Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “But you want me to be what I hate.”

  “Yes,” Norina said. “There is no alternative.” She had finished filling her pockets. She picked up the map case and went out.

  With his gear added to the pile in the hallway, Garland went into the kitchen. He snatched up his spice box, so he could at least make the camp swill more palatable for Karis. The wooden spoon? If there was any combat, he’d need an implement to indicate he was no fighter. He stuck the spoon in his belt, hung his apron on a hook, and reluctantly took the captain’s insignia out of the pocket.

  Saugus and Maxew must believe that without Emil there would be a collapse. And maybe Norina was trying to prevent that collapse by shifting everyone into new roles.

  Sighing, Garland pinned the insignia to his shirt.

  What a lot of moving things about was necessary even in a crisis, he thought as he came out into the hall and saw that the Paladins had started carrying the gear outside.

  He heard Karis’s hoarse voice in the parlor: “But no one can follow her for long.”

  Near a bright window, Karis and Norina were studying a map: not an ordinary map, but Norina’s, so covered with notes and filled with detail that it was useless for finding one’s way. It had unrolled itself off the edges of the table and partway across the floor. Karis, who always had odd things in her pockets, took out a bolt and stood it on the map, then put a second one a short distance away. Norina examined the two bolts as though she was about to interrogate them, two upright travelers on inexplicable missions. Someone was following Zanja?

  Norina said, “But why has she gone into those woods? They’re a tangle, and there’s nothing much beyond them. Does she want to make it impossible to follow her?”

  Karis didn’t reply. She picked up the bolts and put them back in her pocket.

  The dogs were barking. Clement entered the house with her baby in her arms. “Madam Truthken, I have two companies here.”

  Garland went out to distribute to the soldiers two baskets of ripe peaches that he had meant to use in pies. But he soon gave the task to someone else so he could introduce himself and Kamren to the Sainnite captains. Garland knew nothing about those captains or their companies, but Kamren knew how to greet them in Sainnese, and they knew how to clasp hands with him.

  Bothis said, “Here comes the Captain of Hanishport. I hope he’s still a lucky man. He’ll be needing it.”

  Gilly was arriving in a crowd of Shaftali councilors—the entire Peace Committee, summoned from a meeting apparently without explanation, only to find a hundred soldiers and five laden wagons at the G’deon’s door. There being no one else, Garland gave them a hurried explanation, and so suffered the fate of all who bring bad news.

  Gilly, at least, was accustomed to crisis. He calmly pulled Garland away from the councilors’ agitated questions. With his other hand he tapped Garland’s insignia. “Captain Garland?”

  “Norina has decided that you’re to be in charge of Hanishport, and I’m to be her assistant instead of you.”

  “They’re making me the horsefly of Hanishport, eh?” Gilly grinned. “Oh, how I’ll make those asses kick!”

  Inside, they found Clement faced off with Seth. “I’m going with you,” Seth was saying. “Someone in the Peace Committee should be present, and I’m volunteering. I won’t stay here and watch the baby, so don’t even ask.”

  Norina said, “Go pack a bedroll, Seth. Do it quickly. Peace Committee, Gilly, I’ll speak with you in that parlor.” The tangle of committee members gave way before Norina like a knot being cut by a sharp knife. She added over her shoulder, “General Clement, bring Gabian along.”

  The general said angrily, “Are we also bringing a cow? And stopping four times a day to feed him?”

  “I can solve that problem,” said Karis, in the other parlor. “Come in here.”

  Garland, longing to put the teakettle on the fire and pile some pastries on a plate, followed behind Clement. He might as well get used to following her around, he thought gloomily.

  Karis said, “Undo your buttons.”

  Clement did, and Karis put her hands inside her tunic and filled her breasts with milk.

  Chapter 27

  Chaen rushed through the quivering, rippling brightness of the Wilton Road until Hanishport disappeared and the ocean became a flat horizon. Then she had to stop, and sat on a rest-stone in a shady woodland.

