Shatterglass

Tris woke to a hammering at the door. Glaki opened it to reveal Kethlun standing in the morning light. He was trembling. Lightning flickered in his eyes. “I think I have one,” he said nervously. “Another globe. It’s an itch, only in my skull where I can’t scratch it.”

Tris sat up. Her bones ached with weariness and too little sleep; the tides and lightning she had used to keep going were starting to run out. She would have to pay with days in bed once their strength was gone. “Go to Touchstone and get things ready,” she croaked. “Don’t start till I get there. I’ve an idea.”

Keth, about to leave, stopped himself. “Will you get there?” he wanted to know. “You look like death walking. Maybe you — never mind.”

Tris, taking the pins from two fresh tide braids, looked at him sharply. He was stepping away from the door. “Never mind what?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s just that when you start to fiddle with your hair I want to leave. No offence,” Keth added hastily. “It’s lovely hair, I’m sure.” He fled.

Tris looked at Glaki. “Can you put your kyten on without my help?” she asked.

“Yes, Tris,” replied the girl. “And my belly band, except you have to tie it.” Tharians wore an undergarment like a diaper that tied at the waist with a drawstring.

“Put it on and come here, then,” Tris ordered. When the girl’s belly band was secure and she was wrestling with a worn, faded tunic of pale blue wool, Tris returned to her tide braids, undoing five centimetres of each. She drew their strength in, letting it slide through vein and bone, foam through her lungs, and race to her head. When she had taken it all in, she redid the braids and pinned them back into their patterns. She hoped they caught the Ghost soon, before the price she had to pay to keep awake and alert through all this got high enough to be painful, not just exhausting.

Her strength restored, she dressed, put a leash on Little Bear, tucked Chime into the sling on her back, tied Glaki’s sandals, and bustled everyone out of the door.


At Touchstone Keth assembled everything he would need, put ingredients into the crucible to melt, checked his work from the previous day, tried to read the book of glass magic Tris had lent him, gave up and paced, unable to stand still. He blinked when she arrived with Glaki, the dog and Chime. At Ferouze’s she’d been the colour of ash, her smattering of freckles darker in contrast. Now she was so full of vigour she nearly threw off sparks. If he needed a reminder that those cursed braids truly were her mage’s kit, packed with magic both powerful and invisible, this was it.

She was the strangest girl, he thought as she settled Glaki in the corner. Kind when she was teaching, testy when people argued with her, briskly caring with the child. He would love to know her life’s story.

“We did business with a family named Chandler out of Capchen in Anderran,” he said abruptly. “Natron, mostly.”

About to walk her protective circle around the workshop, she looked over her shoulder at him. “My family handles natron imports,” she replied, a little stiff. “My great-uncle Murris. Not exclusively, of course. My family deals in all kinds of goods.” She smiled crookedly. “Except defective ones. Those they don’t handle very well.” She set to work, leaving Kethlun puzzled. They had thought her defective? he wondered. Then he thought of the way she handled lightning. He could see where that might unnerve even his own family.

Once they were enclosed in her magical shield, Tris turned to Keth, hands on hips. “Meditation first,” she ordered.

“Do we have to?” he asked, trying not to whine as if he were still a restless boy in the schoolroom. “I don’t think I can concentrate.”

“But you will try, won’t you?” she asked, in the sweet way she used when she was about to close the steel fist in her steel glove. “Because you won’t control anything without first working on your control.”

He took a breath to argue, but memory made him breathe out without speaking. She sounded just like the guildsman who’d taught the apprentices how to master their breathing and how to use as much of their lungs as possible, vital skills for a glassblower. “I’ll try,” he mumbled, thinking, What kind of a world is it, when a chit of fourteen sounds like a guild master?

To his surprise, it was easier to reach the state she demanded in meditation than he thought. Keth felt sheepish when he realized that. He considered an apology, and decided against it. She would only be smug, and he hated it when she was smug with reason.

Maybe if I didn’t keep putting my foot in my mouth with her, he thought as they got to their feet and stretched. A scary thought occurred to him. “You say there are three more of you in Emelan?” Keth asked, goosebumps covering his arms at the thought. “Just like you?”

“Oh, no,” Tris replied, mischief in her grey eyes. “They’re much worse than I am.”

Thinking of the kind of people who could be counted on to survive long acquaintance with her, Keth said, “I believe you.”

“It could be worse,” Tris assured him. “We could all be here. Now,” she added, going from playful to brisk, “let’s think about this next globe. Am I wrong, or when you blow into the gather, do you deliberately allow your power to flow on your breath?”

“Sometimes,” Keth admitted, thinking it over. “Sometimes not.”

“Let’s make a choice, then,” she suggested. “This time, try to let only a trickle of your power run through the blowpipe. Just a thread. Can you do that?”

Keth picked up first one blowpipe, then another, not liking the feel of either, though both were favourites. “I believe so, but it’ll be hard,” he admitted. “It feels like a flood behind a dam, Tris. It wants out. It wants to say what it has to say.”

Up went her near-invisible gold brows. Tris pursed her mouth. “It’s your magic, isn’t it?” she reminded him. “It’s time you taught it who’s in charge.”

“It is,” mumbled Keth, choosing a blowpipe he’d never handled before. It felt right in his hands.

“Go on thinking that your power is in charge, and it will stay so,” she explained. “Your single most important tool as a mage has to be your will, Keth. What you want, what you don’t want. Your magic feeds on those things. You have to make it feed only on what you grant it, or it will rule you and ruin your life.”

He nodded.

“Imagine the crucible in your mind, can you do that?”

Keth nodded.

“Now put all of your power in it, but for a single thread that you’ll blow into the globe,” she directed.

He did as she suggested and imagined his power flowing into the crucible. Imagining it, he could also feel his magic disappear endlessly, like an illusionist’s trick, into some part of himself that held it neatly. In his mind’s eye he saw the lone thread hanging from the opening like the loose end on one of his mother’s balls of yarn. After a pause to make sure his grip was solid, he opened his eyes. “Done,” he told Tris.

She nodded. “While you blow the globe, let that thread and only that thread travel with your breath into the glass. Maybe the problem has been that all of your magic is pouring into the globe until it explodes. Give it a try.”

Keth’s hands trembled. This was exciting. This might actually help. He glanced down at the blowpipe in his hands, the one he’d never used before. Set into its sides was a line of Kurchali, like advice from a seer who knew that one day a mage would hold the pipe: “Grant me steady hands, and steady breath.”

Normally he didn’t use an unfamiliar blowpipe on important projects, but this one, with the advice cut into it, seemed like an omen. Keth slid the pipe into the furnace, until its end was firmly set in molten glass. He began to twirl as he withdrew the rod. Up came the gather, a nice, red-orange blob. Frowning in concentration, Kethlun sent breath and power sliding through the pipe. The gather began to spread.

By the third reheating his magic began to fight its way free of the crucible in his mind. Keth clamped down. In that moment of distraction the glass developed an irregular bulge on one side: he’d slowed at twirling the pipe. He controlled its movement and blew, reshaping a perfect globe. A moment later he saw that the merest thread of his magic had thickened.

Then the force that had urged him to blow a globe expanded up and through Keth, filling the glass. The piece was finished.

Keth sighed and cut the globe free of the pipe. A veil of lightnings shimmered softly over the surface, a tamer version compared to the others Keth had made. Inside it was the same, a multitude of lightnings that moved, flashed and split so much it was impossible to see anything.

Tris was reading from her leather-bound volume again. She looked at the globe as he passed it to her. “Some got away from my control,” he admitted.

“Not as much as before,” she murmured as she turned the globe over in her hands. “You know what you have to do now, right?”

Keth sighed. “Wait for that thing to clear.”

“And waste the time while you wait?” she asked.

Keth glared at her. “Slave-driver.”

“A bad name is just a fart with consonants,” she informed him loftily. “Well?”

Once more Keth sighed. “I need to work on my control.”

“For a while. Then you can just blow glass if you like,” his taskmistress said. “From the looks of you, most of your power today went into that globe. I’m going outside to do my own work. I’ll make sure the barriers are sealed.”

She was being an alarmist, Keth thought. He felt just as good now as he had on getting up that morning. Shaking his head over her lack of faith in how much magic he could work at one time, Keth sat cross-legged on the workshop floor. Tris opened her protective barrier and walked outside, Little Bear following. As she resealed the barrier around the workshop, Keth looked at Glaki. “You must get bored, sitting around here all day.”

The little girl shook her head: she and Chime had discovered a game in which she would point to one of the dragon’s food dishes, and Chime would eat, then produce coloured glass flames for her. Keth noticed the little girl’s brown curls were glossy and thoroughly combed, her face, arms and legs clean. Yali and Iralima had both belonged to the “do as well as can be expected” school of grooming a child. Most of their time had to be used on their own appearance, in preparation for a night’s performance. Keth decided that of course Tris would do an exacting job on Glaki’s hair: only look at what she put her own through.

He glanced outside, where Tris, veiled by the silver glow of the magical protections on the workshop, stood in the courtyard. Her spectacles were tucked away somewhere. She stared into space, eyes wide and unseeing. What was she doing? That was another thing he’d ask her, when he found the courage.

This wasn’t helping him to control his power. Taking a deep breath, Keth began to meditate.

Glaki roused Keth from meditation when Dema arrived. It took both Dema and Little Bear to bring Tris back to the real world. Keth frowned as the older man helped his teacher to stand so she could remove her magical barrier on the workshop. As Tris’s student it was his job to look after her, not Dema’s.

Both Keth and Dema rushed to catch her when she staggered on her way into the workshop door. When Keth touched her, a fizzing power like his own, only a hundred times stronger, flooded his body. He gasped and flinched back, then steeled himself to steady her on the left as Dema steadied her on the right.

“Oh, stop that,” she said when they placed her on a bench inside. “Give me a moment to catch my breath.” She looked at Dema. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying!” he retorted. “My eyes are watering. Girl, what were you doing?”

Her eyes darted to and fro, as if she tracked the movement of a dozen insects inside the workshop. “Meditating,” she said shortly. “Is there water?”

Glaki brought it, steadying it as Tris drank. Keth was silently grateful to the girl as he sat unnoticed on one of the benches. His knees were a bit unsteady.

When she finished her water, Tris looked at Dema and Keth. “Did you show him, Keth?” she asked.

Keth blinked, puzzled, then remembered his globe. He reached over to the nearby workbench and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. “Do you send your people into Khapik tonight?” he asked Dema.

“All four women, plus the guards we’re putting on them, arurimi in civilian clothes,” the older man replied. “The female arurimi will wear the yellow veil with the ends knotted, so they can be identified.”

“Will they perform?” asked Keth. He was trying to manipulate the lightning inside his creation, without result. He only felt as if he simply pretended to have magic.

“Gods,” Dema said, sinking on to the bench next to Tris. “Don’t ask. I’ve seen them try. They won’t get any customers with music or dancing.”

“What about weapons exhibitions?” asked Tris. “That’s entertainment for kings and emperors up north.”

Dema rubbed his lips with a knuckle. “That might work for some of the more hopeless ones. I’ll suggest it.”

Keth handed the globe to Dema. “Surface lightning’s not so bad, but the inside’s as clouded as ever.”

“I’ll take this back to the watch commander at the aruritnat,” Dema said. “He’ll watch it while I look our yaskedasi over. Thank you, Keth.” He got to his feet, looking old. To both Keth and Tris he said, “Try not to kill yourselves, whatever you’re doing. It makes the city look bad.” He left them, the lightning globe cradled in his hands.

Instead of following the Street of Glass straight to Khapik when they finished for the day, Keth asked to stop by the Elya Street arurimat, to see how his globe fared, though his head ached thunderously. When they walked in, the arurim present gave them a wide berth. Only one, a hard-faced woman in charge of the main desk, didn’t inch away from their small group, Keth saw, but perhaps she felt safe behind her wooden barrier.

