Shatterglass (31 page)

“Glaki,” whispered the girl. “Glakisa Irakory.”

“She’s an orphan,” Tris murmured. “And she’s staying with me, Niko.” She met Niko’s glance with steady eyes this time.

“We will discuss the details later,” Niko replied. He smiled at the child. “It is very nice to meet you, Glaki Irakory.”

He sees her magic, Keth realized. What doesn’t he see?

Niko left soon after, once Keth and Tris described the things they had done since Tris left Jumshida’s house for Khapik. When he stood to go, he looked as weary as Keth felt. “I’ve started to scry for this Ghost,” he said, rubbing one temple. “It’s more useful than listening to my fellow mages blather, which doesn’t mean a great deal.”

“Have you seen him?” asked Keth. It would smart if someone else caught the Ghost after so much work, but not as much as it would hurt if he killed another yaskedasu.

“What does he look like?”

Tris went over to help Niko adjust his overrobe to a perfect drape while Niko smiled wryly. “I’m sure I have seen him somewhere, in the thousands of futures that have appeared to me since I began to look,” he said. “I am sure I have seen him imprisoned, killed, making a successful escape, murdering others… All I need to do is sift through all of the futures I’ve seen, in addition to all the futures that result from the next thing you do, or Dema does, or the Ghost does. I told you it was only a little more useful than listening to my peers argue about the foreword to our text.“

Tris followed him out as Keth collapsed on to the bed.

“What was he talking about?” Glaki asked.

“About the idea that mages are powerful being a great big joke,” Keth replied. “Is that a new doll? Let me see it.”

Tris went out after Glaki was asleep, leaving the child under Keth’s drowsy eye. She found a very different Khapik. Arurim were everywhere. There were new faces among the yaskedasi, strong, stern women who tumbled or did exhibitions of hand-to-hand combat with no-nonsense faces and without any trace of the alluring smiles one usually found in Khapik.

“I suppose they think nobody can tell the difference,” Tris heard a yaskedasoi tell one of the musicians who lived at Ferouze’s.

He replied, “I’m surprised they remembered to take the red tunic off.”

Tris shook her head. She would have to tell Dema his volunteers had to work harder at pretending to be true yaskedasi. If these people knew the difference, chances were that the Ghost would know, too.

Other things were different with the newcomers’ arrival. Laughter and music sounded forced. Yaskedasi and shopkeepers gathered on corners, talking softly, their eyes darting everywhere.

Of course, Tris thought. With all these disguised arurimi under their noses, they can’t ignore the fact that the Ghost exists. Now they have to face it. They can’t tell themselves pretty lies.

Seated for a while by the Cascade Fountains, Tris eavesdropped on a group of girl singers. Tris could see they were frightened, watching their surroundings and jumping at unexpected noises.

“I don’t understand,” one of them told the others, her mouth trembling. “Why does the Ghost do this? What have yaskedasi done to him?”

“Nobody cares when we disappear,” an older girl replied. “If the dead weren’t showing up outside Khapik, do you think they’d have the arurimi out now?”

“That can’t be all of it,” retorted the girl who’d first spoken. “Look how many he’s killed. If it was people nobody cares about, he’d pick prathtnuni, or those who live in Hodenekes.”

A prathmun who swept the sidewalk glared at the yaskedasu. Tris wanted to tell him that the singer hadn’t meant it the way it came out, but she knew the girl had indeed spoken the truth as she believed it to be.

Tris walked on, still thinking about the conversation. They would have to catch the Ghost to learn what truly drove him. After so many deaths, she had come to think it wasn’t the simple matter of a grudge against the yaskedasi. He went to considerable trouble and risk to rub Tharian noses in death’s reality. He must know that when he despoiled public spots the city would be forced to hold long, expensive rituals before its people could use those places again. He even turned those same Tharian beliefs about death to his benefit to cover his tracks from the arurim.

The Ghost staged his show of hate not for just one group, or two, but all of Tharios: for its people, its lifestyle, its religion, its customs, its history. Tris couldn’t imagine a hate so thorough as that of the Ghost for Tharios. Once she reached the headache point of a case of hate, she simply walked away. She had a feeling the Ghost enjoyed hate headaches.

