City of Bones

by Martha Wells

  Elen stopped suddenly, whispering, "There's somebody up there." She was looking up at the roof of the fortune-teller's house, three stories above the court and lost in shadow.

  "Where?"

  "Up on the roof. Someone crouching over."

  That he hadn't expected. Khat ducked inside the empty house that leaned against the back wall of the fortune-teller's home. Something fled across the floor, skittering, at their approach-more confirmation the place was deserted. It was nearly blind dark except for the moonlight coming through the windows, but the house was so small it scarcely mattered, just two boxlike rooms one atop the other. Khat took the narrow, crumbling steps three at a time, Elen scrambling after him.

  The trapdoor to the roof was missing, and Khat peeked out cautiously before risking more of his head. The roof was a flat landscape, featureless in the moonlight. Radu's house towered about six feet above it, the smaller dwelling swaying drunkenly into the larger.

  Khat drew himself up onto the roof, keeping to a crouch. The other rooftops made an angular sea around them, cut through by the pitch-dark chasms of alleys, empty and silent until it reached the lighted boundaries of the more ordinary quarters. Elen climbed out of the trapdoor and sat on the edge, fishing under her robes. Before he could ask, she pulled out a painrod and attached it to the loop at her belt, murmuring, "Just in case."

  Khat stood, caught the edge of the higher roof, and pulled himself up onto it. Radu's house had four wind towers and several piles of broken brick rubble decorating the open expanse of its flat roof: more than adequate cover for any number of intruders. He waited for Elen to find toeholds in the wall below, watching carefully for movement. Nothing stirred, but remembering that her Warder eyes were considerably better in the dark than his, he didn't find himself much inclined to doubt her.

  Elen hauled herself up next to him, and he asked her in a low whisper, "See anything?"

  She shook her head.

  He gestured for her to circle around to the left, and took the right side himself, drawing his knife. If these were local thieves who had unluckily decided to turn Radu's house tonight, they would far rather run like hell than risk confrontation. At least, when Khat had turned houses on the Third Tier, that's what he had always done. He reached the first wind tower and found no one crouching behind it, moved silently on to the next.

  If they were thieves.

  Just before he reached the second wind tower something exploded from behind it. He had half expected that whoever it was would try to rush Elen, who was obviously the smaller opponent, and be unpleasantly surprised by a painrod in the hands of a trained in-fighter and trapped until Khat could get to them across the roof. It was the best tactic someone in this situation could adopt, but this person obviously cared nothing for tactics.

  He had time for one knife thrust, but the point hit his attacker's collarbone, and the weapon was jolted out of his hand. Suddenly he was locked in a struggle with someone his height and almost too quick. Then one of his feet was hooked out from under him, and he was on his back on the warm stone of the roof, trying to keep a pain-rod away from his head. The weight on top of him was heavy, but definitely female. He was holding her forearm, trying to keep her from bringing it down on his throat, and the texture of her skin was like silk over solid rock. He twisted her wrist, and she dropped the painrod but smashed her elbow down on his chin with enough force to shock him into losing his grip.

  She surged to her feet, hood torn away, and the dim moonlight showed him a profile and glittered off loose, colorless hair. I know who this is, he thought, confused. He couldn't see if she was bleeding from the knife wound or not. It hadn't seemed to slow her down at all. Then two other dark figures bolted from cover, leaping down to the next roof, and as she grabbed up her painrod and turned to follow them he kicked her in the back of the knee, knocking her flat.

  She hit the roof hard, but rolled to her feet again as if the fall and the blow had been negligible.

  She hesitated, but as he struggled to stand she bolted after her companions, easily making the leap to the roof below.

  Elen was beside him suddenly. The fight had only taken moments. "Did you see who that was? Shiskan son Karadon. We saw her at the palace. It means Constans is here."

  "Was here. I don't know if you noticed, but they were in a hurry to leave." Khat rubbed his sore jaw, remembering the Judge's daughter who was Constans's disciple, looking up as the Heir spoke her name from a window that was obviously too far away for the sound to carry. He hadn't seen her very clearly tonight either, but that had little effect on his reaction to her.

  He got to his feet, and after a moment's search found his knife where it had fallen and thoughtfully ran his fingers along the blade's flat. They came away darkened by Shiskan son Karadon's blood. He had gotten her, all right, but she had simply ignored it, the way Constans had ignored the blow from Elen's painrod in the Waste.

  "They must have followed us the first time we came here." Elen pounded her knee with her fist in frustration. "If they found out where Radu sold the relic ..."

  "Can't hurt to look, anyway." Maybe it would keep his mind off what it would be like to make love with the woman who had just tried to kill him. "Come on."

  Set into the roof was a light copper hatch reinforced by iron bars at some point in its past. This hadn't helped it when the lock had been smashed off.

  Inside, a narrow flight of steps led down to a small shaft with two doorways, one that opened into a disused pantry and the other curtained with heavy cotton. Khat lifted the curtain and saw it led directly into Radu's fortune-telling room. This was the door from which the impressive servant had watched them this afternoon.

  Most of the candles had guttered, and the clockwork that drove the fans had wound down, making the large chamber silent, still, and dark as a cave. Something like a robed body lay on the alabaster table; a step forward and Khat saw that it was actually the cover of the oracle's cage.

  He looked up and saw the cage was empty, its door torn open and hanging on broken hinges. He hesitated, listening hard, but the room felt empty. There was no noise, no sign of life from Radu or his servants, but Khat hadn't expected any after a visit from Constans or one of his minions. The entire house felt empty.

  But no use taking chances. "Elen." He pointed up at the cage. "Be careful."

  She glanced up at the empty cage and made a face. "Oh, how lovely. But if I was that thing I'd run right out of here and keep running until I got to the edge of the tier." She looked around the room, biting her lip thoughtfully. "He had some drawers, or compartments or something, under that table."

  "You check those, and I'll do the rest of the rooms down here."

  There seemed to be nothing on the ground floor. No sign of the impressive servant, though Khat found the cubby where he probably slept, off the room where the water, oil, and grain were stored. The open court in the center was bare of anything except an unadorned fountain that served the pantry and a domed bread oven. The windows of the upstairs rooms that looked down into it were bricked up to hamper thieves; only sensible in this half-deserted quarter. If Radu kept anything valuable, it would be upstairs.

  Khat stopped to scoop a handful of water from the fountain for a drink. At least the bricked-up windows couldn't stare down at him accusingly. Radu's dead in this house somewhere, he thought. The odd thing was that there was no reason he and Elen shouldn't be dead up on the roof now. I should have made a better deal with Riathen. Relic dealing wasn't the safest business in the world, but it wasn't normally this dangerous, either.

  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-tellin
g," 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."