“I’ll tell Dhaskoi Nomasdina you’re here, Dhaskoi Warder,” she said.

Keth started. It was the first time he’d been given the title of mage. He started to say, “I’m only a student,” but caught himself in time. After facing the prospect of torture in this building, it was very pleasant to be treated with respect and a little fear.

“If you’d like a seat, dhask?” the woman asked, indicating the benches against the walls.

Keth and Tris sat gratefully. Once settled, Keth leaned over to Tris and murmured, “Different from my last visit.”

She smiled back, her eyes busy following some movement Keth was unable to see. “Mine, too. Chime, how many times have I told you to stay out of the ashes?” she asked as the dragon hiccuped and expelled a cloud of dust. “I don’t care if you like it, you don’t seem able to digest it.” She looked at Glaki. “If you catch her at it, don’t let her eat ashes.” Glaki nodded. She pressed close to Tris’s side and took the older girl’s hand. Keth was surprised at her apparent affection for the redhead. The Glaki he’d known in the company of Iralima and Yali had been shy.

“Keth! Tris! Hello, little one,” Dema said to Glaki as he walked into the waiting room. He held the lightning globe in his hands. The surface bolts were gone; shapes and colours were dimly visible inside. “I’m about to ride uptown so we can be close when it clears, since uptown seems to be where our kakasoi is headed. Do you want to come?”

Keth was eager to go. He wanted to catch this beast, not just tell others where to find him. He glanced at Tris, who frowned. “Not me,” she replied. “I’m not going to leave Glaki by herself.” She pursed her mouth, then looked directly into Keth’s face for the first time since she had meditated that morning. “Are you sure that you feel up to this?” she asked sharply. “Because you have maybe a pinch of magic left in you, no more than that. My experience is that when you’re that drained of magic, your body’s on the edge of exhaustion, too. You may collapse before too much longer, no matter how good you feel right now.”

“I’m fine,” Keth said testily, through the pounding in his head.

Tris shrugged. “Please yourself. Glaki and I are going to Ferouze’s.” She looked at Dema, her face serious. “I hope you catch him,” she said quietly. “Good luck.” She levered herself up from her bench, gathered up dog, dragon and girl, and left the arurimat.

Dema turned bright, eager brown eyes on Keth. “We’re going to ride. Come on — let’s get you a horse.”

Progress up the Street of Glass towards Assembly Square and Heskalifos was annoyingly slow. Time after time Keth wanted to shout for people to get out of the way, but with the globe’s contents still shrouded in lightning, it made no sense to hurry. The press of humanity on the streets was loud and colourful, a constant irritation to Keth’s nerves. He also didn’t like it that Dema kept sneaking looks at him.

At Apricot Street skodi, Dema halted at a street vendor’s for small eggplants stuffed with lamb and rice, a Sotaten dish that was popular in Tharios. He bought enough for everyone, and ordered Keth to eat. Keth bolted the food: he hadn’t realized how very hungry he was. Dema paid another vendor for skewers of grilled kid marinated in olive oil, cinnamon and onion, and a third for plum juice. They moved their horses to the side of the street to devour it all, licking their fingers when they were done.

The thickest crowds were bound for Khapik, but even headed uphill there was plenty of traffic as the city’s shopkeepers, clerks and merchants turned their faces towards home. The First and Second classes would not venture out for their evening’s entertainment until dark, Dema told Keth. Their servants ran last-minute errands at the skodis, doing business at a trot that made their hobnailed sandals strike sparks from the stones of the roadway.

Dark drew down slowly. Torches were lit at eating houses, other shops that stayed open late, and inns. Foot traffic began to thin out, replaced by horses, chairs and litters. Keth’s headache eased after he’d eaten, but now he was dizzy. He bit his lip, determined to say nothing to Dema.

They halted at Akaya Square, where the Ghost had left Yali’s body. At an open-air eating house they bought dishes of olives, dates, liver patties, dried apricots and flatbread, along with a pitcher of grape juice, and settled down to wait. The globe held the place of honour at the centre of the table, drawing attention from diners and from passers-by. Keth and his companions watched as it cleared inside, the lightnings fading.

Keth couldn’t eat a thing once they were seated. He tore a piece of flatbread into the tiniest of crumbs, to the approval of the pigeons who came to forage by torchlight. It was unfair to wait for his own device to reveal something in its time, not Keth’s. Magic, he thought ruefully, is more the master than the pet dog. In his mind he heard Tris say scornfully, “Whoever told you it was anything else?”

He tried again to draw the lightnings out, but it was as if his magic no longer existed. It was maddening to sit here and wait, and risk the chance that they would be too late to save the next victim.

Dema put a hand on Keth’s arm. “It’s clear what you’re thinking,” he said quietly. “But Keth — she’s probably dead by now, whoever she is.”

Keth sat bolt upright, his mouth dry. “That’s a horrible thing to say! We might see her in that, still alive!” He pointed to the globe. “Don’t pronounce her dead until you’ve found the body — as well invite the gods to kill her, not the Ghost!”

Dema leaned closer, inspecting Keth’s face by torchlight. Suddenly he placed the inside of his wrist on Keth’s forehead. When Keth jerked away, Dema calmly produced a black leather case from his sash and opened it to reveal a lens. He held it up to one eye, then put it away, shaking his head. “She was right, and I was too hot to get moving to realize it,” he muttered. “Your skin’s clammy, you’re hot and you’re sweating a river. You’ve overdone it. If you try to do more tonight, you’ll make yourself ill. You need rest.”

“I’m fine,” Keth retorted. “What is it, getting a mage’s credential turns you all into old women, forever fussing and worrying over someone? I made that cursed globe and I’ll see it through. You and Tris can go nursemaid each other!” He struggled to his feet and stood, wavering, as sweat trickled down his cheeks. “I’ll settle the Ghost…” His ears buzzed. His legs turned to over-cooked noodles. Shadows filled the edges of his vision, shadows that grew and expanded as the buzz turned to a roar.


In the room that Tris shared with Glaki, they sat together on the bed, the little girl freshly bathed. Glaki petted Little Bear as Tris explained how Sandry, Briar and Daja had decided that Tris would miss the dog most of all of them during her travels. She had reached the point at which Little Bear had to be coaxed on to the ship when she heard Ferouze’s hoarse bellow in the courtyard below.

She stalked out to the gallery over the courtyard, ready to berate Ferouze for raising such a noise when it was nearly Glaki’s bedtime. Looking down, she saw the old woman at the entrance to the street passage. Three men stood with her, two in amrim red. The third, sagging between them, was Keth.

Tris tucked Glaki in, ordered her to sleep, then went down to her student.

“Just keeled right over,” the older of the arurimi said as Tris guided them to Keth’s room. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina was saying he overdid it, and Keth here was giving him what-for when his eyes rolled up and down he went.” The arurimi laid Keth on his bed and set about removing his boots. “Will he be all right, dhaskoi?” the man asked. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina said he would, but then, Dhaskoi Nomasdina didn’t see this lad was reeling in the saddle.”

“He won’t even know he was ill in the morning,” Tris assured them. “This is normal enough, when a student’s too big for the teacher to order him to bed.” She waved them out and returned to open Keth’s shirt and bathe his sweaty face. “You want to cure all the ills of the world in one day, because you think magic can do that,” she murmured as she drew a sheet over Keth. “You’ll learn.”

Less than an hour passed after Dema had sent Keth home when the globe began to clear. The men he’d sent with Keth were riding into Dema’s view when one of his arurimi leaned in to stare at the globe. “I know that balcony! It’s at Lagisthion, the debate arena at Heskalifos!”

They scrambled for their horses, Dema tossing coins from his purse on to the table to pay for the dishes they broke. They rode to Heskalifos like fiends, scattering people left and right as they galloped up the Street of Glass. Bolting through Akaya Gate, they ignored the yells of the university peacekeepers as they sped over paths not meant for riders. Where the paths failed to provide the most direct route, Dema led them across carefully tended gardens between buildings.

They reined in before a small, round hall built of white marble with pillars all the way around. Dema slid from the saddle, the globe clutched to his chest. He raced up the bank of steps that served as pedestal to the hall.

“Brosdes, open that thing,” he ordered, pointing to the door.

One of the arurimi, a short black man with knots of muscle in his arms and legs, approached with a heavy pack over one shoulder. He inspected the double doors with an expert eye. “Right,” he said, kneeling to extract a chisel and mallet from the pack. “Majnuna, give me a leg up,” he ordered.

The arurim Majnuna, a huge, olive-skinned woman who stood a full head taller than any of the others, knelt beside the door. Brosdes jammed hammer and chisel into his sash, then climbed on to Majnuna’s shoulders. The big woman stood and braced herself.

Brosdes cut the head off the pin that secured the hinge with two hammer blows, then knocked the pin out. When Majnuna lowered him, Brosdes did the same for the lower hinge. Everyone moved aside as half of the door trembled, groaned, then fell to the marble floor.

Inside the globe, Dema saw a limp woman on the stage of the debating hall. He led his arurimi inside, motioning for them to spread out in every direction and cover the doors out of the place. They obeyed, lighting torches from those that blazed outside the front entrance. The outer lobby was empty. Two arurimi vanished up the curving stairs on either side to search the balcony.

Dema and three arurimi, each with a lead-weighted baton in hand, passed into the immense theatre where the university’s famed debates were held. Opposite them was the stage.

It was empty.

“Is the globe wrong?” asked one of the men.

Dema looked at the globe, where the image was rapidly fading. Keth had done it, Dema realized. He’d made the inside visible before the Ghost could display his victim. His success wasn’t complete, what Dema wanted was a look at the murderer himself— but Keth had come a long way towards their ultimate goal.

Hope burned in Dema’s chest like a red-hot coal. The killer might be nearby. “Quietly,” he whispered. “Fan out and search. Inside and out.”

He and Majnuna were in the wings of the stage when one of the arurimi came for them. The arurimi outside Lagisthion had found a service entrance to the hall’s underbelly. It was hidden by a clump of brush thirty metres away.

Dema cursed. He had forgotten the service entrances. “They didn’t want to ruin the beauty of the building with anything as sordid as taking out the rubbish,” he panted as he and his arurimi raced outside. “They never do anything simple if they can think of a complicated way around it.”

Quickly they found the path into the greenery and followed it to a circle of open ground. An open door yawned at its centre. On top of the steps leading down lay the body of a yaskedasu.

Dema clenched his fists. They were too late, again.

He looked around. They had been quiet since coming outside. There was a chance that the killer was still nearby.

An application of heartbeat powder over the dead woman told him she’d been dead less than an hour. He didn’t waste time with the vision spell, but immediately gulped a mouthful of stepsfind and sprayed it over the yaskedasu. In the gloom of the night it drifted to one side of her, and shimmered in the form of footsteps on the ground.

None of the arurimi said anything. They followed. They tracked the Ghost through the back ways of Heskalifos, through alleys and service entrances hidden with brush and trees, until the trail of the killer turned downhill. They followed him right up to the white marble columns and stones of a building so thoroughly protected by cleansing magics that all trace of him was lost. Dema’s curses brought the priests out to discover who was making so unholy a racket.

Seeing them, Dema literally ground his teeth. The killer had vanished into the bowels of the Heskalifos temple of the All-Seeing. He had carried his pollution into the temple’s foundations, where the guardian spells erased all trace of him. Once more he’d managed to be a Ghost in fact, vanishing from a trail so plainly marked Dema could have followed it blindfolded.

