Fire Logic (13 page)

Karis glanced over her shoulder. “Loan me your dagger, Nori.”

Zanja had noticed the night before that Norina’s knife could serve as a substantial dowry. Now she saw that her fighting blade would have become an heirloom among Zanja’s people, a blade with a genealogy, passed among the generations of the
katrim
as lovingly and devotedly as any story of heroism and self-sacrifice. Norina gave the dagger to Karis, and Zanja would not even touch it until Norina impatiently nodded her permission. It was a subtle weapon of austere beauty, with a blade deceptively slender and of startling substance. The metal had been folded upon itself, over and over, leaving a wavering, overlapping pattern inlaid in its shining steel, like ripples on sand. An extraordinarily skilled and patient metalsmith had sweated over, meditated upon, and lived with that blade, day in and day out, until it welded into the smith’s very dreams and became itself a vision.

“You’re cutting yourself,” Karis said.

Zanja had involuntarily closed her hand around the blade, and it had casually parted the fabric of her palm. It could have sliced all the way to bone by weight alone, and she might never have even felt it. It seemed amazing, impossible even, that the blade had no Mearish mastermark. Surely only in Mear did the smithery exist to produce such a blade. But even a Mearish mastersmith might well have been awestruck by such workmanship, unable to reproduce it or even to say exactly how it had been done.

Zanja said shakily, “It is—an artwork. I’ve never seen its like.” She returned the magnificent blade to Norina, who sheathed it absently, seeming preoccupied with a Truthken’s arcane calculation.

Karis said, “Perhaps you’ll accept a blade like it, as a poor substitute for the friendship we’ll never have.”

Only then did Zanja realize whose vision the beautiful blade embodied, and whose hand had held the hammer that folded that bright molten blade into its final form. “I’ll send it to you by mid-winter,” Karis said. “Have you had enough sunshine? I think I might be feeling cold.”

Norina’s bundle contained bread and ham and a pair of new boots that fit Zanja as though they were made for her, though in fact they had been made for Norina. Norina sent J’han away to attend a difficult birth she had heard about while in Leston, and the three of them had a surprisingly peaceable day. Zanja slept and ate for most of it, and once when she awakened upon the kitchen hearth she found herself covered by the sheepskin jerkin, which smelled, she realized now, of coal smoke and the forge. Karis and Norina were chopping vegetables for a ham stew and discussing a book of political philosophy. Norina said something that Zanja could not understand, and Karis burst out laughing and put her arm around her. They stood so for a while, leaning against each other, silent, mysteriously united by ideas, knowledge, and experiences that Zanja did not, and could not share.

The na’Tarweins were infamous for their jealousies, but Zanja had so far managed to avoid that well-worn path. It seemed intolerable that Karis would leave, that Zanja would spend the winter here with this admirable but unlikeable woman, that these few hours she’d spent with Karis were all she would ever have. Norina was the barrier that stood between them. Unfortunately, thanks to the oath that Zanja had sworn to Karis, that barrier was permanent.

Zanja would have to make a life for herself alone, on the other side of this barren winter. But now she might steal a few more moments with Karis before sunset and smoke took her away, and so she sat up and asked Karis to explain what philosophy was, and what it was good for. That question took the rest of the day for Karis to answer. The sun set too soon.

Thus ended their brief and strange two-day friendship, for the next morning’s brief and inarticulate good-byes hardly counted as anything more than empty ritual.

Part Two: Fire Night

Without courage, there would be no will to know.

Without the will to know, there would be no knowledge.

Without knowledge, there would be no language.

Without language, there would be no community.

—
Mackapee’s
Principles for Community

Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be silenced. Who sympathizes with the enemy must lose their heart. Who dreams of peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged the land will be eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.

—
Mabin’s
Warfare

When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and it was I who chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy first met me, I was a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as her friend. So all people are glyphs, and every understanding comes from choice.

