Bones of the Past (Arhel)

by Holly Lisle

  “Then I’m going to kill the Keyu, too!”

  “You can’t. I already killed them all.”

  “I can if I want to. You just said you killed them all—but you didn’t really.”

  “Did so.”

  “Did not, sharsha.”

  “Did, too, tagnu.” Choufa glared at Runs Slow, and Runs Slow glared back.

  Runs Slow narrowed her eyes. She took a deep breath, then whispered, “That green stuff all over you looks ugly.”

  It was a telling blow. Choufa had nothing to come back with. She stared at the tattoos on her arms and hands and knew that every inch of the rest of her was covered with equally hideous designs, and her eyes filled with tears.

  She climbed down off her beast while hot tears blurred her vision and rolled off her cheeks and walked away from the monster room. She heard quick, light footsteps behind her. She kept on walking.

  A hand rested on her arm. “I’m sorry,” Runs Slow said. “I didn’t want to make you cry.”

  Choufa sniffled but didn’t say anything.

  Runs Slow said, “I think your decorations are pretty. I just wanted to make you angry.”

  Choufa bit her lip. “The Silk People hurt me. You know how they made these pictures?” She held out her arms and stared at them with loathing. “They stabbed me with sharp needles. It hurt so bad I wanted to die. They did it so I would be ugly—and I am.” In spite of herself, she started to cry again.

  “No. You’re still pretty. I think so. Kirtha thinks so.” Runs Slow turned and called back into the monster room with a rapid chaos of words Choufa didn’t understand. “I asked her didn’t she think you were pretty.”

  There was silence from the room.

  Kirtha was talking to the monsters the last time I saw her, Choufa thought. But was she in the room when I left?

  Both girls exchanged puzzled looks. “Was she in there when you came out?” Choufa asked.

  “I thought so. She was talking to the monsters.”

  “I thought so too.”

  They walked back into the biggest monster room.

  “Kirtha!” Runs Slow called.

  Choufa began looking down the long rows of statues. She couldn’t see the little girl. “Kirtha?” she yelled.

  “Kirtha? Where are you?”

  Both girls stood quietly, listening. Silence. They shook their heads. If we lose her, the peknu will kill us, Choufa thought. Or at least throw us out of the city. That would be the same thing.

  “We have to find her,” she told Runs Slow. “Terrible things will happen to us if we don’t.”

  Runs Slow nodded. “There is a door at the back of this room. We should check in there.”

  They ran through the door. The room behind was dusty, dimly lit by what appeared to Choufa to be circles of clear stone—and filled with stacks of dust-covered white tablets. There were no little footprints in the dust.

  “She hasn’t been in here.”

  “No,” Choufa said. “She hasn’t.”

  “Then where?”

  Standing at the door of the empty room, Choufa suddenly heard the low, heavy grating of stone against stone. The noise was coming from nearby.

  “The next room,” Runs Slow whispered. “Run!”

  Choufa could imagine terrible things—a statue fallen on the little girl, or stones broken loose from the wall, even the huge roof overhead collapsing. She didn’t trust all that stone above her. But when she and Runs Slow charged around the corner and into the next room, nothing was out of place.

  There were only six statues in the room, which was much smaller than the one they’d just left. The room was dimly lit by more of those clear stones in the ceiling. Even in the dim lighting, though, Choufa could see Kirtha wasn’t in there.

  “The sound…” Runs Slow said.

  “The next room?”

  “Maybe.”

  They ran to the third monster room, then the fourth. Kirtha was nowhere to be found.

  “We need to check the rest of this place,” Choufa whispered, “but we need to make sure the peknu don’t see us until Kirtha is with us again.”

  Runs Slow nodded vigorously. “We must find her fast.”

  Both girls took off at a run, racing down the aisles, darting quietly into side rooms if they spotted any of the peknu, looking into each cranny and hideaway provided by shelves. The building was huge, but by moving quickly and splitting up, they managed to cover it all. They met back at the first monster room, breathing hard and thoroughly scared.

