Fire Logic (37 page)

Zanja found that humor difficult to endure, and finally she excused herself to check on Karis. Tucked within her womb of stone, Karis lay curled upon her side, with a hand resting palm down upon the rock. Sweat plastered the hair upon her face. She opened her eyes at Zanja’s touch, but her gaze remained dull and blank.

Medric had come in behind her. “She has a fever,” Zanja said, and added in frustration, “Despite all the elemental talent gathered there on the beach, she is our only healer, and if she could heal herself we would not be in this predicament.”

Medric said quietly, “And the smoke will not easily let her go. There’s a reason why my father’s people use it to enslave.”

“What does the future hold for her? Have you no idea?”

“I feel that we’ll be safe here, at least for now. I cannot see beyond that, because Karis’s life is in the balance.”

“There must be a way to tilt the scale.”

“Zanja, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

Though Zanja sat beside Karis that night, waiting for just a word of two with her before she slipped away again, Karis went directly into convulsions without ever leaving her stupor. It was all Zanja could do to get some smoke in her, and afterwards she paced up and down the length of the stony beach in a bitter rage, unable to endure the fact that she was losing a battle she did not even know how to fight. She did not sleep at all.

All night and all day Karis burned with fever, and not even water remained long in her stomach. She had already gone thirteen days without food, and could not survive much longer. Zanja could not endure watching her starve to death like every other smoke addict, and, in desperation, withheld the drug from her one night. After a long while, the violence of Karis’s seizures began to alternate with a death-like stillness. Zanja finally lit and smoked a pipe herself, breathing the foul-tasting stuff into Karis’s mouth and lungs for her, one mouthful at a time, until Karis opened her eyes and stared at her in bleak horror. At least, Zanja thought, she seemed to be conscious for once.

Then her wits deserted her entirely, and the gift of smoke was thrust upon her willy-nilly, if a complete cessation of rational thought and physical sensation could be called a gift. Later, she would remember that she had become like a worn-out child, who curled where she was upon bare stone and shut her eyes to sleep.

She awoke puzzled, heavy-bodied, tortoise-slow. A big hand smacked her cheek, and the dull shock of pain and surprise brought her upright. It was morning, well past dawn. She dimly smelled the cookfires’ smoke, and heard the laughter of the Otter People as they gathered up their nets. A fist caught her braids and she was jerked back down onto the pallet beside Karis, and a muscled arm embraced her throat

Karis’s voice rasped in her ear. “You will not smoke again. Swear.”

Clawing at the blacksmith’s muscles, Zanja choked, “No.”

“Swear!”

Black spots swam before Zanja’s eyes. “Only—to save—your life,” she gasped.

“My life is not worth such a price!”

And then she was shoved irresistibly away onto the bare stone, where she lay until her vision stopped swirling and she dared sit up, rubbing her neck and testing the hair at the back of her head to make certain it was still attached. “It’s good to see you feeling so well,” she said, speaking with some difficulty.

Karis lay upon her back, breathing convulsively, tense with rage, as though she was about to leap up and wreck the cave and all its contents, like a berserker. Zanja got up and went to the door. Emil and Medric lay in each other’s arms on the stony beach, groggy with love and sunshine. She shouted imperiously at them to bring some porridge, and they both stared at her.

She went back in, and knelt at Karis’s side, and begged her pardon for taking a risk she’d had no choice about and had every intention of taking again should the need arise. Her patent insincerity was enough to make Karis smile weakly. “I guess I didn’t make much of an impression.”

Zanja rubbed a bruised elbow. “You made an impression all right.”

As Emil came in with the porridge, followed by Medric, they each in turn blocked the sunlight and cast the cave into shadow. Emil still limped badly. He bowed ironically as he handed Zanja some porridge. “I had checked on you just minutes ago.”

“I was rudely awakened and it made me ill-mannered. I am sorry.”

“Well, you’ve been under a strain,” Emil said more kindly. “How is she?”

He looked directly into Karis’s face and recoiled with surprise.

Zanja remembered then what it had been like to meet Karis for the first time, to feel the shocking, palpable presence of her intelligence, like a handshake that leaves the hand aching. Emil, whose talent made people’s hearts transparent to him, dropped heedlessly to his knees. Karis gazed at him in some puzzlement, then at Medric, who had crouched, wide-eyed, beside him, and then she turned to Zanja and said, “I should know these people.”

“They helped in your escape and have been with us ever since. These are my friends, Emil Paladin and the seer Medric.”

