Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  “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 body lengths 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 anymore.”

  “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?”

  But Mabin cried, “For the land’s sake, kill her! Can’t you see what she’ll do to Shaftal?” No one moved or even seemed to have heard.

  A hand touched Zanja’s shoulder. Norina and Emil had walked fearlessly into the midst of Mabin’s people. The old man seemed to know them both, and said, nearly in tears, “Take her, take her! How were we to know? Tell her—tell the lady—tell her we are not all such fools.”

  He helped to haul Zanja to her feet. She could not stand on her own, but Emil braced her from behind, from foot to shoulder holding her erect, with his arms wrap
ped tightly around her. Norina knelt upon the stones and buckled Zanja’s belt around her waist. With her head bowed she said, “I have wronged you and don’t expect your forgiveness. But I will make amends.” She looked up then, and Zanja saw how even humility can be an act of unbending pride. Norina read her thoughts as though they were words written upon Zanja’s face, and she smiled, showing all her teeth. “You really should savor my abasement while you can, for I assure you, you will never have an opportunity like this again.”

  Zanja said, “One opportunity is enough. I’ll savor this moment my whole life, and remind you of it incessantly.”

  “That seems fair.” Norina rose and put her arm around Zanja’s waist, and took half her weight onto her shoulder. So she and Emil walked Zanja across the river-washed stones, while the frightened, speechless Paladins let them go, and Mabin did not disgrace herself again by shouting commands that no one would have obeyed. Karis stood waiting, a woman of iron and stone and soil and everything that grows. At the last moment, Emil stepped away, and it was Norina alone who delivered Zanja into Karis’s arms.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Medric would not be appeased. “I am a historian,” he insisted. “Now that you need not keep these secrets any longer, it would be criminal to refuse to tell me.”

  Norina said, “Young man, you have appalling nerve to call a judge, a servant of the law, a criminal.”

  Medric grinned. “You wouldn’t waste your time admonishing me if you didn’t like me.” He sat down beside her, and folded his ink-stained hands expectantly. “I’ll trade you. You tell me the past, and I’ll tell you the future.”

  The six of them had camped fearlessly upon the open plain, where grass and stone stretched to the horizon, flat as water and rippling in the wind. They drew knobby, weathered rocks up to the fire for chairs, and Emil brewed tea, using J’han’s supply, as he’d long since run out of his own. They had told Zanja what had happened, and what they had done. Like Karis, who scarcely had said a word even when she unwound the bandages and healed Zanja’s broken bones, Zanja inhabited a place of stunned silence and could not seem to find the pathway out. But Emil sat beside her, and sometimes he lay a hand upon her shoulder, or clasped her hand in his, and slowly Zanja felt herself re-enter the world. She thought, the future: these people will be my companions as long as we are alive. And she felt the years spread before her, like a wonderful new country.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t recognize your strategies until the end,“ she said to Emil. ”I should have known when I heard about the fleas that it was your kind of war.“

  Emil grinned. “ ‘Drive the enemy insane and she will defeat herself.’ ”

  Zanja recognized the quotation from Mabin’s Warfare, and laughed until Emil had to pound her on her back.

  Emil said, “It was easy to do, with four elementals under my command. Ah, to think of the misery this little company could inflict… but no, those days are past.” He sighed with false regret.

  Karis had walked away on her own and had not yet returned. At sunset she needed to be alone, J’han explained. It was a clear night, and the sky was filling with stars. There was a stillness, a vastness, pressing down upon the little tribe camped here upon the heath. They’d stepped through the door and now found themselves in this open, lonely place, a handful of people in a universe of stars. From now on, each step they took would be on a path of their own forging.

  Norina said to Medric, “No, I don’t want to know the future. It’s the not knowing that gives us heart, it seems to me. But I think I will tell you a bit of history, for Dinal’s sake. And for yours, Zanja, since I must still earn your forgiveness. I witnessed very little myself: I was a child, a student, who happened to live in the House of Lilterwess, like many other students. But the night Harald G’deon died, Dinal and I sat beside Karis’s bed, where she lay unconscious from the blow of power that Harald had struck her with—brutally, out of necessity, for he was breathing his last breath. By then we had discovered the bitter truth of Karis’s smoke purse inside her shirt, and all the council knew, and had been arguing for hours what to do. Dinal took me to Karis’s bed, and asked me to bind myself to her with an oath. After I had done this, she told me this history, and I, of course, know that it was the truth. So listen, Medric.”

  Medric managed to look even more expectant and alert. Norina began her tale.

  Harald had been G’deon of Shaftal for thirty-two years. He had always refused to identify a successor, and, since the G’deon owes no one an explanation, no one understood why. As word of his illness spread across the land of Shaftal, even the most ardent and loyal of his followers—already distressed due to the harrying of the Sainnites—were thrown into confusion and dismay. Some asked if the G’deon had lost his mind, to have grown old without giving any thought to those who would outlive him. Others, more cynical, declared that he had failed to choose a successor out of spite, to irritate his lifelong critic and opponent, Councilor Mabin.

