Elemental Logic - Fire Logic Part 3

Trembling now, Zanja heard Ransel's voice, clear despite the distance. "Rise up, Ashawala'i, and flee for your lives! The enemy is upon us!" Three times Zanja heard this cry, until Ransel's voice was swallowed in the rising uproar.

The Sainnite commanders, certainly hearing the noise, shouted sharp orders. The soldiers, working with terrible speed, began to form a battle line. Zanja stood alone between her people and disaster, trying to hold it back by will alone. She imagined Ransel and the katrim, running ahead of the fleeing people to secure the northern trail, the only route up the cliffs that could safely be climbed in the darkness. She imagined the Ashawala'i, confused and disorganized, with panicked children and crippled elders in tow, running across the gra.s.sland. And how many of the katrim would have the courage to run the other way,towards the river and the enemy?

Oh, but the katrim were arrogant. Zanja had scarcely begun to doubt them when they began to arrive, breathless and excited, with their boots on their feet and their blades in their hands. Some hunters arrived as well, with their deer bows and longest arrows. They could see well enough to shoot the horses, they a.s.sured her, and she chose not to tell them that the horses were wearing armor. Their courage came from ignorance, and she wished that she had more of both.

She locked her terror into a distant dungeon where it could do whatever it liked, unnoticed, and hastily sorted the katrim into a battle line. A few of them had lances, and she put them first, to try to stop the horses. The hunters she poised behind them, and the katrim, with their daggers, standing to the rear to await the foot soldiers who would follow behind the cavalry. She took a lance herself and stood in front, not from courage but from eagerness for the excruciating wait to end. She noticed, with relief and horror, that the cavalry had begun its charge.

How much time had pa.s.sed? How quickly could the tribe climb up that single, narrow path and flee into the safety of the forest?

Even though they had to run up slope, the horses picked up speed, and she saw ephemeral sparks flash from their iron hooves.

The katrim began to shout: an eerie, shrill, challenging cry. Zanja felt a jolt of pride. Perhaps, she thought, we will survive.

She screamed defiance at the monstrous shadows that reached the top of the slope and blotted out the stars. Arrows clattered uselessly on the horses' iron plates, but the katrim shouted with satisfaction as one rider fell. And then the dust washed over them like smoke. Choking, Zanja felt a wave of riders veer past as her lance point jarred off a horse's armored side.

Like a fist through parchment, the cavalry punched through the line of katrim, and wheeled around, sparks showering where iron struck stone. The clenched groups of horses opened up like hands and formed a line, and part of Zanja remembered how she had once watched Sainnite hors.e.m.e.n practice this very drill. At her back now, the foot soldiers were running up the slope. The katrim were trapped, like a fly between two clapping hands.

Zanja cried, "Ashawala'i!" She charged a horseman with her lance and dove between the horse's hooves to drive its point into the underbelly. The rider's ax shrilled past her ear. The horse screamed. She rolled away as the monster fell, hooves thrashing, the rider tangled in the stirrups. She jerked her dagger from its sheath and turned to face a foot soldier, whose blade clashed upon hers once, twice, three times. She never even gained her balance, but simply moved her weapon to block his, with the rest of her body tumbling after it, whichever way it happened to go. There was no grace in it, she thought sorrowfully. She pierced him with a blow that was more luck than talent, and saw him fall to his knees with her dagger still caught in his ribs.

She leapt forward to s.n.a.t.c.h her dagger back, but a horse bore down on her. Empty-handed, she dodged spiked hooves and gnashing teeth. The horse reared, and wheeled. Choking in dust, Zanja found the fallen soldier and jerked her gory dagger from his chest. The horse was on her once again. Horse and rider both bared their teeth at her, laughing, no doubt, for she was no more than a bee trying to sting them with her little blade. The rider's ax came whistling down at her. She fell to the ground and felt its edge slash across her tunic. His lance, held in his other hand, glimmered faintly. She rolled, jumped back to her feet, and ran under the horse.

The horse reared. She tripped, and saw the big, iron-wrapped hooves come down at her. She felt amoment of stunning pain, like a blacksmith's hammer striking her head over an anvil. The dust-masked stars went out like candles.

