For once the Elya Street arurimat was quiet when Dema sat at his desk. The night patrols had gone out; the higher-ranking officers had left. With no one to hang over his shoulder, Dema took out the envelope of reports on the Ghost murders, from Nioki’s, the first, to Iralima’s, the most recent. He’d had two arurimi carry in a long worktable: now he used it to lay out the notes on each killing in order, so he could look for a pattern.
He was studying them when an arurim rapped on his door. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina, there is something you should see.”
Dema turned, scowling. Standing beside the arurim was a little Tharian who wore the yellow stole of a clerk or scribe, hemmed with the white key pattern of Heskalifos. He clutched a covered basket with hands that shook. The silk of the cover shone to Dema’s magical vision: spells for purification and containment were stitched into every centimetre of the cloth.
“I took it to the Heskalifos arurimat,” the clerk explained, wheezing. “The captain there said to bring it to you. It was blown by a man who claimed to possess magic. He was at Heskalifos looking for a teacher. When he made this, it was just covered in lightning.”
“And now it is not?” asked Dema, taking the basket. If this was a joke at his expense, he would seek revenge, he thought as he pulled the silk covering aside. He had too much to do without dealing with jokes.
Inside the basket was a globe of clear glass that sparkled. Curious, Dema touched a spark: it stung.
“Lightning, you say?” he asked. He went to his mages’ kit and got his leather gloves.
“Miniature,” replied the clerk, wheezing still.
Dema glanced at his two guests as he pulled on his gloves. “Arurim, perhaps a cup of water for the koris?”
The arurim bowed and hurried off. Dema lifted the globe from the basket. The globe was fully fifteen centimetres wide and perfectly round, with something inside. When Dema held it before his eyes, he saw a room in its depths. It looked to be some public space. He saw a thirty-centimetre-high dais with seven backless chairs. Beyond it was a good-sized room furnished with benches, and another, smaller dais with a podium, set to face the chairs.
A dead woman lay on the big dais before the chairs. Dema knew she was dead: there was no mistaking the swollen, dark face of a strangler’s victim, even under a yaskedasu’s make-up. She was dressed in a tumbler’s leggings and short tunic, with brightly coloured short ribbons stitched into the seams. The yellow noose itself was lost in the swelling of her neck, but the bright yellow ends of a yaskedasu’s veil once more lay straight from her side, almost as if they were placed to make the delegates seated in the chair look right at the body.
“What did the captain at the Heskalifos arurimat tell you?” Dema inquired.
“That this was a matter on which you are chief investigator,” replied the clerk, “and that if I spoke to anyone else before you gave me leave, I could be arrested for promoting disorder.”
“He was right,” Dema said, continuing to examine the ball. He looked at the proscenium that framed the dais. There, in mosaics, was Noskemiou, the charity hospital, and the brightly painted walls that wrapped around Khapik, with the yellow pillars that marked the main entrance. There on the right side was the Elya Street arurimat. He knew this place. It was the Fifth District’s Forum, where the affairs of that part of the city were discussed and voted upon before the seven District Speakers. The place was closed during the day, when everyone worked. He glanced out of the window of his office: the sun was reaching the horizon. They would open the Forum any minute.
Dema shoved the ball into the basket. “You’re with me,” he told the clerk, who was drinking the water the amrim had brought. To the arurim Dema said, “I want a full squad at the Fifth District Forum, soonest. We’ll need barricades, arurimi to watch them, and prathmuni with a death cart. Scramble!” He grabbed his mage’s kit in his free hand and strode out of his office.
“Can’t I go home?” whined the clerk. “I’ve been all over the city. My wife will be worried — ”
Dema turned and faced him. “Are you a citizen of Tharios?” he demanded coldly, glaring at the shorter man.
At the word “citizen” the clerk straightened, thrusting his out bony chest. “Of course I am,” he snapped, indignant that anyone might question his status.
“Then I, Demakos Nomasdina, of the First Class, call upon you to do your duty as a citizen. Do you serve Tharios?” he asked.
The clerk hung his head. “Always and for ever,” he replied wearily. The formula was part of his oath of citizenship. If a member of the First Class called on any resident of the city as Dema had done, that person was obligated by his oath to serve in whatever way he might be commanded.
Dema thrust the basket into the clerk’s hands. “First we’re going to see if this means anything.”
They reached the Forum just as its custodians laid hands upon the wooden bars across the doors. Dema showed them what he’d been taught in school, the “face of the First Class”, the expression, bearing and crispness that anyone of his rank put on when necessary, to uphold the dignity of the First Class and of the city that was the final responsibility of the First Class. Even the weakest-willed children learned to act as if they knew what they were doing. Their duty was to assure the lower classes that Tharios was eternal, as long as order was kept. The duty of the lower classes was to obey those who bore ultimate service to Tharios in their very bones. Dema was grateful for that long, hard training now; it hid his fear of what he might be about to see.
The custodians opened the doors for him and the arurimi who had caught up with him, then closed the doors to keep the public outside. Only a few idlers were present, either for the night’s Forum debates or because they had seen arurimi on the move, but Dema knew their numbers would soon grow.
Inside, he motioned for the clerk and the arurimi to keep back. He advanced on the dais, a ball of mage fire drifting beside him to light the way. When he reached the podium, he wrote a sign in the air. It gleamed, then faded. His mage fire grew until the front half of the room was mercilessly lit, without a shadow anywhere.
It had looked like a Ghost murder in the globe, and it looked like a Ghost murder now. Dema crouched beside the dead woman and opened his kit. A pinch of heartbeat powder sprinkled over the yaskedasu darkened to scarlet: she’d been dead almost an entire day.
Why did no one report that she was missing? he wondered. If they had, he would know. These days any word of missing yaskedasi came to him first.
Dema ground his teeth in vexation. The yaskedasi drove him crazy with their secretiveness.
Even when it was to their benefit they would not deal with the arurimi unless forced to it. They made it that much harder to find who had seen these women in the last hours of their lives, just as they made it harder to identify the dead. The yaskedasi just didn’t seem to understand that cooperation was for their own good.
With a sigh, Dema opened a bottle of vision powder and sprinkled a pinch over each of the woman’s open, staring eyes. The killer’s essence began to fade fifteen hours or so after a slaying, but Dema wanted to try it anyway. If the victim had seen her attacker, the powder would reveal at least a smudge over her eyes, if not the killer’s face. This time there was not even a smudge. Dema bit his lip: she must have been taken from behind. Her fingernails were broken, yellow silk threads caught in their shredded edges, from her fight to get free of the noose. The killer had to be strong, because the tumbler was solid muscle.
Dema selected one of the blessed ivory rods that had arrived at the arurimat the day after he’d spoken with the priests at Labrykas Square. He used it to pull the veil’s ends out flat. “Melchang lodgings, Willow Lane” was embroidered at the edge.
“Stand aside, Demakos Nomasdina, before you are in need of cleansing yourself,” called a clear, female voice. “You are too close to the pollution.”
Dema looked around. The prathmuni in charge of the dead had come and, with them, the priests of the All-Seeing, ready to cleanse the Forum. Like the fountain, it would need prolonged cleansing. It was a public place. The Fora were also the heart of Tharios, the reason the city had grown and succeeded without emperors and their follies.
“I haven’t touched her,” he replied sharply. “And your cleansings wipe away all traces I can use to track this mirizask.” The clerk with the globe, standing behind the priests, squeaked at Dema’s coarse language.
Turning his back on them, Dema selected the bottle of stepsfind from his kit, took a mouthful, stood and sprayed it in the air over the dead woman. When it fell to the ground, it revealed blurred footmarks leading to the back of the dais. He followed those smudges off the dais, down two steps to the small meeting rooms behind the Forum, past the privy set aside for the use of government officers, and through the hallway to the rear entrance. He tracked the smudges through the unlocked door and ran smack into a wall of silver fire. With a yelp Dema sprang back. He’d just tried to walk through a circle of enclosure. Not only was he unable to pass, but his face and hands felt as if he’d scrubbed them with nettles.
“How can we catch him if you erase any trace he leaves?” he cried, maddened, to the white-veiled priest outside the circle.
“What good will his capture do, if his infection spreads to the city? If you take on his pollution at the risk of your clan?” demanded the priest coldly. “Our souls are more important than these sacks of putrefaction and disease we call bodies, Demakos Nomasdina. Go and be cleansed yourself.”
