“Where is this?” he demanded, trying to recognize her surroundings. “Dema — ”
“I tell you we don’t have time to deal with whoever’s in charge!” a clear, crisp voice shouted. The speaker was downstairs in the Winking Eye, where Dema had his command post. “A woman’s in danger now, you bone-headed behemoth!”
Dema looked at Keth. “Niko?” they chorused. Both ran for the stairs.
Below stood the arurimi Brosdes and Majnuna. Each of them held one of Niko’s arms, impervious to the mage’s fury. “He says he knows where our boy is and who’s the next victim,” explained Brosdes. “Wants us to turn out the whole force to track ’em.”
“Let him go,” ordered Dema. “What is it, Dhaskoi Niko?”
“Dhaskoi?” muttered the taller of the arurimi. “He never said nothin’ about bein’ dhaskoi.”
Keth thrust the globe at Niko. “Is this it?” he demanded. “Is this why you’re here?”
“Where did that come from?” Dema wanted to know. “Where — Tris?”
“I made it clear again,” Keth explained.
“This is why I’m here,” snapped Niko. “I was scrying for the future, and this time the images came together.” Hands trembling, he laid them over the globe, his fingers touching Keth’s. Both of them concentrated, Keth letting what power he had left pass into the glass. The image of Tris shrank as the vision grew wider and wider. “Where is that?” demanded Niko. “Where is she?”
“Cricket Strut?” asked the thick-voiced Majnuna, squinting at the image. “Brosdes?”
“I’ve frozen it where she is right now. She won’t be there when we arrive,” Niko said hurriedly. “We need Little Bear. He can track her. We need him and we need to move. This takes place in fifteen minutes, twenty if we are fortunate. Her life is about to intersect with the Ghost’s — I don’t know how, but if you want him to be alive when you question him, we must go!”
“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?”
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 the 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 coloured fires that remained from her scrying.
Chime leaped free as Tris went down. Now she 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 might as well have been 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