Bones of the Past (Arhel) Read online

  “You want to waste our time paying social calls?” Thirk’s expression changed to disbelief, then became barely contained fury. “Praniksonne will beat us to the find!”

  Roba glared him down. “We’ve discussed Praniksonne as much as I want to. Medwind Song lives here—maybe she’s heard something. Besides, I haven’t seen her in years. I’m not coming all this way and then not even stopping to say hello.”

  Thirk snarled into his beard and turned his back on her.

  From inside the palisade, a single bell began to ring, calling the hour before nondes.

  Kirgen came up beside her and smiled. “Nothing compared to the pandemonium in Ariss, is it?”

  Roba picked up her travel pack and slung it over her shoulder. With one finger, she activated the airfloat that carried the rest of her supplies and beckoned for it to follow her. “I’d prefer the pandemonium,” she remarked.

  Kirgen looked surprised and a little hurt. “Don’t let him upset you. Go visit your friend—and cheer up. This could be fun.”

  “This would be fun if somebody besides Praniksonne had ever made it out of the jungle alive.”

  Kirgen shrugged. “I’ll bet people do it all the time—but nobody thinks to mention it.” He sighed. “Hell, Roba, it’s a forest. Trees, you know? What could possibly be so threatening about that?”

  Tromping through the town on her own, trying to find either Fair Road or North Street, or especially the place where Fair Road met North Street, where Medwind said the house was, she decided Kirgen was probably right. It seemed ludicrous that people would live so close to a jungle—surely full of game animals and wild fruits—and never, ever, go in it. The tales of the inviolate Wennish jungles were probably distortions, like the unbelievable stories she’d heard spread about herself when she became one of the first mages to take a teaching position in a saje university. That exchange program had fostered some ludicrous tales—but experience had proven the truth to her doubting students. Things were rarely as strange as people made them out to be.

  She smiled and relaxed a bit.

  The houses had ceased to be rush-walled slums a block or so back. Now, trudging through heavy drizzle along the ludicrously named Fish Street, she noticed that the buildings were becoming distinctly good. They were large and sturdy, and looked warm and inviting with the yellow glow of lamps and a few ghostlights spilling out onto the streets. She found Fair Road, figured out which way north would be, and turned to her right, hoping that whoever had named the streets had a practical mind.

  He had. North Street was the last one before the town backed up against the palisade again. The house directly in front of her, a colossal white one-story with tall, gabled, thatched roofs, had two massive, carved, wood gates. On one of them hung a sign painted in six languages.

  The sign said:

  “Qualified, Certified-Safe Magics—Guarding, Transporting, and Livestock Our Specialties. Also Historical Research. We Buy Books! Private and Group Lessons Watterdaes. NO LOVE SPELLS!!!”

  “Livestock?” Roba muttered. “What by the gods have they come to, mucking about with livestock?” She rapped on the carved stone knocker and listened to the crash that echoed inside. That doorknocker would drive me insane, she thought. I don’t know how Medwind stands it.

  She waited, with the rain pissing merrily on her head. It was picking up force; she half-suspected this was because the bloody weather knew she was stuck out in it. She gritted her teeth and stuck her hands into the pockets of her travel cape and determined not to notice.

  After a moment, she heard footsteps coming toward her. “Coming, coming,” someone yelled, and then a small door inside the gate flew open, and Roba confronted the oldest living human being she’d ever seen. He was a saje, with fabulous long white braids bound in gold. He wore his official robes—evidently he’d been working. She looked at his chest for the visual ribbon-salad of awards, guilds and other frippery the sajes loved to confer on each other and was surprised to discover the busy mess wasn’t there. Where it would have been, the old man wore a single featureless onyx sphere, circled with a narrow rim of smooth yellow gold.

  Roba had been in the saje side of Ariss long enough to recognize that award. It was the Eye of the Infinite—the highest, and rarest, award the sajerie offered. Roba had been given to understand that the only plane of existence higher than “Wearer of the Eye” was god— and not one of the minor demi-gods, either.

  The old man grinned at her. “You’re wet,” he said.

  “It’s raining.”

