“That was true of you once, one of the times you were dead.”
“It’s true now, for I remember all that the storyteller knew. Shall I tell you a story?”
“Yes, Speaker.”
She told a story and then another story. She told stories until her voice became like fingers brushing over dry paper. Once, the storyteller’s gift had freed Zanja from sorrow. Now it freed her from madness. She did not hear the distant thunder, did not hear it drawing closer, did not notice the wind shaking the trees.
“Zanja, take shelter,” said Karis.
She stared at the boy. “What?”
He spoke, and again he was Karis. “Take shelter, Zanja, I beg you. Do it now!”
Fat drops of rain struck Zanja’s face. Lightning flashed, and birds startled forth all around her, a shrieking cloud of them, colliding into her and careening away. The trees groaned. The wind attacked in a barrage of dead leaves, broken twigs, green nuts.
“Where?” she yelled.
“Follow me!” The boy ran. She ran after him. A dead limb cracked and crashed down through the canopy. Green leaves filled the air, torn from their stems, then there was a torrent of rain.
“This way!” cried her guide.
She ran: ambushed, pummeled, assaulted by the storm. Now they were climbing. Water poured down the slope. She slipped in mud and fell to her hands and knees. Small stones bouncing in the torrent flung themselves at her. She crawled up the hillside.
“Here!” The boy sat upon a fallen tree and pointed at an old tangle of fallen limbs caught in boulders, roofed by rotted leaves, cemented by old slides of gravel. There was a hole. She crawled in, and smelled the stink of occupation. She worked her way deeper, until her hand touched living rock, and she was in a natural cavity that offered room to turn and sit, with her back against stone and her head pressing the tangled wooden ceiling. She was sheltered, but the storm seemed to be all around her. Thunder boomed and the rock shuddered. Wind roared and the forest squalled like a hunted animal. Rain trickled in, soaking her shoulder. She twisted around to suck and lap water from the rock.
A nose touched her arm. She turned slowly and saw a little fox. “Do you want a drink?”
At the sound of her voice, it ducked back into the burrow, but she saw its bright eyes watching as she shifted out of the way. She sat still until the little fox came out and began to lap water from the puddle. Two more foxes came out of hiding, then a fourth. They were fox children, too young to know that a creature like her could be dangerous. They took turns drinking from the puddle, then began to play, yipping and snarling at each other, chasing each other deep into the burrow and back out again. One raced across Zanja’s lap.
A blinding explosion. A jolting concussion of thunder. A net of blue light crackled across the dark den. The foxes dove for safety. Alone, Zanja shuddered with fear. She smelled smoke—and here she lay, buried in tinder. But the smell dissipated. A thousand rocks pelted her hiding place. Some rattled in: lumps of ice. A tree screamed, fell, paused, crashed, screamed again. Then more, and still more, a forest of screams, a massacre of trees, and a sound like the roar of a thousand winds. She shut her eyes, but lightning flashed on her eyelids. She covered her ears, but she heard it in her memory, the bloody, chaotic end of her ancient people.
The rattle of hail became the hiss of rain. Zanja’s horror and fear became mere exhaustion. She crawled to the puddle and lapped water like the foxes. Now she needed to piss, so she crawled outside and found the boy still sitting on the log, soaked to the skin, laughing with excitement. The slippery ground glittered with hail. She stripped off her wet clothing and bathed in the downpour.
The boy asked curiously, “Do falling trees always scream?”
“I don’t know. I have never seen a storm like this.”
“But it was marvelous!”
As the veil of rain began to lift, it revealed a destruction such as Zanja had never seen: trees stripped naked, limbs torn away and leaving raw wounds, trunks snapped in half and folded over, their golden flesh in rags. As far as she could see, the forest had been flattened and torn to pieces.
And nearby, trapped in a tangle of fallen limbs, a shipwreck.
“Oh, by the gods,” she breathed. “The ship of air!”
