Water Logic (29 page)

That hollow in her belly had not been helped by food. Perhaps it wasn’t hunger at all. “They’re teaching me to kill people,” she said.

“That can’t be an easy job for them.”

She glanced up at his face. Yes, it had been a wry joke. “Gilly thinks that Clement won’t recover from what she has to do.”

“Why don’t people tell me things when I can do something about them?” Emil seemed more weary than angry. He shut his eyes for a moment.

“Can Norina help her, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Norina had to settle for half measures with Zanja.”

Medric spoke, startlingly close. “What a couple of gloomy people you are. Your map, General Emil.” He delivered a Sainnite’s salute, mockingly exaggerated, and handed Emil a rolled piece of parchment.

Emil glanced at the notations on the outside of the document. “It’s two hundred and thirty years old. A Truthken’s map—Norina might be interested in it. It’ll work, I suppose.”

He carefully unrolled the crackling, ancient parchment and held it open across his legs. “Where is our missing assassin, Master Seer?”

“Don’t call me that,” Medric said.

“But you called me ‘general.’ ”

“Oh, revenge is it?”

Medric pointed at the map. Emil turned it so Seth could see what Medric was pointing at: Basdown.

Seth felt the gorge rise in her throat. Medric promptly handed her a cup half-full of cold tea, which may have been sitting on Emil’s table. She swallowed a mouthful. It may have been old, but it settled her stomach. “This work is too hard. I think I’ll go back to cow doctoring.”

“Will you? I’ll be a librarian, then.” Emil gestured at Medric. “And my husband here—”

“I can shoot. It’s my only useful skill.”

“Useful in war. Too bad we’re at peace.”

“I’ll starve, then,” said Medric cheerfully.

The two men smiled at each other. This silly banter made Seth impatient. “So there’s an assassin in Basdown,” she said.

“Karis finds us tiresome, also.” Medric wandered back into the books.

“I’ve been terrified for Karis,” said Emil. “I’m sure you think I’ve been parsimonious with information, but I would have told you more had I known anything. The ravens stopped talking a day after she left for Watfield. I only knew Karis was unharmed because of that one note a couple of days ago, and it was chary with detail—she doesn’t much like writing. But I guess it occurred to her that I might be worried by the ravens’ silence, and she sent another note. She had the Paladins kill a raven to save Clement, and now she can’t make the ravens talk. She can’t be in them, though she still knows what they know. So she told me that a raven had lost track of one of the assassins, and that it had looked for him in Basdown but had been unable to find him. So I need you to go to Basdown to locate our man and tell the raven where he is.”

“You want me to make a ten-day journey to help a bird?”

Emil gazed at Seth. Her face began to feel warm. He finally said, “A broken thing is nagging at you, something you can’t fix.”

“Plenty of those.”

“But you’re making good progress. It’s a slow project, but that shouldn’t trouble you.”

“Seth should go to Basdown.” Medric’s voice, muffled by books, seemed very far away.

Emil’s eyebrow lifted. “Well, you may ignore me with impunity, but ignore Medric at your peril.”

“Bloody hell,” Seth muttered.

Far away in the books, Medric burst out laughing. “She’s cursing in Sainnese!”

Seth had grudgingly learned to appreciate the importance of the garrison’s protocols. Every cow farm in Basdown raised its bull calves with great care so the animal would be accustomed to obedience and placidity. Even so, young bulls sometimes became unmanageable and had to be killed. The garrison was much like a cow farm that raised only bulls, people who from childhood were taught to be killers. Such people must be strictly controlled lest their violence become unmanageable. This much Seth had learned from observing the company captains, who ruled their soldiers with a mix of affection and loathing that matched exactly how Seth felt about bulls.

When she returned to the garrison carrying a basket of butter cakes from Garland’s kitchen, she went first to Gilly, who accompanied her to the commander’s quarters where Ellid was eating a meal. Ellid accepted a cake, approved Emil’s request, and wrote the order to be delivered to a lieutenant who would tell it to Captain Prista, who would tell it to Damon. No one would ask Damon what he thought of these orders, nor would the young soldier expect to be asked his opinion. Seth gave a cake to Gilly when they parted and brought the remaining cakes to Prista’s company.

