Pile of Bones (12 page)

“Fine.” She put the volume in her bag. “I’ll add it to the tower. I’ve almost reached the point where I can turn my library books into functional furniture.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“A guy on the Internet did it with FedEx boxes. Why can’t I do it with hardcovers?”

“Boxes aren’t liable to crush you. Maybe we should go shopping for some appropriate surfaces. I haven’t seen your place in a while—are you still using the oven as a drawer?”

“No. You were right about that being a terrible idea.”

“I’m glad you listen to me sometimes.”

Shelby squeezed her mother’s hand. “I always listen. I just reserve the right to make my own dumbass mistakes.”

“At least let me buy you a new bookshelf. And silverware.”

“I have silverware.”

“I don’t believe you. Come for dinner tomorrow, and you can raid my cupboards. I’ll make spinach salad.”

“You know I can’t resist bacon bits.” Shelby stood. “I’ll text you later.”

“You’re so much faster than me when you text. I misspell things—it’s embarrassing.”

Shelby smiled. “Nah. You’re better at it than you think.”

She left her mother’s office and walked into the fierce
sunlight. Halfway across the field, she took off her shoes and socks, letting the dry grass crunch beneath her toes. The sky devoured her from all sides. When she reached the shade, Andrew would be waiting for her, with sour candies and a double digest. Smiling, she broke into a run.

T
ODAY WOULD BELONG TO THE BATTLEMENTS
. Morgan pressed a palm against the familiar stones of her alley. Currents of green moss tickled her lifeline. Naked, she let the hot air settle over her shoulders. She could hear the sounds of the city, breathing close, but here she remained untouchable. She wondered what it must be like for Roldan, who could hear the lares muttering at his feet, or for Babieca, whose mind tipped with melodies. All she could hear was the city settling, and above, the racket of gulls. They probably expected her to hear the sigh of arrows, the complaint of the bow as it bent to her will. She heard none of these things, though. Only the frayed edge of a voice that she couldn’t quite recognize, pronouncing the same word over and over. She heard it among leaves and between notes, over the white silence of worms decaying in street pools, louder than the constant fizz of flies around drying meat. The word was a drum sounding far away. It meant nothing and everything, and she’d stopped trying to understand it. Like a name, it was something she lived with.

The sagittarii were the eyes of Anfractus. They saw everything from their stone aviary, high atop the Arx of Violets.
Like gargoyles between the crenellations, they scanned the intramural space beyond the city that bled into forest. The silenoi were the only true threat in that direction, and they could never take the city. Night hunts kept them sated, for the most part. There was always the possibility of invaders from beyond the sea, but in her two years on the battlements, Morgan had only seen a handful of vessels willing to brave the fierce nexus where the rivers met. The city had never depended on sea trade. It had never depended on anything, really. It seemed to graze on some invisible substance, growing and perspiring without any obvious source of nourishment. There must have been other cities like it, but she’d only heard them spoken of quietly, like the dead.

Morgan pulled the bricks out of her wall. The bundle was untouched, like always. The city swarmed with furs, but none of them had ever wandered down this particular alley. No soul had discovered the hairline crack in the wall, the loose bricks that could be moved aside to reveal the humid cell of her belongings. The bundle smelled of moss and weathered stone, cradled in its knot of darkness.
We all have our cells and bundles,
she thought.
Our untouchable alleys, the only safe spaces on a dangerous board.
She looked up. Something must be watching from above, keeping track of all those blind corners. It stood to reason. Something must have arranged those stones, calculated those cracks where light and shade met like accidental animals. Morgan reached as far as she could into the darkness of the crack, but beyond the bundle, there was nothing. Just currents of warm air.

She dressed in a light leather lorica, knotting her rust-colored cloak over one shoulder. Her quarrel was light, but the flexible sinew case retained its shape and was crushproof. Seen from the top down, it resembled a cut pomegranate, with holes for barbed, brass-toothed, and trilobe arrows. Her short bow, edged in horn, felt familiar in her hands. The core was made of polished bone, and her fingers knew every groove. She liked the idea that every part of the weapon had once been alive. The miles liked to brag about how they
kept the city safe, but it was the bow, not the sword, that protected Anfractus. Whatever might come for them, she’d be the first to see it. Not that she usually saw anything other than smoke, gull fights, or the dance of rooftop cats. If there was an enemy, it knew how to stay hidden. Perhaps it would devour them from below rather than above. Arrows would be useless in that case. The furs would have to protect them. She couldn’t imagine them emerging from their underground warrens, like perfectly blind moles, carrying broken knives. But anything was possible.

