Martha Wells - City of Bones

[version history]

Scheherazade meets Dumas: City of Bones is a wondrous Arabian Nights fantasy from a rising new

talent in the field.

A finalist for the 1993 Compton Crook Award, Martha Wells’s first work, The Element of Fire, earned

such acclaim as:

“A fascinating read...I had to finish it up in one fell swoop staying up until 2:30 to do so, and hadn’t

known I’d spent that much time in her world!”

— Anne McCaffrey

“A richly detailed world of court intrigue, family tensions, and magical marvels.”

— Steve Gould, author of jumper

City of Bones

Now, with City of Bones, Wells shapes a fabled and mysterious Arabian Nights wonderland in which

science and magic meet in a head-on clash. It is a place that has been devastated by an ancient

holocaust, and where most of the world’s water has evaporated.

But out of the ashes, a bizarre and wonderful civilization arises. Sand ships now traverse the routes

once used by the great war galleons, and a glittering chain of city-states dot the Great Waste. And

greatest of them all is Charisat. Charisat, Imperial seat and wonder of wonders, a great monolithic

structure towering over the desert. Charisat, a phantasmagorical place where silken courtesans and

beggars weave lies side by side, where any man’s dreams can be fulfilled at the whisper of a genie, and

where the tier that you live on determines how high up the food (or more importantly, water) chain you

are.

Charisat, the goal of every schemer, treasure hunter, and madman intent on finding his heart’s content.

For if it can’t be had in Charisat, it’s not worth having.

A beautiful woman and a handsome thief try to unravel the mysteries of an age-old technology to stop

a fanatical cult before its members unleash an evil that will topple Charisat.

And destroy all the water in the world.

City of Bones is a rollicking fantasy adventure, filled with evil mages and beautiful maidens, wily

thieves and deadly palace intrigues. It’s a joyride of a novel, and one that we hope you will enjoy.

Tor books by Martha Wells

The Elements of Fire

City of Bones

Martha Wells

TOR

A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

Copyright notice

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

To Scott McCullar and Nancy Buchanan, for everything

Chapter One

contents - next

Somewhere else, in a room shadowed by age and death, a man readies himself to look into the

future for what may be the last time.

The day was long, and Khat was bored with bargaining. He leaned on one pole of the awning and

looked out into the dusty street, ignoring Arnot’s wife, who was examining their find as if she had never

seen the like before and never wanted to again.

“Two days, no more,” Arnot’s wife finally said, mopping the sweat from her brow with a corner of

her scarf and feigning disinterest.

Khat shook his head, irritated at this display of deliberate ignorance. His partner Sagai raised an

eyebrow in eloquent comment and said, “The lady has a mischievous sense of humor, and Arnot is an

honorable man. One hundred days.”

Khat smiled to himself and thought, The lady is a thief, and Arnot is a rat’s ass. More dust rose in

the narrow street outside as pushcarts trundled by, piled high with wares destined for markets on the

upper tiers. The sun had started its downward progress into late afternoon, leaving the high canyon of the

street outside Arnot’s shop in shadow. The heat was still stifling under the patched awning and must be

far worse in the shop’s cavelike interior, dug out of the black rock of the city’s backbone, where Arnot

himself sat on his money chest and listened to his wife bargain.

The man in the shadowed room cups the fragments of bone in one hand. They are only a focus,

because the power to see beyond time is inside his thoughts and his blood and his living bones, not

in the dead matter in his hand.

The woman’s laughter was a humorless bark. She said, “Nothing is worth that.”

The article in question lay atop a stool, wrapped in soft cloth. It was a square piece of glazed

terra-cotta floor tile, made particularly valuable by the depiction of a web-footed bird swimming in a pool

filled with strange floating flowers. The colors were soft half-tones, the purplish-brown of the bird’s

plumage, the blue-green color of the pond, the cream and faded yellow of the flowers. The subject

matter, a waterbird that hadn’t lived since the Fringe Cities rose from the dust, and the delicate colors,

impossible even for Charisat’s skilled artisans to duplicate, marked it as Ancient work, a relic of the lost

times more than a thousand years ago.

