Текст книги "Earth Logic"

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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At first, the confined soldiers were so anxious that every sneeze or cough seemed a death knell, and to complain of an itch or a pain was to be condemned to days of avoidance–not easy in these cramped quarters. However, after a few days in which none of them experienced a worse affliction than boredom, they began making a joke of this enforced idleness. Clement gave up fretting over Han Garrison, since there was nothing to be done. Often, she found herself actually enjoying the company of her fellow soldiers. She had not slept in a barracks in at least twenty years, but the members of this company had lived together for so long that they had blunted each other’s sharp edges years ago. Though Clement, along with the medic, got the usual courteously distant treatment accorded outsiders, the conviviality was still comforting enough to make her nostalgic for the days when the members of her company had constituted her entire world.

By the end of her confinement, five more messengers had arrived bearing news of garrisons devastated by illness. The messengers were all quarantined in a dank basement, where two had died, while the other three idled away the time and complained about the food. In the quagmire of the garden, bright green spikes had broken through, and Clement, along with most of the soldiers in the garrison, checked every day to see if any bulbs were blooming yet. It rained, and rained, and rained.

Seeking Gilly in the archives, Clement trotted through a downpour with a packet of papers inside the oiled leather of her coat to protect it from the wet. The archives were in a massive storeroom near the stables: a dusty, cluttered, mildewed space in which the shelves crowded so close together that it was almost impossible to pass between them. Gilly had visited the archives only once before and had declared the place a hopeless trash pile of worm‑eaten paper. Now, Clement found him crouched miserably in the dank room at an unsteady table, leafing through hundreds of deteriorating documents with a girl soldier fresh out of the children’s garrison to do his fetching and carrying.

“All the messengers are still well today,” said Clement, as she sat beside Gilly. Gilly hushed her, jerking a thumb towards a lamplit corner, where his young assistant was shuffling papers. In a low voice he asked, “And no one in Watfield Garrison is sick yet?”

“No. Nor anyone in town, either, I’m told. But in some towns, as many as half the people are sick.”

“And it’s an ugly way to die.” Gilly stretched his crooked back, grunting with pain. “Look at this, will you?” He opened a leather‑bound book and showed her how an enterprising mouse had made herself a cozy nest inside some garrison’s old logbook. Six naked mouse babies lay in the hollow chewed out between the covers, curled in a bed of shredded paper. “Sometimes I think this is all these books are good for,” said Gilly. “But I have learned a few things–nothing very useful, yet. You soldiers probably brought this illness with you from Sainna. I’ve learned that.”

“But this thing is killing Shaftali people as well.”

“Do you think an illness can pick and choose between you and me?” His bitter gaze mocked her.

“But we came from Sainna over thirty years ago. Where has this illness been hiding?”

“What do you expect of me, Clem? If you need expert understanding, you’ll have to bring a Shaftali healer back from the dead to consult with.”

For Clement to actually be able to resolve one of the problems that were her unfortunate responsibility was a rare event. “As requested,” she said, gloating as she put the thick packet in front of him.

“What? What is this?”

“Well, I can’t read it, since it’s in Shaftalese. But someone handed it through the gate at first light, and told the guard it was from a healer, and that it’s about this terrible illness. Cadmar is suspicious, of course. I myself am wondering why a healer would help us, if that’s what this is.”

“To keep healthy Shaftali from being infected by sick Sainnites,” said Gilly, studying the first page. “That’s what the healer writes here.”

He scanned the documents. “Look: a drawing of a person’s insides. This healer is a bit of an artist.” Later he said, “Well, here’s the answer to why it might take thirty years for the illness to reappear. It’s an illness of rats, he says, and only occasionally does it get transmitted from rats to people. Through flea bites. Now I wonder how the healer figured that out.”

“A rat illness, carried by fleas? It’s bizarre!”

Gilly, apparently fascinated by the healer’s exposition, turned back to the anatomical drawing. “This healer says that if a sick person gets big, painful boils here or here”–he pointed at the groin and the armpits–“then the sickness can only be passed from the sick person to the well person by fleas. But if there are no lumps, then the illness is in the lungs, and can be transmitted by the sick person’s breath. These are the people who must be quarantined, and they almost certainly will die within a few days of falling ill. The others can be cared for in the infirmary, so long as it’s free of fleas, and half of them may survive.”

