Chapter Four
In a stone cottage tucked into a hollow in the iron-rich hills that surround Meartown, Karis, a mastersmith of Mear, sat on the stoop in the morning sunshine, fumbling with her bootstraps. From where she sat, she could see a dark cloud rising as the furnaces of Meartown were lit. She smoothed her big, sooty, callused hands across the stoop’s worn stone, testing to see if the smoke paralysis had lifted sufficiently for her to at least be able to sense the hammer as she gripped it. The light of the rising sun was blinding.
Lynton moved slowly through the lush garden, his white hair gleaming among the bean plants. Bald Dominy came out the open door of the cottage with a packet of food for Karis’s dinner. “It’s bread, dried fish, some cheese and a couple of apples,” he said. “Be sure you eat it all, whether you want it or not. A person your size has to eat.”
She nodded. Dominy or Lynton had said these words, or something like them, every morning, all the years she had lived with them. She did not reply, for if she tried to talk she would slur like a drunk, since her tongue was still half paralyzed. The old man patted her shoulder affectionately. Before she moved in, he and Lynton had added an oversized room to their house to accommodate her oversized frame. After she moved in, thanks to their incessant fretting, she had finally put on the bulk to match her height.
The sunshine chased the lingering poison from her paralyzed nerves. She said, without too much difficulty, “Something has changed.”
Dominy shouted to Lynton to be sure to pick plenty of tomatoes. “What’s that?” he asked absently.
“Something has changed,” she said again. She felt it, a shifting of the earth’s weight, as though the earth and stones were gathering up their strength for a great effort. “I feel an urgency.” She pressed her palms again upon the stoop. “What has happened?” she asked the warm granite.
Most of the time, Dominy treated her like any other metalsmith. Sometimes, she did something that astounded him, and he would remember that she was a witch. As she looked up at him now, he asked diffidently, “What does the stone say?”
“It speaks of blood and death throughout the land. That is not new. But it speaks of something else, a life.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand. It pulls at me.” She looked down, as though a child were tugging at her shirt.
“You’re going to be late,” Dominy said.
She stood up. His head tilted back, and back, until it seemed he was gazing up at a mountain. He squinted fiercely in the sun. “I’m not going to the forge,” she said. “I need to think.”
“You want me to carry a message to the forgemaster, I suppose.” Grumpily, he took the food packet out of Karis’s hand. “I’ll get a satchel for this. Where will you go? Out onto the heath? Better bring a water bottle, too.”
Far from the danger and stink of the furnaces and forges, Karis walked through lands too dry and poor to interest farmers. The sun rose up in a breathless rush, the rocks shifted in their foundations, and the seedpods of summer shattered open. When the sun was high, she supposed she must be hungry and thirsty, so she sat down and ate. Afterwards, she lay on her back and listened. A life, the deep soil said to her. Pay attention!
When she came home, Lynton told her she was tired, and fed her a great bowl of vegetables from the garden. Dominy told her the forgemaster had merely nodded when he heard Karis would not be there. The sun hung low in the sky, and the only hunger Karis ever felt was consuming most of her attention: she needed smoke. Yet beneath that hunger, she still sensed the vague, irritating nagging of the earth. A life, it said. You must do something! But it never told her what she needed to do.
Often, when Karis lay awake, but still under smoke, a strange thing would happen: her spirit would break free of her insensate flesh to take residence in a particular raven. This raven traveled with Norina Truthken, far to the southeast. Norina usually contrived to be alone for the sunrise, and on this morning, she sat on a split rail fence at the edge of a harvested cornfield, waiting to see if the raven would speak to her.
Karis said through the raven, “There is a new presence in the land.”
Norina rubbed her eyes, which were still crusted with sleep. “I don’t understand.”
“A person has come into Shaftal, and the land seems to cry out to me, demanding that I pay heed.”
Norina gazed into the cornfield. “Is it an earth elemental? The one we have been waiting for?”
