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At Ferouze’s, Xantha, Poppy, Ferouze, and the four musicians were in the courtyard, talking. Keth went to his room. Tris and Chime settled on a step, watching Glaki and Little Bear stretch their legs in a game of chase.
Xantha, relaxing as Poppy combed her long gold hair, began to hum, then to sing, her voice a sweet soprano. Poppy joined in to sing the counterpart in her lower voice. From overhead they heard the sound of a Namornese balaka, a plaintive, sharper version of a lute: Keth descended the stairs playing it. Ferouze and one of the men fetched common lutes to play. One musician brought a recorder, another a set of graduated wooden pipes, while the fourth backed his deep bass voice with a harp. One song passed into another, as naturally as the late afternoon breeze flowed through the galleries around the courtyard.
It was the kind of time Tris had never expected to find in Khapik, like the evenings when her foster mothers, sisters, and brother all sat in the main room of their cottage, working on projects and singing, talking, or telling stories as the sounds of Winding Circle came through the windows.
As Tris watched the players, sparks appeared in the air’s currents. She thought they might be part of a picture, but when she strained to see them, they disappeared. At last she gave up, relaxed, and drifted.
The gathering broke up as the shadows lengthened. Everyone but Ferouze, Keth, and Glaki had to work. Keth, seeing that Tris was not inclined to move, took Glaki and Little Bear to the Lotus Street skodi to fetch their supper.
12
That night the three of them ate in Yali’s room, washed their dishes, and settled in for an evening’s study. Keth pored over a book of glass magic Tris had borrowed from Heskalifos. Tris continued to read Winds’ Path. When she caught Kethlun yawning, she ordered him off to bed. Glaki was already asleep — she barely twitched when Tris changed her dress for a nightgown and tucked her in. Little Bear curled up beside the child. Tris napped, exhausted by her day, but she woke some time after the clocks had struck midnight, the mix of lightning and tidal strength in her veins fading but strong. Her magic told her that dawn was still hours away, but she was no longer sleepy.
She went to Ferouze and made the same bargain as the night before, that the woman would stay with Glaki. She barely trusted Ferouze, but Keth needed his rest. With Ferouze to watch over Glaki and her lightning-sparked payment, Tris went out into Khapik. Once more Chime rode on her back, as fascinated by the changing worlds inside the district as Tris.
Tonight there was a festival in which yaskedasi dressed as butterflies, their wings huge creations of gauze and bamboo painted in a variety of designs. They paraded around the streams and islands in a soaring of flutes and the silvery tones of bells and hand cymbals. Guests and other yaskedasi showered them with confetti, dancing around the butterflies.
When Tris tired of the noise and crowd, she turned down one of the quieter streets, venturing into Khapik’s darker areas. She came upon two women taking a purse from a drunken man. Tris considered putting a stop to it. She finally decided that if the man were fool enough to get so drunk that he could be separated from his friends and robbed, perhaps the missing purse would teach him a lesson he’d remember. The women looked at Tris, eyes glittering, as if they considered doing something about her, but when she walked by silently, they left her alone.
The encounter made her wonder again about what manner of person the Ghost was. He must look normal enough, to come and go everywhere with no one the wiser. He was clever, to turn the city’s dislike for the dirtier side of life to his advantage. That he loathed the female yaskedasi was obvious. Did he want to be caught? Given that he left his victims in public places, it would seem that he did — or was that due more to his contempt for the city as a whole? Perhaps he didn’t hate just the pretty, shady entertainers. Perhaps he hated all Tharios.
Tris shook off her musings. Thinking about what drove the Ghost, while fascinating, was Dema’s job. If she were to help, if she were to do more than shepherd Keth as he followed his strange connection to these deaths, it would be through wind scrying. The air was everywhere. If she could see what the moving air touched, she could trace the killer, and avenge Glaki’s loss of the women who loved her.