Clement gazed at the drawing in horrified fascination.

“I think this is no fabrication,” said Gilly. “This healer writes from a knowledge that far exceeds mine.”

“Or maybe it’s the healer’s imagination that exceeds yours.”

“That, too,” said Gilly enviously.

They sat in silence for a while, then Gilly called loudly, “Kelin! Come out of your dark corner!”

Clement looked up as a slim girl, bearing a lamp and an armload of documents, approached out of the darkness. Half a year ago, when Kelin was first released from the children’s garrison, Commander Purnal, who was usually irascible, had acknowledged her potential with what passed for him as eloquence: “Keep her from getting herself killed.” Clement had assigned Kelin to a particularly reliable company, right here in Watfield Garrison. She had wanted to keep an eye on her, for young soldiers did have a way of getting themselves killed. Even though Captain Herme immediately assigned a veteran of his company to look after Kelin, Clement had forbidden the girl to go outside the garrison. Throughout the winter, Gilly had given her an actual education in reading and writing and also in speaking Shaftalese, none of which Commander Purnal bothered to provide his young charges.

In six months, Kelin had never ceased to interest and even delight her guardians. She was eager, high spirited, and unrestrainedly curious. After half a year, the young soldier had an entire battalion of hardened veterans watching out for her as obsessively as any devoted parent. Never had a young woman been more coddled and worried over. Naturally, Kelin complained about it: she was fearless, and could not imagine what her battle‑scarred elders were protecting her from.

Kelin stopped short when she saw Clement, and apparently was confused by the problem of how to salute with her hands full. “You can always greet me,” Clement said.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant‑General.”

“Good afternoon, Kelin. I have been receiving good reports of you.”

“I hope so, Lieutenant‑General.”

“Why don’t you put that lamp down before you drop it and set us all on fire?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Kelin set down her burdens and said apologetically to Gilly, “Most everything is eaten by bugs or covered with mold.”

“Oh, ours was a doomed project from the beginning,” said Gilly lightly. “But it’s kept us out of the rain, eh? And now the very thing we were looking for has been sent to us by a healer.”

Gilly showed Kelin the document, which she studied with interest even though she could read Shaftalese no better than Clement could.

“I thought we killed all the healers,” Kelin said.

“Tell me, Kelin,” said Gilly. “If there were five hundred healers scattered across Shaftal who looked and dressed exactly like everyone else, and if everyone you talked to was determined to keep their identity and location secret, how exactly would you kill them all?”

“One at a time,” said Kelin. “And I wouldn’t give up. Or lie about it.”

“Never give up, and always tell the truth,” said Clement dryly. “It’s amazing we didn’t try that.”

Kelin was more than relieved to be released from the moldy prison, even though it just meant she’d go back to being bruised and humiliated and rolled in the mud by her bunkmates, who were unrelenting in their efforts to improve her weapons skill. With some difficulty, Clement and Gilly convinced Cadmar that following the mysterious healer’s recommendations could not cause any harm, and Gilly and the company clerk spent a day copying and re‑copying a complicated general order that, among other things, detailed the care of the sick, defined methods for killing fleas and domestic rodents, and recommended that the commanders populate the garrisons with house cats. In due time, the responses returned that these measures had proven effective, but that cats were nowhere to be had. Kittens, one commander reported, were sold before they were even born, at exorbitant prices. Besides, commented another commander, what do soldiers know about keeping cats?

If the soldiers had known something about keeping cats, thought Clement angrily as she pored over the duty rosters, maybe the illness wouldn’t have reduced their force by another three hundred irreplaceable fighters. Maybe it was time they learned.

Chapter Four

That year’s spring mud was a tortuous season: rain fell and stopped, the roads firmed up, then rain fell again. Many a farmer, thinking the rain had ended, went out to sow the fields, only to watch the precious seeds wash away. Many a wanderer thought it was time to travel, only to be stranded by renewed flooding and boggy roads.

Norina had been spared such frustrations, for though only a water witch could control the weather, an earth witch like Karis could at least predict it. Norina was able to sandwich her journey neatly between rainstorms, and arrived dry and cheerful at her destination. The same could not be said about Councilor Mabin, who arrived on horseback several days later, muddy and wet, taunted by the sunshine that after four days of rain once again rent through the storm clouds and set the sodden fields to sparkling.

