The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders Read online

  Paul left, and I never saw him again.

  UP HERE ON the Wrekin it’s now completely deserted. For the moment. Every now and then I fancy I can hear a snatch of singing or child’s laughter, and that is most definitely peat smoke I can smell.

  Paul might not have persuaded me to spend my future in his past, but he did inadvertently set my life on the road which it has followed for the past forty years. What he said about the number of thin places in the skin of the world was quite true. I know: I’ve spent my life investigating them – everything from Mayan pyramids and the Nazca lines to stone circles, primeval forest glades, and even remnants of the old Birmingham back-to-backs which most people think have all been demolished – but the more of these ancient mysteries I’ve seen, the less I’ve been able to solve the greatest and most ancient of them all. The one called simply ‘if’.

  If I hadn’t taken that job.

  If I’d married that woman.

  If I’d only chosen the road.

  I look down from this ancient height to the Shropshire plain sprawled with the lights of towns and villages which one day will be nothing more than green mounds in the grass, but which at the moment are full of people enjoying the bright now of their lives and ignoring the wide darkness of time surrounding them on all sides, and I recall the look of terror on that Roman soldier’s face as he found himself in an alien time, and I wonder how often that same look has been on my own face in recent years. And here they are come to meet me, out of the warm-orange doorways set below thatched conical roofs, with gold gleaming about their throats and smiles on their faces and songs in the voices. The Cornovii have come for me, and I am home.

  Bones by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  BETWEEN THE SCARF and the hood, hardly anything of Elantris’ face was exposed and still he was breathing grit, every blink grinding the stinging particles into his eyes so that he thought he would go blind before they reached Dust Port.

  “Is this a sandstorm?” he demanded of the man in the locust’s forward saddle, leaning forwards to yell in his ear.

  “Sandstorm’d strip your flesh from your bones!” The rider’s amusement was plain. “First time in these parts, then?”

  “Domina Hastella never wanted to visit before,” Elantris yelled. The man’s back was offering no insights. “Which means you found something?”

  Their locust dipped and dived, some current of desert air slipping out from beneath its wings. For a moment the pair of them could only cling on and let the labouring insect regain its hold on the element.

  The rider cursed the beast, swatting at its antennae for emphasis. “Found lots of things,” he called back. “But yes.” When not proving a surprisingly able locust-wrangler, the man in the forward saddle was an academic, a Beetle-kinden named Fordyce Gracer, a student of the buried past.

  Elantris recalled waiting for Gracer in a shabby town of white-walled, flat-roofed buildings where south had been the desert, only the desert, like the edge of the world: vast, ground-down stretches of broken, rocky country standing barely proud of the sea of sand. If there was some habitable place on the far side of that barren ocean, nobody could swear to it. Even airships that had tried to brave the storms and the heat and the abrasive air had either come back in defeat or not at all. Surely nothing of any value to man lies that way, had been Elantris’ only thought. And yet not true: here were Elantris and, on the locust ahead, his mistress Hastella, two Spider-kinden come all this way to inspect her family’s investment.

  “It didn’t used to be like this,” Gracer bellowed. He seemed to be guiding the locust lower, but the blowing sand kept Elantris from taking a look as he hunched in the Beetle-kinden’s wind-shadow.

  “Like what?” he managed.

  “We’ve known for a while this wasn’t always a desert. Sea was much closer, and we’ve found where rivers were. It was green, all this.”

  “So what happened?” To Elantris it sounded like something out of the old stories, that some ill-worded curse could parch a whole country to this death-by-dust.

  “Time happened,” was Gracer’s curt reply. “Things change. You go digging around the place as much as I have, you realize that. But in this case it’s a good thing. When the desert came, it buried a lot of fascinating stuff, and that stuff’s still there. So long as it’s out of the wind, you’d be amazed what secrets the desert keeps.”

  Then the locust had spread its legs, although its wings flung so much sand up that Elantris could not even see the ground. A moment later the insect came to a clumsy, skidding stop, hopped a few paces as though uncertain, then folded its wings primly.

