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A dead woman lay on the big dais before the chairs. Dema knew she was dead: there was no mistaking the swollen, dark face of a strangler’s victim, even under a yaskedasu’s makeup. She was dressed in a tumbler’s leggings and short tunic, with brightly colored short ribbons stitched into the seams. The yellow noose itself was lost in the swelling of her neck, but the bright yellow ends of a yaskedasu’s veil once more lay straight from her side, almost as if they were placed to make the delegates seated in the chair look right at the body.
“What did the captain at the Heskalifos arurimat tell you?” Dema inquired.
“That this was a matter on which you are chief investigator,” replied the clerk, “and that if I spoke to anyone else before you gave me leave, I could be arrested for promoting disorder.”
“He was right,” Dema said, continuing to examine the ball. He looked at the proscenium that framed the dais. There, in mosaics, was Noskemiou, the charity hospital, and the brightly painted walls that wrapped around Khapik, with the yellow pillars that marked the main entrance. There on the right side was the Elya Street arurimat. He knew this place. It was the Fifth District Forum, where the affairs of that part of the city were discussed and voted upon before the seven District Speakers. The place was closed during the day, when everyone worked. He glanced out the window of his office: the sun was reaching the horizon. They would open the Forum any minute.
Dema shoved the ball into the basket. “You’re with me,” he told the clerk, who was drinking the water the arurim had brought. To the arurim Dema said, “I want a full squad at the Fifth District Forum, soonest. We’ll need barricades, arurimi to watch them, and prathmuni with a death cart. Scramble!” He grabbed his mage’s kit in his free hand and strode out of his office.
“Can’t I go home?” whined the clerk. “I’ve been all over the city. My wife will be worried —”
Dema turned and faced him. “Are you a citizen of Tharios?” he demanded coldly, glaring at the shorter man.
At the word “citizen” the clerk straightened, thrusting out his bony chest. “Of course I am,” he snapped, indignant that anyone might question his status.
“Then I, Demakos Nomasdina, of the First Class, call upon you to do your duty as a citizen. Do you serve Tharios?” he asked.
The clerk hung his head. “Always and forever,” he replied wearily. The formula was a part of his oath of citizenship. If a member of the First Class called on any resident of the city as Dema had done, that person was obligated by his oath to serve in whatever way he might be commanded.
Dema thrust the basket into the clerk’s hands. “First we’re going to see if this means anything.”
They reached the Forum just as its custodians laid hands upon the wooden bars across the doors. Dema showed them what he’d been taught in school, the “face of the First Class,” the expression, bearing, and crispness that anyone of his rank put on when necessary, to uphold the dignity of the First Class and of the city that was the final responsibility of the First Class. Even the weakest-willed children learned to act as if they knew what they were doing. Their duty was to assure the lower classes that Tharios was eternal, as long as order was kept. The duty of the lower classes was to obey those who bore ultimate service to Tharios in their very bones. Dema was grateful for that long, hard training now; it hid his fear of what he might be able to see.
The custodians opened the doors for him and the arurimi who had caught up with him, then closed the doors to keep the public outside. Only a few idlers were present, either for the night’s Forum debates or because they had seen arurimi on the move, but Dema knew their numbers would soon grow.
Inside, he motioned for the clerk and the arurimi to keep back. He advanced on the dais, a ball of mage fire drifting beside him to light the way. When he reached the podium, he wrote a sign in the air. It gleamed, then faded. His mage fire grew until the front half of the room was mercilessly lit, without a shadow anywhere.
It had looked like a Ghost murder in the globe, and it looked like a Ghost murder now. Dema crouched beside the dead woman and opened his kit. A pinch of heartbeat powder sprinkled over the yaskedasu darkened to scarlet: she’d been dead almost an entire day.
Why did no one report that she was missing? he wondered. If they had, he would know. These days any word of missing yaskedasi came to him first.