Dema shivered and walked back into the Forum, thoroughly ashamed of himself. For a moment he’d been so caught up in the need to catch the murderer that he had lost sight of his duty to his family and to Tharios itself, to keep the pollution that accompanied death from tainting the city. At the very least he risked his own soul and his status; at most, he risked dragging all of his kinsmen, everyone who’d had contact with him or his immediate family, into exile, or worse, into the ranks of the prathmuni. He had nearly ruined one of the great clans of Tharios.
There has to be another way to find the killer, he told himself as the priests inside the Forum cleansed him with prayer, ritual and incense. Then he remembered the clerk. The man sat on a bench at the rear of the Forum, the basket at his side, a glum look on his face as he watched the priests go to work over the dead woman.
Dema took the globe from its basket. “Who made this device?” he asked.
Removing each needle from Kethlun’s face was an exacting task. Tris sat on the table, Keth on a chair in front of her. As she worked, he told her, Niko and Jumshida about his life before and after one summer day on the Syth.
When he finished, Niko regarded his fingernails. “The seed of magic you had all along probably saved your life when you were struck, Kethlun.”
“I’m not thanking it for any favours,” grumbled Keth. “I’d pass it to anybody else in a heartbeat.”
“You don’t have that choice,” Niko retorted. “Moreover, until you master the lightning side of your power, you won’t be able to make another satisfactory piece of glass — not blown, anyway. Not shaped by the breath that keeps you alive. That is why you need Tris, not a glass mage.”
Tris scowled. “There isn’t anybody else?” she demanded. “Oh, don’t bother answering, I know there isn’t.” All the needles were out. She dipped some cotton into a jar of balm made by her foster-brother and dabbed it on the bloody spots on Keth’s face.
“Ow!” Keth snapped, flinching away.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Tris ordered. “You bore getting bit by lightning, you can bear a little sting.”
Keth grumbled, then let her continue. “But she’s a student,” he protested to Niko. “Students don’t teach!”
“It’s unusual,” Jumshida said, her voice comforting. “But lightning magic is so rare…”
Jumshida and Keth had made an understandable mistake. Normal mage students got their credential in their twenties, and taught only after that. Tris, her two foster-sisters, and her foster-brother, were unique. They had mastered their power when they were all thirteen or so. Winding Circle gave them their mage’s medallion, spelled so that, until they were eighteen, the four would forget they had them unless asked to prove they were mages. It was a useless exercise: Tris’s ability to see magic and detect metal meant that she always knew what she wore.
Now she glanced at Niko; he nodded. Tris set aside the balm, reached under her collar, and drew out the ribbon from which her medallion hung. The metal circle had a silvery sheen to it, but it was a blend of silver and other metals. The spiral sign for Winding Circle was stamped on the back, to show where Tris had earned it. Tris’s name and Niko’s were inscribed on the edges of the front of the medallion: student and principal teacher. At the centre, small but still clear to the eye, the smith-mage Frostpine had engraved a tiny volcano, a lightning bolt, a wave and a cyclone, to show where Tris’s weather-magic worked. She hated bringing it out where people could see it. It felt too much like bragging.
“If she’s a mage, why do I never see her with a mage kit?” demanded Keth. “You both carry yours, even though you’re just attending a conference.” He pointed through the door to the hall, where Jumshida’s and Niko’s mage kits, fitted into good-looking packs, lay on a table.
Tris let go of her medallion and picked up the balm again. She dabbed more on Keth’s wounds. “I carry a mage kit all the time,” she replied, squinting to get the bloody spots under his short-cropped gold hair. She pointed to her head with the hand that held the cotton. “Right there.”
“Your skull is your mage kit?” asked Keth.
Tris scowled at him, though her touch remained gentle. “My braids, Kethlun,” she replied. She sat back with a sigh; she thought she had got every puncture. The ones she had tended first were already healed. By morning he wouldn’t know he’d been hurt. Briar, her foster-brother, brewed up good medicines with his plant magic. “I store power in my braids for when I need it. They hold it because I pin them in certain patterns.” She set the balm aside and pointed to the thickest braid. It ran from the middle of her forehead to the nape of her neck. “Earth force here, bled out of a few earthquakes. Tidal force in these braids.” She touched two on each side of her head. “If I’m tired, I can draw a little strength off these, or a lot, depending on what I need.”
“And then you collapse after you run out of it,” Niko said. “Actually, you collapse once you use any of your braids but the little ones.”
Tris shrugged and quoted a great-aunt’s favourite saying: “All business requires some risk.” She looked back at Kethlun and saw that he didn’t believe her. “These — ” she indicated four more braids, two on each side of her head — “are heavy lightning, like the two by my face are just for quick things.”
“Like shocking me,” Keth said drily.
Chime voiced a shushing sound that Tris thought was probably a hiss of warning. “I did tell you to stop,” she reminded Keth. “If I’d known you were afraid of lightning, I might have used something else, but you rushed me.”
“Any other braids I ought to know about?” Keth wanted to know, smiling indulgently.
“Oh, there’s a few wind ones in there, some heat ones. No rain, sadly. It makes me go all frizzy. Then power starts leaking out through the loose hairs. It’s hard enough keeping everything smooth with lightning in my braids as is.” Tris spoke in her most matter-of-fact voice. He probably thinks Niko won’t ruin the joke about weather in my hair by telling the truth, she thought. That’s all right. If I have to teach him — and I do know how few lightning mages there are — it won’t go well if he’s afraid of me.
She glanced at Jumshida and her heart sank.
Their hostess was ashy under her bronze skin. “Well,” Jumshida said. “One assumes the Initiate Council of Winding Circle knew what it was doing.”
“There were unusual circumstances,” Niko explained. He had not told Jumshida, or anyone, of the extent of Tris’s skills. Tris had asked him not to unless it was necessary. She had seen Jumshida’s shock — or worse, jealousy, dislike, even hate — directed at her and her friends over their last year at Winding Circle, never mind that they had not chosen to be what they were.
“Events made Tris combine her power with that of her foster-brother and sisters,” Niko went on. “As a result, they expanded and structured their original abilities. Later events made them separate their magics again, but they kept certain abilities from each other. The result, and the work they put in afterwards, brought their control over their magics to the level of an accredited, adult mage.”
Jumshida shook her head. “I did not receive my credential until I was twenty-eight.”
Tris knew what the woman thought, what other mages thought, when they knew what she had achieved. It was too much power, too much accomplishment, for a mere girl of thirteen or fourteen. They saw only the awe of it, the ability to move hurricanes and earthquakes, the ability to do complex workings alone and without sleep, because she could borrow strength from currents in the air, in the ground, and in the water. Others dreamed that with Tris’s power and control they could live in grand palaces, dress in silks and be given all they could wish for by the rulers they served.
They didn’t understand that she meditated every day to control her emotions. Without a grip on her temper, Tris didn’t just hurt someone’s feelings or start a fight. When she lost control, she destroyed property; she sank ships.
They didn’t understand that she had yet to find a way to earn a living. Rain-making was chancy. She always had to be sure that if she moved one storm, she would not upset weather patterns for kilometres, creating floods or droughts. She was best suited for battle magic, but her dreams of the floating dead after her first battle still left her screaming in the night. She wanted to be a healer, but even now her control wasn’t tight enough, unless people wanted her to do surgery with a mallet.
And she hated the palaces and courts she and Niko had visited on their way south to Tharios. They all seemed wasteful.
“We didn’t ask to be singled out,” Tris told her, silently begging the woman to think Tris’s situation through. Jumshida had been friendly since she and Niko had arrived. Tris wanted that back. “We didn’t ask the Initiate Council for the medallion.” She stuffed it back into her dress and jumped down from the table. When she sat on a chair, Chime curled up in her lap.
Niko told Jumshida, “The Initiate Council felt Tris, Briar, Sandry and Daja should be sworn to a code of conduct, to the rules of the mage community, in case they were tempted to use their power unwisely. As the council saw it, the choice was to grant the four the medallion and its responsibilities, or bind their magics until the council felt they were old enough to know what they held.” Niko smiled. “Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. They were given the medallions.”
At the thought that anyone might try to restrict her ability to get at her magic, Tris drew herself up, grey eyes flashing. “They could try to bind my power,” she snapped. This was the first she had heard of that debate.
“Spoken very like Sandry,” Niko teased gently.
Tris looked down. Her foster-sister was a noble who forgot her rank until anyone questioned her right to hold it. “What do you expect, after living with her four years?” she grumbled. She petted Chime. “And it’s true all the same,” she added stubbornly.
“The difficulty of actually binding you was a consideration,” Niko admitted, smoothing his moustache. “It would look very bad if we tried, and failed. Not that any of you would have had the bad manners to resist,” he added, raising his eyebrows at Tris.
