Pale, red‑eyed with sleeplessness or sorrow, Medric dropped to one knee beside Zanja. “Karis promised to make it possible to find her. She said she’d go west along the canyon rim as far as she could go in five days travel, and then she’d hole up in some hollow place where she could see the sky. She asked me to beg your pardon, Zanja, for deceiving you, but she had to fight this battle alone.”
“She brought enough smoke to last until today?”
“Yes.”
“All three of you must go find her, then. If she can be saved–”
J’han said, with that terrible honesty that was sometimes the only gift a healer could give, “Zanja, there is no hope of that. Even if we can find her before she dies, the only thing that could save her is smoke, and we have none.“
Emil said in a low voice, “Mabin has some.”
There was silence. Zanja said, “Karis would rather die.” She made the mistake of moving, and for some time she could do nothing but breathe and struggle to stay conscious. When J’han put the bowl to her mouth she drank just a swallow of the bitter pain killer. “J’han, Karis is vested with the power of Shaftal,” she said.
He sat back sharply, nearly spilling the bowl of potion. “What!”
“Go with them to find her. If she is dying, at least she should die with dignity.”
“Annis can take care of Zanja,” Emil said.
Annis grumbled because her long recess with the Otter People had come to an end, but she did not refuse her old commander’s will. They settled Zanja onto the pallet with the potion beside her, and within the time it would have taken ten drops of water to fall from the water clock, they were gone.
Zanja took one more swallow of the bitter potion, and told Annis to leave her alone. After that came a merciful darkness and stillness.
As she slept, Zanja dreamed that she was an owl, flying across the face of the earth, with the river flowing to her right, black as blood, and rocks below, like scattered bones. At last, she found Karis, a broken and twisted body in a grassy hollow where sharp stones broke through the earth like teeth. Her body was cold; no breath passed her lips. Emil, Medric, J’han, and Norina knelt in a circle around her, digging with their bare hands to cover her with earth. Norina was weeping, racked with a grief made all the more terrible by the bitter strength her sorrow had overcome.
Zanja must have cried something in her sleep, for she opened her eyes to find Annis beside her, with a cool hand upon her burning forehead. Zanja’s throat felt scoured raw, and her voice came out a whisper. “They will find her too late. Is there any word?”
“Zanja, it’s much too soon.”
“But someone is here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel it.”
“Maybe the potion is giving you hallucinations.” But Annis went to the doorway, where Zanja could see a bit of star‑scattered sky above, and a bit of star‑scattered lake below. “I don’t see anything,” Annis said. Then her body gave a jerk and she uttered a surprised grunt and lifted a hand as if to investigate what had struck her, but before she could understand what had happened, she fell.
It happened so suddenly that the sound of the pistol’s report didn’t register until after Annis’s knees buckled. There was nowhere for Zanja to go, even if she’d had the ability and will to flee. Her blade lay within reach, but thanks to Norina her blade hand was useless. Her pistols were still in Homely’s saddlebags, and the three men had taken Homely with them. Five people came into the cave and made certain that Zanja was indeed helpless, and then Mabin came in. “Where is Karis?”
“Karis has returned to earth.”
Mabin struck her across the face. “The truth!”
Zanja tasted blood. She said thickly, “Karis has delivered herself to the smoke.”
Mabin sat back on her heels, rigid with frustration. “She makes no sense.”
“There’s no one else here,” one of her companions said. “We’ve searched all along the beach. No horses, no equipment, no nothing. Just the two of them, and Annis is dead.”
Mabin hissed in her breath, and then released it. “If I’d known it was Annis–well, there’s no help for it now. So long as we’ve got this one, we’ve as good as got the one I want. We’ll have to settle for that.”
“This one seems to be newly injured. Broken ribs, it looks like, and–” Zanja felt her injured arm lifted and examined. “She was cut defending herself, with healer’s stitches closing up the wound. A nice, clean job of it.”
“A healer, and someone with a nasty temper–that would be Norina and her consort. No doubt there’s been a disagreement and Norina has taken off with Karis.” Mabin fell silent a moment, and then she muttered, “Shaftal, what have I done to deserve this?”
Zanja was tired to the bone, and tired to the heart. She shut her eyes and did not open them again until her captors lifted her onto the litter they had made for her, and the pain began again. The Paladins had to step over Annis’s body as they carried Zanja out into the cold night. And Karis–Karis also would soon be dead.
Chapter Twenty‑five
Emil, Medric, and J’han traveled through the afternoon and across the dark span of the night as though demons were after them. “I think we’re close now,” Medric said, sometime after dawn. Soon afterwards, they spotted the white flag lying limp in the half light: Karis’s shirt, they realized when they had drawn near, tied to a tree branch by the sleeves. They untied it and soon had found their way into a hollow of earth that was cupped like the palm of a giant hand. There in the center Karis lay in the wet grass. Norina, whose long intimacy with Karis must have helped her to find her first, lay beside her, embracing her naked body with her own.
“She’s too cold,” she said.
Emil lay down on Karis’s other side and they sandwiched her between them. After J’han had listened to Karis’s heart, he covered her with blankets, and sat upon a stone with his head in his hands, as though he could not bring himself to speak. The Truthken, though, began to weep. Having emptied herself of anger, Emil thought, now only grief remained. She had indeed loved Karis, however badly she might have done it.
Emil held Karis tightly, as though to keep her from falling. Her powerful muscles lay limp and cold; her heartbeat was intangible, the motion of her breath so weak it seemed illusory. She’d bitten her mouth, battered her hands, scraped her skin raw upon the stones, in a terrible, solitary agony that had mercifully ended now. She would die without ever opening her eyes again. The healer did not have to say it out loud.
Norina sat up. Her hair was plastered down with water and mud, her face pale with exhaustion beneath the grime of hard travel. “J’han, what can we do?”
“Only smoke could save her,” J’han said.
The Truthken shuddered, as though she’d been cut with a blade. “I have some smoke,” she said. “Ten years I’ve carried it with me, as a surety.”
J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”
“But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of them made any move to stop her.
J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”
Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.