By the time Keth left Ferouze, the sky was covered with heavy masses of fast-moving grey clouds. He had delayed going to his room as long as he could, first by helping the old woman to feed Glaki, then by telling the girl a story until she fell asleep. Only after that did he gather his courage and go out into the courtyard. There was no sign of Tris, Little Bear, or Chime. Keth knew he should be relieved that she was gone; instead he was puzzled. He was starting to get some idea of what she was like. She wasn’t the sort to just go away.
He was also dissatisfied with himself. Why hadn’t she made him face the storm? He thrust that idea clean out of his mind. It was just another of the bits of folly that had entered his thoughts after he’d been struck by lightning. Instead he told himself that Tris had finally seen it was futile to argue with him.
With another wary look at the sky, Keth climbed the stair. It would pour at any time. Probably Tris had returned to Jumshida’s to dance in it, or something. He hoped that the yaskedasi had found indoor work. This storm felt like a big one.
He slid his key into the lock on his door and turned it. The door was locked. Frowning, Keth turned the key in the opposite direction. The door opened. He didn’t like that. Had he left the room unlocked all day? Yali would never steal from him, but he didn’t trust Poppy or the male yaskedasi who lived at Ferouze’s. How could he be so stupid as to forget to lock up?
When he entered the room he found that he’d also left the shutters open. He swore: if it had rained in the day, his sketches for designs would have got soaked. Then he registered movement beside his door. It was the dog. Tris sat on his stool. A flash at the corner of his other eye drew his gaze to Chime, who sat atop the pile of his sketches.
“You found it open and you just walked in?” he demanded. Somehow he was not as surprised to find her there as he should have been.
“No,” said Tris, smoothing out her skirts. “My breezes found the one with your magic in it, and I picked the lock.” She held up a pair of hairpins.
Whatever he had expected her to say, that was not it. “You picked a lock.”
Tris tucked the pins back into her braids. “Briar taught me. He said I had a gift for locks. It’s high praise, coming from him. Not that your lock was much of a challenge.”
Little Bear came over, wagging his tail. Keth scratched his ears. “Hello, Bear. Good boy.” To Tris, in a less affectionate tone, he said, “You let yourself in, let yourself out.”
“No,” she replied as a gust rammed through the open window. “Come on. We’re going up to the roof.” Chime gave off a high, singing note that rose and fell as sparks popped in her eyes.
Keth shivered. He could smell rain on the wind. “I told you, no. Just because there’s a storm coming doesn’t mean I’m going to play in it.”
Tris removed her spectacles and rubbed her nose. “Keth, I’m not asking you to play.” Her voice was surprisingly gentle and reasonable. “But I need to show you something.”
“I don’t need to be shown anything.” Keth folded his arms over his chest. He hoped she couldn’t see that he was shaking. “Not in a storm, anyway.”
“But you do.” This time her voice was even gentler; that same kindness was in her level grey eyes. Now she scared him. She wasn’t kind. “Keth, as long as you fear lightning, you’ll fear your power. It doesn’t have to be that way. You’re not the same fellow who got struck beside the Syth. I can prove it to you.”
He shook his head stubbornly, though he couldn’t have said what he was denying or refusing. Outside, the tiniest growl of thunder rolled through the greenish air. His skin rippled with gooseflesh.
Tris took a deep breath and tried again. “So, you’ll learn magic, but only to the point where it starts to scare you. Is that it? How far will that get you? Magic doesn’t respond to orders like ‘this far and no further’. The more you do, the better you get, so the more power you have. If you don’t keep ahead of it — if you don’t learn how to release it safely — it will find its own ways to come out. You really don’t want that to happen.”
Keth shook his head again, his heart thudding in his chest. What she said had the unpleasant feel of truth. For all her fiery temperament, she wasn’t the dramatic sort who liked to exaggerate. She was irritating, but she was also forthright. And when she spoke of magic, somehow the things she said carried more weight than the pronouncements of his mage uncles. She was fourteen and difficult, but when it came to magic, she seemed as much a master of her craft as Niko or Jumshida, and even more than Dema.
