The Circle Opens #4: Shatterglass Read online

  “Shall I have the girl bring a tray to your room?” the cook asked, checking a sauce.

  “No, not when you’ll all be so busy. I’ll come here when I’m hungry, if that’s all right,” replied Tris. Assured that it was, she took the staircase from the courtyard to the second floor.

  She had just set an armful of Jumshida’s books on her bed when she heard Niko call from the workroom they shared, “Trisana, why is there a glass creature eating our antimony?”

  Tris walked over to the open workroom door. There stood her teacher, hands on hips, surveying the glass dragon. Despite his long day at the conference, Niko looked fresh and crisp. His clothes, made by Tris’s foster sister Sandry, a thread mage, showed not a single wrinkle. Niko wore a sleeveless gray linen overrobe and breeches, and a paler gray silk shirt, its full sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuffs. On his feet were black slippers. He refused to wear Tharian sandals, telling Tris that he would reserve the sight of his bare toes for himself alone.

  At five feet ten inches Niko was half a foot taller than Tris was, and wiry, with silver-and-black hair worn in a horsetail most of the time. He possessed a full, natty, black-and-silver mustache of which he was vain, heavy black-and-silver brows, and deep-set black eyes. His face was craggy, the strong nose jutting from it like the prow of a ship.

  Niko stared down that formidable nose at the dragon, who sat on its hindquarters, staring up at the mage. Its muzzle was coated with antimony; its belly was filled with the stuff.

  “Is that even good for you?” Tris asked it.

  As if in reply the dragon twitched, its belly roiling. A moment later it opened its jaws. Antimony surged from its gullet to form clear glass flames that dropped as soon as they broke away from its mouth. Niko quickly thrust a hand under the dragon’s chin to catch the pieces. When the creature finished, Niko had a palmful of glass flames.

  “I can’t think of the last time I held dragon vomit in my hand,” Niko remarked, his voice dry. “Why, never, in fact. There are no such things as dragons. Need I also point out there are no such things as living glass dragons?”

  Tris picked the creature up and cradled it in her arms. “You shouldn’t stuff yourself that way,” she told it. “You couldn’t absorb it. Surely you can’t be hungry after all you ate at the shop.”

  “Perhaps eating is how she learns the nature and substance of things,” remarked Niko, sidetracked by the thought. “After all, who can tell if she truly sees or not?”

  “It’s an it, not a she,” protested Tris. She held up the dragon so Niko could see its belly was unmarked by male or female organs.

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “So elegant and dainty a creature, with such wonderful eyes, has to be female.”

  “You just say that because you like women better than men,” Tris retorted. The dragon climbed up her arm and draped itself across her shoulders, rubbing its head on her braided hair.

  “With good reason. Few women spend the first weeks of an acquaintance trying to prove how much more they know than you,” Niko said as he gently poured the dragon flames onto the counter by the antimony jar. “You haven’t explained how this creature came to be here, Tris.”

  “It’s a long story. You’re supposed to be down there, aren’t you?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the noisy first floor.

  “For this lady, I will set aside the conference for the moment. I’ve never seen anything like her,” Niko pointed out. “And you’ve been using your lightning. What for? You know I can see it on you and the dragon.”

  Tris shrugged. “It wasn’t much.” She set the dragon on a worktable and fitted the cork back into the antimony jar. “Some glass mage was having a tantrum. I don’t think much of the teachers here, if they can’t make a grown man learn self-control.”

  “Some students don’t want to learn,” Niko offered, rubbing the dragon’s chin with a gentle finger. “Let’s hear the whole of it.”

  Tris went around the room, making sure that every jar was tightly corked, as she told Niko how she had made the dragon’s acquaintance. “I don’t know which was sillier,” she remarked as she finished, “him thinking I’d believe his story about not being a mage, or treating me as if I were a monster. I asked him if he would take the responsibility for the dragon and he refused, so I kept her.”

  Niko sighed. “Lightning scares people,” he reminded her. “I thought you were going to keep a grip on it — and on your temper.”

