Shatterglass (29 page)

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 aruritn 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 nicker 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.