“Give me the pistol,” Mabin said to the man. He handed it to her and went out, closing the door behind himself. Mabin squatted upon the floor, grunting with tiredness.
Knife fights often are won and lost in the first moments of battle, when in the first movements and first contacts of blade on blade, the fighters discover whether or not they’ve met their match. A good strategist learns to use those moments to deliberately mislead the opponent into misjudgments that there is no time to recognize.
Zanja hastily considered her situation. Annis was dead. Mabin had assumed that Karis was still alive, in the company of Norina and J’han. Although Mabin could not know that Karis had won back many hours from smoke, she would not be confident of Karis’s subjugation to the drug, because even under smoke Karis had been able to use her power to aid her own escape. Mabin could not know about Emil, and she had expressed no interest in Medric, so perhaps she assumed that Zanja had rescued Karis unassisted.
She expected that Karis would come for Zanja, at any cost to herself, as Karis had already demonstrated she would do. She did not know that there were other credible witnesses to the enormity of her betrayal, and she would not know about them unless she stumbled across them while searching for Karis. She did not know that Zanja had a tribe, half‑formed and tiny though it was, and that she would protect her people. She did not know what it meant to be a katrim. Above all, she did not know that Karis was dying, or perhaps already dead.
Zanja said, “After the Sainnites captured me, they took symbolic vengeance upon me for the humiliations I and my fellow katrimhad subjected them to. They tortured me, just as you are doing. For some reason, I always expected the Paladins to be different from the Sainnites.”
“Who do you think you are, to–” Mabin began, but it was too late to raise her defenses; the blade of accusation had cut deep into the flesh of her complacency.
“I know exactly who I am,” Zanja said.
“A traitor to the people–a traitor under the law!”
“The Ashawala’i are not subject to the law of Shaftal.”
“What!”
“You wrong my people in wronging me. Does not the law require that you respect and protect the people of the borders?”
“You have no people–”
“Where one survives, the tribe survives.”
“You fight our war, you are subject to our laws.”
“I refuse to be subject to a law that allows people like you to commit murder.”
“Murder?”
“Annis is dead,” Zanja reminded her.
“Another traitor.”
“Is that the way the law works? You kill whomever you like, then declare them traitors?”
“We are at war–”
“At war to save the very law you are destroying. It is you who are the traitor.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“It is not treachery to deliver the vested G’deon into a certain death by poisoning? What is it, then?”
“Who made you judge, Zanja na’Tarwein? You are nothing but rogues, you and Karis both–a couple of fools with too much power and not enough wisdom. You must be restrained, for the future of Shaftal. If you will not accept restraint, then you must be killed. I regret it, yes. But it is you who have made the choice, not I.”
“I have too much power?” Suddenly the entire conversation did indeed seem absurd, and Zanja uttered a laugh, quickly choked off by the pain of her ribs.
“You are all the more dangerous for not knowing what you are doing. Fifteen years ago Harald G’deon made the last and greatest error in his life of errors, when his courage failed him and he cursed Shaftal by filling a weak and inappropriate vessel with his power. For fifteen years I have managed to keep Karis in control. Yet the moment you came to Shaftal, before Karis ever met you, before she ever even knew your name, she began to break her restraints. That is your power, Zanja na’Tarwein: the power to attract, the power to influence, the power to awaken that which should be left asleep. If I allowed you to exercise that power, this very land would be destroyed.”
Zanja said, “You lived with her for years, and yet you do not know her. She would destroy nothing.”
“Your people were destroyed by the very Sainnites that Harald allowed to get a foothold in this land!”
“My people were destroyed,” Zanja said, “by the dream of a misguided seer. If the people of Shaftal had given that seer proper guidance, rather than calling her their enemy because her father was a Sainnite–”
Mabin leapt to her feet and struck her.
Zanja said, “You see, you are not defeating the Sainnites. You are becoming them.”
Mabin struck her again. Then, without a word, she left Zanja alone in the darkness, taking even the lamp with her.
Zanja lay still, hoping for the pain to ease, waiting for her breath to slow. Four witnesses there were to the true nature of Mabin’s betrayal of Shaftal, one from each of the four ancient orders of the Lilterwess. They would have a credibility that Mabin herself could not contravene. And Norina, for all her faults, would not rest until she’d seen justice done. Zanja lay silent in the dark hold of the boat, willing Medric to see her, to understand what she was doing, to convince Emil and J’han and Norina to flee to safety while Mabin, rather than pursuing them, waited for a visit from a woman who was dead.
“Accept the willing sacrifice of a katrim,” Zanja entreated them. “Don’t waste your lives trying to save mine. Go, and make my death and Karis’s death be of some significance. That’s all I ask.”
Several times a day, they came in to lift her up over the bucket that served as her toilet. Often, they also left her a meal and fresh water. Usually, Zanja scarcely even noticed the food, except as a means for measuring the time. She felt no hunger, and even to drink water required more effort than it was worth. Though the worst of her pain began to ease after a few days, she hardly got up from her pallet, for her splinted leg and bandaged ribs made movement nearly impossible in that cramped space. She heard Mabin pacing up and down the length of the boat’s deck, for hours at a time, like a wild animal in a cage. Zanja lay starving in the darkness below where she walked.
Twenty‑one meals had been served when Zanja’s door opened and Mabin stepped into the cargo hold once again. “We will force you to eat if we have to,” she said.
Zanja had been expecting and preparing for this visit all morning, for her prescience seemed enhanced by hunger, just as a seer’s ability to envision the future might sometimes be enhanced by fasting. “I cannot stop you from doing what you like,” she said.
“Such despair is unbecoming in a warrior.”
“Despair is what makes my confinement endurable. I would give you some as a gift if I could, then perhaps you would be less restless. The sound of your pacing interrupts my thoughts.”
“Your thoughts will be even more interrupted if my Paladins have to pour cold gruel down your throat and force you to swallow it or drown in it.” Mabin hung the lamp from the lamp hook. She held a pistol, and despite Zanja’s apparent weakness took care not to turn her back on her. “I expected Karis would come for you by now.”
“No doubt,” Zanja said.
“Tell me what you think she is doing.”
Zanja closed her eyes, and there she saw Karis, as she had never seen her in life, lifting and swinging a great hammer, with the molten metal flying at each blow. Sweat polished the great muscles of her back and shoulders, and sunlight caught on her skin, and in her hair, as if she were made of gold. “She is working at the forge,” Zanja said. “All these years you knew her, and you never knew how strong she is.”
“Nonsense,” Mabin said. “If she had returned to Meartown, I would know.”
But Zanja felt a little peace. Karis seemed so intent on her work, surely that meant she had found contentment at last.