Chained Adept

by Myers, Karen

  “It’s true that we’re not famed for our wizards, unlike sarq-Zannib or even the far Collegium, but every place has a few, even up in the mountains, and the advanced ones come to Dzongphan in Nagthari where some of the temples offer them special knowledge and training.”

  Penrys glanced at Zandaril who looked fascinated. Not famed? More like well-hidden.

  “So, two years ago it was, and rather more, a… person appeared in Neshred-pur, far up west on the northern coast. He had new teachings, he said, and the local wizards listened to him and were impressed. He struck the ground, and water came out. He offered to teach them how to do that.”

  Penrys thought of the exhausted wizards pulling the moisture from the air up on the Horn.

  “He was not Rasesni, himself. No one knew what he was. He seemed to speak every language, even the hill dialects.”

  Vladzan added, “He had a chain, snug around his neck. No one thought anything of it, at first, but then it was noticed that he never took it off.” His eyes slid to Penrys’s throat, and away.

  “We think he came alone,” Zongchas said, “but others joined him. The local people, those for whom something in their lives was failing, they came first. He had food for them, clothing, money for their debts. A purpose for their lives.

  “You understand, we have many temples in Rasesdad, many gods. It seemed harmless enough and, besides, our wizards were keeping an eye on it, and they are educated people and speak to each other.”

  Zandaril asked, “What was his name?”

  Vladzan said, “He called himself the ‘Voice of God.’ We don’t know his real name. We’ve just been calling him ‘Surdo,’ as he named himself.”

  “He traveled from village to village,” Zongchas said, “And everywhere he went, a few people left everything behind and came with him. Several wizards reported their misgivings, as well as their news about new teachings. But it takes a while for word to travel, and by the time a couple of the temples in Dzongphan sent investigators, the wizards he met stopped complaining or admiring, and began to disappear.

  “He suborned some of the hill-tribes with promises of wealth, to keep order among his followers, and together they began to take what they wanted from each village, and there were reports of murders. The locals named them ‘Khrebesni,’ thieves.

  “Behind him was ruin—crops destroyed, villages laid waste, and every wizard gone. On the first summer, he swept into the foothills of Mratsanag, and then to the upper valleys, and the destruction followed him. He crossed to the high southern valleys for the winter, and then took to the hills again this last summer, and never left them, until he brought his horde to Garshnag, the mountains to the north above Nagthari where many had sought refuge, creating a panic and sending them further, into Neshilik.

  “Our loyal hill-tribes fled before him. He is something out of legend to them, something about the end of this cycle of existence, and they will not stand against him. We’ve sent spies to track him, but none of the wizards who get close enough come back.”

  “None of them have escaped?” Penrys said.

  “You two seem to have been closer than anyone, after the first few villages.”

  Vladzan said, “We’ve had some luck with mages riding the minds of birds, but they have to get too close for safety, and when he notices the birds, we sometime lose the bird-rider, too.”

  “What does he want?” Zandaril said.

  Zongchas looked at Vladzan. “We don’t know,” Zongchas said. “He has sent us no demands. It may be that we can resettle the lands he has passed through, but we can’t just bow before him as he passes. Our holy places lie undefended, just waiting for his attention to turn to them. And what is to keep him from returning?

  “Our refugees have turned to Neshilik, those that can, while the government and the high priests remain in Dzongphan, as long as possible.”

  He paused. “Tlobsung is explaining this to your Commander Chang. We can’t get close enough to fight. The soldiers in the front lines just… die. We’ve tried ambushes without men, with devices…”

  Zandaril grimaced, but Zongchas didn’t seem to notice.

  “And those fail, too.”

  He spread his hands eloquently.

  Is this true? My sense of him is that it’s true, at least on the surface. Or is it just a way to encourage the Kigaliwen to enter the fight? Spend their blood instead? Or just distract them from the occupation of Neshilik?

  Penrys looked at Zandaril, then spoke. “Can we work together, all of us wizards? Put aside the hard feelings between the two quarreling neighbors? Because this is a wizards’ problem—if we can’t solve it, nothing else will matter.”

  “We must,” Zongchas said, and Vladzan nodded.

  “All right, then.” Penrys leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. I’ll take them at their word - what else can I do? “How can we help?”

  CHAPTER 38

  Half an hour into the mage council meeting, Penrys was already sick of it.

  The room was handsome, if chilly—a locked interior room, windowless and quiet as a cave when she entered it with Zandaril and Zongchas, their footsteps muffled by the hangings suspended along each wall. She didn’t know the events portrayed in their faded colors, but the tall and icy mountains featured prominently left her in no doubt that these were Rasesni-brought, not part of whatever furnishings had already been in place when they arrived.

  She wished for that vanished silence now, as the disputes continued around the scarred table. Only four of the five council members were present, but they had no compunction about loud argument. Their minds may have been shielded, but not their voices. She had shielded herself, and covered Zandaril, too.

  The pompous Dhumkedbhod leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, his expression unchanged—nose wrinkled as if combating a foul odor and the rest in an implacable scowl.