“You take too much on yourself,” a priestess informed Dema. She had found him on the temple steps, waiting as his people searched outside the grounds in case the Ghost had not vanished into the service tunnels. “You think that magic is not a force of nature but something dead, a tool to be used,” she continued, standing beside him. She was robed and draped as a high-ranking priestess. She had the age for it, with laugh lines and the lines drawn by long watches framing her eyes. Her nose was a straight edge with delicate nostrils, her thin-lipped mouth painted the same red that decorated her robes.

“Magic is not dead,” protested Dema, watching for his arurimi. “But it is a tool, a device we can use to set the balance of justice right.”

The priestess shook her head. “Magic is a living force that obeys its own time and its own laws. We must accept that and learn to live with it, for our own serenity’s sake. Magic leaves us no choice.”

Dema shook his head stubbornly. He hated not having a choice.

The priestess rested a hand on his shoulder. Dema looked at her, wary. So far his contacts with this particular priesthood were less than encouraging.

“Your heart is in Tharios, Demakos Nomasdina,” she told him.

Dema flinched. He hadn’t mentioned his name, not wanting to be punished for tracking the polluted steps of a killer.

“You are a true and noble servant to our city,” the priestess continued. “When you have laid hands upon this Ghost, return here. I shall see to it that you are made clean by rite and magic, so that you may do your work unhindered. I trust that your clan takes pride in so devoted a citizen.” She drew the circle of the All-Seeing on Dema’s forehead, bowed and retreated into the temple. Dema stared after her, mouth agape.

“Dhaskoi.” There was reverence in Majnuna’s deep, thick voice. The arurimi had come up while Dema was speaking with the priestess. “You’ve been blessed by Aethra Papufos!”

Gooseflesh crawled up Demi’s spine. The high priestess of the All-Seeing almost never appeared in public. Her prayers guarded Tharios; she was considered to be the voice of the All-Seeing on earth.

She had set her hand on him in full view of a handful of priests and arurimi. She had called him a “devoted citizen”. And she had virtually told him that he would be able to find killers unhindered by considerations of pollution — once he caught the Ghost.


The worst part, Tris thought as she groped her way down Imperial Alley, was how confusing it all was. She felt as if she walked through an opal when she tried the magics of Winds’ Path, an opal alive with glittering bits of colour that threatened to overwhelm her sight. None of them served to make any kind of a picture for her, not even so much as last night’s glimpse of a gauze butterfly wing. Worse, they made her half-blind in Khapik, not precisely a good thing to be. Tonight she had Chime and Little Bear with her, and her breezes to warn her, but her head was spinning. Floods of dizziness came and went.

“Enough,” Tris told her companions. “I’ll just have to try again tomorrow.”

Chime rubbed her head against Tris’s cheek. The girl sighed and closed her eyes, willing the magic away. At last she put her spectacles back on and returned to Ferouze’s. She doubted that she could sleep, thanks to the tides in her blood and bones, but at least she could read further. Maybe there was a way to sort all these firefly bits until they showed her something real.

About to climb from the first storey of Ferouze’s to the second, she saw that Chime scratched at Keth’s open door. Tris looked into his room. Her student lay awake on his bed, watching the ceiling shadows by the light of one candle. He pulled the sheet up to his bare chest when she came in and smiled ruefully. “Yes, they had to send me back because I was exhausted. Please don’t say ‘I told you so’,” he begged.

Tris sat on a chair, Chime at her feet, Little Bear dropping with a groan in the doorway. “It’s the furthest thing from my mind,” she assured him, watching threads of colour in the breeze that flowed between the window and the door. The threads all came to hover around Keth, lighting on his eyes, his jaws, his chest, making him sparkle in Tris’s sight.

“I suppose you never did anything of the kind,” Keth accused.

“Never,” replied Tris, straight-faced. “And if Niko tells you that one time I decided to halt the tides, and the rocky cove where I tried it is now called ‘Gravel Beach’, well, he exaggerates.”

“You. Tried to halt the. The tides.” There was awe in Keth’s voice.

“The important word there is ‘tried’. I was very foolish, and lucky enough to survive the experiment,” Tris informed him. “Are you hungry at all?”

Keth shook his head. “Sleepy, a little. Trying to think of ways to pull the lightning out of the globes. Where were you? I went upstairs, but Ferouze is with Glaki.”

“I’m trying something of my own,” Tris said. “I need to be in open air for it to work. It’s not going as well as I had hoped,” she confessed, and sighed.

“You have trouble? But you wear the medallion,” Keth protested, sitting up on his elbows. “I thought, once you have that — ”

Tris shook her head with a rueful smile, wishing that were so. “Different spells make different kinds of trouble,” she explained. “Nobody can do every kind of magic, and the more complex a spell, the harder it is to work.” She sighed, remembering. “Three years ago there was an epidemic in Summersea,” she told him. “Nearly thirty of us, including my brother Briar and two great mages, worked day after day, trying to make a cure using magic. Every time something went wrong, we knew more people were dying. And there wasn’t a thing we could do except keep working, one hard step at a time.”

She looked at him. She could see that he listened to her with every particle of his being. Finally now, to Keth she was not fourteen and unworthy; she was a mage, with a mage’s wisdom. They had come a long way since their first meeting. “Every mage knows what it means to fail at something,” she continued, “or to bungle it, or to do so much you just collapse. One of our great mages got the essence of the disease on her by sheer accident. She got sick and nearly died.”

“I thought magic made things simpler,” Keth protested. “Just a wave of a hand, and poof! You have answers. This slowness, this plodding, it’s — ”

“Too much like the everyday world?” suggested Tris.

Keth nodded.

Tris leaned over to pat his arm. “In some ways, magic is the everyday world, complete with fumbles, sweat, tears… All the happy things. Go to sleep, Keth. Tomorrow your magic will be fresh. We’ll try again.”

“My heart flutters with joy,” he grumbled. With a groan he turned on his side. “I’d like to tuck this killer into the furnace, let him anneal for a while. It might burn off the impurities.”

“I like that,” Tris said, imagining it. “Try not to dream about it, though.” She got up and blew out his candle, then went outside with Chime and Little Bear. Quietly they climbed back up to their room.

Tris halted outside the door, staring into the dark, or at least into a dark punctuated by the occasional spark of colour. Her head ached; her eyes burned. She would learn how to do this. She wouldn’t allow herself to be driven mad by a flood of sparks. The trick would be to learn it in time to capture Yali’s murderer. She was beginning to doubt that she would.

She woke the dozing Ferouze and sent her back to her rooms, her payment of five biks stripped of sparks. Glaki, sound asleep, lay half out of bed, her head nearly touching the floor, as limp as her ragged doll. Tris gently lifted her back on to the bed and arranged Glaki’s old doll on her left side. On her right Tris placed a new doll she had bought earlier, a pretty thing with brown hair, a yellow veil and a costume much like Xantha’s. Beside the doll she also set a brightly coloured ball so Glaki could play with Little Bear. They were just tokens, not that expensive, but Tris had owned few toys. She knew it could be lonely, sometimes, to have only one doll.

Tris washed her face and hands and settled in the chair to read. The flicker of the candle was too hard on her weary eyes. She blew it out. Making herself comfortable, she combed one of her thin braids until enough lightning had collected on the end to make it glow. With steady light to read by, Tris opened Winds’ Path.


At Touchstone the next morning, Tris and Keth were preparing to meditate when Tris looked at Glaki. The girl sat in her usual corner, out of the range of any molten glass accidents. She had arranged her dolls, Chime and Little Bear around her, but she was looking at Keth and Tris, loneliness in her eyes.

“You’d find it boring, most likely,” Tris warned.

Glaki shrugged.

Tris looked at Keth, who also shrugged. “As long as she doesn’t make noise.”

Before Tris could invite her, Glaki raced across the shop to plop herself on to the dirt floor between Tris and Keth. “I do things and count to seven,” she told Tris.

“Right,” the older girl said. “Breathe in and count, hold it and count.”

Keth vanished into his meditation, his magic back to its former strength and tucked into his imagined crucible, where it shone brightly in Tris’s magical vision. Once she saw Glaki knew how to breathe, Tris began, deliberately using her power to reach for water without using her eyes as a change from her normal exercises. She found it. Water ran in the gutter outside as shopkeepers washed their doorsteps; it splashed in fountains on the Street of Glass, rushed in streams throughout the city, churned in the bed of the Kurchal River as it raced to the sea. Further off, in the marrow of her bones, Tris felt the pull of the sea and the draw of the tides. When they would have taken her far from shore, Tris shook herself free and returned. Glaki was asleep, her thumb in her mouth. Keth looked much improved.

They spent the morning quietly. Tris went to try wind-scrying again. Keth moulded glass bowls and pressed signs for health into their bases. When Glaki woke, she played with her dolls, Chime and Little Bear.

The city’s clocks had just struck midday when Keth shouted, “Tris?”

The redhead’s still figure in the courtyard didn’t move.

Keth frowned. “Chime, bring Tris out of it?” he asked.

Chime soared into the open air, the sun gliding from her wings as she flew. She lit on Tris’s shoulder and looked back at Keth. He nodded.

Chime sank glass fangs into Tris’s earlobe. Tris let out a yelp, swatted the dragon and fumbled for her spectacles and handkerchief. “What did you do that for?” she demanded. Her vision was filled with colours. She groped around her as a blind person might, trying to see past everything that filled the air. Chime stayed just out of her reach as Tris snatched at her.

“Tris, I’ve got that feeling again,” Keth called, his voice shaking. “Another globe.”

“Start,” she ordered. With her handkerchief pressed to her earlobe, she carefully made her way over the stones of the courtyard, seeing them dimly behind washes and currents of moving colour. “Keth, did you tell Chime to bite me?” The dragon, chinking in distress, lit on Tris’s shoulder beside the unwounded ear.

“Of course not!” Keth said, picking up a blowpipe. “But I’m glad it worked.”

“I’m sure you are,” she said sarcastically. “Next time I’ll send her to get you out of bed in the morning, see how you like it. Get started, Keth, don’t wait for me. Try what you did yesterday. Make the lightning thinner, if you can.” Without even looking she called her protective barrier out of the ground outside the shop. That was one of the benefits of laying protective circles in the ground: the earth remembered them if they were made on the same lines more than twice.

Tris sat on a bench to watch as Keth collected his gather and brought the pipe up. His hands were more deft than they had been when she’d first seen him. He barely looked inside the furnace, sensing when he had enough glass for his needs. Best of all, Tris could feel the change in him. He must have been this way before the lightning struck him, in casual command of fire and glass, born to work in a place like this. She wished she could tell him so, but doubted he would listen. To him a lightning globe that caught the Ghost was his way to buy his life back. He wouldn’t realize he’d already got his life, with some changes, until afterwards.

Once he finished, the globe was as full of lightning as it had been the day before, though only a handful of miniature bolts shimmered along its surface. “Tris, I want to try something,” Keth said. He took the finished globe off the blowpipe and held it in one hand. “I want to see if I can take back some of the lightning I put in.”

“Now that the globe’s closed?” she asked with a frown. She supposed it could work. To her the glass shielded the lightning inside, but it might well be a barrier that would not affect Keth at all.

“I think I can do it,” replied Keth.

“Have you ever taken in lightning you just got rid of?” Tris asked, still trying to think it all through.

“No. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why it won’t work.” Keth grimaced, then admitted, “I’m scared, a bit.”

Tris chewed on her lower lip, calculating. “It could be tricky. One moment.” She went to the cullet barrel with its mix of broken and discarded glass. She saw plenty of sparks from Keth’s magic in there, from the pieces they’d thrown in. Perhaps her next move ought to be a container for magicked glass, to keep the power from spreading, or perhaps Keth could learn to remove the power and make it harmless. She put those thoughts in the back of her mind to brew, and threw the protective barrier she had once used to guard Keth around the barrel. With it in place, she raised her hands and lowered them, opening the protections on the top of the barrel, until it was sheathed from rim to ground in white fire.

