Текст книги "Fire Logic "

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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Zanja said, “But why are you not Shaftal’s rightful heir?”

“You have to ask? Just look at me.”

“Do you believe that Harald G’deon picked you as thoughtlessly as he would pick a whore, and raped you with his power merely because you were convenient? Or rather, is that the story Mabin wants you to believe? This same Mabin who hates you and controlled you first through smoke and later through your beloved friend, and finally, rather than have you escape her control, all but murdered you? You still trust that woman’s judgment?”

A long time the silence lasted. Karis rubbed her eyes as though to clear away a blur of tears.

“Tell me what happened when they brought you to Harald,” Zanja said.

“It was afternoon. The night before, I had managed to use smoke without Dinal realizing it, for we were sleeping under stars. But once we came to the House of Lilterwess, I began to worry, for it was such a crowded place. Dinal had been so kind to me, I feared to lose her regard by telling her the truth, but I thought that I would have to. That was the only thing on my mind as she brought me into Harald’s room. The room was full of silent, dignified people, who all turned in surprise to stare at me. Dinal’s hand was on my shoulder. She pushed me forward, and the dying man on the bed opened his eyes and held out his hand to me. I felt a surprise, a kinship–he was an earth witch like myself. I knew so little that I didn’t even realize this must be Harald G’deon. I thought that he might teach me what to do with myself, if he lives. But his life fire burned so faintly, I knew he would only live a few more hours at most. So I took hold of his hand, to bid him a safe journey. That is what I remember clearly. Norina says he died immediately after empowering me, without saying a word.“

“Who decided it was not Harald’s intention to name you his successor?”

“It was the Lilterwess Council. Once Dinal explained who I was, and it became evident I was a smoke addict, the council decided not to affirm me as G’deon.”

“But Norina was not party to that meeting, was she? And Mabin is the only councilor who survived the night.”

“Norina has her faults, but she has never lied to me.”

“No, but it’s possible she doesn’t know the entire truth. I’m asking because I don’t understand why Mabin fears you enough to kill you.”

Karis said quietly, “I have been vested with a stunning power, and nothing can stop me from exercising it as I choose. Don’t you find that frightening? I’m certain Mabin fears that I will challenge her, and claim the G’deon’s right. That I have no desire to do so must be unbelievable to her.”

“But what if Harald G’deon knew what you were when he sent Dinal for you? Even if he was out of his mind, as some say he was, he was not a fool. So let the G’deon’s chair remain empty if that’s what seems right to you, and wander the land in rags and die unknown like Mackapee did. Scholars like Emil and Medric will study the obscure history of your life a hundred years from now and never quite make sense of it. So what, so long as it makes sense to you?”

Karis uttered a short laugh.

“What I see is that your life has been decided by people who seem determined to keep you within boundaries and to keep you from realizing that they are controlling you. And I see that as a result you never have made a choice for yourself except one time, the time you saved my life. And it put all of your keepers into a panic, which surely reveals how illusory are the boundaries they’ve put around you, and how easy it would be for you to simply step outside of them. So why not set yourself free of them? If you were free to live as well and joyfully as you could, exercising with honor what powers have been given to you, what would you do? Can you even imagine?“

Karis muttered to herself, as her raven would have, “Oh, I am in dire danger.”

She laid her hands flat against the stony beach. “I know exactly what I would do,” she said. She got abruptly to her feet. “Excuse me.” And she was gone, striding quickly back the way she had come, to where Medric sat awake in his bed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light reflecting from his spectacles that made it seem as if he were staring at them across the length of the beach. Karis sat beside him and they had a long, sometimes agitated conversation, which ended only when Karis got up to go back into her cave.

Zanja looked in on her after a while, and Karis raised her head from where she sat in a huddle upon the floor, with her filled smoke pipe in reach, and the water clock plunking the occasional drop into the bowl. Zanja said, “Since you were kidnapped twenty‑one days ago, one keeper or another has been hovering over you. It’s not a role I relish much myself, so I hope you’ll just tell me when you think you’re strong enough to need no looking after. Are you strong enough today?”

Karis shook her head. She looked frightened and worn out, and Zanja remembered that Karis had no way to judge what her limits were. “Shall I come in?” she asked.

“You’re very formal.”

“Well, I’m making up this dance as I go along. I can’t get it right all the time.”