Dema ground his teeth in vexation. The yaskedasi drove him crazy with their secrecy. Even when it was to their benefit they would not deal with the arurimi unless forced to it. They made it that much harder to find who had seen these women in their last hours of their lives, just as they made it harder to identify the dead. The yaskedasi just didn’t understand that cooperation was for their own good.
With a sigh, Dema opened a bottle of vision powder and sprinkled a pinch over each of the woman’s open, staring eyes. The killer’s essence began to fade fifteen hours or so after a slaying, but Dema wanted to try it anyway. If the victim had seen her attacker, the powder would reveal at least a smudge over her eyes, if not the killer’s face. This time there was not even a smudge. Dema bit his lip: she must have been taken from behind. Her fingernails were broken, yellow silk threads caught in their shredded edges, from her fight to get free of the noose. The killer had to be strong, because the tumbler was solid muscle.
Dema selected one of the blessed ivory rods that had arrived at the arurimat the day after he’d spoken with the priests at Labrykas Square. He used it to pull the veil’s ends out flat. “Melchang Lodgings, Willow Lane” was embroidered at the edge.
“Stand aside, Demakos Nomasdina, before you are in need of cleansing yourself,” called a clear, female voice. “You are too close to the pollution.”
Dema looked around. The prathmuni in charge of the dead had come and, with them, the priests of the All-Seeing, ready to cleanse the Forum. Like the fountain, it would need prolonged cleansing. It was a public place. The Fora were also the heart of Tharios, the reason the city had grown and succeeded without emperors and their follies.
“I haven’t touched her,” he replied sharply. “And your cleansings wipe away all traces I can use to track this mirizask.” The clerk with the globe, standing behind the priests, squeaked at Dema’s coarse language.
Turning his back on them, Dema selected the bottle of stepsfind from his kit, took a mouthful, stood, and sprayed it in the air over the dead woman. When it fell to the ground, it revealed blurred foot marks leading to the back of the dais. He followed those smudges off the dais, down two steps to the small meeting rooms behind the Forum, past the privy set aside for the use of any government officers, and through the hallway to the rear entrance. He tracked the smudges through the unlocked door and ran smack into a wall of silver fire. With a yelp Dema sprang back. He’d just tried to walk through a circle of enclosure. Not only was he unable to pass, but his face and hands felt as if he’d scrubbed them with nettles.
“How can we catch him if you erase any trace he leaves?” he cried, maddened, to the white-veiled priest outside the circle.
“What good will his capture do, if his infection spreads to the city? If you take on his pollution at the risk of your clan?” demanded the priest coldly. “Our souls are more important than these sacks of putrefaction and disease we call bodies, Demakos Nomasdina. Go and be cleansed yourself.”
Dema shivered and walked back into the Forum, thoroughly ashamed of himself. For a moment he’d been so caught up in the need to catch the murderer that he had lost sight of his duty to his family and to Tharios itself, to keep the pollution that accompanied death from tainting the city. At the very least he risked his own soul and his status; at most, he risked dragging all of his kinsmen, everyone who’d had contact with him or his immediate family, into exile or, worse, into the ranks of the prathmuni. He had nearly ruined one of the great clans of Tharios.
There has to be another way to find the killer, he told himself as the priests inside the Forum cleansed him with prayer, ritual, and incense. Then he
remembered the clerk. The man sat on a bench at the rear of the Forum, the basket at his side, a glum look on his face as he watched the priests go to work over the dead woman.
Dema took the globe from its basket. “Who made this device?” he asked.
4
Removing each needle from Kethlun’s face was an exacting task. Tris sat on the table, Keth on a chair in front of her. As she worked, he told her, Niko, and Jumshida about his life before and after one summer day on the Syth.
When he finished, Niko regarded his fingernails. “The seed of magic you had all along probably saved your life when you were struck, Kethlun.”
“I’m not thanking it for any favors,” grumbled Keth. “I’d pass it to anybody else in a heartbeat.”
