Fire Logic (3 page)

The young woman looked up and caught Zanja’s eye. Her gaze was almost unendurable. Trying to back away, Zanja stumbled into the tea table. The young woman turned aside without a word, picked up the packet of papers, and left the room.

The Speaker said, without removing his gaze from the fire, “We have none like her among the Ashawala’i.”

“She is an air blood?” Zanja guessed, for the Ashawala’i had only earth and fire clans, and water bloods were rare everywhere.

“She is an air elemental, and a Truthken. Now you know why the Truthkens are so feared.”

Zanja still felt the effects of that young woman’s regard, even though she was no longer in the room. “Yes, I felt as though her look invaded me.”

“In time she’ll learn more subtlety, I assume. Do you want to hear the Councilor’s speech? I myself have no interest in it.”

“I suppose she’ll be inspiring,” Zanja said.

The Speaker glanced up at her, amused. “I have never learned to love Mabin either, though she has many admirers. Have a cup of tea, at least. You may never again taste green tea as fine as this, and if we don’t drink it, it will go to waste.”

She poured herself a cup, and went over to the room’s one small window to look out at the dawning day. The window viewed the back of the charterhouse, an unkempt garden of herbs and flowers that were just starting to bloom, and the track that led to the stables. As she watched, a wagon was brought out and loaded with baggage and people. The last to arrive was the young Truthken, still carrying the packet of papers, but now escorting another person. Zanja pressed her face to the windowpane, intrigued by the strange appearance of the Truthken’s companion. She was very tall—taller than a grown man—but thin and gangly as an adolescent in a growth spurt, with big hands and feet, wearing clothing she seemed to have outgrown. Her hair was a tangled bird’s nest. The Truthken walked her to the wagon as if she were a prisoner or a puppet. On the tall woman’s face was an expression of blank, stunned despair.

Zanja watched the wagon roll away. She did not know what she had seen, but she knew that it was terrible. She remained at the window long after the wagon had passed out of sight.

Chapter 2

One fine day in early autumn, nine years after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, two Sainnite soldiers impatiently waited for the stablehand to bring them their horses. The cool air was freshened by winter’s distant breath, but not yet a hint of the mud season’s first rainclouds had appeared in the sky. The soldiers complained about the cold, as though they had never lived through a Shaftali winter, and did not know they would soon be longing for a day this warm.

“A thankless day’s work it will be,” grumbled one, tightening the buckles on her cuirass of boiled leather.

“Is this a soldier’s work?” Her companion was younger and bulkier than she, and carried a number of weapons: swords, daggers, even a small battle ax, as though he intended to spend the day in grueling, hand-to-hand fighting. “Breaking heads to force reluctant peasants to hand over a few coins…”

“We’ll take supplies instead of money. Gladly.” She checked her three pistols to see that they were properly loaded.

“What, are we filthy tradesmen?”

“We are soldiers,” she said, “Who need to eat. And the peasants—”

“—don’t know their frigging place—”

“—literally!” she concluded. “If they would just lie down and do what they’re supposed to do…”

Their conversation deteriorated. The stable hand, who had become all too familiar with the Sainnites’ assumptions about what non-Sainnites were good for, deliberately knelt in horse dung as she checked the horse’s hooves. She was grimy already, but wanted to make certain the soldiers found her unappealing.

“How long does it take to saddle two horses?” said the man, banging his booted foot against the floor as though he were a horse himself.

“That stable hand is always slow. A simpleton.”

“All barbarians are. And they live like animals.” The soldier’s lip curled as the stable hand brought out the horses. “Look at her. She’s been rolling in horse dung. She may even eat it for all we know.”

The woman companionably made a retching sound, and set to work checking over her mount with insulting care, testing every strap and buckle. The stable hand stood back, gaze humbly lowered. Though the soldier had found nothing wrong with the horse’s gear, she cuffed her casually on the way out the door.

As the two soldiers rode off to harass the people they called peasants, the stable hand raised her dark eyes to gaze after them. She said softly in her own language, “You two will die today.” It was no idle threat. She sensed the death awaiting them, hidden in the woods not too far out of town.

