by Myers, Karen
“Not in the customary Zannib way, I mean. Khizuwi and Jiqlaraz—they won’t understand the experience I have. They’ll expect Khizuwi to take charge, and if he won’t, that Jiqlaraz looks all to ready to step up instead.”
He pursed his lips. “I’ve heard of Jiqlaraz’s family. It’s something of a scandal.”
At Penrys’s raised eyebrow, he added. “That clan only produces bikrajab in that one family’s line, instead of the talent popping out in various bloodlines unpredictably. They marry the sisters and daughters of other bikrajab, when they can’t find a bikrajti.”
“So, when he named himself the uncle of an apprentice bikraj…” Penrys suggested.
“His brother and father are bikrajab, too—I know the story.” Najud said. “It’s always awkward to apprentice your own close relative, in any field. It almost never happens for a bikraj, but in this family line…”
“Why do they do it? Are they trying to make themselves stronger? Could they make a clan of wizards, all closely related?”
“I’ve never heard an explanation. Maybe we’ll get one tonight.”
“This chained wizard… you don’t suppose he might think of her as breeding stock, do you?”
Najud blinked. “That’s impossible.”
“No one tries to redeem a wizard-tyrant, then?” she said. “Who condemns them?”
“There’s usually a trail of dead bodies to accuse them,” he muttered, “though this one is by far the largest I’ve ever heard of.”
“So, what are you going to do tonight?”
He just shook his head.
CHAPTER 25
After an hour of tooth-clenched politeness, the dispute in Najud’s kazr broke out in earnest.
Jirkat and Ilzay were resolute in asserting the priority of the rescue of their kinsmen, and Najud agreed with them. Jiqlaraz made the case for the traditional control of the eldest bikraj in a hunt like this.
The man’s nephew was too young to voice his own opinions, but Najud was rapidly coming to dislike Jiqlaraz with his condescending references to Najud as a newly declared jarghal. He wondered why Khizuwi had said so little thus far.
Penrys had refrained from interfering all this time, but he could feel the impatience rising in her, and now it broke out.
She stood up. “If you’ll forgive a foreigner’s opinion,” she said in feigned humility, “this is pointless. I’m sure everyone wants to save as many of the Kurighdunaq as possible, and to do that we have to catch up with her, and then stop her.”
She pinned them with an exasperated look. “Until then, we all want exactly the same thing.”
Jiqlaraz glanced at her and then looked away. “We will lose too much time on the trail raising these rock cairns. That can wait until we return.”
Najud heard the sharp intake of breath from the outraged clansmen, seated together left of the stove. Before one of them could voice his outrage, he tried to inject a tone of reasonability. “We will catch her in another couple of weeks or so. But the snow is overdue, and once it falls we have no hope of marking the dead or confirming their deaths.”
“You’ll have the survivors, if any,” Jiqlaraz said. “That should tell you who you’ve missed.”
Even Khizuwi murmured at this callousness.
Penrys took a deep breath. “Have you heard what Najud’s masterwork was? His nayith? He discovered a way to organize wizards, to combine their strengths until they could defend themselves against one of these chained wizards, in Neshilik. It had never been done before—the Rasesni lost dozens of their mages before he helped defeat that wizard-tyrant.”
“And who saw all that, in a foreign land?” Jiqlaraz asked scornfully. “Who judged it?”
“I did,” she said, and glared at him. “And if you think I’m not qualified, you’re welcome to test me. Very welcome.”
She wasn’t tall or imposing, but the menace of her stance was enough to silence everyone. She wasn’t often angry, he reflected, but she made up for it in sincerity once something grabbed a hold of her.
When no one took her up on her offer, she backed off slightly. “My point is, Najud is the zarawinnaj of this bit of the clan, no one disputes that. He and I have fought against one of these chained wizards before, and we’ve both organized wizards to work together to stand against them. You have no idea what you may be facing.”