Karis smiled. “That’s better. You know, you aren’t always the most restful of companions.”

“Are you admonishing me?” Zanja sat down beside her. “I’ll be boring if you will.”

“No,” Karis said, “and no again. But let’s not talk about the future anymore.”

So Zanja diverted Karis with tales of her lifelong friendship with Ransel, until the water level in the bowl had risen high enough, and Karis reached for the pipe. She suffered no life‑threatening convulsions, and because of her rapidly increasing strength, she remained awake after she had smoked. Zanja supposed she could take her for a walk, like a pet, but the very idea was so unsettling that she got up and left the cave instead. It was more than disconcerting to see Karis go from the morning’s robust passions and willful vigor to this helpless passivity. The contradiction between the two Karises was not at all easy to encompass, and Zanja began to understand a little of why Mabin and Norina and even Karis herself had been unable to imagine her as anything other than a flawed vessel, to be patched together until it could be replaced. But if fire talent could not encompass a grand contradiction, what good was it?

It seemed strange that the nights had turned chilly, until Zanja examined the night sky and realized that any day now, the stars of summer would set. Karis took Zanja exploring up the river canyon, which required more stamina than Zanja would have thought Karis possessed. Karis’s energy seemed inspired by the grand scale of the landscape: the broken rocks as big as houses, the foaming river, the looming stone cliffs, the narrow strip of sky. Her fascination with the place worked as a camouflage, and it took some time for Zanja to realize that the quality of their conversation had changed, and not for the better. They skated across the surface of a conversation mysteriously opaque and impenetrable, like water turned to ice.

By the time they returned to Otter Lake, Zanja was utterly confounded. Karis had used herself up by then, and they stopped to rest on a rock at the edge of the beach. The sun had dropped below the canyon rim, but the rock retained its warmth, and Zanja lay back upon it and shut her eyes, only to be assailed by a chaos of emotion that her disciplines could hardly keep in check. So this was love, she thought ironically, and hoped she’d soon discover the remedy for it. Then, she felt a mouth touch hers, tentatively, curiously, and she opened her eyes to find Karis’s somber face, carved into hollows by her hard tight with smoke, so close that Zanja scarcely would have had to move to kiss her again. Zanja said desperately, “Now you are torturing me.”

“I’m torturing myself,” Karis said. She sat back, but Zanja still could scarcely breathe. “If my hands had been cut off I’d still be interested in picking things up, and I might even try it once in a while.”

Zanja said, in a voice that did not seem hers, “Please don’t try it again.”

“Then how am I to live as well and joyfully as I can? You pose me quite a paradox.”

Karis had given Zanja’s scarcely functioning mind a glyph of words to figure out. While Zanja floundered in her divination, Karis sat with her chin upon her fist. Sometimes, a trembling passed over her. At last, Kans spoke again. “Maybe you’ve been merciless for good reasons, but you’ve been merciless nonetheless.”

“It’s a wonder you can stand my company,” Zanja said stiffly. “Surely it’s not pleasant to be reminded constantly of what you cannot have.”

“Zanja, I could have whatever I wanted, if only I couldwant it. But I’m not like you, for even when you lay paralyzed, with your back broken, you still could want something. So you could imagine a life worth living, though there was much you might want and be unable to have. It’s not the having that matters to you, am I right? So you can imagine living your whole life beside me, in a state of unfulfilled desire, and that’s acceptable to you because it is desire itself that gives you joy. But I am an earth witch and no matter how rich my life of heart and mind become–and I am rich now, richer than I ever have been–it never can amount to joy. I need the earth, the flesh, the life of the skin. Without that, this whole thing–” she gestured at the shadowed canyon, the vivid sky, “–is just an intellectual exercise.”

Zanja sat up, more bewildered by herself than she was by Karis. “I can’t explain it, but I know that what you’ve said is only half the truth. You’re standing in a doorway looking in one direction and thinking that what you see is all there is. But if you turned around you’d see something else entirely.”

If Karis had received a classical education, then surely she would know that the Woman of the Doorway faces danger any way she looks. But Karis did not state this obvious objection, and she sighed and seemed relieved, as though this very peculiar conversation had served a purpose only she could comprehend. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try to turn around. I apologize for my behavior,” she added. “It seemed like you wanted to give me some comfort yesterday with all your talk of Ransel–a model friendship, untainted by desire. But it only made me realize how much I detest the compromise you’re offering. So I thought of how I’ve learned to feel the metal beneath my hammer, not by touch, but by knowing it from within. I thought I might know you that way.”

