Fire Logic (45 page)

Long before sunrise, she rose from her cold bed. She tied her hair back to boldly reveal the three earrings of Right, Regard, and Rank, and called her horse to the saddle. She rode in darkness down the steep track from the highlands to the coast. As the sky lightened, dawn winds carried to her the scent of the sea.

The sun had just risen when she rode into Lalali. The city gates stood open, guarded only by a pretty-faced boy dressed in purple silk. He ran up, boldly clasped the heel of her boot, and gazed winsomely up into her face as he invited her to have her way with him. When he suggested what they might do, she jerked her foot away in disgust. Undiscouraged, he latched onto the empty stirrup. “Speak your secret desire, and it shall be yours. Is it a girl you’d prefer? Is it not power you seek, but rather to be overpowered?”

“Stand away, boy! I travel on the G’deon’s business!”

She threatened him with her lifted foot. He stepped away from the horse, crowing with amusement. “The G’deon’s business? Tell the G’deon there is only one business in Lalali!”

Dinal’s horse jumped forward at a kick of the heel, and left the young man to enjoy his hilarity in private. His laughter swooped and howled through sunrise’s silence. “The boy seems half mad,” Dinal muttered.

On horseback, she wandered the streets of Lalali as the sun gradually chased away autumn’s chill and cast a shimmer of light across the copper-tipped towers. Sunlight glared on walls of white sandstone. It gilded three nude marble figures in the center of a fountain, engaged in a complicated sexual act.

Dinal passed a crew of blank-eyed, starved and sore-riddled street sweepers, who were so numbed by smoke that they did not even flinch when the foreman laid into them with a switch. Other than these, Dinal did not see another living soul until noon approached. Then, a few early-rising whores came out to sit naked in the sun. Their pierced and bejeweled nipples glittered; last night’s golden paint peeled away in patches to reveal bruises, scars, scabs, and bloody wounds. Lounging in chairs dragged out into the middle of the road, they cushioned certain parts of their bodies with pillows, and watched Dinal pass with the same stunned and incurious gaze they turned upon each other. A street doctor made her rounds, dispensing poultices and headache remedies.

They smoked to dull the pain, Dinal supposed. But a whore under smoke was helpless to defend herself against injury. So the trap closed, and there was no escape.

Dinal’s horse stopped dead in the middle of a deserted square and looked at her over his shoulder. Dinal could offer him neither explanation nor purpose for their continued wandering. It was her lot and joy to serve at the beck of the G’deon. She would have to remain in this cursed town, and await either the bidding of her heart or the long-expected word that the G’deon had finally breathed his last.

She allowed the horse to drink from one of the pornographic fountains, then she turned him toward the eastern end of town. Here, the nearby ocean scented the air with a sweet reek of seaweed and salt. In the debris of narrow alleys, rag-dressed people huddled against moldy stone. When the sun suddenly came blazing over the edge of the rooftops, they began to awaken, in a mutter of groans and curses.

The narrow street led Dinal to a plaza, where a broken-wheeled carriage stood with the horse still in the traces, and the driver, asleep or dead, slumped to one side with the reins in his hands. A few newly risen drunks had gathered to dunk their heads in the fountain. Two shouted at each other, and seemed on the verge of blows. One vomited onto bare stone, as another looked speculatively at the carriage. Others still lay like soldiers mowed down in a desperate rout and left behind to rot. Dinal’s horse picked his way squeamishly among the fallen.

Not much liking the look of this plaza or its occupants, Dinal turned her horse toward the nearest alley. Directly across from her, in a windowless wall scabrous with the remains of a decaying mosaic, a door opened. Out came a barefoot girl, dressed only in a night shift, with a water jug balanced upon her hip. She was extraordinarily tall and thin. The invading sunlight passed across her face as she stepped through the human debris. At Dinal’s hail, the girl neither stepped forward nor stepped away.

Dinal held out a hand, with a silver coin in the palm. “I have lost my way. Will you take me back to the main road?”

The girl examined Dinal from toe to head, her gaze lingering longest on the tell-tale gold earrings: three of them, marking her high rank. “All roads lead to the main road. No one will ever believe you are lost. Who are you?” Her body was all arms and legs; she had been growing with astonishing speed and her breasts had started to form. And she had come into her power, and had only just begun to realize what she was. This Dinal saw, imprinted in the girl’s very flesh. She was earth.

“I’m Dinal Paladin. I’ve come here to find you.”

“Now there’s a story,” the girl said. Yet her body had shivered, as with yearning, before she spoke with such quick cynicism. Perhaps she had half expected someone to come and find her, thinking that surely someone, somehow, would realize that an earth witch had emerged in the back streets of Lalali.

“I was sent by the G’deon,” Dinal said. “I am the mother of his children.”

After a moment, the girl said, “You must speak to my master and hire my services. Do you have a kerchief or a length of cloth, something to cover your face? And let loose your hair.”

