Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  Zanja did not have to turn to know who had spoken. A black shadow flapped upon the ground in front of her. Her frail courage faltered.

  Emil said, his voice still soft with anger, “A misguided gift.”

  Zanja said, “Sir, it is my calling to transgress, but it is my duty to cause no harm by that transgression. Let me do my duty.”

  Emil gazed into her eyes, expressionless, unblinking. And then he turned away, to speak to his lieutenants. “This matter will not turn out the way any of us might expect. It seems ill-advised to do this so publicly, when so much damage already has been done to our community.”

  Willis said, “No,” as though he already was the commander. This was, certainly, his spectacle.

  Emil smiled oddly, without amusement. “Well then, at least let’s get into the shade, for courtesy to our guest.” He gestured toward an arbor of flowering vines, where there were some inviting benches in the shade.

  Zanja turned then, and looked into the scarred, sun-browned face of Norina Truthken. “What are you doing here? It is not your business.”

  Norina said, “Who did you think would come?”

  Though Zanja had lived with her until four months ago, she’d had no idea that Norina was pregnant. Even the heavy clothing of winter could not have concealed it now. Though her dust-stained clothing and red-rimmed eyes suggested a heroic journey had brought her here so quickly, her jutting belly hinted that at any moment she might deliver a child. Just the thought of her as a mother made Zanja’s head hurt.

  Karis’s raven rode upon her shoulder. It was a most uncanny sight.

  Zanja could barely walk the short distance to the arbor. The bullet wound in her leg had not healed at all as she lay helpless in the Underworld. At least she could escape the sun and sit upon a bench, though everyone else except Norina remained standing. A man-at-arms stood beside Norina, bristling with weapons like a brigand.

  Willis began, “I found Zanja’s bed empty shortly after dark, and—”

  Emil said, “I know what happened, Willis.”

  “But the Truthken—”

  “If Madam Truthken wishes to know something, she may ask.”

  The watchfulness of Norina’s gaze, and the black bird on her shoulder, hardly seemed calculated to set anyone at ease. She said, “Lieutenant—Willis is your name?”

  Willis jumped, and Zanja felt something, the faintest prickle of anticipation. “Madam Truthken,” he said belligerently.

  “You have not told the truth.”

  “I am not lying! Anyone who was there will confirm—”

  “You wanted Zanja dead, and were desperate for an excuse. That is what you have not said.”

  His face went white, but his chin came up. “I admit I had my men abandon her in a firefight. But I did that because I knew she was a traitor, and Emil would not see it, just as he will not see it now. I did it to save the company.”

  Norina gazed at him, expressionless. “So you named yourself commander.”

  Dazzled and bewildered by the vivid shine of truth in the midst of this nightmare, Zanja said, “He acted under Mabin’s command.”

  She heard the faintest sound from Emil: a grunt of pain or surprise.

  Norina’s gaze on Willis’s face never wavered. “She says the truth?”

  “Yes,” Willis said, with more apparent pride than fear.

  Norina blinked, once, and turned to Emil.

  Emil said in a strangled voice, “What did she offer you?”

  But Willis, seeming to think he had the upper hand, said loftily, “That’s between me and the councilor.”

  The bloody fool would get command of South Hill Company. Zanja could feel no more horror; the betrayals had accumulated until she hardly noticed them. But the look on Emil’s face was worse than her own pain.

  Norina stood up. “Commander, I need to speak to you alone.”

  They stepped aside. The five lieutenants, two of whom Zanja scarcely knew, shuffled their feet and muttered to each other. The man-at-arms stood stolid as a plowhorse, but his gaze never ceased to flick from one person to the next. Zanja ached in every part of her body. She felt her face with her fingers, to find her eyelids swollen, her lip split, her cheekbone raw and bruised. Her leg hurt with a dull and insinuating pain. She kept forgetting where she was, and the faces of the lieutenants and the observers kept changing, from Paladin to Sainnite to Ashawala’i.

