These same two Paladins had departed hours ago, but now they scarcely seemed the same people: the woman was gaunt, and the man had grown a white beard. They clung to Karis’s hands as though the swift current in which they had been traveling might continue to carry them away. The man was the first to let go of Karis. “Lil, we have arrived.”
“Have we?” said his companion doubtfully.
“Kamren!” he cried. The two men embraced like friends reunited after a long separation. “How long have we been gone?”
Kamren took a watch from his waistcoat. “Four hours and a half.”
“It’s been eighteen days,” said Lil.
“Lil, Rane, what did Grandmother Ocean say?” Karis was looking very pale.
The returned Paladins both fumbled at their belts to untie flasks that had the natural asymmetry of gourds but were intricately decorated and shone like glazed pottery. The vessels were dressed in delicate fish nets, each knot decorated with small shells that shimmered in the sunshine, their colors alive and unstable like a film of oil on moving water. Karis accepted these gorgeous vessels with reluctance, holding them by the braided cords as though she didn’t want to touch them.
“Stomp on it, is what the water witch said. Or rather, that’s what she demonstrated.”
Chaen let out an inadvertent sound. Surely such lovely things had not been made only to be destroyed!
“Stomp on which? Or both?”
“She may have told us,” said Lil, “but her speaker, Silver, didn’t translate. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because she gave us both of them at once, and we can’t tell them apart.”
“After that, she went under the water and didn’t come back up. Silver told us there was no time for us to talk further—we had to leave before the water she had splashed on us was dry. And he said to tell you that Grandmother Ocean is dead.”
“She’s dead?” said Seth. “How can she be dead if she lives outside of time?”
“Which one do I smash?” Karis asked Medric. The seer pointed at one of the bottles.
Karis gave the other to Kamren and, without a word, turned on her heel and strode off through the dust cloud, up the slope of a nearby rise. Not even Norina followed her, though her gaze never wavered from the furious giant, who had arrived at the top of the slope and now stood still, at the meeting of earth and sky, with the morning’s sun still shining on her sweat-glazed back. Karis put the bottle on a boulder, then took the hammer from her belt. For a moment, Chaen could see the tool’s heaviness reflected in the swelling of her muscles, not just in her arm and shoulder, but all the way down her back. And then she swung it, and there was a terrific boom, and the pieces of the bottle floated upwards, and bits of stone sprayed outward, raising little puffs of dust wherever they landed. One of the horses gave a jump, and a piece of rock thumped onto the toe of Chaen’s boot. But she wouldn’t let herself be distracted by the shrapnel, and so she saw what the rest of the watchers may have missed, a little dervish of dust that went spinning away, then disappeared as it flung off the haze that had given it form. But a small cloud, which had been journeying across the dull sky so slowly it practically seemed to be hovering, was suddenly smeared along the edge as if by a painter’s knife.
Now there would be mischief, Chaen thought.
Chapter 34
Although exhausted from the day’s trials, Tashar stood watch all night while Maxew slept in the bow like the survivor of a drunken brawl and the old man sprawled along one side like a disregarded body putrefying in a gutter. Yet at daybreak, Tashar could turn and turn, until he had viewed the full circle of the horizon, like the rim of a vast round plate filled with greenery, winding streams, miniature ponds, and farmsteads like children’s toys in the midst of tiny orchards and fields. The Shimasal Road appeared below them, so straight it seemed to have been laid first, and the hills rose around it like loaves of bread afterwards. And a remarkable wind took them northward, faster than the carts below and steady as the compass. It began to seem that this fair and lucky wind would carry them all the way to Shimasal, where they could hire a wagon and take the road south to the ruins of the House of Lilterwess. Maxew would be furious, but, to Tashar, it seemed like a reasonable solution to their aimlessness.
At around midday, a haze appeared. At one moment Tashar was flying over Shaftal, and at the next the landscape faded away and disappeared. For a short while they floated above the fog, and then the sun and sky disappeared. Only a short time earlier, he had been able to see to the ends of the earth! How could he have been surprised by a fog bank? Had he fallen asleep without realizing it? Well, they must travel below the fog, even though he might lose the wind. He would not stand oblivious again while his precious ship flew into danger.
He banked the fire carefully so he could build it quickly should he need to and kept his face close to the telltales, which otherwise disappeared in the fog. No seaman likes to be trapped like this without landmarks or skymarks. Becalmed ghost ships floated for ages in such fogs, rotten and rusting and empty of life.
The lines were strung with water drops, like a spider’s web on a dewy morning. Tashar wiped his wet face with a wet sleeve. The weight of the water alone should drag their ship downward, but the telltales flapped heavily: they were neither rising nor falling.
The old man was not dead after all. He became restless and mumbled indistinctly. He said, “Water.” And his tone seemed wrong: not a request, but an announcement.
Maxew started awake. “What!” he said in an aggrieved tone.
“Fog,” said Tashar.
He imagined Maxew touching his swollen nose and puffy eye, blinking stupidly as if the fog were in his vision rather than in the air, pulling the blanket around his shoulders, and letting his anger start to build.
