Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  She expected that Karis would come for Zanja, at any cost to herself, as Karis had already demonstrated she would do. She did not know that there were other credible witnesses to the enormity of her betrayal, and she would not know about them unless she stumbled across them while searching for Karis. She did not know that Zanja had a tribe, half-formed and tiny though it was, and that she would protect her people. She did not know what it meant to be a katrim. Above all, she did not know that Karis was dying, or perhaps already dead.

  Zanja said, “After the Sainnites captured me, they took symbolic vengeance upon me for the humiliations I and my fellow katrim had subjected them to. They tortured me, just as you are doing. For some reason, I always expected the Paladins to be different from the Sainnites.”

  “Who do you think you are, to —” Mabin began, but it was too late to raise her defenses; the blade of accusation had cut deep into the flesh of her complacency.

  “I know exactly who I am,” Zanja said.

  “A traitor to the people—a traitor under the Law!”

  “The Ashawala’i are not subject to the Law of Shaftal.”

  “What!”

  “You wrong my people in wronging me. Does not the Law require that you respect and protect the people of the borders?”

  “You have no people —”

  “Where one survives, the tribe survives.”

  “You fight our war, you are subject to our laws.”

  “I refuse to be subject to a Law that allows people like you to commit murder.”

  “Murder?”

  “Annis is dead,” Zanja reminded her.

  “Another traitor.”

  “Is that the way the Law works? You kill whomever you like, then declare them traitors?”

  “We are at war —”

  “At war to save the very Law you are destroying. It is you who are the traitor.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “It is not treachery to deliver the vested G’deon into a certain death by poisoning? What is it, then?”

  “Who made you judge, Zanja na’Tarwein? You are nothing but rogues, you and Karis both—a couple of fools with too much power and not enough wisdom. You must be restrained, for the future of Shaftal. If you will not accept restraint, then you must be killed. I regret it, yes. But it is you who have made the choice, not I.”

  “I have too much power?” Suddenly the entire conversation did indeed seem absurd, and Zanja uttered a laugh, quickly choked off by the pain of her ribs.

  “You are all the more dangerous for not knowing what you are doing. Fifteen years ago Harald G’deon made the last and greatest error in his life of errors, when his courage failed him and he cursed Shaftal by filling a weak and inappropriate vessel with his power. For fifteen years I have managed to keep Karis in control. Yet the moment you came to Shaftal, before Karis ever met you, before she ever even knew your name, she began to break her restraints. That is your power, Zanja na’Tarwein: the power to attract, the power to influence, the power to awaken that which should be left asleep. If I allowed you to exercise that power, this very land would be destroyed.”

  Zanja said, “You lived with her for years, and yet you do not know her. She would destroy nothing.”

  “Your people were destroyed by the very Sainnites that Harald allowed to get a foothold in this land!”

  “My people were destroyed,” Zanja said, “By the dream of a misguided seer. If the people of Shaftal had given that seer proper guidance, rather than calling her their enemy because her father was a Sainnite…”

  Mabin leapt to her feet and struck her.

  Zanja said, “You see, you are not defeating the Sainnites. You are becoming them.”

  Mabin struck her again. Then, without a word, she left Zanja alone in the darkness, taking even the lamp with her.

  Zanja lay still, hoping for the pain to ease, waiting for her breath to slow. Four witnesses there were to the true nature of Mabin’s betrayal of Shaftal, one from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. They would have a credibility that Mabin herself could not contravene. And Norina, for all her faults, would not rest until she’d seen justice done. Zanja lay silent in the dark hold of the boat, willing Medric to see her, to understand what she was doing, to convince Emil and J’han and Norina to flee to safety while Mabin, rather than pursuing them, waited for a visit from a woman who was dead.

  “Accept the willing sacrifice of a katrim,” Zanja entreated them. “Don’t waste your lives trying to save mine. Go, and make my death and Karis’s death be of some significance. That’s all I ask.”