Something else occurred to her as she trekked the back alleys of Khapik. Thwarted of his display at Heskalifos, the Ghost had killed the very next day - and he hadn’t been able to display that victim, either. “He’ll kill again tomorrow,” Tris told Chime. “He’s shown he can’t stop himself.”

And who was to stop him? He knew the city so well he’d turned its laws and customs against it, coming and going as if he were invisible. How could anyone arrest a ghost?

Though she hadn’t slept after her return to Ferouze’s, the strength of the tides kept Tris awake and alert the next day. When her strength ran out in a few days, she would have to accept the consequences and not try to revive it again. There was only so much of the ocean’s strength a human body could stand before the blood turned to salt water and the muscles to braids of kelp.

At Touchstone that morning, Glaki joined Tris and Keth at meditation. As before, she ended up napping. Keth, his power at full strength again, crafted bowls, small globes and vases for Antonou, to make up for the materials he used for his magical work.

As Keth blew glass Tris returned to her scrying. She let the flood of colours, textures and half-recognized shapes wash over her, her mind snagging on images of a temple cornice, a finch in a tree, a ball rolling across an empty courtyard and angry people in motion against the white marble splendour of Assembly Square.

It’s about time they protested, she thought when she came out of her trance. Then she realized that a public outcry might drive the Keepers to remove Dema from the investigation, disgracing him and his clan. He would be made to pay because, as he’d said at the beginning, he was green and expendable.

“No, they won’t get rid of him yet,” Antonou said over lunch. Keth’s relative knew much of the city’s gossip. “Nomasdina clan pays for the arurimi to patrol Khapik for the Ghost.” He made Glaki’s yaskedasu doll jump, surprising giggles from the girl.

“The Assembly may be snivelling cowards when it comes to popular opinion,”

Antonou went on, “but they’re also cheap. Getting rid of young Nomasdina means they must come up with a plan and pay for it from the Treasury. If this goes on another week, I’m not certain, but for now your friend is safe.”

“How reassuring,” drawled Keth.

“That’s Tharios,” Antonou replied. “Reassuring in its miserliness. Now, I happen to know a bunch of grapes I believe a certain girl would like very much. Who will carry them back from my house for Keth and Tris to have a share?”

“Me, me!” Glaki cried, jumping to her feet.

Tris watched the girl and the old man walk back to his residence. “Your cousin’s a good man,” she remarked thoughtfully, seeing a swarm of rainbow sparks part around him as the air flowed around his body.

Keth looked at her, surprised. “He gave me a berth, didn’t he? And he was a curst good sport about me destroying the cullet. Plenty of masters would have thrown me out on my ear.”

“And you’re repaying him with those globes,” Tris said. “It all works out.”

“I’d like to work the Ghost out,” Keth muttered. “Before he orphans another child.”

While Glaki napped and Tris read in the shade to escape the hottest part of the day, Keth went to visit other glassmakers. He found enough journeymen at work while their masters rested to buy three crates of cullet glass to replace what he had destroyed. As he filled the new barrel that Antonou had provided, he felt the first twinges of a globe coming on. The feeling was distant, not the roaring pressure it would be soon. When he finished with the barrel, he doused himself with a bucket of well water to cool off and hunkered down by Tris.

“Taking the lightning back yesterday helped some, but I didn’t pay for more cullet just to explode it again,” he announced when the girl put down her book. “What can I do, O wise mistress of all knowledge?”

She made a face at him. “If I ”were such a mistress, I’d have this killer in a lightning cage,“ she informed Keth. She looked up. Grey clouds rolled over the sky above, a promise of more rain now that Tris had put an end to the blockage overseas. The normal summer storms flowed over Tharios as they should. ”I think I can, um, redistribute your lightning,“ she said, grey eyes as distant as the clouds overhead.

Keth looked up. “ There?” he asked, startled.

“Why not?” she wanted to know. “It’s already brewing some of its own. A little more won’t hurt.”

“Most girls your age worry about husbands, not the redistribution of lightning,” he pointed out, getting to his feet.

She grinned up at him, showing teeth. “Most girls aren’t me,” she reminded him.

And thank Vrohain for that, he thought, paying tribute to the Namornese god of justice. I hope I never meet those sisters of hers, or that brother, he told himself as he checked the crucible in the furnace. I’d probably have nightmares for weeks.

