Laurie Marks - Elemental Logic 02 - Earth Logic

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EARTH LOGIC

A sweeping drama of war, intrigue, magic, and love...

With Earth Logic, Laurie J. Marks continues the epic of her stunningly imagined world of Shaftal, which

she first introduced in Fire Logic.

Shaftal has a ruler again, a woman with enough power to heal the war-torn land and expel the invading

Sainnites from Shaftal. Or it would have a ruler if the earth witch Karis G’deon consented to rule.

Instead, she lives in obscurity with the fractious family of elemental talents who gathered around her in

Fire Logic. She is waiting for some sign, but no one, least of all Karis herself, knows what it is.

Then the Sainnite garrison at Watfield is attacked by a troop of zealots claiming to speak for the Lost

G’deon, and a mysterious and deadly plague attacks the land, killing both Sainnites and Shaftali. Karis

must act or watch her beloved country fall into famine and chaos. And when Karis acts, the very stones

of the earth sit up and take notice.

Praise for Fire Logic, Elemental Logic

“Marks has created a work that is filled with an intelligence that zings off the page...This beautifully

written novel includes enough blood and adventure to satisfy the most quest-driven readers.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Fire Logic is entertaining and

engaging—an excellent read!”

—Kate Elliott

“Marks is an absolute master of fantasy in this book. Her characters are beautifully drawn, showing

tremendous emotional depth and strength as they endure the unendurable and strive to do the right thing,

and her unusual use of the elemental forces central to her characters’ lives gives the book a big boost.

This is a read-it-straight-through adventure!”

—Booklist (starred review)

“Fire Logic is a deftly painted story of both cultures and magics in conflict. Marks avoids the

black-and-white conflicts of generic fantasy to offer a window on a complex world of unique cultures and

elemental magic.”

—Robin Hobb

By Laurie J. Marks from Tom Doherty Associates

Earth Logic

Fire Logic

EARTH LOGIC

Elemental Logic

Book Two

Laurie J. Marks

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are

used fictitiously.

EARTH LOGIC: ELEMENTAL LOGIC: BOOK 2

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marks, Laurie J.

Earth logic / Laurie J. Marks.

p. cm. — (Elemental logic ; bk. 2) “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN 0-765-30952-1

I. Title.

PS3613.A765E37 2004

813‘.54—dc22

2003061223

First Edition: March 2004

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

CONTENTS

Map

Part 1: Raven’s Joke

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Part 2: How Raven Became a God

8 9 10 11 12 13

Part 3: The Walk-Around

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Part 4: What’s Inside the Buffalo

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Part 5: How Tortoise Woman Saved the World

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

For the people of Melrose, Massachusetts—especially the baristas, poets, counselors, babies,

delivery people, firemen, illegal parkers, students, parents, photographers, coffee drinkers,

jaywalkers, and neighbors. And also for the people who love snow, plant flowers, hang Christmas

lights, and refuse to put vinyl siding on their beautiful Victorian houses. And for their dogs and

cats, and for the crabby snapping turtle I rescued from the middle of the road one afternoon, and

for the flocks of geese that fly by overhead.

Acknowledgments

For four or more hours a day, for more than a year, I sat writing in the front window of a downtown

coffee shop, in sun and snow, warmth and chill. The people of Melrose came and went before and

around me— and gradually they began waving hello, chatting, and inquiring about my progress. I am

grateful to them— and I am equally grateful to the smiling young baristas who concocted my lattes,

visited my table to see if I needed a refill, and stayed to ask questions about writing, language, and

education. Thanks also to the friends who suffered through my incoherent first draft, the members of my

writing group, the Genrettes— Delia Sherman, Rosemary Kirstein, and Didi Stewart. And, when this

book had—with their help—moved beyond its early confusion, even more people read the manuscript

and helped me to see how to finish it: Amy Axt Hanson, Diane Silver, Jeanne Gomol, Debbie Notkin,

Deb Manning, my agent, Donald Maass, and my beloved Deb Mensinger. As my life is so filled with

kind, intelligent, generous friends, it’s no surprise this book is filled with them as well.

