She followed the passage between sleeping people and their bags, weapons, and boots. She passed through a dry sprinkle of dirt that was trickling through the rotten ceiling boards. She put her hand on a heavy, closed door and knew its history: acorn, sapling, tree, and then thick oak boards strapped with iron. Now the wood was returning to earth, its bolts rusted away, its hinges turning to red dust.
Karis was in Zanja’s hands. The iron submitted to her, and the wood was healed. Zanja swung the door silently open, slipped into the passageway, and shut the door again. With Zanja’s mouth Karis whispered, “More people are sleeping in the next room.”
“And one of them is Saugus,” Zanja replied.
“We must go through.”
In the next doorway, all that remained of the door was some spongy splinters underfoot. Zanja should never have uttered the air witch’s name, not even in a whisper scarcely louder than a breath. She had awakened Norina that easily many times. She stepped in, terrified, remembering how she said to Leeba, Never scream or yell from fear—it only makes you more afraid.
This room was drier than the last, and the company’s food stores were here, hanging from the ceiling beams in oilcloth bags. The powder kegs were here also, lined along the wall. A dozen more people slept here. One was turning restlessly: Saugus. Zanja raced to the far door and again was able to open and close it with no sound. Yet she continued to flee, down the short passageway, to the next, empty room. There she forced herself to pause, to slow her thudding heartbeat. But deep breathing only made her dizzy.
She crossed the room to the next door and stopped short in dismay. She could hear the mutter of voices. A few ghostly traces of light slipped through the cracks. That guarded passage would be similar to the others: two body-lengths’ long, one wide, with beamed ceilings and walls of mortared stone. Two body-lengths separated Zanja from Leeba.
She could not think what to do. She felt strangely light-headed, her heart pounding as if she had stood up too suddenly after a long illness. How many people were in the passage? If she opened the door, what then? She must not, dared not, could not fail!
Something poked her left arm. She turned sharply, lost her balance, and staggered into nothing. She felt the poke again. Karis! Why had she become so stupid? Poke. She shuffled to the left. Poke. She shuffled forward. The palms of her hands were tickling. She pressed them to the wall.
A wall of stone and mortar, with earth behind it, thicker than Karis was tall, more stones and mortar on the other side, and then the next storeroom. The mortar was weak, and it powdered at her touch. Zanja dug her fingers around the edge of a stone, pulled it out and managed to lower it to the floor, though it probably weighed as much as Leeba. She staggered dizzily and cracked her head on the wall. She pulled out another stone and put it atop the first, giving herself a platform to kneel on. She pressed her hands to bare soil.
Between each particle of dirt there were channels: the pathways of earthworms, of ants, and of roots that had rotted away. She slid a finger into one tiny passage, claiming room from other passages that were equally tiny, claiming more room, making her own passage larger until her head and shoulders could enter the earth and she could wriggle through it. The weight of earth pressed upon her. There was no air. Lungs aching, she wormed through the wall. She struck stone with her bruised head. The far wall? And her arms were trapped at her sides.
Her ears were roaring. There was a sick pressure in her temples. She wiggled her legs, which moved the soil a little further, just enough that she could bend her knees and creep backwards to the empty store room and kneel on the stone platform, gasping.
Muffled voices spoke. Too far way to worry about. “Bad air,” Karis gasped. “Smothering. Must go forward.”
Zanja wiggled back into the earth, this time with hands reaching ahead of her. When she touched the rock wall of the next room, the mortar dissolved into limestone and sand. She pushed the stone desperately, and it fell. Sweet air poured into her tunnel. She breathed. Her first clear thought was that she should have swooned a good while ago. And if she had fainted, Karis would have fainted with her.
Leeba lay utterly silent, possibly sleeping, possibly frozen with terror.
“Leeba, it’s me. I’ve come for you. Don’t make a sound. Stay where you are.”
Zanja pushed out another stone, which should have thudded to the floor so loudly that a person would have to be deaf not to hear it. But it landed almost soundlessly, and when Zanja dragged herself into Leeba’s dungeon, there were no stones—just mounds of gritty dust. She ran into the room, dropped to her knees, and grabbed her daughter.
“I didn’t scream,” said Leeba.
Chapter 47
Tashar slept.
“Here he is,” said someone.
He blinked his eyes vigorously, but the darkness didn’t go away.
People dragged him through long, whiplike stems that slashed at his face. Other people in a wagon bed hauled him aboard. He noticed the flickering flame of a lantern with its dirty chimney girded in rusty iron hanging from a pole above the driver. He heard people talking, hooves scraping on stone, harnesses rattling. He smelled wood and burlap. Someone put a folded sack under his head.
Later, it began to rain.
Later, a voice commanded him to awaken.
He jerked upright. “The bastard!” he cried.
Five sodden, solemn children gazed at him from outside the wagon. “He means Maxew,” a girl stated.
“What did Maxew do to him?” asked a boy with wet hair in his eyes.
Two soldiers swam out of the rain. They yanked Tashar from the wagon. He staggered on stiff, numb legs and fell to his knees. The rain opened like a curtain, and a woman stood there. “Return to Hanishport,” she said.