She met his gaze defiantly, and saw a world of things in his dark brown eyes: the time they’d spent on the road, the many nights they’d discussed books, the way they looked out for one another.
He’d been the first person she’d ever known who understood her.
She smiled ruefully. “Well, maybe not,” she said. “Though I can’t vouch for Briar’s manners.”
Kethlun, steeped in depression, said gloomily, “Splendid. She’s a freak, and I’m a freak. We should be quite happy together.”
Tris scowled. “Get used to freakishness, my buck,” she informed him. “You have nowhere else to go, and lightning isn’t exactly the most biddable force in nature.”
Kethlun glared at her, red spots of fury burning on his cheeks. “I never asked for it! Never! I’d give it up if I could!”
“Well, you can’t,” retorted Tris. “Nobody can. Even the ones who want magic end up hating it sometimes. You have to work your life around it, not the other way around. Join the party and stop whining.”
“That isn’t kind,” Niko said with gentle reproof.
Tris lifted her chin. “I’m not a kind person. Everyone says so.”
“You mean you don’t want people to think you’re kind. You believe they’ll see it as weakness,” retorted Niko.
“Put yourself in this young man’s shoes,” added Jumshida.
“I don’t want anyone in my shoes,” Kethlun muttered, his voice slow. “I don’t want to be in my shoes.”
“Be silent,” Jumshida told him. To Tris she said, “Here is someone who has had this news dropped on him at an age when other mages are completing their studies. He — ”
“I was going to be head of the guild,” Keth interrupted, the slow words falling from his lips like stones. “Even without magic there was talk of me being named Glassmaker to the Imperial Court. You can always have a glass mage engrave signs or bless the sands for imperial work. I almost had enough to pay for a house. I had a good marriage arranged, with a pretty girl I like who doesn’t bore me. Then I had to go for a walk by the Syth. For inspiration.” A harsh noise that might have been a laugh came out of his mouth. “I got all the inspiration I can take.”
Tris propped her chin on her hands and glared at Keth. Lately she’d begun to think that her greatest flaw was her imagination. Listening to him, imagining herself in his place, she could see how it might have been easier if the lightning had killed him. Instead he was newly born, forced to grow up in weeks, not years, with all his thoughts as a man still in his head. He’d already mentioned the long struggle to make his body and his tongue work. Would she have the patience and determination it must have taken to do that for long, weary months, not knowing if she would succeed?
“Then we’re stuck with each other,” she told him, not allowing her surge of pity to touch her face or voice. “The sooner we get started, the sooner you can wield your magic, instead of it wielding you.”
“But first, I’ll tell Cook it’s two for supper, not one,” Jumshida said, getting to her feet. “Niko, we’re expected at Balance Hill at sundown. We must change our clothes.”
“What’s Balance Hill?” Tris asked.
“It’s where the Keepers of the Public Good live during their three-year terms of office,” Jumshida explained, walking towards the kitchen. “Our entire conclave has been honoured with an invitation to Serenity House.”
“Better you than me,” said Tris as Niko ran upstairs and Jumshida entered the kitchen. She looked at Keth. “Well.”
“Well,” he said, looking back at her.
Tris inspected him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with strong, wiry muscles. His nose was short, his teeth white and even. His head was blocky, his gaze level, as if he were a rock she was not about to move. She’d noticed his short blond hair and the blueness of his eyes the day before, just as she had noticed his very large hands. Now she saw the burn marks that stippled his hands, and the way the last two fingers on his left hand stayed curled even when the other fingers and his thumb were straight — another legacy of the lightning strike, like the white spot in his hair, and his magic.
He dressed like a northerner in a plain white shirt, frayed a little at the shoulder seams, brown homespun trousers, and calf-high boots that had seen a lot of wear. His belt was nicked in spots, his belt-purse made of cheap leather, his belt knife a fine one that had seen long use. All in all he looked as if he’d once been more prosperous than he was now. If determination were any indication, though, she would bet he would regain his place in society before much longer.
“So where do you come from?” he demanded as the cook came out with a tray of food. She set it on the table, then returned for tableware and plates. “Not around here, any more than your Master Goldeye does.”
“I was born in Ninver, in Anderran,” Tris said, pouring water into their cups. “To a merchant family. They sent me to Stone Circle temple when I was ten. That’s where Niko found me and saw my magic.” She wasn’t about to tell this stranger that her family had passed her from relative to relative, each keeping her only until they grew so terrified of the strange things that happened around her that they couldn’t wait to get rid of her. Stone Circle was her family’s way of washing their hands of Tris. “Niko took me to Winding Circle temple in Emelan, where they specialize in ambient mages. Do you know what ambient mages are?”
“We do have mages in our family,” Keth informed her drily as he cut up a baked chicken and served her. “Sometimes I listened when the big folks talked.”
“There’s only one person on this earth who’s allowed to pull my tail, and you aren’t him,” Tris retorted.
“Let me guess. Your foster-brother.” He watched as Tris added spiced chickpeas to his plate, then hers.
“That’s right. He and I and two others lived in this one cottage. We trained with the mages who ran it and other mages around the temple.”
“And you never went back to your family?” he asked, curious. “You don’t think they’d be proud to have a mage? My parents’ biggest disappointment was that I didn’t have more power than just a seed.”
“They’d be delighted, I suppose,” Tris replied. “And that’s the only reason they’d be happy to have me back.”
“Oh.” Keth looked at his plate. “It was that way for a friend of mine, back home. He said he’d never return.” He glanced at her. “But you have family now, your foster-family.” Tris nodded. Keth went on, “And you look after each other, and study together.”
“Lots of studying,” Tris replied with a smile as she helped herself to the seasoned cantaloupe. “We were all in the same basket with our power, you see — none of us knew we even had any, even though it was breaking out all over the place. It wasn’t until we learned to meditate that we got any kind of control. That’s where you have to start, too. Meditation, the whole thing. Breathing, clearing your mind, exercises to strengthen your grip on your magic.” She held Chime away from her plate as the dragon tried to inspect it for anything edible.
“I know how,” Keth told her, then took a bite of chicken.
Tris pursed her lips. It sounded as if he claimed he could simply to shut her up. “You know how to meditate. And where, pray, did you learn?”
Now he looked up into her face. “We all learned it,” he said impatiently. “In the Glassmakers’ Guild. It helps you get control over your breath, so you can blow long and steady and not swallow molten glass. It was the first thing we learned as ’prentices. Well, that and how to tell what’s good charcoal and what’s bad.”
Tris propped her chin on her hand. “Show me.”
“Now?” Keth demanded. “I’ve been pounding around Heskalifos all the blessed day.”
“If you’re to be a mage, you must control your mind — your power — anywhere, at any time, tired or no,” she retorted. “Now.”
Keth put down his fork with a sigh. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. Slowly he inhaled as Tris counted silently to seven. He held the breath for the same count, released it for seven, and held for seven. As he continued Tris closed her eyes briefly, concentrating on her vision. When she opened her eyes again, Kethlun’s magic was as plain as day to her sight.
His breathing and stillness served to calm him, that was clear, but his power was unaffected. It jetted from his skin in erratic flares, fluid like molten glass one moment, crooked like lightning the next. Then the lightning shapes grew, racing over Kethlun like groping hands, splitting into more bolts, until he was nearly covered with light. He opened his eyes and the lightning vanished.
“Well?” he demanded irritably. “I said I know how.”
For a moment Tris didn’t reply, stunned by the fiery lacework that had covered him over. Then she remembered to breathe herself. How could Keth hold such beauty and not know it?
She remembered something Briar had once said while her friends cowered under a tree in the rain. Tris was dancing in a field as lightning flashed and thunder roared overhead. “Not everybody thinks it’s a play-pretty like you do, Coppercurls! Send it on its way so we can go home!”
“So you can meditate,” she said to Kethlun now. “That saves time. Let me see — ”
She was interrupted by someone banging on the street door. “Open for the arurim!” a man cried. “Open in the name of the law!”
Little Bear dashed into the hall, barking furiously. Tris leaped after him and seized his collar. The housekeeper passed them both, opening the door only when she saw that Tris had the big dog under control. Tris hung on to her pet with both hands, dragging him back with all her strength as men and women in bright red tunics shouldered past the housekeeper, heavy batons in their hands.
“What is this?” the servant cried. “We are law-abiding people!”
“We seek Kethlun Warder,” said a man who wore a sergeant’s black sword border on his tunic sleeves. “We have information that he is present here.”
