Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  One of the dogs breathed on Chaen’s hand, and she stroked its head. On the first night of this hard march, the dogs had led the way until Karis and the rear party caught up with them. When they stopped for a breakfast of travel bread and water, Chaen discovered that five air children had joined their party.

  “You are Maxew’s mother,” one of them said, and talked with her for a while—stiffly and awkwardly, as though he were practicing a difficult lesson. It was from him that Chaen learned what Death-and-Life Company had done to Norina’s healer husband and their daughter, and she was sick with shame.

  Chaen took off her boots, hissing with pain when her blistered feet touched ground.

  “I am an old woman,” Seth groaned. “And with every step I take, I grow far older.”

  “So do we all,” said Chaen. “Even the children.”

  “Those aren’t children,” said Seth. “That is the Order of Truthkens.”

  At daybreak, on the third dawn of the march. Chaen sat upon the ground, eating hardbread and a handful of sweet currants. Nearly a hundred people sat nearby, but not a single word was said, not even by the Paladins. Chaen could hear the general suckling her baby. The Truthken strode past, with death in her face.

  The medics were checking everyone’s feet, as they did every morning. Chaen pulled off her boots and socks. Karis came and lowered herself heavily to the ground. She lifted one of Chaen’s feet and put her rough palm against the blistered sole.

  The pain retreated. Chaen’s head cleared.

  Karis was hollow eyed. Her clothing hung from her frame. Even the bones of her hands were revealed, like stones uncovered by a torrent.

  Chaen said, “When people are weary, they lose their will. But not you.”

  “I am driven—but not by my own will.” Her smoke-wrecked voice was a raw whisper. She laid down Chaen’s foot and picked up the other.

  “Does Shaftal’s power never run out?”

  “Chaen, I think it is without limits. When Tadwell was G’deon, a water witch goaded him into laying waste to the land, which he regretted the rest of his life. Zanja believes I will do far worse, and is running ahead of me to prevent that.”

  “Is Zanja correct?”

  ‘’Oh, yes,” she said. The G’deon of Shaftal was in a desperate, dark mood.

  One of the air children approached them, and Karis heaved herself to her feet. A flock of birds that had gathered in a nearby tree made an agitated and contented racket, like market day in a city. Despite the noise, Chaen could hear Karis speaking to the boy in a formal, polite way. It was the same boy Chaen had spoken with the other night, but she didn’t know his name.

  The boy’s back was to Chaen. “. . . Emil Paladin . . .”

  “What did he say?” asked Karis.

  The boy answered. Karis, looming over him like a tree over a mouse, gazed above his head at Chaen. “Can you do something for me?” she asked Chaen.

  Chaen hastily put on her socks and shoes. Her body was like a stream in drought, empty and dry, its secret hollows exposed, its little fishes rotting in the sun. But her blisters were healed and her feet didn’t hurt. She followed Karis to a cluster of people that had gathered around Emil. He sat upon his litter, with the general’s baby sleeping in his arms. Emil’s face was unshaven, but his clothing still was clean, his hair still combed back and tied; even his boots were not dirty. People who had no time to care for themselves were continuing to care for him. His gaze switched from face to face as people spoke, and there was a profound intensity to his listening. If Maxew had intended to destroy the man, he should have undone his ability to pay attention, for that surely was his greatest gift.

  Chaen hung back until Karis, who had knelt to draw in the dirt, looked up and said, “Chaen, can you do it?”

  “Yes,” said Chaen. “What do you want me to do?”

  The Sainnite general turned to Chaen with an expression of approval, as though she were one of her soldiers.

  Karis pointed at a straight line she had drawn in the dirt. “This is the Shimasal Road.” Across the road she drew a mark. “This is the southern edge of the storm-wrack.” She pointed to some humps of dirt that she had shaped with her fingertips. “Here is the hill country. Zanja arrived here yesterday, at dawn. She left her glyph cards hanging in a tree, here.” Karis touched one of her bolts, which she again was using as a marker. Then she touched the other. “And we are here.”

