think you're going to have any luck?" Khat asked his partner as they paused there.
"If I see the piece we want and hear whether he is willing to sell it or not, I'll count myself lucky. But I doubt it will go so far."
"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.
