Fire Logic (19 page)

Willis kept his camps in exacting order, with all the gear packed away, so it could be easily snatched up should it become necessary to flee or fight. Lately, though, the Sainnites no longer chased the Paladins into the woods, and seemed satisfied to simply disrupt their sleep, night after night. It was a policy of persecution that did not subject their own soldiers to much danger, while continuing to wear out the Paladins. Willis had sent Emil an impatient message that next time the Sainnites approached his camp, he intended to attack rather than retreat. Emil had dispatched Zanja to find out his plans in more detail.

Willis sat talking with a sharpshooter who was said to be his lover, several other opinionated and incautious people, and a couple of his brothers, who tended to repeat whatever he said as though they had thought of it themselves. Whatever Zanja’s assessment of their characters, these were seasoned and courageous fighters, and she supposed she might learn something about the value of aggression from them.

Willis spotted her and said with extraordinary joviality, “Well, well! Unfortunately, you have missed the midday meal.”

“I was delayed by being shot at in the woods.”

“That’s strange. Perhaps a lone Sainnite is out there today. Either that, or it was that spy we’ve been watching out for.”

Zanja said, “Well, I never saw who it was, but it makes no sense that someone who wants to avoid notice would have shot unnecessarily. Are you certain that it wasn’t a member of your company taking a shot at me?”

“Well, if you didn’t answer the hail—”

“No one hailed me.”

“Then it was no Paladin. We don’t shoot at our own.”

“Of course not,” Zanja said, and perhaps she might have left it at that, but the memory of the wasted afternoon rankled. “But how can I be confident that everyone in South Hill Company recognizes me as one of their own?” she asked.

She had said it quietly enough, but Willis reacted as she might have expected, with a roar calculated to make her regret having even mentioned such a possibility. “No one questions the truthfulness and honor of my people! If my man says no one answered his hail, then that is what happened!”

“No one hailed me,” she said again.

“So it wasn’t one of my people!”

“Then you have a sniper lurking in the woods, and had better beware. A solitary person could easily slip past your pickets.”

“My pickets are always watchful,” Willis said dismissively.

Mechanically, bitterly, Zanja gave him Emil’s message, and then tried to listen closely as Willis and the others explained their plan to her. She had intended to ask Willis to show her the site of his intended ambush, but now could not convince herself to remain any longer than strictly necessary. If she left now, she could reach Daye’s unit before dark.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said Daye, when Zanja had found the encampment, shortly before sunset. They were dousing the cookfires to make it harder for the Sainnites to find them in the darkness, but the stew was still hot. The evening watch was already in position; the night watch slept; the day watch played cards or dice by the fading light. Daye claimed she had nothing important to do, and sat and chatted with Zanja while she ate.

“Is Annis away?” Zanja asked.

“She’s conducting experiments again, now that she’s got more gunpowder. That child is rather excited about something, but won’t tell me what.”

Zanja ate a few mouthfuls. “I need some advice,” she finally said.

She had come to trust Daye during the months that she served under her command. Daye had been the first to congratulate her on her promotion, and to point out that now Zanja’s swift mind would prove even more important than her swift feet. Now, Daye paused in plaiting her gray hair, and looked at Zanja inquiringly.

“I think someone in Willis’s unit tried to shoot me today,” Zanja said. “And I think that Willis commanded it.”

“That man,” Daye said, apparently not much surprised, “is an ass. I’ve known him his whole life, and he has always been an ass. It’s hopeless.” In silence, she finished plaiting her hair, and Zanja cleaned out her porringer with a bit of bread.

“I’m just a stranger...” she finally began.

Daye cut her off. “You’re a smart fighter and that prescience is an asset to the company. I’ll talk to Emil.”

“I can talk to him myself.”

“No, Emil and I have a long history. I am the one who tells him the truths that are so bitter no one else dares tell them to him, and he has to listen because I’m his elder. The older I get, the blunter I get. You young people waste so much time on niceties.”

Zanja said, “I don’t want Emil to think I’ll run to him every time I have a problem rather than solving it myself.”

