Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Leave Medric alone.”

  “Of course,” Norina said bitterly. She started out the door, then turned back. “Zanja na’Tarwein, be careful with your life.”

  In Lalali, Norina stood guard over Karis like a furious gargoyle. Zanja could not concentrate with Norina glaring at her, so she went to the plaza, which was pleasant now that the little stages and the awful statuary had been broken up and hauled away. Sitting on golden stone, with the sun on her skin and a noisy flock of birds chattering nearby in the arbor, she laid out the array of cards and then became distracted by pointless worry about what exactly Karis had done, why Zanja had induced her to do it, and what was going to happen next.

  But she wanted to be solving the problem she was prepared to solve, not some other problem entirely. Karis had wanted to come to Hanishport even before Chaen fortuitously settled there. Chaen’s wanderings seemed so convincingly purposeless that it was decided to manufacture a reason to arrest her so Norina could extricate the truth from her. To find and capture the rogue air witch, that was the problem that mattered, regardless of its unpleasantness. Zanja’s part in that enterprise was the interpretation of the glyph cards.

  She mechanically sorted the eleven glyph cards into clusters, then re-sorted them into different clusters. Violence: a terrible animal, large as a house, was ridden to battle; paired warriors threatened each other, frozen in identical poses; a man fled a burning village, unaware that the belongings on his back also were burning; a warrior bristling with weapons was stabbed by a naked child. But did these images refer to Chaen’s internal struggle with her contradictory self? It was impossible to know, without knowing what question the cards were answering.

  Zanja heard a small sound. Without moving, she slid her gaze sideways. A filthy, emaciated street child, who had crept toward her across the paving stones, now had frozen, like an animal that hopes to evade a predator’s notice by holding still. It was the boy who had watched her before.

  “This is a difficult problem,” Zanja murmured, as if talking to herself. The boy neither fled nor spoke. She said, “I’m studying these glyph cards because I am a presciant. Do you know what that is?”

  “You know the future,” said the boy.

  She was careful not to look at him directly, lest she frighten him away. “No, the future is never clear to me. But I have feelings or ideas that won’t go away, and if I pay attention to them, they lead me to more, and if I keep following them, sometimes I can discover what I want to know.”

  “Like a good smell.” The boy’s voice was scarcely audible.

  “Yes. Or like feeling restless, and walking, and discovering that going one way rather than another feels better, and ending up in a plaza where a strange-looking woman is studying some glyph cards.”

  She glanced at him again without moving her head. His face was a mask of distrust.

  She said, “Perhaps the cards are saying the assassin believes someone must be blamed. For if no one is guilty, then her pain has no meaning.”

  The boy stretched toward her, straining to see the cards, until he strained so far that he lost his balance. Zanja folded her hands and waited. His equilibrium regained, he cast a look at her. Then he pointed a filthy fingertip at a card. “The pain is her fault.”

  He had pointed at the Wilderness, where Chaen stood lost in the wreck of her life. “Why is the pain her fault?” Zanja asked.

  The boy pointed at another card. “Because she saved only one of them.”

  It was the Quarrel, which showed two men standing back-to-back with their arms folded.

  “What did she save him from?”

  The boy pointed at the man who fled the burning village while the belongings on his back also burned.

  Zanja recalled the confrontation that Karis had with Chaen on the day they took her prisoner. “She said that her son died in a fire. But she didn’t say that she had two sons, and that she saved one of them? Why did she keep that a secret?”

  The street child nearly touched a card, a solitary warrior, burdened by weapons and armor, being stabbed by a naked child. “The son she saved can kill her enemies,” he said.

  Oh, to have such pure, quick insight, unimpeded or muddled by love and sorrow! Zanja sat speechless, while the boy, his caution apparently forgotten, picked up her pile of cards and looked through them impatiently. “Where are the rest?”

  “The rest haven’t been painted yet, and won’t be finished for a long time—years, maybe. But I have seen and remember all of them. What does it look like, the card that you want?”

