“The Bear’s at Ferouze’s,” Keth told Dema. “I’ll 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?”
15
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 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 colored fires that remained from her scrying.
Chime leaped free as Tris went down. Now the dragon 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 was nearly 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 molded 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 prathmuni. 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 prathmuni 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 stone cracks and veins, letting it disperse into the earth that had lent it to her for awhile.
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 yard 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 quietly. “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 mur
der. 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 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 five-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 onto the laces. In controlling her earthquake, she had burned up the last of her borrowed strength. It was time — past time — 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 awoke, 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 gray muslin gown that fit 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.”
Tris looked around the edge of the screen at him as she did up her sash. “Help me with what? I didn’t help find him, I walked bang into the man, Niko! Is he dead yet?”
Niko’s large, dark eyes filled with distress as he watched her. “Do you care so little, Tris? He paid in blood, yesterday.”
“I feel sorrier for the prathmuni,” she retorted. “There was a slaughter, wasn’t there?” She had dreamed it, seeing knots of prathmuni disappear under the stones and clubs of outraged citizens.
“Sadly, yes,” Niko admitted. “Twenty-nine prathmuni dead, four of them children. The Keepers finally decreed martial law and ordered the arurim to get the city under control.”
Tris paused, her sash half-tied. She emerged from behind the screen, frowning. “Twenty-nine?” she repeated. She had expected far more.
“I was shocked, too,” admitted Niko. “But that’s all that were found. Tharios’s prathmuni have vanished. The Assembly is fighting about who will do their work.”
Tris grinned. They had listened to her, then. They had escaped.
Niko tugged at his mustache. “I find it interesting that they left at almost the same time the Ghost was captured. Do you think they were warned?”
Tris ignored so foolish a question. Niko was too clever not to realize she had alerted the prathmuni. “Where’s Glaki?” she asked. She wished everyone had escaped, but if prathmuni were like most people, some must have insisted that no one would blame their entire class for the acts of one man. At least the number of dead was far smaller than it could have been. “How’s Keth?”
“He’s in the workroom, meditating,” replied Niko. “Glaki is helping in the kitchen. They’re staying here for the time being — Khapik was closed during the riots. What do you plan to do with the girl, Tris?”
“Keep her with me,” Tris replied. “She needs something constant in her life, and she has no family.” She held up a hand to silence her teacher when he opened his mouth. “I know I need to provide for her properly. I’m too young for motherhood. And she’s an academic mage, though too young to work with it much. I want to learn to be an academic mage myself; I don’t know how to teach one.”
“She has used her power somewhat,” Niko remarked. “She is far more disciplined than I would expect for a child her age.”
“It’s the meditation, I
suppose,” Tris replied. “I suppose that will do for now. I was thinking of taking her back to Winding Circle when we go home.” Searching an open drawer for a scarf for her hair, which was a mess of half-undone braids that had to be washed, arranged, and pinned afresh, she found Chime sound asleep in her belongings. “Hello, beautiful,” she murmured, stroking the glass dragon as she eased a blue scarf out from under her.
Chime opened one glass eye and chinked at her, then resumed her slumber.
“Come eat something,” Niko said. “You don’t have to plan Glaki’s life today.”
“Good,” Tris replied, clutching a chair. “Right now I’d be hard put to decide between honey and syrup for my bread.” She took the arm Niko offered, leaning on it more than she would have done had her strength been normal. “How’s Dema?” she asked as they went downstairs.
“Vindicated. About to receive a more prestigious appointment,” replied Niko. “We thought it was best for all concerned if he got sole credit for the Ghost’s arrest. Some grumblers say he should have sent disguised arurimi into the district earlier, but they’re in the minority. Do you mind?”
“Dema getting credit?” Tris asked as Niko let her sink onto a dining-room chair. “He’s welcome to it. I told you, I didn’t find the Ghost, I ran into him. Does Keth mind?”
“He says no,” replied Niko, ringing the bell for the cook.
“Tris, Tris!” Glaki plunged out of the kitchen, arms upraised, spoon in one hand. Tris managed to hold off the spoon while welcoming the four-year-old’s passionate hug. “You’re awake!”
“We thought you’d sleep all year,” said Kethlun. He’d come downstairs without Tris realizing it. “So tell me, if you were storing other things than lightning in your hair, why didn’t we feel them tear up the house while you were snoring?
“I don’t snore,” Tris retorted. “And there are protections on my head to keep the power from escaping even when I’m not in control of it. I renew them every time I wash my hair, all right?”
Keth sighed. “Here I was, all hopeful you wouldn’t even have the strength to pick on me once you woke up. So much for boyish dreams.” He wandered into the kitchen.