  He waved one fleshy arm at Zongchas. “You can blather all you want about allies, but you have yet to convince me why we should believe them.”

  The conversation from the start had remained in Rasesni, and after a couple of protests from Zongchas to switch to Kigali-yat, Penrys had just kept a link open to Zandaril and provided a silent running translation. He took advantage of it to provide his own commentary in return.

  *I don’t know what this Dhumkedo god has to say about foreigners, but he certainly says it loudly.*

  Penrys mentally shushed him. *He can maybe hear you.*

  Zandaril snorted out loud. *So you keep saying. Much I care. Strangers get the courtesy they merit.*

  Penrys didn’t detect any reaction from Dhumkedbhod to Zandaril’s scorn, but there was no way to be sure if he couldn’t overhear it, or if he was just canny, a survivor of decades of infighting.

  Nyagchos, whose religious objections seemed to be more moderate, tilted his gray head and pursed his lips. “If they won’t trust us enough to show us proof, why should we trust them?”

  There were two sticking points. They flatly disbelieved her account of ignorance, that the last three years were all she could remember, and seemed almost insulted at the story. Among themselves they debated how she could prove it, even if she were willing to let them in and see for themselves. “Nothing easier than to put a barrier in place,” Dhumkedbhod had said, “And how would we know the difference?”

  The second objection had more possibility of being addressed. After Zandaril had described, in Kigali-yat, their encounter with the Voice, Nyagchos had called for seeing exactly what that had been like, in his mind and Penrys’s, and Dhumkedbhod pointed out the same difficulty of verification. This time, Vladzan had cut in unexpectedly. “If she shows us people we recognize, it would be easier to believe, yes?”

  Penrys was not entirely in favor of this. Aside from the danger of granting access, she’d been successful so far in not describing exactly how they’d escaped. If council got its way, they would have to know about her wings, and she’d wanted to keep that as a surprise, just in case.<
br />
  She sighed. That just might not be possible.

  Holding up her hand, she distracted them from Zongchas’s attempts to make progress. “I will show you. I will share it with all of you, Zandaril, too, so that you can feel his testament to the accuracy of it.”

  Zandaril and Dhumkedbhod broke in at the same time. In wirqiqa-Zannib, Zandaril said, “You must not let them in.”

  Penrys patted the air to urge him to calm, while Dhumkedbhod objected, strongly, “I will not do this, and you would be fools it you did. She’s just like him—look at the chain. She’ll just show you whatever she wants you to see. Dhumkedo forbids it.”

  Everyone turned to listen to him as he intoned, “Will you be taken in by another chained monster?”

  Zongchas shared a look with Vladzan and Nyagchos, then turned to Penrys. “We will do this.”

  Penrys straightened in her chair. “This far and no further,” she warned. “I will protect myself.”

  She began with her memory of their capture by the hill tribesmen, the mental voice that had detected and then captured them until they were securely bound. Her audience had to lower their own shields to do this, so she tried to monitor their reactions and their intents while keeping a light touch on Zandaril, too. It was a complicated bit of juggling.

  “Show me that again,” Zongchas said. “That tribal camp.”

  She listened to their discussion about the weaponry and clothing of their captors and the camp at the base of the horn.

  She wanted to shortcut the tedious climb up the trail at the Horn, but they refused. They paused her again to examine her view of the horde, discussing which tribes seemed to be represented. An undercurrent of dismay began to run through her Rasesni audience. The more they believed the truth of what they saw, the worse it grew.

  She muttered, “Captives,” out loud, to warn them, and took them through the fettered wizards in rags, pulling water from the air.

  “But that’s Igzhun,” Vladzan said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “And Drannyal, and maybe Shrigirnang, too.” Nyagchos’s voice was no longer skeptical, nor his mind, either. “I thought they were dead.”

  When she finally showed them their enemy, and his chain, she let them feel the throb of her own chain in response. “My chain recognized his,” she told them.

  Reluctantly, she showed them the end—how they ran off the cliff and fell through the air, with Zandaril’s weight dangling from her bound hands, and even the two arrows that hit her, before she cut them off and shoved them out, re-erecting her shields.

  She tried to suppress the emotional resonance of the event, to control her breathing and heartbeat, but she knew she had failed when she felt the echo of concerned sympathy from Zandaril.

  The council members who had come along with her were blessedly silent for a moment, until Dhumkedbhod’s strident voice broke in. “Well? Was it worth it?”

  CHAPTER 39

  The entire community gathered for their evening meal in the great hall on the first floor. Penrys and Zandaril joined Zongchas and Vladzan at the head table, and Penrys was amused when she noticed the covert glances their presence brought from the rest of the diners.

  As in the Collegium, light was provided by devices mounted at head height along the walls, where torches might be expected. Penrys was itching to examine one up close, since they didn’t feel as though they operated on the same principles as the kind she was familiar with. When one dimmed, she noticed a young wizard who rose from his seat to tend to it, taking it down from the wall, then rehanging it again once it had brightened. Charging its power-stone? The task of apprentices, to teach them technique?

  She tried to get a sense for the mood in the room, both apprehensive and hostile. The students all wore armbands in several colors. Rank, maybe? Student colors were used in the Collegium.

