Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Speaker!” called a distant voice.

  Her guide’s voice came from the cedar park. She crept around the hill to the woodland and spotted movement at the edge of the trees. She followed him deep into the park. She stopped to unstrap her boots and yank off her socks to feel the way over gnarled roots and outcroppings of stone with her bare feet. She felt Shaftal before her and beneath her. She felt the deep roots of the people, Zanja’s people, gripped tightly to the foundations of the land, Zanja’s land. Shaftal endured, in death and in renewal. The generations made terrible mistakes, and recovered, and did their best.

  Karis seemed to be waiting for her among the ancient trees. She said, “Take off your clothes. Lie down and rest.”

  Zanja removed her filthy clothing and lay down on the soft loam. The quiet power of Shaftal came into her. The fissures of pain in her travel-worn feet knitted together. Her muscles, worn and torn like ragged fabric, were rewoven. She breathed in, and fell asleep.

  She slept the remainder of the night and well into the day. When she awoke, Karis spoke with her lips: “Below you there is a foundation of stones on which the House of Lilterwess used to stand.”

  “I feel those stones, joined to bedrock.”

  “Those stones were cut and laid by sweat and labor, but by earth magic they clenched the bedrock with a grip that will never be broken.”

  “So the Sainnites, having won a great victory over powers they desperately feared, tried and failed to move those stones.”

  “Zanja, something is cupped in those stone hands.”

  Zanja shut her eyes and saw a series of underground rooms, each one connected to the next by a tunnel. She said, “The House of Lilterwess is gone, but the storerooms survived.”

  In one of those rooms, a little girl lay huddled in the darkness. They had not even given her a candle. “I know Leeba is there,” Zanja said.

  Now Norina spoke. “They are torturing Leeba with fear so that Karis will be tortured by fear. What they do to her next will be much worse.”

  “And then what? Will you confront Saugus, and condemn yourself to death?”

  The Truthken said, “Yes.”

  “How does this knowledge help me, Madam Truthken? I already know that I must not fail!”

  Karis spoke, and for a moment Zanja was aware of her own lips moving: “Medric says, What lies far from you is close at hand.”

  Zanja stood up and dressed, hung Norina’s dagger at her side, put the satchel over her shoulder, but left her shoes where she had dropped them. She advanced on the ruin of the House of Lilterwess with her feet on the ground.

  Chapter 45

  Tashar soon fell behind, because Maxew, with his thin, long limbs, could step or climb over the main trunks, while Tashar, being shorter and stockier, was forced to aim for the crowns, where he must step over or duck under each limb.

  At midafternoon he noticed some smudges of smoke up ahead. Sometime later, Maxew called that he heard voices. It turned out to be two sawyers sitting upon a log, eating peaches. One was saying that there was plenty of work for everyone, including the Sainnites. The other replied that he would do everything himself rather than work beside those murdering parasites.

  The first started to argue, but when Maxew stepped over their tree trunk and continued down the half-cleared road without saying a word, they fell silent with surprise. Tashar picked his way through the crown of the tree, greeted the sawyers, and asked, “Which mile is this?”

  “Mile twenty-six.”

  “The people at the northern side of the jam are at mile twenty-nine.”

  The sawyer groaned. “We’ll be clearing this road all winter!”

  “We’ll be warm, though, with all this firewood,” said the other.

  Up ahead, Maxew had gotten onto a wagon’s running board, and was waving at Tashar to hurry. Tashar managed a staggering trot on his bruised, aching legs and jumped onto the board as the wagon began to roll away. “Why such haste?”

  “I should have been there yesterday.”

  “For what?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t know!”

  The wagon, laden with tree limbs, jolted over debris as they passed the various stages of road-clearing that they had passed through in reverse that same morning, and the same sorts of labor-hardened people and draft animals that leaned patiently into their yokes beneath the hot sun. This labor camp was larger but more ramshackle, with mismatched teams, all kinds of wagons, and a collection of much-used tools, barrels, and food, all marked with the glyphs of the farmsteads to which they belonged. Surely these farmsteads could ill afford to be without these workers at this time of year. The road-clearing seemed a heroic effort, as memorable in its way as the legendary shipwreck rescues that were recounted in Hanishport taverns during the long, slow days of wintertime. I should stay and work, thought Tashar.

  The wagon stopped at the limb dump, where on many sawhorses the fallen trees were being cut for firewood. Maxew hopped off and walked away, and Tashar followed several steps behind him, ashamed of his misery.

  “Where are we?” asked Maxew.

  “Mile twenty-six.”

  Maxew glanced at the sun. “We can be there by sunset, but we must keep our pace.”

  “Since you won’t tell me why we’re in such a hurry—”

  “Exactly. Should Norina Truthken get hold of you, you’ll babble everything.”

  “A Truthken will get the truth from you as easily as from me.”

  “Not nearly as easily.”

  “Why don’t you just enslave me to your will? Is it that you’d rather harangue me? Maybe to keep from haranguing yourself?”

  “What we’re doing is important! If the operation succeeds, it will end the necessity for us to live in secret as though we are the wrongdoers and not the wronged! The Power of Shaftal will belong once again to Shaftal and not to these leaders who are misleading us into injustice!”

