Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Me?”

  “Yow!” cried the baby. Garland picked him up and tickled him gently, and the baby shrieked happily, showing off a tiny new tooth.

  “Tell the general that I’ll have fresh milk here at the house every day. The dairy refuses to deliver to the garrison.”

  “Of course not,” Gilly said dryly.

  “And you’ll come over for dinner whenever you get tired of soldier’s fare?”

  “I’ll be here every day, then. Maybe I’ll just move in, eh?”

  “No! I’m already fitting twenty people into six bedrooms, and one of those bedrooms is supposed to be a storeroom! And only one outhouse!”

  “One outhouse? You’ll have a lot of people pissing into the ocean every morning! Oh, but that’s not allowed.”

  “It’s not? How do you know?”

  “I used to beg for a living on these very streets. Thus I know for certain that Hanishporters will allow a crippled child to starve in the street. It’s no surprise they won’t help the smoke users of Lalali.”

  “Unload!” Emil called from the open front door, and Garland made haste to the stoop, so he could tell people where to put their belongings. “I like the location,” Emil said to him. “Close to the garrison, easy to defend. Norina wishes it was stone rather than wood.”

  “This is the only unoccupied building in Hanishport, stone or wood.”

  “We’ll put a bucket of water in every room, and forbid candles.”

  “I suppose you noticed that there’s no furniture. I have a plan, but it needs to be written down.”

  “I’ll gladly be your secretary. I just want a word with Clement before she leaves.”

  Emil trotted out to General Clement, who was indistinguishable from any other dusty and sweaty soldier, except for her insignia, just as Emil looked like any other Paladin except that he wore three earrings. They spoke briefly, clasped hands, and parted, Clement calling her soldiers into order for a march to the garrison, where there was certain to be a startled scramble when the soldiers realized who she was.

  Emil, who like all Paladins was never without a pen, took the packet of writing materials out of his waistcoat pocket and improvised a writing table on the edge of the stoop. He dribbled water from his flask onto his ink stone, mixed in a bit of ink powder using the butt of his pen, weighted the paper with pebbles to keep it from curling, and wrote Garland’s list as people passed in and out the doorway, with their dusty boots only a fingers’ breadth from the paper.

  Garland told the travelers where to put their belongings, while also telling Emil what to write. When the wagons were empty and had been driven away to the garrison, the Paladins and councilors convened in a parlor, and Emil handed out slips of paper that directed them to shops scattered throughout the city. Norina had recruited guides from among the spectators—those who didn’t leave when they realized she was a Truthken—and the travelers set forth to convince the sellers of furniture, mattresses, linens, lamps, dishes, and lumber to donate or loan items to the G’deon’s temporary household.

  With the house nearly empty again, Garland went into the kitchen to attend to his pots, and the four people who had not gone out on errands sat on the empty crates Garland had been using for furniture: Emil, Medric, Norina, and Norina’s student, Maxew. The dogs drank water, flopped onto the cool stone floor, and fell asleep.

  “Are Karis and Zanja planning to slip into the city after nightfall?” Garland asked.

  Norina gestured vaguely in the direction of the city. “They’re here now.”

  Emil had taken an orange fruit out of the bowl to examine it. “What is this? It smells wonderful.”

  “How could Karis and Zanja possibly go unrecognized?”

  “No one is expecting them to be here.”

  Emil added, “Karis said that if she couldn’t spend a few hours without an escort, she’d have to kill somebody.”

  “Better she kill someone than that someone kill her,” Garland muttered.

  Chapter 5

  Zanja na’Tarwein stood in a black, crisp-edged shadow that draped the western side of the alley. Soon Chaen, the woman from the alehouse, crossed the narrow opening, squinting in the light that glared from the city’s white sandstone walls. When Zanja had showed her the first glyph card, her attention had focused on it like a dog upon a scent, which suggested she had a fire talent. But she did not have any prescience, or else Zanja could not have evaded her by simply standing in a shadow. Nor could the raven, briefly visible as it swooped between rooftops, have followed her unnoticed during the months since the assassination attempt.

