Shatterglass

Shatterglass - By Tamora Pierce


Tharios, capital of the city-state of Tharios On the Ithocot Sea

The short, plump redhead walked out of the house that belonged to her hostess and looked around, her air that of someone about to embark on a grand adventure. She shook out her pale blue cotton dress and petticoats, then wrapped a collection of breezes around her chubby person as someone else might drape the folds of a shawl before she went to market. The breezes came obediently to her call, having become so much a part of her in the girl’s travels that they no longer rebelled. They spun around her black cotton stockings and sensible leather shoes, raced along the folds of skirt and petticoats, slid along the girl’s arms and over her sunburned, long-nosed face. They swept over the spectacles that shielded intense grey eyes framed by long, gold lashes, and twined themselves over and along her head. They followed the paths of her double handful of copper braids, all pinned neatly to her scalp in a series of rings that left no end visible. Only two long, thin braids were allowed to hang free. They framed either side of her stubborn face.

With her breezes placed to her satisfaction, guardians against the intense southern heat, the girl whistled. The big, shaggy white dog that was busily marking the corners of the house whuffed at her.

“Come on, Little Bear,” ordered Trisana Chandler, known to her friends as Tris. “It’s not really your house anyway.”

The dog fell in step beside the girl, tongue lolling in cheerful good humour. His white curls, recently washed, bounced with his trot; his long, plumed tail was a proud banner. He was a big animal, his head on a level with Tris’s breastbone. Despite his size, he wore the air of an easy-to-please puppy as effortlessly as the girl wore her breezes.

Tris strode down the flagstone path and out through the university gates without so much as a backward glance at the glory of white stucco and marble that crowned the hill above the house. She thought that the university, called Heskalifos, was fine, in its own right, and its high point — the soaring tower known as Phakomathen — was pretty, but there were perfectly good universities in the north. She was on her way to see the true glory of Tharios, its glassmakers. Let her teacher Niko join their hostess Jumshida and many other learned mages and apprentices in their long-winded, long-lasting presentations on the nature of any and all vision magics. Tris, on the other hand, was interested in the kind of visual magic wrought by someone who held a blowpipe that bore molten glass on its end.

At one of the many side entrances to the grounds of Heskalifos, Tris halted and scowled. Had Jumshida said to turn left or go straight once she was outside the university enclosure?

A girl her own age stood nearby at a loading dock, emptying the contents of a rubbish barrel into the back of a cart. The muscles of her arms stood out like steel cables. Though she was clearly female, she wore her hair cut off at one length at ear level, and the knee-length tunic worn by Tharian men. She was also extremely dirty.

“Excuse me,” Tris called to her. “Do you know the way to Achaya Square?”

The girl picked up the second barrel in a row of them and dumped its contents into her cart.

Tris cleared her throat and raised her voice. “I said, can you tell me the way to Achaya Square?”

The girl flicked her eyes toward Tris, then away. She dumped her empty barrel next to the others, and picked up a full one.

Well, thought Tris. She can hear me; she’s just being rude. She stalked over to the cart. “Don’t you people believe in courtesy to visitors?” she demanded crossly. “Or are all you Tharians so convinced that the world began here that you can’t be bothered to be polite?”

Though the barrel she had taken to the cart was still half full, the girl set it down and fixed her gaze on Tris’s toes. “You shenosi,” she said quietly, using the Tharian word for foreigners. “Don’t they have guidebooks where you come from?”

Tris’s scowl deepened. She was not particularly a patient girl. “I asked a simple question. And you can look at me if you’re going to be snippy.”

“Oh, it’s a simple enough question,” replied the girl, still soft-voiced, her eyes still fixed on Tris’s no-nonsense shoes. “As simple as the way is if you just follow that long beak of yours. And I’ll give you some information for nothing, since you’re obviously too ignorant to live. You don’t talk to prathmun, and prathmun don’t talk to you. Prathmun don’t exist.”

“What are prathmun?,” demanded Tris. She chose not to take offence at the remark about her nose. It was not her best feature and never had been.

“I am a prathmun,” retorted the girl. “My mother, my sisters and my brothers are prathmun. We’re untouchable, degraded, invisible. Am I getting through that thick northern skull yet?”

“Why?” asked Tris, curious now. This was far more interesting than a simple answer to her question. “Why should prathmun be those things?”

The girl sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands, smearing more dirt into it. “We handle the bodies of the dead,” she told Tris wearily. “We skin and tan animal hides. We make shoes. We take out the night soil. But mostly, we handle the dead, which means we defile whatever we touch. If you don’t move along and a giladha — ”

“What?” asked Tris.

“One of the visible people,” replied the girl. “If they see you talking to me, they’ll demand you get yourself ritually cleansed before you go anywhere or do anything. Now will you go away?” demanded the prathmun, impatient. “You’ll get cleansed, shenos, but I’ll be whipped.”

She said it so flatly that Tris believed her. She walked two steps away, then asked without turning around, “What’s shenos? And how do you tell who’s a prathmuri?,”

“A foreigner is shenos,” retorted the prathmun, dumping the rest of her rubbish barrel in the cart. “And we all have the same haircut and the same kind of clothes, and straw sandals. Now go.”

Tris followed the road that lay straight before her, the direction the prathmun had indicated with such flattery. “Niko said I’d find some of the customs here barbaric,” she informed Little Bear when she was out of earshot of the prathmun. “I’ll bet you a chop for supper this is one of the ones he meant. Whoever heard of people not being just because they deal with the dead?”

Once she reached Achaya Square, Tris found the Street of Glass easily enough. Reading about Tharios on the way here, she had formulated a plan of exploration with her usual care to detail. She would start at the foot of the street where most of the city’s glassmakers kept their shops, beginning with the smaller, humbler establishments near the Piraki Gate, and work her way back to Achaya Square until her feet hurt. She meant to spend a number of days at the shops that caught her interest, but first she wanted an overview. Tris was the kind of girl who appreciated a solid plan of action, perhaps because often her life, and her magic, was in too much of an uproar to be organized.

As she walked, she looked on the sights and people of Tharios with interest. Buildings here were of two kinds, stucco roofed with tiles — like those in her home on the Pebbled Sea — or public buildings built of white marble, fronted with graceful colours and flat-roofed, with corners and column heads cut into graceful lines. The Street of Glass and Achaya Square fountains were marble or a pretty pink granite. Statues carved from marble and painted to look life-like stood on either side of the paved stones of the road. It was all very lavish and expensive. Tris might not have approved, but her view of people who spent so much on decoration was leavened when closer inspection showed her soft edges on statues and public buildings, and fountain carvings worn almost unrecognizable by long years of weather. Tharios was an old city, and its treasures were built to last.

The Tharians themselves were a feast for her eyes. The natives ranged in skin colour from pale brown to black, and while their hair was usually black or brown, many women used henna to redden it. Men cropped their hair very short or even shaved their heads altogether. Ladies bundled their hair into masses of curls that tilted their heads to the appropriate, sophisticated, Tharian angle. The prathmun, male and female, sported the same rough, one-length cut Tris had seen on the girl she spoke to. All prathmun wore a ragged, dirty version of the knee-length tunic worn by Tharite men. Tharian women dressed in an ankle-length, drape-sleeved version called a kyten. In summer these garments were cotton, linen, or silk, with sashes or ribbon belts twined around waists and hips. On top of the tunic or kyten upper-class Tharians also wore stoles of many colours, each of which indicated the wearer’s profession. She knew that mages here wore blue stoles, shopkeepers green, and priests of the All-Seeing God red. Beyond that she was lost. No matter what colour the stole, it was usually made of the lightest cotton, or even silk, money could buy. The Tharians looked cool and comfortable to Tris.

Since the prathmun girl had called her attention to shoes, Tris noted that better-dressed Tharian men and women generally wore leather sandals that laced up to the knee. Many of the poorer residents went barefoot. This wasn’t as risky as it might be anywhere else: Tris saw prathmun collecting trash and cleaning the street on nearly every block.

Though Little Bear was content to stay with his mistress, Tris’s breezes were not. They roamed freely around her, tugging at curls, tunics, kytens and stoles, exploring people’s faces, then returning to Tris like excited children gone for a walk with a favourite aunt. They brought her scraps of conversations about trade rates, fashions, family quarrels and political discussions from all around her, pouring those scraps into her ears. She half-listened, always interested in local gossip.

Some conversations mentioned her. A few of the Tharians she passed had discovered her way to stay cool. Perhaps her breezes wouldn’t have been noticed if the air were not perfectly still. The only winds outside Tris’s circle of influence were those made by hand-held fans and those roused by pigeons in flight from uncaring feet.

Tris sighed, and drew the breezes closer to her. People continued to stare as her dress and petticoats stirred in different directions. She ignored them. It was too hot to give up her fresh air so a number of stuck-up southerners weren’t made nervous. If they were as clever as they claimed, they’d find ways to hold breezes of their own, Tris told herself.

She had a number of breezes tied up in knots of thread back at the house. Perhaps she could peddle some at the market, and make a bit of extra money. There were two more moons of summer to go, and the problem with city walls was that they tended to keep out the wind. She ought to be able to sell a knot, or two, or three, for pocket money. She would ask Jumshida how to go about it.

On she walked, planning and observing. She passed between shops filled with wonders: vases, bowls, platters, glass animals in a multitude of colours and sizes. In the shops on the Achaya Square end of the Street of Glass, windows were made of small panes of glass, treasures in and of themselves, which gave a watery, rippling shape to the beautiful objects behind them.

Mingled with the higher-priced glass was glass that had been spelled in some way. Magical charms and letters in the sides and rims of pieces, suncatchers magicked to catch more than just sun, rounds of glass imbued with magic to capture and hold an image in them, all glinted silver in Tris’s vision, showing her the work of the glass mages of Tharios. It was for this reason that she chose to start among the poorer shops, those more likely to sell plain glass and few charms. Tris knew she would spend most of her time later among the glass mages, comparing notes and learning how they practised their craft.