“How is that different from what you had to do in Lalali?” Zanja put her head in her hands. “You can know me without touching me.

“If I were a fire blood, yes.”

“I see,” Zanja said, in the grip of a deep dismay.

After a while, Karis’s big hand stroked softly down the back of Zanja’s shirt, and Karis said, “There’s no point agonizing. I just want you to understand.”

“I can’t understand without agonizing,” Zanja said. But she lifted her head and added shakily, “You’ll be wanting to get back.”

Karis stood up and they started down the beach, and after a while Karis closed her hand around Zanja’s. “Norina already has left her child and is traveling north. I had promised to send the raven before her labor began, so if I know Norina, she’s in a panic now.”

Zanja said, “Well, we can’t have her tearing apart the countryside looking for us, with no idea of what the dangers are. I’ll have to go find her, somehow, before Mabin does.”

Karis nodded. Zanja’s hand felt like it was pinched in a trembling vice.

“How soon do you think I’d have to leave?”

“She’s traveling very fast, and we’ll want to catch her well before Strongbridge. That’s what, six day’s travel from here?”

“At least.”

“At least? Then you should leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!”

Karis said softly, “I agree. It’s much too soon.”

“She’ll come rampaging in–”

“She will,” Karis agreed.

They had walked in silence almost to the cave before either one of them spoke again. Zanja said, “The last time I left you, you disappeared.”

“Well you could be the one who disappears this time. I’m sure Mabin is looking for you. You should take Emil with you.”

“No. Emil stays with you. Emil and Medric both.”

“With Medric and the water witch looking out for me–”

“They don’t have Emil’s knowledge and experience.”

Karis sighed. “You want Emil to stay with me for the same reason I want him to go with you. Well, let’s not get into an argument about whose life is most worth protecting. I always lose that one.”

They were standing at the entrance to the cave, and Zanja realized that this time Karis did not want her to go in. Karis said, “I’ll be awake long before the sun tomorrow.”

“Wake me up once you’re awake.”

Karis nodded. Her sorrow might have been a load of iron, yet she smiled wryly, as though she recognized that she was accepting the very compromise she detested: an arm’s length intimacy that must inevitably be corrupted by bitterness. After she had gone inside, Zanja sat alone upon the beach, wishing futilely for one easy choice, one option that did not leave her bleeding and bereft. The sky grew dark, and Emil and Medric came walking down the cliff path, hand in hand, talking earnestly, carrying a brace of rabbits and a basket of mushrooms for supper. Between the two of them, they were more kind to her than she could endure, and she went to bed early to get away from them.

After sunrise, Emil walked with Zanja to the top of the canyon path where their horses were picketed. Emil decided not to tell her about Medric’s restless night; she did not need to worry more. He promised to look after Karis. From Homely’s back, Zanja looked down at him and said with something of her old irony, “So now you’re nursemaid to two rogue elementals. Your elevation has been meteoric.”

“I can stand it a little longer,” he said. “Just look out after yourself.”

She did not remind him that her survival up until now had bordered on the miraculous. “A warrior shouldn’t have so much to lose,” she said. “Especially knowing as I do just what it’s like to lose it.”

“Nothing will be lost.” He took her hand and lightly kissed her knuckle. “I’ll look for you in twelve days. Medric and I will hunt some fowl, and we’ll have a feast. And then all of us will decide what we’re going to do with ourselves. Now go.”

Her ugly horse pranced across the pathless ground as though he thought he was on parade. Watching her go so lightly and yet so heavily, Emil had the odd thought that she did not yet know what she had to fear. Yet, knowing her way was fraught with unknown danger, she had set forth. And so we all are Paladins, Emil thought, every last one of us who sets forth so lightly upon a dangerous road.

He had this same thought again, later, when Karis came out from under smoke and spent the afternoon with him and Medric in a hilarious attempt to circumnavigate the lake. Karis feared deep or flowing water and, like all earth witches, could not endure setting foot in a boat. While scrambling up and down the rocks, Karis made herself entertaining, with a humor that was deep and subtle and utterly entrancing. But the charming afternoon left Emil with an aching heart, and he and Medric spent a strangely silent evening afterwards. That something of great import was at work in both of them seemed clear. But what they struggled with Emil could not fathom, and both of them kept their own counsel.

