Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  “Maybe he’s lost his mind,” she said.

  “Maybe he’s stopped dreaming. It happens.”

  “Maybe he had a bad love affair.”

  “Maybe he’s fallen ill.”

  “Maybe,” Zanja said, “he’s had a change of heart.”

  Emil looked out at the smoke-hazed valley, then back at Zanja. “Surely not. We fire bloods are cursed with loyalty. To turn traitor against the people we call our own—it’s not in us.”

  “Sometimes insight overrides loyalty,” Zanja said, too bitterly.

  They sat in silence for a while. So long as Zanja didn’t move, the pain in her leg was not unendurable.

  Emil said softly, “Every time I close my eyes, I dream the same dream. A man sits before me, with a wooden box in his lap. He holds it up to me, as if proffering a gift, and opens the lid. I can’t see what’s in the box, but I know that I want it desperately.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “The man? Oh, I don’t know. It’s all in shadow: a big, dark room with a single lamp flame. Why does it matter?”

  “It matters,” Zanja said, but felt that she could not explain. Later I will explain, she thought wearily, but now I cannot endure any more consequences.

  “Well then,” Emil said, “next time I dream of him, I’ll try to get a look at his face.” He took her hand in his. “My dear, with only one leg, you’d still be invaluable to South Hill.”

  “Of course Jerrell sent for you.”

  “When a member of my company chooses certain death—”

  Zanja said, “Do you remember when the bridgekeeper bit me?

  “It wasn’t so long ago.”

  “Which arm was it?” She held out both her arms, and after some hunting, Emil found the scar, nearly faded to invisibility.

  “So you heal clean,” he said. “But a pistol ball—”

  “Sir, Jerrell has already lectured me.”

  “Sir!” He sat back a bit.

  “My brother,” she amended. “I am not choosing death out of despair. I know my leg will heal.”

  He looked at her for a long time, as if studying a particularly complex pattern of glyphs. “Someday,” he said finally, “you will tell me your secrets.” He took her hand again. “I’ll instruct Jerrell to trust your judgment, if you tell me the truth about what happened yesterday. Willis says that your companions lost you in the cornfield. They realized the Sainnites were watching for them and retreated, and only then noticed you weren’t with them.”

  “I’m sure they abandoned me deliberately,” she said. “But unless one of those who was with me in the cornfield admits to it, I don’t see how it can be proven.”

  “One of them will admit it soon enough,” Emil said quietly, “and I’ll finally have a good reason to rid myself of Willis, though I suppose his kinfolk will hold it against me forever, no matter how good my reasons are.” He sighed. “Do you know, in the old days, the G’deon might drive a spike into the heart of a particularly irritating enemy, and from that day every beat of the heart would lie in the G’deon’s control. That’s the way to solve my problem with Willis—keep him alive, let him continue as a lieutenant, but let him know that at any moment I might choose to let him drop down dead.”

  He drew up his knees, looking for all the world as if he meant to continue talking to her all day. “Unfortunately, my powers are limited, and whatever I do will have unwanted consequences. Tell me something,” he added abruptly, “Do you feel up to reading the cards?”

  “I don’t even know where they are.”

  “They’re drying in the sun, like everything else you own.” He fetched them, and counted to see that all of them had survived, warped and mud-smirched though they were. As Zanja shuffled the cards aimlessly, he asked, “What characterizes the state of conflict between South Hill and the Sainnites?”

  Zanja picked a card she’d not studied yet. It depicted a balance, or shopkeeper’s scale. Emil glanced at it and nodded without much surprise. “What would tilt the balance in our favor?” he asked.

  Zanja could not choose a card. “Are you thinking too much?” Emil asked after a while.

  “It’s as though every card is the answer.”

  “So in order to tilt the balance we’d have to alter the entire Universe? Well, try this question instead: What is the most important factor in tilting the balance in our favor?“

  Zanja chose a card and tossed it down before looking at it. It was the Owl. “Hmm.” Emil grinned without much humor. “Well now, this is getting interesting.”

  Zanja shifted uncomfortably. Her injured thigh ached.

  “So tell me, what is the Owl to do?”

  Zanja laid down another card without looking at it, then saw that it was the Door. She sighed.

  “What will immediately result from this decision that the Owl must make?”

  She lay down another card, and Emil gave a small start, but said nothing. The glyph was one Zanja did not know; the picture showed an opening into a hillside.

  Emil shook his head, and asked, “What will be the long term result of this decision?”

  The last card seemed the most ambiguous of them all: it showed the silhouettes of a ridged horizon, with the sun above, either rising or setting. Emil moved the cards into an organized row and scowled unhappily at them. At last, he said, “Well, either this is a piece of arrant nonsense or a message of great portent. Based on what I see here, I want to say that it appears that you, Zanja, are a crucial factor in events with implications that reach far beyond South Hill. You are in a position where you must make a difficult decision even though you feel you cannot decide. Your decision will result in some kind of grave danger: a danger of spirit of body or both. It may very well lead to death.” He touched the card with the opening in the hillside. “This is the door to the labyrinth, the underworld. It is always dangerous but not necessarily fatal. Now, it is not clear who or what is endangered, but it may be you, or South Hill Company, or something much more important than any of us here. In the end—” he touched the Sun card “—there will be hope or loss of hope. An end of everything or a new beginning. It could go either way.”