Closer to Labrykas Square the shops had ordinary, shuttered windows, with the wares arranged on shelves to tempt passers-by. Tris lingered at one and another, admiring the curve of a bowl or the blue-green hue of a cosmetics bottle, but she always made herself walk on after a moment. She was determined to start at the very bottom of the glassmakers’ pecking order.

As Tris approached Labrykas Square, the first public square beyond the Piraki Gate, her breezes carried a conversation to her; “—a disgrace!” someone cried. “One of the riff-raff, murdered and left in the Labrykas Square fountain like, like so much rubbish!”

“It will take a powerful cleansing to purify the fountain again,” a woman replied soberly. “Surely the All-Seeing God will take offence against the district for the defilement — ”

“The district? I think not!” retorted the first speaker. “It’s obviously the work of some shenos who respects nothing and no one. The All-Seeing knows that no Tharian would commit so foul an act.”

“The Keepers of the Public Good will put a stop to it,” the woman said with the firmness of complete belief. “They have — ”

The breeze had not caught the rest of the discussion. Tris shook her head as she walked on. Someone is murdered, and all these people care about is the purity of Assembly Square? she thought, baffled. That’s pretty heartless.

She also wasn’t inclined to believe these Keepers would be able to do much about the killing. How effective could they be? They were elected to serve a three-year term each by the Assembly, a body of the oldest citizens and the wealthiest landholders. They would not have the experience or cunning of a proper ruler who’d been raised for the position, like Duke Vedris of Emelan, Capchen’s king and queen, or Empress Berenene of Namorn. She was amazed that the Tharians got anything done, if their entire political system was run by a mob. She had seen at home how much a governing council could quibble, fuss, debate, argue and fight, with nothing to show for it — and Winding Circle’s governing council was only twenty people. She’d heard there were over three hundred in the Assembly.

“It’s different when one man or woman is responsible for a country,” she told Little Bear as they passed through Labrykas Square. The fountain, which she had seen on her arrival in the city, was shrouded in a kind of white, roofless tent. “They have to jump on this kind of nonsense right away, or everyone knows they’re to blame. Here, all the rulers have to do is point to the other Keeper, or someone from the Assembly, and say they’re supposed to be in charge of that.” Disgusted, Tris shook her head and thrust all such dissatisfactions from her mind. She was here to learn, not to let the strange ways in which other people governed themselves get on her nerves.

At last she reached the part of the Street of Glass that she meant to explore first, the part that stretched between Labrykas Square and the pleasure district known as Khapik. She took a moment to look around using her magical vision. One thing she would say in favour of the Tharians, they looked after the magic that was used in public places. She saw very few tag-ends of old charms and spells gleaming silver on walls or around windows and doors. Spells there were in plenty, the usual creations for protection, health and prosperity that anyone who could afford it paid to have laid on their homes and businesses. The thing that Tris admired was that local mages either got rid of what remained of older spells, or wrote the same kind of spell in afresh, so that the magic in them shone in bright silver layers, an indication that differences in the spells did not conflict and cause the magic to go astray.

Tris walked idly up the street, admiring the lace-like patterns of spells on the shop walls, tracing a curve here, a letter there, with her finger. She knew most by heart, but this Tharian way of copying them over and over seemed to extend their power, even if the mage who added the most recent layer wasn’t particularly strong.

Suddenly she felt a twist in the air. Most of her breezes, all of the ones she had acquired in recent months, fled. Only those she had brought from Winding Circle stayed, though she felt them struggle against some powerful call. The escaping breezes whipped around the corner of a nearby workshop: Touchstone Glass, according to the sign.

The breezes weren’t the only things on the move. Power from every charm and spell within twenty metres of the shop streamed past Tris to round the corner in silvery ribbons: protection magic, fire-damping magic, health magic, wards for luck and prosperity, it didn’t seem to matter. Something flexed in the air a second time. Without stopping to ask if she did the wisest thing, she pelted around the corner into the rear yard of Touchstone Glass.

She plunged into a stream of magic. All of it poured through the open doors of a workshop set apart from the main building. It swirled around a man who toiled in front of a furnace. He stood sidelong to the door, a glassmaker’s blowpipe to his lips as he tried to give form to an orange blob of molten glass. Twirling the pipe with one hand, he shaped the base of his creation with a mould clasped in the other.

For a moment Tris thought all was well. Then she realized that despite the glassblower’s twirling of the pipe and the steady stream of air he forced into it, the orange blob wriggled, bulged, then sank like a burlap sack with a cat inside. She had never seen glass do that before. Magic flooded into the man, sliding under his leather apron, squirming into short blond hair cropped close to his blocky head, tugging at his sleeves, then merging where his lips met the pipe. Down its length the magic streamed, disappearing into the molten glass.

The man thrust the glass back into the open furnace, waited a moment, then brought the pipe back to his lips. He cupped the base of the glass with his mould and blew into the pipe. The material at its end bulged, twisted, and thrust about even harder, plainly fighting him. It grew longer and snake-like, with big lumps on top and underneath. Magic gleamed, as if the glass were shot through with silver threads as it stretched away from the pipe. As it pulled free, its connection to the blowpipe stretched thinner and thinner. Only a thread connected it to the pipe.

Tris shook her head. The man had obviously lost control of his magical working. “You’d better let it go,” she informed him. “And what possessed you, that you didn’t draw a protective circle?”

The man jerked and yanked the pipe from his lips. The glass wriggled, spiralled, and broke free, tumbling in the air as it flew madly around the room. Little Bear yelped and fled into the yard.

“Why didn’t you undo it?” Tris demanded. She ducked as writhing glass zoomed over her head.

“Didn’t they teach you, the more power you throw into magic gone awry, the more it will fight your control? Forget reusing the glass. It’s so full of magic now you’ll have real trouble if you try to make it into anything else.”

The glass thing — she couldn’t tell what it was — landed on the man’s skull. Smoke and the stench of burning hair rolled away from its feet. The man swore and slapped at it. Terrified, his creation fled. As it flew, its features became sharper, more identifiable. The big lumps became very large, bat-like wings. Smaller lumps stretched out to become powerful hind legs and short forelegs. Lesser points shaped themselves as ears; an upright ribbed fin rose on its neck; another point fixed the end of the glass as a tail. When the thing lit on a worktable, Tris saw the form it had fought to gain. It was a glass dragon, silver-veined with magic, clear through and through. It was thirty centimetres long from nose to rump, with fifteen more centimetres of tail.

The man had dumped a pail of water on his head as soon as the dragon left him. Now he flung his blowpipe across the room, shattering three vases.

“Tantrums don’t do the least bit of good,” Tris informed him, hands on hips. “Old as you are, surely you know that much.” She noted distantly that there was a circle of dead white hair atop the man’s head, almost invisible against the bright, closely cropped blond hair that surrounded it.

He wheezed, coughed, gasped, and glared at her with very blue eyes. “Who in Eilig’s name are you? And what did you do to me?” He spoke slowly and carefully, which didn’t match his scarlet face and trembling hands.

Tris scowled. “You did it yourself, dolt. You threw good magic after bad, including power you drained from all around this neighbourhood because you didn’t protect the workshop. Now look. You’ll have to feed it and care for it, you know: And what it eats is beyond me. Living metal feeds on metal ores in the ground, but living glass?” She tugged one of the thin braids that framed her face, picking the problem apart. “Sand, I’d suspect. And natron, and seashells, since that’s what you make glass with in the first place. And antimony and magnesium to make it clear.”

“Will you be quiet?,” the man cried, his voice still slow. “I have — no magic! Just — a seed, barely enough to, to make the glass easier.”

Tris glared at him. “I may only be fourteen, but I’m not stupid, and you’re a terrible liar.”

The glassblower doubled his big hands into fists. “I — am — not — a — liar!” he cried, his slow words a sharp contrast to his enraged face. “How dare you address me like that? Get out!”

Little Bear didn’t like the thing that zipped so dangerously around the workshop, but even less did he like the glassblower. He thrust himself between Tris and the man, hackles up, lips peeled away from his teeth, a low growl rumbling through his large chest.

“Now look,” Tris said with a sigh. “You upset my dog.”

The glassblower backed away. “I am a journeyman of the Glassmakers’ Guild,” he said, forcing the words past clumsy lips. “I have no magic. I am no liar. I want you and your dog gone. And that thing you made, too!”

“I made?” Tris demanded, aghast. “As if I didn’t see the power flow from you into the glass! Look, Master Jumped-Up Journeyman, that dragon is your creation—”

The glassblower yelled and grabbed a long pair of metal tongs. The dragon had landed on a worktable and was trying to climb into a jar on top of it. “Get out of there!” he cried, smacking the tongs on the table a centimetre from the dragon’s tail. “Colouring — agents cost — money!” His sluggish speech was in sharp contrast to his quick strike at the dragon.

The glass creature leaped clear before the glassblower could shatter it with a second blow. It flew to a shelf on the wall, its front half covered with powder. Clinging to the shelf, it spat blue fire at its attacker. Once clear of its muzzle, the flames solidified and fell to shatter on the floor.

“Don’t you dare hit that creature!” cried Tris. “It’s alive — you might break it!”

“I’ll smash it to bits,” the man growled. He poked the dragon with his tongs as it scrabbled a new jar with its claws. For a moment it teetered, then righted itself. The man advanced on it, tongs raised in his hand.

“It’s a living thing,” Tris called. “You may have made it, but that doesn’t give you the right to break it.” She yanked one of her thin braids free of its tie and combed it out with her fingers. Sparks formed in the crimped red locks, sticking to her palms.

The glassblower ignored her. The dragon glided to another shelf, one that supported an uncorked jar. Curious, it stuck its head inside. “That’s it,” the man said grimly. “You’re dead.” With tongs raised high, he went after it like a man in urgent pursuit of a mouse.

“I’m warning you,” Tris said clearly. She had to tell people when she was about to use particular magics: in her hands magic was a deadly weapon and had to be treated as such. “You can’t kill that.”

