Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  She used what remained of her funds to bespeak a private room at the inn. The room overlooked the street, which became only more crowded after sunset. Perhaps it was a holiday, or perhaps the giddy laughter and music on the street below was a symptom of something else: a relentless tide, a surge of rage threatening to break through. Zanja sat in the window and felt her own tide surging. She drank water; the people below drank ale.

  There was a tap on the door. “Chemist’s delivery.”

  Zanja opened the door and let Annis in. “It’s good to see you. Have you eaten? I can have supper sent up for you.”

  “I ate.” Annis seemed perplexed and even peeved that Zanja had not been more surprised to see her. She paced the room agitatedly. “How did you find me? You can just tell Emil to leave me alone.”

  Zanja sat in the window again, leaving Annis an unimpeded route to the door, if she decided to take flight. She had no intention of bringing her back to Emil against her will. When she had decided this she could not remember. “I found you by luck and good sense, and Emil has no idea where you are. Tell me what you’re up to,” she said.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Then why did you come here to see me? You didn’t have to.”

  Annis glared at her. “Why did youcome here?”

  “I thought you might want some help.”

  Annis stopped dead in the middle of the room.

  Zanja said, “You searched for your family’s bodies, didn’t you? Like I did.”

  “They’re alive, as far as I know. I suppose the Sainnites figured I’d come begging for their lives, offer myself in their place, tell everything I know about South Hill Company.” Annis spat in the general direction of the garrison. “Bunch of idiots.”

  “On the other hand, you can hardly hope to rescue them.”

  “I don’t even know where they are.” For a moment, she looked exhausted. “But even if I could rescue them, my home would still be gone. I have nowhere to go, nowhere to rest.”

  She began pacing the room. “The Sainnites build with wood, did you know that? Even though everyone knows how dangerous it is to build with wood in a city. Stone is too cold and damp for them.”

  “My people built with wood also,” Zanja said. “And the Sammies burned the entire village to the ground.” They looked at each other. “Tomorrow is the dark moon,” Zanja added. “And it’s about time the Sainnites lost a village of their own.”

  Annis suddenly calmed, and sat on the bed. “Emil won’t have his people acting on their own. He might put us out of the company.”

  Zanja looked bleakly down upon the crowded street of a community that would never be hers. “He and I are fighting different wars.”

  Annis rubbed her hands together gleefully. “You won’t believe what I’ve got to show you. It’s made of paper, like a kite, but it flies like an arrow. It’s got a fuse up the middle and in the very tip a cargo that explodes.”

  Zanja said, “That sounds rather startling.”

  “Startling? It’ll scare the Sainnites half to death. Come on, we’ve got some work to do, and then we’ll have some fun.”

  Zanja stood up. The room moved around her. Her head filled with an appalling pain. Ransel came out of the mist, and put his arms around her. “I knew you would survive,” he said. “Now we shall have vengeance.”

  Any wall can be breached, but Zanja had never imagined that it would be so easy to break into the Sainnite garrison. They did it with a spindly ladder that they had cobbled together in the basement of the chemist’s shop. It was a dark night; even starlight was veiled by thin clouds. No one noticed them carrying their ladder through the streets of Wilton. No one cried a warning as they climbed the ladder to the top of the wall, dragged it up, and dropped it to the other side so they could climb down. The wall was nice and wide; it made it easier to maneuver their awkward burdens.

  Even as Zanja worked with Annis in the secret factory in the chemist’s basement, she had not really expected that they’d get this far. Surely the Sainnite seer would anticipate that they would arrive, reeking of gunpowder and other less common concoctions, bearing their bags full of brightly colored lethal gifts: packages of fused gunpowder, odd constructions of sticks and paper that Annis swore would fly. But it seemed the Sainnites were not expecting them. Perhaps even a seer could not predict something so unpredictable as this night.

  She and Annis tucked their ladder into a shadow. The only light came from the smoldering cords they carried at their waists, which Annis called slow lucifers. The lucifers glowed very faintly, like coals in ashes. A pair of Sainnites scuffed past along the wall, talking amiably in a low murmur. One of them carried a lantern, but its light didn’t travel far. Zanja and Annis hid the faint light of the lucifers behind their cupped hands.

