Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Well, thank you for clarifying matters,” said Zanja.

  “It seems like I should be more useful than I am, doesn’t it?”

  He hardly ever did anything useful, but more than once Zanja had trusted him with her life. So she waited for him to say something else.

  He said, “I suppose you hoped for a prediction? Very well, I predict that you will never wish you had danced less with Emil.”

  She laughed. But he seemed serious. She said, “I’ll go dance with him right now. Thank you, master seer.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he muttered. He switched spectacles and returned to reading his book.

  Chapter 2

  Grandmother Ocean had arrived at the day of her death. Although to her people it might seem as if she had been alive for twenty generations, she had lived no longer than anyone else, but had lived in bits and pieces, scattered between her birth in one year and her death some four hundred years later. She had never been able to swim beyond the summer of the year known by the Shaftali as Karis 1, and so she had long known that it was the year that her river of time would run dry. Now she had discovered the exact day.

  She sat on the wet sand and ate raw fish that she cut from the bone in slices so thin that the sunlight shone through them. On this hot, clear day, the harbor’s water lay still, and the children played as they had done for centuries, diving from their houseboats into the water and endeavoring to drown each other. One of those children was a water witch like her, like several others she had accidentally encountered over the years. Possibly, she had already met this child as an adult, or possibly not. Perhaps this one knew—or would know—what Ocean had done so that her people could survive in their hidden harbor.

  Some months ago, she had collected seaweed floats out in the open sea, swimming with the otters whose sinuous agility mocked her splashing. She had known by then that her great endeavor would succeed, and had, in fact, succeeded, 200 years earlier, when Tadwell changed the river’s flow. She gave two of the floats to a carpenter, to dry and preserve for her. Now the carpenter approached her across the beach with one of the dried floats in each hand. He had drilled a tiny hole in each of them.

  Ocean’s first 200 years had been eventful enough. Her second 200 years had not occurred as she remembered them. She had used up the past and had reached the end of her future. She would fill the vessels and then would devote the rest of her life to decorating them. It seemed a restful and worthwhile task.

  The current Speaker of the Essikret people was named Dancing-Silver-Light, although he allowed the outsiders whose languages he spoke to call him Silver. Dancing-Silver-Light spoke with Ocean in the evening, and she asked him to send two people in boats inland on the next rising tide, to meet two visitors at the westernmost end of the salt marsh, and to bring them to her when the tide turned. “Those visitors are messengers from the G’deon,” she said. “I will give them these vessels for her.”

  Dancing-Silver-Light said, “Less than a season ago, the G’deon swore to kill you if you interfered with her again. And now she is sending you messengers?” He laughed heartily.

  Grandmother Ocean laughed with him. Not often had she been able to share such a rare and subtle joke.

  Chapter 3

  There are plenty of ravens in the world, thought Chaen, but only a few are enchanted. The bird that had caught her attention as it soared past, a black silhouette against the burnished sky, had already disappeared. It was not hunting for her.

  Crushed shells snapped like old bones underfoot as Chaen cleaned the brush and sealed the cork of the mineral spirits bottle with wax. She had finished painting the alehouse sign, which lay on a board across two empty kegs, the wet varnish already beginning to dry in the heat. The stone walls of this sheltered yard muted the noisy city’s racket and would protect the sign from dust, flower petals, and other debris when the sea breeze washed through the streets and alleys. Before sunset, it would be dry.

  Now what should she do? Ten evenings in a row she had waited for Jareth at the tide clock. She had never liked him much, but his failure to make an appearance was more irritating than his presence would have been. Was he ill? Captured? Dead?

  When the members of Death-and-Life Company attacked the false G’deon in her bed, none of them had believed they could fail. They hadn’t considered what it would be like for her to be a fugitive, skating across the surface of other people’s lives, aimless and disconnected, denied even the relief of knowing exactly when the solitude could end. From winter’s end, through spring, and well into summer, Chaen had endured that strange exile. She could manage the loneliness; but without purpose or people, she had begun to feel as if she didn’t exist. Little though she liked Jareth, at least she could have talked frankly with him.

  She opened the back door of the alehouse and stepped into the kitchen, where the cook, dozing in a wooden chair tilted back to rest precariously against the wall, did not notice when she took a slice of bread, a piece of cheese, and a scoop of butter. She brought this simple meal into the public room. The ships had departed after many lingering days in port waiting for the weather to clear. The usually crowded and noisy room lay empty, except for the publican and the old man who always sat in the corner, and his companion.

  Rain had kept Chaen from finishing the sign on time, but the publican blamed her because he believed everyone was trying to cheat him. As he approached the table, Chaen said before he could speak, “The sign is finished, and I’ll hang it up before dark.”

  “Hmph. You’ll be gone tomorrow, then.”

  At least he wasn’t evicting her tonight. She had no money for lodging, and the city was home to many people she would rather not encounter in the dark.

