Shatterglass (30 page)

“No. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why it won’t work.” Keth grimaced, then admitted, “I’m scared, a bit.”

Tris chewed on her lower lip, calculating. “It could be tricky. One moment.“ She went to the cullet barrel with its mix of broken and discarded glass. She saw plenty of sparks from Keth’s magic in there, from the pieces they’d thrown in. Perhaps her next move ought to be a container for magicked glass, to keep the power from spreading, or perhaps Keth could learn to remove the power and make it harmless. She put those thoughts in the back of her mind to brew, and threw the protective barrier she had once used to guard Keth around the barrel. With it in place, she raised her hands and lowered them, opening the protections on the top of the barrel, until it was sheathed from rim to ground in white fire.

“Now try,” she advised Keth, shooing Glaki and Little Bear into a far corner of the shop. “If you can’t bear it, throw it into the cullet.” She stood beside the barrel, her hands loose at her sides.

“But I should be able to take it back, like you do when you take the circles down,” he protested. “I can feel you reclaim the magic that was in them.”

“That’s magic. This —” she pointed to the globe — “is lightning, even if it’s sheathed in magic to keep it from burning everything in sight. Once you free lightning, I’m not sure you can reclaim it.”

“It’s my lightning. I can reclaim it,” he replied stubbornly.

“Lightning doesn’t belong to anyone,” she said, but he ignored her. Tris sighed. He might be right; if he wasn’t, he’d soon realize his mistake.

Keth cradled the globe in both hands. Tris watched as his power flowed out around the globe to envelop it. First he peeled away the surface lightnings, pulling them back into himself. Then he reached deeper, through the glass. Slowly he drew some of the inner lightning out, pulling it back into his chest.

She could see it hurt him. His face went red; sweat popped out all over his upper body, He grimaced and continued to draw on the lightning, until he was gasping.

“Tris —” he began to say. She pointed at the cullet barrel. He turned towards it and opened his mouth.

Lightning roared from his throat and slammed into the junk glass. The moment the last of it came out of Keth, Tris enclosed the barrel in a globe of power.

She backed away, feeling his power batter her protections. For a moment nothing happened. Suddenly the barrel quivered, shook and exploded with a roar, hurling charcoal and glass into the magical barrier. Smoke filled it as if her power was glass, whirling and twisting inside.

“Beautiful,” whispered Glaki.

“Stupid,” said Keth with chagrin.

“You needed to find out,” Tris told him, hands on hips as she watched the smoke and ash settle. “Now you know.”

“I have to pay Antonou for the cullet, and replace it,” Keth remarked, glum. “We need it to make other glass. But it should have worked, curse it!”

Tris shrugged. “It’s lightning. It’s no more amenable to ‘should haves’ than you are.”

“Ouch,” Keth said, wincing. He looked at the globe in his hands. The surface was clear, but he’d drawn hardly any lightning from inside it. He sighed and sank on to a bench. “So we wait,” he said, resigned. “I —” He stood, swaying.

“I’ll get our midday,” said Tris, seeing the magic under his skin gutter. It was funny how academic mages were never exhausted by their first workings, she thought, but ambient mages were. “Why don’t you see if Antonou has a crate and shovel, so we can clear out the mess when it settles.”

Keth flapped his hand at her in gloomy resignation and walked out of the shop, smack into the barrier around the outside. “Just what I needed,” he moaned as she retrieved its magic. “A knock on the head.”

“Well, it’s not like it hurt anything important, is it?” Tris asked tartly.

Keth turned, expecting to see that disgusted expression on her face. Instead she grinned at him. “Why aren’t you one of those teachers who believes in coddling students?” he demanded.

“I couldn’t,” she said, straight-faced. “It would be bad for your character.”

He fled, before she could think of another joke to make at his expense.

The globe began to clear as their afternoon’s work, getting rid of the mess of molten glass and charcoal, came to an end. They were packing to leave Touchstone for the day when Dema arrived. Under the shade of the courtyard trees he told them .of the fruitless search the night before, then took charge of the globe.

Keth had recovered after his midday, enough to help clean up and to blow the small globes that Antonou liked to sell. Tris wasn’t sure that he ought to go with Dema after the previous night’s collapse, but Keth didn’t give her the chance to debate it. He simply followed Dema out into the street.

With Keth gone, Tris turned to Glaki. “Have you ever been up on the wall?” she asked. “The wall around the city?”