“Watch me.” The man struck at the dragon, missing by a centimetre. When he raised his weapon again, a hair-thin lightning-bolt slammed into the tongs. The man shrieked and dropped them, nursing a hand and arm that twitched in the aftermath of a moderate shock. He whirled to stare at Tris, white showing all the way around his irises.

She waited, her loosened braid hanging beside her face, sparks glinting along its strands. In her open right hand a circle of lightning played, leaping from finger to finger. “Try to break that poor creature again and what you just got will seem like a love-tap,” she said, crimson with fury. “You can’t kill it — didn’t your teachers make you learn anything? Once you make a working that lives, you have to treat it like you would a human child. You’re not allowed to destroy a living creation.”

The dragon knew a champion when it saw one. Voicing a cry like the sound of a knife striking a glass, it flew to Tris and perched on her shoulder, wrapping itself around her neck.

“Yes, that’s fine,” she reassured it, stroking the creature where it crossed her neck. “Calm down.” She kept her eyes on the glassblower, who now huddled in the corner furthest from her, clutching the hand she’d shocked. His face was ash-grey; his hair stood on end. “Who’s your teacher?” Tris demanded.

“I don’t have one,” he replied, his speech agonizingly slow.

“Nonsense. You may as well tell me. I’ll find out,” she said. “I’ll have your master’s name before the week’s done.”

The man shook his head.

“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 Keth-lun 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 remelted 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..


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.

The nettle in the garden of his service, the first dead yaskedasu, sprouted five months after he’d finished his training and settled in at Elya Street. He hadn’t realized that the easy service of an arurim dhaskoi was due to the fact that, more than nine times out of ten, the victim knew the criminal. It was a family member, or a friend, or a neighbourhood roughneck. These were all offenders that regular arurim found easily by talking to the family, friends and neighbours of the victim, then tracking down everyone who looked suspicious, questioning them until they confessed. The arurim dhaskoi were called in only when the criminal was a mage, or when no one with a motive or chance to get at the victim could be traced. When the investigation of yaskedasu Nioki’s murder produced no possible killers, the case had come to Dema.

Now, three dead women later, Dema felt like those animals who chewed off a limb to escape a trap must feel. His service to the arurim was no longer fun. He wanted to destroy the one who destroyed the beauty and harmony of Khapik, and he couldn’t even get his fellow arurim to care about it as much as he did. One cheap yaskedasu or three yaskedasi, the others told him, okozou still meant no one was supposed to work up a sweat over this.

So Dema did his best, and knew it wasn’t good enough. He was too ignorant. Most of his spells for uncovering events could be used only when he had a suspect or when the crime had taken place elsewhere or had not led to death. Trying to find the killer was like sifting through a tonne of barley in search of a pin. No one knew anything. No one saw anything. The priests who had ritually and magically cleansed the murder sites noticed nothing irregular, and Dema found no traces of magic. He was at his wits’ end, even dreaming about the case. What was he doing wrong?

“I see word’s got out,” grumbled his arurim guide. Dema’s head jerked up. He’d done it again, forgotten what he was supposed to be doing as he worried over the case. He’d been so preoccupied that he hadn’t even noticed they had reached the square. Despite the very early hour — the sun was just up — the outer edges of the square were packed with human beings. Unlike most Tharian crowds, this one was a hushed, silent, nervous gathering. The arurim had to poke and nudge people aside to clear the way for herself and Dema.

At last they emerged on to open ground, the Labrykas fountain. It stood in its full glory, each of its four lower basins two metres wide, fed from the mouths of three rearing horses. A long stone pillar topped by the double-headed axe called a labrys spouted water to bedew the heads of the beautifully carved white marble horses. It was the first official Tharian monument seen by new arrivals who came through the Piraki Gate, and Dema never got tired of looking at it. Many mornings he would sit on the rim of a lower basin to listen to the water and relax after his night’s service, calming down until he could ride home, serene.

When Dema saw the blot that fouled the south basin, he gasped. Inside a ring of priests and arurim that stood around the fountain, a dead woman sprawled, her legs hanging out of the basin, her upper body in the water, her arms flung wide. Her make-up showed dead white against her swollen, bloated face. Her long black curls floated in the water, creating a chilly semblance of life. Her kyten, the longer, feminine version of the Tharian tunic, was streaked with filth. The long ends of her yellow veil had been carefully straightened to grip the basin’s edge, like a yellow arrow that ended at her neck.

A short, stocky man in arurim red, wearing the silver-bordered white stole of the district commander, stalked up to Dema’s horse. “Why haven’t you caught this monster, Dhaskoi Nomasdina?” he growled. “Why didn’t you stop him before he committed this, this, atrocity!” He glared at the ring of priests and arurim. “A week, the priests of the All-Seeing tell us, a week before the fountain can be fully cleansed!” Already the priests were placing in the anchor-posts and white cloths that would shroud the entire fountain while they performed a major spiritual and magical cleansing. “A week before the people can begin to forget this offence against the order of the city!”

Dema tumbled from his horse’s back and stood at attention as the commander raved. Finally, when the man fell silent, Dema said, “I’ve been doing my best, sir. This is a canny murderer, not the usual sort of criminal at all. He has found a way to hide his tracks from magical scrutiny, there are no witnesses when he kills them, and he transports them where he likes. I’ve only eight months in the arurim, and I did request extra people to patrol Khapik. He kills them there.”

“You will do the proper work with those you have,” snarled the commander. “With this abomination in a public place, the people will be more eager to come forward, to name this murderer and cleanse Tharios of him.”

Dema’s heart plummeted into his belly. According to the advice given to him by the Elya Street arurim and the arurim dhaskoi, he had been doing all the proper things. “May I get a ban on the cleansing of this site, then?” he asked, his voice breaking. “Until I have a chance to go over it with spells of investigation?”

The commander leaned in close, his eyes fixed on Dema’s. “Ban the cleansing?” he whispered in a voice more frightening than a yell. “Take one more moment than we must to erase this spectre of disorder? It’s not just the fountain which must be cleansed, you young idiot. It’s the pipes and the source of the water itself. Apply yourself to proper investigation, and let us purify the square!”

Dema bowed his head. “I spoke rashly, without thought,” he whispered. With the taint of death hanging over the square, the least he could expect was sin and riots in the Fifth District. The immediate cleansing of the city had stopped the violence that had followed the fall of the Kurchal Empire. Ridding Tharios of all taint of death in those days had purified her, had kept the city safe and standing while the rest of the world ran mad. Its purity had guarded the city from barbarian attacks and made her leaders strong enough to do all that was necessary to restore order. Asking the priests to delay their cleansing was opening the door to madness. He hadn’t stopped to think of that when he’d made his request.

The problem was, in crimes of this sort, cleansing nearly crippled investigators. It was both physical and magical, erasing all trace not just of the death, but of the killer and how the killer had come and gone from the death site.

“You had best start thinking, Demakos Nomasdina,” the commander whispered, gripping Dema’s arm in a hold that would leave bruises under Dema’s brown skin. “Remember the pride of your clan. Now go look at that mess, then let the priests do their job.”

Dema swallowed. He walked between two priests who were setting up the tent-like veil that would hide the long process of cleansing from the people’s eyes, so they would not carry the taint of death away from the square. He approached the south basin of the fountain, steeling himself to look on another murdered woman. There were men and women at Elya Street, arurim and dhaski, who could look on someone who’d been robbed of life and eat a hearty meal after. Dema didn’t know how they could do it. Even after eight months he still felt as if someone had offended him personally, had killed a member of Dema’s own family — which was true enough. The other classes of Tharios were the responsibility of the First Class, Dema’s class. Someone had taken the life of a young woman in his charge.

That she was young he guessed from her hands, unlined, with well-tended nails, and the fresh, tight skin of her belly, feet, and legs. She wore the halter top, semi-sheer skirt and tight, calf-length leggings of a tumbler or dancer; her brown arms and legs were muscular. Dema glanced away from her eyes, so startled at the fate that had come upon her.

As he leaned over the edge of the basin, he noticed two priests closing in. “I’m not going to touch her,” he snapped. “Stand away, leave me be.”

They took a step back and waited, hands clasped at their waists, their eyes level as they watched Dema. The morning breeze tugged at their white head-veils and the ends of their complexly draped red stoles.

Dema glanced at the knot in the yellow veil right under the left ear, just like the knot on the other four victims. Bending, he squinted at the ends of the veil, laid so neatly on the basin’s rim.

A gloved hand thrust its way into his vision, holding an ivory rod. “Use this,” the priest of the All-Seeing told Dema, a kind note in his voice. “We will send you such tools, blessed for this work, dhaskoi!,”

“Do other arurim dhaski have them?” Dema wanted to know, meeting the priest’s dark brown eyes.

“None of them want to get so close as you,” replied the priest. “We have seen this in you before. Do not let curiosity take you too far. Yours is a noble house, free of the stain of corruption. We will protect you, as best we may.”

Dema hesitated, then accepted the rod with a nod of thanks. He used it to straighten the curled ends of the veil. By law yaskedasi had to carry their home address stitched along the hem of their veils, one of the ways the city kept watch on their disreputable ranks. While most were fairly honest, everyone knew that their ethics in matters of theft were flexible.

Here was the dead woman’s address: Ferouze’s Lodgings, Chamberpot Lane, Khapik. Dema would start his questioning there. He straightened and returned the rod to the priest, fixing the woman in his mind. Then he turned to be cleansed before he went to find her name. The arurim prathmuni moved in to take charge of the body.


Tris put the rest of her time in the lower part of Tharios to good use, visiting other glass-makers. Most of the people with shops on the Street of Glass understood that they were there to entertain as well as to create, and that someone who saw a piece being made often bought it. They were happy to welcome Tris into their workshops and to answer her questions, though the sum of what she learned was not comforting. None of them knew of any glass mage at Touchstone, only that the owner, Antonou Tinas, had a distant kinsman from the far north working there. His name was Kethlun Warder, they told Tris, and they described the man that Tris had met. They also had never heard of anything like the glass dragon, though all of them were fascinated by the creature and insisted on giving it a thorough examination. From the way the glass dragon preened, it enjoyed the attention.

