Table of Contents
Prologue: Seeking Balance
Fire
Water
Earth
Air
Part One: The Region of Reconstruction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two: Mud Season
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three: Transported
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Part Four: Sea Change
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the author
Praise for Laurie J. Marks’s previous Elemental Logic novels:
Fire Logic
“Marks has created a work filled with an intelligence that zings off the page.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive always to do the right thing, and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost. This is read-it-straight-through adventure!”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
“A deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and elemental magic.”
—Robin Hobb
“Cuts deliciously through the mind to the heart with the delicacy, strength, beauty, and surgical precision of the layered Damascus steel blade that provides one of the book’s central images.”
—Candas Jane Dorsey
“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Entertaining and engaging—an excellent read!”
—Kate Elliott
“This is a treat: a strong, fast-paced tale of war and politics in a fantasy world where magic based on the four elements of alchemy not only works but powerfully affects the lives of those it touches. An unusual, exciting read.”
—Suzy McKee Charnas
“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.”
—Nalo Hopkinson
“Most intriguingly, about two-thirds of the way into the book, the low-key magical facets of her characters’ elemental magics rise away from simply being fancy “weapons” and evoke—for both the readers and the characters—that elusive sense of wonder.”
—Charles de Lint, The Magazine of Fantasy & ScienceFiction
“An exquisite novel of quiet charm. Fire Logic is a tale of war and magic, of duty, love and betrayal, of despair encompassed by hope.”
—SF Site
Earth Logic
“The powerful but subtle writing glows with intelligence, and the passionate, fierce, articulate, strong, and vital characters are among the most memorable in contemporary fantasy, though not for the faint of heart. Definitely for the thinking reader.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)
“The sequel to Fire Logic continues the tale of a woman born to magic and destined to rule. Vivid descriptions and a well-thought-out system of magic.”
—Library Journal
“Twenty years after the invading Sainnites won the Battle of Lilterwess, the struggle for the world of Shaftal is far from finished in Marks’s stirring, intricately detailed sequel to Fire Logic. . . . Full of love and humor as well as war and intrigue, this well-crafted epic fantasy will delight existing fans as surely as it will win new ones.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Rich and affecting. . . . A thought-provoking and sometimes heartbreaking political novel.”
—BookPage
“Earth Logic is not a book of large battles and heart-stopping chases; rather, it’s more gradual and contemplative and inexorable, like the earth bloods who people it. It’s a novel of the everyday folk who are often ignored in fantasy novels, the farmers and cooks and healers. In this novel, the everyday lives side by side with the extraordinary, and sometimes within it; Karis herself embodies the power of ordinary, mundane methods to change the world.”
—SF Revu
“It is an ambitious thing to do, in this time of enemies and hatreds, to suggest that a conflict can be resolved by peaceable means. Laurie Marks believes that it can be done, and she relies relatively little on magic to make it work.”
—Cheryl Morgan, Emerald City
“Earth Logic is intelligent, splendidly visualized, and beautifully written. Laurie Marks’s use of language is really tremendous.”
—Paula Volsky
“A dense and layered book filled with complex people facing impossible choices. Crammed with unconventional families, conflicted soldiers, amnesiac storytellers, and practical gods, the story also finds time for magical myths of origin and moments of warm, quiet humor. Against a bitter backdrop of war and winter, Marks offers hope in the form of various triumphs: of fellowship over chaos, the future over the past, and love over death.”
—Sharon Shinn
“A powerful and hopeful story where the peacemakers are as heroic as the warriors; where there is magic in good food and flower bulbs; and where the most powerful weapon of all is a printing press.”
—Naomi Kritzer
Water Logic
An Elemental Logic Novel
Laurie J. Marks
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2007 by Laurie J. Marks. All rights reserved.
www.lauriejmarks.com
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
smallbeerpress.com
weightlessbooks.com
[email protected]
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marks, Laurie J.