Piled all around under the awning were the rest of Arnot’s wares: serving tables with faience

decoration, ornamental clocks, alabaster vessels, tiny decorative boxes of valuable wood, and junk

jewelry of beads, lapis, turquoise, and carnelian. There were few Ancient relics out on display here; the

quality would be inside, away from the untutored eyes of casual buyers.

“We know what these tiles are fetching on the upper tiers,” Sagai said with reproof. “Don’t treat us

like fools, and our price will be more reasonable.” He folded his arms, ready to wait all day if necessary.

With an ironic lift of an eyebrow, Khat added, “We only come to you first because we’re such good

friends of your husband.”

There was a choking cough from within the shop’s dark interior, possibly Arnot about to launch into

an attack of apoplexy. Arnot’s wife bit her lip and studied them both. Sagai was big and dark-skinned,

the hair escaping from his headcloth mostly gone to gray, his blue robe and mantle somewhat frayed and

shabby. He was despised as a foreigner because he came from Kenniliar Free City, but all the dealers

knew he was a trained scholar and had studied the Ancients long before circumstances had forced him to

work in Charisat’s relic trade. Sagai’s features were sensitive, and right now his brown eyes were liquid

with humor at Arnot’s wife’s predicament.

Khat was krismen, and even lower on Charisat’s social scale than Sagai, for he had been born deep

in the Waste. He was tall and leanly muscled, longish brown hair touched by red, skin browned against

the sun, and a handsome face that he knew from experience was no help with Arnot’s wife, who was just

as much of a professional as he and Sagai were.

But Khat could tell she was starting to weaken. He pointed out more gently, “They’re buying these on

the upper tiers like cheap water. You could turn it around in the time it takes us to walk back to the

Arcade.”

“Or we can take our business elsewhere,” Sagai added, frowning thoughtfully as if he was already

considering which of Arnot’s competitors to go to.

Arnot’s wife ran a hand through her stringy white hair and sighed. “Twenty days.”

“Forty,” Sagai said immediately.

There was a growl from the shop’s interior, a crack and a sound of the shifting of massive bulk that

seemed to indicate Arnot himself was about to appear. Arnot’s wife rolled her eyes and folded her arms

over her tattered gray kaftan.

The man closes his hand on the fragments of bone, thinking of their former owner and how

unwillingly he parted with them.

Arnot appeared in the arched doorway, glared at the two men from under lowered brows, and

advanced toward the tile. As he reached for it, Khat said, “By the edges.”

Arnot regarded him a moment in silence. Legend said krismen eye color changed according to mood.

Khat’s eyes had lightened to gray-green. Dangerous. Arnot lifted the tile gently by the edges, and turned

it, so the light filtering through the red awning caught the colors and made them glow almost with life. The

tiles were one of the few relics that even the cleverest forgers hadn’t the skill to copy; before the rise of

the Waste, that tile had graced some Ancient’s fountain court, and Arnot knew it.

The dealer considered, then set the tile gently down again. He nodded approval to his wife, and she

dug in the leather pouch at her waist for tokens.

Something made Khat glance out into the street.

Three men watched them from the edge of the awning. One wore the robes and concealing veil of a

Patrician, and the other two were dressed in the rough shirts and protective leather leggings of wagon

dock laborers. An upper-tier Patrician down in the market quarters of the Fifth Tier meant one

thing—Trade Inspector.

Arnot’s wife, caught in the act of passing over the brass counters, each representing several days of

artisan’s labor, froze and stared at the intruders, her gray brows coming together in consternation. Sagai

had his hand out, Khat and Arnot were obviously giving their countenance to the deal, and the

merchandise lay in plain view on the stool.

It took them all several moments to remember that there was nothing illegal about what they were

doing.

Smiling, the man looks up at his companion across the table and says, “It’s an intriguing

game, where one player sees the board and the other is blindfolded.”

“Yes,” she replies. “But which player are we?”

Arnot nudged his wife, and she dropped the counters into Sagai’s palm. Sagai tucked them away

inside his robe, and exchanged a look with Khat. Their expressions betrayed nothing; it would have been

a mistake to show any kind of fear.

Arnot took his wife’s elbow and steered her toward the door of the shop, a protective gesture Khat

was surprised to see from the cutthroat dealer. Arnot growled, “We close early today.”

