“Well,” Emil said, as he came over to the bed, breathing heavily, “An unconventional solution.” He helped Zanja to contrive to bind Annis more securely to the bedframe. Then he covered Annis modestly with the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed, admonishing her to behave herself, while Zanja hauled Medric through the window. Annis stopped fighting the tethers after a while.
The raven flapped heavily on sodden wings to the windowsill. Zanja patted his feathers with a towel to sop up the worst of the wet. Medric had knelt on the hearth to take apart and clean his pistols and re-load them with dry gunpowder. He did it as if he had an impatient commander screaming at him to do it faster. As Zanja came over to put on her wet shirt, he asked, “Now what?”
“I don’t know. Any ideas, raven?”
The raven shook his wet feathers and brooded.
Karis lay rigid in the too-small bed, with the rain sound rushing past her. From far away, she watched three bedraggled rescuers crawl through an open window. One was like a knife blade white hot from the forge—one was like a knife blade tempered and honed—and one was like the forge itself. Fire and earth makes the forge; fire and earth makes the blade.
She must not sleep. Oh Shaftal, she prayed. Oh Shaftal I must not sleep. She could not remember why. Oh Shaftal I must not move lest the watcher awaken. Oh Shaftal.
The raven turned his head and now she saw Zanja: wet and thin and grim as death. Zanja—implacably loyal—Oh Shaftal protect her heart, she is so true, the truest blade I ever forged. Zanja save me I am gone to smoke, I am gone.
Karis. I know you can hear me. Karis, I am at your door.
The rain whispered now. The voice whispered in her raven’s ear. Karis do you feel me I am here. Silence. Presence. Do you remember when I was imprisoned doubly imprisoned and you freed me. In bed, Karis remembered what a good night that had been, how tired she had been, and then the hunger that drove her was sated and she could rest for a while. She remembered Zanja, limp as an exhausted child, sleeping in her arms as the snow fell. For a few hours, for a night, the world had been as it should be, and her heart had been at peace.
Now I am here for you but you must unlock the door.
A whisper: Unlock the door. Dear gods Karis unlock the door.
Karis touched stone through plaster, the stone of the wall which was rooted in earth, and breathed in. Presence. She sat up in the bed.
Dear gods Karis unlock the door.
She stood up. Her body was stone. She could not move except when pushed. The white hot blade, the forge, the pumping bellows. Fire and earth makes the forge. The room swirled around her, dark and blurred with smoke. She stepped. The floor shall not creak. She stepped. The watcher shall sleep. She stepped. I am the key. Open. Oh Shaftal. And now she is looking at herself and the room is full of smoke and she opens her eyes and she sees the raven looking at her. Presence. Zanja has touched her. Dear heart.
“Dear heart,” Zanja breathed.
Karis opened her mouth. The raven croaked, “Zanja.”
Emil whispered, “There is someone in the room.”
With Karis’ limp, cold hand clasped in both of hers, Zanja listened. She heard even, deep breaths. She looked around the doorjamb. A candleflame flickered on a tabletop; a woman’s head rested on the table, her arms dangling, as if she had been hit from behind with a hammer. Zanja grinned into Karis’ vacant stare, and in a moment saw the faintest twitch of a smile. Slow-witted was not the same as no-witted.
“Hurry!” Medric hissed. Then Zanja felt nearby, a faintest stirring, the restlessness of a time-tempered intelligence and a bitter, ruthless heart. Someone was awakening; someone had heard something. Mabin.
Karis could not be hurried. One step at a time they took her down the stairs. When they came up they had climbed at a distance from each other to keep the treads from creaking, but now they could not be so artful. Karis had no shoes. Her steps were silent but her weight was not. The building sighed under the burden of her.
On the floor above them, a door opened and there were footsteps. A moment later the four of them slipped into Annis’s room and Emil eased the door shut. “It has no lock,” he breathed, and began moving furniture to block the door.
