by Martha Wells
A square ramp with a slant a shade too steep for comfort led upward through the solid stone to the well chamber level. There were no air shafts in its steeply sloped ceiling, making it a dark, airless climb. At the end of it the antechamber was unchanged, and still as obscure as anything else in the Remnant.
It was a boxlike little room, lit by reflected sunlight through the tall square door of the well chamber. Its walls were covered with shapes, cut a hairsbreadth into the stone walls, surrounded by spirals and patterns of hairline grooves. Squares, stylized suns, triangles, abstract shapes-Khat had copied them all at one time or another, sometimes selling the drawings to scholars. They were the same shapes that decorated the walls of the antechambers of other Remnants, but arranged in an individual pattern. Whether they served, or once served, some function or were merely decorative was anyone's guess.
Past the antechamber, the well chamber was a wide bowl-shaped room, open to the hot blue sky overhead but set within a forty-foot well in the Remnant's thick stone roof that protected it from most of the windblown sand. In the center was a cistern of water five feet deep and more than half the length of the chamber. It was the theory that each Ancient Remnant had been built on an artesian water source, like the Survivor cities. The system that raised the water from the underground source to this level was as clever as the one that brought reflected sunlight through the shafts to the central room below, or the one that raised and lowered the door. The pattern Khat had told the Patrician about was between the cistern's rim and the door to the antechamber, though the general shape of it was obscured by a coating of sand and dust now. It was made up of overlapping triangles forming a roughly square shape, and was probably only decorative.
The Remnants hadn't been meant for occupation; that was made plain enough by the roads, which were built at the same time-or so the Survivors had recorded-and passed near the structures but never led directly to them. It was a practicality that made Robelin's theories about the Remnants as storehouses for arcane engines all the more believable.
Khat hopped on one foot to get his boots off, then stripped and slid into the pool. The water was warmed by the sun's passage, but still pleasant. This was all the Remnant had to offer: central chamber, ramp, antechamber, and well chamber. Khat had been on the roof of this Remnant many times, as well as several others to the east, and found them as featureless as all the other explorers had before him. If there were other chambers hidden in the thick walls, they had been hidden well.
Before Robelin died, Khat had spent long afternoons at the Academia Garden, lying on the grass and listening to the old man instruct Charisat's wealthy youth in the lore of the Ancients and occasionally interrupting him with a correction. Khat's presence had often startled the more sheltered of the students, which had amused Robelin. The scholar had shocked his colleagues when he had declared that the krismen living in the deep Waste had been studying the Ancient ruins far longer than anyone in the Fringe Cities, and were an untapped resource of potential knowledge. And he was right, Khat thought, floating on his back, but even we've forgotten more than we know.
It was frightening how knowledge slipped away. The Ancients had left few written records and an oral tradition with as many holes as a sieve. Most of the useful texts came from the Survivor Time, and were often journals describing the almost impossible task of learning to live in the presence of the Waste and passing on the authors' fears of the unnatural powers of the Ancient Mages and their prejudice against the new race of krismen.
The Survivors had gathered on the sites of the Ancient cities, like Charisat's immense crag and Ekatu's plateau, that were above the clouds of noxious gas and pools of fire that had dotted the Waste then. They had used the ruins for shelter and lived off what was left of the cities' grain stores. Charisat's artesian spring had been near the top of the mountain, still accessible; Ekatu's wells had been buried under tons of rubble. One of the most popular Survivor texts was a description of the unearthing of those wells, written years after the event by a woman scribe who had faithfully recorded everything but her own name. The intensity of that search for water still burned from the faded pages, and in Khat's opinion anyone who could read it without breaking into a sweat simply had no finer feelings. It was copied and circulated more than any other Survivor text; even the kris Enclave, isolated from the Fringe Cities by miles of Waste and years of alienation, had six copies in its archive. The text was probably responsible for any number of young people becoming Ancient scholars. Or relic dealers.
Khat found his thoughts going back to the Patrician woman in the chamber below. She had to have a reason for coming out here. And for traveling unobtrusively, on a hired wagon. Obviously she could afford to travel in safety and comfort, with enough vigils to frighten off any number of pirates.
Khat slung himself out of the pool, irritated, and sat on the sun-warmed stone of the edge. From here he could look into the antechamber, and remember all the relics Robelin and other scholars had hauled out to try to fit into those shapes on the walls. Many had been the decorative mythenin plates found in the Ancient ruins beneath the crumbling mud-brick houses on Charisat's lower tiers. Those plates had delicate floral designs etched into them if you were lucky, and bringing them out to fit into the shapes in the antechamber's walls had been all the rage among relic collectors for a few years, but nothing had come of it. While some objects closely approximated the shapes, none really fit well into them.
Then he remembered that the only time that stubborn-as-a-stone Patrician had shown any interest was when he had mentioned the pattern in the floor of the well chamber. That's it, Khat thought, pounding his fist on the basin's edge.
He struggled into his clothes, a task made more difficult by the fact that he was still dripping wet, slung boots and robe over his shoulder, and started down the ramp.
Instinct warned him as he reached the door back into the central chamber, and he hesitated at the threshold, wary.
