by Martha Wells
"If you think I'll let you go so easily, you're much mistaken," Lushan was saying. "If you don't continue with your part of our arrangement, I'll have a conversation with a certain Trade Inspector I know who will-"
"And when he hears about your part of our arrangement?" Lushan hated to be interrupted, which was why Khat did it so often.
"Foolish boy, why should he believe you?" Lushan's smile was malice itself.
"He doesn't have to believe me. But he'll have to believe the Patrician."
"Patrician?"
"The one I'm working for now." The lie grew, blossomed. "He's inherited a collection of Ancient relics, and I'm valuing it for him." When Khat was younger, he had found it difficult to get used to the idea that he could lie to city dwellers while looking straight at them, and the shifting color of his eyes would tell them nothing. Now he didn't have that problem. "I told him you wanted me to work for you, but he said-"
"What?" Lushan's voice grated.
"That I wouldn't have the time. I'd hate to have to tell him different. You know how they are."
Lushan slammed the cup down on the table, cracking it and spilling wine onto the matting. The servant girl winced. "You will tell him nothing, you bastard kris."
There was no point in staying any longer. Khat stepped over to the flimsy door in the copper screen. "I'll send someone with the coin. It may be a few days. I hope you don't need it to pay your bill here." The second cup in the set came flying at him, and he ducked out the door.
A short flight of steps led up to the brass-railed gallery running above the private balconies. The great dome curved up overhead. Below, the milling crowd was applauding the fakir, who had now climbed to the top of his magically stiffened rope and was standing on his head, supporting himself with one finger on the frayed end. Khat ran along the gallery, ignoring outcries as he was spotted by wealthy patrons in the other balconies below. He reached the first vent, which was long and only a few feet wide, starting about eight feet up the wall and ending just before the base of the dome. Khat jumped and caught the bottom of the sill, pulling himself up onto it.
The night air was wonderfully fresh after the heat inside the theater. The flat roof spread out below him, and the rise of the Third Tier was behind him, blocked by the height and breadth of the dome. There was a shout behind him, and he scrambled out of the vent and landed down on the slate-flagged roof.
He crossed the wide expanse, surefooted on the slick surface, the warm wind pulling at his clothes and hair. No one came after him. Lushan would not want to draw attention to himself by sending his vigils, and the theater owners would only care about getting the intruder off the gallery and away from the private balconies; they wouldn't be much concerned with how he left, as long as he did.
Khat reached the waist-high wall formed by the uppermost portion of the theater's pediment and leaned on it, enjoying a unique view of the street below, and thought, I'm glad that's done. He had been an idiot to get involved with Lushan in the first place, which Sagai and the others would certainly point out to him if they knew. But not knowing was the only protection for them, if Khat had ever been caught stealing relics from the upper tiers.
It only remained to see if the mysterious Patrician lived up to his part of the bargain. Or if I live through it, Khat thought.
There was an agitated stirring in the massed folk near the theater's steps, and after a moment Khat spotted the cause. Three Warders moved up the street below, cutting a path through the crowd, their brilliant white robes and veiling reflecting the flickering lamplight and drawing attention amid the bright colors of the rich and muted tones of the poor. After Lushan, maybe, with an Imperial order of execution, Khat thought hopefully, but the trio passed the steps of the Odeon without pausing.
Warders were the special servants of Charisat's Elector, protecting him from poisons and assassins and destroying his enemies in the other Fringe Cities. Rumor said that if someone wanted to kill the Elector, the Warders could pick the thought right out of his head. They could cloud an onlooker's eyes to hide themselves even when in plain sight, and make ordinary people see things that weren't there. Khat was not entirely sure he believed everything that was said about them, but he considered them another one of Charisat's less endearing oddities.
Before the three Warders on the street below could pass out of sight and out of mind, one of them suddenly broke away from his companions.
