The next day, as she rode down the main road to the ferry, Karis's raven dropped out of the sky onto her shoulder. "Something is wrong!"

A startled farm family that shared the road with her drew back, staring fearfully.

"What do you mean?" she asked the raven. "Did Karis send you to me? Did you see something from the air that I should know about?"

The raven uttered a strangled caw, as though he had half forgotten how to talk. "It is Karis," he managed to say. "Something is wrong with Karis."

Zanja never got on the ferry.Seven days later, in an evening that had turned suddenly cool after sunset, Zanja rode up to the Meartown gates. The stars had come out, and the gate was closed: a gate of iron forged in the form of ivy climbing a trellis, with spear-shaped leaves tipping the gate's top, edged, no doubt, with sharpened steel. Though Zanja had allowed Homely regular rest, she had scarcely slept, and now she saw the beautiful, deadly gate with a terrible clarity of exhaustion and panic. Not since the night of the frogs had she been forced to function in spite of such horror. "Something is wrong!" she shouted at the cranky old woman who came too slowly out the metal-hinged door of her stone house. The town stank of dust and coal.

"Stop ringing the cursed bell," the woman said, holding her ears. "The town's children are asleep."

Zanja made her hand stop pulling the bell rope. Her exhausted horse had not even jumped at the noise of the ringing.

"And come back in the morning," the woman said. "You can sleep by the road there. There's a pump so you can water your horse."

"I'll climb the gate if I have to, and come pounding at your cottage door."

The woman said dryly, "This is Meartown. We know how to make a gate here."

She started to turn away, and Zanja shouted at her back, "Do you know Karis? Do you know her best work? Look here!" She thrust her dagger through the gate's bars. "She doesn't give these blades to many people, does she? For pity's sake, look at me, look at the raven on my shoulder. I am her friend!"

The woman took the dagger from Zanja's hand, scrutinized it, and gave it back. "You do have a fine blade," she said doubtfully. She peered through the gate at the bird on Zanja's shoulder. "And a strange pet."

"Mardeth," the raven said, the first word he'd spoken in many days. "Help her."

"Shaftal's Name!" The woman s.n.a.t.c.hed up the key at her waist and unlocked the gate. Zanja all but fell through as it swung open. "You're not the one I expected," Mardeth said.

"I'm Zanja. Norina's pregnant."

"Well, blessings upon her," Mardeth said automatically. She examined Zanja, then stepped forward to take Homely's reins. "You've had a bad time of it. Come in and take a bite to eat, before I show you the way to Lynton and Dominy's house. You'll be needing your strength, won't you."

Zanja followed her, too dazed with hunger and weariness to protest or demand an explanation. It wasn't until she sat in the woman's kitchen with the teakettle starting to hiss and some bread and cold meat before her that she thought to wonder why the gatekeeper might have been expecting Norina to come frantically ringing the gate bell in the middle of the night. She nearly leapt up and ran out to the yard, where the woman was watering the horse and giving him some hay, but she made herself eat instead.

She'd be needing her strength, Mardeth had said.

Mardeth came in, and cut her a piece of pie. "Your horse isn't in too bad shape. Leave him with me tonight, and I'll have him shod in the morning. Looks like you've been keeping him in oats but not feeding yourself. Are you out of money?"

"I've got enough for the shoeing.""As if the blacksmith would accept a single coin from you. I'll send around to the other mastersmiths and take a collection to help you on your way. We were getting ready to send out some people ourselves.

It's taken us this long to figure out that she's not somewhere nearby, off her head or injured somewhere.

Six days we've been scouring the countryside. What's the matter with you?"

Zanja had knocked the pie into her lap and sent the plate spinning to the hearth, where it clanged on the stones like the gate bell, and set the woman's dog to barking. "She's disappeared?"

"Yes, of course she's disappeared. What else are you here for?"

"The raven couldn't tell me what was wrong. I thought she might be ill."

"Well now, that's odd," the woman said, looking askance at the raven, who paced restlessly along the back of a chair. "Very odd indeed. Not that I know a thing about elemental ways, but they say a witch's familiar knows everything she knows, and if the raven doesn't know anything, what does that mean, I wonder?"

Mardeth rousted up a neighbor to let them out the gate and keep an eye on it while she was gone.

"Lynton and Dominy live up there a ways." She pointed into the nearby hills. "Karis has lived with them, oh, for some years. There's some trees up there, and a bit of a spring, and it seems to make her happy."