  Norina and Emil returned. Emil said somberly, “I will communicate with Mabin on what to do with you, Willis, but meanwhile you are relieved of duty.”

  Willis’s face turned red with anger. “And the traitor? You’ll let her go unpunished, of course!”

  “We have not yet addressed the problem of Zanja,” said Emil evenly. “But I have relevant information that I doubt any of you have yet heard. The Shaftali prisoners were set free from Wilton garrison last night. Some of those from Annis’s family came direct to me and told me about how they’d been freed by a Sainnite man, who unlocked the doors and escorted them safely out of the garrison and out of the city itself, all under cover of darkness.”

  “A Sainnite?” repeated Willis in disbelief.

  “Yes. In fact, the freed prisoners carried a letter to me from him.” Emil turned to Zanja. “What did you tell this Medric, the night Willis found your bed empty?”

  Zanja said, though it took a great effort, “I never saw him that night.”

  Emil glanced at Norina. “Madam Truthken?”

  “Truth,” Norina said.

  “What were you intending to tell him?”

  “I was going to bring him to you, to have you meet him.”

  “Truth,” Norina said.

  “Why?”

  “He wanted to join the Paladins.”

  Norina said, “I can’t judge the truth of hearsay.”

  “Ah, yes. But Zanja believes what he told her to be true?”

  “I can’t be certain, Commander. She wants it to be true, but for this very reason she does not trust her judgment—and for other reasons as well,“ Norma added, as though she were reading words being written as she spoke. ”I think she is unbalanced. How long has it been since she ate, or drank?“

  “Just two days,” Willis said defensively. “Maybe three.”

  “Wounded and bleeding. And your man says he heard her screaming.”

  “What matter? She’s a traitor!”

  “You believe that she’s a traitor,” Norina corrected him. “The truth, however, has yet to be determined, and cannot be determined when she is scarcely even in her right mind. Commander, I am here for my own reasons, but since you have asked me to arbitrate I must insist that you at least get her some water.”

  Emil sent someone for water, and while that was being brought, Norina took a cloth bag out of the pocket of her doublet and tossed it to Zanja. It contained some kind of old dried fruit, gone hard as rawhide and practically as tasteless. Zanja held a piece in her mouth, and as it softened and dissolved a sudden clarity came to her: enough at least for her to realize how weak she was, how worn out with despair and horror. With the second piece the pain in her leg was eased, and with the third she sat erect and pushed some loose strands of hair from her face, and thanked the girl who had brought a dipper of water for her.

  She said, “I met Medric on Fire Night. And though I was and am still half afraid that he might be engaged in some kind of elaborate trick, I took the risk of talking to him, because I thought the benefits could be great. It’s he who told me that the Sainnites were going to attack us at Fen Overlook.”

  There certainly were some huge gaps in this story she’d told, but Emil at least seemed able to fill them in. He glanced at Norina, who said, “Clearly the truth.”

  “What have you told him in return?” Emil asked.

  “He asked only to meet you, Emil, and I told him nothing.”

  “Truth,” Norina said.

  Willis exploded. “What does it matter! She spoke to a Sainnite! She did it in secret!”

>   There was still something Zanja might do. She said, “Medric is a better man than you, Willis.”

  Norina said, “Zanja, be quiet.”

  “He said he would prove his trustworthiness to me, and he has proven it. Meanwhile, you have proven that nothing matters to you but your own ambition.”

  Norina said, “Silence her!”

  But Zanja cried, “There is just one traitor here, Madam Truthken!”

  With all her strength, she flung herself at Emil’s weak knee, and he toppled like a rotten tree at exactly the moment of the pistol blast.

  Zanja lay across him, gasping, terrified that she might have flung him into the line of fire rather than away from it. Then, Emil raised a hand and gently laid it on the back of her head. “Quite a display of prescience. What in Shaftal’s name do you think you’re doing?”

  She said, for his ears only, “That man just guaranteed that he would never command South Hill Company.”