“I’m Kethlun Warder,” Keth said. He came to stand by Tris and the nearly-hysterical dog. “Why would the arurim look for me?”
A man stepped through the arurimi’s ranks. He was young, with dark brown skin, kinked black hair cut in a short cap around his head, and sharp brown eyes. Like the men of the arurim he wore a scarlet tunic, but his was topped by a blue mage’s stole bordered in scarlet braid. “Kethlun Warder, is this your work?” The mage held out a round glass ball. Sparks glinted faintly on its surface.
“It looks like my work,” Kethlun answered slowly. He leaned in to better look inside the ball. “Or rather, it’s like something I made this afternoon, but there was nothing in it then. It was all lightning.”
“According to a clerk from Mages’ Hall, the lightning cleared to reveal this scene just before he was to leave for the day. He brought it to us,” replied the mage.
Tris squinted at the ball and frowned. “That woman looks dead.”
To his sergeant the mage said, “Arrest him.” The arurimi surged forward to grip Keth by the arms.
“Stop!” cried Tris, outraged. “You can’t march into a private house — can they?” she asked the housekeeper. The woman nodded.
The arurim mage frowned at Tris in a well-bred way. “I do not answer to children,” he informed her. “Murder was done at the Fifth District Forum. The whole thing looked just as it does here, which means we arrest Kethlun Warder for murder.”
“But I just blew the globe, I didn’t kill anyone!” protested Keth.
“Quiet,” growled an arurim as she twisted one of Keth’s arms up behind his back. “You’ll speak when spoken to.”
Tris looked from the arurimi to their mage to Keth. She had no understanding of what was going on here — she’d been in Tharios less than a week — but she knew what Niko would say her duty was. Briar and her foster-mother Lark both had told stories of what happened to defenceless people who were taken away by those who enforced the law.
“Then I am going with him,” she informed the mage haughtily. “He is my student. You will answer to me should any harm come to him.”
The mage lost his air of superiority when he goggled at her. “You’re joking,” he said in a less self-important, more matter-of-fact way.
Tris gave the housekeeper Little Bear’s collar, then reached for the ribbon around her neck. She pulled out the medallion and allowed the arurim mage to see both sides. When he reached for it, she closed her eyes. The moment he touched the medallion to test if it were a proper mage’s token, it threw out a blaze of white light that left everyone but Tris blinking.
“I don’t joke,” Tris said, her voice flat. “It makes my head hurt. Where are you taking Keth? Who are you, anyway?”
The mage sighed. “My name is Demakos Nomasdina, arurim dhaskoi at the Elya Street arurimat. That’s where we’re taking this murder suspect, teacher or no teacher. And who are you?”
“Dhasku Trisana Chandler,” she retorted, giving herself the Tharian title. This superior young man would learn that she could not be pushed around. “And I’m coming with you.” She looked at the housekeeper. “Send someone for Jumshida and Niko. They’ll want to know about this.”
“Yes, dhasku,” the woman replied with a bow of the head.
“I hope you are a truthsayer,” Tris informed Nomasdina. She knew how to manage this. She had to keep him on the defensive, and not allow him time to think that she was only fourteen, medallion or not. “Because I doubt that Dhasku Jumshida Dawnspeaker will be happy to learn a guest of hers was abused.” From the looks exchanged by the arurimi and the mage, she knew she’d hit a nerve. She’d hoped that Jumshida’s name and position — that of First Scholar of Mages’ Hall and Second Scholar of Heskalifos — would throw a damper on things. “Or did you not notice whose house this is?”
The mage reassembled his lofty facial expression. “She may vouch for him at Elya Street,” he informed Tris. “And there are truth spells I can use. First, though, we are going to see the woman he murdered.”
“I didn’t — ” Keth began, only to receive Tris’s elbow in his ribs.
Before he could ask why she’d poked him, Tris told Dema, her voice as lofty as his, “Then I go with him.” To Chime, who waited on the dining-room table still, she said, “You stay here.”
First they had gone to the Fifth District Forum, where Keth saw the reality of the image inside the glass ball. Numb all over, voiceless with pity over this unknown yaskedasu, he was only dimly aware of the quarrel between Nomasdina and the priests of the All-Seeing. He overheard snippets. The priests had wanted to take the dead woman away two hours ago, but they had agreed to wait until the arurim dhaskoi confronted Keth with the crime he was supposed to have committed. Keth knew he’d disappointed Dhaskoi Nomasdina when he didn’t crumble and shout out his guilt. All he could do, seeing the tumbler’s remains, was address a prayer to Yorgiry, the Namornese goddess of death and mercy, that she grant the dead woman a new, longer life.
When he could bear to look no longer, he turned away and inspected his surroundings. The arurimi who’d arrested Keth watched him, as intent as dogs looking at a bone just out of their reach. Keth shuddered. If the arurim dhaskoi’s truth spell didn’t work, and such spells were tricky if the caster didn’t originally have the ability to truth-read, Keth knew what came next: torture. Unless they had a truthsayer on duty at the arurimat. Somehow he didn’t think the district that included the charity hospital, Khapik and the slums of Hodenekes spent a great deal of money on truthsayers.
A small, nail-bitten hand rested on his arm briefly. “They’ll come,” Tris said quietly. “Niko and Jumshida. Nobody’s going to hurt you if we can help it.”
Keth stared at her, numb. How could she possibly say that? Was she so young that she didn’t know how things worked for outsiders in any city, in any nation? Jumshida was a Tharian; she wouldn’t protest the way things were done.
“That fellow Nomasdina keeps watching me for some sign of guilt,” he replied at last, feeling he ought to say something. “I suppose I’m going to have to tell him I knew one of the Ghost’s victims.”
“The Ghost?” Tris repeated with a frown.
“It’s what the yaskedasi are calling the murderer. Because he seems invisible. A girl disappears, and the next day she’s dead with a yellow veil around her neck.”
“You mean to tell me there’s been more than one killing?” asked Tris.
Keth looked at the poor dead creature now enclosed in a circle of protective magical fire. “Six, with her.”
The arurim dhaskoi Nomasdina stamped over to them, a scowl on his dark, lean features. “They can report me to the First arurim all they want,” he grumbled, more to himself than to Keth or Tris. “I had to give it a try. Let’s go,” he ordered his arurimi.
“Elya Street.” To Keth he said, “I have to veil you again.”
Unlike the first time Dema shielded them, on their approach to the Forum, neither Keth nor Tris protested. As they had walked there, magically hidden inside a circle of arurimi, they had pushed through a crowd of people ripe for murder if they got their hands on the Ghost. Now Tris and Keth huddled inside the guards as the arurimi walked them out through the mob. There were cries of “When will you find the kakosoi?” and “How long does it take to find a killer?” There were other cries, suggestions of what should be done to the murderer when he was caught, bloody and fiery plans.
“I admire their imagination,” Tris murmured to Keth as the crowd jostled the arurimi and the arurimi jostled her and Keth.
He looked down at her, startled: though they were invisible to everyone else, they could see each other perfectly well. How could she joke at a time like this? “Th-they might think I did it,” he reminded her, fright making him stammer. “Hard to admire their i-magination wuh-when they wuh-want to do that to m-me.”
“Oh — sorry,” replied Tris casually. “But are you the killer? This Ghost?”
Keth started to shout a denial, then remembered he was supposed to be invisible. “No,” he whispered fiercely. “Do I look like a killer to you?”
“Just for curiosity’s sake, how long have you been student and teacher?” Dema asked. The circle of arurimi broke free of the crowd and marched toward Elya Street, dodging pleasure-seekers on their way to Khapik.
Keth and Tris looked at one another and shrugged. “Two hours?” asked Keth.
“Something like that,” Tris replied.
Once inside the Elya Street arurimat, they were taken to a room where magic could be worked and kept from spreading to other parts of the building. There Dema positioned Keth inside a holding ring set into the floor and called on its protections so the northerner couldn’t escape. Once they were set and Tris was tucked into a chair in the corner, Nomasdina produced vials of powdered sage, coltsfoot and orris, and blew a pinch of each at Keth’s face. The powders hung, sparkling with the magic that made them more powerful. Nomasdina then used a carnelian to sketch the signs for truth and eloquence in the air between them, watching the silvery paths the symbols made as they floated in the air.
“Lie to me,” he told Keth. “Tell me something — ”
He never finished his suggestion. Keth took a deep breath to speak, and the room flashed with white fire, blinding Nomasdina, the arurim who was there to take notes, Tris and Keth himself.