Startled, Khat watched the rogue Warder rush wildly across the street and seize a man out of the crowd. The Warder shook the unfortunate despite his struggles and screamed incoherently into his shocked face. The people in the street milled in confusion, half trying to escape, half trying to get closer. The Warder dragged his victim toward the colonnade, slamming him up against a pillar, his head striking the stone with a sharp crack that made Khat wince in sympathy.
The other two Warders reached the rogue one and wrestled him away from his captive, who slid limply to the pavement. Then the mad Warder tore himself free, sending one of his companions staggering.
He seemed to hesitate, standing as if paralyzed, staring down at the man who lay helpless in the street while the other Warder tried ineffectually to pull him away and the crowd stirred and muttered in fear. Then a white light suffused the ground under the limp form, and the unconscious man's clothes were in flames.
Khat felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as screams echoed up from the street. The bystanders started back in panic, and the other Warders managed to seize the mad one again. They hauled him away despite his struggles this time, and several figures leapt forward to smother the flames with their robes. Finally they were able to lift the body and carry it out of the street.
For years, Khat had heard rumors of incidents like this, but this was the first he had actually witnessed. Everyone knew the Ancients' magic made people as mad as sun-poisoned beggars, but the Warders practiced it despite the inherent danger. The street fortune-tellers, ghostcallers, fakirs, and kris shamen used only natural magics, simples and healing and divination, and even they sometimes went too far and ruined themselves; the older powers that Warders played with were far more deadly. Khat shook his head grimly and looked toward the horizon and the black still sea of the Fringe rock in the distance. And they think the Waste is dangerous.
Chapter Two
Khat leaned back against the low rail of the steamwagon's platform and watched the world rattle past. From horizon to horizon the Waste stretched forever, the flowing waves of tan, gold, and black rock glowing like gilded metal under the oppressive heat of the late morning sun. The weirdly shaped boulders were a sea frozen in stone that grew steadily higher as the wagon trundled along. Before they reached the Remnant the rock of the True Waste would be several times the wagon's height, riddled with chambers and canyons and tunnels and made dangerous by the predators that lived in the soft sand beneath. It was no wonder the people of the Fringe Cities thought of the Waste as a living entity, bent on eating away the last of the habitable land as it had conquered the Ancients.
Here and there the spiny tops of jumtrees were visible, waving gently in the hot wind. Their tapering trunks stretched up almost sixty feet out of the gorges or sinkholes, wherever there was a mid-level sand patch deep enough to hold their roots. They bristled with sharp thorny twigs, but the pulp inside the trunk retained large amounts of water, if you knew to cut your way in to it.
The Ancient road beneath the wagon was as straight as a carpenter's plane, cut from smooth black stone that vanished beneath the rougher rock lining the edges. The heavy iron wheels of steamwagons were already wearing ruts in it as the lighter wooden windwagons and those driven by human labor had not; soon this and the other old roads would be ruined for any kind of travel. Then what will the silly bastards do? Khat thought. The roads and the Remnants had been the last true works of the Ancients, completed after the seas had drained away and lakes of fire and molten rock had still dotted the Waste. There were scarcely any Ancients about now to
rebuild trade roads destroyed by the Empire's own folly.
Charisat had made itself the ruling city of the Fringe by its position on the hub of twenty-seven of those Ancient trade roads, the only safe routes of travel through the Fringe of the Waste. When the other cities didn't comply with Imperial dictates, Charisat simply blocked the Last Sea grain caravans from their trade roads. Its influence didn't extend into the Low Desert, where the Ilacre Cities and other smaller dominions held sway, but the only city in the Fringe that hadn't fallen into line was Kenniliar. Kenniliar Free City had its own trade route to the Last Sea and had fought to keep it open, holding out from sheer stubbornness until Charisat had given way.