Khat exchanged a look with Sagai to make sure they were both thinking along the same lines, then

stepped out from under the awning. One of the dockworkers moved to intercept him and said, “Are you

Khat, the relic dealer from the Sixth Tier?”

The man was smiling at him unpleasantly. He was big for a lower-tier city dweller and blond, his

short-cropped hair greasy with sweat and blown sand. The one who hung back with the Patrician was

short and stocky, wearing a red headcloth. He carried an air gun slung casually over one shoulder. The

copper ball beneath the stock that was the gun’s air reservoir had been recently polished, and the

skeleton butt had shiny brass fittings.

Khat didn’t answer, and Sagai shouldered his way gently past the dockworker before the man could

react, saying, “Excuse us, gentlemen.”

Khat followed Sagai up the narrow canyon of the street. Walls of black rock and mud brick rose up

on either side of them, with narrow doorways on the lower levels and shallow balconies and windows on

the upper, some with cheap tin shutters painted with desert flowers or luck signs. Clothes hung out to air

festooned some of the upper floors, and sewer stink was suspended in the still, hot air. The three men

followed them, though not fast enough to be actually chasing them, and the rifle wielder did nothing

overtly threatening. Sagai muttered, “And the day was going so well, too.”

Trade Inspectors would never have let them walk away. But Khat and Sagai had no Patrician clients

and no reason to expect any, with rifle-wielding guards or without. “ ‘Was’ is right,” Khat answered,

irritated. Their pursuers were still too close for them to dodge down any connecting alleys.

The street widened into an open court, where a fountain carved into the shape of an upended tortoise

shell played and the sewer stink was not quite so bad. There was still no opportunity to bolt. Grim now,

Sagai said, “They know your name, obviously. They may know where we live. We’ll have to talk to

them.”

Khat couldn’t think of a better idea, so he took a seat on the fountain’s wide edge to wait for their

pursuers to catch up, and Sagai rested one sandaled foot next to him.

Women in light-colored kaftans filled jugs and buckets at the fountain and lingered to talk, old men sat

on the stone balconies above them and smoked clay pipes, and a shrieking gang of children tore by,

scattering a peddler’s collection of baskets and stampeding some stray goats. An old woman sat on a

faded red rug near the fountain, telling fortunes by burning fragments of bone in a brazier. The old man

who kept the fountain casually strolled toward them and shook his clay bowl of coins and tokens

suggestively, reminding them to pay before using the water.

The Patrician and the hireling with the rifle stopped several paces away, the blond man coming nearer

to confront them. Khat lounged at ease on the fountain rim, and Sagai regarded the man’s approach with

polite interest. None of the other inhabitants of the court fled at the sight of the possible altercation, but

the women who had not been disturbed by Khat and Sagai’s presence at the fountain found reasons to

move on, and the water keeper retreated across the court.

The rifle’s odd, Khat decided. It was an upper-tier weapon, used by lictors assigned to court

officials or paid vigils. Even bonetakers and cutthroat thieves could only afford to carry knives.

Presumably the Patrician could have hired the dockworkers and given them the weapon to defend him,

but it was hard to believe he would be quite that trusting. It was more likely that the pair were private

vigils as much accustomed to the upper tier as their master. And who are they protecting him from? he

wondered. The septuagenarian fountain keeper maybe, or the beggar woman telling fortunes? This

was only the Fifth Tier, not the Eighth. Still smiling, the blond man spoke to Khat. “I’m Kythen Seul, and

I know who you are.”

On the table is an iron bowl half-filled with hot coals. The bones will be burned there as the

man looks past the slow turning of time. He does not know the reason for this except that a

symbolic death by fire seems to aid the process.

His companion watches.