Morgan walked toward the clepsydra. Even approaching from a distance, she could hear the din of its gears and the noise of people gathering around it. People lazed on the rims of fountains, while link-boys hurried by with crucial wax tablets. Wagons rolled along deep ruts cut into the road, and the smell of animals was thick. Flies clustered everywhere, glistening like layers of black fish eggs on hide and stone alike. The street-level popinae had already begun to fill up, and people lined the stone bars, drinking wine and spooning hot chickpeas from wooden bowls. Morgan could hear the owners cursing as they reached into the round stone ovens. Many of the customers were well into their cups, in spite of the early hour. An aging meretrix sat at one of the nearby bars, eating spiced cabbage. Her mask was gilded in opals, and between bites, she dabbed her lips with the corner of a fine napkin.

Cold whores of the mind,
someone had once called the meretrices. Those who rose above the level of the cheap cell were treated with an odd mixture of dignity and mistrust. Polished and educated, they still weren’t allowed to forget the den of wolves from which they’d risen. Certainly they had power and status, but they would always be lupae, wolves who’d formerly prowled the stone circuits of the necropolis. They’d stood beneath the night-flowering plants, calling themselves glass-mongers, hairdressers, match-sellers. Those upon whom Fortuna smiled were accepted by the parents of a basia, given lessons in everything from seduction to ancient languages. But Fortuna didn’t smile
often. Most had to fight for their masks, and nobody would fail to point out the scars of that struggle.

The older meretrix caught Morgan looking at her. For a moment, she was frozen beneath the woman’s green eyes. Her mask seemed to glow in the sun, until Morgan felt that she was looking at a face cut by sharp planes of light. Then she smiled, raising her cup slightly. Her lined hands were dark and beautiful. Morgan inclined her head politely, then hurried toward the great clock. Roldan and Babieca were waiting for her, beneath the water-driven wheel. As Roldan raised a hand in greeting, one of the carved spokes cast a shadow over him. Morgan looked up and saw that it was the aspect of constant change—the throw forever in motion.

“Are you sky-gazing today?” Roldan asked.

“It looks that way. I’ll be alone mostly. It will give me the chance to ponder how absolutely terrible this plan is.”

“There’s a one-in-six chance that it will work,” Babieca said. “Like all things here. I thought the”—he almost said
lupo
, but managed to stop himself—“the meretrix seemed to have faith in us.”

“He has a name.” Roldan spoke while studying the fountain. “Felix. There’s no cause to keep reminding us of his profession.”

“I met a lot of people that night. Some of their names escape me, so it’s simpler to refer to them by their skill sets.”

“What do you know about his skill set?”

“There’s no time for this discussion,” Morgan said. “We simply have to roll. And since I’m the only member of this company who actually has a die, that falls to me.”

“Is this the part where you show it to us?”

“You should be so lucky.” She turned back to Roldan. “We have a day until the basilissa’s banquet. Felix can get you past the gates. I’ll be somewhere close, but I need to remain hidden. If we run into each other, we’ve never met.”

“I still think you should come in a dress,” Babieca said. “Who’s going to recognize you out of uniform?”

She gave him a long look. “Despite what you might think,
I am known to a few people in the Arx of Violets. Wearing something with layers of taffeta won’t serve to disguise my face, and I’m certainly not qualified to go masked. I’ll be more useful if I stay armed.”

“You could fit a dagger in the right dress.”

Morgan ignored this. “Roldan, how do you feel about your part?”

He was still staring at the fountain. “I understand what’s expected.”

“Babieca will pass for a courtier, if he doesn’t drink too much. You, however, will not. Auditores make people nervous. The surest way to disappear into the scenery—”

“—is to become his cup-bearer. I grasp the plan.”

“I think what Morgan may be alluding to,” Babieca said, “is that cup-bearers must be silent and obedient. You’re adept at the first part, but I wouldn’t call you obedient by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Am I so contrary?”

“Not necessarily. But you don’t always listen, either. You get distracted by the lares whispering around you.”

“I won’t say anything to reveal us.”

“That includes not exposing fallacies, drawing attention to lies, or pointing out that most of the people we’ll meet are idiots. Your job is to be silent and keep the wine flowing. I won’t be drinking much, although it will seem like I am.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Morgan said.

Roldan made no reply. He was lost in his own thoughts. There was no point in belaboring the issue. She’d have to trust him to play his part. Instinctively, her hand went to the collar of her lorica. Beneath the leather, she could feel the die around her neck. She’d won it after spending her first night on the battlements, alone, listening to the city below. At first, the noises had been indistinct. But after a few hours, they began to separate: love cries, imprecations, the song of coins, the pulse of lives moving down endless alleys. Near the end of her watch, she could distinguish between the sound of animals and the footsteps of the few silenoi who hunted along the darker streets. Even that high up, she felt
vulnerable. They were, after all, her opposite on the dark die. They had arrows of their own.