This possibility had not even occurred to Karis, and she cried out in surprise, “And if it is, what then?”
Norina said, quite calmly, “All this will come to an end.”
“And the end of our friendship, too.”
Norina turned sharply to the raven, then. “Is that what you think?”
“You will have more important concerns.”
“I will always be your friend,” Norina said. And, because she was a Truthken, Karis almost believed her. “So is it the one we are waiting for?” Norina asked.
“I don’t think it is an earth witch. If it were, then surely I would understand what is happening better than I do. I feel an urgency, a danger, an impulse to intervene. Perhaps this person has been broken.”
“And you want to go find this person.”
Karis didn’t have to reply. Norina knew her well enough.
“Whatever calls you,” Norina said, “You must not let it call you out of hiding, or you will find there the hand of the Sainnites, stretching out to grab you by the throat.”
Karis could not speak. Norina said, “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“This presence—it makes you restive.” Norina got down off the rail. “Don’t do anything foolish. I’ll be there in a few days.”
Karis’s spirit broke loose of the raven. When she came to herself, she lay once again in her bed, with the light of sunrise in her face.
By the time Norina ended her visit, she had reluctantly agreed to try to find the person whose presence haunted Karis. Autumn harvest began and was finished. The rains soon commenced, the days rapidly grew short, autumn began to turn to winter, and still Karis was haunted by nagging, inarticulate worry.
One day, she stayed later than usual at the smithy, and shadows barred the roadway as she walked to the tavern. There, she ate her pigeon pie in haste, and still could have left before sunset if not for the baked apple that appeared before her. “Did I ask for this?” she resentfully inquired of no one.
Someone—she did not know who—said, “Karis, you are getting thin.”
The apple was a gift then, and so she had to eat it, and even to pretend that she appreciated it. As she ate and smiled politely, she felt the sun go down like a shutter slamming shut. A woman wrapped in sheepskin came in, and everyone shouted at her to close the door. “It’s going to snow,” somebody muttered, in a voice that spoke of shoveling the paths and carrying the wood and sharpening the runners on the sleigh.
Karis’s plate was empty. She left the tavern without saying goodbye or uttering a word of thanks, and realized it too late, halfway out of town. Would they all forgive her one more time? Could she still depend on them? The presence in the land, which before had lured her into untoward expectation, had now begun to constantly distract her: not by its demand for her notice, but by its steady retreat. Half her attention constantly sought after it, worrying. With her attention so divided, she was forgetting to eat, losing track of time, forgetting common courtesy, making mistakes that could well be the death of her.
“I can’t continue,” she said. No one answered. The cold had driven everyone indoors. The wind carried frost-rimed leaves into shadowed places, and in the west stars had appeared. Karis tried to sing to them, forgetting for a moment that the smoke drug had destroyed her voice years ago.
She left the cobblestones behind and wandered through the icy mud of the wagon ruts, weaving like a drunk on her trembling legs. Will I even make it home? she asked herself, for the hill seemed to go up forever. And then home stood before her
, a thatched cottage with a lamp flame in the window. A black thing dropped down from the treetops and struck her shoulder like a blow. She uttered a cry, then caught her breath. “So you’re home.”
Crisp feathers rasped on her ear as the raven folded his wings. She fumbled in her pocket for something to feed him—a bread end or a bit of grain—but today her pockets were full of stones. She could not remember why she had picked them up, or where. “I have to smoke,” she said.
The raven spoke in a voice no more harsh than hers. “Then smoke.”
“Come inside. I think Lynton and Dominy are already in bed.”
In her room, she opened the window so the raven could come and go. While she filled her pipe with shaking hands, he ate the bread and bacon ends she had snatched up in the pantry. Now came a quiet, for with the pipe in hand, her panic eased. She could wait a little longer. In the fireplace, the coals caught in new wood and flames began to flicker. The raven drank from a bowl. “What did Norina find out?” Kans asked.