Six days Zanja traveled across a familiar landscape. She skirted Meartown to the west and forded the river north of Strongbridge, then worked her way south, cross‑country. A day’s journey south of Strongbridge, she took lodging at a farm near the road she and Norina had traveled, and settled down to watch the road. In the afternoon of her second day of watching, Norina appeared. She traveled in the company of her gentle husband, riding horses so tired they dragged their hooves in the dirt.

Zanja greeted J’han first, who said in some bewilderment, “Zanja? I hardly can believe my eyes!” She clasped his hand, thinking how incredible it was that he had endured Norina’s company long enough to claim a husband’s right, and yet his wife did not trust him enough to explain where they were traveling, or why.

To Norina, Zanja said, “Some terrible things have happened, but Karis has survived.”

Norina subjected her to a remote examination. “You are not confident of her well‑being, though.”

“At that farmstead over there, you can have your horses looked after, and perhaps even eat some supper and get a night’s rest. It will take some time for me to explain.”

“We’ll go to the farmstead, of course,” J’han said, and started his reluctant horse forward. In a moment, Norina followed. J’han laid his hand on Zanja’s shoulder as she walked at his stirrup. “So this is all about Karis? I should have known.”

Norina said, “And it’s not your business, as I’ve been telling you all along.”

“Your health and safety are not my business,” J’han said, as though agreeing. Norina glared, and fell back out of hearing rather than be further subjected to the criticisms she could not help but hear, no matter what words her husband chose to use.

J’han said to Zanja, “We have a hearty daughter, with a healthy set of lungs on her. She’s down there on the seacoast, no doubt screaming fit to raise the dead.” And I should be with her, his tone of voice said, so clearly that even a non‑Truthken easily could hear it.

Zanja said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to return to your daughter.”

J’han smiled sadly. “I have every intention of doing that.”

“Without Norina?”

“Norina chooses differently from how I choose. And as you know, she is uncompromising. So this is how it ends.”

Later, having situated the horses and made suitable arrangements with the farmers for lodging, Zanja sat with Norina in the guest room and told her how Mabin had tried and failed to kill Karis. Norina listened in unnerving silence. She asked no questions, neither did she argue. For a while she lay upon the rope bed, then she got up to pace the room, then she sat down and picked the dried mud from her boots. When Zanja had finished, Norina went to the window and leaned out to shout for J’han to come inside.

“Have you ever heard of someone using less smoke?” she asked him when he came in, wiping his hands on a towel.

“Less than what?” he asked blankly.

“Karis was forced to smoke more frequently than her usual amount, much more. Enough to nearly kill her. And now she’s decreasing that frequency, trying to reduce herself back down to once a day. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“No,” he said in some astonishment. “Is she being successful?”

“Yes, apparently, though it hasn’t been easy.”

“I always have heard the smoke users inevitably increase the amount they smoke, until they die of the poison or else from their inability to buy as much drug as they need. If it’s possible for them to use less…” He paused, shaken and distressed. “Then we have abandoned them to a fate that we always assumed to be inevitable, when in fact we should have been trying to help them.”

“Karis is different,” Norina said.

“She is an extraordinary person of great wit and will. But she is human, and her body is no different from mine or yours.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Norina snapped.

J’han set his lips and visibly restrained himself from a sharp reply.

“What is wrong with you?” Zanja said to Norina later, after she had sent J’han away again. “I can hardly endure your company, and I don’t see how bringing you to Karis will do her a service.”

“Watch your words, Zanja na’Tarwein. I’m not in a tolerant mood.”

“I would never expect you to be tolerant.”

Norina sat again on the bed and dug her fingers into her short hair, which was stiff with dirt and stood upright like wheat stalks. “Go away.”

After a long silence she looked at Zanja, who had remained sitting where she was, at the table by the window. Norina said, “You tell me that Karis’s true enemy is my commander and a hero of the people, and that somehow I, a Truthken, never noticed. You tell me that when my dearest friend needed me the most desperately, she nearly died in my absence. And now you imply that you have the ability and the right to keep me from her unless I behave myself according to your high standards. Your very presence chides me. Go away and chide someone else.”