“I will.” He would have said anything to make her go away. The rain flapped like a blanket, and she disappeared.
The children drew around him, peering at him with great interest.
“He doesn’t mean it.”
“He won’t do it.”
“But it doesn’t matter.”
“Karis can find him.”
“Then he should do as he was told.”
“It’s only reasonable.”
“But Madam Truthken, he could flee on a boat.”
“Good riddance,” said the Truthken, who appeared and disappeared again in a gust of wind.
“If he flees, he can never return. Does he know that?”
“He knows now.”
“Go away!” Tashar cried.
They disappeared. When the rain opened again, he saw two soldiers hoisting the children into a wagon. A huge woman strode past with a man riding on her back, who said, “. . . must be another word. Your language doesn’t seem able to express how much I appreciate . . .”
People stretched a tarpaulin over the wagon bed to shelter the children from the rain. A soldier handed a babbling baby to one of the children.
Someone helped Tashar to his feet. He gaped at her: it was Maxew’s mother, in sodden shirt and dripping hair.
“Can you tell me anything about my son?” she asked.
“That bastard,” he croaked.
“Does he only exercise his power upon people? Will he never do it for them?”
Tashar laughed at the idea. Maxew’s mother, who didn’t seem to have been joking, walked away.
A voice shouted words Tashar didn’t understand. Everyone in the road stopped still, and by that stillness he realized how much activity, and how many people, had been around him all that time. The voice shouted again, and now everyone replied, hoarsely, fiercely. Some cried their answer in Shaftalese: “Yes, General!” The horses groaned and began to pull, and the people groaned and began to run.
A Paladin ran into Tashar. “Pardon me,” she said over her shoulder. “Get out of the way.”
Tashar shuf
fled to the road’s edge and stood there, stupid as a sheep, while history passed him by.
Many hours passed. The rain stopped falling, and the sky was riven by cracks that for a time hovered over him like a net of black lace, until the clouds started to glow, and the net became a cloud-clotted sky. He saw tall grasses strung with glittering beads. He saw stands of trees, and streams swollen by rainfall. But the sun had not yet risen when he heard a distant yell of rage, metal clanging on metal, and the brisk announcement of a bugle.
Tashar stepped off the road and tried to run toward the sound, but soon he had to walk again, although he was gasping with excitement. How hopeless he had felt throughout that wet night. He had thought that everything he had done and sacrificed had amounted to nothing. But he was not too late! The fate of Shaftal had not yet been decided!
He pushed through a stand of trees and came out near the base of a hill. Although many of the walls had tumbled down, crescent-shaped terraces climbed the slope like gigantic stair steps. No one had looked after these gardens, but the plants were green. A mossy stream that waterfalled over and meandered along the terraces was too decorative to be natural. The hilltop, slopes, and spiral road were cluttered with massive stone blocks: the remains of the House of Lilterwess.
Upon one of those blocks at the hilltop, a soldier stood, her gray uniform gilded by a foolish sun. She was watching the battle, which Tashar couldn’t see. Near the soldier stood the bugler, whose instrument flashed as he raised it to blow a signal. The soldier must be the general. Excited, Tashar ran toward her. He scrambled onto the first terrace, then was slogging through the wet tangle of the lowest garden. He fought through: waist deep, then chest deep, in leaves so shiny they seemed varnished, among sweet-scented flowers that were twisting open in the sunlight. Then he stepped into an emptiness he couldn’t see and fell into an invisible pond. Insects exploded upward, black clouds of gnats, darting blue jewels of damsel flies. The vines that had grabbed each other across the pond now held him upright in the warm water, where, assaulted by the sewer stink of stagnant mud, he could see nothing but leaves.
He felt somewhat discouraged. He pushed away the vines that blocked his view. The general was bent over, speaking with someone Tashar couldn’t see. Then she spoke to the bugler, and he blew another signal. Between Tashar and the hilltop, a clump of people staggered into view, their arms wrapped around each other like lovers. They stumbled out of sight before Tashar could figure out what they were doing.
Then he noticed a person who, like him, was creeping toward the Sainnite general, but she was following the wall of the highest terrace. In one hand she carried a dagger and in the other a pistol. When her face turned toward the vivid light of sunrise, Tashar recognized her as a member of Death-and-Life Company. After the massacre at the Children’s Garrison, she had spent the winter huddled in a dark corner—or so it had seemed to Tashar, in his sporadic visits to the house in Hanishport. But now she was intent, fearless, focused as a predatory cat.
He saw movement between two of the massive stones. A man slipped out of the shadows and dropped down behind the woman. She whirled on him, dagger in hand, and three more people jumped down behind. One grabbed her fighting arm, one grabbed her pistol arm, and the third, a very large man, wrapped his arms tenderly around her from behind. She yanked her dagger hand free and swung awkwardly at the first man. The weapon he raised to block her blow looked like a giant cooking spoon. It broke into pieces. One of the others yanked her arm backwards, and her dagger went flying. Gunpowder exploded, and the pistol ball screamed as it ricocheted from stone. Tashar kept his eyes on the flying dagger. There, he thought, when it landed. There in the next terrace, near the pine saplings.
