Clement burst into barracks, roused the sleepers, dealt with the affronted company captains, and dismayed the soldiers with her urgent questions. By half-way to morning, Clement had spoken to all four hundred soldiers in combat companies, and also to the armorers, the cobblers, and the stable crew. It was in the stable that she finally found a man, the stable captain, who had participated in the attack on the Ashawala’i. A bow-legged man Clement’s age or older, he had been burned while rescuing horses from last summer’s fire, and after all these months the injury still kept him awake nights. In the back room of the newly-built stable, he stoked the fire in the stove and set on top of it a rusty pot of what appeared to be treacle, though he claimed it was tea. He appeared to view Clement’s unprecedented visit as the opportunity for a leisurely chat to while away the night, and he was less than pleased when, upon learning that his duties had prevented him from attending any of the storyteller’s performances, she insisted that he immediately put on his coat and come to the gaol with her.
The night had gotten bitter cold. The deserted roadways, transformed to narrow passageways by the piled-up snow, offered a very slippery argument for the value of hobnailed boots. It was the kind of cold that silences speech, but Clement persisted with questions that the captain answered with chilled brevity.
He had witnessed the attack on the Ashawala’i from a distance. The Sainnites’ approach had been noticed in time for the tribal warriors to set up a defense, but the war horses had galloped right over them, and had herded the fleeing villagers into the second prong of a two-pronged attack. What followed was a bloody slaughter.
“So that was it?” Clement asked. “The Ashawala’i were all killed?”
“We certainly wished that were true. Some ten, twelve days it took us to get out of the mountains, and sometimes we feared not one of us would get out alive. They burned our supply wagons, drove our pack animals over a cliff, and shot a dozen pickets. That was just the first day.”
“How many survivors were there, do you think?”
“We didn’t know. We hardly saw them.”
“What did the people of this tribe look like?”
“Like racers: deep chests, light build, strong legs. It’s hard to even breathe in them mountains. And if you’re not grinding your way up a heartbreaking slope, you’re trying to keep from falling down one. Those people, they could run all day up and down those vicious ridges, and then they would sneak into our camp at night, and cut throats so quietly no one would even notice until fifteen or twenty soldiers were dead. It got so no one dared sleep.”
“They were fearsome, then. But what was their appearance?”
“Dark skin. Black hair: straight, coarse, long as a horse’s tail. Eyes the color of their skin. Their faces were sharp and narrow. Long, braided hair—dozens of braids, all knotted together.”
There was a silence while in her mind Clement compared this description to the storyteller, and found no difference but in the length of her hair—excepting that solitary braid.
The stable captain said, “You’re not thinking this storyteller is the one that was captured alive? Because I can tell you now, she’s not.”
“One of these warriors was captured alive?” she said in amazement.
“She lured us into a canyon, and then her companions dumped a mountain of rocks onto our heads. We pulled her out of the rocks, and it turned out she spoke Sainnese, so the commander thought she might be some use, and didn’t kill her.”
“Good gods, she spoke Sainnese? Would you recognize her, do you think?”
“I tell you, it’s not her. This warrior we captured, her back was broken. She was paralyzed—when they chopped off some of her toes she didn’t even flinch. And her skull was cracked, too, a kick from a war horse, probably. The medic figured she’d die any moment, but she was still alive when we reached the garrison. I don’t know what became of her, but she sure isn’t walking on her own two feet!”
They had reached the gaol. As they went through the ritual of recognition and admittance, Clement’s exhausted thoughts were overcome by a dreadful image of a woman warrior like herself—maimed, broken tormented by memories of a massacre—and yet alive. Then, Clement and the stable captain stood at the barred door of the gaol cell. Within, the storyteller sat awake, huddled in her cloak, gazing blankly into darkness. Clement held up the lantern so its light could enter through the grate. The stable captain peered in. He stumbled back. He gave Clement a look of terrified disbelief. “It’s her.”
In Clement’s bed the girl-nurse slept, puffy-eyed and tangle-haired, in a mess of blankets that testified to a terrible restlessness. She must have realized the child was sick, and was terrified even before she saw the storyteller arrested. But she had found a temporary peace now, and Clement left her alone. The baby, closely wrapped in his basket near the fire, was still cold, still limp, still unresponsive, but still breathing. She talked to him softly and bid him farewell. An eventful, possibly dreadful day lay before her, and she doubted she would manage to see him alive again.
She left him in his basket, and went to Gilly’s room. Perhaps two hours remained before Cadmar would have reason to angrily summon her, and even the sight of Gilly’s sleeping face, gray and drawn with pain, could not make her wait to awaken him. She shook him. He opened his eyes, squinting in the lantern light. “You look like hell,” he mumbled.
She sat heavily in the chair by his bed. “I’ll help you to get up. I don’t even know where to look for your aide at this hour.”
“Give me some time to wake up, or I’ll just fall over. How is the baby?”
“I doubt he’ll survive the morning.”
He sighed.
“Gilly, what do you know about earth magic? How does it work? What can it do?”
“Earth magic?” Gilly rubbed his face with one hand. “It is physical—a physical power with a physical existence. It inhabits the flesh of the earth bloods, and it flows out of them through physical contact. Whatever earth witches do, they do it with their hands.”
