by Karen Myers
Penrys appreciated the subtle sarcasm she heard in his voice as he referred to the Rasesni as “neighbors” when they were in the midst of an invasion at time. He’d been there—he knew what he was talking about.
“I understand that a similar wizard was recently encountered in western sarq-Zannib, though I don’t yet know the details.”
He turned his eyes to Najud and Penrys, but it was Munraz who stiffened under his gaze, and that clearly puzzled him. “I look forward to hearing the whole story. I was convinced by what I saw in Neshilik, and there have been changes in how Imperial Security handles this new information.”
Penrys blinked. Just how high up is he in this organization? The title notju, Intelligence Master, doesn’t really convey any sense of rank.
“We haven’t yet taken any steps with the ordinary untrained wizards we now believe live among us, as they do with all our neighbor nations. We plan to do so, but we have a more urgent concern. The wizards with chains.”
All eyes turned to Penrys’s exposed throat with the gold-brassy metallic chain that circled it closely. She felt her furry ears move back along her scalp, hidden by her hair, and her skin prickled. The Ndane woman gave her a cold stare.
Tun Jeju cleared his throat. “You know what we Kigaliwen are—we are organized.”
This drew a few chuckles which eased the tension.
“We sent out a call to our neighbors asking for reports of people bearing chains like hers.” He nodded at Penrys. “We also asked about people who had gone missing and had never been found—I’ll explain that soon. And, of course, we searched our own nation the same way.”
“Most of you here conveyed reports from your countries. And also—which we didn’t expect—some of you provided evidence.”
That brought Penrys upright in her seat, all concern about her uniqueness in this group put aside. They found more? Alive or not?
She glanced at Vylkar, and he nodded. He found others?
“The purpose of the next few weeks is to discover everything we can about these chained wizards, to evaluate the threat, and to determine what can and should be done about it. In all of our nations.”
Penrys swallowed. And here am I, in the center of a trap if they don’t decide the right way.
Munraz had no difficulty following the Kigali yat in the city, much less in this smaller space where he could follow one conversation at a time. Penrys had been right—it got easier with practice once you’d figured out how to tap it at all. He was more worried about the writing—there weren’t any useful documents to use. Maybe his jarghal would come up with some, once they settled somewhere.
He’d had a few days to get used to the exotic appearance of the Kigaliwen in Tengwa Tep and the smaller villages they’d passed through after they crossed the border. He thought he’d started to see local differences in the city folk—short, broad-faced people and thin, elegant ones, for starters. I bet they’re from different parts of Kigali, originally.
There were more Kigaliwen behind this Tun Jeju, quiet and attentive, like people who wanted to see but not be seen, and he remembered just where he was, in the building that housed Imperial Security.
It made him want to wrap armor around himself, somehow.
When he glanced around the tables, he wondered if there were others who felt the same way. The dark Ndant leader looked like not much would intimidate her, small though she was, but her young female attendant didn’t seem very happy to be there.
The two Rasesni seemed pleased with their company and stared curiously at everyone. The Ellech reminded him a little bit of Penrys with their “I’m just watching, it’s not my business” air of amused detachment. Penrys would typically dive in later after that initial hesitation—he wondered if these were the same. He’d heard of Vylkar, the man who’d found her when she appeared as a chained wizard.
No one had found the qahulajti he’d killed, and that was probably why she went wrong. Under the table, his right hand clenched and he forced it open again.
Why had his two masters been summoned, and he with them like a spare pack of grain?
“She’s one of us, I tell you.”
The groom who’d ducked out of the stable and slipped away from the compound kept his voice low despite his insistence. “She didn’t cover the chain at all—left it on display as if she were proud of it.”
His fingers crept to the the high neck of his tunic, a style which had been revived in the last couple of years in the working-class neighborhoods, not least because of the influx of new migrants to the city who adopted it. The collar hid many things, in particular the chain that marked the young man as someone of interest to Imperial Security, anywhere in Kigali.
Rin Tsugo listened to the report of his agent in an alley around the corner from the compound’s entrance and considered what it might mean. When Jing Tajip had alerted him by mind-speech, it had pulled him away from his work in Chankau Tep, the industrial district—he’d wanted to see Jing Tajip in person and evaluate the truth of the matter.
“A brown-robe runner brought her in?” he asked. He wanted to get closer to Jing Tajip to keep the conversation quieter, but the chains around their necks prevented them from getting within arm’s reach without pain.
“With a Zannib husband and some younger Zannib man, and those pack-strings they use for their migrations. Eighteen horses!”
“But she’s not a Zannib?” Rin Tsugo wanted to be sure.
“No, wo-chi. Reminds me of Dar Datsu. Straight brown hair, round eyes, not very tall.”
Rin Tsugo winced at the reminder of the latest member of his band, his gewengep, to have been captured by the City Guard. “And the runner took her to Imperial Security?”
Jing Tajip looked around nervously at the very mention of the name. “That’s what they were talking about when they left. I think they came because they were sent for.”
He looked uneasily at Rin Tsugo. “I couldn’t just follow them—I’d have been noticed.”
