Fire Logicby J. Marks Laurie

EARTH‑AIR‑WATER‑FIRE

These elements have sustained the peaceful people of Shaftal for generations, with their subtle powers of healing, truth, joy, and intuition.

But now Shaftal is dying.

The earth witch who ruled Shaftal is dead, leaving no heir. Shaftal’s ruling house has been scattered and destroyed by the invading Sainnites. The Shaftali have mobilized a guerrilla army against these marauders, but every year the cost of resistance grows, leaving Shaftal’s fate in the hands of three people:

Emil the Shaftali paladin:an officer and a scholar whose elemental powers make him an excellent judge of character;

Zanja the diplomat:the sole survivor of a slaughtered tribe, her fire powers bringing the gift of prescience;

Karis the metalsmith: a half‑blood giant whose earth powers can heal and create, but only when she can muster the strength to hold off her addiction to a deadly drug that suspends her will.

Separately, all they can do is watch as Shaftal falls from prosperity into lawlessness and famine. If they can find a way to work together, they may just change the course of history.

In the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin and Elizabeth Lynn, Laurie J. Marks weaves a complex tale of political and personal struggle, set in a world whose concerns are as familiar as today’s headlines.

Praise for Fire Logic

“Laurie Marks brings skill, passion, and wisdom to her new novel. Entertaining and engaging–an excellent read!“

–Kate Elliott

“This is a treat: a strong, fast‑paced tale of war and politics in a fantasy world where magic based on the four elements of alchemy not only works but powerfully affects the lives of those it touches. An unusual, exciting read.“

–Suzy McKee Charnas

“A glorious cast of powerful, compelling, and appealingly vulnerable characters struggling to do the right thing in a world gone horribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down until I’d read it to the end. Marks truly understands the complex forces of power, desire, and obligation.“

–Nalo Hopkinson

“Since reading Dancing Jack,I’ve been yearning for a new book by Laurie Marks, and the long wait has been rewarded: Fire Logiccuts deliciously through the mind to the heart with the delicacy, strength, beauty, and surgical precision of the layered Damascus steel blade that provides one of the book’s central images.“

–Candas Jane Dorsey

FIRE LOGIC

Laurie J. Marks

For three enduring friends, who, with their elemental talents of fire ,,

earth, water, and air, bound into this book their insights,

truths, joys, and intelligence:

Rosemary, Delia, and Di di

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate in my friends, a sustaining community of people who read this manuscript again and again, and whose thoughtful responses helped this book and its author to transcend her limitations. I am particularly indebted to the group known fondly as the Genrettes: Rosemary Kirstein, Delia Sherman, and Didi Stewart, whose cappucino‑inspired insight saw to the heart of many an incoherent draft, and whose energized and entertaining companionship spirited me through a long labor. In addition, for commentary, advice, and support in every imaginable form, I am profoundly grateful to Deb Manning, Susanna Sturgis, Wendy Marks, Gretchen Marks, Diane Silver, Gillian Spraggs, Donna Simone, Amy Hanson, Ellen Kushner, and my beloved Deb Mensinger.

Fire Logic

Part 1

Foolhardy

What is worth doing is worth merely beginning.

– MACKAPEE’S

Principles for Community

Who breeches the wall breeches the trust of the people, for without walls there can be no defense.

–MABIN’S

Warfare

Without a history, we cannot distinguish heroes from fools.

–MEDRIC’S History

of My Father’s People

Chapter One

In the border regions of northern Shaftal, the peaks of the mountains loom over hardscrabble farmholds. The farmers there build with stone and grow in stone, and they might even be made of stone themselves, they are so sturdy in the face of the long, bitter winter that comes howling down at them from the mountains.

The stone town of Kisha would have been as insignificant as all the northern towns, if not for the fact that Makapee, the first G’deon, had lived and died there. His successor, Lilter, had discovered the manuscript of the book in which were laid out the principles that were to shape Shaftal. During the next two hundred years, the library built to house the Makapee manuscript had transformed the humble town into an important place, a town of scholars and librarians who gathered there to study and care for the largest collection of books in the country. The library had in turn spawned a university, and the scholars, forced to live in the bitter northern climate, tried to make their months of shivering indoors by a smoky peat fire into an intellectual virtue.

Emil Paladin considered frostbite a small price to pay for the privilege of being a student in the university at Kisha. He was older than some of the masters, and his long‑time teacher, Parel Truthken, had warned him that he might be more learned, as well. For ten years, since his first piercing, Emil had accompanied Parel on the rounds of his territory, capturing fleeing wrongdoers and occasionally executing them when it was necessary. It was Parel who had finally arranged Emil’s admission and who would be paying his fees. So now Emil had arrived for the spring term, with a letter of introduction that was about to bring him into the presence of the Makapee manuscript itself.

Despite expensive carpets, rooms crammed with books, and fires that burned year round to prevent the damp, the library was a chilly and echoing place where men and women in scholar’s robes tiptoed about. Being admitted to the Makapee manuscript, which set forth the principles that now unified Shaftal, was like being admitted into a temple. As he put on the silken gloves that he was required to wear, it occurred to Emil that Makapee himself would have found this ritual tremendously peculiar. The first G’deon had been an obscure potato farmer, who sat by a peat fire all winter long, writing of mysteries in a crabbed, nearly unreadable handwriting. The paper, Emil had been told, still smelled of peat. He doubted that the frowning librarian would let his nose come close enough to the paper for him to sniff it, but still, Emil felt almost giddy with anticipation.

A door opened, and the sound of an urgently ringing bell intruded on the silence. The librarian turned her head, frowning. “What!” she breathed at the man who hurried towards her.

The man whispered in her ear. Paling, she turned aside and hurried away. Emil was left with the gloves on his hands and the door to the Makapee vault still bolted shut. He felt a tearing, a sense of loss so profound he could not believe it had anything at all to do with the manuscript. Something momentous had happened. Dazed, he went through the halls, following the sound of the bell out into the square that fronted on the library.

As the bell continued to ring, the square became crowded with scholars carrying pens with the ink still wet on the nibs, librarians carrying books, townsfolk wearing work aprons, with babies in their arms and tools in their hands, and farmers from the countryside in heavy, muddy boots, with satchels on their shoulders. The farmers must have spotted the messenger on the road, and followed him into town to hear the news. The messenger’s dirty, ragged banner hung limp from the bell tower, and Emil could scarcely make out the single glyph imprinted on it. It was Death‑and‑Life, he realized finally, which was commonly depicted on glyph cards as a pyre into which a man stepped and became a skeleton, or, alternately, from which a skeleton stepped and became a man. It was the G’deon’s glyph, carried through Shaftal only once in each G’deon’s lifetime: when the previous G’deon died and the new one was vested with the power of Shaftal. It called the people to simultaneously mourn and rejoice. Soon, the messenger would announce the death of Harald G’deon, who had given the land protection and health for thirty‑five years, and would name his successor.