“That this was a matter on which you are chief investigator,” replied the clerk, “and that if I spoke to anyone else before you gave me leave, I could be arrested for promoting disorder.”
“He was right,” Dema said, continuing to examine the ball. He looked at the proscenium that framed the dais. There, in mosaics, was Noskemiou, the charity hospital, and the brightly painted walls that wrapped around Khapik, with the yellow pillars that marked the main entrance. There on the right side was the Elya Street arurimat. He knew this place. It was the Fifth District’s Forum, where the affairs of that part of the city were discussed and voted upon before the seven District Speakers. The place was closed during the day, when everyone worked. He glanced out of the window of his office: the sun was reaching the horizon. They would open the Forum any minute.
Dema shoved the ball into the basket. “You’re with me,” he told the clerk, who was drinking the water the amrim had brought. To the arurim Dema said, “I want a full squad at the Fifth District Forum, soonest. We’ll need barricades, arurimi to watch them, and prathmuni with a death cart. Scramble!” He grabbed his mage’s kit in his free hand and strode out of his office.
“Can’t I go home?” whined the clerk. “I’ve been all over the city. My wife will be worried — ”
Dema turned and faced him. “Are you a citizen of Tharios?” he demanded coldly, glaring at the shorter man.
At the word “citizen” the clerk straightened, thrusting his out bony chest. “Of course I am,” he snapped, indignant that anyone might question his status.
“Then I, Demakos Nomasdina, of the First Class, call upon you to do your duty as a citizen. Do you serve Tharios?” he asked.
The clerk hung his head. “Always and for ever,” he replied wearily. The formula was part of his oath of citizenship. If a member of the First Class called on any resident of the city as Dema had done, that person was obligated by his oath to serve in whatever way he might be commanded.
Dema thrust the basket into the clerk’s hands. “First we’re going to see if this means anything.”
They reached the Forum just as its custodians laid hands upon the wooden bars across the doors. Dema showed them what he’d been taught in school, the “face of the First Class”, the expression, bearing and crispness that anyone of his rank put on when necessary, to uphold the dignity of the First Class and of the city that was the final responsibility of the First Class. Even the weakest-willed children learned to act as if they knew what they were doing. Their duty was to assure the lower classes that Tharios was eternal, as long as order was kept. The duty of the lower classes was to obey those who bore ultimate service to Tharios in their very bones. Dema was grateful for that long, hard training now; it hid his fear of what he might be about to see.
The custodians opened the doors for him and the arurimi who had caught up with him, then closed the doors to keep the public outside. Only a few idlers were present, either for the night’s Forum debates or because they had seen arurimi on the move, but Dema knew their numbers would soon grow.
Inside, he motioned for the clerk and the arurimi to keep back. He advanced on the dais, a ball of mage fire drifting beside him to light the way. When he reached the podium, he wrote a sign in the air. It gleamed, then faded. His mage fire grew until the front half of the room was mercilessly lit, without a shadow anywhere.
It had looked like a Ghost murder in the globe, and it looked like a Ghost murder now. Dema crouched beside the dead woman and opened his kit. A pinch of heartbeat powder sprinkled over the yaskedasu darkened to scarlet: she’d been dead almost an entire day.
Why did no one report that she was missing? he wondered. If they had, he would know. These days any word of missing yaskedasi came to him first.
Dema ground his teeth in vexation. The yaskedasi drove him crazy with their secretiveness.
Even when it was to their benefit they would not deal with the arurimi unless forced to it. They made it that much harder to find who had seen these women in the last