Well, Khat hadn’t tried to hide it. He said, “Then why did you ask?” He felt his theory was

confirmed. Seul spoke Tradetongue too well for a dockworker. Khat looked over at the Patrician, who

seemed to have a slight build under all that heavy cloth. His inner robes were rough silk without

beadwork or embroidery, the outer mantle of tougher cotton, and the long gauze veil was wound around

his head and over the lower half of his face. Not ostentatious, unless you considered how far such

materials had to be ported across the Waste to reach the Charisat markets. Khat wore a light shirt over

tight trousers and soft leather boots, with his robe folded back and tied off around his waist, and to

anyone accustomed to the robes and heavy veiling affected by Charisat’s upper-tier nobility, this was

practically undressed. The krismen needed less protection from the sun than he did relief from the heat; it

was cooler out on the Waste than it was on the black stone of Charisat’s streets in the afternoon.

Seul displayed his tolerance of uppity krismen by ignoring the question. He glanced pointedly at Sagai

and said, “Your friend can go.”

“Oh, but we have business still to do together,” Sagai said, as if he thought it suggestion rather than

command. “I prefer to stay.”

Seul’s eyes hardened, but the smile didn’t disappear. Khat was beginning to dislike that smile. Seul

inclined his head back toward the Patrician, and said, “The Honored needs a knowledgeable guide to

take him to the Ancient Remnant on the Tersalten Flat.”

Sagai frowned. “The one to the west?”

“Yes.”

Khat had done this before, but usually for scholars from some other city or the Academia, and he

didn’t feel accommodating today.

“If you already know where it is,” he said patiently, but with the patience usually reserved for a child,

“why do you need a guide?”

“I don’t need a guide.” Seul’s voice took on a testy edge. “I prefer one.”

“And you want me to suggest someone?” Khat looked mildly confused. As a way to drive someone

wild he had found this was second to few, especially when what the person was trying to tell you was as

plain as daylight.

“No, I want you.”

Khat smiled back at him for the first time, a particularly krismen expression that revealed pointed

canines and had an unequivocal meaning. “The whorehouse is down that way.” Out of the corner of his

eye he saw Sagai glance briefly skyward, as if asking the air spirits to witness what he had to deal with on

a daily basis. His partner had also unobtrusively rested a hand on the knife hilt concealed by a fold of his

robe.

Seul’s smile came close to evaporating, but he only said, “The Honored doesn’t ask for free service.

He intends to pay.”

Before Khat could answer, Sagai interposed, “Might one ask why?”

“He’s curious.” The smile was back with renewed strength. “He’s a student of the past.”

The man drops the bones into the glowing coals in the iron bowl, and they yellow, then blacken

as the heat takes them, and thin veins of smoke rise into the still air of the time-darkened room.

“Not the future?” Khat asked, and then wondered why. The old woman hadn’t moved from her rug

near the fountain, where she muttered to herself and burned bone chips to look into the future. Perhaps

he had been thinking of her.

Amazingly, Seul stopped smiling. “The reason isn’t important. He’ll pay ten gold reals.”

Khat heard Sagai’s snort of disgust. He said, “Is this a joke?”

The man’s eyes shifted from the krismen to Sagai and back. “It’s a fair price.”

“It’s more than fair,” Khat agreed. “But I’m kris. I can’t get a trade license to own Imperial-minted

coins.” In Charisat and most of the other Fringe Cities, citizenship had to be bought, and noncitizens

couldn’t own or handle minted coins unless they bought a special license to do so, which was almost as

expensive as citizenship itself—and sometimes not worth the trouble, since Trade Inspectors paid special

notice to sales made with minted coins. Trade tokens were a holdover from the old days of barter, and

worthless without the authority of the merchants or institutions who stamped them. If a city became too

crowded and faced a water or grain shortage, it could always declare all trade tokens void, forcing

noncitizens to leave or starve in the streets.

It was better than the early days after the Waste had formed, when the Survivors had struggled for

food and safety on the ruins of the Ancients’ cities, killing any outsiders who tried to encroach on their

water sources, but to Khat’s mind not much better. Foreigners, even foreigners from other Fringe Cities,

were still viewed with suspicion, and if you were poor you stood little chance of ever amassing enough

trade tokens to buy citizenship. Or if you were krismen, and were simply not permitted to buy citizenship

or special trade licenses. For any price.

“I meant the equivalent in trade tokens,” Seul said.

Khat consulted Sagai, who shook his head minutely. He looked back at Seul and said, “All right. I’ll

guide him.”

