Garland sat on the stool beside Karis and piled a little mound of cold ham onto a small, slim square of black bread, dabbed it with mustard, and decorated it with transparent sweet pickles. This he rather summarily slipped into Karis’s mouth. Leeba found the operation hilarious and demanded that she be allowed to help. Karis ate passively and obediently from her daughter’s hand. For the first time, Garland could see the lingering ghost of Karis the smoke addict, who had gotten in the habit of cooperating with the people who worked to make her survive a drug that eventually killed everyone who used it. It was a terrible insight.
Garland felt Norina’s discomforting gaze on him, as he piled up more ham for Leeba to feed to Karis. “Careful—don’t let it fall apart,” he said, as the little girl snatched it from him.
“Karis doesn’t like pickles,” Leeba announced when a pickle slice fell to the floor.
“She does so. You’re the one who doesn’t like pickles.”
“The ravens don’t even like pickles,” Leeba persisted, as Emil came in with another raven. “Open up!” she said severely to her mother, and jammed the food into her mouth.
Garland glanced at Norina finally. The Truthken had done something to Karis—had grabbed hold of her somehow and pulled her back from a cliff she was about to fall over. Now the danger was past, and Norina looked cool and distant as ever, and the hand she rested on Karis’s shoulder was merely reminding her that she was there.
“Emil, that pot on the table should be ready to pour,” Garland said.
Emil had put his raven on the back of a chair. “Bless you,” he said sincerely, and began pouring tea. “Do you want some, Karis?”
“No tea,” J’han said. “By Shaftal, she’s going to sleep.”
Karis wiped mustard from her lip. “I am? How?”
“Feet first.” J’han had one of Karis’s big, callused feet in his hands. He reached for the oil that he had set on the hearth to melt, and proceeded with a demonstration.
Karis sank visibly into her chair. “The Sainnites—” she began.
Mabin, who had just come in, said, “Karis, give some credit to your people. If Sainnites start tearing things apart, we’ll take care of it. You don’t actually have to solve every single problem with your own hands.”
As Emil gave Mabin a confused look, Norina uttered a sharp laugh. “Are you supplanting me as Karis’s scold? I doubt she can endure two of us, but I’d be glad to find a new occupation.”
“No, thank you. It seems a pointless job.”
Emil went to lean wearily by the fireplace. “Karis, I’m told the Sainnites managed to get two parties of soldiers over the wall, but that the soldiers seem very skittish and are only going through the motions of hunting for us. Every person in Watfield is keeping an eye on them. Believe me, it is safe for you to sleep.”
Karis had shut her eyes. Whatever J’han was doing to her foot seemed irresistible. “I suppose,” she said. “Since they’re got no weapons.”
Emil straightened sharply, and had to steady his teacup in its saucer. “None at all?”
Karis murmured, “J’han, I concede. Your power is greater than mine.”
J’han said, “Leeba, let Karis lie down on the floor. You can help her take a nap, if you want to.”
“Even the edged weapons?” said Emil, as Leeba crawled off Karis’s lap.
“Dull beyond repair,” said Karis. “Even the kitchen knives.”
Garland stood up. “I’ll get some blankets and a pillow.”
But he paused at the door, distressed suddenly by the memory of that tired and hungry soldier, the lieutenant-general, reeling back from the general’s vicious blow. “Emil?”
Emil was sipping spilled tea out of his saucer. He gave Garland a glance of a sort that had never been directed at him before: not merely inquiring, but respectful. It was unnerving.
“Do you want to make the Sainnites completely desperate?” Garland asked.
“No, no, not at all. I want them reasonable.”
“Without kitchen knives, they’ll have nothing to eat but porridge. That’s going to make them desperate.”
Emil gazed at him thoughtfully, obviously waiting for a suggestion.
“Let’s feed them a decent meal,” Garland said.
Mabin uttered a snort of disbelief. “Five hundred soldiers?”
