Fire Logic (16 page)

“You will be responsible for collecting bread from the farmholds, and distributing it to the company.”

“I see. Well, sir, I’ll do my best.”

“The next time you call me ‘sir,’ I’ll demote you.”

“But how would it be possible to demote me further?”

“Zanja, it was a joke.”

After he left, someone said kindly, “Bread is important.”

“It is a child’s job,” she retorted. No one contradicted her.

“At least your face will become familiar across South Hill.”

Zanja suspected that the commanders had another advantage in mind: They wished to obscure the links between the company and the farmholds, but without bread they could not survive long. So they gave the duty of collecting food from the farmholds to a stranger, who had no relatives to be executed in retaliation, and who could legitimately pretend to have never heard of South Hill Company. It was a sensible decision.

Still, Zanja went to bed angry, and woke up angry in the middle of the night, with a dull headache and a full bladder, and a vague sense of dread that seemed related to the dreams she could not remember. She crept past her sleeping companions and went a little way into the woods. She had re-buttoned her breeches and stood wondering why she wasn’t going back to bed, when a voice spoke in the leafless branches overhead. “Zanja na’Tarwein.”

A dark shape flapped against the stars, leading her further away from the clearing. She followed, with her heart in her throat. The night gave a sigh, as a brief breeze lifted and then fell still. The raven dropped out of the branches and stalked at her feet like a restless rag of night sky.

Zanja sank into a squat. “What are you doing here?”

The raven said, “You were more courteous when you thought I was a ghost.”

“But now I know you are just a messenger, and that your messages are not supposed to be for me.”

“Ha!” the raven cawed. “Norina thinks I serve at Karis’s will, but you should know better.”

“Should I? What do you serve, then, if not her will?”

“I serve her secret heart.”

The raven god of the Ashawala’i was an amoral trickster, so Zanja found herself unable to believe entirely in this raven’s honesty. She said, “Well, perhaps you can ignore Karis’s promises, but I have to honor promises of my own. I am certain Norina would forbid me to talk with you.” She rose to her feet to leave, though she was not certain she could walk away.

The raven said, “This evening, as the sun set, I saw a thing that might surprise you.”

Zanja often had wished she could see from above, like a bird. She said politely, “What did you see, good raven?”

“I saw Sainnite soldiers creeping through the woods.”

Zanja’s vague dread sharpened. “Are they creeping towards this encampment?”

“Oh, yes. They approach you from the west, spread out, to catch you in a net of soldiers as you try to flee.”

“Then should we flee due east?”

“Northeast,” the raven said. “The forest is not so thick there, and the land grows steep and rocky. It seems a good place to defend yourselves.”

“Do you know if they outnumber us?” Zanja wondered, then, if the raven could even count. She could scarcely believe she was discussing battle tactics with a bird, and had to keep reminding herself that the raven shared Karis’s intelligence.

“They are greater than your company, but not by much.” She heard the dry sound of the raven running a wing feather through his beak. “Zanja na’Tarwein,” he added, and she could have sworn it was the god that spoke to her. “You can be drearily punctilious.”

He spread his wings, and, only mildly offended, she said hastily, “Well, tonight I appreciate your lack of punctiliousness. I’ll try to leave some food for you in the camp.”

She found Emil with no little difficulty, finally locating him by his gear: the box that contained his tea set, and the campstool that was never out of reach. He awakened at her touch. “Zanja?”

“I think we are in danger.”

He sat up, and seemed to consider, or perhaps to consult his own talent for prescience. “Yes, we are indeed in danger.” He reached for his boots. “It is the Sainnites, of course. I wonder how they found us.”

“That I don’t know. But I think they are to the west, spread out in the woods.”

“Yes,” he confirmed, in some surprise. “There’s a place to the north and east where we might stage an ambush. What do you think?”

“Why not?”

She gave him a hand up, and he grunted as he put his weight on his bad leg. He held her hand for a moment longer than necessary. “Two fire bloods,” he said thoughtfully. “This is an advantage I had not considered.”

“I’ll pack your gear for you,” she said. “I know how you like it arranged.”

What followed was the most swift, silent, and orderly retreat Zanja had ever seen. She had scarcely managed to buckle her belt and sling her knapsack on her shoulders when the company began moving into the woods. She delayed a moment to put a chicken carcass and a handful of cracked corn atop a flat rock for the raven. By then, Daye had sent someone back for her, a laconic veteran who moved through the woods as a snake glides through grass. The abandoned clearing lay empty behind them, with only the warm ashes of the campfires to tell the story of how recently it had been occupied.

An occasional mimicked bird call, far ahead, gave the scattered company members a direction to follow. 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 spyglass.

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 shapeless hats 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, hoarse 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 shirt. 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 that 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 cuirass 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, and 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 shirt.

“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 her blood, and she wanted nothing more than to find a quiet stream and rinse out her shirt. But she had been through this horror before, and knew there was no remedy except to wait for it to pass. 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 spyglass, 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 shirt and to settle her stomach with a mouthful of hard tack 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 campstool 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.”