Shatterglass (33 page)

“Cricket Strut?” asked the thick-voiced Majnuna, squinting at the image. “Brosdes?”

“Cricket Strut,” confirmed Brosdes. “Near Silkfingers Lane.”

“I’ve frozen it where she is right now. She won’t be there when we arrive,” Niko said hurriedly. “We need Little Bear. He can track her. We need him and we need to move.

This takes place in fifteen minutes, twenty if we are fortunate. Her life is about to intersect with the Ghost’s — I don’t know how, but if you want him to be alive when you question him, we must go!”

“The Bear’s at Ferouze’s,” Keth told Dema. “Ill get him and meet you at the corner of Chamberpot and Peacock.” As he raced out of the inn, Keth heard Brosdes mutter, “If we want him to be alive‘?”

Tris, dazed by her wind-scrying, hadn’t even heard the man. As she dragged at the cloth he fought to twist around her neck, Chime lunged up from her sling over Tris’s shoulder and spat needles into the man’s face. He screamed, clutching a punctured eye, and staggered back, releasing the girl. Dragging the cloth from her throat, Tris kicked out, hard, catching the man between his legs. Down he went into the gutter muck.

She blinked hurriedly, clearing her vision of magic, and yanked her spectacles from her sash, putting them on. At last she could see what she and Chime had brought down: a prathmun, wearing the dirty, ragged tunic and the chopped haircut decreed for all of his class. Tris pulled a length of yellow silk off her neck and clenched her fingers around it.

“Do I look like a yaskedasu?” she wanted to know.

He scrabbled back, away from her, his right eye a ruin. Tris closed on him. “You’re here, ain’t you?” growled the prathmun. “Night after night I seen you, out walkin‘

where none of the outsiders go. You consort with them, you’re as good as them, ugly little filth-wench to be left all dirty on their nice, white marble.“ He tried to pull the needles out of his face.

“What did the yaskedasi do to you?” demanded Tris. “They aren’t that much better off than you, or much more respected.”

“One whelped me!” the Ghost snarled. “Her and her Assembly lover, they got me, but they wouldn’t keep me. They throwed me into the sewer to live or die, till the other sewer-pigs found—”

She wasn’t expecting it; later she would scold herself. He slammed her in the chest with both bare feet. Tris’s head cracked on the cobblestones as she fell, adding the white flare of pain to the coloured fires that remained from her scrying.

Chime leaped free as Tris went down. Now she swooped on the killer prathmun, spitting needles into his scalp as he crawled toward Tris to snatch the yellow veil from the girl’s hand. He jumped to his feet with a snarl, arms flailing as he tried to knock the glass dragon away. With no torches to illuminate her, Chime might as well have been invisible. She swooped again, raking the Ghost’s head with sharp claws.

Tris kicked out, catching him behind the knees. He stumbled, lurched, gathered his feet under him and ran.

“Chime, go!” Tris ordered. “Slow him down!”

The dragon followed the Ghost, her glass body silent-and hidden in the night. Tris got to her own feet, passing her power over her eyes again and again to clear her vision.

All of her braids sprang from their pins, hanging free. The ties popped off her two lesser lightning braids.

Tris reached to the top of each thin braid and ran her hands down, sparks leaping under her fingers. She moulded them into a ball to see by and let it hang in the air as she drew a good, stiff breeze from two wind braids. She sent it after Chime as a living rope, so she wouldn’t lose the glass dragon, then followed. As she trotted along she thanked the gods of earth and fire for Chime. If not for the dragon, her corpse might be on its way to defile one of Tharios’s proudest places right now.

The child of a yaskedasu and someone from the First Class, tossed in among the prathmun. It made a kind of warped sense, if the Ghost told the truth. Maybe he thought it was the truth. Maybe it was simply the excuse he needed first to murder women who showed him temptation they would never give to a prathmun, then to rub the noses of those who used prathmun in the worst thing they could imagine —

public, unclean death.

She heard the claws on glass screech that was Chime’s alarm. Tris ran, sending more breezes ahead to keep the Ghost from opening any doors. As she rounded the corner into the next street she found him, tugging frantically at the handle of a door set in a cellarway. The building above it looked abandoned.

Tris slowed, panting. Chime flew at the Ghost’s face, slapping him with her broad wings. He ducked his head and continued to tug, refusing to let go of the handle.