“Are earth bloods healers?”
“Yes, people with earth talent might be healers, farmers, stonemasons, artisans of any type.”
“Could an earth witch heal a broken back that had caused paralysis?”
Gilly’s painful effort of sitting up was excruciating to watch. He finally said, “I doubt it. I don’t know what the limits are, but surely something so dramatic would be talked about.”
“Could a G’deon?”
“A G’deon?” Gilly considered. “Yes, it seems possible.”
Clement said, “Well then, the proof of the Lost G’deon’s existence, and the proof of the storyteller’s identity may all be written down, in a document that even Cadmar can read.”
“What document?” said Gilly with great surprise.
“The storyteller’s body: her skin, her bones, her scars.”
Gilly rubbed his furrowed face again. “You must be awfully frightened, Clem,” he said. “Terror brings out your genius.”
The storyteller waited, as she always waited, in silence and stillness, without impatience or fear. Gilly entered the cell behind Clement and sat heavily on the stone bench.
The walls of the cell were shiny with ice. A barred window, as big as a hand, let in a little gray light. When the wind picked up, it blew in a cloud of fresh snow. A few flakes decorated the storyteller’s shoulder.
Clement said, “Take off your clothes.”
The storyteller commented, “This is a strange conclusion.”
Gilly said sharply. “What do you mean?”
In the silence that followed, the storyteller stood up and undressed. Under cloak and jacket she wore her close-fitted suit of heavy gray wool. Under that there was silk, and linen, and under that nothing. Her skin, even the skin that was never exposed to sun, was brown, almost black. She had a light build, a deep chest, and powerful legs. It was not at all difficult to imagine her running lightly up and down the vicious ridges of the hi
gh mountains, or sneaking into a heavily guarded camp to cut the throats of sleeping soldiers.
Clement lay her hand on the woman’s bare shoulder. She felt a shudder, but the storyteller only seemed to be shivering from cold. Clement put a hand to the woman’s coarse, stiff hair. She dug her fingers to the skull, and her fingertips encountered the hard ridge of a healed fracture. She felt how the woman’s hair tangled there, where it grew out crooked from a ragged scar. “How long has it been since your head was broken?” Clement asked.
“My head was broken?” the storyteller asked.
Surely this flat curiosity was feigned? Exasperated, Clement said sharply, “Turn around so I can see your back.”
The storyteller turned impassively.
“Good gods! Gilly, hold up the lantern!”
The storyteller’s back was a shocking patchwork: a disease, or a terrible burn, had left large pale patches in her skin. But when Clement touched the pale skin, she found it soft, healthy, unweathered as a child’s. What could cause such a thing?
Gilly said, “Lying a long time on the back in an unclean bed can cause the flesh to be eaten away, I’ve heard.” He was speaking with difficulty; the lantern trembled in his hand.
Clement said, “Did that happen to you, storyteller?”
The storyteller said nothing.
“Hold still.” Clement pressed her fingers down the length of the woman’s backbone. When she found the lumpy mass of a healed bone in the woman’s lower back, she felt no surprise, only relief. She knelt, taking the lantern from Gilly to illuminate the woman’s bare feet. Some of her toes were brown, others were pink. And then, as Clement raised her face, she found right in front of her nose the distinct, round scar of a gunshot wound in the side of the storyteller’s thigh.
“You must have taken that gunshot when you were in South Hill,” Clement said. “When you were a Paladin. But a wound like this would have putrefied. It wouldn’t be a clean scar like this—in fact, you should have lost your leg entirely.”
The storyteller looked down at her. “What a story my skin is telling you.”
“I read here that you are long-time enemy of my people, an Ashawala’i warrior whose back was broken six years ago.”
“Katrim,” she said.
“What?”
“You believe I am an enemy of your people, a Paladin, and a katrim?”
“I believe you are the last survivor of the Ashawala’i. I believe your injuries were healed by the Lost G’deon.”
The storyteller said, “May I get dressed?”
“Oh, for gods’ sake! What possible purpose can your pretense of forgetfulness serve?”
“I do not pretend.” Without permission, the storyteller began dressing.
Clement sat next to Gilly and put her head in her hands. Her relief had given way to crushing exhaustion. Like a wanderer lost in a dark night, she could see no further than her next random step. After a night’s desperate work, she could prove that the Lost G’deon existed. And now she had no idea what to do with that knowledge. “Gilly, help me.”
Gilly said, “I have always believed the storyteller to be telling the truth as she understood it. Storyteller, will you tell us what is your purpose in Watfield?”
“I am collecting stories,” the storyteller said.
“It occurs to me that a fire blood could probably make a great deal of sense of us, just by hearing our stories.”
The storyteller looked up from doing her buttons. “A fire blood can make sense of anything. Perhaps I could also, were I more than half a person.”
“You are half a person?” said Gilly blankly.
“That is what the raven told me.”
Clement lifted her head from her hands. “Gods of hell!” she breathed.
“You’ve been talking to a raven?” said Gilly casually. “What did you talk about?”
“You must ask the raven, Lucky Man. I do not owe you a story.”