  She had no water—just an empty bottle in the knapsack brought to her by a puffing Paladin who had immediately run away again. She tried to recall how far it was to the next watering place, and then tried to remember why she was fleeing Hanishport with such haste and urgency.

  Her family was dead; she had betrayed all her friends; and in any battle that had yet to be fought she had chosen the wrong side. Rather than seeking water, why shouldn’t she shrivel here in the heat, like meat in a smokehouse?

  She noticed the glyph card that remained in her hand: the Brothers. Arin was dead, but he had a brother, an air witch. Chaen remembered nothing about him, not even a face or a name. But he certainly was in dire danger—from one air witch who had subverted him, and from another who would hunt and kill him.

  She must have raised her son to be stupid, for he had thoughtlessly destroyed the love of the only person he could have depended upon to help him. She must help him anyway.

  First she must devise a method for remembering him, for she could not simply carry the glyph card in her hand until sweat and dirt destroyed it. She studied the image on the card, hoping it would unfold a hidden truth to her, but her fire talent had made her an artist, not a presciant. Well then, she would draw. She took out her sketchbook and began to make a copy of the illustration.

  She had scarcely blocked out the shapes and the figures before she began to change them. Arin, at less than a year old, had yet to speak his first word, and had never argued with his brother. So she changed the image so he was a babe in arms—in her arms—and it was she who turned her back on her second son, an older child with his arms petulantly crossed.

  That image pierced her heart, so it must be true.

  If she left the drawing unfinished, it would nag at her, and she would open the sketchbook and remember. Beneath the sketch, she wrote an instruction to herself: Flee the Truthken!

  She looked up, startled by a distant sound. Someone was running toward her, coming from direction of Hanishport. She snatched up her belongings and flung herself into a thicket.

  As she waited, scarcely breathing, she noticed a faint trickling sound. There was water nearby.

  The footsteps drew close, and stopped. She heard Zanja’s familiar voice say something in that language she had used while sitting on the steps in Hanishport. Silence, except for panting, then Zanja spoke again. Now Chaen heard the faintest rustle as Zanja stepped through dry leaves. The sound grew close, then drew away. Chaen dared move her head slightly, and she glimpsed Zanja slipping into the woods.

  The border woman was not chasing Chaen, but had her own errand, compelled and accompanied by visions, and Chaen needed not concern herself with it.

  She found a dribble of a stream, dripping over a tree root, forming a puddle of water that was bitter with oak leaves. Three times, Chaen filled her flask and drank, still hearing only silence where Zanja had disappeared.

  She returned to the thicket to gather and pack up her things. She remembered that there was an unfinished drawing in her sketchbook, and looked at it to remind herself what she had been working on. The glyph card was tucked inside. She recalled the petulant boy, her son, whom she had not loved well enough.

  Could Zanja be chasing Chaen’s son? Perhaps at the behest of the Truthken?

  Zanja was known to have prescience. If Chaen followed her, she might also find her stupid son, so she could demand that he restore her memories.

  Chaen followed her.

  In the
clear summer sky, twilight lingered: the sun descending reluctantly like a child who didn’t want to go to bed. But in this dense woodland, Chaen was peering through shadows and stumbling over unseen stones and brambles long before the stars came out. By then, the woods were tar black and choked with malevolent undergrowth that slapped her face, caught at her feet, tore at her clothing, and bit her with tiny, sharp teeth.

  Zanja left few distinguishable traces, and it was more by luck than knowledge that Chaen discovered a place that her quarry had dug for water in a dry streambed, and some disturbed soil and wilted leaves where she had pulled up and trimmed some smallage, then left a trail of peelings as she ate the root while walking. That first night, Chaen made herself a dry and comfortable bed but paced for hours, fruitlessly trying to scent Zanja’s campfire. The simple traps she had set for game were empty in the morning, and she felt lucky to find some edible plants, though the time it took to eat them seemed wasted, because she was no less hungry afterwards. That day, she lost the trail. If Chaen’s fire talent had been helping her in this hunt, it seemed exhausted now. Nevertheless, she continued.

