Water Logic (35 page)

“They need a senior officer, Captain Seth.”

“How did you know Jareth had stolen the donkey?”

“Because he sneaked away.” Damon paused. “Donkeys carry things. He took something else, something heavy.”

“Shit!”

The room fell silent at the sound of this barn curse, which was never to be uttered indoors. “Seth!” Mama hissed.

“Jareth stole a box that was under his bed. I’m sure of it. It was a locked wooden box, marked with glyphs.”

A couple of people went upstairs to check. Mama, who was still holding the mugs of tea, thrust one rather violently into Seth’s hand. “If you won’t set down your burdens—”

“Mama, we have to leave almost immediately. Do you know anything about that box? It must have been there forever.”

Mama, having also given Damon his cup, stood back with her fists on her hips. “What haven’t you told your own family, Mariseth?”

For a moment Seth felt like a little girl being chastised. But it would not do. Damon was right: an officer was needed here, and, like it or not, that person was her. She raised her voice so it would carry over the bickering. “Didn’t the dogs tell you which way Jareth went?”

“They were barking down by the southern boundary in the middle of the night,” admitted one.

“I heard it, too. I thought it was that fox again.”

The two people came back downstairs to announce that there was no locked wooden box under the guest bed.

Mama said, “I do remember a box like that. A long time ago, before you were even born, Seth, we had a bad leak in the roof and had to empty the entire attic. All of us puzzled over that box. We tried all the keys in the basket but couldn’t unlock it. Some people were all for knocking apart the hinges. But in the end we just put it back where we found it.”

The farm itself was hundreds of years old. The box could be that old, also. “I should have taken the box when I realized Jareth had been interested in it. But I was looking for his snake poison, the same poison that his friends used to attack the G’deon.”

The room fell silent. Mama abruptly sat down. “Jareth was one of those people? And you didn’t tell us?”

“I couldn’t. But now he has killed the G’deon’s raven that was following him, and we’re going to lose him again. Now do you understand?”

They looked as if they could continue to demand explanations all night. Seth gave Damon’s sleeve a tug. “Let’s go.”

A number of dogs went with Damon and Seth into the marshland and were soon leading the way, their white hindquarters easily visibly in the starlight. Seth, though still unsettled by the dogs’ secret ability to cross farm boundaries, appreciated that escort. The marshland was not easy to negotiate even in full daylight, but the dogs never took them off the dry path. Then, at dawn, the dogs barked to draw Seth’s attention and snuffled in the hoofprints that were quite visible in the sideways sunlight.

The dogs went home, and Seth and Damon followed the tracks directly into the tangled wilderness.

The next day, they caught their first glimpse of the sea.

Chapter 26

Zanja spread a blanket on the dry remains of last year’s heather and sat on this crackling, lumpy mattress under the open sky. The blasted landscape of the Barrens seemed ablaze, but it was just the light from a
brilliant sunset. Among stones of unrelenting black, Zanja felt that she had wandered into a vast coal fire. From dawn to dusk a heat shimmer had blurred
the horizon, and she could see neither her back trail nor her destination. She had been lucky to find a pool of sweet water, but her last meal, provided by a friendly ferryman who had carried her to the south bank of the Corber, had been eaten two days ago. She would have to endure yet another comfortless night.

Her involuntary travel companion, a donkey she had stolen from a poor farmstead outside Kisha, was scavenging for greenery in the fading light. He had borne the monstrous book with reluctance as she fled through pathless wilderness, first north, hoping to mislead her pursuers into concluding she had taken refuge in the northern borderlands, then east, then south. When she finally reached Shimasal, a bland market town, she half expected that a company of Paladins would be looking for her there. But she aroused no more interest than usual.

In Shimasal she asked the glyph cards a direct question: should she go east, to the water tribe that lived near the mouth of the Aerin River? Or should she continue south, towards the shattered coastline and the place called Secret?  She wanted to go west, for it would be a much shorter journey and she could avoid passing the House of Lilterwess. The glyph cards told her to go south, though. Now she had nearly reached Basdown without seeing any pursuit and could only hope that Tadwell was no longer there. Once news of the theft and the rogue Paladin reached him, she might as well surrender.