  Several times a day, they came in to lift her up over the bucket that served as her toilet. Often, they also left her a meal and fresh water. Usually, Zanja scarcely even noticed the food, except as a means for measuring the time. She felt no hunger, and even to drink water required more effort than it was worth. Though the worst of her pain began to ease after a few days, she hardly got up from her pallet, for her splinted leg and bandaged ribs made movement nearly impossible in that cramped space. She heard Mabin pacing up and down the length of the boat’s deck, for hours at a time, like a wild animal in a cage. Zanja lay starving in the darkness below where she walked.

  Twenty-one meals had been served when Zanja’s door opened and Mabin stepped into the cargo hold once again. “We will force you to eat if we have to,” she said.

  Zanja had been expecting and preparing for this visit all morning, for her prescience seemed enhanced by hunger, just as seers’ ability to see the future might sometimes be enhanced by fasting. “I cannot stop you from doing what you like,” she said.

  “Such despair is unbecoming in a warrior.”

  “Despair is what makes my confinement endurable. I would give you some as a gift if I could, then perhaps you would be less restless. The sound of your pacing interrupts my thoughts.”

  “Your thoughts will be even more interrupted if my Paladins have to pour cold gruel down your throat and force you to swallow it or drown in it.” Mabin hung the lamp from the lamp hook. She held a pistol, and despite Zanja’s apparent weakness took care not to turn her back on her. “I expected Karis would come for you by now.”

  “No doubt,” Zanja said.

  “Tell me what you think she is doing.”

  Zanja closed her eyes, and there she saw Karis, as she had never seen her in life, lifting and swinging a great hammer, with the molten metal flying at each blow. Sweat polished the great muscles of her back and shoulders, and sunlight caught on her skin, and in her hair, as if she were made of gold. “She is working at the forge,” Zanja said. “All these years you knew her, and you never knew how strong she is.”

  “Nonsense,” Mabin said. “If she had returned to Meartown, I would know.”

  But Zanja felt a little peace. Karis seemed so intent on her work, surely that meant she had found contentment at last.

  Now the time Zanja had bought for her friends’ escape was indeed running out, and she could only hope that Medric’s dreams had brought them all to a place of safety. She began to eat a little—enough to placate Mabin, she hoped, but not so much that it would dull her heightened senses. Mabin came into the cargo hold and talked to her for hours at a time, and Zanja devoted all her energies toward making the experience more unpleasant for Mabin than it was for her.

  She was aided in this endeavor by an astonishing run of bad luck that began to plague her captors and to harry Mabin in particular, as only small annoyances can. Zanja learned first-hand about the mice and maggots fouling the food supply, but she also heard hints of other irritants as well: an infestation of fleas, broken ropes and fouled lines, unseasonably cold and wet weather which forced her captors into close quarters, and an unpredictable tendency for the boat to slip its anchor. Already tormented by these unremitting vexations, M
abin could not endure with any grace Zanja’s deliberate attempts to infuriate her.

  By the end of another two days of questioning, Zanja knew she had put herself in grave danger. This battle of wills between the two of them operated with its own logic, and had long since become far more than a mere delaying tactic. Though she lay awake that night, she fell into a restless sleep at last. Night upon the river was a silent time, and Zanja slept with her ear against the wood that separated her from the water. Sometimes, in her dreams, it seemed she could hear the water sliding past, but tonight she heard something else: a faint, rhythmic tapping, sometimes close and sometimes far away, almost as though someone were swimming up and down the length of the boat, drumming lightly upon its hull.

  Near dawn, Zanja awakened abruptly. She was cold—and wet. Her pallet and blankets were soaked with cold water. The water was collecting in the lowest point of the hold, where it stood in a puddle a hand’s width deep, but she could not figure out its source. Every part of the hull seemed wet, as though the wood was weeping. She dragged herself up the slope of the hull and waited to see what would happen next.

