Fire Logic (14 page)

“Now our hearts, first stunned by the magnitude of our defeat, then ripped apart with grief and rage, have become cold and hard as stone. The Law failed us, we realize now, because it made us gentle. It relied upon a decency at the heart of every community, the willingness of each person in Shaftal to treat the next with generosity and understanding. When strangers came who were estranged from that decency, our kindness became our weakness.

“Therefore there is no longer a place in this war for acts of mercy. Lest we balk at this grim truth, let us always remember that this is a new Shaftal, a Shaftal created by the Sainnites. This is the land they wanted. Why should we suffer our pains while they become rich and fat from our labors? It is they who have created this new Shaftal. Let them pay the price.”

Zanja lay down the book, and noted distantly that it had stopped raining. Oddly, Mabin’s last bitter statements had caused her to think not of the Sainnites who had killed her people and who she had and would continue to kill in return, but of Karis. Nowhere did Karis appear in Mabin’s account, except, perhaps, in the reference to unnamed companions. Yet she had been there, she and Norina, two precious talents saved from the destruction.

Zanja looked out the small window at the darkening sky, but what she saw was Karis, apparently a prisoner, possibly out of her mind with smoke, being walked by Norina to the wagon. She thought of the old suicide scars on Karis’s wrists. Was it simple dislike that made Zanja want to make Mabin the source of Karis’s misery, or was it fire logic?

Throughout the cold winter and into the harsh early spring, Zanja had scarcely thought of Karis. Karis had sent the artful blades she had promised as a poor substitute for friendship, and Zanja had accepted them. Now, she was a Paladin, and soon would wage war against the destroyers of her people. Still, thinking of Karis now, Zanja felt a restlessness, and a haunting loss. Why? she asked herself, and could not think of an answer.

She stood up, remembering almost too late to duck the low ceiling, and climbed down the ladder. In the kitchen, a pot of saltmeat stew bubbled on the hearth, and Emil darned a sock by the dim light of the fire. His supply of lamp oil was exhausted, he had told her, and the last of his candles had been eaten by mice. It was when he sat working in the dark like this, refurbishing his gear for the hard season ahead, that he seemed most willing to talk.

He said to her now as she knelt upon the hearth, “What do you think of Mabin’s
Warfare
?”

“I notice she does not dwell much on heroism.”

“She always argued that we would win through intelligence rather than bravery.”

“And are we winning?”

“We merely resist. We keep the Sainnites from becoming comfortable, and we keep the people of Shaftal from forgetting that they used to be free. We outnumber the Sainnites, of course, but their advantage over us is too great.”

“I have studied the Sainnites,” Zanja said, “And I cannot see their advantages.”

“They can make their living by stealing food from farmers—taxing them, they call it—while the people of Shaftal must either work or starve. To fight, as you and I will fight, is a costly luxury to people who live on the edge of hunger. South Hill Company survives on charity: the leavings of the already depleted harvest. So we often go hungry, while the Sainnites eat the fat of the land. That is their advantage.”

Emil stitched away at the heel of his sock for some time. “I have not discouraged you?”

“No,” Zanja said, thinking rather distantly about how her loss had left her with nothing to be discouraged over.

Emil cut himself another length of yarn. The yarn was a sorry sight, gray and lumpy with weed seeds, and the famous weavers of Zanja’s extinct people would have sneered at it. Emil had spun it himself, probably, out of wool gleaned from a thorn bush, with a spindle cobbled together from a rock and a stick. He was not, she had noticed, ashamed to do things badly, so long as they got done. He glanced down at her, where she sat upon the stone hearth. “You don’t like furniture.”

“It just seems unnecessary.”

Emil looked amused. “I think the rain is done for now. What do you say, shall we spend one more day here, or shall we leave tomorrow and slog our way through the mud?”

“Truthfully, my aimlessness wearies me more than any walk in the mud will.”

“And the mud can’t be avoided anyway, this time of year. Well then. Let’s grease our boots and pack our bags.”