  They had entered an ornamental garden that was rank with the perfume of night-blooming vines. White moon flowers glowed in the shadows, and delicately formed trees drooped across the walkways like lace curtains. They crossed the garden cautiously. Its wooden fence was merely ornamental. They climbed it easily and followed a cobbled walkway between buildings, out into the main yard. Here sprawled the stables and the carriage houses on one side and the barracks on the other, with the headquarters between, facing the gate. The architecture was strange. The rooflines were curved, parts of the buildings jumped forward like arms or wings, and beads of wood dripped from the eaves.

  Most of the barracks windows were propped open to let in the night breeze. Annis showed her teeth again, and gestured silently toward the stable. Briefly, her hand was warm in Zanja’s, and then they separated. Zanja set out to find a way to the stables. Since all the passageways radiated out from this courtyard, it took some time for her to negotiate the maze. Finally, huddled against the stable wall, she noticed for the first time that there was a guard at the stable door. However, many of the stall windows were propped open. They were too small to climb through, but when Zanja looked in she could see that the stall walls were only shoulder high, which suited her purposes.

  She went as close to the edge of the courtyard as she dared, and signaled with the smoldering tip of her lucifer. She could not see Annis at all in the shadows, but in a moment her lucifer appeared as well, drawing the shape of a flame in the darkness. The flame: transformation, revolution. The collapsing poles of the clanhouses, the burned out shell of the farmhouses. Fire for fire.

  Zanja started unpacking her bag of flying explosives, and balanced one on the ledge of each open stall window. She held the tip of the lucifer to each fuse and blew on it to make the smoldering red tip flame and catch the fuse. It was rhythmic, meditative work, easy to do even in the darkness. The horses grew restive as she worked her way around the stable. She used some rockets with medium length fuses, and had switched to short fuses when she heard the harsh hiss of the first rocket. Then she saw it fly in a hissing spray of sparks across the inside of the stable, the horses braying with terror at its fiery passage, and then the rocket exploded with a bang and a blinding flash of light. The horses screamed. Shod heels crashed against the wooden walls. Zanja lit the last fuse and started running, though the crazy woman in her head wanted to stay and watch the rockets soar, trailing fire and a glowing white smoke, carrying their explosive cargo to the many things that are all too ready to burn in a stable: hay, for instance. There would be plenty of hay.

  She could hear explosions now from the barracks as well, and shrill shouts. Overhead, a balcony door banged open, and a woman rushed out, cursing as she pulled on her shirt. Zanja paused directly beneath her to light one of her packages and toss it through a street-level window into the upholstered cushion of a chair. The package was a lightweight thing, made of little more than paper and gunpowder, with a little bottle of liquid fire at its center, but the sharp report of its explosion echoed down the narrow passageway, and it was followed by a blinding white flame. The night stank of gunpowder, and was filled with shouts and the banging of doors.

  Zanj
a hid in the shadows of a side door until it looked as if all the building’s occupants had rushed out to fight the fire, then she went in, pistols in hand. The building was dark and quiet, the stairs easy to find. But as she started up them, a man suddenly came rushing down, and fell into her when she shot him. She managed to catch herself on the handrail and the soldier fell all the way down the stairs.

  Zanja stopped in his bedroom, where the bedding was thrown to the floor. She pried a board from the bed, tucked it under her arm, and went out onto the balcony. The drooping roofline was an easy climb from the balcony rail, but after she had put all her burdens onto the roof she went back to set off an explosion in the middle of the straw mattress. The floors were covered with straw mats, as well. No wonder almost every room had a fire bucket filled with water by the door.

  The rooflines, which protected the passageways between buildings against weather, seemed almost designed to allow a fugitive to escape across the rooftops. Only occasionally did Zanja have to use her board to cross the gap; usually it was a mere step. She paused at nearly every building to climb in through a window and set off fire bombs in the beds, now that every soul in the garrison seemed to be out on the streets.

