Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  The raven flew east and north across the Midlands for three days, until he came to Norina’s cottage in the woods. There she had returned for a rest from her wanderings up and down the length of the region, where she ceaselessly rewove and repaired the fabric of the law, which the Sainnites tore apart again, before and behind her.

  The raven tapped on the window to wake her up, and she went into the kitchen to let him in. She bore the weight of the child lightly enough, but she did not awaken as easily or gracefully as she used to. She fumbled at the window latch and then sat heavily by the cold hearth, rubbing her face. “You’ve been gone over twelve days.”

  Embodied in the raven, Karis said, “This raven went to South Hill again. And I’ve spoken to Zanja.”

  Looking through the raven’s eyes was strange, for he had two fields of vision and could see Norina in only one of them. As she leapt to her feet and cried out, “What!” then strode in agitation across the length of the kitchen, she moved from one eye to the other. “I ought to wring your neck!”

  “You’re right; you ought to. Why don’t you do it, then?” Karis flew the raven over so Norina could reach his black neck easily.

  Norina’s hands unclenched. She lifted them up as though to directly entreat the goddess Shaftal for assistance, though she could hardly be described as devout.

  “Zanja told me that it was a Sainnite seer that caused such havoc in Rees last year. And this year he’s in South Hill.”

  Norina walked back to the hearth and sat down. Her face had lost its color and the scar across her cheek stood out like a brand. “Tell me everything that she said. Every word.”

  Karis told her. Norina stirred the coals and then sat without moving until the few flames that she had coaxed out of the ashes died down from neglect. She covered her face with her hands. When she looked up, she had slipped from dismay back again to anger. If her infant could survive a tumultuous nine months in Norina’s womb, Karis thought irrelevantly, the rest of the child’s life surely would seem easy and restful by comparison.

  Norina said, “What you don’t see, and she can’t see, is how she endangers you with her concern. If it is in fact true that the only seer in all of Shaftal is a Sainnite—and that the only person in Shaftal besides myself who is devoted to you has made herself his enemy—it will not be long before the seer begins to dream of you. If it has not happened already.”

  Karis, muddled by air logic, rather plaintively said, “I am not sure I understand you.”

  “He will know of you through thinking of her. Perhaps he will know more of you than she does—and certainly, she knows too much already.“

  “For all these months, Zanja has kept her counsel—”

  “She will not tellthe seer. She will not have to. It will come to him, that’s all.” Norina leapt to her feet and started pacing again. “We have to get her out of South Hill.”

  Karis said flatly, “She will not go. Not without an explanation.”

  “She will do whatever you ask her to do, Karis. Her obligation to you—”

  “Her obligation to me is counterbalanced now by her obligation to her company, to her commander. They are in desperate straits. She will refuse to abandon them without a reason—a compelling reason.”

  Norina stopped in the middle of the room. “No,” she said. “I will not tell her more, when with every breath I wish that she knew less.”

  “Well then, it seems there’s nothing we can do but hope.”

  “Hope!” Norina spat it out, like a curse.

  Karis, more present in that kitchen than she was in her own body, which, unattended, fought its daily battle to overcome the paralysis of smoke, could feel the closeness of sunrise. This conversation would soon end.

  “You have to leave Meartown,” Norina said.

  “You know I will not.”

  “It won’t take long for this seer to realize that when you’re under smoke you’ll walk up to him as trustingly as a newborn lamb. Your first obligation is to survive unharmed. Not just for the people of Meartown, but for the people of Shaftal.”

  Karis said nothing, which Norina would recognize as rebellion. Norina said, finally, “I’m going to write to Mabin. Perhaps she can do something.”

  Karis tried to remind Norina that Mabin hated her and probably wouldn’t care if she were killed by the Sainnites, but the words came out garbled, and she realized that she had come back to her own skin, speaking inarticulate sounds with a mouth still paralyzed by smoke. A speckling of sunlight lay upon the eastward-facing windows, and she heard faintly the sound of Dominy stirring up the coals of the kitchen fire.

  He came in with a pot of tea later, and found the garden doors flung open and Karis standing in the doorway, neither outside nor inside, pulling on the twisted locks of her hair as though they were ropes connected to thoughts, and her thoughts were drowning. It would not be one of her good days.

  Before the weary Paladins arrived at Midway Barn, where Emil’s messengers anxiously awaited his reappearance, worrying shreds of news had already reached them: tales of farmsteads razed and entire families disappeared. Emil came out from his solitary hearing of the messengers’ reports, looking drawn and gray with pain and exhaustion. Four highland farmsteads that had been steady providers of bread and supplies to South Hill Company had been burned to the ground; and of the farm families, even the children, no one remained, though no bodies had been found. Some hundred people in all had gone missing.

  He delivered no inspirational speech, but left to closet himself with Linde, whom he had selected to replace Daye, along with Perry and Willis. Zanja sat among the others, a filthy, bloody, half-starved band of ruffians, and waited for her turn behind the healer’s curtain. The smell of chicken stew cooking seemed about to drive them all insane, when the one-armed bread runner fortuitously arrived with the donkey, Zanja’s old companion, heavily laden with great wheels of flat bread. Without butter or broth to dip it in, the bread was dry as sawdust, but they ate it gratefully. Slowly, Zanja began to hear a murmur of her companions’ old stout-heartedness. She sat with them, and ate dry bread, and plotted revenge.

