Fire Logic Read Online Free PDF

climbing.”
    “Aha! A bribe! Well then, since you know my price, I shall agree.”
    They walked companionably together, behind the horses, who kept up an eager pace because they could smell the nearness of home. “So tell me the news,” Zanja said. She did not usually have to prompt him.
    He said, soberly for once, “Well, I don’t know a good way to tell you this, my sister. The Speaker is dead.”
    She stopped in her tracks. Ransel’s momentum carried him a couple of steps beyond her, and he turned around. “Here,” he said. “Sit for a moment. The horses know the way.”
    He squatted on his heels beside her in the middle of the path. “It was a quiet thing. One morning, he simply did not wake up. Salos’a had come during the night to carry him across his last boundary.”
    “Without anyone there to remind him of the stories of his life.”
    “I am sure there was no need. Salos’a knows his life already.”
    “I wanted to be there at his death. And I needed to ask him…” To the astonishment and embarrassment of them both, she abruptly began to weep, and could not get herself under control for some time. As much as she looked forward to Ransel’s staunch affection, she had looked forward to her long conversations with her old teacher, the only one she could confide in. Though she had taken over his duties and position, she still relied heavily on his advice. Now, when she needed most to ask him what to do, Salos’a had taken him off to a far land where he could not possibly be so badly needed.
    She raised her head at last. Ransel, uncertain what to do in this unprecedented situation, had simply looked away and was courteously pretending not to have noticed her tears. She stood up, wiping her face, and they continued down the path. After a while, Ransel, somewhat muted at first, began to tell her all the other events of the summer, as he always did. By the time they reached the Asha Valley, where Zanja’s people thrived in peaceful comfort, she had gotten more surefooted as she tread the precarious edge of sorrow, and was able to keep from falling into it again.
    The next day, she spoke to the elders, who gathered in the elderhouse to hear her. She told them of her summer with the Sainnites, and she told them of the fear she now carried with her. While living with the Sainnites, she had learned the extent of their arrogance and their ignorance. She had learned that the Sainnites feared Shaftal: they feared its supposedly conquered people for their tenacious refusal to give up the fight; they feared the rage and bitterness that they themselves had caused; they even feared the long, harsh winter that to them seemed arbitrary and undeserved as a curse from a vengeful god. And she had learned to fear the Sainnites in return, because she learned that, because they were exiles in a land they detested, they could be destructive and vindictive in a way no sane people could tolerate. She reminded the elders of the weapons that kill at a distance, and of the smoke drug that insidiously killed the will and spirit of Shaftali city dwellers.
    All morning and well into the afternoon, she tried to convince the elders of their danger. When she was finished, they placidly replied that the Sainnites were indeed dangerous, and so it was fortunate that they had no reason to even notice a remote tribal people like theirs.
    They agreed to post additional sentinels in a wide circle a day’s journey outside the valley, so that if a danger were to approach them, they were would least know of it in advance. But they refused to develop a plan for how to defend the village against attack, since it would have required them to explain the danger to the Ashawala’i people. “When you are old,” they said to Zanja, “You will understand. Now, it is difficult for you to see how easily that which is right and good can be changed, and how difficult it is to change it back again. You say that our people are endangered by these