As they hurried up the steep, scrupulously maintained road, Mardeth told Zanja how it had happened that Karis disappeared in the middle of the night, but no one realized anything was amiss until the next evening, when the forge master finally came looking for her at her house. They had wasted all the time since then trying to find her in the environs of Meartown, having a.s.sumed that she had come to harm somehow on one of her wanderings. That her harm might have come in the form of a human being seemed not to have occurred to any of them until finally one of the two men noticed a broken door latch in Karis' room. "In all the years they've known her," Mardeth said, "she's never broken anything. She can be clumsy as an ox, but she's never even cracked a teacup. And it was a good, strong, Mearish latch. No, someone must have broken it to get into her room from outside. But why would anyone wish to do her harm? Especially someone from around here?"

She glanced at Zanja and realized she was weeping. "Now then," she said awkwardly. "I'm sure we'll find her."

Something about the image of Karis blundering around a kitchen with a fragile teacup in her hand had left Zanja devastated, and she could scarcely stem her tears even when they arrived at the cottage, where two aged men welcomed them in. They seemed eager when they realized Mardeth was at their door, perhaps even hopeful that she brought good news. But when they saw Zanja's face, they fell to weeping themselves. "She's dead, is she?" said one.

"Now calm down, you," Mardeth snapped. "We know nothing at all, and the stones themselves would defend her from harm. Put on the kettle there, Dominy. This one's just in tears because she didn't know until now what had happened. She'll be all right in a minute, when it's done sinking in. Now all of you sit down and I'll make the tea."

"No, I want to see her room," Zanja said. Lynton took her down the dark hall through a wide door at the end, and Zanja stood there in the doorway to Karis' bedroom as the man hurried to light a couple of lamps. The flames illuminated a high, raftered ceiling, high enough that even Karis would not have to worry about banging her head on it, and several pieces of oversized furniture: a chair, a work table piledwith books and debris, a settle by the fireplace, a huge, high bed with the linens in disarray, and a double door constructed almost entirely of gla.s.s that looked out upon a garden. The old man swung the doors open and showed Zanja the broken latch.

"Was her room in such a mess when you found it? The bed and such?"

The old man shrugged. "No different from usual. We'd come in every few days and clean for her, not that she noticed. She never had time for tidying up, and never lost anything, anyway."

Zanja sat on the settle. She was learning more about Karis now that she was missing than she'd ever learned in her presence. "Would you leave me alone, please?"

"Of course. Madam." He touched his forehead, an old-fashioned gesture of respect rarely seen these days. Not only had they all a.s.sumed she was a member of the Lilterwess like Norina, but he, at least, apparently a.s.sumed she was a ranking member. He left the room without another word.

The room was still imbued with Karis's presence. The raven, who had come in with her, flew to a claw-scarred chair back near one of the windows and fluffed up his feathers sleepily. Faintly, Zanja could hear voices in the kitchen, and the sound of water being poured for tea. She picked up a book from the floor, and spelled out its t.i.tle: Principles of Clarity. Some of its pages were bent, as though Karis had tossed it impatiently aside. A small pot on the hearth contained a hardened, resinous substance-hide glue, Zanja thought, which would soften when warmed, and harden again when taken off the fire.

Zanja stood up abruptly, and began methodically searching the room. In the trunk were more books and a few articles of clothing, some clean and roughly mended, some dirty and stinking of the forge and Karis' sweat. The sheepskin jerkin that Karis had been wearing when they first met lay in there, and several pairs of socks, badly darned. The men who looked after Karis were not much good with a needle, apparently.

Small models of machinery, constructed of slips of wood and amber dabs of glue, cluttered the tabletop.

A book lay open to a page of diagrams of waterwheels, but this was no grain mill Karis had been designing. Zanja turned one of the miniature wheels, and watched it operate a thing like a hammer.

Another one operated a bellows, of the kind used in the forge. Karis's model was so precise that it even blew little, rhythmic puffs of air.

Zanja hunted through the room, but though she found Karis's belt on the floor, with sheathed knife, tin cup and various small tools still dangling from it, she did not find pipe or smoke purse. Zanja checked for loose boards in the floor, felt the stones of the wall, and finally found Karis' hiding place in the chimney, where a small stone had cracked loose from its mortar. A wooden box was crammed into the hollow behind it and could only be worked loose with great effort. At last Zanja slid open the lid and folded back the oilcloth covering; it was filled to the top with small cubes of smoke, at least half a year's supply.

Since Karis's kidnappers had not hunted for this supply, they must have brought some with them. Surely a woman who could unlock doors with a touch would easily escape, unless her captors kept her continuously under smoke. She was being poisoned three or even four times a day.

Now Karis would be-had already become-like all the other smoke users. Something was wrong, the raven said, and then he began, inexorably, to become ordinary. The evidence had lain before Zanja all along. Karis was not dead yet, but she might as well be dead.