—
Medric’s
History of My Father’s People

Chapter 7

Emil habitually wintered in a shepherd’s cottage in the highlands, a place so solitary and forbidding that he rarely saw another living being, animal or human, between first snow and spring thaw. The cold became tiring, but he never grew weary of the solitude or the silence. When weather permitted, he would walk on snowshoes from one end of the highland to the other, and the austere and terrible beauty of that wild land would take root, and create in him a serenity all the more precious because he knew from experience how ephemeral and fleeting it would prove, come spring. When the wind howled and the falling snow made of the vast expanses a small and restless blank, he stayed indoors and read yet again by candlelight the words of the great Shaftali philosophers until whole passages became as palpable to him as a single word, a single thought. Every moment, every breath of frigid air, every flicker of candle and crackle of ice became precious. For most of the year his life belonged to the Law, but in winter, his life was his.

Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as clear as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home, he heard the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.

Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting flowering peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling of the skin, made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the narrow from the direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he had come to trust his small talent for prescience, which never told him very much, but told it dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he turned back to his pea planting until the travelers had ridden close enough to talk to. The horses were tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely had scarcely been passable. One rider looked cross; the other’s face was a closed door.

“Emil Paladin?” said the cross one. “I am Norina Truthken.”

He bowed to her in the old fashion, though he was not happy that the solitude of his last precious days had been disturbed.

The riders dismounted, and it was the silent one that Emil watched. Plain farmer’s clothing could not obscure her exotic appearance: the dark coloring and the sharp angles of her face. She moved with the fluidity and precision of a blade fighter, who had learned her skills in a place where pistols and gunpowder had not yet eliminated all the beauty and skill from combat. She looked up to meet his gaze with her own: eyes black as night, with a flame in their centers.

“By Shaftal!” Emil reached to clasp hand. “I think I remember your name. Zanja, am I right? When I heard about the Ashawala’i, I wondered what had become of you.”

“I guess they did make you a commander,” she said.

“I’m afraid they did. And all these years I have been making the best of it.” He gazed at her, feeling the distance from which she observed him, remembering the reserved but talented young woman she had been. She would be over thirty now, and for fifteen years her intelligence had been sharpened by bitter experience. He said, “I hope you have come to join my company.”

“Yes, sir,” she said impassively. Her face held back everything. Emil invited them to settle their horses and come in for tea.

Once they were all seated in the kitchen, with the Truthken choosing a chair and the tribal woman sitting on her heels, he poured tea from his small porcelain teapot and sliced bread fresh from the oven, on which they melted slices of midlands cheese produced from Norina’s saddlebag. Though the two women had certainly been traveling together for days, they exchanged not a word with each other. A silent journey it must have been.

Norina said, “Well, Commander, I see I need not explain who Zanja is. I have been charged with finding a place for her among the Paladins, and your company was suggested.”

“They say that a few survivors of the initial attack all but wiped out a battalion,” Emil said to Zanja.

“No, but seventeen of us did kill some sixty Sainnites.”

“It is more than my company has killed in six years.”

Her somber expression cracked away a bit. “Paladin techniques work well in the mountains.”

Emil sat back to think and sip his tea, and finally brought himself to say, reluctantly, “You will not have an easy time of it in South Hill, and perhaps you would be better off in one of the northern units, where they are more accustomed to the sight of northern tribesmen.”

“I am accustomed to being a stranger.”

Norina added, “She is too well known in the north.”

“Well, then.”

Norina took a money pouch from inside her doublet. “She has no family to support her.” She handed the pouch to Emil, who had not felt such a weight of funds in many a year. “A sponsor,” she explained, though it explained little. Where would a solitary tribal woman find herself a sponsor in such uncertain times?”

“This has been a day of many surprises,” he said. The cups of the traveling porcelain teaset were very small, so he refilled them with the rare and expensive green tea. Though no one conducted hospitality rituals anymore, Zanja courteously complimented the tea’s fragrance and flavor, leaving him with the impression that she could have fulfilled her role in the entire ceremony, uncoached, without missing a step. She was not a warm woman, he thought, at least not on the surface. But oh, she was careful, and, like him, she belonged in another world. He fingered his right earlobe, where once had dangled two gold earrings that he had dropped into a well many years ago. The holes had since closed, but the scar tissue remained.

