Zanja gazed at him so as to rest her eyes from the difficult, beautiful glyph illustrations. But he too was a glyph—the man on the mountain, embracing the sky in his open arms, pierced to the heart by the light of the stars. Then he became a Paladin, dressed in black, three gold earrings in one ear, pen, paper, and ink in one breast pocket, and a commander’s timepiece in the other. Then he was a father, cradling baby Leeba to his chest, soothing her to sleep with his watch’s quiet ticking. She watched him kill one Sainnite soldier and fall in love with another, painstakingly repair a damaged book, walk down a dusty road with a heavy knapsack on his back, and stand at the head of the reconstructed government of Shaftal.
Emil said, “My sister, are you certain this casting is not about your own questions rather than hers?”
“What are you seeing?” she asked in surprise.
He touched one card after another, saying, “Loss. Death. Boundaries. Insight. Destruction. Fire.”
The pattern did describe her own life, but Zanja didn’t think she had made the novice mistake of casting cards for herself. “Perhaps the assassin and I have similar histories. If Willis had been commander of South Hill Company instead of you, and if he had been able to overlook my alien features and manner, I could have followed him when he formed Death-and-Life Company. I could have ended up serving under the rogue air witch. I could have been an assassin.”
“Hmm.”
Emil made that sound when he was following a new train of thought, and Zanja fell silent. She picked up the Wilderness card and seriously considered whether her unlikely sympathy for Chaen was a misplaced sympathy for her own past self.
The door cracked open and Medric said, “Oh, at least you’re not working. There’s far too much banging, bashing, bubbling, and brushing in this house.”
He entered, and a cool, salty breeze washed in behind him. He picked up a card from the floor and stood by the window to examine it in the light. “Why is it so blurry?”
“Wrong spectacles,” said Emil, without looking at him.
Medric exchanged the lenses on his face with the pair that was in his pocket. “Oh, it’s the Ship of Air again.”
“Give us back that card,” said Emil. “I haven’t seen it before today.”
Emil wasn’t looking at Medric. Only Zanja saw how the seer’s loose, uncombed hair filled with the light of the window. He surrendered the card, which Emil put in its place on the floor. Garland came in, set a tray of tea and bread on the floor beside Emil, and left in a rush so no one would thank him. Emil poured the tea, sniffed it, then gave it to Zanja. “Smell that. It’s extraordinary.”
The scent of the steam rising from the teacup transported Zanja to a distant memory: a remote Paladin hostel, surrounded by Shaftal’s gathering champions, her teacher taking his ease by the fireplace, as Councilor Mabin, who was now dead, left the room, and Norina, then a novice Truthken, gathered Mabin’s papers. There Zanja had stood at a window and glimpsed Karis for the first time, as she was carried away in a wagon like a criminal. In Zanja’s hand had been a cup of this tea.
“You may never again taste tea as fine as this,” she murmured.
Medric, who could not drink tea, took Zanja’s cup, sniffed it, and gave it back to her. “You’re remembering something. Who said that, and when?” A historian in his own peculiar fashion, Medric always wanted to know who and when. And, although he couldn’t find a clean shirt without help, he remembered the details of other people’s lives more accurately and reliably than they themselves did.
Zanja said, “It was my old teacher, the Speaker of the Ashawala’i. He and I were drinking a pot of this tea, which had been made for Mabin, who had been awake all night, writing.”
Emil said, “It must have been eleven days after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, in a Paladin hostel where Shaftal’s forces were gathering to fight the Sainnites. Mabin probably was writing Warfare.”
“Such an angry book,” Medric muttered. “And no wonder.”
“It was a remarkable day,” said Emil. “Zanja, Norina, Karis, and I—the four of us were all in the same place, each of us unaware of how important we would become to each other, each one thinking we had been doomed by the Fall of the House of Lilterwess.”
“How little things have changed!” said Medric, and Emil choked on a crumb, and Zanja escaped the downward drag of memory and burst out laughing.
It was the good kind of laughter, the kind that brings a person along the narrow edge of grief, then shows her the pathway back to firm ground, with tears on her face.
Emil sipped his tea and uttered a sound that was half sigh and half moan. “Blessed day—this tea must be priceless.”
Zanja had tucked her braid into her shirt earlier to disguise her identity, for even the minor details of her appearance had become common knowledge, and now she began to pull it out—a long, slender black cord with a red tassel tied at the tip. Emil folded his ink-stained hands around his teacup. He said to Medric, “I want to ask you why you picked up that Ship of Air card. But . . . there are questions you should answer, questions you cannot answer, and questions you should not answer. If I inadvertently ask you the latter, I must watch you struggle to reply without hinting at the truth you must not reveal.”
Medric said, “But how am I to know the answer unless someone asks me the question? And how are you to know the next question unless you ask the one before it? I am a ridiculous person, I know, but I’m the only seer we’ve got, and to spare me from struggle is to prevent everyone from discovering the truth.”
“You are correct, of course,” said Emil. “But sometimes I can’t bear it. Maybe I’m getting weak-minded in my old age.”