Zanja began to think again: cold, hard thoughts. She took out her glyph cards and picked out the fourglyphs that, among other things, symbolize the four directions. Ten times in a row she plucked the same card from the four in her hand, the one with the glyph that meant "north."

She fell asleep on Karis's bed. One of the men came in later, to take the boots off her feet and tuck a blanket around her against the chill. She tried to say something to him about the morning, but he hushed her, saying, "We'll take care of everything." One by one, he blew out the lamps.

Chapter Twenty-two.

They brought Homely to her at dawn. He had bitten the man who tried to ride him, and so they led him to her, ignominiously tethered behind a stolid cart horse. His hooves were newly shod, his tack and all Zanja's gear refurbished, and his saddlebags were filled with food. "Is the blacksmith all right?" Zanja asked Mardeth.

"Oh, he's used to temperamental horses." Homely bared his teeth at Zanja, and she had to grab the raven by the feet to keep it from taking flight at the sight of all the people who had come to see her off, but horse and raven both calmed down once she was mounted. Mardeth handed her a money pouch, and Dominy gave her sweet rolls and boiled eggs to eat as she rode. Two or three dozen other people had made the trek to the hollow for no other purpose, it seemed, than to stand around and look at her.

Mar-deth murmured that some of them stood ready to accompany Zanja, if she wanted them.

"It's not numbers I need," Zanja said, though she would have given almost anything to have Ransel, or Emil, or even Norina, at her side. As she rode away, a chorus of good wishes shouted after her. When she looked back, the townsfolk all stood in a forlorn huddle around the two old men, who were still waving their red kerchiefs. Ten years they had looked after Karis, as much as she would let anyone look after her. "Idiots," Zanja muttered. She needed someone to rage at.

At noon, the raven spoke. "Pendant," he said.

Zanja had been riding cross-country, following whatever animal trails and streambeds she could find that went more or less northward. She had recently stumbled onto a deeply rutted dirt road. While the horse rested, Zanja searched up and down the stretch of road, sometimes kneeling in the muck that remained from a recent rain storm. Finally, she found it, buried in the mud: the pendant of green stone that she had given Karis beside the river in Strongbridge. A torn piece of green ribbon trailed from it as she pulled it out of the mud. Karis must have torn the ribbon that first dawn, when she started to come out from under smoke, and realized something was wrong, before her kidnappers forced her to smoke again. That was the dawn that the raven had flown to Zanja with his dreadful message.

"You're watching, aren't you Karis?" Zanja said, after she had started on her way again, with the raven on her shoulder. "I can't feel you any more, but at least sometimes you still see me through the raven. I must seem very far away to you, just as you seem to me. Can you hear me now?"

"Yes," the raven said.

"Can you tell me where you are?""Mabin," the raven said.

"Mabin? Has she been captured also?"

The raven looked at her blankly, and said nothing more.

The countryside remained treeless and desolate, and the road she followed northward seemed to go nowhere, though wagons traveled it often enough to keep the gra.s.s from growing in the ruts. Norina's maps showed empty, un-annotated countryside.

One morning, as Zanja saddled her horse behind the knoll where she had spent the night, a single rider loped past. The only remarkable thing about him was his horse, a luxury Zanja could not have afforded if she hadn't been given money so generously by friends and by strangers. She continued more cautiously, traveling far to one side of the road rather than upon it. Here and there were sudden fingers of rock pointing at the sky. She noticed, atop one of these, a watchkeep huddled in the shade of a lean-to that looked almost like a pile of brush, if one didn't look too closely. Zanja slipped past in the countryside behind him, where the lean-to blocked his view, and from there she could see the little bell tower upon which he could ring his alarm.

She soon came upon the thing he guarded: a lush green valley much like the valley of her birth, with a small, but busy village at one end-a village with walls, and a sentry at the gate. The valley had been carved out of the earth by a river that cut a deep swath across the countryside as far as Zanja could see in either direction. This river, at least, appeared on Norina's map, though the valley and the village did not. As she watched the village from the rim of the valley, Zanja realized it was not a village at all, but a military settlement-not of Sainnites, but of Paladins. She had found the hidden heart of the Shaftali resistance; Shaftal's government in exile.

Both the glyphs and her own judgment pointed inexorably into the valley. Zanja wanted to violently brush away the possibilities that tickled at her skin. Had Karis been kidnapped and cruelly drugged, not by Sainnites, but by the Paladins?

To break into a Paladin stronghold without a.s.sistance or even the vaguest idea of where to hunt for Karis seemed insanely foolhardy. She would do it tonight, she decided, and shut her eyes to think.

It was a warm summer afternoon, and the accuser bugs droned their shrill curses down in the valley.