  “I did,” she retorted. “I just gave him enough of a shock to make him drop the tongs, and I warned him. He would have killed her,” she said defensively, rubbing the dragon between its tiny ears. “I can’t abide people who blame others for their mistakes, Niko, you know I can’t. I’d like to give his teacher a piece of my mind.”

  “And if he’s a new mage?” inquired Niko.

  Tris snorted. “How could that be? He’s a grown man!”

  “Lark didn’t know her gift with needlework was magic until she was nearly thirty.” Lark was one of Tris’s foster mothers, a powerful thread mage. “It isn’t unusual for the person not to know, if his power, or hers, comes from things used every day,” Niko added.

  “Hmpf,” replied Tris, unconvinced. “Well, he knows now. And it’s not like there aren’t fistfuls of glass mages in this city, so I won’t be stuck with him.” Any mage who was certified by Lightsbridge University in Karang or Winding Circle Temple in Emelan agreed to a pact to get a mage’s credential: he, or she, had to teach any new mage if there was no teacher with that same magic on hand. Despite their age, Tris, her foster sisters and her foster brother all wore the medallion that marked them as accredited mage-graduates of Winding Circle. Sandry and Briar had written her about the mage-students they had taken on since Tris and Niko left Emelan. Tris preferred to avoid their fate. She was responsible for Little Bear and now, it seemed, for the dragon. That was more than enough for her.

  “You should check on him in the morning. Make certain that he has a teacher,” Niko said. “No fooling about, Tris. A student is a serious matter. Can that thing even digest charcoal?”

  The glass dragon took her muzzle out of the box that held sticks of charcoal and belched. This time she produced semi-transparent black glass globes that rolled over the worktable.

  Niko stretched a hand out to the creature and twitched his fingers. “Come here, you,” he ordered.

  The dragon looked from Tris to Niko, plainly thinking it over. “It’s all right,” Tris assured her. “He’s my teacher.”

  Niko smiled at her. “One of the strongest bonds between mages, isn’t it?”

  Tris nodded.

  Gingerly the dragon walked over to Niko and, leaning back on her haunches, sat up. First the mage looked her over, inch by inch, examining the seamless joins of wings to body and claws to feet. Then he conducted an examination with his sensitive fingertips. He got nipped once for putting a finger into the dragon’s gullet. “Don’t do that,” he said absently. “Now, stay.”

  He patted the dragon on the head as if she were a dog, then set his bony fingers on his closed eyelids. Tris raised a hand to shade her vision as white fire sprang from Niko’s eyes. Startled, the dragon fell onto her back. Quickly she scrabbled to her feet and turned to see if her tail was still there.

  When Niko opened his eyes, the glass dragon sneezed noiselessly.

  “Very likely,” Niko told her. He looked at Tris. “She’s … strange,” he said, frowning slightly.

  Tris bridled in defense of her newest stray. “Of course she’s strange,” she retorted. “The one who made her tried to kill her.” She didn’t even notice that she had accepted Niko’s decision that the dragon was female.

  Niko sighed. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t know if I ever told you, but I hold a credential in glass magic —”

  “In addition to your credentials in teaching magic, seer’s magic, and star magic,” the girl replied. “That’s why they wanted you for this circus.” With a wave of her hand she included the
boisterous gathering of mages downstairs.

  “Yes, Trisana,” replied Niko patiently. “Now, I learned to make glass to expand my magical vision, and because I like glassmaking. I can tell you that this creature contains a surge of glass magic, but it’s not focused in the way that a trained glass mage would do it. Her skeleton is made of glass magic. I’m also picking up traces of protective magics, wind magics, healing magics, prosperity magics, and love magics.”

  “Kethlun pulled all that in from the neighborhood,” Tris explained. “Every loose bit of magic from a block all ended up in her. I told you he didn’t raise any barriers.”

  “As I have now seen for myself,” replied Niko. “Her blood though — her blood is lightning.”

  Tris sat on a stool, frowning, then turned her attention to the dragon. Carefully she removed her spectacles and set them on the table. Once they were off, everything in the everyday world went grainy: without her spectacles, she was nearly blind. On the other hand, if she wanted to look at highly detailed magic, her vision was sharper without the lenses. She rubbed her eyes for a moment, then surveyed her new charge.