  They were east and south of the hill country. Soon they would break out of the woodland and reach the road.

  Kamren Paladin said, “Emil thinks we need to fetch the cards.”

  “Need vision,” said Emil. He had become able to pair a verb with a noun, but, although Norina or one of the air children worked with him night and day, he could do no more than that.

  “I gave my far-seeing to Zanja,” Medric explained, but Chaen was unenlightened.

  Kamren seemed to recognize her confusion. “Some of the Paladins will be diverting northward, to seek food and wagons. You can travel with them for a while, then get the cards and double back to bring them to Medric. The glyph cards may help him see.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Karis said, “Granite will go with you. She’ll show you the way back to us.” The G’deon’s dirty finger poked the hill country. “By then we’ll be around here, I guess.”

  Chaen had been running, or nearly running, then walking quickly, then trudging and stumbling, for many days. She didn’t see how she could meet up with the main group in the way Karis was proposing—she simply couldn’t move quickly enough.

  But Clement was speaking now. “Karis has agreed not to employ the Power of Shaftal upon the soldiers, for only if they serve her by their own power will they regain their lost honor. But your honor has been restored to you already.”

  It had? wondered Chaen.

  Karis rose up and took Chaen in her arms. She was overwhelming, and Chaen felt a panic, and tried to yank away. But Karis held her, and laid a coarse hand on the back of her neck, and jolted her with the Power of Shaftal. Chaen heard herself utter a cry, or a groan, and for a moment thought she might faint. Karis said in a low voice, “Sometimes people fall. Are you all right now?”

  Chaen managed to reply. Karis released her, and Chaen stood on her own feet. She had been weary for eleven years—so weary for so long that she had ceased to be aware of it.

  “Pace yourself,” Emil said, very kindly.

  The cook, Garland, handed Chaen an extra ration of bread. “The giddiness will pass.”

  Norina said, “Maxew and Tashar are going south on the Shimasal Road.”

  Chaen understood immediately why Norina was telling her this. “When will our paths intersect?”

  “By the time we reach the road, the two young men will be south of us.” After a moment the Truthken added, “I promise you, we are not getting you out of the way so that we can deal with Maxew.”

  Chaen had needed to hear it said. Or later, when solitude filled her with doubt, she would need to have heard it. This was what air witches did instead of being kind.

  Seth hobbled up to kiss Chaen farewell, and then Kamren did also, which surprised Chaen in more than one way.

  “You’re not coming?” she asked.

  He gestured vaguely toward the cluster of advisers. “To replace Emil requires many people. I play two parts: the fire blood and the Paladin.” Then he took her to the other Paladins and told her their names, and they set forth, a company of five, one of them the dog named Granite. Chaen walked among them, silent, distracted by wild imaginings of that man between her legs.

  Eventually, the giddiness did wear off.

  Chaen had been hovering at the edges of the Paladins’ peculiar, incessant conversations for days. Much of their talk had been about Sainnese verbs: they were endeavoring to understand how the verbs changed, depending upon how
they were used, and how that in turn affected certain nouns that were associated with the verbs. Whenever they thought they had an insight into the pattern, they immediately dispersed among the soldiers to test it.

  The Paladin conversations left Chaen feeling ignorant, although her education was no better or worse than that of most Shaftali. Shamed and mystified though she was by the Paladins’ communal groping after understanding, she had continued to walk close enough to overhear them. But now they walked in silence.

  It was still morning when they stepped from shade into sunshine, and they paused, dazzled. To their right and left, the ragged edge of the forest wound in and out among corrugated hillsides. A distant spring flashed like a signal mirror.

  “I see part of the road.” The Paladin gestured toward a quivering of heat waves in the distance.

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s a long way yet.”

  “Should we go through the hills? Or follow the forest edge?”

  Granite uttered a sound like a polite cough. Chaen said, “I guess we part ways now.”

