Martha Wells - Ile-Rien 02 by City of Bones

Author:City of Bones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-31T14:10:13+00:00

Chapter Eleven

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“Elen is a sweet girl, and to be searching for relics of strange repute is wonderfully interesting,” Sagai said thoughtfully. “But I wish there was some way we could bow out of this game.”

“I shouldn’t have dragged you into this,” Khat said. He had told Sagai about his most recent adventure, leaving out only Aristai Constans’s part in it.

“I invited myself in, and if anyone is going to be assigned blame it should be this Riathen, who sounds like a very unpleasant sort of man.”

Khat couldn’t argue with that. They stood at the wall of the Academia, under the shade of one of the double row of colonnades that ran along it. This was as much as most people ever saw of the place, and here the students and lesser scholars taught classes for those who could afford to pay. Reading and writing Tradetongue for archivists, numbers and sums for clerks, and an occasional wild-eyed and threadbare scholar who told stories of the Ancients for copper bits. This was also where scholars bought relics from lower-tier dealers, and there were a few such transactions going on now. Khat saw Danil and another dealer he knew displaying a collection of tile or ceramic fragments for an eager young scholar, and he hoped Elen would get here before they finished and came over to pump Sagai and him for information.

Across the street a gaggle of peddlers sold anything the scholars might want, from scraps of paper and ink cakes to the backings for wax tablets. The Academia had been founded by the Seventh Elector as a small school for the study of the Ancients. As Charisat had grown in power and relics had grown in value in the markets, the Academia had grown in size and influence. It now taught everything from medicine to philosophy, and had one of the largest archives of Survivor texts in the Fringe Cities.

Elen appeared out of the crowd and came up to them. She nodded a greeting to Sagai, then said stiffly to Khat, “I was going to apologize to you, but after what you did to me, I don’t think I will.”

“Did Seul die of apoplexy?” he asked her.

Elen’s lips twitched as she suffered through some internal struggle. Then in a more normal voice she said, “No, but he’s going to die of something else if he keeps behaving the way he has been.”

“Do you have the name?” Sagai asked her.

Elen held up a scrap of paper. “Yes. I came as soon as the clerks found it. It’s a scholar named Arad-edelk.”

“Never heard of him before,” Khat said. He had been hoping it would turn out to be someone he had done work for, someone who might be inclined to believe their warning, but at least it wasn’t one of the more prominent scholars, who were notoriously contemptuous of relic dealers. Maybe this Arad would be easier to talk to.

Armed with the clerk’s scrap of paper, Elen went up to the gate vigil.

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