Part 1

Raven’s Joke

One day, Raven was bored. He left his home in the cliff that can be found at the end of the world and

went flying back and forth over the forest, until he noticed a woman sneaking through the trees. The

woman was trying to shoot a deer to cook for her three daughters, who had big appetites.

Raven flew up ahead of the hunter until he saw the deer, which was lying in the cool shade waiting for

sunset. Raven shouted, “Run away, deer, as fast as you can, for there is a hunter’s arrow aimed at your

heart!” The deer jumped up and ran into the forest. Then the hunter was very angry and cried, “You are

an evil bird, for because of you my daughters will go hungry!”

Raven was ashamed of himself and said, “You are right to be angry with me. So take your bow and

arrow and shoot me, and take me home for your daughters’ supper.” So that is what the hunter did. She

killed the Raven and cooked him in a soup.

Even though the girls ate the soup, they were still hungry, and no matter how much they ate, they stayed

hungry. And the hunter, their mother, who was tired because she had been hunting all day, stayed tired

no matter how much she rested. And their neighbor, who was very old and sick, never died. And the

summer never turned to autumn. And the harvest never ripened. And nothing ever broke, but the things

that already were broken could not be mended.

One day everyone in the world came to visit the tired hunter and her three hungry daughters. “Did Raven

trick you into killing him?” they asked. The tired hunter told them exactly what had happened. Everyone

became very upset with her and said, “Didn’t you know that Raven is the one who decides everything?

He may be mischievous and hard-hearted, but without him we cannot go forward with our lives. You

should have thought of what you were doing. Now we will never see our children grow up, and whatever

we are now, that is what we will always be, and nothing will ever change.”

They all thought and thought, and then the hunter’s youngest and hungriest daughter said, “I know where

Raven’s bones are.” So they dug all Raven’s bones out of the ashes of the fire. The middle daughter took

some string and glue and put all the bones together the way they were supposed to be. Then, the oldest

daughter found all the Raven’s wing and tail feathers and glued them on the bones. Finally, the hunter

took the arrow that had killed the Raven and smeared the bones with the blood that was still wet on the

arrowhead. And then, all the people of the world began to laugh. “Hey, Raven,” they said, “that was a

pretty good joke!” Raven, of course, could never resist a good laugh, so began to laugh too. “Ha! Ha!”

he said. “That was a good joke!” And then he flew on his bone wings to the river to eat frogs and snails

until he got fat and looked like himself again. The hunter shot a deer and her daughters were no longer

hungry. The harvest ripened, the old neighbor died, and the world continued its journey as it should, from

summer to winter, from life to death, and from foolishness to wisdom.

Chapter One

The woman who was the hope of Shaftal walked in solitude through a snow-muffled woodland.

Dressed in three shirts of threadbare wool and an ancient sheepskin jerkin, she carried an ax in a sling

across her back, and dragged a sledge behind her, in which to pile firewood. She might have been any

woodcutter setting out between storms to replenish the woodpile.

The season of starvation had brought down another deer. It was frozen in a bed of churned-up scarlet

snow, and the torn skin now lay in stiff rags. Rib bones gleamed with frost, the belly was a hollowed

cavern, and a gnawed leg bone lay at a distance. The woodcutter scarcely glanced at this gruesome mess

as she strode past, breaking through the snow’s crust and sinking knee-deep with every step. But the

ravens that followed behind her uttered hoarse shouts of discovery and swooped eagerly down to the

feast of carrion. They stalked up to the deer’s remains, sprang nervously up into the air, and landed

again. After this silly ritual of caution they began to bicker over the best pieces.

The woodcutter, having selected a tree, unslung her ax. As the sharp blade bit into the trunk, clots of

snow were shaken loose from above. The ravens paid no heed, not even when the tree fell with a

spectacular crash.

