by Myers, Karen
The night camps were quiet, and everyone was involved in the making of the little leather pouches. Najud had charred some bits of fallen wood until he had enough to grind more charcoal with the small mortar and pestle he kept with his craft things in the special pack. There was no way to make more of the linseed oil on the trail—when that ran out, he would have to try cooking oil, a poor substitute. Najud proposed to use ink, first, if it came to that.
She was worried about Ilzay’s long silences. Najud had told her that Ilzay had ridden west at sunset, alone, last night, and was gone for more than an hour. Jirkat reported that when he returned, he’d said nothing about where he’d gone, or why.
“You can feel him yourself,” Najud had told her. “You know how this business buries his spirit. We’re going to do something about that tonight.”
Penrys curved west as the trail below her did. She’d discovered the most efficient way to handle the cold in the air for these long flights—she tucked her gloved hands under the armpits of her sheepskin coat to make her upper body more compact, and used a loose strap coiled simply around her knees several times to help keep her legs together. She could rig it in the air, and a tug on the end freed them before she needed to land, but it relieved her of some of the effort of holding them together for hours, so that she could take better advantage of the efficiencies of flying. Her human body wasn’t designed for it, and her legs were in the way, a drag on her speed.
The gap between the wings and tail and her body had no difficulty adjusting to the increased thickness of her clothing, and she marveled at the complexities of design hinted at by that, more even than the wings themselves. I wish I had some idea of how a device like this works. None of its principles are clear, not least that the wings behave like flesh, with feeling and even blood. But the chain is a mystery, too, the way it can store power taken from wizards, almost like a living power-stone. Where does this knowledge come from? Where were these devices made?
She shook her head to free it from her obsessive picking at the old problem. She was almost at the end of her outward flight. Time for one more mind-scan of the landscape.
A man. Someone living. And four horses.
She ignored the trace below her and swung directly toward him. As she got closer, she realized he was another wizard. Land now, and walk the rest of the way, or drop in on him from the air?
Before she could decide, a strange mind-voice intruded.
*Now that’s not something you see every day, bikrajab in the sky.*
The humor of it persuaded her, and she swooped in to land a few yards away from him and let her wings vanish.
The man stood not far from the trail, and his tethered riding horse and the three pack horses grazed the winter grasses behind him. A half-built cairn and the rock in his hands told its own tale.
“You have anything to do with this?” he asked, as he dropped the rock into place and dusted off his gloved hands.
She shook her head. “I’m tracking them with the Kurighdunaq—it’s their people.”
“Since when do they have a flying, foreign bikrajti at their disposal?” he said.
“Now that’s a long story, it is.” She considered him. The gray eyebrows and lined face declared he was in his fifties, but he was hale and confident.
“M’name’s Penrys,” she said, “I’m traveling with Najud, of the Zamjilah. We were headed home from the High Pass when we came across the Kurighdunaq disaster.” Her hand wave included the cairn.
He nodded to her. “I’m Khizuwi of clan Umzabul, of the Maqurrah. We’ve been hearing stories, and I came out to see. I’ve been moving up the trail—didn’t want to get too far from the zudiqazd this late in the year and the track looked too old for me to catch up anyway, going the other way.”
She looked down and saw a cloth on the ground, spread with bits of fabric and a buckle. It was all too familiar.
“Find many, did you?” She pointed at the cloth. “Did you do that for all of them?”
“I knew people would be looking and would want to know. I recognized the clan, from the decorations, and figured someone would come, from that direction.”
She felt his eyes looking her up and down. “Lose many of them, did they?”
“Almost three hundred missing, just about all of the clan.”
At that, he swallowed and pursed his lips.
“Well, you can tell them tadas and mawik have found their last homes at my hands.”
Eleven, she translated—five couple and one.
She sighed, and her shoulder slumped. “Look, we’re about twenty miles back on the trail from here. There’re five of us, and we build the cairns as we go which slows us down, some, but we’ll get here by evening or sooner. Will you wait for us?”