  As the shadows deepened into evening, she was pushing through undergrowth, seeking any suggestion of Zanja’s passage, when a bramble slapped across her eyes. Carefully, delicately, she peeled the thorny branch from her eyes and face, leaving a trail of burning pinpricks. From one eye, tears began to drip. She held out a hand to catch the branches that might slap her again, and stumbled on. She could not remember why.

  Her foot sensed an obstacle of tree roots. She stepped over it, and there was nothing on the other side. She fell. A wily hand yanked at her ankle. Still, she fell. A thousand tiny arrows broke in a thousand dry explosions. She continued to fall. A stone mallet smashed her head.

  She shouted in the shock of pain, and immediately began to drown—not in water, but in stinking, liquid mud. Her arms trapped by the dense thicket; her feet entangled in tough vines; her pinned head-down on a steep slope by her knapsack; she could scarcely lift her face out of the mud.

  She had always planned to die for a cause. To die like this, ungainly, absurdly, and unnecessarily, was unacceptable. Fighting, flailing, shouting, she broke one arm free and at least could support her head and keep her face out of the mud. She lay exhausted.

  Time slipped through the woods, leaving no trace. A voice spoke in the thick darkness. “Chaen.”

  “Zanja!”

  She heard a rustle and the soft hiss of the weapon being drawn. The vine wrapped around her ankles snapped like thread. Zanja grabbed and lifted the weight of her knapsack, and Chaen drew up her knees and staggered to her feet.

  Zanja said, “Stop following me.”

  “I can’t,” Chaen said.

  But the space where Zanja had been standing had become vacant.

  Chaen touched the throbbing knot on her forehead. She cupped a hand over her right eye, which with every blink of the eyelid was pierced by fresh pain. She worked her ankles, checking for sprains. Then she settled her knapsack and started again through the darkness.

  Chapter 28

  As abruptly as she had arrived in the city of Hanishport, Karis departed from it. She walked at the head of a column of soldiers, the largest group seen outside the garrison since the truce had begun in midwinter.

  The people of Hanishport, being positioned at the juncture of Shaftal and the world, were accustomed to strangeness. Yet they were astonished by the soldiers, who ambled untidily in their undershirts, tunics tied to their bedrolls, calling badly pronounced greetings and apologies to the people they happened to block or inconvenience. At the rear of the column, among the old and ailing, in the cloud of dust and dirt, with the supply wagons nudging at her heels, walked Clement, with Garland beside her. Many accounts of that strange passage would be reported in Hanishport, Clement said, and that could not be avoided. But if any of those stories claimed that Karis had been taken captive by Sainnites, the teller would be deliberately ignoring the evidence.

  Clement said that she was afraid for her disarmed soldiers all across Shaftal, whose survival depended on traditions they themselves had practically destroyed. She must hope that the Peace Committee would succeed in quelling the inevitable rumors before they spread far enough to endanger her people.

  West of Hanishport, the road was in terrible repair, and Clement told her captains to send scouts ahead to fill potholes and reset cobbles. The column kept a brisk pace now, and the lame, weak, and short-legged soldiers in the rear soon were dirt-pasted and coughing in fitful unison, as though coughing itself were contagious. A green haze of trees appeared in the distance. The column came to a halt, and people hopped into the ditch to build a causeway for the wagons.

  Garland noticed Medric standing in the road. The seer, his spectacles encrusted with dust, dirty tear tracks on his cheeks, wore Emil’s straw hat, which made him look like a lost and bewildered boy.

  Medric and Emil often played frivolous word games with each other, and a person who didn’t know them might think they were only bound together by cleverness. But Garland, who for a few months had slept in an attic with them, had seen them early in the morning wrapped around each other like strands of twine and had been awakened during the night by their lovemaking—sweet, fierce, and often interrupted by muffled laughter. Emil and Zanja were the only people who understood Medric, and now he was without both of them.

