Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “I will never lie to you,” she said. “And you will not lie to me, or to each other. You will submit to the law as I have submitted to it. The penalty for violating these rules is death. You know there once was a time that children like you were gathered and nurtured by members of the Order of Truthkens. You know that when I accepted the six of you as my students, it was an act of mercy. But I will never show you such mercy again.”

  He and the others murmured hastily, “Yes, Madam Truthken.”

  Norina said, “Your duties begin today, at this moment. You will memorize and understand the Law of Shaftal. You will learn history, geography, mathematics, and how to ride and fight. You will complete your full share of the cooking, cleaning, and mending. You will guard this house. You will exercise your power on no one unless I give you permission. You will not use your judgment except as I assign you to do. Because my duties already are heavy and difficult, you will help me with them, so I will have enough time to teach you.”

  Then she had examined them, one by one. Anders had studied his fellow students also, but he doubted that he saw them as she did. Maxew, who had been a vagabond, had been given a copy of The Law of Shaftal by someone he met at a fair. Braight had come from the lawless region of Appleton, where she had killed someone. Serrain, from the Highlands, had been fortunate to be raised by a father with a strong air talent. Arlis and Minga, both 11, had been born days apart to different mothers in a family that transported materials up and down the Corbin River on barges.

  “The six of you,” Norina had said, “will create the new Order of Truthkens, if you survive.”

  Norina’s daughter, Leeba, came into the room as she did every evening. “Greetings, Leeba,” said Anders.

  She mumbled something that might have been a greeting and crawled into the cupboard where she had secreted her toys that morning. J’han Healer arrived and stood patiently in the doorway. Like everyone in his family, he was accustomed to air logic and was not at all unsettled by being in the presence of five air witches. Except for Karis and J’han, who were elementally compatible with Norina, the members of her own family respected but did not love her.

  “Greetings, J’han,” said Anders.

  “Good evening, Anders, Braight, Serrain, Minga, and Arlis. Was anyone injured today?”

  They each assured him they had not been hurt, beyond the usual scrapes and bruises.

  “Has anything happened that Norina would want to know about?”

  It was the fourth night that J’han had asked this question. “We wish we could have gone with her,” said Serrain, and Anders wished he had thought to say it. He understood that J’han was only asking for negative reports, and it had not occurred to him to answer the question differently from how it was intended.

  “I’ll tell her that in my next letter. But about your behavior today, toward each other and the people you have worked with, is there anything she would want to know?”

  Norina would only want to know if any of them had become impossible for the group to manage, for she expected them to discipline each other, and rarely intervened. “You are like a pack of dogs,” she had said once. “If you struggle for dominance, you’ll kill each other, and the last one alive will starve to death. If that is your fate, you deserve it.”

  They told J’han there was nothing Norina would want to know.

  Leeba had crawled out of the cupboard with her toys, and J’han plucked a cobweb out of her hair. “Very good,” he said. “Good night, then.”

  After he and Leeba had left, Arlis and Minga said, “Why does the brat keep hiding her toys in our room?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Braight.

  Anders and Serrain both shrugged. Children weren’t sufficiently complex to be interesting, and, as with animals, they were impervious to air magic.

  “I’m going to study J’han,” said Anders. “He likes people. I want to know how that works.”

  Serrain said, “He’ll be easy to study. He is exactly what he seems to be.”

  Anders found it difficult to initiate conversations, and he tended to make speeches instead. He had been waiting all evening for the time just before bed, when they often practiced their conversation skills with each other. He announced, “I have learned something interesting about the old way of raising air children.”

  Serrain put her pen in the inkwell. “What have you learned?” She always helped Anders to make conversation. Due to her good fortune of having a father who enjoyed her company, she was skillful at getting along with people and enjoyed uncovering the secrets concealed in casual conversation. Anders frequently borrowed her book, in which she recorded page after page of failed and successful conversations, with commentary in the margins, and additional notes as she revisited and reconsidered them. This accretion of commentary made her book increasingly difficult to read, but also made it increasingly useful.

  Anders said, “I learned that air children used to be fostered by fire bloods until they were old enough to begin their studies.”

  He stopped. Now, instead of lapsing into a monologue, he must utter a comment or question that invited reply or further comments. His fellow air children, not surprisingly, frequently lost patience when he had to pause to think in the middle of a conversation. But they all needed to practice patience with each other, so they could expect the others to practice patience with them. “I’ve been wondering why,” he finally said.

  “Have you?” Braight’s words usually were correct, but her tone never was. “And what have you concluded?”

  “Your sarcasm seems unnecessary,” said Serrain.

  “Go stick your head in a pig trough.”

  Braight’s home, Appleton, was a lawless, violent place, a haven for bandit gangs that collaborated with the Sainnites, controlled the brandy trade, and distributed the smoke drug throughout the western regions. There Braight had served a bandit chief as a kind of Truthken, enforcing his law rather than the Law of Shaftal. She had never learned to behave properly, but she had become an expert in the complex bonds of obligation and power that unite people into groups. She should have been interested in this conversation, since she was collecting in her book everything that could be gathered about the organization, roles, procedures, and conventions of the old Order of Truthkens. She was supposed to be practicing the discipline of respect, but Anders thought she was doing a poor job of it. In everything, Braight was impeded by her ill temper.