“Assuredly,” he said. “This Najud, he is a bikraj, yes? Good. There is work for us here.”
He waved his hand at her, as if to shoo her away. “Be off with you. I’ll be waiting.” He cocked his head at the cairn. “Plenty to do.”
Once Penrys got within range of Najud, she called to him. *Met a wizard on the trail coming our way. Khizuwi, from clan Umzabul.*
There was a delay and she pictured him telling the others.
*Jirkat says he’s famous, he is. Maqurrah tribe, west of here. Some relative of Hadishti’s—that’s her original clan. He’s going to wait for us?*
*Seemed to think that was easiest. And there’s a stream nearby, for a camp.*
She paused. *He’s been piling rocks, he says.*
*Oh. How many?* She could feel Najud bracing himself for her answer.
*Another eleven. And I’ve spotted several more on the way back.*
By then she was in sight of her companions, just starting to remount after building another cairn, a small one.
She dropped down to give them her report in detail.
CHAPTER 21
“Tell me everything!”
After a week isolated together on the trail, Khizuwi was a breath of fresh air for the trackers, and Penrys was amused to see how he charmed them all, even Ilzay.
At Najud’s insistence, Khizuwi had cheerfully abandoned his kamah to share their living space. Penrys regretted their loss of privacy, but they couldn’t leave him to shiver when he could sleep warm in their roomy kazr. The nominal bed hanging didn’t suit her sense of modesty, but there would be other times.
Now, in the fading afternoon light, he poked busily into everyone’s affairs. Once he caught Penrys following him with her eyes, as he moved from Jirkat, cleaning his horse gear, to Winnajhubr, who bowed respectfully, and he winked at her before quizzing the young man about his family.
Only when he came to Ilzay did he change his manner, regarding the tally horn that hung from his neck with a sober demeanor. He laid a hand softly on the pack that held the remembrances of the dead. “We will bless this in the morning, when we add the new ones,” he told Ilzay, “and they will all rest the more quietly for it.”
He held Najud in conversation for some time as he helped them finish setting up the kazrab, teasing all the names of his Zannib teachers out of him, and then asking about his latest expedition in Kigali, his meeting with Penrys, and the chained wizard they’d found there.
When he turned to Penrys at last, he chuckled. “You were right. It is a long story.”
He drew her by the hand and walked her out of the shadow cast by the kazr into what was left of the sunlight. “Let me look at that chain of yours, now.”
She stood his inspection, and even showed him the fox-like ears hidden beneath her hair, low on her head in the place of human ears.
“Najud told me about your hand. What was it, six weeks ago? May I see?”
No one had asked Penrys about the thin glove, the whole time she had traveled with them, and she only just realized it now. She stared quizzically at Najud.
*I told them. Seemed the best thing to do.”
She shook her head in chagrin at her own obliviousness and sighed. Then she peeled off
the glove she refitted each morning. Her left hand hadn’t required bandages for weeks now, just a little protection against accidental damage. And curious looks.
“Where was it cut?” he asked.
She drew a diagonal line with her finger across the back of her hand, starting an inch above the wrist and running up below all four knuckles. None of that damage was visible. Only the too-short little finger was left to tell the tale, and soon it would be done re-growing.
Maybe it’s time to just leave off the glove. Stupid to just make a habit of it.
She stuffed the glove in one of her pockets.
“And the wings?” He cocked his head and smiled into her face, and she couldn’t take offense at it.
She noticed the three young men sidling up for a closer look, too, so she waved them in and let them see. She pointed out the gaps between her body with its clothing and the start of the wings and tail, and explained her conclusions about it being a device, before she stopped dead, having forgotten the attitude toward physical magic cultivated by Zannib wizards.
He glanced at her as she stiffened. “Just because I’m twice your age doesn’t make me hidebound yet. Not all of us believe that physical magic makes you a qahulajti. We’ve heard of other practices, some of us.”