  Then there was silence.

  Emil contemplated the cards. “Surely if this were nonsense I would recognize it. So what am I to make of this?” Then he grinned with a wry amusement. “Or, more specifically, how can I help you to make the right decision?”

  “Anyone else would insist—demand—that I explain,” Zanja said.

  “But if this is a true reading—and you would have told me by now if it wasn’t—then I have to assume that you don’t feel able to explain. If you don’t feel able to do it, then for me to insist that you do would only complicate your situation when it seems I ought to be making it simpler.” He looked up at her. “I must somehow help you without actually understanding what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. Tell me what to do.”

  “In truth, I—am at a loss. These portents—they do not explain anything.”

  “They tell me that you are caught up in something that’s much more important than you realize.” He turned the Door card so that it was right-side-up for Zanja and tapped it with his fingertip. “What can you tell me about this?”

  Zanja said, “If I decide wrongly, then you are the one that will be endangered.”

  “Me personally?”

  “Emil—you have made yourself my friend. How could it not be personal? But it’s difficult to imagine that what happens to you won’t affect South Hill Company, our entire enterprise here, or the whole history of Shaftal which brought us to this point.”

  “So. You’ve been avoiding me ever since the night we evacuated Fen Overlook—maybe even longer, since Fire Night. Something happened that I don’t know about.” He clasped his hands across his knee, as though restraining himself from doing something else: hitting her, embracing her; it was impossible to tell. “How can I help you?” he asked again. “Or is it absolution you need?”

  “Tell
me, in your dream—”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You think my dream is relevant to this?”

  “What is in the box?”

  He tapped a finger on the Sun card. “Hope,” he said. “Or at least the hope of hope.”

  “Would you die for it?”

  “Yes, I would. So—am I going to die for desire’s sake after all, like every other fire blood since the dawn of time? Should I get my affairs in order? You understand,” he added gently, “I think it’s about time I had something worth dying for, something better than this idiot’s war.”

  He held her hand for a while, then offered her a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and picked up the cards that she had let rail. Then he fetched Jerrell, who checked Zanja’s bandage and agreed to arrange for her family to give Zanja a safe place to recuperate, as soon as she could be moved. She gave her another potion to drink. The memory of Emil sitting quietly beside her, cleaning and oiling her pistols for her, accompanied Zanja in her sleep, in her dreams, into the day that followed, and into the night that followed that. It was such a small thing, and yet at the time she most needed it, it gave her a great peace.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the silent night, the warm air lay heavy and still, and starlight blurred behind a lingering haze of smoke. Leaning on a staff, Zanja shuffled through the silence where accuser bugs should have shouted from the tree branches. But the trees all had been cut down, and without the intervention of their uplifted hands, the sky pressed down upon the earth like a smothering blanket. Here on the dark plain, the farmers slept by smoldering barns and clenched their fists in their dreams. It seemed the whole world had been put to the torch.

  Zanja’s staff scraped gravel. Her foot dragged behind her; her patience wore thin. She had left the Paladin camp as early as she dared, but by the time she reached the grove outside of Wilton she had heard the city bell ring midnight. The grove, of course, had been cut down. She saw no sign of Medric, and sat upon a stump to wait.

  She waited, listening to the clock toll out the passing hours. At last, she accepted that he was not coming. All her distress, it seemed, had been for nothing.

  She thought she had allowed enough time to reach the camp again before summer’s early dawn overtook her, but her leg had stiffened as she waited, and then the wound reopened as Jerrell had warned it would if she didn’t keep it still. Her leg was bathed in warm, slow-flowing blood, and a lassitude came over her. So the horizon had begun to lighten when she climbed the steep path through the trees, past the inattentive pickets and back across the boundaries of the Paladin camp.

  As she headed for her abandoned blankets, she heard a camp cook bang a pot as the flames of a cookfire began to crackle. It still was dark among the trees. She walked in shadow, careful, worried, wondering what had become of Medric and what she should do now. When Willis rose up from beside her empty bed, she stared at him, stupid as a rabbit in torchlight, unable to imagine what he was doing there, or what it meant.

  She heard the others rise up out of darkness where they had been hidden. She let her staff fall, lest they mistake it for a weapon, and held out her empty hands. Contrary to what Ransel used to say, she did in fact know when to give up.

  “So you deign to return to us,” Willis said. “Where have you been all night?”

  I should have put up a fight and gotten myself killed, she thought, now that it was too late.

  Willis struck her. She fell, and the earth did not catch her. She fell into the darkness, into the vortex of that catastrophic year.

  A grinning Sainnite forced her to watch what he did to her, even though she could not feel it.

  The Paladins lifted her up, and he struck her again.

  He cut off her toes, one by one. His companions held her head by the hair, so she could not look away.

