Fire Logic (33 page)

“Stop ringing the cursed bell,” the woman said, holding her ears. “The town’s children are asleep.”

Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even jumped at the noise of the ringing.

“And come back in the morning,” the woman said. “You can sleep by the road there. There’s a pump so you can water your horse.”

“I’ll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door.”

The woman said dryly, “This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here.”

She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, “Do you know Karis? Do you know her best work? Look here!” She thrust her dagger through the gate’s bars. “She doesn’t give these blades to many people, does she? For pity’s sake, look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!”

The woman took the dagger from Zanja’s hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. “You do have a fine blade,” she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at the bird on Zanja’s shoulder. “And a strange pet.”

“Mardeth,” the raven said, the first word he’d spoken in many days. “Help her.”

“Shaftal’s Name!” The women snatched up the key at her waist and unlocked the gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. “You’re not the one I expected,” Mardeth said.

“I’m Zanja. Norina’s pregnant.”

“Well, blessings upon her,” Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then stepped forward to take Homely’s reins. “You’ve had a bad time of it. Come in and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house. You’ll be needing your strength, won’t you.”

Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an explanation. It wasn’t until she sat in the woman’s kitchen with the teakettle starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, but she made herself eat instead. She’d be needing her strength, Mardeth had said.

Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. “Your horse isn’t in too bad shape. Leave him with me tonight, and I’ll have him shod in the morning. Looks like you’ve been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?”

“I’ve got enough for the shoeing.”

“As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I’ll send around to the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were getting ready to send out some people ourselves. It’s taken us this long to figure out that she’s not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere. Six days we’ve been scouring the countryside. What’s the matter with you?”

Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman’s dog to barking. “She’s disappeared?”

“Yes, of course she’s disappeared. What else are you here for?”

“The raven couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill.”

“Well now that’s odd,” the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced restlessly along the back of a chair. “Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing about elemental ways, but they say a witch’s familiar knows everything she knows, and if the raven doesn’t know anything what does that mean, I wonder?”

Mardeth rousted up a neighbor to let them out the gate and keep an eye on it while she was gone. “Lynton and Dominy live up there a ways.” She pointed into the nearby hills. “Karis has lived with them, oh, for some years. There’s some trees up there, and a bit of a spring, and it seems to make her happy.”

As they hurried up the steep, scrupulously maintained road, Mardeth told Zanja how it had happened that Karis disappeared in the middle of the night, but no one realized anything was amiss until the next evening, when the forge master finally came looking for her at her house. They had wasted all the time since then trying to find her in the environs of Meartown, having assumed that she had come to harm somehow on one of her wanderings. That her harm might have come in the form of a human being seemed not to have occurred to any of them until finally one of the two men noticed a broken door latch in Karis’ room. “In all the years they’ve known her,” Mardeth said, “She’s never broken anything. She can be clumsy as an ox, but she’s never even cracked a teacup. And it was a good, strong, Mearish latch. No, someone must have broken it to get into her room from outside. But why would anyone wish to do her harm? Especially someone from around here?”

She glanced at Zanja and realized she was weeping. “Now then,” she said awkwardly. “I’m sure we’ll find her.”

Something about the image of Karis blundering around a kitchen with a fragile teacup in her hand had left Zanja devastated, and she could scarcely stem her tears even when they arrived at the cottage, where two aged men welcomed them in. They seemed eager when they realized Mardeth was at their door, perhaps even hopeful that she brought good news. But when they saw Zanja’s face, they fell to weeping themselves. “She’s dead, is she?” said one.

“Now calm down, you,” Mardeth snapped. “We know nothing at all, and the stones themselves would defend her from harm. Put on the kettle there, Dominy. This one’s just in tears because she didn’t know until now what had happened. She’ll be all right in a minute, when it’s done sinking in. Now all of you sit down and I’ll make the tea.”

“No, I want to see her room,” Zanja said. Lynton took her down the dark hall through a wide door at the end, and Zanja stood there in the doorway to Karis’ bedroom as the man hurried to light a couple of lamps. The flames illuminated a high, raftered ceiling, high enough that even Karis would not have to worry about banging her head on it, and several pieces of oversized furniture: a chair, a work table piled with books and debris, a settle by the fireplace, a huge, high bed with the linens in disarray, and a double door constructed almost entirely of glass that looked out upon a garden. The old man swung the doors open and showed Zanja the broken latch.

“Was her room in such a mess when you found it? The bed and such?”

The old man shrugged. “No different from usual. We’d come in every few days and clean for her, not that she noticed. She never had time for tidying up, and never lost anything, anyway.”

Zanja sat on the settle. She was learning more about Karis now that she was missing than she’d ever learned in her presence. “Would you leave me alone, please?”

“Of course. Madam.” He touched his forehead, an old fashioned gesture of respect rarely seen these days. Not only had they all assumed she was a member of the Lilterwess like Norina, but he, at least, apparently assumed she was a ranking member. He left the room without another word.

The room was still imbued with Karis’ presence. The raven, who had come in with her, flew to a claw-scarred chair back near one of the windows and fluffed up his feathers sleepily. Faintly, Zanja could hear voices in the kitchen, and the sound of water being poured for tea. She picked up a book from the floor, and spelled out its title:
Principles of Clarity
. Some of its pages were bent, as though Karis had tossed it impatiently aside. A small pot on the hearth contained a hardened, resinous substance - hide glue, Zanja thought, which would soften when warmed, and harden again when taken off the fire.