Tris went to the window, turning her face up to the blast of the rising wind. The two thin braids she wore loose on either side of her head fluttered wildly.
Chime flew over to hover in front of Keth as she made a chinking sound. Once she got his attention, she flew to the door and back, as if in invitation. She wanted Keth to go outside.
Tris faced him, the wind turning her braids so they reached towards Keth like yearning hands. Quietly she said, “I don’t believe lightning has the power to hurt you any more. I think it would recognize you as a kindred spirit. But in case I’m wrong, and I suppose I could be, I can protect you from it. I can keep it off you. But Keth, for that to happen, you have to trust me.”
For a long moment he said nothing, his mind in an uproar. It did come to trust, didn’t it? She was his teacher. Until now she’d been a good one. “You threw lightning at me,” he reminded her. “That hurt.”
“Because you’d put all of yours into Chime.” Quick as a flash her hand whipped forward. A thin stream of lightning — where had she got it with her braids all done up? — shot between them to strike Keth’s crossed arms. His muscles twitched, then stilled. Nothing else happened.
“You did it again!” he yelled, outraged.
“That’s right.” Her eyes were cold and steady. “Just a bit I yanked from the air, with the storm almost on us. Did it hurt?”
“That’s beside the point!” he cried. “You threw — ”
“Did it hurt?” she interrupted, steely-voiced.
Keth struggled, trying to think of something cutting to say. Finally he snapped, “You tell me to trust you, then you throw lightning at me.”
It was her turn to cross her arms over her chest. “Show some sense, Keth. How else am I going to get you to listen to me, if you won’t take my word for it?”
Suddenly the wind went out of his sails. She was right. She was right, and he, a grown man, was wrong. “You won’t let it hurt me?” His voice emerged far smaller, and far more trembly, than he liked. “You said you’d protect me.”
“I will.”
Keth sighed and wiped his sweaty face with a hand that shook. “Let’s go, then.”
They climbed to the second-floor gallery, then up to the roof. Ferouze had already taken the wash down from the lines strung up here, leaving a few buckets and a bench to endure the storm.
Keth looked up. Rough black clouds billowed overhead. The wind rose, whistling through the streets and over the rooftops. In a lodging house across the way someone had not closed his shutters completely: they slammed in the wind until one ripped free of its hinges. The air had taken on the green hue of olive oil. Thunder rolled in the distance. Keth shivered, and huddled in a corner of the rooftop wall, Little Bear on his left, Chime tucked securely in his lap. He had thought he would be safe in this low part of Tharios that would not draw lightning. That no longer mattered with Tris here. With Tris for company, no place was safe.
I’ll protect you, she had said. Now he had to learn, did he need protection?
Tris stood at the centre of the roof, idly removing hairpins, releasing some braids. They hung below her shoulders, flapping and popping in the wind.
Lightning flashed. Keth waited, counting silently to himself. At thirty he heard the roll of thunder. The storm was fifteen kilometres away — plenty of time to scramble downstairs, except that now he couldn’t bring himself to move.
Lightning again. Keth resumed his count, ending when thunder boomed at twenty. Ten kilometres. The storm moved fast. Another flash, and another. Thunder made the stones under him shiver. He hoped Glaki wasn’t frightened. He couldn’t remember if Ira had ever said if her child was afraid of storms. Keth had never been afraid, one of the reasons he was stupid enough to be caught in the open when the Syth blew up a surprise.
Lightning jabbed down near the Piraki Gate. Thunder blasted through the narrow canyons made by the buildings.
