Shatterglass (3 page)

“And if your teacher said you were fit to practise magic and turned you loose on the world, I’m reporting you both to the Mages’ Guild,” Tris snapped. Was something wrong with him? she wondered, puzzled. Was he slow of mind? He spoke as if he were, though his eyes were too intelligent, compared to the simpletons she had known. He had to be twenty if he were a day, yet he was huddled down like a child who expected a beating. She hadn’t given him enough of a shock to hurt him permanently. Something here wasn’t right, but clearly she would get nothing else from the fellow. “What about this dragon?” she wanted to know. “Do you claim it as yours? Will you be responsible for it?”

The glassblower shook his head vehemently.

Tris scowled at him. “Well, that’s of a piece with everything else I’ve noticed about you,“ she said tartly. ”If you won’t take responsibility for it, then I - Trisana Chandler, educated at Winding Circle Temple, take charge of this magical creation. Be sure I’ll mention that at the Mages’ Guild, too!“

Outside Tris fed the lightning in her hand into her pinned-down braids. With fingers that still trembled with anger she tucked the braid she’d pulled apart behind one ear.

She would visit more shops and calm down. She wanted to talk to Niko about the dragon before she tracked down the local Mages’ Guild, and he wouldn’t be back until his conference ended late that afternoon. She might as well use her time profitably.

“Come on, Bear,” she ordered the dog. “Let’s find somewhere sane.”

Kethlun Warder, journeyman glassblower, didn’t know how much time passed before he found the courage to get to his feet. The hand and arm that held the tongs had gone from painful jerking to a pins-and-needles sensation. When he touched his good hand to his head, he found that his hair was nearly flat again, though it crackled still.

Slowly he closed the hand that had taken the lightning’s power. It was stiff, but it worked. He moved each finger, then his wrist, forearm, and at last the entire arm.

Everything worked. The motion was slow, but at least he wasn’t paralysed a second time.

What about the rest? he thought as he tried to stand. Last year it had taken weeks, even months, to get all of his body working again.

On his feet he wavered, then dropped to his knees. Fear swamped him: had she paralysed him? After a moment’s thought he tried again. Carefully he stretched first one leg, then the other, leaning on his hands. Only when his knees responded as they should did he try to stand a second time.

His mind was functioning, he thought as he leaned on a worktable. But what of his mouth? He was scared to try, in case he learned that she had turned him back into a gobbling freak, but he was also scared not to try. His ability to speak had taken the longest to return, and he was still unable to talk quickly.

He drew himself upright, took a long breath and blew out, thrusting all emotion away.

He emptied his lungs completely before he filled them again. Once he was calmer, he said, “My n-name is Kethlun W-warder. I am-m a journeyman.” Heartened, he went on, “I come from — Dancruan in N-namorn. My family is in the glass tr-ade.”

Relief doused over him like cold water. Yes, the stammer was back, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been. He could manage it by speaking slowly. His hands were steady enough. He was all right, or as much so as he’d been in the past year.

He’d heard his mother say that he was damaged, not incapable. As usual, she had hit the nail on the head. He was damaged, but he was getting better. He would be better.

He just needed time.

A year ago he had not needed time.

Glassblowing had been natural to him. He expected to succeed every time he thrust a blowpipe into the furnace. He’d pitied apprentices who inhaled by accident, burning their tongues or throat with drops of the molten liquid. He’d smirked as they singed their eyebrows, burned their arms, or dropped half of the gather into the flames. The basic work had come easily, greased by his tiny drop of magic, but the artistry had been all his own. Whenever the subject of his lack of greater magic came up, he reminded his family that at least he had considerable talent.

Then he’d gone for a walk along the Syth one summer afternoon. The storm caught him in the dunes between the beach and the Imperial Highway, tearing at his clothes and hair, driving sand into his face. In a panic, he ran for shelter instead of dropping into a dip between the dunes and lying flat on the ground. The lightning bolt caught him as he scrambled over the last dune between him and shelter. The only warning he’d had was the eerie sensation of all of his body hair standing straight up, before his old life ended in a flash of white heat.

That he’d survived was a miracle. The discovery that he was half-paralysed and unable to speak made his survival a mockery.

But his youthful conceit had a tough core to it. He fought the living tomb of his body.