  Trying desperately to continue the conversation, Anders said, “I suppose air witches must be exposed to fire logic so we can learn to tolerate it. But I wonder . . .” He stopped himself, for he was trying to avoid speaking more than one sentence at a time, but none of the others offered to finish his sentence or ask him a question. That was interesting: half-finished sentences seemed to hold listeners in suspense. “I wonder whether we might gain something else.”

  Minga and Arlis groaned in unison. Arlis said, “You’re thinking about Emil again! Why are you so obsessed with understanding him?”

  “Understanding him will help me with my discipline.”

  “Oh, your discipline,” said Minga jeeringly. “As if you’ll ever be congenial!”

  “I’ll be congenial long before you’re loyal!”

  “Anders!” Serrain said sharply.

  Anders added hastily, “I apologize for being unfair. You two do have loyalty to each other, and that permits you to double your intelligence.”

  When the Two continued to stare aggressively at him, Anders casually rested his hand on his chin, blocking his face so they couldn’t tell that they were aggravating him.

  Minga and Arlis were unique, according to Norina: No conjoined minds had ever been noted or recorded. They never spoke directly to each other; they both wrote in their shared Book of Everything; and even their handwriting was identical.

  “Desist, Two,” said Serrain, “O
r repay us for the time you’re wasting.”

  They had selected Serrain to keep an accurate record of wasted time, and anyone who did not desist had to repay all of them by doing their chores. Ever since they invented and agreed upon this punishment, only the Two had incurred penalties, and, inevitably, had complained about the unfairness of the punishment. Their inability to understand group loyalty also made them unable to understand group sanctions.

  Anders heard Serrain’s pen scratch on paper as she noted the time. The Two desisted, and Anders lowered his hand, to find them apparently fascinated by a book of history.

  Serrain’s pen scratched again, noting the time.

  Braight said abruptly, “What could we gain by being forced to live with a fire blood?”

  “Books of Everything,” said the Two.

  Anders restrained his impulse to remind them that he had invented the first Book of Everything and had brought his to Watfield with him, practically his only possession. When it was much admired by the others, although it was a poor thing, just paper sewn into a pamphlet. Emil had devoted several days to teaching them bookbinding, a craft he had learned because he loved books, as was typical of fire bloods.

  Serrain had been turning the pages of her Book of Everything. Now she read out loud: “Fire talent may be expressed in many different ways. For example, Zanja na’Tarwein is gifted with language, and Emil Paladin is gifted with people. Both of them are presciants, and both have a talent for glyph interpretation, but Emil is better at asking questions while Zanja is better at answering them.”

  Braight said, “Gifted with language? With people? These seem like ordinary talents to me.”

  “But fire bloods know ordinary things differently,” said Anders. “And maybe that’s what makes Emil both unsettling and agreeable. He knows us differently from how we know ourselves. But his knowledge is still accurate.”

  He had said three entire sentences in a row, without lapsing into recitation. He was learning. But oh, what a grueling project it was.

  Chapter 7

  The tailor, unable to give Chaen a bed, had told her to sleep in the storeroom, among paper-wrapped bolts of plain undyed wool and linen. Expensive bundles of fine imported fabrics were arrayed on shelves overhead, and the door had an opening cut in it so the store cat could patrol for rodents. For the right to lie down in that stuffy room at night, and to eat two meals a day, Chaen would repaint both sides of the shop sign.

  First thing in the morning, in the alley behind the tailor’s shop, Chaen set up her sawhorses and laid the sign across them for study. The wood was ancient but smooth, without major cracks or splits. She gazed at the ghostly remains of the original paint, and the lost pattern began to emerge. In the center had stood a solitary figure, the glyph illustration known as the Artisan, which could be either a man or a woman, engaged in any skillful task, but always standing in a conventional pose, with a tool in the right hand and raw materials in the left. However, this Artisan was reversed, with a needle and thread in her left hand and a length of fabric draped over her right arm. (Chaen thought she could depict an expensive fabric, perhaps a brocade with gold embroidery, like the fabric of a coat she had noticed the other day.) The sign had been edged with a simple red border, nothing like the complicated borders of the cards that the strange woman had displayed to her yesterday: Waiting for a Dead Man.

  Chaen had decided to stop lingering at the tide clock, hoping that Jareth would appear. Nor would she expectantly watch for the event that Saugus had said she would recognize, that meant she needed to be a fugitive no longer. The summer was nearly half over. She would earn some traveling money drawing penny portraits at the Hanishport Fair, then go into the countryside, seeking a prosperous farm that could hire a portrait painter for the winter. She had been an itinerant artist for much of her life; she need not put on a pretense.

  The alley door opened, and the tailor peered out. “Two ships are coming in,” he announced.

  “Which ships?” asked Chaen, in the conventional manner.