Emil, leaning on the wall again, crossed one booted foot over the other. “Oh, Garland can do it,” he said.
A tap at the door awoke Clement, and she was surprised to find that the room had grown dark, the fire had burned to coals, and her infant son slept in her arms, in the tangled mess the girl-nurse had made of the blankets on the bed. The medic had come by to set her broken nose. The pain had been awful, but somehow she had fallen into a doze despite it.
The door opened. “Clem? Can I come in?” It was Gilly.
“Has the garrison fallen apart yet?” Clement asked indifferently. She got up, and helped her old friend to a chair, and put the baby in his arms. The baby squinted at Gilly, yawned, and uttered a mild complaint.
Gilly blinked down at the infant, and smiled reluctantly. “This G’deon exercises a cruel generosity, eh? She gives you your heart’s desire so you can destroy yourself with it. But you’re so glad you don’t even care that you’re dead.”
“She apologized,” Clement said wryly. She lit a lamp, looked around rather hopelessly for something to eat, and was briefly distracted by the sight of her face in the little mirror tacked to the wall.
“You’re even uglier than me at the moment,” Gilly said.
“I see that.”
“I always feared Cadmar would smash your face in someday.”
“It was inevitable, really.”
“Have you heard? The postern gates and the water gate can’t be opened. The weapons can’t be repaired. Not a blade in the garrison will hold an edge. We’ve got nothing to defend ourselves with but our bare hands.”
Clement couldn’t bring herself to be concerned. She sat heavily beside him, her face throbbing. “So what will Cadmar do? Surrender, or let us be massacred?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The man’s been in a temper all afternoon. Maybe he’s trying to shout the G’deon to death. Do you think she’s actually his daughter? She seems too astute, frankly.”
The baby yelped. “Are you hungry again, Gabian?” Clement picked up the bottle that she had left to keep warm on the hearth. Gilly handed her the baby.
“A good name,” he commented. “Your mother’s, I believe.”
Gabian sucked the bottle energetically, gazing into Clement’s face, apparently indifferent to her swollen nose and black eye.
“Has Cadmar had you write my demotion orders yet?” Clement asked.
“Not yet. But you don’t actually care, do you?”
Clement looked at her bent, worried, desperately unhappy friend, and felt a wrenching helplessness. “Gilly, I’ve reached the end.”
Gilly gazed determinedly at his hands, which rested on his sturdy, battered cane. “You’re going to desert. I knew that when I heard you had sent the girl away. You’ve got to get out now, or your son will starve. But where can you hope to find shelter? I know you, Clem: maybe you imagine that cow farmer would be glad to see you again, but you’ll never impose such a risk on her. The local Paladins might find a use for you, but not a use you could accept. The G’deon, though, she’s gone out of her way to put you in this position. What do you think? If she shelters you, will she allow you to advocate for your people without actually betraying them? That’s a very difficult balance to keep—I should know.”
Gilly continued to gaze at his folded hands, as though this simply was not a conversation that could have been conducted eye-to-eye. Thinking of Gilly’s uneasy life of betrayal made the choice Clement was contemplating even more discomforting. Every day she would walk into this G’deon’s circle of advisors, negotiate the strange Shaftali customs, and be subjected to their seething hostilities. And she would be friendless
for the rest of her life.
“Gilly, I need you to come with me.”
Gilly gave her that familiar sideways glance, and asked dryly, “Are you proposing to sling me over the wall in a basket, like Gabian?”
“Oh, hell,” she muttered, reminded that they were practically prisoners in their own garrison, and that her nimble-minded friend was in fact a cripple. “I’ll have to come back for you somehow.”
“I’ll certainly be glad to see you,” said Gilly. But they both knew perfectly well that the risk to Clement would be too great, and that once Clement was gone, Cadmar would make certain Gilly didn’t follow her. “In the meantime,” Gilly said steadily, “You can make it easier on yourself by getting the G’deon to give you some kind of assurance. It wouldn’t hurt to win yourself some of her gratitude. Bring her the storyteller. That’s a woman who can climb a wall, I’d wager.”