  Chaen sipped a cup of spring water, which was delivered in kegs, like ale, because well water in Hanishport was too salty to drink. The city sounds wandered in through the propped-open windows: peaceful sounds of children shouting in play, carts rattling past, laundry flapping on lines stretched across the street, and hammers ringing at the shipyard forge.

  The old man in the corner laughed out loud. His companion, a silhouette against the glare of the window, started to leave, but paused at Chaen’s table.

  It was a border woman, far from home no matter which border she had come from. Her coloring was alien—raven-black hair, skin the color of wet soil, eyes that were black and lightless even with the sun shining on her face through the window. But it was her face, all hard edges and sharp shadows like a broken piece of granite, that made Chaen’s fingers itch for her pencil and sketchbook.

  The border woman said, “Shall I cast cards for you?”

  In her hands were an enormous number of cards—glyph cards, Chaen assumed. Apparently the confidence artists had already begun to arrive for the Fair. “I have no money.”

  “I did not ask for money.” The woman put her cards on the table, sat down, and without looking at her hands drew out a card and lay it before Chaen. “This card reveals your essence.”

  Glyph cards usually were cheap and crude, but this card was a piece of art. It depicted a woman standing alone in a stone-strewn landscape. She gazed at nothing, for there was nothing to see—just emptiness, and a swirl of clouds, pushed by the same wind that had torn loose the cloth that wrapped her body, and that made her hair flow across her face like water, so she seemed to be drowning. The illustration’s intricate borders were composed of tiny, detailed drawings that depicted her life: a peculiar little house, a tangled woodland, a hilly landscape, a harbor filled with oddly rigged ships, an island in the ocean, a rugged coastline, a battlefield cluttered with corpses. That life caged her in the wasteland.

  “What glyph card is this?” Chaen asked.

  “The Wilderness.”

  The name was wrong. It should be called Waiting for a Dead Man. “I have never seen this card.”

  “It is unique.”

  “You
invented it?”

  “I stole it.”

  “If the entire deck is like this, I don’t blame you for stealing them.”

  “Will you ask a question?”

  “Do you think you can tell me what to do?”

  Perhaps the woman could not recognize sarcasm, for she began casting cards onto the tabletop. She cast a dozen cards, each one intricate, beautiful, and unrecognizable. Chaen scarcely glimpsed each image before it was covered by the next. Then, as swiftly as the woman had cast the cards, she gathered them up, tied the pile with a leather cord, and tucked it in her satchel. “Leave the city right away,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That is your answer.”

  The border woman rose and walked away. The door let her out into a blaze of sunshine. She passed in front of the windows, and was gone.

  What a strange, presumptuous woman.

  Chaen had never been interested in the arcane art of glyph interpretation, but she doubted that a dozen cards were necessary to generate that simplistic advice about Chaen’s difficult situation. Leave Hanishport right away? “I’m not going anywhere,” she muttered.

  She cleared her dishes and went out into the glare of sunlight. The bright rhythm of a metalsmith’s hammer rang like a bell in the shipyard, and the sweet, rotten, salty scent of low tide rode the back of the sea breeze that had just started to freshen. She headed for a tailor’s shop down the street, where the shop sign was so faded that scarcely a ghost of the original paint remained.

  Chapter 4

  During the years Garland had wandered Shaftal, he had done all sorts of work on the land, although it was a rare day that he didn’t wind up in a kitchen eventually. He had herded sheep and butchered pigs in the south; he had cut hay, cleaned milking barns, and picked fruit in the east; he had plowed, seeded, and harvested fields in the north; he had cut logging roads and hauled iron ore in the west; and he had shoveled snow or hoed weeds everywhere. Now, whenever he set out to prepare a meal, he remembered that the raw ingredients in his kitchen had come there due to the labor of many others. He had become the cook for the government of Shaftal, and each councilor from every region, and each member of every order, had been raised, fed, educated, and supported by a family, which in turn was supported by a network of families, not one of which could survive without the land. But not until Garland came to Hanishport did he realize that the people of Shaftal also relied on people in far distant lands; not for food, metal, or timber but for the raw material of imagination. The ships that from a distance seemed as calm and elegant as seabirds, and that up close were gigantic cradles crammed with frantically working sailors, came into the port loaded with cargo that spawned inventiveness: gorgeous fabrics, exotic woods, fruits that tasted like sunlight, and spices that by their scent alone caused Garland to dream of dishes no one had ever cooked before.

  The dirt under their feet was different, too, Garland thought wryly as he swept the vacant house again. He was the only one to come and go through those doors, and as soon as he stepped in, he took off his shoes. Yet the floors were gritty with sand, and he could sweep until his arms fell off and the floor would never come close to being clean. When he had swept as much as he could endure, he put on a hat, for the sun was hot and blindingly bright, and went out to hoe weeds, as he had done for a short while every day ever since he decided to move into the derelict house, because he could not claim it unless he made improvements and repairs. In case his work with the weeds went unnoticed, he also had painted the front door a deep, greenish blue that matched the water of the bay that lay immediately on the other side of the little-used road.

