Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”

  “Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I could want it. But I’m not like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself which gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of heart and mind become—and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been—it never can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without that, this whole thing —” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky. “— is just an intellectual exercise.”

  Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”

  If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all your talk of Ransel—a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”

  “How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in her hands. “You can know me without touching me.”

  “If I were a fire blood, yes.”

  “I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.

  After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”

  “I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”

  Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know Norina, she’s in a panic now.”

  Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, before Mabin does.”

  Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.

  “How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”

  “She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”

  “At least.”

  “At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!”

  Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”

  “She’ll come rampaging in —”

  “She will,” Karis agreed.

  They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”

  “Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking for you. You should take Emil with you.”

  “No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”

  “With Medric and the water witch looking out for me—”

  “They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”

  Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth protecting. I always lose that one.”

  They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the sun tomorrow.”

  “Wake me up once you’re awake.”

  Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.

  After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been meteoric.”

  “I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”

  She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”

  “Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now go.”

  Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.

  He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.

  Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the west and forded the river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, cross country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their hooves in the dirt.

  Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.

  To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has survived.”

  Norina subjected h
er to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her well-being, though.”

  “At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for me to explain.”

  “We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should have known.”

  Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”

  “Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband chose to use.

  J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a non-Truthken easily could hear it.

  Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”

  J’han smiled sadly. “I have every intention of doing that.”

  “Without Norina?”

  “Norina chooses differently from how I choose. And as you know, she is uncompromising. So this is how it ends.”

  Later, having situated the horses and made suitable arrangements with the farmers for lodging, Zanja sat with Norina in the guest room and told her how Mabin had tried and failed to kill Karis. Norina listened in unnerving silence. She asked no questions, neither did she argue. For a while she lay upon the rope bed, then she got up to pace the room, then she sat down and picked the dried mud from her boots. When Zanja had finished, Norina went to the window and leaned out to shout for J’han to come inside.

  “Have you ever heard of someone using less smoke?” she asked him when he came in, wiping his hands on a towel.

  “Less than what?” he asked blankly.

  “Karis was forced to smoke more frequently than her usual amount, much more. Enough to nearly kill her. And now she’s decreasing that frequency, trying to reduce herself back down to once a day. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “No,” he said in some astonishment. “Is she being successful?”

  “Yes, apparently, though it hasn’t been easy.”

  “I always have heard the smoke users inevitably increase the amount they smoke, until they die of the poison or else from their inability to buy as much drug as they need. If it’s possible for them to use less...” He paused, shaken and distressed. “Then we have abandoned them to a fate that we always assumed to be inevitable, when in fact we should have been trying to help them.”

  “Karis is different,” Norina said.

  “She is an extraordinary person of great wit and will. But she is human, and her body is no different from mine or yours.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Norina snapped.

  J’han set his lips and visibly restrained himself from a sharp reply.

  “What is wrong with you?” Zanja said to Norina later, after she had sent J’han away again. “I can hardly endure your company, and I don’t see how bringing you to Karis will do her a service.”

  “Watch your words, Zanja na’Tarwein. I’m not in a tolerant mood.”

  “I would never expect you to be tolerant.”

  Norina sat again on the bed and dug her fingers into her short hair, which was stiff with dirt and stood upright like wheat stalks. “Go away.”

  After a long silence she looked at Zanja, who had remained sitting where she was, at the table by the window. Norina said, “You tell me that Karis’s true enemy is my commander and a hero of the people, and that somehow I, a Truthken, never noticed. You tell me that when my dearest friend needed me the most desperately, she nearly died in my absence. And now you imply that you have the ability and the right to keep me from her unless I behave myself according to your high standards. Your very presence chides me. Go away and chide someone else.”

  Zanja left her, and found J’han out in the kitchen, examining a collection of dirty and impatient children, who clearly wanted to make the best of the remaining daylight and saw no reason to be subjected to a healer’s scrutiny. J’han sent them away, reassured the gathered parents about their health, and took Zanja by the arm out into the privacy of the yard. They sat upon the edge of the well, and for some time neither of them said a word.

  “The people of air are not easy to love,” Zanja said at last.

  “Nor even to like sometimes,” J’han said.

  “Would you at least come and have a look at Karis, before you start your own journey? I’m weary with caring for her.”

  “Yes, of course. My child’s in good hands, and I am afraid Norina will kill herself with this hard traveling. It was not an easy birth.”