The Patrician had gotten to her feet and was limping along the far wall, running her hand over it and stopping occasionally to examine the fine stone more closely. She started when she saw Khat, and her attitude was such a mix of guilt and confidence that he was certain she had done something.
He looked down. On the floor just in the center of the doorway was a short piece of knotted cloth, probably a strip torn from her mantle. There were three knots, each slightly larger than the one before it. Kris shamen used knotted cords in simples for finding pirates or sources of underground water, and fakirs used them to make periapts against death. Warders, perhaps, used them for some other purpose.
Khat bit his lip thoughtfully and considered his options. She was young, he knew. And if she was a Warder, she hadn't been able to do anything to protect herself or her companions from the pirates. The chances were that she wasn't terribly good at being one yet, and he couldn't stand here forever. He reached down and brushed the knotted cloth out of the doorway.
Nothing happened, at least as far as he could tell. He looked up, and saw her eyes were startled. Whatever reaction she had expected, she hadn't gotten it. "What was that for?" he asked her.
She stiffened. "What do you mean?"
As an attempt to brazen the incident out it was unconvincing, and Khat lost the last of his patience. "Fine. Keep your bad granny magic to yourself if it makes you happy. But show me what you brought out here."
"What are you talking about?" she demanded, flustered enough that he knew he had guessed right.
Khat dropped the robe and his boots, and started barefoot across the chamber towards her. He said, "You brought something out here. You've got it with you now."
She backed away, wary. "I don't have anything. You're mad."
The Patrician was surprisingly strong, but still unsteady from her injuries. The brief struggle ended with her pinned to the floor. Khat ducked to avoid a desperate swing that would have hurt considerably if it had connected, and found a flat wrapped package in the inside pocket of her
outer mantle. Wrestling it away from her, he rolled out of range and came to his feet, tearing the gray cloth wrapping away.
She struggled to stand, cursing him fairly well for an upper-tier woman. "And I thought you were only defending your modesty," Khat told her. Then the last concealing piece of cloth fell away from the relic, and he forgot about baiting the Patrician.
It was a thin mythenin plaque with some kind of crystal glass or quartz seamlessly woven into its surface in long narrow strands. The crystals sparked with color, a red sheen that came alive and brightened to sun color as he turned it in the light, then darkened to green, then blue, then near black and back to red again. The plaque itself was irregular in shape, almost but not quite square.
Khat found he had wandered across the chamber and sat down at the edge of the pit. The Patrician limped up behind him and kicked him in the back. "Ow," he protested, glancing back up at her. Fortunately she had missed the kidney, whether from design or bad aim, it was difficult to tell.
"You knocked me down." Her eyes were furious, and she was holding the disarranged veil over the lower half of her face. Awkwardly leaning over, she made a grab for the plaque.
He held it out of her reach. "You had to show it to me eventually, love, if you don't want this trip to be a waste of time. And there's some dead folk out on the road who wouldn't appreciate that."
She sat down and pulled off her veil, flinging the crumpled gauze into the pit. It drifted gently to the stone floor, a highly unsatisfactory thing to fling in anger. "If you didn't know I was a woman before, you certainly found out then," she said bitterly.
"I knew before."
Her mouth twisted wryly. "When?"
He considered saying he had known it from the first meeting in the fountain court, but if they were being honest now it would be a poor way to start. "Your voice. And I've only seen upper-tier women shave their hair like that." And when it came down to it, she made a thin, awkward sort of boy, but a slender, fine-featured woman. Her skin was light, which in a Patrician was a sure sign of a newer family, probably Third Tier, but it was sun-darkened from time spent outdoors.
"Why didn't you say something then?" she asked.
"Your private life isn't any of my business."
"My private life has nothing to do with it. Who would wear a veil if they didn't have to?" She frowned and ran a hand over her blond fuzz, as if it felt odd to have it out in the open. "How do you know how Patrician women keep their hair?"
"I read it somewhere," Khat said, and knew he needed to change the subject. "Who are you?"
She hesitated, biting her lip, then answered, "Elen."
Khat noticed she hadn't added her household or any other family affiliation. "Where did you get this relic, Elen? It isn't one of the hundred and seventy-five known types."
She looked hopefully at the plaque in his hands and said, "It's an actual relic, isn't it? Not some kind of forgery."
"No." Khat turned the plaque over again, trying to stop admiring it long enough to examine it dispassionately. "It's not a fake. And there hasn't been a new type of find for over twenty years." He dug in his pocket and brought out a flea glass, a useful little device no more than two inches long, made of two finely carved bone cylinders, each containing a glass lens. Examining the plate through the glass, he could make out the pattern of finely cut lines between the crystals. "Oh, you've got something here, all right." Crystal pieces or heavy glass tubes filled with quicksilver, especially set into mythenin, were known to be remains of arcane engines, or at least the kris and the scholars knew them to be remains of arcane engines. Khat wondered if the Warders knew it as well.
"Does it resemble something in here, or fit into something?" Elen asked, trying to look over his shoulder.
He looked up and waited until she met his eyes. Her mouth made that wry twist again, and she added, "We thought it might."