The stolen lexicon, the cause of her trouble, lay on the blanket beside her. She opened it carefully and lost herself in examining an illustration. The foreground and the background of the picture were s
o
entangled it was difficult to distinguish the dog leaping across its center. Around it were intertwined images of other animals, wild and domestic, among trees, grasses, ponds, grasslands, and townhouses with upcurved rooflines like those in a garrison. The animals were as odd and fantastic as those Zanja had glimpsed in the fresco of the library vault. The cows were spotted, the lion was striped, the birds were blue; even the plants and trees looked like nothing she had seen. The chaotic illustration had too much vitality: Zanja could not take in the whole, could not think of how it made any sense. She struggled with it until dark, and then shut the book. The donkey had already lain down to sleep. So did she—but her stomach ached, the inexplicable illustration haunted her, and the twigs of her mattress dug into her back. She turned restlessly, exhausted and frustrated.

While eating supper with the four students in the Kisha pie shop, Zanja had asked Coles how long it had taken him to master all the glyphs. “It took more than four years,” he had told her. “We learned the glyphs in groups, of course, so we could understand them by similarity and difference. And we learned them in sequence, so we could see how the meanings build upon each other. I’d say we learned one a day.”

I’d learn much faster than that, Zanja had thought. But with neither a teacher nor an interpretive text—at least not one she could read—she was making no progress.

For a few days after she took the lexicon, she had been able to trick herself into thinking she had a personal mission here in ancient Shaftal—a mission to recover not just knowledge but wisdom. Then she reminded herself it would be impossible to bring the actual lexicon home with her. If she did find the witch, and if the witch was in fact required by the logic of her magic to return Zanja to her place, Zanja would make the journey in water, and the lexicon, even if it didn’t drown her with its weight, would be destroyed. The book would travel only in her memory.

Surely the library contained many other lexicons, with plainer illustrations and readable text—why had she not seen fit to steal one of those, which she might be able to learn more quickly? Why had she burdened herself with a book that required many years of study? Her situation had not been clarified by the theft of the book; rather it had been made impossible.

She lay in discomfort, glaring at the distant, bright stars.

Some hours later, the donkey scrambled up and uttered an ear-shattering
bray. Zanja found herself on her feet, kicking away the entangling blankets and snatching up her dagger. As the donkey brayed his alarm again, she peered across the rocky, treeless landscape, seeking the flowing shape of a great cat, or the precise formation of a wolf pack. But what she spotted was a man walking towards her through the shadows.

At the same moment the lone traveler seemed to spot her. “Zanja na’Tarwein, can you not silence that awful racket?”

“Is it Arel?” she cried. “How can that be?” She hurried to meet him and they clasped hands, laughing at each other’s amazement. “You are in the Asha Valley,” she insisted. “You could not possibly have traveled there and back again so quickly.”

“Then you are not here, either,” Arel declared.

“I wish I could make you welcome, but I have neither food nor drink.”

“Let’s eat the donkey.”

“I’ve got no fuel to cook him with.”

He waved an arm extravagantly at the sky. “Star-fire!”

“That’s too much trouble, considering that our shoes would be tastier to eat. But at least I have blankets we could sit on. Come and explain yourself to me.”

“I believe I have some Basdown cheese in this satchel of mine,” he said as they walked back to Zanja’s campsite. “And possibly even some bread and dried fruit.”

Zanja did not say much more until after she had satisfied her first mad rush of hunger. By then, having had time to consider, she said, “You must be attending the G’deon in Basdown. He has realized he cannot repair whatever is wrong there, and he sent for you because he thought a traveler-between-worlds could have insights that a mender-of-broken-things cannot.”

“Yes, of course.”

“But why did you return to the House of Lilterwess with your journey not completed?”

“Halfway to the Asha Valley I encountered some katrim who had set forth as soon as the pass was clear, to find out what had become of me. They took the ponies and goods to bring to the valley, and I turned back.”

After a moment Zanja said, “The elders will disapprove.”

Arel shrugged, as Zanja had often done in response to such concerns. “I was miserable with unsatisfied curiosity—too miserable to do anything but turn back. I had to find out what had become of you.”

“Ah, a reason I understand. Well, I haven’t found the water witch yet, but I think I know where she is.”

