City of Bones

by Martha Wells

  He was the one the Trade Inspectors would be after, the one whose silence Riathen would desire the most. The Master Warder had seen Sagai only once, at Arad-edelk's quarters, and if Sagai was out of the city he would discount him. Khat was the one he would want to find, and if the Trade Inspectors might hesitate to leave the city, the Warders would not.

  The docks grew gradually more crowded with crewmen, passengers, and street vendors all shouting or trying to get somewhere, with carters unloading goods on the overhead ramps from the warehouses or hauling them into the streets for the long journey up the tiers, while mad beggars gabbled pleas or abuse at everyone. Finally the sun broke over the city, and the shadows fled through the crumbling levels of multistoried warehouses down to the stone piers and finally past the caravan wagons as they rolled out onto the flat expanse of the trade road. It was a relief, really; now Khat had only himself to worry about.

  The sun glinted off the marble and polished iron of the colossus and warmed the dirty paving of the steep, narrow walkways below, and Khat felt his fever returning. So everyone's right, you're sick, he told himself. There was always some illness sweeping the lower tiers, though none had ever affected him before. It was bound to pass off soon enough.

  It was pure luck he saw Ris. The gateway behind the colossus was the main entrance to this section of the dock area, and he saw the boy dodge through the crowd and fight his way to the edge of the street, where he leapt to the top of the stone pediment and shielded his eyes to scan the levels below. Khat swore, and hopped down from the statue's base. Darkness hovered at the edges of his vision, and he had to steady himself before he could cross the street and drag Ris down off the pediment.

  Bustling people jostled them, and Khat pulled the boy to a clear space before he shook him and said, "I told you not to come to the Eighth Tier alone. I haven't been gone a quarter day yet and you're already down here?"

  "You didn't leave," Ris protested, nonplussed.

  "That's not the point."

  "But it was important. An Academia scholar came looking for you. We didn't tell him anything, but he said his name was Arad-something and he gave me a whole one-day token-look, here, see?" Ris felt obliged to prove this statement, digging through his grubby robe until he produced the token. "To find you and tell you he had to see you and Sagai right away, it was very important, and to come to the Academia as soon as you could."

  Khat looked off across the docks, distracted. Someone had discovered the copy of the text, maybe? It could hardly be anything too bad, or Arad wouldn't have been free to search for him. A trap, maybe? "What did he look like?"

  "This tall." Ris held out a hand to indicate an average-sized lower-tier city dweller. "Dark skin, dark eyes, umm ..."

  "Never mind." That described Arad, as well as most of the other inhabitants of Charisat. "Don't tell anyone you saw me, all right? And go home."

  Khat stepped back into the crowd, and didn't answer when Ris called after him, "Does this mean you're not leaving?"

  The streets up through the tiers had never been so long. The ramps up to the gates had never been so steep. Khat managed to make it past the Seventh Tier to the relative safety of the Sixth without looking too much like someone who was ripe to be murdered. He thought of stopping to rest there in familiar territory, but he didn't want to risk meeting anyone else he knew. Seeing Ris at the docks had been bad enough. He had tried to live on the fringes of the Enclave for a time, after leaving his uncle's guardianship. That had taught him to make clean breaks, if nothing else.

  The fever had reached the dangerous point where he wasn't sweating anymore, and his muscles ached as if he had had a thorough beating from an expert at the trade. It made the pain from the cuts on his back seem like a negligible twinge. He was beginning to admit that he knew what caused it.

  Hiding the winged relic in his pouch had been a bad idea. If he hadn't done it, he would still be in the Trade Inspectors' prison, but that didn't change what was happening now. People had died this way, most often when something went wrong with the embryo implanted in their pouch and the baby died, and its death poisoned them before they realized what had happened. Kris were just as prone to that kind of danger as the city people, with their far more difficult method of birth.

  Later Khat remembered reaching the Academia and arguing with the gate vigil about getting in. He had the feeling the man had already been ordered to admit him, and that he was only delaying to puff up his own importance. The gate was in full sun at this time of day, and Khat was too stubborn to show off his weakness by leaning against the wall or simply sitting down in the street. So when he finally collapsed, it was just inside the gate on the hot flagstones of the entrance court.