“There’s no escape tonight,” Tris called. “Not here. You’ve used your last yellow veil.”

That got the prathmun’s attention. He struck Chime, throwing her against the building, and scrambled up the stairs into the street. He fled down its length until he reached a brick wall. Digging his toes into its cracks, he began to climb.

Tris lifted her hands to the single heavy braid that went from her forehead to the nape of her neck. The tie dropped from it; strands pulled free of the braid. The power they released flowed, ripe and heavy, into Tris’s palms.

She took a deep breath. The prathmun raised a hand to hit Chime, who had recovered quickly, and fell from the wall to the ground. With the persistence of a terrier he began to climb the wall again.

Tris held out her hands. The power in them trickled into the soggy ground of the alley.

She set down protective barriers on either side, sinking them deep in the earth and up the walls of all the buildings. Only when her control was locked in place did she release what she had taken from that one braid. It followed the channel made by her protections straight down the street. The ground quivered. The quivers spread and rolled forward, taking the shape of waves in the soil, rolling on like a small earthquake. The floor of the alley turned to earthen soup as Tris harnessed the tremors,

directing them to flow as she wanted. Her teeth hurt, they were clenched so hard. Her eyes were locked on the Ghost.

He was three quarters of the way up the wall when the tremors struck. The brick under his feet quivered. Old plaster and mortar dropped away as the waves hit directly under the wall, held there by Tris. With a cry the prathmun fell to the street, into now-liquid ground. It swallowed him up to his hips before Tris shoved all of the force she had released deep into the soil. She jammed it down through cracks and veins, letting it disperse into the earth that had lent it to her for a while.

In the ringing silence that followed, the brick wall grated and dropped. Tris’s “winds thrust it back from the Ghost, into the yard it had shielded.

Tris walked down the alley, the dirt reasonably firm under her sensibly shod feet. She reclaimed her protections from ground and buildings, satisfied that she had done them no damage. No one here would die because she’d allowed a place to be shaken past the point where it could stand.

At last she stopped a metre away from the trapped prathmun. He stared at her, sweat crawling down his face.

“You orphaned a little girl twice,” she said quietly, as cold as if she were trapped inside a glacier. “You took two of her mothers. A little girl who never did you harm.”

Lightning dropped in fat sparks from her hair to her feet. It lazily climbed back up her plump body in fiery waves.

“You. left her among strangers who might have thrown her into the street. Never once did you think of her.”

“Never once did anyone think of me!” he snapped back, his eyes black and empty.

“Fit to haul dung but not fit to be seen - this place is rotten. If she don’t like the smell of rot, she shouldn’t live here, and neither should you.”

Her lightning blazed as it flowed down her arms, gloving her from fingertip to elbow.

“No,” Tris said quiedy. “You shouldn’t live.” She put her hands together, then pulled them apart, creating a heavy white-hot thunderbolt.

“No, Dema, let her do it!” The familiar voice was Kethlun’s. “Don’t stop her!”

“For her own sake, she must be stopped,” Niko replied. Tris should have known that Niko would see this piece of the future. There were times when having a seer as a teacher was a pain.

“Tris, give him up,” Dema pleaded. “If you kill him, I’ll have to arrest you and have you executed.”

“No!” argued Keth. “She’s doing Tharios a service. He killed Ira. He killed Yali. Let him cook!”

“Is this what it comes to, Trisana?” Niko called, his normally crisp voice gentle.

“When you sank the ships at Winding Circle, you defended your home. If you do this, it’s murder. You will be a murderer by choice.”

“He deserves to die” she shouted.

“But do you deserve to kill him?” Dema asked quietly. He was much closer to her.

“Leave him to the State, Tris. That’s what it’s for. His first debt is to Tharios. Let him pay it.“

She should have just killed the Ghost the moment they arrived, she thought ruefully.

Now she was afraid they made sense. She let the lightning trickle into the earth, following the route of her tremors. The molten lava far below the surface wouldn’t mind the extra power.

When the last bit faded, a long, wet nose thrust itself under her palm. Little Bear whined and -wagged his tail, nudging her for a scratch behind the ears. “Traitor,” Tris murmured. She knew very well that the dog had helped to track her.