Dinal untied the thong that bound her hair, so that it fell forward and covered her earrings. She took a black scarf out of her baggage, and the girl helped her to tie it so it covered her entire face, except for her eyes. “Now, stand so, holding the reins.” The girl demonstrated an attitude of impatience and boredom. “You must seem eager, but do not agree to pay more than you have there in your hand.”

The girl’s master, a thin, hard-faced man with a grimy red ribbon tying back his greasy hair, seemed none too willing to let the girl go with Dinal, even for so little time. They dickered until the girl reappeared in the open door, fully dressed in a plain, serviceable tunic and trousers. Dinal, who had been holding the coin between her fingers where the girl’s master could see it, abruptly closed her fist and mounted her horse. “Never mind, then. I was particularly taken with your girl’s unusual appearance, but I will find someone else.”

“Lady, if you knew what it costs me to keep her!” Defeated, the girl’s master reached behind himself to grab the girl and shove her forward, but smacked her cheek when he got a good look at her. “What are you wearing? Will you shame me before the entire city?”

Dinal said, “Her plain clothing pleases me.” She held out the coin. “Come here, girl, and take your payment.”

Expressionless, the girl took the money and dutifully delivered it into her master’s hand. A handprint had appeared on her cheek. “Bring her back by sunset,” the man warned, as the girl mounted behind Dinal.

When the girl pressed against Dinal’s back, the tension in her muscles belied the calm, even indifferent expression on her face. They rode down the cluttered alley. As they turned the corner, Dinal said, “He assumed I wanted a whore, and I let him believe what he liked. But you must understand that you are free now, and it is your choice whether or not to come with me. I intend to take you to the House of Lilterwess, where you belong. Will you come with me, of your own will?”

The girl said, “Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“Karis,” she said.

The girl directed Dinal safely to the main boulevard, where masked men and women now sauntered arrogantly down the rows of whorehouses, surveying the exotic beauties beckoning wearily from the steps. At the city gate, a dozen boys and girls now gathered, each more beseeching and desperate than the last. Dinal rode past them, as a bell tower counted the second hour of the afternoon, and a drunken troubadour balanced his way along the top of the wall, incoherently singing.

Then they passed through the gate, and Karis sighed, as though she had been holding her breath. Dinal never felt her turn to look back at the city, not even once.

Several days later, Harald G’deon vested Karis with the power of Shaftal, and died. It was the last night that the walls of the House of Lilterwess would remain standing.

In the twilight, Zanja spotted Karis coming towards them across the ragged plain, stumbling because her head was tilted back so she could watch the sky. Zanja stood up, unsteady from the lingering weakness of starvation. “I want to be alone with her for a while.”

“See if you can get her to sleep,” J’han suggested, offering a blanket. “She doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

Zanja walked across the treeless heath. Karis was a tattered shadow, with fraying hair and raveled shirt. Her hand caught Zanja by the shoulder as if starlight had blinded her, and she said in a voice as rough as a hoe’s edge, “Zanja, what am I going to do?”

Zanja said, “Lie down with me and I’ll tell you the stories of the stars.”

Karis lay down where she was standing, and starlight filled her eyes as water fills a cup. Zanja had to fit herself around the sharp stones and prickly plants that Karis had not heeded. The blanket that she drew over them smelled of smoke and mildew and the detritus of a long, hard journey, a journey far from over, perhaps never over.

Karis said, “Emil fought me for Mabin’s life. And even now I wonder if it was wisdom or cowardice that I didn’t simply kill her. I could have.” She sounded both amazed and horrified. “Accept the burden of responsibility, Emil says, or become what Mabin imagines I am.”

Zanja said, “Now you will become something else.”

“Something better, or something worse?”

They lay in silence. Zanja said, “It
is
possible to exercise power well.”

“You think so? Did I exercise it well when I deceived you?”

“I suppose you thought I wasn’t strong enough to let you choose to go to certain death. I admire your courage now, of course, but in the moment of decision, I would have begged you not to take the risk.”

Karis said, “I never feared that you would hold me back. I did fear that if I made you part of my decision, you would choose to die with me if I died.”

They had been quiet long enough for the crickets around them to start to chirp, when Zanja finally said, “Karis, thank you for this year.”

“What? It’s been the most lonely, miserable, forsaken year...”

“But even the gods must be amazed by it.”

“Amazed?” Karis said in a choked voice.

Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis’s hair. It pushed back against her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.

Zanja said, “Of course you are uncertain. That’s the way it is.”

“For everybody?”

“Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one massacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G’deon and you’ll be consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart like a herd with too many stallions.”

Karis uttered a hoarse, ragged gasp of laughter.

“Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be learned.”

“Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I’ll never do it as well as you do.”

“But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee I am...”

“How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?” said Karis.

Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, Karis added, “Weren’t you going to tell me the stories of the stars?”

“That’s what I have been telling you.”

A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with stories of her own, so that none of the stories were finished. The silences grew longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away some of the stones from underneath them both, then folded herself against Karis’s back. Karis’s shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.

She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited like tinder.

Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J’han checked on her and said simply, “Let’s leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us.” So they improvised a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the seam to splint her leg. Norina and J’han seemed engaged in extremely complex negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry J’han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.