staggered back into the darkness behind the willow, flailing as she clawed at the strangler’s noose.
If Keth waited, she would die before the arurimi came. Yelling, he plunged into the stream and slogged up the far bank, toiling in slippery mud to get to her and capture her assailant. He stumbled over a root on the outskirts of the willow. As he struggled to stay on his feet, the girl flew at him out of the dark, yellow veil wrapped twice around her throat and knotted tight. Her face was plum-coloured, her fingers increasingly feeble as she dug at the silk. Keth wavered between helping her and chasing the Ghost, then unsheathed his belt knife. The veil was expensive silk, his knife not at all good. Finally he cut the knot and unwrapped the cloth from the yaskedasu’s swollen neck just as his glass bubble and the arurimi found them.
“Which way?” demanded their sergeant. Keth pointed wordlessly with his free hand, his other wrapped around the coughing girl to keep her from falling into the stream. The arurimi pelted away, their feet striking great splashes from the wet grass.
Keth pulled the girl further under the willow’s shelter and waited with her. Her racking coughs slowed, then stopped. She clung to Keth as if he were her last hope in the world.
“He’s gone,” Keth told her over and over. “He won’t come back. Let me fetch you some water from the stream…”
She shook her head furiously. Her fingers dug deeper into his arm.
“Or not,” said Keth. “Let’s go and sit, at least.” He swung her up in his arms — she was just a scrap of a thing — and carried her over to the shrine. The topmost step was dry, protected by the domed roof from the rain that pelted down with a roar. Keth reached out with cupped hands and ferried mouthful after mouthful of rain to the girl. She drank greedily, wincing as the liquid passed through her bruised throat.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle again when the arurimi returned. Dema and a number of other arurimi came with them, summoned from the command post. Judging by the mud that splattered all of them royally, Keth guessed they had searched all through the downpour at its worst.
Dema stood in the rain, hands on hips, water pouring from his sopping mage-blue stole and arurim red tunic. “What were you thinking?” he asked amiably enough. “What, if anything, was passing through your mind?”
Keth glared up at him as the yaskedasu shrank into the shelter of his arm. “He was killing her. I didn’t know when your people would arrive.”
“You let him go,” Dema said, bright-eyed. “He was right there, almost within our grasp, and you let him escape.”
“She would have been dead if I hadn’t cut the scarf from her throat,” Keth insisted. To the girl he said gently, “Show them, please.”
She raised her chin to show them the plum-and-blue mass around her neck.
Dema refused to meet her eyes. “The fact remains, he was right here, and you scared him off.”
“What did he do?” Keth asked knowingly. “Run through another of those ridiculous cleansing temples you have?”
“A mage’s storeroom,” grumbled one of the arurimi, smearing mud as he dragged his forearm over his face. “There’s no telling where he went from there.”
“He’s probably got escape routes all over the city,” Keth said.
“I know that.” Dema’s voice was thick with awful patience. “That’s why we needed to catch him in the act.”
“She would have died,” Keth insisted stubbornly. “Where’s the honour in catching him if you let him kill someone else?” He held Dema’s eyes with his own, trying to get the other man to see his point.
The yaskedasu at his side muttered something, and coughed.
“What?” asked Keth.
The yaskedasu looked at him, then glared at the arurimi. “Okozou,” she said in a voice like a dry file drawn over broken glass.
“Your murder isn’t an okozou matter to me,” Keth said fiercely. “And it shouldn’t be okozou to you,” he added, with a glare of his own for Dema.
Dema sighed. “All right,” he told the arurimi. “You know the drill. Search the area once more, then resume your patrol pattern. Move out.” To Keth and the yaskedasu he said, “Come on. We’ll get you dried off and looked after. And then we’ll try and find out what you saw.”
“Din’t see nothin’,” the girl rasped.
“I know,” replied Dema with heavy patience. “But we’ll try to dredge something from you anyway.”