Fire Logic (20 page)

Zanja said seriously, “Surely the voice will speak again if it seems we need more guidance.”

“You believe we are watched over?”

“I believe the gods take the shapes of birds when they choose to speak to us.”

“I am not a religious man.”

They sat in silence, until Zanja said, “I imagine the Sainnites have their seer with them, and he will have realized by now that we are running ahead of them. So if we cannot take them by surprise, how are we to stop them from crossing the bridge?”

“Have you ever tried to shoot a mouse with a pistol?”

“I should think,” Zanja replied after a moment, “That any self-respecting mouse would no longer be where it was, by the time the pistol ball arrived.”

“Exactly. And where would the mouse be instead? I doubt even the mouse knows.”

“So our best strategy is no strategy?”

“When seers predict the future, they are simply telling themselves stories, as you and I tell stories to each other. And they have the gift for knowing which of many possibilities are the most likely. The better educated they are, the better the stories they can tell themselves. But if all the possibilities are equally likely, then how will our enemy know where to point his pistol, and when to pull his trigger?”

“He will not know.”

“That’s what I hope. I suppose it depends on just how smart he is.”

After a moment, Zanja added, “No strategy? Willis won’t like that.”

“Don’t tell him I’ve been hearing voices.”

When Zanja last crossed this bridge, the river had been flooded. But even though spring thaw and mud were long past, it remained a most intimidating river, that muscled its temperamental passage between the steep shoulders of the hills. It could not be safely forded, someone told Zanja. Before the bridge was built, the river was so much trouble to get across that few people bothered, which explained why Darton had so few inhabitants to this day.

A cottage stood by itself on the hillside above the sturdy bridge and the wild river, with a vegetable plot in the back and a fat, pampered cart horse running loose on the grassy hillside. As Zanja and her companions came down the road, having reached the end of Bandit’s Road and arrived at the East-West road with no Sainnites in sight, a peculiar old man came trotting down the hill to meet them. “You pay a toll to cross this bridge,” he said, and counted heads and began doing calculations. Perhaps haggard, heavily armed brigands were an everyday sight to him.

Emil stepped forward. “Sir—”

“Don’t interrupt!”

“Sir, I am Emil, Commander of Paladins, South Hill Company. I regret to inform you that we have come to tear down the bridge.”

The bridgekeeper gaped at him. “You’ve got no right!”

“I am a ranking commander, authorized by the Lilterwess Council to act on behalf of the Shaftali people. I do have the right.”

Zanja had flopped down with the others by the side of the road, too stupefied with exhaustion to even consider the enormous labor that yet had to be accomplished that day. When the bridgekeeper submissively started his way back up the hill, Zanja somehow got her legs under her and tackled him, and almost immediately regretted it. The man uttered a harridan’s screech and swung his fist wildly, narrowly missing her nose. Still screaming, he fought her like a crazy man, slamming a foot into her shin and getting a good punch to her ribs before she managed to get him to the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a fist in his hair for good measure. “Check the cottage!” she shouted to her companions. “Stop fighting!” she yelled at him.

He let his muscles go limp, but then, wild-eyed, turned his head and sank his teeth into her forearm. Zanja cut him then, and though it apparently took a moment for his pain to register, the man released his teeth from her flesh to shout in outrage, “You’ve killed me!”’

“Dead men don’t argue,” said one of Zanja’s companions dryly, having come over, somewhat puzzled, to help restrain him.

Emil came down from the man’s cottage. “That little house is built like a fortress and is crammed with guns. With the clear shot he’s got of the bridge he could have held us off all day.”

They trussed the bridgekeeper to a tree, where he screamed curses until they plugged his mouth with a kerchief. Besides the cut in his neck, he had broken his hand punching it into the pistol that came between his fist and Zanja’s ribs. Anger seemed to be keeping him from feeling it, but he certainly would regret losing his temper soon enough. Zanja went up to the cottage to have the bite in her arm washed with soap. She and her companion returned to the bridge, lugging baskets of food ransacked from the cottage: preserved meats, bottled pickles, dried fruit, tins of crackers. Emil and the others had finished inspecting the bridge by then, and, standing in a group, they fished pickles from the jars with their fingers, chomped the dried fruit, and smeared preserved meat on crackers and ate them in a single mouthful. The luxury was wasted: they would have eaten raw horsemeat with just as much enjoyment.

