Fire Logic (9 page)

Then, in the place where her back had been broken, below which she had felt only dead weight for months, pain blossomed. Her entire body began to spasm. “Hold fast,” said Karis hoarsely, and pinned Zanja down with her weight.

When the fit had passed, Zanja tasted blood from her bitten tongue, and the sharp salt of sweat. The weight of Karis’ body lifted. She was gasping for breath as though she had run a long way at a desperate pace.

Zanja had been long enough removed from the lower half of her own body that her legs felt foreign to her: ungainly contraptions of sinew and bone; but at least she felt them, and even could make them move, however reluctantly, with the lever of her will.

She breathed something in her own language, stupefied.

“Hush,” Karis said absently. She had moved the rush light, and so Zanja watched by its light as those big hands delicately kneaded her feet, straightening the clenched muscles and stretching and moving the flesh with her long fingers to form new, perfect toes, one by one. Karis frowned as she worked, like a potter at the wheel, with her eyes half closed, seeming to feel her way with her fingers. Her sweat shimmered in faint light as it fell, drop by drop, from her chin.

Half drowned in the tingling, burning, cramping sensations of her repaired flesh, Zanja felt the pressure of those fingers only remotely, but as new toes budded and grew upon her disfigured feet, the feeling of it was so bizarre that it was all she could do to keep from snatching her foot from the witch’s grasp.

When Karis laid Zanja’s foot down, she rested her head in her hand for a moment as though exhausted or overwhelmed by her labor.

“
Serrain
,” Zanja said again. Even her voice trembled shamefully. Having given Karis this title of great respect, she could not think of what to say, or what to ask, or even what words might begin be adequate.

Karis lumbered to her feet, a great, graceless woman who seemed suddenly weary to the bone. She did not speak, but dressed Zanja in gigantic clothing, and then tied her onto her back with rope, where she could neither aid nor impede her.

The fugitive journey felt like a fever dream. Karis strode rapidly down dark ways where dawn’s faint light had not yet penetrated, bent over in a crouch to avoid the rough-hewn beams of the low ceiling. From behind the steel-clad doors where other prisoners stared or froze in terrible solitude, there was no sound. Karis turned, and turned again, unhesitating. And then they were mounting a narrow, twisting stairway which pressed in on both sides and clawed at Zanja’s knees. They climbed into light that wormed its way through narrow slits of windows and dispersed like dust through the darkness. Karis stopped short, and her rapid, shallow breaths swelled and receded within Zanja’s tightly bound embrace.

“...this cursed country!” said a voice harshly in Sainnese. Boots rasped upon stone.

“Remember the grape arbors of Sainna. In winter they dropped their leaves, that was how we knew the season. And the wind came in from the north, bringing rain.” The speaker paused, perhaps overcome by his own poetry.

“And we sat indoors drinking warm wine.” The guard spat. “I’d rather almost have been killed than be exiled in this barbaric country.”

“Our hearts are turned to stone in this land of stone,” said the poet.

The angry man snorted. “A land of ice, more like.”

“Have another swig.”

Zanja smelled the harsh fumes of distilled liquor. The echoes of stone made the sound tricky, but by the smell she realized that the two men stood very close by. She took a deep breath and smelled the rancid tallow with which they had waterproofed their cuirasses. All Sainnite soldiers smell the same because of that tallow; she had sometimes been able to track them through the woods by smell alone.

“Well, it’s not getting warmer,” said the angry man. “I might as well go feed the beasts. They’ll whine like dogs today.”

The poet only grunted. His poetry he reserved for speaking of his native country. Like Zanja, it seemed he was a refugee. The two men separated, and for a moment, a shadow blocked the dim light at the top of the stairs, then passed. Zanja felt Karis begin to breathe again. “I wonder what they were talking about,” she murmured.

“The weather,” said Zanja.

“Do you speak their language, or are you just guessing?”

“I do speak it, though with a terrible accent.”

“You speak this language with an accent too, though I’d not call it terrible.” Karis stepped out into the wide corridor, into which opened double doors wide enough to admit a wagon such as the one that had carried Zanja to this place. Karis ignored these massive doors, and went out through a nearby postern door, around which mud and slush brought in by the guards’ boots puddled.

At first, all Zanja could see was snow. Then the walls took shape, a solid gray against the white sky. The low stone buildings to the right looked like stables; those to the left the guards’ quarters. One set of buildings looked no different from the other except that one had chimneys and smaller doors. The wind picked up and for a moment the entire scene disappeared behind blowing snow. Karis started boldly across the yard. The snow on Zanja’s face felt like sparks from a fire.