Zanja left her, and found J’han out in the kitchen, examining a collection of dirty and impatient children, who clearly wanted to make the best of the remaining daylight and saw no reason to be subjected to a healer’s scrutiny. J’han sent them away, reassured the gathered parents about their health, and took Zanja by the arm out into the privacy of the yard. They sat upon the edge of the well, and for some time neither of them said a word.

“The people of air are not easy to love,” Zanja said at last.

“Nor even to like sometimes,” J’han said.

“Would you at least come and have a look at Karis, before you start your own journey? I’m weary with caring for her.”

“Yes, of course. My child’s in good hands, and I am afraid Norina will kill herself with this hard traveling. It was not an easy birth.”

Zanja sighed. “I was beginning to see how being friends with a Truthken might be invigorating enough that I could put up with the exasperation. But now I can’t see it anymore.”

J’han laughed heartily, without anger for once.

“And I fear for Karis, should she be trapped between air and fire. In truth, I wouldn’t blame her if she decided to get rid of us both, just so she could have some peace.”

They talked until after dark, when one of the farmers called them in to supper. Norina did not appear at the supper table, and J’han slept out in the barn with Zanja. In the morning, their journey north began, an angry journey made even more grim by the weather, which turned wet and stormy only after they had traveled beyond the reaches of civilization and there was no shelter to be found. By the time they reached the canyon path they all had been wet to the skin for two days and nights, and the nights had been cold as well as wet. They had been sleeping huddled together for warmth, but relations between them had not thawed much.

In all, thirteen days had passed since Zanja had last traversed this rocky pathway down to the lake. Then the lake had glowed like a jewel; now it was gray, with the muted colors of tree and canyon bleeding across it like ink on a wet page. Halfway down the path, Zanja spotted Emil riding up to meet them. He also rode on horseback, with his horse muddied to the belly and rain dripping from its mane, and he looked as wearied and worried as Zanja ever had seen him. Before he even spoke she knew that something terrible had happened.

“Karis has disappeared again,” he said. “Five days we’ve been hunting for her, and haven’t seen a trace, not even a footprint. Zanja, listen–before you ride off in a panic and kill yourself on the slippery stones–I swear to you that she was not taken away. She has written a glyph upon the space of her cave, and the message, I think, is intended for you.”

In the cave shelter, the water clock was not merely shattered, but pulverized to powder. In the middle of the cave floor lay Karis’s box of smoke, with the lid broken to splinters, and the interior burnt to charcoal. Of the contents, the half year’s supply of smoke, nothing remained but ashes.

Yes, Zanja could easily read this glyph. She dropped to her knees beside the incinerated box. Of course Karis could not imagine herself free from Mabin’s control and Nonna’s expectations if she could not also imagine herself free of smoke. Nearly a month of battling back the smoke must have given her an insane hope that she might be able to defeat it for good. That was the doorway she had decided to enter, the doorway where certain death lurked.

And then Norina was shouting at her: “What have you done! What did you do to her!” And it did not even occur to Zanja until too late that she had to defend herself, and Norina’s heavy boot slammed into her side–once, twice, a third time–before Zanja had managed to catch Norina’s foot and take her down. And then they were rolling, their blades of folded steel ringing like bells, a sweet, terrible sound. But no matter where Karis was, at the very moment that Zanja’s blade cut into Norina’s flesh, Karis would know.

Zanja flung her dagger away and blocked with her forearm a stroke that could have killed her, and felt the dagger slice through cloth and flesh and all the way to bone. She brought her knee up reflexively into Norina’s crotch and heard her shout, and then she was rolling away and rising to her feet, but Norina’s heavy boot cracked into her knee and Zanja heard, rather than felt, the bone shatter like pottery. Then Emil took Norina from behind and the fight seemed to be over. And then the pain came.

“Hold still,” J’han said, his voice deadly calm.

“Gods burn her to ashes–”

“Zanja, hold still. Your ribs might be broken and you could be killed yet.”