Here came another bolt, three-pronged, thunder on its heels. It struck Tris squarely, all three prongs twining around her. She held up her arms; she laughed as the bolt clung to her without vanishing, a white-hot ladder to the clouds. Several of her braids exploded from their ties, the hair in them wrapping around the lightning that secured her to the sky. Oddly enough, the rest of her hair stayed where it was, unbudging, locked in place with pins. Keth’s rescuers told him that his hair had been standing straight up when he was found. Why did some of Tris’s hair move, but not the rest?
It was her mage’s kit. Suddenly he believed that she held other forces ready for use in her many braids. She had not been joking when she had described the range of her power. Niko had said nothing that day, not because he liked the joke Tris played on Keth, but because she told the literal truth.
I’m dead, he thought helplessly. And all thanks to a cross-grained fourteen-year-old.
Chime’s claws bit into Keth’s breeches, forcing him to yelp and straighten his legs. Free of the bowl of his lap and arms, the glass dragon took flight, swooping and soaring around the trapped branch of lightning that still clung to Tris.
Keth stared. Inside Chime he saw a skeleton of silver. Around it twined veins that flickered and rippled like lightning.
Little Bear had seen enough. The big dog scrambled to the door and into the house, tail between his legs.
The bolt that held Tris shrank. It wasn’t dying, Keth realized. It was soaking into the hair that his young teacher had freed of its pins. It grew thinner and thinner, until it was gone. The braids that had absorbed it shimmered.
An immense fist pounded Keth on the head. He fell to his knees, staring at his hands. They blazed — he blazed — with lightning. He groped his scalp, and found something stronger and far hotter than the power in the globe he’d made for Dema. A bolt of lightning had struck his head, in the same place the last bolt had struck. His brain fizzed, his eyes filled with a glory of white fire that trickled down his throat, into his belly, through his arms and legs. In that splendid moment Keth saw that all things had some lightning in them. Physical matter did not reject lightning; it was simply overwhelmed by it, as a teardrop was overwhelmed by the ocean.
Lightning struck objects because it was drawn to the ghost of itself within them.
Except there was no ghost of lightning inside Keth: he had the true thing. He drank the power in like a thirsty man drinks water and, like Tris, raised his arms to call even more to him.
Later, as they staggered down into the house, he found the voice to croak, “You promised you’d protect me.”
“I did,” she replied, her voice as rough as his. “I saw that your power was calling to the lightning, and I made sure that you weren’t hit by so much you’d panic.”
“You made me think you’d — ” he began.
She interrupted him. “What? Wrap you in a cocoon of magic? In a nice safe blanket? I would have done so, had there been the need. There wasn’t. It’s my job to know these things, remember? I wasn’t about to lose my very first student because he didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.”
They had reached Keth’s door before he’d summoned the energy to say, “You are a wicked girl.”
Tris shrugged. “So I’ve been told. I’ve learned to live with the shame of it.” She looked at Little Bear, who huddled in front of Keth’s door. “Come on, Bear. Lightning’s done.” She turned her sharp gaze on Keth. “Answer me truly — have I done you a disservice?”
It was his turn to shrug. He hung his head for good measure. “You know you didn’t.”
“I knew. I wanted to make certain that you did, too.” Before Keth could jerk away, Tris stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. A spark jumped between them. They both grinned. “If you have any leaks, put a big pot under them,” she warned. “It’ll rain all tonight and all tomorrow. Not my doing — this storm built up a lot of power while it was stuck in the east, and coming this way has made it stronger. I hope you’ve got a hat to wear to the shop tomorrow.”
Though he wasn’t sure if he would like the answer, Keth heard himself ask, “How do you know so much about it?”
Tris grinned, waved, and left him without a reply. Chime, riding on her shoulder, napped her glass wings in farewell.
The rain continued to fall as it had fallen all night, steadily, without let-up. Tris was glad for it. She felt like parched ground in the first showers of spring, greedily drinking up the moisture in the air.