She waved her hand at Khizuwi and Jiqlaraz. “No idea at all. I maintain that he is well qualified in many ways to lead the attack on this girl himself, despite the experience and worthiness of the two of you. I ask you to set aside that aspect of your tradition to allow us a unified leadership for our team.”
She managed a Kigali-style bow and sat down clumsily again.
Before Jiqlaraz could respond, Khizuwi asked, “And what about yourself, jarghalti? I suspect you are stronger than any of us, and more familiar with the dangers we will find. Don’t you wish to take command, for the same reasons you recommend Najud?”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be fitting, not while Najud can fill that role. I’m not part of the Kurighdunaq, I’m not even a Zan. And I certainly don’t have the experience to be a zarawinnaj.”
“And if we can’t agree to this, what then?” Khizuwi said. “If other bikrajab come join us, they’ll likely be older than Najud, too—no dishonor to him.”
Very bravely, Ilzay stood up and injected himself into this dispute between bikrajab. “Please forgive me, jarghal,” he said, “but without Penrys to scout for us, we will be much slower, and very much blinder. And my clansmen and I are sworn to follow our zarawinnaj. It may be that other bikrajab will not join us under Najud—I have no say in that. But my ujarqa who met this qahulajti put his faith in the two of them, and I think you should, too.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Penrys said later, after everyone had left, and Najud had lowered the flap over the kazr’s door for the night. Only the light of the banked fire in the stove gleamed in glimpses through the barely open fire draft door.
“What good are these three wizards—or is it two and a half—going to be against a chained one anyway?” she said. “Remember the Voice?”
Najud held her in his arms in her bed, her back curled into him like a spoon, and he could feel the words as well as hear them.
He grunted, still upset by the unresolved leadership issue. The other three bikrajab had gone off eventually to discuss it among themselves.
Penrys mused out loud again. “Maybe this one has never met a wizard before. She could’ve crushed an untrained Umzakhilin with her mind, I suspect, so why did she use a horse instead?
Najud said, “You see how Umzakhilin has sent messengers out about this qahulajti. We’re going to have to send word to everyone, eventually—all the bikrajab—about these chained wizards. Khizuwi made that clear to me.”
There was a moment of silence before Penrys said, in a quiet voice, “And then I will become everyone’s dreaded enemy.”
“No, Pen-sha, we will explain…”
He could feel the shrug of her shoulders.
“How can you possibly explain, in a message that will be carried by a chain of relays? Can’t be done.”
Should I tell her it’s worse than that? He hesitated, but honesty compelled him.
“The word will filter out to Kigali and Rasesdad, I fear.”
She sighed. “Ellech, too, I imagine. D’ye suppose they’ll say, at the Collegium, that they always knew I was a monster, it’s what they expected?”
There was nothing he could say to this, so he wrapped his arms around her to give her what shelter he could.
She chucked darkly. “I wonder if your team of wizards will wait until we’ve stopped this girl before they turn on me.”
Not for the first time, Najud doubted the wisdom of having all three of the bikrajab living together.
In a patent effort to change the topic, Penrys said, “I meant to tell you what I was thinking the other night, when you were talking about kassa with Khizuwi.”
“Hmm?”
“I was seeing you as a trader, again. It’s admirable, the way things keep dovetailing into this western caravan idea of yours—the suggestion for Umzakhilin to found a base, the donkeys for breeding mules, trade goods like the kassa. I was impressed.”
He snorted.
“No, truly. It’s a side of you I haven’t seen much of.”
“I haven’t told you everything,” he confided. “If we can get a caravan base started below the High Pass, there’s no reason it shouldn’t prosper. You could build a library there, too—why not? Start with copies of the books scattered throughout sarq-Zannib. Not just the bikraj books, but all kinds.”
“Another Collegium?” Penrys asked, with a bit of a tease in her voice.
Najud was glad the darkness hid his face. He tightened his hold on her. “Want to come be a librarian again? Show them how it’s done?”
“But what about your family?”
