Water Logic (5 page)

The raven, flapping towards her down the hall, squawked, “Take care! Their weapons are poisoned!”

Emil’s prey must have also died suddenly and strangely. Zanja touched the assassin’s warm body cautiously, found no heartbeat, and then put the raven again on her wrist.

The bird said, “I’ll bring you and Emil towards the last one from opposite sides.”

The raven gave directions and added, as Zanja continued blindly through Travesty’s maze, “Norina wants you to keep him alive. Don’t let him stab himself.”

Norina was a better fighter, but in darkness Zanja and Emil could fight by intuition, and Norina could not.

“But be careful,” said the raven. “Even a scratch—”

Zanja’s heart thudded crazily. She breathed too fast and then too slowly. “I understand the danger.”

The raven fell silent, except to utter occasional one-word directions, and then to tell Zanja that she had drawn near the intruder, who had entered an unoccupied room. Zanja set down her bird-guide and waited. At the far end of the hallway, Emil also waited: noiseless, a shadow among shadows, a presence so vivid to her he might as well have been holding a lantern.

The man came out of the room—a small man, able to slip silently in and out of doorways, his feet soundless, his shape nearly indistinguishable.

Emil’s shoe leather whispered on wood.

The man snapped into tension. Zanja heard the faint hiss of an arrow’s flight. She also flew, and tackled the intruder from behind, flinging herself into the center of his body and flattening him, face first, into the floor.

The man’s groan as he sucked air back into his lungs was followed by a cry of rage. Zanja pinned him, got her hands around his neck, and pressed the veins closed.

“Emil!” she cried. The man flailed frantically beneath her.

“Don’t choke him to death,” Emil said. He searched the prisoner, removing and setting aside several weapons. The assassin uttered a shriek as Emil twisted an arm behind his back. “I guess you broke a bone or two.”

Zanja discovered she could not speak at all. Emil’s hand touched her shoulder, gently. “She’s not hurt,” he said to a raven, “And neither am I. So stay where you are, Karis—please. Until we can awaken the house.”

“She’s not replaceable,” he added to Zanja. Then he let his breath out in a groan. “Oh, by the land—”

Emil, one knee on the groaning prisoner’s shoulder, was probably thinking hours, days, years into the future already. Zanja thought only about the smell of the blood on her skin.

Then Norina arrived with a light, another raven, and several distraught Paladins.

The Paladins took over Zanja’s prisoner. She sat back on her heels. Now she began to tremble, and a weakness came over her.

“Emil—that poisoned arrow missed Karis by a hand’s breadth.”

Emil lifted her to her feet and put his arms around her. “
This
massacre,” he said, “you prevented.”

“How could he have gotten so close?” she cried. “Who are these people?”

Norina said, “Look—here is your answer.” She turned the lantern to illuminate the assassin’s face. Upon his forehead was painted three black strokes: the Pyre, the G’deon’s glyph.

“You seek to kill the G’deon in the name of the G’deon?” Norina asked.

The man’s chin jutted defiantly. “To kill the impostor,” he said. “In the name of the true G’deon.”

Emil’s embrace was also a restraint, Zanja realized. And for just a moment, she let herself feel the anger—at that idiot Willis, who had nearly killed her when they both were Paladin irregulars under Emil’s command. At Norina, for judging Willis harshly enough to destroy his ambitions, but leaving him alive. At Clement, for killing nearly all Willis’s rebel band, including Willis himself, and yet failing to eliminate them.

“And how do you know which G’deon is false and which is true?” asked Norina.

But the light flashed on Norina, on her shorn head, and the man cried, “Are you a Truthken? Keep away from me!”

Norina turned away from him, as the law required. The scar that crossed one side of her face, from eyebrow to chin, looked as black as the glyph on the prisoner’s forehead.

“Saleen, do something sensible with this man,” said Emil.

“Yes, Emil.” The Paladins walked the prisoner away.

Emil’s clench relaxed and became an embrace again. Zanja pressed her face against his shoulder, grateful for him, and then desperate to get away from him. “I am not confused,” she told him. “I know the difference
between this night and the night my tribe was destroyed.”