Tris would have talked to the city’s glass mages as well, but found only their students in the workshops near Achaya Square. The mages themselves were at the same conference as Niko, since glass magic was often used in order to see things or to make a problem clearer. Talking to the students did teach her one thing: while glass mages were as common as dirt in Tharios, a glassmaking capital, for the most part they were academic mages, people who worked with charms, spells and signs worked on to the material. Tris knew, since she had seen the dragon shape itself, that in all likelihood this Kethlun was an ambient mage, one whose magic came from something in the world around him. Tris had always thought the balance between academic mages and ambient ones was equal, until Niko explained that it only looked that way to her, because she had been schooled at the single greatest centre for ambient mages in their part of the world.

For every ambient mage there were four academic ones, not counting those with ambient magic who could also practise academic magic. Moreover, some types of ambient magic were more common than others: the magics for stones, carpentry, healing, cooking, thread and needlework, pottery, fire and the movement of weather in the air. Ambient glass magic, one of the mages’ journeymen told her, was “middling rare”, though Tris had no idea what that meant.

With such a scant amount of information, Tris returned to Heskalifos and Jumshida’s house. If memory served her, Jumshida’s private library held a number of books on magic. Tris might learn more there.

Inside the house, she banished Little Bear to the inner courtyard and carried the glass dragon to her room. Jumshida had granted Tris and Niko the whole of the first floor on the east wing of the house, rooms for each of them, as well as a workshop they could use during their stay. Tris put the dragon in her room, freshened up, then went downstairs.

Jumshida’s cook welcomed her. Preparing supper for an unknown number of mages was always a tricky business. Even with the help of a maid hired for the length of the conference, there was still plenty for Tris to do. She chopped, grated, washed and peeled, soaking in kitchen scents and listening to the servants talk about their lives and the schedule for the week. Muscle by muscle, Tris relaxed. Kitchen life comforted her. It was a place where she knew the rules and knew how to act. Since the staff only knew her as Niko’s student, they didn’t watch themselves around her as they would around a fully accredited mage. Tris could be ignored as long as she made herself useful, and she could hear about the university and the people who lived on its grounds.

The bell that marked the closing of the city’s gates had just rung when the front door of the house burst open, admitting a flood of chattering men and women. The maid picked up the waiting tray with its pitcher of wine and many cups; the housekeeper gathered the tray of fruit juice and cups. “Tell my husband I will greet him in the next world,” the maid said drily as she walked out.

Tris snorted with amusement as the women braved the guests. “Is it that bad?” she asked the cook.

“Girl, there is nothing worse than a crowd of hungry mages who don’t have to pay for the food,” the cook informed her. “I’d as soon be hunted by wolves. Aren’t you going out there?”

Tris shook her head. “I don’t like parties,” she confessed. “I never fit in.” If older mages knew her as Niko’s student, they treated her like an idiot, not fit to converse with adults. If they’d heard of her, they treated her with distrust and suspicion. Her own talents, so broadly distributed over forces in the air, ground and water, intimidated those who actually believed she had them. Many chose instead to think Tris lied about the extent of her power to make herself look more important. Tris preferred to stay with her own circle: her foster sisters and -brother, their teachers, a handful of mages and students from Winding Circle, and Duke Vedris of Emelan. They not only knew her; they treated her as one of them, someone they loved.

“Shall I have the girl bring a tray to your room?” the cook asked, checking a sauce.

“No, not when you’ll all be so busy. I’ll come here when I’m hungry, if that’s all right,” replied Tris. Assured that it was, she took the staircase from the courtyard to the first floor.

She had just set an armful of Jumshida’s books on her bed when she heard Niko call from the workroom they shared, “Trisana, why is there a glass creature eating our antimony?”

Tris walked over to the open workroom door. There stood her teacher, hands on hips, surveying the glass dragon. Despite his long day at the conference, Niko looked fresh and crisp. His clothes, made by Tris’s foster-sister Sandry, a thread mage, showed not a single wrinkle. Niko wore a sleeveless grey linen overrobe and breeches, and a paler grey silk shirt, its full sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuffs. On his feet were black slippers with turned-up toes. He refused to wear Tharian sandals, telling Tris that he would reserve the sight of his bare toes for himself alone.

At one and three-quarter metres Niko was fifteen centimetres taller than Tris was, and wiry, with silver-and-black hair worn in a horse-tail most of the time. He possessed a full, natty, black-and-silver moustache of which he was vain, heavy black-and-silver brows, and deep-set black eyes. His face was craggy, the strong nose jutting from it like the prow of a ship.

Niko stared down that formidable nose at the dragon, who sat on its hindquarters, staring up at the mage. Its muzzle was coated with antimony; its belly was filled with the stuff.

“Is that even good for you?” Tris asked it.

As if in reply the dragon twitched, its belly roiling. A moment later it opened its jaws.

Antimony surged from its gullet to form clear glass flames that dropped as soon as they broke away from its mouth. Niko quickly thrust a hand under the dragon’s chin to catch the pieces. When the creature finished, Niko had a palmful of glass flames.

“I can’t think of the last time I held dragon vomit in my hand,” Niko remarked, his voice dry. “Why, never, in fact. There are no such things as dragons. Need I also point out there are no such things as living glass dragons?”

Tris picked the creature up and cradled it in her arms. “You shouldn’t stuff yourself that way,” she told it. “You couldn’t absorb it. Surely you can’t be hungry after all you ate at the shop.”

“Perhaps eating is how she learns the nature and substance of things,” remarked Niko, sidetracked by the thought. “After all, who can tell if she truly sees or not?”

“It’s an it, not a she,” protested Tris. She held up the dragon so Niko could see its belly was unmarked by male or female organs.

“Nonsense,” he replied. “So elegant and dainty a creature, with such wonderful eyes, has to be female.”

“You just say that because you like women better than men,” Tris retorted. The dragon climbed up her arm and draped itself across her shoulders, rubbing its head on her braided hair.

“With good reason. Few women spend the first weeks of an acquaintance trying to prove how much more they know than you,” Niko said as he gently poured the dragon flames on to the counter by the antimony jar. “You haven’t explained how this creature came to be here, Tris.”

“It’s a long story. You’re supposed to be down there, aren’t you?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the noisy first floor.

“For this lady, I will set aside the conference for the moment. I’ve never seen anything like her,” Niko pointed out. “And you’ve been using your lightning. What for? You know I can see it on you and the dragon.”

Tris shrugged. “It wasn’t much.” She set the dragon on a worktable and fitted the cork back into the antimony jar. “Some glass mage was having a tantrum. I don’t think much of the teachers here, if they can’t make a grown man learn self-control.”

“Some students don’t want to learn,” Niko offered, rubbing the dragon’s chin with a gentle finger. “Let’s hear the whole of it.”

Tris went around the room, making sure that every jar was tightly corked, as she told Niko how she had made the dragon’s acquaintance. “I don’t know which was sillier,” she remarked as she finished, “him thinking I’d believe his story about not being a mage, or treating me as if I were a monster. I asked him if he would take responsibility for the dragon and he refused, so I kept her.”

Niko sighed. “Lightning scares people,” he reminded her. “I thought you were going to keep a grip on it — and on your temper.”

“I did,” she retorted. “I just gave him enough of a shock to make him drop the tongs, and I warned him. He would have killed her,” she said defensively, rubbing the dragon between its tiny ears. “I can’t abide people who blame others for their mistakes, Niko, you know I can’t. I’d like to give his teacher a piece of my mind.”

“And if he’s a new mage?” inquired Niko.

Tris snorted. “How could that be? He’s a grown man!”

“Lark didn’t know her gift with needlework was magic until she was nearly thirty.” Lark was one of Tris’s foster-mothers, a powerful thread mage. “It’s not unusual for the person not to know, if his power, or hers, comes from things used every day,” Niko added.

“Hmpf,” replied Tris, unconvinced. “Well, he knows now. And it’s not like there aren’t fistfuls of glass mages in this city, so I won’t be stuck with him.” Any mage who was certified by Lightsbridge University in Karang or Winding Circle temple in Emelan agreed to a pact to get a mage’s credential: he, or she, had to teach any new mage if there was no teacher with that same magic on hand. Despite their age, Tris, her foster-sisters and her foster-brother all wore the medallion that marked them as accredited mage-graduates of Winding Circle. Sandry and Briar had written to her about the mage-students they had taken on since Tris and Niko left Emelan. Tris preferred to avoid their fate. She was responsible for Little Bear and now, it seemed, for the dragon. That was more than enough for her.

“You should check on him in the morning. Make certain that he has a teacher,” Niko said. “No fooling about, Tris. A student is a serious matter. Can that thing even digest charcoal?”

The glass dragon took her muzzle out of the box that held sticks of charcoal and belched. This time she produced semi-transparent black glass globes that rolled over the worktable.

Niko stretched a hand out to the creature and twitched his fingers. “Come here, you,” he ordered.

The dragon looked from Tris to Niko to Tris, plainly thinking it over. “It’s all right,” Tris assured her. “He’s my teacher.”

Niko smiled at her. “One of the strongest bonds between mages, isn’t it?”

Tris nodded.

Gingerly the dragon walked over to Niko and, leaning back on her haunches, sat up. First the mage looked her over, inch by inch, examining the seamless joins of wings to body and claws to feet. Then he conducted an examination with his sensitive fingertips. He got nipped once for putting a finger into the dragon’s gullet. “Don’t do that,” he said absently. “Now, stay.”

He patted the dragon on the head as if she were a dog, then set his bony fingers on his closed eyelids. Tris raised a hand to shade her vision as white fire sprang from Niko’s eyes. Startled, the dragon fell on to her back. Quickly she scrabbled to her feet and turned to see if her tail was still there.