Outside of Meartown, no one knew whose invention had made the Meartown pistols more accurate and reliable than those of the Sainnites. Years ago, Karis had determined that the pistol ball rattled about in the barrel when the gunpowder exploded, making its trajectory unpredictable. It was she who told the metalsmiths how they could make the pistol ball spin instead, by cutting spiral grooves on the inside of the barrel. Yet Karis had refused to make a gun or any part of a gun. She refused to even make a fighting blade, though the single dagger she forged long ago for Norina had become famous over the years, and connoisseurs of weaponry frequently appeared at fairs or even in Meartown itself, insisting that someone there could make a blade of rustless, folded metal that never lost its edge.

It was not only this refusal to profit from her own genius that baffled Karis’s fellow metalsmiths. Though her apprenticeship was long ended, she had never been able to choose a glyph to be her mastermark. Even though she had been relentlessly educated, the glyphic syntax of metaphor and implication had resisted her every attempt to comprehend it. She was always too honest to engage in a purely mechanical exercise, and so when faced with the mechanical exercise of choosing a glyph to act as her mark of certification, she could not do it.

Without a mastermark she could not be a master smith. So Karis never opened a smithy of her own, and never took apprentices, and never went to stand behind her work at major fairs, and never dressed in silk or soaked her hands to leech out the soot ground into her skin. She kept working where she was, and her old master paid her five times an apprentice’s wage to keep her from going somewhere else.

When the word got out in early winter that she was making a blade, the work of Meartown practically came to a standstill, as the mastersmiths of Meartown sent all their best apprentices to learn Karis’s secret.

Metalsmithing, a dramatic and dangerous profession, was never practiced in solitude, especially not in Meartown. But Karis would rather have made Zanja’s blades in private, for she engaged in a private conversation as she shaped them. She could have made a model of Zanja’s right hand, including the blood vessels and the nerve endings, but to fit the blade to the hand was the easy part; it was the less tangible matters that preoccupied Karis to the point that she forgot her rapt audience and lost all track of time. She had never seen Zanja in her strength. Forging a blade to match Zanja’s fighting style when Karis’s only information came from an intimate knowledge of Zanja’s wasted muscles and compact skeletal structure was a matter of the purest kind of speculation.

People fight the way they talk, Norina had said once, and so Karis made a blade for a gracious and graceful fighter whose manners were the velvet that covered the steel. Zanja would win by talent and persistence, not by power, so Karis gave the blade an edge that would slip in and out on the moment of inspiration and be gone before the recipient of that moment could know that he was dead. It was indeed an artist’s blade, and that worried Karis. She realized as she forged it that if Zanja fought the way she talked she didn’t belong in a war at all.

Karis loved the work of making the dagger and its companion knife, but hated the aftermath. A half dozen people were injured trying to imitate her methods, and many others demanded that she show them again how to do one thing or another, and explain it this time. She couldn’t have explained what she was doing even if she had been willing to do the demonstration. For a while her relationships with nearly half the townfolk were in disarray, and various people had to go around reminding other people that she wasn’t like the rest of them.

Later, when the blades had been delivered, Norina admitted that when Zanja unwrapped them she had nearly been in tears. She admitted that Zanja fought as if she were dancing, and that it was a beautiful but not completely impractical performance.

Now, with the spring mud season not even half over, Norina had come to visit. Her face was familiar in Meartown, and the people there at least vaguely understood her role as Karis’s protector. The rain prevented them from walking the barren heath as they usually did, so Karis left the forge to spend the day in a tavern instead, and the metalsmiths who constantly sought her advice soon began to find her there. After one of these interruptions during which Karis solved a problem with a new kind of door latch that the smith was inventing, Norina commented, “Meartown’s reputation has become practically legendary in the last ten years. While the people of this town conspire to maintain you in obscurity, the entire town has become notorious instead.”

Karis pushed away the remains of a meat pie Norina had made her eat. “For years you have been congratulating yourself for your cleverness at hiding me here, ‘one talented artisan among many.’”

Norina made a face at hearing her own words quoted back at her. “Well, this year I am less pleased with myself. Perhaps the Sainnites will never come here looking for an earth witch to slaughter, but surely they must be desperate to eliminate the metalsmiths that supply the Paladins with their fine weaponry. With Meartown so famous, how could the Sainnites not know where those weapons are coming from? They will come, Karis, and when they do, I fear you will not flee.”

“And leave Meartown to face its attackers without me? Of course I will not flee.”

Norina sighed. “So I was not so clever as I thought. Now, Karis...”