Rain washed Tharios. Gutters ran clean on both sides of the Street of Glass, their burdens of rubbish swept away the night before. The white stucco of the houses and store-fronts blazed; the orange-coloured roof tiles shone. It was all scrubbed clean, right down to the soaked and sullen prathmun. They were almost the only people in sight as they went about their endless chores. Those Tharians of the other classes who walked abroad did so in oiled straw hats and capes, or with oiled silk umbrellas over their heads. Tris simply ushered the rain away from herself, Little Bear and Chime. She’d had her fill of rain the night before, and the heat of Keth’s workshop would make a wet dress unbearable. Let the passers-by stare at her and her dog, shedding drops as if a glass bowl lay over them. It was time they learned that they did not control all the wonder in the universe.
Keth was hard at work by the time she reached the shop. “Did you sleep at all?” Tris asked, seeing the lightning’s power blaze through his skin.
“A little,” he said, “but I had an idea, and I wanted to test it.” He grinned. “Close your eyes,” he ordered. “I’ve got something for you.”
“It had better not be slimy,” Tris warned as she obeyed.
“Spoken like a girl with a brother,” Keth said, moving behind her. “Even in Khapik I’d have to look hard for anything slimy.” Something light fell around Tris’s neck as Chime crooned.
Tris opened her eyes and looked down. On a black silk cord around her neck dangled a bright red flame-like piece of glass, its tail twisted to provide a loop for the cord. On either side of it hung two smaller, blue glass flames. “Keth, this is beautiful,” she whispered. “How did you make it?”
“Actually, Chime did most of the work,” replied Keth, standing back so he could see the full effect of the necklace. “I found these on my sketches when I woke up this morning. She leaves them everywhere she goes, practically. I guess because she eats the ingredients that make and colour glass.”
Tris nodded.
“Well,” continued Keth, “I got to thinking that we could sell them as novelties, to pay Antonou for supplies and to buy more food for Chime. The hardest part was actually heating the tails to bend them for the loop. Whatever’s in those, it resists fire.” He poured a handful of glass flames, all with looped tails, into her hands. “I kept some back for the girls at Ferouze’s,” he confessed. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
Tris frowned. “You aren’t thinking of taking Chime back, are you?”
Keth shook his head. “I gave up my responsibility to her. Besides, I think she belongs with you.”
Chime underscored Keth’s words by twining around Tris’s neck.
“I love you too, Chime,” mumbled Tris, her cheeks crimson. “Thank you, Keth. It’s a wonderful idea.” She patted her necklace, then looked at him. “Ready to meditate?”
Meditation that day was easier than it had ever been, particularly the exercise in which Keth placed his magic into a crucible. It was as if the night’s lightning had cleared his mind of fear and increased his strength. Tris watched as he treated the lightning in him just as he did glass, with a friendly but firm hand. Today he gripped the power just hard enough to control it, but not so hard that it erupted through the weak places in his concentration. On his fourth try he managed to pack it all into the image he held in his mind of a crucible: Tris could see its shape as it folded in on itself, reduced to a blazing, fist-sized sun. He was so giddy with his success that he repeated the exercise two more times, just because he could.
“We’ll stop for midday,” Tris said, gathering in the magic she had used for her circle of protection. “Then let’s try for another globe.”
“That’s what I hoped to do,” Keth replied. “I might be more successful, now that I have some idea of how my power works — ”
“Tris. Keth.” Dema stood in the doorway, wearing a rain hat and cape. He looked harried, and he would not meet their eyes. “The Ghost struck last night — another girl from Keth’s lodgings. I need you to identify her,” he explained, tight-lipped. “I’ve got horses. Can the dog keep up?”
Keth turned white and rushed from the shop. Tris followed, throwing her rain shield over all of them. In silence they mounted the horses Dema had brought, Chime riding on Tris’s shoulders.
Dema led the way to Elya Street, past the arurimat, and on to Noskemiou Way.
Tris kneed her horse even with Dema’s. “Where?” she asked. “Where was she? Back in Khapik?”