“Now try,” she advised Keth, shooing Glaki and Little Bear into a far corner of the shop. “If you can’t bear it, throw it into the cullet.” She stood beside the barrel, her hands loose at her sides.

“But I should be able to take it back, like you do when you take the circles down,” he protested. “I can feel you reclaim the magic that was in them.”

“That’s magic. This — ” she pointed to the globe — “is lightning, even if it’s sheathed in magic to keep it from burning everything in sight. Once you free lightning, I’m not sure you can reclaim it.”

“It’s my lightning. I can reclaim it,” he replied stubbornly.

“Lightning doesn’t belong to anyone,” she said, but he ignored her. Tris sighed. He might be right; if he wasn’t, he’d soon realize his mistake.

Keth cradled the globe in both hands. Tris watched as his power flowed out around the globe to envelop it. First he peeled away the surface lightnings, pulling them back into himself. Then he reached deeper, through the glass. Slowly he drew some of the inner lightning out, pulling it back into his chest.

She could see it hurt him. His face went red; sweat popped out all over his upper body, He grimaced and continued to draw on the lightning, until he was gasping. “Tris — ” he began to say. She pointed at the cullet barrel. He turned towards it and opened his mouth.

Lightning roared from his throat and slammed into the junk glass. The moment the last of it came out of Keth, Tris enclosed the barrel in a globe of power.

She backed away, feeling his power batter her protections. For a moment nothing happened. Suddenly the barrel quivered, shook and exploded with a roar, hurling charcoal and glass into the magical barrier. Smoke filled it as if her power was glass, whirling and twisting inside.

“Beautiful,” whispered Glaki.

“Stupid,” said Keth with chagrin.

“You needed to find out,” Tris told him, hands on hips as she watched the smoke and ash settle. “Now you know.”

“I have to pay Antonou for the cullet, and replace it,” Keth remarked, glum. “We need it to make other glass. But it should have worked, curse it!”

Tris shrugged. “It’s lightning. It’s no more amenable to ‘should haves’ than you are.”

“Ouch,” Keth said, wincing. He looked at the globe in his hands. The surface was clear, but he’d drawn hardly any lightning from inside it. He sighed and sank on to a bench. “So we wait,” he said, resigned. “I — ” He stood, swaying.

“I’ll get our midday,” said Tris, seeing the magic under his skin gutter. It was funny how academic mages were never exhausted by their first workings, she thought, but ambient mages were. “Why don’t you see if Antonou has a crate and shovel, so we can clear out the mess when it settles.”

Keth flapped his hand at her in gloomy resignation and walked out of the shop, smack into the barrier around the outside. “Just what I needed,” he moaned as she retrieved its magic. “A knock on the head.”

“Well, it’s not like it hurt anything important, is it?” Tris asked tartly.

Keth turned, expecting to see that disgusted expression on her face. Instead she grinned at him. “Why aren’t you one of those teachers who believes in coddling students?” he demanded.

“I couldn’t,” she said, straight-faced. “It would be bad for your character.”

He fled, before she could think of another joke to make at his expense.

The globe began to clear as their afternoon’s work, getting rid of the mess of molten glass and charcoal, came to an end. They were packing to leave Touchstone for the day when Dema arrived. Under the shade of the courtyard trees he told them of the fruitless search the night before, then took charge of the globe.

Keth had recovered after his midday, enough to help clean up and to blow the small globes that Antonou liked to sell. Tris wasn’t sure that he ought to go with Dema after the previous night’s collapse, but Keth didn’t give her the chance to debate it. He simply followed Dema out into the street.

With Keth gone, Tris turned to Glaki. “Have you ever been up on the wall?” she asked. “The wall around the city?”

“No,” replied the girl. She had begged a scrap of cloth from Antonou’s wife and fashioned it into a sling like the one Tris used to carry Chime. Into it she had tucked her dolls. Little Bear carried his ball. All afternoon he and Glaki had played with it, until it was covered with dirt and dog drool.

“Would you like to climb the wall, Glaki?” Tris wanted to know. “I want to try something. I’m always better at new things when I’m up somewhere high.”

“Let’s go,” the four-year-old said eagerly, grabbing Tris’s hand. She towed the older girl down to the city’s gate.

As Tris had expected, Tharios’s wall was a favourite with visitors: the guards waved them straight to the stair. When they reached the top, they found a broad walkway, ten metres above the ground. From there they could see the roads that led around the city, the river bridges, and the road that led south-east to the seaport of Piraki. To their left, a tumble of huts and hovels clung to the rocky hillside between Tharios and the Kurchal River. A number of huge pipes dotted the same rocky ground, pipes that emitted streams of brown, clotted water that flowed into the river: the city’s sewer outlets. Swarming over the hillside, hanging out washing, minding goats and chickens, talking, grinding grain, playing and cooking, were prathmuni, recognizable even from this height by their clothes and haircuts. Tris felt cold, seeing their dwelling place. She knew the mages at Heskalifos had to be aware of the connection between sewage and disease, yet they allowed people to live where the night soil of Tharios was dumped. How many prathmuni children lived even to Glaki’s age, let alone her own? Tris wondered. How many old prathmuni were there?

“Tris, please don’t,” whispered Glaki, tugging Tris by the sleeve. “Please don’t.”

She glanced at the little girl. “Don’t what?” she asked, her voice clipped.

Glaki actually backed up a step. She still found the courage to say, “Please don’t thunder inside. It’s scary.”

Remorse flooded Tris at the fear in Glaki’s eyes. She knelt and held her arms out. “It’s not about you, Glaki,” she said, deliberately gentling her voice. “You could never make me angry.”

Glaki clung to her, even with a doll in each hand. Tris soothed her until she was sure the little girl was calm. This too was something she knew all too well. The anger of adults almost always had meant packing her bags and moving on to a new home. An adult in a temper meant new relatives with new rules and new places where she was not welcome.

When Glaki was calm, Tris sat her on a bench with Little Bear and Chime, and gave the child her spectacles to hold. Closing her eyes, she entered the trance she needed to scry the winds. When she opened her eyes, colours and half-images assaulted her, flashing by so quickly she couldn’t track them. Time after time she tried to seize an image and hold it, but by the time she’d picked one, it was gone. Grimly she persisted until her eyes began to water and ache.

Once more, she thought, biting her lower lip. One, just one… She imagined hooks magically tethered to her eyes, and sank them into a flash of crimson. Then she fought to keep her eyes in one position. They wanted to flick aside to capture another of the images that raced by like a river in flood. She widened her eyelids and refused to let them jitter, staring instead at what she had caught. Slowly the image cleared as the fight to keep her eyes steady got harder.

Suddenly she realized what she saw. Excitement surged through her, cutting the vision free of her grip, but Tris didn’t care. Her eyes began to dance again as eyestrain tears streamed down her cheeks.

She had seen something real.

“A ship, Glaki!” she said, reclaiming her spectacles. “I saw a ship on the wind! A ship with a crimson sail and a sun emblem on it!”

“Course you did,” the little girl replied, for all the world as if she were Tris herself. “There’s all kinds of ships down in Piraki harbour.”

It took some time for Tris’s vision to clear. When she could actually see, she asked Glaki, “Show me the ships?”

The girl pointed. Far below, through a gap in the rocky hills between Tharios and Piraki, Tris saw the ant-like shapes of vessels anchored in the harbour. Above one was a dot of red: the red-sailed ship Tris had seen life-size on the wind.

“Supper now?” Glaki pleaded, tugging her skirt.

Tris hugged the child to her side. “Definitely supper.” She looked around for Chime and saw the glass dragon on the wall a few metres away, inspecting the guards and tourists as they inspected her. “Chime, come,” Tris called. The dragon took flight and returned to her, while the tourists clapped. “Show-off,” Tris murmured as Chime wrapped herself around Tris’s neck.

“But she’s beautiful,” protested Glaki. “She should show off.”

Tris smiled. “Spoken like a yaskedasu’s daughter,” she said. “Come on. Maybe Keth caught the Ghost.” Her pride would suffer if he did, but her pride wasn’t important. Sending that murderer to a place where he could kill no more was.


Two hours after he left the arurimat, Keth returned to Ferouze’s. To his considerable surprise, Dema was there with Tris and Glaki. The older man stared gloomily into a cup of water. “You can hear it from me,” he told Keth. “We found her in a rubbish bin, in Perfume Court. We tracked him to the temple of the All-Seeing, where it looks like he vanished into thin air. Of course, the place is hip-deep in cleansing spells, enough so that they stick to you when you come out of it. He’s gone, and we lost him.” He got to his feet. “Sorry, Keth. You did all that work, and we failed you.” He walked out without even saying goodbye.

Keth sat down hard. “All I did was stop for supper on the way,” he complained. “And a bath. And this Ghost killed and escaped. Maybe he is a ghost. Maybe we need an exorcist, not mages.”

Tris shook her head. “He’s just a man who knows Tharios from top to bottom,” she told Keth. “Look at it this way — tonight your globe brought the arurimi down on him before he could even smuggle his prey out of Khapik. You get closer every day.”

Keth smiled crookedly at her. “I won’t be happy until he’s in chains, and neither will you.” He looked at Glaki. “So what did you have for supper?”

They had just finished the dish washing when Tris straightened, staring at the door. “What is he doing here?” she asked. Before Keth could inquire into “his” identity, Tris had run out of the room. Little Bear galloped at her side, barking furiously as his tail wagged hard enough to create a breeze.

By the time Keth could reach the door, Niklaren Goldeye had stepped on to the second-floor gallery. “No, Bear, you know better,” he informed the dog as Little Bear danced around him. “Just one pawprint on my clothes and I will make myself a Little Bear rug.”

Keth’s eyes bulged as he took in Niko’s appearance. Even for Khapik the mage dressed well: tonight he wore a crimson sleeveless overrobe with a gold thread subtly worked into the weave, loose black trousers, and a cream-coloured shirt. His long hair was combed back and secured with a red-gold tie.

Tris looked entirely unimpressed by her teacher’s splendour. She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “Those aren’t Khapik clothes,” she informed Niko tartly. “Those are Balance Hill clothes.”

“Actually, they’re Phakomathen clothes,” Niko told her, allowing Chime to light on his outstretched arm. “You are more beautiful than ever,” he told the dragon. To Tris he said, “You look dreadful.”

“I don’t feel dreadful,” she retorted. “I know what I’m doing, Niko. I don’t need a nursemaid.”

He raised his black brows at her. “And did it ever occur to you that I might need reassurance that you are well and sane?”

To Keth’s astonishment, Tris turned beet-red. Looking at the boards under her feet, she mumbled something that sounded like an apology. Keth stared at Niko in awe. In one sentence he had transformed Tris from a short, plump, sharp-nosed terror into a fourteen-year-old girl. It occurred to Keth for the first time that perhaps magic wasn’t simply a matter of fires, lightning and power in the air, if spoken words could also create such a transformation.

Niko turned his dark eyes, with their heavy frame of lashes, on Keth next. Keth managed to meet them for a moment, before he too gave way to the urge to inspect the floor. Suddenly he remembered that Niko’s magic revolved around sight, and that if he saw magic, he would know the state of Keth’s power. “She keeps telling me not to overdo,” he said hurriedly, thinking Niko might feel Tris was careless in her teaching. “And we try, really, we try so I don’t go too far, but I need to stop the Ghost.”

“Any kind of weather magic is hard to regulate,” Niko said mildly. “Academic mages have trouble building their strength up, because it all comes from within them. Ambient mages suffer the opposite problem, struggling to manage a great deal of power that is drawn to them without their knowledge. Lightning, of course, only increases the levels of power that run through you.”

“Of course,” whispered Keth sheepishly. He felt like an apprentice who hadn’t seen the obvious.

