“Stop right there,” a man’s voice said quietly. “I’ve got a pistol pointing right at you.”
Zanja stopped. Her thoughts were strangely quiet; her heart scarcely even jumped in her throat.
The man was a pale form on the other side of the room. He was breathless with fear or exertion–exertion, she decided, for his voice seemed calm. “I really don’t want to shoot you,” he said. Strangely, he spoke fluent, unaccented Shaftalese.
“Then don’t,” Zanja said.
“Just promise not to set my house on fire,” he said.
Zanja was poised to duck his bullet and leap out the window. This, though, she had not anticipated.
“I have books,” he said. “An ancient, priceless collection. Shaftali books. Irreplaceable books. No civilized person would choose to see them burn.”
Zanja said stupidly, “But the house next door is already burning.”
“I just need time to get the rest of the books out into the garden, where they’ll be safe.”
“My war is not against books.”
“Well then, I am not your enemy.” She heard the sound of him setting down his pistol onto a tabletop. “There’s a lamp just to your right,” the man said. As she groped in the darkness and lit the lamp with her lucifer, he said, “I’ve been watching your progress for a while. You are having quite a frolic. I hoped I might get a chance to meet you.”
The flame revealed a man, remarkably young, dressed in a nightgown. Spectacles glinted in the light. Without the uniform, he looked no more like a Sainnite than she did. “I’m Medric,” he said. “I don’t know your name, but I know that you are trapped in the past. Would you like to sit down?” He sat in a chair. The lamp illuminated walls lined with nearly empty bookshelves, and a small chest stood half full on the floor. Even with the fire coming at him, Medric had not packed his books sloppily, but had methodically fit them into the chest as though he were solving a puzzle.
Zanja said, “You wanted to meet me?”
“In my dream you were an owl with feathers of fire. You flew back and forth over the rooftops, dripping flames onto the houses. They caught like tinder behind you. Are you truly a seeker after wisdom?”
The garrison was burning in the glass of his spectacles. He had known it would burn, and had not warned his people. The Sainnite seer now sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. He did not move as Zanja drew a pistol. “The past makes us what we are,” he said, “but the present makes us what we will be. If you shoot me, I will have a kind of peace that part of me wishes to embrace, and you will spend what remains of your life–and it will not be long, I’m afraid–refusing to read the glyphs of possibility. If you do not shoot me, however, anything can happen.”
Zanja sat down in a chair. She did not holster her pistol; neither did she point it at him. “You let me burn down the garrison.”
“It was the only way I could get you here. I need to ask your advice.”
“Advice?” Zanja lay back in the chair and laughed like a madwoman, and could hardly make herself stop. When she had gotten herself under control, she wiped her face with her hands, and found them wet with tears. “Well, why shouldn’t a lunatic give advice to a seer?”
“My vision has been too small,” he said. “And now I think I have begun to see at last, I see most clearly my own corruption. How can I redeem myself?”
“Redeem yourself? In whose eyes?”
He gazed at her, his face flickering with flame. “In the eyes of my mother’s people. In the eyes of Shaftal.”
“Your mother is Shaftali?”
“My mother was Shaftali, and my father was Sainnite. Somehow I must come to peace with myself, and how can I do that so long as this land is at war?”
A breeze came through the open windows and the air was thick with smoke. Still, Zanja sat contemplating a glyph she could not read. Was this danger? Or was it opportunity?
It was danger for certain if she delayed much longer, and this young man’s books would be nothing but ashes if he didn’t get back to work. “I can’t answer your questions,” she said.
“Not right now, perhaps.” He stood up. His long, fair hair was caught back with a blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose. “There’s a grove of trees just north of the city. I’ll be waiting for you there in, oh, five days, at high noon. If you decide to send an assassin instead, I’ll know. Still, I’ll be there, and I won’t hold it against you. You must make your decisions just as I must make mine.”
“You know perfectly well that I won’t send an assassin.”
“In five days you might come to your senses.”
Zanja had gotten dazedly to her feet and picked up the satchel of explosives. Annis was waiting in the garden, and surely would not wait much longer. When the seer held out his hand she clasped it and then wondered why she hadn’t even hesitated. “Won’t you tell me your name?” he said.
“Zanja.”
He smiled again, less tentatively this time. “Zanja, I dreamed that we were friends.”
“That would be some other world you dreamed of.”
“Yes. But you are the one who travels between the worlds, are you not?”
He was not much taller than she, and when she found herself caught within his gaze, it meant neither capture nor dominance, but a stare between befuddled equals. At last Zanja spoke, and not exactly to him: “The gods have quite a sense of humor.” So she left him, and went down the stairs and out into the garden, where the air was choked with ashes and the brays of terrified horses and the raw shouts of voices scoured by smoke. But now she could not remember exactly what she was doing here, or even who she was or why she had wanted to burn down the garrison. She had crossed a border. And now she was lost.
She found Annis pacing the garden. She was exalted with fire, and once she began talking could not stop until Zanja shook her sharply by the shoulder. They climbed the wall, and this time left the ladder rather than carry it home, but they had to make their way without being noticed through a roused city. The balconies were crowded with onlookers fascinated with watching the fires or fretful with the possibility that the fires might spread beyond the garrison. They passed below, unmarked, and avoided all contact with anyone, lest the smell of smoke and gunpowder that suffused their clothing betray them. By dawn, they were far outside the city, having buried the remains of their explosives, and having bathed with soap and washed their clothing as well. At sunrise they stood on a hilltop on the north end of the river valley. A pall of smoke lay over Wilton, and Sainnite soldiers moved like locusts across the lush farmland of the river valley.
“Emil will kill us for this night’s work,” Annis said placidly. “But not until he hears how we did it, so he can get the word to other companies. And actually, since I’m the only one who knows how to make those rockets, I guess he’ll have to let me live. You’re the one who’s going to be in trouble.”
“Yes, I am in trouble.”
They had neither food nor drink, except for water dipped out of a stream and a couple of handfuls of watercress. Annis was still eating her watercress one leaf at a time, and wrinkling her nose at the peppery taste. Zanja could not remember tasting hers.
“I have an idea,” Annis said suddenly. “We’ll lie.”
Zanja put her head in her hands. “Of course.” Annis never even noticed that she was laughing bitterly to herself. “Why not?” she said. “What have I got to lose?”
It took more than a day for them to find South Hill Company, encamped at the Fens Overlook, a rise of land on the northern tip of the river plain, that was protected from armed incursion by a marsh on one side and a particularly tangled woodland on the other. The company was too far from Wilton to have seen the rockets explode, but not too far to see the smoke that still lay in a haze across the river valley. Emil, having already received a report from his spies in Wilton of the garrison fire and the wonderful explosions that preceded it, was in a quiet fury. His spies had told him it was wizardry, but Emil had not doubted that it was Annis. He did not question Zanja’s explanation that she had been seeking Annis in Wilton when the explosions at the garrison brought her to the garrison wall, when she had intercepted Annis during her escape.