Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Willis sat back, his face flushed. “I’m just sick and tired of missing our opportunities. Now that you have new counsel you pay no heed to the old.”

  Emil could seem astonishingly harmless, but he did not look harmless at that moment. “You question my judgment, the Councilor’s judgment, and gravely insult a fellow Paladin who has repeatedly risked her life this season, and this is all you have to say?”

  There was another silence, then Willis, his face bright red, said, “I beg your pardon—sir. I meant no insult. I was over-zealous.”

  Emil said nothing. His hand still lay heavy upon Zanja’s shoulder.

  Willis looked directly at Zanja and said, “I hope you will pardon me as well.” There was no mistaking the hatred with which he said these words.

  Zanja wanted desperately to challenge him to a duel and win a more sincere apology on her own terms. But this was not the Asha Valley, and Willis was no katrim. She said, as stiffly as he had, “Of course I will pardon you.”

  Everyone began to talk then, as though nothing had happened. But no one else suggested ambushing the Sainnites. The discussion focused on the logistics of retreat, for their fifty fighters had swelled to a hundred, and they had precious equipment to protect.

  Jerrell’s infusion did little for Zanja’s headache. When Emil’s circle dispersed to spread the word that they were breaking camp, Zanja got to her feet and nearly fell over.

  Emil caught her and said, “What is it? Are you ill?”

  She said, “Willis thinks you are ripe for replacement and is just biding his time, waiting for you to prove yourself incompetent. But my precipitant rise in your esteem has made him think that I am a pretender to a position that he considers rightfully his.”

  “Yes, yes,” Emil said patiently, and felt her forehead.

  “You trust me because I’m so much like you. Even a fool like Willis can see it.”

  “No, I trust you because I know you’re trustworthy. What is the matter with you?”

  “Last summer, a Sainnite war horse kicked me in the head. I was like this for months afterward.”

  “Sit down. I’ll have someone get your gear. I want you to stay with me tonight.”

  By full dark, South Hill Company had dispersed, with a third of the Paladins under the command of each lieutenant, hauling gear and supplies to new encampments on the various overlooks. Zanja traveled in the smallest group, which consisted of Emil, the distinguished guests, and a few fleet-footed couriers. They traveled in a wide circle, north through woods so thick that the dignitaries had to lead their horses, west through farmlands, then south upon the dark road, back to the end of the lowlands, just to the southwest of Fen Overlook.

  Mabin had insisted on accompanying Emil, though Emil was concerned that the Sainnite seer might detect her presence and send the soldiers out hunting her. The two of them sat awake while the rest of their small company slept, though Zanja was only pretending. Without witnesses surrounding them, the two commanders acted less formally, and it seemed apparent that they had a long acquaintance, though they did not act like friends. After a while they walked away, and Zanja was able to doze upon the hard ground. When she woke up later it was still dark, and her head seemed ready to finally split open and spill its contents.

  No doubt Emil was keeping watch upon the stone overlook, waiting to know for certain whether Zanja’s prescience had been accurate. She could go to him and tell him the whole truth: that she had lied to him, that she had twice failed to kill the Sainnite seer, that she feared she was being tempted into treachery by a man who understood her better than she understood herself.

  She got up and made her way through a haze of darkness and pain, until she could actually see him, a thin, still silhouette against the stars, the Man on the Hill. Her affection for him washed over her and brought her to a standstill. Wasn’t he already making his precarious way between the fragile and competing loyalties that held South Hill Company together? Already, he had to know the minds of his people, the minds of the enemy, and his own mind. Surely it would do him no good if she imposed her burdens upon him, in the selfish hope that somehow they would become easier for her to bear. And then there was the dream, and the loaded pistol. She turned away.

  “Zanja,” said a low voice. “Are you having trouble sleeping? Sit with me a while.”

  It was Mabin. Like Emil, she sat alone in the darkness, waiting for the dawn. Zanja went over to her reluctantly. “Councilor.”

  “It’s not a good night for sleeping. I’ve been watching the torch bugs swarm. Sit down, sit down.”

  Zanja squatted nearby, wishing that she’d had the sense to stay in her blankets until sunrise. Even with Mabin just a dark shadow, still she felt too closely watched, as though Mabin were a fox, and she a mouse.

  “I hear that fire bloods are often tormented by nightmares,” Mabin said.

  “Yes, madam, so I hear.” Was Mabin lonely, or troubled, to be inviting a total stranger into intimacy like this? She added, lest she seem too rude, “But I am just tormented by my headache.” A swarm of torch bugs swirled in a nearby bush, like sparks in a wind, except that the air was warm and still.

  “Emil seems to think highly of your abilities.”

  “I think highly of his.”

  “So do I,” Mabin said after a moment, as though she’d had to think about it. “Yet I confess, I am concerned. Like that man tonight—Willis was his name?—I wonder that he is willing to let an opportunity go by like this, just on your say-so. How can we even be certain of the existence of this Sainnite seer?”

  “How can we not be certain of it?” Zanja said reasonably.

  “Because it seems so unlikely! And it’s always possible that the Sainnites are just better strategists, or luckier than we. And perhaps the whole point is to make South Hill Company cautious, so that at the very moment when you must act, you will hesitate. And we must not lose control of South Hill.”