“How could this be?” Karis said blankly.

Much to Zanja’s relief, Emil’s look of astonishment gave way to a genuine smile. “Well, Karis, Medric had a dream that Zanja needed us, and so as soon as we could we traded our dray horse and wagon for a couple of riding horses, and nearly killed them coming here cross country, rather to Zanja’s surprise. But for us it was very simple, really.”

Karis looked from him to Medric.

Medric said, “Karis, you are the hope of Shaftal.”

There was a silence. Karis said, “So I see that, like all seers, you are mad.”

Zanja convinced Karis to eat while she explained where they were and how they had gotten there. Before she finished the tale, Karis’s tremors began again, and Medric and Emil delicately took their leave. Karis set the mostly empty bowl aside and lay back upon the plain pallet, wan and hollow-eyed. She said, “I didn’t want and never would have chosen the ancient office of G’deon. But your fire blood friends seem enchanted by the glamour of it.”

Zanja said, “Oh, yes, it is quite glamorous. I myself am struck dumb by the glory of it.”

Karis shut her eyes, and said heavily, “I know I should laugh. But the truth is too bitter. For fifteen years I have carried this weight within the flawed receptacle of my flesh and bones, and as if that weren’t enough, have also borne the burden of Mabin’s unremitting censure and Norina’s overbearing solicitude. Mercy could only be had from the secrecy that allowed me to be a mere earth witch and metalsmith of modest ambitions. Now that mercy is gone.”

Zanja said, “So now you must become accustomed to being treated with affection and respect by three fire bloods. Why is it terrible to be so richly perceived now?”

Karis flinched as a particularly strong tremor shook her frame. “If I live—then I will fail your hopes. Shaftal—I am so tired.”

“Our hopes for what?”

Karis shuddered again. Sweat beaded her forehead as if she endured an intense pain. “Whatever you want. Deliverance. The healing of the world. All things I cannot do.”

Zanja said softly, “Even the gods could not save my people from destruction. So if Shaftal is to be saved, it seems it must happen in a more ordinary way. Karis, how can I give you peace? Shall I tell you that I’m simply fulfilling my long overdue obligation in a trade agreement? You broke into a Sainnite prison and saved my life and rescued me; now I have broken into a Paladin prison and saved your life and rescued you. It’s a simple exchange. Or would it make you feel better if I tell you that once I’ve made you indebted to me I have every intention of abusing your sense of obligation? That
would
make you feel better.”

Karis began to laugh, but it was painful to watch.

Zanja said, “But the truth is that I dare not let you die, nor dare I release your secret to the world, for Norina will hunt me down and skewer me.”

“That’s true,” Karis said. “But it’s not the whole truth.”

“Well, of course, I am devoted to you. So why can you accept devotion from Norina and not from me?”

Karis’s hand clenched convulsively in Zanja’s, her palm sticky with sweat. “I accept Norina’s duty,” she said. “But you have no excuse.”

The convulsions began

Even the worst of battles has an end, but for Karis the siege never seemed to lift. Three times between each sunrise, Zanja sat beside her as she fought her tedious, horrifying struggle, only to give in, over and over again. With slowness that seemed unendurable, Karis won back her life from smoke, gaining ground so slowly that many a time it seemed as though she won nothing at all. It was a wearying, desperate, grinding labor of will that yielded too little reward. Days of sudden fevers and devastating fits of nausea gave way to days of dispirited exhaustion and irritable boredom. Then, Karis made a water clock by piercing a hole in an empty pot and hanging it to drip water into a container. This clock became her enemy, and the changing containers Zanja put down to catch the water defined the progress of the combat. For seven days the time Karis called her own could not fill one of Emil’s tiny porcelain teacups. But then the teacup overflowed and Zanja’s battered tin porringer replaced it.

Ten more drops of water today than yesterday, and tomorrow it would be ten more. Medric timed the water drops with Emil’s watch, then worked a cipher on the stone floor with a piece of charcoal. At this rate, a year would pass before Karis was smoking only once a day again. Zanja made him erase it before Karis could see the grim numbers.

One afternoon, when Zanja came out of the shadowed cave into the rich warmth of the late summer sunshine, Medric was waiting for her. Karis had just smoked, and had fallen into an exhausted sleep. This was not the first time either Medric or Emil lay in wait for Zanja, but only now did she realize that it was no accident. “The two of you are taking turns,” she said.

