Shatterglass (26 page)

“Of course we’ve picked up and questioned a number of them already,” Dema replied, suddenly uncomfortable as well as unhappy.

“Did they have anything to do with Khapik, or the victims?” Keth wanted to know.

Dema shrugged. “They’re Khapik prathmuni. And they haven’t admitted anything so far.”

“You’re torturing them,” Tris accused.

“That’s how we handle prathmuni” replied Dema. “Everyone knows a prathmun lies as easily as he breathes. Since the arurim prathmuni bring them in anyway, it’s easiest to go right to it. If you were Tharian, you wouldn’t even ask about it.”

“So you get the torture out of the way, whether there is reason to suspect the prathmuni you arrest or not,” Tris said angrily.

“That’s how things are done here,” replied Dema. “Our ways aren’t yours. Could we change the subject? It’s not exactly a decent one, particularly in front of a child.” He got to his feet, half of his honeycake still in one hand. “If you create another globe today?”

“We’ll let you know,” Keth said.

Tris, Keth and Glaki watched Dema trudge out of the courtyard. Only when he was well out of sight did Keth hear Tris mutter, “Barbarians.” She looked at Glaki and scowled. “It’s fine to talk about torture in front of a child, but gods forbid we talk about the people who get tortured.”

When Glaki’s eyes went wide with fright, Tris smiled crookedly. “I’m not angry with you,” she assured the little girl. “Not even a bit.” Glaki relaxed slightly and returned to playing with her ragged doll.

“Tharian customs,” murmured Keth, though he understood Tris’s feelings. “We’re only guests here.”

“Slavery is more honest,” she retorted. “At least the only thing anyone ever blames slavery on is bad luck, not impurity.”

Keth nodded. “We’d better start. I want to get some ordinary pieces done for Antonou today besides the other things. He’s been very good about me using up his supplies.”

Tris settled Glaki with her toys and placed her magical protections around the workshop. Once more she and Kethlun settled into meditation. That morning, at her direction, Keth worked on letting his magic fill just his skin without going outside his body. Tris barely said a word apart from letting him know that his efforts were successful.

Once they finished pure meditation, Keth blew glass. Working slowly, taking pains, he produced three glass balls. None of them held lightning; all had lightning that flickered over their surfaces, but only in bursts that did nothing to hide the glass underneath.

Glaki was placing the third globe where the others sat — the lightning on these globes didn’t sting — when someone outside the barrier cleared his throat. It was Antonou.

“Keth? Cousin? Might I have a word?”

Tris lowered her magical barrier. “Keep an eye on Glaki,” she told Keth, walking past Antonou into the centre of the courtyard. “I’ll be right here, but don’t disturb me.”

Standing beside the well, Tris took off her spectacles and tucked them in her sash, then closed her eyes and began to meditate. The men’s voices and the sound of Glaki as she played with her doll, Little Bear and Chime, faded from her attention, along with the street noise. Once Tris was ready, she opened her eyes.

The day’s breezes slid before her sight: they were clear in her vision, though nothing else was. She saw the air’s eddies and pools, the change in currents where heat from the kitchen flowed through cooler air. Chime soared past her nose. Tris’s eyes picked out the curling and parting of the air as the dragon cut through it, as water parted around a boat.

Whispering a magical formula, Tris drew signs first on her left temple, then on her right: the crescent for magical vision, the seven-pointed star for the strength to manage what she would see, and the four small waves of the winds. Then she clasped her hands before her, and waited for her sight to improve.

A wisp of colour shone on a current of air, like the glint in the depths of an opal.

Another wisp. Another. The air streamed with flares in many hues, threads of fast-moving colour. The wisps grew infrequent, then rare. At last they stopped appearing to Tris’s eyes at all.

She sighed. Her first try was over. Using a counter-clockwise motion, she wiped the signs from her temples, and lurched. A strong arm caught her. She looked up into Keth’s face. “Why are you mauling me?” she demanded, struggling weakly. She felt as wrung out as a sheet on laundry day.

Something on Keth’s face looked suspiciously like a smile. Tris gave up her fight and groped in her sash for her spectacles.

“I had to stop you from falling into Antonou’s well,” he explained, his voice quivering. “They’d never get the taste of mage out of the water.”

