Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “You’ve left South Hill?”

  He closed the book carefully, and wrapped it in a jacket of leather. “It was time I remembered what my life was about.”

  “I hope you’re here to help me.”

  “Sit down. Despite that nap, you still look ready to collapse.” Emil opened his padded box and took out two teacups. “Why else would we rush up here into the wilderness like madmen chased by rabid hounds, except to help you? Help you do what, by the way?”

  Medric sat on Zanja’s other side. “Zanja, I see history rippling away from you.”

  Emil smiled affectionately at the Sainnite seer. “Medric is full of wild stories he’s made up from reading too many books.”

  Medric said, “It’s not possible to read too many books. To read too few, now that’s possible.”

  “Medric says there’s a third road for Shaftal. We—the three of us—are at the crossroads, he says.” Emil offered Zanja a cup of tea. The cup might have been made of flower petals that released a delicious fragrance. Somewhere, Emil had invested in some very expensive tea. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking like any smoke addict’s.

  Medric said, “Zanja, where is the lost G’deon? Somehow, she must be saved!”

  Emil murmured, “Set that cup down before you drop it. It’s irreplaceable, you know.”

  Zanja put the cup on the ground.

  Medric said, “I saw her in a dream, a woman like a mountain, but shackled hand and foot, blinded, with her tongue cut out...”

  Emil put his arm around her. Zanja lay her head back upon his shoulder and stared up at the sun-red sky, which swirled and swam in her vision. “But she is not the G’deon.”

  “She is. I know what I dreamed. The land cries out to her to give it healing.”

  Emil said, “Zanja, have mercy. Who is she?”

  “Karis. The Woman of the Doorway. How can she be G’deon…a half-Sainnite smoke addict?”

  “She’s a smoke addict?” Emil cried.

  “She’s Sainnite?” said Medric.

  “But if Harald G’deon meant to choose her, and not just to use her as a kind of storage, then every moment, from the day of her birth—and even before—the people of this land have failed her.” And then it came to Zanja, the truth she had not wanted to know, and she started wildly to her feet, crying, “Mabin did this to her, and it’s my fault! Dear gods —” Something was impeding her, and she struggled with it blindly until a mild voice entered her awareness, saying her name. Medric stood before her, his hair having come loose, somewhat out of breath. Emil had her by the arms, from behind.

  “Sit down,” he said. “You’re off your head and that’s never good when someone carries weapons as sharp as yours. Sit down and explain.”

  She sat back down, her knees gone weak, and let Emil talk her into some semblance of calm, until he trusted her with a teacup again.

  Medric said, “The G’deon’s choice of a successor had to be confirmed, isn’t that right?”

  Zanja said, “Norina told me that Harald waited until the last possible moment to send for Karis, and then he did it in secret. But perhaps he did it on purpose, so he could get around the Council, for everyone knows that he was at odds with them, and with Mabin in particular.”

  “Well, it’s true that Harald’s last years were fraught with controversy,” said Emil. “For he insisted that we accept the Sainnites, which was a very unpopular idea. Are you saying that for fifteen years we have had a G’deon vested but not confirmed? And that she has been willing to live in obscurity all this time, while the land is torn to ruins around her?” Emil paused, and shook his head, and added more gently, “By Shaftal, what else could she honorably have done? To exercise such power outside the constraints of the Lilterwess—”

  Zanja said, “She was constrained, not just by smoke but by Mabin, who indirectly controlled her through Norina, who exercised all her formidable powers to keep Karis tractable.”

  “Norina?” Medric said.

  “The Truthken, Karis’s oldest friend.”

  Emil said dryly, “Ah, I see. Air logic. Inflexible and absolutist. No doubt Norina believe she is doing her duty. But what do you mean when you say Mabin did this to her? What has been done, and why do you blame yourself?”

  “Someone sent a letter,” Medric said.

  “Norina sent a letter. To Mabin.”