When Niko opened his eyes, the dragon sneezed noiselessly.

“Very likely,” Niko told her. He looked at Tris. “She’s… strange,” he said, frowning slightly.

Tris bridled in defence of her newest stray. “Of course she’s strange,” she retorted. “The one who made her tried to kill her.” She didn’t even notice that she had accepted Niko’s decision that the dragon was female.

Niko sighed. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t know if I ever told you, but I hold a credential in glass magic — ”

“In addition to your credentials in teaching magic, seer’s magic and star magic,” the girl replied. “That’s why they wanted you for this circus.” With a wave of her hand she included the boisterous gathering of mages downstairs.

“Yes, Trisana,” replied Niko patiently. “Now, I learned to make glass to expand my magical vision, and because I like glassmaking. I can tell you that this creature contains a surge of glass magic, but it’s not focused in the way that a trained glassmage would do it. Her skeleton is made of glass magic. I’m picking up traces of protective magics, wind magics, healing magics, prosperity magics and love magics.”

“That’s what this Kethlun pulled in from around the neighbourhood,” Tris explained. “Every loose bit of magic from a block around all ended up in her. I told you he didn’t raise any barriers.”

“As I have now seen for myself,” replied Niko. “Her blood though — her blood is lightning.”

Tris sat on a stool, frowning, then turned her attention to the dragon. Carefully she removed her spectacles and set them on the table. Once they were off, everything in everyday world went grainy: without her spectacles, she was nearly blind. On the other hand, if she wanted to look at highly detailed magic, her vision was sharper without the lenses. She rubbed her eyes for a moment, then surveyed her new charge.

The dragon blazed, the silver fire of the neighbourhood magics rippling over her surface. Through the ripples shone a skeleton as bright as real silver, needle-thin bones that supported the dragon’s elegant form. Twined around those bones was the hotter, blue-white fire of pure lightning, moving in streams like veins. Lightning shone in the small round bumps that served it for eyes, glinted along its thin teeth, and swirled down the length of its forked tongue.

Tris sighed as she hooked her spectacles back over her ears. “I wonder if he even could have killed you.”

The dragon shrugged, her magical skin rolling with the movement.

“That isn’t your lightning,” pointed out Niko. As her teacher, he knew the many shapes of Tris’s magic better than anyone.

“No. I didn’t use mine till after the dragon broke away from the blowpipe,” Tris admitted.

“Do you suppose it’s his? Kethlun’s?” asked Niko.

The dragon toddled over to Tris and stepped down into the girl’s lap. There she curled herself, cat-like, into a ball.

“I thought that lightning mages either learned to control themselves before they got to be my age or they died,” Tris replied quietly. “That’s what you told me.” She smoothed a hand over the length of the dragon’s spine. A pure musical note rose from the creature as Tris stroked her, a lingering tone like those drawn from the lips of glasses filled with water. The girl smiled. “Is that your purr?” she asked. The ringing tone rose each time she ran her fingers down the dragon’s spine. The sound continued, first low, then higher, a melody that grew softer and softer, until it stopped. “I think she’s asleep,” Tris whispered to Niko. “I’m going to name her Chime.”

Niko was still fixed on Chime’s lightning blood. “It’s true, if this Kethlun Warder were born with lightning magic, he wouldn’t survive to adulthood without mastering it,” he pointed out, smoothing his moustache with a bony finger. “There has to be an explanation of some kind.”

“You’re welcome to find it,” Tris replied. She kept her voice soft, not wanting to wake the dragon. “Are you going to have time after the conference?”

Niko cleared his throat. “Actually, that was something I wanted to discuss with you.”

Tris raised her eyebrows and waited.

“We, er, had a vote today,” Niko explained, tugging the cuffs of his sleeves. “You know that from time to time mages get together to do some encompassing study of a particular sort of magic.”

Tris knew that. She had handled the result of such research in the past four years, substances which helped mages to fashion cures for diseases. Those substances had been the result of years of research on the part of a handful of mages. “The conference is for something like that?” she asked.

“It is now,” replied Niko. “In an outburst of magely fellowship and affection, it was resolved that all of us work together to create the single biggest compendium of visionary magics ever written, ambient and academic, truthsaying, past seeing, scrying in water, flame — ”

“On the wind?” Tris asked eagerly. “You’re going to write about scrying on the wind?” She knew that some mages were able to see images on the wind, glimpses of things the wind had touched. Being fond of winds herself, Tris thought that being able to see things on them would be well worth learning. The problem was that Niko, the finest seer she knew, couldn’t do it, and thus couldn’t teach it. “Who have you got for it? Can I meet her? Him?”

Niko sighed. “We don’t have a wind seer. I hate to think of leaving this out… I suppose we could dig up what’s been written about it until now, though it would be wonderful if we had someone who could actually write about it as they do it.”

Tris slumped on the stool. “Oh.”

“Scrying the wind is very difficult, Tris,” Niko said gently. “It’s like scrying the future. You’re assailed with thousands of images — fragments, really. It drives many who try it insane.”

“You learned to scry the future,” Tris pointed out.

“And a number of people have informed me they think I am mad,” Niko replied, his voice very dry.

“Niko!” someone yelled from downstairs. “Will you hide all night? We’re starving. And Lieshield refuses to discuss anything else before we choose who will do the index!”

“And so it begins,” Niko said wearily, straightening his clothes. “We could be here for decades.” He stopped to give Chime a gentle caress. “You could always bring her down to distract my colleagues,” he suggested, hope in his eyes. “You could meet some of your peers.”

“I could always pull my ears from my head, too,” replied Tris. “It would be just as much fun. You know I hate parties.”

Niko sighed. “You’ve always been too sensible for me. Check on this Warder fellow tomorrow,” he reminded her. “Make sure he has a teacher.”


Antonou Tinas had agreed to give Kethlun shop-room, but that didn’t include sleeping quarters. The small building on the other side of the shop was just big enough to hold the old man, his wife, their youngest daughter and her husband. From the sound of the quarrels, Kethlun wasn’t even sure that there was room for the younger couple. There was certainly no room for Keth.

At the end of the day, Keth closed the workshop. After saying good night to Antonou, he walked down the Street of Glass to his home, located inside the entertainment district known as Khapik. It wasn’t the best housing, as the district hosted quite a few people who regarded theft as an art form, but it was interesting and cheap. Students and young journeymen like Keth could afford Khapik’s prices and also be entertained for free. Residents and guests spanned the full spectrum of performance, all lumped together under the name yaskedasi: poorer mages, actors, musicians, tumblers, dancers, illusionists, singers, gamblers and fortune-tellers. Other residents and employees included outright criminals; servants and cooks at the many eating-houses, theatres, inns, coffee and tea houses; and clerks who served in the multitude of shops that offered everything under the sun: clothing, souvenirs, jewellery, art, flowers and musical instruments.

Keth liked Khapik. There were things to see and do no matter how late the hour. Everyone came here sooner or later: foreigners, nobles, students and merchants — male and female — going from attraction to attraction. Keth’s slow speech, occasional stammer, and slight clumsiness went unnoticed in a district where the beggars were missing body parts and the poorer folk were missing teeth. No one cared that he didn’t talk much: here good listeners were in popular demand. Best of all, the occasional storms that swept through Tharios spent their lightning bolts on towers. There were no towers in Khapik.

After a few changes of address, Kethlun had settled at Ferouze’s lodgings on Chamberpot Alley. Ferouze let rooms cheaply, to yaskedasi and anyone else who could pay. Keth couldn’t see what had brought fame as a yaskedasu to this old, fat, snaggle-haired woman, but her house and her linens were clean and she had enough healing skills to treat the small injuries that befell even the most careful performer. She also played chess. With her help Keth was regaining his old skill at the game.

When he entered the house, built like other Tharian homes around a central courtyard, Keth was surprised to find it so quiet. This was the hour when the place should be waking up, with six yaskedasi in residence. Ferouze’s watchdogs came trotting down the corridor to sniff him, then returned to their normal pursuits, allowing Keth to pass into the courtyard. The rooms on all three floors opened on to this small square of green where Ferouze had a kitchen garden and the well.

Normally the yaskedasi would be talking back and forth from the upstairs galleries around the courtyard, trading gossip and insults as they prepared for work. Today Keth found three of the girls seated on one of the staircases, and no sign of their landlady or the two men who lived there. The girls still wore day clothes, undyed wool kytens. None of them wore a speck of make-up; all had been crying. Yali sat with the absent Iralima’s four-year-old daughter curled up in her lap. Little Glaki’s black curls were tangled. Her face was red and swollen with weeping, and she slept with her thumb in her mouth. Xantha, the blonde northern dancer who lived there, still wept, her face puffy.

Keth looked at Yali, who raised wet brown eyes to his. “What’s wrong?” he asked. All thought of the redheaded girl and her lightning fled his mind; goosebumps rippled over his skin. He didn’t have to be a mage to know he was about to hear bad news. “Where is everyone?”

“Ferouze and the men are at Noskemiou Thanas,” replied Poppy. Her green-and-brown eyes, normally filled with anger, were dull. Her brown skin was ashen.

Keth had to think for a moment to translate what she had said into his native Namornese. The city’s great hospital for the poor was called Noskemiou; Thanas was the wing where the dead were brought. “Why?” he asked when his brain sorted it out. “Who died?”

“Iralima,” Yali whispered, her full mouth quivering. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina, who’s been investigating for the Arurim, he came and described her.” She covered her mouth with a hand that shook. Keth hesitated, then reached out and clasped her shoulder, trying to comfort her. He had liked Ira, and his heart went out to Glaki. Iralima was the child’s only family. Ira’s clan had kicked her out when she declared her intention to be a Khapik dancer.

“Where have you been all day, in a hole in the ground?” demanded Poppy. “The Ghost got her. He got her, and he strangled her, and he dumped her in the fountain on Labrykas Square like she was rubbish.”