A good team of dray horses is what we need,” said one. “But that little horse on the hill won’t be worth the effort it will take to catch him.”

“What we need is Annis and a couple of bags of explosives.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

“What we have, however, is a couple of axes and our bare hands,” said Emil.

They glumly studied the sturdy bridge, jaws working, passing the pickle jars. “I guess we’d better get busy,” someone finally said.

They chopped through the massive timbers one by one, and pulled apart the rubble pilings, stone by stone. By sunset, the bridge had begun to groan. The river joined the game, pushing and pulling at the teetering structure, until the bridge collapsed into the water, and the river broke it up as though it were no more substantial than a sugar cake. Not one member of the company was unbloodied by then, but no one had been carried away in the collapse of the bridge, so they found the energy to utter a ragged cheer that was more relief than jubilation. Then Perry looked around at the battered company and said wryly, “Well, we’re in slightly better shape than the bridge, though not by much. Good thing there’s been so sign of the Sainnites. Rather than fight or escape, I’d beg them to put me out of my misery.”

The sun was setting. They dragged themselves a little way into the woods and lay down on the ground like wounded animals.

Zanja awoke with rocks embedded in her cheek and big black ants crawling through her hair. The members of her company were strewn like corpses across the hillside. Others moved among them in the mist, shaking them awake, offering to fill their porringers with porridge spooned from the kettle that two people carried between them. She turned and saw Willis squat down beside Emil to shake him vigorously by the shoulder.

“What were you thinking? You left the bridgekeeper tied to the tree, and he told us exactly where you had gone. If the Sainnites hadn’t turned around in their tracks—”

“What?” said Emil in a voice blurry with exhaustion. “When did they turn around?”

“We met them on the road before dark.”

“That was before the bridge fell.” Emil sat up, rubbing his face. “Shaftal’s Name! Were they just a decoy? What are the Sainnites up to in the flatlands, while all of South Hill Company is out of the way?”

Zanja felt a peculiar, urgent impulse to be alone. She got to her feet with difficulty, and limped into the woods, where night had not yet given way to dawn. With the awakening voices of her company sounding far away behind her, she sat upon a fallen tree cushioned with damp moss. She felt only half awake: some part of her still dreamed of the ringing ax and the scraping away of her skin on the heavy stones. Her wandering thoughts vaguely considered a young man, a Sainnite, cleverer and further-seeing than she, who knew before she did what she was going to do next, and danced her on strings like a puppet at a fair. She noticed that in her bloody hand she clasped one of the bridgekeeper’s crackers, and she gazed at it in some bewilderment.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. Then, the storm-battered doors of her mind creaked slowly open, and she broke the cracker to pieces and lay them on the log beside her. Like a shadow untouched by daylight, Karis’s raven appeared from the shadows and landed softly beside her.

These seven months of her reclaimed life had largely been filled with hectic and dangerous effort. In the peace of the wood, Zanja felt how illusory was all this activity, how empty her life truly was. In a voice as racked as any smoke addict’s, she said, “Good raven, I brought you this bit of bread.”

The raven ate. Zanja said, “Your help has been vital these last few days. Even though the Sainnites may have tricked us, I am sure that if we had not destroyed the bridge, the Sainnites would have crossed it.”

The raven, his cracker eaten, turned on Zanja an intelligent gaze. “Zanja, at dawn for just a little while, my soul inhabits the raven.”

“Karis!” Zanja saw her hand reach out under its own power, as though to grasp the muscled arm of her friend and not the raven’s rasping feathers. “Karis!” she cried, but said no more, for the words that crowded forward were dangerous and filled with longing.

Karis said through the raven, in a voice as hoarse and frayed as her own would be at this hour, “I also am surprised. The raven is not supposed to be in South Hill.”

“I understand that. But I think he is watching over you. He intervened to help prevent the Sainnites from crossing into Darton.”

The raven—Karis—was silent. Whether her silence meant confusion or displeasure was impossible to know.

Zanja said cautiously, “Surely you did not think it would be too difficult for me to realize you live in Meartown.”

“Well, you aren’t supposed to know.”

“Like everyone in South Hill Company, I have good reason to protect the forges and furnace that provide our weapons. My reason is just more personal than most.” Zanja added, “And thank you for my dagger. It is such a fine blade that I sometimes think it could fight on its own. I often wonder why you have not made more of them.”

