Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Philosophy!” said Garland. “Eat that when your belly is empty, and see what it gains you.”

  “Garland!” Leeba said.

  “Jam buns,” he replied. “I promise. As soon as I have a kitchen.”

  “I am here, Leeba love,” said J’han.

  “Daddy, the people hurt you!”

  “Yes, they hurt me,” he said. “Listen, Leeba. This is important. Every single day of your life, remember that I love you.”

  Zanja put her hand on Leeba’s shoulder, and it was Karis’s hand. Karis said, “I’m sorry, Leeba-bird. Some things I cannot fix.”

  J’han said, “Leeba love, sing a song for me—the song of the four elements.”

  In a thin, wavering voice, Leeba began to sing:

  The way of earth is to make and till.

  Earth needs fire to enrich its soil,

  Earth wants air so its storehouse fills,

  Four elements for balance.

  She must have learned the song in school. Zanja had never heard it.

  She sang,

  The way of air is to judge and prove

  Air by earth can be beloved

  Air needs water so it can move

  Four elements for balance.

  Medric spread his long fingers and gathered up the lexicon and the dream guide. Zanja saw her lost son’s laughing face, and then the book and boy were crumpled into a ball.

  “Boy,” she said, but he was already gone.

  “Now, Emil,” said Medric, “the fire.”

  Emil pierced his own heart with his pen, so it burned with starlight. With that he lit the crumpled stuff of intuition, and Medric’s hands were filled with fire.

  Leeba sang,

  The way of fire is to see and know

  Fire with earth can be renewed

  Fire needs water to ease its woe

  Four elements for balance.

  The way of water is to change and sing

  Water needs air for its lightning

  Water wants fire for divining

  Four elements for balance.

  “Now, Zanja,” said Medric, “water, earth, and air.”

  Zanja dipped Norina’s dagger in the fire. The dagger became the flame, and the flame became a dagger of light that rippled like water along the wavemarks in the steel. The flame burned in Zanja’s trembling grip, and it was much too late to pass that awful weapon to someone else.

  Leeba sang,

  Four enemies, or four friends

  Four elements to tear and mend

  Four elements to begin and end

  Four elements for balance.

  The door opened.

  By the light of the lantern held up by the first man, Zanja saw three people, but several others stood behind them.

  “Hold on, Leeba,” said Zanja and backed away until the wall was at her back—the outer wall, the foundation wall, which with stone fingers gripped the bones of the earth. She heard a distant, muffled sound of shouting.

  The man with the lantern cried, “Saugus—there is a woman with her!”

  His surprise reminded Zanja that she was standing in darkness, armed with a dagger, clutched by a child, talking with spirits. But the spirits remained.

  “We left the door unguarded for a little while to help the boy up the hill.”

  “But she couldn’t have passed us in the hall,” objected another one of the guards Zanja had squirmed past.

  The front lantern briefly illuminated the wall, but Zanja’s tunnel had closed, and no one heeded the missing stones.

  “I was going to warn you,” Maxew said. By the light of a second lantern in the crowd, Zanja glimpsed his swollen nose and the shredded hem of his sleeve.

  Bran—Saugus—said, “How ironic it is that your arrival, Maxew, distracted the guards so that she could get in.”

  The young man said sullenly, “Everywhere we went, she arrived first. And she is out of her head too.”

  “Fire bloods can be difficult to hinder. But now she’s trapped. Hold up that light.”

  The lantern that shone on Zanja also illuminated his face. He looked at Zanja as though he would only be satisfied if he could kill her a dozen times, in a dozen different ways. Norina had often looked at her in that way.

  “What arrogance,” Norina said.

  “Disagreeable,” said Garland.

  “An ass,” said Emil.

  “A ninny,” said Medric.

  Maxew said, “She’s crazy!”

  “She has spells,” said Saugus correctively. “But Norina could reach her, and so can I. Zanja na’Tarwein, I know how you entered these cellars. But how did you enter this room?”