“Hush!” scolded Yali in a whisper, covering Glaki’s ear. “Not in front of the child, Poppy, for the All-Seeing’s mercy!”

“I shouldn’t have told Ira that she was a selfish old hen,” wailed Xantha. “It’s my fault.”

Yali and Poppy exchanged disgusted glances. “We forgot the whole world spins around you, Xantha,” said Poppy, her voice as tart as vinegar. “Just don’t fight with us and we’ll have long, happy lives.”

“Girls.” If Poppy and Xantha got started, Keth knew they’d be at it all night. “Did you tell this dhaskoi when you saw Ira last? Where she danced?”

“We told him,” replied Yali, rubbing her arm over her eyes without disturbing the girl in her lap. “It’s not like he broke his back finding out who killed those other yaskedasi, is it?”

“Antrim have a word for crimes against people like us, remember?” Poppy demanded.

Defeated, Kethlun spoke it: “Okozou.”

“Okozou,” Poppy repeated. “No one worth a bik,” Tharios’s smallest copper coin “got hurt.”

“If they scurry on this one, it’s because Ira fetched up in the Labrykas fountain,” added Yali. “They’ve had the cleansing tent up all day. They can’t have a dead yaskedasu defiling a public place, now, can they?”

“Tell us your own Antrim back in the north would care about the likes of us,” taunted Poppy. When Keth didn’t reply, Poppy nodded. “I didn’t think so.” She struggled to her feet. “I have to get dressed.”

“You’re working tonight?” cried Xantha. “With Iralima at Noskemiou Thanas?”

Glaki whimpered. Yali bent over her, smoothing the child’s rumpled curls with a tender hand.

Poppy glared at Xantha. “And you’re not? Ira would be out there if it was you in Thanas. Didn’t you say you don’t have the rent money yet?”

“Deiina!” muttered Xantha, naming the patron goddess of Khapik. “I forgot!” In a flash she was on her feet, pushing by the other two on her way upstairs.

“It’s not right,” Kethlun told Yali. She was the cleverest of the three, the one he could talk with most comfortably. “Yaskedasi are Tharians, too.”

“You’re sweet, Keth,” Yali replied. “It won’t last if you stay here.” She got to her feet with a grunt, balancing Glaki’s weight on her hip. The child was all cried out and didn’t even stir. Yali said, “There will be a Farewell at the Thanion.” It was the temple dedicated to the god of the dead. “Shall I tell you when they have it?”

“Please,” Keth replied. Tharios’s dead were burned outside the city, so there were no burials, only Farewell ceremonies. As Yali continued her climb upstairs, he called after her, “Yali, what about her?” He nodded to Glaki.

Yali kissed the little girl’s hair. “She’s mine, now. I’ll take care of her.”

“If you need help, just ask,” Keth said. “I’ll watch her, help pay for her food, whatever you need.”

His reward was a slight lifting of the cloud in Yali’s brown eyes, and a smile that made his heart turn over. “You’re a good fellow, Keth,” she told him. “I’ll take you up on that.”

“I want you to,” he said as she finished the climb to her room.

The night was close and hot, bringing very little rest with it. Around midnight Keth took his sleeping mat up to the roof and placed it between Ferouze’s potted herb garden and the wall. He placed a jug of water beside him — he’d been unable to drink wine since his encounter with a lightning bolt — and lay down, locking his hands behind his head. Heat lightning played in sheets under the clouds in the sky. It made him edgy, but not enough to go back inside. Heat lightning didn’t strike, it only taunted those trapped in the baking city with the promise of rain.

As always, once he was in the open air, the tangled ball of thoughts that had kept him awake began to unravel. Here in the dark, alone, with the sounds of the crowds on the main streets of Khapik muffled, he could think about the girl who threw lightning. His gut twisted over the memory, but he could think about it, and he could admit some truths to himself. The glass in the blowpipe had fought him. When, before his accident, had he ever felt that the stuff he’d worked with all his life had a mind of its own? That idea had grown since his travels began, along with the notion that glass had come to life while he wasn’t looking. It never even occurred to him to call that feeling magic. Perhaps that was because none of the glass mages in his family had mentioned sensing the glass was alive. He was used to thinking of glass magic as his family described it: a matter of charms, signs, special twists in pulled glass, special shapes in moulded glass, and blown glass shaped to hold and direct spells. They spoke of glass as Keth and his friends did: a substance to which they did things, not a living being.

As much as it pained him, Keth finally admitted the redhead was right. He should have been relieved to find an answer, but he wasn’t. He’d had plans, important ones. His master’s credential, marriage, a family, a rise in the guild until, one day, he led it. He would make glass for the imperial court and have the power and wealth to work on his own projects.

Now he was back at the foot of the ladder, a student, a beginner along with children. The study of magic would cut into his time with glass for years.

He had regrets; of course he did. He supposed he would always have them. But watching heat lighting ripple through the clouds, Kethlun Warder faced facts. Tomorrow he would find a glass mage to teach him.


Tris had used shawls to make a nest for Chime by the window, but when morning came, she turned over in bed and felt a glass corner poke her right eye. She opened the left: the cause of her discomfort was Chime’s tail. The rest of the glass dragon was draped over an extra pillow, just as Little Bear sprawled over her feet. Tris grumbled and gently moved Chime’s tail, then got up to begin her morning clean-up. At least she didn’t have to worry about feeding her starling, Shriek. After four years of screaming at her the moment she woke up, Shriek had joined a flock of Hataran starlings when she and Niko passed through that country. Tris, secretly a romantic, told herself that a particularly comely lady starling must have caught her bird’s eye. She never let on to anyone that she missed the speckled bird’s chatter any more than she admitted to missing Sandry, Daja, or Briar.

Screams in the kitchen and Little Bear’s deep-throated barks interrupted Tris as she made her bed. She raced downstairs. The maid was in hysterics, having discovered what she called “a monster” — Chime — in the honeypot. Little Bear had already decided Chime was family. He stood between the maid and the glass dragon, barking a warning. The cook scolded the girl for being upset while Tris ordered Little Bear outside. Together Tris and the cook managed to get Chime clean. By the time she was free of honey, the glass dragon had begun to produce flames like bits of honey glass.

“May I keep some?” asked the cook. “They’re so pretty.”

Tris, glad to find a way to calm the servants, shared out the flames with the cook, the housekeeper and even the trembling maid, then went to finish straightening her room. She hated to let others do housework, but looking after her own room and the workroom that Tris shared with Niko was all Jumshida’s staff would permit her to do. After a light breakfast, she made a shawl into a sling, tucked Chime into it, then set off for Touchstone Glass with her dog at her heels. She would check on Kethlun as she had promised Niko, then explore more of the city’s glass shops.

She had almost reached Touchstone when the flare of magic caught her eye. Three priests, two in white tunics, one in a kyten, all in white head-veils and complex red stoles that marked them as servants of Tharios’s All-Seeing God, stood where an alley opened on to the Street of Glass. One priest wielded a censer of smoking incense: cypress, Tris’s nose told her, with myrtle, cedar and clove — cypress for death, myrtle for peace, clove for protection, cedar for purification. A white candle burned between the priests on the ground. The female priest carried a basket full of them. The third priest was the mage. Power flowed from his moving hands and lips to sink into the ground under the candle.

“What’s going on?” Tris asked the stocky older man who leaned against the open door of Touchstone.

“A man dropped dead there last night,” the Tharian replied. He was plump and grey-haired, light-skinned for a Tharian, with small, sharp, brown eyes and a chunky nose. He wore a pale blue tunic. His shopkeeper’s short, dark green stole lay over his shoulders, its ends hanging even with the hem of his tunic. “Once the prathmun collect the remains and scrub the site, the priests must cleanse the area of all taint of, well, death. No one here may do business until then.”

“Everything dies,” Tris pointed out, watching as the air between the three priests turned magic-white. “Do you also cleanse for dead animals and insects?”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “You are a shenos. You’re not used to our ways. The death of humans, the highest form of life, clings to all that it touches. It must be cleansed, or everyone who comes near will be polluted.”

The priests turned their backs on the space they had just cleansed. As one they clapped their hands three times, then walked off. It was neatly and precisely done, with the deftness of long practice.

“Well, thank heavens the prathmun were here first thing,” remarked the shopkeeper. “Sometimes they don’t come until late in the day. The place can’t be cleansed until the remains are gone, and we can’t open our doors until the cleansing is done. Lucky for us the district prathmun are reliable, as their kind go.”

Tris wiped her forehead on her sleeve to hide her scowl. Of all the peculiar foreign customs she had encountered since travelling south with Niko, she wasn’t sure which she disliked more: the creation of the prathmun class, or the need to ritually cleanse anything touched by death. Tris thought the treatment of prathmun was cruel and the pollution of death stupid. Thinking about it called on every speck of control over her temper that she had.

“Have a good day,” the man said. He started to open the shutters on his shop. Tris, remembering why she had come, said, “Actually, Koris. . .” She didn’t know the man’s name.

“Antonou Tinas,” the shopkeeper informed her and bowed.

“Koris Tinas,” Tris said, with a polite bow in reply. “I’m here to see a man who works for you, Kethlun Warder.”

“Keth’s not in just now,” Antonou replied. “I’m not — Hakkoi’s hammer,” he whispered, calling on the Living Circle’s god of smiths and glassmakers, “what is that!” He pointed to Tris’s bosom.

Tris glanced down. A small, clear glass muzzle with hair-fine whiskers stuck out of the shawl as Chime peered up at her. The girl smiled and tickled the dragon’s chin with a gentle finger. “That is why I need to talk to Koris Warder,” she explained.

“May my fires never die,” murmured the older man. “Come in, Koria —?”

“Chandler,” replied Tris, following Antonou into the shop. It was a relief to get out of the sun, even with her usual cocoon of breezes wrapped around her. “Trisana Chandler.”

