by Myers, Karen
CHAPTER 11
Rather than go up one side of the unloaded wagon column and back again, Penrys decided to drive straight to the head of the line and start a hundred yards in front. From there she could go back along one side of the spine, probing the goods on the ground in their two parallel lines.
It was tricky—she had to do the supplies a hundred yards before she got to them, and the wagons on either side as she passed, and it was hard to remember which of the piles of supplies she had already examined.
The first explosion, however, woke her right up, her heart pumping in recollection of the night before.
Her expectation had been that the goods were most at risk, like the mirror, but it was a wagon which blew apart initially. She stopped to let Chang’s outriders identify whose it had been and retreat from the dangerous neighborhood before she went forward. And she was glad she’d waited, because the wagon beside it, already riddled with wood fragments from the first one, went up next.
The driver focused on reassuring their horse that these loud noises were nothing to be alarmed about, and Penrys straightened up and concentrated.
They managed a few more yards before the first supply load boomed into the air, well ahead of them.
Their progress down the line was slow and tedious, and the damage in their wake was substantial—four wagons, and five loads. It was too dark to tell just what could be salvaged from the sabotage. Well, at least it was balanced. Would have been smarter to target more wagons, force them to leave supplies behind. Guess they didn’t think the wagons and supplies would be separated.
What if that Rasesni spy had triggered all of this instead of just fleeing? Why didn’t he? The only reason not to would be to trigger them later, when the surprise had more value.
Maybe last night was lucky, despite the cost. If they’d had to face all of this, unwarned…
She thought of the deaths that might have resulted, as they reached the end of the wagon column, and was more reconciled to the disaster of the previous night.
One of Chang’s outriders rode up to her as she clambered down to the ground. “He wants to see you.”
She stifled a yawn unsuccessfully. “Doesn’t he ever sleep?”
A fleeting grin flashed over his face. “Not tonight. We’ll be off tomorrow, mid-morning, after we re-load all the supplies. Those pack mules will earn their keep, for the leftovers.”
Penrys limped into the command tent, silently cursing new boots and long days. Her stomach rumbled at the smell of roasted beef, and her head turned involuntarily to a table along the tent wall, covered haphazardly with wooden platters and used metal dishes.
Chang, behind his table, noted her entrance and waved her over to the food. She seized one used dish, emptied its scraps onto another one, and carved fresh bits of beef onto it, with some slices off the loaf to eat them with. She dumped the contents of one stoneware mug into another, and looked for pitchers. The empty ones smelled of stale beer as she passed them by, but the water pitchers were hardly touched, so she filled the mug, drained it on the spot, and filled it again.
She found an vacant seat, placed the mug carefully on the ground beneath it, and balanced the plate awkwardly on her lap, the arm in its sling not much use in keeping it steady.
Chang left her alone for several minutes to let her wolf down the food. Her shoulder still ached from her tumble the night before, but her appetite had returned. As she slowed down, she glanced up tardily to find his eyes on her.
She used the last bit of bread to wipe the grease off her lips, and swallowed.
“Sorry there was so much damage, Commander-chi,” she said. “I still have to deal with that one thing, that charm. Could it wait until daylight?”
He held up a hand to stop her and turned to the man who had been sharing the thin end of his table, a discarded plate shoved away from the sheets of paper in front of him. She’d seen his face repeatedly since last night—dark and broad, middle-aged, and sparsely bearded.
“This is Tun Jeju, my Notju, Intelligence Master,” Chang told her. “He’s been running the interrogations—everyone whose property was compromised.”
She tipped her head to him. “You must have been busy today.”
He smiled slightly. “We’ve discovered some very interesting things while you’ve been turning the camp upside down.”
She rolled her eyes and tried not to belch while he continued.
“About half of the losses are not accounted for by the owners of the property or the drivers of the wagons. That is… not unexpected, if these are small devices, easy to hide.”
He paused. “But there’s a common thread running through several of the others. The first one you triggered, the soldier with the juk, the charm?”
She nodded.
“Well, two of the men in the destroyed tent also had similar charms they left there. And the list of items for two of the others, the laundry supplies and one of the food dumps, included charms, stashed there by the workers.”
“That’s awfully suggestive,” Penrys said.
He lifted a finger. “There’s more. We spoke at length to the rest of the herdsmen, as well as the lakju, the Horsemaster. When your man fled last night, all he had was what was on him. When we went through the possessions he left behind, we found more of those charms.”
“But I examined everything he abandoned first, before I did the main camp! Did I miss those?”
Chang interjected. “When we’re done here tonight, I want you to go look again. We’ve pulled them all out together and taken them a safe distance away.”
“But…” She stopped and stared off into space as something occurred to her. “Maybe I didn’t miss them. Maybe they aren’t… prepared yet.”
She focused on Tun Jeju. “I need to see everything he had, every scrap. He may have had tools and other things.”
“That will be your job in the morning, after you confirm they’re not dangerous,” Chang said. “We had your trooper who carried the charm in his pocket walk it back to the same place, separate from the others, so everything suspicious is in one general location. It’s under guard for the night.
