Shatterglass (23 page)

Glaki took her thumb from her mouth. “Did you cry?” she asked.

“I cried like you did, where nobody would hear and yell at me, or slap me,” replied Tris softly.

“Tell me about your family?” asked the girl.

Tris was telling Glaki about the day Briar stole a miniature tree when she realized that Keth stood in the doorway. She glanced at the little girl, who was fast asleep. “How is everyone?” Tris asked Keth in a whisper.

“Frantic,” Keth replied abruptly. “Angry. They’re talking about a march to Balance Hill in the morning, to tell the Keepers that they’ll stop working if something isn’t done. Khapik brings a lot of money into the city, it’s the place foreigners usually visit first. Maybe the Keepers will listen.“

Tris frowned. If that was true, that the district brought income to the city, what chance did Dema have of making the Keepers shut Khapik down?

Keth rubbed the white spot in his hair. “Look, I’ll get a chair to take you home.

You—”

Tris cut him off. “You’re out of your mind,” she said flatly. “This child just lost the two most important people in her life. I’m not taking her from the only home she knows, and I’m not leaving her with this lot. That Poppy slapped her, for Mila’s sake!

I’ve sent word to Niko. In the meantime, I’m staying here.”

“But she’s not your problem,” Keth protested. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know how she feels,” replied Tris. “I’ve been in her shoes, or a pair that looked a lot like them. If Little Bear and Chime give her some comfort, I’m not taking it away.

Have you heard word from Dema?”

“Tris, this isn’t necessary,” argued Keth stubbornly.

Tris glared at him, refusing to share any more of her private miseries to explain why it was necessary. “I asked, have you word from Dema?”

He might not know about her childhood, but he did understand the look on her face.

“Nothing.” He wandered to the window and leaned out, letting the rain fall on his head. “At least not that many yaskedasi are out working in this.” Struck by an idea, he turned to Tris. “Could you keep it raining a few days? The fewer people on the street, the fewer targets.”

Tris shook her head. “The storm’s already moving on.”

“Then stop it,” replied Keth.

“You don’t stop storms,” she explained. “You usher them on, guide them down a path they might have taken anyway, but you can’t stop them. That’s why you had a drought before this -someone was holding the rains in place across the sea. Besides, Keth, the rain won’t stop him from killing. If he can’t find someone on the street, he’ll go elsewhere.”

Keth jammed his hands into his pockets. “You mean he’ll go to the nice, sheltered women of the city. Women with families who care ‘what happens to them. Women who aren’t as shady as yaskedasi!’

She had only meant that the killer would try the back alleys, the courtyard yaskedasi, or even go after Khapik’s women in their homes. There was nothing in this room to stop anyone from coming in who wanted to; Yali’s lock was even worse than Kethlun’s. It hadn’t occurred to Tris that the killer might leave Khapik, to find victims in the rest of the city.

Once he’d said it, though, the truth became clear. “They’ll refuse him, won’t they?

The Keepers, and Dema. Between the money this place brings, and the risk the killer will go elsewhere, they won’t let Dema shut Khapik down.”

Keth slumped into the room’s sole, rickety chair. “No. I don’t think they will.” He looked down at his clasped hands. “I don’t know what Dema can do if the Keepers won’t help.”

Tris leaned her head back, staring at the ceiling. “Me neither,” she admitted.

For a long moment Keth was silent. Finally he said, “I need to get back to work on the lightning globes. I’ll make them clear sooner. I’ll make one that will show us his face.”

“Then sleep,” Tris advised. “Try, anyway. We’ve a long day tomorrow.”

Her breezes reported back to her all through the night. They brought Tris nothing.

In the morning Tris made sure that Glaki, Chime and Little Bear were comfortable in the workshop at Touchstone Glass with Keth. He had agreed to watch them while Tris ran some necessary errands. Once she had purchased breakfast for the group Tris headed back up the Street of Glass, dodging two brawling prathmun whose wagons had collided. Other pedestrians and riders swerved around the brawlers as if they didn’t even see them.

The skies were clear; the brooklets that had run in the gutters were shrinking. The city sparkled, rinsed clean for the moment. Atop the two hills ahead, the white marble structures of Heskalifos and the Assembly gleamed like hope and dignity given shape.

