horses, Dema tossing coins from his purse on to the table to pay for the dishes they broke. They rode to Heskalifos like fiends, scattering people left and right as they galloped up the Street of Glass. Bolting through Akaya Gate, they ignored the yells of the university peacekeepers as they sped over paths not meant for riders. Where the paths failed to provide the most direct route, Dema led them across carefully tended gardens between buildings.
They reined in before a small, round hall built of white marble with pillars all the way around. Dema slid from the saddle, the globe clutched to his chest. He raced up the bank of steps that served as pedestal to the hall.
“Brosdes, open that thing,” he ordered, pointing to the door.
One of the arurimi, a short black man with knots of muscle in his arms and legs, approached with a heavy pack over one shoulder. He inspected the double doors with an expert eye. “Right,” he said, kneeling to extract a chisel and mallet from the pack. “Majnuna, give me a leg up,” he ordered.
The arurim Majnuna, a huge, olive-skinned woman who stood a full head taller than any of the others, knelt beside the door. Brosdes jammed hammer and chisel into his sash, then climbed on to Majnuna’s shoulders. The big woman stood and braced herself.
Brosdes cut the head off the pin that secured the hinge with two hammer blows, then knocked the pin out. When Majnuna lowered him, Brosdes did the same for the lower hinge. Everyone moved aside as half of the door trembled, groaned, then fell to the marble floor.
Inside the globe, Dema saw a limp woman on the stage of the debating hall. He led his arurimi inside, motioning for them to spread out in every direction and cover the doors out of the place. They obeyed, lighting torches from those that blazed outside the front entrance. The outer lobby was empty. Two arurimi vanished up the curving stairs on either side to search the balcony.
Dema and three arurimi, each with a lead-weighted baton in hand, passed into the immense theatre where the university’s famed debates were held. Opposite them was the stage.
It was empty.
“Is the globe wrong?” asked one of the men.
Dema looked at the globe, where the image was rapidly fading. Keth had done it, Dema realized. He’d made the inside visible before the Ghost could display his victim. His success wasn’t complete, what Dema wanted was a look at the murderer himself— but Keth had come a long way towards their ultimate goal.
Hope burned in Dema’s chest like a red-hot coal. The killer might be nearby. “Quietly,” he whispered. “Fan out and search. Inside and out.”
He and Majnuna were in the wings of the stage when one of the arurimi came for them. The arurimi outside Lagisthion had found a service entrance to the hall’s underbelly. It was hidden by a clump of brush thirty metres away.
Dema cursed. He had forgotten the service entrances. “They didn’t want to ruin the beauty of the building with anything as sordid as taking out the rubbish,” he panted as he and his arurimi raced outside. “They never do anything simple if they can think of a complicated way around it.”
Quickly they found the path into the greenery and followed it to a circle of open ground. An open door yawned at its centre. On top of the steps leading down lay the body of a yaskedasu.
Dema clenched his fists. They were too late, again.
He looked around. They had been quiet since coming outside. There was a chance that the killer was still nearby.
An application of heartbeat powder over the dead woman told him she’d been dead less than an hour. He didn’t waste time with the vision spell, but immediately gulped a mouthful of stepsfind and sprayed it over the yaskedasu. In the gloom of the night it drifted to one side of her, and shimmered in the form of footsteps on the ground.
None of the arurimi said anything. They followed. They tracked the Ghost through the back ways of Heskalifos, through alleys and service entrances hidden with brush and trees, until the trail of the killer turned downhill. They followed him right up to the white marble columns and stones of a building so thoroughly protected by cleansing magics that all trace of him was lost. Dema’s curses brought the priests out to discover who was making so unholy a racket.