City of Bones by Martha Wells EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Martha Wells
- Language: English
- Genre: Action & Adventure Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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.”
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