Vision only returned slowly. The first thing Keth saw, when he could see, was that the circle he’d been standing in was a charred mark on the floor. Its barrier was gone, as if lightning had struck the thing and burned it out of the wood. Nomasdina’s powders were a small, black clump on the floor. Nomasdina himself was covered in soot. His carnelian, which he still held, was black and cracked.
“Deiina of all mercy, what was that?” whispered the arurim clerk.
Tris removed her spectacles to rub her eyes. Keth thought that without the spectacles she actually looked her age, not like some fierce old lady with unwrinkled skin. Nomasdina rounded on her.
“What did you do?” he growled. “I ought to put you in irons, and don’t think I can’t!”
“Excuse me, dhaskoi,” said the clerk. She was there because she too could see magic. “It didn’t come from her. It came from him, and he didn’t actually do anything. It just surged out of him, like — like lightning. Like he couldn’t help it.”
“Lightning is part of Keth’s magic,” Tris informed Dema. “He only found out about it recently. He hasn’t learned to control it yet. And if I may, a hint? Don’t threaten someone unless you’re certain you can carry out the threat.”
Nomasdina snorted and turned to Keth. “Well, if your power fights me, then there’s only one way to do this,” he said. He went to the door and pulled it open.
Keth’s knees buckled. He dropped to the floor. Nomasdina was going to call for torturers.
“Just one moment!”
Everyone turned to stare at Tris, who had risen from her chair. The door yanked out of Nomasdina’s hand and slammed shut, as if a high wind had blasted through the windowless room.
“Keth, get up,” Tris ordered, her eyes blazing. Keth obeyed without realizing he was taking an order from her. Tris walked over to stand between him and the arurim dhaskoi. To Nomasdina she said, “Now, I’ve been nice and cooperative so far.” Her eyes blazed up at the Tharian. “We came peaceably; we didn’t make trouble. You had your disgusting show back there, exhibiting that poor girl to us without so much as covering her face. But I am at the end of my patience. You are not torturing Keth. You’re going to get a truthsayer, like a civilized human being.”
Nomasdina sighed. “The arurimat has no truthsayer funds. It’s not like we’re in First District here.”
“Then you wait until my teacher comes with Dhasku Dawnspeaker,” retorted Tris. “She will tell you that my teacher is the finest truthsayer known, and he’ll do it for no charge. You should be ashamed, leaping to torture a man on no more evidence than a glass ball!”
Nomasdina looked puzzled as he stared at Tris. Keth knew how the other man felt. “Are you so ignorant of your standing?” asked the arurim dhaskoi, genuinely curious. “You’re a foreigner, here on sufferance. In Tharios we take the law very seriously. Interference is not appreciated.”
“We take it seriously in Emelan, too,” snapped Tris. “I’m not saying you can’t question him, I’m just saying you can’t torture him. If you try, I promise you, I will bring this place down around your ears.”
Keth saw a spark crawl out of one of her braids, then another, and another. “Please listen to her,” he begged, suddenly as afraid of her as he was of torture. “You won’t like it if she loses her temper!”
“I still want to know why you’re in my way,” Nomasdina repeated stubbornly, his eyes fixed on Tris’s.
“He’s my student,” Tris said. “Maybe we haven’t been together very long, but I learned from the best teachers what a student is owed. I refuse to shame them by letting you do whatever you like to Keth, when anyone but a desperate idiot could have seen back there that Keth didn’t kill that woman.”
Though she stood only as high as the arurim dhaskoi’s collarbone, there was no question in Keth’s mind who dominated the conversation: Tris. Something in the way he felt about her changed, frightened though he was by the sparks in her hair. He wasn’t sure what had changed just yet, only that something was different.
Nomasdina frowned. “You know, I’m beginning to believe you are a mage,” he remarked slowly. He turned to Keth. “So tell me something. Did you kill her?”
“Gods, no,” Keth replied, trembling. “I hate the Ghost. I’d kill him myself, given the chance. Iralima was a friend of mine.”
“Iralima? The last victim?” Nomasdina asked.
Keth nodded, then winced. He’d just spoken the fact he’d thought he was too clever to reveal.
“You realize that makes you look even more suspicious,” the dhaskoi pointed out.
Keth nodded again. Suddenly a breeze whipped around him, and Tris raised a hand. A cocoon of silver mage fire enclosed Keth from top to toe. He touched it: the fire stung.
“I told you, Nomasdina, you’re not going to torture him,” Tris said flatly.
Nomasdina looked at Keth in his cocoon. Then he looked at Tris. “Do you know how long it would take me to raise protections like that? You’re starting to scare me.”
“Join the guild,” Keth muttered.
Nomasdina glanced at him and smiled crookedly. Then he pulled a stool over to the barrier that sheathed Keth and sat on it. “Right now I’m just asking questions,” he informed Tris wearily. He looked at Keth and asked, “How did you know Iralima?”
“She lived at my lodging house. You were there yesterday,” replied Keth. He sat cross-legged on the floor, inside the protections Tris had set around him.
“Did you know any of the other victims?” inquired Nomasdina.
“I knew Zudana by sight,” Keth replied. “I used to listen to her sing all the time. She had a beautiful voice.”
“She did,” Nomasdina agreed. “Before they put me on the murders, I used to sneak out on my shift to hear her. How long have you been in Tharios?”
He questioned Keth for an hour as the clerk took notes. Tris resumed her seat in the corner without lowering her protective barrier. Keth gave Nomasdina the details of his movements for the last two weeks, the tale of his arrival in Tharios and his employment at Touchstone Glass, and all that he’d heard said about the Ghost and his murders. At last Nomasdina went to the table, where he picked up the glass ball with the gruesome scene at its heart.
“I’m sticking my neck out,” he admitted, “but I believe you are innocent. That won’t be enough for my superiors. I’m new at this. While mages know we must listen to and rely on what our instincts tell us, the regular arurimi are quick to tell me I’m a newborn babe in this business of the law.”
The clerk ducked her head to hide a smile.
“We’ll wait for a truthsayer. If yours doesn’t come, I’ll pay for one out of my own pocket. Will that satisfy you?” Nomasdina asked Tris.
She smiled sweetly. “I’ll wait until I actually see a truthsayer, thanks all the same,” she replied.
“It grieves me to find one so young who is this cynical,” Nomasdina said to no one in particular. “But let me ask you both something.” He hefted the globe in his hands. “If Kethlun here isn’t the Ghost and this globe isn’t a confession, then it is a way to see the future, maybe. The time the clerk said the lightning faded and he could see the image was close to the time the dead woman was left in the Forum, or the time we were meant to find her. What if you made another of these, and tried to clear it of lightning immediately?”
Keth scratched his head. “Why would I want to go through that again?” he asked, not unreasonably, he thought. “Perhaps you’re accustomed to death and murder, Dhaskoi Nomasdina. I’m not. I got into glassmaking because I love beautiful things.”
Nomasdina drew himself up, his face taking on that lofty, distant, proud cast that it had worn when he came to Jumshida’s house to arrest Keth. “Are you a citizen of Tharios?” he demanded.
“No,” Keth replied.
Nomasdina’s face quivered. A smile made him human again. “Very true. Look, Koris Warder, I can understand you don’t want to face this pollution, even with glass between you and it. But consider: you might save another yaskedasu from death. Better, you might give us a look at our murderer. You can be cleansed after.”
Keth sighed. “I don’t know how I did it.”
Nomasdina looked at Tris. “You might consider making such globes as teaching him his craft.”
Tris was not attending to the conversation. She sat up straight, her eyes on the door. It swung open.
“I do not appreciate learning that guests have been taken from my house without my leave.”
Keth recognized that haughty voice: Jumshida Dawnspeaker. In she swept, dressed for the most elegant circles in a bronze silk kyten with beaded hems, heavy gold earrings set with pearls, and a matching bronze stole. Niklaren Goldeye came behind her, dapper in a white silk overrobe, white shirt and white trousers.
The silver barrier around Keth vanished. He saw threads of it stream back into Tris’s hands.
Jumshida looked at the soot-streaked arurim dhaskoi, who grimaced and bowed to her, then at Nomasdina’s captain, who had followed her and Niko. “As well for you he hasn’t been tortured,” she said sharply. “Kethlun Warder, did you murder the woman who was found tonight?” Niko shaped signs in the air with his fingers.
“No,” Keth said wearily. “She just appeared in that glass bubble I made.”
Soft white light radiated around him, the sign that he told the truth under a properly applied truth spell.
“Did you kill any of the Ghost’s victims?” asked Jumshida.
“No,” Keth answered.