Clement was nonplused, but Gilly apparently had overcome the lingering mental dullness caused by his pain draught, for he promptly said, “But you do owe a story to Clement, now she has read to you the story in your skin.”
Prompted by a jab of Gilly’s elbow, Clement said politely, “I would very much like to hear this tale.”
The storyteller covered her once-mutilated feet with heavy wool socks. Then, she reached into her left boot and took out her packet of glyph cards. “The raven told me that I am part of a whole, and that the remainder of my self is lost. In return for this story, he asked me to cast the cards, to answer a question. The question was, How can the Sainnites be overcome without destroying the spirit of Shaftal? This is how I answered him.”
As she lay fifteen glyph cards on the bench, in a complicated arrangement, Gilly said in a low voice, “To read the glyphs with any depth requires long study—and I thought this arcane knowledge was lost entirely. How a tribal woman learned it is difficult to imagine.”
Apparently finished laying out the cards, the storyteller put on boots, jacket, and cloak. She pulled the hood over her head, and sat on the bench with her knees tucked to her chest and her cloak wrapped around herself against the cold. The illustrated people on the glyph cards variously spoke, shouted, screamed, or wondered—but they were all speechless, and the odd situations the cards depicted seemed meaningless. Gilly said, “Ask her to explain, Clem.”
Clement said, “Explain these cards to me, as you explained them to the raven.”
“I could not explain the pattern to the raven, and I cannot explain it to you.”
“You cast the cards without understanding them?” said Gilly in dismay. “What good do you suppose it did the raven?”
The storyteller said, “The raven did not seem disappointed.”
The dawn bell began to ring. Its crisp sound could be heard clearly in the small cell. The storyteller said, “This is the twelfth day of the new year. Now I am done telling stories.”
And, though Clement and Gilly both asked increasingly frustrated questions, the storyteller remained as implacably and unreadably speechless as her cards.
Chapter 35
In one of the four rented rooms, in the center of a table, there lay a small, bloodstained file. A raven had filched it from a dead woman’s pocket and had brought it to Karis, who had carried it in her own pocket for the last five days of their grueling journey to Watfield. Next to the file lay Emil’s pocket watch, ticking merrily, oblivious to its exile from the little room where Emil and Medric studied, questioned, and argued over a pattern of glyph cards laid out on the floor. The twelfth day of the first year of Karis G’deon had dawned—and Karis sat at the table with her head in her hands, still waiting for her two wise men to tell her what to do.
Nearly six years had passed since Garland left Watfield to become a wandering exile. Last night he had returned, hauling a sledge packed with blankets and cooking gear, surrounded by a dozen companions, including Councilor Mabin and six of her Paladins, plus one bored and irritable little girl, and a raven too tired to fly. To find shelter at that late hour for such a number of travelers had proven quite difficult. Garland had heard the midnight bell ring in the garrison as they finally built up the fires in their rented rooms.
Just past midnight, Norina had sat beside Karis at this very table. “It is time for the storyteller to die.”
Karis said, “The Sainnites imprisoned her this afternoon. She’s safely out of your reach.”
Norina had silently studied her, until Karis hid her face in her hands and told her to leave her alone.
Norina said to Garland, “Has Karis slept at all since Long Night?”
“She’s slept a little, some nights.”
“She has a sturdy constitution, but she can’t continue like this.”
Karis said, “Leave the nagging to your husband—he does it better. And go away.”
Norina had complied, but not for long. The Paladins, sent out to locate some specific townsfolk, began to return with them: more of E
mil’s numerous friends, Mabin’s agents, members of the local Paladin company—all confused by this abrupt summons from their beds, and inclined to react with amazed tears when they were introduced to Karis. She endured their adulation with a certain graceless patience. Mabin and Norina talked with these people all night, and Emil’s incomprehensible work with the glyph cards was frequently interrupted as he was asked to greet newcomers, or to answer questions.
Soon after dawn, when the city elders arrived, Garland went out to purchase a nearby baker’s bread as it came out of the oven. But Karis could not eat anything. Now, the two of them sat alone, waiting.
Clement and Gilly arrived in Cadmar’s quarters a few moments behind Commander Ellid. They walked in on her complaint about not having been forewarned of Clement’s actions, but Cadmar was still too dumbfounded at what he was hearing to have yet become angry.
Clement attempted to explain herself.
Ellid, who knew nothing of the political matters that concerned Clement, lapsed into a bewildered silence, which she broke only once to comment, “Well, perhaps there was some justification.”
But Cadmar scarcely seemed able to hear what Clement was saying. “I told you to rest!”
“Yes, general.”
“And instead you took it upon yourself—”
Gilly said, “General, in this one case, perhaps . . .”
Cadmar roared, “I will not overlook it!”
In the past, Clement’s frequent disagreements with Cadmar had always been resolved by a combination of persuasion and manipulation in which Clement and Gilly had usually collaborated. Clement knew better than to oppose Cadmar directly: Cadmar loved to fight, and delighted in displaying his superiority, and she could not possibly win against him. Now, the flood of Cadmar’s rage washed over her, and she could only endure the shouting, seething at the waste of time.
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