Zanja na’Tarwein’s prescience had been particularly heightened this year, for to live safely among the Sainnites required a degree of caution and conscientiousness that verged on the supernatural. For months now, she had been dodging attention as meticulously and instinctively as the rat that lives underfoot, unnoticed. The gift of prescience was a troubling talent: useful when it came to guarding her own safety, distracting and unnerving when she became conscious of pending events in which she did not care to intervene. Perhaps a dull winter at home among her people would suppress her foresight to a more tolerable level.

She had returned to the dreary work of mucking out the stalls, but paused at the thought of home. Suddenly, between one breath and the next, she decided it was time to leave the Sainnite garrison. She had covertly learned their language, and she had learned much else that left her worried and distressed. The Sainnites were skilled fighters, accomplished tacticians, and ruthless oppressors. She did not want to know any more. She had done her duty; she had crossed into the Sainnites’ world. Thankfully, the same god that required her to travel between worlds did not forbid her to travel home again.

Zanja na’Tarwein leaned her pitchfork on the wall, fetched her money pouch from its hiding place, dropped it down the front of her filthy shirt, and left the stable. At this time of day, the garrison was lively with the orderly and energetic activity that she had reluctantly come to admire. A company of soldiers was delicately weeding a flower bed—the Sainnites loved flowers, and cultivated them in every inch of bare ground. Disabled soldiers were busy with the housekeeping: sweeping and scrubbing one or another item that Zanja would have sworn had just been cleaned the day before. Pigs were being slaughtered in the kitchen yard, and the practice field was crowded with soldiers who sweated and grunted and shouted with triumph or dismay.

That spring, when she had first presented herself at the garrison gate, a good portion of the day had passed before she was able to communicate that she had learned there might be work in the garrison for border people like herself—barbarians, according to the Sainnites, who stupidly assumed that the border people could not be spies because they had no ties to the land of Shaftal. Now, leaving the garrison in early autumn, Zanja had to wait no longer than it took the bored soldier to unlock the gate. She didn’t even have to display the empty bottle of horse liniment she had brought with her as an excuse for going out.

By contrast to the garrison, the streets of the city were practically deserted. As the work of harvest drew to a close, the city would fill with farmers. But now, Zanja walked down an empty street hung with tradesmen’s shingles, marked with glyphs that Zanja had never learned to interpret. One had a Shaftali rug on display that Zanja remembered selling to a northern trader the year before. She proceeded cautiously, for even though someone as ragged as she seemed an unlikely target for thieves, smoke addicts were known to steal anything from anyone, often in broad daylight. She had been forced to go unarmed all summer, and though this was not the first time she had wished earnestly for a weapon, she hoped that it would be the last.

She turned down a side street and stepped into the narrow doorway of a public bath, startling the proprietor from her doze over the account books. Surely the woman had seen plenty of dirty people come through her door, but still she wrinkled her nose. “I hope you have something clean to wear.”

Zanja said, “Yes, I stored my belongings with you in the spring. You’ll remember me when the dirt is washed off.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Shaftal’s Name, you certainly are changed. I’d better get the water heating. A lot of water.”

Alone in a private room, Zanja sat naked on the bench and painstakingly undid the tight plaits of her hair. When the woman and her assistant arrived bearing between them a vat of hot water, Zanja knelt over the drain and allowed herself to be doused with water, briskly scrubbed with brushes and foaming soap, and doused again. Her skin was raw before the last of the dirt had been scrubbed away. The two bath attendants chattered about people she had never and would never meet as they washed her hair, treated it with various mysterious unguents, and combed it for her. In an ecstasy of cleanliness, Zanja gladly paid what they charged, and when she left was dressed in her accustomed goatswool and deerskin clothing, with a dagger at the small of her back and her stablehand’s rags left behind on the ash heap. She doubted that the Sainnites would even notice that she was gone.

