by Myers, Karen
“You. This is you, touching her. Pay attention to it. The grass isn’t real—you already know that, it’s why you ignore it—but this is real. The woman is real, and the kazr. I am real, moving your hand and talking to you.”
When she guided the woman’s hand back to her lap, she encountered resistance for the first time. Bimal raised her other hand and felt for Penrys’s, where it rested on her arm.
“Yes! I’m real. Look, you can take my hand and move it. See?”
She let her hand be examined, and projected the image as strongly as she could. Even for what Najud described as the mind-deaf, she thought some of it was getting through.
Bimal blinked and turned her head independently, keeping her grasp of Penrys’s hand. Penrys turned with her to supply a version of what she was seeing over the grassland vision, and that stale image in Bimal’s mind… flickered, reappeared, and flickered again.
Unexpectedly, Bimal lurched to her feet, and Penrys held her arm. She slowly rotated in place, and Penrys stopped supplying alternative visions to let her own eyes take over. When she faced the stove, she stretched out her hands to it and took a step in that direction, and Penrys supported her until they stood just a couple of feet from its solid, undeniable heat.
Bimal touched Penrys’s face lightly with her stove-warmed hand, and jerked her hand back as if she hadn’t been sure Penrys was real.
“I’m Bimal,” she said, in a voice rusty with disuse. “Dirum for the Kurighdunaq.” There was wonder in her voice, as if she were only just now awakening.
“Yes, you are,” Penrys confirmed, “and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Welcome back.” She took the woman in her arms and hugged her, and the stiff body relaxed into a single shudder before straightening again.
“What happened to us?” she asked, as she pulled back from the embrace.
As she spoke, Najud opened the door of the kazr and caught the end of her question.
His grin was infectious. “You’re talking!”
Bimal smiled back tentatively.
He turned to Penrys. “What did you do?”
She shrugged. “Hard to explain. Showed her the real world, and made her believe in it, I guess. Ought to work on most of them, I imagine.”
“What’s that you’ve got?” she asked Najud, when she noticed the bundle in his hands.
“Shirts or robes for all the women, courtesy of the men in camp. We’ll make something out of the blankets, maybe, for breeches, but this’ll do for a start.”
“Good. I’ll work on the rest of them, and you can tell Bimal the story.”
By mid-morning, all the women had been broken out of their hallucinations and started to recover. Lurum had the most trouble with staying focused in the real world, and Bimal took charge of her, talking to her constantly and leading her around the kazr, touching things.
Khizuwi popped in early in the process. “What’s this Najud’s been telling me?”
He stayed and watched for a while, making observations to Najud, then the two of them ducked out together.
Penrys led each of the women outside, one at a time, to look at the camp. Lurum and Bimal came out together, and Bimal made a ball of snow and put it in Lurum’s hands. “You used to be good at this, Lusha,” she teased her. “Bet you can’t hit me now.”
A sly expression crept over Lurum’s face and she threw the snowball directly at Bimal who scrambled away from her. Lurum bent down of her own will and scooped up another handful, and then stopped, looking at the walls of the kazr, at the other two kazrab, at the trampled snow… Then she turned and looked at Penrys, and touched her face, with the hand full of forgotten snow, and Penrys flinched as it dropped down her neck.
“You are real. This is the snow we walked through,” Lurum said, then shuddered. Bimal trudged back and held her, and cocked her head at Penrys. “I’ll take care of her, lijti.”
Movement caught Penrys’s eye, and she saw Najud emerging from Jirkat’s kazr, followed by everyone who’d been inside.
*Bringing you guests, Pen-sha. Your method’s working the best, Khizuwi says.*
Penrys did a quick calculation of what the kazr could hold. *All of them at once?*
She felt his amusement. *Khizuwi’s, too.*
She spun to look. He was right—there they came.
“All right, ladies, we’re going to be crowded. Better get back inside and pick out the best seats.”
Lurum ignored her and ran down the path to one of the men in Najud’s group. She grabbed his hand and started talking earnestly into his ear, keeping him company as they came. He wasn’t responsive, as far as Penrys could see from a distance, but that didn’t stop her.
Bimal watched with her, and told her, “That’s her brother.” She shook her head. “So many of us dead. How will we ever rebuild?”
CHAPTER 36
“You show them the real world, in here,” Penrys tapped her forehead, “reinforcing what their eyes are seeing, which they’re currently ignoring. They’ve got a habit of sight now, of ignoring the image in their heads which they know is false. That’s what you’ve got to break through—make them trust their eyes again and ignore the old compulsion.”
Penrys was trying to explain her method to the other wizards. The women on the outer edge of the crowd in the kazr nodded their agreement, but Khizuwi voiced the problem.
“We believe you, jarghalti, but how do you do it?” he said, spreading his hands.
“I’ll show you again.”