  “Yes, it is. But you’re a mage—why the hell are you wet?” He was still grinning—and standing in the rain, she was still getting wetter.

  “I’m wet because it’s raining.”

  The old man laughed, and did something, and suddenly, standing there in the pouring, rapidly-becoming-sheeting rain, she wasn’t wet anymore. “See?” he asked. “If you don’t want to be wet, just think dry.” He moved out of her path and beckoned her inside.

  He looked up at her from under his bushy brows, and his expression became mysterious. The pitch of his voice rose, while he stared through and beyond Roba, and his eyes half-closed, and he began to rock slightly from side to side. “Roba, mage, you have come to visit Medwind Song. Your mission takes you far from your home. Your two friends should have come with you, though. I suspect we could have found for them the things they sought.”

  Roba felt chillbumps rising on her body—neither from the rain nor the weather nor from anything else of the sort. The old man was scary.

  “Ummm, yes,” she agreed. “So, ah, is Medwind here?”

  She stepped past him, into the huge public room, and realized that one solitary room was bigger than her entire apartment. The whitewashed plaster walls and soaring ceiling that rose into a dark tangle of mortise-and-tenoned beams and roof thatching would have been cozy in a smaller place. Like home, she thought and shook her head. But in this place, they were rather grand. Primitive, but grand.

  Then she heard other, faster footsteps in the passage. Good, she thought. Maybe somebody normal—A moment later, she confronted an ageless, fierce-looking Hoos woman with ice-blue eyes and glossy white hair. Roba thought, Her face is so young, but…

  A trick of the stranger’s movement caught her attention, and Roba gasped. “Medwind?”

  The Hoos woman grinned. “None other. But you needn’t look so surprised. You’ve changed as well, Roba Morgasdotte.”

  “If I’ve changed so much, why did you recognize me?”

  “I know only two women with your height. The other lives here. With those odds, I had a fair chance of being right. So, what brings you to the backwater hells of Omwimmee Trade? I thought you’d sworn never to leave the comforts of civilization again.”

  Roba laughed. “I fell among evil companions who led me astray.”

  Medwind linked arms with her. “As have I. This is my husband, Nokar Feldosonne, once Chief Librarian of Faulea University, now out in the sticks hedge-wizarding for love of me. He seduced and corrupted me.”

  Roba had barely enough time to nod politely before Medwind was dragging her back through the house. Her old roommate’s last line finally registered on her ear when the two of them were halfway along an enormous breezeway. She stopped and looked at her one-time roommate and snorted. “He seduced and corrupted you? What about those nine young husbands you were forever going on about when we roomed together—and the men you used to sneak into the room, and—?”

  Medwind waved Roba’s objections away with a delicate sweep of her hand. “I seduced and corrupted them. There is a difference. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

  Roba laughed. “Ah, Medwind, yours is like the tale of the randy bellmaker seduced by the village virgin—very little rings true.” She chuckled and leaned on her friend’s arm. “You are as full of bilge as you ever were.”

  “Very possibly,” Medwind agreed, and grinned, and opened a door. “This is the workroom. Best room in the house for just visi
ting, as far as I’m concerned. Have a seat.”

  Roba dropped herself cross-legged onto a large, soft cushion, and sighed. “So what in the hells happened to your hair? I swear you look younger now than you did when we roomed together—but last I saw you, your hair was black as the inside of a demon’s heart.”

  Medwind arched an eyebrow at her. “Interesting analogy—I’ll try not to take it personally.” She sat on another cushion, and shrugged. “I went Timeriding—it has some side effects. This,” she brushed a hand through her hair, “was one of them. A bit of physical un-aging was another.”

  Roba was fascinated. “I heard a rumor of your Timeride. You were involved in the Second Mage/Saje War. You went over to the saje side of the city… there was some talk at the time of you being a traitor.”

  Medwind leaned back on several extra pillows. “Indeed. To some of my colleagues, feelings ran deeper than talk. After that brief war was over, I found it easier to leave Ariss. I feared the Council might decide to try and sentence me—it was easier to go voluntarily into unofficial exile. I didn’t mind too much. Unlike you, I never had any great love for the City of Fogs and Bogs.” She gave Roba a bemused smile. “That’s why I never understood why you left after you took your master’s. I know the mages would have found a teaching spot for you—probably even reserved you a room in their tower.”