Once more the soft light shone.
“Satisfied, captain?” Jumshida asked. She didn’t even wait for the answer, but looked at Nomasdina. “If we may have the documents for his release? And next time, I recommend more caution, should you attempt to set a truth spell on someone whose magic is rooted in an unpredictable source, such as lightning.”
‘I’ll require Dhaskoi Goldeye’s signature,“ Nomasdina said. His brown cheeks were flushed under the soot that marked him when his truth spell went wrong.
“This way,” the captain said, bowing. “You understand we must interrogate all suspects in this so delicate a matter…” Jumshida, Niko, Nomasdina and the clerk followed the man out of the room. The door closed gently.
Keth sighed in relief, and dropped on to the stool Nomasdina had vacated. He looked over at Tris. The girl slouched in her chair, her spectacles near the end of her long nose, running her fingers along one of her thin braids. Silver glinted over every hair of the braid. Sparks followed her grasp.
“Please don’t do that,” Keth said nervously.
Her grey eyes flicked over to meet his. She thrust her spectacles higher on her nose. “Do what?”
Keth pointed, then dropped his hand before she saw that it shook. “With the braid. The lightning thing. You’re sparking.”
Tris frowned, then looked at the braid in her hand. “This?” she asked, scraping the lightning from her hair. “It’s nothing.” She closed her hand, then opened it to reveal a tiny ball of lightning.
The hair on Keth’s arms and at the back of his neck rose, prickling against his shirt. “Please put that away.”
She pursed her lips and ran the ball of lightning over the braid it had come from. It vanished. “Kethlun, you won’t get very far like this. You have to overcome your fear of lightning.”
“Well, I won’t,” he retorted. “You’d understand if it made a cripple out of you and then turned your world on its ear.”
“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that you may be immune now,” she offered.
“No,” Keth said flatly. “Now will you drop the subject?”
She did, but only because Jumshida had returned. “That’s settled,” the woman told Keth and Tris with satisfaction. “Now, Kethlun. Where do you stay? Touchstone Glass?”
“I live at Ferouze’s, on Chamberpot Alley, in Khapik,” he replied.
“Khapik?” Jumshida asked, startled. “You live in Khapik?”
“Lodging is cheap in Khapik,” explained Kethlun. “And it’s safer than in Hodenekes.”
“Safer?” Jumshida raised her eyebrows. “But surely they steal from you. Yaskedasi are born thieves.”
Keth shook his head. “Not the ones I live with, dhasku,” he replied. “Besides, everyone knows that if Khapik is the best you can afford, you don’t have anything worth stealing.”
“Well, I won’t hear of your going back to lodgings in Khapik,” Jumshida told Keth. “We brought chairs to ride in — you must be exhausted. You need a proper meal and rest, and you and Tris have things to settle tomorrow. Come along.”
Keth didn’t argue. The truth was that Jumshida’s house was pleasant and cool; Ferouze’s place was hot and stuffy, and he would have been forced to buy his supper. He’d got better at accepting free meals since he’d left his wealthy family’s house in Dancruan.
Nomasdina stopped him as he was about to walk out of the arurimat. “Think about what I suggested, that’s all I ask,” the arurim dhaskoi said to both Keth and Tris. “One of those balls might turn the tables on this monster.”
Long habit brought Tris and Niko downstairs the next morning shortly after dawn, despite their late bedtime. They ate breakfast in silence, the quiet broken only by noise made by the cook as she brought dishes and took them away. When her last plate had been removed, Tris sat with her head propped on her hand, while Niko had a second cup of tea.
All kinds of thoughts had been rolling through Tris’s mind. Many of them she preferred to keep to herself. It was the most recent one that bothered her. “Niko?”
“You’re the only one who can teach him,” he said instantly.
“It’s not that,” she said. “I know that!”
“What then?”
“Kethlun’s not going to like me telling him to do things, is he?” she asked. “Sooner or later he’ll forget the lightning and remember I’m just fourteen.”
“Gods,” Niko said wearily. “No, I’m not grumbling. You’re right. But Tris, teaching mages is different from teaching normal students in any event.” He rubbed his temple with his free hand. “It’s a matter of persuasion, not orders. Even if a student accepts your command, his magic might not. You have to work around it. Every teacher fumbles a bit until he finds the right approach to each new student. Your task is just twice as hard because Keth is a grown man. Try to understand his feelings.”
Tris nodded thoughtfully. It had occurred to her that she also had to find a way around his fear of her lightning before he could learn much. Niko had just confirmed her thinking. If Keth was to catch the Ghost, a cure for that fear should come sooner, rather than later.
With breakfast done, Tris took Little Bear into the courtyard and tethered him there with a meaty bone the cook had set aside. Then, with only Chime in a sling on her back as a companion, she set out for the heart of Heskalifos, following the maze of flagstone paths that covered the grounds. Except for the odd prathmun clearing away rubbish, the grounds were deserted. Even the clerks and teachers who worked here would not start their day until the third hour of the morning. That was fine with Tris. She didn’t want any witnesses to what she was about to do.
Phakomathen, the Torch of Learning, was the pride of Heskalifos and of Tharios. Its tower rose from the east side of the Heskalifos Museum, soaring a hundred metres into the air. At its peak a figure of Asaia Bird-winged, the Living Circle goddess of learning, faced east, massive wings outstretched. In both hands she grasped a torch. Its flame was made of crystals that flashed in sun and moonlight, spelled against damage from wind and lightning. Six metres below the goddess a platform and guard rail were set. From the platform visitors who had survived the twelve-hundred-step climb could see all of Tharios. On their second day here, Jumshida had brought Niko and Tris up to view the city that had thrown off the ancient Kurchal Empire and pursued its own glorious destiny.
Now Tris opened the doors at the base of the tower and walked inside. It was a point of pride for the university that they were never locked, so that stargazers, young lovers, students and tourists could see the city in each of its moods, if they had the desire and the stamina for the climb. Tris remembered the climb. She had managed it, of course. Though she was plump, the legs beneath her sensible skirts and petticoats were hard with muscle. She just saw no reason why, after a long, dramatic night, she could not cheat.
Besides, she wanted to realize an ambition she’d had since she’d laid eyes on the hollow heart of that tall stone cylinder.
She thrust the doors shut with a breeze, and looped it to and fro around the latches. It would serve as a rope lock until Tris removed it. The doors secured, Tris sent a few more breezes out to explore the upper reaches. They returned to her carrying non-human sounds — settling building, outside winds, birds who nested in the owl figures set over each of the staircase windows. There were no humans in Phakomathen, no one to spy upon Tris.
She summoned all the winds and breezes within reach, calling them in through the windows of Phakomathen. Waiting for their arrival, she walked a large protective circle around the floor. She then called her magic not to form a cylinder or cocoon of protection, but a flat shield within the circle she had made, to protect the elegant, tiled floor.
She took down two of her wind braids and freed half of what they held, spinning around to show them how she needed them to flow. They had been with her a long time: they settled into the spin as neatly as her sister Sandry’s favourite spindle. With her palms Tris thrust her winds low and flat until they shaped a whirling disc of air. When she judged it to be solid, she halted the disc and stepped on to it.
Now came the Tharian winds, pouring through the windows and down the inside of the tower like honey. When they touched the floor, they slid under her disc. Tris gripped the first of them and twirled her finger. Like her own winds, these understood what she wanted. They began to spin, rapidly, under the disc of air where Tris stood.
Slowly, little by little, the column of twirling wind grew in height. Other breezes joined in, giving it strength, bulk, and speed. Steady on her disc of flattened air, Tris let the moving winds thrust her up through the hollow core of Phakomathen, passing the stairway by as she rode her tightly controlled cyclone. Higher and higher she went, until she reached the door to the outside platform, twelve hundred steps high. She tugged on her cyclone. It swayed, letting her step from her disc on to the landing.
With a snap of her fingers her air disc came apart. Tris caught the ends of those winds and twined them back into her braids. The Tharian winds she set free, thanking them silently as they poured back into the city through the tower windows.
“Now, how was that?” she asked Chime.
The dragon, who had experienced the whole thing from her place on Tris’s back, climbed on to her shoulder. She rubbed herself, cat-like, under the girl’s chin, making the musical glass sound that Tris was convinced was a purr.
“I liked it, too,” admitted Tris. “Much more sensible than all those steps.” She suddenly remembered that people might wonder why the tower was locked. Putting two fingers in her mouth in a way Briar had taught her, she blew a piercing whistle. Chime made her glass-scratch complaining noise as the breeze that had secured the doors below returned to Tris. The girl listened to it for a moment, but the only sounds it carried were those of the tower and of the winds she had summoned, not of people trying the doors in frustration.
