Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  He paused to swallow from his cup. Saugus gazed at Willis with a fixed expression of bland attention. Near him, the boy was sitting in the dusty grass. His gaze was not on the Lost G’deon’s general, but on Tashar. Tashar didn’t want to look into his eyes, but couldn’t stop himself, and then he couldn’t look away. He felt an awful sensation, like a sharp blade slicing into a finger, only far worse. The boy’s face was hideously deformed, and when he opened his mouth, he had tiny, pointed teeth like a cat’s, and a flickering tongue like a lizard’s. “Leave now,” yowled the monstrous boy. “Go, or I will kill you!”

  Saugus struck the boy sharply with the back of his hand. The blow turned his face sideways and broke the gaze that held Tashar enthralled. The boy was just a boy again, a furious boy, with tears of pain starting in his eyes.

  Then Saugus said something in a low voice, and the horrible immediacy of what had happened became in a moment just a dim memory. Willis had begun talking again. “. . . the Lost G’deon’s pardon and said that in my hopelessness I had forgotten the power of Shaftal. But how could I have believed that Harald G’deon would fail to vest that power in his successor? No G’deon would abandon his people! Then I said to her, ‘Why are you in hiding? Why haven’t you stepped forward to save your people from the Sainnites?’ She replied, ‘Shaftal is polluted by Sainnites, and I cannot defeat them alone. If the people of Shaftal rose up against them, Sainnites would be eliminated in a single day. There are a hundred or more Shaftali for every Sainnite! But they are too fearful, and are satisfied to allow a few people to fight while the rest go about their ordinary business.’ Then I cried, ‘Madam G’deon, I will fight for Shaftal! But I am just one man. Won’t you step forward and call on your people, and take us into battle?’ Then she said to me, ‘I am not a warrior—I am the G’deon of Shaftal. But you will be my general. You must go forth and create an army, and when the Sainnites have been defeated, I will come.’”

  The people sighed, and Tashar realized that Willis’s story was done.

  “Well, where is your army?” he asked.

  The people laughed, not unkindly. Willis said, “I am building the army one fighter at a time.”

  “I want to join it,” said Tashar.

  The people who constituted the harsh and seething heart of Death-and-Life Company were like Willis—hardened veterans of the long guerrilla war against the Sainnites, uprooted from their families and farmsteads, many of them survivors of families or companies that had been annihilated by soldiers. They were wounded, bitter, righteous warriors whose commitment to their cause Tashar longed to emulate.

  Yet although Willis led them all, from the beginning Tashar felt a greater loyalty to Saugus. The uprooted nature of the company made it rapid, agile, and impossible to suborn. But it also made for hungry fighters, for no families fed, clothed, or sheltered them. Saugus and his crew, including Tashar, did not fight, but instead kept the army on its feet through a hodgepodge of continuing and spontaneous operations, many of them nefarious. It was Saugus who taught Tashar how to keep accounts, and how to tell lies with numbers, so that whoever reviewed the books would see no trace of theft. Then he sent him home to Hanishport, and the richest family in Shaftal became an unintentional patron of the Lost G’deon’s army.

  With the family wealth and contacts, Tashar could import items useful to the cause, such as snake poison. Once, he had paid an agent an extraordinary amount to convince a man from Kanir to undertake the long and dangerous journey to Shaftal. Three seasons had passed before the ship returned, carrying neither the agent nor the man. The agent had disappeared in a remote port city, the captain explained. The man had died of seasickness. “Your agent said he was a pilot,” added the captain. “What kind of pilot dies of seasickness?”

  At first, Tashar’s covert duties had made his heart race, but he had grown weary and bored by the routine. Then, last winter, a large number of Death-and-Life fighters, with Saugus among them, had overwintered in Hanishport, and Tashar had paid their expenses. He had happened to be visiting them in Leeside after paying their rent, when an exhausted and panicky messenger arrived with the news that Willis and some forty others had been killed on Long Night. So Tashar had been present when Saugus, without any resistance or complaint, became the new leader of Death-and-Life Company.