“Norina found nothing. Nothing to find, nothing to be done. There is a place shut up like a strongbox, which stinks of death. The Sainnites imprison people there—unfortunates who might have secrets to trade for a merciful death. People avoid the place, or stop up their ears so they won’t hear the screams or be cursed by the ghosts.”
“Is that all?” Karis cried, when the raven fell silent. “That cannot be all there is to know!” Karis paced back and forth across the room until she banged into the settle and felt a faraway pain in her shin. She forced herself to stop, to breathe deeply, to listen to the silence. For months the person who had been broken had endured in that place of horror while she and Norina argued. But now that bright spirit was a candleflame guttering in its socket.
“This person’s life has become important to me. Much more important than my own life.”
“And what does that mean?” the raven said, as Norina would. “Your life is not your own. You will not be foolish with it.”
Karis looked at the pipe in her trembling hand. If she didn’t smoke, she would die, and if she did smoke, that flame in the darkness might go out while she dreamed and drooled, drug giddy. “You must fly to that place of imprisonment, and find that person.“ The raven drank more water, and shook out his dry feathers.
“Tonight?” he said.
“Now.” Karis took up a small pouch and emptied it onto a tabletop. She put in a dry crust of bread and hung the pouch around the raven’s neck. “Go quickly, good raven. Or we will be too late.”
As Karis, having smoked her pipe at last, sprawled upon her bed and watched the shadows dance, the raven flew over his kingdom, with darkness above and below. The lamplights below had all been blown out, and an impending storm had blotted out the lights of the sky. The raven flew on until morning, when the snow began to fall. He waited out the storm in the rafters of a barn, which he shared with an owl and some bats and an anxious flock of chickens whose eggs he ate surreptitiously, hiding the broken shells so the farmers would not know. When the snowfall ceased, he flew on, with the sun setting behind him. Below, a company of Sainnite soldiers trampled a path through the snow. Then they were gone, and night fell again.
The ruins of the House of Lilterwess passed beneath him, a great stone cairn for the martyrs of the defeat.
Once again, Karis lay under smoke. Sometimes smoke made her able to see through the raven’s eyes. So she now saw the cairn swoop past, and she tried to make the raven circle it again, to examine the ruin of the bell tower by the front gate, where on the night after Harald G’deon’s death Dinal had stood bravely ringing the alarm bell as the Sainnites broke through the gates. Dinal had been an old woman, the mother of four grown sons, a lieutenant of the Paladins, the beloved friend and lover of Harald G’deon. Karis had only known her as a kind stranger who appeared suddenly in the mad carnival of Lalali and offered Karis a way out the gates.
Harald, the last G’deon of Shaftal, also lay beneath the fallen walls of the building. Sometimes his bones spoke to Karis, but not tonight. After fifteen years of delay, watching the encroachments of these invaders and refusing to do anything about it, he had died before the final carnage began. The Sainnites, still fearing his power though they knew that he was dying, waited for him to die, and then attacked.
At this turning point of history, Norina came to show Karis the Way to safety, and found her lying vacantly in bed while cannonballs smashed into the building. Sometimes, the memory still made Karis desperate with self-loathing. She should have saved the House of Lilterwess, but smoke made her incapable of even saving herself. Sometimes, it seemed impossible that Norina had been able to forgive her.
The ruins had passed, and now there was only darkness to be seen. Karis slipped deeper into sleep.
When Zanja opened her eyes to the bitter darkness of the wintry night, she was surprised to find herself still entrapped in flesh. It scarcely seemed possible her spirit could hold on for so many months when she had seen so many die so easily. A blow or two of the blade usually was all it took to sever soul from body, a moment of agony and then the soul was translated.
She had been dreaming of all the people of her village, gathered beside their summer fires in the Land of the Sun, chasing children, strutting before their rivals, stirring pots of fragrant kich. But just as the path Zanja followed seemed about to deposit her in their midst, it turned her mysteriously away, back into the wilderness, and she was lost again, trapped once more in a stinking box of straw, where she had been laid some months earlier like a side of meat being cellared for the winter.