Khat stood up, still holding her gaze. "Oh, it could 'fit in' to something here. This is somebody's secret, somebody's important secret. Still say we were going to part friends when I'd done what you wanted?"
She spread her hands apologetically. "Yes, but I didn't realize you would understand, or know so much..."
Enough to be dangerous, Khat thought, and started toward the ramp.
He reached the antechamber and stood in the center, studying the shapes cut into the walls. Elen limped up the ramp behind him and stopped in the doorway, distracted by her first sight of the well chamber. Khat stepped closer to the wall, turning the plaque over thoughtfully. The shape he had chosen looked right but ... He pressed the mythenin plaque in, and it fit like a foot into an old familiar boot.
After a moment Elen shifted impatiently, and said, "Nothing happened."
"Would you have preferred an explosion? Or the Remnant gradually sinking into the sand, maybe?" Khat tried to wiggle the plaque, but it fit too well into the carved depression. And here he was without even a marked string to measure with. "You know, if you'd let me in on this secret before we left the city, I could've brought some measuring tools to see just how closely this matches. As it is, you'll be telling your friends that yes, we stuck it in there, and yes, it looked about right."
"But..." Elen came closer, reached up to touch the plaque carefully, investigating the fit with her fingertips. "I thought it would do something."
The idea that relics had mysterious purposes was a common misconception among those whose entire knowledge of the Ancients and the Survivor Time was acquired at the knee of their superstitious and half-mad old granny. "The highest drama in the relic market is when your competitors get fed up with your success and try to kill you," Khat told her. The Mages' arcane engines must have been hideously complex if the leftover bits that Khat had seen were any indication; they might find a crystal-inlaid plaque for each shape in the antechamber wall without having even half the pieces that made up the whole device, and still have no way to wake the thing. Still, it was an invaluable clue to the Remnant's purpose. Robelin would have danced with delight. Khat might feel like dancing himself, once the enormity of it had a chance to sink in.
After a moment's thought, he gently pressed the plaque in the center. With a bell-like tone, it obligingly popped out of the shape into his hands. "But there's no mistaking that it's meant to go there, and that still makes it a major find. You know the Academia will want to buy it. I can do a valuation for you, but an upper-tier dealer will have to confirm it since my mark on a legal document isn't worth anything." He glanced at Elen and saw that she looked more than just disappointed. She looked crushed. "What did you expect?" he asked her. "I can count the number of known arcane relics that actually do something on one set of fingers." Painrods, for one, he thought. She probably believed she had lost hers out in the Waste.
"I know." She was shaking her head. She doesn't really understand, he thought, she just thinks she does. They all do. Immediately proving him right, she added, "It just isn't what I thought it was."
If I was holding that much coin, I wouldn't complain. But some things were relative to your situation. "We can try it again in the morning before we leave. The sun floods this chamber then, and it may tell us something. Of course, it's probably just a decoration. From what the Ancients left behind, you'd think they never had anything but trinkets." A Warder would want to hold on to a piece of an arcane engine; a decorative plaque she might be persuaded to sell to the Academia.
"We're leaving in the morning?" She looked suspicious. "What about the pirates?"
"I'm leaving in the morning. You're welcome to stay as long as you want," Khat said, not liking to admit that in all the excitement over the relic he had forgotten the pirates.
She sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I meant that if the pirates are gone, can't we leave sooner? I know it's dangerous to travel the Waste at night, but..."
At night the predators and parasites that hunted the bottom level of the Waste would move up to the mid- and top levels. For someone without natural resistance to th
eir poison, it made travel of any distance difficult if not impossible. And there were those pesky pirates to consider. Especially now that Khat knew why they had attacked the wagon. "The pirates may not be gone. They didn't get what they wanted, did they?" Khat held out the plaque to her, and after a moment, she took it.
Chapter Three
Outside, nightfall would be bringing some relief from the stifling heat of the Waste, but within the protective walls of the Remnant the only indication that the sun was setting was the gradual failure of light in the main chamber. Khat collected a bundle of the dried stalks of ithaca that had been left in the central chamber to build a small fire to see by. The air shafts in the ceiling high overhead would draw up the smoke and disperse it to the wind.
From the opposite side of the pit Elen watched him build the fire, frowning slightly. "Are there ghosts here?" she asked finally.
Khat glanced over at her. "Sometimes." The city dwellers believed the souls of the dead were drawn down through the surface of the Waste to the still-burning fire that lay just beneath. If your life had been just and modest, your soul had more weight, and sank below the seven levels of fire to the cool center of the earth where the night was eternally calm. The worst souls were the lightest of all, and they drifted above ground, still preying on others as they had when they were alive, growing more evil as they absorbed whatever filth their invisible forms passed through. These were the ones that eventually grew so strong they left the ground behind entirely, and rode the wind as air spirits.
Whatever the Ancients' opinion on the subject had been, it was now lost; the Survivors had believed their gods were dead, killed by the rise of the Waste, like the seas and the Ancients' cities. Little cults flourished throughout the Fringe Cities, worshiping any number of odd things, but most people believed only in ghosts.