He forced a finger to move, then a toe, then two fingers, two toes. Hour after hour, day after day, he reclaimed his own flesh. When his family saw that his mind still functioned, they brought in the best healer-mages in Dancruan. The happiest moment of his life was in the morning when he returned to his uncle’s factory, ready to work once more.

By noon that day his happiness was dust. His old ease was gone. Even as a first-year apprentice his hands were never clumsy with the tools, sands, salts, ashes and woods that were the basis of glasswork. The first time he tried to blow glass, his breath had hitched, he’d jerked the pipe up, and a fleck of red-hot glass rolled on to his tongue.

When he tried to pour glass into a mould, it shifted, making one side of a bowl far thinner than the other. For weeks every piece he made ended in the cullet or waste glass barrel, to be remeltedj or used in other projects.

Now the other apprentices and journeymen smirked as his gathers dropped in the furnace or on to the floor. They grinned as the masters rejected piece after piece. Once Kethlun had never measured how much of a colouring agent to add to a crucible of molten glass: he just knew. When he measured now, the colours came out wrong.

He did not dare say that he thought the glass itself had turned on him. He had the notion that it was trying to tell him things. It wanted him to shape it in ways that differed from what he wanted. Keth feared that if he spoke such thoughts to any of his family, they would turn him over to healers who specialized in madness, and never let him near a furnace again. Even the mages in his family never talked of glass as if it were alive.

One spring day he came home to find the guildmasters seated with his father and uncles. All of them, men and women, looked decidedly uncomfortable when they saw him. Keth’s brain, so much quicker than his tongue or hands, told him what was in the wind. The guildmasters meant to strip him of his journeyman’s rank and send him back among the apprentices until he regained his old skill, if he ever did.

He could not bear it. “I’ve been th-thinking,” he said, trying to keep from stammering.

He leaned against the receiving-room wall, hoping to look casual, hoping they would not sense his fear. “A change of scene, th-that’s what I need. Fresh inspiration. I’m a j-journeyman. I’ll journey. South, I th-think. Visit the cousins. Learn new techniques.”

Guildmistress Hafgwyn looked at Kethlun’s father. “It might be for the best,” she said. “I am not comfortable with the matter we discussed.” Her bright black eyes met Keth’s. “It will do. You may go with the guild’s protection. Bring fresh knowledge back to us, along with your old skill.”

And so he had worked his way down the coast of the Endless Ocean, going around the Pebbled Sea and continuing south and east. At last he reached the shop of his fourth cousin once removed, Antonou Tinas, in Tharios. By then he’d recovered some of his old ability with moulds and pulled glass. Antonou was getting old. He preferred to do engraving and polishing in the main shop as he waited on customers. Keth could make the pieces Antonou needed, then practise his glassblowing in private, with no one to see how badly he did it.

Just when he felt safe, along came this girl, and her lightning.

Trembling, Keth forced himself outside, to the well, and drank some water. Then he returned to the workshop. It was a shambles. He’d broken finished glass, thrown his blowpipe, knocked over jars of colouring agents. He had to clean up before Antonou saw the mess. He reached for a broom.

The plump redhead had held lightning in her hand as casually as if it were a bracelet she had just taken off. It glinted in that free lock of hair by her face like the bits of mica the yaskedasi, or entertainers, used to make their hair glitter in the torchlight.

The girl had thrown lightning as a soldier would a spear, shocking his hand and arm into numbness. And she’d done it to save the abomination that had wriggled out of his breath and into a gather of molten glass.

Keth never wanted to see that girl again. Please, he prayed to any gods that might be listening, I don’t even want to see her shadow again..

DEMA

Earlier that day:

Dema Nomasdina was asleep. In his dreams he saw the four dead women whose killer he had yet to find: Nioki the tumbler, Farray the dancer, Ophelika the musician and Zudana the singer. All four women wore the yellow veil of the yaskedasi, licensed entertainers who worked for the most part in the garden district called Khapik. Instead of floating around their heads, pinned over curls or braids, their veils were wrapped tightly around their necks and knotted. Each woman, who was beautiful, their friends had assured Dema, had the swollen, dark face of the strangled.

“He left me dumped in an alley like rubbish,” said Nioki. Despite the silk knotted around her throat, her voice was perfectly clear and damning in its grief.

“I was thrown down a cellar stair,” whispered Farray.

“He sat me against a building at the intersection of Lotus and Peacock streets for the world to see,“ Ophelika reminded him.

