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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
casually parted the fabric of her palm. It could have sliced all the way to
bone by weight alone, and she might never have even felt it. It seemed
amazing, impossible even, that the blade had no Mearish mastermark.
Surely only in Mear did the smithery exist to produce such a blade. But even
a Mearish mastersmith might well have been awestruck by such
workmanship, unable to reproduce it or even to say exactly how it had been
done.
Zanja said shakily, It is an artwork. I ve never seen its like. She returned
the magnificent blade to Norina, who sheathed it absently, seeming
preoccupied with a Truthken s arcane calculation.
Karis said, Perhaps you ll accept a blade like it, as a poor substitute for the
friendship we ll never have.
Only then did Zanja realize whose vision the beautiful blade embodied, and
whose hand had held the hammer that folded that bright molten blade into
its final form. I ll send it to you by midwinter, Karis said. Have you had
enough sunshine? I think I might be feeling cold.
Norina s bundle contained bread and ham and a pair of new boots that fit
Zanja as though they were made for her, though in fact they had been made
for Norina. Norina sent J han away to attend a difficult birth she had heard
about while in Leston, and the three of them had a surprisingly peaceable
day. Zanja slept and ate for most of it, and once when she awakened upon
the kitchen hearth she found herself covered by the sheepskin jerkin, which
smelled, she realized now, of coal smoke and the forge. Karis and Norina
were chopping vegetables for a ham stew and discussing a book of political
philosophy. Norina said something that Zanja could not understand, and
Karis burst out laughing and put her arm around her. They stood so for a
while, leaning against each other, silent, mysteriously united by ideas,
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
knowledge, and experiences that Zanja did not, and could not share.
The na Tarweins were infamous for their jealousies, but Zanja had so far
managed to avoid that well-worn path. It seemed intolerable that Karis
would leave, that Zanja would spend the winter here with this admirable but
unlikeable woman, that these few hours she d spent with Karis were all she
would ever have. Norina was the barrier that stood between them.
Unfortunately, thanks to the oath that Zanja had sworn to Karis, that
barrier was permanent.
Zanja would have to make a life for herself alone, on the other side of this
barren winter. But now she might steal a few more moments with Karis
before sunset and smoke took her away, and so she sat up and asked Karis
to explain what philosophy was, and what it was good for. That question
took the rest of the day for Karis to answer. The sun set too soon.
Thus ended their brief and strange two-day friendship, for the next
morning s brief and inarticulate good-byes hardly counted as anything more
than empty ritual.
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
Part 2
Fire Night
Without courage, there would be no will to know.
Without the will to know, there would be no
knowledge.
Without knowledge, there would be no language.
Without language, there would be no community.
MACKAPEE S Principles for Community
Who is seen to speak to the enemy must be
silenced. Who
sympathizes with the enemy must lose their
heart. Who dreams of
peace must dream no more. Those who ravaged
the land will be
eliminated: without compromise, without mercy.
MABIN S Warfare
When I first met my enemy, she was a glyph, and
it was I who
chose to read her as my friend. When my enemy
first met me, I was
a glyph, and it was she who chose to read me as
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
her friend. So all
people are glyphs, and every understanding
comes from choice.
MEDRIC S History of My Fathers People
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
Chapter Seven
Emil habitually wintered in a shepherd s cottage in the highlands, a place so
solitary and forbidding that he rarely saw another living being, animal or
human, between first snow and spring thaw. The cold became tiring, but he
never grew weary of the solitude or the silence. When weather permitted, he
would walk on snowshoes from one end of the highland to the other, and
the austere and terrible beauty of that wild land would take root, and create
in him a serenity all the more precious because he knew from experience
how ephemeral and fleeting it would prove, come spring. When the wind
howled and the falling snow made of the vast expanses a small and restless
blank, he stayed indoors and read yet again by candlelight the words of the
great Shaftali philosophers until whole passages became as palpable to him
as a single word, a single thought. Every moment, every breath of frigid air,
every flicker of candle and crackle of ice became precious. For most of the
year his life belonged to the law, but in winter, his life was his.
Inevitable spring allowed him one last walk across the frozen water of the
Finger Lakes, where he cleared the snow to watch the fish through ice as
clear as glass. But as he stood on a rise of land about to turn toward home,
he heard the sharp report of cracking ice. So the muddy thaw began.
Some twenty days later, during a break in the rain, he was planting
flowering peas along the fence when something, a faint sound or a tingling
of the skin, made him turn sharply, to see a pair of riders coming down the
narrow from the direction of Gariston. In nearly thirty years as a Paladin he
had come to trust his small talent for prescience, which never told him very
much, but told it dependably. Knowing he had no reason for concern, he
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
turned back to his pea planting until the travelers had ridden close enough
to talk to. The horses were tired and muddy to the belly, for the roads surely
had scarcely been passable. One rider looked cross; the other s face was a
closed door.
Emil Paladin? said the cross one. I am Norina Truthken.
He bowed to her in the old fashion, though he was not happy that the
solitude of his last precious days had been disturbed.
The riders dismounted, and it was the silent one that Emil watched. Plain
farmer s clothing could not obscure her exotic appearance: the dark coloring
and the sharp angles of her face. She moved with the fluidity and precision
of a blade fighter, who had learned her skills in a place where pistols and
gunpowder had not yet eliminated all the beauty and skill from combat. She
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