  “Nowhere,” Choufa said.

  “I couldn’t find her, either.”

  “She has to be here. There is only one door, and that is clear at the front. Somebody would have seen her.”

  Runs Slow crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head. “If we couldn’t find her, she isn’t here.”

  “Well, she has to be somewhere!”

  “Yes. But not here.”

  Choufa buried her face in her hands. “The peknu will be so angry.”

  “They will probably make us leave,” Runs Slow offered. “They will probably make us be tagnu again.”

  Choufa looked up. “Think. She was talking to the monsters. Do you think one of them could have eaten her?”

  Both girls eyed the statues doubtfully.

  “Maybe,” Runs Slow said. “I hope not.”

  “Well, what about that noise we heard in the next room. Do you think that was the sound of a monster eating her?” The more Choufa thought about that possibility, the more likely it seemed. The monsters stared at her with their beady black eyes, and grinned wicked grins with their long, sharp teeth showing.

  “Maybe because she was all alone,” Runs Slow said. Her eyes were huge and round. “Maybe they haven’t tried to eat us, because we are together. But if she was alone…”

  “You’re right,” Choufa agreed. “Maybe we should tell the peknu.”

  “No. We have be sure first.”

  “But if the monsters ate her—”

  Runs Slow held out her hand. “We’ll look together.”

  Choufa took her hand, and trembling, both girls walked back into the second room. Knowing what she knew, Choufa realized that these monsters’ smiles were much more wicked. They looked hungrier than the monsters in the first room, and their eyes watched her more closely. She shivered—and only part of that shiver was because the room was cool. Her fingers instinctively tightened around Runs Slow’s.

  “How will we know which one ate her?” she asked.

  Runs Slow gave her an odd look. “We’ll check the teeth. We’ll be able to tell from the teeth.”

  Choufa looked at all those very sharp, very white teeth, and her heart pounded so hard she was sure it would burst from her chest. “I don’t want to,” she whispered.

  “I know. But we have to.”

  “I know.”

  They walked forward, slowly, taking tiny steps that got smaller the closer they got to the first monster.

  “Nothing on those teeth,” Choufa said.

  “We have to look closer than that.” Runs Slow climbed up on the base and stared at the teeth with her face right next to them. Choufa thought she was very brave—but crazy. “Nothing on those teeth but dust,” she reported, and jumped off the base.

  They crept to the next one.

  “You have to look this time,” Runs Slow said.

  Choufa nodded, and swallowed hard. She licked her lips, and very, very carefully, she climbed up onto the base. She stared at the monsters’ teeth. Like the last monster, this one had a mouth full of dust.

  “Not this one,” she said. Her voice came out as a funny croak.

  They worked their way to the back of the room, taking turns. Runs Slow checked the giant red-and-black monster, Choufa checked the tan one with big blotches of dark brown, Runs Slow checked the pale blue-green one with thin black stripes. That left the last monster for Choufa.

  It was bigger than the rest of them, she realized. It gave her a knowing
smile as she approached. She was almost certain she could see it breathing.

  Please don’t eat me, she thought. Oh, please, please, please don’t eat me. She was shaking so hard she was afraid she would fall off the base, but she climbed up anyway, ready to look at the monster’s teeth.

  The moment her feet touched the base, the room came alive with the grinding sound of stone against stone. Oh, no! Choufa thought. She shrieked, and fell off the pedestal, trying to back away.

  Runs Slow grabbed her shoulder as she scrabbled backward. “Stop,” she whispered. “Look at the wall!”

  A section of it was sliding up—a single band of greenstone in the striping of green and white stone that made up the room was crawling into the ceiling high over their heads. Behind the opening, darkness waited.

  “She’s in there,” Choufa said.

  “Should we go in, or should we tell the peknu?”