Seul nodded, his hard eyes expressionless. Perhaps he was surprised to come to an agreement so

easily. “I know where you live. One of us will meet you there at sunrise.” He turned back to the Patrician,

spoke with him a moment, then all three retreated up the street.

Watching them go, Sagai sighed. He said, “So you’ve gotten yourself hired for some uncertain and

suspicious purpose by an upper-tier relic dilettante. You have some clever way out of this, I assume?”

As Khat stood, the beggar woman caught the hem of his robe and said, “Tell your fortune, pretty?”

Because of the cloudy film over her eyes she was nearly blind. He dug distractedly in a pocket for a

half-bit trade token and dropped it onto her frayed carpet, and told Sagai, “He knows who I am, where

we live. How can I refuse?”

The woman took more bone fragments from a stained cloth bag and rubbed them between her palms,

preparing to drop them into her brazier. Some fortune-tellers unscrupulously used rat or lizard bone.

Most bought what were supposed to be the bones of executed murderers or stillborn babies from the

dealers on the Seventh Tier, but those were more often from murder victims, killed by the dealers’ own

bonetakers. Purists in the trade believed that only krismen bones gave a true casting of the future, and,

being one of the few kris in Charisat, Khat occasionally had difficulty keeping his intact.

Sagai was capable of infinite patience. It was one of the reasons he and Khat got along together so

well. Finally, Khat met his friend’s skeptical eyes and said, “He wants to go there for a reason. Maybe he

knows something I don’t.”

“Betrayal,” the beggar woman whispered, startling them both. She was holding her hands in the wisps

of smoke rising from the coals, the burning bones. “Betrayal of you, betrayal by you.”

In the death-shadowed room the coals have already cooled, and the bones are ash.

Sagai was still registering disapproval when they reached their own court down on the Sixth Tier. It

was ramshackle and poor, and its fountain was only a small basin up against one wall, but the day-coated

tin shutters on all the second- and third-story windows glowed with Sagai’s colorfully painted designs,

and some of the neighbors lounging around the court greeted them cheerfully.

Their house, consisting of three rooms set one atop the other and a fair share of rooftop, had been

owned for a time only by the widow Netta and her two children. Netta was well able to take care of her

own affairs, but a large family of cap makers from the next court had taken a fancy to the house, as well

as to Netta’s daughter, and had continually tried to force the widow out. She had taken in a pair of young

street entertainers to help her hold on to her property, but the struggle to keep the cap makers out went

on so long they had little time to practice their own livelihoods. It was not until Khat and Sagai, and

Sagai’s wife Miram, had moved in that the cap makers had chosen discretion as the better part of valor.

Netta had boasted that all the two relic dealers had had to do was sit out on the front stoop and all

enemies had fled. Khat and Sagai hadn’t told her that they had also gone to the cap makers’ house late

one night and beaten the libido out of the three eldest brothers.

The other neighbors in the court were mostly street entertainers or peddlers who worked the fringes

of the Garden Market, and it was a good arrangement, with no other relic dealers nearby to generate

competition or theft.

“He could still be a Trade Inspector trying to trap you somehow,” Sagai argued as they crossed the

court. “That Seul fellow did offer you coin.”

“Then I’ll be honest,” Khat answered, reaching into the door hole to pop the latch. “I’m always

honest.”

Sagai snorted. “No, you think you’re always honest, and that is not the same thing at all.”

This side of the court had been in shadow as the sun moved behind the bulk of the city, and the room

would have been almost cool except for the press of bodies. The floor was covered with children of

various ages: Netta’s youngest, barely able to walk, Sagai and Miram’s three small daughters, and the

baby boy whom Sagai had vowed would be the last child born to them in Charisat. Libra and Senace,

two young men who did a juggling act in the market, were sprawled on the faded matting, counting the

copper bits they had been tossed that day. Copper could be weighed and exchanged for trade tokens,

another way noncitizens could get around the Coin Laws.

The widow Netta sat on the narrow bench carved out of the wall, fanning herself and Miram, who

was at the low table separating a tray of colored beads into individual glass bottles. The two youngest

children were helping her in this task by struggling for possession of her lap. When Miram and Netta

could afford to buy the metal thread they needed, they made jewelry from the supply of beads Miram

had managed to bring with her from Kenniliar, and sold the product to one of their neighbors who kept a

market stall.