Her breezes, sent out that night from Ferouze’s, found her now and then with their burden of sound. She listened to the conversations and noise they carried, finding nothing she could use. She also strained to view something, anything, in them. Once she thought she saw the curve of a gauze butterfly wing. She froze, trembling, needing to see more, but if she had actually glimpsed anything, the air that carried it had moved on, one of a hundred currents that flowed down the street.
“Probably just my imagination,” she muttered to Chime, and sighed.
Deep within Khapik, she walked down a service alley for the first time, having avoided them for their trash and smell until now. Two prathmuni sat there with a wagonload of garbage, eating supper. Tris was about to pass them by, but curiosity made her stop. “Have the arurimi talked to you?” she asked. “About the murders? Whether you’ve seen anyone or anything suspicious?”
The prathmuni — a woman with muscles like a bull’s and a teenage boy — regarded Tris with equally flat eyes. Finally the woman spit on the flagstones at her side. “Shenos, get some local idiot to explain what happens if you’re caught talking to one of us. We’d as soon not catch the whipping. And go away.”
“No one will hear about this talk from me,” Tris replied. “So will you answer my question?”
“Why?” demanded the boy. “What have you done for us?”
“Shut up,” growled the woman.
“It’s what I can do for you, if you pass the word around,” Tris replied. “If I tell the dhaskoi who’s charged with finding the Ghost that you’re helping, he can stop the arurim prathmuni from taking your people in for questioning.”
“He must be a god, then,” said the woman. “How ‘bout it’s more likely the arurimi will just keep torturing till one of us confesses and gets executed for it?”
“What if it is one of you?” Tris asked, curious.
The prathmuni looked at each other and drew the circle of the All-Seeing God on their foreheads. “They beat that out of us long ago,” said the woman, but she looked uneasy.
“One of us — gods,” breathed the boy. “They’d slaughter us all.”
“Is it one of you?” Tris asked again.
“No,” they said at once.
“Never,” added the boy.
“But surely you’ve angry folk among you,” Tris pointed out, watching as sparkles, a fistful of them, flowed past her eyes.
“Plenty,” replied the woman. “But they know better than to risk everyone’s lives. They know how the upper classes feel about us.”
“That’s right,” the boy agreed weakly.
There was no image in the passing clump of light. Tris sagged with disappointment. To the woman she said, “Madmen aren’t guided by what their people need.”
The woman spat to one side again before she said, “You’re strange even for a shenos. Are there more at home like you?”
Tris smiled ruefully. “No, mostly they’re traveling, too.”
“I hope not here,” the woman said. “Now please go away.”
Tris woke to a hammering at the door. Glaki opened it to reveal Kethlun standing in the morning light. He was trembling. Lightning flickered in his eyes. “I think I have one,” he said nervously. “Another globe. It’s an itch, only in my skull where I can’t scratch it.”
Tris sat up. Her bones ached with weariness and too little sleep; the tides and lightning she had used to keep going were starting to run out. She would have to pay with days in bed once their strength was gone. “Go to Touchstone and get things ready,” she croaked. “Don’t start till I get there. I’ve an idea.”
Keth, about to leave, stopped himself. “Will you get there?” he wanted to know. “You look like death walking. Maybe you — never mind.”
Tris, taking the pins fr
om two fresh tide braids, looked at him sharply. He was stepping away from the door. “Never mind what?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that when you start to fiddle with your hair I want to leave. No offense,” Keth added hastily. “It’s lovely hair, I’m sure.” He fled.
Tris looked at Glaki. “Can you put your kyten on without my help?” she asked.
“Yes, Tris,” replied the girl. “And my belly band, except you have to tie it.” Tharians wore an undergarment like a diaper that tied at the waist with a drawstring.
“Put it on and come here, then,” Tris ordered. When the girl’s belly band was secure and she was wrestling with her worn, faded tunic of pale blue wool, Tris returned to her tide braids, undoing two inches of each. She drew their strength in, letting it slide through vein and bone, foam through her lungs, and race to her head. When she had taken it all in, she redid the braids and pinned them back into their patterns. She hoped they caught the Ghost soon, before the price she had to pay to keep awake and alert through all this got high enough to be painful, not just exhausting.