Clement had scarcely been thinking, she realized, or she would have thought of this on her own.
“And do it tonight,” Gilly added. “For Cadmar has ordered her executed tomorrow.”
“Bloody hell! Gilly, I can’t get the storyteller out of gaol—the soldiers won’t let me. And if I try I’ll just get myself arrested. And if I even were willing to attack my own people to win her freedom, what would I attack them with?”
Gilly raised a hand to rub his face. His calm was finally shaken. “Oh, Clem, she must not die! Just because Cadmar can’t smash his fist into the one he’s actually angry at, and he’s using the storyteller as some kind of proxy—”
“That stupid man will assuage his injured pride even if it destroys his entire people in the process.”
“Now you’re sounding mutinous,” said Gilly seriously.
She got up abruptly, and handed Gilly the protesting baby. “I’m going to open the window. Keep him out of the draft, will you?”
The window had not been opened since autumn, but with some banging and effort she managed to wrestle up the sash. The ice and snow that coated the shutters cracked loudly as she swung them open. The stars were coming out. The sky, that gorgeous deep blue that she loved, breathed down at her its bitter breath. She said out the window in a low voice, “Is there a raven here? I want to send a message to the G’deon.”
She heard nothing. The garrison itself lay in unearthly stillness. The night bell suddenly began to ring, and she muttered, “Gods, this is a demoralized silence.”
“No knives,” said Gilly sardonically. “Therefore, no supper.”
“Is that it? Hell!” She leaned out the window and twisted her body, so she looked up at the eaves of her own roof. “Raven!” she called, more loudly, feeling foolish, though Gilly maintained a serious silence.
She heard a scrabbling, and then, almost invisible against the sky, a head peered down at her. She heard a voice, like the creaking of old hinges. “Hold out your arm.”
“Gilly, it talked!”
“Of course it talks,” said Gilly. “You’re still capable of surprise?”
She stuck her arm out the window. There was a dry, heavy flapping, and the raven landed—ungainly, claws digging through heavy wool cloth into skin. She brought him in, a heavy, drooping, ice-decorated bird.
“Put him by the fire,” said Gilly reasonably. “Close the window. Give him something to eat.”
Doing all this took a while. Clement shook the crushed remains of the rolls out of her coat pockets. Standing on the chair near the fire, the raven ate these crumbs, and drank water from her washbowl. All this was not so strange, until the bird said, “Thank you.”
He flapped his wings, spraying Clement with ice water and slush. He fluffed his feathers in the warmth of the fire and looked like he would now go to sleep.
She said, “My message to the G’deon is urgent. Can you carry her a note?”
The raven said, “Emil is addressing to you. Please speak your mind.”
Clement looked at Gilly, rather desperately. But he seemed to think that holding the baby was participation enough.
“What one raven knows, we all know,” explained the bird. “Emil has a raven beside him, saying your words to him.”
And what else was that raven saying to him, Clement wondered rather wildly? Would it describe her dark, disordered room, her battered face, her hunched companion and the restless, grunting baby that he awkwardly dandled on his knee?
The raven added, unnervingly, “Emil is sitting with Karis while she sleeps. The room is dark, like this one. Karis is asleep on the floor, near the fire. She has hardly slept since Long Night, and he does not wish to wake her up. He asks that you speak with him instead of her. How can he win your confidence?”
“Who is Emil?”
The raven said, “Emil was commander of South Hill company for twenty years, and is now a General of Paladins, and a councilor of Shaftal.”
“He was the commander in South Hill?” Clement stared at the raven and demanded, irrationally, “What happened in South Hill? When that woman in our gaol, who used to be a warrior of the Ashawala’i—”
“Katrim,” corrected the raven.
“Katrim,” she said irritably. “She became a Paladin in South Hill, didn’t she? Under Emil’s command! And something happened there.”