“Don’t waste your breath. I can already recite your arguments in my sleep. These people have been loyal to me.”

“They admire and rely upon your skill, but would they die for you?”

“Why should they?” Karis asked.

“Exactly!”

Karis glared at Norina, exasperated. “Well then, Meartown will have to rely on the Paladins, as we always have, to keep the Sainnites away.”

“Do you know what lies between Meartown and the Sainnites?”

Karis said, “A couple of rivers, a small mountain range...”

“And fifty farmers who think they can fight.”

“And two fire bloods,” Karis said, for Norina had told her earlier that Zanja’s new commander was also a fire blood.

“And what’s that worth? Zanja may be a fire blood, but she never won a single blade match against me.” She added, grudgingly, “I suppose that Paladin commander might prove more difficult to defeat, despite his game leg.”

“You’re awfully surly,” Karis said.

“I’m pregnant.”

“I noticed.”

“It’s your fault! J’han and I have been lovers for years, but the one night you sleep under my roof...”

Karis began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Norina glared at her. “I want neither a child nor a husband, and I intended to get an abortion.”

“Yet here you sit with your belly swelling. It’s too late for an abortion now.”

“J’han wants the child.”

Norina’s blunt, strong fingers tapped the tabletop. It was rare for her to betray any sign of upset, and Karis looked into her face more closely than usual. This was her friend, reliable as steel but much less pliable. It must have been a stunning moment when Norina decided to bear the child for her lover’s sake; Karis regretted that she had missed it.

“How can I make amends? Shall I give you a painless birth?”

“I don’t know a better midwife than you. But J’han wants to be with me. I’ll go to my sister’s house when the time comes, so she can foster the child. Her youngest will be just about due for weaning, and I have already written asking her to raise my child as her own.”

Norina would not ask for money—she never did. But surely she would need some, for her family were plain fishing folk whose ability to live comfortably was unreliable at best.

“More ale?” asked the tavernkeeper. Norina grumpily waved her away.

“Did he like her?” Karis asked.

“Did who like who?”

“Did Emil like Zanja?”

“Zanja has mystery, integrity, and wasted talent. Any fire blood would like her.”

Karis wondered, not for the first time, if it would be possible to know what Truthkens know and not be cynical.

“Now stop worrying about her,” Norina said. “She’s her commander’s concern, now.”

“I don’t know why,” Karis said, “But I can’t stop worrying about her. I have no control over it.”

Norina studied Karis’s face for a long time, in that way that Truthkens have, that leaves one feeling like skin and flesh have been dispassionately peeled back from the bone. “Sometimes I get a hint,” Norina said finally, “Of why Harald G’deon all but drove Mabin insane.”

Chapter 8

For two days, Zanja and Emil walked through unnamed lands, following a river of mud, that Emil claimed was a wagontrack. Then, they turned east and traversed an uneven, rocky land until they started to pass a few desperately poor farmholds, and finally reached something resembling a cobbled road, though it was in poor repair. The road improved as they traveled, until they reached a flooded, fast-flowing river and a sturdy bridge with a bridgekeeper’s cottage on the far side. Zanja paused to get her bearings. To her north lay rising land, possibly even mountains, obscured by the lowering sky. “That’s Darton,” Emil confirmed. So Zanja placed herself on the sprawling landscape of western Shaftal, with Darton to the north, and the region of Mear to the north of that. South Hill lay on the other side of the bridge they were about to cross. To its north lay Rees, which the Sainnites had devastated last summer. North of Rees lay Damar, where almost a year ago Zanja’s horses and gear had been stolen by rogue Paladins. It seemed like a long time ago.

This southward-flowing river marked the limit of Sainnite control. Zanja said, “So the duty of South Hill Company is to prevent the Sainnites from crossing the bridge?”
“Essentially,” Emil said. As they started across the bridge, cold rain again began to fall.

They sheltered that night in a farmstead where Emil was welcomed like a beloved uncle, and was handed a bundle of letters and documents that had been accumulating for him all winter. The next day, his face was creased along its squint lines like pleated cloth, but he did not reveal to Zanja the bad news that surely had awaited him in that bundle of letters. The rain that had become sleet during the night became a downpour again by dawn, and they slogged on through mud the consistency of undercooked porridge.