Shatterglass (12 page)

Nomasdina drew himself up, his face taking on that lofty, distant, proud cast that it had worn when he came to Jumshida’s house to arrest Keth. “Are you a citizen of Tharios?” he demanded.

“No,” Keth replied.

Nomasdina’s face quivered. A smile made him human again. “Very true. Look, Koris Warder, I can understand you don’t want to face this pollution, even with glass between you and it. But consider: you might save another yaskedasu from death.

Better, you might give us a look at our murderer. You can be cleansed after.”

Keth sighed. “I don’t know how I did it.”

Nomasdina looked at Tris. “You might consider making such globes as teaching him his craft.”

Tris was not attending to the conversation. She sat up straight, her eyes on the door. It swung open.

“I do not appreciate learning that guests have been taken from my house without my leave.”

Keth recognized that haughty voice: Jumshida Dawnspeaker. In she swept, dressed for the most elegant circles in a bronze silk kyten with beaded hems, heavy gold earrings set with pearls, and a matching bronze stole. Niklaren Goldeye came behind her, dapper in a white silk overrobe, white shirt and white trousers.

The silver barrier around Keth vanished. He saw threads of it stream back into Tris’s hands.

Jumshida looked at the soot-streaked arurim dhaskoi, who grimaced and bowed to her, then at Nomasdina’s captain, who had followed her and Niko. “As well for you he hasn’t been tortured,” she said sharply. “Kethlun Warder, did you murder the woman who was found tonight?” Niko shaped signs in the air with his fingers.

“No,” Keth said wearily. “She just appeared in that glass bubble I made.”

Soft white light radiated around him, the sign that he told the truth under a properly applied truth spell.

“Did you kill any of the Ghost’s victims?” asked Jumshida.

“No,” Keth answered.

Once more the soft light shone.

“Satisfied, captain?” Jumshida asked. She didn’t even wait for the answer, but looked at Nomasdina. “If we may have the documents for his release? And next time, I recommend more caution, should you attempt to set a truth spell on someone whose magic is rooted in an unpredictable source, such as lightning.”

‘I’ll require Dhaskoi Goldeye’s signature,“ Nomasdina said. His brown cheeks were flushed under the soot that marked him when his truth spell went wrong.

“This way,” the captain said, bowing. “You understand we must interrogate all suspects in this so delicate a matter…” Jumshida, Niko, Nomasdina and the clerk followed the man out of the room. The door closed gently.

Keth sighed in relief, and dropped on to the stool Nomasdina had vacated. He looked over at Tris. The girl slouched in her chair, her spectacles near the end of her long nose, running her fingers along one of her thin braids. Silver glinted over every hair of the braid. Sparks followed her grasp.

“Please don’t do that,” Keth said nervously.

Her grey eyes flicked over to meet his. She thrust her spectacles higher on her nose.

“Do what?”

Keth pointed, then dropped his hand before she saw that it shook. “With the braid.

The lightning thing. You’re sparking.”

Tris frowned, then looked at the braid in her hand. “This?” she asked, scraping the lightning from her hair. “It’s nothing.” She closed her hand, then opened it to reveal a tiny ball of lightning.

The hair on Keth’s arms and at the back of his neck rose, prickling against his shirt.

“Please put that away.”

She pursed her lips and ran the ball of lightning over the braid it had come from. It vanished. “Kethlun, you won’t get very far like this. You have to overcome your fear of lightning.”

“Well, I won’t,” he retorted. “You’d understand if it made a cripple out of you and then turned your world on its ear.”

“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that you may be immune now,” she offered.

“No,” Keth said flatly. “Now will you drop the subject?”

She did, but only because Jumshida had returned. “That’s settled,” the woman told Keth and Tris with satisfaction. “Now, Kethlun. Where do you stay? Touchstone Glass?”

“I live at Ferouze’s, on Chamberpot Alley, in Khapik,” he replied.

“Khapik?” Jumshida asked, startled. “You live in Khapik?”

“Lodging is cheap in Khapik,” explained Kethlun. “And it’s safer than in Hodenekes.”

“Safer?” Jumshida raised her eyebrows. “But surely they steal from you. Yaskedasi are born thieves.”