She invited them to watch through mind-touch while she worked with Dhalmudhr, the leader of the survivors. Bimal came forward and offered to be the familiar face he would first see, and Penrys went through the same process as before, showing him what was in front of him, projecting that vision into his mind, until finally he reached out to test it for himself, with a tap on Bimal’s knee, and a bewildered emotional release.
Bimal tugged at him until he stood up and followed her back to the recently recovered women. She talked quietly but earnestly to him there.
“Do you see how that worked?” Penrys asked her colleagues.
Najud said, “I saw what you did well enough, but I can’t do that, put an image in someone’s mind, a living model of the world they see. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
He looked at Khizuwi and Munraz, and they shook their heads, too. “Looks like this task is yours, bikrajti,” Khizuwi said. “The sooner we can break the illusion for all of them, the sooner we can help them, and find out what we need to know.”
It took more than an hour to work her way through the rest of them. Some were much smoother than others—the illusion was easier to break. None were even as difficult as Bimal had been, and Penrys learned quickly that she could predict how the process would go as soon as she first touched a mind.
Only one was a problem. Jirkat called him Haraq, and he was Umzakhilin’s cousin, related through their mothers. Penrys shifted him to the end as soon as she touched him, and when she returned to him it was as she’d anticipated—the imposed illusion was ingrained so strongly into his mind that she couldn’t successfully overlay it with reality.
When it gradually became apparent that she was not winning this one, at least not on the first attempt, the survivors nearest to him guided him back to sit in the middle of the group, and all who could reach him touched him, absorbing him back into their midst protectively.
Penrys watched their actions with an impassive face, but behind that mask her mind was busy. These are probably a random set of people from the clan, but this disaster has bound them together into a family. See how they look after their own. They’re not going to be absorbed into this camp easily.
Najud stood up and bowed deeply to the eleven survivors who could see him, barring Haraq. “I’m Najud, son of Ilsahr of clan Zamjilah, of the Shubzah tribe, and I’m the zarawinnaj of this expedition on behalf of the Kurighdunaq. Here’s what we know…”
He took them through their finding of the summer encampment, the fate of
Umzakhilin, and the addition of the other bikrajab as the word spread. He avoided mentioning Penrys’s chain, or her unknown relationship with the qahulajti who had enslaved them, for which she was grateful. Nor did he mention such strange things as wings, not yet anyway—he was unspecific about how Penrys had found them.
Her hand crept up to her throat to check the coverage of her scarf there, and she caught Jiqlaraz’s eye on her while she did so.
When Najud finished his summary, he waited expectantly. Dhalmudhr rose unsteadily, and Najud sat down again on his portion of the rug, next to Penrys.
“I’m Dhalmudhr, son of Bajushaz, of the Kurighdunaq. I recognize Jirkat, and Ilzay, and Winnajhubr here, my clan-kin, but I’m dismayed by this tale, and sickened. We have been lost in this nightmare for three months, you say?”
Najud nodded.
“Where are my children? Where is my wife? My father?” Dhalmudhr’s voice broke, and only the muffled crackling of the fire in the stove was audible while they waited for him to recover.
Ilzay stood up, with a hand on the horn around his neck that recorded the tally of the dead. “We’ve found many who died along the way, and Umzakhilin will have found others between the summer encampment and the zudiqazd. Some of the dead we can name to you and perhaps you can name more of them. Others have eluded us, and we hope more are still to be found, alive, held by this qahulajti. Only you can tell us that.”
Dhalmudhr nodded. His face was so lean and wrinkled that it was hard to guess his age. It carried little expression—they were all that way, as if they’d grown unaccustomed to communicating with their faces to those who couldn’t see them.
“There are others, we know there are, but we couldn’t see them. At night, there was only darkness for us—no stars, no moon. In the daytime, she spun lies of green fields with terror and fire behind us to keep us moving.”
Penrys watched Winnajhubr nod along as if this reminded him of her experiment with illusion.
“We found each other by chance,” Dhalmudhr said, cocking his head at his fellow survivors, “and once we did, we tried to never let go. There were more of us once…” He swallowed. “But they were lost. Some died—from cold, from injuries no one could treat, from sickness, from hunger. From worn-out shoes, sometimes—it’s so easy to hurt your feet when you can’t see what you’re walking on, and if you couldn’t keep up, well, you were just another injured beast.”
“Some wandered away and lost contact with us.” He nodded at Bimal. “It was her idea to tie us together, a long time ago. A good idea.”
Clearing his throat, he added, “We tried to get others to join us, or to at least make their own groups, but many of them couldn’t hear us, and most of us couldn’t speak.”
He paused again, then continued. “We were lucky. We all had good shoes or boots, if not at the beginning, then from the dead. We could sometimes talk to each other, at first, at least a bit—talking got harder and harder. And we had knives. With knives, we could eat.”
