The Circle Opens #4: Shatterglass Read online

  The man thrust the glass back into the open furnace, waited a moment, then brought the pipe to his lips. He cupped the base of the glass with his mold and blew into the pipe. The material at its end bulged, twisted, and thrust about even harder, plainly fighting him. It grew longer and snakelike, with big lumps on top and underneath. Magic gleamed, as if the glass were shot through with silver threads as it stretched away from the pipe. As it pulled free, its connection to the blowpipe stretched thinner and thinner. Only a thread connected it to the rod.

  Tris shook her head. The man had obviously lost control of his magical working. “You’d better let it go,” she informed him. “And what possessed you, that you didn’t draw a protective circle?”

  The man jerked and yanked the pipe from his lips. The glass wriggled, spiraled, and broke free, tumbling in the air as it flew madly around the room. Little Bear yelped and fled into the yard.

  “Why didn’t you undo it?” Tris demanded. She ducked as writhing glass zoomed over her head. “Didn’t they teach you, the more power you throw into magic gone awry, the more it will fight your control? Forget reusing the glass. It’s so full of magic now you’ll have real trouble if you try to make it into anything else.”

  The glass thing — she couldn’t tell what it was — landed on the man’s skull. Smoke and the stench of burning hair rolled away from its feet. The man swore and slapped at it. Terrified, his creation fled. As it flew, its features became sharper, more identifiable. The big lumps became very large, batlike wings. Smaller lumps stretched out to become powerful hind legs and short forelegs. Lesser points shaped themselves as ears, an upright ribbed fin rose on its neck; another point fixed the end of the glass as a tail. When the thing lit on a worktable, Tris saw the form it had fought to gain. It was a glass dragon, silver-veined with magic, clear through and through. It was twelve inches long from nose to rump, with six more inches of tail.

  The man had dumped a pail of water on his head as soon as the dragon left him. Now he flung his blowpipe across the room, shattering three vases.

  “Tantrums don’t do the least bit of good,” Tris then informed him, hands on hips. “Old as you are, surely you know that much.” She noted distantly that there was a circle of dead white hair atop the man’s head, almost invisible against the bright, closely cropped blonde hair that surrounded it.

  He wheezed, coughed, gasped, and glared at her with very blue eyes. “Who in Eilig’s name are you? And what did you do to me?” He spoke slowly and carefully, which didn’t match his scarlet face and trembling hands.

  Tris scowled. “You did it to yourself, dolt. You threw good magic after bad, including power you drained from all around this neighborhood because you didn’t protect the workshop. Now look. You’ll have to feed it and care for it, you know. And what it eats is beyond me. Living metal feeds on metal ores in the ground, but living glass?” She tugged one of the thin braids that framed her face, picking the problem apart. “Sand, I’d suspect. And natron, and seashells, since that’s what you make glass with in the first place. And antimony and magnesium to make it clear.”

  “Will you be quiet?” the man cried, his voice still low. “I have — no magic! Just — a seed, barely enough to, to make the glass easier.”

  Tris glared at him. “I may only be fourteen, but I’m not stupid, and you’re a terrible liar.”

  The glassblower doubled his big hands into fists. “I — am — not — a — liar!” he cried, his slow words a sharp contrast to his enraged face. “How dare you address me like that? Get out!”

  Little Bear didn’t like the thing that zipped so dangerously around the workshop, but even less did he like the glassblower. He thrust himself between Tris and the man, hackles up, lips peeled away from his teeth, a low growl rumbling through his large chest.

  “Now look,” Tris said with a sigh. “You upset my dog.”

  The glassblower backed away. “I am a journeyman of the Glassmakers’ Guild,” he said, forcing the words past clumsy lips. “I have no magic. I am no liar. I want you and your dog gone. And that thing you made, too!”

  “I made?” Tris demanded, aghast. “As if I didn’t see the power flow from you into the glass! Look, Master Jumped-Up Journeyman, that dragon is your creation —”

  The glassblower yelled and grabbed a long pair of metal tongs. The dragon had landed on a worktable and was trying to climb into a jar on top of it. “Get out of there!” he cried, smacking the tongs on the table a half-inch from the dragon’s tail. “Coloring — agents cost — money!” His sluggish speech was in sharp contrast to his quick strike at the dragon.