Charisat was visible in the receding distance now as a mammoth pile of rock, a massive crag out of which a city was carved, a great mass rising in eight concentric tiers to the topmost pinnacle that was the Elector's palace. Dark with black rock and mud brick on the lower levels, Charisat grew lighter as it grew taller, until the First Tier glowed white under the brilliant sun with limestone and marble. The rocky outcrops scattered nearby hid mine shafts that fed the independent forges and the huge metal works on the Seventh Tier which produced everything from copper beads to steam wagons. It might have been a city of the dead now; they were too far out to see the activity around the wagon docks at this side of the base, and the pall of coal smoke was torn away by the hot constant wind before it could dull the sky.
The stocky vigil with the red headcloth had come for Khat that morning as the krismen was sitting on the edge of the basin in the court watching the keeper count yesterday's water payment. The man was still made up as a wagon dockworker-stained shirt, battered leather leggings, and the incongruous air gun slung over one shoulder.
"The tokens," Khat had said, looking up at him.
Netta's youngest child wobbled unsteadily out of the doorway, bread and grain paste still smeared on his face, and tried to climb into Khat's lap.
The vigil smiled down at him, a false expression of good comradeship. "He says he'll pay you after."
The widow herself appeared in the doorway, saw-the strange man, and reached instinctively for the stout club she always kept near to hand. Khat said, "It's all right, Netta." He lifted the squirming child out of his lap and nudged him back toward the doorway.
Netta withdrew, shooing the boy ahead of her and glaring bale-fully back at the vigil. Netta wasn't really a widow, though she wore the title like a badge of honor; her husband had left the city shortly before her second child was born. There was some bizarre Charisat prejudice against widows, but it was apparently nothing compared to the prejudice against women whose formal husbands abandoned them. This had made Netta almost as wary of strangers as Khat was.
To the vigil Khat said, "No, he would have sent at least half of it with you." How else, he thought, can I be tricked into a false sense of security? He also wondered who the man meant by "he," Seul or the Patrician. It was difficult to tell who was running things.
The vigil's face turned cold. "Are you calling me a liar?"
"No," Khat said, waited a beat, then added, "I just want the tokens he gave you for me."
The old fountain keeper snickered. Sagai came out and leaned in the doorway, eyeing the impasse, and said, "Just as well. Now you don't have to waste the time. There's business aplenty for us in the Arcade."
The vigil's face didn't change, but Khat could almost see the wheels turning like the works of a glass-cased clock. Finally the man said, "You mean the trade tokens." He burrowed in a pocket, came up with a handful of trade tokens, and counted them out, one by one, into Khat's outstretched palm. There were six ten-day tokens, each worth ten days of artisan's labor, the equivalent of half the amount of Imperial minted gold Seul had promised.
The vigil's face bore no ill feeling, and Khat decided, This one's dangerous. Khat had handed half the tokens to the fountain keeper, who counted them twice and marked them off on his tally stick. He stood to give the rest to Sagai, saying, "Find me something pretty in the Arcade."
And Sagai, never one to drop a moral lesson, had said, "It will certainly buy you a pretty funeral."
Now the sun burned into the Waste, and Khat shifted, trying for a more comfortable position, then gave it up as useless effort. The metal of the steamwagon's platform was hot, from the sun and from the boiler only a few feet away inside the housing, and the warmth was creeping unpleasantly up through the folded robe he was using as a seat cushion and the thinner fabric of his pants. He could even feel it through his boot leather. The action of the steam-driven pistons made the iron wagon shake like the world's end, and the hiss and rattle of the boiler was deafening.
The wagon was high, about twenty feet off the ground, with a platform in front for passengers and cargo, and a smaller elevated platform behind where the carter who worked the steering perched. The housing covered the boiler and the coal bin and the pistons which turned the wheels, and the aged stoker who kept the whole cumbersome thing moving. Khat would have much preferred a windwagon, which, while shaky and erratic, at least was fairly quiet.
His employer couldn't be enjoying the journey either. The heat had already driven the Patrician up onto a precarious perch on the railing. He wore faded brown robes that made him look like a poor merchant, but even in this heat he still kept his gauze veil. Khat had his sleeves rolled up; he wouldn't need the protection of his own robe until the sun was at its height.