  Zanja felt Norina’s twisted, predatory smile upon her own face, and the rogue witch’s gaze was like a dissecting knife trying to cut a block of granite.

  “Ask again,” Norina suggested. “But you never ask a question twice, do you? As a point of pride, a display of petty power.”

  “Petty?” cried the air witch in a dreadful voice. “Every moment, every day, I serve only Shaftal!”

  In her life of hairpin turns and gaping canyons, Zanja had often been astonished; but never more than at that moment, hearing Saugus say those words. He served only Shaftal. He was not like herself, who served her fear of losing her second tribe as she had lost her first. Nor was he like Emil, whose humility concealed his vanity, or Medric, whose desire to understand events was driven by desire to control them. J’han and Garland both managed other people’s lives because it helped them to feel more comfortable, and Karis used her vast powers to insulate herself from fear. As for Norina, wasn’t her devotion to the law merely a convenience?

  But Saugus, his love for Shaftal was pure. He did not struggle with an unclear vision; he was not weighed down by affection and tragedy, nor was he entangled by history and tradition. He had never known doubt. Zanja was too broken to know what was right. She certainly should obey him.

  “Zanja, lay down the blade,” Saugus said.

  Medric and Norina grabbed Zanja’s wrist. They could not fight her for the blade—they weren’t even there—yet they could help her to lift the dagger and fling it at Saugus.

  It struck him in the chest and fell harmlessly to the floor with a ringing sound. Startled, Saugus stepped backwards, striking Maxew’s smashed face. The young man shrieked with pain and staggered into a woman with a lantern. The shadows spun. The glass chimney shattered on the floor. The spilled oil caught fire. Everyone began screaming, shouting, rushing to pull Saugus out of danger. Somehow they knocked him over, and his clothing exploded into flame.

  Karis flung Leeba into Zanja’s arms and shoved both of them into the wall. The stone dissolved: a glittering powder sifted down between her and the burning. Then the flames dissolved. The earth’s great weight squeezed the breath from her lungs, the sound from her ears, and the light from her eyes. Something scraped down the length of her body; something shattered across the top of her skull.

  Hands gripped under her armpits. She entered the light of dawn. In a shouting circle of Paladins and soldiers, Karis hauled her wife and child out of the ground.

  Two soldiers grabbed Zanja, with Leeba still clinging to her neck, and dragged them both away—Zanja gasping, coughing, spitting, choking out some words in Sainnese: “Bloody hell, I can walk!”

  “General’s orders,” one snapped.

  They hauled her far from the battle, to the swale that rose up to the park, dropped her in the meadow, and left. Nearby, in the shade of the cedars, cooks, medics, and farmers seemed to be improvising a hospital.

  Zanja lay in soft, wet grass, coughing until she could breathe. Then she sat up and brushed the soil from Leeba’s eyebrows and eyelashes. Leeba grinned, her small teeth very white in a face brown with dirt.

  “You lost a tooth!”
said Zanja. “You’re getting very old.”

  “You are the dirtiest person in the history of the world.”

  “Except for you, Hurricane.”

  “Where did Karis go? Is she all right?”

  Zanja peered over her daughter’s head at the struggle on the hilltop. Karis was a wild-haired titan with a fierce dog at either side. A man charged her with an ax in his hand, but one dog grabbed his leg by the calf, the other bit his forearm, and Karis punched him. The attacker twirled away, blood spraying from his smashed nose, and landed untidily among the stones. Someone tripped over him. Then a couple of soldiers grabbed him by the arms and legs and hauled him away.

  “Don’t worry about Karis,” Zanja said. “Only an idiot picks a fight with a metalsmith.”

  Chapter 49

  Tashar had worked his way toward the north side of the hill, where the steeper slope dropped into a swale. On the facing slope, just beyond the hill’s shadow, was a collection of wagons. At least a dozen draft horses were calmly tearing up the grass in a field so lush and green it even looked appetizing to him. Various people—Shaftali farmers, by the clothing—were stretching tarps between wagons to make sun shelters. A pot had been hung over a brisk fire, but no one was paying attention to it.