“You don’t have that choice,” Niko retorted. “Moreover, until you master the lightning side of your power, you won’t be able to make another satisfactory piece of glass — not blown, anyway. Not shaped by the breath that keeps you alive. That is why you need Tris, not a glass mage.”
Tris scowled. “There isn’t anybody else?” she demanded. “Oh, don’t bother answering, I know there isn’t.” All the needles were out. She dipped some cotton into a jar of balm made by her foster brother and dabbed it on the bloody spots on Keth’s face.
“Ow!” Keth snapped, flinching away.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Tris ordered. “You bore getting hit by lightning, you can bear a little sting.”
Keth let her continue. “But she’s a student,” he protested to Niko. “Students don’t teach!”
“It’s unusual,” Jumshida said, her voice comforting. “But lightning magic is so rare….”
Jumshida and Keth had made an understandable mistake. Normal mage students got their credential in their twenties, and taught only after that. Tris, her two foster sisters, and her foster brother, were unique. They had mastered their power when they were all thirteen or so. Winding Circle gave them their mage’s medallion, spelled so that, until they were eighteen, the four would forget they had them unless asked to prove they were mages. It was a useless exercise: Tris’s ability to see magic and detect metal meant that she always knew what she wore.
Now she glanced at Niko; he nodded. Tris set aside the balm, reached under her collar, and drew out the ribbon from which her medallion hung. The metal circle had a silvery sheen to it, but it was a blend of silver and other metals. The spiral sign for Winding Circle was stamped on the back, to show where Tris had earned it. Tris’s name and Niko’s were inscribed on the edges of the front of the medallion: student and principal teacher. At the center, small but still clear to the eye, the smith-mage Frostpine had engraved a tiny volcano, a lightning bolt, a wave, and a cyclone, to show where Tris’s weather magic worked. She hated bringing it out where people could see it. It felt too much like bragging.
“If she’s a mage, why do I never see her with a mage kit?” demanded Keth. “You both carry yours, even though you’re just attending a conference.” He pointed through the door to the hall, where Jumshida’s and Niko’s mage kits, fitted into good-looking packs, lay on a table.
Tris let go of her medallion and picked up the balm again. She dabbed more on Keth’s wounds. “I carry a mage kit all the time,” she replied, squinting to get the bloody spots under his short-cropped gold hair. She pointed to her head with the hand that held the cotton. “Right there.”
“Your skull is your mage kit?” asked Keth.
Tris scowled at him, though her touch remained gentle. “My braids, Kethlun,” she replied. She sat back with a sigh; she thought she had gotten every puncture. The ones she had tended first were already healed. By morning he wouldn’t know he’d been hurt. Briar, her foster brother, brewed good medicines with his plant magic. “I store power in my braids for when I need it. They hold it because I pin them in certain patterns.” She set the balm aside and pointed to the thickest braid. It ran from the middle of her forehead to the nape of her neck. “Earth force here, bled out of a few earthquakes. Tidal force in these braids.” She touched two on each side of her head. “If I’m tired, I can draw a little strength off of these, or a lot, depending on what I need.”
“And then you collapse after you run out of it,” Niko said. “Actually, you collapse once you use any of your braids but the little ones.”
Tris shrugged and quoted a great-aunt’s favorite saying: “All business requires some risk.” She looked back at Kethlun and saw that he didn’t believe her. “These” — she indicated four more braids, two on each side of her head — “are heavy lightning. The two by my face are just for quick things.”
“Like shocking me,” Keth said drily.
Chime voiced a shushing sound that Tris thought was probably a hiss of warning. “I did tell you to stop,” she reminded Keth. “If I’d known you were afraid of lightning, I might have used something else, but you rushed me.”
“Any other braids I ought to know about?” Keth wanted to know, smiling indulgently.
