Tamora Pierce - Circle Opens 4 - Shatterglass

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tamora%20Pierce%20-%20Circle%20Opens%204%20-%20Shatterglass.htm
CHAPTER ONE
Tharios, capital of the city-state ofTharios On the Ithocot Sea
The short, plump redhead walked out of the house that belonged to her hostess and looked around, her air
that of someone about to embark on a grand adventure. She shook out her pale blue cotton dress and
petticoats, then wrapped a collection of breezes around her chubby person as someone else might drape
the folds of a shawl before she went to market. The breezes came obediently to her call, having become
so much a part of her in the girl’s travels that they no longer rebelled. They spun around her black cotton
stockings and sensible leather shoes, raced along the folds of skirt and petticoats, slid along the girl’s
arms and over her sunburned, long-nosed face. They swept over the spectacles that shielded intense grey
eyes framed by long, gold lashes, and twined themselves over and along her head. They followed the
paths of her double handful of copper braids, all pinned neatly to her scalp in a series of rings that left no
end visible. Only two long, thin braids were allowed to hang free. They framed either side of her stubborn
face.
With her breezes placed to her satisfaction, guardians against the intense southern heat, the girl whistled.
The big, shaggy white dog that was busily marking the corners of the house whuffed at her.
“Come on, Little Bear,” ordered Trisana Chandler, known to her friends as Tris. “It’s not really your
house anyway.”
The dog fell in step beside the girl, tongue lolling in cheerful good humour. His white curls, recently
washed, bounced with his trot; his long, plumed tail was a proud banner. He was a big animal, his head on
a level with Tris’s breastbone. Despite his size, he wore the air of an easy-to-please puppy as effortlessly
as the girl wore her breezes.
Tris strode down the flagstone path and out through the university gates without so much as a backward
glance at the glory of white stucco and marble that crowned the hill above the house. She thought that the
university, called Heskalifos, was fine, in its own right, and its high point — the soaring tower known as
Phakomathen — was pretty, but there were perfectly good universities in the north. She was on her way
to see the true glory of Tharios, its glassmakers. Let her teacher Niko join their hostess Jumshida and
many other learned mages and apprentices in their long-winded, long-lasting presentations on the nature
of any and all vision magics. Tris, on the other hand, “was interested in the kind of visual magic wrought
by someone who held a blowpipe that bore molten glass on its end.
At one of the many side entrances to the grounds of Heskalifos, Tris halted and scowled. Had Jumshida
said to turn left or go straight once she was outside the university enclosure?
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A girl her own age stood nearby at a loading dock, emptying the contents of a rubbish barrel into the back
of a cart. The muscles of her arms stood out like steel cables. Though she was clearly female, she wore
her hair cut off at one length at ear level, and the knee-length tunic worn by Tharian men. She was also
extremely dirty.
“Excuse me,” Tris called to her. “Do you know the way to Achaya Square?”
The girl picked up the second barrel in a row of them and dumped its contents into her cart.
Tris cleared her throat and raised her voice. “I said, can you tell me the way to Achaya Square?”
The girl nicked her eyes toward Tris, then away. She dumped her empty barrel next to the others, and
picked up a full one.
Well, thought Tris. She can hear me; she’s just being rude. She stalked over to the cart. “Don’t you people
believe in courtesy to visitors?” she demanded crossly. “Or are all you Tharians so convinced that the
world began here that you can’t be bothered to be polite?”
Though the barrel she had taken to the cart was still half full, the girl set it down and fixed her gaze on
Tris’s toes. “You shenosi,” she said quietly, using the Tharian word for foreigners. “Don’t they have
guidebooks where you come from?”
Tris’s scowl deepened. She was not particularly a patient girl. “I asked a simple question. And you can
look at me if you’re going to be snippy.”
“Oh, it’s a simple enough question,” replied the girl, still soft-voiced, her eyes still fixed on Tris’s no-
nonsense shoes. “As simple as the way is if you just follow that long beak of yours. And I’ll give you
some information for nothing, since you’re obviously too ignorant to live. You don’t talk to prathmun,
and prathmun don’t talk to you. Prathmun don’t exist.”
“What are prathmun?” demanded Tris. She chose not to take offence at the remark about her nose. It
was not her best feature and never had been.