When Niko remained quiet, Keth looked at him, and saw that the older man stood still, his hand out. Keth looked to see who Niko was trying to lure to him, and saw that Glaki was peering around the door. Slowly she inched forward as Niko’s hand remained where it was, steady in the air. At last Glaki put her fingers in his. “Good evening, young one,” Niko said quietly. “What is your name?”

“Glaki,” whispered the girl. “Glakisa Irakory.”

“She’s an orphan,” Tris murmured. “And she’s staying with me, Niko.” She met Niko’s glance with steady eyes this time.

“We will discuss the details later,” Niko replied. He smiled at the child. “It is very nice to meet you, Glaki Irakory.”

He sees her magic, Keth realized. What doesn’t he see?

Niko left soon after, once Keth and Tris described the things they had done since Tris left Jumshida’s house for Khapik. When he stood to go, he looked as weary as Keth felt. “I’ve started to scry for this Ghost,” he said, rubbing one temple. “It’s more useful than listening to my fellow mages blather, which doesn’t mean a great deal.”

“Have you seen him?” asked Keth. It would smart if someone else caught the Ghost after so much work, but not as much as it would hurt if he killed another yaskedasu. “What does he look like?”

Tris went over to help Niko adjust his overrobe to a perfect drape while Niko smiled wryly. “I’m sure I have seen him somewhere, in the thousands of futures that have appeared to me since I began to look,” he said. “I am sure I have seen him imprisoned, killed, making a successful escape, murdering others… All I need to do is sift through all of the futures I’ve seen, in addition to all the futures that result from the next thing you do, or Dema does, or the Ghost does. I told you it was only a little more useful than listening to my peers argue about the foreword to our text.”

Tris followed him out as Keth collapsed on to the bed.

“What was he talking about?” Glaki asked.

“About the idea that mages are powerful being a great big joke,” Keth replied. “Is that a new doll? Let me see it.”


Tris went out after Glaki was asleep, leaving the child under Keth’s drowsy eye. She found a very different Khapik. Arurim were everywhere. There were new faces among the yaskedasi, strong, stern women who tumbled or did exhibitions of hand-to-hand combat with no-nonsense faces and without any trace of the alluring smiles one usually found in Khapik.

“I suppose they think nobody can tell the difference,” Tris heard a yaskedasoi tell one of the musicians who lived at Ferouze’s.

He replied, “I’m surprised they remembered to take the red tunic off.”

Tris shook her head. She would have to tell Dema his volunteers had to work harder at pretending to be true yaskedasi. If these people knew the difference, chances were that the Ghost would know, too.

Other things were different with the newcomers’ arrival. Laughter and music sounded forced. Yaskedasi and shopkeepers gathered on corners, talking softly, their eyes darting everywhere.

Of course, Tris thought. With all these disguised arurimi under their noses, they can’t ignore the fact that the Ghost exists. Now they have to face it. They can’t tell themselves pretty lies.

Seated for a while by the Cascade Fountains, Tris eavesdropped on a group of girl singers. Tris could see they were frightened, watching their surroundings and jumping at unexpected noises.

“I don’t understand,” one of them told the others, her mouth trembling. “Why does the Ghost do this? What have yaskedasi done to him?”

“Nobody cares when we disappear,” an older girl replied. “If the dead weren’t showing up outside Khapik, do you think they’d have the arurimi out now?”

“That can’t be all of it,” retorted the girl who’d first spoken. “Look how many he’s killed. If it was people nobody cares about, he’d pick prathmuni, or those who live in Hodenekes.”

A prathmun who swept the sidewalk glared at the yaskedasu. Tris wanted to tell him that the singer hadn’t meant it the way it came out, but she knew the girl had indeed spoken the truth as she believed it to be.

Tris walked on, still thinking about the conversation. They would have to catch the Ghost to learn what truly drove him. After so many deaths, she had come to think it wasn’t the simple matter of a grudge against the yaskedasi. He went to considerable trouble and risk to rub Tharian noses in death’s reality. He must know that when he despoiled public spots the city would be forced to hold long, expensive rituals before its people could use those places again. He even turned those same Tharian beliefs about death to his benefit to cover his tracks from the arurim.

The Ghost staged his show of hate not for just one group, or two, but all of Tharios: for its people, its lifestyle, its religion, its customs, its history. Tris couldn’t imagine a hate so thorough as that of the Ghost for Tharios. Once she reached the headache point of a case of hate, she simply walked away. She had a feeling the Ghost enjoyed hate headaches.

Something else occurred to her as she trekked the back alleys of Khapik. Thwarted of his display at Heskalifos, the Ghost had killed the very next day — and he hadn’t been able to display that victim, either. “He’ll kill again tomorrow,” Tris told Chime. “He’s shown he can’t stop himself.”

And who was to stop him? He knew the city so well he’d turned its laws and customs against it, coming and going as if he were invisible. How could anyone arrest a ghost?

Though she hadn’t slept after her return to Ferouze’s, the strength of the tides kept Tris awake and alert the next day. When her strength ran out in a few days, she would have to accept the consequences and not try to revive it again. There was only so much of the ocean’s strength a human body could stand before the blood turned to salt water and the muscles to braids of kelp.


At Touchstone that morning, Glaki joined Tris and Keth at meditation. As before, she ended up napping. Keth, his power at full strength again, crafted bowls, small globes and vases for Antonou, to make up for the materials he used for his magical work.

As Keth blew glass Tris returned to her scrying. She let the flood of colours, textures and half-recognized shapes wash over her, her mind snagging on images of a temple cornice, a finch in a tree, a ball rolling across an empty courtyard and angry people in motion against the white marble splendour of Assembly Square.

It’s about time they protested, she thought when she came out of her trance. Then she realized that a public outcry might drive the Keepers to remove Dema from the investigation, disgracing him and his clan. He would be made to pay because, as he’d said at the beginning, he was green and expendable.

“No, they won’t get rid of him yet,” Antonou said over lunch. Keth’s relative knew much of the city’s gossip. “Nomasdina clan pays for the arurimi to patrol Khapik for the Ghost.” He made Glaki’s yaskedasu doll jump, surprising giggles from the girl. “The Assembly may be snivelling cowards when it comes to popular opinion,” Antonou went on, “but they’re also cheap. Getting rid of young Nomasdina means they must come up with a plan and pay for it from the Treasury. If this goes on another week, I’m not certain, but for now your friend is safe.”

“How reassuring,” drawled Keth.

“That’s Tharios,” Antonou replied. “Reassuring in its miserliness. Now, I happen to know a bunch of grapes I believe a certain girl would like very much. Who will carry them back from my house for Keth and Tris to have a share?”

“Me, me!” Glaki cried, jumping to her feet.

Tris watched the girl and the old man walk back to his residence. “Your cousin’s a good man,” she remarked thoughtfully, seeing a swarm of rainbow sparks part around him as the air flowed around his body.

Keth looked at her, surprised. “He gave me a berth, didn’t he? And he was a curst good sport about me destroying the cullet. Plenty of masters would have thrown me out on my ear.”

“And you’re repaying him with those globes,” Tris said. “It all works out.”

“I’d like to work the Ghost out,” Keth muttered. “Before he orphans another child.”

While Glaki napped and Tris read in the shade to escape the hottest part of the day, Keth went to visit other glassmakers. He found enough journeymen at work while their masters rested to buy three crates of cullet glass to replace what he had destroyed. As he filled the new barrel that Antonou had provided, he felt the first twinges of a globe coming on. The feeling was distant, not the roaring pressure it would be soon. When he finished with the barrel, he doused himself with a bucket of well water to cool off and hunkered down by Tris.

“Taking the lightning back yesterday helped some, but I didn’t pay for more cullet just to explode it again,” he announced when the girl put down her book. “What can I do, O wise mistress of all knowledge?”

She made a face at him. “If I were such a mistress, I’d have this killer in a lightning cage,” she informed Keth. She looked up. Grey clouds rolled over the sky above, a promise of more rain now that Tris had put an end to the blockage overseas. The normal summer storms flowed over Tharios as they should. “I think I can, um, redistribute your lightning,” she said, grey eyes as distant as the clouds overhead.

Keth looked up. “There?” he asked, startled.

“Why not?” she wanted to know. “It’s already brewing some of its own. A little more won’t hurt.”

“Most girls your age worry about husbands, not the redistribution of lightning,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.

She grinned up at him, showing teeth. “Most girls aren’t me,” she reminded him.

And thank Vrohain for that, he thought, paying tribute to the Namornese god of justice. I hope I never meet those sisters of hers, or that brother, he told himself as he checked the crucible in the furnace. I’d probably have nightmares for weeks.

That afternoon he blew globe after globe to hurry along the one he wanted, but he might as well have blown smoke. Antonou was pleased to have more trinkets to sell, but Keth thought he would put his own head through the wall in frustration. Tris helped as she did that first time, shaping the glass with heat drawn from the heart of the earth, but even that produced no visions of death.

Taking a break, Keth worked on an idea he’d had. He blew a handful of tiny glass bubbles as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, almost lighter than air. That alone was enough to make him glow with pride: since he’d begun to master his power, his old skill and control were slowly returning.

He didn’t stop there. With Tris to advise him, he infused each bubble with a dab of his lightning-laced magic. They sprang to life like a swarm of fireflies, darting around the workshop, then the courtyard, as Glaki and Little Bear chased them.

“Signal flares,” Keth told Tris as he tucked them very gently into his belt-purse. “Or tracking aids, I’m not sure which.”

She smiled at him proudly. “Very good. You’re learning the most important thing an ambient mage can learn. Your power shapes itself to your need, if you put some thought into it.”

Keth’s need to create a globe with a new image of a murder blossomed at last, shortly before they would have stopped for the day. Keth worked the glass with care. When it was done, he and Tris went outside. There he drew the lightning out of the globe, imagining his hand as a pair of tongs and the lightning itself as glass that he pulled into a new shape. Once he worked part of the lightning free of the globe, he sent it streaming to Tris. She guided it up into the sky, where it slithered into thunderheads that had already begun to voice the odd rumble or two.

A white mist remained inside the globe, hiding whatever image was there. Keth gritted his teeth in frustration, so hard that he heard them creak, and closed down the workshop for the day. He, Glaki, Tris, Chime and the dog were on their way to Elya Street when Glaki pointed to the globe in his hands. It was clearing.

The sky opened up. Instantly Tris did something. The rain that drenched their surroundings slid around them. Under that invisible umbrella they walked up to the steps of the Elya Street arurimat, where a soaked Dema waited for them. Tris instantly spread her rain protection to include the arurim dhaskoi. When she was close enough that she could speak quietly and be heard, she told him what she’d heard the yaskedasi say the night before about the disguised arurim.

“Ouch,” Dema said, glancing at Keth’s globe. “I never realized…”

“Tell your people not to be so grim,” advised Tris. “Real yaskedasi smile and laugh all the time, even if they don’t want to. They know they have to be pleasing and pleasant for the customers, and never show what they really think.”

Keth raised his eyebrows. “You’ve learned a lot,” he pointed out as he passed the globe to Dema.

Tris shrugged. “Are you going to try to hunt the Ghost again tonight?”

Keth hung his head. “I know I’ll probably go all weak in the knees and have to come home before we even get a whiff of him, but I have to try,” he confessed. “I hate sitting about doing nothing while he’s out there.”

From the way Tris looked at him, he suspected that she felt much the same way. “Well, I can’t keep Glaki out until all hours,” she replied, confirming his suspicion. “We’ll see you later.”

Dema ushered Keth and his globe into the arurimat. The outer chamber was crammed with arurimi, both those in standard uniform and the ones disguised as yaskedasi. They gathered around eagerly as Keth and Dema inspected the globe. It showed a Khapik stream bank. A lone yaskedasu took shelter from the rain under a huge willow there. Keth turned the globe, but no matter how they shifted it, no one could see behind the tree or into the shadows behind a shrine in the background. All they could tell was that it was one of many dedicated to the gods of entertainment.

