Elemental Logic - Fire Logic Part 10

Zanja and her companion sometimes encountered others, traveling through the dark woods, but they separated again. The trees began to thin, and boulders loomed. Zanja realized from the ache in her calves that the ground had begun to rise. The trees dropped away. The bird call sounded: closer, but above her.

She looked up and saw a rocky hillside pressed against fading stars. A dozen dark shapes climbed the rocks; soon she was one of them, hauling herself and her gear from stone to stone, sometimes being given a hand from above, and sometimes offering one to the climber below. At the top, the entire company had gathered, some gasping for breath, some loading their pistols and winding their crossbows. Daye had used pebbles to lay out a map on the ground. She looked up as Zanja squatted nearby. "Annis says you're not much of a shot yet."

"This is an opportunity to practice."

Daye grinned. "Well, first rule of ambush: Don't be the first one to shoot, not even if you feel like the Sainnites are right on top of you. And until you hear that first shot, don't even look to see where the Sainnites are. If you can see them, they can see you."

A half dozen late-comers stood or squatted around the impromptu map as Daye reviewed the plans for what must have been the third or fourth time. Others gathered around Willis and Perry, being instructed in much the same way, while Emil climbed to a high point and took out his spygla.s.s.

The dawning day revealed a lone black bird soaring overhead. The last of the company members scattered to find positions in the bulwark of stone, and Zanja settled behind a boulder to wait, with her loaded pistols at hand. The dull brown clothing of her fellow Paladins melted into stone; their shapelesshats disguised their heads and faces. She watched the raven, wondering if with the flaps of his wings he sent signals that she could not read.

The rising sun had begun to cast shadows when Zanja heard the distinct, harsh tones of a tin signal whistle, and some time later faintly heard a few words spoken in Sainnese. No doubt the Sainnites were arguing whether to continue on, for to anyone with any sense the hillside was an intimidating prospect.

She heard a few more words, angry now: a hot-headed commander, frustrated at having nothing to show for the long night in the woods. They were going to give up the chase, she thought, with a deep sense of relief.

A long silence followed, then she heard quite distinctly a woman just below her, saying in Sainnese, "They came this way, that's for certain. But I say they're long gone-scattered through the forest, impossible to find by now. They used the rough ground to obscure their traces."

A man said angrily, "That seguli swore we would have a proud victory this night."

"Well, the night has ended," the woman said.

"He has never been wrong before!"

The woman offered no argument, but it seemed it was her ill luck to be the target for her commander's wrath. "Climb up and tell me what you see," he said.

It was Zanja's ill luck that the woman began to climb where she stood, perhaps two body lengths below Zanja's hiding place. She waited, hearing the casual conversations of the Sainnites below, the chirps of a few early season birds, the faint, hoa.r.s.e cry of the raven. The woman climbed swiftly, impatiently, and yet when she reached the other side of the boulder behind which Zanja sheltered, she paused, and Zanja heard the hiss of a blade sliding out of its scabbard. The Sainnite soldier came around the boulder weapon first.

For a moment, she looked, startled, into Zanja's eyes, and then Zanja quietly embraced her neck with her dagger's edge, and almost fell with her as the woman dropped her blade and grabbed Zanja by the s.h.i.+rt. Zanja hung on the hillside by her fingernails, and scrambled back to shelter, briefly seeing a dozen or more surprised soldiers staring up at her, or down at the flailing, dying soldier who had fallen practically on top of them. In almost the same moment, she heard Emil fire the first shot, and in the immediate volley the Sainnites fled for the marginal shelter of the thin woods.

Zanja and her companions chased them down the hillside. She leapt over the dying soldier, whose heart continued to pump blood onto the stones. She chased down a wide-eyed young man whose pistol shot dodged crazily past her shoulder and into the sky. He dropped the pistol and jerked a short sword out of its scabbard, but by then Zanja's dagger had sliced through his leather cuira.s.s and into his chest so easily it seemed the man's armor and flesh were constructed of lard. She missed his heart, though, and had to try again, and in the moment between her first blow and her second, the panicked young soldier took a stumbling swing at her. She caught the terrified blow on her dagger, and felt it jar her arm and shoulder like a blow from a stave, but she managed to strike him again, and this time the blow was true, and the boy died.