Miram looked tired and frazzled from the children, but still smiled up at them as they came in. “Well,

are we wealthy yet?” Though Miram hadn’t made a serious study of the Ancients, she had picked up an

interest in the subject from Sagai. Her education hadn’t been nearly so extensive, but her ability to read

and write Trade-tongue occasionally let her do a lucrative business in reading legal documents and writing

letters for their neighbors.

“No, but we’re comfortable, at least for today,” Sagai said, and put the result of their day’s trading on

the table for the others to look at. There was a small box etched with floral designs and made of

mythenin, a hard, silvery Ancient metal that made up most of the relics found intact. There were also

some pieces of smooth stone of a rich blue-green color in round settings of the same metal, that might

have been anything from jewelry to pieces in some forgotten game.

Charisat’s metalworkers and gemstone cutters were acknowledged as the best across the Fringe and

down to the cities of the Last Sea, but even they couldn’t manipulate liquid metal like the Ancients.

Khat settled on the seat next to Netta. Water jugs filled most of the cubbies, and pegs pounded into

the clay-smoothed walls held the few copper cooking implements Netta owned and the oil mill and grain

grinder every household needed. The position of honor on the only shelf was taken by her grandmother’s

copper tea decanter.

Sagai was telling the others about their adventure.

“That’s worrisome,” Miram said, with a critical glance at Khat. “To go into the Waste when you

don’t know what this person wants.” She was younger than Sagai, and had come from a well-to-do

family in Kenniliar who had not entirely approved her choice of a learned but poor husband. When Sagai

had decided to come to Charisat, he had tried to convince her to stay behind until he returned with his

fortune, or at least enough coin to buy himself a place in the Kenniliar Scholars’ Guild. She hadn’t taken

the suggestion well at all. She didn’t like Charisat, but she preferred it to living with her disapproving

family in Kenniliar and wondering every day if her husband was alive or dead.

“In the Waste, that Patrician will be helpless,” Khat pointed out. Miram didn’t entirely approve of

Sagai working the relic trade because she thought it was dangerous. Khat couldn’t argue that point with

her; she was perfectly right, it was dangerous. She didn’t entirely approve of Khat sometimes, either, and

he had to agree with her on that score, too. “I can walk out of it alive, and he can’t, guards or no

guards.”

“His guards could shoot you,” Netta pointed out helpfully. “They don’t carry a gun for their own

amusement.”

Khat didn’t answer. He knew that drawing the attention of an upper-tier citizen was not particularly

good, but the last thing he wanted to do was tell them his real reason for accepting the commission.

The door flew open suddenly, and their neighbor Ris stood there, panting. The painfully thin,

dark-haired boy had obviously been running. After a moment he managed to say, “Lushan’s looking for

you, Khat.”

“Since when?”

Ris collapsed on the floor and pulled the crawling baby into his lap to tickle. “Not long after noon. I

heard it from one-of the fire-eaters outside the Odeon.”

Netta got up to rescue the squealing child from him. “Outside the theater? I should tell your aunt.”

“She knows,” the boy retorted. Ris and his family lived in the next house over, and his father was a

street entertainer who performed in the Garden Market. Last year a pair of drunken slummers had

smashed his harmonium and therefore his livelihood. After some time, Khat had been able to repair the

instrument, replacing all the fiddly bits of metal and wire by trial and error, and Sagai had polished off the

job by painting the case with delicate scrollwork. Since then, Ris had carried messages and run errands

for them.

“Lushan again?” Sagai said, frowning. “What can that misbegotten creature want?”

Khat leaned back against the wall and managed to look unconcerned by the news. “I’ll go see him

later. He could have some deals to throw our way.”

“And why should he favor us?” Sagai objected, but the baby was hauling itself up on the hem of his

robe, distracting him. Pulling it into his lap, he still added, “I don’t trust him. But then, you can’t trust

anyone in our business.”

Khat wished his partner hadn’t phrased it quite that way.