  “Tell me where you have been!” he cried. He raised his fist.

  A war horse’s hoof struck her in the head. She fell.

  Ransel jerked her up by the hair. His familiar, battered war blade shone in a light too vivid to be sunlight.

  “You are a traitor!” he cried, triumphant. The Paladins, startled and bewildered, or angry and jeering, gathered around.

  “You are no longer one of the people!” Ransel cried. The Ashawala’i people stood silent, accepting his judgment.

  He struck her, and she fell. She did not know anymore who was her brother, or her companion at arms, or her enemy. She fell, and she fell.

  She opened her eyes, but could scarcely see. Upon bare ground, she lay bleeding, unwatched. It was a contemptuous inattention, for they certainly knew that she could not flee: she had no toes; her back was broken. Ransel had cut off her hair, thus rejecting her from the tribe. Why had they not brought her the suicide drink? The Ashawala’i had given all other outcasts that mercy: why not her?

  She felt blindly for her weapons. The dagger was gone, and the pistols. But her small knife was still tucked into her blood-smeared boot.

  She held the blade to her own throat, but could not cut deeply enough. She began to weep. “Lord Death, now I choose you.” Her fingers were painted with bright red ink. She wrote a message to him upon the shining metal of the blade. Then someone noticed, and with an exclamation snatched the knife out of her hand.

  At the height of a stroke, Karis dropped her hammer. The red hot piece of iron fell from the tongs, and those also clattered onto the stone floor. A boy rushed over with the water bucket, but she dropped to her knees upon the stone floor, and swept her hand across it to clear the debris. With a scrap of iron she scratched a line upon the stone, then another crossing it, then a third.

  “That’s the Raven,” said the boy helpfully, water sloshing out over his feet.

  “What?”

  “That’s the Raven glyph. Isn’t it?” The boy peered down at the marks she had made. “Your mastersign!” he said, apparently trying his best to make sense of her crazy behavior. “The messenger of good and bad fortune. It just came to you, right? And you wanted to write it down before you forgot, right? And now you can be a forgemaster, and you’ll take me to work for you?”

  “The Raven.” Karis looked again at the marks she had drawn on the floor. “Something has gone terribly wrong.”

  Zanja lay paralyzed in a bloodstained hay cart. At a distant mountain peak, the moon lifted her pale face to the starry sky. Except for the occasional calls of the soldiers on watch duty, the Sainnite camp lay silent. Zanja watched the sky, able only to wait, now that all choices had been taken away from her.

  A slight sound made her turn her head, and a slim shadow separated from the darkness: lithe and silent, grinning teeth shining with moonlight. “Oh my brother,” she breathed. “Why do you risk your life for me? I am already dead, but you can still live.“

  He came to her, though, silently laughing his raven’s laugh. “You trickster,” she said. “You have come to take my life in mercy at last.”

  Yes. His blade was in his hand. She smiled at him, her courageous friend. “Come, then,” she said. And then a Samnite uttered a warning shout, and they rose up and killed him.

  It had happened again. It would happen again, again, and again, while she lay hopelessly screaming, and Ransel’s sturdy heart pumped his lifeblood onto the ground. Over and over, he came to deliver the mercy blow, and over and over they killed him.

  A heavy door grated open. There was a terrible blaze of light and a flapping shadow, like a big bird’s wings. “Come out of there,” Willis said.

  “She’s been unusually quiet the last few hours,” another voice said doubtfully.

  Emil’s voice, low and quiet, said, “She has been shouting and you left her unattended? She has a serious injury!”

  For Emil, quiet meant angry, angry almost beyond speech. “I’m going in after her,” he said. But Zanja had managed to get to her feet by then, and shakily walked into the light. Emil was just a shadow she could see even with her eyes closed, and surely she was no more than a shadow to him, a being of th
e Underworld, a house habitated by memory.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  He should not be merciful to her, or he would die. But she took the hand he reached down to her, and let him haul her out of the darkness, into the dusty, milling chaos of a hot and sunny farmyard.

  Through a blaze of tears brought on by sunlight, she saw farmers in their summertime work clothes, come to see who had been locked in their cellar and why. She saw each of Emil’s lieutenants, who had never, even at a funeral, seemed so grim. She saw many other Paladins, some who had jeered at her, some who might eventually have become her friends. All of them stared at her, and at the dignified man she’d had the temerity to call her brother, not so long ago.

  His rage was masked, but she felt it like knife on bone. “You have made friends with a Sainnite,” he said.

  She knew what she had to do. “Yes, sir.”

  “And you went out the other night to meet this person?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What for?”

  This time, he would not die. He would not help her as his enemies lay in wait. Better for him to hate her than to die because of her. She said, “I went to lead an attack on Willis’s unit, but they said they were not ready.”

  His hand rested on his pistol. This close to her, he would get a good shot, and even in anger would shoot well, kindly, remembering his affection even as he knew it was betrayed. But then he sighed, and all was lost. “I know that is a lie,” he said.

  A voice spoke behind Zanja. “She intends her lie as a gift.”