Chapter 36
Tashar huddled in an ice-stiff blanket, shivering in the bitter cold. He had ceased to check the telltales and the firebox, for it had become too laborious and served no purpose. His mind wandered.
Maxew stood up awkwardly and staggered one way then the other. “Do something.” Perhaps he thought he was the captain, the master of air! Tashar giggled derisively.
Maxew pointed at the telltale. “What that means.”
“Up,” Tashar said. “Up, up, up.”
The air witch leaned over the side and vomited.
If the ship’s sides were lower, the spasms of the witch’s retching would make him go over the edge and fall to his death in a rain of his own spew. That would truly be funny, the funniest thing Tashar would ever see. His own laughter was funny: haw-huh, haw-huh, like a donkey being strangled. Maxew turned upon Tashar, careened into the stove, and fell. He lay atop the old man, gasping like a fish. Tashar laughed until he fainted.
He was awakened by tiny icicles, broken loose from the lines, piercing his skin like poisoned darts. The ship was falling. Its silken sail billowed, on the verge of collapsing. Exhausted and resigned, he fumbled at the firebox. His fingers were stiff and grotesquely swollen. Within the stove he found only embers. He nursed the fire back to life, one twig at a time. He could scarcely see, his eyelids were so swollen.
They had burned through nearly all of the poor fuel they had gathered. The sagging sail continued to billow. He patiently added bits of wood to the stove.
Maxew awakened, groaning. His face was grotesque, puffy even where it wasn’t bruised, his eyes swollen to slits. He uttered a quacking sound and flapped his limbs uselessly.
They descended from gloom into darkness. Dark cloud swirled around the little ship, yanking it this way and that, wild dogs fighting over a shred of rotten meat. A terrible light flickered. Something attacked the silk overhead. Then Tashar was hit, and pellets of ice bounced on the wicker deck. Maxew jerked with surprise.
“It’s hail,” Tashar squawked. At first he had thought they were being shot at.
Lightning cut through the clouds. The crashing explosion of thunder jolted the ship sideways, knocking Tashar onto his back.
Buffeted, swinging, spinning in the grip of ferocious winds, the little ship dodged the powers of the storm. The wind ripped open the silk. Now we are dead, Tashar thought.
A terrific jolt. The stove jumped an arm’s length above the deck, and Tashar jumped with it. Again. The wicker squealed. A spear of wood pierced through the deck. The stove lay on its side, spilling hot coals. The ripped silk streamed bravely through the rain, a gigantic, ragged flag. Then a tree grabbed it and fell over with the silk held in its clutches.
Had they landed in a waterfall? To keep from drowning, Tashar covered his face and breathed through his hands. His ears ached. He coughed, and pain stabbed in his ribs.
Time passed.
Unlike Willis, Saugus had been a poor speechmaker, so it was odd that Tashar remembered so vividly every word he ever said. “Some things are right. Some things are true. Some are just. These are the values that make us great. If we allow them to be taken from us, we become like animals who live only to continue living. But if we retain our beliefs without acting on them, we don’t deserve to live. Only the cowards have meaning without risk. The Sainnites have made us cowards. If each person in Shaftal, every pig farmer, apple grower, trader, and sailor, acted upon what they say they believe, we could be free in a single day! We’d be free of murderers, free of those who collude with them, free of those who say we should forget the blood and injury and sorrow and deat
h that has been visited upon us all these years. The people of Shaftal are cowards, but they will remember their courage when their leaders show them what to do!”
I will be a leader, Tashar thought. He would show the people of Shaftal that belief could become action. He would show them that he could stand up.
He crawled to his knees, grabbed the wicker gunwale, and dragged himself to his feet. With wet hands he wiped rain from his eyes and looked at a nightmare landscape, a wreckage that may once have been a forest. He saw some half-drowned deer in the distance, struggling wildly, entangled in limbs of fallen trees. Rain poured down, making the disaster sodden.
The air boat was wrecked, the wicker deck buckled and shattered, the long rags of the sail entangled in fallen trees.
His beautiful boat! Tashar wanted to weep.