There were several things that made her nervous about this plan. The first—which she didn’t want to admit to Roldan—was that she didn’t entirely trust Felix. Should the evening come crashing down around them, he was the one with the most to lose. It was a long and perilous plummet from the good graces of the basilissa. It was convenient to think that he cared for her, that he wanted to shield her from potential danger, but his part in this was still obscure. He knew more than he was willing to say, and Morgan didn’t believe for an instant that he’d been a passive player thus far. He would turn on them if the situation worsened. Only a fool would do otherwise.

The second problem was knowing, unavoidably, that Narses was manipulating all of them in some way. The spadones ruled the arx, and he ruled them. What if he’d wanted them at the banquet from the very beginning? They could take the blame for whatever he had planned. Nobody positioned themselves against the Gens of Spadones, because it was like fighting an enemy who saw three moves ahead of you. They’d practically invented the board, and people were just stones that they nudged from square to square. They hunted their own way, different from the silenoi, but just as effective. They could destroy you with a tablet, a whisper, a poisoned ring, or a perpetual kiss dissolved in wine. Unlike the furs, who clung to certain standards of roguery, eunuchs dealt with everyone.

“Let’s part,” she said. “Earn some coins so that you’ll have something to jingle at the banquet. Courtiers always jingle. While you’re fleecing drunkards, I’ll see what I can catch a glimpse of inside the arx. They’ll be preparing like mad, and it shouldn’t be hard to move relatively unseen through the halls. I may even catch a glimpse of the high chamberlain, or at least one of his shadows.”

“I’m not an automaton, you know,” Babieca replied. “My fingers are still raw from the last time I played.”

“Trovadores are supposed to bleed for their art.”

She walked away before he could respond. He’d play well—not because he wanted them to succeed, but because he was in love with music. His fingers had no choice. And if the crowd was too drunk to care, Roldan would persuade a salamander to make the lamps dance. That always loosened a bit of coin. She supposed that most people thought the lares were a kind of miracle, the only magic left. They made Morgan uneasy. She didn’t like the hold that they had over Roldan, or the fact that they always did what they wanted. As queer little gods, they were powerful, but not to be trusted. She supposed that she’d be difficult as well if people tore down her lararium to reuse the pink marble, leaving her with nothing more than a scattering of crumb-dusted roadside shrines.

She walked along the edge of the market, which was no less crowded than the center. The tang of sulfur hit her nose, rising from the impluvium of the fullonica. She heard the clothes being beaten inside. There was a line of people waiting to drop off their laundry at the window. Underneath the sulfur, she smelled the urine that was used to fix colors. Morgan loved the idea that tunicae belonging to rich citizens were soaked in piss. Color required sacrifice. Hundreds of sea snails had perished for the red fringe on her gens-issued cloak. Thousands of madder berries were plucked for the cheaper scarlets, and a certain unoffending insect, when pulverized, yielded up the indigo currently in fashion.

As Morgan crossed the street, the smell changed to baking bread. She closed her eyes for a moment, standing before the pistrinum where she used to work. That was when she’d first arrived in the city and couldn’t find a wage anywhere else. Now the rumble of the grinding stones made her feel oddly reassured. She’d enjoyed pouring grain into the neck of the hollow stone, although the smell of the mules that turned the mill was somewhat less appealing. Still, furs lingered nearby, hoping to steal a few rings of freshly baked bread. Her stomach did a flip, but she didn’t want to brave the line. There was a free ration waiting for her at the arx—not fresh by a long shot, but she couldn’t argue with the price.

She needed a bath. Her tunica smelled fine, but the heat was making her sweat. It would be unseemly to visit the tower without bathing first. Fortuna didn’t mind, but the sagittarii would wrinkle their noses and avoid her. Morgan headed to the Stabian baths, which were cheaper and less appointed than those in Vici Arces. You could still purchase food, receive a bracing massage, or visit the love cells in the next building. The entrance, floored in sea-green tesserae, offered a picture of sandals with the message
Bathing is a virtue
.

Morgan paid the attendant, then headed to the apodyterium to change. Men and women bathed during separate periods, which meant that there was a single room for changing. She undressed and placed her clothes in a stone cubicle, next to a picture of a leaping fish. Some women laughed at the dirty pictures on the opposite wall. Laughter deflected jealousy, and it was hard not to snicker at the painted man riding a double-ended dildo. Morgan glanced again at the fish, which would aid her in recalling where she’d left her clothes. Then she walked toward the tepidarium, beginning to relax as the damp air touched her skin.