Keth shook his head. “Not the ones I live with, dhasku,” he replied. “Besides, everyone knows that if Khapik is the best you can afford, you don’t have anything worth stealing.”

“Well, I won’t hear of your going back to lodgings in Khapik,” Jumshida told Keth.

“We brought chairs to ride in - you must be exhausted. You need a proper meal and rest, and you and Tris have things to settle tomorrow. Come along.”

Keth didn’t argue. The truth was that Jumshida’s house was pleasant and cool; Ferouze’s place was hot and stuffy, and he would have been forced to buy his supper.

He’d got better at accepting free meals since he’d left his wealthy family’s house in Dancruan.

Nomasdina stopped him as he was about to walk out of the arurimat. “Think about what I suggested, that’s all I ask,” the arurim dhaskoi said to both Keth and Tris.

“One of those balls might turn the tables on this monster.”

Long habit brought Tris and Niko downstairs the next morning shortly after dawn, despite their late bedtime. They ate breakfast in silence, the quiet broken only by noise made by the cook as she brought dishes and took them away. When her last plate had been removed, Tris sat with her head propped on her hand, while Niko had a second cup of tea.

All kinds of thoughts had been rolling through Tris’s mind. Many of them she preferred to keep to herself. It was the most recent one that bothered her. “Niko?”

“You’re the only one who can teach him,” he said instantly.

“It’s not that,” she said. “I know that!‘

“What then?”

“Kethlun’s not going to like me telling him to do things, is he?” she asked. “Sooner or later he’ll forget the lightning and remember I’m just fourteen.”

“Gods,” Niko said wearily. “No, I’m not grumbling. You’re right. But Tris, teaching mages is different from teaching normal students in any event.“ He rubbed his temple with his free hand. ”It’s a matter of persuasion, not orders. Even if a student accepts your command, his magic might not. You have to work around it. Every teacher fumbles a bit until he finds the right approach to each new student. Your task is just twice as hard because Keth is a grown man. Try to understand his feelings.“

Tris nodded thoughtfully. It had occurred to her that she also had to find a way around his fear of her lightning before he could learn much. Niko had just confirmed her thinking. If Keth was to catch the Ghost, a cure for that fear should come sooner, rather than later.

With breakfast done, Tris took Little Bear into the courtyard and tethered him there with a meaty bone the cook had set aside. Then, with only Chime in a sling on her back as a companion, she set out for the heart of Heskalifos, following the maze of flagstone paths that covered the grounds. Except for the odd prathmun clearing away rubbish, the grounds were deserted. Even the clerks and teachers who worked here would not start their day until the third hour of the morning. That was fine with Tris.

She didn’t want any witnesses to what she was about to do.

Phakomathen, the Torch of Learning, was the pride of Heskalifos and of Tharios. Its tower rose from the east side of the Heskalifos Museum, soaring a hundred metres into the air. At its peak a figure of Asaia Bird-winged, the Living Circle goddess of learning, faced east, massive wings outstretched. In both hands she grasped a torch.

Its flame was made of crystals that flashed in sun and moonlight, spelled against damage from wind and lightning. Six metres below the goddess a platform and guard rail were set. From the platform visitors who had survived the twelve-hundred-step climb could see all of Tharios. On their second day here, Jumshida had brought Niko and Tris up to view the city that had thrown off the ancient Kurchal Empire and pursued its own glorious destiny.

Now Tris opened the doors at the base of the tower and walked inside. It was a point of pride for the university that they were never locked, so that stargazers, young lovers, students and tourists could see the city in each of its moods, if they had the desire and the stamina for the climb. Tris remembered the climb. She had managed it, of course. Though she was plump, the legs beneath her sensible skirts and petticoats were hard with muscle. She just saw no reason why, after a long, dramatic night, she could not cheat.

Besides, she wanted to realize an ambition she’d had since she’d laid eyes on the hollow heart of that tall stone cylinder.

She thrust the doors shut with a breeze, and looped it to and fro around the latches. It would serve as a rope lock until Tris removed it. The doors secured, Tris sent a few more breezes out to explore the upper reaches. They returned to her carrying non-human sounds — settling building, outside winds, birds who nested in the owl figures set over each of the staircase windows. There were.no humans in Phakomathen, no one to spy upon Tris.