“We stick to the streams, then,” Dema ordered. “You women, keep your eyes open and your whistles handy. If you even suspect something, don’t play the hero, whistle for your team. I don’t want to lose any people to this human malipi, you understand? My command post will be at the Sign of the Winking Eye on Fortunate Street.” He looked at each of them. “Any questions?”

“Oh,” Keth said, remembering his day’s work. He carefully extracted one of the bubble globes from his purse and called to the fire and lightning in it. The bubble threw off a burst of darting colours. “If you see one of these, it means we know something,” he told them. “Put your hand up to stop it, then follow it back to us.”

Dema took the bubble. Its lights gleamed through his long brown ringers. “I’ll be switched,” he murmured. “Oh, I like these.” He handed it back to Keth. “Could you make more?”

Keth shrugged. “Given materials and shop time, yes.”

“That’d be a nice thing for patrols and such,” said a sergeant. “Be nicer if they weren’t so showy. If it were empty, like, it could fetch your partner back to you, without everybody hearing the whistle.”

“Let’s discuss this later,” Dema told Keth. “Even if they throw me out on my ear, I know the arurim will commission a batch of these. The army, too, might like them. Excuse me.” He looked around the group once more. “Yaskedasi, both sexes. A moment, if I may.” He gave the bubble and the stream-bank globe to Keth and went apart with the disguised yaskedasi.

Keth slid the bubble into his shirt pocket, then held up the globe. “Does anyone recognize this place?” he asked.

His arurimi companions shook their heads. “Problem is, there’s willows and shrines all along the streams,” explained a woman in uniform. She could well have been somebody’s sweet-faced old grandmother, but for her muscular arms and the baton, knife and thong restraints that hung from her broad leather belt. “Willows are the symbol of the yaskedasi. You know, they bend but they don’t break. When Khapik was rebuilt about five hundred years back, they dug the streams with all these nips and tucks so folk could have privacy for their entertainment.”

“And since it’s raining, it’s dark out anyways, so we can’t tell if this is day or night,” added one of the young arurimi. “Though the light’s greenish, so maybe it’s late day?”

“Near sunset,” another woman said. “We’ve an hour, maybe two, to get in place.”

The false yaskedasi streamed out of the room, on their way to their posts. When Dema came back to Keth’s group, they told him what they’d worked out from the scene in the globe.

“There’s one more thing,” Dema told them. He pointed to the globe. “Look at her. She’s alive. We’ve a chance to find her and set a trap around her before he even gets there.”

“All-Seeing, make it so,” murmured the grandmotherly arurim. The believers around her drew circles on their foreheads.

Keth stayed close to Dema as they entered Khapik, keeping a watchful eye on his surroundings. At first he saw very few human beings. The storm was at its height, its thunders bouncing through the streets. Lightning jumped overhead, lacing the sky. Keth wondered if Tris was on Ferouze’s roof right now, and wished he were there with her, gripped by lightning. Then movement and a flash of yellow caught his eye: he looked and saw one of the arurim dressed as a yaskedasu, sheltering in a doorway. She smiled wickedly and beckoned; Keth grinned and shook his head. As far as he was concerned they behaved like real yaskedasi.

Dema settled to wait at their command post, upstairs in the Winking Eye. Keth decided to go walking on his own. He was known here; he belonged. If the Ghost knew Khapik, the sight of Keth, who had lived there eight months, would raise no alarms in his mind.

Up and down the streams Keth rambled, hands in pockets. The rain thinned, and stopped. He heard the sound of a flute on the air, then a tambourine. Now business would pick up, though many customers would stay home rather than risk a second shower. Yaskedasi moved out into the open. Normally they were discouraged from using the neatly clipped stream banks for performances, but Khapik guards could be persuaded to look the other way for a coin or two, if the yaskedasi weren’t too noisy or didn’t get enough of an audience to trample the grass.

Here came the customers, pleasure-seekers from all over the known world. Some visitors left after seeing one red tunic too many. Keth grimaced. The fewer genuine tourists there were on the streets, the more likely it was that Dema’s people would stand out.

A light rain began to fall. Now Keth really searched the stream banks. He found what he sought on Little Rushing Brook, which ran beside Olive Lane. The yaskedasu was far downstream in the shadow of the city wall. She huddled under a willow on the opposite side of the brook from Keth, peering out at the rain.

Keth dared not leave: the Ghost might be here already, in the shadows. Slowly Keth reached into his shirt pocket and drew out one of his bubbles. He closed his eyes briefly, willing it to seek out anyone in a red tunic, then sent it flying on its way. The arurimi would be here in a hurry, and the yaskedasu would be safe.

Keth sighed in relief, then froze as the yellow veil slipped off the girl’s head. In a flash it looped out of the dark to drop around her neck. The Ghost had used the shadows and rain to creep up behind her. She staggered back into the darkness behind the willow, flailing as she clawed at the strangler’s noose.

If Keth waited, she would die before the arurimi came. Yelling, he plunged into the stream and slogged up the far bank, toiling in slippery mud to get to her and capture her assailant. He stumbled over a root on the outskirts of the willow. As he struggled to stay on his feet, the girl flew at him out of the dark, yellow veil wrapped twice around her throat and knotted tight. Her face was plum-coloured, her fingers increasingly feeble as she dug at the silk. Keth wavered between helping her and chasing the Ghost, then unsheathed his belt knife. The veil was expensive silk, his knife not at all good. Finally he cut the knot and unwrapped the cloth from the yaskedasu’s swollen neck just as his glass bubble and the arurimi found them.

“Which way?” demanded their sergeant. Keth pointed wordlessly with his free hand, his other wrapped around the coughing girl to keep her from falling into the stream. The arurimi pelted away, their feet striking great splashes from the wet grass.

Keth pulled the girl further under the willow’s shelter and waited with her. Her racking coughs slowed, then stopped. She clung to Keth as if he were her last hope in the world.

“He’s gone,” Keth told her over and over. “He won’t come back. Let me fetch you some water from the stream…”

She shook her head furiously. Her fingers dug deeper into his arm.

“Or not,” said Keth. “Let’s go and sit, at least.” He swung her up in his arms — she was just a scrap of a thing — and carried her over to the shrine. The topmost step was dry, protected by the domed roof from the rain that pelted down with a roar. Keth reached out with cupped hands and ferried mouthful after mouthful of rain to the girl. She drank greedily, wincing as the liquid passed through her bruised throat.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle again when the arurimi returned. Dema and a number of other arurimi came with them, summoned from the command post. Judging by the mud that splattered all of them royally, Keth guessed they had searched all through the downpour at its worst.

Dema stood in the rain, hands on hips, water pouring from his sopping mage-blue stole and arurim red tunic. “What were you thinking?” he asked amiably enough. “What, if anything, was passing through your mind?”

Keth glared up at him as the yaskedasu shrank into the shelter of his arm. “He was killing her. I didn’t know when your people would arrive.”

“You let him go,” Dema said, bright-eyed. “He was right there, almost within our grasp, and you let him escape.”

“She would have been dead if I hadn’t cut the scarf from her throat,” Keth insisted. To the girl he said gently, “Show them, please.”

She raised her chin to show them the plum-and-blue mass around her neck.

Dema refused to meet her eyes. “The fact remains, he was right here, and you scared him off.”

“What did he do?” Keth asked knowingly. “Run through another of those ridiculous cleansing temples you have?”

“A mage’s storeroom,” grumbled one of the arurimi, smearing mud as he dragged his forearm over his face. “There’s no telling where he went from there.”

“He’s probably got escape routes all over the city,” Keth said.

“I know that.” Dema’s voice was thick with awful patience. “That’s why we needed to catch him in the act.”

“She would have died,” Keth insisted stubbornly. “Where’s the honour in catching him if you let him kill someone else?” He held Dema’s eyes with his own, trying to get the other man to see his point.

The yaskedasu at his side muttered something, and coughed.

“What?” asked Keth.

The yaskedasu looked at him, then glared at the arurimi. “Okozou,” she said in a voice like a dry file drawn over broken glass.

“Your murder isn’t an okozou matter to me,” Keth said fiercely. “And it shouldn’t be okozou to you,” he added, with a glare of his own for Dema.

Dema sighed. “All right,” he told the arurimi. “You know the drill. Search the area once more, then resume your patrol pattern. Move out.” To Keth and the yaskedasu he said, “Come on. We’ll get you dried off and looked after. And then we’ll try and find out what you saw.”

“Din’t see nothin’,” the girl rasped.

“I know,” replied Dema with heavy patience. “But we’ll try to dredge something from you anyway.”

Keth got up and helped the girl to her feet. They followed Dema as the rain slowed, then stopped.


Glaki was restless that night. Tris finally settled her late, by telling stories of her time at Winding Circle. Outside she felt the rain slack off, build, pour, then stop. There would be no more rain for two days; this storm had moved on. With Glaki asleep at last, she wished the storm well and gave Little Bear a much-needed combing. Chime was a useful dog’s maid, her thin claws easily working their way through the matted coat.

When the clocks chimed midnight and Glaki did not so much as twitch, Tris collected Chime. Little Bear, worn out by the process of beautification, snored on the bed next to the sleeping child. Once Tris set the usual terms with Ferouze and watched the old woman climb up the stairs to Glaki’s room, she settled Chime in the sling at her back and walked out into Chamberpot Alley.

The air was cool and fresh, the winds that explored Khapik lively and curious. Tris slipped off her spectacles and tucked them in her sash, dropping into the trance she would need to scry the winds. As colour, movement and shapes soared by, she set off into Khapik. She kept to the back alleys, not wanting the sight of arurimi in disguise to distract her.

The winds were interesting that night. They came from the north-east instead of the usual south-east. She caught a glimpse of towering, snow-capped mountains, red stone fortresses and a small, crazed jungle that was once a garden in a dry land. She gasped with wonder at that last. Not only was it infused with magic from root to leaf, but the magic was familiar: Briar’s. She would have loved to know how a garden that was such a mess had anything to do with him, but the wind had carried the image away while she groped for more of it. She leaned against a building with a sigh, waited to regain the calm she needed to do this, and set forth once again.

It was easier to see wind-borne colours and images that night. Darkness and torch-light leeched the colour from her surroundings. Feeling more confident in her ability to navigate, Tris wandered down Woeful Lane, through the mazes of back-of-the-house paths and service alleys to Painted Place, then out along Drunkard’s Grief Street. She saw very few people, which was how she wanted it. These were the paths taken by servants, prathmuni, and those whose business in Khapik was suspect. As she made her way the air showed her things: silk gliding along a woman mage’s arm, the flare of magic at hennaed fingertips, and a metal bird coming to life. She wanted to see that bird.

Not tonight, she told herself. You’re looking for other things tonight. Standing at the intersection of three streets, she turned, eyes wide, searching for any hint of the Ghost. There: the air blowing down Kettle Court showed her a dirty hand fumbling at a ragged tunic. It yanked out a yellow head veil, a yaskedasi veil.

The Ghost. It was him, and he was running into the breeze that took his image to Tris.

She ran, her eyes fixed on that current, following it along Kettle Court. Her feet pounded along the cobblestones. Rounding a corner she stepped in rubbish and slipped, the movement jarring the image from her eyes. A thick hand gripped her arm. A yellow scarf wrapped around her neck.


Dema paced as the arurim healer examined the rescued yaskedasu. If the healer pronounced the girl fit to bear it, Dema would try a spell to enhance her memory of the attack, to see if she could describe the man who had so nearly killed her. In the meantime, he alternated between chewing his nails and berating Keth. For his own part, Keth understood Dema’s frustration, but he was preoccupied. The globe, which had earlier cleared to show the yaskedasu under her willow, had clouded again. Keth sat with it gripped in his hands, Dema’s words falling on inattentive ears. Sparks of lightning flowed from Keth’s fingertips, lancing through the mist inside. There was a new image in the globe. He could see the outlines of it, dark buildings, a back street, wooden fences.