“No,” replied the girl. She had begged a scrap of cloth from Antonou’s wife and fashioned it into a sling like the one Tris used to carry Chime. Into it she had tucked her dolls. Little Bear carried his ball. All afternoon he and Glaki had played with it, until it was covered with dirt and dog drool.

“Would you like to climb the wall, Glaki?” Tris wanted to know. “I want to try something. I’m always better at new things when I’m up somewhere high.”

“Let’s go,” the four-year-old said eagerly, grabbing Tris’s hand. She towed the older girl down to the city’s gate.

As Tris had expected, Tharios’s wall was a favourite with visitors: the guards waved them straight to the stair. When they reached the top, they found a broad walkway, ten metres above the ground. From there they could see the roads that led around the city, the river bridges, and the road that led south-east to the seaport of Piraki. To their left, a, tumble of huts and hovels clung to the rocky hillside between Tharios and the Kurchal River. A number of huge pipes dotted the same rocky ground, pipes that emitted streams of brown, clotted water that flowed into the river: the city’s sewer outlets. Swarming over the hillside, hanging out washing, minding goats and chickens, talking, grinding grain, playing and cooking, were prathmuni, recognizable even from this height by their clothes and haircuts. Tris felt cold, seeing their dwelling place. She knew the mages at Heskalifos had to be aware of the connection between sewage and disease, yet they allowed people to live where the night soil of Tharios was dumped. How many prathmuni children lived even to Glaki’s age, let alone her own? Tris wondered. How many old prathmuni were there?

“Tris, please don’t,” whispered Glaki, tugging Tris by the sleeve. “Please don’t.”

She glanced at the little girl. “Don’t what?” she asked, her voice clipped.

Glaki actually backed up a step. She still found the courage to say, “Please don’t thunder inside. It’s scary.”

Remorse flooded Tris at the fear in Glaki’s eyes. She knelt and held her arms out.

“It’s not about you, Glaki,” she said, deliberately gentling her voice. “You could never make me angry.”

Glaki clung to her, even with a doll in each hand. Tris soothed her until she was sure the little girl was calm. This too was something she knew all too well. The anger of adults almost always had meant packing her bags and moving on to a new home. An adult in a temper meant new relatives with new rules and new places where she was not welcome.

When Glaki was calm, Tris sat her on a bench with Little Bear and Chime, and gave the child her spectacles to hold. Closing her eyes, she entered the trance she needed to scry the winds. When she opened her eyes, colours and half-images assaulted her, flashing by so quickly she couldn’t track them. Time after time she tried to seize an image and hold it, but by the time she’d picked one, it was gone. Grimly she persisted until her eyes began to water and ache.

Once more, she thought, biting her lower lip. One, just one… She imagined hooks magically tethered to her eyes, and sank them into a flash of crimson. Then she fought to keep her eyes in one position. They wanted to flick aside to capture another of the images that raced by like a river in flood. She widened her eyelids and refused to let them jitter, staring instead at what she had caught. Slowly the image cleared as the fight to keep her eyes steady got harder.

Suddenly she realized what she saw. Excitement surged through her, cutting the vision free of her grip, but Tris didn’t care. Her eyes began to dance again as eyestrain tears streamed down her cheeks.

She had seen something real.

“A ship, Glaki!” she said, reclaiming her spectacles. “I saw a ship on the wind! A ship with a crimson sail and a sun emblem on it!”

“Course you did,” the little girl replied, for all the world as if she were Tris herself.

“There’s all kinds of ships down in Piraki harbour.”

It took some time for Tris’s vision to clear. When she could actually see, she asked Glaki, “Show me the ships?”

The girl pointed. Far below, through a gap in the rocky hills between Tharios and Piraki, Tris saw the ant-like shapes of vessels anchored in the harbour. Above one was a dot of red: the red-sailed ship Tris had seen life-size on the wind.

“Supper now?” Glaki pleaded, tugging her skirt.

Tris hugged the child to her side. “Definitely supper.” She looked around for Chime and saw the glass dragon on the wall a few metres away, inspecting the guards and tourists as they inspected her. “Chime, come,” Tris called. The dragon took flight and returned to her, while the tourists clapped. “Show-off,” Tris murmured as Chime wrapped herself around Tris’s neck.

“But she’s beautiful,” protested Glaki. “She should show off.”