“Well, this is the kind of problem he needs to know about. He’s always had one good reason or another to put up with Willis, but he truly can’t endure the man. So he ties himself in knots trying to be fair, and ends up looking the other way when he shouldn’t.”

Zanja said, rather astonished, “Should you be telling me all this about my superiors?”

“What!” Daye laughed. “South Hill thrives on gossip. Fertilizer, we call it, to make the crops grow.” She added, more seriously, “When Emil told me about his decision to promote you, I could see there was more to it than simple admiration for your good sense. You and him, you seem like kinfolk to me.”

Zanja awoke from troubled sleep to the sound of a pistol shot. Her unreliable prescience had once again failed her. Shouting, she leapt out of her blankets and snatched up her dagger. Gunpowder flashed all around the encampment. She ran through a chaos of confused Paladins at the closest gunpowder flash, following the distinctive oily stink of a Sainnite cuirass. The soldier was still blinded by the flare of his own gunshot, and, before Zanja was even full awake, she had dispatched him. She did not know where she had cut him, but the smell told the tale of her sloppy work. If she survived the night, it would be in clothing as foul as a butcher’s.

Barefoot, half blind, she attacked another opponent. The two of them had come too close to killing each other before they realized they were allies. The guns flashed around them, deafening. She and her fellow Paladin screamed at each other, asking each other what to do. Then he collapsed at her feet and she stared at him stupidly. Pistol balls buzzed through the clearing.

Move or die. She dodged through the darkness and the billowing gunsmoke. How could the Sainnites keep shooting so long? In their zealousness they would surely soon be shooting each other.

She heard a metallic whistle, and the guns fell silent. By some devil’s luck—too little luck, too late—she had broken through the ring of soldiers, and now as they tightened their noose upon the trapped Paladins, she was outside of it, as helpless to save them as they were helpless to escape.

With only a dagger in her hand, she followed the tightening circle of soldiers inward. She heard a scream, and bit her own tongue. The clearing seemed filled with soldiers. She might kill one more before she herself was killed, then no one would survive to light the signal beacon, or carry a message to Emil.

She got herself under command and slipped back into the dark wood.

She had scarcely gotten her bearings when she heard a tentative bird call. The racket of battle was already falling silent and she dared not whistle back, but stumbled about until she had found a handful of others: some survivors of the evening watch, who were booted and armed and frantic with guilt, some barefoot like her, with or without weapons, several of them injured, one certain to die before the night ended.

Knowing that Zanja reported to Emil, the people who had been on watch gave her a garbled account of not having seen a bit of movement in the valley all night, until suddenly the firefight erupted. “They must have slipped out of Wilton last night. Somehow, our spies there didn’t notice. And they worked their way towards us from the north, along the rim of the valley where we couldn’t see them. That’s what we think happened.”

Zanja paid no heed, for how this horror had happened seemed irrelevant. “We need to light the beacon,” she said.

“There’s three people up there already, like always.”

“They would have lit the signal fire by now if they were still alive.”

“Shaftal’s Name!” someone said, raw voiced. “These Sainnites are devils!”

But they were too experienced to waste precious time cursing the enemies. The five that were still in condition to fight set out for the beacon hill, which pressed itself like a blunt knucklebone against the stars. But, as Zanja more than half expected, the hill crawled with Sainnites, with more arriving even as Zanja and her companions watched. It had been a well-planned attack, the Paladins bitterly told each other. The Sainnites must have attacked the beacon, the watchposts, and the encampment simultaneously, and now two-thirds of Daye’s unit was almost certainly dead.

But now the Sainnites appeared to have nothing better to do than to keep the Paladins from lighting the beacon. Zanja and her companions returned to the site of the encampment, finding it now occupied only by the sprawling dead. Daye had died fighting—“As she intended to,” said one of the survivors dully.

Zanja sorted through her trampled gear, blinded by tears, feeling as choked for breath as though she were drowning. But one part of her stood distant from her grief, coolly reminding her that she had survived worse horrors than this. Mechanically, she found and put on her boots, holstered her pistols in the belt that crossed her chest, slung a light haversack upon her back, and abandoned the rest of her gear where it lay.

