Fire Logic

“I amdead,” she rasped, in a voice harsh with smoke and blood.

“So are we all. Here.” He tilted a gourd cup to her mouth. She drank. He said, “You breathed too much smoke, and you have some burns and bruises, but your head is your worst injury. A horse trampled you, I think.”

“How did you find me?”

“You found me,” he said. “I was looking for you, and you came out of the burning village.”

“What happened to our people?”

“When they heard my warning, they left their belongings and followed me and the other katrimto the cliff path. Sai

“Names of the gods!” Zanja groaned.

“We fought them a long time,” Ransel continued quietly. “What was accomplished I do not know. Did even one of our people escape? I wish I knew the answer, but I do not know. I and some other katrimfled when the Sai

Zanja saw that other katrimwere gathered in this hollow, and that many had drawn close to hear the conversation. Her vision was blurred and she could not count them, but it seemed there were fewer than twenty.

“I was pi

Others also told their stones, in voices as harsh and lifeless as the voices of ghosts are said to be. Zanja listened, thinking that surely she also had witnessed the horrors they described, but she only remembered a sensation of chaos and then of stillness. To have forgotten so much surely was a mercy, but it also was dreadful to gaze at these shattered tribesmen and feel confusion rather than sharing their horror.

“The Sai

“They must have killed the watchers before they could spread the alarm,” said another. “Though the watchers were hidden and it should have been impossible …”

“No, they knew exactly where the watchers were,” said Zanja. “Tarin must have told them–told his friend in the woods, in payment for smoke. He betrayed his entire people.”

They were silent then, for this was something they had not known, and could scarcely begin to understand. But Zanja understood that if she had only taken action immediately to find out what exactly had happened to Tarin, rather than delaying to let her anger cool, she might have discovered his betrayal immediately and been able to forewarn her people of their danger. Not for the last time, Zanja wished that the war horse’s kick to her head had been harder.

Ransel did not know of how she had failed the Ashawala’i, and she was too stu

When she opened her eyes, she saw stars burning. The katrimroasted river trout over a small fire, and talked about revenge. Ransel hovered nearby, and drew close when she stirred.

“The Sai

The other katrimabandoned their meal to come over and hear what she had said. “Speaker, how do you know?”

“They told me in my dreams.”

“Then we will follow them, to haunt them like ghosts, to kill as many as we can.”

“If we do this, we all will die.” She could see them more clearly now: some fine warriors and some she had long considered fools, but with the foolishness burned out of them now.

“What does it matter, so long as we can die in honor?” said Ransel.

They all murmured agreement, their voices empty and bitter with loss.

“Then we shall follow them,” Zanja said. She did not understand how she had become their leader, or why they listened to her, when her certainty might be nothing more than the delirium of a broken head.

She shut her eyes and slept the night through. At dawn, they began hunting Sai

Zanja and her companions lived ghost lives. They did not speak of the past, or of the dead, or of their own deaths. They watched the Sai

The fifteen katrimbecame twelve, and then seven. The seven became five. With more warriors and more time, they might have eventually destroyed the entire Sai

Only Zanja had ever traveled so far east of the Asha Valley. She told about a treacherous canyon they soon would pass, and suggested that one of them might lure the Sai

She would always remember the moment when the mountain fell on her. It was her second death, and far more satisfying than the first. She would remember the Sai