For the hundredth time Tris wondered how Dema had fared with the Keepers of the Public Good. She was almost positive that she and Keth had been right, that the Keepers would not shut Khapik down, but she wanted very badly to be mistaken.

At Jumshida’s, Tris found her hostess seated at the breakfast table, reading a book.

“Niko’s still abed,” she told Tris. “He made a late night of it, at Serenity House.”

Tris frowned. “What was he doing there?”

“The arurim dhaskoi, Nomasdina? He came to us for reinforcements for when he talked to the Keepers yesterday. I felt badly for him,” Jumshida said, peeling an orange, “but he’s so obsessed with catching the Ghost that he forgets what truly matters here in Tharios. I tried to remind him of the duty he owes his clan, but he would have none of it. He convinced Niko to go to the Keepers with him. The Keepers didn’t see them until after midnight. I think it was the third hour after that when Niko returned to us.”

“Do you know if the Keepers listened?” asked Tris.

Jumshida shrugged. “Niko said nothing to me, but I would be much surprised if they changed the way we have done things for a thousand years, just to meet a temporary emergency.” She met Tris’s eyes with her own grey-green ones. “We are great believers in time, here in Tharios,” she explained. “Time, and the eternal balance of things.”

The cook walked into the room with a tea tray. “He rang for this,” the woman explained.

“I’ll take it up,” Tris offered. The cook was more than happy to relinquish the heavy tray to her, and Tris was more than happy to get away from Jumshida, before the woman patronized her any more. Sheer survival over centuries isn’t a guarantee of virtue, Tris fumed as she climbed the stairs. It’s just a guarantee that nothing will change for the better!

Niko was busily cleaning his teeth when Tris came in and set the tray on a table.

“Jumshida said you went with Dema,” she said as Niko spat, rinsed, and spat again.

“Will the Keepers do anything?”

“Nothing,” he informed her waspishly, throwing down his facecloth. “They will not close Khapik. They said it would alarm the populace and cause financial hardship to those who work there. They will not intercede with the priesthood of the All-Seeing to let the arurim dhaskoi or even me work seeing-spells over the dead. They will not risk the purity of the city and of the conference. Even though I am a foreigner, they will protect me for my own good. Arrogant, hide-bound, unimaginative—”

He might have gone on, but Tris interrupted. “Niko. Yali, the woman who came here to see if Keth was all right? She was the most recent victim.”

Niko sighed. “So Dema told me.” He took the cup of tea Tris handed to him.

“Well, she left a foster-daughter, the child of one of the other dead women. I mean to stay with the little girl — her name’s Glaki — until some provision is made for her. I don’t think she ought be left to the other women in the lodging house, and Keth wants to concentrate on the globes.“

“Is he Glaki’s father?” Niko asked, sipping his tea.

Tris hadn’t thought of that. She considered it, then shook her head. “Glaki’s Tharian clean through. Anyway, I’m back for some clothes, and I wanted to ask about scrying again.” Tris smoothed a wrinkle in her dress. “I sent my breezes through Khapik last night, to let me know if they heard a woman being strangled, but it doesn’t work very well. Has anyone arrived yet who can see things on the winds?”

“You are still determined to learn?” asked Niko. “Even after all I’ve told you?”

“You survive being pelted with images,” Tris pointed out. “It hasn’t driven you mad — though you can be quite odd, when you put your mind to it.”

Niko sat on his bed and looked at her. “So much of it means nothing,” he pointed out.

“So much of it you don’t even really see because it’s gone in a flash. The headaches are ferocious. Every account I’ve read of wind-scrying compares it to seeing the future, and the grief involved in that I know all too well.”

Tris sat next to him. “Has anyone come who knows it?” she asked again. “Niko, these women deserve better than to have a monster pick them off one by one while those who should protect them say it’s all right if they die, as long as they don’t spread the pollution of their deaths around. I could go as mad from not being able to help as I could from being drowned in visions.“

Niko sighed. “Start looking at and through a particular breeze, clearing your vision as you clear your mind. According to what I’ve read, you should first begin to see colours, then movement… Tris, you do realize that only one mage in thousands can do this? One in a generation?”

“I have to try,” replied Tris, her voice low but passionate. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, but stared at her hands, fisted in her skirt. “It’s not right, what’s happening here.”

