Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Medric, you’re supposed to express Emil’s insight,” Seth reminded him.

  Medric sat silent, but at least he wasn’t restless any more. No one said anything for quite a while. Medric said, “I’ve been thinking about how a bird would explain a fish to another bird: it flies in water; its winds are currents; its feathers are like little, stiff leaves—”

  Someone uttered a muffled laugh.

  Medric said, “Air magic is the opposite of fire magic. So I ought to be able to guess what Saugus is doing by imagining the opposite of what I would do. That’s not insight, though—it’s work.” Medric sighed. “And it’s work I can’t avoid. Suppose I were in a position to determine Shaftal’s future—well, I am in that position, little though I like it. Suppose that, like Saugus, someone of great power, like Karis, was doing something I disapprove of. Using fire logic, I can anticipate that person’s every move and impede it. I can guess what she hates the most, and subject her to it. My goal probably would be to isolate her from her powers—not from her element, of course, but from her ability to do anything effective with it. In the end I’d probably drive her away.”

  “What’s the opposite of everything Medric just said?” Kamren asked.

  It seemed like an absurd question. But one of the Paladins immediately answered, “Rather than anticipating what she will do, you would force her to do things.”

  “The things you want her to do,” said another.

  “By making it seem like there’s no other choice.”

  “Rather than make her life unendurable, you would make it inescapable.”

  “A trap of duty—duty without joy.”

  “Rather than make her ineffective, you would delude her with effectiveness.”

  “She would think she’s doing something worthwhile, but would be wasting her energy.”

  “Or perhaps she’d be isolated from herself—from her ability to know what is the right thing to do.”

  “Isolated from her friends, maybe.”

  “And in the end—in the end, what? She’d drive herself away?”

  “Or she’d be lured too close.”

  “Too close to what? To her own powers?”

  They were talking about Karis! Garland felt an awful sensation, and cried, “Too close to Saugus! Without fire logic to show her another way, and without air logic to protect her from him!”

  “Bloody hell,” said Medric.

  Chapter 31

  Just past sunrise, Maxew awakened Tashar by poking a toe in his ribs. He said that during the night they had been becalmed, and he had been nearly mad with boredom. “We must go west,” he said. “Today.” He lay down and covered his head with the blanket.

  The cloudless sky was pale and dull. On a day like this, Tashar’s little boat would have remained at dock. Tashar had explained to Maxew that their direction of travel depended entirely on the wind, so he didn’t know why the younger man persisted in thinking that Tashar could decide their direction. Yet Tashar’s translated scroll had explained that the winds wrapped the earth in layers, so he decided to go upward, hunting for a wind that would take them in the direction they needed. He built up the fire, and the air boat began to ascend.

  The landscape below faded as though a thin mist had crept over it, while at the same time the sky overhead turned a brilliant blue, and the air became refreshingly cool. The telltales never indicated the wind Tashar sought, but he remained at that amazing height for much of the day.

  Maxew slept.

  Their prisoner occasionally opened his eyes or mumbled something. Maxew had not bothered to force him to eat or drink, and soon the old man would die. There was nothing Tashar could do about it.

  Their wood supply was depleted. In late afternoon, he decided they’d have to land—and they could choose a landing place no more easily than they could choose a direction of travel. He stopped putting wood into the stove, and leaned on the wicker gunwale to watch for a good landing place, should one happen to appear. The telltales started to flutter upward.

  They slowly penetrated the haze. Tashar peered in all directions, seeking landmarks, roads, rivers, anything to tell him where they were. Nothing stood out in the landscape, nothing but black boulders amid the dull green. He couldn’t tell if the land was flat or hilly, or whether there were any settlements. Finally he realized that the haze of blue beyond the edges of the land was not sky but ocean. His stomach flipped in a sickening way, as his sense of the world was reorganized. They had made shocking progress eastward—the wrong direction—and the earth was much, much closer than it had seemed.

  “Maxew!” he cried. He yanked open the stove door to put in a fresh log. But the fire had burned down to a few embers amid the ashes. He whacked the sleeping boy with a stick, and Maxew sat up.

  “We’re falling!”

  “What? Why did you let the fire go out?”

  Tashar flung handfuls of tinder into the stove. He blew to make it flame, but blew too hard, and got a faceful of hot ash. Taking a breath to blow again, he sucked in ashes and began choking.

  Maxew shouted at him—angrily and pointlessly. Tashar could not catch his breath, but the tinder caught without his help. He added some small sticks, one at a time, very carefully. An ember was smoking in the wicker near his knee, and he doused it with the last of their water. He carefully closed the stove door and looked up into the silk bag. It was filled with smoke. But on a hot day, only a hot fire could keep them afloat, since the air in the bag must be far warmer than the air outside the bag. He looked at the telltales. They continued to stream upwards; the air boat continued to fall.

  Cursing, Maxew shoved wood at him, and Tashar crammed it into the fire box. Now the telltales were flapping, which meant their fall was slowing. More embers fell out. He crushed them with his bare hands.