The war horse trampled her into the stones and dust. The katrim died all around her. The peaceful history of the Ashawala'i reached a bitter, b.l.o.o.d.y conclusion. Zanja lay with the others, her blood soaking the dry soil, and the dust slowly settled around her.

She opened her eyes to the heavy mist of dawn. Far away, m.u.f.fled voices called in Sainnese. She struggled to her knees, vomited from pain, and fainted. She regained consciousness with her head resting on the cold flank of a dead horse. Without moving, she raised a hand to feel her b.l.o.o.d.y head. The morning breeze blew the smoke of the burning village across the valley. In the rising light of day, she saw Sainnites working their way methodically across the battlefield, claiming their dead, finding their injured, killing any enemies found alive. She could not stand, but crawled across the b.l.o.o.d.y bodies of her kinsmen, into the smoke.

When she opened her eyes again, she lay wrapped in a fine woolen blanket, in a neat hollow guarded by giant stones. Overhead, the sky was a deep blue, with the stars starting to come out. "My sister," Ransel said, "a dozen times today I have thought you were dead."

"I am dead," she rasped, in a voice harsh with smoke and blood.

"So are we all. Here." He tilted a gourd cup to her mouth. She drank. He said, "You breathed too much smoke, and you have some burns and bruises, but your head is your worst injury. A horse trampled you, I think."

"How did you find me?"

"You found me," he said. "I was looking for you, and you came out of the burning village."

"What happened to our people?"

"When they heard my warning, they left their belongings and followed me and the other katrim to the cliff path. Sainnites lay in wait at the top of the path. We fought them. But they were many, and they have strange weapons that explode with fire."

"Names of the G.o.ds!" Zanja groaned.

"We fought them a long time," Ransel continued quietly. "What was accomplished I do not know. Did even one of our people escape? I wish I knew the answer, but I do not know. I and some other katrim fled when the Sainnites came up the path behind us. The cliff path is now choked with bodies. The village is a smoking ruin. I walked through the valley hunting for you, and everywhere I went, I saw our people slain: elders and children, warriors and farmers. The only people alive are those you see here."

Zanja saw that other katrim were gathered in this hollow, and that many had drawn close to hear the conversation. Her vision was blurred and she could not count them, but it seemed there were fewer than twenty.

"I was pinned under a fallen horse," one of them said. "I lay there all night, watching the butchery. The Samnites did not rest until no one was left alive. Finally, I pulled myself free and escaped in the smoke, as you did, Speaker."Others also told their stones, in voices as harsh and lifeless as the voices of ghosts are said to be. Zanja listened, thinking that surely she also had witnessed the horrors they described, but she only remembered a sensation of chaos and then of stillness. To have forgotten so much surely was a mercy, but it also was dreadful to gaze at these shattered tribesmen and feel confusion rather than sharing their horror.

"The Sainnites must have taken the long path through the mountains," one of them said. "For they have wagons and horses that could not have surmounted the steep pa.s.ses."

"They must have killed the watchers before they could spread the alarm," said another. "Though the watchers were hidden and it should have been impossible . . ."

"No, they knew exactly where the watchers were," said Zanja. "Tarin must have told them-told his friend in the woods, in payment for smoke. He betrayed his entire people."

They were silent then, for this was something they had not known, and could scarcely begin to understand. But Zanja understood that if she had only taken action immediately to find out what exactly had happened to Tarin, rather than delaying to let her anger cool, she might have discovered his betrayal immediately and been able to forewarn her people of their danger. Not for the last time, Zanja wished that the war horse's kick to her head had been harder.

Ransel did not know of how she had failed the Ashawala'i, and she was too stunned by shame to tell him. He gently tended her wound and gave her more water to drink. She could not resist sleeping again, and in her sleep she dreamed of Sainnites. She dreamed that they sat around a fire where they roasted a slaughtered goat. In their own language, they talked about the hard work they had done and about the dreary journey home that lay before them.

When she opened her eyes, she saw stars burning. The katrim roasted river trout over a small fire, and talked about revenge. Ransel hovered nearby, and drew close when she stirred.

"The Sainnites will march out at first light," said Zanja.

The other katrim abandoned their meal to come over and hear what she had said. "Speaker, how do you know?"