“I am a prathmun” retorted the girl. “My mother, my sisters and my brothers are prathmun. We’re
untouchable, degraded, invisible. Am I getting through that thick northern skull yet?”
“Why?” asked Tris, curious now. This was far more interesting than a simple answer to her question.
“Why should prathmun be those things?”
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The girl sighed, and rubbed her face with her hands, smearing more dirt into it. “We handle the bodies of
the dead,” she told Tris wearily. “We skin and tan animal hides. We make shoes. We take out the night
soil. But mostly, we handle the dead, which means we defile whatever we touch. If you don’t move along
and a giladha—”
“What?” asked Tris.
“One of the visible people,” replied the girl. “If they see you talking to me, they’ll demand you get
yourself ritually cleansed before you go anywhere or do anything. Now will you go away?” demanded the
prathmun, impatient. “You’ll get cleansed, shenos, but I’ll be whipped.”
She said it so flatly that Tris believed her. She walked two steps away, then asked without turning around,
“What’s shenos? And how do you tell who’s a prathmuri?”
“A foreigner is shenos” retorted the prathmun, dumping the rest of her rubbish barrel in the cart.
“And we all have the same haircut and the same kind of clothes, and straw sandals. Now go.”
Tris followed the road that lay straight before her, the direction the prathmun had indicated with such
flattery. “Niko said I’d find some of the customs here barbaric,” she informed Little Bear when she was
out of earshot of the prathmun. “I’ll bet you a chop for supper this is one of the ones he meant.
Whoever heard of people not being just because they deal with the dead?”
Once she reached Achaya Square, Tris found the Street of Glass easily enough. Reading about Tharios on
the way here, she had formulated a plan of exploration with her usual care to detail. She would start at the
foot of the street where most of the city’s glassmakers kept their shops, beginning with the smaller,
humbler establishments near the Piraki Gate, and work her way back to Achaya Square until her feet hurt.
She meant to spend a number of days at the shops that caught her interest, but first she wanted an
overview. Tris was the kind of girl who appreciated a solid plan of action, perhaps because often her life,
and her magic, was in too much of an uproar to be organized.
As she walked, she looked on the sights and people of Tharios with interest. Buildings here were of two
kinds, stucco roofed with tiles — like those in her home on the Pebbled Sea - or public buildings built of
white marble, fronted with graceful colours and flat-roofed, with corners and column heads cut into
graceful lines. The Street of Glass and Achaya Square fountains were marble or a pretty pink granite.
Statues carved from marble and painted to look life-like stood on either side of the paved stones of the
road. It was all very lavish and expensive. Tris might not have approved, but her view of people who
spent so much on decoration was leavened when closer inspection showed her soft edges on statues and
public buildings, and fountain carvings worn almost unrecognizable by long years of weather. Tharios
was an old city, and its treasures were built to last.
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The Tharians themselves were a feast for her eyes. The natives ranged in skin colour from pale brown to
black, and while their hair was usually black or brown, many women used henna to redden it. Men
cropped their hair very short or even shaved their heads altogether. Ladies bundled their hair into masses
of curls that tilted their heads to the appropriate, sophisticated, Tharian angle. The prathmun, male and
female, sported the same rough, one-length cut Tris had seen on the girl she spoke to. All prathmun
wore a ragged, dirty version of the knee-length tunic worn by Tharite men. Tharian women dressed in an
ankle-length, drape-sleeved version called a kyten. In summer these garments were cotton, linen, or silk,
with sashes or ribbon belts twined around waists and hips. On top of the tunic or kyten upper-class
Tharians also wore stoles of many colours, each of which indicated the wearer’s profession. She knew
that mages here wore blue stoles, shopkeepers green, and priests of the All-Seeing God red. Beyond that
she was lost. No matter what colour the stole, it was usually made of the lightest cotton, or even silk,
money could buy. The Tharians looked cool and comfortable to Tris.
Since the prathmun girl had called her attention to shoes, Tris noted that better-dressed Tharian men
and women generally wore leather sandals that laced up to the knee. Many of the poorer residents went
barefoot. This wasn’t as risky as it might be anywhere else: Tris saw prathmun collecting trash and
cleaning the street on nearly every block.