So they sat talking, in a land so empty and quiet that they could hear wind whistling in the fissures of the bare black stones. Zanja did not tell Arel everything. In the morning, when in daylight he noticed the donkey’s peculiar burden, he certainly realized she was keeping a secret from him. But the Ashawala’i were circumspect. Arel did not demand an explanation.

That day the sun rose over a bank of clouds that lay on the flat horizon to the east. The distant winds that normally move the clouds across the sky did not affect these vapors, and Zanja found their immobility disconcerting.

“It is strange,” Arel agreed. “Tadwell told me it’s water weather—a fog that through spring lies over the coastline at dawn and burns off by midday.” He added, “Like me you have not been here before?”

As the bank of clouds faded away Zanja kept glancing to the east, but the ocean itself was too distant to see. She would view the ocean soon enough, for she was just a few days’ journey from Secret. She couldn’t avoid Tadwell now, so she continued as she had done since reaching Shimasal: she walked boldly down the highway as though she truly were a Paladin. Arel, who seemed to have become fascinated by the problems in Basdown, recounted with horror the most recent clash between two families in which one person had been so badly clubbed that he died, and another had been crippled.

“That is the worst of the feuds right now,” said Arel. “But nearly every family has at least one long-standing grudge against another. The Truthkens say that the entire region has a madness, and even the children are afflicted with it. This madness has gone unnoticed for many generations. And even they do not know how to cure such a thing.”

That the problem would be resolved Zanja knew, and she listened to Arel with a disinterested indulgence. “Tadwell must be furious with them.”

“He would like to force them all to leave Basdown entirely and start new elsewhere. But the Truthkens say the Basdowners would bring the madness with them and thus infect the entire country with it.”

“Have you thought of any solutions?”

Arel laughed. “I have been here three days, and the only person here who is more stubborn than these Basdowners is Tadwell. I don’t know of a solution for stubbornness.”

“How many Truthkens are with him?”

“Three now, and it is dreadful to converse with all of them at once. Tadwell is considering whether to send for all the Truthkens in Shaftal, over a dozen of them. If I were a Basdowner I’d flee.”

Entering Basdown was like stepping over a threshold from the dry, sparse expanse of the Barrens into a sodden, lush land of dense woods and rolling hills. Soon the Barrens had passed completely out of sight, and here was a land of sunny meadows, shining brooks, numerous small ponds, and narrow, twisting woodlands that dug roots into the waterways that marked the lowlands between cow-scattered hilltops. Zanja soon noticed that live trees had been clear-cut wherever it was possible to enlarge the meadows; every farmstead was surrounded by stacked logs—much more firewood and timber than any family would need in a year. Zanja muttered, “Something is wrong with these people. They’re laying waste to their own woodlands!”

“And they have too many children and keep too many cattle. They are greedy.”

Late in the day, they reached a small inn. Here Tadwell’s Paladins and Truthkens had more than filled the stable and the guest beds. Several temporary sleeping shelters had been built in the inn yard, and a number of riding horses ran loose in a meadow. By the time Zanja had set her donkey loose with them and dumped her gear in one of the shelters, a Paladin had come out to escort them to Tadwell. The Paladin looked sharply at Zanja’s disguise but asked no questions. Zanja beat the dust out of her clothing and left her dirt-caked boots at the door.

“Tadwell says you are to keep from being noticed,” the Paladin said. “Almost everyone is in the public room right now. Perhaps the Speaker will assist me in shielding you from being seen.”

So Zanja entered the inn with the two men crowding between her and the open doorway of the public room. She caught only glimpses of sullen cow farmers and did not spot the Truthkens at all, although her skin crawled with awareness of their presence. Once they had passed the doorway, she realized she was holding her breath.

When they reached a guarded door, Arel stood back and she went in alone. Tadwell, unattended, sat at a table by the open window, eating beef stew. “Sit down,” he said. “You must be hungry.”

She sat opposite him and forced herself to take a spoonful from the bowl that awaited her, hoping that her appetite might overcome her tension so she could eat with proper enthusiasm. At any moment, a messenger from Kisha might arrive.

“Are you in Basdown to see me?” asked Tadwell. “Or are you simply making a tour of the borderlands?”