  For a dizzying moment, Zanja realized how likely it was that Medric was using her for this very purpose Mabin had described—that he had discovered in a vision her closeness to Emil, and so had realized that he could subvert the entire company by subverting her. This was the nightmare that caused Zanja such dismay, but she could not endure to consider it directly for longer than a moment. She said, though she was sick of explaining herself, “I can never depend upon my prescience to serve me when I need it to. But when it does serve me, it has never been completely wrong. And Emil’s and my talents seem to complement each other, for when he forms the questions I can form the answers, and he has the knowledge to interpret those answers, and I in turn can sense whether or not his interpretation is the right one. So we are more certain together than we would be separately: certain of each other and certain of what we know.”

  “A steeliness disguised in ritual humility, Norina wrote of you.”

  Irritated by this reminder of the Truthken’s heavy hand, Zanja said, “My people believed that courtesy comes from strength, not from weakness, and that it was no shame to be constantly reminding each other that without this fabric of ritual courtesy our tribe would have fallen apart.”

  After a moment, Mabin said, “Norina also wrote that you are wasted in South Hill. I want to bring you with me, to help me plan strategy for all of Shaftal.”

  “Thank you, madam, but Norina is wrong. I belong where I am.”

  Mabin’s head lifted as though now she was surprised. If she had ever been turned down before, which seemed unlikely, certainly it had never been so promptly and directly.

  “Well then,” she said, with ill-disguised irritation,, “It is your choice, of course. Let me ask you directly what concerns me. What makes you think the Sainnites have a seer?”

  “The glyph cards told us.”

  “It was a divination?” Mabin sounded appalled.

&nbs
p; Zanja rose abruptly to her feet. “Madam, Emil surely is better qualified to explain our method. I know you will excuse me, for I feel quite dizzy and must go lie down.”

  But as she returned to her blankets, Zanja heard Emil utter a grunt of surprise from atop the pile of boulders where he kept watch. She reached him in a few strides, in time to see the fading aftermath of a rocket’s faraway explosion.

  “Oh,” Emil said, “It was beautiful. Did you see it? That Annis is a genius.”

  Mabin had come up behind Zanja, too late to see the fireworks. “What happened?”

  Emil said, “One of the scouts set off a rocket. Not over trees, but over the river. That explains why we’ve seen no sign of the Sainnites on the road. They came up the river.”

  “By boat?”

  “No, not against the current, surely. More likely they simply walked up the riverbank.” Emil’s teeth showed in the darkness; he was grinning with relief. “The Sainnites are nervous now, I’d wager, after seeing that rocket. What do you think they’ll do, Zanja?”

  “I don’t know,” Zanja said. She was sick of her talent, sick of being asked questions and then being challenged for knowing the answers.

  “Well, let’s pretend they continue onward and find the camp empty. They’ll take the road home, won’t they, rather than walk home on rocks?”

  “Then they’d follow the edge of the fen and come out just below where we are,” she said.

  “So we’ll get a good look at them, anyway, and be able to see how they’re judging our strength.”

  Perhaps just to be certain that the message had been received, or perhaps out of sheer delight, the scout set off another rocket over the river. “Oh,” Mabin said when it exploded, “that is a sight. We could set those off just for show. A waste of good gunpowder, though.”

  The sun had fully risen when the soldiers finally appeared. They had not fled the woods in panic at the prospect of an ambush, and instead they seemed to have spent the time since dawn scouring the woods.

  Mabin, peering at them through a spyglass, muttered as they marched away, perhaps repeating to herself the advice in Warfare to never make a direct attack on a large company in broad daylight. She turned on Zanja a glance that was almost a glare. “Well, your prescience seems reliable enough. So perhaps this business of a Sainnite seer is also to be believed.”

  Emil rescued Zanja, taking her to the fire where camp porridge cooked in several porringers tucked into the hot ashes. Emil used his own porringer to mix up a horrid, bitter concoction that he made Zanja drink.

  “I dared not give this to you last night,” he said, “For if it’s your old injury doing this to you, I feared you would sleep so deeply you would never wake up. I’ve seen it happen.”

  They were sitting by themselves, so Zanja said in a low voice, “Did you hear my conversation with Mabin?”

  “Most of it. Apparently, she’s got some kind of hornet in her hat.”

  “Is it so bizarre to practice divination?”

  “Not at all. Mabin probably played at it herself when she was a girl.”

  Zanja was beginning to feel very odd, as though her head were separating itself from her shoulders. The nearby Paladins seemed very distant, and the birdsong seemed to come from another world entirely. “Emil,” she said, carefully shaping the words lest they come out strange, “I think she wants me dead. Since I will not come with her.”

  “I think that you’re delirious,” Emil said gently.

  “She wants me out of South Hill. I don’t know why.” The pain abruptly drained out of her and she stared at Emil, stunned by the suddenness of it.

  “Finally!” he said.

  “This is a very strong potion.” Her words came out like polished jewels. “Sometimes your knee hurts a great deal, doesn’t it?”