  “And Mabin did what?”

  “She kidnapped Karis. And holds her prisoner down there, in that garrison.”

  Medric said, “So whatever was in that letter convinced Mabin she needed to act, and quickly.”

  “The letter told her that Karis had sent me to find you, and bring you to her.”

  Medric looked baffled, but Emil said, “Oh, I see.”

  “What?”

  “Well, what would you have told Karis, when you met her?”

  Medric said, “That she is the hope of Shaftal.”

  “And that,” said Emil, “Would be the one thing Mabin never wants Karis to hear. Not from a seer, anyway. Not if she intends to keep Karis from knowing the truth.”

  “Mabin doesn’t command the border people,” Zanja said, “So she doesn’t command me.”

  “Me neither, obviously,” Medric said cheerfully. “How soon do you want to leave, Zanja? Shall I load my pistols?”

  Emil put his head in his hands. “She still commands me. Which of my vows and beliefs shall I betray today?”

  Zanja said, “Well, the truth is —” She had to take a breath to steady herself. “Truth is, I have no hope of rescuing Karis. All I can do is to rescue her living remains. She has been under smoke day and night for over ten days now. To save what little can be saved is hardly worth becoming forsworn for.”

  Emil raised his head. “But fire logic can encompass the grandest of contradictions, and I have done my share of encompassing these last few days. Why should I not continue?”

  On Zanja’s other side, Medric uttered a snort of laughter.

  Emil continued gravely. “So of course I will go with you to rescue what survives of our G’deon. And perhaps once we have done that we will find something else to save from this disaster. Surely three fire bloods together can redeem even the most hopeless situation.”

  Medric went away to load his pistols, which was a task complex enough by daylight, but which seemed to give him no difficulty even in the darkness. He had been raised to be a soldier, after all. Zanja said to Emil, “I thought you were a celibate.”

  “Hmm. Of course my position required a great deal of restraint, but surely you didn’t think it was by choice. Fire blood and celibacy? You know better than that.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “So. I always suspected that with Annis you were settling for a poor substitute.”

  “You know more than I did,” Zanja said. “You’re usually very good at minding your own business, Emil.”

  He chuckled. “And you’re usually better at protecting yourself from a prying old man.” He took her hand. “A smoke addict. You might as well be celibate. Why do you say this disaster your fault?”

  “When I first met Karis, Norina said I would endanger her, by making her restless. If Karis had simply stayed as she was, passive and invisible as she has been, Mabin would have no reason to do anything to her.”

  “That certainly sounds like air logic,” said Emil dryly. “But you and I, we know better.”

  Though the village walls were well guarded, it was not particularly difficult to breach them. Two presciants and a seer could hardly help but recognize the moment it was safe to climb the wall. They scrambled over and huddled in the shadows on the other side as a watchman passed, and then Zanja whispered, “This place has never been attacked, I gather, or they would not be so relaxed.”

  “
It’s never even been discovered,” Emil said. “The closest Sainnite garrison is a long way from here, you know, and the Mearish folk are notoriously secretive. But the few survivors of the Fall are housed here, and so I doubt anyone ever becomes complacent.”

  They set forth, walking in a group, like soldiers done with the day’s work, and what with the dark night and the unlit streets they were able to cross from one end of the small village to the other without attracting notice. They saw no taverns or shops, just a series of residential buildings that looked a good deal like military barracks, and a great exercise yard at the village center, with a huge horse stable. The settlement was even about the same size as the Wilton garrison, and Zanja noticed Medric shaking his head as though bemused.

  “I have no idea where your Karis is,” Medric said, when they had crossed the village. “She’s here, though.”

  “We’ve got the whole night to wander the streets,” Emil said. “And tomorrow night, and the night after that.”

  Zanja pulled the four glyph cards from inside her shirt, and shuffled at them while looking at the stars to establish a sense of direction. The card she chose told her to go south, back the way they had come.