  The glass creature leaped clear before the glassblower could shatter it with a second blow. It flew to a shelf on the wall, its front half covered with powder. Clinging to the shelf, it spat blue fire at its attacker. Once clear of its muzzle, the flames solidified and fell to shatter on the floor.

  “Don’t you dare hit that creature!” cried Tris. “It’s alive — you might break it!”

  “I’ll smash it to bits,” the man growled. He poked the dragon with his tongs as it scrabbled a new jar with its claws. For a moment it teetered, then righted itself. The man advanced on it, tongs raised in his hand.

  “It’s a living thing,” Tris called. “You may have made it, but that doesn’t give you the right to break it.” She yanked one of her thin braids free of its tie and combed it out with her fingers. Sparks formed in the crimped red locks, sticking to her palms.

  The glassblower ignored her. The dragon glided to another shelf, one that supported an uncorked jar. Curious, it stuck its head inside. “That’s it,” the man said grimly. “You’re dead.” With tongs raised high, he went after it like a man in urgent pursuit of a mouse.

  “I’m warning you,” Tris said clearly. She had to tell people when she was about to use particular magics: in her hands, magic was a deadly weapon and had to be treated as such. “You can’t kill that.”

  “Watch me.” The man struck at the dragon, missing by half an inch. When he raised his weapon again, a hair-thin lightning bolt slammed into the tongs. The man shrieked and dropped them, nursing a hand and arm that twitched in the aftermath of a moderate shock. He whirled to stare at Tris, white showing all the way around his irises.

  She waited, her loosened braid hanging beside her face, sparks glinting along its strands. In her open right hand a circle of lightning played, leaping from finger to finger. “Try to break that poor creature again and what you just got will seem like a love tap,” she said, crimson with fury. “You can’t kill it — didn’t your teachers make you learn anything? Once you make a working that lives, you have to treat it like you would a human child. You’re not allowed to destroy a living creation.”

  The dragon knew a champion when it saw one. Voicing a cry like the sound of a knife striking glass, it flew to Tris and perched on her shoulder, wrapping itself around her neck.

  “Yes, that’s fine,” she reassured it, stroking the creature where it crossed her neck. “Calm down.” She kept her eyes on the glassblower, who now huddled in the corner farthest from her, clutching the hand she’d shocked. His face was ash gray; his hair stood on end. “Who’s your teacher?” Tris demanded.

  “I don’t have one,” he replied, his speech agonizingly slow.

  “Nonsense. You may as well tell me. I’ll find out,” she said. “I’ll have your master’s name before the week’s done.”

  The man shook his head.

  “And if your teacher said you were fit to practice magic and turned you loose on the world, I’m reporting you both to the Mages’ Guild,” Tris snapped. Was something wrong with him? she wondered, puzzled. Was he slow of mind? He spoke as if he were, though his eyes were too intelligent, compared with the simpletons she had known. He had to be twenty if he were a day, yet he was huddled down like a child who expected a beating. She hadn’t given him enough of a shock to hurt him permanently. Something here wasn’t right, but clearly she would get nothing else from the fellow. �
�What about the dragon?” she wanted to know. “Do you claim it as yours? Will you be responsible for it?”

  The glassblower shook his head vehemently.

  Tris scowled at him. “Well, that’s of a piece with everything else I’ve noticed about you,” she said tartly. “If you won’t take responsibility for it, then I — Trisana Chandler, educated at Winding Circle Temple, take charge of this magical creation. Be sure I’ll mention that at the Mages’ Guild, too!”

  Outside Tris fed the lightning in her hand into her pinned-down braids. With fingers that still trembled with anger she tucked the braid she’d pulled apart behind one ear. She would visit more shops and calm down. She wanted to talk to Niko about the dragon before she tracked down the local Mages’ Guild, and he wouldn’t be back until his conference ended late that afternoon. She might as well use her time profitably.

