Air Logic by Laurie J. Marks

Author:Laurie J. Marks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2019-04-26T19:32:24+00:00

Chapter 24

The empty cup of Zanja’s skull was filled to overflowing by a pitcher of pain.

“Will Karis pardon me? If I betray my friends?”

Zanja saw a large room, dimly lit by high windows. Her hand rested on the shoulder of a starving woman who should have been young but was not. She touched the worn, greasy texture of the woman’s ragged silk shirt. She felt the dust of a thousand other people, living and dead, trapped there in the dirty silk. She tasted the salt of distant oceans. She sensed the scalding fingertips of slave children unwinding the silk from the cocoons; the tiny lives of the silkworms; the lives of the trees whose leaves they ate; and the life of the soil that fed and stabilized those trees.

“Yes,” Karis said with Zanja’s mouth and Zanja’s breath.

Zanja opened her eyes. Chaen was wending through an appalling labyrinth, one dreadful turn at a time.

“Yes,” Zanja said. “Yes.”

“Then—where is Saugus?” Chaen asked.

Dazedly, Zanja chose a card.

It was a card from the original casting. It depicted a luxurious room, walled with tapestries, in which a woman sat upon a chair that had no back but had curved armrests nearly as high as her shoulders. Her rich robe covered the entire floor like a carpet. A narrow, winding staircase led to a door that was set in a hillside. The roots of a tree buttressed the walls of the room.

Zanja said to herself, in her native language, “How can I understand this picture?”

“Speaker? Did you call me?”

The boy had been swimming in the Asha River. The city grime had dissolved in its cold, fast-flowing water. He had put on a summer tunic with the woven border pattern of the na’Tarwein clan. His black, wet hair hung nearly to his waist.

“I did call you,” she said.

“What is your will?”

“Tell me what this picture means.”

The boy examined the glyph card. “It is a burrow.”

“Like a rabbit’s burrow?”

“It is for those who live among us, underfoot.”

“Yet we don’t see them. Why is that?”

“Because they keep out of our sight, or they pretend to be what they are not.”

Chaen was staring, and well she might, since Zanja was speaking with an invisible boy in an unknown language. Zanja said in Shaftalese, “Chaen, ask me where is this underground room.”

Chaen glanced in the direction of Zanja’s apprentice, but to her, he was not there. “Where is this underground room?” she asked.

The boy offered Zanja a page from the lexicon. That page showed a farmer, walking behind a plow pulled by the peculiar oxen of Sainna, whose horns covered their heads like helmets. In the turned soil immediately behind the farmer’s feet, plants were already sprouting. A river bordered the four sides of the field, floated upon by strange ships, swum in by sinuous fish, and settled by elaborate houses along its shore.

The details may have been wrong, but it was the Corbin River. This farmer could be Waet, plowing the field after which the city of Watfield had been named.

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