“Oh, there’s a few wind ones in there, some heat ones. No rain, sadly. It makes me go all frizzy. Then power starts leaking out through the loose hairs. It’s hard enough keeping everything smooth with lightning in my braids as is.” Tris spoke in her most matter-of-fact voice. He probably thinks Niko won’t ruin the joke about weather in my hair by telling the truth, she thought. That’s all right. If I have to teach him — and I do know how few lightning mages there are — it won’t go well if he’s afraid of me.
She glanced at Jumshida and her heart sank. Their hostess was ashy under her bronze skin. “Well,” Jumshida said. “One assumes the Initiate Council of Winding Circle knew what it was doing.”
“There were unusual circumstances,” Niko explained. He had not told Jumshida, or anyone, of the extent of Tris’s skills. Tris had asked him not to unless it was necessary. She had seen shock like Jumshida’s — or worse, jealousy, dislike, even hate — directed at her and her friends over their last year at Winding Circle, never mind that they had not chosen to be what they were.
“Events made Tris combine her power with that of her foster brother and sisters,” Niko went on. “As a result, they expanded and structured their original abilities. Later events made them separate their magics again, but they kept certain abilities from one another. The result, and the work they put in afterward, brought their control over their magics to the level of an accredited, adult mage.”
Jumshida shook her head. “I did not receive my credential until I was twenty-eight.”
Tris knew what the woman thought, what other mages thought, when they knew what she had achieved. It was too much power, too much accomplishment, for a mere girl of thirteen or fourteen. They saw only the awe of it, the ability to move hurricanes and earthquakes, the ability to do complex workings alone and without sleep, because she could borrow strength from currents in the air, in the ground, and in the water. Others dreamed that with Tris’s power and control they could live in grand palaces, dress in silks, and be given all they could wish for by the rulers they served.
They didn’t understand that she meditated every day to control her emotions. Without a grip on her temper, Tris didn’t just hurt someone’s feelings or start a fight. When she lost control, she destroyed property; she sank ships.
They didn’t understand that she had yet to find a way to earn a living. Rainmaking was chancy. She always had to be sure that if she moved one storm, she would not upset weather patterns for miles, creating floods or droughts. She was best suited for battle magic, but her dreams of the floating dead after her first battle still left her screaming in the night. She wanted to be a healer, but even now her control wasn’t tight enough, unless people wanted her to do surgery with a mallet.
And she hated the palaces and courts she and Niko had visited on their way south to Tharios. They all seemed wasteful.
“We didn’t ask to be singled out,” Tris told her, silently begging the woman to think Tris’s situation through. Jumshida had been friendly since she
and Niko had arrived. Tris wanted that back. “We didn’t ask the Initiate Council for the medallion.” She stuffed it back into her dress and jumped down from the table. When she sat on a chair, Chime curled up in her lap.
Niko told Jumshida, “The Initiate Council felt Tris, Briar, Sandry, and Daja should be sworn to a code of conduct, to the rules of the mage community, in case they were tempted to use their power unwisely. As the council saw it, the choice was to grant the four the medallion and its responsibilities, or bind their magics until the council felt they were old enough to know what they held.” Niko smiled. “Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. They were given the medallions.”
At the thought that anyone might try to restrict her ability to get at her magic, Tris drew herself up, gray eyes flashing. “They could try to bind my power,” she snapped. This was the first she had heard of that debate.
“Spoken very like Sandry,” Niko teased gently.
Tris looked down. Her foster sister was a noble who forgot her rank until anyone questioned her right to hold it. “What do you expect after living with her four years?” she grumbled. She petted Chime. “And it’s true all the same,” she added stubbornly.
“The difficulty of actually binding you was a consideration,” Niko admitted, smoothing his mustache. “It would look very bad if we tried, and failed. Not that any of you would have had the bad manners to resist,” he added, raising his eyebrows at Tris.
She met his gaze defiantly, and saw a world of things in his dark brown eyes: the time they’d spent on the road, the many nights they’d discussed books, the way they looked out for each other. He’d been the first person she’d ever known who understood her.
She smiled ruefully. “Well, maybe not,” she said. “Though I can’t vouch for Briar’s manners.”