  At a sound like the creaking of a gate in the wind, Garland looked up from his unpleasant labor. A raven was walking along the eaves of the house. “Are you hungry or thirsty?” Garland asked it, as he would ask any visitor. The bird soared to the ground and walked ahead of Garland to the back door, where it waited patiently while Garland brought out a pan of spring water and some food. The bird was a speechless guest, for Karis’s ravens had lost the ability to talk, and it carried no written message either, because Garland couldn’t read. Its presence was the message: Karis and the government of Shaftal would arrive tomorrow. “I’m so glad they’re almost here,” he told the raven. “Cooking only for myself seems pointless.”

  Garland’s work with the hoe had cleared the old wagon path to the side-door for water deliveries, and the water seller was there at the crack of dawn, delivering a barrel to keep the water in. As she waited for the kitchen barrel to fill with water from her wagon, she chatted with Garland about the weather and about the latest ships to arrive at or depart from Hanishport—two topics that must be discussed, Garland had learned, in every single conversation—then she brought up the subject of the Hanishport Fair, which would begin in a few days. She said that she could suggest where his family might find the best company of players, the best music, the best ale and wine. Garland merely thanked her, and she went away with her curiosity unsatisfied.

  Then came a fishmonger with two crates of fish that he said had been alive and swimming at sunrise, and once again Garland had to discuss the weather and the ships while the fish were being piled onto his work table, the only piece of furniture in the entire house. “That’s an awful lot of fish for one person,” the fishmonger observed. Garland agreed that it was a lot of fish, and the fishmonger left without learning anything he could gossip about.

  The grocer brought an entire wagonload of supplies, and the greengrocer was immediately behind him with baskets of fruits and vegetables. At least Garland only had to discuss the ships and weather once, but the two of them worked on him in concert, and he was hard put to be cordial while refusing to answer any questions. The wood seller came next, and last was a pretty young woman with a handcart full of bread, who tried flirting with him. Maybe someday he could have a lover, Garland thought regretfully, as the woman, baffled and probably offended, pushed her handcart home to the bakery.

  Finally, he could cook.

  He had brought a few things with him—kitchen knives, a box of spices, and a long-handled wooden spoon that he was fond of. He had bought the spoon on his first shopping trip with Karis, a sturdy spoon that fit his hand just right, was flat at the tip so it could scrape a pot bottom, and had no cracks or grooves that food could collect in. As he picked up his beloved spoon, he felt a puzzling sensation. The spoon bothered him. Something about it just wasn’t right. This was not the first time he had been troubled about the spoon. Like all the other times, he examined it carefully. There was nothing wrong with it at all. So he forgot about it, and started making a stock from the vegetable trimmings and fish heads.

  He was out in the yard hoeing again when the raven on the roof uttered a cry, and he went out to the front gate to watch the first wagon in the distance, making the turn from Marketway onto Harborway. Most of the travelers were afoot, walking beside the wagons, and could mainly be identified by their clothing—black-dressed Paladins, gray-dressed soldiers, and councilors in ordinary longshirts and breeches of various colors and patterns. At a discreet distance behind the wagons, a few brightly dressed, curious Hanishporters were following. Of course, in Watfield soldiers could be seen working with Shaftali people everywhere, even in Garland’s own kitchen, learning trades, learning the language, and learning how to be Shaftali. But in Hanishport, as in the rest of Shaftal, Sainnite soldiers remained in their garrisons—weaponless, and with the gates ajar—dependent on the Shaftali people for their survival. Thus, the people of Hanishport had never seen Paladins and soldiers together before today.

  Norina Truthken was the first to reach the gate, with the dogs panting at her heels. She took Garland’s hand in hers, and he struggled not to yank away. “Garland, how are you?” she asked, with utter indifference.

  “I’m well, Madam Truthken. But I’ve been awfully lonely. How I managed all those years without friends, I can’t imagine.�
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  “What have you been doing?”

  She didn’t care about that answer either. But Emil, who was within hearing, did care, so Garland gave a thorough report, as if he were a soldier again—horrible thought! When he fell silent, she asked, “Anything else?”

  “I’ve been hoeing, sweeping, painting, and avoiding answering questions. I can’t think of anything else.”

  She nodded and walked past him, into the house. Emil patted Garland’s shoulder and followed her. Garland supposed he should stay out of the way while they inspected the quarters, so he got into the front wagon, where Gilly sat, with General Clement’s son, Gabian, in a basket beside him. Different though the two men were, they had become friends because of their shared peculiarity: Gilly a Shaftali who lived as a Sainnite, and Garland a Sainnite who lived as a Shaftali. Garland asked, “Has something happened? Why is the Truthken treating me like an enemy?”

  “Doesn’t she always treat everyone that way?” Gilly grinned, which made his ugly face even uglier.

  “I would rather she ignored me like she usually does.”

  “Well, nothing new has happened. I assume that Madam Truthken wanted to make sure that the other air witch didn’t discover you were alone out here and use air magic to turn you into an assassin.”