“Listen,” she said to the others, who stood in an aimless, stunned group. “The Sainnites have bigger plans that this tonight, or they wouldn’t be troubling themselves to secure the beacon. We need to learn what they are doing, and then we need to run messages to Willis, Perry, and Emil. Some of us need to go to the nearest farmholds to get help for the wounded and to carry away the dead. Do any of you watchers have a spyglass?”

They all walked the short distance to the overlook, where more bodies lay. It was impossible to see much in the dark, but the column of soldiers marching briskly towards them across the valley along the east-west road would have been difficult to miss. Zanja handed back the spyglass to its owner. “I’ll carry the news to Perry and Emil,” she said, and began to run.

The pallid light of dawn was warming Zanja’s shoulders when the road began to edge its way around an appealing meadow, where anyone with any sense would break their journey to rest and water their horses, if they had them. She herself paused to fill her canteen at the brook, and then stood for a while, wasteful though it seemed to stand so quietly while disaster unfolded around her. Her thigh muscles quivered with fatigue, but surely the Sainnites also would be weary after marching all night, and even on a forced march would have to take the time to rest and eat. This meadow seemed a likely place for it.

She took herself up a gentle hillside on the far side of the road, and settled down among the dappled shadows to eat her honeycakes and fight off desire for sleep. Soon, a few outriders arrived on worn-out horses, and while the horses were being watered, the riders searched their immediate surroundings for lurkers. The bulk of the army arrived soon after: 150 soldiers, Zanja counted, all heavily laden with the kind of gear that might support a long and rigorous journey.

Perry’s encampment now lay a hour’s journey to the south. Zanja got heavily to her feet, and as soon as she had found a deerpath to follow she began to run again, which relieved her from the need for further thinking, until the path abruptly popped her into the channel of a chattering brook. On the other bank, Emil sat waiting for her. Stupid with exhaustion, she gaped at him. Two of his messengers lay under the trees nearby, apparently sleeping.

He said, “I sent a message to Perry some time ago, and I expect his entire company will arrive shortly. Have you alerted Willis and Daye?”

“Daye’s dead,” she gasped. “Attacked last night. Most of the company was killed. I was with them.” She sat down where she was, rather too quickly as her legs gave out under her. For a little time they sat in silence, with the brook between them. Then, Emil breathed in, white-faced, and asked calmly for more information. She told him all she knew.

He sat silent. She groped for something more to say. “How did you know to send for Perry’s unit?”

“I heard a voice in my sleep. But when I awoke, it kept talking to me for a while. A voice in the sky. It was very strange. Perhaps,” he added, not much seeming to care, “I am losing my mind.”

Zanja looked around for any sign of a big, black bird. “Well,” she said, in a neutral tone. But in the midst of her exhaustion, she felt an extraordinary relief.

Chapter 12

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, until they could no longer see the way, Zanja and her twenty companions made a swift, hectic journey through the woods, following a path cut through the wild lands that they jokingly named Bandit’s Road. The older Paladins told how that path had first been cut—how in the interval between planting and harvesting, Emil had recruited farmers and dray horses from all across the region to help in the enterprise, which none of them had thought necessary. Every year since then, a grumbling expedition walked the length of the path with saws and axes to clear away the year’s growth and deadfall. Now, more than one old timer patted Emil’s shoulder and apologized for cursing him behind his back.

The Bandit’s Road paralleled the East-West Road, but rather than meandering around the hills and wild lands, it cut directly through whatever lay before it, straight as a compass could make it. Zanja and her companions could not know how far ahead of the Sainnites they traveled, but that they were in fact ahead of them seemed certain.

That first night, Zanja awoke from exhausted sleep, and tottered out to the edge of their haphazard encampment. There she found Emil sitting by himself, weeping for his dead where no one could see him. She sat with him, dry-eyed. In time, he wiped his face and in a rough voice admonished her for not resting when she had the chance.

“I’d say the same to you,” she said, “If you were not my commander.”

“My blasted knee keeps me awake. But I drank a potion for it and should be able to sleep soon.” He tilted his face back so the starlight shone on his deeply creased skin, and added, in a voice still hoarse with sorrow, “I’ve heard no speeches from the sky tonight.”