Norina had last seen Mabin the year Leeba was born. Since then, the councilor’s hair had gone to white, and her vigorous frame had begun to shrink. Her face, however, was no more or less hard and embittered than it had ever been.

The councilor was escorted by a half‑dozen black‑dressed, gold‑earringed Paladins–a rare sight these days, for most of the surviving true Paladins had put on plain clothing and were commanding companies of Paladin irregulars, as Emil had done for fifteen years.

Some of these who served Mabin were Emil’s age, and they seemed to know of Norina’s connection to him, for their inquiring glances asked questions about him: What has become of our brother Paladin? Why will he not explain his sudden retirement? These sharp looks were puzzled, impatient, but not condemnatory. Just as a Truthken’s duty was to judge, a Paladin’s was to suspend judgment. With Mabin avoiding putting herself in a position where she would have to answer questions, and with Emil maintaining a bland silence, the Paladins apparently had simply suspended judgment of him, and of Mabin, for five years now.

It was a remarkable exercise of philosophy, Norina thought, and wondered briefly how this paralysis of silence might finally come to an end. Mabin was both an air blood and a Paladin, a rare combination that condemned her to a lifelong duel between flexible ethics and rigid principles. The principles won, of course, for one’s natural elemental logic would always prevail, and as a result Mabin was often in the exceptionally awkward position of having to ethically justify acts that were grounded in unexamined prejudice. The Paladins in her command certainly would not overlook such intellectual sloppiness. The pain of a steel spike in her heart–that Mabin could bear with equanimity. But the inability to explain how and why it had happened, that must have been almost beyond endurance.

Norina had stood silently without greeting Mabin for some time, and Mabin had neither spoken nor dismounted. The exercise of politeness was an expression of status, after all, and Norina wanted to establish that she was not under Mabin’s command as badly as Mabin wished to establish that she was. Norina was about to turn her back and walk away, which certainly would force Mabin to accede, when Mabin said nastily, “Well, Norina, everyone in the region could tell me where to find you. Though I suppose if I had asked the Sainnites in their garrison, they would have been surprised to learn that their region is ruled by a Truthken.”

“Oh, no,” Norina said. “The Sainnites have put a price upon my head, which goes up every year, much to everyone’s amusement.”

Mabin dismounted stiffly. The farmers, who had gathered around with their tools in their hands, curtsied unnoticed. Their work‑dirty children stared; only the chickens took no interest in the living legend that had trampled through their muddy farmyard. The family elders invited Mabin into the tea room.

Mabin greeted them, though Norina could see behind the gracious mask to the councilor’s resentment at having to waste her time and energy on people she had no use for. Mabin was too canny a campaigner to forget that when the Sainnites left the Paladins devastated, it had been the farmers who had taken up arms and given her an army to command. But when she was finished with courtesy, she muttered, “Little do the farmers suspect that you should be as much an outlaw to them as you are to the Sainnites!”

Norina found this comment no less entertaining for the fact that Mabin apparently believed it true. However, Mabin’s truths were extraordinarily difficult to read, for the disguises she cast over her secret motivations were several layers deep. So now, to keep testing her own judgment, Norina said, “Shall we tell these farmers what happened four‑and‑a‑half years ago, and let them judge between us? I will admit that I violated a councilor’s edict–never mind that a Truthken isn’t much use if she can’t challenge and refuse an unlawful command. But you must admit in turn that you tried to murder the vested G’deon.”

“I acted for Shaftal’s sake,” said Mabin.

“You nearly killed Shaftal.”

They were about to step through the commonhouse door. Mabin paused and looked at Norina–a deliberate look, deliberately revealing, and no less surprising for all that. “I tried to murder the vested G’deon,” she said. She spoke as a repentant criminal, as sincerely as possible, considering that she was not actually convinced of the wrongfulness of her actions.

Norina said, “Councilor, you cannot be hoping to deceive me. But you certainly are surprising me.”

An anxious child helped Mabin remove her boots and coat, and Norina showed the way to the tea room, which the family had spent two days cleaning. Now, the new‑painted walls glared with reflected sunlight, the rare old Ashawala’i rug’s bright colors and ornate pattern had been released from a prison of dust, and the heat of a brisk fire in the scoured fireplace competed with a cool breeze coming in the open window. The sideboard was spread with an extravagant array of morsels: savory dumplings, dried fruit compote, sausage rolls, a steaming loaf of bread and golden pat of butter, a half dozen bowls of jam. But Mabin, noticing none of this, stopped short in the doorway and said sharply, “Where is Karis?”