  On that bitter winter’s night five months ago, while Chaen and her companion, Jareth, waited outside the house called Travesty, five of their fellows, using darts and blades dipped in snake poison, had entered the building and killed everyone they encountered, most of whom had been asleep in bed. They had missed their target, Karis, by a few hands-breadths. Had Zanja not awakened and defended her, Shaftal would now lack a G’deon, and Zanja would be a widow.

  Karis had not waited in this alley as she was supposed to. Zanja followed the alley, in and out of shadows that seemed like they could have been trimmed from black paper with sharp scissors. The narrow passage squeezed between walled and fenced yards. Two buildings squatted knee-to-knee like gardeners, and their bright red window frames were propped open, curtains undulating in the shadows. Some late-blooming trees reached over the fence to cast white blossoms in her hair.

  For a moment, the sweet, rhythmic ringing of the smith’s hammer became a piercing sound of unbearable beauty. Then a racket overpowered it: the hollow knocking of mallets, the cries of work bosses, the clatter of shod horses and ironclad cartwheels. The alley opened onto a hectic street, where brown children shrieked, freight horses groaned, shopkeepers screamed, and a din of tools scraping, cutting, sawing, and hitting came from the shipyard.

  To the right, the road climbed to a peak, over which the freight wagons disappeared. To the left, the roads sloped to the harbor—an expanse of water so vast that the open ocean was just a blue haze indistinguishable from sky. Before her there rose a skeletal ship from whose timbers people dangled, pulling themselves up and down ropes like spiders. Between her and the shipyard lay a hectic, shouting, struggling traffic of empty wagons rattling past on one side, and filled wagons creeping uphill on the other, with no break on either side as far as could be seen. She stepped into the road and skipped across—pausing, leaping, pausing, and leaping again, until one final hop took her over the dung-clogged ditch on the far side.

  An old man perched upon a rickety stool in a doorway applauded her performance enthusiastically. Zanja worked her way uphill, jostled by big-shouldered stevedores and repeatedly jabbed in the back by a bundle of staves carried on the shoulder of a woman behind her. She ducked into the arched opening of a cool tunnel, where it was surprisingly quiet, except for the smith’s hammer, which rang now as loudly as an alarm bell. The tunnel opened into a walled yard with a row of furnaces marching down the center. There the shipyard smiths all took their ease on stools, beneath ruffling shade awnings or in shaded doorways. A couple of skinny apprentices came through the tunnel hauling a handcart and began shoveling coal into the furnaces.

  Karis worked at the one active forge. She had tucked her left hand into her belt, and her foot pressed a complicated device that held the metal steady on the anvil. The anvil was too low, and the hammer too small, but Karis was accustomed to being a giant in a small and cluttered world. She lifted the hammer and smashed it down onto the hot metal with such force that fiery bits sprayed around her, and the observers had to dance back. She turned and spoke to a one-armed man, then lifted the hammer again.

  Zanja found a shady place and squatted down to wait. A heavily pregnant woman offered her a cup of fruit juice and asked, “Do you know that woman?”

  “Somewhat,” said Zanja truthf
ully. The juice was interesting: bright orange, both sour and sweet.

  “My friend and I have a bet.” The woman stood tilted backwards to counterbalance the weight of her belly, her hands at the small of her back. She had been squinting in the bright light for so long that pale lines radiated from the corners of her eyes like white paint on her sun-brown skin. “My friend says she’s the G’deon, and I say she’s not.”

  Zanja laughed sharply.

  “I laughed, too,” the woman said. “Is every woman with Juras blood the G’deon? I said. And for what would the G’deon be wandering into a shipyard smithy?”

  “If the G’deon did that, it would be very odd,” Zanja said.

