Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “It’s not good at all—sir, can you cut that?—Your kneecap’s shattered so badly I don’t know if it can mend. At the very least it’ll be a long time before you can move about at all, even on crutches. I’ve got it in a splint, but—”

  Zanja shut her eyes to understand him better, but the information seemed beyond comprehension. All she could think of was Karis, incinerating her entire smoke supply and walking away. How long would it take for her to die? Would Zanja feel it, when Karis died?

  “What happened to Norina?” she asked.

  “She went away,” J’han said distractedly.

  Zanja glanced sideways and saw Emil, holding Zanja’s arm still so that J’han could work on it, watching J’han’s work with professional interest. There was blood everywhere. Feeling Zanja’s attention, Emil raised an eyebrow and said mildly, “Now that was the dirtiest fight I’ve seen outside of a tavern. Too bad you were at the receiving end.”

  Zanja gasped, “I’d hurt Karis if I hurt her.”

  “Unfortunately, Norina had no such compunctions. But this is an amazingly clean wound.”

  J’han said, “With the right blow, a blade like that could kill you before you knew you were hurt. I wish my surgeon’s knives were that sharp.”

  “Where’s Medric?” Zanja said.

  “Now you’re starting to think,” Emil said. “Karis seems to have convinced Medric to keep his mouth shut. He’s refused to help look for Karis, as have the Lake People refused. It’s been just me and Annis, chasing around the countryside like a couple of wastrels. I even tried your trick with the directional glyphs, but it doesn’t work for me.”

  “Hold still!” J’han said.

  “Gods curses on that madwoman,” Zanja gasped as a fresh wave of pain washed through her. “I’m the only one who can find her!”

  “You’ll have to accept that you’re not going anywhere,” J’han said.

  Annis brought over a steaming bowl of dark, stinking fluid and held it out for J’han’s inspection. He dipped in a fingertip and tasted it, and made a face. “Practically undrinkable. That’s about right.”

  “No one’s been able to find Medric either,” Annis said. “He’s around, but no matter where you are, he’s just left moments before.”

  Medric said at the doorway of the cave, “I’m here now. Good gods.” He looked around the blood-smeared cave.

  “You didn’t dream this part?” Emil said bitterly.

  Pale, red-eyed with sleeplessness or sorrow, Medric dropped to one knee beside Zanja. “Karis promised to make it possible to find her. She said she’d go west along the canyon rim as far as she could go in five days travel, and then she’d hole up in some hollow place where she could see the sky. She asked me to beg your pardon, Zanja, for deceiving you, but she had to fight this battle alone.”

  “She brought enough smoke to last until today?”

  “Yes.”

  “All three of you must go find her, then. If she can be saved—”

  J’han said, with that terrible honesty that was sometimes the only gift a healer could give, “Zanja, there is no hope of that. Even if we can find her before she dies, the only thing that could save her is smoke, and we have none.”

  Emil said in a low voice, “Mabin has some.”

  There was silence. Zanja said, “Karis would rather die.” She made the mistake of moving, and for some time she could do nothing but breathe and struggle to stay conscious. When J’han put the bowl to her mouth she drank just a swallow of the bitter pain killer. “J’han, Karis is vested with the power of Shaftal,” she said.

  He sat back sharply, nearly spilling the bowl of potion. “What!”

  “Go with them to find her. If she is dying, at least she should die with dignity.”

  “Annis can take care of Zanja,” Emil said.

  Annis grumbled because her long recess with the Otter People had come to an end, but she did not refuse her old commander’s will. They settled Zanja onto the pallet with the potion beside her, and within the time it would have taken ten drops of water to fall from the water clock, they were gone.

  Zanja took one more swallow of the bitter potion, and told Annis to leave her alone. After that came a merciful darkness and stillness.

  As she slept, Zanja dreamed that she was an owl, flying across the face of the earth, with the river flowing to her right, black as blood, and rocks below, like scattered bones. At last, she found Karis, a broken and twisted body in a grassy hollow where sharp stones broke through the earth like teeth. Her body was cold; no breath passed her lips. Emil, Medric, J’han, and Norina knelt in a circle around her, digging with their bare hands to cover her with earth. Norina was weeping, racked with a grief made all the more terrible by the bitter strength her sorrow had overcome.

  Zanja must have cried something in her sleep, for she opened her eyes to find Annis beside her, with a cool hand upon her burning forehead. Zanja’s throat felt scoured raw, and her voice came out a whisper. “They will find her too late. Is there any word?”

  “Zanja, it’s much too soon.”

  “But someone is here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel it.”

  “Maybe the potion is giving you hallucinations.” But Annis went to the doorway, where Zanja could see a bit of star-scattered sky above, and a bit of star-scattered lake below. “I don’t see anything,” Annis said. Then her body gave a jerk and she uttered a surprised grunt and lifted a hand as if to investigate what had struck her, but before she could understand what had happened, she fell.