What about his family, indeed. “It’s not so far, say, three hundred miles—a couple of weeks. Maybe we could go back and forth.”
“When you’re not leading caravans to Dzongphan,” she commented, skeptically. “How can one man do all of that?”
“You start small,” he said, “And you just keep going.”
He wondered if Umzakhilin had thought more about his proposal. Maybe he had even started to get the word out to other clans.
“That kassa would be a good trade item. Lightweight. I wonder why the Rasesni don’t use it already? They might like it in Kigali.”
“Ellech, too,” Penrys said. “They’ve got other infusions, but nothing this complex, and with the kick of bunnas. Think you can deliver it to a harbor for them?”
He smiled in the dark. “Someday… Do you miss things from Ellech?”
“How can I not? It’s all I know.”
She nestled more comfortably against him. “It’s a cold-weather place, too—many similarities. What you call cabbage is lot like something in Ellech, the way it keeps well over the winter. I think of that whenever I smell it.”
She rolled over onto her back and lifted a hand to stroke his cheek. “Not your beards, though. None of you in the South can raise a good Ellech beard—not the Zannib or the Kigali, or even those barbarous Rasesni. Some of the Ellech men shave, but the ones that don’t… it’s like living with a bunch of bears—some tidy, some shaggy, and some downright fashionable.”
Najud inhaled the smell of her hair and leaned his head into her hand, glad he’d cleaned himself up this evening.
“I’ve heard that women don’t like being scraped by a man’s beard,” he murmured, freeing his hand to explore.
She arched into him. “I wouldn’t know,” she sighed.
CHAPTER 26
Penrys flew in at mid-day under a gloomy sky to report a change in terrain. The track was cutting west through the low, mostly treeless hills it had been following, and the land was becoming better watered. They would be passing through sparse woodlands along a set of streams to some sort of gap in the ridge.
“I went ahead, far enough to confirm where the track was headed.” She avoided looking at Najud when she said this, conscious that it was further than he liked.
When Penrys described this, the two senior wizards exchanged looks. Jiqlaraz said, “That’s the entry to the long vale of Silmat. It’s in between us and the Mahab tribe to the west, and just far enough away that neither of us use it for grazing on the tarizd. Both of us go there for wood, though—it’s well forested.”
Khizuwi added, “I’ve been there myself. Wood, water, and protection from the worst of the western storms. I can think of worse places to winter up.”
The two of them turned to Najud. The argument the night before had been settled somehow in the wizards’ shared kazr, and Khizuwi had told Najud this morning that they were content to combine their task with the needs of the Kurighdunaq and accept Najud as the zarawinnaj.
Najud had nodded soberly at their decision, then commented privately to Penrys, “They don’t say what they’ll do once we find her—probably be another fight with them then, but I’ll take this compromise for now. Anything that gets us there with some hope of finding survivors.”
Now Najud asked her, “How much more of the steppe do we have, before the ground rises to the gap?”
“About twenty-five, thirty miles. What are you thinking?”
“We can burn wood, but I can think of better uses for it. Any bodies?”
“Not on this stretch,” she said, “not that I could see, but I found horses, about a dozen of them. We’ll pass near them, and soon.”
“They can’t be from our tribe,” Jiqlaraz said, “Too far away.”
Ilzay spoke up as he put the remains of his meal away in his saddle pack. “More of our herds, seems likely.” He turned to Najud. “We should pick them up.”
“It’ll slow us down,” Winnajhubr objected.
Najud looked around the little group and considered. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to scoop those horses up and bring them along. I also want every bit of fuel we can find while we’re still in the grasslands. Use some of the large empty packs for that.”
Winnajhubr opened his mouth to ask questions, then glanced up at the threatening sky and shut it again. Najud noticed and with a little smile he explained. “I think it’s very interesting that horses managed to get away from this qahulajti after all this time. All we’ve seen until now, since the zudiqazd, have been injured beasts, abandoned and left behind. Is she tired? Does she have too much to control?”