She summoned all the winds and breezes within reach, calling them in through the windows of Phakomathen. Waiting for their arrival, she walked a large protective circle around the floor. She then called her magic not to form a cylinder or cocoon of protection, but a flat shield within the circle she had made, to protect the elegant, tiled floor.

She took down two of her wind braids and freed half of what they held, spinning around to show them how she needed them to flow. They had been with her a long time: they settled into the ‘ spin as neatly as her sister Sandry’s favourite spindle.

With her palms Tris thrust her winds low and flat until they shaped a whirling disc of air. When she judged it to be solid, she halted the disc and stepped on to it.

Now came the Tharian winds, pouring through the windows and down the inside of the tower like honey. When they touched the floor, they slid under her disc. Tris gripped the first of them and twirled her finger. Like her own winds, these understood what she wanted. They began to spin, rapidly, under the disc of air where Tris stood.

Slowly, little by little, the column of twirling wind grew in height. Other breezes joined in, giving it strength, bulk, and speed. Steady on her disc of flattened air, Tris let the moving winds thrust her up through the hollow core of Phakomathen, passing the stairway by as she rode her tightly controlled cyclone. Higher and higher she went, until she reached the door to the outside platform, twelve hundred steps high.

She tugged on her cyclone. It swayed, letting her step from her disc on to the landing.

With a snap of her fingers her air disc came apart. Tris caught the ends of those winds and twined them back into her braids. The Tharian winds she set free, thanking them silently as they poured back into the city through the tower windows.

“Now, how was that?” she asked Chime.

The dragon, who had experienced the whole thing from her place on Tris’s back, climbed on to ‘ her shoulder. She rubbed herself, cat-like, under the girl’s chin, making the musical glass sound that Tris was convinced was a purr.

“I liked it, too,” admitted Tris. “Much more sensible than all those steps.” She suddenly remembered that people might wonder why the tower was locked. Putting two fingers in her mouth in a way Briar had taught her, she blew a piercing whistle.

Chime made her glass-scratch complaining noise as the breeze that had secured the doors below returned to Tris. The girl listened to it for a moment, but the only sounds it carried were those of the tower and of the winds she had summoned, not of people trying the doors in frustration.

“I don’t mind walking down,” she told Chime. “It’s the up part that’s a pain.”

The dragon took flight, swooping and circling through the open air inside the tower.

Tris watched briefly, thinking again how beautiful the creature was, then walked outside.

She had not come for a view of the city, though she did admire it. She had not even come for the winds, which pushed her, teasing her for making them work. “Oh, you do it every time you power a windmill,” Tris scolded affectionately. “Don’t complain.”

She looked over the balcony rail. Outside the walls, which had been added to and rebuilt for nearly two thousand years, lay the broad brown ribbon of the Kurchal River, once called “the lifeblood of empire”. On it flowed, down through the distant harbour town of Piraki and into Kurchal Bay. Beyond that lay the grey-green sparkle of the Ithocot Sea, more green than grey under the yellowish heat haze that lay over Tharios and everything beyond.

Behind the city in the north lay the golden grasslands of Ubea, with the farms and villages that kept Tharios alive. To the west lay forests, then mountains; to the east, the stubborn rocky stretches that supported goats, olive trees, and little else until they touched the sea. Somewhere in all this, Tris reasoned, a storm was brewing. She just needed to find it, and see if it could be moved. Keth had to overcome his fear, and not just of the little bolts she had conjured in front of him. He would never master his power until he mastered that. She would need big proof, final proof, that his magic now shielded him from the dangers of lightning.

There was a storm out there, one that would teach Him a lesson he desperately needed to learn. Ignoring the snippets of conversation the city’s winds brought to her — bits of gossip, legal proceedings, speeches in the Assembly and the temples of the All-Seeing — Tris made herself comfortable on the platform and spread her spirit on the winds.

She was forced to go further afield than she’d expected. It made her cross as well as exhausted as she plodded down those many steps, past the first sightseers of the day.

It shouldn’t have happened, she thought as she rested on a bench near the door.

Quietly she gathered the magic that had kept her cyclone from ripping up the floor tiles. It was monsoon season in Tharios and the lands far south of the Pebbled Sea.