  The dragon blazed, the silver fire of the neighborhood magics rippling over her surface. Through the ripples shone a skeleton as bright as real silver, needle-thin bones that supported the dragon’s elegant form. Twined around those bones was the hotter, blue-white fire of pure lightning, moving in streams like blood. Lightning shone in the small round bumps that served her for eyes, glinted along her thin teeth, and swirled down the length of her forked tongue.

  Tris sighed as she hooked her spectacles back over her ears. “I wonder if he even could have killed you.”

  The dragon shrugged, her magical skin rolling with the movement.

  “That isn’t your lightning,” pointed out Niko. As her teacher, he knew the many shapes of Tris’s magic better than anyone.

  “No. I didn’t use mine till after the dragon broke away from the blowpipe,” Tris admitted.

  “Do you suppose it’s his? Kethlun’s?” asked Niko.

  The dragon toddled over to Tris and stepped down into the girl’s lap. There she curled herself, catlike, into a ball.

  “I thought that lightning mages either learned to control themselves before they got to be my age or they died,” Tris replied quietly. “That’s what you told me.” She smoothed a hand over the length of the dragon’s spine. A pure musical note rose from the creature as Tris stroked her, a lingering tone like those drawn from the lips of glasses filled with water. The girl smiled. “Is that your purr?” she asked. The ringing tone rose each time she ran her fingers down the dragon’s spine. The sound continued, first low, then higher, a melody that grew softer and softer, until it stopped. “I think she’s asleep,” Tris whispered to Niko. “I’m going to name her Chime.”

  Niko was still fixed on Chime’s lightning blood. “It’s true, if this Kethlun Warder were born with lightning magic, he wouldn’t survive to adulthood without mastering it,” he pointed out, smoothing his mustache with a bony finger. “There has to be an explanation of some kind.”

  “You’re welcome to find it,” Tris replied. She kept her voice soft, not wanting to wake the dragon. “Are you going to have time after the conference?”

  Niko cleared his throat. “Actually, that was something I wanted to discuss with you.”

  Tris raised her eyebrows and waited.

  “We, er, had a vote today,” Niko explained, tugging the cuffs of his sleeves. “You know that from time to time mages get together to do some encompassing study of a particular sort of magic.”

  Tris knew that. She had handled the result of such research over the past four years, a substance which, after years of research on the part of a handful of mages, helped others to fashion cures for diseases. “The conference is something like that?” she asked.

  “It is now,” replied Niko. “In an outburst of magely fellowship and affection, it was resolved that all of us work together to create the single biggest compendium of visionary magics ever written, ambient and academic, truthsaying, past seeing, scrying in water, flame —”

  “On the wind?” Tris asked eagerly. “You’re going to write about scrying on the wind?” She knew that some mages were able to see images on the wind, glimpses of things the wind had touched. Being fond of winds herself, Tris thought that being able to see things on them would be well worth learning. The problem was that Niko, the finest seer she knew, couldn’t do it, and thus couldn’t teach it. “Who have you got for it? Can I meet her? Him?”

  Niko sighed. “We don’t have a wind seer. I hate to think of leaving this out…. I suppose we could dig up what’s been written about it until now, though it would be wonderful if we had someone who could actually write about it as they do it.”

  Tris slumped on the stool. “Oh.”

  “Scrying the wind is very difficult, Tris,” Niko said gently. “It’s like scrying the future. You’re assailed with thousands of images — fragments, really. It drives many who try it insane.”

  “You learned to scry the future,” Tris pointed out.

  “And a number of people have informed me they think I am mad,” Niko replied, his voice very dry.

  “Niko!” someone yelled from downstairs. “Will you hide all night? We’re starving. And Lieshield refuses to discuss anything else before we choose who will do the index!”

  “And so it begins,” Niko said wearily, straightening his clothes. “We could be here for decades.” He stopped to give Chime a gentle caress. “You could always bring her down to distract my colleagues,” he suggested, hope in his eyes. “You could meet some of your peers.”