“Water!” said the old man triumphantly. He laughed a little: “Ha, ha, ha!”
Maxew grunted with pain, rocking the basket as he staggered to his feet. Tashar spotted his ghostly shape bending over the old man. “What do you know?” he said. “Tell me what you know!”
The prisoner mumbled. Tashar heard a thump, and the old man groaned.
Better he kick him than me, thought Tashar.
One of the telltales swam into visibility, still flapping. There was a brightness above. Tashar looked up and saw the sun, a ghostly, glowing disk that brightened, faded, and brightened again. And suddenly its brilliance blinded him. Blue sky! And against that blue, a massive column composed of clouds.
The fog closed in once again.
There had been something menacing about those clouds. “I have never seen weather like this,” Tashar said.
“Strangeness is all that you fear?” asked Maxew.
“I saw something . . . I’m not sure what . . .”
But then he did know. He had never seen that cloud column so close, and had never flown toward it rather than fleeing for shelter in his sailboat. “It is a thunderstorm.”
The telltale reappeared in the fog. It was streaming downward. The sky boat was rising.
“Ha, ha,” said the old man.
Chapter 35
Zanja’s journey had been more stupid than strange. At least twice a day she changed her direction, and once her trajectory doubled back on Chaen, whose dogged pursuit had only been a mild distraction until she took a foolish fall and nearly drowned herself. By the sixth time Zanja changed direction, Chaen no longer pursued her. Sometimes Zanja felt Emil’s presence so strongly that she crept through thickets in silence, expecting to encounter his captors in mere moments. Yet his presence always pulled away from her, leaving no evidence—no campfire, no horse droppings, not even an area of trampled grass. It was frustrating—bewildering—disheartening. Zanja, knowing that if she ceased to trust her prescience it would cease to be trustworthy, fought a dreary battle with self-doubt.
She ran out of water and could not find more. Hunger could be
endured, but thirst would kill her, especially traveling at this pace, in this heat. At a dry streambed, she moved some large stones with a lever fashioned from a tree branch; the smaller stones she tossed aside; then she dug with her hands through sand and silt, until the soil became mud. As she waited for this little well to fill with water, she dumped the contents of her satchel on the ground. A magpie’s collection: twine, though she could not wait for a squirrel or rabbit to wander into a noose; a tinder bag for the fire she didn’t need; Medric’s spectacles, without which he couldn’t see more than an arm’s length, while she had excellent eyesight; a sewing kit for mending she would not bother with; a packet of healing herbs labeled in J’han’s writing, but no pot to steep them in; and the glyph cards, precious but unnecessary, since her dream guide could answer every question by showing her a page from the lexicon.
Her little well yielded only a slurry, more mud than water. She dipped her cup and drank the mud, then dug the well deeper. Dirt grated between her teeth.
“I’m losing my trust in you,” she told her guide, who waited on the far side of the dry stream. He had been walking beside her for days, and his bare feet were not even dirty. He had not eaten or slept, and he entertained himself sometimes by singing the songs Zanja had sung in her childhood.
“If you don’t trust me, then you don’t trust yourself,” he said.
“How can Emil be west of us in the morning and east of us at noon? How can his captors move so swiftly through such rough country? And why are they traveling by a zigzagging route that doubles or triples the distance?”
“They turn like the wind.”
“But air witches don’t change their minds!”
There was enough muddy water to fill her flask. Since Zanja had traveled beyond the watershed north of the Corben River, she would find no running water until she reached the Asha River, or stumbled across one of its tributaries. Farmsteads with wells could be found along the Shimasal Road, but her quarry had never traveled that far west. Their drunkard’s path did tend northward, though it zigged and zagged between west and east. Perhaps Zanja eventually would find herself in Shimasal, or swimming the river. But this afternoon, her eastward journey might take her to the coast again.
Her guide said, “Maybe we will see the House of Lilterwess.”
“The House of Lilterwess lies to the south—the only direction we haven’t traveled.”
“Yes, Speaker. But it would be marvelous to see!”
The legendary place had been a ruin for twenty years, but the boy seemed to occupy a timeless world—the world of stories, perhaps.
“Will I need these things?” She gestured toward the pile of useless objects. “Or shall I put the bread in my pockets and leave the rest behind?”
“You will need some of them.”
Until Zanja could distinguish necessary from useless, she would carry all of it. She packed her satchel again. “So we’re turning east again. But if I were to lie down and go to sleep, would they be west of us when I awake?”
“They might be.” Tireless and unburdened, the boy stood up and led the way.
She went east, and west, and east again, to the eastern edge of the forest, where dwarfed trees kept at a distance from each other beneath big expanses of sky. Here her guide paused to gaze upward. Zanja also looked up and saw three buzzards, their great wings spread to catch the wind, soaring westward.
“The wind has changed,” the boy observed.
Zanja gazed dully at the sky. The boy’s guidance had always been clear, and Medric had implied she could rely on him. But he was a spirit, like the ghosts that haunted her; he did not occupy the world as she did: change, heartbreak, and uncertainty were unknown to him.