Rin Tsugo waved the concern away and thought. The woman hadn’t been arrested, at least not yet—she’d gone willingly, with some of her family. What was that about? Was she working for them? Why would the Zannib bring her?
There were people in their gewengep who looked like the Zannib, though everything else about them was Kigali. They weren’t real Zannib. More than half of the brotherhood had the features of other nations, but otherwise they were all the same—chained, out of place, shorn of memories more than three years old, and on the run from Imperial Security. Only the ones that looked like Kigaliwen could venture out for paid work—all the rest earned their keep behind the walls of the battered compound they’d taken for their own in Chankau Tep. Unless Rin Tsugo sent them out for special tasks under the cover of night.
New members had been arriving weekly from upriver, ever since the decrees that began six months ago, making the villagers and farmers suspicious of the rootless laborers in their midst, especially the ones that looked like foreign crossbreeds. As long as no village talked about it to another, they’d paid little attention to the oddness of the one person without family who kept himself in the background and took jobs of low status to earn a living.
But once a decree came down from Imperial Security, looking for news of missing people or strangers with neck chains, all hands had turned against them. Many were killed, and their bodies presented to the yankat, the headman of the village, to satisfy the Imperial Security request. The rest had slipped away, blurring the attention of the villagers if they could. Rin Tsugo didn’t know how many had made it to Yenit Ping, drawn by obscure news of refuge here, and how many were simply lost, but they were still arriving, some on foot, and some by river, down the Junkawa.
And the gewengep was responsible for all its members, and he was elected to lead it.
Rin Tsugo looked piercingly at the younger Jing Tajip. “You didn’t try to bespeak her?”
“Merciful heavens, no! She was clearly a foreigner, in her Zannib robes.
She might have exposed me on the spot.”
“I want to see what’s in her packs.”
Jing Tajip backed away. “Can’t be done. They’re under the bond, and sealed.”
“Not even at night?”
“They’re guarded, and no groom has any excuse to look in on them. The guards wouldn’t let me past, and I’d certainly lose my position.”
“I won’t ask you to do it now,” Rin Tsugo said, “but the time may come when the brotherhood requires it.” He held Jing Tajip’s eyes until the young man nodded reluctantly.
“Good. Meanwhile, I’ll put a watch around the Imperial Security building. She’ll have to come out sometime, and then we’ll follow her.”
“What about Dar Datsu?” Jing Tajip asked.
“We don’t know if he’s in their hands or if the City Guard still has him. We’ll keep an eye out for him, too.” But we’re not likely to see him alive again, and Jing Tajip should know that by now.
CHAPTER 5
Vylkar of Ellech was the first to report to the groups around their tables. He glanced at Penrys in apology, and began to speak.
“I encountered my first chained wizard three and a half years ago.” He gestured at Penrys, so that there would be no confusion.
“It was winter then, in the north, and I was at my hunting lodge with my family in the uplands of Asuthgrata, when I heard a loud noise, here.” He tapped his forehead. “I reached for the source, and brought men with me to look for it. And we found her, naked except for her chain, and speechless.”
Penrys clenched her teeth and looked down. This was her earliest memory, the cold, wet snow on her bare skin and the torches of the riders flickering in the trees.
“By the time we got her home and warmed up, she had our language. When I probed her to see where she might have come from, she raised a shield, and so I knew she was a wizard, as I am.”
He pursed his lips, half-hidden in his gray-shot tidy scholar’s beard, as if to consider how to abbreviate the remainder. “I took her with us back to the Collegium of Wizards in Tavnastok, and there she baffled us all. Old Aergon resurrected an antique title—Adept, hakkengenni in Ellechen guma—and she spent three years with us, mostly in the library and working on devices, ruanarys, there being little to teach her in beolrys, the mental magic.
“Six months ago she vanished, but Tun Jeju has told you something of what followed and I’ll let others carry that story. I received Penrys’s own report about it just days before I got the Kigali request for information about missing people and chained wizards.”
Vylkar cleared his throat. “At the Collegium, we thought Penrys was a unique mystery, but when we looked, thus prompted, we found we were wrong.”
He reached into a pack, pulled out a chain identical to Penrys’s, and tossed it onto his table where it clattered. “This was discovered on the remains of an unclothed man found inside a crypt in a country town, when they opened it for a new internment. He was not one of the expected inhabitants of the tomb,” he commented dryly.
“The surprised funeral party called for help from the local magistrate, and it’s from him I got the chain and the story. The conclusion was that, however the man had entered the tomb, he’d been unable to leave and so he died there. There wasn’t much left, but the hair was black and curly, rather like that of a Zannib.”
Penrys swallowed. There were worse things than materializing naked in the snow.
“We do have people missing, and some of them are wizards. I’ve provided Tun Jeju with a list, but whether some of them are now wandering around some other country with a chain and no memory—which is what is being clearly implied—I have no way of knowing.”
He paused. “Perhaps they were simply murdered by unhappy spouses and cleverly disposed of.”
A nervous titter traveled around the tables.
“And so, I and my companions, Bildaer and Innurrys, came to learn more.”