“Shut the door,” said Norina. When Mabm had complied, Norina leaned out the open window. “Raven!”

The raven, who had been lingering at the top of a nearby tree, flew down and landed on the windowsill. “The councilor wants to know where Karis is,” Norina said to him.

The raven said, “She is with Zanja and J’han, in the Juras grasslands.”

Pretending she had not noticed Mabin’s rigid surprise at being confronted with a talking raven, Norina said, “Tell the councilor why she is there.”

“Karis has been eradicating a plague, town by town. And now she is fighting the illness among the Juras people.”

Norina turned to Mabin. “My husband believes that some half of the people in Shaftal would have been dead by summer’s end if Karis hadn’t acted so quickly. No one knows to thank her, either, not even the healers, who are winning the battle because J’han has written to all of them to tell them how. So,” Norina added, “there’s your lesson, Councilor, should you choose to learn it. Do you care to take some tea?”

The silence lingered as Norina poured, offered a cup to Mabin, who appeared not to notice, and sat down at the table with a filled plate. She gave the raven, a big, unlovely bird, a meat dumpling to eat.

Mabin finally said, rather unsteadily, “What is that bird?”

“The raven is Karis,” said Norina. “He is her eyes, her ears, her thoughts.”

The raven took a pause from gorging itself to ask, “Why did Mabin want this meeting?”

“To berate you,” Norina said.

“No, I’m here to be berated, apparently,” said Mabin.

“I’ve always admired your ability to recover from surprise,” said Norina politely. “Are you certain you don’t want some tea? These dumplings are really quite good.”

The councilor came to the table, picked up the teacup Norina had poured, tasted it, then added a half spoonful of sugar. Stirring the cup, she said to the raven, “Tell Karis that what I have to say to her deserves to be said in person. But of course I admire what she is doing, and I don’t doubt that it’s more important.”

“Half true,” murmured Norina. “At best.”

Mabin said coolly, “Will you be satisfied for once, Madam Truthken? Half truths are all you ever get from anyone.” She tasted her tea again and appeared to be considering more sugar. “Karis is acting like a G’deon,” she commented.

“Karis is doing what she cannot help but do. She is acting like herself.”

There was a silence. Mabin said again, “In acting like herself, she acts like a G’deon. Why does she not call herself what she is?”

Twenty years ago, almost immediately after being vested with the power of Shaftal, Karis had been forbidden to act as G’deon, a decision that could only be reversed by Mabin herself. Yet Mabin was in no position to prevent Karis from doing what she liked, so her question was not quite so absurd as it at first seemed. Norina said, “Are you demanding that she explain herself? Or are you simply sick of trying to anticipate what she’ll do?” This strategy of listing possibilities and observing the reaction was usually sufficient to get a reluctant witness to reveal her secrets. But Mabin did not particularly react. “Why are you here?” Norina asked. “It’s early spring; the Paladins are sharpening their blades and grinding fresh gunpowder. You have work to do.” Now, at last, a momentary trembling of Mabin’s disguises. Norina said swiftly, “But you can’t do it, can you? No, you can’t, and though you’ve come all this way to ask Karis for her help you can’t bring yourself to ask for it. Councilor, why must you make my business so difficult!”

Mabin drank half her cup of tea in a swallow, and didn’t flinch. “Perhaps you already know this, but I doubt you understand it. The rumor of a Lost G’deon has inspired a new uprising.”

“Are you referring to Willis of South Hill and his little band of fanatics?”

“I’m told he has fifty followers, which means he really has at least two hundred. And most of them are veteran Paladin irregulars, like him, not the kind of people I would lightly dismiss.”

Mabin paused, perhaps expecting that Norina would use this opening to continue to accuse and challenge her. “Do continue, Madam Councilor,” Norina said.

“If Karis were to join these people who call themselves Death‑and‑Life, their numbers would immediately swell to thousands. An irresistible army. The Sainnites would be defeated.”

Now it was Norina’s turn to use her teacup as a prop to make herself seem unsurprised, and even indifferent. But the raven spoiled the effect by uttering a harsh caw of laughter.