A girl raced down a street, sling around her torso, twin braids flapping against her cheeks. She wore no spectacles, but Keth had no trouble recognizing Tris. If these globes were connected to the Ghost, then Tris was in danger.

“Where is this?” he demanded, trying to recognize her surroundings. “Dema — ”

“I tell you we don’t have time to deal with whoever’s in charge!” a clear, crisp voice shouted. The speaker was downstairs in the Winking Eye, where Dema had his command post. “A woman’s in danger now, you bone-headed behemoth!”

Dema looked at Keth. “Niko?” they chorused. Both ran for the stairs.

Below stood the arurimi Brosdes and Majnuna. Each of them held one of Niko’s arms, impervious to the mage’s fury. “He says he knows where our boy is and who’s the next victim,” explained Brosdes. “Wants us to turn out the whole force to track ’em.”

“Let him go,” ordered Dema. “What is it, Dhaskoi Niko?”

“Dhaskoi?” muttered the taller of the arurimi. “He never said nothin’ about bein’ dhaskoi.”

Keth thrust the globe at Niko. “Is this it?” he demanded. “Is this why you’re here?”

“Where did that come from?” Dema wanted to know. “Where — Tris?”

“I made it clear again,” Keth explained.

“This is why I’m here,” snapped Niko. “I was scrying for the future, and this time the images came together.” Hands trembling, he laid them over the globe, his fingers touching Keth’s. Both of them concentrated, Keth letting what power he had left pass into the glass. The image of Tris shrank as the vision grew wider and wider. “Where is that?” demanded Niko. “Where is she?”

“Cricket Strut?” asked the thick-voiced Majnuna, squinting at the image. “Brosdes?”

“Cricket Strut,” confirmed Brosdes. “Near Silkfingers Lane.”

“I’ve frozen it where she is right now. She won’t be there when we arrive,” Niko said hurriedly. “We need Little Bear. He can track her. We need him and we need to move. This takes place in fifteen minutes, twenty if we are fortunate. Her life is about to intersect with the Ghost’s — I don’t know how, but if you want him to be alive when you question him, we must go!”

“The Bear’s at Ferouze’s,” Keth told Dema. “I’ll get him and meet you at the corner of Chamberpot and Peacock.” As he raced out of the inn, Keth heard Brosdes mutter, “If we want him to be alive?”


Tris, dazed by her wind-scrying, hadn’t even heard the man. As she dragged at the cloth he fought to twist around her neck, Chime lunged up from her sling over Tris’s shoulder and spat needles into the man’s face. He screamed, clutching a punctured eye, and staggered back, releasing the girl. Dragging the cloth from her throat, Tris kicked out, hard, catching the man between his legs. Down he went into the gutter muck.

She blinked hurriedly, clearing her vision of magic, and yanked her spectacles from her sash, putting them on. At last she could see what she and Chime had brought down: a prathmun, wearing the dirty, ragged tunic and the chopped haircut decreed for all of his class. Tris pulled a length of yellow silk off her neck and clenched her fingers around it.

“Do I look like a yaskedasu?” she wanted to know.

He scrabbled back, away from her, his right eye a ruin. Tris closed on him. “You’re here, ain’t you?” growled the prathmun. “Night after night I seen you, out walkin’ where none of the outsiders go. You consort with them, you’re as good as them, ugly little filth-wench to be left all dirty on their nice, white marble.” He tried to pull the needles out of his face.

“What did the yaskedasi do to you?” demanded Tris. “They aren’t that much better off than you, or much more respected.”

“One whelped me!” the Ghost snarled. “Her and her Assembly lover, they got me, but they wouldn’t keep me. They throwed me into the sewer to live or die, till the other sewer-pigs found — ”

She wasn’t expecting it; later she would scold herself. He slammed her in the chest with both bare feet. Tris’s head cracked on the cobblestones as she fell, adding the white flare of pain to the coloured fires that remained from her scrying.

Chime leaped free as Tris went down. Now she swooped on the killer prathmun, spitting needles into his scalp as he crawled toward Tris to snatch the yellow veil from the girl’s hand. He jumped to his feet with a snarl, arms flailing as he tried to knock the glass dragon away. With no torches to illuminate her, Chime might as well have been invisible. She swooped again, raking the Ghost’s head with sharp claws.

Tris kicked out, catching him behind the knees. He stumbled, lurched, gathered his feet under him and ran.

“Chime, go!” Tris ordered. “Slow him down!”

The dragon followed the Ghost, her glass body silent and hidden in the night. Tris got to her own feet, passing her power over her eyes again and again to clear her vision. All of her braids sprang from their pins, hanging free. The ties popped off her two lesser lightning braids.

Tris reached to the top of each thin braid and ran her hands down, sparks leaping under her fingers. She moulded them into a ball to see by and let it hang in the air as she drew a good, stiff breeze from two wind braids. She sent it after Chime as a living rope, so she wouldn’t lose the glass dragon, then followed. As she trotted along she thanked the gods of earth and fire for Chime. If not for the dragon, her corpse might be on its way to defile one of Tharios’s proudest places right now.

The child of a yaskedasu and someone from the First Class, tossed in among the prathmun. It made a kind of warped sense, if the Ghost told the truth. Maybe he thought it was the truth. Maybe it was simply the excuse he needed first to murder women who showed him temptation they would never give to a prathmun, then to rub the noses of those who used prathmun in the worst thing they could imagine — public, unclean death.

She heard the claws on glass screech that was Chime’s alarm. Tris ran, sending more breezes ahead to keep the Ghost from opening any doors. As she rounded the corner into the next street she found him, tugging frantically at the handle of a door set in a cellarway. The building above it looked abandoned.

Tris slowed, panting. Chime flew at the Ghost’s face, slapping him with her broad wings. He ducked his head and continued to tug, refusing to let go of the handle.

“There’s no escape tonight,” Tris called. “Not here. You’ve used your last yellow veil.”

That got the prathmun’s attention. He struck Chime, throwing her against the building, and scrambled up the stairs into the street. He fled down its length until he reached a brick wall. Digging his toes into its cracks, he began to climb.

Tris lifted her hands to the single heavy braid that went from her forehead to the nape of her neck. The tie dropped from it; strands pulled free of the braid. The power they released flowed, ripe and heavy, into Tris’s palms.

She took a deep breath. The prathmun raised a hand to hit Chime, who had recovered quickly, and fell from the wall to the ground. With the persistence of a terrier he began to climb the wall again.

Tris held out her hands. The power in them trickled into the soggy ground of the alley. She set down protective barriers on either side, sinking them deep in the earth and up the walls of all the buildings. Only when her control was locked in place did she release what she had taken from that one braid. It followed the channel made by her protections straight down the street. The ground quivered. The quivers spread and rolled forward, taking the shape of waves in the soil, rolling on like a small earthquake. The floor of the alley turned to earthen soup as Tris harnessed the tremors, directing them to flow as she wanted. Her teeth hurt, they were clenched so hard. Her eyes were locked on the Ghost.

He was three quarters of the way up the wall when the tremors struck. The brick under his feet quivered. Old plaster and mortar dropped away as the waves hit directly under the wall, held there by Tris. With a cry the prathmun fell to the street, into now-liquid ground. It swallowed him up to his hips before Tris shoved all of the force she had released deep into the soil. She jammed it down through cracks and veins, letting it disperse into the earth that had lent it to her for a while.

In the ringing silence that followed, the brick wall grated and dropped. Tris’s winds thrust it back from the Ghost, into the yard it had shielded.

Tris walked down the alley, the dirt reasonably firm under her sensibly shod feet. She reclaimed her protections from ground and buildings, satisfied that she had done them no damage. No one here would die because she’d allowed a place to be shaken past the point where it could stand.

At last she stopped a metre away from the trapped prathmun. He stared at her, sweat crawling down his face.

“You orphaned a little girl twice,” she said quietly, as cold as if she were trapped inside a glacier. “You took two of her mothers. A little girl who never did you harm.” Lightning dropped in fat sparks from her hair to her feet. It lazily climbed back up her plump body in fiery waves.

“You left her among strangers who might have thrown her into the street. Never once did you think of her.”

“Never once did anyone think of me!” he snapped back, his eyes black and empty. “Fit to haul dung but not fit to be seen — this place is rotten. If she don’t like the smell of rot, she shouldn’t live here, and neither should you.”

Her lightning blazed as it flowed down her arms, gloving her from fingertip to elbow. “No,” Tris said quiedy. “You shouldn’t live.” She put her hands together, then pulled them apart, creating a heavy white-hot thunderbolt.

“No, Dema, let her do it!” The familiar voice was Kethlun’s. “Don’t stop her!”

“For her own sake, she must be stopped,” Niko replied. Tris should have known that Niko would see this piece of the future. There were times when having a seer as a teacher was a pain.

“Tris, give him up,” Dema pleaded. “If you kill him, I’ll have to arrest you and have you executed.”

“No!” argued Keth. “She’s doing Tharios a service. He killed Ira. He killed Yali. Let him cook!”

“Is this what it comes to, Trisana?” Niko called, his normally crisp voice gentle. “When you sank the ships at Winding Circle, you defended your home. If you do this, it’s murder. You will be a murderer by choice.”

“He deserves to die,” she shouted.

“But do you deserve to kill him?” Dema asked quietly. He was much closer to her. “Leave him to the State, Tris. That’s what it’s for. His first debt is to Tharios. Let him pay it.”

She should have just killed the Ghost the moment they arrived, she thought ruefully. Now she was afraid they made sense. She let the lightning trickle into the earth, following the route of her tremors. The molten lava far below the surface wouldn’t mind the extra power.

When the last bit faded, a long, wet nose thrust itself under her palm. Little Bear whined and wagged his tail, nudging her for a scratch behind the ears. “Traitor,” Tris murmured. She knew very well that the dog had helped to track her.

Chime landed gently across her shoulders. There she voiced the ringing chime that was her purr. Tris rubbed the dragon’s head with her fingertips, looking down at the Ghost. “Take him then, Dema,” she said clearly, “but I won’t dig him out for you.”

“Send for the arurim prathmuni,” Dema ordered one of his people. “I won’t befoul myself by handling the likes of him.”

And that’s where your world goes wrong, thought Tris as she walked by him.

As she passed Niko he took her arm. Gently she pulled free. “There’s something I have to do right now,” she told him. “It’s really important, Niko. Life and death, literally.”

He released her. “Go,” he said, his voice soft. “But we need to talk later, you and I.” He frowned at Keth. “And I’ll need a word with you, Kethlun Warder. You too had better learn that mages don’t kill unless it’s unavoidable.”

Tris hurried on. She sent her breezes out, searching for someone in particular. Soon enough a current of air returned, carrying an unmistakable smell. She followed it back to its source, the prathmuni woman and boy she had met several days ago.

They backed away from their cart as she approached at a trot. Then the woman stopped, and squinted through the back alley gloom. Tris drew a handful of sparks from a braid to illuminate her face.

“You,” said the boy. “What do you want with us now?”

Tris waited until she was very close to speak. “They’ve caught that killer, the one they call ‘The Ghost’,” she informed them. “He’s one of you.”

They both drew the sign of the All-Seeing on their foreheads, though the woman snapped, “Impossible.”

Tris nodded to her partner. “He knows the truth of it.”

When the woman scowled at him, the boy said, “Not even Eseben would be that foolish.” He didn’t sound as if he believed himself.

“How do you know?” the woman demanded fiercely.

“I caught him,” Tris replied. “He’s confessed. The arurimi have him now. It won’t be long before the news gets out.”

