Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  “Some of us are worse than others.” Norina stopped at the edge of the beach and would proceed no further, but her gaze yearned to the hammer-swinging, half-naked giant standing spread-legged on the stones. It was a magnificent sight. Then, Karis turned and looked at her, and Norina turned quickly away. “I’m not welcome here. I’ll stay at the top of the trail with the horses.”

  “No, you stay right here until I’ve talked to her.” Emil walked across the stony beach to the amazing cobbled-together forge and the rock-shattering woman. From the midst of the smutty, laughing children, Medric grinned at Emil, his face black with soot, his eyes afire with joy. Emil wanted nothing more than to embrace him, soot and all, but he went to Karis instead, and said, “By our land, you’re a beautiful sight.”

  There probably was nothing he could have said that was more likely to stop her in her tracks. She all but dropped the gigantic stone hammer.

  “Such beauty lifts the heart,” Emil declared, and knelt. “Dear Karis—”

  “Emil—”

  “Dear Karis,” Emil persisted, “your lifelong friend and I have found Zanja, but rescuing her will not be easy. However, we have some ideas that you might like, when you care to hear them. But for now let me ask you on Norina’s behalf what else she can do to make amends—”

  Karis stepped over, took him by the shirt, and lifted him bodily until he stood once again on his feet. She was not particularly gentle. “Kneel to me again and I’ll make it so you’ll have no choice but to stand.” And then she stopped, breathing heavily from her exertions, and added after a moment, “I suppose you want me to realize that if I don’t want to be treated like a sovereign I’ll have to avoid acting like one.”

  “I’m so glad I succeeded in getting your attention,” Emil said. “You were looking rather dangerously single-minded.”

  Karis gazed at him, suddenly just a tired, wasted woman whose great strength seemed about to fail her, fueled as it was by a rage that surely could not sustain her much longer. “I want to hold my love in my arms,” she said. “She doesn’t even know—”

  Emil said, “This is Zanja na’Tarwein we’re talking about, not some fool.”

  “But when she gives up hope—”

  “I have seen her under the most desperate of circumstances, and she does not surrender.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “She would want you to listen to your friends,” Emil said.

  There was a silence. Karis said bitterly, “I’m listening to you. Just don’t ask me to insult Norina with a false forgiveness. If you want to tell her something, tell her I have no respect for someone who can’t cherish what I was willing to die for.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Emil said. “But she can’t make peace with her husband when she feels like she has to sleep with the horses to avoid irritating you with her presence.”

  “She doesn’t have to sleep with the horses,” Karis said. “Just tell her not to talk to me. I’m going to kill someone, and I’d rather it wasn’t her.”

  Emil stepped back involuntarily.

  “Medric already has talked me out of tearing Mabin’s precious village to pieces, which I could do.”

  “I do not doubt it,” Emil said. “I’m glad you heeded him; I don’t think I could endure it if the House of Lilterwess were to fall a second time. Can I ask what you’re working on?”

  “A hammer,” Karis said. “A hammer for working steel.”

  He waited, but she explained no further. She did add after a moment, “Let me finish with this, and then I’ll stop and rest, which will make J’han happy, and we can talk about what to do.”

  She turned back to her rocks, and the sound of them shattering under her hammer followed Emil back to the edge of the beach.

  *

  “What is she making?” Norina asked. She had sat upon the ground and was reorganizing her clothing, having perhaps submitted to an examination of some kind.

  “She’s making a hammer. What she’ll make with it I can’t imagine, but she’ll tell me. What I want to know is where she got coal. That’s not the sort of thing that can be picked up off the ground.”

  J’han shook his head. “The water witch and she are like hand and glove. Who knows how they’re doing it.”

  Norina, seated among the stones, said, “By tradition, the people of the borders are protected by the G’deon. If the water witch recognizes her, no doubt he thinks he owes her a certain fealty.”

  “That bodes well,” Emil said.

  “Doesn’t it, though.” Norina stood up. “Well, am I an exile?”

  “No, but you should not talk to her.”

  “I guess that’s an improvement. Why did you kneel to her?”

  “I thought she needed to be taught a lesson. She is very teachable.”

  Norina smiled, though not with a lot of vigor. “I know this all too well. But some lessons, I fear, she will never learn.”

  “Norina—” Emil hesitated to say this in front of J’han, but it would have been too awkward to ask him to step away. “Karis says to tell you that she has no respect for someone who can’t cherish what she was willing to die for.”

  Norina accepted this fresh censure with surprising equanimity. “I thought as much,” she said. “J’han, is there any hope she’ll recover her physical sensations, or is that damage permanent?”

  J’han said irritably, “My impulse is to say that it’s permanent, but what do I know? She’s still having convulsions at sunset every day—one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. Maybe this is as well as she will ever get.”

  Norina looked at Karis as her heavy hammer once again smashed into the ore. “She deserves better,” she said.

  There was a silence. Emil took the reins of the horses, to unload their gear and take them up to graze. Norina said to J’han, “How do I keep my milk from drying up?”

  J’han looked at her in some astonishment.

  Of course there was a way, but lacking a spare child to give suck to, this seemed like a husband’s problem. Emil left them to work it out.

  *

  That night, he seduced his beloved Sainnite seer and did not care when their groans became cries that anyone trying to sleep upon the beach could hear. If Karis was awake, she’d know that at least two of her companions knew how to cherish what they had.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  When Zanja opened her eyes, she lay in a shallow, strangely shaped wooden room, which was lit by a gently swinging lamp that hung from a hook. “She’s awake,” said the man who sat near her upon the steeply sloping floor. He held a pistol.

  Mabin came in. The ceiling was so low she had to walk crouched over. The entire room seemed to move. The lamp swung as if in a breeze. Zanja had never in her life been in a boat, and had not guessed that they might have enclosed rooms like this, not a place for people—it was not shaped right—but apparently for storage. Now, except for the pallet upon which Zanja lay, it was empty as a coffin.

  “Give me the pistol,” Mabin said to the man. He handed it to her and went out, closing the door behind himself. Mabin squatted upon the floor, grunting with tiredness.

  Knife fights often are won and lost in the first moments of battle, when in the first movements and first contacts of blade on blade, the fighters discover whether or not they’ve met their match. A good strategist learns to use those moments to deliberately mislead the opponent into misjudgments that there is no time to recognize.

  Zanja hastily considered her situation. Annis was dead. Mabin had assumed that Karis was still alive, in the company of Norina and J’han. Although Mabin could not know that Karis had won back many hours from smoke, she would not be confident of Karis’s subjugation to the drug, because even under smoke Karis had been able to use her power to aid her own escape. Mabin could not know about Emil, and she had expressed no interest in Medric, so perhaps she assumed that Zanja had rescued Karis unassisted.

  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 katrimhad 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 a seer’s ability to envision 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 firsthand 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, Mabin 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 l
ogic, 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.”