Tris shoved her glasses on to her nose and glared at him. He was smiling. “What’s so funny?” she growled.

“You. Did you know it’s almost midday?” Keth set Tris on her feet.

She swayed as she looked around. There was the lip of the well, just thirty centimetres away. Little Bear, Chime and Glaki sat on the ground nearby, staring at her in fascination.

“Come on, great teacher,” Keth said, wrapping an arm around Tris’s waist to steady her as she tottered over to a bench. “Rest your weary bones.”

“It can’t be nearly midday,” Tris argued, though her magical senses told her it was.

“What happened to the morning?”

“It passed while you gazed into the air,” Keth replied, easing her on to the bench.

“You didn’t even twitch when the Bear chased a cat in the garden. We owe Antonou basil plants, by the way.”

“I don’t know why that dog bothers,” muttered Tris. “Every time he corners a cat, it beats the fur off him. I should get our midday.” Her head swam. Odd sparks flared in her sight as she moved her head.

“Antonou is bringing it,” Keth assured her.

Tris looked at him sharply. “Why? He’s under no obligation to feed me or Glaki.”

Keth grinned and sat beside her. “There’s been a change in our arrangements,” he explained. “Antonou likes having a glass mage in the shop -that’s why he’s left us alone. And he really likes those globes.” He pointed to his morning’s creations, which continued to glitter and spark, pale copies of his lightning globes. “If he sells anything I create that I don’t need to keep, I’ll get half the price. It solves a lot of problems, Tris. He says what he can make just from the globes will pay for my time and materials, and we’ll have plenty left over. I thought you’d approve, since you sold those pendants I made of Chime’s flames.”

“Ah, she is back with us.” Antonou approached from the kitchen wing of the house, a tray of dishes in his broad, scarred hands. “So, Dhasku Tris, does Keth need these globes? As mementoes, or for study? I can get a very good price for these. People love magical novelties that don’t carry unpleasant consequences.” He set the tray down on a table near the kitchen garden and took another tray from his wife, who had followed him.

“But I won’t always be making magical devices, will I?” asked Keth, placing benches around the table. “I’ll be able to do plain glass again?”

“You can do whatever you like, when your magic is completely under control,”

replied Tris. “And those globes are your work. They’re yours to dispose of. Just let me test them this afternoon, to be sure they don’t hold any surprises.” She looked for Glaki, and saw that the girl was now hiding behind Little Bear. Both she and the dog stared at the good-smelling dishes with yearning.

“Here, you are too skinny,” Antonou’s wife said, putting things on a plate for the child.

While Keth tried to blow another lightning globe that afternoon, secure inside Tris’s protective circle and working on his magical control, Tris inspected the new globes, exploring them with her power. They held not a nicker of true lightning, or of anything else. When she put the last one down, she noticed that Keth watched her.

“They’re empty,” she said. “If Antonou wants them, and you want him to sell them, go ahead.”

He nodded. “So Khapik is safe for tonight,” he said, inspecting the globe he had just, finished. It glittered like a round piece of ice in his hands. “As far as we know.”

“As far as we know,” Tris repeated with a sigh. “We should tell Dema.” She was tired.

Keth finished his work, cleaned the shop, and told Antonou the globes were there for him to sell.

At last he, Tris, Glaki, Little Bear and Chime set off towards Khapik. “How’s business?” he asked the guard who stood at the district gate.

“Not good,” the man replied, disgusted. “The yaskedasi are scared. Some are leaving.

And the guests are falling off, too. I suppose they think there’s a chance this madman will mistake them for one of us.”

“How bad is business off?” inquired Keth.

“A quarter,” the guard replied.

Keth winced as they passed through the gate. “This will hurt everyone,” he told Tris.

“We’ve got to catch him.”

Tris looked up at him and saw lightning flash in his eyes. “Keth, calm down,” she ordered. “Breathe and count. You’re sparking.”

“I’m what?” he asked. “Where?” Tris pointed to his eyes. “Oh,” Keth said sheepishly.

“That never happened before,” he pointed out, breathing slowly and carefully. The lightnings in his eyes faded.

“But the lightning found a path through you it likes, so it will keep following it.

You’ll have to learn to control your temper,” Tris said firmly.

