Fire Logic (41 page)

“Karis has returned to earth.”

Mabin struck her across the face. “The truth!”

Zanja tasted blood. She said thickly, “Karis has delivered herself to the smoke.”

Mabin sat back on her heels, rigid with frustration. “She makes no sense.”

“There’s no one else here,” one of her companions said. “We’ve searched all along the beach. No horses, no equipment, no nothing. Just the two of them, and Annis is dead.”

Mabin hissed in her breath, and then released it. “If I’d known it was Annis—Well, there’s no help for it now. So long as we’ve got this one, we’ve as good as got the one I want. We’ll have to settle for that.”

“This one seems to be newly injured. Broken ribs, it looks like, and—” Zanja felt her injured arm lifted and examined. “She was cut defending herself, with healer’s stitches closing up the wound. A nice, clean job of it.”

“A healer, and someone with a nasty temper—that would be Norina and her consort. No doubt there’s been a disagreement and Norina has taken off with Karis.” Mabin fell silent a moment, and then she muttered, “Shaftal, what have I done to deserve this?”

Zanja was tired to the bone, and tired to the heart. She shut her eyes and did not open them again until her captors lifted her onto the litter they had made for her, and the pain began again. The Paladins had to step over Annis’s body as they carried Zanja out into the cold night. And Karis, Karis also would soon be dead.

Chapter 25

Emil, Medric, and J’han traveled through the afternoon and across the dark span of the night as though demons were after them. “I think we’re close now,” Medric said, sometime after dawn. Soon afterwards, they spotted the white flag lying limp in the half light: Karis’s shirt, they realized when they had drawn near, tied to a tree branch by the sleeves. They untied it and soon had found their way into a hollow of earth that was cupped like the palm of a giant hand. There in the center Karis lay in the wet grass. Norina, whose long intimacy with Karis must have helped her to find her first, lay beside her, embracing her naked body with her own.

“She’s too cold,” she said.

Emil lay down on Karis’s other side and they sandwiched her between them. After J’han had listened to Karis’s heart, he covered her with blankets, and sat upon a stone with his head in his hands, as though he could not bring himself to speak. The Truthken, though, began to weep. Having emptied herself of anger, Emil thought, now only grief remained. She had indeed loved Karis, however badly she might have done it.

Emil held Karis tightly, as though to keep her from falling. Her powerful muscles lay limp and cold; her heartbeat was intangible, the motion of her breath so weak it seemed illusory. She’d bitten her mouth, battered her hands, scraped her skin raw upon the stones, in a terrible, solitary agony that had mercifully ended now. She would die without ever opening her eyes again. The healer did not have to say it out loud.

Norina sat up. Her hair was plastered down with water and mud, her face pale with exhaustion beneath the grime of hard travel. “J’han, what can we do?”

“Only smoke could save her,” J’han said.

The Truthken shuddered, as though she’d been cut with a blade. “I have some smoke,” she said. “Ten years I’ve carried it with me, as a surety.”

J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”

“But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of them made any move to stop her.

J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”

Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.

Norina wiped a sleeve across her eyes as though to clear a fog, and looked at him in that way which makes even the bravest warrior flinch back from a Truthken’s stare. “By the land, what are you?” she said softly.

Medric did not flinch under her gaze.

She said, as quietly as before, “Better people than I have given you their trust. Tell me what you see.”

“Madam Truthken, when you destroyed that smoke, I saw you close a door. And I saw another door open. There is no one in this land who knows Karis like you know her. So tell me, why did she take off her clothes?”

“Even though Karis cannot feel the wisdom of her flesh, there’s times she knows exactly what she needs to do. I suppose it is earth logic.”

“So wouldn’t it be even more logical if she lay on soil rather than grass?”

Norina began pulling up great handfuls of grass by the roots. J’han and Medric helped her ,and by the time the sun had risen, they had cleared a patch big enough to lay Karis upon with her skin pressed the damp black earth.

“It looks like a grave,” Norina said.