  Every window in Hanishport was open, including Tashar’s own. The night breeze washed through the room and across his bare skin as he lay on the sheets. He heard the voices of his family coming home from the House of Samel. His younger siblings began laughing shrilly at something. His aunt spoke, in that piercing tone she so often employed in place of reasonable speech. Tashar covered his lamp so they would think he was sleeping. When the door slamming and floor creaking and calling from room to room had settled, he opened the portfolio of papers that he had taken to bed with him.

  The first few pages in the portfolio were filled with bland notes copied from his pocketbook. Behind them he kept a sheaf of papers, written in his own hand, with diagrams he had carefully copied from the original scroll. The scroll had been translated during the winter by a sorrowful sailor who was becalmed an ocean away from his homeland. Tashar had taken the sailor to a public house, supposedly to celebrate the project’s completion, but on the way, at Saugus’s command, he had shot him dead and left his body in the slush of a frozen back alley in Leeside, where bodies often lay undiscovered in snow drifts until spring thaw uncovered them.

  Although Tashar had read the translation many times, it still thrilled him to read it, to whisper to himself its opening phrases: Those who sail the seas may claim the world, but they are subject to wind and waves, and inevitably surrender their lives to the waters, and sleep their last sleep in the mysterious deeps. Such sailors know that this penalty will and must be paid. But I am a sailor of another sort, for I have sailed in places that have never seen a ship of any kind, by means no one has dreamed of. Herein I will record my secrets.

  Tashar read on, and never had anyone so savored the words written on a piece of paper—not even an infatuated lover brooding over a letter from his beloved.

  Two days after the false G’deon came to Hanishport, Tashar found a note hidden behind a stone in the deserted Market Common. “Evening,” it said. It was signed by the portrait painter, Chaen. She wanted to meet him at the evening tide, and she had taken the coin Tashar had secreted there, which meant she needed something.

  Chapter 9

  The sun, newly risen above the light-burnished water of the bay, striped the dusty road with the travelers’ long-legged shadows. In the near distance, dozens of fanciful towers pointed painted fingertips at the sky, and Zanja caught her breath: those ornately decorated towers were an illustration from the lexicon! She said in a low voice to Medric, who had sleepwalked beside her all the way from Hanishport, “The soldiers that built Lalali seem to have been desperately homesick.”

  Medric shielded his eyes and gazed at the distant towers in delight. “I had thought the cities in the lexicon were flights of whimsy! Well, what a grim place Shaftal must have seemed to my father and his fellows. So plain, so practical, so crotchety.”

  “Like the Shaftali people.”

  Nearby, Seth was saying, “What idiot builds a village upon a cliff? Just imagine the winds of winter howling in from the ocean!”

  Seth certainly was the very embodiment of the Shaftal Medric had described. He began snickering like a child.

  Ever since they had awakened in darkness to the sounds of Garland putting his pots on the fire in the kitchen, Karis had seemed oppressed. Zanja clasped her hand, and thought about the power of Shaftal, passed from one forceful G’deon to the next, each one with skilled hands that were stained and callused by labor. Surely all of them had suffered, as Karis sometimes did, from fear that they could not manage the burden of Shaftal.

  That morning, they had traveled in a cloud of ridiculous conversations. Clement seemed to have comma
nded the officers of Hanishport garrison to talk with the Paladins who surrounded Karis in a loose circle, and the Paladins insisted on speaking Sainnese, despite their incompetence with the language. Some members of the Peace Committee had joined in, for they all had lived with Sainnites in the barracks of Watfield garrison as much as they could stand to do so. They could scarcely do better than to use an occasional noun and act out the verbs.

  Altogether, they numbered more than forty people, a group larger than an air witch could manipulate or command, yet Norina prowled at the rear like a wolf watching for prey.