He grinned unexpectedly down at her. “And you’re going to teach me?” Though he knew she kept a tight hold on her deepest feelings, he’d also got enough of the tart edge of her tongue to find the idea funny.

Tris drew herself up. “I can lose my temper because my power is under control,” she said in her primmest voice. In a return to her normal, dry speech she added, “And quite a fight it is.”

At Ferouze’s, Xantha, Poppy, Ferouze and the four musicians were in the courtyard, talking. Keth went to his room. Tris and Chime settled on a step, watching Glaki and Little Bear stretch their legs in a game of chase.

Xantha, relaxing as Poppy combed her long gold hair, began to hum, then to sing, her voice a sweet soprano. Poppy joined in to sing the counterpart in her lower voice.

From overhead they heard the sound of a Namornese balaka, a plaintive, sharper version of a lute: Keth descended the stairs playing it. Ferouze and one of the men fetched common lutes to play. One musician brought a recorder, another a set of graduated wooden pipes, while the fourth backed his deep bass voice with a harp. One song passed into another, as naturally as the late afternoon breeze flowed through the galleries around the courtyard.

It was the kind of time Tris had never expected to find in Khapik, like the evenings when her foster-mothers, -sisters, and -brother all sat in the main room of their cottage, working on projects and singing, talking, or telling stories as the sounds of Winding Circle drifted through the windows.

As Tris watched the players, sparks appeared in the air’s currents. She thought they might be part of a picture, but when she strained to see them, they disappeared. At last she gave up, relaxed and drifted.

The gathering broke up as the shadows lengthened. Everyone but Ferouze, Keth and Glaki had to work. Keth, seeing that Tris was not inclined to move, took Glaki and Little Bear to the Lotus Street skodi to fetch their supper.

That night the three of them ate in Yali’s room, washed their dishes, and settled in for an evening’s study. Keth pored over a book of glass magic Tris had borrowed from Heskalifos. Tris continued to read Winds’ Path. When she caught Kethlun yawning, she ordered him off to bed. Glaki was already asleep — she barely twitched when Tris changed her dress for a nightgown and tucked her in. Little Bear curled up beside the child. Tris napped, exhausted by her day, but she woke some time after the clocks had struck midnight, the mix of lightning and tidal strength in her veins fading but strong.

Her magic told her that dawn was still hours away, but she was no longer sleepy.

She went to Ferouze and made the same bargain as the night before, that the woman would stay with Glaki. She barely trusted Ferouze, but Keth needed his rest. With Ferouze to watch over Glaki and her lightning-sparked payment, Tris went out into Khapik. Once more Chime rode on her back,

as fascinated by the changing worlds inside the district as Tris.

Tonight there was a festival in which yaskedasi dressed as butterflies, their wings huge creations of gauze and bamboo painted in a variety of designs. They paraded around the streams and islands in a soaring of flutes and the silvery tones of bells and hand cymbals. Guests and other yaskedasi showered them with confetti, dancing around the butterflies.

When Tris tired of the noise and crowd, she turned down one of the quieter streets, venturing into Khapik’s darker areas. She came upon two women taking a purse from a drunken man. Tris considered putting a stop to it. She finally decided that if the man were fool enough to get so drunk that he could be separated from his friends and robbed, perhaps the missing purse would teach him a lesson he’d remember. The women looked at Tris, eyes glittering, as if they considered doing something about her, but when she walked by silently, they left her alone.

The encounter made her wonder again about what manner of person the Ghost was.

He must look normal enough, to come and go everywhere with no one the wiser. He was clever, to turn the city’s dislike for the dirtier side of life to his advantage. That he loathed the female yaskedasi was obvious. Did he want to be caught? Given that he left his victims in public places, it would seem that he did — or was that due more to his contempt for the city as a whole? Perhaps he didn’t hate just the pretty, shady entertainers. Perhaps he hated all Tharios.

Tris shook off her musings. Thinking about what drove the Ghost, while fascinating, was Dema’s job. If she was to help, if she was to do more than shepherd Keth as he followed his strange connection to these deaths, it would be through wind-scrying.

The air was everywhere. If she could see what the moving air touched, she could trace the killer, and avenge Glaki’s loss of the women who loved her.