Norina said, “And yet you want to prevent this from happening? I thought you wanted to rid Shaftal of its Sainnite scourge.”

“Has Karis thought of joining them? She must have heard that they believe the Lost G’deon will appear to them.”

“I’ll answer you, if you tell me why it would be so terrible if she did. Because you yourself would be put out of power?”

Mabin said quietly, “Although these people call themselves Death‑and‑Life, they have no alliance to the old ways. They would dismiss the orders, the law, the code–” She paused. “Madam Truthken, I am an old woman, and sometimes I am very tired. Inevitably–soon–I will be put out of power by someone, or by death. But I do not want to die in a land I loved and could not save from destruction.”

“Truth!” said Norina, amazed.

Mabin gave her a wry look. “How can you waste such talent?”

“It’s no waste to serve Karis, I assure you.”

“Who also wastes her talent.”

“She’s saving the land from being devastated by plague.”

“Saving it for what?”

“This is a fruitless argument,” Norina said.

“Will she join these people who call themselves Death‑and‑Life? Or not?”

“Of course not. They are warmongers, and war makes her sick.”

But Mabin did not seem relieved. She set down the empty teacup on the table, and took a breath. “I want Karis to know that I regret that she was hurt by the way she was treated in the past. I thought I was acting for the best–”

“I listen to people try to justify themselves all day long,” Norina said. “I wish I might meet one who could do it with brevity.”

“What I did was wrong,” Mabin said. “I wish to ask Karis to come to me, to the Lilterwess Council, and take her rightful place in the G’deon’s chair.”

A long time Norina gazed at her, but, although she was not certain what had caused this amazing reversal, she could see no sign of dissimulation. Even the raven stared at her, speechless. “The last time I saw you,” Norina said, “you declared that Shaftal would never come into the hands of a Sainnite pretender, the smoke‑addicted daughter of a whore. Those are your words, exactly as you uttered them.”

“Karis no longer uses smoke. Her mother was of an ancient, respected people. I would wish Karis a non‑Sainnite father, but so might she.” Mabin seemed to realize how self‑serving these corrections on her past statement might sound, and added, “I’m very sorry for those angry words. I was mistaken. And I was wrong.”

Norina turned to the raven in astonishment. “Did Karis think she’d live to see this day? How shall I reply? Does she want to know why Mabin has changed her mind? Or does it even matter?”

The raven said, “Give her the note.”

Norina found herself reluctant. “The councilor has made a sincere apology.”

“Give her the note.”

Karis had written the note many weeks ago, shortly before she, Zanja, and J’han stepped into the snowstorm. She had not asked for Emil’s advice on how to deal with Mabin’s request. She had simply written three words on a piece of paper, which Norina took out of a pocket now and handed to Mabin. “Leave me alone,” Karis had written.

Mabin read the note and then crossed the room, threw it into the fire, and watched it burn. When she turned back, though, she seemed calm enough. She said to the raven, “Haven’t I already left her alone, these four years? And not because I feared this.” Her hand briefly touched her breast, where Karis’s steel pierced her heart. “She’ll regret making this choice. What is happening in Shaftal is worse than a plague.”

“There is no choice,” the raven said.

Mabin turned to Norina, who read in her face an honest desperation. “Will she give up Shaftal to Willis, rather than give up her anger against me? Will you knowingly allow her to do so? And will even Emil fail to intervene? Does every one of Karis’s followers think loyalty must be blind?”

“We are not her followers, and we argue with her and with each other incessantly. I don’t know how Emil would advise Karis, but he certainly would disagree with you about the way you have conceived these choices. We air bloods are always drawing neat lines through everything, as though dividing good from bad and right from wrong were a simple business. When I first began to live with three fire bloods, I feared their chaos of possibilities would drive me insane! My companions live courageously, in doubt and loss and desperate uncertainty, and I’ve come to tolerate their thinking and even to admire it sometimes. But your way, Councilor, is too simple. If Karis refuses to restore the old order, and also refuses to embrace the warmongers, why does that mean she has no other options?”

There was a silence. Mabin said, “I used to have arguments just like this with Harald. Might as well argue with a wall. Shout all I want, the wall is unmoved.” She turned away as though to leave the room, and then turned back. “Karis is the hope of Shaftal. How can she refuse?”

