Shatterglass (17 page)

Tris hated to feel useless. Keth had the lightning globes as a goal, though she still believed it would take much more work before he could get anything useful from them. Quite possibly the Ghost would be caught by other means before Keth mastered his globes. She wondered if there might be something about Keth that made him attuned to crimes in general, not just crimes against people he knew. Once the Ghost was accounted for, would Keth make other such globes? She probably ought to suggest it to him, so he could prepare himself. He’d made it clear he wanted to make beautiful glass, not deal in ugly crime.

Her mind busy, Tris strode up the Street of Glass. She stopped to quietly gather Little Bear and Chime from the Touchstone Glass courtyard, then resumed her walk up the long hill back to Heskalifos.

Tris was reading in the workroom when Niko found her. He and Jumshida had been out late, attending yet another party for the conference. On his way to bed, he’d seen the light under the workroom door and looked in.

The moment he saw her, his black brows snapped together. “You’ve been using your braids again,” he remarked sourly.

Tris looked up from her book. “And with very good reason. I need to help Keth with his fear of lightning, and the closest storm on the path to Tharios was stuck in Aliput.”

Niko crossed his arms. “Trisana…”

“It’s true!” she protested. “Some mage over there had things locked down, and I had to pry them loose.” As he remained silent, she made a face. “All right, I used winds to lift myself to the top of Phakomathen first. But I’m not joking about the storms, Niko, and I am careful, using the stronger powers I store.”

Niko sighed. “No, it’s true, you are. And I suppose we’re beyond the point where I can lecture you about such things. I do like to think you’re too sensible to use them so often that they become a drug for you.”

“As sick as I’ll be once I can stop to rest? That’s not at all addictive. You don’t have to worry,” she replied. She inspected his face. “What’s the matter? You look cross.”

“Did you know they magically cleanse the site where a dead person is found?” Niko demanded. “Scour it of all traces of the events there?” Tris nodded. “It’s obscene!”

cried Niko. “I talked to the arurim officials in a position to allow me to raise a vision of the past, to help catch this beast, but they tell me the cleansing isn’t just religious, it’s magical as well. How do they ever catch criminals here?”

Tris shrugged. “Dema — Demakos Nomasdina, the arurim dhaskoi you met - and Keth think Keth’s globes will do it.”

“And you don’t.” The way Niko said it, it was not a question.

“It’ll be a while before Keth can do magic to order instead of by accident,” Tris said frankly. “He seems to think that now he knows the problem, he can just get to work.

And maybe he’s too involved. He knew one of the women; he watched another of them perform. He wants it to work too badly. It’s getting in his way.“

“You’ll have to find a way to calm him down,” Niko said, yawning. Suddenly he smiled. “Something I would give a great deal to see, actually.”

He’d lost Tris in his thinking. “What?” she asked. “What do you want to see?”

Now he grinned outright. “ You, trying to calm someone down.”

Tris smiled, but wryly. “So funny I forgot to laugh,” she retorted.

Niko stretched. “I will laugh for us both, then.”

Tris ran her fingers over her book. “Niko?”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever been to Khapik?” she asked.

“Many times. Not since we came, but in my youth,” he admitted. “It had the unfortunate effect of sucking all the coins from my purse, so I stopped going.” His eyes were distant as he thought. “I remember it was very beautiful, particularly the area of streams and islands around the main gate.”

“It’s still there, and it’s still lovely,” Tris informed him. “Why would anyone want to ruin it? Maybe the yaskedasi aren’t as respectable as they could be, but they do such amazing things, and this Ghost is killing them.”

Niko sighed, his dark eyes gentle as he looked at her. “I’ve never known why anyone would destroy something beautiful, but such people exist.” For a long moment there was silence between them. Tris regarded the book in her lap while Niko watched her.

At last he said, “Did you know that Lark used to work in Khapik?”

Tris’s head jerked up at the sound of her foster-mother’s name. “No!” she exclaimed.

“She did?”

Her teacher nodded. “There was a year when the performing troupe she was with decided to rest for a few seasons and create new material. They stayed and performed in Khapik.”