That afternoon he blew globe after globe to hurry along the one he wanted, but he might as well have blown smoke. Antonou was pleased to have more trinkets to sell, but Keth thought he would put his own head through the wall in frustration. Tris helped as she did that first time, shaping the glass with heat drawn from the heart of the earth, but even that produced no visions of death.

Taking a break, Keth worked on an idea he’d had. He blew a handful of tiny glass bubbles as fragile as a butterfly’s wing, almost lighter than air. That alone was enough to make him glow with pride: since he’d begun to master his power, his old skill and control were slowly returning.

He didn’t stop there. With Tris to advise him, he infused each bubble with a dab of his lightning-laced magic. They sprang to life like a swarm of fireflies, darting around the workshop, then the courtyard, as Glaki and Little Bear chased them.

“Signal flares,” Keth told Tris as he tucked them very gently into his belt-purse. “Or tracking aids, I’m not sure which.”

She smiled at him proudly. “Very good. You’re learning the most important thing an ambient mage can learn. Your power shapes itself to your need, if you put some thought into it.”

Keth’s need to create a globe with a new image of a murder blossomed at last, shortly before they would have stopped for the day. Keth ‘worked the glass with care. When it was done, he and Tris went outside. There he drew the lightning out of the globe, imagining his hand as a pair of tongs and the lightning itself as glass that he pulled into a new shape. Once he worked part of the lightning free of the globe, he sent it streaming to Tris. She guided it up into the sky, where it slithered into thunderheads that had already begun to voice the odd rumble or two.

A white mist remained inside the globe, hiding whatever image was there. Keth gritted his teeth in frustration, so hard that he heard them creak, and closed down the workshop for the day. He, Glaki, Tris, Chime and the dog were on their way to Elya Street when Glaki pointed to the globe in his hands. It was clearing.

The sky opened up. Instantly Tris did something. The rain that drenched their surroundings slid around them. Under that invisible umbrella they walked up to the steps of the Elya Street arurimat, where a soaked Dema waited for them. Tris instantly spread her rain protection to include the arurim dhaskoi. When she was close enough that she could speak quietly and be heard, she told him what she’d heard the yaskedasi say the night before about the disguised arurim.

“Ouch,” Dema said, glancing at Keth’s globe. “I never realized…”

“Tell your people not to be so grim,” advised Tris. “Real yaskedasi smile and laugh all the time, even if they don’t want to. They know they have to be pleasing and pleasant for the customers, and never show what they really think.”

Keth raised his eyebrows. “You’ve learned a lot,” he pointed out as he passed the globe to Dema.

Tris shrugged. “Are you going to try to hunt the Ghost again tonight?”

Keth hung his head. “I know I’ll probably go all weak in the knees and have to come home before we even get a whiff of him, but I have to try,“ he confessed. ”I hate sitting about doing nothing while he’s out there.“

From the way Tris looked at him, he suspected that she felt much the same way.

“Well, I can’t keep Glaki out until all hours,” she replied, confirming his suspicion.

“We’ll see you later.”

Dema ushered Keth and his globe into the arurimat. The outer chamber was crammed with arurimi, both those in standard uniform and the ones disguised as yaskedasi.

They gathered around eagerly as Keth and Dema inspected the globe. It showed a Khapik stream bank. A lone yaskedasu took shelter from the rain under a huge willow there. Keth turned the globe, but no matter how they shifted it, no one could see behind the tree or into the shadows behind a shrine in the background. All they could tell was that it was one of many dedicated to the gods of entertainment.

“We stick to the streams, then,” Dema ordered. “You women, keep your eyes open and your whistles handy. If you even suspect something, don’t play the hero, whistle for your team. I don’t want to lose any people to this human malipi, you understand?

My command post will be at the Sign of the Winking Eye on Fortunate Street.” He looked at each of them. “Any questions?”

“Oh,” Keth said, remembering his day’s work. He carefully extracted one of the bubble globes from his purse and called to the fire and lightning in it. The bubble threw off a burst of darting colours. “If you see one of these, it means we know something,“ he told them. ”Put your hand up to stop it, then follow it back to us.“

Dema took the bubble. Its lights gleamed through his long brown ringers. “I’ll be switched,” he murmured. “Oh, I like these.” He handed it back to Keth. “Could you make more?”