Zanja and Medric both snorted. There was nothing feeble about Emil.
“Anyway,” Medric said, “ask anything you like about Ship of Air—that card’s meaning is hidden from me.”
“But you think it’s important,” Zanja said.
“It’s important, but it’s impenetrably obscure.”
“Then it must be about air logic.”
“Oh, I suppose so. I’m so pressured by air logic lately that my mind feels like it can’t breathe. Which is ironic.”
“You have been in uncomfortably close contact with air witches since we left Watfield,” said Emil.
Medric dug his fingers through his hair, which did not improve his appearance. “I hope that being surrounded by fire bloods makes them this wretched.”
Zanja said, “Maybe this close contact will help you to figure out how fire logic can contradict, or retaliate against, or frustrate air logic.”
“It certainly should be able to do that, since fire logic is air logic’s opposite. But if it’s possible to impede, or destroy, or undermine air logic, the fire witches of the past have neglected to mention it in any book. Maybe that was a ploy, to keep it secret from the air witches. Or maybe it’s a knowledge that’s unspeakable.”
“Literally?” Zanja asked. “Norina does seem to think you could talk her to death.”
“No, no, no, no,” said Emil, beginning to laugh again. “Talking alone can’t do much to her. But by knowing things that are so unlikely, irrational, and unbelievable . . .”
“You could annoy her to death,” Zanja said.
“Exactly!” cried Medric. “I’m quite certain I could do that!”
A while later, Norina came to the door, with her student Maxew at her elbow as always, and found all three of them prostrated by laughter at an insane plan they had concocted for annoying an air witch to death. Norina did look annoyed. “Emil, Kamren has returned from Lalali, bringing a couple of healers with him. Karis is talking with them in the parlor, and General Clement is on her way here.”
Emil got up from the floor, and Medric brushed sand from his clothing while Zanja smoothed back his hair and retied the thong that held it in a tail. He said, “I expect Kamre
n brought those healers because they are complaining about our plan to have soldiers work in Lalali. I would appreciate your help, Zanja.”
Zanja picked up the piece of carpet to bring with her. The parlors were probably furnished with chairs by now, but, even though she had lived exclusively in Shaftal for seven years, she could not sit comfortably in a chair. She said to Medric, “And I would appreciate it if you could explain that casting to me when I come back.”
“But that would be work,” said the seer.
Chapter 6
FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Why am I here? I understand this question to have two aspects: First, why did I come here? And second, why have I remained here?
I came here to Watfield in search of Norina Truthken because I was both desperate and inspired. I had lived in a tack-room in the stable for more than five seasons because I could not bear any longer to be with my family. It was a large family of more than thirty members, and they jabbered incessantly, with their words scarcely ever in alignment with their truths, so that I was driven to distraction by their agitated and contradictory chorus. And the quality of their truths, which were trivial, irrational, and repetitive, bored and infuriated me. I had discovered that my ability to perceive their feelings, perceptions, and motivations—and thus to guess their thoughts—was not a passive gift. I could control people. The few times I did so, it gave me great glee. It also made me very unhappy, because my actions changed the people around me, my family, and it was not a good change. Before, they had been puzzled by but also half-proud of me. After, they feared me and thought about how to get rid of me. They thought about how, when I was an infant, they had debated whether to kill me, because there weren’t any Truthkens they could summon to raise me and make me a student of the Law of Shaftal. Now my family knew I had become dangerous, and they regretted their softheartedness.
I wanted very much to behave correctly, and I didn’t want to be the boy who lived in the stable, never talked to anyone, and didn’t even join his family—who wished they had murdered him—for meals.
My desperation came from knowing that there had once been a place for people like me, but it no longer existed, and now I had no possibility of belonging anywhere or of learning how to be useful and not malevolent. My inspiration came from reading in the broadsheet that announced that Shaftal had a G’deon again. The broadsheet said, “The family of Karis G’deon is composed of people from all the old orders: Paladin, Truthken, Healer, and Seer.” That night, I filled a sack with food from the kitchen, put on all my clothing, hoping it would keep me warm enough, and set out for Watfield. I did not leave a message for my family, but I realize now that I should have.
Just as I had left my home by dark of night, so also I arrived in Watfield. It was very late, but I found someone who could direct me to Travesty. There I found an unlocked door, watched over by a Paladin named Kamren, who was reading a book by lamplight. Kamren’s way of thinking was strangely organized. His attention was extraordinary, but he did not pay attention to normal things. Though he was very polite, I could scarcely bear to be near him. This was my first encounter with a fire blood.
Kamren fetched Norina Truthken from her bed. She glanced at me and said to him, “There will be others.”
He answered, “We have plenty of room.”
She turned away, and I followed her.
Most people make a show of welcoming people when they arrive, but the Truthken didn’t even speak to me. She already knew that my only reason for traveling all that way, through hunger and frostbite and bewilderment, was that I wanted to follow her. Her glance told me I would be permitted do so.
It’s difficult for me to explain what I felt as I walked after her down the wide hallway. Probably all air witches since the dawn of history have felt the same way when they first met another of their kind. Someday, if I survive being a Law student, a young air witch may yearn to follow me.