Tris smiled. “Spoken like a yaskedasus daughter,” she said. “Come on. Maybe Keth caught the Ghost.” Her pride would suffer if he did, but her pride wasn’t important.

Sending that murderer to a place where he could kill no more was.

Two hours after he left the arurimat, Keth returned to Ferouze’s. To his considerable surprise, Dema was there with Tris and Glaki. The older man stared gloomily into a cup of water. “You can hear it from me,“ he told Keth. ”We found her in a rubbish bin, in Perfume Court. We tracked him to the temple of the All-Seeing, where it looks like he vanished into thin air. Of course, the place is hip-deep in cleansing spells, enough so that they stick to you when you come out of it. He’s gone, and we lost him.“ He got to his feet. ”Sorry, Keth. You did all that work, and we failed you.“ He walked out without even saying goodbye.

Keth sat down hard. “All I did was stop for supper on the way,” he complained. “And a bath. And this Ghost killed and escaped. Maybe he is a ghost. Maybe we need an exorcist, not mages.”

Tris shook her head. “He’s just a man who knows Tharios from top to bottom,” she told Keth. “Look at it this way — tonight your globe brought the arurimi down on him before he could even smuggle his prey out of Khapik. You get closer every day.”

Keth smiled crookedly at her. “I won’t be happy until he’s in chains, and neither will you.” He looked at Glaki. “So what did you have for supper?”

They had just finished the dish washing when Tris straightened, staring at the door.

“What is he doing here?” she asked. Before Keth could inquire into “his” identity, Tris had run out of the room. Little Bear galloped at her side, barking furiously as his tail wagged hard enough to create a breeze.

By the time Keth could reach the door, Niklaren Goldeye had stepped on to the second-floor gallery. “No, Bear, you know better,” he informed the dog as Little Bear danced around him. “Just one pawprint on my clothes and I will make myself a Little Bear rug.”

Keth’s eyes bulged as he took in Niko’s appearance. Even for Khapik the mage dressed well: tonight he wore a crimson sleeveless overrobe with a gold thread subtly worked into the weave, loose black trousers, and a cream-coloured shirt. His long hair was combed back and secured with a red-gold tie.

Tris looked entirely unimpressed by her teacher’s splendour. She crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “Those aren’t Khapik clothes,” she informed Niko tartly.

“Those are Balance Hill clothes.”

“Actually, they’re Phakomathen clothes,” Niko told her, allowing Chime to light on his outstretched arm. “You are more beautiful than ever,” he told the dragon. To Tris he said, “You look dreadful.”

“I don’t feel dreadful,” she retorted. “I know what I’m doing, Niko. I don’t need a nursemaid.”

He raised his black brows at her. “And did it ever occur to you that I might need reassurance that you are well and sane?”

To Keth’s astonishment, Tris turned beet-red. Looking at the boards under her feet, she mumbled something that sounded like an apology. Keth stared at Niko in awe. In one sentence he had transformed Tris from a short, plump, sharp-nosed terror into a fourteen-year-old girl. It occurred to Keth for the first time that perhaps magic wasn’t simply a matter of fires, lightning and power in the air, if spoken words could also create such a transformation.

Niko turned his dark eyes, with their heavy frame of lashes, on Keth next. Keth managed to meet them for a moment, before he too gave way to the urge to inspect the floor. Suddenly he remembered that Niko’s magic revolved around sight, and that if he saw magic, he would know the state of Keth’s power. “She keeps telling me not to overdo,” he said hurriedly, thinking Niko might feel Tris was careless in her teaching. “And we try, really, we try so I don’t go too far, but I need to stop the Ghost.”

“Any kind of weather magic is hard to regulate,” Niko said mildly. “Academic mages have trouble building their strength up, because it all comes from within them.

Ambient mages suffer the opposite problem, struggling to manage a great deal of power that is drawn to them without their knowledge. Lightning, of course, only increases the levels of power that run through you.”

“Of course,” whispered Keth sheepishly. He felt like an apprentice who hadn’t seen the obvious.

When Niko remained quiet, Keth looked at him, and saw that the older man stood still, his hand out. Keth looked to see who Niko was trying to lure to him, and saw that Glaki was peering around the door. Slowly she inched forward as Niko’s hand remained where it was, steady in the air. At last Glaki put her fingers in his. “Good evening, young one,“ Niko said quietly. ”What is your name?“