  They paced back down the wide boulevard, pausing at every cross-street to shuffle the cards. “Now this is very conspicuous behavior,” Emil commented.

  Prescience had a way of fraying away into ambiguity and uncertainty if it was relied upon too deliberately. When, while standing upon one street corner without moving, the glyphs told Zanja to go south, then west, then south again, she was not much surprised. “I guess we’re finished,” she muttered, and stuck the cards into her shirt.

  Emil nudged her and pointed at Medric. He had wandered up against the wall of the tall corner building, which had no windows at all on the first floor, and he was gazing upward at a lit window. He gestured at them sharply, and they dove into the shadows against the wall as a big, slump-shouldered, shambling figure moved restlessly to the window, only to be eased impatiently away by another, smaller person.

  Emil put his hand on Zanja’s shoulder. She was, she realized, scratching at the mortared stone with her fingernails, as though to dig through into the building with her bare hands.

  Medric came up to them. “Just for a second there, I felt the mountains turn over in their sleep.”

  Emil grabbed them both by their sleeves and marched them a distance away. “There’s a good reason why nobody quite trusts us fire bloods. One minute we’re inspired visionaries, the next we’re drooling idiots. Don’t you two turn idiotic on me.”

  A black shape hurtled at them from out of the darkness overhead. Zanja snatched the raven out of the air before he plummeted into Emil’s stomach. The raven uttered a squawk, then settled down and let Zanja perch him upon her shoulder. “The good raven doesn’t see well in the dark,” she explained. Then, a thought came to her. “Karis, do you hear me?”

  “Yes,” the raven said, and Medric and Emil both jumped with surprise.

  “Lie down and pretend to sleep, and be patient. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” the raven said.

  “Then do it now. We are coming for you, but you must wait for us.”

  They walked through the village and came back at the building from another direction. The building’s only door opened into a walled courtyard rather than directly to the street. The courtyard’s arched gate stood closed and locked. The wall was smooth, impossible to climb. Nor was there enough space to slip over the top of the gate even if it could be surmounted. In any case, the courtyard had an alert watchman, who paced determinedly from one end to the other, and paused every couple of rounds to peer through the gate and examine the roadway. The other three walls of the house presented blank faces, and offered no access to the roof, either, even if it were possible to get from the roof into Karis’ room.

  Zanja drew her companions away from the building again, to the shadows of another street corner. Emil was vigorously shaking his head, though she had not said a world. “We are not assassins,” he hissed.

  Zanja turned on him in a fury. “Well then, if we can’t attack the guard, what are we supposed to do? Rattle the gate and ask politely to be let in?”

  “Zanja, these are our people, not our enemies.”

  “It doesn’t matter!”

  “Right now it doesn’t. Later, when you can’t forget that once you were a warrior, but then you became a murderer, it will matter very much. You have a good reason for killing that young man. All murderers have a good reason for doing what they do.”

  Medric hushed them urgently. “This is not the place to argue moral philosophy.”

  “I should never have accepted your help,” Zanja muttered.

  “But you did, and now you’re stuck with me. Zanja, listen to me: If they were going to kill her outright, they would have done it by now. So let’s study the problem and come up with a solution we all can live with. We have time.”

  They found a sheltered place within sight of the walled courtyard, and settled down in the shadows. Medric promptly fell asleep, with his head upon Emil’s shoulder. Emil seemed to doze as well, but Zanja kept watch as the night settled into a stillness broken only by the ring of the guard’s iron-studded heel upon stone.

  The stars gradually disappeared, and there was a faint rumble of thunder. As lightning flickered suddenly over the village walls and the first scattered drops of rain began to fall, she heard hurried footsteps and a man in a rain cape came around the corner and rushed up to the gate, cursing. The guard in the courtyard came over, and they argued bitterly as the gate lock rasped open. The gate swung open and now both men stood outside of it, still arguing. A blinding flash of lightning illuminated their faces, distorted with rage and streaked with rain. The two men flinched from the light. Then they wordlessly traded places, one stepping into the courtyard, one starting angrily down the street.