"They told me in my dreams."

"Then we will follow them, to haunt them like ghosts, to kill as many as we can."

"If we do this, we all will die." She could see them more clearly now: some fine warriors and some she had long considered fools, but with the foolishness burned out of them now.

"What does it matter, so long as we can die in honor?" said Ransel.

They all murmured agreement, their voices empty and bitter with loss.

"Then we shall follow them," Zanja said. She did not understand how she had become their leader, or why they listened to her, when her certainty might be nothing more than the delirium of a broken head.

She shut her eyes and slept the night through. At dawn, they began hunting Sainnites. Zanja went with them, leaning on one or another shoulder, carried sometimes, as they ran lightly across the mountaintops while the Sainnites, burdened by armor and horses and wagonloads of supplies, trudged below. The Sainnites did not realize what haunted their journey until that night, after the katrim slipped into their camp like the ghosts they were, and used the hay the Sainnites carried for the horses as tinder to set fire to all the supply wagons. Zanja could not make that raid with them, but despite her blinding headache,she told them where to find the hay wagons and how to avoid the pickets, and only two katrim were killed. Fifteen remained, including herself, but they bore the weapons of dozens more dead companions, and they knew how to survive in these ungenerous mountains. They waited a few days to let the Sainnites lower their guard, and they struck again, once or twice a night, night after night, and during the day made it impossible for the weary Sainnites to safely forage for food, or use the latrines, or even take off their armor. While the katrim ate roots and greens and berries and trout, the Sainnites began butchering and eating their starving horses.

Zanja and her companions lived ghost lives. They did not speak of the past, or of the dead, or of their own deaths. They watched the Sainnites, and slipped through the mountains like shadows, and from time to time let fly a precious arrow, or cut the throat of a straying soldier. One by one, Zanja's companions disappeared. Like the Sainnites, the katrim were leaving behind them a trail of abandoned bodies that they dared not try to find and had no time to burn. The mountain vultures and ravens followed them.

Zanja could walk on her own feet now, but was often disabled by dizziness or blinding pain. The Sainnite soldiers continued to speak in her dreams, telling her all their secret plans and terrors and blood l.u.s.ts.

The fifteen katrim became twelve, and then seven. The seven became five. With more warriors and more time, they might have eventually destroyed the entire Sainnite battalion. But now, with only five of them remaining, and only one more pa.s.s to climb before the Sainnites could safely exit the mountains, they knew their time for vengeance would soon come to an end. None of them wished to survive. They camped among stones, high above the miserable Sainnites and their disgusting horsemeat. They ate sweet trout flesh and sucked on the transparent bones. They ate tart berries and crunched the seeds with their teeth. They tallied the Sainnite dead and were satisfied.

Only Zanja had ever traveled so far east of the Asha Valley. She told about a treacherous canyon they soon would pa.s.s, and suggested that one of them might lure the Sainnites into the canyon, while the others dislodged stones to fall down on their heads. They drew lots, and Zanja chose the longest stick.

That night, Ransel put his arms around her and said, "Wait for me in the Land of the Sun, my sister. I will not be far behind you." She fell asleep with her head in the hollow of his shoulder.

She would always remember the moment when the mountain fell on her. It was her second death, and far more satisfying than the first. She would remember the Sainnites gleefully chasing her up the canyon, the four katrim levering the rocks overhead, and the canyon wall collapsing onto the people below.

Mercifully, she would not remember much else: She would not remember when the surviving Sainnites dragged her out from under a boulder with her back broken. She would not remember how they tortured her, when they realized she was still alive. She would not remember when they killed Ransel, who might have been trying to either rescue her or deliver her with a merciful blow of the dagger. She would not remember that she mistakenly thought she was already dead, and he was coming to join her. She would not realize for a long time that in fact he had left her behind among the living.

Chapter Four.

In a stone cottage tucked into a hollow in the iron-rich hills that surround Meartown, Karis, a mastersmith of Mear, sat on the stoop in the morning sunshine, fumbling with her bootstraps. From where she sat, she could see a dark cloud rising as the furnaces of Meartown were lit. She smoothed her big, sooty, callused hands across the stoop's worn stone, testing to see if the smoke paralysis had lifted sufficiently for her to at least be able to sense the hammer as she gripped it. The light of the rising sun was blinding.

