Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  The farmer subsided, still unhappy.

  Norina turned to Maxew. “Maxew of the Midlands, by the Law of Shaftal, I condemn you to death.”

  Chaen dropped her pencil. “Madam Truthken!”

  Maxew, pale as milk, turned a startled gaze on her. Chaen directed a thought at him: Allow me to rescue you, stupid boy!

  She said, “I am Maxew’s mother, and he is the only surviving member of my family. During his childhood I could not give him the life an air child needs, and I helped him become criminal. Therefore, I ask the G’deon’s clemency.”

  Karis rose to her feet. “Madam Truthken, I have been consulting with the children of the new Order of Truthkens. They have suggested that Maxew be given a choice. He may die, or else he may choose to live for five years with a spike pierced in his heart. That will enable him to roam freely while his life is in my hands.”

  She took the spike out of her pocket. She had made it from the two bolts, which she had melted down and pounded into an ugly, sooty thing. She placed it on the table, and the Truthken put her beautiful dagger beside it.

  Norina said, “Maxew, which do you choose, the spike or the blade?”

  Chaen became a Paladin. First she lived in Watfield, then in Kisha, and finally in the House of Lilterwess as it was being rebuilt. During the winters she helped copy the glyphic lexicon, and during the summers she traveled, often with Seth and other members of the Peace Committee. Occasionally, in places that violence had not yet been replaced by reason, the Paladins had to fight. But in most places, the old ways had persisted or at least had been eagerly reinstituted. Some members of Death-and-Life Company became Paladins. So did some soldiers, including Clement.

  Five years passed. Maxew came to the House of Lilterwess and was accepted by the Order of Truthkens. Karis pulled out the spike that she had pounded into his heart. Then Maxew visited Chaen. He had grown to be as handsome as his father, but was far quieter. Chaen’s memories of their life together had long since been restored, although those memories would always seem distant to her. She was no longer the bitter, grief-raddled woman who had willingly joined the infamous Death-and-Life Company. She and Maxew both had developed detachment and restraint.

  Now they would once again spend a winter under the same roof, and eat and work together as did everyone in that rebuilt house, who crowded together in a few rooms and worked together to build a few more rooms that they would occupy next winter.

  Some buildings, Chaen thought wryly, are never big enough. Some buildings are always being built.

  Epilogue

  Four elements to begin and end

  Four elements for balance.

  As green summer began to dance with golden autumn, Zanja returned home to the landscape that haunted her dreams, to the mountains that until then had marked the northern border of Shaftal: a shadow, a wall, a perilous obstacle. She led a small party of Paladins and pack horses through the foothills to the narrow pass scoured through the rocks by the Asha River—which eventually would meander placidly across Shaftal’s flatlands to the sea but here was a crashing torrent. Their precarious path climbed the precipice, with mountains above and river below, and soon even the horses were groaning with pain as they toiled nervously and wearily upward.

  After climbing for many days, they stood looking back at the path, which wound among ridges and rock falls, and soon disappeared entirely from view. The plunging river also disappeared behind a fold of the vast canyon and did not reappear until it was merely a flash of silver among the foothills.

  That mountaintop was a harsh, astoundingly beautiful place. Even the sunshine felt unfamiliar, said Zanja’s companions: brighter, purer, immoderate. Zanja wondered if Karis might be disoriented by the height. But Karis was smiling, her eyes teared only by wind, her hair blown back from her face. Leeba, riding on her shoulders, raised her arms to feel the power of the wind.

  Now they walked downhill more than they went up, and sometimes even walked on the level for short stretches. As the path became easier, Zanja felt both dread and eagerness, as though she simultaneously remembered and had forgotten what had happened in Asha Valley.

  “Am I going mad again?” she asked.

  Karis said, “Shall we turn back?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I insisted on this journey. Of course, you’re a helpless ninny who cannot say no.”

  Zanja pretended to be seriously considering this statement, until Karis laughed. “The closer we are to the valley, the more peculiar I feel. But let’s go on. If I’m to lose my mind again . . .”

  “If it happens, at least you’re with your tribe.” Karis gestured toward the busy camp, which was being set up in one of the few halfway comfortable places on that difficult trail, near a spring-fed pond of crystal clarity, sheltered from the wind. The Paladins drew water but didn’t allow the horses to drink directly from the pool; for, like the Ashawala’i, they treated such springs with reverence. One Paladin had put Leeba on horseback and was teaching her to ride.

  Zanja said, “This is my tribe. A very peculiar tribe, of disparate people whose beliefs are so complex they must be recorded in books, and a whole class of people must be devoted to keeping track of what the books say.”

  “A strange tribe,” said Karis agreeably. “With many peculiar members—like you, and like me.”

  Two days later, they reached a place where the path wound between two high pinnacles. Atop one of these had been an outpost, where the katrim had kept watch on the pass. It was the farthest limit of the land that the Ashawala’i considered to be theirs. From that outpost, the watcher could signal watchers farther down the path, giving warning of a stranger’s approach from one peak to the next, all the way to the valley.