“Please sit down, Koria Chandler,” Antonou urged, indicating a chair. This shop was meant for customers, unlike the workroom at the back. The floors and counter-tops were covered with pale tiles in cream or beige to best display the glassware. Arranged neatly on shelves throughout the room were plates, bowls, vases, figures, bottles of every imaginable size, even pendants and ear and hair ornaments.

Tris sat and helped Chime out of her sling. “Don’t start flying about and breaking things,” she warned. “I can’t afford to pay for them.”

“May I?” asked Antonou, holding out his hands. “It’s not koria, is it? It’s dhasku,” He had properly identified her as a female mage.

“It’s just Tris,” she replied as she offered Chime to him. The glassblower gently wrapped his square, blunt-fingered hands around the willing dragon and sat on a stool, steadying Chime on his knees. Chime looked up into his face and gnawed one of his fingers.

“You should be careful,” warned Tris. “She tries to eat anything she sees.”

“I would be old and gamey to the taste,” Antonou told Chime. He surveyed the creature with wonder, noting each detail of her eyes, muzzle, feet and mouth. “You say Keth knows something about this creature?”

“He made her,” Tris replied, watching the glassblower’s face. Antonou was no mage; she had already looked inside him for that.

“Kefir?,” repeated the man, shocked. “Kethlun made this lovely being?”

A low, musical, steady note rose from Chime. “That’s her purr, I think,” explained Tris. “Be careful. You don’t want her to be vain.”

“A beauty like this has every right to be vain,” Antonou replied. Chime nibbled one of his shirt buttons. “Well, if Keth did this, it explains this morning,” Antonou commented. “He came here just after dawn, looking as if Hakkoi’s Firewights were on his trail. When he told me he’d got magic, like it’s a disease to be caught, and he needed to find a teacher, I thought he’d been drinking.”

Tris thrust her brass-rimmed spectacles up on her long nose. “I’m sure he thinks magic is a disease,” she said drily. “That’s how he acted yesterday. You say he’s looking for a teacher now?”

“At Heskalifos,” Antonou replied. “And magic explains more than it doesn’t. He was struck by lightning, you know.”

Tris stared at Antonou, mouth gaping, before she remembered her manners and closed it. When she had enough wit to speak again, she said, “He neglected to mention it.”

“Oh, well, he usually does, poor lad. He lived, but it made a shambles of his life.” Suddenly Antonou beamed at her. “Actually, this is wonderful news. A proper teacher can rid him of the malipi that’s gnawed on him since he came. Anyone could see he was troubled. I kept saying, go to Dhaskoi Galipion over on Witches Row. Whatever malipi rides you, he’ll be able to banish it.

“But young people, they don’t understand how many troubles come from the unseen world,” he continued, shaking his head. “They insist that all this reason and rationality that’s so popular these days proves there is no supernatural, only what the mind can grasp and make plain. ‘How about magic?’ I ask them, but they tell me magic is also governed by reason. Pah.” Antonou shook his head. “Law and reason are very well, but to say the gods are only tales told to comfort us… Hey, you!” Tris jumped. Antonou lunged over to a counter, where Chime was attempting to thrust her muzzle into a low, fat jar. “What is she looking for?” Antonou demanded.

“Food,” Tris said, getting to her feet. “Actually, Koris Antonou, what substances are used to colour glass, and where might I buy them? At this rate Chime’s going to eat all of my mage supplies.”

Antonou was happy to assist her. Half an hour later, he sent her off with a list and explanations for every item on it, and directions to the Street of Glass’s skodi, or marketplace. There Tharios’s glassworkers bought raw ingredients and residents could buy whatever they fancied in the way of plain glasswork. Tris would find all she needed to feed a glass dragon there.

She went happily, just as curious to see the raw materials of glassmaking as she was to see the work itself. A small part of her mind was uneasy about the information she had gathered from Antonou regarding Keth’s search for a teacher. That part of her demanded constantly, And what of the lightning? Lightning and glass don’t go together in the day-to-day world. Lightning melts glass. How can a glass mage teach him to combine the two?

Tris ignored that part of her mind. Keth was no longer her problem. That was all that mattered.

Still, she might cut her day of exploration short, she thought. Go back to Heskalifos, to the Mages’ Hall library, and see what books they had on the subject of glass magic. In the past she’d never thought about it much, but now that she had, she wanted to find out how it was worked, and what could be done with it. If she had a motto, it was “New learning never hurt anybody.” She wouldn’t know what insights she could or could not get from glass magic until she learned more.


Rather than wander the Street of Mages, Kethlun went straight to the source, Mages’ Hall at Heskalifos. He presented himself to the clerks at the third hour of the morning, when he was informed that few mages were available. It seemed most of them were at some kind of conference in Philosophers’ Hall, and would not return to their offices until midday. In the meantime, a clerk sat with him to ask a number of questions, writing Keth’s answers down as he gave them. The clerk made it plain that he was not surprised to find a northerner who hadn’t recognized his power until he was twenty. His attitude was that it was a wonder that northerners, unschooled in logic, reason and discipline, discovered their magical skills at all. Keth tried to explain his near-lack of power before his encounter with lightning, then gave up. Perhaps the mages would be more understanding.

After the questions, Keth was interviewed and tested by three student mages. One of them gave Keth a glass ball to hold as the student gazed into it. One used a glass wand to perform the same exercise. The third used a mirror made of glass and backed in silver. Each young mage reacted to his testing in the same way: they inspected their devices, then summoned the waiting clerk. After a few words from the student, the clerk made a note on the paper of information about Keth, then led Keth to the next student. After the third student, the clerk sent Keth off to eat his midday meal, with instructions to return in the afternoon.

Several hours passed after he came back. He spent them in the mages’ museum, marvelling at the many objects they had created, and briefly in the library, flipping through books. For a moment he thought he’d glimpsed braided red hair and the gleam of light along a long, curved glass edge passing by a stack of shelves on his right. Rather than see if it was the lightning girl or not, he went back to the museum.

At mid-afternoon his clerk-escort brought him to one of the university’s mages, Vishaneh Amberglass. Keth felt better the moment he was ushered into her ground floor offices. Amberglass’s office was a glassmaker’s workshop, stifling hot from the fire in the furnace.

The mage herself was a tiny creature in her sixties, perched on a high stool. She had icy grey-green eyes, olive skin and black hair worn in a coil ruthlessly pinned to her scalp. Instead of the Tharian kyten and stole, she dressed in the long tunic coat and leggings of a Trader or Bihanese. “I am told that you are a journeyman glassmaker,” she said, eyeing him through round spectacles.

“Yes, dhasku,” replied Kethlun.

“There is a crucible in the oven. Blowpipes over there.” Amberglass pointed them out. “Have you studied breath control through meditation?”

“Of course,” he replied, startled by the question. “You don’t get past your ’prenticeship without it.”

“Do you know that meditation is a form that mages use to get at their power?” Her voice was crisp.

“Yes, dhasku. I learned from my uncles, who are glass mages.”

“Then blow me a round glass ball, meditating as you do so,” the mage instructed. “Don’t take for ever about it.”

He didn’t take for ever. He did take his time, inspecting several blowpipes before he chose one that suited him, then eyeing the crucible in the glory hole of the oven. “Dhasku Amberglass, you do understand that it’s blowing glass where I get into trouble. It’s why I’m here at all.”

She inspected a thumbnail. “Either you are a journeyman, or you are not,” she said tartly. “Which is it?”

Kethlun sighed. Closing his eyes, he fell into the breathing rhythms he had learned years ago. Meditation and breath control were as much a part of his family life as meals. Slowly he counted to seven as he inhaled, then held his breath to a count of seven, let it go for a count of seven, stopped for a count of seven, then began to inhale once more. Like magic his troubled mind instantly calmed. He could almost smell his mother’s lavender sachet, his father’s spicy hair pomade, the scent of baking bread in the kitchen. Gently he slid his pipe into the crucible, into the mass of molten glass, and collected a glob of it at the pipe’s end. Bringing it out, he began to spin the pipe as he blew into it carefully.

“Let your mind drift,” murmured that sharp voice, its edges blunted. “Close your eyes — I’ll watch for you. Clouds go by, you smell spring rain — ”

His mood shattered. He smelled hot metal and death. The hairs on his arms went stiff: lightning was here! He had enough sense to yank his mouth away from the pipe before he gasped in panic. The bubble at the end of the rod shimmered, then flashed with lightning. Miniature bolts rippled on its surface and through the centre of the globe so thickly, it was impossible to see inside it.

Amberglass raised her hands and snapped her fingers. The bubble tore free of Kethlun’s pipe and flew to her. She caught it in her palms. If the hot glass burned her, she gave no sign of it.

Trembling, Kethlun lowered the rod. “I did say — ”

“Be quiet,” she snapped, eyes fixed on the ball.

He knew the voice of a master; he shut up. Quietly he cleaned the excess glass from the pipe, cleared the inside of the pipe, and put it away. When he finished, he glanced at the stool. Amberglass was gone. She soon returned, with his companion clerk who carried the lightning ball, tucked into a silk-lined basket. Keth noticed that the lightning that covered the outside of the ball seemed to have no effect on the silk.

“This is beyond my skills,” Amberglass told him. Her gaze gentled slightly. “I’m sending you to Dhaskoi Rainspinner. He works on weather.”

With anyone else Kethlun might have complained, but not with this woman. She had gone to some trouble to see precisely what was wrong with him. He bowed to her, resigned, and followed the clerk to the upper floors of Mages’ Hall.

By the end of the afternoon, Kethlun was more adrift than he had been that morning. He had seen two more mages after Rainspinner. Like Amberglass, they had sent him on to other glass mages or weather mages. Keth yearned to go home. If he spent much more time up here, Yali would have left Ferouze’s and gone to perform by the time he got home.