Najud diverted him. “We think we know one way this chained girl may be controlling the animals. Penrys discovered she could do it, too. With mice.”
Khizuwi grinned. “Can you show me?”
A bit diffidently, in front of the interested audience of non-wizards, Najud said, “When we first met, Penrys let me watch, from the inside, when she did things.” He tapped his forehead meaningfully.
“May I do so, bikrajti, please?”
She answered him silently. *You are welcome to look.*
“Good,” he said. “Now, find us a mouse.”
“Stand still, everyone,” she said. She checked for the tiny mind-glows she usually ignored, and was startled to discover how many mice there were, warmly tucked into burrows under the yellowed grasses.
She concentrated on a single rodent, and a loud squeak ten feet in front of them produced a startled leap from Winnajhubr. She felt that jump from the mouse’s perspective—a movement of the air and a thump felt through the ground itself, and the mouse fled.
She shook her head and glared at Winnajhubr, while Jirkat and Ilzay laughed at him. “Quiet down and I’ll try that again,” she told them.
This time, when she focused in on a new specimen, she tried to project a sense of food, to no effect. She used an illusion of sound instead, the alarm of the other mouse to the footsteps of a man behind it, but subdued, as though it were further away.
The mouse scurried from its hiding place to a new tussock of grass, closer to them and visible, and then froze there in the open, all except for its glittering black eyes.
*Seems to be easier to drive it than to entice it.*
She felt Khizuwi’s agreement. She released the mouse and waved her arm at it, and it fled in terror.
Ilzay whispered, “Is that what the qahulajti is doing to our people?”
“I have no idea,” Penrys admitted. “I don’t know if it would work on a person.”
Khizuwi commented sagely to the three young men, “It would be most unpleasant to have a bikraj in your mind, eh?”
Winnajhubr stepped forward, looking to redeem himself from the laughter of the others. “I don’t care about that. Try me.”
Penrys considered the youthful pride of him. “Are you sure?”
He stood up straight. “If you need to find out… Anything that gets us there faster… I’ll do it.”
That drew looks of respect from both Jirkat and Ilzay, and Najud nodded to him.
Penrys drew a deep breath. “Remember, it won’t be real, none of it.”
Winnajhubr smiled uncertainly.
Conscious of both Najud and Khizuwi watching through her, she tried to picture a wolf in the high grass, and added a growl for effect.
Winnajhubr started to reach for his knife before he dropped his hand sheepishly and stood still again.
Next she tried to picture a grassfire edging his way. She could manage the crackling sound, but couldn’t add the sense of heat or smoke to it.
Even so, Winnajhubr began to edge backward. “I know it’s not real,” he said, “but I can’t help it. It looks as if it might be.”
Penrys stopped. “What was it like?”
“Well, the wolf seemed real at first glance, until I realized it wasn’t moving. And the fire… no heat. Still, if I didn’t expect it…”
“Like the mouse,” Jirkat added, and snickered.
Winnajhubr ignored him. “It was real enough, and I think you’d get better at it, with practice.”
Khizuwi looked at her speculatively. “I believe she would.”
CHAPTER 22
Khizuwi’s comment echoed unpleasantly in Najud’s mind.
He was waiting after his evening meal for the serving of bunnas in his kazr, where everyone had gathered to hear the bikraj’s story. He wasn’t immune to Khizuwi’s charm, any more than the rest of them, but he didn’t like the way he’d encouraged Penrys to try and do the same things the qahulajti had done.
He recognized that some of the churning in his stomach was guilt that he hadn’t sufficiently considered how his colleagues might look upon her. He’d gotten so used to both foreign travel and her unique skills that he’d lost his revulsion for devices, for the physical magic that his teachers would consider forbidden. That was the very definition of a qahulaj—one who did forbidden things.
He didn’t do physical magic himself, but she did, and he’d watched her do it and learned from her. Was she exposed now, were both of them, as targets for other bikrajab? He snorted quietly, thinking of the thirty-odd Rasesni mages she’d stripped of power to help fight the Voice.