“No,” Dema said tersely. “She was at the foot of the last emperor’s statue in Achaya Square. They didn’t tell me until she was taken to Noskemiou Thanas, so I wouldn’t risk pollution by getting too near the body.” His mouth tightened into a grim line. “They won’t try that little trick again.”
They rode on to Noskemiou Way, where the great hospital lay directly across the Piraki Gate from Khapik. Tris gasped when she saw the sprawl of buildings, larger than any of Winding Circle’s infirmaries or Summersea’s hospitals. Four storeys high, white stucco over brick, Noskemiou was laid out like a series of ladders. Between the wings that were the ladders’ rungs lay courtyard gardens where the healers grew herbs for their medicines.
Dema led them past the wings, each with a sign that named it as a House in Tharian, Kurchali and Tradertalk, the main languages spoken here. They rode by Children’s House, Mothers’ House, Elders’ House, Poverty House. Beyond them the blazing white stucco was painted black. This part of the hospital had no windows, only a few doors, and no signs at all. An arurim stood in front of one of its small doors.
Dema rode up to him and dismounted. “The arurim will mind the horses,” he said curtly. “It would be better if the dog remained, too.”
“Little Bear, stay,” ordered Tris as she slid out of the saddle. “What is this place, anyway?” she asked.
“Noskemiou Thanas,” Keth said, his voice more crackly than usual. “The House of the Dead.”
They followed Dema into the building. Magical signs for preservation, cold, and permanence shone in Tris’s vision from the walls and floors. The people who walked here were civilians — who quarrelled, wept, or bore their losses silently — or they were those who worked here, silent prathmuni dressed in black tunics or kytens.
Dema led them to a door that bore a brass number five and opened it, motioning for Tris and Keth to go in. Two black-robed prathmuni, at work there, turned towards them. “Number eighteen,” ordered Dema. They led him, Tris and Keth to a covered form on a wooden table.
Tris clenched her hands until her ragged nails bit her palms. She hated the sight of dead people: they looked sad, alone, abandoned. Though she had seen a great many dead since her career as a mage began, they still made her flesh creep.
The prathmuni drew the cover away from the dead woman’s face.
Tris bit her lip. The woman had been strangled. Under the mud splatters of last night’s storm the weapon showed yellow at her throat: the head veil of a yaskedasu. While she and Kethlun had revelled in lightning, rain and cool air, the Ghost had struck. His way of killing had changed the woman’s face enough that her own family might not recognize her, but Tris knew the lavender scent, the soggy brown curls and the embroidery on the dead woman’s kyten.
Keth was not as slow as Tris to recognize the victim. He dropped to his knees, burying his face in his hands.
“Oh, Yali,” Tris murmured, her lips trembling. She closed the dead woman’s staring eyes with one hand. From her sash she brought out a pair of coppers and used them to weight Yali’s eyelids, so that the soul could not return to its old home, which had begun to decay. Chime crept on to Yali’s body, making the screeching metal on glass sound that was her distress cry.
Now at last the prathmuni, who had seen people behave as Tris and Keth did a thousand times, showed emotion. Chime caused them to step away nervously as they sketched the circle of the All-Seeing on their foreheads.
Tris put a hand on Keth’s shoulder, then offered him her handkerchief. He ignored it, though tears dripped to the floor through his fingers. Tris looked around: where had Dema gone?
She found him in the hall, talking to an arurim. “I don’t care what it takes in bribes to the secretaries, I’m good for it,” he said fiercely, his dark eyes ablaze. “I want to talk to the Keepers of the Public Good today.”
“But dhaskoi, what can they do?” enquired the arurim. “They aren’t equipped to investigate criminals!”
“They can shut down Khapik!” snapped Dema. “Close it down until we find the rotted polluting Ghost! So get moving. Lay those bribes on as thick as you can. Stop by Nomasdina Hall and get chits from my mother for it, but I need the Keepers’ attention now!”