“She wore that dreadful yellow veil?” Tris asked, the hair on her arms prickling. She loved Lark. The thought that a killer like the Ghost might have gone anywhere near her was chilling.

“Actually, I believe she wore it as a neck scarf,” Niko replied, his eyes sombre.

“There’s a frightening thought.”

Tris made the sign of the Living Circle on her chest.

Niko sighed. “It’s late. I’m off to bed, unless there’s something else you need?”

“Someone to teach me to scry the wind,” she said wryly. “I could send my breezes searching for the killer in Khapik, if I could see things in them.”

Niko rubbed his temples. “Tris, in some ways it’s very like seeing the future, you know,” he pointed out. “You’re showered with different images and events — how do you sort one from another? That’s why future seers are as rare as lightning mages.

Most go mad from sheer confusion. Does it really mean so much to you?”

“I feel useless,” Tris admitted. “Like a bride’s attendant to Keth - I get to hold the basket of herbs, but he’s the one who says the vows.“

“Do you think I’m useless?” asked Niko. “Or Lark, or Frostpine, or Rosethorn, or Crane?” He’d named the main people who had taught her and her friends at Winding Circle.

“No!” cried Tris, startled. “You’re wonderful, all of you!”

“You will produce wonders in Keth, I’m sure of it,” Niko said. “Think again about scrying for something that will drown you in visions. The price you pay is every bit as high as what you’ll pay when the strength of lightning and tides runs out of you.”

With a tired wave, he went off to bed.

Tris thought about what he’d said for a long time.

DEMA

He’d got a proper meal into Keth. It seemed like the least he could do, when Keth had worked himself into numb silence trying to produce a vision of the next murder before it came to be. Dema knew that state of unblinking exhaustion all too well. Every student mage reached that point. He wished he had a bik for every time he had poured out all of his power over the course of a day, until he simply had nothing left.

He made sure an arurim saw Keth home, giving the arurim coins to buy Keth a honeycomb and good tea in one of the Khapik skodi along the way. Keth would need both in the morning. If he was like Dema, he would wake feeling as if someone had run a hot wire through his veins.

What would it have done to him, Dema wondered, to wake at twenty with strange magic on his back? He wasn’t sure. Like every other child of Clan Nomasdina, at the age of five he had been interviewed by mage testers. Once they proclaimed him a fledgling mage, Dema began the years of lessons, experiments, tests and study under various teachers. After he’d earned his credential from Heskalifos at twenty-two, he’d chosen a career, knowing that his position as a mage would make his advancement easier.

He had not known that the average arurim’s view of a new mage was one of cheerful contempt. One of them had advised him to “cast your little magic and don’t bump into the furniture”. They were laughing at him tonight, as Dema went everywhere with a basket on his arm. No matter that the nearness of the lightning globe made the hair on his arm prickle, or that every time he accidentally touched it he got a small, nasty sting. He wanted the thing where he could see it when the lightnings cleared.

In the meantime, he investigated the newest victim. Her name was Rhidassa; she had been a tumbler and a dancer. She left behind a husband and two children, all shattered by her death. She had not told them if she had noticed anyone strange loitering about in her last days of work. Her family’s blank faces and hard, shiny eyes told Dema that they might not tell him if they did know of such a person. Fortunately his truth spell worked on them. That was reassuring: his self-confidence had suffered when Kethlun’s magic had scorched it from existence. That was the problem with spells cast by those without innate ability as truthsayers: they were easily destroyed by strong magic.

Defna was drinking tea at his favourite shop on Peacock Street when he wondered if Keth realized just how strong his power was. Probably not, since he’d taken his failure to clear the globe he’d just made personally. Dema hoped Tris would tell Keth that he had done better today than most student mages did after years of study.

Two hours before sunrise Dema realized he’d brushed the globe without being stung.

Looking at it, he saw that the surface lightning was reduced to specks that flashed and vanished. The bolts inside looked as if they were thinning out. At that point he gave up any pretence of investigating further. He ordered a horse saddled and a squad of arurimi prepared to ride with him, then sat at his desk to wait for the globe to clear. It did, an hour before dawn, to show a dark-skinned yaskedasu in a flowing, silvery kyten. She lay on an altar Dema did not recognize, the yellow veil knotted around her throat.