  From the rooftops she could see the barracks on one side and the stable on the other, fully engulfed in flame. No bucket brigade or even a water engine could have put out those fires; the Sainnites would be devoting their energies to keeping the fire from spreading. As Zanja stood watching, she saw the glowing passage of a rocket shoot across the rooftops. She set one off herself, in reply. It skittered up the slope of the roof and shot into the air, where it exploded in a shower of fire. Almost immediately, Annis replied with another, like a star with wings. “Beautiful!” Zanja cried out loud.

  The next time she paused in her aerial journey, she noticed that her backtrail was marked by flames. Some scattered buildings far from her trail also were burning, perhaps set on fire by the burning gobbets that dripped from the rocket. Zanja set off a couple more rockets, but then stopped, fearful that they’d give away her location. Annis set one off as well; she was only a couple of buildings away now.

  Zanja climbed off the roof to another balcony, which overlooked the garden. The garden below lay serenely empty; no one patrolled the walls. She could hardly believe her fortune, but clearly the first concern of the Sainnites was to fight the fires. Grinning, she stepped through the balcony door, into the room beyond.

  “Stop right there,” a man’s voice said quietly. “I’ve got a pistol pointing right at you.”

  Zanja stopped. Her thoughts were strangely quiet; her heart scarcely even jumped in her throat.

  The man was a pale form on the other side of the room. He was breathless with fear or exertion—exertion, she decided, for his voice seemed calm. “I really don’t want to shoot you,” he said. Strangely, he spoke fluent, unaccented Shaftalese.

  “Then don’t,” Zanja said.

  “Just promise not to set my house on fire,” he said.

  Zanja was poised to duck his bullet and leap out the window. This, though, she had not anticipated.

  “I have books,” he said. “An ancient, priceless collection. Shaftali books. Irreplaceable books. No civilized person would choose to see them burn.”

  Zanja said stupidly, “But the house next door is already burning.”

  “I just need time to get the rest of the books out into the garden, where they’ll be safe.”

  “My war is not against books.”

  “Well then, I am not your enemy.” She heard the sound of him setting down his pistol onto a tabletop. “There’s a lamp just to your right,” the man said. As she groped in the darkness and lit the lamp with her lucifer, he said, “I’ve been watching your progress for a while. You are having quite a frolic. I hoped I might get a chance to meet you.”

  The flame revealed a man, remarkably young, dressed in a nightgown. Spectacles glinted in the light. Without the uniform, he looked no more like a Sainnite than she did. “I’m Medric,” he said. “I don’t know your name, but I know that you are trapped in the past. Would you like to sit down?” He sat in a chair. The lamp illuminated walls lined with nearly empty bookshelves, and a small chest stood half full on the floor. Even with the fire coming at him, Medric had not packed his books sloppily, but had methodically fit them into the chest as though he were solving a puzzle.

  Zanja said, “You wanted to meet me?”

  “In my dream you were an owl with feathers of fire. You flew back and forth over the rooftops, dripping flames onto the houses. They caught like tinder behind you. Are you truly a seeker after wisdom?”

  The garrison was burning in the glass of his spectacles. He had known it would burn, and had not warned his people. The Sainnite seer now sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He did not move as Zanja drew a pistol. “The past makes us what we are,” he said, “but the present makes us what we will be. If you shoot me, I will have a kind of peace that part of me wishes to embrace, and you will spend what remains of your life—and it will not be long, I’m afraid—refusing to read the glyphs of possibility. If you do not shoot me, however, anything can happen.”

  Zanja sat down in a chair. She did not holster her pistol; neither did she point it at him. “You let me burn down the garrison.”

  “It was the only way I could get you here. I need to ask your advice.”

  “Advice?” Zanja lay back in the chair and laughed like a madwoman, and could hardly make herself stop. When she had gotten herself under control, she wiped her face with her hands, and found them wet with tears. “Well, why shouldn’t a lunatic give advice to a seer?”

  “My vision has been too small,” he said. “And now I think I have begun to see at last, I see most clearly my own corruption. How can I redeem myself?”

  “Redeem yourself? In whose eyes?”