There was sufficient iron in Dema’s voice; the arurim left at a trot. Before he could open the door to the outside, a man and a woman in the white robes of priests emerged from a room next to the door. The arurim halted and raised his arms as the man surrounded him with incense smoke from a censer, and the woman rattled off the prayers for cleansing. Tris gritted her teeth. They all would have to undergo this nonsense when they tried to leave.
Demi turned to her. “What?” he demanded.
Tris shook off her thoughts about cleansing. “That was badly done, in there,” she said, pointing to the room where Yali lay. “Springing it on us like that. You could have warned us.”
“I didn’t know,” Dema retorted. “Wouldn’t it be just as cruel for me to say I think it’s a woman I’ve only seen for thirty minutes in my life, and have it turn out not to be so? There are two other yaskedasi at Ferouze’s, remember. And I have other things on my mind.”
Tris folded her arms over her chest. “Such as?”
“We have to shut down Khapik, forbid the yaskedasi to work. We need to put extra arurimi on this, as many as can be spared. I don’t want any more dead women. They have to listen to me this time,” Dema insisted, trembling with urgency. “He’s moving closer to Assembly Square. He’s taunting us — it can’t be allowed to go on, and it won’t!”
“Well, while you’re enraged over being taunted, Keth just lost somebody he cared for,” Tris said coldly. “I wish you had thought better, Dema.”
He took a step back, startled to be addressed in that tone. “I’m trying to save lives, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“So in your rush to save lives you don’t care if you shatter one or two? And they tell me I’m not kind,” Tris said flatly. “Her name was Yali. She was a friend to Iralima, and she was taking care of Iralima’s daughter.”
“You don’t understand,” Dema said wearily, rubbing his forehead.
“I don’t want to,” Tris replied.
The door to the room where Yali lay opened. Keth emerged. His eyes were red and puffy with weeping. Chime stood on his shoulder, steadying herself by gripping his hair in her forepaws. She looked at Dema and hissed, spraying him with tiny glass pellets.
“I agree,” Tris said, glaring at Dema.
Keth ignored her. To Dema he said harshly, “You have to close Khapik. Before he kills anyone else. How does he come and go unseen, even in Achaya Square? I know the amrim patrol up there.”
“I’m going to see the Keepers of the Public Good today, to petition them to shut Khapik,” replied Dema, leaning against the wall. He looked exhausted. “As for how…” He grimaced. “There are service and sewage tunnels throughout the city.”
“Wonderful,” Keth said sarcastically. “Let me guess. Nobody wants to see the prathmuni and servants at work.”
Dema nodded. “This entire city is a giant sieve. It can’t be guarded well, though I’ll bet the Assembly authorizes the money for more guards. They’ll have to pay a lot to get them into the sewers, and they’ll have to have priests to cleanse them, or no one will do it. Even the arurim prathmuni refuse sewer duty.” His voice, cracking with exhaustion, softened. “Keth, I’m sorry. My mind was going in six different directions… You were close?”
Keth nodded. “I have to go home,” he said. “I want them hearing it from me.”
“Did she work last night?” asked Dema.
“Yes,” Tris replied softly.
“You know how it is for most of the street yaskedasi,” explained Keth. “If they don’t work, they don’t eat, they risk losing their lodgings… And Yali was clever. She wouldn’t take risks.” He looked at Tris. “I can’t go back to Touchstone — ”
She shook her head. “I’ll go to Ferouze’s with you,” she said, thinking, Maybe I can do him some good.
After a moment’s hesitation, Keth nodded.
“Let’s get cleansed, then,” said Dema, leading them to the priests. “Keth, take your horses with you. Just have someone return them to Elya Street.”
Tris endured it as the priests worked their cleansing with incense and prayers, her mind racing furiously. As they mounted their horses, she asked Dema, “Do you think your Keepers will listen?”
“They must.” Dema gathered the reins and urged his horse to a trot down Noskemiou Way.
