City of Bones

by Martha Wells

  This Khat was prepared for. "You've got the relic with you?" Elen clutched the inside pocket of her robe protectively. "Then kick out the fire and get back up to the well chamber."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "We're giving them what they want. We're letting them in." He went to the door block, laid a hand on it, and could feel the faint vibrations from their efforts on the other side. They might not lift the block on their own, but they might break the hidden mechanism by trying to force it. If it broke, he knew the block would slide upward. Apparently the Ancients had meant for no faulty works to trap anyone inside.

  "I think I see." Moving awkwardly, Elen scattered the coals and stamped them out. "But they're going to know we've been here from this hot ash."

  "I'm not trying to convince them that we were never here, just that we're not here now."

  The last sparks died, and he heard Elen's footsteps on the other side of the chamber. Khat gave her a moment or two, then kicked out the rock preventing the peg from turning and ran to the ramp, keeping one hand on the wall to guide himself.

  He reached it as the block started to rise, caught up with Elen at the top. In the well chamber he held the rope steady while she climbed it, then swarmed up after her. He pulled the rope up and bundled it out of the way, motioning Elen to back away from the edge. Then he lay flat on the warm stone.

  The pirates rushed into the well chamber, halting in confusion when they confronted an empty room. In the yellow light of the battered oil lamps they carried, Khat could see they were a motley assortment. Their robes were dirty and stained enough to have been looted from the dead, and he could smell the bodies underneath from up here. The Tradetongue they spoke was so pidgin it was difficult for him to understand them, but their anger and confusion were evident. One bright lad stood on the rim of the cistern and held his lamp high to look under the water, and Khat eased cautiously back from the edge to where Elen waited.

  There was some arguing below in muted voices; then the light faded as someone carried the lamps back into the antechamber. Khat went to the outside edge of the Remnant above the door slab, dropping to his belly before he reached it so as not to silhouette himself against the skyline. The moonlight was bright against this side, and he easily counted nine figures crossing the base back toward the cover of the Waste. Nine. There had been at least twelve in the well chamber.

  As he turned back he heard Elen's warning cry. The missing three pirates were climbing the well chamber wall to the roof.

  Elen ran forward and kicked the first in the chest. The blow wasn't strong enough, and the man caught hold of her foot. Khat expected to see her tugged over the side, but instead she dropped down and used her other foot to smash the pirate solidly in the face. He released her with a strangled scream and fell backward into the well chamber.

  The second had already scrambled over the edge before Khat tackled him. An elbow smashed into his face as they fell, and they rolled dangerously close to the well chamber's drop-off. The pirate made the mistake of trying to lever himself away from the edge, and Khat managed to drive his knife into the man's breastbone. The pirate flung himself away with a cry, only to fall forward, forcing the blade in deeper. Khat looked for the other one, then saw he could take the time to free his knife.

  The third pirate lay sprawled on the stone moaning. He had obviously made the mistake of trying to ignore Elen and take Khat from behind. She must have struck him in some vulnerable spot in the neck or spine, Khat decided. The man barely struggled when he finished him off.

  Khat glanced down into the well chamber then and saw the first pirate had tumbled backward into the cistern. Either he had hit his head on the edge or the water hadn't been deep enough to cushion his fall; he floated facedown, lifeless.

  He looked for Elen then, and saw she was curled into a ball, clutching her calf where the spider had bitten her and rocking back and forth. He crouched next to her and said, "Are you all right?"

  "Of course. I'm a trained infighter. I don't lie around by a fountain all day like-"

  "Prove it. Stand up. Walk, or dance."

  "Stop making fun of me," she snarled.

  "I'm not making fun of you, you oversensitive bitch. Let me see your leg."

  She pulled her pants leg up with a sob of pure frustration. He felt the area of the spider bite gently. It was swollen and hot to the touch, and he could tell it hurt her, though she wouldn't make a sound. The venom remaining in the bite had formed a lump just under the skin. To hide it, to limp around painfully, and to fight the pirates had taken substantial determination. "The poison's taking on badly. It does that to some people. Why didn't you say something?"

  "There was nothing you could do. Poison is a force. I should be able to ... purge myself of it with my power ..."

  Now she was babbling. "Know everything, don't you?" He couldn't use his knife; it would have to be cleaned in a fire after having dirty pirate blood all over it, and he didn't want to reveal their position to the rest of the world by building one up here. And there was no knowing how long they had before the other pirates returned. He would just have to do it the traditional way. He took a firm grip on the underside of her calf. "Don't scream."

  Before she could react he bit through the skin over the distended lump, then pressed it to let the poison flow out. Elen did scream, but deep in her throat, without opening her mouth.

  After a few moments she took a deep breath and said reproachfully, "There's blood running all down my leg."

  "That's what's left of the poison, love. Don't touch it."

  "You could've warned me." He snorted. She said, "All right, I would have reacted badly, I admit that, but still... And if they come back, how can I fight like this?"

  "Try to walk on it."

  She struggled upright awkwardly, and hopped on her good foot, putting her weight gingerly on the other. "It's better," she reported after a moment, sounding surprised. "Sore, but I don't feel as if I'm being stabbed every time I move."