Chime landed gently across her shoulders. There she voiced the ringing chime that was her purr. Tris rubbed the dragon’s head with her fingertips, looking down at the Ghost. “Take him then, Dema,” she said clearly, “but I won’t dig him out for you.”

“Send for the arurim prathmuni” Dema ordered one of his people. “I won’t befoul myself by handling the likes of him.”

And that’s where your world goes wrong, thought Tris as she walked by him.

As she passed Niko he took her arm. Gently she pulled free. “There’s something I have to do right now,” she told him. “It’s really important, Niko. Life and death, literally.”

He released her. “Go,” he said, his voice soft. “But we need to talk later, you and I.”

He frowned at Keth. “And I’ll need a word with you, Kethlun Warder. You too had better learn that mages don’t kill unless it’s unavoidable.“

Tris hurried on. She sent her breezes out, searching for someone in particular. Soon enough a current of air returned, carrying an unmistakable smell. She followed it back to its source, the prathmuni woman and boy she had met several days ago.

They backed away from their cart as she approached at a trot. Then the -woman stopped, and squinted through the back alley gloom. Tris drew a handful of sparks from a braid to illuminate her face.

“You” said the boy. “What do you want with us now?”

Tris waited until she was very close to speak. “They’ve caught that killer, the one they call ‘The Ghost’,” she informed them. “He’s one of you.”

They both drew the sign of the All-Seeing on their foreheads, though the woman snapped, “Impossible.”

Tris nodded to her partner. “He knows the truth of it.”

When the woman scowled at him, the boy said, “Not even Eseben would be that foolish.” He didn’t sound as if he believed himself.

“How do you know?” the woman demanded fiercely.

“I caught him,” Tris replied. “He’s confessed. The arurimi have him now. It won’t be long before the news gets out.”

“Massacre,” breathed the woman.

“Have you ways to leave the city unnoticed?” asked Tris. The youth nodded. “Then alert everyone you can,” Tris continued. “Let Tharios manage without her prathmuni!‘

The pair traded a look, then turned their backs on Tris and raced down the alley without a word. Tris hadn’t expected thanks. “Shurri Firesword guard you all,” she murmured. They would need the goddess’s protection. Tharios was a big city, and there were many prathmuni. Not all of them would escape by dawn. Perhaps some wouldn’t even try to flee, though she hoped they would have better sense.

She walked back to Ferouze’s, warning every prathmun she glimpsed.

In Yali’s chamber, Ferouze was nodding off as the little girl slept on the bed. “Thank you,” Tris said, pressing a ftve-bik piece into the old woman’s hand. “You were good to stay with her.”

“Like Keth would have given me a choice,” Ferouze grumbled, stuffing the coin into her sash. “So what’s going on? He came racing in here like the Hounds of War were at his heels. He took that dog of yours away with him.”

If I tell her, all of Khapik will know by dawn, Tris realized. Ferouze was a notorious gossip. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I found Little Bear waiting for me outside.”

“Dhaski,” muttered Ferouze as she let herself out. “All mysteries and no explanations.”

Tris sat on the bed and bent to unlace her shoes. The room started to spin. Her fingers were suddenly too weak to hold on to the laces. In controlling her earthquake, she had burned up the last of her borrowed strength. It was time, and past, to pay for it.

She lay back, before she collapsed in a heap. I hope they think to look here for me, she thought before a tide of unconsciousness swamped her.

When she woke, five days later, she was in Jumshida’s house. Niko sat by her bed, reading. He didn’t even wait for Tris to clean up. Instead he proceeded to relieve his feelings about girls who tapped the power of the earth, looking after children who weren’t their own, and searching for dangerous madmen, as they avoided wise elders who would see the folly they committed and bring them to their senses. When he showed no signs of calming down, Tris went behind a screen to change clothes.

Someone, she hoped Jumshida, had dressed her in a nightgown. Tris replaced it with a shift, a single petticoat and a pale grey muslin gown that fitted more loosely than it had before she’d gone to Khapik.

“Are you even listening?” demanded Niko.

“Not really,” she replied wearily. “Either I’m adult enough to have a medallion and a student and make my own stupid choices, or I’m not. It’s not like I did it for party entertainment, Niko.”

He sighed. “No, I know you didn’t. I suppose I feel guilty because I should have helped you more, instead of letting conference politics sap my strength.”