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She had set her hand on him in full view of a handful of priests and arurimi. She had called him a “devoted citizen.” And she had virtually told him that he would be able to find killers unhindered by considerations of pollution — once he caught the Ghost.
13
The worst part, Tris thought as she groped her way down Imperial Alley, was how confusing it all was. She felt as if she walked through an opal when she tried the magics of Winds’ Path, an opal alive with glittering bits of color that threatened to overwhelm her sight. None of them served to make any kind of a picture for her, not even so much as last night’s glimpse of a gauze butterfly wing. Worse, they made her half-blind in Khapik, not precisely a good thing to be. Tonight she had Chime and Little Bear with her, and her breezes to warn her, but her head was spinning. Floods of dizziness came and went.
“Enough,” Tris told her companions. “I’ll just have to try again tomorrow.”
Chime rubbed her head against Tris’s cheek. The girl sighed and closed her eyes, willing the magic away. At last she put her spectacles back on and returned to Ferouze’s. She doubted that she could sleep, thanks to the tides in her blood and bones, but at least she could read further. Maybe there was a way to sort all these firefly bits until they showed her something real.
About to climb from the second story of Ferouze’s to the third, she saw that Chime scratched at Keth’s open door. Tris looked into his room. Her student lay awake on his bed, watching the ceiling shadows by the light of one candle. He pulled the sheet up to his bare chest when she came in and smiled ruefully. “Yes, they had to send me back because I was exhausted. Please don’t say ‘I told you so,’ “ he begged.
Tris sat on a chair, Chime at her feet, Little Bear dropping with a groan in the doorway. “It’s the farthest thing from my mind,” she assured him, watching threads of color in the breeze that flowed between the window and the door. The threads all came to hover around Keth, lighting on his eyes, his jaws, his chest, making him sparkle in Tris’s sight.
“I suppose you never did anything of the kind,” Keth accused.
“Never,” replied Tris, straightfaced. “And if Niko tells you that one time I decided to halt the tides, and the rocky cove where I tried it is now called ‘Gravel Beach,’ well, he exaggerates.”
“You. Tried to halt the — the tides.” There was awe in Keth’s voice.
“The important word there is ‘tried.’ I was very foolish, and lucky enough to survive the experiment,” Tris informed him. “Are you hungry at all?”
Keth shook his head. “Sleepy, a little. Trying to think of ways to pull the lightning out of the globes. Where were you? I went upstairs, but Ferouze is with Glaki.”
“I’m trying something of my own,” Tris said. “I need to be in open air for it to work. It’s not going as well as I had hoped,” she confessed, and sighed.
“You have trouble? But you wear the medallion,” Keth protested, sitting up on his elbows. “I thought, once you have that —”
Tris shook her head with a rueful smile, wishing that were so. “Different spells make different kinds of trouble,” she explained. “Nobody can do every kind of magic, and the more complex a spell, the harder it is to work.” She sighed, remembering. “Three years ago there was an epidemic in Summersea,” she told him. “Nearly thirty of us, including my brother Briar and two great mages, worked day after day, trying to make a cure using magic. Every time something went wrong, we knew more people were dying. And there wasn’t a thing we could do except keep working, one hard step at a time.”
She looked at him. She could see that he listened to her with every particle of his being. Finally now, to Keth she was not fourteen and unworthy; she was a mage, with a mage’s wisdom. They had come a long way since their first meeting. “Every mage knows what it means to fail at something,” she continued, “or to bungle it, or to do so much you just collapse. One of our great mages got the essence of the disease on her by sheer accident. She got sick and nearly died.”
“I thought magic made things simpler,” Keth protested. “Just a wave of a hand, and poof! You have answers. This slowness, this plodding, it’s —”
“Too much like the everyday world?” suggested Tris.
Keth nodded.
Tris leaned over to pat his arm. “In some ways, magic is the real world, complete with fumbles, sweat, tears…. All the happy things. Go to sleep, Keth. Tomorrow your magic will be fresh. We’ll try again.”