  He gazed at her, his face flickering with flame. “In the eyes of my mother’s people. In the eyes of Shaftal.”

  “Your mother is Shaftali?”

  “My mother was Shaftali, and my father was Sainnite. Somehow I must come to peace with myself, and how can I do that so long as this land is at war?”

  A breeze came through the open windows and the air was thick with smoke. Still, Zanja sat contemplating a glyph she could not read. Was this danger? Or was it opportunity?

  It was danger for certain if she delayed much longer, and this young man’s books would be nothing but ashes if he didn’t get back to work. “I can’t answer your questions,” she said.

  “Not right now, perhaps.” He stood up. His long, fair hair was caught back with a blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “There’s a grove of trees just north of the city. I’ll be waiting for you there in, oh, five days, at high noon. If you decide to send an assassin instead, I’ll know. Still, I’ll be there, and I won’t hold it against you. You must make your decisions just as I must make mine.”

  “You know perfectly well that I won’t send an assassin.”

  “In five days you might come to your senses.”

  Zanja had gotten dazedly to her feet and picked up the satchel of explosives. Annis was waiting in the garden, and surely would not wait much longer. When the seer held out his hand she clasped it and then wondered why she hadn’t even hesitated. “Won’t you tell me your name?” he said.

  “Zanja.”

  He smiled again, less tentatively this time. “Zanja, I dreamed that we were friends.”

  “That would be some other world you dreamed of.”

  “Yes. But you are the one who travels between the worlds, are you not?”

  He was not much taller than she, and when she found herself caught within his gaze, it meant neither capture nor dominance, but a stare between befuddled equals. At last Zanja spoke, and not exactly to him: “The gods have quite a sense of humor.” So she left him, and went down the stairs and out into the garden, where the air was choked with ashes and the brays of terrified horses
and the raw shouts of voices scoured by smoke. But now she could not remember exactly what she was doing here, or even who she was or why she had wanted to burn down the garrison. She had crossed a border. And now she was lost.

  She found Annis pacing the garden. She was exalted with fire, and once she began talking could not stop until Zanja shook her sharply by the shoulder. They climbed the wall, and this time left the ladder rather than carry it home, but they had to make their way without being noticed through a roused city. The balconies were crowded with onlookers fascinated with watching the fires or fretful with the possibility that the fires might spread beyond the garrison. They passed below, unmarked, and avoided all contact with anyone, lest the smell of smoke and gunpowder that suffused their clothing betray them. By dawn, they were far outside the city, having buried the remains of their explosives, and having bathed with soap and washed their clothing as well. At sunrise they stood on a hilltop on the north end of the river valley. A pall of smoke lay over Wilton, and Sainnite soldiers moved like locusts across the lush farmland of the river valley.

  “Emil will kill us for this night’s work,” Annis said placidly. “But not until he hears how we did it, so he can get the word to other companies. And actually, since I’m the only one who knows how to make those rockets, I guess he’ll have to let me live. You’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.”

  “Yes, I am in trouble.”

  They had neither food nor drink, except for water dipped out of a stream and a couple of handfuls of watercress. Annis was still eating her watercress one leaf at a time, and wrinkling her nose at the peppery taste. Zanja could not remember tasting hers.

  “I have an idea,” Annis said suddenly. “We’ll lie.”

  Zanja put her head in her hands. “Of course.” Annis never even noticed that she was laughing bitterly to herself. “Why not?” she said. “What have I got to lose?”

  It took more than a day for them to find South Hill Company, encamped at the Fens Overlook, a rise of land on the northern tip of the river plain, that was protected from armed incursion by a marsh on one side and a particularly tangled woodland on the other. The company was too far from Wilton to have seen the rockets explode, but not too far to see the smoke that still lay in a haze across the river valley. Emil, having already received a report from his spies in Wilton of the garrison fire and the wonderful explosions that preceded it, was in a quiet fury. His spies had told him it was wizardry, but Emil had not doubted that it was Annis. He did not question Zanja’s explanation that she had been seeking Annis in Wilton when the explosions at the garrison brought her to the garrison wall, when she had intercepted Annis during her escape.