“But it is a garden.” Medric’s eyes had seemed glazed with sleeplessness and sorrow, but he was, Emil realized suddenly, in the midst of a waking vision.

Emil said, “Medric, what should we do now?”

“Plant her,” Medric said. “Plant her so she will grow.”

Emil went creeping through the nearby brush until he managed to kill a couple of heavy ground birds with some lucky shots. Plucking and cleaning the birds took nearly as long as hunting them had, and then he dug up some roots that would make a poor substitute for potatoes, and picked greens. He returned with his heavy gathering bag to find that nothing much had changed. J’han had dosed Medric with a sleeping draught to stop his hallucinations, and Medric slept, pale and exhausted even in sleep, his face still creasing sometimes with worry or fear. J’han, a botanist like all healers, had collected a pile of strengthening herbs. Norina knelt at Karis’s side like a mud-covered statue, watching her breathe. Karis, except for her face, was covered with a blanket of soil that steamed now in the warm afternoon sun. She had not died yet, and that was surprising.

Emil filled his pot with the fowl and the roots and set it on the fire to stew, then went off again to gather wood and fill their canteens. Normally, all the walking and riding and worrying would have crippled him by now, but when Karis laid her hands upon his knee she had repaired much more than that one badly-healed old injury. He had returned to their camp, and was stirring the pot that had started to simmer, when he heard Norina say in a voice destroyed by weeping, “Karis.”

Emil feared what he would see, but what he saw was that the soil had cracked over Karis’s chest, and those cracks widened and narrowed in rhythm with her deep breaths. Karis lay quiet, eyes open, gazing at Norina with an expression Emil would not have liked to have directed at him. She turned her face away and Norina sat back, as if she had been hit.

J’han scraped away the earth so he could listen to Karis’s heart. He said, “Well, Karis, it seems your heart wants to keep beating.”

He put his head near hers, for she seemed to have spoken. “Emil, she’s asking for you.”

Emil went to kneel beside her. Her voice was just a whisper, like a sheet of paper being torn. “Zanja,” she said.

“We left her in the cave by Otter Lake. She and Norina had a fight and she was unable to travel.”

On Karis’s other side, Norina covered her face with her hands. Zanja’s blood still spattered her shirt.

Karis opened her mouth again, and the tearing paper sound resolved itself into a word: “No,” or perhaps, “I know.” Then she said, “Where is she?”

Emil gazed at her, baffled. Norina dropped her hands and said, “Karis, I swear I didn’t kill her.”

Karis did not look at her or seem to have heard her.

“She is alive,” Emil said. “She was bitterly angry at Norina and desperately worried about you, last I saw her.”

Karis said very carefully, as though to a stupid child, “Where. Is. She.”

Silence, then Norina spoke, looking at Emil and not at Karis. “Something has befallen Zanja. Karis cannot perceive her presence.”

“What!” Emil leapt to his feet.

“I will accompany you. I won’t anger her any longer with my presence.”

J’han began to protest, but stopped himself and said in exasperation, “There’s no point in even talking to you. Emil, if I give you some powders, will you find a way to make her take them? Slip them into her drinking water if you have to. She has not even rested since giving birth, and seems determined to kill herself.”

“I’ll take your powders,” Norina said. She stood up and began to gather her gear, making the jerky, mechanical movements of a body strained beyond endurance.

Karis continued to gaze at Emil. Only the earth had brought her back from the threshold; she had no business being alive at all. Anger burned in the depth of her sunken eyes, and suddenly, Emil could imagine her as G’deon of Shaftal.

Emil said to her, “We’ll wait a little while for Medric to wake up, in case he can tell us what’s befallen her. We will find her. You have plenty of evidence that fire bloods do not lose what they love.”

Some time after Karis had eaten and been taken hostage by a healing sleep, Medric awoke, not with a start, as he usually did, but slowly, so that Emil, who had been doing what he could for the exhausted horses, could contrive to be beside him when he finally awoke, and place the correct pair of spectacles upon his nose. Medric said thickly, “I recognize you even as a blur.”