  As she had always done, Zanja cupped her hands around her mouth and called in her native language, “Greetings, my brother or sister! It is I, Zanja na’Tarwein, returning home again!”

  In a moment she heard the echo—her own voice, shouting that greeting back at her.

  Then the mountains spoke again: “My sister! Zanja na’Tarwein! You have been gone a long time!”

  Zanja staggered.

  “Who’s that?” cried Leeba.

  Karis, a massive tension, said to Kamren in a low voice, “It’s just one person.”

  “One person in such an advantaged position—”

  Zanja, feeling astonished, angry, and stupid all at once, said to them, “It’s a ghost!”

  “It’s a real person,” Karis said. “Zanja—is it someone you know?”

  “It’s Torel na’Parsa,” she said, and fainted.

  When her head cleared, Karis was holding her by the armpits, saying, “Reply to him, before he shoots at us.”

  She managed to call, “May I climb up and speak with you?”

  He showed himself: a thin-legged silhouette in warrior’s braids. “Climb up.”

  When the mountain fell on Zanja, and when her beloved brother was killed before her eyes, Zanja had felt like this, as though her thoughts could not attach themselves one to another. She felt a trembling in her bones, as if they might shudder into dust. She unfastened her belt, from which now hung the new dagger Karis had made for her in the smithy yard of Hanishport. “Hold this for me, Little Hurricane.” For Leeba was pinched with fear, clutching Karis’s leg with both hands, like a toddler. “I’m going to climb up and talk with him. He’s a katrim like me—a friend I have known all my life.”

  Leeba said, “But they’re all dead. You said so.”

  “I don’t understand how he could be alive, but I’ll ask him to explain.”

  Karis said, “If you fall, I’ll break your head myself.”

  Generations of katrim had crawled up that rock face, and the route of hand- and footholds was easy to see. Zanja climbed up, then Torel clasped her wrists and helped her onto the ledge, where there was a simple rai
n shelter of wood and hide, a basket of supplies, and a rolled sleeping rug. “How can you even be alive?” they both said.

  She said, “My brother, I thought I was the last of the Ashawala’i. I was taken prisoner, and I would have died also, but that woman down there—the very tall one—saved my life, for she is an earth witch. Since then, I have lived with her and her people.”

  Torel said, “Zanja na’Tarwein, why are you bringing these strangers into our country?”

  “I have been haunted—maddened—by memories of the massacre. So my friends offered to come with me, to help me bury the bones of my people. They thought it would give me peace.”

  Before, Torel had been younger than she: energetic, impulsive, not considered trustworthy. But now he looked old, and he was trusted with this guard post, where the first and most important decisions were made. “Your friends are carrying weapons.”

  “They are katrim of Shaftal. But their blades are tied in the sheath.”

  He said, “I will say this, Zanja na’Tarwein: You are dead. I saw your body. We sang your spirit into the land of the dead. We burned your body and buried your bones.”

  He spoke with a stunning certainty, but how could what he said be true? She said, “I feel like I have died many times. To come back, to be alive again, has seemed so difficult that I have been tempted to stay dead. But I did survive the attack on our people.”

  They stared at each other, until Karis’s raven flew up from below and hovered above them, looking at them curiously. Karis still could see and hear whatever Zanja saw and heard, so the raven was a signal from her, a question: Do you need me yet?

  “How did you survive the attack?” Zanja asked. “On that night that filled the Asha Valley with bodies, and our village was burned to the ground?”

  “Of course, we did as we had practiced—as you had insisted. The children and young people ran to take the path behind the village, with some katrim to protect them, and the skilled adults that had been chosen by the elders to go with them and teach them. The kernel of the people you always called them.”

  “I called them that? I insisted?”

  “Yes. Your plan—which many mocked—it saved the people. More than half of us died—but many hundreds survived, though we live in the shadow of hunger.”

  A trembling came over her. She knelt so she wouldn’t fall. “But how did I know?” she said. “How could anyone have known?”

  Torel did not seem surprised by her behavior, or by her ignorance of her own life. “You knew from a song—a mourning song. One day you overheard someone singing it, and you said it was a message that predicted the doom of our people.”

  “What song?”

  Torel sang:

  Time is the stone river flowing

  Past a village of charcoal and ashes.

  Time is the summer camp

  In which the sleepers do not awaken.

  The voice of Zanja’s dream guide had been sweet when he sang her this song, but Torel’s was cracked and tuneless. He sang as one who had survived; who had fled catastrophe and returned to destruction; who had rebuilt in the ruins and planted in the bones. He sang as one who knew exactly what the song meant.

  Zanja said out loud in Shaftalese, “Karis, my people have survived, but they are starving.”

  The raven turned into the wind and soared down to the pathway. When Zanja climbed down, she spotted Karis on her knees, writing a tiny message with ink she had made from spitting on an ink stone.

  “Grain?” Karis asked, when Zanja stood before her. “Preserved meat? For how many people?”

  “Four hundred and seventy, he says.”