  He crept in shadow, sneaking up the hill along the old spiral road. As he drew near the crest of the hill, the bugle uttered a brassy cry, and a few fighters shouted a hoarse answer.

  Now he saw the battle, and his excitement drained.

  It didn’t seem like a battle at all. People, mostly soldiers, but Paladins also, were clustered around what seem to be a hole in the ground, from which smoke drifted. There was a flurry of activity, but by the time he could distinguish what was happening, all he saw was a passive prisoner being escorted away. Off to one side, a group of soldiers seem to be chasing someone in and out among the blocks. In another place, the false G’deon talked with a Paladin, and a couple of large dogs panted beside her. Blood dripped from her right hand. A man, one of Willis’s old lieutenants, was being carried away, his head bobbing loosely and his mouth slack, his face blood smeared.

  Tashar felt a dizzying, spinning sensation: his sky boat caught in the storm, falling, caught in the heavy grip of the tumbling trees, smashing and torn to shreds. His foot slipped, and he grabbed wildly at the stones, at the gravel, at the sky, but could get no purchase. Then he was giddily clutching the tilting earth. Oddly, he thought about his mother, who had abandoned him to the care of a disapproving family and taken a boat somewhere. In his mind, she had always been a romantic wanderer, enchanted by the horizon. But maybe she had just been disappointed.

  He stood up cautiously. No one had even noticed him. The calm, efficient business on the hilltop continued. Tashar’s faintness certainly was from hunger. What should he do now? Was anything left at all?

  He turned away from the hilltop. He noticed, at the near edge of the swale, that a woman sat with a child in her arms. It was the woman who had stolen his sky boat and made him feel like a coward. The G’deon’s wife.

  He had stuck the dagger in his belt, but now he took it in his hand.

  He slithered down the steep slope, crossed the spiral road, and more cautiously crept down the slope again. He heard the child ask a querulous question, and heard the murmur of a reply.

  “They’ll be sorry they made her so mad!” he heard the girl say.

  “She won’t want to forgive them,” said Zanja na’Tarwein.

  “She shouldn’t.”

  “She probably wants to hurt them like they hurt you,” said the woman.

  Tashar could not hide from view, but the woman’s back was turned to him, and the girl was nearly invisible in her lap. With the ground nearly level, and the wet grass silent underfoot, he approached them. He heard the girl begin to weep: not the shrill, temperamental cries Tashar was accustomed to hearing in the House of Lora, but a heartbroken wail.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the woman. She was crying also. How dared she weep? He wasn’t weeping, even though he had lost his sky boat and upon the hilltop the brave members of Death-and-Life Company were being captured and hauled away like dumb animals.

  He charged her. In his mind’s eye, he slashed the blade across her throat. But her forearm somehow got in the way, and instead he sliced a long piece of flesh from her arm. He glimpsed the little girl, white-eyed with terror.

  The child would be so easy to kill! Yet somehow the girl had been flung away, and the woman, scrambling on one hand and two feet like an insect with half its legs pulled off, was impeding him, blocking him, forcing him to strike again at the bloody, bare bone of her arm. His weapon stuck in the bone and nearly slipped out of his hand. The famed fighter, Zanja na’Tarwein, had not even managed to get to her feet! If he thrust down at her back, and remembered to angle his blade so it slid between her ribs, he would pierce her lungs and might even pierce her heart.

  He felt a glee, like when he was sailing tight to a brisk wind, with the boat leaping from the waves and the sun shining in the spray so he was flying through rainbows.

  Then something punched him in the chest, and he fell.

  “Zanja,” Emil said.

  She looked at him, and he was smiling wryly at her. “Am I dead again?” she asked.

  “Alive,” he answered. “Bleeding some.”