  The stone came to a stop high over their heads, held still for the briefest of instants, and then began to descend.

  “Let’s go,” Runs Slow said. “Hurry! Before it shuts!”

  They ran under the closing stone door, and it slid smoothly shut behind them. The darkness surrounded them.

  Then Choufa’s eyes began to adjust. “Look,” she whispered. “There’s light ahead.”

  They walked toward it down a gentle slope. The stone beneath their feet was smooth. They reached the light and found that it came from overhead, a single circle of the clear stone, carved to throw light in six triangles to all sides of them. They stared at it for a moment.

  “Pretty,” Choufa said. She thought she would like one of those lightstones to keep where she slept at night, so the darkness would never frighten her again.

  “Kirtha,” Runs Slow called softly. “Kirtha!”

  The little girl didn’t answer.

  They walked on, away from the light, farther down the slope. In a short while, they reached another spot of light and left it behind, then reached another. Choufa noticed that the ground beneath her feet no longer felt like stone. She bent down and touched it. It was soft and grainy. She scooped up a handful of the stuff and it ran through her fingers.

  “What are you doing?” Runs Slow asked.

  “Touch the ground. What is this?”

  Runs Slow crouched and picked up a handful. “Sand,” she whispered. “It is a kind of dirt that grows near the salty lakes.”

  “Are we near a salty lake?”

  “We might be.”

  Choufa noticed, when they reached the next light in the tunnel, that one small set of footprints preceded them, going in the same direction they travelled. The rest of the sand had been carefully swept smooth in huge semicircles. They followed the footprints.

  “Kirtha!” Choufa called. “Kirtha! Come here!”

  They listened to their cries echo away to nothing.

  Then they heard a faint, answering call. “Come see!” the high, piping voice shouted, and the echoes of that shout whispered past their ears and came back to them again.

  “YES!” Runs Slow shouted.

  “She’s not hurt!” Choufa yelled.

  They both broke into a run, keeping their eyes on the faint trail of tracks in the sand. They passed two more lighted areas, and then the path leveled out and turned abruptly to the right.

  They raced around the corner and came face to face with Kirtha, who sat cheerfully beside one of a multitude of large, round boulders that covered the floor of the cavern. She played in the sand under the sad eyes of yet another of the giant painted monsters.

  Choufa looked up. Tens and tens of tens of the sparkling lightstones dotted the roof of the cavern. They made the room bright as outside, and lit the rows of big white boulders. All the boulders were covered with the funny lines and dots the peknu got so excited about. Around the room, more monster statues sat, and the expressions on all their ugly faces were sad.

  There were two arching passageways out of the cavern besides the one the girls had come through. Choufa, no longer frightened by the monsters or worried about Kirtha, found that she was curious. She trotted across the warm sand to the first, which lay to the right side of the cavern. She peeked down it.

  At the end of a short, dark tunnel, she could see the lights of another cavern, full of more round boulders just like the ones behind her. She went to the other passageway.

  Like the first two, it held the carved boulders. But a brighter, yellower light emanated from around the corner and out of sight. Choufa called to the other two girls, “Come down this way! There’s something here!”

  Runs Slow hurried to her side. Kirtha dawdled behind, playing in the sand until Runs Slow called her in that other language. Then she came quickly enough. They walked down the passageway together, noticing that the light grew more and more brilliant the closer they got.

  It’s beautiful, Choufa thought. Light yellow as the taltiflowers that grow in the tops of trees—

  They reached the end of the short passageway and peeked to one side.

  There, caught up in a pillar of the yellow light, a man knelt on one knee, held his sword in one hand and raised a giant stone cup aloft with the other. He didn’t move—didn’t even seem to breathe.

  Choufa looked at his handsome face and fell in love. She thought she had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  * * *

  Thirk waited until everyone was busy doing sketches of the site or taking rubbings of the directory before he interrupted Roba. She tried not to show her annoyance, but she wished she could just tell him to go away.