A shout echoed down the stairwell. Medric had already gone out the window and was halfway to the ground. Footsteps thundered up the stairs. How long would it take for the building’s occupants to figure out what had happened? The confused guard out in the courtyard would insist no one had come in or out. How long would it take for them to realize that rescuers must have come in through a window? Emil was pulling up the rope. They would have to lower Karis, who scarcely seemed able to place one foot in front of the other and certainly could not be expected to climb down a rope.
Zanja abruptly took out her knife and hacked Annis’s bindings to tatter. Annis jerked the gag out of her mouth.
“I need your help,” Zanja said.
“After you made a fool out of me? I think I’ll just do the same to you. It seems fair!” Annis leapt off the bed and started for the door, clearly expecting Zanja to jump her.
“Annis, this is no game. Karis is the G’deon of Shaftal. Settle with me later, if you must, but help her now.”
Annis stopped short. “What? Is this another one of your tales?”
“It’s the truth. Come and help us lower her to the ground—she’s too heavy just for the two of us. Come! There is no time!”
Annis hesitated, but she had always been impulsive. “Oh all right!” she said, but her face glowed with excitement.
Emil was ready. Despite, or perhaps because of the smoke Karis looked panicked as they dropped her over the edge. The three of them popped their shoulder joints and burned the skin off their hands lowering her safely to ground, but then Medric had her, and Zanja could breathe easier. Annis went out the window, followed by Emil. Throughout the building, doors were being slammed open, but no one had yet been sent out to check the surrounding streets. Mabin’s people still thought that Karis was still somewhere in the building.
Emil had reached the ground. The sky opened up in a fresh downpour. Zanja swung out the window and only then remembered the raven. His feathers were fluffed comfortably in the warmth of the fire, and he seemed disinclined to leave, but finally flew to the windowsill the third time Zanja called him. She slid down the rope as Annis’s door crashed open.
There was a pistol blast, and the raven exploded like a feather pillow ripped open. In the street below, Karis uttered a terrible, wordless cry, and fell to her knees.
Chapter 23
Annis said, “This way.”
They ran, propelling Karis forward with one person pulling at each arm, and another pushing at her back. Annis darted ahead, light-footed, grinning like a child set loose to play. They ducked into a narrow back way. Behind them, Mabin’s people jammed the house’s single doorway, struggled into the courtyard, and shouted at the guard to unlock the gate. With no idea which way the fugitives had gone, Mabin would have to divide her forces at every turn. Soon, Zanja and her companions would outnumber the pursuers. Pistols would not fire in the rain; she and Emil might well be testing their long unused daggers before the night was done.
“This way,” Annis called. They fled down an alley where garbage piles awaited the trash wagon. They trampled through a vegetable garden, where squash vines tripped them and soft mud clung to their ankles. They crashed through a gate into another garden, and then between buildings to more gardens, and at last to the wall.
“There’s a door in the wall right around here,” Annis said. “So people can escape to the river should they need to.” She hopped on one foot, belatedly putting her shoes on muddy feet. She had put on a shirt, but her breeches were still tucked under her arm.
Zanja could hear Mabin’s people shouting the village awake behind them. Karis leaned in her embrace,
cold and soaking wet, gasping for breath. She heard a bolt shoot open, and Emil said, “Annis, don’t take the path. That way, through the woods.” Annis leapt forward, happy in the chase. The three of them followed, compelling Karis through the thicket, where a tracker might be able to follow their route, but not until daylight and not until the rainfall had ceased. They made their way to their horses and put Karis on Homely. The rest of them went on foot, heading westward, into the wilderness.
It rained all night and well into the morning, and then the sun split the clouds open like a bright hammer upon gray stone. Zanja, trudging across the rocky landscape with her hand on Homely’s stirrup, sensed a quickening in the giant riding beside her, and looked up to see that Karis had lifted her hanging head and was squinting up into the sun. “Karis, are you awake?”