  She heard a troubling sound, the hysterical cries of a child. “Leeba!”

  “Safe,” Emil said. “Safe. Safe.”

  He wasn’t wearing a shirt. He was hurting her arm. She looked down and saw his shirt padding her arm, sodden with blood. He pressed it with both his hands. I really should lie down, she thought. But she was already lying down.

  She turned her head and saw Medric with Leeba in his arms and a pistol in his hand. She saw a dead man who had a neat, black hole burned in his shirt. He had been trying to kill her, and she didn’t know why. But he was solemn, and quiet, and would never explain himself to anyone.

  Chapter 50

  When that motley company left their belongings on the edge of the forest, they also had left behind some twenty soldiers who were strung like beads along the supply line. These soldiers hauled the belongings back to the wagons, then drove the wagons by stone roads westward and then northward until they stumbled upon the main company. The air children received their Books of Everything, Norina her maps, the Paladins their notes for the dictionary, and Chaen her sketchbook. She immediately began to draw.

  Eventually, she and her sketchbook would go to Watfield, where the artists who lived in Travesty would teach her how to turn her drawings into etchings to be printed in a broadsheet distributed throughout Shaftal. A year later, those same etchings would be in Medric’s book, A Hinge of History: The Last Year, and the First. That book would be printed and reprinted until every village had at least one copy. But Chaen merely drew the pictures because her memory felt overfilled. She never imagined that, for the rest of her life, she would never be far from a print of those drawings.

  Chaen drew two people carrying a burned woman through the doorway to the cellar as soldiers hurried down the stairs to help them. Norina studied the faces of the people, members of Death-and-Life Company, then said to Chaen, who stood beside her, “Something has happened to Saugus—he may even be dead.”

  Chaen drew Karis, who was approaching them with her dogs and Paladins, blood dripping from the broken knuckles of her right hand. “Leeba is safe,” she said to Norina, who heaved a breath, as though she had not breathed at all for many days.

  Chaen even drew herself, a shadow in the smoky cellar, facing a thin, gangly young man of knobby bones and little muscle, like his father had been when Chaen first loved him. She grabbed Maxew’s bony arms and said, “I told them I could convince you to surrender.”

  He had made a strange, barking sound—perhaps it was laughter, distorted by smoke and despair. “Surrender for what, Mother
? Only death lies before me. Death and nothing else.”

  “You know nothing of what is possible,” she said. Then she knocked him down and threw herself upon his chest, so he couldn’t use his voice of command on her.

  But she did not draw how she begged Karis for his life, or how Norina took Maxew’s will into her control and led him into the darkness.

  Chaen drew Saugus, contorted by pain, dressed in the ashes of clothing, among charred blankets that had been used to smother the flames. His flesh was gruesome: vivid red, leathery white, and charcoal black. And yet he was alive enough to utter a wheezing whine of pain. In the drawing, Karis knelt beside Saugus on the smoking stones, numbing his agony with one hand while with the other she passed Norina the dagger she had plucked from the ashes.

  Norina spoke a few formal words and then killed him. His blood welled sluggishly from the large veins of his throat, flowed thickly between the floor stones, and stained the knees of the G’deon’s breeches. This Chaen did not draw. Nor did she draw how she had lingered beside the dead man and thanked him for his right and kind actions that few would remember. Saugus had not been evil—not always—but how could that fact be portrayed in a picture?

  She drew sleeping people—Sainnite, Paladin, and farmer—scattered across the swale while draft horses grazed among them, as Seth and a medic went from one person to the next with baskets of unguents and bandages. In the foreground lay Zanja and Medric, with Leeba between them. Emil watched over them, resting his hand sometimes on one, sometimes on another.

  Emil had beckoned Chaen over. “You, Paladin, become,” he had said.

  “I don’t understand—”

  He took her earlobe between his fingers, then touched his own, three-times pierced.

  “Become,” he had said.