But he was a leader! He crawled out of the basket to see what might be saved. They were trapped in branches, well above the ground. If he put his foot here, and then here, he might manage to climb down. But a branch broke under him, and he pitched into a sodden mess of vegetation that held, then broke, then held again, and broke again, until he landed in mud, buried in wet vegetation, with a cold little stream pouring into his collar. He flung away the mess, dully amazed to find himself unhurt. He seemed to have fallen into a well made up of twigs and shredded leaves. Through the opening at the top, he saw Maxew, water dripping from the strings of his hair. His face was less puffy, as Tashar’s also seemed to be, for he could open his eyes fully again.
“What are you doing?” Maxew yelled.
Tashar could hardly hear him. Shaking the water from his ears made no difference.
“The silk!” Tashar yelled. “To keep the food dry!”
He got up and began to force a passage through the wreckage of the forest. It was rough work, and he soon wished he had told Maxew to toss down the hatchet. He broke branches with his hands, trampled a pathway with his feet, and then fell through and sprawled on the ground. He had broken into a pocket in the shattered forest, which felt almost like a house, roofed by silk that diverted the rain, walled by wood, built by a force that had flattened a forest. Safe, dry, on solid ground, he realized how terrified he had been.
He heard a muffled thud and then a clang. He dragged himself to his feet and returned down his path. Maxew was dropping supplies from the wrecked sky boat: water tins, waterproof sacks of food, sodden blankets. Tashar hauled everything to shelter. He had no idea where they were; they might spend days lost in this catastrophe.
Maxew dropped a knife to him and bellowed, “Cut some rope!”
“Why?”
“For the prisoner!”
“Why?”
“Do as I say!”
Tashar was silenced, but in silence he argued with his detested companion: Maxew didn’t understand that they could not travel easily through this wrecked forest. To travel while carrying all their supplies and another person was certainly impossible. They would have to leave the old man behind, dead or alive, so why waste effort getting the man out of the air boat?
His resentment grew like steam under a pot lid, but he worked his way through the tangle toward the guide rope, cut it, and struggled for a long time to disentangle it from debris. When he had finally managed to get a piece long enough to be useful, he had to climb back up to the basket, which seemed impossible until Maxew pointed out a limb that went up at an angle and would serve as a ladder. Tashar climbed it—like climbing rigging, which he had used to do for fun when he was young, but he was heavier now, and appallingly tired.
At last he had climbed high enough that Maxew could haul him into the basket. The boy had wasted all that time improvising a sling out of a blanket and the lines that had once secured the sail to the boat. The prisoner’s body was a long, unmoving shape.
“How can he breathe?” asked Tashar.
“He’s dead.” Maxew pushed his wet hair out of his face.
“Why bother with him, then?”
“So long as the G’deon thinks he’s alive, he’s bait.”
“Bait for what? I think I deserve to know—”
“You will shut your mouth!”
Again, Tashar was silenced by air magic. He no longer disliked Maxew—he hated him bitterly.
A dead man is appallingly heavy. Both of them were gasping by the time they managed to hoist the body over the basket’s edge. They lowered it to dangle above ground, apparently so that the false G’deon would not discover what had become of her advisor. Then they climbed down the ladder-like limb. They immediately became horribly lost. They could not see the wreck, or the body dangling from it like a fly from a spider’s web. They could not see any silk overhead. They could not find the sheltered place where Tashar had taken their supplies. They floundered in one direction and another, staggering through tangles of broken wood and shredded leaves. Maxew shouted in frustration at Tashar’s back, “This disaster is your fault!”
“I don’t control the wind!”
“You should have brought a compass!”
“I have a fucking compass!”
So they continued, breathlessly bellowing at each other as they fought their way aimlessly through the debris, looking wildly around themselves. They were sodden, filthy, and furious; and Tashar thought it was too bad Maxew had contrived to get the knife back, because he wanted nothing more than to murder him.
They would find the body somehow, and bring it to shelter.