  He came to in a hazy way when he was being carried into the shade of the gatehouse's porch. The old scholar who had let them in the first time they came to see Arad and who could never keep his veil in place was leaning over him, saying, "Bring water, quickly. Soak a cloth in it."

  They had treated it like it was heat sickness, which had probably saved his life. He was surprised they bothered. But it took a certain character to devote your life to collecting old knowledge and searching for new; evidently having that character made it difficult to stand idly by while a life expired on your doorstep.

  "This is that krismen the Trade Inspectors came for," someone else said. "Fetch Master Ecazar. He wanted to know when he came back."

  No, don't do that, Khat thought. He tried to sit up then, and the inside of his head quietly exploded.

  When he opened his eyes again he was in a dark room, lit only by lamplight from the passage outside, all its shadows at unfamiliar angles. It smelled faintly of ink and old paper, and more strongly of someone who had been terribly ill recently. His throat felt raw and dry, though his body remembered being given water only a few moments ago. He lay on something so soft it was difficult to move, tangled up in a heavy blanket. He was shivering from a chill that seemed to come from within, unabated by the hot still air in the room. It had made him dream confusedly of ghosts; that's what had woken him.

  Before that he had been dreaming of the Waste and the pirates, of being stretched spread-eagle on the exposed stone of the top level while the heat of it burned into his back and somebody's knife burned a line down his thigh. That was after they had gotten tired of the game of let-him-escape-then-catch-him-again, after the others were dead. Worse dreams had mixed what they had done to him with the vivid images his imagination constructed of what they had done to the others, creating a false memory of seeing the things that in reality he had only been able to hear in the distance. Footsteps were approaching down the passage, but he was drifting off again.

  There was another gap of missing time, then suddenly the shadows of three men fell across the band of yellow light in the passage. An unfamiliar voice said, "He has any number of recent wounds, but none appear infected. The tincture of poppies should bring down the fever, but it isn't having any effect. All I can think of is increasing the dosage."

  "There is no evidence poppy decreases fever," Arad said, sounding harassed. "As far as I can see, all it does is slow the heart and put the patient into a drugged stupor."

  "He is krismen. That's why it isn't working on him. If you would confine yourself to your area of study and let me practice mine-"

  "Don't be idiots." Ecazar's dry voice, cutting through the quarrel like a sharp knife. "It's obvious it is no simple fever, and even you, Physician, must admit that you've never treated a kris before. Meddling with tinctures is only going to make it worse. He will either get over it himself or die."

  Blunt but probably true. Yes, the Ancient Mages had wrought well. Remnants that still towered over the Waste, roads that cut through it, and kris to live in it. The Waste couldn't poison him, and he couldn't get their dirty little city diseases, either. But he could poison himself.

  It was some time later that Khat opened his eyes again. He lay on his side, on a pad of heavy cotton batting, much thicker than
anything he normally slept on. A few feet away was a clay jar, water beading on its rounded sides. It looked inviting, and he considered sitting up. Maybe later, he thought after a moment. He managed to lift his head enough to look around, and saw this was a bare room, swept clean, and the light coming through the vents high in the wall was the early morning sun. There were some chests in the corner, the expensive kind used to store books. The doorway opened into a passage, unbarred even with so much as a curtain. That was reassuring. But I'm supposed to be dying, he remembered. He didn't feel like going anywhere, but he didn't feel like dying, either.

  Footsteps in the passage again. This time he stayed awake long enough to see who it was. An old woman, with a plain face above a plain gray kaftan, peered at him through the doorway, then turned back to call out to someone, "He's awake again."

  Khat made an effort to push himself up, and everything faded out.

  The next time he woke he did sit up, ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair, and knew this time he really was awake. It was the same room, and still morning. Stiff and sore, Khat stretched carefully. He was weak but not light-headed, and not so utterly drained of strength as he had been on his last waking. The fever was blessedly gone. He laid a hand on his pouch, wondering if he had been lucky or if he really had done something permanent to himself. Everything felt all right, and still seemed to work, though when he looked there was a faint trace of redness around the pouch lip.