  During those last, terrible days of the G’deon’s life, Dinal kept vigil by his bedside. She neither wept nor slept, and would allow no one else to be his honor guard. When Dinal broke her vigil, as she occasionally did to bathe or seek out a mouthful of food, she saw that gloom and panic now reigned unchallenged in the House of Lilterwess. Meals went uncooked, children ran wild, scholars stood about in the unswept hallways, councilors hurried with an odd aimlessness from one room to the next.

  On the seventh day, as Dinal returned to the G’deon’s room to resume her watch, Councilor Mabin herself, who kept vigil in her own fashion, snatched at Dinal’s sleeve as she passed. “Ask him what will become of Shaftal, when we have no G’deon. Ask him how we can keep the godless Sainnites at bay.”

  Dinal eased her sleeve from Mabin’s grasp. “Excuse me, Councilor.”

  “Ask him if he has forgotten his calling, and his people!”

  “Councilor, Harald G’deon cannot answer your questions. Though his heart continues to beat, his spirit has departed. We both know that he would never have chosen to die with so much left incomplete. But death comes when it comes.”

  “Then will he be the last G’deon of Shaftal? This is a bitter destiny.”

  “His life has been bitter,” Dinal said. “Why not his death?” She turned her back, and Mabin wisely let her go.

  That night, Harald G’deon uttered a sigh, and Dinal sat up sharply in the chair in which she had been dozing. The healer, who read a book at the table in the corner, came softly across the room. The G’deon sighed again, and it almost seemed as if he had said Dinal’s name. She took his hand in hers. “Harald, why do you suffer so? You need not remain in this world any longer. Your time is done, and we will find a way to live without you.”

  Shadows filled the hollows of his wasted face, but within his eyes the light of the guttering candle flickered. “Go,” he said.

  “Where am I to go? My place is by your side.”

  “Lalali.”

  “Lalali! What can there be of value in Lalali?”

  Once again, he lay silent, with only the faint tremor of a heartbeat to let Dinal know he had not yet departed.

  She kissed his hand and laid it down upon the coverlet. She stood up, bones aching with weariness, and went out into the corridor, where some of the councilors slept upon benches. In her own rooms, she made no noise as she rolled up some blankets and tossed a few things into a bag. Yet, despite her quiet, her foster daughter awakened and came to stand, sleepy and disapproving, at the bedroom door in her night shift. Norina said, “Did you intend to leave without bidding me goodbye? Where are you going?”

  “Lalali.”

  “Lalali! Surely not alone! Let me come with you.”

  “The only thing that could make this journey more burdensome would be having to worry about your well-being as well as my own. You will remain in the House of Lilterwess.”

  There was a silence, then Norina said quietly, “I’m afraid I won’t see you again.”

&n
bsp; Dinal slung her sword belt over one shoulder, her bag over the other, and kissed Norina farewell. “Know I love you.” She left her standing in the darkness.

  She took a loaf of bread from one of the kitchens, and, out in the yard, saddled the first horse to come at her whistle. A weary, bent, aging woman wrapped in a black cloak, she rode out of the House of Lilterwess. Hoping to avoid the plague of violence that made the main roads unsafe to travel any longer, Dinal took the mountain road from Shimasal to the coast. This isolated and windblown track took her through the tablelands, along ridges which overlooked the rich Aerin River Valley. She traveled from before dawn to long after nightfall. She made her bed on hard ground, under cold stars, and she lay awake, counting the years of sorrow and naming the dead. She spoke the name of Harald G’deon himself in that grieving litany. Perhaps even now he breathed his last breath, as the mother of his sons dutifully followed his last whim on this lonely road to the sea.

  Long before sunrise, she rose from her cold bed. She tied her hair back to boldly reveal the three earrings of Right, Regard, and Rank, and called her horse to the saddle. She rode in darkness down the steep track from the highlands to the coast. As the sky lightened, dawn winds carried to her the scent of the sea.

  The sun had just risen when she rode into Lalali. The city gates stood open, guarded only by a pretty-faced boy dressed in purple silk. He ran up, boldly clasped the heel of her boot, and gazed winsomely up into her face as he invited her to have her way with him. When he suggested what they might do, she jerked her foot away in disgust. Undiscouraged, he latched onto the empty stirrup. “Speak your secret desire, and it shall be yours. Is it a girl you’d prefer? Is it not power you seek, but rather to be overpowered?”

  “Stand away, boy! I travel on the G’deon’s business!”

  She threatened him with her lifted foot. He stepped away from the horse, crowing with amusement. “The G’deon’s business? Tell the G’deon there is only one business in Lalali!”