  “This woman, who’s waiting for a dead man.” He pointed at Wilderness. “She’s under water.”

  “Is there a fish?”

  “A fish—or a monster—bigger than she is.”

  As usual, some of Karis’s tools had ended up in Zanja’s satchel, including a carpenter’s pencil. With it, Zanja drew a rough sketch on a piece of stiff paper that she used to protect the cards in their stacks. She could not draw well, so she described the illustration as she shaped it on the blank card. “The woman is either swimming or drowning. The fish has long teeth, and is about to bite her, but she might be about to grab it by the gills and fight it. On the shore, a bowman is aiming his arrow into the water, maybe at her, and maybe at the fish. Water usually signifies time, like it does here.” She tapped a finger on the winding river that framed the woman in the wilderness. “And the fish might be the monster each of us carries within ourselves. The bowman might be her true enemy.”

  “He is her son,” said the boy.

  “Her son? Why doesn’t he shoot the fish and save her?”

  “Because he’s her true enemy,” he said impatiently.

  “Oh. What do you think the fish is?”

  A bell rang in the distance. The boy stood up.

  “I wish you would stay,” Zanja said.

  “It’s the dinner bell.” The boy trotted away. The soles of his bare feet were black with dirt.

  “Well, of course you can’t miss dinner,” Zanja muttered. When the boy was out of sight, she called, “Raven!” Unless Karis had sent the bird on an errand, it would be nearby.

  The raven flew down from the trellis that was covered with blooming vines. Zanja said, “That boy has a strong fire talent—he could even be a fire witch.”

  During the previous spring, when Zanja was making mischief in the distant past, two of the ravens had been killed, and the four that still survived had lost their ability to talk. This bird stared at her, and never had a raven’s gaze seemed more impenetrable.

  “Follow him. Watch over him,” said Zanja.

  The raven flew away. Zanja gathered up her cards and began looking for Karis.

  She had not even reached the hospital when she met Karis and Norina hurrying toward her.

  “What has happened?” Zanja asked.

  Karis put a hand on Zanja’s arm. Norina said, “Tell me about the boy.”

  “It was the child who was watching me yesterday. He understood the card-casting.”

  “Fire logic?” Karis asked.

  “I told you,” Zanja began, then realized Karis hadn’t been talking to her. Irritated, she waited for them to finish their conversation, so she could say more about the boy. Perhaps winning his trust might be a task Medric was suited for.

  Norina said, “Maybe.”

  “Let’s bring her to Emil,” said Karis.

  “Will you send the raven for the Paladins?”

  Now, as always, Karis would make an aggravated comment about the waste of Paladins’ time in escorting her from place to place. But she said, “I don’t have any paper for a note.”

  “The raven is following the boy,” Zanja said.

  “It can’t follow him,” Karis said. “It never saw him.”

  “What’s wrong with the raven?”

  “The raven saw an
d heard you. But there was no boy.”

  “It was a hallucination,” Norina said.

  “It was a Lalali street child, not one of my ghosts!”

  “It was a hallucination, nevertheless.”

  Zanja said, “I felt as if I have been watching for him, just as he has been watching for me. I loved him, and this didn’t surprise me. He must be real.”

  “Nevertheless,” Norina began, and then fell silent. For Zanja had begun to weep.

  Chapter 18

  Garland was beating eggs for a cake to give the soldiers. Beating eggs took a lot of time but not much attention, so he thought about the day’s problems, some of which were left over from the day before. The farmers and fishers were offering foodstuff to the G’deon’s household as a matter of pride, but the Hanishport merchants, on whom they depended for sugar, salt, tea, and spices, mainly offered excuses. And Garland didn’t have Seth’s knack for shaming people into doing what was right—he was soft as an overcooked potato.