Water logic : an elemental logic novel / Laurie J. Marks. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-23-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-931520-23-2 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3613.A765W38 2007
813’.6--dc22
2007010083
First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Paper edition printed on 50# Natures Natural 50% Recycled Paper by Thomson-Shore, Dexter, MI.
Text set in Minion.
Cover art © Corbis: “To Pastures New” by Frederic Cayley Robinson.
For the people who looked after Deb and our pets, made certain we could pay the bills, took care of my students, and literally put my pieces together and got me back on my feet.
Prologue: Seeking Balance
Fire
If it can be imagined, it can be done, said Emil.
Emil, Medric, and Zanja, all fire bloods, had each by an equally unlikely route become governors of Shaftal. Yet only Emil even knew what a government was. He alone had been a minor thread in the vast tapestry of the old government before it unraveled. Children not then born had now borne children of their own—children who expected only bloodshed and oppression, who did not know and could not imagine how it had once been.
The patterns of the past can no longer serve, but people believe that strength lies in tradition, said Emil.
Zanja said, because of tradition they believe in Karis, little though she wants to be believed in.
No, earth is what they believe in, said Emil.
But even earth is unstable, said Medric. For the power of any witch arises from lack of balance. What we must have is the steadiness that comes from balance: the insight and passion of fire, the solidity and fertility of earth, the ideals and intelligence of air, the fluidity and vision of water. When, though informing and contradicting each other, the elements are in balance, then they become stable, and then we have strength.
But how can an entire country be in balance? asked Zanja. How can we do now what we must, while also devising a future?
Oh, it’s an impossible task, said Medric. Let us begin it at once.
Water
Ocean stands knee-deep in the future.
The water is warm. The harbor is protected. There is a narrow beach, insurmountable cliffs, a pounding waterfall. These have not been enough.
She is a child when she flees there with the remnant of the tribe. The strangers have come, with their weapons and their anger. Ocean is there, and now she is the leader of the tribe. She finds a haven for them. She is standing there now, but the tribe has gone.
The people have built larger boats, and have learned to grab the wind with them. They have slipped between the rocks and dared the open sea. Ocean returns to the ship, to every ship, in every storm, in every passage. She returns and the sea never takes the sailors, and they find the way back to the harbor with barrels of salted fish. They go out and meet other ships, and they trade for all that their small harbor does not give them. To this chary shore, to toothed rocks, to hungry waves, they return, she returns, the tide rises and falls and she returns, and the pattern is failing.
She stands in childhood; she stands in adulthood; an old woman now, she stands in the future. The tide flows, in and out, and always inevitably there is less. The pattern will be failing, the pattern has always been failing, and it has failed. She will stand in the future, is standing there, and she is alone. The pattern has failed. It must not fail. She returns and again she begins.
Earth
Months had passed, and every night Seth still thought about Clem, a weary, haunted, quiet woman, making a difficult journey in dead of winter. They had made love in the way of strangers who are compelled towards each other—a surprising, strange, unsettling, yet heady business, coming to know each other’s skin without knowing each other’s secrets.
Later, when Clem returned as Clement, lieutenant general of the Sainnites in Shaftal, leading a company of soldiers, the uniform had changed her into someone else. They had not touched, though Seth’s hands had yearned to her: not to the heavy, oil-blackened leather, not to the gray wool underneath, where brass buttons flashed. Her hands yearned to the skin, upon which her fingers had once sensed the scars in the dark, the scars Seth never mentioned and hardly even heeded.
Seth’s hands had betrayed her into foolishness, into a stupid mistake that might well make her notorious—a Basdown cow doctor who was such a bumpkin she had mistaken a Sainnite soldier for a Shaftali farmer, even when they lay naked in her bed! Yet at that second meeting, Clem’s—Clement’s—identity had been a surprise but had not mattered: Seth’s hands still wanted that hauntedness, that hunger. She wanted Clem.