“I certainly should hope so,” Emil said.

Medric smiled, and so it seemed that they would survive the anger and disappointment of the last few days. Still, Emil said, as was right, “I feel as if I failed you by being angry at the choices you felt you had to make. Surely it was a terrible time for you, and my anger only made it worse.”

Medric said in some astonishment, “Are you trying to tell me that—”

“Karis is going to live, as far as J’han can tell. And, apparently, she’s going to live without smoke.”

“Oh, Shaftal,” Medric said, sitting up in a daze. “Oh, earth and sky, do you feel it? The door is swinging open, and the breeze is blowing through...”

Emil said, though he hated to dampen the young seer’s enthusiasm, “I’m so worried about Zanja and Annis that there’s not much else I can think about. Something has befallen them, Karis says, and that something can only be Mabin.”

“Karis doesn’t know what happened?”

“She can hardly talk, but Norina says that Zanja is beyond Karis’s ken.”

“Well, that puts her over water then, doesn’t it? It seems obvious enough.” He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

It had not been at all obvious to Emil, but, remembering Karis’s discomfort around water, it began to make a kind of sense. It was said that Shaftal is the G’deon’s flesh and bone, and nothing happens between ocean and mountain that the G’deon does not feel. If Karis could not feel Zanja, alive or dead, then it could only mean Zanja was no longer in physical contact with the earth. He said, “So she’s somewhere on the river.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Medric, my dear, if Karis ever needed a seer beside her, now is the time. I’ll find Zanja without your help. You know I can. And I have Norina, who is the equivalent of an entire battalion.”

“But it’s an awfully big river.”

“You forget about our friends the Otter People. Surely the water witch will know what’s happened on his river.” Emil kissed Medric, not too hastily, and then he kissed him again. Before he could stand up, he had to disentangle himself from the fist gripped in his hair. For the first time in days, it was not just weariness that made him so dizzy.

And so the next day Emil and Norina found the empty cave and fresh blood splashed across the stones, and then the Otter People came and took them to the island, where they showed them Annis’s body. They had laid her in a little boat with her knees drawn up to her chest like an infant curled in the womb, and they had filled her boat with journey gifts: a net and fishing spear, tiny people of twisted reed to accompany her, a bottle of good spring water, a supply of dried fish, and many small items of great value: knives and beads and pieces of worked fishskin, the kind of gifts that are given to a beloved friend when bidding her good-by. At sunset they all escorted Annis across the lake to the river outlet, and they let her boat go and watched until she’d slipped out of sight. They uttered encouraging shouts to send her on her journey, but many of the people seemed devastated with grief. They’d loved her more, and better, than her family ever had.

Emil had seen many a Paladin killed or maimed, but always had been able to explain the death as having served a cause. This death could only be explained as a betrayal. When he wept for Annis, he wept also for himself, for an entire adulthood spent serving under the command of a leader who would kill an innocent like Annis simply for being in the way.

Emil understood perhaps three dozen words of the Otter People’s language, which was not enough to ask the question he needed to ask. But the old water witch was dismayed by the terrible, sudden violence that had occurred on the shores of his lake, and told what had happened using story dolls, like the little reed poppets that had accompanied Annis on her last journey. The doll that had Zanja’s long hair was in a boat two day’s journey to the east of Otter Lake.

Emil and Norina left at dawn to journey to the Paladin garrison where all that remained of the old traditions of Shaftal were preserved, all except the traditions of honor and open-handed generosity. These traditions were not even mentioned in the letter of the Law, but without them the Law was just a mindless formula. Emil had dared to read a little of the Mackapee manuscript before he carefully put it away in a mouse-proof chest, in a dry attic, in a stone building unlikely to burn down. And what he’d read there was the spirit of a man who valued change. “The peaceful speech of strangers transforms the world,” Mackapee had written in his crabbed handwriting. If Emil had laid eyes on the manuscript fifteen years before, he’d have hurried past those words, looking for more subtle revelations, words to argue about in the university.