  Roba smiled and stroked a cat that climbed up on her lap. “I stayed with city life. I didn’t want to teach; I didn’t want that responsibility. I wanted to be free to spend all my time learning—so I accepted a position as a civic mage down in Braxille. I lived in the archives at night.”

  “Gods, Braxille’s not a city. It’s an iceberg!”

  “If you spend all your time indoors, it doesn’t matter.”

  Medwind gave her friend a disbelieving laugh. “I suppose not. Still, I think I’d rather be dead than in Braxille.”

  “Ah, yes.” Roba nodded wisely. “The motto of the Fisher Province. I think they’ve even stamped it on the money now.” She grinned and shrugged. “Anyway, I did get tired of the cold and the dark. For about the last year, I’ve worked on the saje side of Ariss, teaching mage history and historical mage-applications of magic. I’ve pulled a lot from the Fishers, and a lot from Daane University—and besides, it’s one mighty library that old man of yours left behind in Faulea.”

  Medwind leaned forward, curiosity stamped on her face. “And that brings us to what you’re doing here, in the far reaches of hot, steaming nowhere.”

  “Ask your husband. He knew my name, how I got here, why I’d come—he’s very, very good at farsight. And very spooky.”

  Medwind sputtered and inexplicably threw herself back on her pile of pillows. She was laughing, Roba realized—silent convulsions that became big, gasping roars of laughter. Tears rolled down the Hoos woman’s cheeks. “Nokar good at farsight!” she howled. “Nokar—good—at farsight!”

  Roba leaned forward and told her old friend, crisply and with cold precision, “That was what I said. Would you mind letting me in on the joke?”

  Medwind caught her breath and made herself quit laughing. Wiping tears from her eyes, she said, “Nokar couldn’t farsee past the end of his nose. He bribes the town urchins to bring him news—pays them in sweets and the occasional copper rit. They come running up to the window of his workroom and tell him anything they think he’ll be interested in—every once in a while, they even bring something he can use. But then, when he thinks he’ll get away with it, he does this big farcical mystical act—”

  Roba remembered her awe of the old man. She wasn’t convinced by Medwind’s denial of his talent. “He fooled me.”

  “Yeah, well—he’s had lots of practice. He has the fishermen around here so nervous they tack trinkets on our gate before they go out to sea, thinking to appease the mighty magician Nokar with them.”

  “But,” Roba protested, “he wears the Eye of the Infinite. He must be brilliant to have earned that.”

  Medwind sighed and scooted back to an upright position. “He’s one hell of a fine librarian,” she agreed. “Superb researcher, too. Pretty decent linguist. And he can transport himself and a roughly equal mass simultaneously without ending up in the middle of solid objects—” The Hoos woman shrugged and made a dismissive gesture. “That’s about it.”

  Roba wanted to be more impressed. “He can keep rain off someone.”

  “So can a rainjacket.”

  Roba gave up. Obviously, she had been duped. “All right. So—I was suckered, and I was spied upon by snot-nosed village kids.”

  “So you were. It happens.” Medwind tossed her rows of braids back out of her face. Her pale eyes flashed and the dangling bit of gold she wore in her nose jingled. “And still you haven’t told me what you’re doing in this hole at the end of the universe.”

  “Chasing after frogs by trying to walk on water, I suspect.”

  Medwind laughed. “That sounds frustrating.”

  “Mmmm-hmmm. Worse, since I suspect all I’m going to get out of the ordeal is a soaking—a soaking, I might add, I richly deserve.”

  Roba quickly told Medwind about Thirk’s fascination with Edrouss Delmuirie and her decision to join the Delmuirie Society so she could get a desperately needed raise, and finally, about the fiasco with the cobbled-together hoax of a new Delmuirie theory she and her young lover had devised. As she described Praniksonne and the tablet, however, and the events that led up to her hurried flight to Omwimmee Trade, she sensed a shift in Medwind’s mood. It only made sense, she supposed. Medwind had always had a place in her soul reserved for ancient history, just like Roba. It was part of the reason they’d remained friends.