  Karis missed a step. She was looking at the tumbledown wall that surrounded the town, the rusted gates ajar and sagging. A few curious children had appeared, ragged and filthy, heads shorn for lice. Karis said, “The day I left Lalali, a fiddler was dancing on the wall. He turned a one-handed cartwheel without dropping his fiddle. I wondered if people did such things in the place I was being taken, but I was too afraid of Dinal Paladin to ask her any questions.”

  The buildings of the village all seemed to tilt toward one side or the other, and fully half the fabulous towers had collapsed. “An entire village in disrepair,” Karis said. “How much renovation can we do in one summer?”

  A healer they had met with the previous evening had been watching for them at the gate and came down the road. She had been the most vehemently opposed to the plan—which she insisted on calling a proposal—for the Hanishport soldiers to labor in Lalali. Healers tended to be earth bloods, and therefore the Order of Healers needed a method for dealing with intransigence, lest they be perpetually paralyzed by disagreements. This woman seemed to have been assigned by her fellows to play the role of greeter, which forced her to behave exactly contrary to her inclinations. Clement, with her usual impeccable manners, offered a warm greeting and a handclasp that the healer ignored. Within moments, Zanja heard Clement telling her bristling officers that they did not deserve to be treated by any Shaftali with a modicum of politeness, and therefore had no right to be offended. It was the kind of conversation Zanja often wished the Shaftali most hostile to Sainnites could overhear, but they never would, because they would never learn the language.

  Beyond the gates lay a vast plaza with a dry, green-stained fountain and a few pieces of appalling statuary. It could be a fine place for markets and entertainment, but it was abandoned except for the children, who ran to a curved row of cubicles and began posing for the visitors on those miniature stages, demonstrating their use as display cases. The healer sharply told the children to get down.

  “I never stood there,” Karis said. “I was too gawky.”

  “To be a lovely child in this place can’t have been a good thing,” Zanja said.

  “To be an ugly child was terrible enough. What a foul smell!”

  “J’han said the sewers were abysmal.”

  “Was it a mercy I couldn’t smell then, because of the smoke drug?”

  They walked down a wide boulevard as large and empty as the plaza, beside which lounged buildings with large porches and doors that folded back to reveal faded, but still gaudy, rooms and boudoirs. Past these, they arrived at an eating house, where the delicious scent of baking bread overcame the stink of the sewers. A clutter of ragged children sat outside, scooping porridge into their mouths with fingers. Inside, the tables were crowded, but the people ate in dull silence and scarcely glanced at the crowd of visitors. In the adjacent kitchen, the propped-open windows cast light-streamers upon a scene of chaos, people rushing about carrying pots, bowls, and mixing spoons; dodging piles of bagged flour, loose onions, crated apples, and topsy-turvy furniture.

  One of the few seated people, who was reading what appeared to be a cookbook, stood up to greet them, and gestured toward the back, where the windows opened on to a weedy garden. They went outside and the healers came out, one and two at a time, wiping dirty hands and sweaty faces on striped towels, to meet Karis. Some of the healers then went with the Peace Committee and the soldiers to tour the town and discuss repairs. Karis and a few others went to a bordello that had been transformed into a hospital. Like Norina, Zanja’s only task was to follow Karis: her prescience had saved Karis from assassins, and now it was her doom to watch over her.

  Lalali had been created by soldiers for their own entertainment. But the truce had turned the soldiers into paupers; the brothel keepers had fled with their wealth, and the rest of the town’s disreputable residents had begun to suffer from lack of food, and die from lack of smoke. Norina’s husband J’han had envisioned turning the village into a place where Shaftal’s smoke users could reside, be cared for, and begin to care for others during a gradual relinquishment of the drug. But the actuality had been harsh and desperate as smoke-users stole from and sometimes murdered each other while the supply of smoke dwindled.

  This gradual catastrophe had filled the hospital’s windowless rooms, and the few who were merely recovering from knife wounds may have thought themselves lucky. The others lay naked and starving upon filthy linens, bound by ankle and wrist to their beds, screaming for water, for smoke, or for freedom, mumbling in delirium, or lying still and silent, nearly dead. “It’s not right to gaze at these poor people for no purpose,” Zanja said to Norina. “I’ll wait outside.”

