“What does that symbol mean?” asked Serrain. “Between Maxew and Bran?”
Braight peered over the top of the book to read her own notes. “Hierarchical obedience. I’ve never actually seen Maxew with Bran, but I noticed the effect. I used to think it was the effect of Norina on Maxew, but I’ve noticed it before, when she wasn’t even here, and I think I have eliminated all other possibilities.”
Braight’s ability to perceive how people affected each other was both subtle and accurate, but in this case she was relying on logic, not observation.
Anders said, “I don’t understand how someone could have such a strong effect on so many people but make no impression on six air witches. I’m sorry, Braight, but I think your chart may be wrong.”
Braight asked, “Why has Bran had no effect on you?”
“I’ve never even met him.”
“Neither have I.”
“Me neither,” said Serrain.
Minga and Arlis shook their heads.
“And if we assume that Norina hasn’t met him either . . . how is that possible?”
Braight said, “Maxew may have admitted him to the house the first time he came here, and after that, Bran could have come in through the kitchen.”
The front hall was guarded by the air witches, including Norina when she was not busy with other duties. The kitchen door was unguarded but barred, opened only by Garland to receive kitchen deliveries. The housekeeper should never have been admitted through that door, but possibly it had happened.
“I’m not satisfied,” said Braight. “I don’t see how it’s possible for someone who is here so frequently to never be seen by any of us.”
Perhaps they had seen him but didn’t know who he was. Perhaps he simply didn’t frequent the parts of that vast house that the air children spent their time in. Perhaps he did the housework at night, by lamplight. These possibilities could all be investigated.
The Two were losing interest in the game. The hall clock sounded the hour, and the Paladin appeared with a lamp in one hand and a book in the other. “Bedtime for the law students,” he said amiably.
“Orin Paladin,” Serrain said, “does Bran come in at night to do housework?”
“At night? Not that I know of.”
“Have you seen him in the last few days?”
“I’m not sure,” said Orin. “You know how it is with ordinary things—you don’t really pay attention. Go to bed now. One must sleep to learn.”
They left the room and went down the hall toward the main stairway, and the Paladin continued to his post in the front hall. When his light was just a faint glow on the wall, the air children whispered fiercely to each other.
“Did you see that?”
“What is he concealing from us?”
“I don’t think he knows he’s concealing it.”
“What?”
“I don’t think he knows,” Serrain said again.
Anders thought she looked pale in the dim light. Perhaps he looked pale also. “How could he not know that he’s concealing something?” he asked, although he knew the answer. But he was hoping that one of them would suggest another entirely believable explanation.
No one spoke. Silently, they climbed the stairs and went to bed.
During morning blade practice, at breakfast, and during a lecture on botany that was attended by most of the healers, the air children also conducted their investigation. They sat for their examination, and Anders suspected that none of them would perform as well as their history teacher expected. Then they scattered, each of them with additional matters to inquire into. They missed lunch, but when they reconvened later, Serrain brought bread, butter, and fruit from the kitchen, and they talked while they ate.
Braight confirmed that no messages had arrived from Hanishport or anywhere else. But she had looked in every occupied bedroom and had found a raven in one. Maybe the raven had arrived with a message, or maybe it was resting or injured.
Over breakfast they had asked about J’han and Leeba, but no one seemed to know where they were. The Two had gone to the healers’ common room and asked about them again. The healers had become irritated, which was unusual. Even more oddly, they expressed no curiosity about J’han’s absence.
No one had noticed Bran in the last several days, and the air children had asked every resident of Travesty and several other people as well. But some of the answers had an ambivalent quality, which was peculiar since they were asking simple questions of fact. Also, the children had asked what Bran looked like, and although there was agreement about his height and build, there was none about his face, not even on whether or not he had a beard.
No one had dropped anything heavy during the night, but others had been jolted awake by a noise—a thud or a bang.
Serrain and Anders had gone into the room J’han shared with Norina and Leeba. The bed was stripped of linens, and even the blankets were missing. Leeba’s stuffed rabbit and wooden lizard were not to be seen. J’han’s pack lay on the floor, with a few pieces of clothing in it. The floor was clean, and the room smelled faintly of soap. Anders found, under the table, the toy lizard’s tail, broken, as if it had been stepped on.
He showed it to his fellow students: evidence of something, or evidence of nothing. Anxious and frustrated, they gazed at it, a brightly painted curve of wood in the palm of his hand.
The Two said, “It’s impossible for Bran to avoid us, so that we never even catch a glimpse of him.”
“You avoid me,” Braight said. “If you didn’t have to be with me, I would never see you at all. How do you do that?”
“Never mind how,” said Serrain. “Why?”
“Because we don’t like her,” said the Two.
“I mean, why would Bran avoid us?”
“Why are all of you avoiding the truth?” said Braight impatiently. “Do you think that avoiding it will make it less true?”