  “Welcome to Dust Port!” Gracer boomed. “Dig’s just a little way on. You’ll learn to love it, just like we have!”

  A moment later the wind lulled, the dust swirling and sinking, revealing a camp of tents and slope-sided shacks ringing a stand of stunted trees that Elantris thought must be a watering hole. Gracer was waving at a train of animals winding its way in from the far side, a half-dozen round-bodied beetles with ridged, black shells, laden with boxes and barrels but stepping lightly enough that he guessed the containers were empty. A little logic suggested that the caravan had been sent to Dust Port from the dig site for supplies.

  Elantris dismounted and made it to the other locust just in time to help his mistress down. She was sufficiently swathed in silks that he had no clue to her mood, but then even her bare face was seldom a good guide to that. They were both Spider-kinden, but Hastella was pure Aristoi, a distant scion of the Aelvenita family that was paying for Gracer’s research. Her Art always hid her true thoughts deep behind her mask of watchful patience.

  So has he finally found something to repay the investment? Elantris wondered. When Hastella had ordered him to arrange the journey she had not seemed keen, so much as resigned.

  Elantris was just a poor secretary: letters, music and a little divination on the side. What would he know?

  Gracer was heading off for the caravan. Beetles like him were tenacious, robust and found everywhere, just like the insects they drew their Art from. They got caught in Spiders’ webs like any other prey, though, and now Gracer’s little struggles had attracted the spinner’s notice.

  Hastella watched him go, then gestured imperiously for Elantris to follow her over to a ramshackle collection of wood that turned out to be something like a taverna. There, he procured some watered wine from the leathery-skinned Fly-kinden proprietor and brought it over hesitantly.

  “It won’t be much, Domina,” he murmured. “I think it has sand in it.”

  She hooked her veil down so that he would receive the sharp edge of her expression. “If there’s anything within ten miles that doesn’t have ‘sand in it’, it’s news to me.” Still, she took the wine and downed it without a flinch, which was more than Elantris could manage.

  He looked about the close slope-ceilinged confines of the taverna’s single room, the stifling air glittering with dust motes where the sun crept in. There were a couple of big Scorpion-kinden sitting in one corner: waxy-skinned, bald men with snaggling underbites and claws on their hands. A scarred Spider woman reclined nearby, wearing armour of silk and chitin, and with a rapier displayed prominently at her belt. Most of the rest of what passed for the taproom was taken up by a dust-caked party of Flies and Beetles and a single sullen-looking Ant-kinden, all glowering at Elantris when they caught him looking their way. In Dust Port you kept your curiosity to yourself.

  “You think I’m mad, of course, to come out here,” Hastella said softly.

  He started guiltily. “I would never…”

  “Gracer is quite the scholar, you know. He believes what he does is important. He’s right, though perhaps not quite in the way he thinks.”

  “Mistress, forgive me, I don’t even know what he does, what anyone could be doing out here.”

  “The past is a book, and knowledge is never wasted. A grand discovery, an ancient palace, a city from time before record lost to the sands, these thing
s buy status and prestige for him as a scholar, for me as his patroness. For the Aelvenita as my kin. And sometimes men like Gracer turns up something genuinely intriguing – some scrap of ancient ritual that might be put to use, some antique blade still sharp despite the ages… Knowledge is never wasted. But, like good wine, it is sometimes best kept to those who appreciate it. After all, Master Gracer would scrabble in the earth with or without the patronage of the Aristoi. Better that we pay for his hobby, just in case it profits us. Just in case he finds something remarkable…”

  “Mistress, can I ask … what was it drew you here, really? You wouldn’t say…”

  “No, I would not. Not back where the foolish lips of a secretary could spread the word.” Her cold look did not endure, seeing his hurt expression. “Very well, Elantris, as we’ve arrived.” She reached into one of her many pouches and produced a folded paper. “Feast your eyes.”

  For a long time he stared at the sketch, turning it and turning it and trying to understand what he was looking at. In the end he was forced to confess his ignorance.

  “It’s a skull, Elantris. A drawing of a skull.”