  Later, after a chilly bath of water splashed from a stream, with her poorly laundered clothing drying in the hot breeze, and her bitten arm, blistered feet, and raw hands bandaged and salved, Zanja let herself enjoy the illusion of rest and comfort. She was asleep in a patch of sunshine when Emil woke her. His drawn face, dirty clothing, and even the staff on which he now leaned, reminded her how desperate their situation had become.

  “That bite in your arm isn’t festering, is it?” he asked.

  “No, Emil.”

  “That’s fortunate, I suppose. Jerrell tells me that the surviving Paladins are going to fall ill or succumb to one or another infection if they don’t get some rest and a few decent meals in them.”

  “I ate some bread.”

  He responded with a flash of his old humor. “That’s practically a feast. And you’ve slept, what, an hour or two? That should be more than enough.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “I want you to find Annis, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

  “You don’t know where she is?” Zanja had thought of Annis in passing, but had been willing enough not to think of her too long. Her name had not been on the list of dead or injured, so she assumed there was no reason for concern.

  “No one knows where she is. Her family, though, is one of the three that has disappeared. Her home is burned, they tell me. When she came in from her experiments, she would have heard all this. I am a bit concerned about what she might do.”

  Zanja got to her feet—stiffly enough, but apparently with enough grace to win her a glance of unabashed envy from Emil. This grueling journey had all but crippled him. “There are others who know her haunts better than I.”

  “None of them are fire bloods who have been her lover.”

  She muttered, “Nothing escapes you, does it?”

  “By the land, I wish that wer
e true!” He put a hand upon her shoulder. “Listen: you need a place to shelter out the winter. To partner with the daughter of an established farm family can only be to your benefit. But if it turns out you have to bring her to me at the end of a rope, do you think you could?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “If you had to?”

  She said reluctantly, “Yes.”

  “Good.” Emil added, rather bitterly, “But do hold onto what shreds of decency you can.”

  The next day, Zanja made her way to Annis’s family farm. There, the black, burned-out walls of seven buildings gaped like the jaws of corpses. All around them spread lush fields of knee-high grain and white-blossomed potato plants. Zanja stood at the edge of an orchard, where a din of insects made the voices of the man and woman walking through the field seem very far away. Zanja had been watching them for some time. They had walked from building to building, looking in at the tangles of charred wood contained by each stone shell. Once, they ventured inside, but came out again quickly, coughing and wiping away tears. Now they walked meditatively through the fields, pausing sometimes to discuss something vehemently, with sweeping gestures that seemed to include the entire landscape.

  As they drew close to the orchard, they spotted Zanja and stopped short in confusion. She stepped briskly out into the field, taking care to avoid trampling the seedlings, but stopped at a distance so they would not be too frightened of her, and bowed. “I am Zanja Paladin of South Hill Company, a friend of Annis’s. You are her kinfolk, yes?”

  The two of them clutched each other in dismay, but the woman said cautiously, “Everyone in South Hill is her kin.”

  They looked enough like Annis that it seemed certain all three of them had a parent in common, but then the South Hillers seemed peculiarly indifferent to ties of blood; what united them into families was the land alone. Now that Annis’s family was gone, the land they had farmed was an orphan, an event as rare in South Hill as the orphaning of a child. This event presented the entire community with a problem: Who was now obligated or entitled to tend the crops? This must have been the problem this brother and sister had been pondering.

  The man said, “South Hill Company should have no interests here. Where were you when the farm was burning?”

  “We were chasing the enemy and burying the dead,” Zanja said.

  “I hear you were off on a hare-chase, tearing down Darton Bridge for no good reason when you should have been here.”

  The woman jerked his arm roughly, and he fell into sullen silence.

  Zanja said, “Please, if you see Annis, would you tell her that I’m looking for her? I’m worried about her.”

  Both the farmers seemed startled at the suggestion that someone might actually care for their eccentric sister.

  “I’d like to look at the buildings. Would you mind?”

  The siblings did not respond. Zanja walked over to the remains of the commonhouse. Portions of the walls remained standing, though the roof had collapsed in a crazy tangle of charred timbers that filled the interior. Cradles had hung from those rafters. Now the acrid stink of destruction seared Zanja’s lungs, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

  and pain ballooned in her skull as she stumbled through the fierce heat of the flames where people were trapped and screaming and she followed the rhythmic signal of a newborn’s cry: the na’Tarwein infant she had last seen in a basket beside her sleeping mother. And the blazing fire swam in her vision, now close and now far, hot enough that it seemed her flesh must cook upon her bones, and she stumbled through smoke, walking on embers, following the sound

  “Madam!”

  and the infant’s voice fell silent and as Zanja stumbled up to the na’Tarwein clanhouse the roof collapsed and the roar and pressure of flames drove her away, wheezing and reeling in a daze of pain and horror

  “Madam Paladin!”