  Noticing that he wore a light cotton robe and nothing else, Khat struggled out of the pallet and found his clothes and boots atop one of the book chests. Even his knife was there.

  Dressing, he discovered the cuts on his back had scabbed over. He rubbed his chin and realized he had more than one day's growth of beard. There had been more than one morning, at least.

  Arad-edelk appeared in the doorway as he pulled his shirt over his head, saying, "At last. We didn't think you would ever wake."

  "How long has it been?"

  "You were unconscious three full days. This is the morning of the fourth day since you collapsed," Arad said, watching him worriedly.

  "Three days?" Khat stopped to stare at him.

  "It was a terrible fever. You're lucky to be alive at all," Arad told him. He didn't look too well either. He wasn't wearing a veil, and his face was tired and worn and his eyes were red, as if he had spent the past few nights working by lamplight. "Where is Sagai? I felt sure he would come to look for you, even if he didn't get my messages."

  "He took his family and left the city." Khat tucked his knife through his belt in back and let his shirt hide it. Someone had even cleaned his clothes. At least he had picked a good place to collapse. He supposed Arad had somehow talked Ecazar out of turning him back over to the Trade Inspectors, though he thought he remembered Ecazar being here at one point... He also remembered why he had been on his way to the Academia in the first place. "Why did you send for me?" he asked.

  The scholar's expression turned grim. He said, "Are you sure you're well enough to hear it?"

  "I'm not well enough to stand the suspense. Just tell me."

  "It's something in the Survivor text. The most incredible things ... Come out here."

  Khat followed Arad down the passage to his sunlit workroom, where the Ancient mural still lay incomplete in the corner. The rest of the floor was covered with stacks of paper and unfolded journals. Arad had been hard at work on something.

  The scholar took up the Survivor text, searching through the fanfolded pages, as Khat eased himself down to the floor. Arad said, "After Sagai showed me the translation method he was taught, the work went much faster."

  "You finished it?" Khat asked, surprised. Reading Ancient Script was a painstaking process.

  Arad met his eyes, his face serious. "When I began to understand what I was reading, I had no difficulty staying up through the nights." He found the little copper clip that marked his place, and set it aside. "Listen. 'The Inhabitants of the West were driven back through the doors, but many were left behind. They are beings of light and silence, but deadly. Their voices are music. Once in our world they ride the winds at night, but their embrace is death.' The intonation marker for the type of death means to die from cold, if that's possible. It's talking about air spirits, don't you see? And the creatures we call ghosts. 'Most died in the fire, but some learned to live within it...' It goes on like that."

  Arad searched for another place in the book, and Khat protested, "Wait. Finish that part." He wanted to rip the text away from Arad, but he was afraid to tear the delicate pages.

  "That's not important."

  "Not important?"

  "Not compared to this." He removed another copper clip and read, " 'The Inhabitants of the West came as friends, speaking soft words to all those who would hear'-or know, something like that, it's not clear-'They brought the ...' Oh, it's complicated, but what it seems to be saying is that the Inhabitants taught the Mages all sorts of new magics, including a type of arcane engine that seems to be what we call a painrod. Doesn't that make a strange kind of sense? The painrods aren't like anything else the Ancients left behind."

  "Arad, we'll discuss it later. Keep reading."

  The scholar turned more pages, then read, " 'The Inhabitants swarmed into our air from the Doors to the West. Driving them back caused the skies to turn dark, the sea to steam and empty, and burning rock rose up from the seabed and drained the water. Strange creatures followed in the wake of the Inhabitants, even as the doors closed, plagues of creatures that burrowed in the blasted earth Arad's voice trailed off. He shook his head and fumbled for another page. " 'They'-the Mages-'made the'-this word might be translated as 'arcane engine,' but from the context I'm going to recommend 'transcendental device.' I think it's more exact. 'To close the Western Doors of the sky, to prison the Inhabitants of the West in that dead land between the sky and the stars'-that's why I thought it said the Inhabitants of the West came from the land of the dead, but once I applied the alternate method of reading the intonation markers, the meaning became clear." Arad seemed torn between excitement and horrified doubt. "I know it's hard to believe. What's been going through my mind since I found these passages ..."