Zanja stood up abruptly, and began methodically searching the room. In the trunk were more books and a few articles of clothing, some clean and roughly mended, some dirty and stinking of the forge and Karis’ sweat. The sheepskin jerkin that Karis had been wearing when they first met lay in there, and several pairs of socks, badly darned. The men who looked after Karis were not much good with a needle, apparently.

Small models of machinery, constructed of slips of wood and amber dabs of glue, cluttered the tabletop. A book lay open to a page of diagrams of water wheels, but this was no grain mill Karis had been designing. Zanja turned one of the miniature wheels, and watched it operate a thing like a hammer. Another one operated a bellows, of the kind used in the forge. Karis’ model was so precise that it even blew little, rhythmic puffs of air.

Zanja hunted through the room, but though she found Karis’ belt on the floor, with sheathed knife, tin cup and various small tools still dangling from it, she did not find pipe or smoke purse. Zanja checked for loose boards in the floor, felt the stones of the wall, and finally found Karis’ hiding place in the chimney, where a small stone had cracked loose from its mortar. A wooden box was crammed into the hollow behind it and could only be worked loose with great effort. At last Zanja slid open the lid and folded back the oilcloth covering; it was filled to the top with small cubes of smoke, at least half a year’s supply. Since Karis’s kidnappers had not hunted for this supply, they must have brought some with them. Surely a woman who could unlock doors with a touch would easily escape, unless her captors kept her continuously under smoke. She was being poisoned three or even four times a day.

Now Karis would be—had already become—like all the other smoke users. Something was wrong, the raven said, and then he began, inexorably, to become ordinary. The evidence had lain before Zanja all along. Karis was not dead yet, but she might as well be dead.

Zanja began to think again: cold, hard thoughts. She took out her glyph cards and picked out the four glyphs which, among other things, symbolize the four directions. Ten times in a row she plucked the same card from the four in her hand, the one with the glyph that meant “north.”

She fell asleep on Karis’ bed. One of the men came in later, to take the boots off her feet and tuck a blanket around her against the chill. She tried to say something to him about the morning, but he hushed her, saying, “We’ll take care of everything.” One by one, he blew out the lamps.

Chapter 22

They brought Homely to her at dawn. He had bitten the man who tried to ride him, and so they led him to her, ignominiously tethered behind a stolid cart horse. His hooves were newly shod, his tack and all Zanja’s gear refurbished, and his saddlebags were filled with food. “Is the blacksmith all right?” Zanja asked Mardeth.

“Oh, he’s used to temperamental horses.”

Homely bared his teeth at Zanja, and she had to grab the raven by the feet to keep from taking flight at the sight of all the people who had come to see her off, but horse and raven both calmed down once she was mounted. Mardeth handed her a money pouch, and Dominy gave her sweet rolls and boiled eggs to eat as she rode. Two or three dozen other people had made the trek to the hollow for no other purpose, it seemed, than to stand around and look at her. Mardeth murmured that some of them stood ready to accompany Zanja, if she wanted them.

“It’s not numbers I need,” Zanja said, though she would have given almost anything to have Ransel, or Emil, or even Norina, at her side. As she rode away, a chorus of good wishes shouted after her. When she looked back, the townsfolk all stood in a forlorn huddle around the two old men, who were still waving their red kerchiefs. Ten years they had looked after Karis, as much as she would let anyone look after her. “Idiots,” Zanja muttered. She needed someone to rage at.

At noon, the raven spoke. “Pendant,” he said.

Zanja had been riding cross country, following whatever animal trails and streambeds she could find that went more or less northward. She had recently stumbled onto a deeply rutted dirt road. While the horse rested, Zanja searched up and down the stretch of road, sometimes kneeling in the muck that remained from a recent rain storm. Finally, she found it, buried in the mud: the pendant of green stone that she had given Karis beside the river in Strongbridge. A torn piece of green ribbon trailed from it as she pulled it out of the mud. Karis must have torn the ribbon that first dawn, when she started to come out from under smoke, and realized something was wrong, before her kidnappers forced her to smoke again. That was the dawn that the raven had flown to Zanja with his dreadful message.

“You’re watching, aren’t you Karis?” Zanja said, after she had started on her way again, with the raven on her shoulder. “I can’t feel you any more, but at least sometimes you still see me through the raven. I must seem very far away to you, just as you seem to me. Can you hear me now?”

“Yes,” the raven said.

“Can you tell me where you are?”

“Mabin,” the raven said.

“Mabin? Has she been captured also?”

The raven looked at her blankly, and said nothing more.

The countryside remained treeless and desolate, and the road she followed northward seemed to go nowhere, though wagons traveled it often enough to keep the grass from growing in the ruts. Norina’s maps showed empty, un-annotated countryside.

One morning, as Zanja saddled her horse behind the knoll where she had spent the night, a single rider loped past. The only remarkable thing about him was his horse, a luxury Zanja could not have afforded if she hadn’t been given money so generously by friends and by strangers. She continued more cautiously, traveling far to one side of the road rather than upon it. Here and there were sudden fingers of rock pointing at the sky. She noticed, atop one of these, a watchkeep huddled in the shade of a lean-to that looked almost like a pile of brush, if one didn’t look too closely. Zanja slipped past in the countryside behind him, where the lean-to blocked his view, and from there she could see the little bell tower upon which he could ring his alarm.