# Read the first page of City of Bones by Martha Wells

Read the opening of City of Bones by Martha Wells free, no signup. A relic dealer in a desert city is hired to hunt dangerous ancient artifacts.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/city-of-bones-martha-wells
- Genre: Science fiction
- Year: 1995
- ISBN: 9781250872777
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781250872777&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781250872777
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781250872777

## The opening

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.”

There was a choking cough from within the shop’s dark interior, possibly Arnot about to launch into an attack of apoplexy. Arnot’s wife bit her lip and studied them both. Sagai was big and dark-skinned, the hair escaping from his headcloth mostly gone to gray, his blue robe and mantle somewhat frayed and shabby. He was despised as a foreigner because he came from Kenniliar Free City, but all the dealers knew he was a trained scholar and had studied the Ancients long before circumstances had forced him to work in Charisat’s relic trade. Sagai’s features were sensitive, and right now his brown eyes were liquid with humor at Arnot’s wife’s predicament.

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