  As though the sketch had been one of those trick images, abruptly he saw it, the line of the jaw, the eye socket, the teeth; he had never seen such teeth. “A skull of what?” he asked.

  “That’s just it,” Hastella confirmed. “Nobody knows.” Her gaze might have been fixed on some image that existed only in her mind, but Elantris fancied that, while he studied the sketch, she had been staring at the two Scorpion-kinden, and that they had been looking back, yellow eyes fixed narrowly on the Spider Arista. Brigands? was Elantris’s alarmed thought. Scorpions hereabouts were not noted for their genteel or law-abiding ways.

  Interrupting his thoughts, Gracer ducked in, spotted them and ambled over, managing a creditable bow before Hastella. “Domina, we’re ready to head to the dig site. You may fly the last leg if you wish, but we have a howdah for you if you prefer a more comfortable ride on the beetles.”

  “So kind, Master Gracer, and I accept.” She favoured him with one of her warmest smiles, the kind she reserved for truly useful underlings – and which Elantris himself saw precious few of.

  GRACER’S DIG WAS out where the bones of the earth jagged from the dusty ground, tiers of barren, red-rock uplands rising higher and higher until they broke free of the abrading hand of the sand to form the true mountains that spiked the horizon. It was stark, uninhabitable, malevolent country, and yet even here people lived. Riding atop one of the pack beetles, Elantris saw huddles of huts that must count as villages, corrals of animals.

  “What did they raise here?” he asked Gracer.

  “Crickets, beetles,” the man explained. “The local varieties barely need to drink from one tenday to the next. The herders let them out before dawn, and their carapaces catch the dew like cups. If you know what you’re doing you can fill your water-skin from them.”

  “And you say this place was once green!”

  “Look ahead.” Gracer’s finger hands drew out landmarks from the stepped and broken terrain. “See the land dip there? Follow the gully up. That was a river once. People lived here, many people. This land wasn’t just good enough to keep them alive, it was good enough to fight over.”

  “How do you know?”

  The Beetle-kinden’s teeth flashed in his dark face. “Because of what we found, young Spider. Because of what brought your mistress here.”

  Monster bones? But it was plain that Gracer meant more than that.

  The dig itself was a large tent backed onto a sheer rock face, surrounded by a collection of smaller shelters, all dust-coloured, patched canvas looking as though it had suffered there for decades rather than just under a year. The motley collection of people who came out to greet them had rather the same look. Elantris’s image of academics was the elegant and sophisticated, debating some point of abstract interest in an Arista’s parlour, not this pack of weathered, villainous men and women, their hardwearing clothes layered with dirt and their hands calloused from the spade and the pick.

  Gracer was making introductions, but the names passed Elantris by – even though he knew Hastella would recall every one. Instead he was just looking from face to face, wondering how one would separate a scholar from a fugitive killer just from the look. A half-dozen were Beetles like Gracer, stocky, dark and powerful, and there were a couple of Elantris’s own kinden as well as three Flies and a lean Grasshopper woman employed to look after the locusts.

  Elantris could see how such a team would function out here, the strengths each would bring. Every insect-kinden had its Art, the abilities it drew from its totem. The Flies would bring swift reflexes and the wings they could manifest on demand, able to scout the sands as swiftly as the saddled locusts. The Spiders drew on their archetype’s patience and presence. The Beetles had their rugged endurance, and the Grasshopper must own that most ancient of Arts, able to speak with her kinden’s beasts. Elantris watched her commune with them before walking off to their pen with the great creatures trailing meekly behind her. Without Art the merely inhospitable would have become uninhabitable.

  Art aside, the barren surroundings and the looming rock face oppressed Elantris, loaded with an invisible threat that plucked at the edge of his mind. He felt as though some predator was laired there, crouched within those cliffs having drawn the substance of the desert before it as a blind, to entrap the incautiously venturesome. He glanced at Hastella, but her smooth composure admitted nothing of her thoughts.

  And besides, this was one reason she kept him at her side, despite his more general failings. He had good eyes for the invisible, and what was history if not a great edifice of the unseen?

  I shall have harsh dreams here.