  Many of the people without sashes wore similar clothing, male and female. Priests. I’ve seen those garments in illustrations about Rasesdad. There were three whose clothing reminded her of Pyalshrog, the hill-tribe leader from yesterday’s parley, all skins and sashes.

  Once again there was no pretense of speaking at the table in Kigali-yat for Zandaril’s benefit. She translated for him, but she could feel his frustration.

  “Tonight,” she said to him, as they waited for the meal to end. “You will learn the sharing of language tonight.”

  “Too bad,” he murmured, for her ear alone. “I had other plans.”

  “I have an idea about that,” she answered. “Tonight you will start to learn Rasesni, from me, and I promise you will be happy about it.”

  He raised an eyebrow, but she refused to elaborate.

  Zongchas rose, and everyone in the hall quieted as they saw him.

  He glanced throughout the space, catching eyes in every corner, until he had the attention of all.

  “Today we have welcomed two wizards from the Kigaliwen, who are not Kigaliwen themselves. They have seen our enemy, recently. He is not far away.”

  At that there was a rising hubbub throughout the hall, and he waited for it to subside.

  “We have a plan to help us, all of us, defeat him. We begin tomorrow.”

  He raised his hand to request silence after the resulting outburst, and beckoned to his guests.

  Penrys rose and walked to stand next to him, where she would be clearly visible, and Zandaril joined her.

  She pitched her voice to carry throughout the hall, and spoke in Rasesni, translating for Zandaril via mind-speech. “My name is Penrys, and this is my colleague, Zandaril. As you can see from his face and his robes, he is from sarq-Zannib.”

  She paused. “I am not.” She pulled at the collar of her shirt until it was spread wide and the thick chain around her neck was clearly visible.

  Not entirely to her surprise, people actually stood up from their seats to get a better look, and conversation broke out everywhere.

  Zongchas leaned down and pounded the table with the butt of his knife. “Silence!” It took a few moments before she could speak again and expect to be heard.

  “I do not know your enemy,” she said, “but it may be that I share in some of his abilities. I hope so, for you’re going to learn how to fight me and we’ll see if a motivated and organized group of wizards can defeat him and take their revenge.”

  She raised her voice as she spoke to penetrate the rising response, until the final words came out in a shout, and it was impossible to say more.

  Penrys noticed that several of the older wizards were close-mouthed and unresponsive, and nodded to herself. Skeptics weren’t a bad thing—they gave her something to concentrate on. The young ones were easy. If she could convince the others, then maybe they all had a chance.

  A sudden assault against her shield got her attention. One of the people in front of her wanted her dead, now. He was young, about Zandaril’s age, and weaker than she was. She fended him off easily, but others joined him.

  The crowd was growing aware of the attack. Some watched in silence, monitoring its progress, and many actively cheered it on.

  The head table beside her remained neutral. Penrys heard Zongchas mutter, “We should stop this,” but someone else, Nyagchos she thought, responded calmly, “Let’s see what happens.”

  With a wry smile, she thought, I should have expected this. So let’s give them a show, since they insist.

  Despite the situation, she enjoyed using her strength without worrying about who saw her.

  She pushed back against her attackers, evicted them casually, and waited for the cheers of their partisans to falter before taunting, “Don’t you want to learn how to do that right? If you can’t beat me, how will you beat the Voice?”

  She walked off to the side of the head table so that she could face it, too, and include it in her speech. They were none of them her friends here, except Zandaril, but they all needed to work together, and if she couldn’t make them accept her, there was no hope for them.

  “Better learn how to w
ork together instead of dying alone.”

  She could feel their outrage. Some cried out the names of people taken by the Voice, friends or relatives she presumed.

  She let them, for a few moments. “Don’t you want them back?” She gestured to indicate Zandaril, who remained standing at his place. “We saw many of them alive.”

  That silenced them all. Penrys looked at the dirty dishes along the table, the servants frozen against the walls.

  “Let’s do this now, since that’s what you want. Who’s the strongest among you?”

  From different points in the hall three people stood up and glanced challengingly at each other, while anyone else still standing resumed their seat, barring Zandaril. Clearly there’s some disagreement among them about who is best.

  With an inner smile, she waved the implicit dispute aside. “Altogether, then. Try me.”

  There was little attempt at cooperation and they made no impression upon her shields. She overpowered each of them, and the audience monitoring had no trouble following the details.

  She nodded at them, then glanced at the entire room. “Let me know when you want to learn how to do it better.”

  Turning, she walked out and felt Zandaril follow her. The noisy buzz rising behind them told her all she needed to know.

  CHAPTER 40

  “So what’s all this about my learning Rasesni?” Zandaril asked.

  Penrys waved him aside with a remote look. “Shhh. That’s for later.”

  She cocked her head at the closed outer door to her room on the third floor. The door between them, in adjacent student rooms, stood open, and Zandaril was seated in the one chair in her own room, while she perched cross-legged on the narrow bed. They seemed to be in an unoccupied corner of the half-empty building. “I’m waiting for someone to come. If I did that right, that’s what they’ll do.”