  The woman walked away to tell her friend the untruth that he had lost the bet. The furnaces, their fires renewed, began to smear black smoke across the bright blue sky. The metalsmiths were finishing their noon meals, rising up, stretching stiff muscles, and putting on their leather aprons. Karis returned the borrowed hammer and seemed to be thanking the one-armed smith for letting her try his curious device.

  Zanja rose up as Karis approached, each of them unsurprised to have found the other so easily. “Have you tasted this marvelous juice?” Zanja asked.

  “Yes—it is wonderful. It’s from a round fruit with skin like leather that’s grown in a distant southern country. The price is usually too dear for ordinary people, but a ship blown off course was forced to sell its cargo cheaply because it had begun to spoil. The entire city has been drinking this juice for a week.”

  “You didn’t find out how to grow the plant?”

  Karis laughed. “I did ask, but they didn’t know.”

  At the entrance to the dim tunnel, Karis crouched over and shuffled awkwardly, using her riot of hair like a cat uses its whiskers, to keep from cracking her head on the ceiling. “So you met Chaen. What do you think of her?” she asked. With the racket of the street entering from one end of the tunnel, and the clangor of the hammers entering from the other, her smoke-damaged voice was nearly inaudible.

  “I think she is lost in the wreck of her life.”

  “Like you, sometimes.”

  “But I follow you when I’m lost. She follows a rogue air witch who could destroy Shaftal.”

  “Usually, I’m following you,” Karis said.

  “Not today.”

  “Not yet, anyway.”

  Karis had been born in Lalali, which lay only a short walk from the port city, but she had never visited Hanishport, and neither had Zanja. They wandered the city unheeded. Zanja noticed several people with skin as dark as hers, or darker. Some were border people of Shaftal, and she wanted to talk with them but couldn’t risk becoming too distracted in this crowd. Some looked nothing like her, and must have been sailors from a far country. She had never been particularly interested in the world beyond Shaftal, and today her lack of interest seemed peculiar—perhaps Medric had a map among the books he had brought with him from Watfield. They heard the famous tide clock ring to mark ebb tide, and on the quay they watched a ship sail in, while people on shore scrambled to be ready to unload it. At a smaller dock, over a fire that burned in a huge kettle, a woman fried fish directly from a fishing boat. Zanja bought two fried fishes wrapped in slices of bread that also served as plates and napkins. They ate standing up, spitting bones onto the ground.

  “That is how fish should taste,” said Zanja, remembering the mountain trout she had sometimes caught, cooked, and eaten at a lake’s edge.

  Karis said, “While you were getting the food, a man offered me a job as a stevedore.”

  “What kind of job is that?”

  “Stevedores load and unload ships.”

  “Did you tell the man you’re afraid of water?”

  “I told him I have too much work already. I was tempted to accept, though!”

  They wandered from shop to shop on Merchant’s Way, amazed by the variety of things that were for sale. They paused in a spice shop with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with jars of leaves, flowers, bark, seeds, and roots. Two customers were tasting a concoction that the proprietor had just ground for them, arguing about whether it needed more of one spice or another. Another customer came in and said, “Have you heard? Some Paladins are moving into that abandoned house on Ocean Way. And people are going about begging for furniture and lamps and such, in the name of the G’deon.”

  Zanja and Karis left the shop hurriedly and nearly knocked over two members of the Peace Committee, who were lugging between them a huge basket filled with bed linens. The councilors directed them to a nearby seller of bedding, and soon they and other members of their household were staggering down the hill with mattresses balanced on their heads. On the road that followed the edge of the restless water, they encountered other hot and breathless people with chairs resting on their shoulders, lamps dangling from their arms, and tables balanced on their heads. One of them was Seth, who peered between the legs of a chair, laughing at the spectacle.

  People of Hanishport had gathered outside a wooden derelict of a house with the ocean sighing at its doorstep, two big dogs panting in the shade of a scraggly tree, and an extremely organized man on the stoop telling people where to bring their burdens. Seth said, “What is wrong with these people? Why are they watching instead of helping?”