Though Little Bear was content to stay with his mistress, Tris’s breezes were not. They roamed freely
around her, tugging at curls, tunics, kytens and stoles, exploring people’s faces, then returning to Tris
like excited children gone for a walk with a favourite aunt. They brought her scraps of conversations
about trade rates, fashions, family quarrels and political discussions from all around her, pouring those
scraps into her ears. She half-listened, always interested in local gossip.
Some conversations mentioned her. A few of the Tharians she passed had discovered her way to stay
cool. Perhaps her breezes wouldn’t have been noticed if the air were not perfectly still. The only winds
outside Tris’s circle of influence were those made by hand-held fans and those roused by pigeons in flight
from uncaring feet.
Tris sighed, and drew the breezes closer to her. People continued to stare as her dress and petticoats
stirred in different directions. She ignored them. It was too hot to give up her fresh air so a number of
stuck-up southerners weren’t made nervous. If they were as clever as they claimed, they’d find ways to
hold breezes of their own, Tris told herself.
She had a number of breezes tied up in knots of thread back at the house. Perhaps she could peddle some
at the market, and make a bit of extra money. There were two more moons of summer to go, and the
problem with city walls was that they tended to keep out the wind. She ought to be able to sell a knot, or
two, or three, for pocket money. She would ask Jumshida how to go about it.
On she walked, planning and observing. She passed between shops filled with wonders: vases, bowls,
platters, glass animals in a multitude of colours and sizes. In the shops on the Achaya Square end of the
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Street of Glass, windows were made of small panes of glass, treasures in and of themselves, which gave a
watery, rippling shape to the beautiful objects behind them.
Mingled with the higher-priced glass was glass that had been spelled in some way. Magical charms and
letters in the sides and rims of pieces, suncatchers magicked to catch more than just sun, rounds of glass
imbued with magic to capture and hold an image in them, all glinted silver in Tris’s vision, showing her
the work of the glass mages of Tharios. It was for this reason that she chose to start among the poorer
shops, those more likely to sell plain glass and few charms. Tris knew she would spend most of her time
later among the glass mages, comparing notes and learning how they practised their craft.
Closer to Labrykas Square the shops had ordinary, shuttered windows, with the wares arranged on shelves
to tempt passers-by. Tris lingered at one and another, admiring the curve of a bowl or the blue-green hue
of a cosmetics bottle, but she always made herself walk on after a moment. She was determined to start at
the very bottom of the glassmakers’ pecking order.
As Tris approached Labrykas Square, the first public square beyond the Piraki Gate, her breezes carried a
conversation to her; “— a disgrace!” someone cried. “One of the riff-raff, murdered and left in the
Labrykas Square fountain like, like so much rubbish!”
“It will take a powerful cleansing to purify the fountain again,” a woman replied soberly. “Surely the All-
Seeing God will take offence against the district for the defilement—”
“The district? I think not!” retorted the first speaker. “It’s obviously the work of some shenos who
respects nothing and no one. The All-Seeing knows that no Tharian would commit so foul an act.”
“The Keepers of the Public Good will put a stop to it,” the woman said with the firmness of complete
belief. “They have —”
The breeze had not caught the rest of the discussion. Tris shook her head as she walked on. Someone is
murdered, and all these people care about is the purity of Assembly Square? she thought, baffled. That’s
pretty heartless.
She also wasn’t inclined to believe these Keepers would be able to do much about the killing. How
effective could they be? They were elected to serve a three-year term each by the Assembly, a body of the
oldest citizens and the wealthiest landholders. They would not have the experience or cunning of a proper
ruler who’d been raised for the position, like Duke Vedris of Emelan, Capchen’s king and queen, or
Empress Berenene of Namorn. She was amazed that the Tharians got anything done, if their entire
political system was run by a mob. She had seen at home how much a governing council could quibble,
fuss, debate, argue and fight, with nothing to show for it – and Winding Circle’s governing council was
only twenty people. She’d heard there were over three hundred in the Assembly.
“It’s different when one man or woman is responsible for a country,” she told Little Bear as they
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摘要：

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tamora%20Pierce%20-%20Circle%2Opens%204%20-%20Shatterglass.htmCHAPTERONETharios,capitalofthecity-stateofThariosOntheIthocotSeaTheshort,plumpredheadwalkedoutofthehousethatbelongedtoherhostessandlookedaround,herairthatofsomeoneabouttoembarkonagrandadventure...

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