Free Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks

gates.
    Harald, the last G’deon of Shaftal, also lay beneath the fallen walls of the building. Sometimes his bones spoke to Karis, but not tonight. After fifteen years of delay, watching the encroachments of these invaders and refusing to do anything about it, he had died before the final carnage began. The Sainnites, still fearing his power though they knew that he was dying, waited for him to die, and then attacked.
    At this turning point of history, Norina came to show Karis the way to safety, and found her lying vacantly in bed while cannonballs smashed into the building. Sometimes, the memory still made Karis desperate with self-loathing. She should have saved the House of Lilterwess, but smoke made her incapable of even saving herself. Sometimes, it seemed impossible that Norina had been able to forgive her.
    The ruins had passed, and now there was only darkness to be seen. Karis slipped deeper into sleep.

    When Zanja opened her eyes to the bitter darkness of the wintry night, she was surprised to find herself still entrapped in flesh. It scarcely seemed possible her spirit could hold on for so many months when she had seen so many die so easily. A blow or two of the blade usually was all it took to sever soul from body, a moment of agony and then the soul was translated.
    She had been dreaming of all the people of her village, gathered beside their summer fires in the Land of the Sun, chasing children, strutting before their rivals, stirring pots of fragrant kich . But just as the path Zanja followed seemed about to deposit her in their midst, it turned her mysteriously away, back into the wilderness, and she was lost again, trapped once more in a stinking box of straw, where she had been laid some months earlier like a side of meat being cellared for the winter.
    She heard a dry, rasping sound, and turned her head. The moon shone through the barred window, as it briefly did sometimes, and faint light shimmered on the ice-encased walls of her cell. The floor by the window was white with drifted snow. Silhouetted against the white, a raven stood on the edge of her box, near her head. He preened his wing feathers, just like any other bird after a long flight, but she knew him: the Messenger, He Who Decides. At last.
    She tilted up her chin so that his blunt beak could better reach her throat. “I have been waiting for you a long time, Lord Death.” Her voice whispered like dry wind.
    “It is not yet time for you to die,” said Death. His voice was harsh, and echoed of the deep canyons where he made his home.
    “How could it not be time? I have no home, no kin, no clan, no companions. I am broken, paralyzed. That smell—do you smell it?—that is my flesh rotting from my bones as I lie in my own shit. What more can the gods expect me to accomplish? What is left for me except death?”
    “You are still bound.”
    “Bound to what? The gods?”
    “To earth,” the raven said, implacably. In the silence, he paced the length of the box, perhaps inspecting her in the darkness. The blanket covered some parts of her ravaged frame, but to cover her feet required that she lever herself up with her arms to toss the blanket, and she had not been strong enough to do this in quite some time. Surely the sight of her feet, spastically curled and with half the toes hacked off, would convince even a god that her usefulness in this world was at an end. But Death paced back to her head again, unperturbed, and fed her a crust of bread, dry and stale and hard as stone, as if she were his fledgling. Her mouth was dry; she could not chew. He brought her a beakful of snow from the drift by the window, and she managed to swallow the dry crumbs. They burned within her like coals in a hearth, and warmed the parts of Zanja’s body where she could still feel the warmth: her torso, her arms, the shattered places of her heart. But the physical agonies that had only recently been numbed at last by cold were not renewed. For a while, she