The woodcutter gazed with satisfaction at the fallen trunk. Her cut had revealed the tree’s sick center, the

rot that would have soon killed it. Breathing heavily, she took off her bright knit cap to cool herself, and

her wild hair sprang up like the tangled branches of a thicket. “It’s cold enough to freeze snot,” she said.

The ravens, apparently easily amused, cackled loudly.

The woodcutter let her gaze wander upwards, across the tree-tops, toward a distant smear of smoke,

nearly invisible against the heavy clouds. “Scholars! They’d die of cold before they noticed they were out

of firewood.”

“Ark!” protested a raven, as another stole a tidbit right out of his mouth. They scuffled like street

children; feathers flew.

“Uncivilized birds!” The woodcutter struck her ax into the stump.

The birds looked up at her hopefully as she approached the dead deer. Using a knife that had been inside

her coat, she trimmed back the deer’s stiff skin and sliced off strips of meat, which she fed to the

importunate ravens. The birds were not yet sated when she abruptly rose out of her squat and turned

toward the northeast.

She was tall: a giant among the Midlanders. Still, she could not see over the treetops, yet she seemed to

see something, and her forehead creased. A raven flew up to her shoulder. “Another storm is coming,”

the raven said.

“Of course,” she replied. “But there’s something else. Something strange. And terrible.”

“In the village,” said the raven, as though he knew her mind.

“Something has come,” she said.

“No, it has always been.”

“Not always. But a long time. Longer than I’ve been alive.”

“Waiting?” croaked the raven. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Because some things wait.”

“The Sainnites came thirty-five years ago. Is this thing theirs?”

“Yes, they brought it with them.”

After this firm declaration, raven and woman both were silent. Then, she took a deep breath and added

heavily, “It is my problem now.”

“Ark!” exclaimed the raven with mocking surprise.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Coward,” he retorted.

With a sweep of the hand she flung the bird off her shoulder. He landed in the snow, squawking with

laughter.

“Tell Emil what I am doing,” she told him.

She left her ax and strode off through the snow, between the crowded trees. She could see the storm

coming: a looming black above, trailing a hazy scarf of snowfall. She walked toward it.

In the attic of the nearby stone cottage, Medric the seer dreamed of Raven, the god of death. “I will tell

you a story, but you must write the story down,” said Raven. Medric went to his battered desk and

found there a fresh candle burning and a newly trimmed pen, which he dipped into an inkwell. “What

shall I title this story?” he asked.

“Call it ‘The Raven’s Joke,’” said the god, and began: “One day, Raven was bored ...”

Downstairs from the seer’s book-filled attic, a little girl was very busy. She had been induced to take a

bath that morning, but now had smudges of dirt on her wool smock, and a spider web, complete with

dead bug, tangled in her hair. The woman who sat on the hearth studying a book paid no attention as the

girl rummaged through cupboards and closets, while conversing with the battered stuffed rabbit whose

head poked out of her shirt pocket.

A man came into the parlor, looked vaguely around, and said to the woman on the hearth, “You’re letting

the fire go out.”

The woman reached for a log and put it onto the coals without taking her eyes off the stained page of the

ancient book. Her dark skin, hair, and eyes; her narrow, sharp features; and her long, complexly braided

hair identified her as a katrim of the otherwise extinct Ashawala’i people. The book she studied was

written entirely in glyphs; few could have made sense of the arcane text.

“Leeba, why have you taken my ink?” the man asked the little girl.

“I need it,” she declared.

“I need it also. What do you need it for? You have neither paper nor pen.”

“I need it for my journey. When I reach a place, I’ll ask the people there if they need anything. And if

they need some ink, I’ll sell it to them. By the time I come home, I’ll have a hundred pennies.”

“A hundred pennies? Well, let’s see. How much were you going to charge for this lovely bottle of ink?”

There followed an impromptu numbers lesson. The woman on the floor rubbed her eyes, for the fireplace

was smoking. Finally, she looked up from her book to push the split log further into the fireplace, and to

blow on it vigorously until the flames caught. The man went out, and came back in with a sheet of paper

and a pen. He said to his daughter, “Loan me some ink, I’ll make some pennies to pay you with.”

