he followed his strange connection to these deaths, it would be through wind-scrying. The air was everywhere. If she could see what the moving air touched, she could trace the killer, and avenge Glaki’s loss of the women who loved her.
Her breezes, sent out that night from Ferouze’s, found her now and then with their burden of sound. She listened to the conversations and noise they carried, finding nothing she could use. She also strained to view something, anything, in them. Once she thought she saw the curve of a gauze butterfly wing. She froze, trembling, needing to see more, but if she had actually glimpsed anything, the air that carried it had moved on, one of a hundred currents that flowed down the street.
“Probably just my imagination,” she muttered to Chime, and sighed.
Deep within Khapik, she walked down a service alley for the first time, having avoided them for their rubbish and smell until now. Two prathmuni sat there with a wagonload of garbage, eating supper. Tris was about to pass them by, but curiosity made her stop. “Have the arurimi talked to you?” she asked. “About the murders? Whether you’ve seen anyone or anything suspicious?”
The prathmuni — a woman with muscles like a bull’s and a teenaged boy — regarded Tris with equally flat eyes. Finally the woman spat on the flagstones at her side. “Shenos, get some local idiot to explain what happens if you’re caught talking to one of us. We’d as soon not catch the whipping. And go away.”
“No one will hear about this talk from me,” Tris replied. “So will you answer my question?”
“Why?” demanded the boy. “What have you done for us?”
“Shut up,” growled the woman.
“It’s what I can do for you, if you pass the word around,” Tris replied. “If I tell the dhaskoi who’s charged with finding the Ghost that you’re helping, he can stop the arurim prathmuni from taking your people in for questioning.”
“He must be a god, then,” said the woman. “How ’bout it’s more likely the arurimi will just keep torturing till one of us confesses and gets executed for it?”
“What if it is one of you?” Tris asked, curious.
The prathmuni looked at one another and drew the circle of the All-Seeing God on their foreheads. “They beat that out of us long ago,” said the woman, but she looked uneasy.
“One of us — gods,” breathed the boy. “They’d slaughter us all.”
“Is it one of you?” Tris asked again.
“No,” they said at once.
“Never,” added the boy.
“But surely you’ve angry folk among you,” Tris pointed out, watching as sparkles, a fistful of them, flowed past her eyes.
“Plenty,” replied the woman. “But they know better than to risk everyone’s lives. They know how the upper classes feel about us.”
“That’s right,” the boy agreed weakly.
There was no image in the passing clump of light. Tris sagged with disappointment. To the woman she said, “Madmen aren’t guided by what their people need.”
The woman spat to one side again before she said, “You’re strange even for a shenos. Are there more at home like you?”
Tris smiled ruefully. “No, mostly they’re travelling, too.”
“I hope not here,” the woman said. “Now please go away.”
Tris woke to a hammering at the door. Glaki opened it to reveal Kethlun standing in the morning light. He was trembling. Lightning flickered in his eyes. “I think I have one,” he said nervously. “Another globe. It’s an itch, only in my skull where I can’t scratch it.”
Tris sat up. Her bones ached with weariness and too little sleep; the tides and lightning she had used to keep going were starting to run out. She would have to pay with days in bed once their strength was gone. “Go to Touchstone and get things ready,” she croaked. “Don’t start till I get there. I’ve an idea.”
Keth, about to leave, stopped himself. “Will you get there?” he wanted to know. “You look like death walking. Maybe you — never mind.”
Tris, taking the pins from two fresh tide braids, looked at him sharply. He was stepping away from the door. “Never mind what?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s just that when you start to fiddle with your hair I want to leave. No offence,” Keth added hastily. “It’s lovely hair, I’m sure.” He fled.
Tris looked at Glaki. “Can you put your kyten on without my help?” she asked.
“Yes, Tris,” replied the girl. “And my belly band, except you have to tie it.” Tharians wore an undergarment like a diaper that tied at the