Norina said wearily, “When I was young and knew no better, I delivered Karis to you, and betrayed her without knowing it by pressuring her into obedience. I am fortunate that she forgave me for it. But she is in her full power now, and even I don’t know exactly what that means. Only a fool would trifle with her–and I am not a fool anymore.”

“I’m not asking you to betray her, just to remind her,” Mabin said. “When the day comes that she can leave her bitterness against me behind, remind her that I said I would acknowledge her.”

“I will remind her, Mabin, though a reminder will not be necessary.”

When Councilor Mabin had left the room, taken her leave of the farmers, and ridden off with her attendants down the muddy road, Norina said to the raven, “I had to promise Mabin something or I would not have gotten rid of her. Are you still hungry, raven?”

The raven flew away with a sausage roll in its beak. Norina tossed her cold tea out the window and poured a fresh cup, but then sat without drinking it. She was expected in a nearby town to judge an accused murderer–and, if necessary, to execute him. But she was considering what a relief it would have been to her had Karis simply accepted Mabin’s offer. And then she considered how little she would admire Karis had she accepted.

Chapter Five

Zanja’s clan brother, Ransel, had been dead for years, yet every day she missed him. They had been born in the same lodge within a month of each other, and as infants they had nursed at the same breasts and slept in the same cradle. Inseparable as children, they had remained scandalously close into adulthood, and the gossips were always examining Zanja’s shape, hoping to be the first to discover that she was concealing an incestuous pregnancy. The fire clan of Tarwein was mostly known for its skilled, artistic rug weavers. Only occasionally did the clan produce a person like Zanja whose elemental talent, and the confirmation of the owl god Salos’a, destined her to be a crosser of boundaries. But Ransel also had become a katrim,and served the raven god–Raven in his trickster aspect–for Ransel’s relentlessly lighthearted delight in the world had seemed inextinguishable. Nearly six years after the Sainnites killed Ransel, what Zanja remembered most vividly was his wide grin and his loud laugh–both rather shocking among a people of such emotional restraint.

Zanja had survived without him–a bereaved twin, uncertain how to know herself without her alternate self to measure by. And then she met Emil. Now, Shaftali people, whose big, loose families accommodated every kind of coupling imaginable, occasionally referred to Emil as Zanja’s husband–which startled and embarrassed her, but inspired Emil to laugh. He’d say,

“We fire bloods are always arguing about words because they’re so inadequate. That’s a good example: husband.”

After five years with Emil as her commander, teacher, father, brother, and friend, Zanja could predict both what he would say and what he would be thinking. During their long summer separations, Zanja conversed with Emil in her imagination, and would discover, months later, that Emil remembered those talks as though they had actually occurred.

Now she plodded through thick mud in a merciless rain, with J’han suffering silently behind her, and Karis finding the way by dead reckoning through a woodland of sparse trees and dishearteningly dense thickets. Karis often resorted to simply forcing through the bushes, dragging Zanja and J’han behind her. Thorn‑pricked, twig‑scratched, rain‑soaked, mud‑coated, and unspeakably weary, the three of them were about to chase the springtime plague right out of Shaftal.

“You’re crossing the boundary,” Emil commented in Zanja’s head.

“A boundary of thorn bushes,” Zanja responded crabbily. “Another one. And another one after that.”

“No one ever promised it would be easy.”

Ahead of Zanja, Karis had paused to sense the land ahead, stretching to her full height to see over an obstacle that Zanja was too exhausted to trouble to identify.

Emil said in that quiet way of his, “She seems so ordinary.”

“In all these months, no one has paid her much heed, other than to remark on her size and strength. She goes steadily from one task to the next, until the impossible project is completed. Her persistence is what is supernatural. Her imperviousness is what’s supernatural–her imperviousness to discouragement, her strength of will.”

“These qualities are both admirable and maddening,” commented Emil. “What do you think she’ll do next?”

“I don’t know! She wants to serve the land as she is serving it. But Shaftal needs a leader, not a servant.”

“Does it?” Emil said thoughtfully.

Karis was pushing through a thicket again. Zanja pressed up against her to use her as a shield. Still, the thorns grabbed hold of her; her ragged rain cape made a ripping sound; she was snagged. Then Karis reached casually back and jerked her loose, out of the thicket into the abrupt, surprising flatness of a new land.

“How about that!” said J’han, as Karis pulled him loose in turn.