“Mabin,” Zanja said, as the councilor turned away to investigate this new disaster.
“What?” she snapped.
“Karis is dead.”
Mabin stood very still in the doorway, with the lamp beyond her, silhouetting her. A hard, pitiless woman, it seemed the only thing that could stop her in her tracks was the thing she most wanted to hear.
Zanja said, “The smoke did kill Karis. She endured so much, but in the end she decided to die rather than use smoke any longer.”
“Why have you kept this from me?” Mabin asked. Her voice was nearly a whisper.
“You have murdered the G’deon of Shaftal. While I’ve been playing games with you here, witnesses to that murder have gotten safely away. Now, there will be an accounting.”
Mabin turned away without a word, and closed and locked the door behind her. Alone in the darkness, sitting upon the weeping boards, with the collected water slopping gently in the silence, the vast wilderness of loss opened up within Zanja, and for a long time she wept, as the water level rose higher and people rushed back and forth across the length of the boat, their voices edged with disbelief and dismay. Soon they would abandon the boat and leave Zanja here to drown in the rising water. It seemed a lonely and cold death, but it was as good as any, she supposed.
But Mabin came back with two others, and fought open the door, and had her men haul Zanja out of the hold and up into a misty, cold early morning where the sun was nothing more than a haze of light. There they bound her hands and put her into a rowboat, along with so many other people that the little boat also seemed in danger of sinking. It was so crowded the rowers could scarcely move to row it to shore. Mabin sat beside Zanja, glowering at her.
Zanja could not imagine why Mabin had come back for her. Perhaps she was haunted by Zanja’s declaration that she was no better than the Sainnites. Perhaps she wanted the satisfaction of killing Zanja with her own hands, rather than letting her drown. The hazy light was almost too bright to endure after Zanja’s days of darkness. As the rowboat lurched toward shore, the riverboat settled deeply into the water behind them, like a hen settling onto her nest. Soon it would be sitting on the river bottom.
The muffling silence of the fog crept across the rowboat. The grumblers fell quiet and Mabin stared bleakly across the water, where the shore now came hazily into view, as stony as any other bank of this harsh river, with boulders that huddled in the mist like bodies upon a battlefield. Beyond the shore, the fog loomed like a wall. Something lay within the mist: a universe of possibilities, thousands of routes through the wilderness, thousands of days yet to dawn.
It seemed very strange that a perfectly sound boat had suddenly begun to leak, and not just from one place, but from everywhere at once. Fingertips had drummed on the boat’s hull in the dark of night, as if slender swimmers, playing like otters, had swum up and down, sometimes coming up for air, laughing gleefully, with their faces in the water to muffle the sound. What a fine game it would have been. And to repeatedly slip loose the boat’s anchor, to make deliveries of fleas… this was guerrilla warfare indeed.
The rowboat ground into the stony shore, and the rowers shipped their oars. Grumbling again, some of the people in the boat got out and hauled the boat into the shallows. The boat tilted and its occupants got out. Two men dragged Zanja from the boat, and hauled her through the knee‑deep water onto dry land, holding her by the elbows. They lay her down upon the shore and she immediately began, quietly, to drag herself away.
“I don’t like this fog,” Mabin said. “I don’t like anything about this day. Let’s get to town, and quickly.” She looked at Zanja. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Zanja uttered a cry of longing and anger, and struggled under the knee that dropped onto her back. It took two men to get her under control. When she hung like baggage from their iron grips, she noticed Mabin, standing several body lengths away, with her pistol drawn. “That was stupid of you,” Mabin said. “I don’t know why I didn’t simply shoot you. You have little value for me anymore.”
“Why don’t you let me go?” Zanja said. “What harm can I do now?”
Weather magic is water magic. The wall of fog was dissolving now, and the wretched, flood‑distorted trees that grew along the shore seemed to step forward, one tree at a time. And then one of the trees lifted its head like a horse catching a familiar scent, and the tree beside it was a person holding its reins. The fog rolled back like a curtain folding away from a bright window. More people. More horses. A gaunt scarecrow leaned upon one of the gnarled trees as though upon a cane. And then the sun washed across her and she drew herself erect.
Karis.
“Councilor Mabin,” she said, in a voice heavy with irony, “this time you have brought your fate upon yourself.”
The pistol hammer clicked as Mabin pulled its trigger. The powder pan did not ignite, for gunpowder is earth, nothing more than earth.
Karis stepped towards her. Those among the trees remained at a distance: a Healer, a Truthken, a Paladin, a Seer; witnesses from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. There was laughter in the river. Mabin seemed unable to look away from the giant woman who confronted her. “Councilor Mabin,” Karis said again, softly. “One way or another, you will let her go.”
Mabin cried, “Kill the captive!”
Zanja threw herself forward, breaking the grip of her captors and collapsing again onto stones. Then they had her again, but they paid her little attention. A rag‑dressed collection of muscle and bone, Karis took another step forward, and Mabin toppled backward at her touch, as though she had been pummeled. She sprawled upon her back, and Karis took her by the shirt and tore open the heavy fabric as though it was gauze. She lifted a fist as though striking a hammer upon the forge. But she held a glittering needle of steel in her fist, bright and terrible in the sudden sunshine, and she drove it without hesitation into Mabin’s heart.
Mabin uttered an awful cry. Blood gushed, vivid scarlet in the bright sunshine. Karis pressed her palm to Mabin’s breast. Mabin clawed empty air as though to pluck the cold steel from her heart. The Paladins stood transfixed.
“Before Shaftal,” breathed the man who knelt upon Zanja’s back, “she’s spiked her heart. Shaftal, what have we done?” He got up hastily and made as if to offer Zanja a hand, but she did not even look at him.
Mabin lay still. Karis stood up, breathing heavily, her hand painted scarlet. Mabin lifted a trembling hand to touch the blunt end of the steel spike embedded in her flesh. Karis said, “Mabin Paladin, Councilor of the Lilterwess, you live now at my tolerance. My advisors have convinced me to let you live, for the sake of the people who honor their old oaths. It is for them, and them alone, that I give you your life. See that you give me reason to continue to tolerate you.”
Mabin gasped bitterly, “I know the law. You need not instruct me.”
The old man who had tried to help Zanja to her feet cried out, “Lady, we didn’t know! We thought it was our duty to serve the councilor! How were we to know who you were? Mabin, you can yet ask for pardon–”
“Pardon?” Mabin said, and sat up, though she clutched an agonized hand across the spike. “Shaftal will not come into the hands of a Sainnite pretender, the smoke‑addicted daughter of a whore! I will tell the people what you are.”
Karis’s bloodied hand clenched into a fist. A horrified silence fell, so profound that Zanja, with her ear to the stones, could hear rocks grinding in the bottom of the nearby river. Then Karis said, “I always thought that you hated me for what I am. But if I am Shaftal, then Shaftal is what you hate. Isn’t that true, Mabin Councilor? Don’t you hate Shaftal, the land and the people both, because we are half Sainnite? Don’t you hate Shaftal because this land is, now, the child of violence and rape? Don’t you hate the land because of its subjection and paralysis? And isn’t it true that your hatred is killing the land, just as it nearly killed me?”