  Khat left her to recover and found his robe still on the roof where she had left it. He took out the bloater and used the knife to make a few strategic cuts, turning the thing's guts inside out and freeing the membrane. His nose was bleeding, and the cut he had taken in his earlier fight had torn open again; they were lucky to be so far above the Waste floor, where the predators would've been driven mad to reach them by the smell of blood.

  "What are you doing now?" Elen hobbled over to stand next to him.

  "Going to get some water'."

  "You can't go down there. What if they come back?"

  "Can't let them trap us up here without water." In the morning, under the sun with the roof like a baking pan. "And I have to get the offal out of the cistern."

  Elen couldn't argue with that. Every instinct dictated that a water supply should be preserved.

  She waited on the edge for him as he hauled the dead pirate out of the cistern and filled the membrane from the opposite end. There was no sound from the Remnant's interior, but Khat resisted the urge to press his luck and check it for himself. Elen let the rope down for him, and he climbed up again without incident.

  She seemed surprised by the idea of searching the two pirates' bodies, but did it with only the mild protest, "They stink." The results were disappointing; the pirates carried two long knives, but no painrods, broken or otherwise, and no other belongings. As if they knew they might be caught or killed, and wanted to leave nothing to help us, Khat thought. But that seemed too complex a notion for disorganized pirates.

  They waited and watched and listened, and after what felt like an hour, Khat said, "A trick. They never meant the others to come back."

  "Strange." Elen lay down and pillowed her head on her arm.

  "And how did they know we were still up here? A lucky guess?" He was thinking aloud, and was surprised when Elen answered.

  She said hesitantly, "There are ways to tell if living beings are near, and where they are, what their intentions might be
..."

  He waited for her to say more, but she was silent. He had seen her move through pitch dark as if it were broad daylight, so he supposed there might be something in what she said. "Can you do it? Can you tell me where the other pirates are?"

  "No." Her voice was flat.

  In a tone of false pity, he said, "Oh."

  Elen's quick intake of breath suggested frustration and a bitten lip. "It wouldn't be safe for me to do so."

  "I see."

  "No, you do not." She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees. "We know the Ancient Mages had power that would make Warders children in their eyes, but so little of what they knew was passed down to us. We can't make their arcane engines, or do any of the great magics they could accomplish. The farther we reach to understand, the greater the risk of damage to the soul. If I had the Ancients' skill I could make the Waste around us an image inside my head and see every spark of life in it and tell which sparks were only living creatures, which were thinking beings. But if I tried that without the right teaching it would put me one step closer to the day when inevitably my power will make me insane, and the others in my household will send me away. Do you want me to go insane?"

  "If you did, how would I be able to tell?" Khat retorted, almost automatically. He knew Warders went mad, but in Elen's case it was hard to take the possibility seriously. She was so sane she was annoying.

  But the maniac out on the Waste had found him in the midlevel maze quickly enough.

  He could hear Elen tapping her fingers on the pitted stone of the roof. In a cold voice she said, "Might we change the subject?"

  "Seeing in the dark is one of these Ancient skills?"

  Khat didn't think she was going to answer, but the desire to discourse on one's favorite subject, whether the listener wanted to hear it or not, was not a fault confined to scholars and relic collectors. She relented, and said, "It's not really seeing in the dark. It's a sign of the Sight, of the ability to see with the Eye of the Mind. The Sight is what allows us to glimpse the future." She looked away toward the west and the limitless stretch of the Waste. "It's nothing special. It's the first sign of potential Warder talent."

  "How do you know all this, Elen? Is there a Survivor text that talks about the Ancients' magic?" If there was one, it had been kept hidden from the Academia.

  "No. All the teaching we have is passed from master to student; it's forbidden to write any of it down. Not that there's much to write down." Elen shrugged. "But the words of the Oldest Master, the Ancient Mage who Survived and taught the first Warders, were 'Man was given magic to repel the thunderbolt of what is to come.' That's reason enough for me to keep learning. He also said, 'What magic does is to open the mind to the world, and sometimes the world isn't what we think it is.' He didn't say it in quite those words, but that's what he meant. At least I think so." She sighed. "There's much that will be revealed to me later. I'm young in the ways of power, so they tell me."

  There was that amorphous "they" again. They who owned the relic, who were going to be waiting for her, and possibly for him, back in the city. Khat didn't enjoy being reminded of that.

  Elen asked suddenly, "Why don't you live in the Waste? Why did you come to Charisat?"

  "Why are you a Warder?"

  "No, I'm serious. I let you bite me in the leg; you ought to answer a simple question for me."