  Zanja briefly glimpsed their new house when she dumped her awkward burden in the barren front garden. Then the spectators realized that Karis had walked past them, hidden under the mattresses, and surged forward, but the dogs, Granite and Feldspar, leapt up to block the gate. Garland abandoned his post on the stoop to hurry Karis and Zanja into a dim front hall with parlors on either side and a groaning staircase in the middle.

  Karis said to Zanja, “We’ve moved from a house that makes no sense to a house that’s falling apart.” She sighed. The weight of Shaftal had settled upon her shoulders once again.

  Garland was saying, “Twenty people, not counting the dogs—and Emil said the Paladins can all sleep in the other attic room, where there are bats, and it’s hot as an oven. I’m sorry I couldn’t find a better house.”

  Karis hugged him.

  Embarrassed, Garland continued hurriedly, “Norina and Emil left a while ago to seek out the city elders, who can usually be found in a tea shop just off the quay. General Clement has gone with Gilly and her escort to set up headquarters in the garrison. Medric is asleep on the second floor. Norina thinks we can risk keeping the doors and windows open today, so the sea breeze will blow through the house and cool it off. Seth has taught the dogs how to guard the doors. Do you want to see your room?”

  Karis said, “I had better get my toolbox. That staircase is about to collapse.”

  Zanja said, “I’d like to see the room. I need to be alone.”

  Garland showed Zanja to a small, dark, barren storeroom adjoining the kitchen, tucked under the groaning staircase. The walls were marked by pale horizontal lines where the shelves had been removed. It had one small window that didn’t look like it could be opened. “It’s the only room on this floor that has a door,” Garland said apologetically—Karis could only sleep on the ground floor of a building. “I wore my feet out hunting for another house, but with the festival coming, the city is more crowded every day.” He added, “Someone was throwing out that bit of carpet, and I thought you’d like to have it to sit on, because the floors are always gritty with sand, no matter how much I sweep them.”

  When he had left, Zanja shut the door, sat on the square of carpet, and laid the assassin’s array of cards upon the floor.

  An hour or so later, Emil opened the door. “I’m told you did manage to cast cards for her.”

  “Come in and look at them. There’s nothing for you to sit on, though.”

  “I don’t see how there could be. Will Karis even have room to lie down in this closet?”

  He knelt beside her and examined the cards, picking
up each one and then replacing it exactly as it had been. After a while, he said, “Perhaps this casting will settle one question: Will the glyph cards prove useful, or are they nothing more than gorgeous artifacts?”

  She said, “Don’t offer again to buy me a cheap deck of glyph cards instead. I would rather not grow backwards.”

  “May I wish you had done a simpler casting?”

  “You may. But I don’t think the assassin is a simple person, and she asked me a difficult question: You think you can tell me what to do?”

  Emil laughed, and then sighed. “So this casting might be telling her what to do. Or it might be addressing her distrust. Or it may be about your own interpretive abilities.”

  The little room lay silent then, but the house and stairs creaked restlessly. Zanja finally said, “No—she was thinking about this card, the Wilderness, which expresses her essence. The entire array could be an elaboration on this card.”

  Emil picked up the card. “I wish I had more time to study! You showed Chaen this card, and she thought something about it, a question she didn’t say out loud?”

  “I think that’s what happened. I know it was a true casting, but I don’t know what question she asked.”

  Emil was Zanja’s oldest friend. She had first met him shortly after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, when she had still been a child traveling with her teacher. Following the annihilation of her tribe, she had served under Emil in a company of Paladin irregulars, and he had taught her how to use and interpret the glyphs of Shaftal. When their family coalesced around Karis, Zanja began to call him, in the language of her people, brother, as she would call any of the katrim. He assisted her through the periods of madness that overcame her every summer, and she knew—although no one had said so—that one reason Emil had traveled to Hanishport rather than remaining in Watfield was to help Zanja through that madness again.