  It happened so suddenly that the sound of the pistol’s report didn’t register until after Annis’s knees buckled. There was nowhere for Zanja to go, even if she’d had the ability and will to flee. Her blade lay within reach, but thanks to Norina her blade hand was useless. Her pistols were still in Homely’s saddlebags, and the three men had taken Homely with them. Five people came into the cave and made certain that Zanja was indeed helpless, and then Mabin came in. “Where is Karis?”

  “Karis has returned to earth.”

  Mabin struck her across the face. “The truth!”

  Zanja tasted blood. She said thickly, “Karis has delivered herself to the smoke.”

  Mabin sat back on her heels, rigid with frustration. “She makes no sense.”

  “There’s no one else here,” one of her companions said. “We’ve searched all along the beach. No horses, no equipment, no nothing. Just the two of them, and Annis is dead.”

  Mabin hissed in her breath, and then released it. “If I’d known it was Annis—Well, there’s no help for it now. So long as we’ve got this one, we’ve as good as got the one I want. We’ll have to settle for that.”

  “This one seems to be newly injured. Broken ribs, it looks like, and—” Zanja felt her injured arm lifted and examined. “She was cut defending herself, with healer’s stitches closing up the wound. A nice, clean job of it.”

  “A healer, and someone with a nasty temper—that would be Norina and her consort. No doubt there’s been a disagreement and Norina has taken off with Karis.” Mabin fell silent a moment, and then she muttered, “Shaftal, what have I done to deserve this?”

  Zanja was tired to the bone, and tired to the heart. She shut her eyes and did not open them again until her captors lifted her onto the litter they had made for her, and the pain began again. The Paladins had to step over Annis’s body as they carried Zanja out into the cold night. And Karis, Karis also would soon be dead.

  Chapter 25

  Emil, Medric, and J’han traveled through the afternoon and across the dark span of the night as though demons were after them. “I think we’re close now,” Medric said, sometime after dawn. Soon afterwards, they spotted the white flag lying limp in the half light: Karis’s shirt, they realized when the
y had drawn near, tied to a tree branch by the sleeves. They untied it and soon had found their way into a hollow of earth that was cupped like the palm of a giant hand. There in the center Karis lay in the wet grass. Norina, whose long intimacy with Karis must have helped her to find her first, lay beside her, embracing her naked body with her own.

  “She’s too cold,” she said.

  Emil lay down on Karis’s other side and they sandwiched her between them. After J’han had listened to Karis’s heart, he covered her with blankets, and sat upon a stone with his head in his hands, as though he could not bring himself to speak. The Truthken, though, began to weep. Having emptied herself of anger, Emil thought, now only grief remained. She had indeed loved Karis, however badly she might have done it.

  Emil held Karis tightly, as though to keep her from falling. Her powerful muscles lay limp and cold; her heartbeat was intangible, the motion of her breath so weak it seemed illusory. She’d bitten her mouth, battered her hands, scraped her skin raw upon the stones, in a terrible, solitary agony that had mercifully ended now. She would die without ever opening her eyes again. The healer did not have to say it out loud.

  Norina sat up. Her hair was plastered down with water and mud, her face pale with exhaustion beneath the grime of hard travel. “J’han, what can we do?”

  “Only smoke could save her,” J’han said.

  The Truthken shuddered, as though she’d been cut with a blade. “I have some smoke,” she said. “Ten years I’ve carried it with me, as a surety.”

  J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”

  “But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of them made any move to stop her.

  J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”

  Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.

  Norina wiped a sleeve across her eyes as though to clear a fog, and looked at him in that way which makes even the bravest warrior flinch back from a Truthken’s stare. “By the land, what are you?” she said softly.

  Medric did not flinch under her gaze.

  She said, as quietly as before, “Better people than I have given you their trust. Tell me what you see.”

  “Madam Truthken, when you destroyed that smoke, I saw you close a door. And I saw another door open. There is no one in this land who knows Karis like you know her. So tell me, why did she take off her clothes?”

  “Even though Karis cannot feel the wisdom of her flesh, there’s times she knows exactly what she needs to do. I suppose it is earth logic.”

  “So wouldn’t it be even more logical if she lay on soil rather than grass?”

  Norina began pulling up great handfuls of grass by the roots. J’han and Medric helped her ,and by the time the sun had risen, they had cleared a patch big enough to lay Karis upon with her skin pressed the damp black earth.

  “It looks like a grave,” Norina said.

  “But it is a garden.” Medric’s eyes had seemed glazed with sleeplessness and sorrow, but he was, Emil realized suddenly, in the midst of a waking vision.

  Emil said, “Medric, what should we do now?”

  “Plant her,” Medric said. “Plant her so she will grow.”