  By the time the door was opened for her morning meal, the water was knee deep, and the man who had opened the door uttered a surprised yelp at the little river that flowed over his feet when he forced open the door. Soon the boat echoed with pounding footsteps, and Mabin came with three guards behind her to search the cargo hold for the puncture that they assumed Zanja had somehow put through the hull. “After we repair the leak you’ll sleep in water,” Mabin said. “You’ll have only hurt yourself.” But they had scarcely begun their search when someone came to the door with the news that the aft hold was half full of water as well.

  “Mabin,” Zanja said, as the Councilor turned away to investigate this new disaster.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Karis is dead.”

  Mabin stood very still in the doorway, with the lamp beyond her, silhouetting her. A hard, pitiless woman, it seemed the only thing that could stop her in her tracks was the thing she most wanted to hear.

  Zanja said, “The smoke did kill Karis. She endured so much, but in the end she decided to die rather than use smoke any longer.”

  “Why have you kept this from me?” Mabin asked. Her voice was nearly a whisper.

  “You have murdered the G’deon of Shaftal. While I’ve been playing games with you here, witnesses to that murder have gotten safely away. Now, there will be an accounting.”

  Mabin turned away without a word, and closed and locked the door behind her. Alone in the darkness, sitting upon the weeping boards, with the collected water slopping gently in the silence, the vast wilderness of loss opened up within Zanja, and for a long time she wept, as the water level rose higher and people rushed back and forth across the length of the boat, their voices edged with disbelief and dismay. Soon they would abandon the boat and leave Zanja here to drown in the rising water. It seemed a lonely and cold death, but it was as good as any, she supposed.

  But Mabin came back with two others, and fought open the door, and had her men haul Zanja out of the hold and up into a misty, cold early morning where the sun was nothing more than a haze of light. There they bound her hands and put her into a rowboat, along with so many other people that the little boat also seemed in danger of sinking. It was so crowded the rowers could scarcely move to row it to shore. Mabin sat beside Zanja, glowering at her.

  Zanja could not imagine why Mabin had come back for her. Perhaps she was haunted by Zanja’s declaration that she was no better than the Sainnites. Perhaps she wanted the satisfaction of killing Zanja with her own hands, rather than letting her drown. The hazy light was almost too bright to endure after Zanja’s days of darkness. As the rowboat lurched toward shore, the riverboat settled deeply into the water behind them, like a hen settling onto her nest. Soon it would be sitting on the river bottom.

  The muffling silence of the fog crept across the rowboat. The grumblers fell quiet and Mabin stared bleakly across the water, where the shore now came hazily into view, as stony as any other bank of this harsh river, with boulders that huddled in the mist like bodies upon a battlefield. Beyond the shore, the fog loomed like a wall. Something lay within the mist, a universe of possibilities, thousands of routes through the wilderness, thousands of days yet to dawn.

  It seemed very strange that a perfectly sound boat had suddenly begun to leak, and not just from one place, but from everywhere at once. Fingertips had drummed on the boat’s hull in the dark of night, as if slender swimmers, playing like otters, had swum up and down, sometimes coming up for air, laughing gleefully, with their faces in the water to muffle the sound. What a fine game it would have been. And to repeatedly slip loose the boat’s anchor, to make deliveries of fleas...this was guerrilla warfare indeed.

  The rowboat ground into the stony shore, and the rowers shipped their oars. Grumbling again, some of the people in the boat got out and hauled the boat into the shallows. The boat tilted and its occupants got out. Two men dragged Zanja from the boat, and hauled her through the knee-deep water onto dry land, holding her by the elbows. They lay her down upon the shore and she immediately began, quietly, to drag herself away.

  “I don’t like this fog,” Mabin said. “I don’t like anything about this day. Let’s get to town, and quickly.” She looked at Zanja. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Zanja uttered a cry of longing and anger, and struggled under the knee that dropped onto her back. It took two men to get her under control. When she hung like baggage from their iron grips, she noticed Mabin, standing several bodylengths away, with her pistol drawn. “That was stupid of you,” Mabin said. “I don’t know why I didn’t simply shoot you. You have little value for me any more.”