Nearby, Homely chomped away at the gra.s.s, and the raven, perched overhead atop a pointed rock, cleaned his feathers busily. It was a commonplace kind of sound, like the rustling of paper. In the midst of her dismay, Zanja felt a sudden, unlikely sensation of peace.

When she opened her eyes, the summer sun hung low and red, glaring into her face like coals of a fire.

She could still hear the rustling paper sound, but she could not see the raven. She rolled over, groaning, for she had fallen asleep with her back against the pile of rocks. The man sitting nearby turned a page of the book in his lap, nodding and chuckling to himself. His spectacles were glazed red with sunset. "Dear G.o.ds," Zanja said.

Medric looked up from his book. He seemed rather the worse for wear: a rag tied back his stringy hair, and dust covered his drab clothing. "I guess you were tired. Some warrior you are."

Two additional horses grazed companionably with Homely on the other side of the clearing. She got stiffly to her feet, and found a smokeless fire burning at the other side of the rock pile, where a soot-black pot stood empty, and a porcelain teapot steeped upon a stone. Emil sat there on his folding stool, just looking up from the book upon his knees. "You're awake at last. Now we shall have some answers.""You've left South Hill?"

He closed the book carefully, and wrapped it in a jacket of leather. "It was time I remembered what my life was about."

"I hope you're here to help me."

"Sit down. Despite that nap, you still look ready to collapse." Emil opened his padded box and took out two teacups. "Why else would we rush up here into the wilderness like madmen chased by rabid hounds, except to help you? Help you do what, by the way?"

Medric sat on Zanja's other side. "Zanja, I see history rippling away from you."

Emil smiled affectionately at the Sainnite seer. "Medric is full of wild stories he's made up from reading too many books."

Medric said, "It's not possible to read too many books. To read too few, now that's possible."

"Medric says there's a third road for Shaftal. We-the three of us-are at the crossroads, he says." Emil offered Zanja a cup of tea. The cup might have been made of flower petals that released a delicious fragrance. Somewhere, Emil had invested in some very expensive tea. She took a sip. Her hands were shaking like any smoke addict's.

Medric said, "Zanja, where is the lost G'deon? Somehow, she must be saved!"

Emil murmured, "Set that cup down before you drop it. It's irreplaceable, you know."

Zanja put the cup on the ground.

Medric said, "I saw her in a dream, a woman like a mountain, but shackled hand and foot, blinded, with her tongue cut out. . . ."

Emil put his arm around her. Zanja lay her head back upon his shoulder and stared up at the sun-red sky, which swirled and swam in her vision. "But she is not the G'deon."

"She is. I know what I dreamed. The land cries out to her to give it healing."

Emil said, "Zanja, have mercy. Who is she?"

"Karis. The Woman of the Doorway. How can she be G'deon .. . a half-Samnite smoke addict?"

"She's a smoke addict?" Emil cried.

"She's Sainnite?" said Medric.

"But if Harald G'deon meant to choose her, and not just to use her as a kind of storage, then every moment, from the day of her birth-and even before-the people of this land have failed her." And then it came to Zanja, the truth she had not wanted to know, and she started wildly to her feet, crying, "Mabin did this to her, and it's my fault! Dear G.o.ds-" Something was impeding her, and she struggled with it blindly until a mild voice entered her awareness, saying her name. Medric stood before her, his hair having come loose, somewhat out of breath. Emil had her by the arms, from behind.

"Sit down," he said. "You're off your head and that's never good when someone carries weapons as sharp as yours. Sit down and explain."She sat back down, her knees gone weak, and let Emil talk her into some semblance of calm, until he trusted her with a teacup again.

Medric said, "The G'deon's choice of a successor had to be confirmed, isn't that right?"

Zanja said, "Norina told me that Harald waited until the last possible moment to send for Karis, and then he did it in secret. But perhaps he did it on purpose, so he could get around the council, for everyone knows that he was at odds with them, and with Mabin in particular."

"Well, it's true that Harald's last years were fraught with controversy," said Emil. "For he insisted that we accept the Sainnites, which was a very unpopular idea. Are you saying that for fifteen years we have had a G'deon vested but not confirmed? And that she has been willing to live in obscurity all this time, while the land is torn to ruins around her?" Emil paused, and shook his head, and added more gently, "By Shaftal, what else could she honorably have done? To exercise such power outside the constraints of the Lilterwess-"

Zanja said, "She was constrained, not just by smoke but by Mabin, who indirectly controlled her through Norina, who exercised all her formidable powers to keep Karis tractable."

"Norina?" Medric said.

"The Truthken, Karis's oldest friend."

Emil said dryly, "Ah, I see. Air logic. Inflexible and absolutist. No doubt Norina believes she is doing her duty. But what do you mean when you say Mabin did this to her? What has been done, and why do you blame yourself?"