  The tailor replied with two names. Now, if Chaen had been a true citizen of the city, she would make a comment about the history of the ships, asking if they had replaced that sorry excuse for a spar-mast, or a similar sort of question. Instead, she gestured toward the ghostly figure on the shop sign. “Was this your mother?”

  He blinked with surprise. “Yes.”

  “She was left-handed.”

  “She was, and people were always stopping in to tell her that the Artisan was backwards. ‘If she’s backwards,’ mother would say, ‘then so am I.’”

  “And then they would order a shirt or a coat?”

  “Often enough!”

  “Well, you are right handed, but I’ll paint the Artisan backwards. Perhaps it will continue to be lucky for you. And I’d like to give the Artisan your mother’s features also.”

  “Sadly, she’s long dead. But I have a miniature, if you can copy it.”

  Yesterday the tailor had behaved as though her offer to repaint his sign was scarcely more respectable than begging. Today he leaned comfortably in the doorframe as though he were chatting with a friend. He wore a loose, knee-length vest of beautifully woven wool. At breast level, a half-dozen glittering needles pierced the wool, each dangling a different color of thread. A silver thimble on his middle finger was attached to a brooch by a long, fine chain, and his index finger was deeply dented by scissors. The least interesting thing about him was his face, and Chaen hoped his mother’s face had been less bland.

  “What a surprise that the G’deon’s come to Hanishport,” said the tailor.

  The pictures that filled Chaen’s mind blew away like smoke before a wind. She leaned over the sign, pretending to study it, until the dizziness had passed. “The G’deon is in Hanishport? I hadn’t heard.”

  “How could you not have heard about it? She arrived yesterday, all alone, and did some metalwork in the shipyard smithy. Those bone-headed smiths didn’t recognize her, not even with a hammer in her hand! A Juras metalsmith—how many could there be?”

  “Not many,” said Chaen distractedly.

  “Not even one! When Juras people come here to sell goatskins, they use the money to buy things made of metal: knives, needles, arrowheads. There’s no metal in the southern grasslands.”

  “Maybe the smiths simply decided it was impossible for her to be here,” said Chaen, because that’s what she herself was thinking.

  “And therefore all smiths are stupid! Listen, if you can get a good look at the G’deon, you could go to the smithy and offer to paint them an Artisan sign that looks like her.”

  “But she’s a giant, isn’t she? It would be a very tall signboard.”

  The tailor went away laughing. Chaen sat on the crate that served as a chair.

  If the false G’deon was here in Hanishport, perhaps Chaen should have followed the fortune-teller’s instructions and left the city. But even though Saugus had insisted on great caution, it seemed impossible that the false G’deon even knew of Chaen’s existence. When others were trying to assassinate her, Chaen and Jareth had not even entered the building, because they had been chosen by lot to wait outside to help the others to escape. During the months of wandering that had followed, Chaen had not once noticed any raven that seemed to be following her. And if the G’deon had come to Hanishport to capture Chaen, then why had she not captured her already? And why would the false G’deon have come to Hanishport at all, when she could simply send the Paladins?

  No one knew that Chaen was in Hanishport—not Saugus, not even Chaen’s own son. The false G’deon had come to Hanishport, like hundreds of others would soon come, to attend the Hanishport Fair. That Chaen happened to be in the same city was simple coincidence.

  She sharpened a pencil and began to draw. From the ghostly shadows of paint, the original pattern reemerged: not merely an ordinary tailor, but an ancien
t symbol of skillfulness. Chaen also had become a ghostly shadow of herself, because she was forced into unnatural aimlessness. As the Artisan’s confidence took shape under her pencil, she felt herself begin to emerge from the oppression of invisibility.

  Chaen would wait no longer.

  Chapter 8

  “Of course you have heard the news about Karis G’deon,” the transfer boss said to Tashar.

  Why must people talk about that woman so much, even if only to point out how mistaken were her actions, or how wrong were her positions? “What about her?” Tashar asked.

  The warehouse boss, who had crouched over to get closer to the dim number, said in a muffled voice, “Why, she’s in Hanishport!”

  “She was on the quay as your ship came in,” said the transfer boss. “The stevedore boss even offered her a job!” With her handful of transfer slips she made a disbelieving gesture, and the warehouse boss obliged her by laughing uproariously.

  “How would anyone recognize her?” Tashar asked irritably. Of course, she was a giant, but so were many Sainnites, and, in Hanishport at least, groups of Juras people were a common sight in the warm season, when they came to trade or peddle tanned goatskins.

  “No one did,” said the warehouse boss. “That’s why it’s funny.”

  “Then how does anyone know it’s her?”

  “It’s her,” said the transfer boss, and gave him a hard look as though daring him to challenge her. He was tempted, but only because of his foul temper. The transfer boss was reported to all day long by people who made their living on the roads of Hanishport, and no doubt she knew where Karis was staying, who she was with, what she had done all day, and what she was eating for dinner.

  “What is she having for dinner?” he asked.

  “Fish, potatoes, greens, and peaches.”