  “Why don’t you let me go?” Zanja said. “What harm can I do now?”

  Weather magic is water magic. The wall of fog was dissolving now, and the wretched, flood-distorted trees that grew along the shore seemed to step forward, one tree at a time. And then one of the trees lifted its head like a horse catching a familiar scent, and the tree beside it was a person holding its reins. The fog rolled back like a curtain folding away from a bright window. More people. More horses. A gaunt scarecrow leaned upon one of the gnarled trees as though upon a cane. And then the sun washed across her and she drew herself erect.

  Karis.

  “Councilor Mabin,” she said, in a voice heavy with irony, “This time you have brought your fate upon yourself.”

  The pistol hammer clicked as Mabin pulled its trigger. The powder pan did not ignite, for gunpowder is earth, nothing more than earth.

  Karis stepped towards her. Those among the trees remained at a distance: a Healer, a Truthken, a Paladin, a Seer; witnesses from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. There was laughter in the river. Mabin seemed unable to look away from the giant woman who confronted her. “Councilor Mabin,” Karis said again, softly. “One way or another, you will let her go.”

  Mabin cried, “Kill the captive!”

  Zanja threw herself forward, breaking the grip of her captors and collapsing again onto stones. Then they had her again, but they paid her little attention. A rag-dressed collection of muscle and bone, Karis took another step forward, and Mabin toppled backward at her touch, as though she had been pummeled. She sprawled upon her back, and Karis took her by the shirt and tore open the heavy fabric as though it was gauze. She lifted a fist as though striking a hammer upon the forge. But she held a glittering needle of steel in her fist, bright and terrible in the sudden sunshine, and she drove it without hesitation into Mabin’s heart.

  Mabin uttered an awful cry. Blood gushed, vivid scarlet in the bright sunshine. Karis pressed her palm to Mabin’s breast. Mabin clawed empty air as though to pluck the cold steel from her heart. The Paladins stood transfixed.

  “Before Shaftal,�
�� breathed the man who knelt upon Zanja’s back. “She’s spiked her heart. Shaftal, what have we done?” He got up hastily and made as if to offer Zanja a hand, but she did not even look at him.

  Mabin lay still. Karis stood up, breathing heavily, her hand painted scarlet. Mabin lifted a trembling hand to touch the blunt end of the steel spike embedded in her flesh. Karis said, “Mabin Paladin, Councilor of the Lilterwess, you live now at my tolerance. My advisors have convinced me to let you live, for the sake of the people who honor their old oaths. It is for them, and them alone, that I give you your life. See that you give me reason to continue to tolerate you.”

  Mabin gasped bitterly, “I know the Law. You need not instruct me.”

  The old man who had tried to help Zanja to her feet cried out, “Lady, we didn’t know! We thought it was our duty to serve the Councilor! How were we to know who you were? Mabin, you can yet ask for pardon —”

  “Pardon?” Mabin said, and sat up, though she clutched an agonized hand across the spike. “Shaftal will not come into the hands of a Sainnite pretender, the smoke-addicted daughter of a whore! I will tell the people what you are.”

  Karis’s bloodied hand clenched into a fist. A horrified silence fell, so profound that Zanja, with her ear to the stones, could hear rocks grinding in the bottom of the nearby river. Then Karis said, “I always thought that you hated me for what I am. But if I am Shaftal, then Shaftal is what you hate. Isn’t that true, Mabin Councilor? Don’t you hate Shaftal, the land and the people both, because we are half Sainnite? Don’t you hate Shaftal because this land is, now, the child of violence and rape? Don’t you hate the land because of its subjection and paralysis? And isn’t it true that your hatred is killing the land, just as it nearly killed me?”