The next morning, as Seth was packing her books to return them to Travesty, Damon knocked on the door frame of the mudroom. “I report to you, Captain Seth!”

“Emil asked me to make this journey and wanted me to have a companion. Then I realized I could bring a soldier with me. You can tell me what it’s like to live with Shaftali people.”

“I am to spy on farmers, eh? Like you spy on soldiers.”

Damon seemed cheerful at the prospect, but Seth said, “If you don’t want to do it, please tell me so.”

Damon gave an exaggerated salute, much like Medric’s from the day before. “I am willing. An adventure, eh?”

“Not a battle.”

“Very good. For I do not fight well.” He displayed his left hand, which had only a finger and thumb.

“You fight better than I do.”

“It is true,” he declared. “You are the worst soldier in the army.”

Seth had bid her bunkmates farewell before breakfast, and Damon’s bunkmates had wished him well, and apparently subjected him to unmerciful teasing, when he received his orders. At the mudroom door, Damon took the heavy satchel and slung it over his own shoulder. “These books are good to eat?”

“We’ll get some traveling food at Travesty and return the books to the library. But first we are going shopping.”

“Shopping?” Damon seemed nonplussed.

“You need some clothes.”

Damon frowned down at his clean but many-times patched and repaired uniform. “But this wool has grown into my skin.”

“Then changing your clothes will be an adventure,” Seth said, “The first of many.”

Chapter 22

“Cider? There’s been no cider since summer!” The tavern keeper, a burly woman of small patience, added sarcastically, “I’d think you were a scholar who can hardly bother to look out the window to see if the world is still there. But with half the road on your clothes and the other half on your face, you’re no scholar, that’s for certain.”

Zanja could hardly tell the woman that last summer she had been two hundred years in the future. She dropped her heavy pack to the floor with a sigh. “Beer, then.” She hated the stuff.

“You’re no apple farmer, either, or you’d be waking every morning with fear in your heart that a late frost has blighted the fruit-set again.”

“Not a farmer,” Zanja said. “Under all this dirt I’m a Paladin. What have you got to eat?”

“Just bean soup.”

“No meat?”

“This is a student’s tavern, Madam Paladin. You can get finer stuff at a finer place!”

The tavern keeper stalked off, pausing to rap a young patron’s head and declare that it was hollow.

Seven days had passed since Zanja climbed out of the canyon and began retracing her own footsteps. She had reached the Kisha highway the previous afternoon and, driven by vague urgency, loped down its rough cobbles half the night before lying down to rest just off the roadbed. When she was awakened at dawn by a passing wagon, the first thing the sunlight revealed was the clock towers of Kisha rising up over the hilltops in the near distance.

The same urgency that had driven her to the town in such haste had compelled her past a Paladin domicile where she would have been entitled to every comfort. Here in this poor tavern she would soon have to surrender some of her limited coins in payment for the rough and reluctant service. It was still morning, but young people had crowded at the tables nearest the windows, raising such a din that it took Zanja
some time to realize they were studying. They recited and reiterated lessons out loud, frequently interrupted and corrected by their fellow students—
corrections that often deteriorated into loud arguments. Every last one of them had a beer mug at the elbow, but rarely did anyone take a sip. A young woman came in—her hair a tangle and her clothing threadbare—and shamelessly went around begging her fellows to contribute a mouthful of beer to her mug so she could stay here and study. The tavern keeper caught her at it and chased her out.

“Can I have a light?” Zanja asked when the woman arrived with her soup and beer. It was gloomy away from the windows.

“For another penny.”

Zanja opened her purse again and was given a cheap candle, which she stood in the accumulated wax of other candles that made a fluid sculpture in the small table’s center. After one sip of beer she set the awful stuff aside, but she was so hungry she didn’t care that the soup was a tasteless mush.

Only one other candle burned in that dim place, and it was guttering at the table of a young man who scowled at a paper, moving occasionally to dip his pen in an inkwell, only to return again to thinking without writing at all.