“My heart flutters with joy,” he grumbled. With a groan he turned on his side. “I’d like to tuck this killer into the furnace, let him anneal for a while. It might burn off the impurities.”
“I like that,” Tris said, imagining it. “Try not to dream about it, though.” She got up and blew out his candle, then went outside with Chime and Little Bear. Quietly they climbed back up to their room.
Tris halted outside the door, staring into the dark, or at least into a dark punctuated by the occasional spark of color. Her head ached; her eyes burned. She would learn how to do this. She wouldn’t allow herself to be driven mad by a flood of sparks. The trick would be to learn it in time to capture Yali’s murderer. She was beginning to doubt that she would.
She woke the dozing Ferouze and sent her back to her rooms, her payment of five biks stripped of sparks. Glaki, sound asleep, lay half out of bed, her head nearly touching the floor, as limp as her ragged doll. Tris gently lifted her back onto the bed, and arranged Glaki’s old doll on her left side. On her right Tris placed a new doll she had bought earlier, a pretty thing with brown hair, a yellow veil, and a costume much like Xantha’s. Beside the doll she also set a brightly colored ball so Glaki could play with Little Bear. They were just tokens, not that expensive, but Tris had owned few toys. She knew it could be lonely, sometimes, to have only one doll.
Tris washed her face and hands and settled in the chair to read. The flicker of the candle was too hard on her weary eyes. She blew it out. Making herself comfortable, she combed one of her thin braids until enough lightning had collected on the end to make it glow. With steady light to read by, Tris opened Winds’ Path.
At Touchstone the next morning, Tris and Keth were preparing to meditate when Tris looked at Glaki. The girl sat in her usual corner, out of the range of any molten glass accidents. She had arranged her dolls, Chime, and Little Bear around her, but she was looking at Keth and Tris, loneliness in her eyes.
“You’d find it boring, most likely,” Tris warned.
Glaki shrugged.
Tris looked at Keth, who also shrugged. “As long as she doesn’t make noise.”
Before Tris could invite her, Glaki raced across the shop to plop herself onto the dirt floor between Tris and Keth. “I do things and count to seven,” she told Tris.
“Right,” the older girl said. “Breathe in and count, hold it and count.”
Keth vanished into his meditation, his magic back to its former strength and tucked into his imagined crucible, where it shone brightly in Tris’s magical vision. Once she saw Glaki knew how to breathe, Tris began, deliberately using her power to reach for water without using her eyes as a change from her normal exercises. She found it. Water ran in the gutter outside as shopkeepers washed their doorsteps; it splashed in fountains on the Street of Glass, rushed in streams throughout the city, churned in the bed of the Kurchal River as it raced to the sea. Further off, in the marrow of her bones, Tris felt the pull of the sea and the draw of the tides. When they would have taken her far from shore, Tris shook herself free and returned. Glaki was asleep, her thumb in her mouth. Keth looked much improved.
They spent the morning quietly. Tris went to try wind scrying again. Keth molded glass bowls and pressed signs for health into their bases. When Glaki awoke, she played with her dolls, Chime, and Little Bear.
The city’s clocks had just struck midday when Keth shouted, “Tris?”
The redhead’s still figure in the courtyard didn’t move.
Keth frowned. “Chim
e, bring Tris out of it?” he asked.
Chime soared into the open air, the sun gliding from her wings as she flew. She lit on Tris’s shoulder and looked back at Keth. He nodded.
Chime sank glass fangs into Tris’s earlobe. Tris let out a yelp, swatted the dragon, and fumbled for her spectacles and handkerchief. “What did you do that for?” she demanded. Her vision was filled with colors. She groped around her as a blind person might, trying to see past everything that filled the air. Chime stayed just out of her reach as Tris snatched at her.
“Tris, I’ve got that feeling again,” Keth called, his voice shaking. “Another globe.”
“Start,” she ordered. With her handkerchief pressed to her earlobe, she carefully made her way over the stones of the courtyard, seeing them dimly behind washes and currents of moving color. “Keth, did you tell Chime to bite me?” The dragon, chinking in distress, lit on Tris’s shoulder beside the unwounded ear.
