hours of their lives, just as they made it harder to identify the dead. The yaskedasi just didn’t seem to understand that cooperation was for their own good.
With a sigh, Dema opened a bottle of vision powder and sprinkled a pinch over each of the woman’s open, staring eyes. The killer’s essence began to fade fifteen hours or so after a slaying, but Dema wanted to try it anyway. If the victim had seen her attacker, the powder would reveal at least a smudge over her eyes, if not the killer’s face. This time there was not even a smudge. Dema bit his lip: she must have been taken from behind. Her fingernails were broken, yellow silk threads caught in their shredded edges, from her fight to get free of the noose. The killer had to be strong, because the tumbler was solid muscle.
Dema selected one of the blessed ivory rods that had arrived at the arurimat the day after he’d spoken with the priests at Labrykas Square. He used it to pull the veil’s ends out flat. “Melchang lodgings, Willow Lane” was embroidered at the edge.
“Stand aside, Demakos Nomasdina, before you are in need of cleansing yourself,” called a clear, female voice. “You are too close to the pollution.”
Dema looked around. The prathmuni in charge of the dead had come and, with them, the priests of the All-Seeing, ready to cleanse the Forum. Like the fountain, it would need prolonged cleansing. It was a public place. The Fora were also the heart of Tharios, the reason the city had grown and succeeded without emperors and their follies.
“I haven’t touched her,” he replied sharply. “And your cleansings wipe away all traces I can use to track this mirizask.” The clerk with the globe, standing behind the priests, squeaked at Dema’s coarse language.
Turning his back on them, Dema selected the bottle of stepsfind from his kit, took a mouthful, stood and sprayed it in the air over the dead woman. When it fell to the ground, it revealed blurred footmarks leading to the back of the dais. He followed those smudges off the dais, down two steps to the small meeting rooms behind the Forum, past the privy set aside for the use of government officers, and through the hallway to the rear entrance. He tracked the smudges through the unlocked door and ran smack into a wall of silver fire. With a yelp Dema sprang back. He’d just tried to walk through a circle of enclosure. Not only was he unable to pass, but his face and hands felt as if he’d scrubbed them with nettles.
“How can we catch him if you erase any trace he leaves?” he cried, maddened, to the white-veiled priest outside the circle.
“What good will his capture do, if his infection spreads to the city? If you take on his pollution at the risk of your clan?” demanded the priest coldly. “Our souls are more important than these sacks of putrefaction and disease we call bodies, Demakos Nomasdina. Go and be cleansed yourself.”
Dema shivered and walked back into the Forum, thoroughly ashamed of himself. For a moment he’d been so caught up in the need to catch the murderer that he had lost sight of his duty to his family and to Tharios itself, to keep the pollution that accompanied death from tainting the city. At the very least he risked his own soul and his status; at most, he risked dragging all of his kinsmen, everyone who’d had contact with him or his immediate family, into exile, or worse, into the ranks of the prathmuni. He had nearly ruined one of the great clans of Tharios.
There has to be another way to find the killer, he told himself as the priests inside the Forum cleansed him with prayer, ritual and incense. Then he remembered the clerk. The man sat on a bench at the rear of the Forum, the basket at his side, a glum look on his face as he watched the priests go to work over the dead woman.
Dema took the globe from its basket. “Who made this device?” he asked.
Removing each needle from Kethlun’s face was an exacting task. Tris sat on the table, Keth on a chair in front of her. As she worked, he told her, Niko and Jumshida about his life before and after one summer day on the Syth.
When he finished, Niko regarded his fingernails. “The seed of magic you had all along probably saved your life when