“Me he laid in front of the Khapik Gate for some tradesman to find as he stumbled home,” Zudana said bitterly. “That tradesman fell over me like I was a sack of onions.”

“What are you doing?” asked Nioki. “Why does my ghost still drift in the great emptiness?”

“What are you doing?” moaned Ophelika through swollen lips. “My spirit is not cleansed.”

“What are you doing?” the dead women asked, their voices sharp in Dema’s ears.

“Avenge us,” they said as they faded from view. The last thing Dema saw was their outstretched, straining hands, and the flutter of yellow silk.

“Nomasdina!” A rough hand shook his shoulder. “Wake up, dhaskoi. You’re wanted.”

Dema sat up, his eyes barely open, the taste of last night’s greasy supper in his mouth.

He’d gone to sleep at his worktable, on top of the pages of notes taken on the murders of the four yaskedasi. No wonder he dreamed of them. A glance at the window showed him rays of sunlight that leaked through cracks in the shutters. The room was hot and stuffy. “I’m off duty,” he mumbled.

“Good,” the sergeant on duty told him with false good cheer. “Then you’re free to ride to Labrykas Square. The district captain has sent for you.” The sergeant upended a ladle of water on Dema’s head. As Dema sputtered, the woman added with real kindness, “She knows you’ve been on duty all night. Don’t try to fix yourself up, just go.”

Dema went, though he couldn’t imagine what the Fifth District commander of the Arurim, Tharios’s law enforcement agency and his employer, wanted with a very new mage like him. Dema had been an arurim dhaskoi, investigator mage, for only eight months. He’d done little to draw anyone’s attention. True, he was -working on the murders of four Khapik yaskedasi, but he also knew that he’d been given the task of investigating the first murder, and the three that followed it, because no one cared if he caught the killer or not. One of the first words of arurim slang he’d learned was okozou, which meant “no real people involved”. It was a phrase used to describe crimes among yaskedasi, prathmuni, or the poor of the slum called Hodenekes. It meant no one really expected Dema to work at finding the killer. He’d expected to be summoned before his watch station captain to explain why he’d made no progress weeks ago, until he realized the captain simply did not care.

A mounted arurim waited in front of the Elya Street station with a horse for Dema.

Groggily he mounted up, thinking wearily that it was a good thing he wore his tightly curled black hair cut very short. It was probably the only thing about him that was presentable. He scrubbed at his teeth with a finger which he wiped on the edge of the saddle blanket. “You’re sure you want me?” he asked the messenger.

The woman looked as if she’d spent all night on duty and should have been home herself. She glared at him. “You’re arurim dhaskoi Demakos Nomasdina, in charge of the investigation of four murdered yaskedasi, are you not? This is the Elya Street arurimat, and not my house, where I should be fixing breakfast for my children right now.”

“Sorry,” Dema replied, feeling guilty, even though he hadn’t been the one to assign the arurim to find him.

The sergeant emerged from the station with a flask in each hand, one for the arurim and one for Dema. They held smoking hot guardroom tea, guaranteed to take the finish off wood and to wake the dead. “You’re a lifesaver,” the woman told the sergeant. “I may live to go home after all.”

“They owe you the time you’ve spent after your shift getting our greenie, here,”

replied the sergeant with a nod to Dema. “Make sure they give it to you.”

“I will,” the arurim replied.

“And try not to dent the dhaskoi” added the sergeant. “He’s a good enough sort, for all he belongs to the First Class.”

Dema wasn’t sure which would bother him more if he were awake, the slight to his class or the fact that even after eight months of service they still thought he couldn’t take care of himself. It was too much to think about now. He thanked the sergeant for the tea instead and followed his arurim guide down the street.

Drinking hot tea at a trot was a thankless effort, but Dema made it anyway, catching the spilled drops on an end of the blue stole that marked him as a mage. As he drank and dodged people in the streets, he reflected on how badly he’d been cheated. He had chosen the arurim as his area of advancement because it seemed far less regulated than the army or navy, and infinitely less boring than the treasury or law courts. Few people would be able to order him about among the arurimi, while every person with one more stripe or dot or sword on his sleeve would make military life into something very much like work. Even when his arurim superiors gave him night duty, Dema was pleased. The Elya Street station was just four blocks from Khapik. If things were dull at the station, a short walk led him to the best food, drink and entertainment in Tharios, all neatly tucked inside the walls of the pleasure district.