“Every time you bloody the blade, I know it, and I feel my responsibility. Therefore, I make carpenter’s tools, mainly. They are rarely used for killing.”

Zanja said, “Dear gods—and Norina allowed you to forge me a blade?”

“I never told her. I have the same problem with her blade, but she rarely has to use it. Listen, we haven’t got much time to talk.”

Zanja said hastily, “There’s a danger here that you should know about. The Sainnites have a seer, who is now in South Hill, using his vision to direct the actions of the soldiers. Do you know what happened in Rees?”

“Yes, I have heard about it.”

“That was the work of this seer. And now the same disaster is happening in South Hill. Emil and I together are clever, but I believe the seer has just proven to us that he is more clever still.”

The raven stared, then said in a low voice, “Now I am unnerved.”

“No more than I.” And Zanja, was, indeed, deeply afraid, with the kind of fear no soldier dares admit to, upon realizing that defeat was all but predestined.

Karis said abruptly, “I must go.”

“But won’t you tell me what you can do to help us?” Zanja cried. But the raven spread its wings and was gone, and she sat alone in the bird-loud wood, as the rising sun dropped down through the darkness a thousand streamers of gold.

Chapter 13

In the disordered camp of South Hill Company, Emil took the first few steps of the day, his face white with pain. Five years ago, when a pistol ball had shattered his knee, for a while he had both hoped and feared that his career as a Paladin commander at last would be over. But Jerrell had put his knee back together again, and, disappointed, he had continued on.

In South Hill’s river valley, the farmers stood in their fields, puzzled by the pall of smoke that sunrise had revealed. What had burned? Why had the fire bells not been rung? Someone spoke of hearing far-away screams during the night, and thinking it was a dream. Slowly, they began to fear that something terrible had happened.

In the Sainnite encampment by the east-west road, a young man sat up in his blankets, fumbled for his spectacles, and cried in the language of his mother, “Oh, what have I seen?” A camp cook turned from his busy stirring to glance over at him curiously. But, even with his spectacles on, the young man saw only his vision—and it was like nothing he had ever seen before.

The raven flew east and north across the Midlands for three days, until he came to Norina’s cottage in the woods. There she had returned for a rest from her wanderings up and down the length of the region, where she ceaselessly re-wove and repaired the fabric of the Law, which the Sainnites tore apart again, before and behind her.

The raven tapped on the window to wake her up, and she went into the kitchen to let him in. She bore the weight of the child lightly enough, but she did not awaken as easily or gracefully as she used to. She fumbled at the window latch and then sat heavily by the cold hearth, rubbing her face. “You’ve been gone over twelve days.”

Embodied in the raven, Karis said, “This raven went to South Hill again. And I’ve spoken to Zanja.”

Looking through the raven’s eyes was strange, for he had two fields of vision and could see Norina in only one of them. As she leapt to her feet and cried out, “What!” then strode in agitation across the length of the kitchen, she moved from one eye to the other. “I ought to wring your neck!”

“You’re right; you ought to. Why don’t you do it, then?” Karis flew the raven over so Norina could reach his black neck easily.

Norina’s hands unclenched. She lifted them up as though to directly entreat the goddess Shaftal for assistance, though she could hardly be described as devout.

“Zanja told me that it was a Sainnite seer that caused such havoc in Rees last year. And this year he’s in South Hill.”

Norina walked back to the hearth and sat down. Her face had lost its color and the scar across her cheek stood out like a brand. “Tell me everything that she said. Every word.”

Karis told her. Norina stirred the coals and then sat without moving until the few flames that she had coaxed out of the ashes died down from neglect. She covered her face with her hands. When she looked up, she had slipped from dismay back again to anger. If her infant could survive a tumultuous nine months in Norina’s womb, Karis thought irrelevantly, the rest of the child’s life surely would seem easy and restful by comparison.

Norina said, “What you don’t see, and she can’t see, is how she endangers you with her concern. If it is in fact true that the only seer in all of Shaftal is a Sainnite—and that the only person in Shaftal besides myself who is devoted to you has made herself his enemy—it will not be long before the seer begins to dream of you. If it has not happened already.”

Karis, muddled by air logic, rather plaintively said, “I am not sure I understand you.”

“He will know of you through thinking of her. Perhaps he will know more of you than she does—and certainly, she knows too much already.”