Her strength restored, she dressed, put a leash on Little Bear, tucked Chime into the sling on her back, tied Glaki’s sandals, and bustled everyone out the door.
At Touchstone Keth assembled everything he would need, put ingredients into the crucible to melt, checked his work from the previous day, tried to read the book of glass magic Tris had lent him, gave up, and paced, unable to stand still. He blinked when she arrived with Glaki, the dog, and Chime. At Ferouze’s she’d been the color of ash, her smattering of freckles darker in contrast. Now she was so full of vigor she nearly threw off sparks. If he needed a reminder that those cursed braids truly were her mage’s kit, packed with magic both powerful and invisible, this was it.
She was the strangest girl, he thought as she settled Glaki in the corner. Kind when she was teaching, testy when people argued with her, briskly caring with the child. He would love to know her life’s story.
“We did business with a family named Chandler out of Ninver in Capchen,” he said abruptly. “Natron, mostly.”
About to walk her protective circle around the workshop, she looked over her shoulder at him. “My family handles natron imports,” she replied, a little stiff. “My Great-uncle Murris. Not exclusively, of course. My family deals in all kinds of goods.” She smiled crookedly. “Except defective ones. Those they don’t handle very well.” She set to work, leaving Kethlun puzzled. They had thought her defective? he wondered. Then he remembered the way she handled lightning. He could see where that might unnerve even his own family.
Once they were enclosed in her magical shield, Tris turned to Keth, hands on hips. “Meditation first,” she ordered.
“Do we have to?” he asked, trying not to whine as if he were still a restless boy in the schoolroom. “I don’t think I can concentrate.”
“But you will try, won’t you?” she asked, in the sweet way she used when she was about to close the steel fist in her steel glove. “Because you won’t control anything without first working on your control.”
He took a breath to argue, but memory made him breathe out without speaking. She sounded just like the guildsman who’d taught the apprentices how to master their breathing and how to use as much of their lungs as possible, vital skills for a glassblower. “I’ll try,” he mumbled, thinking, What kind of a world is it, when a chit of fourteen sounds like a guildmaster?
To his surprise, it was easier to reach the state she demanded in meditation than he thought. Keth felt sheepish when he realized that. He considered an apology, and decided against it. She would only be smug, and he hated it when she was smug with reason.
Maybe if I didn’t keep putting my foot in my mouth with her, he thought as they got to their feet and stretched. A scary thought occurred to him. “You say there are three more of you in Emelan?” Keth asked, goosebumps covering his arms at the thought. “Just like you?”
“Oh, no,” Tris replied, mischief in her gray eyes. “They’re much worse than I am.”
Thinking of the kind of people who could be counted on to survive long acquaintance with her, Keth said, “I believe you.”
“It could be worse,” Tris assured him. “We could all be here. Now,” she added, going from playful to brisk, “Let’s think about this next globe. Am I wrong, or when you blow into the gather, do you deliberately allow your power to flow on your breath?”
“Sometimes,” Keth admitted, thinking it over. “Sometimes not.”
“Let’s make a choice, then,” she suggested. “This time, try to let only a trickle of your power run through the blowpipe. Just a thread. Can you do that?”
Keth picked up first one blowpipe, then another, not liking the feel of either, though both were favorites. “I believe so, but it’ll be hard,” he admitted. “It feels like a flood behind a dam, Tris. It wants out. It wants to say what it has to say.”
Up went her near-invisible gold brows. Tris pursed her mouth. “It’s your magic, isn’t it?” she reminded him. “It’s time you taught it who’s in charge.”
“It is,” mumbled Keth, choosing a blowpipe he’d never handled before. It felt right in his hands.
“Go on thinking that your power is in charge, and it will stay so,” she explained. “Your single most important tool as a mage has to be your will, Keth. What you want, what you don’t want. Your magic feeds on those things. You have to make it feed only on what you grant it, or it will rule you and ruin your life.”