  Karis said wryly, “I should have brought Garland to tell me how much food. And Medric, to do the ciphering.” She wrote another sentence, which Zanja read upside-down: “Five hundred people to survive until the pass is clear in spring—two hundred days.” She wrote her name, and Kamren took the paper, which he carefully folded into a strip, to be sealed with wax and tied to the raven’s leg.

  “You don’t look well. Are you all right?” Karis asked.

  “I need to ask Emil and Medric a question.”

  “What question?”

  “Am I alive, or am I dead?”

  Leeba, pressed against Karis’s side, said irritably, “That’s a stupid question.”

  Torel had climbed down to the path and was approaching. Karis heaved herself to her feet. To him she must seem monstrous: gigantic, with hair like a bleached shrub, eyes like pieces of sky, and muscles like boulders. Torel stopped in his tracks, as would every watchpost katrim they met that day. But each time Zanja would convince the katrim to let them pass, and each time she would feel her alienation anew. Either her people were no longer her people, or else she was no longer herself. As she walked, she saw many, many paths: the paths of her companions, of the Ashawala’i, and of herself. It seemed impossible for all of them to go the same way, at the same time, when each of them had arrived by such disparate routes.

  They made camp in a lush meadow with a brook running through it, and it would have been difficult to say who appreciated that grass more: the horses, which had eaten only oats for many days, or the people, who were bruised and sore from many nights sleeping on beds of rock.

  That night, Zanja dreamed she was walking down the dark hallways of Travesty. She needed to find the library, but every time she took a turn that seemed correct, she wound up in an unexpected place: in rooms and halls she had never seen before, or in rooms that were familiar and yet alien—the kitchen, with its pots empty and its stoves cold; the cloak-room with its hooks unused and not even one shoe on the shelf; her own bedroom, filled with broken furniture and strangely cold. She felt desperate and heartbroken, and shouted for Emil in the empty, alien hallway, though she knew he could not hear her.

  “You have had this dream before,” said a young katrim of the Ashawala’i.

  “I don’t think you’re correct,” she said.

  “Many times you have tried to follow the path to the Asha Valley. And many times that path has turned away.”

  “Are you saying that the valley and Emil’s library are the same to me?”

  “Yes, Speaker.”

  “Why am I having this dream?”

  “Because you think you are going home.”

  “Why can’t I find the way?”

  “It’s this way,” he said.

  He led her to Emil and Medric’s bedroom, and opened the door. She flew in and landed on the back of a chair, and then remembered she had been there all night, sleeping, with her feathers puffed up. She said, “Medric, I have become a raven.”

  Medric dropped his book—the lexicon, which was huge and heavy, and made a tremendous thud. Emil jerked upright in bed.

  “Zanja is in the raven,” Medric said.

  Emil peered at Zanja. She had been roosting in a dark corner, and he couldn’t see her there, so she flew to a bedpost that was lit by Medric’s lamp. “Is that all?” Emil said. “And why is that surprising, when a great deal of what we’ve seen is simply impossible?”

  Medric said, “Because I believe she may be dreaming. This is surprising, since you and I are awake.”

  “I was trying to go home,” said Zanja-the-raven.

  Emil gazed at her thoughtfully. “And now you’re here. Why is that, do you suppose?”

  Medric was trying to pick up the book, but apparently it was too heavy to lift. He got on his knees on the floor and began turning the pages.

  “My dear, what has happened?” Emil asked her.

  “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

  “Why not?”

  “There are too many paths. I can’t follow all of them. I thought this would be a simple journey.”

  “But you are in the maze.” Medric tilted the book so Emil and Zanja could see the page, which depi
cted a hedge maze, with several people and various creatures, including a small white dog, wandering through it. Zanja had studied that illustration, trying to find the way from one end of the maze to the other, but after many attempts and much wasted time had never succeeded.

  Zanja-the-raven said, “My people entered through one opening, and I entered through the other. Our paths will never intersect.”

  Medric blinked at her, and his lenses flashed much more brightly than the dim candle flame. “You found a remnant of your tribe!”

  “Yes—and they say they survived because of me. They tell my life story, but it’s a life I never lived. And apparently, I died in the massacre. Many of them died who now are alive. This isn’t my tribe. It’s the tribe of a woman whose name was my name, but who was not me.”

  She heard the familiar rasp of Emil’s hands rubbing his unshaven face. “My dear,” he said rather plaintively, “that isn’t how it works.”

  “It’s water logic,” said Medric.

  “Water logic?” Emil looked sharply at him, then at Zanja, and she saw the spark of candle flame in his eye. “What was the name of that Ashawala’i speaker you met two hundred years ago? Arel? When you traveled through his time, you didn’t dare to reveal your people’s fate to him, but you feared he had realized so much that he might guess the rest. Surely Tadwell decided to give you the lexicon because of Arel.”

  Medric cried, “Oh, Zanja, you are an excellent thief but a dreadful liar! And that failure saved your people!”

  Emil said, “Arel must have done something—and perhaps you can discover what he did—”

  “He was a poet,” Zanja said. “He made a song—a song that would be sung by one generation after another, until I heard it, and by fire logic understood what it meant.”