  “What is this, a recruitment speech?”

  “We’re going to capture the false G’deon, make her subject to Saugus’s will, and thus use her power to destroy the Sainnites—since she has refused to do it herself.”

  “What?” cried Tashar. He found himself gasping for breath. “That is—that plan is—audacious!”

  “It is,” said Maxew smugly.

  “If we can force her to do what she should have done long ago, then of course we must. But how is it possible? Can’t she destroy anyone who even attempts to capture her? Isn’t that why we decided to use poison to assassinate her?”

  “Saugus can control her. But Karis has been guarded by presciants, and such people are nearly impossible to take by surprise. You’ve seen yourself what Zanja is capable of.”

  “You knew Zanja would follow us?”

  “She was supposed to follow us.”

  “Emil was not the bait for Karis, but for Zanja?”

  “She took the bait, didn’t she?”

  “Then—we were supposed to kill her, weren’t we? So Karis would not have her presciants?”

  “Some aspects of the plan weren’t entirely successful.”

  “What’s our hurry, then?”

  “At least try to do some thinking on your own! Emil is dead, we’ve separated Zanja from Karis, and the seer is an idiot. But if Norina and Saugus confront each other and I’m not there, both of them will die.”

  Tashar said spitefully, “Then you should go slowly, shouldn’t you! For once you help him to kill the Truthken, you’ll be more trouble than use to Saugus.”

  “Is that what you think? That people are nothing but tools to him?”

  “I was just making a joke—”

  “Hold your tongue!”

  Tashar’s words stuck in his mouth like nut paste.

  “Stand, traitor, where you are,” said the air witch.r />
  Tashar could not move.

  Once, a fey wind had yanked the tiller out of Tashar’s hands, dumped him into the cold water of the harbor, and carried his boat away without him. Now he felt like that: stunned, embarrassed, dismayed, terrified, and yet laughing at his predicament.

  Maxew yanked the last full water tin from Tashar’s shoulder and trotted away without another word.

  Tashar lost his sense of time. Eventually he saw three people coming down the road—footsore travelers, he thought at first, all dressed the same, which seemed odd. When they were close enough to greet him, they were close enough for him to see that they were Paladins in ragged shirts, earrings glittering below filthy headscarves and daggers at their belts. By their battered appearance, they may well have been following him all the way from Hanishport.

  They took him by the arms, one on each side.

  One woman asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “His muscles are straining—but he seems rooted here.”

  “Then it’s air magic.”

  “This is Maxew’s companion?” The woman peered at him. “What was it like to fly?” she asked.

  “Feel how hot he is. He’s been standing here for hours.”

  “That’s a cruel way to kill a man.”

  “Let’s put him in the shade, at least.”

  They carried Tashar to the road’s edge, then dragged him into a thicket. They were able to adjust his position for him, so they could leave him sitting, with his back supported. But when they tried to give him water, he couldn’t swallow. “We’ll return in a while,” the woman said.

  Tashar sat where they had left him. Afternoon began to feel like evening, and the wind began to blow.

  Chapter 46

  Zanja crept up the hill, often hiding in plain sight. After many hours, near the crest, she lay face down on the ground, her black hair wrapped in a mud-smeared head cloth, her dark face hidden in her plant-stained sleeve, trapped by a group of four that had begun to play a dice game on the hilltop just above her.

  “Hsst!”

  She uncovered one eye and saw the boy perched on a massive foundation stone. “He’s coming,” he said.

  Zanja covered her face. The boy began humming. She could remember some of the song’s words, and made up the rest.

  Time is a katrim who waits and waits and waits.

  Time is a shadow turning slowly with the sun.

  The dice players spoke in deferential murmurs. She heard a voice as soothing as a snake bite. “He should have been here yesterday, at the latest.”

  The boy said to Zanja, “You never liked Bran.”

  Zanja mouthed two words against her shirt sleeve: “Shut up.”

  Bran—Saugus—joked with his people. They laughed eagerly. That the man craved and enjoyed such deference should have been shameful.

  Zanja’s guide said, “He’s studying the landscape. He’s looking down the road, which is completely empty. Now he’s looking at the sky.”

  “Did you notice that a storm is brewing?” Saugus asked.

  A dice player stood up. “Another storm? That last one was dreadful.”

  “So I have heard. But the cellars didn’t flood.”

  “No, Saugus. Just a puddle at the door where the rain came down the stairs.”

  “We should bring the powder kegs into shelter,” Saugus said.

  The boy snorted derisively. “They’re picking up their playing pieces as though their lives depend on it!”

  And they would die for him and think it was a choice. Zanja lay flat on earth, tense with fury.

  “He’s still there,” murmured the boy. “Studying the storm, irritated by your presence . . . but he doesn’t seem to know it. He thinks it’s the weather that’s unsettling him, or that laggard he’s expecting: Maxew, I think. There—he is leaving.”

  Zanja breathed in, and breathed out. When she was calm enough, she advanced to the top of the hill. Now the fortifications concealed her from anyone above her. A person approaching from below might see her, but she could hide in the afternoon shadows.