Zanja had seen the kind of death that came when a rib pierced a lung, and she held herself still, or as still as she could. A very bad time followed. There was much frantic activity around her, and sometimes J’han’s voice penetrated the haze of pain, always calm, measured, talking steadily to her or to someone else: “I know it’s bad, Zanja, but there’s no time to brew a potion. Just keep breathing–you know how to keep the pain from taking control of you–Now, sir, give me the bandages, and that grayish bottle–yes, that one. Put more pressure on her arm; it’s starting to leak again …” He faded out, and when he came back he was working with needle and thread like a seamster–nice of him to mend Zanja’s shirt–except that it was her arm he was mending–and she couldn’t take a deep breath for some reason. “You’re awake again?” he said. “Almost done now. Amazing how easy it is to do this kind of damage and how much work it takes to fix. You can’t breathe very well because I’ve got your ribs bound, but they’re just cracked.”

“What happened to my leg?” she croaked. Her entire leg seemed to be immobilized with a splint of some kind, but the pain was dazzling and nauseating.

“It’s not good at all–sir, can you cut that?–Your kneecap’s shattered so badly I don’t know if it can mend. At the very least it’ll be a long time before you can move about at all, even on crutches. I’ve got it in a splint, but–”

Zanja shut her eyes to understand him better, but the information seemed beyond comprehension. All she could think of was Karis, incinerating her entire smoke supply and walking away. How long would it take for her to die? Would Zanja feel it, when Karis died?

“What happened to Norina?” she asked.

“She went away,” J’han said distractedly.

Zanja glanced sideways and saw Emil, holding Zanja’s arm still so that J’han could work on it, watching J’han’s work with professional interest. There was blood everywhere. Feeling Zanja’s attention, Emil raised an eyebrow and said mildly, “Now that was the dirtiest fight I’ve seen outside of a tavern. Too bad you were at the receiving end.”

Zanja gasped, “I’d hurt Karis if I hurt Norina.”

“Unfortunately, Norina had no such compunctions. But this is an amazingly clean wound.”

J’han said, “With the right blow, a blade like that could kill you before you knew you were hurt. I wish my surgeon’s knives were that sharp.”

“Where’s Medric?” Zanja said.

“Now you’re starting to think,” Emil said. “Karis seems to have convinced Medric to keep his mouth shut. He’s refused to help look for Karis, as have the Lake People refused. It’s been just me and Annis, chasing around the countryside like a couple of wastrels. I even tried your trick with the directional glyphs, but it doesn’t work for me.”

“Hold still!” J’han said.

“Gods’ curses on that madwoman,” Zanja gasped as a fresh wave of pain washed through her. “I’m the only one who can find her!”

“You’ll have to accept that you’re not going anywhere,” J’han said.

Annis brought over a steaming bowl of dark, stinking fluid and held it out for J’han’s inspection. He dipped in a fingertip and tasted it, and made a face. “Practically undrinkable. That’s about right.”

“No one’s been able to find Medric either,” Annis said. “He’s around, but no matter where you are, he’s just left moments before.”

Medric said at the doorway of the cave, “I’m here now. Good gods.” He looked around the blood‑smeared cave.

“You didn’t dream this part?” Emil said bitterly.

Pale, red‑eyed with sleeplessness or sorrow, Medric dropped to one knee beside Zanja. “Karis promised to make it possible to find her. She said she’d go west along the canyon rim as far as she could go in five days travel, and then she’d hole up in some hollow place where she could see the sky. She asked me to beg your pardon, Zanja, for deceiving you, but she had to fight this battle alone.”

“She brought enough smoke to last until today?”

“Yes.”

“All three of you must go find her, then. If she can be saved–”

J’han said, with that terrible honesty that was sometimes the only gift a healer could give, “Zanja, there is no hope of that. Even if we can find her before she dies, the only thing that could save her is smoke, and we have none.“

Emil said in a low voice, “Mabin has some.”

There was silence. Zanja said, “Karis would rather die.” She made the mistake of moving, and for some time she could do nothing but breathe and struggle to stay conscious. When J’han put the bowl to her mouth she drank just a swallow of the bitter pain killer. “J’han, Karis is vested with the power of Shaftal,” she said.

He sat back sharply, nearly spilling the bowl of potion. “What!”

“Go with them to find her. If she is dying, at least she should die with dignity.”

“Annis can take care of Zanja,” Emil said.

Annis grumbled because her long recess with the Otter People had come to an end, but she did not refuse her old commander’s will. They settled Zanja onto the pallet with the potion beside her, and within the time it would have taken ten drops of water to fall from the water clock, they were gone.

Zanja took one more swallow of the bitter potion, and told Annis to leave her alone. After that came a merciful darkness and stillness.