Niko stood and went to the trunk of books he carried everywhere he travelled, opened it, and pushed back the lid. These were the texts of his craft of seeing, volumes on ambient and academic magic, and other books which helped him in the exercise of his own power. He brought out a small, leatherbound volume closed with a strap and a catch, lifted it in his hand as if weighing it, then held it out to Tris. “Take it. There are exercises that may help. The writer could scry the wind.”

Tris looked at the tiny volume and gasped. “Niko! You have a copy of Quicksilver’s Winds’ Path, and you never told me?”

He smiled. “My fears for your sanity are real, you know. My best friend at Lightsbridge, when I was a student there? She went mad from the study of wind-scrying. She was — more easily distracted than you are, though. I,always meant to let you see the book in time. I suppose that time is now.”

Trk stroked the embossed lettering on the cover with reverent ringers. It was said to be the ultimate book on wind magics. It was also very old. “You can’t lend this to me.

What if something happens to it?”

Niko smoothed his moustache. “That’s why I’m giving it to you, so you needn’t worry if anything happens to it. I’ve learned all I can from it, and you need the half that’s about scrying the wind. Just remember, it takes time to master it, if you can.

You may not learn enough to stop this madman.”

That Niko would trust her with such a prize told her more about how he saw her than anything else that had passed between them in recent months. It said that he believed she was a full-fledged mage, an adult and craftswoman. She met his eyes, her own filling with tears. What would happen to her now? Was he saying he wanted her to leave him?

“Not that you get rid of me,” he added, as if he’d read her mind. Neither of them was good at being sentimental with the other. “We’ve places to go yet, libraries to search.

Now, scat, so I can dress.”

“I need to go back to Touchstone Glass,” she said. “You’ll find me there or at Ferouze’s, Chamberpot Alley, in Khapik, if you need me.”

“I will be here or at Phakomathen, scrying the future,” Niko said. “The conference can manage without me, until this monster is caught.”

Tris sighed in relief. “Thank you. You’ll probably see him long before we will!”

•

Tris packed, then visited the university baths. Dressed in clean clothes, her pack slung over one shoulder, she visited the Akaya Square skodi, or market. There she bargained with a jewellery seller for a price on the glass pendants Keth had made with Chime’s flames, selling a quarter of them. At Jumshida’s she had collected all of Chime’s flames she could find, as well as the spiral glass circles that were the dragon’s vomit and the lumpy glass rounds that were Chime’s dung. If she and Keth were to create more lightning globes and look after Glaki properly, they would need cash for glassmaker’s supplies, clothing and food. Tris had money set away, but saw no reason to dip into that if Keth were right about the attraction of the pendants.

Once the bits of glass were sold, Tris set off for Touchstone. The day was heating up.

By the time she arrived, she was red-faced and puffing under the weight of her things.

Inside the workshop, Glaki napped on Little Bear’s flank as Chime tried to wrestle the cork out of a jar of colouring salts. Keth was pacing as Tris set down her pack.

“Where have you been?” he demanded. “Most of the morning has gone! I made three vases already!”

“I had things to do,” said Tris. “Whenever you propose to up-end your life, arrangements have to be made.”

“Nobody asked you to come live with us,” protested Keth with a glance at the sleeping child. “We managed before you.”

“You’ll manage better with me.” Tris went to the well and gulped down a ladle of water, then looked at Keth. “Are you ready?”

Once her circle of protection was drawn and the magical barriers raised, Keth meditated, popping all of his power into and out of his imaginary crucible in the blink of an eye. “Well?” he asked Tris. “I think I remember how to create a globe. I’m going to try to make it big, so we see as much of the surroundings as we can.”

“All right,” Tris said. “Try.”

He got excited as he picked up the blowpipe. His fingers trembled, though his hands were steady enough as he collected a gather of molten glass from the crucible. Tris breathed with him as Keth inhaled, counted, held, and counted, forcing himself to calm down. Raising the pipe to his lips, he exhaled into it steadily as he twirled it. He continued to twirl the pipe as he stopped, inhaled, and held to the count. His second exhale expanded the bulging gather from the size of an orange to the size of Little Bear’s head. He reheated the glass and blew a little more. “It cools faster when I work this way,” he grumbled, reheating the glass again. “I hate going slow.”