  His chest heaved: was he laughing? She could not tell, he was otherwise so solemn. “Careful!” Linde had rushed over and seemed ready to disentangle them by flinging Zanja wildly out of the way. “Calm down, Linde, I’m not hurt. But she already was injured and it’s only worse now.”

  Linde lifted Zanja and set her on the bench, then helped his commander to his feet. Linde’s face was white with shock, but not so white as Willis’s, who half stood and half hung within the grips of the other lieutenant and Norina’s man-at-arms. “I did not aim at Emil,” he said desperately to Norina, who had not moved from where she sat, and if anything seemed uninterested in the chaos before her. “I would never shoot my commander! It was her, the traitor—I lost my temper, is all!”

  Emil walked over to him and hit him, a contemptuous blow that scarcely left a mark on Willis’s face, but silenced him effectively enough. Across the yard, that contemptuous blow registered in the faces of a dozen or more people, who although they had not heard what was said, surely could read the language of the scene, like any other staged drama.

  “And you think that a man who cannot command himself can command a whole company?” He added, “Madam Truthken, is there a traitor here?”

  Zanja felt so strange, so empty, so tired, that she wondered how she could still be present in this strange place. Norina said, “Zanja has merely exercised a fire blood’s usual foolhardiness. As for Willis, it is most ambiguous. Willis meant to shoot Zanja, but he meant it as a blow to you. So in the eyes of the law, perhaps it might be argued that you were his true target. In any case, I would refuse to hear him as Zanja’s accuser, for he only loves the justice that serves his interests, and only sees the Law as a tool to achieve his desires. He is untrustworthy, but technically he is not a traitor.“

  “Let Willis go,” Emil said. Willis was released. “Get out of my sight,” Emil added. “And get out of my company. If you want to complain to Councilor Mabin, you are free to do so. The rest of you, please step away. I wish to talk to the Truthken alone.”

  Reluctantly, they left. Emil sat heavily on the bench beside Zanja. “This is a fine mess!”

  Across the green, Willis had already reached his people, and no doubt he quickly began to explain his version of what they had seen. But they stood back, apparently uncertain whether they wanted to be known to be his supporters any longer.

  Norina said quietly, “Shall I leave?”

  “If you don’t mind, Truthken, I think it best that I avoid the appearance of conspiring with Zanja and so it would be most useful to me if you remain.” Emil folded his hand and rested his forehead upon them in an attitude of utter weariness. “Zanja—You and I are at cross-purposes, of course. I am much more interested in saving your life than I am in saving my position. At the same time, you are trying to save my position and seem little interested in saving your life.”

  Zanja said, “My brother, you have died for me a hundred times. I could not endure it anymore.”

  Ransel looked at her blankly.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Zanja implored him. “Every time you try to help me, you die. Do not burden me with the terrible memory, I beg you! If you do not die, you cannot blame me for failing to avenge you.”

  Ransel took both her hands in his. “My sister,” he said gently, “the past is done and cannot be changed. Come forth out of the Underworld.”

  Emil was holding her hands. He said quietly, “Madam Truthken, this must be the anniversary of the massacre of the Ashawala’i.”

  Norina’s eyes narrowed, as though she had been handed a package that might or might not be a gift.

  “I think she’s half out of her mind,” he added, “and she certainly cannot recover here. I ask you to take her under your protection, and bring her to a healer.”

  Norina stood up. “I will, of course. But first, I think I’d better guarantee that the rogue lieutenant of yours can’t get his forces organized, or we may find it difficult to get safely out of South Hill. I’ll leave my man here, to give you the appearance of propriety. I don’t think any of your people have noticed that he’s deaf.“ She picked up the bag from beside Zanja and gave her a handful of the dried fruit. ”What became of your blades? You don’t know? All right, I’ll find them for you. Is there anything else you own that’s too precious to leave behind? All right, eat that. Come, raven.“

  The raven flew to her shoulder, and, gesturing to her man to remain, Norina walked over to the knot of people that had formed around Willis. The knot loosened as Willis’s people stood back to let him face the Truthken on his own. No doubt she would use her substantial powers and authority to make his present and future life as unpleasant as he deserved.