  The house was as empty as it ever got, but still Garland needed to serve a midday meal to five people. Six, actually, because Maxew, who was guarding the door, had such an appetite that he really should be counted twice. Garland should bake something, as there would still be room in the oven after the cake went in . . .

  The front door slammed open. One of the dogs dozing in the parlor gave a woof of surprise. Garland put down his bowl, glanced unhappily at the oven, and went into the hall to see what had happened.

  “. . . in town,” said Lil Paladin, who had been sleeping in the parlor after watching outside the assassin’s door all night.

  “I know,” said Karis. “Rane has gone to fetch him.”

  Several Paladins who had arrived with Karis began to move away from her. Perhaps she was feeling particularly irritated with them.

  Karis wasn’t embracing Zanja—she was holding her upright. Garland hurried to help her to a chair. She didn’t seem to be hurt, but had a blankness and grayness to her face. “Water?” he offered uncertainly.

  Norina said, “Make the tisane that J’han gave you for Zanja.”

  “No, don’t,” said Zanja. She rubbed her face. “I need to be clearer, not . . .”

  Karis sighed with exasperation.

  “Not all pain is evil,” Zanja said to her.

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  Something must have frightened Karis, to make her so irritable. Garland said, “I’ll bring some water then.”

  It took no time at all to get cups and fill them from the water keg, but when Garland came back, Emil, apparently summoned from Hanishport, was striding into the parlor. He dropped to one knee beside Zanja, clasped her hand, and said something in a language that flowed and stopped and flowed again, like water tumbling down a hillside.

  Zanja took a shaky breath and replied. Had she been weeping? She had not wept when she came back from the dead; nor after the assassinations, when Garland had wept all morning while washing her bloody footprints from the hallways.

  Garland handed Karis a cup of water, and she looked at it blankly, so he took it back again.

  Emil said to Zanja, “I’m not sure I understand you. There was a boy? And what did Karis see?”

  “She says he wasn’t there. He isn’t real.”

  “But your ghosts are real.”

  “He wasn’t a ghost.”

  Emil sat back a little. “What was he, then?”

  “A street child of Lalali.”

  Garland, holding still lest he become a distraction by clearing his throat or scratching a bug bite, abruptly became aware of Karis’s pungent stink—not the honorable smell of hard work, but the fetor of Lalali’s dreadful sewers. But Emil smelled like boiled eggs and clean linen—he must have visited the bathhouse that morning, which used water from a hot spring.

  “What did the boy look like?” asked Medric, from the stairs.

  They all looked at him with surprise. For Medric to be awake in broad daylight was extraordinary, and probably important. That made this the second important thing to happen today. Garland didn’t know yet what the first thing was, but it had left Norina even angrier than usual, which meant it probably had something to do with fire logic.

  Zanja said, “He was filthy and barefoot. His shirt was torn, his hair was trimmed to the skull. For lice, I suppose.”

  The stairs creaked, even under Medric’s light weight. At the bottom of the stairs he paused to remove and polish his spectacles. “And his face?”

  Zanja pressed her fingers to her eyes. “His face? I don’t know. Why does it matter?”

  “So you can’t remember his face? How I envy you!”

  He came into the parlor. He would need some hot milk and toast, but Garland remained rooted in place. “Your boy is a dream guide,” Medric said.

  “Zanja wasn’t asleep,” Karis said.

  “Dream guides aren’t guides to dreams; they are dreams, and they enter the waking world to offer guidance. The Way of the Seer describes ten different types of dream guides. Zanja, you have been visited by the Lost Son.”

  What good is a guide who is lost? wondered Garland.

  Emil, still kneeling, still clasping Zanja’s hands, said to Medric, “By lost, do you mean bewildered? Or mislaid?”

  “I mean unfulfilled possibility. He’s the son Zanja will never have.”

  Norina said, “So he’s an embodiment of her intuition? She was just talking to herself?”

  Karis said, “Will he come again? If every visit leaves her grief-stricken . . .”