Karis glanced bleakly down at her.
Zanja put her hand upon Karis’s sodden knee, wondering if she would even feel the touch. A steady tremor ran through the muscles under her hand, like the vibration of a heavy wagon upon cobblestones. “Should I explain what has happened?”
Karis shook her head.
If reason and will broke free of smoke’s paralysis before bone and muscle did, then Karis had been considering her situation for some time already. Perhaps she felt the vacancy of amputation where her raven had been; perhaps she had sorted through the dreamlike memories. She seemed, now, to become aware of the hand upon her knee, and she covered it with her own. Her hands already were trembling.
Zanja said, “I took the box of smoke from your room. You still have your smoke purse.”
Karis dried with her sleeve the wretched tears that had streaked her face. “Can we stop?” she slurred.
Zanja shouted ahead at her companions, who had outpaced Homely and his heavy burden, then led the horse to a bit of a rise, which she hoped might be less muddy, and helped Karis to dismount. Karis lay down with her back against the earth, like an uprooted plant digging herself back into the soil.
Zanja took hold of her hand again.
“Help me.”
Zanja had cobbled together courage before, using whatever poor bits and pieces of strength she had at hand. But to do it for another person, when she herself felt hopeless, was not an easy feat. She stated the bitter facts, as Norina would have. “If you continue to use the drug as you have been doing, you’ll die. But if you stop, that also will kill you.”
A tremor rippled through Karis’s form, like a small wave running ahead of a devastating flood. “Another choice,” she gasped.
Wouldn’t there have to be a tenuous route, halfway between one death and the other? If there wasn’t one, what harm was there in pretending like there was one? “A dance,” Zanja said. “A balance. Use enough smoke to keep you alive, but not enough to kill you. Every time you smoke, wait a little longer. In time, you will be using the drug just once a day again.”
Karis said hoarsely, “And in the interim, this agony. Death sounds easier.”
“No doubt it is easier. No doubt it would have been easier had I chosen death a year ago, when your raven gave me the choice. There’s been a number of times I wondered why I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?” she gasped. Her eyes were blank with pain.
“I knew I was caught up in something, and could not endure to die with my curiosity unsatisfied.”
Karis smiled faintly. She placed Zanja’s hand upon her breast, where the hard outline of her smoke purse lay under the shirtcloth. “Take it.”
“I don’t want to decide for you—”
“Don’t be so scrupulous.” Another tremor, stronger than the last, shook through her, and Karis took a shaky breath. “It won’t be pretty. I’ve seen smoke addicts die—because they could not—light a match. And no one thought to light it for them.”
Zanja unbuttoned Karis’s shirt and lifted the purse from around her neck. Then, she put the green pendant in its place, knotting the torn and mudstained ends of the ribbon.
Karis seemed to find it difficult to breath. But she asked, “Are you—all right?”
“Is this earth logic, to worry about me when it’s your life that’s at risk?” Zanja added, “When I saw the Sainnite army crossing the Asha River in dead of night with my people helpless before them, that tried my courage. This is not any worse.”
“This is my worst fear.”
“Don’t face it alone.”
“So that’s the secret.”
Karis sat up so Zanja could hold her: against her shoulder, within her arms, between her legs, an embrace that could have scarcely been more intimate if they’d taken off their clothing. When the first convulsion came, it had Karis’s shocking strength behind it, and Zanja could no more hold her still than she could have reined in a maddened plowhorse. She learned to ride it through, evading Karis’s flailing limbs, holding on by gripping her own wrist across Karis’s ribs, so that she still would be there when the seizure was over. Each time a seizure passed, Karis lay limp against her shoulder, sobbing for breath, clammy with sweat, and later weeping, bleeding from a bitten tongue and lips. Finally, she scarcely seemed conscious anymore and Zanja lit the pipe for her and helped her smoke. The convulsions stopped, and then the tremors, and Karis’s head grew heavy and her hands slid down to rest upon the grass that she had torn up earlier by the roots. Her eyes glazed and closed, and Zanja could not rouse her.