“I don’t mind walking down,” she told Chime. “It’s the up part that’s a pain.”
The dragon took flight, swooping and circling through the open air inside the tower. Tris watched briefly, thinking again how beautiful the creature was, then walked outside.
She had not come for a view of the city, though she did admire it. She had not even come for the winds, which pushed her, teasing her for making them work. “Oh, you do it every time you power a windmill,” Tris scolded affectionately. “Don’t complain.”
She looked over the balcony rail. Outside the walls, which had been added to and rebuilt for nearly two thousand years, lay the broad brown ribbon of the Kurchal River, once called “the lifeblood of empire”. On it flowed, down through the distant harbour town of Piraki and into Kurchal Bay. Beyond that lay the grey-green sparkle of the Ithocot Sea, more green than grey under the yellowish heat haze that lay over Tharios and everything beyond.
Behind the city in the north lay the golden grasslands of Ubea, with the farms and villages that kept Tharios alive. To the west lay forests, then mountains; to the east, the stubborn rocky stretches that supported goats, olive trees, and little else until they touched the sea. Somewhere in all this, Tris reasoned, a storm was brewing. She just needed to find it, and see if it could be moved. Keth had to overcome his fear, and not just of the little bolts she had conjured in front of him. He would never master his power until he mastered that. She would need big proof, final proof, that his magic now shielded him from the dangers of lightning.
There was a storm out there, one that would teach him a lesson he desperately needed to learn. Ignoring the snippets of conversation the city’s winds brought to her — bits of gossip, legal proceedings, speeches in the Assembly and the temples of the All-Seeing — Tris made herself comfortable on the platform and spread her spirit on the winds.
She was forced to go further afield than she’d expected. It made her cross as well as exhausted as she plodded down those many steps, past the first sightseers of the day. It shouldn’t have happened, she thought as she rested on a bench near the door. Quietly she gathered the magic that had kept her cyclone from ripping up the floor tiles. It was monsoon season in Tharios and the lands far south of the Pebbled Sea. Storms should have rolled steadily across that open stretch of water between here and Aliput, to die over the waves or to build their strength for an assault on this coast. If she remembered the maps correctly, she’d just gone over three thousand kilometres to find those storms, locked in place around Aliput, piled up like so many logs behind one storm that would not move.
It was even more maddening to realize she would never know who had done it. She wanted to give a piece of her mind and a few other tokens of her esteem to the mage who had pulled this costly stunt. Tris knew this was mage-made. No one else could halt a storm in its track. But it was a stupid mage who had cursed all of Aliput with floods while here in the west the fields withered for lack of rain. She’d given herself an earache, straining to hear a name or any information on the tired winds that reached her. If his name was known, no one had spoken it. If he had spoken, it had got lost on the way east.
Well, at least the storms were moving once more. Just to ensure he couldn’t do this again for a while, Tris had travelled along the line of weather, tying each storm to the one ahead with a mage-knot she had learned from Sandry. He’d never break the string. She hoped he drained himself trying.
She barely made it back to Phakomathen. She must have looked terrible: when she opened her eyes, Chime sat on her chest, giving voice to small tinkling sounds that seemed to mean dismay. She’d had to reassure the dragon while forcing her weary arms to undo one of her tidal braids. It had taken a third of the strength from that braid before Tris could get to her feet, and another third from the opposite tidal braid to get her and Chime down the steps. In the end she drew off all the power of both braids to feel like her old self. Normally she wouldn’t have used so much, not when she would pay the price later, but she and Keth had work to do before he could try another lightning globe. The sooner they got to it, the fewer yaskedasi would meet their end at the Ghost’s hands.
All the way back to Jumshida’s, Tris cursed in Tradertalk and in street slang from two countries. If she could scry the winds, see all they had touched, she might have found the idiot. She might not have used so much of her strength to hunt for storms if she could have seen from the beginning where they were.
She might be able to see the Ghost.
This was mad. As Niko and Jumshida kept saying, their conference was the single greatest collection of vision mages brought together in their time. Surely one of them should know about wind-scrying!
But she had a duty first, to Keth. She remembered how it felt, to believe she was cursed because so many strange things happened when she was present. She remembered how it felt, to get those things under control. Keth had the first claim on her time. She had to guide him before she tried to chase a kind of magic so rare that even Niko did not know who could do it.
As she walked into the courtyard of Jumshida’s house, she heard loud, belligerent voices around the side, by the servants’ entrance. Curious, she went to look. The cook stood in the kitchen door, arms folded over her comfortable bosom, the very picture of an outraged Tharian woman. The person who had drawn the cook’s ire was a slender brunette in her twenties, gaudily dressed and even more gaudily made-up. She wore pomade with bits of mica in it so her curls glittered, even under her yellow head veil. A wisp of breeze carried lavender scent to Tris’s sensitive nose.
“You obviously have the wrong house, Koria Yaskedasu,” the cook was saying coldly. “This is a decent residence. I assure you that no one you might be seeking would set foot in here.”
A prathmun, collecting night soil from the alley that ran beside the servants’ entrance, snorted as he emptied a barrel into his cart. Chime climbed out of the sling on Tris’s back to look at the man, who gaped when he saw her glittering in the morning sun. The moment he realized that Tris was smiling at him, pleased he had an eye for Chime’s beauty, he turned away and busied himself at his work. The cook and the yaskedasu didn’t so much as glance at him.
“I was told he was here,” the yaskedasu told the cook, her hands on her hips. “I’m sorry if it offends you, Koria Respectability, but I want to know how he is!”
The cook gasped. “All-Seeing guard us, you hussies get bolder every day!” she cried. She looked beyond the young woman’s shoulder and saw Tris. “Koria Tris, I apologize that we disturbed you. This — person — was just leaving.”
“Not until I know he’s all right,” the brunette insisted. She turned to look at Tris with large, suspicious brown eyes set over a short nose and full mouth. Tris noted the cheap wool of her kyten and the clumsy embroideries in gaudy thread. The yaskedasu wore brass bells on her wrists and cheap gilt jewellery at her throat and ears. Under the heavy white face paint and bright red lip and cheek colour worn by the entertainers at Khapik, she looked as weary as Tris had felt atop Phakomathen. “We heard that the Elya Street arurim dhaskoi, Nomasdina, took Keth to the arurimat last night, and the desk man at the arurimat says he came here with Dhasku Dawnspeaker.”
“And I told her we’d no more have one of those nimble-fingered Khapik sorts in here than we’d have a camel in the best bedchamber,” snapped the cook.
“Deiina!” whispered the brunette, pointing to Tris’s shoulder. “What is that?” Chime slid her head under Tris’s chin to peer at the yaskedasu. “It’s glass, and it’s moving. I’ve been up much too long.”
Tris absently stroked Chime. “You said Keth. Kethlun Warder?”
The brunette nodded. “He has lodgings in our house. He’s our friend.”
The cook snorted. “Partner in theft, I don’t doubt. I’ve never heard of him.”
“Actually, he’s here,” Tris said. “I’m sorry, Cook. We brought him back with us late last night, after you’d gone home. He’s in the guest room above mine.” To the brunette she said, “Come in. I’ll see if he’s awake.” As she walked by the cook she explained, “Keth’s my new student.”
“Keep an eye on her,” the cook said fiercely as the yaskedasu passed her. “And how does a student have a student of her own?”
“It’s a long story,” Tris replied. “Have you got honeycakes? I’m famished. And tea would be lovely, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“She doesn’t go past the dining room!” the cook said.
Tris whirled. She’d been quite patient until now, considerate of the cook’s lacerated feelings over being wrong and having a yaskedasu in the house, but enough was enough. She was tired still and might need some lightning to pick up her step; she was hungry and in no mood for an argument. Just as she opened her mouth to let the cook know her true feelings, the yaskedasu stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“It’s all right,” the young woman told her. “That’s the way of things in Tharios.”
Tris scowled as Chime stretched out, trying to grab one of the yaskedasu’s, curls. “The way of things in Tharios is starting to give me a rash,” she snapped, leading the way into the dining room. “Please, sit,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Yali,” the woman replied. She put her head in her hands. “Keth is really all right?” she asked, her voice muffled. “Don’t lie to me. Everyone knows the Fifth District arurim have no budget for truthsayers, and the truth spells the dhaskoi have aren’t much good.”
