Shatterglass (2 page)

On she walked, planning and observing. She passed between shops filled with wonders: vases, bowls, platters, glass animals in a multitude of colours and sizes. In the shops on the Achaya Square end of the Street of Glass, windows were made of small panes of glass, treasures in and of themselves, which gave a watery, rippling shape to the beautiful objects behind them.

Mingled with the higher-priced glass was glass that had been spelled in some way.

Magical charms and letters in the sides and rims of pieces, suncatchers magicked to catch more than just sun, rounds of glass imbued with magic to capture and hold an image in them, all glinted silver in Tris’s vision, showing her the work of the glass mages of Tharios. It was for this reason that she chose to start among the poorer shops, those more likely to sell plain glass and few charms. Tris knew she would spend most of her time later among the glass mages, comparing notes and learning how they practised their craft.

Closer to Labrykas Square the shops had ordinary, shuttered windows, with the wares arranged on shelves to tempt passers-by. Tris lingered at one and another, admiring the curve of a bowl or the blue-green hue of a cosmetics bottle, but she always made herself walk on after a moment. She was determined to start at the very bottom of the glassmakers’ pecking order.

As Tris approached Labrykas Square, the first public square beyond the Piraki Gate, her bree’zes carried a conversation to her; “— a disgrace!” someone cried. “One of the riff-raff, murdered and left in the Labrykas Square fountain like, like so much rubbish!”

“It will take a powerful cleansing to purify the fountain again,” a woman replied soberly. “Surely the All-Seeing God will take offence against the district for the defilement—”

“The district? I think not!” retorted the first speaker. “It’s obviously the work of some shenos who respects nothing and no one. The All-Seeing knows that no Tharian would commit so foul an act.”

“The Keepers of the Public Good will put a stop to it,” the woman said with the firmness of complete belief. “They have —”

The breeze had not caught the rest of the discussion. Tris shook her head as she walked on. Someone is murdered, and all these people care about is the purity of Assembly Square? she thought, baffled. That’s pretty heartless.

She also wasn’t inclined to believe these Keepers would be able to do much about the killing. How effective could they be? They were elected to serve a three-year term each by the Assembly, a body of the oldest citizens and the wealthiest landholders.

They would not have the experience or cunning of a proper ruler who’d been raised for the position, like Duke Vedris of Emelan, Capchen’s king and queen, or Empress Berenene of Namorn. She was amazed that the Tharians got anything done, if their entire political system was run by a mob. She had seen at home how much a governing council could quibble, fuss, debate, argue and fight, with nothing to show for it - and Winding Circle’s governing council was only twenty people. She’d heard there were over three hundred in the Assembly.

“It’s different when one man or woman is responsible for a country,” she told Little Bear as they passed through Labrykas Square. The fountain, which she had seen on her arrival in the city, was shrouded in a kind of white, roofless tent. “They have to jump on this kind of nonsense right away, or everyone knows they’re to blame. Here, all the rulers have to do is point to the other Keeper, or someone from the Assembly, and say they’re supposed to be in charge of that.” Disgusted, Tris shook her head and thrust all such dissatisfactions from her mind. She was here to learn, not to let the strange ways in which other people governed themselves get on her nerves.

At last she reached the part of the Street of Glass that she meant to explore first, the part that stretched between Labrykas Square and the pleasure district known as Khapik. She took a moment to look around using her magical vision. One thing she would say in favour of the Tharians, they looked after the magic that was used in public places. She saw very few tag-ends of old charms and spells gleaming silver on walls or around windows and doors. Spells there were in plenty, the usual creations for protection, health and prosperity that anyone who could afford it paid to have laid on their homes and businesses. The thing that Tris admired was that local mages either got rid of what remained of older spells, or wrote the same kind of spell in afresh, so that the magic in them shone in bright silver layers, an indication that differences in the spells did not conflict and cause the magic to go astray.

Tris walked idly up the street, admiring the lace-like patterns of spells on the shop walls, tracing a curve here, a letter there, with her finger. She knew most by heart, but this Tharian way of copying them over and over seemed to extend their power, even if the mage who added the most recent layer wasn’t particularly strong.

Suddenly she felt a twist in the air. Most of her breezes, all of the ones she had acquired in recent months, fled. Only those she had brought from Winding Circle stayed, though she felt them struggle against some powerful call. The escaping breezes whipped around the corner of a nearby workshop: Touchstone Glass, according to the sign.

The breezes weren’t the only things on the move. Power from every charm and spell within twenty metres of the shop streamed past Tris to round the corner in silvery ribbons: protection magic, fire-damping magic, health magic, wards for luck and prosperity, it didn’t seem to matter. Something flexed in the air a second time.

Without stopping to ask if she did the wisest thing, she pelted around the corner into the rear yard of Touchstone Glass.

She plunged into a stream of magic. All of it poured through the open doors of a workshop set apart from the main building. It swirled around a man who toiled in front of a furnace. He stood sidelong to the door, a glassmaker’s blowpipe to his lips as he tried to give form to an orange blob of molten glass. Twirling the pipe with one hand, he shaped the base of his creation with a mould clasped in the other.

For a moment Tris thought all was well. Then she realized that despite the glassblower’s twirling of the pipe and the steady stream of air he forced into it, the orange blob wriggled, bulged, then sank like a burlap sack with a cat inside. She had never seen glass do that before. Magic flooded into the man, sliding under his leather apron, squirming into short blond hair cropped close to his blocky head, tugging at his sleeves, then merging where his lips met the pipe. Down its length the magic streamed, disappearing into the molten glass.

The man thrust the glass back into the open furnace, waited a moment, then brought the pipe back to his lips. He cupped the base of the glass with his mould and blew into the pipe. The material at its end bulged, twisted, and thrust about even harder, plainly fighting him. It grew longer and snake-like, 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 pipe.

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, spiralled, 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, bat-like 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 thirty centimetres long from nose to rump, with fifteen more centimetres 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 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 blond 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 yourself, dolt. You threw good magic after bad, including power you drained from all around this neighbourhood 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 slow. “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 centimetre from the dragon’s tail.

“Colouring - 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 a centimetre. 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 a 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 furthest from her, clutching the hand she’d shocked. His face was ash-grey; 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.