While eating supper with the four students in the Kisha pie shop, Zanja had asked Coles how long it had taken him to master all the glyphs. “It took more than four years,” he had told her. “We learned the glyphs in groups, of course, so we could understand them by similarity and difference. And we learned them in sequence, so we could see how the meanings build upon each other. I’d say we learned one a day.”
I’d learn much faster than that, Zanja had thought. But with neither a teacher nor an interpretive text—at least not one she could read—she was making no progress.
For a few days after she took the lexicon, she had been able to trick herself into thinking she had a personal mission here in ancient Shaftal—a mission to recover not just knowledge but wisdom. Then she reminded herself it would be impossible to bring the actual lexicon home with her. If she did find the witch, and if the witch was in fact required by the logic of her magic to return Zanja to her place, Zanja would make the journey in water, and the lexicon, even if it didn’t drown her with its weight, would be destroyed. The book would travel only in her memory.
Surely the library contained many other lexicons, with plainer illustrations and readable text—why had she not seen fit to steal one of those, which she might be able to learn more quickly? Why had she burdened herself with a book that required many years of study? Her situation had not been clarified by the theft of the book; rather it had been made impossible.
She lay in discomfort, glaring at the distant, bright stars.
Some hours later, the donkey scrambled up and uttered an ear-shattering bray. Zanja found herself on her feet, kicking away the entangling blankets and snatching up her dagger. As the donkey brayed his alarm again, she peered across the rocky, treeless landscape, seeking the flowing shape of a great cat, or the precise formation of a wolf pack. But what she spotted was a man walking towards her through the shadows.
At the same moment the lone traveler seemed to spot her. “Zanja na’Tarwein, can you not silence that awful racket?”
“Is it Arel?” she cried. “How can that be?” She hurried to meet him and they clasped hands, laughing at each other’s amazement. “You are in the Asha Valley,” she insisted. “You could not possibly have traveled there and back again so quickly.”
“Then you are not here, either,” Arel declared.
“I wish I could make you welcome, but I have neither food nor drink.”
“Let’s eat the donkey.”
“I’ve got no fuel to cook him with.”
He waved an arm extravagantly at the sky. “Star-fire!”
“That’s too much trouble, considering that our shoes would be tastier to eat. But at least I have blankets we could sit on. Come and explain yourself to me.”
“I believe I have some Basdown cheese in this satchel of mine,” he said as they walked back to Zanja’s campsite. “And possibly even some bread and dried fruit.”
Zanja did not say much more until after she had satisfied her first mad rush of hunger. By then, having had time to consider, she said, “You must be attending the G’deon in Basdown. He has realized he cannot repair whatever is wrong there, and he sent for you because he thought a traveler-between-worlds could have insights that a mender-of-broken-things cannot.”
“Yes, of course.”
“But why did you return to the House of Lilterwess with your journey not completed?”
“Halfway to the Asha Valley I encountered some katrim who had set forth as soon as the pass was clear, to find out what had become of me. They took the ponies and goods to bring to the valley, and I turned back.”
After a moment Zanja said, “The elders will disapprove.”
Arel shrugged, as Zanja had often done in response to such concerns. “I was miserable with unsatisfied curiosity—too miserable to do anything but turn back. I had to find out what had become of you.”
“Ah, a reason I understand. Well, I haven’t found the water witch yet, but I think I know where she is.”
So they sat talking, in a land so empty and quiet that they could hear wind whistling in the fissures of the bare black stones. Zanja did not tell Arel everything. In the morning, when in daylight he noticed the donkey’s peculiar burden, he certainly realized she was keeping a secret from him. But the Ashawala’i were circumspect. Arel did not demand an explanation.
That day the sun rose over a bank of clouds that lay on the flat horizon to the east. The distant winds that normally move the clouds across the sky did not affect these vapors, and Zanja found their immobility disconcerting.
“It is strange,” Arel agreed. “Tadwell told me it’s water weather—a fog that through spring lies over the coastline at dawn and burns off by midday.” He added, “Like me you have not been here before?”
As the bank of clouds faded away Zanja kept glancing to the east, but the ocean itself was too distant to see. She would view the ocean soon enough, for she was just a few days’ journey from Secret. She couldn’t avoid Tadwell now, so she continued as she had done since reaching Shimasal: she walked boldly down the highway as though she truly were a Paladin. Arel, who seemed to have become fascinated by the problems in Basdown, recounted with horror the most recent clash between two families in which one person had been so badly clubbed that he died, and another had been crippled.
“That is the worst of the feuds right now,” said Arel. “But nearly every family has at least one long-standing grudge against another. The Truthkens say that the entire region has a madness, and even the children are afflicted with it. This madness has gone unnoticed for many generations. And even they do not know how to cure such a thing.”