The Zannib will have a surprise in store for them if they think to overwhelm her with just a few of the righteous. And she’s no qahulajti—she restored all the power she borrowed, and the need was great.
But people had died, he remembered. When she poured her own power into the Voice’s weakened captive wizards, four were overwhelmed and left dead on the field—he’d seen them fall. He wasn’t sure if she knew that, and he didn’t plan to tell her.
Casualties of war. Not her fault.
He felt her eyes on him and he looked her way and nodded reassuringly. The bunnas was being tended by Ilzay, while she used boiling water from Khizuwi’s own pot to steep a special herb he’d brought with him, something he preferred to bunnas.
She poured the infusion into two cups, one for herself and one for their guest. When she emptied the pot, she moved it away from the stove and walked over to sit on the rugs next to Najud, and held the thick clay with the tips of her fingers, waiting for it to cool.
He glanced at the low worktable, in the back portion of the kazr. The eleven packets of personal scraps shared the surface with today’s finds, and he knew it would take hours to engrave and paint the names for all of them, once the ones Khizuwi had brought in had been identified. They’d waited to do that until after their evening council.
Beside him, Penrys cradled the cup in both hands and inhaled deeply. “It reminds me of some of the herbal infusions they use in Ellech.”
She took a careful sip, blew on the liquid to cool it, and tried again. “Interesting. Astringent, bracing. Complicated.” She smiled broadly. “I can feel the vigor in it, the alertness.”
“What did he call it?” Najud asked.
“Kassa. Gets it from Shimiz, he said, by ship, from somewhere to the west. He says there are different varieties, like bunnas.” She swallowed another mouthful. “Try it.”
He took the proffered cup and tasted it for himself. He recognized the alertness she described from bunnas.
He knew the name but had never encountered it. They used it in the west, on the shores of Wandat. It was a specialty of the region.
This would
make a good trade item, he realized, as he took another sip and returned the cup to Penrys. They already valued bunnas in Kigali and Rasesdad, like civilized people anywhere, but he hadn’t heard of this herb being used in either country, or even in the rest of sarq-Zannib.
Ilzay finished pouring bunnas for those who wanted it, and Khizuwi cleared his throat and started to speak.
“My thanks to my hosts,” he began, with a cock of the head at Najud’s bedframe behind him. “A warm kazr and good company are all a man can wish for, when he meets tulqajab along the way.”
He swallowed a mouthful of his kassa.
“I am Khizuwi, son of Urqudham, of the Umzabul, in the Maqurrah tribe, and the Undullah are our respected neighbors.”
He nodded to Jirkat, Ilzay, and Winnajhubr, seated together nearest the door, and they returned the gesture.
“I know of the Shubzah tribe, to the east”—this with a nod to Najud—“and I have even heard of Ellech, though, alas, the Collegium of Wizards there is but a legend to us.”
He smiled graciously at Penrys. Najud was interested to see that her nod in return was polite but restrained. Perhaps she wasn’t entirely under his spell.
“The zudiqazd of the Maqurrah clans is northwest of here, and directly west of the zudiqazd of the Undullah clans. My clan’s route, the tarizd, runs northwest from there, up almost to the rough hills we call Wayat mar-Zarqash, the Corner of Zarqash.”
Jirkat stirred, and Khizuwi looked at him.
“Yes, you know where that is, don’t you? The trail from your summer camp, south of High Pass, to Shimiz runs along the backside of that ridge.”
Ilzay nodded.
“There are caves in the Corner, many of them,” Khizuwi said. “Our children play in them, during the summer encampment. Sometimes our young men pry colored minerals out of the walls and use them for decoration or grind them for pigments.”
He paused. “In the last three years or so, they’ve acquired an evil reputation.”
Najud and Penrys exchanged looks. She had appeared in Ellech about three years ago, and the Voice first became known in Rasesdad at roughly the same time.