They reached the wall. Karis lifted a hand to the rough stone, and for a giddy moment Zanja thought she would simply push her way through, like a mole through earth. But she was testing a gray, snow-speckled rope that lay nearly invisible against the stone.

Already shivering, Zanja felt as though she were drowning in snow. The prison building was nearly invisible. Karis took hold of the rope, dug her toes into the thin cracks between the stones, and began to climb. She did it gracelessly, hastily, almost carelessly. Zanja hung upon her back, helpless as a bundle of laundry. When she turned her head, she could see portions of the compound, made ghostly and distant by the gray light and the falling snow.

The snow cleared suddenly, and the central building appeared, squatting sullenly under its dusting of snow. On each corner of the square enclosure stood a guard tower, whose guards surely could see Zanja as clearly as she saw them. Then the snow began to fall again, but not soon enough. She heard the distinct, echoing report of a musket shot.

Karis muttered a curse, and hauled herself up to the top of the wall. There was a blare of alarm horns. Zanja imagined what she could not see: the doors of the guards’ quarters bursting open, and soldiers in their uniforms rushing for the stables and for the gates.

The sky swirled as Karis swung down the other side of the wall and swarmed down the rope to where a huge horse waited with stolid patience. And then she stood in snow, breathing heavily, holding Zanja by the wrist as she cut the rope with a sharp knife, until Zanja dangled loose across her back, feet dragging in the snow. The rank sheepskin doublet that Karis wore kept Zanja from feeling the muscle of that back, but after these demonstrations of strength she was not at all surprised when Karis simply picked her up and set her upon the horse’s back, then dragged herself up behind her.

The horse jumped as if she had flicked him with a whip, and lunged headlong into the woods and down the hill, spraying clots of snow around him. No horse could keep up such a pace for long in snow so deep, but by the time he slowed, Karis seemed satisfied. “They already are turning back,” she said. “They have no stomach for this foul weather.”

Zanja lay slumped against Karis’s shoulder, too weak to sit up on her own, hardly able to even hold up her head or lift a hand to brush the snow from her face. “This has been a very strange day,” she murmured. And then sleep overwhelmed her.

Chapter 5

Snow still was falling when Karis hid Zanja and the horse in the hills, and went on foot to let herself into the barn of a fine farmstead near the edge of the forest that hems in West Hart. Like everything in this part of Shaftal, the barn was built of stone and mortar within a sheltered hollow, with a roof so low the beasts sheltered there could scarcely lift their heads. Two cows this farmstead owned, and two horses, and a dozen or more sheep. This farmstead was far off the beaten track, far enough that perhaps it had never been raided by Sainnites, who had been known to butcher the milk cows and strip the cellars to the walls. The dark day and shuttered windows had fooled the chickens, who had gone to roost in the low rafters though the sun would not set for some time yet. No doubt the numbers of this substantial flock would be sadly diminished come spring.

These people were not wholly hostile to strangers, for a loaf of pauper’s bread, wrapped in wax cloth, rested upon a shelf just inside the door. A wide-mouthed jar with a stopper hung there as well. Karis milked a cow into the jug. She found some hen’s eggs in the hay and tied them up with the bread. She could find nothing to carry oats in, and finally took off one of her shirts and made a bag out of it by tying the sleeves together and pulling tight the neck string. She left some coins in compensation for having taken more than was customary, and returned the way she had come, walking in her own footprints.

In a goat’s burrow hidden in the nearby hills, Zanja lay as Karis had left her, wrapped in the horse blanket, watched over by the raven. She still slept like a child, her skin flushed as with fever, her hair a matted tangle, her hands limply open against the earth. Her fingers were thin as sticks, and every bone stood out harshly in her sharply angled face. Karis lay down the fistful of oats she had reserved for the raven, and sat in the opening of the burrow, just out of reach of the falling snow. She heard faintly the horse crunching dry oats with his big teeth. He needed to be stabled and fed properly, but a good bit of grueling travel still lay ahead of them this night.

Zanja had slept the entire day through, collapsed in Karis’s arms like a jointed puppet with the strings cut loose. While she slept, Karis nourished her, and felt herself slowly emptied, and knew the giddiness that comes from too much generosity. When the raven rejoined them, he crept inside the shelter of the blanket which wrapped them both, and he muttered in Karis’s ear all he knew, every word Zanja had spoken during that strange night. It had been genius to send the raven, Karis supposed, but now there seemed something diabolical in his masquerade. She had created him intelligent, but he was also without compunction.