  The farmer spoke with sharp impatience, but when Zanja turned her face, she stepped hastily backwards. Zanja put a hand to her face and found it wet, not with blood from her head wound or a dead Sainnite, but with tears. “Some of them burned alive,” she said.

  The woman took another startled step backwards. “But we have not found any bodies.”

  “In my own family.” Zanja rubbed the side of her head, where the rough terrain of a scar crossed her scalp. Until this moment, she had forgotten that, bleeding, dazed, scarcely even conscious, she had walked through the burning village hoping and failing to save just one life from the disaster, a single child.

  “Your family?” The farmer said. “Are you from Rees?”

  “I’m from the northern borderlands. We have Sainnites there, too.” Zanja dried her face with a corner of her headcloth. “What are you and your brother going to do?”

  “Well, as for me, I can’t endure to see this good crop go to waste. But my brother wants to cry for justice at the gates of the garrison.”

  “Justice? Does he think this crime was done by a civilized people?”

  The brother said angrily, “The Paladins are much too busy to occupy themselves with something so trivial as justice. So there is no law left in South Hill, except the law of the Sainnites.”

  “Law? You are at war!”

  Zanja parted from the farmers with cold civility, and traveled through the woods towards the powder cave. Her anger at the man’s stupidity burned itself out, and ashes remained: a fire-gutted village, a corpse-scattered, charred cornfield, the coarse laughter of the Sainnite butchers halfway across the valley. Zanja, weaving through the mists, falling over the bodies of her friends, seeking Ransel among the dead, so that she could lie down beside him, and cut loose her soul from its bindings.

  The Ashawala’i also had never realized they were at war.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At least one keg of gunpowder was missing from the powder cave. Zanja waited there until a summer downpour had lightened to a mist, then she traveled east in dead of night and slipped into the river valley under cover of darkness. She lay in a copse until dawn. Every time she closed her eyes, pain blossomed in her healed skull, her heart began to pound, and she saw flames.

  With her weapons and gear tied in a bundle on her shoulder, Zanja joined a group of farmers headed for Wilton Market. They tolerated her presence as a herd of horses tolerates a donkey in their midst.

  In Wilton, Sainnite soldiers lounged in the sun like lizards on rocks. Zanja concealed her alien face behind the bundle on her shoulder. The tide carried her into and out of a crush of market stalls, where baskets of beans in a dozen different colors, and round, flat, and finger-shaped potatoes crowded up against caged chickens, squalling babies, vendors of steamed dumplings and roast nuts and honey candy, and the occasional seller of fine goods: silken scarves and ribbons, handmade lace, silver jewelry. A couple of Sainnite officers rode down the crowded street on their jumpy war horses, and Zanja found herself crushed up against one of these rickety stalls, along with a man carrying a basket of mewing kittens and a woman with a sack of potatoes. Unable to move, close enough to the stall’s baubles that she could have stolen one in her mouth if she had wanted, she had no choice but to examine them closely, while the stall man shored up the fragile structure by bracing it with his own body. The Sainnites passed and the pressure eased, but before Zanja moved on she bought one of the baubles, a simple pendant like a miniature plumb bob made of deep green stone. What would Emil think of how she was spending the money he’d given her? The thought sank like a rock into still water. She moved on until she saw a sign depicting a flame rising out of stone.

  Transformation, of course, is the business of chemists, but the flame-and-stone also was a traditional call to revolution. Nevertheless, no one except her stood in the street outside the chemist’s shop, mesmerized by the audacity of the weather-worn sign. Someone bumped into her and snapped at her for blocking the way. She stepped into the dim shop, and bowed briefly to the chemist, the shop’s only occupant, who used a pestle to grind a mess of odd ingredients
into a fine powder. A thin, vigorous woman with her gray hair braided and tied with a red ribbon, the chemist nodded but didn’t leave off her work until the grinding was completed. Then she came over to the counter, wiping her hands upon her apron.

  “Yes,” she said, “do you have a receipt for me to fill?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Good, then. I hate to see healthy people dose themselves. So you need a potion for someone else?”

  “For a friend. She needs something to calm her heart. She’s wild with grief, and it’s making her ill.”

  The chemist tutted absently. “Lost a child?”

  “Her whole family is gone. The Sainnites burned her farm. Haven’t you heard about it? Her name is Annis.”

  The chemist seemed to hesitate just a moment, then she shrugged. “That’s country news,” she said dismissively. “So, she’s maddened by grief and you want to … what? Make her sane again? Make her family come back? What?”

  “I want to give her some peace so she can think,” Zanja said. “I’m afraid she’ll do something foolish. Is there some drug that will make her talk to me?”

  The chemist wrote a few glyphs in chalk on a piece of slate. “I’ll have it done tonight. Where should I send it?”

  Zanja named an inn she had noticed just a few streets over. The chemist jotted down the inn’s glyphs on her slate. Perhaps she had studied in a Lilterwess school, and might even have been a healer once. A lot of the old healers were chemists now, according to J’han, and practiced their art on the sly.

  “And your name?” said the chemist.

  Zanja took the slate from her and drew upon it the Snake glyph, for betrayal, and crossed it out, then wrote out her name, and gave the slate back to the chemist, who accepted it without a word.