  Khat watched a vagary of the wind sweep a curtain of sand off the far edge of the roof; it sparkled in the moonlight like gem dust, then vanished in darkness. A decade ago the Enclave had become overcrowded, and some families had moved to the caves and tunnels in the outer walls. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time; the warrens in the inner walls of the massive bowl-shaped rock formation that formed the Enclave were growing cramped and unhealthy, and so many had moved to the outer perimeter that they must have felt safety in their numbers. But the pirates had been experiencing an increase in their ranks too, and when the attack came it had been swift, unexpected, and devastating. The Mages had made only forty-one original kris lineages, with forty-one lines of descent requiring careful mating practices. Bad luck, and maybe hereditary foolishness, had always kept Khat's lineage from branching often. The pirate attack had nearly destroyed it. He didn't mean to tell Elen any of that. He said, "If I was back at the Enclave, I'd be somebody's secondary husband with six babies to look after. And the archive manages to get a new book just about every twenty years; I couldn't stand that." Neither statement was an exaggeration. Kris mated in threes, and the attitude everyone had held toward Khat just before he left the Enclave would have kept him from being anyone's first choice. The idea that the third partner in a marriage was the one who did all the work and took all the trouble was outmoded, but Khat felt that it would have been true in his case, since anyone who took him on would have seen it only as a sacrifice and a duty to the Enclave.

  He looked over at Elen. Knowing that she could probably see his expression, though her own face was unreadable in the dark, was somewhat unnerving. "So why are you a Warder?"

  Her voice was matter-of-fact. "My family were Third Tier Patricians. One day when I was a little girl, the Warders came and said that I had power, that I could be one of them, and they took me away. My father was dead, and my mother didn't object. I was her fourth daughter, and she had trouble enough arranging advantageous marriages for my sisters; there's not much use for fourth daughters." Judiciously she added, "If I had to be married and have six babies I think I'd move to a foreign city, too."

  Khat wasn't sure what was prompting him to attempt to lay Elen's soul bare and reveal nothing of his own in the process. Maybe he was afraid of her, even if she couldn't use her magic for dread of what it would do to her. He asked, "Do you trust me?"

  A few heartbeats of silence passed. She said, "I suppose I do trust you. I've been in more compromising situations with you today than I would have ever dreamed possible, and you've never made me feel afraid."

  Khat struggled to find something in that statement he could construe as an insult and failed. He started to say that her beauty left him underwhelmed, and that since he was disinclined to murder her at the end of their little adventure, rape would've been rather awkward. He reconsidered at the last moment and said, "Forgive me for not being more romantic. I'm too worried about being killed and eaten by pirates."

  "They really eat people?" Elen asked, distracted. "That's not just a myth?"

  "They really eat people. But to them, I'm not people."

  After a moment of silence, she said, "Then we're both in the same rank. I'm a woman, so I imagine I'm not people to them either. Out here I'm just a thing to be used."

  Khat glanced down at her, wondering if all women Warders were this bloody minded, or if it was just her.

  ***

  The first herald of the sun's return was a gentle glow along the eastern horizon. As it rose higher, Khat knew, it would turn the top level of the Waste to molten gold, re-creating for a time how it must have appeared so long ago when it first rose up from hell to destroy the seas. But instead of morning light running like water over the ground it would have been liquid rock, killing everything in its path, forming lakes of fire, spewing gas that choked everyone it didn't burn. Or so the stories said. The stories had never said what caused it.

  Elen had fallen asleep, finally, curled up in her robes like a child. The gathering heat was already spotting her forehead with perspiration. They would need to be off the roof before the sun rose much higher.

  Since the pirates had never returned, Khat saw no reason not to stick to his original plan and start the walk back to the city. Once they were away from the Remnant, hypothetical pursuers would be unable to track them through the midlevel. It was what might happen after they reached Charisat that worried him.

  You've gone soft, he told himself. Living in the city with Sagai and the others, relying on them, had made him weak and careless. Something made him glance away from the sunrise, and he thought he saw a puff of white smok
e in the distance near the trade road. In another moment the wind brought him the smell of overheated metal and burning coal-a steamwagon. Khat leaned over and shook Elen. "Get up. More company."

  She came awake all at once, alert and wide-eyed. "Where?"

  "There's a steamwagon down on the road. Come on."

  She followed him to the outside edge of the Remnant above the door slab, both of them crouching close to the roof to make it harder for observers to pick them out against the hazy predawn sky. From here Khat could see at least twenty figures moving openly over the top level, coming up from the road and obviously making for the Remnant.

  "Oh, it's them." Elen started to stand, and he yanked her down by the edge of her robe. "They're Warders," she explained, a little breathlessly. "My master must have sent them. He must have sensed I needed help." She shook her head ruefully. "Explaining this is going to be interesting. I've caused him more trouble than I'm worth."

  Khat looked back at the approaching party. None of them were robed in pure Warder white, though, like Elen, they wouldn't want to advertise their identity. He felt sweat that had little to do with the early morning heat trickling between his shoulder blades. "Are you certain?"

  Elen's expression was confident, and she wasn't dreaming, or crazy. "Yes. I know it's them. It's difficult to explain, but-"

  "Then explain it later." He rolled away from the edge, came to his feet, and started back to the well chamber's pit. She scrambled after him and caught up just as he tossed the rope down for her. "You'd better get to them before they tear the place apart looking for you."

  Elen hesitated, watching him.

  "What's wrong?" Khat asked. She could hardly help but note that he hadn't lowered the entire length of the rope, only the forty or so feet needed to reach the well chamber's floor.

  Finally she said, "You don't have to run away. They won't hurt you."