  He stood up and looked over the gunwale. Below them, birds were starting out of the trees, scattering below the basket like minnows in a pond. The air boat’s shadow shuddered agitatedly across the treetops. He could not see the guide rope at all. Was it trailing behind them, dragging across treetops?

  A hard jolt. Maxew fell into the side with a yell of surprise. The boat heeled wildly, and Tashar was looking directly down at the ground, which was patched with sunlight and shade and a few tired-looking clumps of grass. The boat swayed back, sickeningly, then forward, then back, and then it hit the ground. The stove tipped over. Tashar went over the edge. I should have lain on the deck, he thought as he fell. He jolted to earth while the air boat, lighter now that it had lost a passenger, bounced upward. It occurred to Tashar that it would come down again. He scrambled out of its path.

  The guide rope, tangled in the trees, had tethered the boat. It subsided gradually and gracefully to earth, and the bag flopped across the treetops like a soft pillow.

  Maxew peered over the gunwale. Blood from his nose gushed down his chin. There was a lot of smoke. Tashar ran to climb in and heave the stove upright. Fortunately, its door had remained latched.

  The silk settled across the treetops, crackling like taffeta. Maxew crawled out of the boat and lay on the ground. He spit out a mouthful of blood. The old man lay crumpled, mumbling, pathetic, covered by wrecked supplies, singed blankets, and their last two pieces of wood.

  No one said anything.

  Tashar dragged the wicker boat to a sturdy tree branch and hoisted it with block and tackle so the old man would remain safely above ground.

  Maxew, with a black eye and his nose starting to swell, stumbled about with hatchet in hand, picking up bits of firewood. Tashar climbed to high ground with the empty tins clanging on his back, but he saw no sign of water. When he returned, Maxew’s pile of wood was unimpressive, and he was sitting in the shade with his head against his knees.

  Would people admire this remarkable journey, or just remember this ignominious crash? Tashar was the captain, and this catastroph
e was his fault—and his duty to mend. Little though he liked that bastard Maxew, much though he was tempted to leave him, his foul temper, and his hapless prisoner here in this forsaken place, he would not fail Saugus. Nor would he abandon his sky boat. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder whether his judgment on these matters was entirely sound, for his dreams of flight seemed real, but his death did not—despite bruises and burns and a devastating crash. But he would not make these mistakes again.

  The basketry boat rocked like a cradle hanging from the rafters of a farmhouse kitchen. The prisoner moved restlessly and uttered muffled, guttural cries. “What’s the matter with him?” Tashar asked.

  Maxew raised his head. There were flakes of dried blood stuck to his chin, and his nose had swollen grotesquely. “We must set forth again.”

  “We will, but not until the wind changes.”

  “If you had said that the ship could not be steered—”

  “It could—if I knew more about winds . . .”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “Because no one knows! And I’m doing the best I can!” He gestured skyward. “There’s no clouds, no birds—”

  Maxew was breathing through his mouth, and his voice was muffled and hollow, as though he had a head cold. “It’s never your fault, is it?”

  Tashar took the hatchet and gathered wood. While wandering among the trees, he stumbled across a mud puddle that had been a vernal pool, in the center of which there had survived a bit of water. He waded in, knee-deep in foul mud, and filled the water tins. He took them back to Maxew and told him to first strain the water through a rag, then give some water to the prisoner.

  The sun was halfway to the horizon when Tashar noticed a few clouds heading westward at a turtle’s pace. With the silk bag spread across the treetops, they built a fire beneath it, filled it with smoke, and went aloft once again.

  Chapter 32

  Early in the spring, the Two had complained to Norina about how difficult it was to study in the main hall of Travesty, with the noise, the comings and goings, and the frequent interruptions. Braight, although she respected and feared Norina Truthken as she did no one else, had said that the law students should be allowed to keep watch in shifts like the Paladins did. Norina replied that the air students must be under the impression that she considered only her own convenience when she decided how things would be done. Far worse than a remonstration, it was the first sentence of a lecture.

  She said, “With enough experience, the heightened perceptions of air witches can be exercised not just on individuals, but on groups. But air children are easily overwhelmed by their own senses, especially since you are painfully conscious that your presence inspires discomfort and hostility in nearly everyone. Thus, air children tend to avoid people, or, when that is impossible, they learn to disappear, so people forget their presence. But both strategies trade learning for comfort. As law students, you must learn to sort your perceptions, to heed what matters and ignore the rest, which can only be learned through exposure. When I was a law student, the school was in the House of Lilterwess, where a tenth of all Shaftali people passed through the doors each year.”

  Anders calculated that the law students in the House of Lilterwess would have had to cope with 30,000 visitors each year. How could he possibly be congenial to so many: eighty people each day, or four people each hour . . . assuming that he never slept?

  Norina’s lecture continued. “You must learn more than tolerance. You must learn more than attentiveness. You must learn to notice, even in a crowd, what is not there. Until you can do that, you will only be useful when you control all the conditions, which is another way of saying that you won’t be useful at all.”

