Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks Page A

valley hunting for you, and everywhere I went, I saw our people slain: elders and children, warriors and farmers. The only people alive are those you see here.”
    Zanja saw that other katrim were gathered in this hollow, and that many had drawn close to hear the conversation. Her vision was blurred and she could not count them, but it seemed there were fewer than twenty.
    “I was pinned under a fallen horse,” one of them said. “I lay there all night, watching the butchery. The Sainnites did not rest until no one was left alive. Finally, I pulled myself free and escaped in the smoke, as you did, Speaker.”
    Others also told their stories, in voices as harsh and lifeless as the voices of ghosts are said to be. Zanja listened, thinking that surely she also had witnessed the horrors they described, but she only remembered a sensation of chaos and then of stillness. To have forgotten so much surely was a mercy, but it also was dreadful to gaze at these shattered tribesmen and feel confusion rather than sharing their horror.
    “The Sainnites must have taken the long path through the mountains,” one of them said. “For they have wagons and horses that could not have surmounted the steep passes.”
    “They must have killed the watchers before they could spread the alarm,” said another. “Though the watchers were hidden and it should have been impossible…”
    “No, they knew exactly where the watchers were,” said Zanja. “Tarin must have told them—told his friend in the woods, in payment for smoke. He betrayed his entire people.”
    They were silent then, for this was something they had not known, and could scarcely begin to understand. But Zanja understood that if she had only taken action immediately to find out what exactly had happened to Tarin, rather than delaying to let her anger cool, she might have discovered his betrayal immediately and been able to forewarn her people of their danger. Not for the last time, Zanja wished that the war horse’s kick to her head had been harder.
    Ransel did not know of how she had failed the Ashawala’i, and she was too stunned by shame to tell him. He gently tended her wound and gave her more water to drink. She could not resist sleeping again, and in her sleep she dreamed of Sainnites. She dreamed that they sat around a fire where they roasted a slaughtered goat. In their own language, they talked about the hard work they had done and about the dreary journey home that lay before them. When she opened her eyes, she saw stars burning. The katrim roasted river trout over a small fire, and talked about revenge. Ransel hovered nearby, and drew close when she stirred.
    “The Sainnites will march out at first light,” said Zanja.
    The other katrim abandoned their meal to come over and hear what she had said. “Speaker, how do you know?”
    “They told me in my dreams.”
    “Then we will follow them, to haunt them like ghosts, to kill as many as we can.”
    “If we do this, we all will die.” She could see them more clearly now: some fine warriors and some she had long considered fools, but with the foolishness burned out of them now.
    “What does it matter, so long as we can die in honor?” said Ransel.
    They all murmured agreement, their voices empty and bitter with loss.
    “Then we shall follow them,” Zanja said. She did not understand how she had become their leader, or why they listened to her, when her certainty might be nothing more than the delirium of a broken head.
    She shut her eyes and slept the night through. At dawn, they began hunting Sainnites. Zanja went with them, leaning on one or another shoulder, carried sometimes, as they ran lightly across the mountaintops while the Sainnites, burdened by armor and horses and wagonloads of supplies, trudged below. The Sainnites did not realize what haunted their journey until that night, after the katrim slipped into their camp like the ghosts they were, and used the hay the Sainnites carried for the horses