Laurie J Marks [Elemental Logic 1] Fire Logic

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their centers.
By Shaftal! Emil reached to clasp hand. I think I remember your name.
Zanja, am I right? When I heard about the Ashawala i, I wondered what had
become of you.
I guess they did make you a commander, she said.
I m afraid they did. And all these years I have been making the best of it.
He gazed at her, feeling the distance from which she observed him,
remembering the reserved but talented young woman she had been. She
would be over thirty now, and for fifteen years her intelligence had been
sharpened by bitter experience. He said, I hope you have come to join my
company.
Yes, sir, she said impassively. Her face held back everything. Emil invited
them to settle their horses and come in for tea.
Once they were all seated in the kitchen, with the Truthken choosing a chair
and the tribal woman sitting on her heels, he poured tea from his small
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
porcelain teapot and sliced bread fresh from the oven, on which they melted
slices of midlands cheese produced from Norina s saddlebag. Though the
two women had certainly been traveling together for days, they exchanged
not a word with each other. A silent journey it must have been.
Norina said, Well, Commander, I see I need not explain who Zanja is. I
have been charged with finding a place for her among the Paladins, and
your company was suggested.
They say that a few survivors of the initial attack all but wiped out a
battalion, Emil said to Zanja.
No, but seventeen of us did kill some sixty Sainnites.
It is more than my company has killed in six years.
Her somber expression cracked away a bit. Paladin techniques work well in
the mountains.
Emil sat back to think and sip his tea, and finally brought himself to say,
reluctantly, You will not have an easy time of it in South Hill, and perhaps
you would be better off in one of the northern units, where they are more
accustomed to the sight of northern tribesmen.
I am accustomed to being a stranger.
Norina added, She is too well known in the north.
Well, then.
Norina took a money pouch from inside her doublet. She has no family to
support her. She handed the pouch to Emil, who had not felt such a weight
of funds in many a year. A sponsor, she explained, though it explained
little. Where would a solitary tribal woman find herself a sponsor in such
uncertain times?
This has been a day of many surprises, he said. The cups of the traveling
porcelain tea set were very small, so he refilled them with the rare and
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
expensive green tea. Though no one conducted hospitality rituals anymore,
Zanja courteously complimented the tea s fragrance and flavor, leaving him
with the impression that she could have fulfilled her role in the entire
ceremony, uncoached, without missing a step. She was not a warm woman,
he thought, at least not on the surface. But oh, she was careful, and, like
him, she belonged in another world. He fingered his right earlobe, where
once had dangled two gold earrings that he had dropped into a well many
years ago. The holes had since closed, but the scar tissue remained.
Zanja sat on the floor of the cramped attic, beside a small window that let in
a gray, rain-smeared light onto the page of her book. What with the rain and
the thaw, sometimes it seemed as though the whole world was melting. The
letters on the page pushed and shoved against each other like people on
market day. They gave up their secrets only with much coaxing and study.
Then, they offended her first by ranting at her and then by cozening her.
She leafed through the pages of Warfare. In the kitchen directly beneath
her, where Emil also read while waiting for the rain to end, she heard him
add a log to the fire. On a day like this, the Ashawala i would sit around the
clanhouses, mending their clothes, sharpening their tools, and telling
stories. She wished Emil had told her stones, rather than handing her this
battered book, with its disembodied demands and disguised angers.
Mabin s Warfare, Emil had said, was the one thing held in common by all
the members of South Hill Company. It was a language, philosophy, and
history all in one. She needed to know it.
Nevertheless, a rainy day called for a story. Zanja turned the pages until a
particularly worn page of the book caught her eye. The Fall of the House of
Lilterwess, she read, sounding the letters out loud. Though she had learned
her letters as a child, during the year she lived with a Shaftali farm family,
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
she had not needed to read very much since then. The book also made
occasional use of glyphs, which she could not interpret at all.
She moved the book closer to the cracked windowpane and read out loud:
When Harald G deon died, I had been sitting at the head of the Lilterwess
Council for three years. It had been considered strange, and even unheard
of for a Paladin to head the council, but the majority of the council members
had decided a warrior should lead in times of war.
Unfortunately, Harald G deon disagreed with the majority. It is commonly
known that the G deon and I, though we accorded each other a great
respect, never were at peace with each other. It is still true that when my
thoughts are in argument with themselves it is his implacable voice I hear.
He was too great-hearted a man, for he could not believe that the Sainnites
meant to harm us. While I argued and he remained unconvinced, the
council sat paralyzed and the Sainnites continued to invade our shores.
While the G deon lay dying over a period of many months, he refused to the
last to name a successor. So the great succession of G deons, who for ten
generations have protected and made fertile the land of Shaftal, arbitrarily
and inexplicably ended, and no one will ever understand why least of all
myself. Harald G deon at the very least, committed a dreadful error. Some
even call it a betrayal.
As Zanja read, she realized that she was imagining Mabin, who she had only
met the one time, speaking these words. On the page, they seemed neutral
and harmless, but speaking them aloud revealed the concealed anger and
sarcasm. Harald had betrayed Shaftal with his naive obstinacy, according to
Mabin. Zanja, disinclined to be generous to a woman she had disliked on
sight, suspected that Mabin might be in the habit of considering stupid the
things that she merely did not understand.
She continued to read, listening closely to herself now, and hearing how
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FIRE LOGIC - ELEMENTAL LOGIC BOOK 1 - LAURIE MARKS
skeptically and ungenerously she interpreted Mabin s revered text. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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