  He came back to himself because Gracer was guiding his mistress towards the largest tent, and presumably she had invited him to show her his finds, or else he was just too enthusiastic for propriety. Elantris followed hurriedly, catching the Beetle-kinden’s words.

  “We’ve dug a selection of trenches, and we hit stone everywhere: foundations, loose blocks, all of it worn by the sand but still recognisable as the work of human hands. No idea how far it extends – that would take far more labour than we have – but I think at least several hundred inhabitants, potentially well over a thousand.”

  “Where are these trenches?” Hastella asked him.

  “We’ve marked locations and recovered them, otherwise the sand will destroy anything we leave exposed. A day or so here and you’ll feel the same way, Domina.” A jovial chuckle. “However, in here we’ve exposed the entryway to a dwelling set into the cliff. The entrance had been carved into the rock and then choked with sand and rubble, maybe actively filled in. People knew there was something here, though. We came here following travellers’ tales.”

  “What did they say?” Elantris blurted out. Gracer and Hastella stared at him and he coloured. “About this place? What did they say?”

  Gracer shrugged. “Some nonsense. They’re not fond of it. Who would be? Nothing but dust here now – not like it was all those years ago. Thousands of years, Domina, five, ten... I’ve never seen anything like what we’ve found here – what we’re still finding here. It’s from before any history, from before even stories.” And, with that, Gracer stepped into the largest tent, forcing his two guests to follow.

  Inside, the heat was stifling, as though the very gloom radiated it. The slope of the ground within was steep where Gracer’s team had dug down to the level of the old, that point in the sands that history had sunk to. There, the shapes of the past emerged from the dry substrate like ships from fog, and Elantris saw the angled lines of walls that had been ground down to mere stubs, the scatter of fallen blocks, carven sides effaced, worn almost smooth. At the far end of the tent, lit up by twin lamps, was a gateway, a crack in the rock that had been widened into a low rectangle of darkness, flanked by uneven, lumpy columns or, no… Elantris recognized the contours: statues cut into the ston
e. There the swell of hips, there elbows, shoulders. Time had played the headsman, though: barely even a stump of neck was left,

  “We’ve collected a lot of odd artifacts, potsherds and the like, all unfamiliar styles,” Gracer explained. “But you probably want to see the guardians.”

  There were a handful of pits dug there, covered with sheets against the dust that still got in, to hang in the air and prickle the throat and eyes. With a showman’s flourish, Gracer drew the nearest one back, revealing—

  For a moment Elantris was convinced he saw living flesh, movement, locking eyes with a fierce, ancestral glower, but there were only bones left of this ancient warrior. Bones, and the tools of his trade. An irregular lump of reddish corrosion was an axe-head, according to Gracer. A near-identical blot was a knife-blade. The armour had fared better, loose scales of chitin still scattered about the ribs, and curving pieces of some sort of helm placed reverently next to that yellowed skull.

  “We’ve found more than twenty so far, buried before this gateway,” Gracer explained, “doubtless we’ve not found them all. Soldiers, guardians, sentries left to watch the threshold, interred with care and respect.”

  “What kinden?” Hastella asked him.

  “Impossible to say.” Gracer frowned, the dissatisfied academic. “You must know, from a skeleton alone the kinden is usually impossible to tell, unless Art has made modifications to the bone structure, like a Mantid’s spines or a Scorpion-kinden’s claws. The thing is, most of the old sites I’ve worked on, there’s usually some fairly strong pictorial evidence to suggest who the locals were – statues of beetles, spider-web motifs, those mantis-armed idol things you get. Go back a couple of thousand years and that’s usually the principal decorative motif. Here – nothing of the sort, not on the stones, not the walls – it all seems to predate that period entirely. Our dead friends here had some personal effects, and we’ve found a pendant with what might be a bee insignia, and a shield that’s been embossed with fighting crickets, but it’s circumstantial… Who were they? We don’t know. We also found the remains of some dead insects close by, again apparently buried with full honours – two fighting beetles, a scorpion, but again, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the people here were any kinden we know today. But you didn’t come all the way to our humble hole in the ground to see these dead fellows, Domina.”