Nodding to Tun Jeju, Vylkar leaned back in his seat, and Mpeowake of Ndant stood up. She smoothed the layers of blue and aqua silk that draped from her left shoulder down to the sash at her waist and thence to her ankles. A tight bodice and long narrow skirt enwrapped her body beneath the outer layer.
She was small and dark and delicately built, with long straight black hair just beginning to go gray. Her eyes pierced those of her audience as she looked around the tables.
“We wizards of Ndant are pledged to our goddess, Pume Chowe. It’s in her name that we work for our people. One who is born a wizard but will not take the oath is an abomination, a witch to be hunted and destroyed, before he can harm any of the innocent. I am the mbaewe, the leader of those who hunt, and these are my assistants.” She gestured at the man and woman on either side of her.
“We do have missing wizards—we are a populous nation—but we have discovered none of these chained wizards, living. However, in the sea cliffs to the north of Shokona Bay, we have a three-year-old mystery. A bird-nester, descending by rope from the top, followed a foul smell and found two dead bodies, a man and a woman. There was no clothing, and the boy believed that they’d fought, using rocks. The woman was dark-skinned like the Ndant, but her hair was short and curly. The man was pale, with hair like fire.” She pointed to redhaired Bildaer in Vylkar’s party.
“Both had chains. We buried them under rocks in the cave, and the cave was sealed. It’s high on the cliff and not easy of access. The chains are there—we chose not to meddle with them.”
She sat down gracefully and folded her hands.
Tun Jeju turned his head to the older of the two Rasesni, both of whom wore the robes of priests.
“I’m Chosmod, and this is Mrigasba. My superior Menchos, who had met with his counterpart in Neshilik”—he nodded at Tun Jeju—“thought it better to send mages rather than come himself. Most of us work in the temples and the schools, or out with the people, not in the security services, though some of us do both.” He gestured casually to include his companion and himself among the latter. “If nothing else, we have an easier time with Kigali yat.”
That drew appreciative smiles from all of Tun Jeju’s foreign visitors, and Penrys mentally kicked herself for not realizing that they were all wizards, every one of them—all shielded and buttoned down. She’d been so busy shielding herself against the overwhelming quantity of people in the city that she hadn’t looked for anything more intimate than surface emotions from the people here in the room. She glanced briefly at Munraz, glad that Najud and she had worked hard on improving his own shield. His eyes were wide in this company, even as his body shrank in on itself and tried to disappear.
Chosmod cocked his head in Penrys and Najud’s direction. “Tun Jeju has told you of our recent chained wizard, the one that was stopped in Neshilik, with their help.”
Penrys reluctantly turned to Najud and held out her hand. He pulled out the small suede pouch from the inner pocket of his tunic, the one she’d given him to hold, since there was no place for it with her formal Zannib robes, and handed it to her.
She placed it on the table in front of her where it drew all eyes, and Chosmod waited for her to untie it. Her hand reached in and settled on the small fragment of chain, just three links, and she pulled it out and laid it quietly on the table. “This is what is left of the Voice’s chain.”
She looked at Chosmod. “Were other pieces found, afterward? I never asked.”
“The area was searched and we turned up four individual links, but no partial links, no broken ones. And not enough to account for them all, though we’re not sure how many that should be.”
“Mine has thirteen links,” Penrys said in a controlled voice. “I’ve seen another, with fourteen. I never counted the Voice’s. The links themselves—all the ones I’ve seen—appear to be the same size.”
Unexpectedly, Vylkar spoke up, waving his hand at the loop of chain before him on the table. “This has fifteen. The man was large.”
Chosmod resumed his story. “After the threat of t
he Voice was eliminated, Menchos formalized the frantic information-gathering that we had been doing in Dzongphan. We consolidated the archives in the capital and pulled fresh information from the satellite temples.”
“And from the harbors,” Mrigasba interjected. “We heard many interesting stories there.”
Tun Jeju nodded. “As did we.”
“In our ports, as well,” Mpeowake contributed.
Chosmod picked up the thread again. “The sailors had tales to tell from other ports. Nothing very believable, nothing different from other tales of demons and monsters hiding as humans.”
Penrys tried not to wince at that.
“But the country folk had much to tell their priests, now that we were casting a wider net,” Chosmod said. “We tracked down every report, and several of them yielded results. We brought those with us.”
He glanced at Tun Jeju who said, “We’ll be looking at that shortly, all of us.”
“Alive?” Penrys asked Chosmod.
“No. None of them. And all recent—in the last three years.”
There was a pause, and Penrys intercepted a significant look from Tun Jeju. Must be my turn.
“You’ve heard the story of my being found in Ellech. A… miscalculation while working with devices brought me unexpectedly to western Kigali, where I met Najud, with everything that followed with the Voice.” She kept her tone bland as she recalled whacking the malfunctioning device framework she was building with the back of her hand in frustration and ending up in a Kigali military tent while they were under attack from a Rasesni device. Power calling to power, she assumed, though that was no real explanation.
“What happened after that… Najud invited me to see his country, his home. We traveled to central sarq-Zannib by way of the High Pass. And that’s when we crossed the track of another chained wizard.”
