Pile of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

smile.
    “That’s easy,” he said.
    Then he turned and disappeared down the alley.
    “We’d best go as well,” Morgan said. “He’s right. We don’t want to run into the aedile, even during the day. Let’s not push our luck.”
    Babieca glared at her. “We haven’t been paid!”
    “We’ll be paid with a sword to the gut if we linger here. A meretrix keeps his word, and he said it would be easy to find him. We’ll return tomorrow and pay a visit to the lupanaria.”
    “Boar shit.” Babieca was fuming. “We paid for tickets to the Hippodrome. My tab at the Seven Sages has run out. Roldan’s tunica is falling apart—”
    “
Move.
I’m not getting thrown in the bloody carcer for this.”
    They hurried back the way they’d come, past the grand clepsydra, past the buzzing Exchange, working their way through the brightly colored crowd. Nightfall came quickly, and it wasn’t safe to be here when the rules changed. Roldan stared at the Tower of Auditores. What night games did they play there? What gossip were the spadones privy to? He’d probably never know.
    His hand still burned where the salamander had touched him. Why did it feel so familiar? A part of him seemed to remember the touch of another claw, ages ago, but the sweet pain was too distant to recall.
    “See you on the other side,” Morgan said.
    They parted, heading back to their alleys. When Roldan arrived, he could already feel the pull. Everything was beginning to change. He undressed, replacing his belongings inside the wall. Once they were covered, he laid his handagainst the warm stones. Now was the moment. He closed his eyes. Something moved through him, unraveling. He surrendered to the current, letting it pull him under.
    When he opened his eyes, it was all different. Or the same, depending on the way you looked at it. They were back in Wascana Park. The power was still heavy on them, but the crossing had worked. Anfractus and its wilds were no longer visible. They were back in Plains Cree territory. The ground used to be littered with buffalo bones, which was what
Oscana
meant in Cree: “pile of bones.” But the white settlers messed up the morpheme and called it Wascana instead. If they’d known Oscana’s secret, they might have taken the time to get the name right.
    It was dawn. The park was empty, so their nudity wasn’t an issue. They pulled their duffel bags from the trees, dressing in silence. For some reason, synthetic fabric wouldn’t make the journey from park to wild. He pulled on his jacket. He could hear the ducks, and faint strains of music from Party Island, where dawn was clearly no impediment to undergraduate drinking. They all had to be at work in a few hours. Now it was the university that seemed like a shadow, not Anfractus, but they’d made their choice.
    Living between worlds meant paying rent.

2
    S HELBY WAS YELLING FROM THE BEDROOM .
    He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was profanity involved. He’d left her under a pillow again. The coffeemaker was confusing him. It was a gift from his father, and had a complex panel on it with a lot of choices, like a replicator from
Star Trek
. He selected “ordinary cup,” whatever that meant, and returned to the bedroom. Shelby’s voice was muffled by the pillow, but the cursing had stopped. He liberated her from the bed and placed her on the nightstand.
    “—
huge
, I’ve never seen one like this before, it’s like a queen, or some kind of monarch, what sort of government would centipedes have?”
    “A republic? I don’t know. Where did it come from?”
    “The hole under the baseboard. I’ve trapped it, but I’m not really sure what my next step should be.”
    “What’s it doing now?”
    “Going apeshit in a mason jar. I’m about to slide some cardboard underneath it.”
    “Be careful. Do apartment centipedes bite?”
    “No, they’re very ethical. How should I know?”
    He heard some rummaging. Then Shelby let out a whoop of