  “I need to talk to you,” he told her, and his voice was urgent.

  She suspected she knew what he wanted to talk about She was going to have to deal with it sooner or later—later would have been much more pleasant but—

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere else to talk.”

  She led, and as her site, chose one of the giant, sunken circles that were a feature of the green room. She sat down on the edge of the circle and waited for Thirk to join her. We’re far enough from everyone else that they won’t hear what we say, she thought, but close enough that they can get here fast if he takes this worse than I’m expecting. She wasn’t sure how Thirk would take her news of her defection from the Delmuirie cause—she didn’t know him that well. Her caution seemed necessary.

  Thirk sat beside her, and got right to the heart of his concern. “Why didn’t you defend your paper—and why did you let them laugh at Delmuirie without saying anything?”

  How badly do I need my job? she wondered. It was a thought that had crossed her mind frequently—and as she sat in the midst of the most incredible archaeological find in the history of Arhel, she decided, Not very badly at all. As codiscoverer of the site—and with priority access to everything in it—her future was guaranteed. She would be able to claim a senior mage post in the historical department of any university in Arhel—including Daane. She smiled as she thought of returning to her alma mater in triumph.

  She decided she could afford to be brutally honest. She thought after an instant’s further reflection that she would probably even enjoy it.

  “Thirk,” she said, “you have to realize that I wasn’t making enough money as your assistant to keep up with rent on a single-room apartment in the Hout-Cadhay Quarter. I was eating badly once a day and hiding from my landlady. I couldn’t afford ghostlights. I was heating and cooking on dried dung. When you made any possibility of a raise contingent on my becoming a member of the Delmuirie Society, I had no choice but to become an enthusiastic supporter of Delmuirie.”

  “So you’re saying that you took advantage of my generosity by pretending to support the aims of the Delmuirie Society—”

  Roba cut him off. “I’m saying I did what I had to do to put food on my table. This isn’t a question of how much I do or don’t believe in the contributions of Edrouss Delmuirie to society. For the record, I doubt that there ever was an Edrouss Delmuirie, and I think the Delmuirie Society is composed mo
stly of lunatics, fanatics, and romantic fools dreaming big dreams.” Roba caught her breath, and clenched the muscles in her jaw and went on. “This is about my survival. I had two options. I could starve—or I could do something that I found repugnant. And while I had quite a few options in the repugnant category, yours was the one that didn’t have acquiring a social disease as a probable outcome.”

  She locked her fingers together and glared at Thirk. “So I joined your stupid society, and when you asked me for a theory for presentation, I gave you a theory.”

  Thirk’s face was a mask. He nodded once, curtly. “Tell me how you came up with your theory, won’t you?”

  “Kirgen and I dug out every old historical myth we could find that dealt with Edrouss Delmuirie. We scrounged out every piece of tripe we could find in Faulea’s library, then went over to the Daane library and pulled out records so ancient we had to scrape the dust off them with a knife blade—we took legends from every discredited historian Ariss ever produced. We didn’t hide our sources—you saw them. I gave you plenty of time to check them.”

  He nodded and his mouth thinned to a grim line. “So you intended your theory to make fools of the Society members.”

  “I intended it to keep my job for me. Which,” she added with a snarl, “I don’t need anymore.”

  “Of course.” Thirk Huddsonne looked down at his hands and sat motionless for a moment. Finally he looked up. “You don’t have your job anymore. That can only be what you expected. However, you are quite correct, I’m sure, in assuming you will have more offers than you could possibly accept. Your association with this find will almost certainly guarantee that—in spite of the references you’ll get from me. They won’t be good,” he said softly, “but I’m not foolish enough to think that will make any difference.

  “You’ve put me in a bad position, Roba.” Thirk played absently with the fringe of his belt. “I’m left having to find Edrouss Delmuirie’s final resting place by myself. I thought I had someone who would help me.” He looked at her sadly and slowly shook his head.