He waved a hand at the lowering clouds. “Is she going to stop moving soon? If she’s looking for a place to hold for the winter, this vale sounds ideal for her. And if horses escaped, surely some of the people can, too.”
He smiled. “These horses will let us bring more fuel. We’ll pick up some of the wood as we go along, and make pack frames tonight. Once we remove the qahulajti, we have to help whoever’s left survive the winter—that was always the most uncertain part of our plan. We can carry the worst of them, with these horses, if the rest can walk. Or we can send the best of them to fetch help from your clan.” He tipped his head to Jiqlaraz.
“And if we have to winter in the vale ourselves and are forced to it, well, we can eat them, or any of the remaining herds we find.”
Watching the roundup from the air provided Penrys with sufficient amusement to make up for the cold. The young nal-jarghal Munraz volunteered to help and was surprisingly adroit at it.
Must’ve been his job before he turned apprentice wizard.
Munraz and Winnajhubr worked the herd from behind to encourage it to accompany the rest of them as they walked the track. Penrys let them know when they’d gotten them all together, and then landed to remount her own horse.
Ilzay confirmed that the horses belonged to the Kurighdunaq, and Winnajhubr recognized the lead mare of the bunch as one of his father’s. He left Munraz as rear herdsman and rode alongside the mare, with his pack-string, talking to her in a low voice.
Even after they had been settled into grazing near their evening camp, Winnajhubr walked off from his kazr and kept the mare company for an hour or so, by himself, one hand always in contact with her, as though he could reach his father better that way. Jirkat and Ilzay left him alone, but Penrys noticed Munraz walking out to him in the twilight, with a dish in his hand.
The threat of the dull, overcast skies was finally realized when the snow began to fall, before they settled for the night, each group warm in its own kazr, working on pack frames. Penrys looked out at it sifting down before she dropped the door flap and closed the door.
It was still snowing lightly in the morning, with that steady fall that presages inches to come, though only half a foot had accumulated overnight.
Najud had scolded her the night before for flying further than a day’s ride ahead to confirm the gap, and this morning they were still arguing in low voices about the distance in front of the
m.
“I can get to the gap—easily,” Penrys said,” The visibility isn’t too bad, it’s not that kind of storm. I’ve got to make as much distance as I can, while I can, before we lose the trail. We’re still too far away.”
“Not out of the reach of your mind-voice. Do it in batches of about five miles. Won’t take any longer.”
She bristled at the feel of a leash, but kept her mouth shut.
He tried to soften his tone. “There’s no sun or stars for direction, the landmarks on the ground are being buried, and how can you find the trail if you can’t see it?”
She pulled her neck scarf up around the bottom of her face and yanked on her gloves, before running a few steps and launching into the air.
Najud’s mouth quirked. She hadn’t actually confirmed she would cut the flight short. She’ll play fair—if she was going to disobey, she’d have said so. And then left anyway. I better let her cool down. Shouldn’t be hard, in this weather.
Khizuwi had watched their byplay from a distance. When Najud returned to his horse to mount up, the bikraj commented, “Impatient, is she?”
“Like a hound after a wolf,” Najud said.
“Good. It takes a pack of hounds to bring down a wolf, and that’s what we need.” He glanced upward at the snow drifting down. “And luck with the weather, or the scent will be buried.”
He kicked his horse and led his pack-string along behind him into place.
Najud grunted and changed his mind about mounting. He pulled his knife from his belt and walked to the nearest tussock of grass, sticking out of its new bedding of snow, and started cutting.
It was only an hour later that Penrys returned, arriving without warning and landing in front of the expedition.
Najud raised an eyebrow at her and got a reluctant explanation.
*Sorry. I had to work off some frustration.*
*I understand, Pen-sha.*
He could feel her relief at the dissipation of the quarrel.
“Could you make out the trail?” he asked.
“It still shows, but I had to set down a couple of times to be sure it was really there, underneath the snow.”