Anders felt deeply unhappy. This was why people feared and disliked Truthkens, he thought, because we know and say things like Braight was about to say. But he wanted to be a Truthken, so he said, “How Bran avoids us is by using air logic. Why he avoids us is so we don’t realize he’s an air witch.”
In the silence that followed, Anders understood something awful, and for the first time in his life made a deliberate decision to refrain from revealing it, not in speech and not in writing. He understood that he and his fellow law students could lose everything—the future they worked for so diligently, the purpose, the principles by which they governed themselves, and their lives. Also, he knew that, regardless of what came next, he was going to take an action that was the exact opposite of what he had promised Norina he would do.
Chapter 21
Two entire trading families had crammed themselves into the House of Lora for the fair. Tashar shepherded a half-dozen young people to taverns, performances, exhibitions, boat trips, and gardens, while pickpockets and scalawags buzzed around his charges like flies around a corpse. After the last night, he gladly put them into their carriages and saw them depart.
By the dim light of dawn, Fair Day sellers hurried to pack their wagons and flee ahead of the crowds that would soon choke the roads. A few lone travelers wandered vaguely or drunkenly from one conveyance to the next, begging for rides. From the top of Artisan’s Way, Tashar could see halfway across the harbor. He longed to take his sailboat out onto the glowing water and spend the day in aimless solitude, pushed lazily about by the wind and the waves. But a Lora ship lay at anchor in the distance and must not wait another day to be unloaded, even though the stevedores and teamsters were dissipated, possibly not sober, and unlikely to work with any energy even if they responded to his summons. Tashar slung the records box over his shoulder and began the long trudge down the hill, to rouse the labor captains, pay the docking fees to the harbormaster, and hire a skiff to carry him to th
e ship to check the cargo.
The sun’s blinding edge peeked coyly from behind a fiery, gilded scarf of cloud. The air lay still and heavy, and in the water’s surface Tashar could see the reflected coastline, the streamers of clouds, the wheeling white birds. He shielded his eyes against the light, but still there was a shimmering before him.
The shimmering became Maxew. The massive book he carried under his arm bent his thin frame sideways. He said, “I’ll meet you at the boat just before sunrise tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow the weather will be unsuitable,” said Tashar. He had been quite startled, and felt an empty triumph that he had not cried out with surprise.
“Oh, are you weatherwise now?”
“I’m not, but the harbormaster is.” Tashar pointed toward the quay, where a string of flags hung listless in the glare. “Those flags say it will be hot, with light land and sea breezes. But what we need is a cool day, with moderate winds.”
“The weather doesn’t matter. We must depart at dawn.”
“Nothing is more important than weather!”
They were arguing in the middle of the road, where any stumbling drunk could hear them. Tashar said, “Why can’t we delay a day or two?”
“Are you reluctant to leave your comforts? Or the false power of the Lora name?”
“I am reluctant to row all the way across the bay, only to die in a spectacular wreck!”
“So you’re a coward also?”
Tashar had stolen a fortune from his own family, and every day for three years had been at risk of discovery. Tashar was no coward, and Maxew knew it. It seemed childish of him to try to behave as if they were still boys, battling for the time and attention of their teacher.
Maxew was giving Tashar a sour look. Tashar supposed it wasn’t pleasant to know what people were thinking, but Maxew only had to behave better and people’s thoughts would soon be more friendly. Tashar said, “I’ll meet you at the small craft landing tomorrow at first light. Maybe the dawn breeze will carry us far enough from shore to catch a wind. If not, I hope you can row.”
“How hard can it be?”
“Hard. It could peel the skin from the palms of your hands.”
Maxew shrugged. “You have supplies? And money?”
“Of course.” He would check his sailboat today, to see if the lock on the hold had been broken and the supplies pilfered. And he would check the water cans, in case the water had soured or the seams had sprung a leak. “I’m expected on that ship,” he said.
Maxew disappeared. Of course he also remained, but Tashar would soon forget that fact and start behaving as though he were alone.
He spoke—loudly, in case Maxew was walking away. “But the portrait painter’s trial is today. Why are you waiting until it’s too late to rescue her?”
Tashar continued his downhill trudge, still speaking in a low voice to remind himself that Maxew could be walking beside him. “You are responsible for your part of the plan, while I am responsible for mine, and we are to know as little as possible about each other’s part. But sometimes this ignorance could become a problem. For example, my, uh, unusual conveyance has certain requirements and limitations . . .”
He stopped muttering, as he had drawn close to a busy family with two young, whiny children, all hard at work tying down the contents of a wagon. One parent cried, “Leave me alone! The sooner we finish, the sooner you can have your bread!” The other two adults, who seemed equally short-tempered after so many hot, sleepless, and busy days, bellowed at the children to get to work.
Then Tashar spotted Maxew, quite a distance away, trotting to catch up to a somber procession of Paladins that was entering a pub, while the publican stood at the door in a crisp new apron, looking anxious. Tashar glimpsed Chaen, Maxew’s mother, dully climbing the steps. Maxew, head lowered in humility, spoke a few words to a woman whose shorn head Tashar could scarcely see behind the shield of Paladins. The Truthken!