In the woods, the Sainnite commander's tin whistle shrilled, "Come to me!" She looked around: scattered Paladins fought and chased the fleeing Sainnites. She ran to help a Paladin who seemed overpowered by a towering brute of a man in metal armor. She shot him at close range with her pistol, which seemed to do no good, then switched her dagger back to her right hand as the monstrous soldier turned to confront her. She would sooner take on an angry bull, she thought as she dodged the battle-ax that could have taken her head off, and leapt forward to slip her uncanny dagger neatly into his armpit.He scarcely seemed to feel it, but it bled like a mortal wound, and she and her companion took turns baiting him while he bled to death. At last he fell slowly as a slaughtered cow, still swinging his deadly ax.

She had a moment, then, to recognize her battle companion. "Is that your blood?" she asked, gesturing at Linde's scarlet-stained s.h.i.+rt.

"I don't think so."

They stood together, gasping for breath, watching the great soldier's eyes glaze over. "It took him long enough," Linde commented.

"I must have just nicked his heart."

"That was a tricky blow." Admiringly, he shook her hand.

"I've got a good blade," she said, which was the truth, though he took it for modesty. "What shall we do now?"

As if in reply, a volley of gunshots sounded in the woods, and Linde said, "The Sainnites have regrouped, by the sound of it, and Emil will be calling a retreat, since we no longer have the advantage. Let's look around for wounded Paladins, and start hauling them up the hillside."

They soon found the company healer, Jerrell, engaged in the same project, and the three of them hastily scoured the battleground for fallen Paladins, finding one wounded and one dead. They finished off two injured Sainnites as well.

With the exhilaration of battle starting to lift, Zanja fought an overpowering nausea. Her limbs trembled as she helped carry the dead and wounded to high ground. Her various victims had doused her with their blood, and she wanted nothing more than to find a quiet stream and rinse out her s.h.i.+rt. But she had been through this horror before, and knew there was no remedy except to wait for it to pa.s.s. Meanwhile, with the Paladins reappearing in the woods and gathering again on the hilltop, Zanja helped Jerrell to amputate the wounded Paladin's mangled arm. When they were finished, she commented unsteadily that she'd rather be a warrior than a surgeon.

Jerrell said grimly, "Well, I've done both, and I'd say killing a stranger is much easier than chopping off the arms and legs of my friends."

The raven circling overhead tilted its wings and flew into the sunrise. Perched on the hilltop with his spygla.s.s, Emil reported that the Sainnites continued to retreat. Annis found Zanja, and her excited monologue gave Zanja some relief from thinking. She had time to change her s.h.i.+rt and to settle her stomach with a mouthful of hardtack before the company began again to travel, carrying the dead and wounded, some somber, like Zanja, and some, like Annis, giddy with triumph.

At mid-day, they stopped to rest and eat. Annis was called away to give her opinion on a faulty pistol, and Zanja sat solitary in the cool shade of a tree, pretending peace for a little while.

Emil limped over with his camp stool under his arm. "Daye says you have something to tell me." He had taken off his doublet, which had been stained with a distinct arc of spattered blood. He sat heavily upon his stool, and offered Zanja a wedge of cheese to go with her half-eaten piece of bread. She said, "I speak Sainnese."

He gave her a startled look, but said half-humorously, "Of course you do. And what did the Sainnites say?""Just before the battle began, I overheard a conversation between the commander and a soldier, the one I killed."

"The first of three, I hear."

"The commander was angry, almost as though he had been so confident of his victory that night that he could not believe it had been stolen from him. He said, 'That seguli swore we would have victory this night.' Then, he added, 'He has never been wrong before.' Then, because he was in such a bad humor, he sent that woman to her death."

"Hmm."

Though the days had begun to warm, in the cool woods it remained chilly, and the trees had scarcely begun to leaf out. Emil wore his tattered coat, and Zanja could hear the faint sound of his watch ticking in a pocket.

Emil said, "What is a seguli?"

"Unfortunately, I have never heard that word before. But I think the seguli may be our true enemy-a talented strategist, the same one who gutted Rees Company last year."

"If he truly has never been wrong before, our little escapade today will surely leave him-and them-a bit unnerved." For a moment, Emil looked as gleeful as a boy, and then he sobered. "Still, if not for you, they would have found us, and it would have been a ma.s.sacre."

"We were lucky," Zanja said. It would not do for Emil to start relying on her to predict their battles for him. The raven was gone, and Karis would certainly see to it that he never returned.

"We were lucky," Emil agreed. "It's the kind of luck we need to survive this summer. I hope that it continues."

Chapter Ten.

