Fire Logic

The tavern was empty. Willis shouted for ale.

“So what is this place named?” Emil asked Zanja, as they sat at a battered table.

“Progress Through Hard Work,” she hazarded. “It seems rather an odd name for a tavern.”

It was an elementary reading compared to what Emil could do, but he nodded approvingly. “There’s a humor in it–most people would miss the joke entirely these days, and simply call this place the Wheel and Hoe.” A big, light‑footed woman entered from the arched doorway that led to a steep stone staircase. Down its length echoed the wail of a baby.

“So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know my husband had gone out.”

She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies for them.

“Husband,” snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, “City folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and then they call usbackwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently clothed and fed.”

“Those beggars are smoke sick,” Zanja said.

“All the more reason why they need their families,” Willis snapped.

“So what would you call this woman’s man?”

“Not her husband,” Willis said obstinately. “Where is the household? Where are the other parents for the child? It’s just the two of them. That’s no family.”

Zanja took a swallow of the bitter ale she’d never developed a taste for, and ate the greasy pork pie the alewife set in front of her. The woman’s husband returned, and they had a brief, bitter argument behind the closed door of the kitchen. When Willis’s brothers arrived, the ale husband came out smiling and rubbing his hands, and wouldn’t leave them alone until Emil threatened to go to another ale house.

Willis’s brothers smelled distinctly of the stable. They were identical twins who dressed alike and ate alike and finished each other’s sentences. When both of them turned their attention upon Zanja, she realized that they probably made love together as well, and she had to struggle to keep from revealing how repellent she found the prospect.

There was a certain affliction that every member of Willis’s family seemed to share, a single‑mindedness that sorely tried her patience. “Tell me about this new commander,” Emil said. “You have at least seen her, haven’t you?”

“She’s young,” said one.

“And handsome,” said the other.

“How young? Is she one of this new breed, Shaftali‑born?”

“She’s older than fifteen!”

Emil rather wearily reminded the brother that, though it had been fifteen years since the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the Samnites had been a presence in Shaftal for a good fifteen years before that.

“I suppose she could be thirty,” said a brother. “Maybe a bit older.”

“What does it matter?” asked the other.

“The young ones sometimes speak our language, and they understand us much better than their fathers did. I think they are the more dangerous enemies because they don’t make as many stupid mistakes.”

The brothers looked at him blankly. “Sai

“Exactly,” said Willis impatiently.

Emil looked as if the three of them together were enough to give him a headache.

The brothers told him that the soldiers reassigned from Rees had arrived all at once, before the thaw. There were too many of them for the brothers to notice any one in particular. They complained at length about the great quantities of baggage the two of them had carried that day. In particular, they remembered some large, remarkably heavy trunks that the two of them had been unfortunate enough to have to move into one soldier’s quarters. “Trunks full of rocks,” they said bitterly. “A lot of rocks.”

“Weapons,” suggested Willis.

“Oh, sure, it could have been ax heads or something made of iron, though what one soldier wanted with so many of them I don’t know.”

“It was books,” said Zanja.

Willis and his brothers burst into raucous laughter. “Books! Even we don’t have books anymore, and at least we know how to read!”

But Emil said somberly, “Books? What kind of Sai

“Perhaps a Sai

“And educated at least a little–though how that might happen I don’t know. Some of them must be able to read, but not in Shaftalese.”

“And he’s influential enough that his commander allows him to fill a wagon, when most soldiers have only one small trunk, and whatever they can carry on their backs.”

Emil turned to the brothers. “Find a man like that,” he said. “A young Sai

The brothers gaped at him as though he was a street corner magician pulling coins out of children’s ears. Willis, predictably, protested, “You don’t even know this man exists. It’s just guesses.”

Emil said quietly, “No, it’s fire logic.”

Willis banged his tankard on the table. “I need more ale.”

Zanja gave him hers. The thick stone walls retained the day’s chill too well, and the fire on the hearth was stingy at best. Dour A

The four of them left the brothers drinking their ale, and followed a circuitous route to a road that ended at the garrison wall. There was no gate; the wall rose up out of the road’s debris. The city buildings stood aloof, with the basements of the buildings that had once stood there filled with the rubble of their demolished walls. The garrison wall had been built of reused stone blocks. As they stood there, a soldier strolled past along the battlement, eating an apple. He carried a long gun by a sling over his shoulder. He did not even glance down at them.

“The main gate is to the west,” said Emil, “and there’s two postern gates, all guarded. We’ve dreamed up half a dozen ways to break in over the years, but we’ve never actually done it. Let them hide away inside their walled city … if they’ll just leave the rest of Shaftal alone.”

They walked to the main gate, and Emil went into a shop within sight of it to visit a friend who had made it his habit to watch the comings and goings of the garrison. When he reappeared, he reported that his friend had nothing useful to tell them. If a Shaftali spy were visiting the garrison, he or she had the sense to go in by the postern gate, and if the owner of the trunks of books were going in and out, he looked no different from any other soldier.

Willis’s mood seemed to have only grown more foul as the day continued. Apparently, he did not like that Emil taught Zanja about glyphs, nor did he like that their intuitions had proven so compatible. But why he was so irritated by these things Zanja could not imagine.

As they walked through the rich farmlands of the river valley, A

In this community of huge, fantastically intermarried families, Zanja’s loneliness was becoming intolerable. She experimented with touching A

“Sometime soon,” Zanja suggested.

A

The land slowly put on the clothing of summer: first white and pink, then many shades of green. The Sai