A crowd of exhausted revelers, driven out of Thieves’ Alley by the harbormaster’s strong-arms, stumbled drunkenly into the road. Behind this cover, Tashar stepped into a doorway. When he peeked out some time later, the Truthken was gone.
That evening, in the woodstove that warmed his bedroom in winter, Tashar burned all his papers, even the translation of the instructions for sailing the new ship. He wished he could destroy the ledgers also, but they would not burn easily. Well, as long as the ledgers sat innocently on their shelves, his family, when they realized he was gone, would merely assume that Tashar had come to harm. Many months could pass before they recognized the scope of his thievery.
During the festival, he had collected the contents of his various caches throughout the city—a difficult business to conduct while herding giddy house guests from place to place. Now his mattress was lumpy with gold, gunpowder, and pistol balls, but he was so exhausted that he slept anyway, until the distant ringing of the high-tide bell woke him before dawn. He went quietly out with his burdens. He would never set foot in that awful house again.
Chapter 22
The Paladin opened the door. Seth came in with a last food tray of pastries and tea. Zanja followed her, inscrutable.
Chaen seemed to have slept in her clothing. Seth spoke, her voice muffled as if by a fog. “The Paladins told me you were awake most of the night, and then you fainted. Drink some tea. Eat some bread or an egg.”
Zanja was looking at the glyph card that lay on the table with its pins scattered around it. Chaen wondered vaguely what the card had been pinned to. She said to Zanja, “It’s not quite finished.”
Zanja stepped out of the way. The amiable Paladin brought in Chaen’s supplies, and she used the small muller to make a tiny bit of red-clay ink. She had practiced drawing the glyph in her sketchbook. Two quick movements of the pen and it was done.
“It will take half a day for the ink to set,” she said.
Zanja asked, “Will the woman in the water be rescued, drowned, eaten, or murdered?”
Chaen shrugged. She could remember that while she worked on the illustration she had been driven by pity and anger. But now it seemed like the swimmer’s fate had already been executed.
As the sun pulled itself up from the water, it glared upon an ill-humored city. A sobbing girl in stained clothing scrubbed a stoop; rubbish collectors cursed the contents of their bins; a ship’s captain shouted at the harbormaster; a shopkeeper used her broom to swat awake a couple of drunks snoring in her doorway. The Paladins escorted Chaen to a shuttered tavern near the quay. From blinding sunlight she went into darkness. Gradually, the faces of the witnesses, illuminated by oil lamps, became visible in the gloom: an odd collection of people that the Truthken might have selected from the street as light dawned. They sat in a restless, crooked row. At a long table, oil lamps illuminated the paper on which a man of astonishing ugliness scratched a few words with his pen. A young man came in after the Truthken and also sat, and began to study the closely printed pages of a large book. Nearby, the seer, his hair wildly disordered, used the tail of a very wrinkled shirt to polish his spectacles. Beside him, Emil wore black, his gray hair tied in a tail and his three earrings glittering in the lamplight. And the Sainnite general, equally neat and polished, stood beside him, so rigidly still that she scarcely seemed alive.
The Truthken addressed the witnesses. The Paladins had left Chaen standing in the middle of the room, and the witnesses seemed to prefer to look at her rather than at the Truthken. Additional people sat behind them, all of them gray-haired—Hanishport’s city elders, thought Chaen. The young man at the table turned a page of his book, and Chaen guessed that the Truthken was quoting the Law of Shaftal from memory while he followed along in the book.
Chaen felt a warm hand touch hers: Seth was standing stubbornly beside her.
The Truthken seemed to be finishing her dull recitation. “I am Norina Truthken. I studied the law in the Hous
e of Lilterwess, and swore my oath twenty-five years ago, witnessed by Councilor Mabin. By that oath I now affirm that the Law of Shaftal is exactly as I have recited it. By that law I now declare that only the truth may be spoken in this room until this trial is concluded. Do you have any questions?”
The witnesses shook their heads and did not dare speak.
The Truthken turned. Chaen understood why the witnesses squirmed under her gaze. “Chaen, you stand accused of intending to murder Karis G’deon. Whatever questions I ask, you must answer.”
The impact of her command was not subtle. How could Chaen continue to breathe? Why did her heart keep beating?
“Do you understand what you are accused of?” The Truthken’s voice seemed far away.
Chaen’s mouth said, “Yes.”
“Say your name.”
“Chaen of the Midlands.”
“Do you affiliate yourself with a militia that is called Death-and-Life?”
“Yes.”
“Three days ago, did you intend to kill the G’deon of Shaftal with poisoned arrows?”
“She is not the G’deon of Shaftal.”
“I am referring to Karis, a Meartown metalsmith of great stature. Do you know who I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Did you intend to kill her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To finish a task. So that the lives of the six who died trying to accomplish it wouldn’t have been wasted.”
Air Logic Page 18
