blazing. Keth obeyed without realizing he was taking an order from her. Tris walked over to stand between him and the arurim dhaskoi. To Nomasdina she said, “Now, I’ve been nice and cooperative so far.” Her eyes blazed up at the Tharian. “We came peaceably; we didn’t make trouble. You had your disgusting show back there, exhibiting that poor girl to us without so much as covering her face. But I am at the end of my patience. You are not torturing Keth. You’re going to get a truthsayer, like a civilized human being.”
Nomasdina sighed. “The arurimat has no truthsayer funds. It’s not like we’re in First District here.”
“Then you wait until my teacher comes with Dhasku Dawnspeaker,” retorted Tris. “She will tell you that my teacher is the finest truthsayer known, and he’ll do it for no charge. You should be ashamed, leaping to torture a man on no more evidence than a glass ball!”
Nomasdina looked puzzled as he stared at Tris. Keth knew how the other man felt. “Are you so ignorant of your standing?” asked the arurim dhaskoi, genuinely curious. “You’re a foreigner, here on sufferance. In Tharios we take the law very seriously. Interference is not appreciated.”
“We take it seriously in Emelan, too,” snapped Tris. “I’m not saying you can’t question him, I’m just saying you can’t torture him. If you try, I promise you, I will bring this place down around your ears.”
Keth saw a spark crawl out of one of her braids, then another, and another. “Please listen to her,” he begged, suddenly as afraid of her as he was of torture. “You won’t like it if she loses her temper!”
“I still want to know why you’re in my way,” Nomasdina repeated stubbornly, his eyes fixed on Tris’s.
“He’s my student,” Tris said. “Maybe we haven’t been together very long, but I learned from the best teachers what a student is owed. I refuse to shame them by letting you do whatever you like to Keth, when anyone but a desperate idiot could have seen back there that Keth didn’t kill that woman.”
Though she stood only as high as the arurim dhaskoi’s collarbone, there was no question in Keth’s mind who dominated the conversation: Tris. Something in the way he felt about her changed, frightened though he was by the sparks in her hair. He wasn’t sure what had changed just yet, only that something was different.
Nomasdina frowned. “You know, I’m beginning to believe you are a mage,” he remarked slowly. He turned to Keth. “So tell me something. Did you kill her?”
“Gods, no,” Keth replied, trembling. “I hate the Ghost. I’d kill him myself, given the chance. Iralima was a friend of mine.”
“Iralima? The last victim?” Nomasdina asked.
Keth nodded, then winced. He’d just spoken the fact he’d thought he was too clever to reveal.
“You realize that makes you look even more suspicious,” the dhaskoi pointed out.
Keth nodded again. Suddenly a breeze whipped around him, and Tris raised a hand. A cocoon of silver mage fire enclosed Keth from top to toe. He touched it: the fire stung.
“I told you, Nomasdina, you’re not going to torture him,” Tris said flatly.
Nomasdina looked at Keth in his cocoon. Then he looked at Tris. “Do you know how long it would take me to raise protections like that? You’re starting to scare me.”
“Join the guild,” Keth muttered.
Nomasdina glanced at him and smiled crookedly. Then he pulled a stool over to the barrier that sheathed Keth and sat on it. “Right now I’m just asking questions,” he informed Tris wearily. He looked at Keth and asked, “How did you know Iralima?”
“She lived at my lodging house. You were there yesterday,” replied Keth. He sat cross-legged on the floor, inside the protections Tris had set around him.
“Did you know any of the other victims?” inquired Nomasdina.
“I knew Zudana by sight,” Keth replied. “I used to listen to her sing all the time. She had a beautiful voice.”
“She did,” Nomasdina agreed. “Before they put me on the murders, I used to sneak out on my shift to hear her. How long have you been in Tharios?”
He questioned Keth for an hour as the clerk took notes. Tris resumed her seat in the corner without lowering her protective barrier. Keth gave Nomasdina the details of his movements for the last two weeks, the tale of his arrival in Tharios and his employment at Touchstone Glass, and all that he’d heard said about the Ghost and his murders. At last Nomasdina went to