  Zanja sighed. “I was beginning to see how being friends with a Truthken might be invigorating enough that I could put up with the exasperation. But now I can’t see it anymore.”

  J’han laughed heartily, without anger for once.

  “And I fear for Karis, should she be trapped between air and fire. In truth, I wouldn’t blame her if she decided to get rid of us both, just so she could have some peace.”

  They talked until after dark, when one of the farmers called them in to supper. Norina did not appear at the supper table, and J’han slept out in the barn with Zanja. In the morning, their journey north began, an angry journey made even more grim by the weather, which turned wet and stormy only after they had traveled beyond the reaches of civilization and there was no shelter to be found. By the time they reached the canyon path they all had been wet to the skin for two days and nights, and the nights had been cold as well as wet. They had been sleeping huddled together for warmth, but relations between them had not thawed much.

  In all, thirteen days had passed since Zanja had last traversed this rocky pathway down to the lake. Then the lake had glowed like a jewel; now it was gray, with the muted colors of tree and canyon bleeding across it like ink on a wet page. Halfway down the path, Zanja spotted Emil riding up to meet them. He also rode on horseback, with his horse muddied to the belly and rain dripping from its mane, and he looked as wearied and worried as Zanja ever had seen him. Before he even spoke she knew that something terrible had happened.

  “Karis has disappeared again,” he said. “Five days we’ve been hunting for her, and haven’t seen a trace, not even a footprint. Zanja, listen—before you ride off in a panic and kill yourself on the slippery stones—I swear to you that she was not taken away. She has written a glyph upon the space of her cave, and the message, I think, is intended for you.”

  In the cave shelter, the water clock was not merely shattered, but pulverized to powder. In the middle of the cave floor lay Karis’s box of smoke, with the lid broken to splinters, and the interior burnt to charcoal. Of the contents, the half year’s supply of smoke, nothing remained but ashes.

  Yes, Zanja could easily read this glyph. She dropped to her knees beside the incinerated box. Of course Karis could not imagine herself free from Mabin’s control and Norina’s expectations if she could not also imagine herself free of smoke. Nearly a month of battling back the smoke must have given her an insane hope that she might be able to defeat it for good. That was the doorway she had decided to enter, the doorway where certain death lurked.

  And then Norina was shouting at her: “What have you done! What did you do to her!” And it did not even occur to Zanja until too late that she had to defend herself, and Norina’s heavy boot slammed into her side—once, twice, a third time—before Zanja had managed to catch Norina’s foot and take her down. And then they were rolling, their blades of folded st
eel ringing like bells, a sweet, terrible sound. But no matter where Karis was, at the very moment that Zanja’s blade cut into Norina’s flesh, Karis would know.

  Zanja flung her dagger away and blocked with her forearm a stroke that could have killed her, and felt the dagger slice through cloth and flesh and all the way to bone. She brought her knee up reflexively into Norina’s crotch and heard her shout, and then she was rolling away and rising to her feet, but Norina’s heavy boot cracked into her knee and Zanja heard, rather than felt, the bone shatter like pottery. Then Emil took Norina from behind and the fight seemed to be over. And then the pain came.

  “Hold still,” J’han said, his voice deadly calm.

  “Gods burn her to ashes —”

  “Zanja, hold still. Your ribs might be broken and you could be killed yet.”

  Zanja had seen the kind of death that came when a rib pierced a lung, and she held herself still, or as still as she could. A very bad time followed. There was much frantic activity around her, and sometimes J’han’s voice penetrated the haze of pain, always calm, measured, talking steadily to her or to someone else: “I know it’s bad, Zanja, but there’s no time to brew a potion. Just keep breathing—you know how to keep the pain from taking control of you—Now, sir, give me the bandages, and that grayish bottle—yes, that one. Put more pressure on her arm; it’s starting to leak again...” He faded out, and when he came back he was working with needle and thread like a seamster—nice of him to mend Zanja’s shirt—except that it was her arm he was mending—and she couldn’t take a deep breath for some reason. “You’re awake again?” he said. “Almost done now. Amazing how easy it is to do this kind of damage and how much work it takes to fix. You can’t breathe very well because I’ve got your ribs bound, but they’re just cracked.”

  “What happened to my leg?” she croaked. Her entire leg seemed to be immobilized with a splint of some kind, but the pain was dazzling and nauseating.