  She dared turn and look at the view that Saugus had been studying: the white, vacant glare of the Shimasal Road, the forest a smear of green beyond the hills, the boiling storm that cast a rapidly growing shadow on the land. She saw a bolt of lightning, brief and startling as an insight.

  People moved past on the opposite side of the barrier, carrying something heavy. Someone shouted and was answered by laughter. Distant thunder rumbled, and the air began to move. That breeze would bring the storm directly to this hill.

  The boy, standing on the massive stone, held up a page from the lexicon: the Whirlwind. It signified a loss of meaning, a tearing loose of all connections, a rending and reversing of every idea, the severing of every love and friendship, the reduction of purpose to lunacy.

  Emil probably was dead, as was J’han. Leeba would be killed, and Zanja would die trying to rescue her. Norina would die in a duel with Saugus, and Saugus probably would survive because he had a plan. Medric, Garland, and Clement would be killed for being Sainnite. Karis would survive in such servitude that her years of enslavement to the smoke drug would look like freedom.

  Zanja huddled in shadow, weeping, as the whirlwind charged the hill.

  People began shouting, chasing hats and belongings. Loose canvas flapped like torn sails. The sailing ship climbed a spilling mountain of black water. An old woman stood upon its plunging decks. She looked across the sea, the land, the waterways, the mountains of Shaftal. Zanja, crouched in a corner by a mountain of stone, scarcely kept her balance, but Grandmother Ocean remained steady, peaceful, and unconcerned upon that tossing deck. She glanced at Zanja and laughed at her despair.

  A lightning strike, a concussion of thunder, a joyful shout from the crew, and Zanja ducked her head as water began to pummel her.

  Karis spoke. “Zanja, except for two guards at the entrance, all others have taken shelter underground.”

  Darkness had come with the storm. Without the sun, Zanja was lost. “Karis—I saw Grandmother Ocean.”

  “This is her storm,” said Karis.

  Zanja breathed out. Her trembling stilled. “Harald G’deon,” she said, “he chose his successor wisely.”

  With weary, fearful sorrow, Karis said, “I hope so.”

  Zanja was alone, but she had remembered that a ghostly army was being dragged behind her, the whole pattern that was implied by her small, ragged piece of carpet. She rose and moved upward among the massive stones, following pathways made by the hill’s other occupants. She found two people who sheltered beneath a flapping roof, watching the road for lost souls, guarding the stairs to the underworld.

  She found a place to take shelter from the gale, close enough to hear the guards shout to each other above the roar of wind. To pass them unnoticed was impossible, and to fight them both—two fighters more hardened and experienced than she—was foolish. She waited, and the storm waited with her.

  “A strange storm,” said one guard, in a lull. The other said that he had expected a summer storm, of the sort that passes quickly, with a clear sky in its wake. But now it seemed likely to last all night.

  “Here comes another downpour.”

  Rain washed over them. Zanja’s only shelter was her own back. With her head on her knees, she sang silently:

  Time is a storm that never ends.

  Time is a witch who pays her debts with rain.

  Sometimes she heard bits of conversation: the guards telling each other about battles they had fought when they were Paladin irregulars in one or another of the militias that had formed to resist Sainnite rule. They had never learned the first lesson of the true Paladins: the only good battle is the one that is avoided.

  She heard a thud. A warped door was wrenched open on squawking hinges. Dim light from a lantern gli
ttered on the rain.

  “I was afraid you’d fallen asleep.”

  “I’ve been about to piss myself for half an hour.”

  “Drink less, then.” The newcomer climbed up to the guard shelter, and one watcher departed down the stairs, presumably to use a bucket latrine.

  Zanja had been waiting for one of them to step away, but the wait seemed wasted. The watcher returned, and the other left. That one returned, and all three of them lingered, saying ordinary things that they all knew to be true. Sometimes she saw their heads nodding in rhythm. Even if they fell asleep, she could not slip past them—not through that squawking, crooked door.

  Upon the Shimasal Road, sodden boots stumbled over flat ground.

  Zanja’s hands clenched into fists. Rain-blinded people from her ghostly army crashed into her.

  Someone tugged her out of the way. Karis said, “Maxew has arrived at the House of Lilterwess.”

  Norina’s voice: “Trust Zanja, and keep walking.”

  In her own wet skin once again, Zanja wiped rain out of her eyes and stood up. She stretched her legs. Her satchel had become heavy with rain. In the shelter, the guards’ aimless talk had become a tense silence.

  A distant voice called, weakly.

  “That’s him!”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “Can you see him?”

  “Coming toward us from the road.”

  All three guards left their shelter, cursing the coldness of the rain, and hurried down the hillside. Zanja ran to the doorway, ducked under the sagging, rain-filled canvas roof, and descended cracked and canted stone steps illuminated by a lantern tucked into a niche. The door with the squawking hinges had been left half ajar. She slipped through and descended into deep darkness, feeling the way down slippery steps to the uneven stones of a laid floor. She sensed shelves and bins looming in thick darkness. She heard the breaths of many sleepers, and the muffled ticking of a clock. She smelled wet laundry, cooked fish, and pungent pistol oil.