The general coolly ignored the skirmish immediately below her. The group struggled and stumbled about until they had bound the woman’s arms behind her back. Three dragged her away, while the fourth remained behind, scanning the gardens. He did not spot Tashar in his stinking hiding place. Now he picked up the pieces of his spoon, climbed the wall, and disappeared between the stone blocks.
Of course, the general had not left her back exposed. Though her guards had borne their prisoner down the road that spiraled the hill, others probably remained. Tashar decided not to attack the general. But he did retrieve the dagger.
Chapter 48
Leeba clung to Zanja. “I did everything you taught me,” she said. “But they caught me anyway.”
“But Leeba, you did well. You were brave!”
“Why did it take so long for you to come?”
“I have been running day and night to come to you. I have hardly rested. But I was far away from you.”
“Where is Karis?”
“She is inside me,” Zanja said, “and she is coming.”
“And Daddy? Is he coming?”
“I don’t know,” said Zanja. She felt certain that J’han was dead, and it seemed likely that Leeba had seen him die. “Leeba-love,” said Zanja, like J’han had always called her. “Leeba-bird,” like Karis. “Hay child, ink child, dirt child, Little Hurricane.” One pet name for each parent, to remind her of them.
Leeba lifted her face from Zanja’s shoulder. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ll escape together. Walk around this room with me, and I’ll try to think of how.”
With her daughter’s hand in hers, Zanja walked the perimeter of the room. This stone floor, like the others, was rippled with age, but the wall stones were so tightly fitted she could hardly distinguish their edges. The only egress was the door to the guarded passage.
She could put Leeba where the door would protect her when it was opened and attack the people who came in, possibly injuring two or three of them before the rest recovered from surprise. She could put Leeba into the worm-tunnel and push her into the adjacent airless room—but only if that room had a door to the surface.
She tried to imagine the space, as she had done before without effort, but now she could not do it. “Boy,” she said in a low voice, but Leeba answered.
“You’re talking in your people’s language again.”
“I’m calling a friendly spirit for help.”
“Come help us, spirit!” Leeba said.
The boy didn’t come.
Zanja said, “My sight and my insight both are gone. I need to see.”
Leeba said, “Then we need Medric.”
“Leeba, what a ninny I am! I have his spectacles!” Zanja’s satchel still hung across her shoulders, sodden and heavy. She dumped its contents on the floor, for it was halfway filled with dirt.
“You sounded like Medric, just now,” Leeba said.
“That was the spirit talking. He speaks with my mouth, and sometimes he sounds like people I know. I found the spectacles. I’m putting them on.”
“Now can you see?”
Medric stood before her: bright as flame but casting no light. Sunburned, dirty, and unshaven, he gazed inquiringly at her.
Zanja said, “What can a fire witch do to an air witch? I need to know!”
He answered, “I do tend to get the missing bits at the last possible moment, don’t I? Well, what does the card-casting tell us?”
Zanja’s dream guide was there, with the lexicon, a huge, heavy book that he held up to the seer as though it weighed no more than a sheet of paper.
“Are you here, Medric?” Leeba asked.
“I am here, dirt child!” said Medric. “Don’t let go of Zanja. Don’t let go at all, no matter what happens. Can you do that?”
Zanja saw Leeba, bright as day, with her rabbit peering out of her pocket and both her hands clenched in the canvas fabric of Zanja’s breeches. She seemed as confident and fearless as Norina.
Norina, Zanja thought, and drew her dagger.
Medric said musingly: “Since air bloods are incapable of unreason, what is the reason they find fire logic intolerable?”
Norina stood rigidly still, her formidable self-control barely adequate to manage her impatience. “Surely we don’t need to discuss this now.”
“But we do,” the seer replied, “or else we can’t continue.”
Norina said, “Fire logic is maddening because it has no facts, purpose, or method. And yet, despite its lack of underpinnings, more often than not fire knowledge turns out to be accurate.”
Zanja found Emil’s pen. And he was there, the suave and somber chief councilor of Shaftal; the shabby tool seller who had wandered the land, seeking the wisest, most knowledgeable, skillful, and respected people of Shaftal; the commander of South Hill Company; the young Paladin who yearned to be a scholar. He was the Man on the Hill, and his star-pierced heart was too bright to look at.
Emil said, “Madam Truthken, your truths rise out of facts and reason. The truths of fire bloods not only lack facts and reason, but sometimes are true in spite of them. Thus, the very existence of fire logic constantly challenges the certainty of air logic.”
“And so fire logic awakens air witches to humility,” said Medric wickedly.
Leeba said, “Emil is here, and Norina. Is Daddy here?”
Zanja had found a packet of healing herbs and a piece of waybread, but neither J’han nor Garland had appeared. So she tore open the packet of herbs and dumped them in her mouth, and they were damp enough thanks to the rain that they didn’t choke her as she swallowed them with the waybread, and a fair amount of dirt.
Air Logic Page 36