As Dema trotted through Achaya Square, he saw that the priests of the All-Seeing had already erected cloth barriers around the defiled statue until it and its surroundings could be purified. They turned to watch him pass. Seeing their eyes on him, Dema remembered his own, slow process of cleansing at their hands — a day and a night stolen from his hunt for the Ghost! — and the priests’ complete lack of interest in the methods needed to trace a murderer. What if the Keepers of the Public Good ignored his arguments? When all was said and done, he was still an arurim dhaskoi of less than a year’s standing, without enough service to Tharios to give weight to his words. He must not waste a trip to Balance Hill or worse yet, waste the clan’s bribe money. In theory the Keepers were duty-bound to hear any Tharian, but there was a great deal of difference between the ear of the Keepers when they were awake, and that of vexed, half-asleep Keepers. There was also a difference between the Keepers and their obligations, and the interests of those who served the Keepers.
It was the sight of Phakomathen, stabbing into the grey mists of rain that gave Dema an idea. The Keepers would have to listen to him if he came with support from Heskalifos, particularly those mages who attended the conference on visionary magics. He turned his mount aside, and rode to the university.
He arrived at the conference hall shortly before the midday break. He waited outside until the doors opened and mages of all races and nationalities spilled out, then strode through them into the hall. The morning’s speakers were still on the dais, talking to one another and collecting their notes. One of them was Jumshida Dawnspeaker; another was Tris’s teacher, Niklaren Goldeye.
Jumshida smiled when she noticed him. “Dhaskoi Nomasdina, is it not?” she asked, her rich voice friendly. “Have you come to join us?”
“Actually, no,” he said, nervous. “I’ve come to beg you for help. The Ghost killed another yaskedasu last night — another woman who lives in the same house as Kethlun Warder.” Jumshida drew the circle of the All-Seeing on her forehead. Dema continued, “I’m on my way to Balance Hill to speak to the Keepers. It was my hope that you would lend me your support.”
Was it his imagination, or did she stiffen?
“I fail to see what use I might be to the arurim,” Jumshida said.
“You underestimate the honour you have in the city,” Dema replied. “You are First Scholar of Mages’ Hall, Second Scholar of Heskalifos. You are responsible for bringing together the greatest vision mages of our time, to produce a work that will define vision magic for centuries.” Children of the First Class also learned the art of flattery. One of their maxims was that bees went to sweet-smelling flowers, not earth-smelling mushrooms. “How would the Keepers not value anything you have to say?”
Everyone but Goldeye left discreetly, watching Jumshida from the corners of their eyes. “What, exactly, do you wish them to value from me?” asked Jumshida, smoothing the folds of her mage’s stole.
“That Khapik must close until this monster is caught,” replied Dema. He took a breath. “And that cleansing the site of a murder must wait until the arurim can trace every influence present.”
“Very sensible,” Goldeye said tartly. “I can’t believe this hasn’t been raised before.”
“Why should the Keepers listen to any thoughts I might have on Khapik?” asked Jumshida. “Have you considered the serious hardship a closing would place on the shopkeepers and the yaskedas. They exist day by day on their earnings. As for the other…” She looked at Goldeye. “You don’t understand, Niko. Killing destroyed the Kurchali emperors, with their mass executions and their gladiators fighting to the death on sacred days. Why else would the blood plague have begun here, where people bled to death through the very pores of their skins? It was a thousand years ago for you of the north, but it took us three centuries to recover from the disorder of those times.” She turned a stern face to Dema. “You are a Tharian, Demakos Nomasdina. You already know these things. It was the cleansing, and the banishment of pollution through death, which saved us from the chaos that followed the emperors.”
“But it hurts us now,” argued Dema, wanting her to understand. “In the case of these murders — ”
She covered her ears with her hands. “You speak blasphemy,” she retorted when he stopped talking. “So the rumours are true. You risk your soul and the safety of Tharios in your pursuit of the Ghost. I will not sully my hands by association, Dhaskoi Nomasdina. And you must decide which is of more value: a few lives, which are fleeting at best, or your family’s standing and your own immortal spirit.” Her body stiff with disapproval, she picked up her notes and walked away.