He let go and took off his own shirt and gave it to her, “Put this on—throw it away later.” He turned towards Norina, saying, “Clement killed Willis and so many of his fighters on Long Night—I didn’t think anyone of that rebel company survived. Or that they would still refuse to believe in Karis—how could anyone be unconvinced? But they have reconstituted themselves, nevertheless.”

Though the assassin was gone, Norina had continued to look down the hall where he had been taken. She said at last, “I’m afraid it’s worse than that, Emil. Much worse.”

By the time a Paladin knocked on the door to rouse Clement to face the new disaster, the first floor of Travesty had been lit up by lamps and was noisy with grief and anger. Clement’s mind, if not her body, still was tangled in the blankets, wrapped in Seth’s sweet, steady, generous warmth. Now the familiar dismay and urgency of recent violence surrounded her, but she could not accept it. She took refuge in a shadow.

Nearby, the two Paladin generals, Emil and Mabin, argued bitterly. Their voices rang and echoed against the polished stone. Further in the depths of the monstrous building, a wail lifted, faded, and lifted again. Pots clashed in the distant kitchen, and in another remote wing there was the thumping of a sledgehammer.

Mabin, an old woman grown hard and stubborn in her lifelong hatred of Clement’s people, was saying fiercely, “It doesn’t matter! Paladins don’t kill Paladins! Shaftali don’t kill Shaftali!”

A Paladin approached and said, “Excuse me, Emil, the uproar is awakening the city. People are coming to the door, asking what has happened.”

“Thank you for this information,” Emil said. “Ask Saleen to speak with them, please, according to his judgment.”

What absurd courtesy!

Clement realized then how angry she was. How dared they—on this night—the only night she had ever taken for herself alone!

And it was she who was being absurd. She took a breath, a deep one, and the old armor fit itself to her, and her mind cleared, and Seth became distant. Clement stepped forward, saying, “Here I am, Emil. I assure you both: I knew nothing of any attack. I’ll say so before your Truthken, though it doesn’t even seem necessary—how could I have been admitted by her if I were plotting this thing?”

“Oh, Norina would have known. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make the gesture of clearing yourself anyway. For then we could let it be known that a Truthken declares your innocence. People will believe what Norina says, even if they don’t want to believe the evidence.”

Mabin said angrily, “What evidence? A glyph painted on the forehead? That doesn’t make a person Shaftali! The weapons and clothing? They could have been acquired anywhere!”

“Oh, for the land’s sake—” Emil muttered.

Clement watched him, curious whether she might finally see him lose his temper. For now he truly was beset, attacked from without and within, and, like Clement, might find it difficult to distinguish between those in his own camp who opposed him, and those outside his camp who did the same. Perhaps he, too, would begin to dread every new development, lest he be forced to take yet another action that he then must justify to friends and enemies alike.

Mabin said, “This must be the work of Sainnites! To the Shaftali people the G’deon’s body is sacred!”

“Karis is hurt?” cried Clement. The Paladin who had awakened her had reassured her about Gabian, but she had not even thought to ask about Karis.

“One of the assassin’s darts missed her by a few feet—” Emil shut his eyes and took a breath. “Zanja killed the assassin in their bedroom, but Karis is unhurt. The one we captured alive said she is an impostor—why would a Sainnite care if Karis were properly vested and confirmed or merely a pretender?” This comment he directed at Mabin, but he continued without awaiting an answer, “Norina is barred, yet she learned something—something significant.”

Mabin began to speak again, but Emil ignored her. He belatedly offered Clement the handclasp of a friend. “I am sorry,” he said.

Clement was learning to make sense of these fire bloods, for she understood that Emil was not apologizing for Mabin’s vituperation. He was sorry for something else, for something lost.

Emil led the way down the lamplit hall to a parlor that had often been used for meetings since it had one of the few fireplaces that drew properly. There, frightened people clustered together for reassurance: clerks, librarians, and councilors who resided in that echoing house. Emil sent them all away on errands, and soon only three people remained: Medric, who cowered in a garishly painted chair with a moth-eaten shawl pulled over his head; Leeba, who was asleep on the carpet, curled up like a cat, with one scruffy foot sticking out from under the bright blue blanket; and Gabian, also asleep in a basket.