  Emil commented, “A formidable woman, even for a Truthken.” He took some folded papers from his doublet’s inside pocket. “My first letter from a seer. He devoted most of it to successfully convincing me to spare your life at any cost. As for the rest, he says he had a dream that the land would recognize him as her son, and so he’s going forth into Shaftal on his own. He wrote that he has left me all his books—had them shipped downriver to a storehouse in Haprin for me to pick up. I feel like I’ve been bequeathed a child by a total stranger.”

  Zanja said, “I wish you could have met him. You would have liked him.”

  “I admit I find his letter both intelligent and convincing. It’s a very strange sensation to be saying such things about a man who has helped to kill so many of my friends.”

  “But he was trapped. When the walls of the House of Lilterwess fell, the Samnites themselves were buried in the rubble. And we all are buried there with them, crushed and suffocating under the stones.”

  “Hmm. Now you aretalking treason. Good thing there’s no one but me to hear.” Emil unfolded his letter from Medric again, and Zanja saw how creased and smudged the paper was. This letter had forced Emil to subject it to uneasy and intense scrutiny, and perhaps its contents still were being delivered to him as he glanced at it once again, still seeming uncertain how to read it. “He wrote some glyphs here at the bottom, do you see? It seems like a message to you. At least, here is your Owl, your Raven, your Door.”

  In fact, Medric had written at the bottom of the page each of the glyphs from Zanja’s frantic card reading the day after Fire Night. But now, no madwoman lay at the center of the circle, holding together or being torn apart by contrary forces. Instead, there was a glyph Zanja did not know how to read. She touched it with her fingertip, and Emil said, “That’s Fellowship, the union of friends to serve a grand design. What do you think he means by it?”

  “I think he’s nineteen years old and hasn’t yet lost his hope.”

  “Zanja na’Tarwein,” Emil said, “may that hope one day be yours and mine as well.”

  When Norina returned, Willis walked behind her, carrying some of Zanja’s gear, including her missing blades. One of his people also followed, leading the horses like a servant. Truthkens must be obeyed, in small things and in large. Zanja hastily chewed and swallowed the dried fruit. It lay within her, warm as ear
th in summer. The wound in her leg stopped seeping blood, and when she stood up, her vision remained clear.

  Emil buckled her weapons belt onto her and put the knife into her boot sheath, and helped her mount one of Norina’s horses. She must have looked a ruin as she rode out of that place, tired unto death, with her breeches blood-encrusted and her face marked and swollen from Willis’s fist. When she looked back, she saw Emil, standing serenely alone in the middle of the roadway. He lifted a hand in farewell. So long as he stood there, Zanja knew, no one would dare chase after them. He was still standing there when the road took a turn, and he was gone from sight.

  Part 3

  The Hinge of History

  All

  love is made of insane hope

  .

  —

  MACKAPEE’S

  Principles for Community

  The past is always with us. For the blood that soaks the earth cries out for justice. And without justice we never will have peace.

  —

  MABIN’S

  Warfare

  Between victory and defeat, between offense and revenge, lies

  a third possibility: neither a compromise nor an abandonment, but a marriage.

  —

  MEDRIC’S History

  of My Father’s People

  Chapter Nineteen

  Like a great wheel the year turned; and now the sower dropped to the horizon, and up rose the gatherer with her arm outstretched to capture the ripe stars and put them in her basket. All day, in kitchens across Shaftal, the ripe fruits had been cut up to be dried in the sun, or cooked with sugar to make preserves, or covered with hot syrup to be baked into pies during the dark half of the year.

  Now it was night, and in the most northwestern borderland, the general of the Paladins sat awake in her lamplit study with a bowl of golden apricots untouched upon her desk. The aging general of the Sainnites also sat awake, drinking wine and pacing restlessly as he made the messenger from South Hill explain again and again how the South Hill garrison had managed to lose track of the Sainnites’ only seer.