  “Come on, Bear,” she ordered the dog. “Let’s find someplace sane.”

  Kethlun Warder, journeyman glassblower, didn’t know how much time passed before he found the courage to get to his feet. The hand and arm that held the tongs had gone from painful jerking to a pins-and-needles sensation. When he touched his good hand to his head, he found that his hair was nearly flat again, though it crackled still.

  Slowly he closed the hand that had taken the lightning’s power. It was stiff, but it worked. He moved each finger, then his wrist, forearm, and at last the entire arm. Everything worked. The motion was slow, but at least he wasn’t paralyzed a second time.

  What about the rest? he thought as he tried to stand. Last year it had taken weeks, even months, to get all of his body working again.

  On his feet he wavered, then dropped to his knees. Fear swamped him: had she paralyzed him? After a moment’s thought he tried again. Carefully he stretched first one leg, then the other, leaning on his hands. Only when his knees responded as they should did he try to stand a second time.

  His mind was functioning, he thought as he leaned on a worktable. But what of his mouth? He was scared to try, in case he learned that she had turned him back into a gobbling freak, but he was also scared not to try. His ability to speak had taken the longest to return, and he was still unable to talk quickly.

  He drew himself upright, took a long breath, and blew out, thrusting all emotion away. He emptied his lungs completely before he filled them again. Once he was calmer, he said, “My n-name is Keth-lun W-warder. I am-m a journeyman.” Heartened, he went on, “I come from — Dancruan in N-namorn. My family is in the glass tr-ade.”

  Relief doused over him like cold water. Yes, the stammer was back, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been. He could manage it by speaking slowly. His hands were steady enough. He was all right, or as much so as he’d been in the past year.

  He’d heard his mother say that he was damaged, not incapable. As usual, she had hit the nail on the head. He was damaged, but he was getting better. He would be better. He just needed time.

  A year ago he had not needed time. Glassblowing had been natural to him. He had expected to succeed every time he thrust a blowpipe into the furnace. He’d pitied apprentices who inhaled by accident, burning their tongues or throat with drops of molten liquid. He’d smirked as they singed their eyebrows, burned their arms, or dropped half of the gather into the flames. The basic work had come easily, greased by his tiny drop of magic, but the artistry had been all his own. Whenever the subject of his lack of greater magic came up, he reminded his family that at least he had considerable talent.

  Then he’d gone for a walk along the Syth one summer afternoon. The storm caught him in the dunes between the beach and the Imperial Highway, tearing at his clothes and hair, driving sand into his face. In a panic, he ran for shelter instead of dropping into a dip between the dunes and lying flat on the ground. The lightning bolt caught him as he scrambled over the last dune between him and shelter. The only warning he’d had was the eerie sensation of all of his body hair standing straight up, before his old life ended in a flash of white heat.

  That he’d survived was a miracle. The discovery that he was half-paralyzed and unable to speak made his survival a mockery.

  But his youthful conceit had a tough core to it. He fought the living tomb of his body. He forced a finger to move, then a toe, then two fingers, two toes. Hour after hour, day after day, he reclaimed his own flesh. When his family saw that his mind still functioned, they brought in the best healer-mages in Dancruan. The happiest hour of his life was in the morning when he returned to his uncle’s factory, ready to work once more.

  By noon that day his happiness was dust. His old ease was gone. Even as a first-year apprentice his hands were never clumsy with the tools, sands, salts, ashes, and woods that were the basis of glasswork. The first time he tried to blow glass, his breath had hitched, he’d jerked the rod up, and a fleck of red-hot glass rolled onto his tongue. When he tried to pour glass into a mold, it shifted, making one side of a bowl far thinner than the other. For weeks every piece he made ended in the cullet, or waste-glass barrel, to be remelted or used in other projects.

  The other apprentices and journeymen smirked as his gathers dropped in the furnace or onto the floor. They grinned as the masters rejected piece after piece. Once Kethlun had never measured how much of a coloring agent to add to a crucible of molten glass: he just knew. When he measured now, the colors came out wrong.