  Garland went over and cleaned his spectacles for him.

  Medric said, “It’s coming undone, all of it.”

  His hopeless tone made Garland want to yell at him. He was a seer, for land’s sake! Why hadn’t he kept this catastrophe from happening?

  He said, “You should wipe off your spectacles occasionally, or you’ll hurt yourself because you can’t see.”

  ‘’I can’t see anyway. These are for reading.’’

  “Where is the pair for far-seeing?”

  “Zanja has them.”

  “Why?”

  “She needs them.”

  Garland couldn’t think what to say. He helped Medic across the ditch and left him where he wouldn’t get trampled. When the wagons had been gotten safely across the ditch, one of the drivers fetched Medric and helped him into the wagon. What the driver made of his peculiar passenger, Garland could not imagine.

  Oh, what a mess things had become! Rather than the orderly progress to integrate the Sainnites into Shaftal, they had abruptly created this mixed company with no planning, no training, and no notice. Here was a cook turned into a soldier, a statesman into a captive, a trickster seer into a dull blind man, a novice Truthken into a liar, and a G’deon into a warrior—a vengeful warrior, Garland feared, if Emil were killed, or Zanja came to harm. The Sainnites’ fearful superstitions about magic may have prompted them to slaughter every talented person they could identify, regardless of their harmlessness, but they had been wise to fear the G’deon so much that they didn’t attack the House of Lilterwess until Harald G’deon was dead.

  What would they do without Emil?

  They were crossing roadless landscape now, but the ground was firm, the dry bushes crackled under the wagon wheels, and the soldiers walking ahead of the wagons could find routes that avoided obstacles. Kamren dropped back to the rear, looking for Clement, but she was in one of the wagons, being educated by Seth in how to feed Gabian. He said to Garland, “I want to request that a new group of soldiers be assigned to help us with the dictionary. Do I make this request to you?’’

  ‘’Bloody hell,” Garland muttered.

  ‘’Bloody hell,” Kamren repeated sympathetically. After six months’ study, he could make himself understood in Sainnese, although he had to insert occasional Shaftali words, like raisins dropped into bread dough.

  Garland said, “How can you even care about your book of words?”

  “Oh, I don’t care. My heart is preoccupied by worry and fear, just as yours pr
obably is. But we can introduce Shaftalese to another group of Sainnites, and we know from experience that they’ll teach whatever they learn to the entire company. It is progress, Captain Garland. If we cease to make progress, then we certainly will fail.”

  The long day gave way to long evening. They made camp: canvas was hung, latrines were dug; stew was cooked, horses were groomed and fed; wagon axles were checked and greased; blisters were treated; socks were washed and hung to dry; food was served and dishes washed; and more than a hundred beds were unrolled. Ten Paladins and seven soldiers, with Garland sometimes serving as translator, exchanged language lessons over supper.

  An uproar rose up on the women’s side of the canvas. Garland saw the other captains running there, so he did also. The soldiers, already crowded around the combatants, pretended they couldn’t hear the orders being shouted at them, and Captain Washlan began clouting heads.

  Norina came up beside Garland. “They should be too tired for such nonsense.”

  Garland said, “A challenge can’t be ignored.”

  “A challenge over what?”

  “Bed position. The best spots are near a window or near the fire.”

  Norina glanced at the bedrolls, the canvas divider, the sheltering trees. “The soldiers lie on the ground in the same position as in the barracks? And where they lie reflects their status? And now that the captains chose soldiers to be the Paladins’ students, new criteria has come into play, and those battles over status must be refought?”

  “That’s how it works,” Garland said.

  She rarely looked at him directly, knowing how uncomfortable it made him. But now she glanced at him, sharp and sudden as an ambush. “Then these people are no better than chickens!”