  Medric gazed at Zanja, not the way Norina did, as if she were an exasperating puzzle, but more like Emil, with understanding, admiration, and a profound affection. These three fire bloods, born ten or more years apart, of three different peoples and languages, never seemed to misunderstand each other. Maxew, on the other hand, who had vacated his chair by the door and, in his desire to get away from the fire bloods, crammed himself into a corner, seemed bewildered and even frightened of them.

  Zanja had bent forward so her forehead rested on Emil’s hands. Now she straightened and said something to Emil. She looked more like her usual alert and composed self, although still burdened by sorrow. She said, “Thank you, Medric.”

  Norina wiped her sweaty face with the tail of her shirt, and for just a moment she seemed like an ordinary person—one who was tired to death. “Upstairs,” she said. “All of us. Maxew, Garland, you too.”

  Garland would have to start the cake and heat the oven all over again. But this didn’t seem like a good time to object.

  They crowded into Emil and Medric’s stuffy bedroom, where disorder on one side and order on the other coexisted in unruly harmony. Medric said to Garland in Sainnese, “We are invincible!” So soldiers always shouted when going to battle.

  “Be serious,” said Garland. “The enforcer has no humor.”

  “If I had to be serious I would go mad.” Medric patted Garland’s shoulder affectionately, then dropped onto the tangled bedding and curled there like a sleepy, mangy cat.

  Medric became more peculiar with each passing day, thought Garland.

  Zanja, put by Norina into Emil’s chair, gazed up at her with no apparent trepidation, as few could do. Karis, Emil, and Garland were forced together by the tight quarters, while Maxew once again crowded himself into a corner. Norina looked closely at each of them, before settling her gaze on Zanja.

  “What have you not told me?” asked the Truthken.

  Garland felt a peculiar impulse to shout, My spoon has something wrong with it, and I don’t know what it is! Then he felt almost as if someone had spoken to him, telling him not to waste people’s time with such nonsense. But no one had spoken. There was just Maxew, moving his gaze away, shrinking into the shadows.

  Zanja said, “I’m not concealing anything from you.”

&
nbsp; Again, Norina looked closely at each of them. Garland felt deeply unsettled. The Truthken asked, “But what have you not said?”

  Zanja replied, very politely, “I find you humorless, rigid, and unimaginative.”

  Norina said, “Yes, what else?”

  “Apparently, I have powerful longings that I’m unaware of.”

  “What else?”

  Zanja shut her eyes.

  When they were getting ready to leave Watfield to come to Hanishport, J’han had said to Garland, “Zanja never complains. But watch for a crease in her forehead—here, between her eyebrows.” Now Garland saw it: the mark of an excruciating headache.

  “Norina, I’m weary with sorrow.”

  Karis said, with stifled fury, “Why are you doing this?”

  Norina glanced at Emil, and Garland knew he would speak next. They had a peculiar partnership, those two. Emil said, “Karis, no harm has been done.”

  Karis began to speak, but he shook his head at her. She wiped her sweaty face on her filthy shirttail—how fortunate that the laundry had delivered clean shirts today!—and didn’t say anything at all.

  “Zanja, do you have a headache?” asked Garland.

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  Karis started forward with an exclamation, but Zanja caught her hand before she could heal her. “Medric, can you go with Karis to Lalali? So I can stay here with Emil?”

  Medric blinked at her. “Yes,” he said doubtfully. “But what did the Lost Son tell you? I must know, or I won’t go anywhere.”

  “Excuse me,” Maxew interrupted, with unusual diffidence. “This headache is significant somehow. May I ask what it means?”

  “It means I was kicked in the head by a Sainnite war horse,” said Zanja.

  Befuddled, the young air witch turned to his teacher. She said, “What Zanja knows is all connected, all equally true. Insights are facts, understanding is a lightning strike, images are events, the pains of the past are the pains of the present. To her, this chaos is perfectly sensible, although to us it is irrational.”