The city was built on a hilltop. As she left the last of its crowded buildings behind, the land opened up below her: fields and forest bright in the vivid light of autumn. Some fields lay barren, their bounty already picked and plowed under. Some were striped with hay rows. Others were alive with industry, as wheat fell before the scythe and potato forks turned up the soil. Zanja, though her back and shoulders ached from the summer’s dreary labor, felt a moment’s guilt at her laziness in such a busy time. She decided to avoid the farmlands and sleep in the woods, lest she find herself recruited, willy-nilly, into the frenzy of harvest. The weather would hold, she thought, examining the sky. She settled her burdens on her shoulders and started briskly northward, towards the mountains that at the moment lay far below the horizon.

A few hours later, she found the dead soldiers. The ravens had arrived before her, and hopped reluctantly away as she approached, uttering insults in their harsh, secret language. The Paladins had done their work as briskly as any butcher, and deliberately left the bodies to be found. The man who had banged his foot on the floor like a horse had been shot with a pistol and then finished with a dagger. The woman whose fist had left an aching bruise on Zanja’s cheekbone had been shot three times. The horses had been recruited to serve the resistance, Zanja assumed. The two Sainnites must have been ambushed here by a number of concealed marksmen, now long gone, perhaps hunting the other Sainnites who had foolishly assumed the members of the resistance would be at home helping with the harvest.

In the near distance, Zanja could hear the voices of the farmers, breathlessly singing a working song to keep their energy from flagging as the afternoon grew old. The smell of violence suffused the bright air. The ravens jostled each other impatiently, edging their way back to the feast. This was still Shaftal, Zanja told herself, but it seemed like an alien land.

A year after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, Councilor Mabin’s book,
Warfare
, had become the manual for insurgency throughout Shaftal. People whose lives had until then been the very model of peacefulness joined the Paladins—the new Paladins, Mabin called them, for they did not give up their families or take complicated vows. Soon, every region of Shaftal that the Sainnites occupied also supported a company of irregular fighters who made it their business to cause the Sainnites no end of misery. The retaliating Sainnites, perhaps thinking to prevent any book from having such an impact again, destroyed all the printing presses, the paper mills, the schools, and the libraries. They executed everyone whose ear was pierced, everyone who appeared to be learned, everyone who had or was rumored to have an elemental gift. They hunted and killed any member of an old order, even the Healers, though their vows forbade them to fight. To escape the harassment of the Paladins, the Sainnites built garrisons in which they could secure themselves, from which they exercised an iron control over the commerce of the cities upon which they depended for the taxes that ensured their survival. The countryside, however, remained firmly in control of the Paladins and of the farmers who fed and sheltered them.

Zanja’s teacher developed a shortness of breath that left him unable to endure the rigors of travel, and she became Speaker at age twenty-two. Traveling beyond the borders, she became adept at avoiding the frequent, brief armed confrontations between Sainnites and Paladins. She learned the side-roads and byways, since the main roads were frequently patrolled by foul-tempered Sainnites. She could not avoid the cities, though, where to sell her woolens she first had to bribe the guards, and afterwards hand over a substantial portion of her profits. In the countryside, the Paladins sometimes were not much easier to deal with, for, like the Sainnites, they had become violently suspicious of any stranger, and especially a stranger like Zanja, whose dark coloring made her uncomfortably visible, and whose presence and purpose could not be easily explained.

She continued to serve her people and her god, however precariously. But every year, she wondered how long she could continue. That she would eventually be caught up and killed in the random violence of the unending war seemed inevitable. But this year, as she reclaimed her horses from the farmers who had looked after them that summer, and continued homeward on northerly roads, she carried a new fear with her. The fear haunted her as the roads became narrow tracks and finally disappeared entirely, leaving her to navigate her way by the stars, the shape of the land, and sheer common sense. The fear followed her as she entered and scaled the mountains, following ways so rarely traversed that scarcely the trace of a path could be seen. She returned home to her people, as she did every autumn, but this year, living among the Sainnites had left her wondering whether her people’s future was any more certain than her own.