  The back door led to an open sewer in a narrow alley. Flimsy buildings leaned upon each other for support, flinging out unlikely staircases like mooring ropes to hold them steady. There, amid the ashes and the tangled tendrils of wild cucumber vines, a few children listlessly kicked a bladder balloon.

  Zanja retreated from the sewer and found a tiny, enclosed courtyard overgrown with exuberant vines. She sat on flagstones beside an ornamental pond, where mayflies floated over a fine mosaic of floating duck weed, and carp hovered in the thick green water like golden ghosts. One rose up to examine her, but when she failed to make an offering, it sank out of sight.

  Medric appeared in the open gate and tossed her a thick biscuit. “For the fish.”

  “Have you been dreaming of starving carp?”

  “I wish I did dream of problems that can be solved by a simple fish-biscuit!”

  She tossed broken bits of the biscuit into the pond, and the carp surfaced. A dozen weird, unblinking gazes stared at them.

  “Good morning, students,” Medric greeted the fish.

  The fish began grabbing the food. Two fought ferociously for one piece, while several pieces floated nearby, unnoticed.

  “This is an awful place,” said Zanja.

  “Yes. I can see why the Hanishporters want to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  “When Karis cut herself loose from smoke, she endured agonies like those people in the hospital are enduring. The courage and desperation it took for her to do that, voluntarily and alone—”

  “Thus demonstrating that she is in fact courageous, and not merely invulnerable.”

  She looked at him with some surprise.

  “Well, a man can’t always be a giddy idiot!” He squatted down beside her. “Zanja, you’re afraid that when you cast the cards for that assassin, it gained us nothing. But I think the cards answer questions we haven’t yet asked.”

  Zanja wiped her hands clean, took out the glyph cards, and from the eleven cards at the top of the stack selected Ship of Air, because they seemed to keep returning to it, and gave it to Medric. The carp finished feeding, and the water grew still.

  “What causes this thing, whatever it is, to happen?” Medric asked.

  Zanja’s fingers plucked another card from that casting, a card she had no name for, which showed a luxurious, windowless room among the roots of a tree. She said, “Perhaps it’s caused by something hidden—something living underfoot.”

  “What results from it?” asked Medric.

  Another card. Medric looked at the image the way he looked at targets when he practiced shooting. “What is that old man? Why is he being carried?”
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  “Wisdom,” Zanja said.

  “Bloody hell,” he said in Sainnese. “That’s a hard hill the young man must climb.”

  “Do you think it’s you?”

  “I’m afraid that it is,” he said glumly.

  “So something is living underfoot that will cause the Ship of Air, which will result in you carrying the weight of wisdom up a hard hill.”

  “It sounds like nonsense, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it sounds like those bizarre conversations the Paladins tried to have with the soldiers this morning.”

  “Weird verbs, oddly chosen nouns, and no connections at all.”

  “But it was meaningful, nevertheless.”

  “It was meaningful enough, you mean. But this—” He gestured toward the cards. “Who or what is hidden underfoot?”

  Zanja ran her fingers over the stacks of glyph cards, but she knew she would not find an answer.

  “Fire logic can’t gain insight into air logic,” said the seer.

  “But we must end this deadlock! Karis can’t be trapped in inaction like this. Every day I’m afraid she’ll demand to be free of her bodyguards.”

  They fell silent. From time to time, a carp rose out of the green water and peered curiously at them.

  Zanja said, “It worries me that you chose to take this journey to Hanishport rather than remain in Watfield with your tower and books.”

  “I do have something to tell you,” he said.

  “One of your obscure commands?” He didn’t reply. “Shit,” she muttered. “Every time this happens, I barely survive what comes next. You told me to be buoyant, and a water witch nearly drowned me—twice!”