Khat strolled down the theater street on the Fourth Tier, enjoying the retreat of the day’s heat and the

long twilight. Colonnades paved with colored tile sheltered peddlers and gave entrance to the shops, and

the street was crowded with folk in search of an evening’s entertainment. It was growing dark, and lamps

enclosed in perforated bronze pots were being lit above the doors of the wealthier establishments of the

goldsmiths, lapidaries, bakers, ironsmiths, and wineshops. Many of the lamps were inset with red-tinted

glass, making the available light murky indeed, but hostile ghosts and air spirits were supposed to avoid

red light. Gamblers hawking for games and especially fortune-tellers squatted outside the doors haloed

by the muddy bloodlights, for security as much as for a way to see what they were doing.

Knowing he still had some time to waste, Khat bought a flower-shaped dumpling from a stall and sat

on the steps of the Odeon, near the prostitutes who were working the theater crowd. The ebb and flow

of the mass of people in the street held endless fascination.

There were robed and veiled Patrician men, Patrician women with their faces unveiled but their hair

hidden under flowing silk scarves or close-fitting cloisonne caps, all with servants trailing them. Litters

draped with silks and lighter gauzes carried Patricians too exalted to even walk among the throng.

The crowd from the lower tiers was less colorful but more active, some turning to climb the steps to

the pillared entrance of the vast theater at Khat’s back, or continuing down the street to the wineshops

and food stalls, and the ghostcallers, fakirs, and clowns performing in the open-air forums. There were

wide-eyed visitors from other Fringe Cities and the ports of the Last Sea, babbling to each other in the

different dialects of Menian and to everyone else in pidgin Tradetongue.

There was a shout, and one of the foreigners fought his way out of the crowd, dragging a struggling

boy. Caught a thief, Khat thought. Then a group of men dressed in the dull red robes of Trade

Inspectors poured out of a nearby shop and surrounded the pair. One of them held up what looked like a

piece of scrap mythenin, and the boy began to yell denials. No, caught an idiot trying to bypass the

dealers and sell a relic for coins. Khat sighed and looked away. From the boy’s threadbare robe and

bare feet he doubted he was a citizen. Soon to be a dead idiot.

The boy was a fool to be caught by such a common trick. Everyone knew that Trade Inspectors

disguised themselves as foreigners and tried to buy illegal relics or offered Imperial-minted coins to

dealers who did not possess the right licenses. Sagai’s notion that the Patrician who had approached

them was a disguised Trade Inspector wasn’t just an idle suspicion.

As the others hauled their captive off, one of the Trade Inspectors stayed to scan the crowd on the

steps, searching for possible accomplices or just anyone foolish enough to look guilty. Khat didn’t betray

any reaction besides idle curiosity, and the man turned to follow his colleagues. You couldn’t be too

careful, even though at the moment Khat hadn’t anything as incriminating as a pottery fragment on him.

The Trade Inspectors took special notice of merchants or relic dealers who were not citizens, and Khat

didn’t have the option of becoming one, even if he could raise the fee.

Tradition said the Ancients had made the kris to live in the Waste because they feared it would

spread to the end of the world. Khat’s people were born with immunities to desert poisons, with the

ability to sense the direction of true north on a landscape where it was death to lose your way, and with

pouches to carry babies, when humans were forced to give birth live, in mess and inconvenience. But the

Ancients were dead, and their plans hadn’t come to fruition. The Waste had taken much of the world,

but it had stopped before the Last Sea and left the coast untouched. The kris were forced into the deep

Waste, and the people of the Fringe Cities, especially the Imperial seat Charisat, plainly did not want

them inside their walls.

More lamps were lit above the Odeon’s doors as the natural light died, and one of the male

prostitutes gently suggested that if Khat wasn’t going to buy anybody he should get the hell out of there.

Khat left without argument; it was dark enough now.

The great hall of the theater was huge and round, the dome ceiling high overhead a vast mosaic of

some past Elector ascending to the throne. The stage was circular and in the center of the hall, with the

audience a noisy flowing mob around it. Wicker couches and chairs were scattered about, and the tile

floor was littered with rotting food and broken glass. The air was stifling, despite the long narrow

windows just below the dome that were supposed to vent the heat. The farce being performed was an

Martha Wells - City of Bones

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