Chapter
ONE
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 have been 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, because he had been born deep in the Waste. He was tall and leanly muscled, with long 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 were 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 the sound of knees creaking 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.
He set the tile gently down again and nodded approval to his wife. 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 glanced at 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 long 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, 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 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 tortoiseshell 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.”
Copyright © 1995 by Martha Wells