With a jolt, Clement remembered that the garrison was even worse defended than Travesty, for Karis had destroyed its weapons first and then knocked down its walls. “Emil, you promised my people would be safe, that no one would contradict Karis. But that obviously is not true—and my people can’t defend themselves.”

“The attackers were
not
Shaftali—” Mabin began again.

“They were,” said Norina Truthken. She dumped an armload of weaponry and clothing onto a chair. “They were Paladin irregulars,” she said.

Clement said, “Madam Truthken, I had no knowledge of this attack.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“My people could be the next target!”

Norina said, “As always, Clement speaks the honest truth.”

“Of course.” Emil sat down and rested his head in his hands.

Mabin allowed not even a pause before she said, “It’s the Sainnites’ fault, nevertheless! Without their corruption—”

Norina said, “Mabin, must you always waste everyone’s time with your character flaws?”

Mabin went white with anger, and Clement almost pitied her.

“Where are the others?” Norina asked.

“J’han is looking for Zanja . . . no, here they are now.”

Norina glanced at the doorway, through which her healer husband was escorting the G’deon’s wife, dressed only in a shirt much too large to be hers, gray-faced, her dark skin speckled with darker drops of blood. The bare blade in her hand rang like a bell when she accidentally touched it to the stone threshold, and she glanced at it in surprise.

Norina asked, “Should I fetch Karis? Or shall we let her smash her own house to bits undisturbed?”

Emil said, “I sent a tremulous librarian after her. You know how she hates to frighten people.”

In fact, the distant pounding had stopped. Garland came in with a tray and poured tea. J’han took the first cup, mixed in enough honey to make it into a syrup, and began urging Zanja to drink it.

Immediately before and after a battle, a soldier’s most essential character is revealed. Clement had long suspected Zanja’s lethality—but that the woman had so visceral a reaction to her own violence was surprising. Clement had never imagined they might have this in common.

Karis arrived: the parlor shrank. She picked Zanja up and embraced her. Zanja’s teacup and dagger both rang sweetly as they fell to the stone floor.

Zanja gasped, “I pity the wall. And all your other enemies.”

Karis set her down. She was shedding plaster dust like snowflakes; her broad shoulders and undisciplined hair were white with it. “What enemies?” she said. “What reason has anyone to kill me—and everyone in my household?”

Zanja, her voice now muffled by Karis’s shoulder, said, “Anyone who won’t pay the price of peace.”

“It’s so much cheaper than war!”

“So one would think,” murmured Zanja.

Karis let her go. During that embrace Zanja’s face had altered from gray to flushed. She scanned the room, pausing on the miserable seer, on Clement, on Emil, and finally on Norina. These governors of Shaftal had raised a child together, and as naturally as they handed off Leeba’s care to each other, so also they handed off authority and leadership. Clement, ill-accustomed to such a fluid command, had learned to look wherever Zanja did, for Zanja always seemed to be thinking a few moments ahead of everyone, except perhaps the seer.

Norina said, “The assassins were Shaftali. They were Paladin irregulars. They had the Death-and-Life glyph painted on their foreheads. General Clement, you’re certain that their leader, Willis, is dead?”

“Willis bled to death in front of me. And I saw his body burned.”

“Then you did us a favor—but too late. Willis may not have known it, but he had already been replaced, by one far more dangerous than he.” Norina paused. “An air witch.”

Zanja’s swift gaze moved to Medric, and the seer came out of his huddle like a rabbit bursting out of cover. “What?” he cried. “Oh, that’s very bad!” He snatched off his spectacles and polished them vigorously on his dirty shirt. “You may not know this, Clement—the Order of Truthkens was invented to get the air witches under control. Before that, the G’deons were constantly having to hunt them down and jam spikes into their hearts.” He added, “Unfortunately, fire magic can’t predict air magic, as they are elemental opposites. So we were taken by surprise.” He put his spectacles on, and blinked.