“It’ll take most of the morning to set things back in order and prepare to move forward. I want you to take that time to tell me what you can find out.”
“All right,” she said, slowly. “What did that trooper tell you? Was the Rasesni giving those charms to others?”
Tun Jeju said, “Selling them when he could, giving them away when he couldn’t. We don’t know how many.” He looked at her. “The owners said he told them they had to wear it on their person for the charm to work, day and night.”
Penrys felt the blood drain from her face. “So he sold them death.”
She turned to Chang. “I believe we were wrong to think of this as a trap for Zandaril—that was accidental. This was a long, slow, thorough seeding of destruction throughout the expedition, waiting for an outside trigger, by the saboteur himself, I should think.”
“Yes, we’ve come to that conclusion ourselves,” Chang said. “The cost has been high—three percent of my men, the loss of some of our supplies and transport—but much less than it might have been, and not when the enemy planned it.”
“Why didn’t he trigger it all when he fled?” she asked.
“I’m sure he thought he could return and do it later. There was no reason to think we’d find any of his work, and now it’s too late for him.”
“If we’d known what it was, exactly, we could have saved some of the destruction today,” she said.
“Better to be sure, and no more men lost,” Chang replied. “And morale is back where it should be, now that the men have seen the threat removed for themselves.”
She could feel his confidence. A military leader’s answer—men first, logistics second. Merchants figured costs and benefits differently. And wizards? They interchanged knowledge and power so frequently they forgot which was which. Men hardly counted at all.
CHAPT
ER 12
“We’re moving out.”
Hing Ganau’s head popped into the back of Zandaril’s wagon and vanished before a startled Penrys could look up.
“I’m not ready yet,” she muttered, and Zandaril, lying flat on a pallet surrounded by boxes and sacks grinned at her.
“Maybe you better tell Chang to wait for you,” he said.
She glared at him and did a quick look around to see if everything was tied in place, nothing in danger of tumbling down onto Zandaril.
“Wish I could have taken that one specimen with me,” she told him, “but it was just too dangerous.” She’d probed the device inside the charm as slowly and carefully as she could to identify its structure, but it had exploded almost immediately, like all the others.
The rest of the Rasesni’s possessions were stored in four large packs, stashed at the back entrance of the wagon where they would be accessible as they traveled. The charm blanks were harmless, and contained no power sources.
“Weren’t they surprised when a herdsman turned up with three extra horses and their packs?” Zandaril wondered.
“Apparently some of them do that work year-long and bring all their possessions. It wasn’t that unusual,” Penrys said. “We’re lucky we caught him on duty and he had to leave it all behind.”
“What happened to the horses?”
She was amused by the greed in his eyes. The Zannib, the horse-hungry.
“Mine,” she said, “by right of, um, conquest.”
She laughed at his disappointment. “I might be persuaded to share them with you. The three he left are running with yours for now. Alas, he took his saddle with him.”
A knock from the front bench through the opening was a warning they were about to set off.
Zandaril called out, “We’re ready.”
His words were followed by an unanticipated lurch that jerked the standing Penrys off balance. She swore when her left shoulder hit a box, and groped with her good hand for one of the more stable bean sacks. Carefully she lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the wagon bed between the foot of Zandaril’s pallet and the back of the wagon.
“Today we’re going to learn about devices,” she told Zandaril, in her most pedantic tones. “We’re going to go through all his stuff, however long it takes us, and see what we can discover.”
Zandaril thought the bouncing of the wagon had to be worse than riding a horse, but he was under strict orders to stay flat all day. He’d suborned Penrys into helping him get propped up with a sack as a backrest, on the pretext that he couldn’t watch what she was doing otherwise.
She lost no time in claiming the space where his feet had been. The first pack had yielded clothing in the Kigali style and personal gear. Neither of them could find anything notable in that, but buried in one of the shirts were three small books. One was in Ellechen-guma, and she recognized it.
“I’ve read this already. The Principles of the Physical. It’s good, well beyond the basics.” She handed it back to him. “D’ya know it?”
“I’ve heard of it,” he said, dryly. And quite a denunciation went with the hearing, too.
She glanced at him as if she’d heard the thought. “Read Ellechen-guma, do you?”
“Well enough. Most of the great books have not been translated, so if you want to study them…”
“It’s the standard edition,” she said. “Could have come right off the shelves at the Collegium.”
She hefted the next tome—paper bound between carved wood, like the first one, but when she held it up to her nose, the smell was different. The ink, maybe. “D’ya know the language of this one?”
“That’s Rasesni. Can’t you read it?”
“Not any more—my source is gone. That’s a weakness of borrowed knowledge. Make it your own or lose it.” She shook her head. “How about you? Can you read it?”
He shook his head. “I can speak it a bit, but there’s little need for us to learn the writing, beyond the letters. Don’t see many books, don’t know if anyone has.”
“This one, too?” she said, holding up the third book.