I continue to remain at Travesty because the Truthken is here. She’s here because of her duty, which is to observe and enforce the Law of Shaftal; but she also is here because she too has someone to follow. Norina serves Karis, has served her more than half her life, and will serve her until she dies. Karis is the person she follows, but she could not follow her if she were not also following the law. The law gives her a framework of principles within which to exercise her judgment, and the law defines her proper role in the world. The law is what makes her a safe person. The law tells her that her proper role is to serve the G’deon of Shaftal, even though Karis is the only person in all of Shaftal who is not subject to the law. In becoming acquainted with Norina, I also have become acquainted with myself, and so I understand that, like her, I must discipline myself every day to serve rather than dominate, and that this self-discipline will never cease to be an effort.
(I wonder, if Karis asked Norina to violate the Law of Shaftal, would Norina do so?)
Secondary Reasons:
Karis. She is both deep and guileless.
My fellow students, especially Serrain, who helps me all the time for no good reason.
Emil Paladin, even though he is a fire blood. Emil may be impossible to understand, but he is easy to trust. He doesn’t mind air witches. He says fire and air are opposites because of their similarity. For fire bloods the insight comes first, and then they explain it if they’re able to, whereas for air bloods the explanation comes first and leads us to a single, inevitable conclusion. Emil’s words made it possible for me to see beyond my antipathy for fire logic.
The Law of Shaftal. It is rational and elegant.
The food.
Note written by Norina: If Karis asked me to violate the Law of Shaftal, I would refuse. But she will never force me to make such a choice. You are correct that you should have left a note for your family. I trust that you have written a letter to them and arranged for it to be delivered. I am assigning you to practice the discipline of congeniality as long as necessary for you to master it, for an uncongenial Truthken will never be relied upon, regardless of how reliable he actually is.
Note written by Anders: Madam Truthken, I think that you are uncongenial, and people certainly rely upon you. Have you made an error?
Norina: People rely on me because they have no choice.
Anders: Please explain how I can learn to be congenial from a teacher who is uncongenial?
Norina: You can’t. It’s fortunate that I am not your only teacher.
Book of Everything, by Anders of the Midlands
Norina Truthken had gone away, leaving the law students to continue their studies while guarding a practically empty house. She might be gone all summer. Even worse, she had taken Maxew with her. Of course, Anders understood why she had chosen Maxew, the eldest by three years, who had dared to own and study a Law of Shaftal when being caught with it could mean death. Maxew’s knowledge and skill were far more advanced than that of his fellow students, and so he could assist her far more. Yet the five who had been left behind resented it very much: If Norina could take one student with her, why couldn’t she take all of them?
A few days after the departure of three wagonloads of luggage and nearly forty people, Anders realized that being left behind was a lesson. For people like them, it was not at all easy to accept what they disliked. If they could not bear the disappointment of being left behind, then they certainly could not endure the torture of restraint when they knew, or thought they knew, how to properly arrange the world. However, this was an insight of the sort he had learned to keep to himself. He might write such things in this Book of Everything, which his fellow students were welcome to read, but that was different. Written words were sufficiently separated from active thoughts that he didn’t need to worry he might reveal smugness or a feeling of superiority that a congenial person would keep to himself.
It was evening, after blade practice and supper, when the sun had crept close enough to the horizon that they could no lo
nger study by its dimming light. The lamp had been lit, and they had abandoned their studies. Anders borrowed Braight’s Book of Everything and leafed through it, examining her charts and analyses of the people who remained in Travesty, for he needed a new exemplar of congeniality. Emil was gone, taking with him a host of people whose names were connected to his by Braight’s complex system for annotating relationships. No one who remained at Travesty was gifted like Emil, but Anders wondered if he could emulate features or aspects of congeniality that other people did enact. Braight had observed that some of the artists were empathetic; all the Paladins were courteous and curious; and the healers genuinely liked people. Perhaps he could acquire these abilities by modeling himself on one person at a time, and grappling later with how to make those separate abilities coalesce.
In his own book, he copied some names. Then he thought carefully and deliberately about Braight’s sophisticated and refined ability to observe people. He said, “Thank you, Braight,” and returned her book to her. She gave him a suspicious look but refrained from a sarcastic reply. Although she had noticed how deliberately he spoke (reminding himself to always be grateful and always use a person’s name), she had been convinced that his appreciation was genuine.
Perhaps, Anders thought, air witches can lie to each other by a similar process—by summoning and exaggerating things that were true, and using them as a concealment for falsehood. This possibility disconcerted him so much that he hastily wrote it down in his book, so that he wouldn’t risk concealing anything from Norina when she reviewed his progress. He couldn’t help but think about forbidden things, so it was fortunate that only the actions and not the thoughts were forbidden.
On a dark winter day, while a snowstorm howled outside the window, the Truthken had told her newly arrived students what was forbidden and what was required. She stood at the head of the table and placed her hands on a book, The Law of Shaftal. It was a book she never opened, because she had memorized every word on every one of its numerous, densely printed pages.
Air Logic Page 5