Lynton moved slowly through the lush garden, his white hair gleaming among the bean plants. Bald Dominy came out the open door of the cottage with a packet of food for Karis's dinner. "It's bread, dried fish, some cheese and a couple of apples," he said. "Be sure you eat it all, whether you want it ornot. A person your size has to eat."

She nodded. Dominy or Lynton had said these words, or something like them, every morning, all the years she had lived with them. She did not reply, for if she tried to talk she would slur like a drunk, since her tongue was still half paralyzed. The old man patted her shoulder affectionately. Before she moved in, he and Lynton had added an oversized room to their house to accommodate her oversized frame. After she moved in, thanks to their incessant fretting, she had finally put on the bulk to match her height.

The sunshine chased the lingering poison from her paralyzed nerves. She said, without too much difficulty, "Something has changed."

Dominy shouted to Lynton to be sure to pick plenty of tomatoes. "What's that?" he asked absently.

"Something has changed," she said again. She felt it, a shifting of the earth's weight, as though the earth and stones were gathering up their strength for a great effort. "I feel an urgency." She pressed her palms again upon the stoop. "What has happened?" she asked the warm granite.

Most of the time, Dominy treated her like any other metalsmith. Sometimes, she did something that astounded him, and he would remember that she was a witch. As she looked up at him now, he asked diffidently, "What does the stone say?"

"It speaks of blood and death throughout the land. That is not new. But it speaks of something else, a life." She shook her head. "I don't understand. It pulls at me." She looked down, as though a child were tugging at her shirt.

"You're going to be late," Dominy said.

She stood up. His head tilted back, and back, until it seemed he was gazing up at a mountain. He squinted fiercely in the sun. "I'm not going to the forge," she said. "I need to think."

"You want me to carry a message to the forgemaster, I suppose." Grumpily, he took the food packet out of Karis's hand. "I'll get a satchel for this. Where will you go? Out onto the heath? Better bring a water bottle, too."

Far from the danger and stink of the furnaces and forges, Karis walked through lands too dry and poor to interest farmers. The sun rose up in a breathless rush, the rocks shifted in their foundations, and the seedpods of summer shattered open. When the sun was high, she supposed she must be hungry and thirsty, so she sat down and ate. Afterwards, she lay on her back and listened. A life, the deep soil said to her. Pay attention!

When she came home, Lynton told her she was tired, and fed her a great bowl of vegetables from the garden. Dominy told her the forgemaster had merely nodded when he heard Karis would not be there.

The sun hung low in the sky, and the only hunger Karis ever felt was consuming most of her attention: she needed smoke. Yet beneath that hunger, she still sensed the vague, irritating nagging of the earth. A life, it said. You must do something! But it never told her what she needed to do.

Often, when Karis lay awake, but still under smoke, a strange thing would happen: her spirit would break free of her insensate flesh to take residence in a particular raven. This raven traveled with Norina Truthken, far to the southeast. Norina usually contrived to be alone for the sunrise, and on this morning,she sat on a split rail fence at the edge of a harvested cornfield, waiting to see if the raven would speak to her.

Karis said through the raven, "There is a new presence in the land."

Norina rubbed her eyes, which were still crusted with sleep. "I don't understand."

"A person has come into Shaftal, and the land seems to cry out to me, demanding that I pay heed."

Norina gazed into the cornfield. "Is it an earth elemental? The one we have been waiting for?"

This possibility had not even occurred to Karis, and she cried out in surprise, "And if it is, what then?"

Norina said, quite calmly, "All this will come to an end."

"And the end of our friendship, too."

Norina turned sharply to the raven, then. "Is that what you think?"

"You will have more important concerns."

"I will always be your friend," Norina said. And, because she was a Truthken, Karis almost believed her.

"So is it the one we are waiting for?" Norina asked.

"I don't think it is an earth witch. If it were, then surely I would understand what is happening better than I do. I feel an urgency, a danger, an impulse to intervene. Perhaps this person has been broken."

"And you want to go find this person."

Karis didn't have to reply. Norina knew her well enough.