“Massacre,” breathed the woman.

“Have you ways to leave the city unnoticed?” asked Tris. The youth nodded. “Then alert everyone you can,” Tris continued. “Let Tharios manage without her prathmuni!”

The pair traded a look, then turned their backs on Tris and raced down the alley without a word. Tris hadn’t expected thanks. “Shurri Firesword guard you all,” she murmured. They would need the goddess’s protection. Tharios was a big city, and there were many prathmuni. Not all of them would escape by dawn. Perhaps some wouldn’t even try to flee, though she hoped they would have better sense.

She walked back to Ferouze’s, warning every prathmun she glimpsed.

In Yali’s chamber, Ferouze was nodding off as the little girl slept on the bed. “Thank you,” Tris said, pressing a five-bik piece into the old woman’s hand. “You were good to stay with her.”

“Like Keth would have given me a choice,” Ferouze grumbled, stuffing the coin into her sash. “So what’s going on? He came racing in here like the Hounds of War were at his heels. He took that dog of yours away with him.”

If I tell her, all of Khapik will know by dawn, Tris realized. Ferouze was a notorious gossip. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I found Little Bear waiting for me outside.”

“Dhaski,” muttered Ferouze as she let herself out. “All mysteries and no explanations.”

Tris sat on the bed and bent to unlace her shoes. The room started to spin. Her fingers were suddenly too weak to hold on to the laces. In controlling her earthquake, she had burned up the last of her borrowed strength. It was time, and past, to pay for it.

She lay back, before she collapsed in a heap. I hope they think to look here for me, she thought before a tide of unconsciousness swamped her.


When she woke, five days later, she was in Jumshida’s house. Niko sat by her bed, reading. He didn’t even wait for Tris to clean up. Instead he proceeded to relieve his feelings about girls who tapped the power of the earth, looking after children who weren’t their own, and searching for dangerous madmen, as they avoided wise elders who would see the folly they committed and bring them to their senses. When he showed no signs of calming down, Tris went behind a screen to change clothes. Someone, she hoped Jumshida, had dressed her in a nightgown. Tris replaced it with a shift, a single petticoat and a pale grey muslin gown that fitted more loosely than it had before she’d gone to Khapik.

“Are you even listening?” demanded Niko.

“Not really,” she replied wearily. “Either I’m adult enough to have a medallion and a student and make my own stupid choices, or I’m not. It’s not like I did it for party entertainment, Niko.”

He sighed. “No, I know you didn’t. I suppose I feel guilty because I should have helped you more, instead of letting conference politics sap my strength.”

Tris looked around the edge of the screen at him as she did up her sash. “Help me with what? I didn’t help find him, I walked bang into the man, Niko! Is he dead yet?”

Niko’s large, dark eyes filled with distress as he watched her. “Do you care so little, Tris? He paid in blood, yesterday.”

“I feel sorrier for the prathmuni,” she retorted. “There was a slaughter, wasn’t there?” She had dreamed it, seeing knots of prathmuni disappear under the stones and clubs of outraged citizens.

“Sadly, yes,” Niko admitted. “Twenty-nine prathmuni dead, four of them children. The Keepers finally decreed martial law and ordered the arurim to get the city under control.”

Tris paused, her sash half-tied. She emerged from behind the screen, frowning. “Twenty-nine?” she repeated. She had expected far more.

“I was shocked, too,” admitted Niko. “But that’s all that were found. Tharios’s prathmuni have vanished. The Assembly is fighting about who will do their work.”

Tris grinned. They had listened to her, then. They had escaped.

Niko tugged at his moustache. “I find it interesting that they left at almost the same time the Ghost was captured. Do you think they were warned?”

Tris ignored so foolish a question. Niko was too clever not to realize she had warned the prathmuni. “Where’s Glaki?” she asked. She wished everyone had escaped, but if prathmuni were like most people, some must have insisted that no one would blame their entire class for the acts of one man. At least the number of dead was far smaller than it could have been. “How’s Keth?”

“He’s in the workroom, meditating,” replied Niko. “Glaki is helping in the kitchen. They’re staying here for the time being — Khapik was closed during the riots. What do you plan to do with the girl, Tris?”

“Keep her with me,” Tris replied. “She needs something constant in her life, and she has no family.” She held up a hand to silence her teacher when he opened his mouth. “I know I need to provide for her properly. I’m too young for motherhood. And she’s an academic mage, though too young to work with it much. I want to learn to be an academic mage myself; I don’t know how to teach one.”

“She has used her power somewhat,” Niko remarked. “She is far more disciplined than I would expect for a child her age.”

“It’s the meditation, I suppose,” Tris replied. “I suppose that will do for now. I was thinking of taking her back to Winding Circle when we go home.” Searching an open drawer for a scarf for her hair, which was a mess of half-undone braids that would have to be washed, arranged and pinned afresh, she found Chime sound asleep in her belongings. “Hello, beautiful,” she murmured, stroking the glass dragon as she eased a blue scarf out from under her.

Chime opened one glass eye and chinked at her, then resumed her slumbers.

“Come eat something,” Niko said. “You don’t have to plan Glaki’s life today.”

“Good,” Tris replied, clutching a chair. “Right now I’d be hard put to decide between honey and syrup for my bread.” She took the arm Niko offered, leaning on it more than she would have done had her strength been normal. “How’s Dema?” she asked as they went downstairs.

“Vindicated. About to receive a more prestigious appointment,” replied Niko. “We thought it was best for all concerned if he got sole credit for the Ghost’s arrest. Some grumblers say he should have sent disguised arurimi into the district earlier, but they’re in the minority. Do you mind?”

“Dema getting credit?” Tris asked as Niko let her sink on to a dining-room chair. “He’s welcome to it. I told you, I didn’t find the Ghost, I ran into him. Does Keth mind?”

“He says no,” replied Niko, ringing the bell for the cook.

“Tris, Tris!” Glaki plunged out of the kitchen, arms upraised, spoon in one hand. Tris managed to hold off the spoon while welcoming the four-year-old’s passionate hug. “You’re awake!”

“We thought you’d sleep all year,” said Kethlun. He’d come downstairs without Tris realizing it. “So tell me, if you were storing other things than lightning in your hair, why didn’t we feel them tear up the house while you were snoring?”

“I don’t snore,” Tris retorted. “And there are protections on my head to keep the power from escaping even when I’m not in control of it. I renew them every time I wash my hair, all right?”

Keth sighed. “Here I was, all hopeful you wouldn’t even have the strength to pick on me once you woke up. So much for boyish dreams.” He wandered into the kitchen.

“Tris, look,” said Glaki impatient, bouncing in the older girl’s lap.

“I’m looking,” Tris replied. “Don’t do that, I might break.”

Glaki pointed to a dish on the table. It rose, shakily, eight full centimetres, then settled again.

“Very good,” Tris said. She hesitated, then kissed Glaki on the cheek. “Your mother and aunt would have been proud.”

Keth had continued to work at Touchstone Glass while Tris slept, with Dema to keep him enclosed with protective magic. A week after Tris got out of bed, she rejoined Keth at the shop, along with Glaki, Little Bear and Chime. They said hello to Antonou on their arrival, then retired to the workshop.

The slip into their old routine was as easy as Tris’s slip into sleep. The three of them meditated. Glaki settled into her corner to play with her dolls as Tris drew her protective circle around the shop. Watching Keth work, she thought that she would dispense with the barrier after today. He kept his power firmly in hand as he created the small, sparking globes that Antonou could sell.

Comfortable with Keth’s skills, Tris let herself out through her barrier, to practise scrying the winds. Her bit of success in pursuit of the Ghost had given her confidence. She could master this in time, and who knew? Unlike her other magics, she might be able to make a living with this.

She only had the strength for less than a half hour of work. Sweating, she lowered her barrier on the workshop and left it down. As she sat on a bench, watching Keth, she realized that his eye was on her.

“What are your plans?” she asked. “Niko says they’re going to move the conference to an island off the coast. I should go with him.” She smiled wickedly. “It seems our fellow mages don’t find Tharios, with all the rubbish piling up, much fun as a place to write their text on visionary magics.”

“I’m going with you,” Keth says. “There are glassmakers on the island related to Antonou. They’ll take the work they can sell to him, and he’ll pay them for my supplies. Later…” He gouged at the floor with his foot.

“Later…?” Tris nudged.

Keth looked at her. “I want to study investigators’ magics. While you slept, Denia shielded me while I made two more globes with crimes in them. It’s not something I want to do constantly, understand, but if I can help, I’d like to.”

Tris nodded encouragement. “That sounds like a wonderful idea. I wouldn’t want you to give up your glassmaking, but even a little help from time to time would make a difference, it seems to me.”

Keth grinned at her. “I thought you’d approve. And Tris, I had another thought.” She raised her eyebrows. Keth said, “How would you like to learn how to work glass?”

Tris blinked. “You mean, learn to work it like an ordinary craftsman does.”

“Exactly.” Keth sat next to her. “You won’t get further than journeyman, probably. You don’t have the time to spend just on glass, for one thing. But you could learn to mould and pull glass. I’ve seen how you admire the work.”

Tris looked at the ground to hide her blush of pleasure. “I’d love to.”

Keth laughed. “Oh, I have you now!” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A little repayment for your hours of torture—” He went into the shop and took down two leather aprons.

“I did not torture you,” Tris retorted. She accepted one apron and tied it over her gown. “No more than you deserved, anyway. And I’m still your teacher, so mind your step.”

“I am going to enjoy this,” Keth said. “Come here. We’ll start with the basic mix of materials you need to melt down.” As Glaki invented stories for her dolls, Keth proceeded to instruct his young teacher on the mysteries of glass.

They were cleaning up for the day, or rather, Keth and Glaki cleaned up while Tris sat on a bench and sweated, when Dema walked into the courtyard. Little Bear greeted him with earsplitting barks as Chime flew around his head. “You look terrible,” Dema informed Tris. “Are you even ready to be out of bed?”

“Nice to see you, too,” she mumbled.

“Slumming, or moving out?” asked Keth, grinning at Dema.

“Neither.” When Keth and Tris stared at him, Dema coughed into his fist. “I’m, ah, staying at Elya Street,” he confessed. “I, well…” He looked at them and shrugged. “I like it down here. I asked the Keepers to promote one of my sisters instead.” When Keth and Tris continued to stare at him, Dema flushed under his brown skin. “They need me more down here than they do further up the hill. And after catching the Ghost, the yaskedasi are talking to me. I’ve been able to solve three old crimes since that night.” He sighed. “The Keepers rewarded me anyway. At least, they said it was a reward. I’m also assigned to the Hodenekes and Noskemiou arurimati. I guess they think if I like the low life, I ought to get a bellyfull of it.” He looked at Tris. “Which reminds me — who tipped the prathmuni off, do you suppose? Let them know to flee the city?”

Tris knew that sooner or later someone would think to ask. Though she was not generally in favour of lying, she saw no reason why anyone should know the truth. She looked Dema in the eye and said, “For all you know, there were prathmuni everywhere on that street. They’re not stupid, Dema.”

“No, they’re not,” he said grimly. “They’re negotiating a contract with Tharios right now, from hiding. They won’t return until the Assembly grants certain concessions, like pay for their work, and better living conditions.”

Keth and Tris exchanged grins. “What a shame,” Keth remarked.

“I feel for you,” said Tris, innocent and earnest. “I feel for all Tharios.”

“Me too,” said Glaki, hugging Dema around the knees.

Dema lifted her up and kissed her cheek. “I’m glad someone around here feels sorry for me.” To Tris he said, “We can’t change overnight. Not Tharios.”

“But a little change won’t kill you,” replied Tris as Chime began to purr in her lap. “It might even help Tharios to stand another thousand years.”


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