Medric grinned. “It’s a measure of how preoccupied you are that it took so long for you to realize it. Here, sit down. I want to talk to you.”

She sat on one of the large stones that served them as furniture. The entire population of the Otter People’s village seemed to be out on the lake this warm afternoon. One of the young people engaged in a raucous boat race was a stocky, brown-haired South Hill farmer who seemed on the verge of tipping her boat into the water. It hardly mattered, since Annis wore no clothing. The sun had cooked her brown as a loaf of overcooked bread. Someone dumped Annis into the water and she came up laughing.

“There is a shadow over Karis,” Medric said. “And it lies over you as well, since you have bound yourself to share her fate.”

“What shadow?” Zanja asked. “Death, is that it? Madness? Neither one seems worse than this torture.”

Medric said, “A moment of decision is coming upon you, a time when you must see clearly and speak with courage. But you have lost your vision. Karis’s whole attention is on the water dripping from her clock, and there’s a kind of madness in that—one which you have come to share with her. Here, eat this.”

He had given her a piece of the Otter People’s flatbread, with some of the ubiquitous smoked fish rolled up inside. Zanja ate it rather as Karis would have done, obediently, without hunger or pleasure. Medric pushed his spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose and gazed rather blearily out across the water, blinking in the glare. “These water folk make me see how much we fire bloods are bound by our seriousness. Everything we do seems fraught with importance. It’s easy to lose perspective.” He took off his spectacles and put on the other pair. “Aha!”

Zanja said, “What can’t I see?”

“I have seen Karis lift a hammer and strike, and the sparks fall around her in a shower of gold. I see her shaping the world on her forge.”

There was a silence. Zanja said, “Will you stay here for a while and keep an eye on Karis? I want a bath.”

She took the cake of soap and bathed in the downriver end of the lake, washing even her stinking clothing and dirty hair, and when she came back with her dripping laundry in her arms, Medric loaned her a clean shirt to wear and combed her hair for her. Then, as Zanja braided her hair, he read out loud from one of the half dozen books that he and Emil continued to haul around with them, though most of the library was safely stored. He read a history of a time so ancient the story seemed more myth than fact, yet the tale had an eerie familiarity: a tale of people arriving by sea to a land inhabited by tribal folk, and how at first they had been conquerors until at last the land tamed them and taught them how to live upon it. That land had been Shaftal.

Zanja lay back, with her hair only half braided, dazed by cleanliness and sunshine and the easy rhythms of Medric’s reading voice, and the ancient cycles of history. Medric broke off and said, “Here’s Emil, looking grumpy, and the water witch.”

Zanja sat up and rubbed her eyes. Two boats had landed on the beach. The water witch, carrying a heavy jug, went into Karis’s cave. Zanja started to get up, but Emil’s hand restrained her. Medric went back to his reading, and then he and Emil sat talking about history for hours. When at last the water witch reappeared, he crouched down beside Zanja and said, “Give her the water to drink until she has drunk dry the jug.”

“Esteemed sir, as you will,” she said, and bowed.

He got into his boat and rowed away.

“You absorb language like paper absorbs ink,” said Medric admiringly.

“Land have mercy,” Emil said, “Isn’t the man tired yet? He took me on a half-day journey upstream until my arms were about to fall off from rowing, and then we had to climb the cliff to a little spring that bubbled out from a crack in the stone. I’m certain he explained it to me, but unlike Zanja, I don’t understand a word he says.”

Zanja said, “You obviously are the elder of our tribe. Therefore, you stand witness on our behalf.”

“Witness to what, though?” Emil said, rubbing a stiff shoulder.

Medric lifted his head and smiled suddenly. Zanja turned to look at what he was seeing, and leapt to her feet and ran to the doorway of the little cave, where Karis stood, braced between stones. Karis said thickly, “If I’m to receive guests now I should be more presentable.” She dropped her shirt, which she had been unbuttoning, and walked across the beach and into the water.

Zanja picked up the shirt, which was even more rank than hers had been, and stood there feeling like a parent must feel when her firstborn suddenly ceases to be a child.

When Karis came out of the water, Emil wrapped her in a blanket, and gave her the last cup of tea. She sat by the coals of the fire, watching Zanja stew her shirt and spice it heavily with shavings from their solitary bar of soap. “You never told me what a peculiar feeling it is to have someone work magic on you,” she said to Zanja.

“Well, I didn’t want to seem as if I were complaining.”