  Zanja had braced her pistols, one upon each knee. As the angry guard disappeared from sight, she slid the guns back into their holsters. Emil, whom she had thought was asleep, said, “There will be a way in.”

  “Guns make killing too easy. It becomes a habit, like it has with Willis and with Mabin. It keeps us from thinking of other ways.” But she could not take her gaze away from the gate, which had been open, and now was closed. The new guard began pacing across the courtyard, in the pouring rain. She could hear his boots ringing on the stone.

  “Rockets!” Medric exclaimed suddenly, his voice blurred with sleep. “Who made the rockets? On Fire Night?”

  “You mean Annis?” Zanja said blankly. Then she said it again. “Annis.” She got hastily to her feet. “Of course. Mabin brought her here.”

  The raven leapt from Zanja’s shoulder and dove into the rain. They followed, but lost sight of him. They circled around into the alley, and finally spotted the raven, sitting miserably in the downpour upon a second floor windowsill, tapping patiently on the glass. The men ducked into the shadows, but Zanja stood in plain sight, with the rain running down her face. The raven tapped steadily, as though he meant to keep tapping until he drowned. Zanja stared up into the downpour, her eyes blurred and stinging. When the window jerked open suddenly, the wet raven fell off the windowsill with a squawk.

  Annis stared down at her.

  “Have you got a moment for an old friend?” Zanja said.

  “Zanja!”

  “Myself.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Emil’s in trouble. I think you can help.”

  Annis disappeared, then reappeared to toss a rope out the window. Of course, Annis would never tolerate being shut up in a building, unable to come and go as she pleased.

  Knots tied regularly in the rope gave Zanja better purchase than she might have expected on such a wet night, but climbing the rope to the window was no easy
task, and hauling herself over the windowsill was even more difficult. Annis dragged her into the room, and then helped her up from an ungainly sprawl. “How’s the rocket business?” Zanja asked.

  “I’m making big, nasty ones now.” Annis started to pull the rope up, but let it go when Zanja clasped her hand. “You’ve got quite a chill on you. You better get those wet clothes off.”

  “Would you make a fire for me?”

  “Oh, sure.” Annis knelt on the cold hearth to lay a fire. She had some big sulfur matches to light it with, but everything seemed to be a bit damp, and it took her some time to get a fire going. Zanja talked as she got undressed, so that Annis would heed her voice more than the sounds outside. She told Annis a tale of selfishness and betrayal in South Hill, a tale that ended with Emil imprisoned by his own company for treachery, with his life endangered by Willis’ assassins, who could not afford to wait for a Truthken to arrive and sort the whole mess out. The situation required Mabin’s intervention, Zanja said, and she had burned through three horses getting here ahead of Willis’s men.

  Annis blew the tinder into flame, then sat back on her heels. “You’re right; I’ve got to help him somehow. He’s been like a father to me. I suppose I have some influence with Mabin...” As she looked up, Zanja contrived to be taking off her last item of clothing, her shirt, which she innocently hung on the chair back. Then, feeling Annis’s gaze, she looked directly into her eyes. “I really have missed you.”

  It was easy, almost natural, to embrace her and kiss her. Annis wore only a hastily-buttoned shirt, and was more than willing for it to be unbuttoned again. Zanja took Annis to the bed and laid her down upon it, with a knee between her thighs and her tongue in her mouth. She dragged the shirt from Annis’s shoulders so it entangled her arms. Annis was entirely distracted when Zanja heard Emil grunt as he hauled himself over the edge of the window. She jammed a fistful of the bedsheet into Annis’s mouth, tossed her onto her belly, and twisted the tangled shirt into a fetter. Annis struggled, but Zanja held her face into the pillow until she fell still, no doubt half smothered.