The woman studied the page, frowning—or, perhaps, scowling— with concentration. A few of the

numerous slender plaits of her hair had slipped over her shoulder and looped across the page like lengths

of black yarn.

The man paid for his bottle of ink with fifteen paper pennies. “Zanja,” he said.

“Don’t bother me,” the woman said.

He bent over to examine the symbol at which she glared. “My land! What are you reading?”

“Koles.”

“The poet? No wonder you’re surly. The poetry students at Kisha University used to swear he had

randomly copied glyphs out of a lexicon.”

“There’s always a pattern. Even if the poet himself didn’t believe he had a reason, or didn’t know what

his reason was.” Her voice trailed off into abstraction, and she abruptly reached for something that she

expected to find dangling from her belt. “My glyph cards!”

“Leeba!” said J’han, horrified.

Leeba interrupted her cheerful humming. “Thirty pennies,” she demanded.

“Oh, dear,” said J’han, as Zanja uncoiled upward from her seat on the hearth.

But the little girl looked up fearlessly as Zanja plucked a pack of cards from her collected goods. “Your

daughter is a thief,” said Zanja to J’han.

“I’m your daughter too,” Leeba protested.

A smile began to do battle with Zanja’s glare. “You are? How long have I had a daughter? How did it

happen?”

Leeba clasped her by the knees, grinning up at her. “Thirty pennies!” she demanded.

“Extortion!”

“I’ll buy them for you,” said J’han hastily. “In gratitude. For not strangling her. Thirty pennies, Leeba?”

He began counting paper pennies.

Zanja protested, “It’s too much. Look at these worn-out old cards! They’ve been dunked in water,

smeared with mud and grease, and—this is a bloodstain, I believe.”

“There must be some sweat-stains too,” said J’han. He paid his daughter, took the cards out of Zanja’s

hand, and then presented them back to her. “A humble token of my esteem and gratitude.”

Zanja was still smiling as she knelt again on the hearth, tugged the book safely out of range of the

crackling flames, and began laying out glyph cards.

Leeba, who came over to watch Zanja lay out the cards, said eagerly, “It’s a story!”

“It’s a story with half its pieces missing. In fact—” She shuffled through the deck. “Did you take one of

the cards? A picture of a person standing halfway in a fire?”

“No.” Leeba sat beside her on the hearth and leaned against her. “There’s a girl,” she said, pointing at the

card called Silence. “Why is she so sad?”

“Maybe she has no one to play with.”

Through this method of question and answer, the sad girl’s story was revealed: how she got herself in

trouble due to the lack of a playmate, and how her toy rabbit came alive after being fed a magical tea

from a miniature teapot. Leeba leapt up and ran out of the room. J’han, who had been drawing again,

commented, “I certainly hope that Emil’s traveling tea set is well hidden. Is this a suitable replacement for

the missing card?”

He handed her a stiff piece of paper, on which he had carefully drawn the glyph called Death-and-Life,

or the Pyre, in the lower left hand corner. Above and around the ancient symbol, he had drawn an

anatomically convincing picture of a person half in, half out of a burning fire. The half that was in the fire

was skeleton; the other half was a very muscular woman with what appeared to be a bush growing on

her head.

Zanja gazed at it until J’han began apologetically, “It’s not very artistic.”

“It looks like Karis,” Zanja said.

“It does?” He looked at his own drawing in surprise. “I guess that makes sense. It is the G’deon’s glyph,

after all. It’s natural I would draw her.”

In the kitchen, there was the distinct familiar sound of disaster, followed by the equally familiar sound of

Norina losing her temper. J’han rose from his squat, saying mildly, “Hasn’t Leeba learned not to drop a

kettle when that mother is in the room?” He went off to make peace in the kitchen.

Zanja said to his back, too softly for him to hear, “Karis is everything. But she’s not the G’deon.”