She heard a dry, rasping sound, and turned her head. The moon shone through the barred window, as it briefly did sometimes, and faint light shimmered on the ice-encased walls of her cell. The floor by the window was white with drifted snow. Silhouetted against the white, a raven stood on the edge of her box, near her head. He preened his wing feathers, just like any other bird after a long flight, but she knew him: the Messenger, He Who Decides. At last.
She tilted up her chin so that his blunt beak could better reach her throat. “I have been waiting for you a long time, Lord Death.” Her voice whispered like dry wind.
“It is not yet time for you to die,” said Death. His voice was harsh, and echoed of the deep canyons where he made his home.
“How could it not be time? I have no home, no kin, no clan, no companions. I am broken, paralyzed. That smell—do you smell it?—that is my flesh rotting from my bones as I lie in my own shit. What more can the gods expect me to accomplish? What is left for me except death?”
“You are still bound.”
“Bound to what? The gods?”
“To earth,” the raven said, implacably. In the silence, he paced the length of the box, perhaps inspecting her in the darkness. The blanket covered some parts of her ravaged frame, but to cover her feet required that she lever herself up with her arms to toss the blanket, and she had not been strong enough to do this in quite some time. Surely the sight of her feet, spastically curled and with half the toes hacked off, would convince even a god that her usefulness in this world was at an end. But Death paced back to her head again, unperturbed, and fed her a crust of bread, dry and stale and hard as stone, as if she were his fledgling. Her mouth was dry; she could not chew. He brought her a beakful of snow from the drift by the window, and she managed to swallow the dry crumbs. They burned within her like coals in a hearth, and warmed the parts of Zanja’s body where she could still feel the warmth: her torso, her arms, the shattered places of her heart. But the physical agonies that had only recently been numbed at last by cold were not renewed. For a while, she dozed, and awakened to find that her strength had gathered and concentrated around the center of that warmth in her belly. No, she would not step across the threshold just yet.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the god. The moon had crossed her small window. Pressed against the darkness, the god still perched at her head, not a handspan away, invi
sible.
She said, “You say I am still bound. Perhaps you mean that I am bound to die in honor, as I am a katrim.”
Death said, “What do you think should be done so that you could die as a katrimshould die?”
“It is the way of the katrimto die in joy.” She had spoken the words of an old lesson, a child’s lesson, easy to recite when Zanja first stood up in the presence of her clan elders and named herself a katrimand proudly said that the owl god Salos’a had chosen her to travel between the worlds. But to recite this lesson now seemed a bitter joke, though Lord Death did not laugh.
“How might you die in joy?” asked Death.
“You mock me with impossibilities.”
“I do not mean to mock you.” Lord Death is a teacher, but the best teacher is the one who waits in silence. She heard the crisp sound of him unhurriedly preening his flight feathers, as though he intended to wait a thousand nights if necessary for Zanja to offer an answer to her own question.
She did not want to wait so long. She tried to remember what once had brought joy to her life, but the massacre of her people lay between her present and her past like an uncrossable divide. So she said, “Perhaps a joyful death comes from being able to understand one’s life as part of a purpose or pattern. But that is the one thing I cannot do.”
“Why not?” asked Death, as though he did not know.
“Because my memory is broken to pieces, and some of the pieces are lost, and the rest don’t fit together any more.”
“Then you must recover what you have lost, and remember who you are.”
“Who I was.” Zanja’s bitterness brought forth weak tears, but surely there was no shame in weeping before a god.
When it is time for someone to die, the people of the dying one’s clan gather around and tell the stories of her life, so that when she crosses the threshold she will still remember, and be able to tell that history to the people on the other side. But Zanja was the last of her people and so she had to tell those stories of her life to herself. This must be what the god wanted of her.
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