“Is Emil still east of us?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The shadows had become attenuated as evening approached. A month after the equinox, those shadows lay west to east with a slight tilt to north and south. She looked at the buzzards again. They were flying towards the northwest.
She said, “In summer, the wind tends from the south. Whether it blows west or east, it also pushes toward the north. What is Emil’s direction of travel?”
The boy showed her the glyph for west.
“Is his direction of travel changing every time the wind changes?”
“Yes, Speaker.”
Five days of time and energy had been wasted, and it was her fault—not the fault of the guide, who inhabited a world of dreams and symbols; who had never learned how to shoot across the zigzagging path of a rabbit.
She began to walk, not toward the east, but across the lines of the shadows, with the sun to her left. When she glanced back, her crestfallen guide was following her. She said, “Foxes chase behind their prey, following its crooked path, because foxes only know where the rabbit is, and cannot guess where it’s going. But I can guess, and so we are going northwest.”
“Yes, Speaker,” said her dream guide.
Once again she entered the deep woods. As the long twilight settled into night, a bank of clouds moved across the sky, blocking the stars. Zanja could not see, and was aching and stupid with weariness. For the first time since leaving Hanishport, she lay down and slept on bare ground.
In the middle of the night, she jerked awake. She thought she had heard a voice speaking in the sky. But the days were past when a raven might suddenly speak to her from the branches overhead; Karis’s ravens could no longer talk. In the sky, clouds opened and closed like curtains over a few patches of stars.
Zanja fell asleep again and dreamed that she and Ransel, her clan brother, were standing above the River of Stones, watching the extinction of their people charge toward them. “Those killers will become my friends,” she told her clan brother, knowing as she spoke that he was nearly eight years dead. “One day I might be able to prevent this massacre, but I won’t take any action.”
He looked at her as if he did not know her, as if they hadn’t crawled together as infants across the same clan-house floor, as if they hadn’t told each other about their trysts, been each other’s blade partner, and become katrim on the same day.
“My brother,” she said in despair, “if you don’t know me, then I don’t know myself.”
The Sainnites overran them, and a war horse trampled her, and with the spikes that bound its hooves the horse shattered her skull.
She awakened herself by her own cry of pain. She clasped her head in her hands and lay sobbing in the leaf mold, among the bodies of her people. The spirit boy, the dream guide, crouched over her. She shouted, “How long must I survive this massacre!”
“As long as your dead lie unburied,” said the boy.
She sat up, and the pain was excruciating. She was and was not in the forest, and she could or could not save the life of her brother, who was dead. “Where is he?” she gasped. “Where is he now?”
“West.”
“His direction of travel?”
“North.”
She staggered to her feet and headed northward, through the dead, trampled, maimed, dismembered bodies: every one of her friends, all of her fellow katrim, every member of her clan, all her relations, every member of her tribe. The field of bodies stretched as far as she could see. So many dead! How could she possibly bury them all? “Show me the way,” she begged her guide. He went ahead, and she followed, putting her feet where he put his. The dead grabbed at her ankles, saying with their stiff mouths, Only vengeance will bring peace.
“That’s not right,” she said. “For vengeance only made me vengeful.”
You could have saved us and you did not, said the dead. You loved your life more than you love your people. More than the past, which will now be forgotten. More than the future, which will not be remade.
“I didn’t dare! I didn’t know how! What Grandmother Ocean did to save her people—how could I have such logic?”
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br /> They clutched at her. An axe of pain whacked through her skull, and she fell into their bony arms.
The world was wrong, turned sideways and filled up with trees. The boy, her companion, squatted beside her. She saw that his tunic was exquisitely woven, with a complicated, intertwining pattern of blue and orange upon a white ground, the border pattern of the na’Tarweins. She said, “But you are just a spirit. I’m the last—the last katrim, the last na’Tarwein, the last Ashawala’i. And I’m a madwoman, lying in a woodland talking to myself.”
“Yes, Speaker,” said the boy. “You tripped,” he added helpfully.
“The dead burden me with their demands and accusations. They grab my ankles and make me fall.”
“You tripped over a branch.”
She drew up her knees and tried to rise, but pain slammed into her skull. She fell forward again, crying out in agony.
You are not hurt, Emil said. You remember an old hurt, and that is all. Your pain is just the memory of pain.
So he had said to her, year after year, reminding her patiently that there was a difference between past and present, reminding her of her living family and friends. By these methods, year after year, Emil had brought her back to life.
She raised her head, though the forest swirled around her. She got to her feet, holding a sapling for support. Slowly, her vision cleared, but she had lost all sense of direction. “Lead me northward,” she said.
The boy walked, and she followed. Her water flask felt heavy, but when she raised it to her lips she got a mouthful of wet mud. Some broken pieces of Garland’s bread remained in her satchel but seemed too difficult to eat. The boy walked ahead of her, light-footed.
When the dead clutched at her again, she called out to the boy: “I know stories—stories you’ve never heard—stories from the south, west, and east—stories from far countries. I am a collector of stories.”
Air Logic Page 28