That the problem would be resolved Zanja knew, and she listened to Arel with a disinterested indulgence. “Tadwell must be furious with them.”
“He would like to force them all to leave Basdown entirely and start new elsewhere. But the Truthkens say the Basdowners would bring the madness with them and thus infect the entire country with it.”
“Have you thought of any solutions?”
Arel laughed. “I have been here three days, and the only person here who is more stubborn than these Basdowners is Tadwell. I don’t know of a solution for stubbornness.”
“How many Truthkens are with him?”
“Three now, and it is dreadful to converse with all of them at once. Tadwell is considering whether to send for all the Truthkens in Shaftal, over a dozen of them. If I were a Basdowner I’d flee.”
Entering Basdown was like stepping over a threshold from the dry, sparse expanse of the Barrens into a sodden, lush land of dense woods and rolling hills. Soon the Barrens had passed completely out of sight, and here was a land of sunny meadows, shining brooks, numerous small ponds, and narrow, twisting woodlands that dug roots into the waterways that marked the lowlands between cow-scattered hilltops. Zanja soon noticed that live trees had been clear-cut wherever it was possible to enlarge the meadows; every farmstead was surrounded by stacked logs—much more firewood and timber than any family would need in a year. Zanja muttered, “Something is wrong with these people. They’re laying waste to their own woodlands!”
“And they have too many children and keep too many cattle. They are greedy.”
Late in the day, they reached a small inn. Here Tadwell’s Paladins and Truthkens had more than filled the stable and the guest beds. Several temporary sleeping shelters had been built in the inn yard, and a number of riding horses ran loose in a meadow. By the time Zanja had set her donkey loose with them and dumped her gear in one of the shelters, a Paladin had come out to escort them to Tadwell. The Paladin looked sharply at Zanja’s disguise but asked no questions. Zanja beat the dust out of her clothing and left her dirt-caked boots at the door.
“Tadwell says you are to keep from being noticed,” the Paladin said. “Almost everyone is in the public room right now.
Perhaps the Speaker will assist me in shielding you from being seen.”
So Zanja entered the inn with the two men crowding between her and the open doorway of the public room. She caught only glimpses of sullen cow farmers and did not spot the Truthkens at all, although her skin crawled with awareness of their presence. Once they had passed the doorway, she realized she was holding her breath.
When they reached a guarded door, Arel stood back and she went in alone. Tadwell, unattended, sat at a table by the open window, eating beef stew. “Sit down,” he said. “You must be hungry.”
She sat opposite him and forced herself to take a spoonful from the bowl that awaited her, hoping that her appetite might overcome her tension so she could eat with proper enthusiasm. At any moment, a messenger from Kisha might arrive.
“Are you in Basdown to see me?” asked Tadwell. “Or are you simply making a tour of the borderlands?”
“I am traveling south. I found a water witch at Otter Lake, and he pointed me towards the sea people. At Kisha I determined where the ocean tribes live, and then my glyph cards pointed me southward . . .”
She didn’t feel hungry but used the stew as an excuse to avoid meeting his sharp stare. When she couldn’t avoid looking up he was still looking at her without any particular friendliness. “Have I done something wrong?”
“You’re a charlatan!”
She let the spoon drop back in the stew. He had tricked her into believing he had not discovered her. Her prescience had failed to warn her. And she could not even explain why she had done what she had done.
“You seem to think I’m a rustic at a fair,” said Tadwell. “Are you going to offer to tell my fortune now?”
Zanja could only hope that her face had not betrayed her terror. “No, Tadwell, people who let others choose their way for them are fools. I only use glyph cards to enhance my little insight, and sometimes they make my decisions clearer—especially when it is a direct question such as what direction to take.” She took out her card pack and hunted through the pile until she found the one that had determined her direction: South, the Herder; with its grassland goatherd singing ecstatically to the stars. “It was a simple answer.”
“But is it good?”
“If not, I’ll ask again.” Wanting to discuss the glyphs and her preoccupation with them as little as possible, she continued her account, pretending that Tadwell’s accusation had not practically stopped her heart in her chest. “The people who live on the coast south of here are the farthest south of the ocean tribes.”
Tadwell’s spoon scraped the bottom of the clay bowl. “Those people are great sailors and boat builders, and they often trade with passing ships. But they don’t wander far, and the don’t appreciate visitors. They send a Speaker to the House of Lilterwess only when there’s something to complain of, and they’ve had nothing to complain of in my lifetime. Why is their witch meddling in Shaftali history?”
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Ravenous,” said Zanja. She discovered that she was.
“I wonder,” said Tadwell as she attacked the rich stew, “If I were to ask how to resolve this Basdown problem, would the cards give you insight?”