Now sunset was approaching and Karis still could not decide what to do. When she turned her head, Zanja was looking at her.

Zanja awoke in a cramped cranny between two boulders, which was blocked at one end by brush and stone, and at the other end by Karis, whose extraordinary length folded impossibly into the narrow space. Her back bowed to match the curve of the stones; her legs fit tightly to her chest, and her arms tucked to her sides, bent at the elbows, with her hands atop her knees. Her shirt hung loose at the neck and wrist, and oat grains were stuck in the weave of the fabric. Slush and melted snow puddled at her feet and dripped from the curled tips of her hacked-off hair. She looked as worn as her stained and poorly patched clothing: a used-up woman on the verge of going to rags.

Why did her kith and kin let a woman of rare and valuable talent go hungry, cold, and poorly clothed like this?

Karis turned her head, and Zanja caught her breath. She sat up, tossed off the heavy horse blanket which covered her, and took off Karis’ sheepskin doublet.

Karis said hoarsely, “No, you wear it.”

“Not while you are cold.”

“I’m not.”

“But you’re trembling.”

Karis lifted one of the hands with which she clasped her knee, and examined its tremor without surprise. “It’s nearly sunset.”

“It is?” Puzzled, Zanja examined their droppings-strewn shelter: the raven, who ate oats greedily, the plain round loaf of bread and the jug and eggs that waited beside it on the ground, and Karis again, who gazed at her steadily, as though waiting for something. Zanja remembered how the day had begun, but she remembered nothing else. Now, a green and raw energy pulsed in her wasted body, like sap rising in winter’s skeletal trees, and Karis, who that morning had seemed gigantic in spirit as well as body, now seemed diminished, exhausted, worn to the bone. It was as though she had poured herself into the wreck of Zanja’s flesh until all her reserves were exhausted.

Zanja said, “
Serrain
, I don’t understand you.”

Karis slid into the cleft and crouched close to Zanja, so close that drops of melting snow from her hair stung the skin of Zanja’s hand. “Why do you call me ‘Serrain’? What does it mean?”

“I—honor you. I don’t know how it’s proper to address a Shaftali elemental...”

“So you’re making me a stranger.”

“No, my people value formality—”

Karis looked away, the line of her body a cipher of frustration. “But if you were being impetuous, even foolhardy?”

“Karis.” It did seem foolhardy, even to call her by name like this. “You could have my servitude, for surely I owe you whatever you demand. So why demand a friendship, which requires an obligation in return?”

“How else could my behavior possibly be explained, except as fulfilling an obligation? Well, madness, I suppose.”

“It does seem like madness,” Zanja said.

“Do you think so?” In body and in spirit Karis filled a great deal of space, and Zanja was fighting with herself to keep from backing away. There was something of the raven in Karis’s way of waiting for Zanja to speak: intent, expectant, almost apprehensive. Unlike the fire bloods, earth bloods normally were stable as stone, but it appeared that Karis doubted her own sanity.

Zanja said, “Perhaps it only seems like madness since you are a complete stranger and have no reason to be obligated to me. But —” The inexplicable certainty of insight rose up in her and she said in astonishment, “But in the future, I will serve you, and you will indeed be obligated —”

Karis let out her breath as though someone had suddenly slammed a fist into her back.

Zanja reached for Karis’s hand. It was surprisingly warm, and had a fluttering tremor, like a palsy. Karis’s other hand rested upon her thigh. When Zanja touched it to turn it over, it flexed involuntarily but did not pull away. Upon this wrist, as upon the other, was inscribed in faded scars an old despair. There had been a time, years ago, when Karis had tried to kill herself.

And then she remembered: the gangly, extraordinarily tall young woman, a refugee from the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, being escorted like a prisoner to the waiting wagon. She remembered how she had watched her being carried away, and how the sight had laid a horror upon her heart.

She looked up into Karis’s shadowed face. That despairing prisoner certainly had been she, though she hardly seemed helpless any longer. Karis broke the silence with a voice that strained to seem indifferent, “If I simply sat here in silence long enough, would you discover all my secrets?”

“I’m beginning to think I might.”

She still held Karis’s trembling hand. In the silence, she could hear how unsteadily Karis breathed. Zanja didn’t say anything, fearing that she had already been too presumptuous. Then Karis said, “There was a time that I could not endure my life. I wish it were my worst dishonor or my greatest shame. But the truth is that I dishonor myself every day, and will do so again today.”