She must uttered a cry, for when she looked up Emil was kneeling beside her. He felt the pulse in Karis’s neck and said, “Zanja, surely you don’t think either one of you can repeatedly endure such a torment.” He must have watched from a distance and been hard put not to intervene.
Zanja’s exhaustion washed over her then, as though Emil’s acknowledgment had raised a water gate. “I am the only one who can help her to walk this hard way, though watching her do it breaks my heart.”
“For the gods require you to show the way across the borders. I understand that. But if you lose her, you will lose yourself. It’s a poor friend who would stand by and let you do such a thing needlessly.”
“Needless?” She considered for a while. “Heedless, certainly. Haven’t you heard that hopeless passion brings out the worst in the na’Tarweins?”
“I’m afraid this is the first I’ve heard of it.” Emil uttered an unkind snort. “I take that to mean you’ll try to listen to me, but you’re making no promises. Well, even when I was your commander I couldn’t depend on you to follow orders.” He felt Karis’s pulse again, and said, “She’s got a strong heart, doesn’t she? Earth witches are notoriously hard to kill. I say you need not be so impatient for a cure. Let her move more slowly out of her darkness.”
Zanja let the reassurance calm her own more volatile heart, and as if in response Karis stirred, and Zanja looked down to find her eyes open, though blank and senseless.
“We can try to get her back on a horse,” Emil said. “My horse looks the best of the three now, though that’s not saying much. I doubt we can travel much further, but Medric says we’ve entered into an elemental’s domain, unlikely though it seems in this wilderness, and he says this man or woman will investigate our presence and either offer us hostility or sanctuary. Let’s hope for the latter, shall we?”
They continued to travel in the direction they had been going, with the river canyon to their right. Some trees had begun to appear in the pathless waste. Just after passing a grove of these at mid-afternoon, a ululating cry echoed behind them. Zanja turned to find a rag-tag group of people emerging from among the trees - children she thought them at first, until she saw that at least two of them had hair gone to gray. Over Emil’s objections she walked back to them alone. Even alone, with her hands held out in friendship, she seemed to frighten them, for they drew back, wide-eyed, as she neared them. Some wore only necklaces and girdles of white shells, and others wore strange woven garments of r
ough linen. Some carried spears of wood, split into three sharpened points. An old man emerged from their midst and came out to her. He spoke in a language she had never heard, a language like water on stone.
Surely they had traveled beyond the borders of Shaftal, into the wild lands of the west, which, like the northern mountains and the southern plains, was tenanted by tribal people. This tribe into whose territory they had wandered clearly were too anxious to be warlike, and probably it was usual for them to avoid strangers, rather than seeking them out like this.
Zanja said, in Shaftalese and then again in the language of her own lost people, “We must have shelter. Will you help us?”
The man replied. She was too tired to listen, too tired to even try to distinguish one sound from the next. He took a step forward, and held out his hand. A large leaf in his palm unfolded to reveal a bit of fish, brown with the smoke that had preserved it. Enemies do not eat each other’s food, so Zanja took the warm piece of smoked fish and put it in her mouth. The wild people immediately stepped forward, peering at her curiously.
Emil had the wit to bring out some of their own meat and bread, and the wild people all ate a mouthful of their food, while those of Zanja’s company ate some of the wild people’s fish. During this necessary waste of time, the old man walked up to Karis, cautious of the horse, and stood for a while beside her, looking up at her. Then he put a hand upon her bare foot, and Karis, who throughout the day had scarcely seemed conscious, heavily lifted her head. He seemed startled - perhaps by her size or blue eyes - but did not step back. Karis opened her mouth as if to speak, though she could not, and the old man bowed to her. He turned to his people and spoke to them, and they all bowed to Karis, with their hands upon their hearts.
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