“Of course not!” Keth said, picking up a blowpipe. “But I’m glad it worked.”
“I’m sure you are,” she said sarcastically. “Next time I’ll send her to get you out of bed in the morning, see how you like it. Get started, Keth, don’t wait for me. Try what you did yesterday. Make the lightning thinner, if you can.” Without even looking she called her protective barrier out of the ground outside the shop. That was one of the benefits of laying protective circles in the ground: the earth remembered them if they were made on the same lines several times.
Tris sat on a bench to watch as Keth collected his gather and brought the pipe up. His hands were more deft than they had been when she’d first seen him. He barely looked inside the furnace, sensing when he had enough glass for his needs. Best of all, Tris could feel the change in him. He must have been this way before the lightning struck him, in casual command of fire and glass, born to work in a place like this. She wished she could tell him so, but doubted he would listen. To him a lightning globe that caught the Ghost was his way to buy his life back. He wouldn’t realize he’d already gotten his life, with some changes, until afterward.
Once he finished, the globe was as full of lightning as it had been the day before, though only a handful of miniature bolts shimmered along its surface. “Tris, I want to try something,” Keth said. He took the finished globe off the blowpipe and held it in one hand. “I want to see if I can take back some of the lightning I put in.”
“Now that the globe’s closed?” she asked with a frown. She supposed it could work. To her the glass shielded the lightning inside, but it might well be a barrier that would not affect Keth at all.
“I think I can do it,” replied Keth.
“Have you ever taken in lightning you just got rid of?” Tris asked, still trying to think it all through.
“No. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why it won’t work.” Keth grimaced, then admitted, “I’m scared, a bit.”
Tris chewed on her lower Hp, calculating. “It could be tricky. One moment.” She went to the cullet barrel with its mix of broken and discarded glass. She saw plenty of sparks from Keth’s magic in there, from the pieces they’d thrown in. Perhaps her next move ought to be a container for magicked glass, to keep the power from spreading, or perhaps Keth could learn to remove the power and make it harmless. She put those thoughts in the back of her mind to brew, and threw the protective barrier she used to guard Keth around the barrel. With it in place, she raised her hands and lowered them, opening the protections on the top of the barrel, until it was sheathed from rim to ground in white fire.
“Now try,” she advised Keth, shooing Glaki and Little Bear into a far corner of the shop. “If you can’t bear it, throw it into the cullet.” She stood beside the barrel, her hands loose at her sides.
“But I should be able to call it back, like you do when you take the circles down,” he protested. “I can feel you reclaim the magic that was in them.”
“That’s magic. This” — she pointed to the globe — “is lightning, even if it’s sheathed in magic to keep it from burning everything in sight. Once you free lightning, I’m not sure you can reclaim it.”
“It’s my lightning. I can reclaim it,” he replied stubbornly.
“Lightning doesn’t belong to anyone,” she said, but he ignored her. Tris sighed. He might be right; if he wasn’t, he’d soon realize his mistake.
Keth cradled the globe in both hands. Tris watched as his power flowed out around the globe to envelop it. First he peeled away the surface lightnings, pulling them back into himself. Then he reached deeper, through the glass. Slowly he drew some of the inner lightning out, pulling it back into his chest.
She could see it hurt him. His face went red; sweat popped out all over his upper body. He grimaced and continued to draw on the lightning, until he was gasping. “Tris —” he began to say. She pointed at the cullet barrel. He turned toward it and opened his mouth.
Lightning roared from his throat and slammed into the junk glass. The moment the last of it came out of Keth, Tris enclosed the barrel in a globe of protective magic.
She backed away, feeling his power batter her globe. For a moment nothing happened. Suddenly the barrel quivered, shook, and exploded with a roar, hurling charcoal and glass into the magical barrier. Smoke filled it as if her power were glass, whirling and twisting inside.
“Beautiful,” whispered Glaki.
“Stupid,” said Keth with chagrin.
“You needed to find out,” Tris told him, hands on hips as she watched the smoke and ash settle. “Now you know.”
“I have to pay Antonou for the cullet, and replace it,” Keth remarked, glum. “We need it to make other glass. But it should have worked, curse it!”