No, the lieutenant general had said. No. And she had left with her soldiers, she had slept with them in the barn, though Seth lay awake half the night listening for the sound of the door latch. She is a Sainnite, she reminded herself, over and over. A Sainnite—a monster—a killer—a leader of monsters and killers. She listened for the door latch, nevertheless. In the morning the soldiers had left, Clement among them, walking across the snow, dragging sledges behind them. Seth’s family went to the cow barn, fearing the worst, but found it neater than it had been; found that the Sainnites had made their beds in straw and left the hay alone; had molested none of the animals and had not even requested food for themselves. Never before had Sainnites been such careful guests.
Later, there came rumors: Harald G’deon had vested a successor after all, a woman who had been living in obscurity but now had stepped forth. She had reached through a garrison gate and nearly strangled the general of the Sainnites with her bare hands. Within hours, he had fallen ill and died. With a single blow of a hammer, the G’deon had knocked to pieces the walls of Watfield Garrison. The new general had clasped hands with the new G’deon, and they had made peace with each other. Surely such things could not be true!
But then there were broadsheets, carried from farm to farm—and Seth had examined an etched illustration of the G’deon and the new general standing upon a pile of rubble, clasping hands: Clement, general of the Sainnites in Shaftal, and, towering over her, Karis, G’deon of Shaftal. The etching was titled, peace between our people. Isn’t that—? said Seth’s family. Surely not!
Later, a Paladin had come to Basdown, bearing a letter addressed to an elder who had died earlier that winter. Soon the letter also made the rounds of the households, grimy and softened from being passed from hand to hand, carried through wet weather, read again and again at one or another farmstead. There would be a government in Shaftal once again. A person from Basdown must be named councilor and must travel to Watfield, to speak for the people of the region.
The elders of Basdown asked Seth to go to Watfield and speak for them.
Air
Whatever he said, she knew it was truth, knew it in her bones, where it transformed to steel the human stuff that broke too easily and never healed right: Meertown folded steel, which no one had seen but everyone knew about, that never lost its edge and never rusted, not even in salt water. His truths gave her bones that did not bend, that supported her changeable, fragile spirit in such a way that she was strong. Such strength she had now!
All will be well, he said. Now she had come here, fearless in this fearsome place, this city where all that was wrong was embraced, where people went about with their eyes glazed, some bewildered and some enchanted and most waiting in doubt for their hopes to be fulfilled. She had traveled here with the others, Senra, Charen, Tarera, Irin, and Jareth, her brave companions. Her son had left, for he had his own calling. His absence freed her. She had nothing to do, and the empty hours begged her to fill them with her pigments and brushes. So she painted them: her son and him, whose name must never be said or even thought, both of them in one face. Not even the others recognized who it was! Yet to her heart the two of them had always been the same.
She painted, in a cramped, dirty room, in this notorious city, where no one suspected her presence. How delicious that ignorance was. The evil ones, the bringers of violence and destruction, here was their center, their ruler, their locus of power. The soldiers, yes—but not only the soldiers, mere animals after all, hardly worth the time and effort required to extermi
nate them. Their leaders, for leaders they must have—they cannot decide anything for themselves, not even where to dig their latrines, for land’s sake. One might almost pity them in their stupidity if they weren’t such brutes.
If they hadn’t—if they hadn’t . . .
Her thoughts stopped there, as they always did, ever since he put a bulwark in her spirit to protect her from the memories. The past did not matter, he had said, and it was true. She looked to the future, to the one who was coming, whose way must be cleared, whose pretender must be eliminated, whose beasts must be butchered, so that the true people of Shaftal could see clearly! Their task had seemed impossible, until he showed them the simplicity of it. Small actions have massive results. So simple!
She painted. Her companions could not abide the smell and left her alone, which was a relief, though she adored them. The two faces gazed out as one face, and she felt full, satisfied, fearless. She might die soon, and the prospect filled her with gladness. Whether she lived or died, those united faces would gaze at her always: solemn, confident, approving. You have done well.
Water Logic Page 1