  They clasped hands and separated. Chaen felt a hollowness where her companions had been, and glanced back. The Paladins were tying on headcloths as they trudged toward the hills.

  She ran along the tree line with the dog trotting beside her, glancing up at her from time to time, grinning amiably, her tongue flapping out the side of her mouth like a scarlet flag. Chaen could not see far to the west, for the hills blocked the view, but if she were to climb one, she would see the road, and might even see two young men walking down it.

  They reached a shelter pine at the edge of the woods. Granite lay in the shade, and Chaen gave her a porringer of water. The dog needed to rest, she told herself. For a long time, she studied the nearby hill, considering whether to climb it to try to look for her son. Birds rustled busily in the tree, and a hawk cried out.

  She must have loved Maxew, difficult though that might have been. But her responsibility to Shaftal was greater.

  She ducked under the massive pine tree’s sagging branches and climbed up a couple of tiers until she could grab a packet that dangled there. She untied the leather cord, unwrapped the oilcloth, and saw the stacks of priceless glyph cards. At the top of one stack, the illustration showed two warriors fighting, with curved swords in one hand and daggers in the other, in identical poses, wearing identical armor. Many other paired fighters surrounded them. Although this was a battle in a war, the fighters stood like arranged statues in frozen, identical poses. “A stalemate,” murmured Chaen.

  The other card, by contrast, showed a world of motion—a chaos of swirling images—sideways, upside-down, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Chaen glanced away at Granite, who still lay quiet, working her lungs like the bellows of a furnace. When she looked again at the illustration, she realized that these people, objects, animals, and plants had all been caught up and carried into the sky by a terrific windstorm. “The whirlwind,” she said. She had seen both cards before—twice, both times Zanja had cast them—but had not had time to study them.

  She wrapped up the cards and tied them to her belt and then, for security, tied them with a second cord that she threaded through a buttonhole.

  “If you’re rested enough, let’s be on our way,” she said to Granite. “We have a war to fight.”

  Granite brought Chaen toward the south, along the tree line, sometimes amid trees and sometimes across open land. Chaen was struggling through heavy undergrowth when she heard Granite bark and then splash noisily into water. She pushed through and saw Norina waiting on a stream bank, while on the other side, two companies of soldiers sprawled in a dappled meadow.

  Chaen hung her cards, boots, and breeches around her neck, put her arm around Norina’s waist, and crossed the stream with her, holding her tightly, hip to hip. On the opposite bank, water sprayed from Granite’s coat, flashing in the sunlight like sparks from a fire. Karis stood in the gravel and grass as though rooted there. Of course she couldn’t cross through water unless she had no choice—earth witches were like that.

  Chaen gave Karis the cards. Karis handed them to Medric. Just beyond them was a clutter of sleeping children. The baby lay under his sunshade made of Emil’s sweat-stained straw hat. “May I watch the card-casting?” Chaen asked.

  “Zanja cast,” said Emil. He had been positioned with his back against a sapling, so he would not topple over.

  “She cast the cards already?” Medric said. “Of course she did! No one is a better card-caster—not even you.”

  Emil shrugged.

  “You say it doesn’t matter,” muttered Medric, picking at the knots. “But you’re secretly furious that you taught her everything you know, and now she’s teaching you.”

  Norina said, “Emil certainly is furious. But not at Zanja.”

  Emil took the cards from Medric and gave them back to Chaen. Baffled for a moment by this round-robin, she untied the knots. Emil put a hand over hers, preventing her from opening the leather wrapping. “What question?” he asked, looking at Medric.

  “The question is the hard part!”

  Karis gazed at the two men and waited. The woman knew how to wait, and when to stop waiting: a humble hillside that one day becomes a deadly avalanche.

  The seer muttered agitatedly. Emil said, “What.”