  “I could always pull my ears from my head, too,” replied Tris. “It would be just as much fun. You know I hate parties.”

  Niko sighed. “You’ve always been too sensible for me. Check on this Warder fellow tomorrow,” he reminded her. “Make sure he has a teacher.”

  Antonou Tinas had agreed to give Kethlun shop room, but that didn’t include sleeping quarters. The small building on the other side of the shop was just big enough to hold the old man, his wife, their youngest daughter, and her husband. From the sound of the quarrels, Kethlun wasn’t even sure that there was room for the younger couple. There was certainly no room for Keth.

  At the end of the day, Keth closed the workshop. After saying good night to Antonou, he walked down the Street of Glass to his home, located inside the entertainment district known as Khapik. It wasn’t the best housing, as the district hosted quite a few people who regarded theft as an art form, but it was interesting and cheap. Students and young journeymen like Keth could afford Khapik’s prices and also be entertained for free. Residents and guests spanned the full spectrum of performance, all lumped together under the name yaskedasi: poorer mages, actors, musicians, tumblers, dancers, illusionists, singers, gamblers, and fortune-tellers. Other residents and employees included outright criminals; servants and cooks at the many eating-houses, theaters, inns, coffee and tea houses; and clerks who served in the multitude of shops that offered everything under the sun: clothing, souvenirs, jewelry, art, flowers, and musical instruments.

  Keth liked Khapik. There were things to see and do no matter how late the hour. Everyone came here sooner or later: foreigners, nobles, students, and merchants, male and female, going from attraction to attraction. Keth’s slow speech, occasional stammer, and slight clumsiness went unnoticed in a district where the beggars were missing body parts and the poorer folk were missing teeth. No one cared that he didn’t talk much. Here good listeners were in popular demand. Best of all, the occasional storms that swept through Tharios spent their lightning bolts on towers. There were no towers in Khapik.

  After a few changes of address, Kethlun had settled at Ferouze’s Lodgings on Chamberpot Alley. Ferouze let rooms cheaply, to yaskedasi and anyone else who could pay. Keth couldn’t see what had brought fame as a yaskedasu to this old, fat, snaggle-haired woman, but her house and her linens were clean and she had eno
ugh healing skills to treat the small injuries that befell even the most careful performer. She also played chess. With her help Keth was regaining his old skill at the game.

  When he entered the house, built like other Tharian homes around a central courtyard, Keth was surprised to find it so quiet. This was the hour when the place should be waking up, with six yaskedasi in residence. Ferouze’s watchdogs came trotting down the corridor to sniff him, then returned to their normal pursuits, allowing Keth to pass into the courtyard. The rooms on all three floors opened onto this small square of green where Ferouze had a kitchen garden and the well.

  Normally the yaskedasi would be talking back and forth from the upstairs galleries around the courtyard, trading gossip and insults as they prepared for work. Today Keth found three of the girls seated on one of the staircases, and no sign of their landlady or the other two men who lived there. The girls were still in day clothes, undyed wool kytens. None of them wore a speck of makeup; all had been crying. Yali sat with the absent Iralima’s four-year-old daughter curled up in her lap. Little Glaki’s black curls were tangled. Her face was red and swollen with weeping, and she slept with her thumb in her mouth. Xantha, the blonde northern dancer who lived there, still wept, her face puffy.

  Keth looked at Yali, who raised wet brown eyes to his. “What’s wrong?” he asked. All thought of the redheaded girl and her lightning fled his mind; goosebumps rippled over his skin. He didn’t have to be a mage to know he was about to hear bad news. “Where is everyone?”

  “Ferouze and the men are at Noskemiou Thanas,” replied Poppy. Her green-and-brown eyes, normally filled with anger, were dull. Her brown skin was ashen.

  Keth had to think for a moment to translate what she had said into his native Namornese. The city’s great hospital for the poor was called Noskemiou; Thanas was the wing where the dead were brought. “Why?” he asked when his brain sorted it out. “Who died?”