  He did not dare say that he thought the glass itself had turned on him. He had the notion that it was trying to tell him things. It wanted him to shape it in ways that differed from what he wanted. Keth feared that if he spoke such thoughts to any of his family, they would turn him over to the healers who specialize in madness, and never let him near a furnace again. Even the mages in his family never talked of glass as if it were alive.

  One spring day he came home to find the guildmasters seated with his father and uncles. All of them, men and women, looked decidedly uncomfortable when they saw him. Keth’s brain, so much quicker than his tongue or hands, told him what was in the wind. The guildmasters meant to strip him of his journeyman’s rank, and send him back among the apprentices until he regained his old skill, if he ever did.

  He could not bear it. “I’ve been th-thinking,” he said, trying to keep from stammering. He leaned against the receiving-room wall, hoping to look casual, hoping they would not sense his fear. “A change of scene, th-that’s what I need. Fresh in-spiration. I’m a j-journeyman. I’ll journey. South, I th-think. Visit the cousins. Learn new techniques.”

  Guildmistress Hafgwyn looked at Kethlun’s father. “It might be for the best,” she said. “I am not comfortable with the matter we discussed.” Her bright black eyes met Keth’s. “It will do. You may go with the guild’s protection. Bring fresh knowledge back to us, along with your old skill.”

  And so he had worked his way down the coast of the Endless Ocean, going around the Pebbled Sea and continuing south and east. At last he reached the shop of his fourth cousin once removed, Antonou Tinas, in Tharios. By then he’d recovered some of his ability with molds and pulled glass. Antonou was getting old. He preferred to do engraving and polishing in the main shop as he waited on customers. Keth could make the pieces Antonou needed, then practice his glassblowing in private, with no one to see how badly he did it.

  Just when he felt safe, along came this girl, and her lightning.

  Trembling, Keth forced himself outside, to the well, and drank some water. Then he returned to the workshop. It was a shambles. He’d broken finished glass, thrown his blowpipe, knocked over jars of coloring agents. He had to clean up before Antonou saw the mess. He reached for a broom.

  The plump redhead had held lightning in her hand as casually as if it were a bracelet she had just taken off. It glinted in that free lock of hair by her face like the bits of mica the yaskedasi, or entertainers, used to make their hair glitter in the torchlight. The girl had thrown lightning as a soldier would a spear, shocking his hand and arm into numbness. She’d done it to save the abomination
that had wriggled out of his breath and into a gather of molten glass.

  Keth never wanted to see that girl again. Please, he prayed to any gods that might be listening, I don’t even want to see her shadow again.

  Dema

  Earlier that day

  Dema Nomasdina was asleep. In his dreams he saw the four dead women whose killer he had yet to find: Nioki the tumbler, Farray the dancer, Ophelika the musician, and Zudana the singer. All four women wore the yellow veil of the yaskedasi, licensed entertainers who worked for the most part in the garden district called Khapik. Instead of floating around their heads, pinned over curls or braids, their veils were wrapped tightly around their necks and knotted. Each woman had the swollen, dark face of the strangled.

  “He left me dumped in an alley like trash,” said Nioki. Despite the silk knotted around her throat, her voice was perfectly clear and damning in its grief.

  “I was thrown down a cellar stair,” whispered Farray.

  “He sat me against a building at the intersection of Lotus and Peacock streets for the world to see,” Ophelika reminded him.

  “Me he laid in front of the Khapik Gate for some tradesman to find as he stumbled home,” Zudana said bitterly. “That tradesman fell over me like I was a sack of onions.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Nioki. “Why does my ghost still drift in the great emptiness?”

  “What are you doing?” moaned Ophelika through swollen lips. “My spirit is not cleansed.”

  “What are you doing?” the dead women asked, their voices sharp in Dema’s ears. “Avenge us,” they said as they faded from view. The last thing Dema saw was their outstretched, straining hands, and the flutter of yellow silk.

  “Nomasdina!” A rough hand shook his shoulder. “Wake up, dhaskoi. You’re wanted.”