He ran outside to the arurimi he’d kept waiting. “Do any of you know where this is?”

he demanded, holding out the globe.

They gathered around, bleary-eyed and no doubt thinking of the end of their shifts in two hours. Most shook their heads, but a twenty-year veteran frowned. She traced the line of the altar and the image of a cow-headed goddess behind it with her finger.

“Do you know it, sergeant?” asked Dema. “Quickly, if you do.”

“It’s a shenos temple, one of them inland religions,“ she replied, squinting. ”Oh, aye, the Temple of Ngohi. But Dhaskoi, it’s near the crossing of Apricot Street and Honour Street in Fourth District. Out of our boundaries.“

“I don’t care if it’s in Piraki,” retorted Dema. “Come on.” He put the globe in his saddlebag, mounted his horse, and galloped out of the courtyard without waiting to see if the amrimi followed or not. He urged his horse onward through the nearly empty streets, the animal’s hooves striking sparks from the cobblestones. Late guests of Khapik, staggering home, scattered out of his way.

The temple’s doors were unlocked. Dema seized his mage’s kit and rushed in, searching for the altar. There was the statue, three times the height of a normal human being. The altar, and the latest victim, were in front of it.

He approached as he fumbled in his kit for heartbeat powder. He didn’t know how long it would take for the priests to arrive, but he had to learn as much from the dead woman as he could. He sprinkled the powder over her, watching as its colour shifted to the faintest shade of pink. She had died recently, maybe as little as two hours ago.

Next came the vision powder, sprinkled over each bulging eye. Inside Dema felt shame for treating her this way, for using her as a source of information rather than mourning her. Even yaskedasi deserved better.

The powder revealed only smudges over her eyes. -She had not seen her killer. In all likelihood he had come up behind her.

Next he got the bottle of stepsfind, took a mouthful, and sprayed it over the body with a fresh, silent apology. Looking down, he saw the killer’s footprints, shadows that led through a side door into an alley.

Three white-clad priests were there, building a circle of protection around the temple.

“How did you know?” cried Dema, furious past all common sense. “How did you know about this?”

One of the priests, the one who held their supplies, turned to look at Dema. Behind him his partners, a man and a woman, closed the protective circle and brought it to blazing life, cutting Dema off from the killer’s traces. “You walk perilously close to the defilement of all you touch, Demakos Nomasdina,” the priest who’d looked at him said, grim-faced. “You would have carried the pollution from the corpse you just saw out into this district, letting the rot spread to innocents. We knew you were capable of it. A watch was placed on you.”

“You had me followed!” shouted Dema. “By what right? I am a citizen of Tharios, a member of the First Class, and I am doing my duty towards the city!”

“Your vision of your duty blinds you to the risk you take, involving yourself with the rotting shell that once housed a spirit,” retorted the priest. “Continue as you meant to just now, and you will carry spiritual rot to the houses of the First Class and to the temples and offices that serve them.”

The female priest looked at Dema. “If pollution spreads over the First Class, the city is doomed,” she said flatly. “It is our purity that saved us while an empire was falling to pieces. It is our cleansing and our vow to stay clean despite temptation which makes us a great power now. And you would destroy that, in your arrogance, in your belief that only Demakos Nomasdina of the arurim dhaskoi may speak for one of the Fifth Class. She is before the All-Seeing. He will judge her as well as her killer.”

“But her killer spreads his pollution, too,” Dema said daringly. “He goes out into the city with death all over him. You say I risk polluting the city -what of the killer?”

“The city’s priests cleanse Tharios in prayer, fasting and meditation,” said the priest who had first spoken to Dema. “The killer will only pollute those who encounter him.

They are plainly of the Fifth and Fourth classes, with the crimes of their last lives to pay for in this one. He is their penance. It is you who are the greater danger. You take this vile taint among those who must keep the city from plunging into chaos.”

“You have lost sight of what is vital, imagining that matters of this world are as valuable as those of the spiritual realm,” the female priest announced. “You will spend this day and tonight among us, to fast, repent and be cleansed.”