  Emil pretended he hadn’t heard, or else Zanja was so confused she hadn’t actually said anything out loud, but only in her head. Emil said. “I have to tell you, I see nothing sinister in Mabin wanting to snatch you away from me. I wish I had a hundred more like you, myself.”

  “A frightening prospect,” Zanja said seriously, but Emil laughed out loud.

  They traveled through the forested heart of South Hill. As she walked, Zanja imagined the ambush they could have planned. In her mind, they killed some twenty soldiers. Those twenty could never be replaced. And now she thought of it, Zanja realized she had never seen a Sainnite child, and precious few soldiers who were younger than Medric. Were the Sainnites, like katrim, forbidden to bear or beget? If so, then they depended upon outsiders to bear and raise their children for them. Of course, the whores of Lalali were one example of how to make this happen, though a brothel village was hardly the place to raise soldiers. The babies would be taken away somewhere, perhaps to a garrison operated by disabled and retired Carolins whose job it was to raise and train the next generation of soldiers.

  If the Paladins could find and kill those children then that, surely, would destroy the fighting spirit of the Sainnites.

  “Dear gods,” Zanja whispered.

  “Careful.” Emil, who had not been out of arm’s reach all morning, caught her, for she had nearly fallen.

  “Do the Paladins make war on children?”

  “Of course not.”

  “The thoughts I’m having.”

  “Here.” He moved her aside so that others in their party could pass. “The potion I gave you to drink sets the thoughts askew, like a fever.”

  The black-garbed dignitaries, with their audacious earrings and upright attitudes pushed past them, one by one. How simple life must be for them, Zanja thought. To never have to distinguish right from wrong, and simply follow the Law.

  She and Emil walked behind them, side by side. Theirs was a far more complicated path.

  Chapter 17

  Mabin and her entourage left with Annis in tow, and Zanja, despite her presentiments, remained unmurdered. Neither pain nor disordered delirium returned to trouble her.

  It soon became apparent that Mabin had mobilized all of Shaftal to the defense of South Hill, and the steady tribute of food, supplies, and hardened veterans from all across the country rapidly transformed their rebel band into an army that Emil was hard put to organize or command. These were not soldiers, but guerrilla fighters, and Emil, though he could convince anyone to do anything, was no general. Nor, he complained rather wearily to Zanja, had he ever aspired to be one.

  Zanja traveled ceaselessly among the five units of thirty that Emil, who needed no longer be so fearful of the Sainnites’ greater numbers, positioned on the high ground that rimmed the river valley. Whenever the Sainnites left their garrison, South Hill Company knew of it almost immediately, because Emil’s spies set off signal rockets that could be seen for miles around. Always conscious that each time she bloodied her blade Karis knew about it, Zanja fought in the three clashes that proved the Paladins’ new strategic dominance. What followed might have been called a siege, except that between the Paladin encampments and the Sainnite garrison lay some of the richest farmland in South Hill. The Sainnites began to do what they seemed best at: methodical, thorough, mindless destruction. While the ancient orchards were toppled and the farmsteads and fields were burned, the valley farmers, bitterly angry at Paladin and Sainnite alike, hauled their children and animals and what belongings could be salvaged out of danger. Wagons crowded the roads of South Hill. The farmsteads outside of danger were overwhelmed with refugees and their belongings. At a time when only steady, careful attention to the crops could prevent the coming year from being a hungry one, all of South Hill lay in chaos.

  Though South Hill Company could not prevent the Sainnites from razing the valley’s rich farmlands, they also could not endure to stand by and do nothing. Despite their disadvantage at direct, hand-to-hand combat, scarcely a day passed without
at least one skirmish in which the Paladins crept up on Sainnites under cover of waist-high corn or drainage ditches choked with rushes, exchanged gunfire, and then fled in much the same way. The Paladins who spent their days crawling through the weeds took to calling these engagements hide-and-seek raids. It was no game, though, but a deadly, dangerous business that put Jerrell’s bone saw in high demand.

  With every casualty Emil seemed another year older. Willis’ unit alone aged him by ten years, and Willis’s gloating reports of thirty or more Sainnites injured and killed did not make Emil less grim. He sent Zanja with a brusque message that she delivered, word for word: “We are not engaged in a contest to determine who can kill the greatest number of Sainnites. And the people of South Hill will not thank us for burdening them with an overwhelming number of crippled fighters. You are to have no more casualties, even if that means that you conduct no more raids.”

  Willis heard this message with amazing equanimity. “No more casualties,” he said. “Well, I suppose he thinks I have his prescience, eh? Oh, but you do have it, don’t you?” He turned to his cronies, for, unlike Emil, he took his strength from numbers, not solitude. “It seems a worthy experiment, doesn’t it, to see if prescience can protect us from casualties?”

  “Oh, yes,” they murmured, and Zanja did not need prescience to know that this conversation had been long planned.

  “You want me to go out on a hide-and-seek raid?” she asked.

  “We’re going out on one today.”

  Zanja looked around that circle of hostile, grinning faces, and felt very tired. What was the price she would have to pay to be a full member of this company? They cared only about Sainnite corpses, it seemed. Well then, she would give them some, though she doubted it would be possible to give them enough.