  But Medwind was suddenly on her feet. “Praniksonne,” she muttered. “I don’t know that name, but—” Her attention shifted to Roba. “Come look at this,” she said, and beckoned Roba to a workstand draped with cloth. “Is this anything like what you saw?” She pulled the cloth back, and Roba looked.

  The University instructor felt the world beginning to shift and spin around her. The tablet lay gleaming and white, seemingly suffused with a light of its own, impressed deeply with the First Folk script. She reached out and stroked it lightly, almost afraid, at first, that it might crumble to powder at her touch. It was cool and smooth and beautiful. It looked newly made, but had about it the feel of great, patient age. “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s it. So you also have found these deformed offspring of the First Folk? You have seen the things Praniksonne spoke of?”

  She knew she sounded hopeful and probably childish in her yearning after the things of another time. But she couldn’t help it. Perhaps Thirk Huddsonne was leading her on a fool’s race—but that didn’t change for a moment the fact that there were real wonders to be found at the end of the race.

  Medwind shook her head, though, in firm negation. “That isn’t what we found at all.” She grinned then, and in that grin, Roba could see the bared fangs of a hunter.

  “Praniksonne lied. He stole that tablet. I have the kids who brought both of them out of the jungle here in my house.” The Hoos woman’s grin became broader, wilder—Medwind’s teeth flashed in the reflected light and Roba saw traces of the barbarian and the warrior the Hoos had once been. “And I hope that when the sajes find out Praniksonne stole that tablet and lied to them, they rope him to the bell tower at midday and set fire demons to dancing under his skin.”

  “Could happen,” Roba muttered.

  Softly, Medwind added, “We have everything ready —we’re going after the real city of the First Folk in the morning. You were planning on going into the jungle anyway—do you want to come with us?”

  There was no question in Roba’s mind but that she would be going along.

  * * *

  Seven-Fingered Fat Girl twisted an end of the heavy braided belt she’d tied around her waist. She knelt inside Medwind Song’s b’dabba beside Dog Nose and Runs Slow and Kirtha. Dog Nose was tense and unhappy.

  “They’re g
oing to take our city away from us. It won’t be our place anymore—it will be their place, and when they get tired of us, they’ll make us leave.”

  “No,” Fat Girl said. “We told them it was our city—that we would let them come to the book place, but they could not stay. They agreed.” She leaned closer to Dog Nose, her body taut with the uncertainty she felt. “They promised.”

  “And what is that worth?—the promise of peknu. As much as the promises of the Silk People, who say they will trade us good silks for the meat we bring, and then trade us dyed ragcloth?”

  Fat Girl made a rude noise. “These are not the Silk People.”

  Dog Nose sat straighter. His face was angry, his lips tight. “You are our fat. Your word is our word—the word of Four Winds Band. But, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl, remember that your life rests with us as ours does with you.” He stared pointedly at her maimed left hand, and forced her to recall the debt she owed him. “Remember who your band is.”

  He stood and stalked out of the b’dabba.

  Kirtha looked at Seven-Fingered Fat Girl and Runs Slow with concern. “Dog Nose mad at?” she asked in Arissonese.

  Fat Girl bit her lip and nodded to the little girl. In the peknu tongue, she said, “Dog Nose mad at. It not matter. His mad go away.”

  “Kyadda,” Kirtha said, crossing her tiny arms over her chest.

  Fat Girl winked at the little girl and forced herself to smile. “Kyadda,” she agreed. That was a Hoos word, one that Fat Girl had picked up quickly. It meant “everything is as it should be.” With Dog Nose angry at her, she didn’t see how everything could be fine—but Kirtha looked happier thinking it was.

  Runs Slow and Kirtha raced out of the b’dabba to play in the garden—Fat Girl sat in the lonely goat-felt tent after they were gone and drummed softly. Maybe she had been wrong to lead her tagnu away from the Paths. Maybe their villages would have started giving them better trades. Perhaps, if she had stayed, the rest of her tagnu would still be alive.