The important work of collecting and distributing bread to the scattered company proved as dull and tedious as Zanja had feared. The greatest challenge it posed was that of finding her way-first to the various farmholds that had agreed to supply the bread, then to the various encampments that needed it.

The farmholds most often provided great wheels of hard rye bread that kept well and did not crumble easily, but they also loaded her poor donkey with whatever else could be spared from their own or their neighbors' storerooms: carrots, cheese, sausage, turnips, apples, potatoes, onions, and ham. At least, when Zanja succeeded in finding a company encampment, no one was sorry to see her.

It had become known that Zanja's prescience had saved the company that night. Although most of the Paladins could not bring themselves to treat her as one of their own, they were courteous enough, though in Willis's unit the welcome remained particularly cool.

"There you are at last," Annis said, when Zanja arrived at Daye's unit with a fresh load of bread. "We're running low on saltpeter, and I have to go to Wilton. Emil says to bring you with me, and we'll meet him and Willis along the way."The next morning, on the east-west road just outside the river valley, they found Emil and Willis waiting for them. The road was busy with market day traffic. Willis and Annis, their weapons hidden in their longs.h.i.+rts, became indistinguishable from any other farmer. Emil might have been a rather seedy accountant looking for work. Zanja wrapped her hair in a headcloth, obscured her face with a hat brim, and hoped no one looked at her too closely.

"I want you to learn to read glyphs," Emil said to her, and produced out of his knapsack a sheet of paper. "I've written some out for you." He pointed. "The four elements, the four directions, the four seasons, the twelve implements."

Next to each carefully drawn symbol, he had written its name, followed by a brief explanation of the symbol's implications. The symbols seemed stagnant, their implications arcane and irrelevant. "Why?"

Zanja asked.

"Indulge me."

She felt Willis glowering at her back. "Of course."

To understand the glyphs seemed like knowledge of the most tedious sort. Each glyph had primary and secondary meanings, and sometimes meant two things simultaneously. Each glyph had a history or special use, and some of them were accompanied by lengthy expository tales that complicated rather than clarified their meaning. In addition, the meanings of the glyphs interacted with each other, so that two glyphs together meant something different from what they meant separately. To fully understand these glyphs might require lengthy study, and the entire system, Emil told her, included a thousand symbols, though he was not certain if anyone remaining alive was familiar with them all. He himself knew about half of them, and had despaired of ever learning the other half.

His pa.s.sion for this strange, ambiguous method of recording and understanding ideas was as evident as Willis's and Annis's excruciating boredom with it. If only out of perversity, Zanja struggled to comprehend what Emil was telling her about the glyphs. The more she came to understand them, the more genuine her interest became.

Wilton was as big as the largest towns Zanja had traded in up in the border country. Located near the junction of two major rivers, it was a warren of narrow byways and sudden plazas, with balconies on opposite buildings a mere hop apart from each other, and a casual att.i.tude toward garbage that left her always on the lookout for dung and debris underfoot or falling from overhead. The rivers brought travelers from far-flung communities who were riding the current to the seaport and paused here to replenish their supplies and sell some of their wares. Many of these travelers looked no more like a South Hiller than she did, and some of them even resembled her.

"I won't say you can get everything in Wilton," said Emil. "It's not like it used to be, and it's nothing like Hanishport, where you can get everything."

"Everything but what you can get in Hanishport's neighboring town, Lalali," said Willis. "Of course, in Lalali you'll be robbed and murdered in the bargain."

The taverns had set up their tables in the streets, the better to entice the farmers to drink what money they had rather than buy seed or tools or pay their taxes. It seemed a hopeless enterprise, however. This early in the season the farmers come into town for market day hadn't much to sell, and they all had a pale, winter-pinched look, and a way of keeping their hands up their sleeves.Emil and Willis had come into town to talk to Willis's brothers, who worked at the garrison. Annis left to make some arrangements with one of her chemist friends.

A row of beggars sat against a wall with their empty hands lifted, moaning tales of being reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. Emil tapped Zanja's arm and pointed at the garish sign that hung over the door. As was common throughout the country, the business folk of Wilton used glyphs to identify their shops. Merchants used only one symbol, the tavern keepers two, which made the name of the taverns amusingly ambiguous. However, the symbols were always represented as pictures: in the case of this tavern a wheel and a hoe.

The tavern was empty. Willis shouted for ale.

"So what is this place named?" Emil asked Zanja, as they sat at a battered table.

"Progress Through Hard Work," she hazarded. "It seems rather an odd name for a tavern."