He nodded.
“Imagine the crucible in your mind, can you do that?”
Keth nodded.
“Now put all of your power in it, but for a single thread that you’ll blow into the globe,” she directed.
He did as she suggested and imagined his power flowing into the crucible. Imagining it, he could also feel his magic disappear endlessly, like an illusionist’s trick, into some part of himself that held it neatly. In his mind’s eye he saw the lone thread hanging from the opening like the loose end on one of his mother’s balls of yarn. After a pause to make sure his grip was solid, he opened his eyes. “Done,” he told Tris.
She nodded. “While you blow the globe, let that thread and only that thread travel with your breath into the glass. Maybe the problem has been that all of your magic is pouring into the globe until it explodes. Give it a try.”
Keth’s hands trembled. This was exciting. This might actually help. He glanced down at the blowpipe in his hands, the one he’d never used before. Set into its sides was a line of Kurchali, like advice from a seer who knew that one day a mage would hold the pipe: “Grant me steady hands, and steady breath.”
Normally he didn’t use an unfamiliar blowpipe on important projects, but this one, with the advice cut into it, seemed like an omen. Keth slid the pipe into the furnace, until its end was firmly set in molten glass. He began to twirl as he withdrew the rod. Up came the gather, a nice, red-orange blob. Frowning in concentration, Kethlun sent breath and power sliding through the pipe. The gather began to spread.
By the third reheating his magic began to fight its way free of the crucible in his mind. Keth clamped down. In that moment of distraction the glass developed an irregular bulge on one side: he’d slowed at twirling the pipe. He controlled its movement and blew, reshaping a perfect globe. A moment later he saw that the merest thread of his magic had thickened.
Then the force that had urged him to blow a globe expanded up and through Keth, filling the glass. The piece was finished.
Keth sighed and cut the globe free of the pipe. A veil of lightnings shimmered softly over the surface, a tamer version compared with the others Keth had made. Inside it was the same, a multitude of lightnings that moved, flashed, and split so much it was impossible to see anything.
Tris was reading from her leather-bound volume again. She looked at the globe he passed to her. “Some got away from my control,” he admitted.
“Not as much as before,” she murmur
ed as she turned the globe over in her hands. “You know what you have to do now, right?”
Keth sighed. “Wait for that thing to clear.”
“And waste the time while you wait?” she asked.
Keth glared at her. “Slave driver.”
“A bad name is just a fart with consonants,” she informed him loftily. “Well?”
Once more Keth sighed. “I need to work on my control.”
“For a while. Then you can just blow glass if you like,” his taskmistress said. “From the looks of you, most of your power today went into that globe. I’m going outside to do my own work. I’ll make sure the barriers are sealed.”
She was being an alarmist, Keth thought. He felt just as good now as he had on getting up that morning. Shaking his head over her lack of faith in how much magic he could work at one time, Keth sat cross-legged on the workshop floor. Tris opened her protective barrier and walked outside, Little Bear following. As she resealed the barrier around the workshop, Keth looked at Glaki. “You must get bored, sitting around here all day.”
The little girl shook her head: she and Chime had discovered a game in which she would point to one of the dragon’s food dishes, and Chime would eat, then produce colored glass flames for her. Keth noticed the little girl’s brown curls were glossy and thoroughly combed, her face, arms and legs clean. Yali and Iralima had both belonged to the “do as well as can be expected” school of grooming a child. Most of their time had to be used on their own appearance, in preparation for a night’s performance. Keth decided that of course Tris would do an exacting job on Glaki’s hair: only look at what she put her own through.
He glanced outside, where Tris, veiled by the silver glow of the magical protections on the workshop, stood in the courtyard. Her spectacles were tucked away somewhere. She stared into space, eyes wide and unseeing. What was she doing? That was another thing he’d ask her, when he found the courage.
This wasn’t helping him to control his power. Taking a deep breath, Keth began to meditate.