Zanja felt a familiar itchiness in her fingertips. She hastily untied the pouch from her belt and took out the glyph cards. Like the student at the other candlelit table, she lapsed into abstraction. To turn an intuition into words—especially into a question of the answerable sort, as Emil would say—could be excruciating. Finally she managed to compose a question and whispered, “Who or what in this room can help me learn what I need to know in Kisha?”

She plucked a card. Its simple illustration revived her longing for the glorious complexity of the glyph paintings. But the card did give her an answer, one so unambiguous and direct that she uttered a grunt of surprise. The glyph might signify expertise and knowledge, or it might suggest the seeking of information. The illustration was of a man at a candlelit table, who frowned at a paper that seemed to be rolling itself up in order to avoid being read.

The young man at the other table uttered a curse. His candle had burned to the end of its wick and gone out. He glared at his curling paper in the darkness. Zanja said, “Here, take my candle.” She broke it loose from its wax footing and went over to set it in the melted puddle that remained of the young scholar’s candle.

Without a word the young man began to write—or draw, rather, for his much abused pen was scrawling a rapid string of glyphs. He seemed oblivious to Zanja standing at his shoulder.

He paused at last, studied his work, and then put down the pen and sat back, waving a hand vaguely to blow air across the drying ink. He
glanced at Zanja and said without surprise, “You can’t be a Paladin.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re eating and drinking swill.”

“Your proof seems inadequate. Perhaps I’m too hungry to care what I eat. And I’ve hardly tasted the beer.”

“One taste is enough,” he said. “It’s cheap, though.”

“I thought no one was drinking because the beer’s so bad. But then I realized that the tavern keeper won’t let anyone stay who has an empty cup.”

“But everyone is penniless at the end of term.”

“May I see what you’ve written?”

He gave her a narrow look. The candle flame revealed a rather dissipated face: eyes red, skin blemished and puffy, mouth dry and cracked. His hair had not been combed since summer, she thought—nor washed. “Oh, you’re a fire blood,” he said, and handed over his page. Zanja sat down and studied it, somewhat distracted by the young man’s sharp and rather anxious gaze. She had seen this composition of glyphs before, or something similar. “Take root in youth, or fail,” she said finally. “I suppose you mean to be ironic?”

The young man uttered a surprised but humorless laugh.

“But I’m afraid I only know a hundred or so glyphs.”

He gave her a shocked look.

“I’ve never been a student,” she explained. “And this is my first visit to Kisha. I’m an oddity, as you surely can see.”

“I thought all Paladins were scholars.”

“Some of us just long to be scholars.”

The young man took his poem back and made no offer to transliterate it for her.

Zanja said, “Your poetry will be renowned some day.”

“Oh, are you a seer?” he said sarcastically. “And will you tell me how I’ll get bread to eat, or a roof to sleep under?”

“No, Coles, I am not a seer, and I can’t say how you will manage. But I can tell you what you’re going to say next.”

He looked at her, chewing his lip.

“You’re going to ask how I know your name.”

“How—” He stopped himself, and laughed sharply. “No, I’m not.” He picked up his mug and nearly drowned himself with a swallow of beer. Choking and sputtering, he managed to say, “So you know I’ll be a poet?”

“You know intuitions can be inaccurate. But yes.”

He threw his head back and laughed so loudly that several students bellowed at him to shut up. “Come up to my room!” he gasped. “I beg you—my friends will never believe me.”

At the building next door, where a dingy tailor’s shop and an even dingier pie shop occupied the first floor, Coles showed Zanja down a narrow alley and up a rickety set of stairs to a dark hallway. He opened a sagging door, saying, “Careful—you might trip on someone.”

The room, as dark as the hallway, smelled of dirty clothing, rotten food, and stale piss. Coles felt his way to the window and opened the shutters. Now a faint light managed to fight its way through the tallow-cloth screen, and Zanja could see three bodies sprawled upon the floor, snoring away on thin mattresses amid a debris of occupation: wooden crates served as furniture, and an overflowing chamber pot suggested they all had recently drunk too much beer.