It was an elementary reading compared to what Emil could do, but he nodded approvingly. "There's a humor in it-most people would miss the joke entirely these days, and simply call this place the Wheel and Hoe." A big, light-footed woman entered from the arched doorway that led to a steep stone staircase. Down its length echoed the wail of a baby.

"So sorry," she said. "I didn't know my husband had gone out."

She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies for them.

"Husband," snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, "City folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and then they call us backwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently clothed and fed."

"Those beggars are smoke sick," Zanja said.

"All the more reason why they need their families," Willis snapped.

"So what would you call this woman's man?"

"Not her husband," Willis said obstinately. "Where is the household? Where are the other parents for the child? It's just the two of them. That's no family."

Zanja took a swallow of the bitter ale she'd never developed a taste for, and ate the greasy pork pie the alewife set in front of her. The woman's husband returned, and they had a brief, bitter argument behind the closed door of the kitchen. When Willis's brothers arrived, the ale husband came out smiling and rubbing his hands, and wouldn't leave them alone until Emil threatened to go to another ale house.

Willis's brothers smelled distinctly of the stable. They were identical twins who dressed alike and ate alike and finished each other's sentences. When both of them turned their attention upon Zanja, she realized that they probably made love together as well, and she had to struggle to keep from revealing how repellent she found the prospect.

There was a certain affliction that every member of Willis's family seemed to share, a single-mindedness that sorely tried her patience. "Tell me about this new commander," Emil said. "You have at least seen her, haven't you?"

"She's young," said one."And handsome," said the other.

"How young? Is she one of this new breed, Shaftali-born?"

"She's older than fifteen!"

Emil rather wearily reminded the brother that, though it had been fifteen years since the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the Samnites had been a presence in Shaftal for a good fifteen years before that.

"I suppose she could be thirty," said a brother. "Maybe a bit older."

"What does it matter?" asked the other.

"The young ones sometimes speak our language, and they understand us much better than their fathers did. I think they are the more dangerous enemies because they don't make as many stupid mistakes."

The brothers looked at him blankly. "Sainnites are Sainnites."

"Exactly," said Willis impatiently.

Emil looked as if the three of them together were enough to give him a headache.

The brothers told him that the soldiers rea.s.signed from Rees had arrived all at once, before the thaw.

There were too many of them for the brothers to notice any one in particular. They complained at length about the great quant.i.ties of baggage the two of them had carried that day. In particular, they remembered some large, remarkably heavy trunks that the two of them had been unfortunate enough to have to move into one soldier's quarters. "Trunks full of rocks," they said bitterly. "A lot of rocks."

"Weapons," suggested Willis.

"Oh, sure, it could have been ax heads or something made of iron, though what one soldier wanted with so many of them I don't know."

"It was books," said Zanja.

Willis and his brothers burst into raucous laughter. "Books! Even we don't have books anymore, and at least we know how to read!"

But Emil said somberly, "Books? What kind of Sainnite would have such a collection of books?

"Perhaps a Sainnite young enough to be fluent in both languages, so he can read Shaftali books."

"And educated at least a little-though how that might happen I don't know. Some of them must be able to read, but not in Shaftalese."

"And he's influential enough that his commander allows him to fill a wagon, when most soldiers have only one small trunk, and whatever they can carry on their backs."

Emil turned to the brothers. "Find a man like that," he said. "A young Sainnite, fluent in both languages, educated, and influential, who arrived with the others from Rees. Find out everything you can about him."

The brothers gaped at him as though he was a street corner magician pulling coins out of children's ears.

Willis, predictably, protested, "You don't even know this man exists. It's just guesses."

Emil said quietly, "No, it's fire logic."Willis banged his tankard on the table. "I need more ale."

Zanja gave him hers. The thick stone walls retained the day's chill too well, and the fire on the hearth was stingy at best. Dour Annis came in, and greeted the brothers with indifferent kisses. Probably the brothers were her cousins, like just about everyone in South Hill. Then she kissed Zanja, much less indifferently.

The four of them left the brothers drinking their ale, and followed a circuitous route to a road that ended at the garrison wall. There was no gate; the wall rose up out of the road's debris. The city buildings stood aloof, with the bas.e.m.e.nts of the buildings that had once stood there filled with the rubble of their demolished walls. The garrison wall had been built of reused stone blocks. As they stood there, a soldier strolled past along the battlement, eating an apple. He carried a long gun by a sling over his shoulder. He did not even glance down at them.