  Serrain, the only one who seemed likely to pass such a test, was the only one who could think about what lay beyond it. “Madam Truthken,” she had said, “toleration, attentiveness, and heedfulness to the missing—are these precursors to the exercise of air magic on a group?”

  Norina had never concealed her reactions from them, though she certainly was capable of it. She showed surprise, followed by wry amusement. “Perhaps. But under what circumstances would it be legal to bend a group of people to your will?”

  On a page of Anders’s book titled “Unanswered Questions” he had written that question, and he still didn’t know the answer. But on the day they found the dead body of Norina’s husband, he thought it likely that an air witch could lawfully use magic to prevent a group from murdering a healer.

  They had searched again in the room J’han shared with Norina and their daughter but found only some faint stains that Braight said could be blood. They had argued about the meaning of the thump in the night—for if the cleaners had carried out a dead man at night, the law students would not be able to find the body now. Braight said that if there was a body, it would be concealed in the house, entire wings of which stood vacant during this season of travel. “Why bother to carry him farther?” she had asked. So they had searched, fruitlessly, every room of the house, until the Two remembered the seer’s tower.

  Halfway up the seer’s ridiculous hidden staircase, Braight had said, “That is the smell of death.”

  When they got the trap door open, the miasma became unbearable. The Two fled, Serrain clapped her hand over her mouth, and Braight cried, “Anders! I can’t do this alone!”

  They had no one in custody whose truths or lies could prove that murder had taken place. Therefore, they must look with their own eyes to see how the man had died. Anders helped Braight to cut the ropes, peel back the canvas that wrapped the body, and examine the dead man.

  Life is action, Anders realized, even if that action is nothing more than the moving sparks of thoughts. Death is a permanent inertia, the end of action. J’han’s actions had always been rooted in fundamental kindness, yet he also had a toughness, a readiness to do the sometimes hard and brutal work of curing people, or of helping them die. Now he would not take any action again; he was dead.

  Surely looking at the dead man’s wounds was not the proper business of children! But they were law students. They had studied together the law regarding murder, and thus they knew what was required.

  “Let’s take some of his hair,” said Anders. Pinching his nose made his voice sound like someone else’s.

  Braight took hold of a blood-stiff lock of J’han’s hair, and Anders cut it with his pocket knife.

  “I need to be alone now,” he said.

  Soon after the law school was formed, the six students had agreed upon protocols for solitude. Anders chose the library as his refuge. Other people might be there, but they always were silent and preoccupied and scarcely seemed aware of his existence. Now, with nearly all the scholars and fire bloods gone to Hanishport, the library was quite empty. A book that Emil had been repairing and rebinding lay in pieces, the old boards waiting to be wrapped in calfskin.

  Anders sat on a stool in a corner of the library. He thought about death, and then he thought about murder. He thought about the window that had stood ajar in J’han’s neat room; the faint scent of soap; one bed, bare to the mattress, while Leeba’s bed was carelessly made, as a young child might do it; long, fresh scars in the floor, where someone’s hobnails had scraped across the grain. He imagined a row of cleaners standing by with brushes and buckets.

  Leeba was not docile or patient. She was persistent and intrusive. After the night of the assassinations, her parents had begun teaching her to protect herself—how to fight, and flee, and scream for help. They had not taught her how to watch her father die.

  A prickling in Anders’s neck grew into a quivering across the shoulders that crept downward until his entire body was trembling. In his dark, silent corner, he sat shuddering, alone with his sadness and terror.

  “J’han Healer has been murdered.”

  The Paladin nodded politely, just as the two Paladins before him had done; but behind the
courteously attentive expression lay incomprehension.

  “His body lies concealed in the seer’s tower,” said Serrain. “If you’ll just come with us, we’ll show you.”

  “Oh, I regret that I can’t. My duties—”

  Anders grabbed Serrain’s arm. “No magic,” he whispered.

  She yanked her arm away. “Magic’s been done to them already!”

  “And the one who did it will be executed!”

  This was an occasion like Norina had warned them of, when it seemed obvious and urgent that they act in ways that seemed natural and easy. “But you must find another way,” Norina had said.

  “We must find another way,” Anders said.

  The Paladin was walking away. From previous experience, Anders and Serrain knew that if they called her back they would have to begin again, for she would remember nothing.

  “Bran’s work,” said Serrain in fearful admiration.

  How could they make the people left behind in Travesty recognize the crime that they had not noticed when it occurred under their noses?

  The big clock in the hall chimed the hour. Soon the people of the house would gather in the kitchen to cook and eat supper. The air children must gather food and slip away before then.

  As often happened, Anders had reached a conclusion while he still thought he was considering the problem. He said, “We must go to Hanishport and find Norina.”

  “But she bid us—”

  “Based on a wrong assumption!”

  “What Norina said was that we must never exercise our judgment!”

  “But we have a duty—”

  “Students don’t have a duty, except—”

  “—to Shaftal.”

  “—to obey!”

  The front door slammed open, and agitated voices sounded loud in the empty hall. “—you think you can just float past—” Braight was saying.