  Emil went creeping through the nearby brush until he managed to kill a couple of heavy ground birds with some lucky shots. Plucking and cleaning the birds took nearly as long as hunting them had, and then he dug up some roots that would make a poor substitute for potatoes, and picked greens. He returned with his heavy gathering bag to find that nothing much had changed. J’han had dosed Medric with a sleeping draught to stop his hallucinations, and Medric slept, pale and exhausted even in sleep, his face still creasing sometimes with worry or fear. J’han, a botanist like all healers, had collected a pile of strengthening herbs. Norina knelt at Karis’s side like a mud-covered statue, watching her breathe. Karis, except for her face, was covered with a blanket of soil that steamed now in the warm afternoon sun. She had not died yet, and that was surprising.

  Emil filled his pot with the fowl and the roots and set it on the fire to stew, then went off again to gather wood and fill their canteens. Normally, all the walking and riding and worrying would have crippled him by now, but when Karis laid her hands upon his knee she had repaired much more than that one badly-healed old injury. He had returned to their camp, and was stirring the pot that had started to simmer, when he heard Norina say in a voice destroyed by weeping, “Karis.”

  Emil feared what he would see, but what he saw was that the soil had cracked over Karis’s chest, and those cracks widened and narrowed in rhythm with her deep breaths. Karis lay quiet, eyes open, gazing at Norina with an expression Emil would not have liked to have directed at him. She turned her face away and Norina sat back, as if she had been hit.

  J’han scraped away the earth so he could listen to Karis’s heart. He said, “Well, Karis, it seems your heart wants to keep beating.”

  He put his head near hers, for she seemed to have spoken. “Emil, she’s asking for you.”

  Emil went to kneel beside her. Her voice was just a whisper, like a sheet of paper being torn. “Zanja,” she said.

  “We left her in the cave by Otter Lake. She and Norina had a fight and she was unable to travel.”

  On Karis’s other side, Norina covered her face with her hands. Zanja’s blood still spattered her shirt.

  Karis opened her mouth again, and the tearing paper sound resolved itself into a word: “No,” or perhaps, “I know.” Then she said, “Where is she?”

  Emil gazed at her, baffled. Norina dropped her hands and said, “Karis, I swear I didn’t kill her.”

  Karis did not look at her or seem to have heard her.

  “She is alive,” Emil said. “She was bitterly angry at Norina and desperately worried about you, last I saw her.”

  Karis said very carefully, as though to a stupid child, “Where. Is. She.”

  Silence, then Norina spoke, looking at Emil and not at Karis. “Something has befallen Zanja. Karis cannot perceive her presence.”

  “What!” Emil leapt to his feet.

  “I will accompany you. I won’t anger her any longer with my presence.”

  J’han began to protest, but stopped himself and said in exasperation, “There’s no point in even talking to you. Emil, if I give you some powders, will you find a way to make her take them? Slip them into her drinking water if you have to. She has not even rested since giving birth, and seems determined to kill herself.”

  “I’ll take your powders,” Norina said. She stood up and began to gather her gear, making the jerky, mechanical movements of a body strained beyond endurance.

  Karis continued to gaze at Emil. Only the earth had brought her back from the threshold; she had no business being alive at all. Anger burned in the depth of her sunken eyes, and suddenly, Emil could imagine her as G’deon of Shaftal.

  Emil said to her, “We’ll wait a little while for Medric to wake up, in case he can tell us what’s befallen her. We will find her. You have plenty of evidenc
e that fire bloods do not lose what they love.”

  Some time after Karis had eaten and been taken hostage by a healing sleep, Medric awoke, not with a start, as he usually did, but slowly, so that Emil, who had been doing what he could for the exhausted horses, could contrive to be beside him when he finally awoke, and place the correct pair of spectacles upon his nose. Medric said thickly, “I recognize you even as a blur.”

  “I certainly should hope so,” Emil said.

  Medric smiled, and so it seemed that they would survive the anger and disappointment of the last few days. Still, Emil said, as was right, “I feel as if I failed you by being angry at the choices you felt you had to make. Surely it was a terrible time for you, and my anger only made it worse.”

  Medric said in some astonishment, “Are you trying to tell me that—”

  “Karis is going to live, as far as J’han can tell. And, apparently, she’s going to live without smoke.”

  “Oh, Shaftal,” Medric said, sitting up in a daze. “Oh, earth and sky, do you feel it? The door is swinging open, and the breeze is blowing through...”

  Emil said, though he hated to dampen the young seer’s enthusiasm, “I’m so worried about Zanja and Annis that there’s not much else I can think about. Something has befallen them, Karis says, and that something can only be Mabin.”

  “Karis doesn’t know what happened?”

  “She can hardly talk, but Norina says that Zanja is beyond Karis’s ken.”

  “Well, that puts her over water then, doesn’t it? It seems obvious enough.” He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

  It had not been at all obvious to Emil, but, remembering Karis’s discomfort around water, it began to make a kind of sense. It was said that Shaftal is the G’deon’s flesh and bone, and nothing happens between ocean and mountain that the G’deon does not feel. If Karis could not feel Zanja, alive or dead, then it could only mean Zanja was no longer in physical contact with the earth. He said, “So she’s somewhere on the river.”