When the clock struck the fourth hour, his guide led him back to the area where the mages’ clerks sat, copying out schedules and lessons and reviewing correspondence. “You’ll have to return tomorrow,” the clerk said, wetting a reed pen in a pot of ink. He had placed the basket, with its sparking glass ball, at the farthest corner of his desk. The clerks at neighbouring desks inched away from it. “Present yourself at — ”

“Come back?” Keth asked, cursing his slow speech. What he wanted to do was scream, but he couldn’t. If he didn’t force himself to speak carefully, the stammer would return. Then no one would be able to understand him. He leaned on the counter between him and the clerks, his head and feet aching. “I have a debt to pay, work to do. I cannot spend my l-life h-here waiting like a pet dog. Aren’t y-you p-people sup-posed to help?” There, he heard it: the stutter. He thrust the knuckle of his index finger into his mouth and bit down just hard enough to grab his attention, pulling it away from his fury. He did meditation breathing until he thought he could continue. None of the clerks had budged since he started talking. “Your charter says you are duty bound to instruct new mages,” he said, letting each word finish its journey from his mouth before he tried the next sound. “Well, here I am. All new and shiny, fresh from the lightning strike. I need help now. Who knows what I will make next, when I do not know what I am doing?”

People were emerging from their offices. Most wore tunics and kytens, with the mage-blue stole looped to waist-length in front and left to dangle to the knees behind. Kethlun looked around, counted, and gulped: twenty-three mages now stood in the room.

“How is it, my peers, that anyone can make such a complaint on this of all weeks?” The speaker was a tall chestnut-brown woman with startling blue-grey eyes. Her nose was long and thin with broad nostrils, her wide mouth smoothly curved. She wore her greying dark hair in curls bound up with ribbons, covered by a sheer blue veil weighted with tiny glass drops at the hems. Like most Tharian women she wore the kyten and sandals that tied around her calves. Her ribbon belts were the same shade of blue as her mage’s stole. Kethlun hadn’t seen her or her companion, a white-skinned older man, emerge from an office behind him. The woman continued, “Here we have gathered a conclave of seers, glass mages, truthsayers and masters of visionary magics from half the world, and we cannot name one man’s power?”

“It is a mixture, Dhasku Dawnspeaker,” explained the clerk who had shepherded Kethlun all day. “Something the mages and assistants who have seen Koris Warder have never encountered before.”

“You give it a try, Jumshida Dawnspeaker,” said the mage Amberglass with a sigh. “I’ve never got such a mangled reading of someone’s power.”

“Then perhaps we must stop wasting everyone’s time, and go to the best vision mage present,” replied Dhasku Dawnspeaker. She looked at her male companion. “Dhaskoi Goldeye?” she asked with a smile that Keth judged too warm for a woman who addressed a mere colleague.

Goldeye was a lean, wiry fellow, dressed in a sleeveless lilac overrobe, light grey silk shirt and loose grey breeches. His long hair was black-streaked grey, held back from his craggy face with a tie. His eyes, dark and fathomless, set between heavy black lashes, caught Kethlun’s gaze and held it well past the time Keth would gladly have looked away. At last he nodded, freeing Keth of the power in his eyes.

“I see why those who tested you were confused,” he told Keth. “You have ambient glass magic, which means you draw power not from inside yourself, as academic glass mages do, but from glass and the things which go into making it, including earth, air, water and fire. The thing that has transformed it, however, is lightning. That lightning gives your power strength and unpredictability. Your power flickers, jumping from element to element within you.”

“Then we have a problem after all,” Dawnspeaker admitted. “We have the finest glass mages in the world in Tharios, but lightning… changes matters. Does anyone here work in lightning at all?”

One of the other mages replied, “None. Lightning mages are rare, if any even exist.”

“They exist,” Goldeye said. “There are lightning mages among the Traders, and one of the academic mages at Lightsbridge has learned to handle it. For that matter, there is a lightning mage in Tharios. A very accomplished one, as it happens.” He looked at Kethlun. “How advanced in the Glassmakers’ Guild are you?”

“Journeyman, Dhaskoi Goldeye,” Kethlun said politely. His brain was racing with new ideas. His problem had a name, and a solution, right here in Tharios. He could gain control over it, and return to his real life. And his family would be pleased. Keth’s lack of magic had always disappointed them. In the world of the Namorn trade guilds, mages equalled power for their guild.

Goldeye smoothed his moustache with a bony finger. “Since you know your craft, it seems to me that any spells you might need could be learned from books, perhaps with advice from a glass mage once your power is controlled.” There was a glint of mischief in the mage’s eye, one Keth didn’t understand. It vanished as the mage continued, “The lightning aspect is the thing that requires most of your attention.”

“You mean you can help me?” Kethlun’s voice cracked with desperation. He blushed hotly. He didn’t want these people to know how scared he was. “What must I do?”

Goldeye put a comforting hand on Keth’s shoulder and squeezed, then let go. Kethlun looked down a scant couple of centimetres into the older man’s face. “Come to supper with Dawnspeaker and me,” Goldeye said. There was understanding in his gaze. “We’ll sort you out.”


After she had chased the glass dragon first from the alum, then the salt, then the myrrh jars in the workroom, Tris used a ribbon to make a leash for Chime and secured her to a chair leg in the downstairs dining room. “I can’t concentrate on these books with you rattling things,” she scolded as she made sure Chime could retreat under the table. Little Bear enjoyed washing his new companion, and Tris wanted Chime to have a place where the dog couldn’t reach her if the dragon decided she had endured enough.

Tris also left a small bowl of water, though she wasn’t sure Chime drank water, and a dish with a tablespoon each of red and blue lustre salts, as well as the powder that turned glass a deep emerald green. These she also tucked well under the table. Little Bear was as convinced as Chime that there was no harm in trying to eat everything at least once.

With dog and dragon settled, Tris returned to the upstairs workroom to read. At first glance all that she had found was academic magic, not ambient. This troubled her. While any ambient mage could and did use spells, signs, talismans and potions to amplify her power, the source of ambient magic came from outside the mage. It had to be approached differently. Academic mages reached first for spell books, ambient mages for the things that gave them their power. Only another ambient mage held the truth of that difference in her very bones. What if Keth didn’t find an ambient glass mage?

I just need to look harder for books on ambient glass magic, she told herself. I’m sure they have them.

Downstairs Little Bear was barking. Tris ignored him, fascinated by the instructions for making a bowl to scry with; the Bear tended to bark at anything and everything. Another sound did shatter her concentration, a bone-shivering screech like a shard of glass dragged over hard stone. She raced downstairs and into the dining room.

Chime had climbed a table leg to the top. She clung there, tucked into the corner of the table’s frame as she made that awful sound. Tris scrabbled to undo the ribbon leash. The moment she freed the dragon, Chime threw herself at her, digging her claws into Tris’s clothes and skin.

Tris crooned gently to the trembling creature, trying to calm her. Looking at the dragon’s food, she saw a few glass flames beside the dish. Holding Chime with one hand, she set the flames in the dish with the colouring powders and put it on the table, where she couldn’t break them by accident. Chime continued to screech. Over and over Tris stroked the dragon, trying to breathe meditation-style, hoping she would calm the frightened creature.

The front door opened as Little Bear continued to bark. Tris’s breezes swirled into the front hall and returned to her with voices: Jumshida’s, then Niko’s.

“It’s all right,” she assured Chime. “They belong here. You remember Niko, don’t you?” Now she was really puzzled. Chime had been admired by total strangers all day and had voiced nothing louder than her musical purr. What had upset her?

Red-faced with effort, several of her braids knocked free of their pins, she edged out from under the table. Once in the open air she sat back on her heels and straightened, holding Chime to her chest with one hand.

“Oh, no,” said a man with a slightly husky, slow, familiar voice.

Tris whirled, forgetting that she still knelt, then fell on her side. Chime leaped free, taking flight. As the dragon zipped around the room, Tris glared up at Niko, furious to be caught unkempt and awkward before a stranger. Looking past him, she recognized the newcomer.

“You!” she cried at the same moment as Kethlun did.

“I take it you two have met?” asked Niko mildly. “Kethlun, Tris — Trisana Chandler — is the lightning mage I told you about.”

Chime screeched, that same ear-splitting sound of a nail on glass, and flew straight at Kethlun. Thirty centimetres away from him the dragon spat a flurry of glass needles into her maker’s face.

“Chime, no!” cried Tris. “Bad!” Quick as a flash — she had practised the movements for weeks so she could do this bit of magic in a hurry — she stripped the tie from one thin braid and collected a handful of sparks. She threw them at the dragon, imagining each spark as a tiny ball of thread connected to her fingertips. The balls spun around Chime to form a lightning cage with the dragon suspended inside. Tris reeled in the cage. Only when she held it in her hands did she look at Keth.

He’d flinched when the dragon came at him, saving his right eye, but that side of his face and head were peppered with thin red, blue and green needles. Niko tried to pull one out and cut himself.

“Serves you right,” Tris informed Keth, scowling at him. “You did try to kill her.”

Keth looked from Tris to Niko. “Oh, no,” he said, voice shaking. “Not her.”

“I’m afraid so,” replied Niko. “She is a lightning mage. You may have noticed,” he added drily.

“I don’t understand,” said Tris, but she was afraid she did, all too well. She had tried to find other lightning mages, just as she had tried to find other mages who could master the forces of the earth or of the sea, with little success. It seemed that, of all the ambient magics, weather was the most dangerous. It drew its power from all over the world. Mages who tried to do more than call rainstorms or work the winds often misjudged their ability to handle the forces that supplied their power, and were crushed. It had been in the back of her mind since Niko had shown her the lightning in Chime, that Keth would have trouble finding a teacher who could help with that aspect of his power.

“Of course you understand,” replied Niko.

Tris glared at him. Niko knew her too well.

“Moreover, you will do your duty,” Niko added, looking down his nose at her. “You accepted that when you donned the medallion of your certification.”

About to argue or even refuse, Tris made the mistake of looking at Keth. He was the picture of misery, blood dripping from the needles in his flesh, lines of exhaustion bracketing his mouth, dark circles under his eyes. Instead of speaking as she had meant to, she pulled out a chair with one hand. “Sit,” she ordered Keth. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”