The parlor windows, double-shuttered against the cold, shut out the light as well. J’han had drawn his

pictures by lamplight, but he had thriftily blown out the flame as he left. Now gloom descended, and

silence. By flickering firelight, Zanja studied the newly drawn glyph card in her hand. She felt no pity for

the woman paralyzed in the flame.

The glyphic illustrations often gave Zanja a path to self-knowledge, but at this moment she was reluctant

to acknowledge that she might be pitiless and impatient. For four-and-a-half years— Leeba’s entire

life—Zanja and Karis had been lovers. Yet Zanja understood Karis less with every passing year. Like

the woman in the pyre, who was neither completely consumed nor fully created, Karis remained

inexplicably contented. Zanja was the one who could not endure this inaction.

She heard Emil return from his weekly trip to town. With much stamping on the door mat, he announced

unnecessarily that it was snowing, and added that according to his watch, which he knew was accurate

since he had just set it by the town clock, it was time for tea. Leeba loudly demanded magic tea for her

rabbit. The racket brought Medric blundering sleepily down the stairs, to plaintively ask for help finding

his spectacles.

“I’m afraid Leeba took them,” J’han said. He called rather desperately, “Zanja!”

“I’m coming.” She extricated both pairs of Medric’s spectacles from Leeba’s pile, and forced herself to

leave the quiet parlor and step into the chaotic kitchen. There Medric, even more tousled and

beleaguered than usual, stood near the stairway peering confusedly into the cluttered room, where Emil

fussed over the teapot, Norina sliced bread for J’han to toast, and Leeba managed to be in everyone’s

way. Zanja set a pair of spectacles onto Medric’s nose and put the other into his pocket. “Wrong!” he

declared, and, having exchanged the pair in his pocket for the pair on his nose, asked, “Do you think

there might be something a bit disordered about our lives?”

“We’ve got too much talent and not enough sense.”

“Really? Is that possible? Well, if you say so.” He added vaguely, “Your raven god has been telling me a

story about himself. Why is that, do you suppose?”

“Whatever Raven told you,” Zanja said, “don’t believe a word of it.”

Medric managed to appear simultaneously entertained and offended. “I’m not a complete idiot. Not

more than halfway, I shouldn’t think. I certainly know an untrustworthy god when I meet one!”

Medric had spoken loudly in his own defense, and everyone in the room stopped working to stare at

him. Norina displayed her usual expression of unrestrained skepticism, which was only enhanced by the

old scar that bisected one cheek and eyebrow. Emil gazed at Medric with amusement and respect. “That

is a bizarre pronouncement.”

“Isn’t it?” An underdeveloped wraith of a man, Medric had to stretch to get his mouth near Zanja’s ear.

He whispered, “Raven’s joke: nothing changes.”

She looked at him sharply, but he had already swept Leeba up in a madman’s dance dizzy enough to put

all thoughts of magic tea right out of the little girl’s head.

The last time Zanja heard the Ashawala’i tale of Raven’s Joke, she had been huddled with her clan in a

building much more crowded than this one, while the snow, piled higher than the roof, insulated them

against the howling wind of a dreadful storm. To her people, the tale had made sense of the maddening

stasis of winter. Now, perhaps Medric’s vision was admonishing her for her impatience. Or perhaps it

was congratulating her for it.

“Where’s Karis?” asked Norina.

Emil looked surprised. “You don’t know? A raven told me she had gone to town, though I didn’t see her

there.”

The toast was buttered, the tea poured, and the letters distributed from the capacious pockets of Emil’s

greatcoat. All three men had received letters, for they each kept up a voluminous correspondence.

Today, even Norina had a letter, which she viewed with doubtful surprise and seemed disinclined to

open. Zanja helped Leeba with her milk and spread jam on her toast, then lay out the glyph cards again.

Once again, she studied Leeba’s sad girl, the glyph called Silence. To Zanja, silence signified thought, but

Laurie Marks - Elemental Logic 02 - Earth Logic

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