“Same.”
“Well, we can puzzle through them together as best we can. There are lots of illustrations.”
She sat back on her heels, balancing as the wagon swayed. “Somehow I think we’ll have some Rasesni in range again before we’re done, and then we’ll see what we can find out.”
She flipped to the front. “Looks like there’s a name written inside the cover, on the first page.”
She showed Zandaril, and he puzzled out the letters. “Veneshjug, I think. That’s a Rasesni name,” Zandaril said. “Do you suppose it’s his?”
He looked at the titles again. “Seem that ‘Venesh’ word is in both of them.”
Penrys laid the two books aside.
“Let’s see what else we’ve got.” She waved her hand at the other three packs. “I just skimmed through them in a hurry before breakfast, to get a quick idea of what there was.”
She reached into the second pack and pulled out a soft leather drawstring pouch, the size of a human head. “Ah, here it is. There’s another one around somewhere.” She loosened the drawstring and spilled some of the contents onto the unoccupied foot of Zandaril’s pallet. Several handfuls of pea-sized faceted stones gleamed dully in the daylight filtering through the white canvas top of the wagon.
He leaned forward to look. The colors were various and muted, and they looked nothing like valuable gems. If he’d seen them on a beach at Shimiz, he would have ignored them. But the hand of man was evident in the care with which they had been cut.
When he sat back and looked up at Penrys, he found her watching him quizzically.
“D’ya know what these are?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Power-stones.”
He could feel his nose wrinkle at the name. So these were hadab makhtab. Such small things.
There was no way to avoid unhallowed knowledge. Not if the enemy was using it. He made himself ask. “How do they work?”
“What do you know about raunarys, thing-skills?”
“Not much. We don’t test for it, and if a wizard has it, he doesn’t speak of it.” And I don’t want to know if I have it. The very idea made him feel dirty.
“Hmm.” She thought for a moment, eying him and his obvious discomfort.
“Here’s what we’ll do. You don’t have to try anything—you can watch through me instead. You already know I’m… hopelessly contaminated, but there’s no need for you to end up that way.” She offered him a half-smile.
“I can do that,” he said. He braced himself for the experience.
She slipped into the mode of teacher to student, familiar to him since his apprentice years. “The commonest form of raunarys is simple movement.” Off the floor of the wagon she picked a small clod of dirt, the size of a thumbnail, and laid it down near the stones, less than a yard from where she knelt.
“Watch, now.” He peered through her mind, as he’d done when she’d showed him how she found languages. She reached out to the little clod and wrapped her focus around it. Then, with significant effort, she picked it up, without touching it with her hands, and moved it a few inches to the right, setting it down gently again. He could feel that it was a strain, and he could perceive some of the work it took for her to do it smoothly.
“You see? It’s not easy. The heavier the object, or the further away, the more difficult it is to do, and the sooner you get tired.”
“But what’s it good for?” he asked, surprised to see so much forbidden effort devoted to such paltry results.
“With the unaided mind, not much. Perhaps you could turn a key in a lock.” She watched his face. “Or stop a heart.”
He felt his skin chill.
She looked away and cleared her throat.
“The power-stones are amplifiers. There are two parts to an amplifier. One is to channel power to the will of the wizard. The other is the powe
r-source itself, usually another stone.”
She plucked a stone from the pile. “An unpowered stone provides more control, but requires just as much power as using no stone at all. Like this.”
He watched through her again as she picked up the clod and moved it. It seemed to take the same effort, but the smoothness came more easily.
“Not much good by itself. But if you add a powered stone…”
She took a second stone in her hand and concentrated on it for a moment. She didn’t invite him to watch from the inside, and he left her in privacy to do it.
“Now.” She held the two stones together and he saw the clod lift easily, sail once around his head, and return to its starting point.
His eyes widened. “How did you do that?”
She repeated the maneuver with him monitoring. The second stone glowed in her mind, nothing like its visible appearance, and she drew upon it for movement. The glow visibly diminished as he watched. When she opened her hand, he could see no difference in the stones with his eyes, nor could he tell which was powered, and which not.
He held out his hand, and she dropped one of the stones into it. “Which one is it?” she asked.
He closed his fist against the little prickle of the pointed facets. He couldn’t tell how to detect it.
He shook his head and offered it to her again on his palm. “It’s not in me, I think.” He could hear the relief in his own voice.
“Why is it forbidden to a Zan, if you can say?”
“Unclean, unnatural.” He looked at her apologetically. “Not you, of course, bikrajti.”
“Of course,” she agreed, dryly. “Dirty, perverted, action at a distance…”
He lowered his eyes.
“What is a thrown spear but action at a distance?” she said. “I can see the emotion in a man’s mind without seeing his face, but any man can see emotion in the face of another. Are these truly different in kind? We call one of them magic, but not the other.”
“I can hear a man’s language in his mind, but any man can hear it in his voice. These things are all similar.” She waved her hand in an arc. “Wizards are at one place on the map, but everyone is on the map somewhere.”