  “What, then. But what what? What should we do, of course . . . but it’s the next part that matters: In order to what?” As the seer dithered and muttered, Chaen noticed that he had been stripping and cleaning his pistol. She knew a little about pistols, enough that she knew this was not merely a pistol in pieces, but one that had its pieces laid out in careful order so it could be put together in moments.

  “What do we want?” Medric was asking himself. “Peace? Well, we have peace, and yet peace brought a new war. We created that peace as well as anyone could have done it, but still we didn’t do everything right. Merely to have the right ingredients is not enough, our intrepid cook would say: they must be composed so the end result has the right balance.”

  As the seer muttered on, Chaen had begun to hear two voices speaking with his mouth, conversing with each other. One voice said Emil’s words: “But not a perfect balance.”

  “Oh, no,” the Medric voice said, “or nothing would ever happen.”

  “And not the balance that comes from inaction, for without action nothing can change, and we’ll end up with a Shaftal like the one in Zanja’s story.”

  “When Raven tricked the hunter into killing and eating him? And the entire world entered a stasis, without birth or death, without mistakes or learning? I like that story.”

  “Poised,” Emil said.

  “The balance of poise? Not that I want to shock you by my maturity, but such a balance seems overly influenced by fire logic! If people are always about to jump into something, how can there be time for the earthish things, like planting and making tools and raising children and suchlike?”

  “Unity,” Emil said.

  “Poised unity?”

  Emil looked pointedly at Medric’s hands, and the younger man glanced down and laughed: while he conversed with himself, he also had put together his pistol.

  “You’re talking gibberish,” said Karis patiently.

  “Excellent! Perfect! Exactly what we need! Chaen, I am seeking the answer to this question: What must we do to achieve a poised and unified balance?”

  Emil lifted his hand, which for the entire time had pressed upon Chaen’s. She folded back the oilcloth from the two stacks of cards. The top cards now were upside-down. Or rather, the Stalemate was reversed, and the Whirlwind was not. That card must have been reversed before, the first time she looked at it, but because the image was so chaotic, she hadn’t noticed it.

  Karis stood up and walked away. Kamren, who was asleep in the shade, awoke to her touch. He fumbled groggily at the bottle of wind
on his belt.

  Chaen said, “I had better wrap the cards up again.”

  Norina said quietly, “General Clement.”

  Clement, who lay at a distance, sat up sharply. She looked at Karis, who was now placing the bottle of wind upon the ground, uttered a curse, and scrambled to her feet. Soldiers sleeping among the trees startled awake at her shout.

  Karis brought her foot down, and the bottle shattered with a sound like thunder.

  Chapter 44

  The long summer day had faded into a moonless night. In darkness, Zanja approached the ruin.

  The massive stone blocks of the exterior wall were scattered down the hillside, an unintentional earthworks around a battlement of rubble. Behind those blocks, the people of Death-and-Life Company waited for the G’deon of Shaftal.

  Zanja huddled at the base of the hill, in the shelter of the first massive stone, and the residual heat in the massive block was like the warmth of a lover’s thigh. She could not attack these hardened, skillful fighters and the powerful genius who commanded them. Not when she was armed only with a borrowed dagger and the unsteady flame of her insight.

  When she had stood on the rise above the Asha River, watching the soldiers cross the river, preparing to fight their armored horses and lance-bearing riders with the blade at her side and all the katrim at her back, that also had been insane, but it was an insanity forced upon them. What lay before her now was the insanity of choice: she must choose to act in such a way that it would prevent Karis from approaching that hill.

  She could have prevented the massacre of her people. She could have been less obedient to the will of the elders, and she could have warned them with greater urgency. She could have asked the katrim to ally with her, even to help her contradict the decisions of the elders. She could have foreseen that her cousin, in exchange for the smoke drug, had betrayed the katrim watch posts and had told the stranger in the woods how to approach the Asha Valley from the north. And when she was abducted into the past, she could have told the future to Arel and Tadwell or demanded that Grandmother Ocean save the Ashawala’i in exchange for the rescue of her own people, the Essikret. But she had not done any of these things.