Zanja sat on the floor of the cramped attic, beside a small window that let in a gray, rain-smeared light onto the page of her book. What with the rain and the thaw, sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was melting. The letters on the page pushed and shoved against each other like people on market day. They gave up their secrets only with much coaxing and study. Then, they offended her first by ranting at her and then by cozening her

She leafed through the pages of
Warfare
. In the kitchen directly beneath her, where Emil also read while waiting for the rain to end, she heard him add a log to the fire. On a day like this, the Ashawala’i would sit around the clanhouses, mending their clothes, sharpening their tools, and telling stories. She wished Emil had told her stories, rather than handing her this battered book, with its disembodied demands and disguised angers. Mabin’s
Warfare
, Emil had said, was the one thing held in common by all the members of South Hill Company. It was a language, philosophy, and history all in one. She needed to know it.

Nevertheless, a rainy day called for a story. Zanja turned the pages until a particularly worn page of the book caught her eye. “The Fall of the House of Lilterwess,” she read, sounding the letters out loud. Though she had learned her letters as a child, during the year she lived with a Shaftali farm family, she had not needed to read very much since then. The book also made occasional use of glyphs, which she could not interpret at all.

She moved the book closer to the cracked windowpane and read out loud:

“When Harald G’deon died, I had been sitting at the head of the Lilterwess Council for three years. It had been considered strange, and even unheard of for a Paladin to head the Council, but the majority of the council members had decided a warrior should lead in times of war.

“Unfortunately, Harald G’deon disagreed with the majority. It is commonly known that the G’deon and I, though we accorded each other a great respect, never were at peace with each other. It is still true that when my thoughts are in argument with themselves it is his implacable voice I hear. He was too great-hearted a man, for he could not believe that the Sainnites meant to harm us. While I argued and he remained unconvinced, the council sat paralyzed and the Sainnites continued to invade our shores. While the G’deon lay dying over a period of many months, he refused to the last to name a successor. So the great succession of G’deons, who for ten generations have protected and made fertile the land of Shaftal, arbitrarily and inexplicably ended, and no one will ever understand why—least of all myself. Harald G’deon at the very least, committed a dreadful error. Some even call it a betrayal.”

As Zanja read, she realized that she was imagining Mabin, who she had only met the one time, speaking these words. On the page, they seemed neutral and harmless, but speaking them aloud revealed the concealed anger and sarcasm. Harald had betrayed Shaftal with his naive obstinacy, according to Mabin. Zanja, disinclined to be generous to a woman she had disliked on sight, suspected that Mabin might be in the habit of considering stupid the things that she merely did not understand.

She continued to read, listening closely to herself now, and hearing how skeptically and ungenerously she interpreted Mabin’s revered text. “The very night of Harald G’deon’s death, the Sainnites attacked the House of Lilterwess. Harald G’deon must have known of the Sainnites’ secret encirclement of our sacred home, but he died without the least word of warning that might have spared us all the years of sorrow which have followed. That night, many of us lay wakeful, fearful for the future. The Lilterwess council never did sleep at all, but sat with our advisors and scribes, free at last to chart a new future for Shaftal. At dawn we planned to gather the Paladins and ride forth against the invaders.

“But the night was not even half over when an alarm bell began to ring. Some wakeful soul—commonly believed to have been Harald G’deon’s companion, Dinal Paladin—must have discovered the breached gate or the assassinated guards. She was certainly the first to die that night, but not before her courage made it possible for some of us, at least, to escape by a secret way. As I stood on a far hilltop that terrible dawn and watched the smoke of destruction blur the sun, I and my companions had much cause to wonder for what purpose we had been spared, while our friends, lovers, children, and whole history were destroyed before our eyes.