Zanja lay her hand on the card pack. It lay passive under her touch. “Not at all,” she said. But then there popped into her head the glyph illustration that had so frustrated her the night before. “A dog. It is completely integrated into the landscape, part of a complex interrelationship of interdependent elements.”
“What?”
She was already wishing she had silenced her impulse to speak. “It’s a glyph I’ve seen but that isn’t in my pack. It just came to me, but you must ask a glyphologist what it means, for I don’t know.”
“One of the Paladins will be familiar with it.”
Zanja was not merely dismissed to continue her hunt for the water witch, but was even given a fresh supply of food. Arel walked down the highway with her, well into the afternoon, until they reached a big, busy farm within sight of the road, where a couple of short-legged, self-important dogs came out to keep an eye on them. Arel said, “That’s High Meadow Farm. Tadwell was here two days ago. That family killed a neighbor shortly after snowmelt.”
“I know someone from High Meadow.”
“Is your friend temperamental, unforgiving, and shortsighted?”
“The exact opposite.” Zanja’s gaze lingered on the dogs, who had lain in a patch of sunlight, grinning cheerfully at the visitors, bright tongues lolling. “I wonder what Tadwell will do.”
“Stay and find out. Why are you in such a hurry?”
“I dare not linger.”
Arel gave her a hard look, and she sighed. “I wish I could tell you everything. But I will say that I’m trying to outrun trouble—trouble I brought upon myself.”
“To run from that kind of trouble is always a mistake.”
“It’s honorable to face consequences and dishonorable to run from them. Yet I am running. The thing that’s driving me is more important than honor.”
She clasped his hand. “Farewell, my brother.”
She left him, and did not look back.
Three days later, she reached the abrupt eastern edge of Shaftal and for the first time set eyes on the sea.
Part Four: Sea Change
Chapter 27
Emil yanks open a sticking window sash and calls, “Raven!” Emil’s raven, never out of hearing, dives down from the gable in a vertiginous, curving swoop.
Karis is far away, and yet she staggers and falls to her knees. The Paladins whose onerous duty it is to watch over her leap out of the wagon where they have been eating a midday meal of bread and cheese. She gestures at them: keep away. Now that the raven has settled on the windowsill, Karis is able to stand up and go to the nearby stones that lie like giant broken teeth at the base of a steep hillside.
The raven—Karis—watches Emil pace from window to worktable, where an old book lies in carefully dissected pieces: boards, spine, and page signatures. “Emil,” she says to him. “I need your counsel. I need your resolve.”
But the raven says nothing. When the Paladins killed her raven to save Clement, that injury had been terrible. And when the assassin in Basdown managed to kill another, it had been worse. Now the surviving ravens cannot speak.
Emil says, “Karis, I know something that I shouldn’t withhold from you. But I’m worried about how you’ll react.”
“Oh, for land’s sake!” Karis mutters.
“I don’t know if you can even hear through your ravens anymore. Perhaps I’m just a dotty old man talking to a bird.”
Medric utters a muffled laugh amid the bookshelves. “Oh, she can hear you.”
“That’s something, anyway.” Emil sits at his table. He leaps up. “Should I tell her?”
“How dreadful for you,” Medric says, “to have to trust our G’deon’s judgment!”
“And how dreadful for her, to have to trust herself!” He sits again. “How ever did I manage, Medric, before you arrived to transform every dark moment into absurdity?”
Karis notes the easing of the worry lines in his face. “It’s a good thing I can’t talk to you,” Karis says. “For nothing I would say could make you happy.”
Emil says, “Karis, your very clever wife has managed to send me a letter, by putting it in the spine of Gerunt’s Decision. She must have remembered that book was on my table for me to mend. The letter is no longer in her handwriting—the librarians discovered it several times in the last two hundred years. Then one moved it to a new printing of the same book, because the original was beyond repair. The letter’s entire history is carefully noted here—every librarian who found and read the letter has made a record of it.”
He opens a protective
folder, and Karis endures vertigo again as the raven flies to the back of Emil’s chair. The many-times-recopied letter had cracked on its fold lines as Emil opened it, and now it has been pasted onto a fresh page. Karis gazes at it through raven’s eyes, her hands covering her own.
Emil reads out loud:
Emil, my dear friend: I have been abducted by a water witch. For over a month I have been trying to discover how to get home again, and I am writing this letter in Kisha, where the students—most of them—are preparing for examinations. I have met some people Medric will yearn to hear about: Tadwell G’deon, the current Speaker for the Ashawala’i, and a student in Kisha named Coles. But I dare not write of them.
Medric utters a theatrical groan. Emil says, “She doesn’t even say why!”
Water Logic Page 29