They would wait for the rain to stop. Maybe they could even build a fire.
Tashar would get his pistol out, ostensibly to check whether the powder was dry.
Maxew would be very surprised when Tashar shot him.
Lost in vengeful imagining, Tashar was nearly killed when the stove fell through the tangle and landed two steps in front of him. He looked up at the basket overhead, at the charred hole the stove had burned through the wicker deck. He began to laugh, and couldn’t stop, until he walked into the dangling rope and fell silent with surprise. The rope had been cut, and the dead man had disappeared.
He felt a wave of relief. “He’s gone!” he cried, before he realized Maxew was immediately behind him.
“If I had known you were an idiot—”
“I’m telling you—” Tashar turned to point at the rope.
A person blocked the path—his path which he had broken through the debris with such effort! He jerked back violently, and his head hit Maxew’s battered face. Maxew shrieked.
“Sorry,” said Tashar, absurdly.
“Fuck!” cried Maxew, with his hands protecting his nose and tears streaming from his eyes.
The woman blocked the path to the sheltered place where he had put their supplies. Tashar scarcely recognized her. In the Hanishport sitting room, she had been an alien. In this destroyed forest, she seemed to belong: a border woman, thin and wild, ferocious as a forest cat. She spoke. “You should have killed me.”
Their water tins were dangling from her hand. She flung them, and they landed with a clanging crash at Tashar’s feet. Something about the dagger in her hand turned Tashar’s knees to water. He wished his companion was in front of and not behind him.
“Zanja na’Tarwein!” cried Maxew, and his voice tried to be terrible. “You will submit to me!”
She flung a food sack onto the tins. It was the smallest of the sacks and was not particularly full. “When you killed my brother in front of me, when I lay paralyzed with my brains leaking out of my skull, when there were hundreds of you, bearing hundreds of weapons, then you might have been able to kill me.”
“Do to her what you did to the old man,” Tashar whispered to Maxew.
“Can’t you tell she’s out of her mind? I have no power over lunatics! Pick up the food and the tins, and let’s go.”
Tashar felt dazzled by anger. “This is my path, my ship, my belongings!”
�
��You’ve been robbed, then.” Maxew pushed impatiently around Tashar and grabbed the tins and supplies. “That dagger in her hand is Norina Truthken’s blade. It’s forged with earth power and wielded by a trained warrior.” He pushed past Tashar again. “And you want to fight her bare-handed? You’ll be dead before you feel the cut.”
The woman stood very still, but Tashar had seen enough trained fighters to realize that her stillness meant she was poised to leap forward. And what did Tashar want to fight her for? For a shattered basket, some torn silk, and a dead body?
Maxew had already departed, and Tashar could hear the tins clanging and the branches breaking as he fought his way through the fallen trees. Tashar began to back away.
The woman watched him; and even after Tashar could no longer see her, long after that dreadful storm had passed by, and even at nightfall when he and Maxew fell down to sleep, Tashar could feel that ferocious gaze.
Chapter 37
The storm dragged a mantle of darkness over the forest, its leading edge flickering with brilliant, blinding columns of lightning. Chaen watched the storm in fearful amazement.
“No good comes of water magic,” Seth muttered.
Once again, the entire company had come to a halt. The seer stared toward the storms with naked eyes. The Truthken stood beside Karis. The cook, who seemed to have forgotten that he was a Sainnite captain, had put his hand on Karis’s broad back.
Chaen could hear a nearby group gathered around a Paladin, reciting words in Shaftalese. She opened her sketchbook and studied her notes about Maxew—more questions than answers. What kind of son was he? How old? Had she ever called him “Max”? How had she raised him without a home or family? When she tried to remember, there were fragments that she knew were important: the pennies that accumulated too slowly, the paintings and drawings done for money, the tedious fairs, the meals eaten among strangers. She remembered the crawling fear that greeted her at every dawn and went to bed with her every night. All this she had endured, for a son who did not want her to remember him, who even now might be falling out of the sky.
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