“The storyteller’s name then was Zanja na’Tarwein. She came to South Hill Company wanting to kill Sainnites. But she turned her back on this war, and opened the way for others to follow her—Emil, and Medric, and Karis. Zanja became a hinge of history, an opener of doors.”
“Well, she had better get some more doors opened quickly, for she is going to be executed tomorrow, at dawn.”
The raven said nothing at all.
Clement stumbled on, scarcely able to believe what she was doing, even as she did it. “I’d like to save her, but I can’t. Perhaps there’s something you or the G’deon could do.”
The raven said, “Emil asks for your patience. This is a painful problem.”
Clement had been pacing the cold room, but now she sat down abruptly, in a chair near Gilly. “I make a traitor out of myself to a raven,” she muttered, “And I get only silence in response. Who do I complain to?”
The raven finally spoke. “It is better that the storyteller be killed.”
“What? How could it be better?”
“It is difficult to explain. Zanja na’Tarwein is no longer alive, and the storyteller’s death will be a gift to her.”
“Her separated spirit can be made whole by killing her?” said Gilly.
“Yes.”
“This makes sense to you?” Clement asked.
Gilly shrugged crookedly. “I believe it’s fire logic.”
“It is fire logic,” the raven said.
As the raven fluffed his feathers in the heat, Gabian watched the black bird with fixed fascination. Clement finally said, “I want to come over the wall tonight, and join the G’deon’s service.”
It was impossible to understand nuances in the raven’s inhuman voice. But the promptness of his reply suggested a lack of surprise. “Lieutenant-general Clement, you will serve Shaftal best by remaining where you are.”
“Now I’m in disgrace, there’s nothing I can do except bring my son to safety before your people attack.”
“There will be no attack. We are here to make peace.”
“But the G’deon said her offer of peace was Cadmar’s only chance.”
“She said she would make peace without him,” the raven said.Something in the raven’s words gave Clement pause. Gilly said, “That is what she said.” He also paused.
“Oh, bloody hell,” Clement breathed. “Gilly, where is Cadmar?”
Gilly said sharply, “You’ve got to keep away from the general! If something happens to him, you’ll be blamed! Clem, listen to me!”
“Look after the baby,” she said, and ran out the door.
Chapter 37
Garland found the kitchen’s oven to be quite cantankerous, but he and his fellow cooks eventually managed to get it to produ
ce a halfway decent tray of meat turnovers. He brought one to the Paladin who sat writing a letter by candlelight as he kept watch outside the parlor door. He took another into the parlor to give Emil. Emil, seated in an upholstered chair, flanked by a flock of extremely weary ravens, made a silencing gesture.
Karis, bolstered by feather pillows and wrapped in blankets, slept on the floor. Before J’han was half finished with her, she had fallen profoundly asleep: oblivious as he stripped her to the skin, unconscious when several people lay hands on her to help turn and arrange her nerveless form. Garland had taken Karis’s clothing into the kitchen, but then lost custody of it to the people who could sew. The worn state of her relatively new clothing offered an appalling measure of how hard Karis had been working.
Garland put the plate at Emil’s elbow, and then quietly added wood to the fire. Karis’s big hand was outspread on the floor, as though even in her sleep she was trying to hold the pieces of a broken thing together.
Emil said in a low voice, “Raven, tell me what is happening now.”
A raven spoke. “The Lucky Man has placed the baby in the basket. Now he speaks: ‘I see you are a subtle people.’ His tone is ironic.”
The fire, rising in the fireplace, crackled softly.
“Tell the Lucky Man he can remind Clement that reluctance to take power is a virtue here. Is he following her to see what’s become of the general?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him it’s not contagious.”
The raven said, “He seems nonplused. He has left the room now.”
“You birds have an astonishing vocabulary,” Emil muttered. He stood up stiffly. “Garland, the storyteller is to die at dawn. How can they kill her with all their weapons broken?”
Earth Logic Page 40