“He’s safe and well and undented,” Tris said as the cook came in with a tray of cakes, a teapot, cups and honey. “Thank you,” Tris said, lifting it out of the older woman’s hands. “I appreciate it, with you being so busy and all.”
The cook looked at Yali, sniffed, and returned to her kitchen.
“Let me give you a hint, since you’re a shenos,” Yali said as she sat up straight. “Yaskedasi are not in the least respectable. She won’t appreciate it that you made her let me in.”
“Why aren’t they respectable?” asked Tris, pouring two cups of tea. “You just perform, right? It’s not like you’re prostitutes.”
“We flaunt our bodies and our skills before anyone who will look,” replied Yali, running her fingers along one of Chime’s wings. “We have no chaperones, we keep late hours, we don’t work at dull, boring tasks all day, we hold noisy parties, we sing loud songs. We must be half streetwalker and half thief. My goodness, this is a beautiful thing.”
“She’s not a thing. She’s a glass dragon that Keth made two days ago,” Tris said, blowing on her tea before she sipped it. “Her name is Chime.”
Yali looked at her, kohl-lined eyes huge with astonishment. “But Keth’s no mage!”
“He wasn’t,” Tris said. “He is now. Let me see if he’s awake.” Leaving Chime and the tea tray, she went upstairs to see if Keth was out of bed.
He was awake, dressed, and shaving when Tris rapped on his door. When he bid her enter, she poked her head inside. “There’s a yaskedasu named Yali in the dining room,” she said as he carefully scraped a razor over his whiskers. “I don’t think she’ll leave till she’s counted all your legs and arms.”
“Yali?” Keth hurried to finish his shave and wiped his face. “She should be at home, in bed! Why did she come here?”
“Ask her yourself,” Tris said. “I’ll be down shortly.”
She stood at the top of the stairs, watching as Keth stumbled down the steps. His face had lit up. There was concern in his voice when he’d asked about Yali. If he still had an arranged marriage back in Namorn, he had a problem, but that at least was not her affair. She walked to her own room, closed the door and sat on the bed. Carefully she took down two of her heavier lightning braids and began to draw a little of their power into her veins, to liven the tidal strength. As she worked, she wondered what would happen to her when this dose of borrowed power was used up, then shook her head. She’d worry about that when it happened.
The cook surprised Keth by making breakfast for him after Yali left. First he said she didn’t need to; when she insisted, he apologized for putting her to the extra work. “A good-looking young fellow like you needs all the strength he can get, to chase off the hordes of girls who must be chasing you,” she said with a wink. Keth laughed for what felt like the first time in ages. He stayed in the kitchen while she cooked, talking to her about the news of the city and her children. She shooed him into the dining room when she finished, saying she had the marketing to do, then sat him at the table and ordered him to eat.
Keth was happy to do so: he was hungry. She had given him fresh flatbread, cheese and a dish of eggs cooked with cinnamon, cumin, cardamom and fermented barley brine. On his arrival in Tharios, he’d tried eggs prepared this way and thought that, with so peculiar a combination of flavours, they weren’t fit for hogs to eat. Now it was one of his favourite Tharian foods.
He hadn’t been eating long when Tris came downstairs. She was accompanied by a just-fed Chime — Keth could see the colouring agents for purple and blue glass in the dragon’s belly. The girl looked odd, strangely awake for someone who had gone to bed well after midnight and risen not long after dawn, according to the cook. Tris poured herself a cup of tea and sat across from him.
“Is your friend Yali all right?” Tris asked as Chime curled around the teapot. “She was upset over you being taken up by the arurimi.”
“She knows they don’t pay truthsayers in Fifth District,” Keth replied, carefully producing each word. His tongue seemed to get thicker when she was near. He couldn’t make himself forget what she could produce from those thin braids on either side of her face. “She just wanted to know I was in one piece.” He scooped up some eggs with a wedge of flatbread. “She didn’t really believe they got a truthsayer because you told them to,” he added. After he’d chewed and swallowed, he continued, “I was there. I’m not sure I believe it.”
“But I was so polite,” Tris replied with a razor-thin smile. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina was such a gentleman, giving way to a lady’s wishes.”
Keth blinked, startled. “Did you just make a joke?” he asked. He’d never thought she had a sense of humour. If she did, it was very dry.
“I hardly ever joke,” Tris informed him, straight-faced as she sat at the table. “It steams up my spectacles.”
Keth put down his spoon to give his full attention to her. For the first time it sank in that this odd girl two-thirds his age was to be his teacher. He had no idea who she was, apart from a heroic bad temper, a hand for lightning, a claim to handle forces too big for any human to wield and a dislike of being baulked. She was gentle with tweezers and medicine. She loved Chime and her impossibly sized dog. The eyes behind those spectacles were uncomfortably sharp. She also took their new relationship more seriously than he did, which shamed him.
“So we’re stuck with each other,” he said carefully.
She propped her chin on her hand, her smile crooked. “Yes, we are. Do you think your cousin will let us do magic at Touchstone? Otherwise we’ll have to find a glass mage who will give us a place to work. If you were younger, I wouldn’t even try to have you do craftwork as you learn basic mage discipline, but we can’t untangle the two now.”
“Antonou won’t mind as long as I keep making glass for him. If we use a lot of materials, I’ll have to find a way to pay him, though. He isn’t rich.” Keth sighed. He would have to stay in Tharios long after he’d mastered his power, just to repay his cousin. Well, it can’t be helped, he told himself. “Let’s go,” he said, pushing back his chair. “The sooner we start, the sooner we catch the Ghost.”
Tris stayed where she was, drumming her finger slightly on the table. Chime woke from her nap and looked from Keth to Tris. “It’s not that easy,” Tris said at last. “You won’t be creating any lightning globes today.”
“Yes I will!” he replied. Really, he thought, just because it took her a while to master her power doesn’t mean it will be the same for me. I’m an adult. She was — is — a child. Patiently he reminded her, “I can meditate, I know I have magic now. All I need is practice.”
“And if it were just a matter of glass magic, you would probably be right,” she replied. “You’re a journeyman in your guild. I concede your knowledge of glassmaking. But you’ve forgotten that small matter of lightning. It’s tricky. It doesn’t do what you expect. Magic itself is like lightning, only worse.”
“You manage to work it pretty well,” Keth said, frowning at her. For the first time in months he felt that control of his life was within his grasp, and here she was trying to muddle it.
“How do you think I got so fast at throwing up protections?” Tris asked. “And some unusual things happened to help me grip it better than most people ever learn to do. Those things won’t happen for you. Don’t expect to hand Dhaskoi Nomasdina a clear globe this evening.”
“Well, the sooner we start, the sooner we know,” he snapped, impatient. The gall of her, trying to patronize him! “So let’s move, already.”
He stalked out of the house, fuming, without looking to see if she kept up or not. She judged everything by herself and her little friends. Children learned by rote because it would be years before they understood the ideas behind the memorization. He’d seen it over and over with apprentices. Tris had to realize that an adult like Keth would make good progress, now that he knew what he dealt with.
Tris let Keth go. Without rushing she put on Chime’s sling and packed a basket of the dragon’s dishes and foods, then beckoned for Chime to hop into the sling. Once the dragon was settled, Tris went into the courtyard and put a leash on Little Bear. After leaving word with the cook about where she would be, she set out along the Street of Glass with her dog, letting him sniff and ornament whatever he wanted to. It was better to let Keth walk his temper off now. He would be in a quieter frame of mind when she reached Touchstone.
She knew what he was thinking. Over and over in these last four years she had seen it: adults always believed they knew more than younger people. Normally this was true, but magecraft always turned the normal world on its head. The rules that governed accounting houses, craft shops, armies and trade were not the rules of magic, even craft magic. Keth’s problem was not his skill. It was the crazed power that was a combination of air, water, heat and cold. Lightning never formed or struck the same way twice. Tris understood that, and managed it. It was something Keth would learn, if she could stop him from getting killed in the process.
“I wish Lark was here,” she told Little Bear and Chime as they passed through Labrykas Square. “She can gentle anybody into doing anything. He’d even thank her for it.” Tris sighed. “I’m not good like Lark. I don’t know how to gentle anybody. We don’t have the time for me to step nicely around his being an adult stuck with a teacher who’s a kid.” When most people used that word, it meant “baby goat”, but to Briar, the street urchins of Summersea and Briar’s foster-sisters, “kid” would always mean someone who was not an adult.
Mila of the Grain, give me patience, Tris prayed as she walked around the side of Touchstone Glass. Yanna Healtouch, give me coolness to keep my temper down. Shurri Firesword, don’t strike him with your lightning arrows.