"Whatever calls you," Norina said, "You must not let it call you out of hiding, or you will find there the hand of the Sainnites, stretching out to grab you by the throat."

Karis could not speak. Norina said, "Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"This presence-it makes you restive." Norina got down off the rail. "Don't do anything foolish. I'll be there in a few days."

Karis's spirit broke loose of the raven. When she came to herself, she lay once again in her bed, with the light of sunrise in her face.

By the time Norina ended her visit, she had reluctantly agreed to try to find the person whose presence haunted Karis. Autumn harvest began and was finished. The rains soon commenced, the days rapidly grew short, autumn began to turn to winter, and still Karis was haunted by nagging, inarticulate worry.

One day, she stayed later than usual at the smithy, and shadows barred the roadway as she walked to the tavern. There, she ate her pigeon pie in haste, and still could have left before sunset if not for the baked apple that appeared before her. "Did I ask for this?" she resentfully inquired of no one.

Someone-she did not know who-said, "Karis, you are getting thin."The apple was a gift then, and so she had to eat it, and even to pretend that she appreciated it. As she ate and smiled politely, she felt the sun go down like a shutter slamming shut. A woman wrapped in sheepskin came in, and everyone shouted at her to close the door. "It's going to snow," somebody muttered, in a voice that spoke of shoveling the paths and carrying the wood and sharpening the runners on the sleigh.

Karis's plate was empty. She left the tavern without saying goodbye or uttering a word of thanks, and realized it too late, halfway out of town. Would they all forgive her one more time? Could she still depend on them? The presence in the land, which before had lured her into untoward expectation, had now begun to constantly distract her: not by its demand for her notice, but by its steady retreat. Half her attention constantly sought after it, worrying. With her attention so divided, she was forgetting to eat, losing track of time, forgetting common courtesy, making mistakes that could well be the death of her.

"I can't continue," she said. No one answered. The cold had driven everyone indoors. The wind carried frost-rimed leaves into shadowed places, and in the west stars had appeared. Karis tried to sing to them, forgetting for a moment that the smoke drug had destroyed her voice years ago.

She left the cobblestones behind and wandered through the icy mud of the wagon ruts, weaving like a drunk on her trembling legs. Will I even make it home? she asked herself, for the hill seemed to go up forever. And then home stood before her, a thatched cottage with a lamp flame in the window. A black thing dropped down from the treetops and struck her shoulder like a blow. She uttered a cry, then caught her breath. "So you're home."

Crisp feathers rasped on her ear as the raven folded his wings. She fumbled in her pocket for something to feed him-a bread end or a bit of grain-but today her pockets were full of stones. She could not remember why she had picked them up, or where. "I have to smoke," she said.

The raven spoke in a voice no more harsh than hers. "Then smoke."

"Come inside. I think Lynton and Dominy are already in bed."

In her room, she opened the window so the raven could come and go. While she filled her pipe with shaking hands, he ate the bread and bacon ends she had s.n.a.t.c.hed up in the pantry. Now came a quiet, for with the pipe in hand, her panic eased. She could wait a little longer. In the fireplace, the coals caught in new wood and flames began to flicker. The raven drank from a bowl. "What did Norina find out?"

Kans asked.

"Norina found nothing. Nothing to find, nothing to be done. There is a place shut up like a strongbox, which stinks of death. The Sainnites imprison people there-unfortunates who might have secrets to trade for a merciful death. People avoid the place, or stop up their ears so they won't hear the screams or be cursed by the ghosts."

"Is that all?" Karis cried, when the raven fell silent. "That cannot be all there is to know!" Karis paced back and forth across the room until she banged into the settle and felt a far-away pain in her shin. She forced herself to stop, to breathe deeply, to listen to the silence. For months the person who had been broken had endured in that place of horror while she and Norina argued. But now that bright spirit was a candleflame guttering in its socket.

"This person's life has become important to me. Much more important than my own life."

"And what does that mean?" the raven said, as Norina would. "Your life is not your own. You will not be foolish with it."Karis looked at the pipe in her trembling hand. If she didn't smoke, she would die, and if she did smoke, that flame in the darkness might go out while she dreamed and drooled, drug giddy. "You must fly to that place of imprisonment, and find that person." The raven drank more water, and shook out his dry feathers.