  "It can't be true." For some reason Khat didn't want it to be true. He felt cold, as if his fever had come back, and it was making the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He had been comfortable with the mystery of the Ancients. Nibbling away at its edges, uncovering pieces of it one tiny bit at a time, had been his life's work. Having so much of the answer dumped in his lap at once was frightening. It felt as if supposedly solid ground was suddenly shifting under his feet. "Are you sure the book's not just telling some kind of story?"

  "I thought that too," Arad assured him. "I thought it was a scribe making up some tale to explain the purpose of the Remnants and the other things the Ancients made that most of the Survivors didn't understand. But that engraving that shows the three relics, so carefully done, the block, the crystal-inlaid plaque, and the one with the winged figure-we know they exist, we've seen them!"

  "It was wrong about the block. It said it was four feet long, and the one we found was only three." Khat knew he was being an idiot. Scribes made more errors with numbers than anything else.

  "Possibly an error in transcription," Arad said gently, humoring him. "We know at least two copies of the book were made."

  Khat still wanted to deny it. Ghosts were ghosts, and air spirits were just a mindless product of the Waste, like spidermites and creeping devil. But there was the one that had come to Radu's house, and stalked them in the Academia... "Did you tell Elen about this?"

  "I've sent messengers every day, but they were all turned away at the gate. I've been going mad!" Arad shook the book in frustration. "She thought the secrets in this book would explain how to construct arcane engines, so the Warders could further their understanding of the Ancients' magic. It isn't that at all."

  "Then what is it?"

  Arad set the book down, folding the tatt
ered pages back carefully.

  "What it seems to say is that the Inhabitants of the West had corrupted some few of the Mages before they were driven back. That the surviving Mages who constructed the Remnants and the 'transcendental device' wanted to make it extremely difficult to ... to dismantle, or to make the device stop working. From what I can ascertain, the device must still exist somewhere, perhaps hidden deep in the earth or... or even up in the sky, for all I know, but still working, still holding the Inhabitants back in their dead land, wherever it is. The Remnants are the key to it. The Mages raised many of them at a great cost to their power and at a great cost in the lives of the workers who did the building. They built one Remnant for each Western Door, it's clear on that, at least."

  "So there's a Door to the West near each Remnant?" Khat asked, thinking, Hell below, that means there's one somewhere around the Tersalten Flat Remnant. That was less than a day's travel from Charisat.

  "I believe so. Or there was, at any rate. The text says that many of the workers were killed by the heat and the foul airs from the living Waste rock during the building, but in the end, they were successful. Only one Remnant could be used to halt the device, and anyone trying to do so would not only have to know which Remnant, but what to do to it once it was found. Oh, there's some process that has to be gone through, and the three relics seem essential to it. I haven't had the chance to translate that section yet. It's most obscure ..."

  Khat was silent, trying to take it in. He thought of the Tersalten Flat Remnant's antechamber, with all those shapes cut into the walls, just like all the other Remnants. Such a strange thing for the Ancients to do. So deliberately confusing. But if it was part of an arcane engine unlike anything ever discovered before, unlike even the hideously complicated device that had once lived in the deepest level of the Enclave ...

  At the time Khat had thought that they might find a plaque to fit every shape in the antechamber wall and still not have all the pieces of the arcane engine, and he had been wrong. You only needed one plaque, to slide into one shape, in one Remnant. Once you looked at it that way, he could see where the block was meant to be placed too. No telling where the little winged relic went, not yet. But it might become apparent once the other two had been put into place, and if one studied the process Arad spoke of. Khat said, "They should have made it impossible to stop; they should have destroyed those three relics, or never made them. But, you know, they were always so careful. You can't trap yourself inside a Remnant, even if you break the plug that works the door. They must have thought that one day, someone might need to stop the engine. So they left a way to do it."