Tris shrugged. “It’s lightning. It’s no more amenable to ‘should haves’ than you are.”
“Ouch,” Keth said, wincing. He looked at the globe in his hands. The surface was clear, but he’d drawn hardly any lightning from inside it. He sighed and sank onto a bench. “So we wait,” he said, resigned. “I —” He stood, swaying.
“I’ll get our midday,” said Tris, seeing the magic under his skin gutter. It was funny how academic mages were never exhausted by their first workings, she thought, but ambient mages were. “Why don’t you see if Antonou has a crate and shovel, so we can clear out the mess when it settles.”
Keth flapped his hand at her in gloomy resignation and walked out of the shop, smack into the barrier around the outside. “Just what I needed,” he moaned as she retrieved its magic. “A knock on the head.”
“Well, it’s not like it hurt anything important, is it?” Tris asked tartly.
Keth turned, expecting to see that disgusted expression on her face. Instead she grinned at him. “Why aren’t you one of those teachers who believes in coddling students?” he demanded.
“I couldn’t,” she said, straightfaced. “It would be bad for your character.”
He fled, before she could think of another joke to make at his expense.
The globe began to clear as their afternoon’s work, getting rid of the mess of molten glass and charcoal, came to an end. They were packing to leave Touchstone for the day when Dema arrived. Under the shade of the courtyard trees he told them of the fruitless search the night before, then took charge of the globe.
Keth had recovered after his midday, enough to help clean up and to blow the small globes that Antonou liked to sell. Tris wasn’t sure that he ought to go with Dema after the previous night’s collapse, but Keth didn’t give her the chance to debate it. He simply followed Dema out into the street.
With Keth gone, Tris turned to Glaki. “Have you ever been up on the wall?” she asked. “The wall around the city?”
“No,” replied the girl. She had begged a scrap of cloth from Antonou’s wife and fashioned it into a sling like the one Tris used to carry Chime. Into it she had tucked her dolls. Little Bear carried his ball. All afternoon he and Glaki had played with it, until it was covered with dirt and dog drool.
“Wo
uld you like to climb the wall, Glaki?” Tris wanted to know. “I want to try something. I’m always better at new things when I’m up somewhere high.”
“Let’s go,” the four-year-old said eagerly, grabbing Tris’s hand. She towed the older girl down to the city’s gate.
As Tris had expected, Tharios’s wall was a favorite with visitors: the guards waved them straight to the stair. When they reached the top, they found a broad walkway, thirty feet above the ground. From there they could see the roads that led around the city, the river bridges, and the road that led southeast to the seaport of Piraki. To their left, a tumble of huts and hovels clung to the rocky hillside between Tharios and the Kurchal River. A number of huge pipes dotted the same rocky ground, pipes that emitted streams of brown, clotted water that flowed into the river: the city’s sewer outlets. Swarming over the hillside, hanging out wash, minding goats and chickens, talking, grinding grain, playing, and cooking, were prathmuni, recognizable even from this height by their clothes and haircuts. Tris felt cold, seeing their dwelling place. She knew the mages at Heskalifos had to be aware of the connection between sewage and disease, yet they allowed people to live where the night soil of Tharios was dumped. How many prathmuni children lived even to Glaki’s age, let alone her own? Tris wondered. How many old prathmuni were there?
“Tris, please don’t,” whispered Glaki, tugging Tris by the sleeve. “Please don’t.”
She glanced at the little girl. “Don’t what?” she asked, her voice clipped.
Glaki actually backed up a step. She still found the courage to say, “Please don’t thunder inside. It’s scary.”
Remorse flooded Tris at the fear in Glaki’s eyes. She knelt and held her arms out. “It’s not about you, Glaki,” she said, deliberately gentling her voice. “You could never make me angry.”
Glaki clung to her, even with a doll in each hand. Tris soothed her until she was sure the little girl was calm. This too was something she knew all too well. The anger of adults almost always had meant packing her bags and moving on to a new home. An adult in a temper meant new relatives with new rules and new places where she was not welcome.