As Khat was thoughtfully eyeing him, the Patrician's outer mantle slipped aside, and the krismen saw he was wearing a weapon. For a moment Khat thought the man had a knife in an ornate metal sheath of the kind carried by travelers from the Ilacre Cities. Then he saw it for what it was.
It was all he could do to keep his expression neutral and drag his eyes back to the road and the rocky landscape. The Patrician casually twitched his robe back up to cover the weapon. It was impossible to guess if he was aware of Khat's reaction.
The man was carrying a painrod, an Ancient relic housing what scholars believed to be a tiny arcane engine. It was a foot-long metal tube with an odd rounded lump on the end, its surface covered with etched designs or studded with semiprecious stones. The weapon was not common; most citizens of the lower tiers would have taken it for a fancy club, if they noticed it at all. As an experienced relic dealer, Khat knew better.
Painrods were not sold on the open market. The rare relics could only be legally owned by Warders. He might be a less-than-legal collector, Khat told himself. He knew from personal experience that Patricians could get anything they wanted, in or out of Imperial law. But the man was probably a Warder. Fine. Here I am with a Patrician wizard who earns his water doing dirty business for the Elector, and who could go mad any moment and try to kill everyone in sight. That thought made the rising Waste rock look inviting, if not downright friendly. The smartest thing he could do now was to jump off the wagon and walk back to Charisat. Khat didn't move. He needed the rest of the promised trade tokens to pay off Lushan.
Still watching the Patrician out of the corner of his eye, he considered the painrod's price as a relic on the Silent Market and decided it was worth at least eight hundred and fifty days of artisan's labor, if not more. Khat wondered if the Patrician could be persuaded to part with it, and in the event of that unlikely occurrence, if he could take it apart without waking the tiny arcane engine that lived inside the metal body and killing himself.
The vigil who had come for Khat that morning climbed around the wagon's housing and onto the front platform. He glanced at the Patrician perched on the railing and then at Khat sprawled inelegantly in the corner. He said, "How much further?"
Khat reluctantly hauled himself up on the railing. "A few miles. You should be able to see it when-"
He was turning forward as he spoke, to point to where the Ancient Remnant would be visible above the ridges and waves of rock. Suddenly the vigil was behind him, grabbing a handful of his hair and shoving him down into the rail. Khat ignored the painful grip, too busy twi
ning an arm around the rail to keep from going headfirst over it and under the front wheels of the wagon. The vigil said, "If you've been lying to us, kris, you'll wish ..."
It was usually only the Patricians who assumed that lower-tier noncitizens lied out of habit; this vigil must have worked for them so long he thought like them. Khat decided to forgo the rest of his lecture. He was bent over the railing, and the vigil stood unpleasantly close. He snapped his elbow back into the man's groin. As the vigil fell away, Khat straightened up to take a seat on the rail, long legs hooking around the corner support. The vigil was doubled over on the floor of the platform, vomiting. Khat smiled at the Patrician, who had stiffened visibly, his hand resting on the painrod. The krismen said, "It's a few more miles. You'll see it as soon as we top the next rise."
The Patrician said, "I don't think that was necessary."
It was the first time he had spoken, Khat realized. His voice was husky and oddly soft. Short for a Patrician and slight, and keeping to his veil despite the heat in the road's canyon. Behaving like someone with something to hide ... To make him talk more, Khat nodded at the vigil, who was showing some signs of recovery. "He has a very upper-tier attitude for a dockworker, don't you think?"
The Patrician hesitated, and then the steamwagon's stoker crawled over the top of the housing to glare suspiciously down at them. A bent old man in a leather apron, he nodded at the vigil, who was still recovering on the platform floor, and said, "It's extra to clean that. Who's going to pay?"
After a moment the Patrician relaxed, dug under his mantle for a coin, and tossed it up onto the housing. The stoker collected it in disgruntled silence and withdrew.
Kythen Seul came around the housing to stare at the scene, and Khat waited, wary but outwardly at ease. But Seul only gave the Patrician a sour I-told-you-so glance.