“I’ll go with you,” Goldeye said, his voice clipped. “I may be only a shenos, but perhaps the Keepers will listen to me.”
Dema hesitated. Would support from a shenos, even one as famed as Niklaren Goldeye, hurt or help him?
As if he read Dema’s mind, Niko said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to them in any case. I want permission to scry the past on the sites where the victims have been found. It’s possible your priests missed something as they cleansed.”
At that Dema bristled: surely the priests knew their craft! Still, he told himself, it couldn’t hurt to have a reputable mage at his side.
Most importantly, he was desperate. He’d seen the look on Keth’s face, when the glassblower recognized the dead woman. He remembered the accusations the people had thrown at him at the Forum and elsewhere, that he didn’t care about their lives. Recently, to enter the arurimat, he’d had to pass through a crowd that grew larger with each murder. They watched him in silence, their eyes accusing: how many more would he allow to die.
“Do you have a horse?” he asked Goldeye.
One of the Nomasdina clan servants awaited Dema at the First Class entrance at Serenity House. The woman greeted him with a bow, took charge of his horse and Niko’s, and handed Dema a heavy, jingling purse.
“Your mother says that coin always gets a quicker response than chits to be redeemed,” explained the servant. “She also instructs me to tell you to take care. She hears what is being said of you, and worries that you risk forgetting your obligations to the clan in your eagerness to meet your obligations to the arurim.” She bowed again and led the horses away.
Dema had visited Serenity House several times with his family and knew how things worked here. As servitor passed him on to servitor, he distributed the bribes that would ensure he was being sent in the right direction, a silver bik each. When he and Niko reached the greeting room set aside for the First Class, Dema gave five silver biks to have his name presented to the Keepers. Then he and Niko were granted a private room in which to wait. Servants came with food and drink; others came with dry tunics for them both.
After a short time a clerk arrived to write down the reason they had come; Dema bribed him appropriately. Several hours later, when their clothes, dried and pressed free of wrinkles, were returned to them, another clerk came to clarify what the previous clerk had written down. She too received the proper bribe.
As the long hours dragged by, Dema and Niko talked of all manner of things: their educations as mages, Niko’s travels and how he’d come to teach Tris, Dema’s family history. They even napped for a time. It was nearly midnight when Niko asked, “I know the customs of Tharios and the blood doctrine. I confess, I’m curious — why do you keep sticking your neck out to trace the killer’s steps? You risk a great deal for a procedure that may not lead you to him.”
Dema looked at him, startled. “You don’t think I could catch him if I could dog his trail?”
Niko smoothed his moustache. “If there had only been one murder, I would say, almost certainly. But with each killing he has shown he is clever — and in our world, clever criminals always have ways to foil magical tracking. In any event, you have put your standing in Tharios in great danger. Why? He’s killed no one close to you. Is it the defilement of public places?”
Dema raised his eyebrows, shocked. “Defilement? That’s for priests to worry about. The busier you keep priests, the less chance they have to pry into our private lives. But the Ghost…” He thought for a moment, then sighed. “The All-Seeing, in his wisdom, arranged my birth to an honourable family in the First Class. I have privileges, but I also have a duty to the lower classes, to protect and guide them. Not everyone takes that duty seriously, but we Nomasdinas do. Even if it’s to yaskedasi and the rest of the Fifth Class. They trust us to watch out for them. That’s what I mean to do.”
“And if the Keepers don’t listen?” Niko asked gently.
Dema wanted to tell the older man that this was ridiculous, but he couldn’t. Refusal was always a possibility. “I’ll have to think of something,” he said, feeling defensive.
“Perhaps you ought to start thinking now,” suggested Niko. “Just in case.”