He looked around his audience as if begging them to understand. “She wouldn’t tolerate us killing a beast from the herds, even when we chanced upon one in our reach. But every now and then one would die, or her wolves would make a kill. And that was our chance, if she moved slowly enough for us to carve something off before all the herds passed, or if it was near the time for the night stop. After we checked the carcase to make sure it wasn’t one of us.”
After a moment of silence, Jirkat asked, “How did you get away?”
Dhalmudhr turned around and looked at the little remnant of the clan he’d broken away with.
“We’d just eaten what we could find of a sheep, before the wolves got to it, and the darkness started. That very day we’d been brought south, down a hill, after many days of going up and west.”
He swallowed. “We were never going to be stronger, and I thought it might be possible to retreat the way we’d come, and put some part of the land between us. We had hours of night to retrace the rise of the land, and if we succeeded, we could turn east when we reached the top, into the sunlight, warm on our faces. Then we could at least die free and together.”
His unused voice was hoarse now. “And then came the blizzard. Walking downhill gave us something to do, with the wind at our backs, through all those green fields our minds told us were there. I don’t think anyone wanted to be the first to stop. Or, anyway, no one said so.” He smiled sardonically at the notion of conversation, and the unexpected expression on his blank face transformed it.
He swayed unsteadily on his feet. “When will you break camp so we can go get the others?” No one answered him, and he sat down again.
Khizuwi called upon his clansman, the young herdsman Ariqnas, to tell his part of the earlier tale.
Penrys thought he looked ten years older than his age-mates Winnajhubr and Munraz.
When the young man stood up to speak, he kept his eyes on Khizuwi. “Barshhubr and I were with the horse herds, up in those well-watered meadows, near the caves,” he said. “You know the place? Wayat mar-Zarqash?”
Khizuwi nodded his understanding, and Ariqnas continued. “Wishkazti rode out to join us for the afternoon, and we all decided…”
“To go exploring inside,” Khizuwi suggested. “You’re hardly the first.”
“None of us had done it before. We’d heard the tales but we didn’t really believe them—it was the sort of thing we told the youngsters around the fire at night and we were too old to be frightened by that.”
He continued in a monotone as if he’d told himself this story over and over again for months.
“We made torches and went inside the big one, the one whose opening you can see from a distance. There was even a sort of path there to it, and sheep bones. Wishkazti was worried about the bones and wanted to turn back, but I… I told her we weren’t cowards and the zarawinnaj would want to know what we discovered. We’d be… we’d be heroes when we got back to the camp that night.”
He added bitterly. “And she believed me, and we kept going. And then she found us.”
After a couple of shaky breaths, he continued. “She was just a kid, younger than me. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. It was hard to tell, because her face never changed. She wore hides, just cut up or tied on. And a chain, a thick chain made of something, didn’t look like gold exactly, around her neck. She was no Zan, not with that light brown hair.
“We introduced ourselves, but she didn’t talk to us—she never did talk to us. She listened when we spoke, to her or each other, but she never spoke. She looked at the torches, too, as if she’d never seen anything like that before.
“Barshhubr complained that his head hurt, and he started to back away, and he stumbled. It was just a little fall, but when he went down we heard the growls behind her for the first time, and her wolves took him.”
He swallowed. “He got his knife out in time to hurt one of them, but it didn’t do him any good. Wishkazti and I, we couldn’t move. We tried!”
Penrys could hear the anguish in his voice breaking through the monotone.
“She held us in place. While the wolves were eating… she walked in among them and picked up the knife and felt the sharp point. She looked at us, at the knives on our belts, and she poked through… what was left and found the sheath and the belt, and took those, too. The wolves never bothered her—they got out of her way when she… growled at them.
“Then she walked over and stood in front of us. There was some blood on her from the injured wolf and Barshhubr—I couldn’t take my eyes off of that. She stared at Wishkazti and when she screamed, she turned to me but… I felt nothing. Then she just… walked away, back deeper into the tunnels, as if nothing had happened. The wolves ignored us, but we still couldn’t move. I couldn’t touch Wishkazti, not even to hold her while they… cracked his bones. It was him she’d come to see when she left the camp, you understand, not me.”
The silence was complete in the kazr.
“She held us for a coup
le of days, I believe. It was hard to tell the time, in the cave and its tunnels. I think she studied us. Wishkazti interested her more than me. She would sit down in front of us, with her wolves. We could move now, but we couldn’t leave the chamber we were in. There was just a glimmer of light to tell us where the big entrance was, but the darkness didn’t seem to bother her any. It was like she could smell us.
“Anyway, she’d sit down in front of Wishkazti, and they’d both go still. I… I tried to make myself invisible. She did it to me, too, but it didn’t really bother me.
“Then, the last time, when she left, Wishkazti wouldn’t talk to me any more. She just sat there and hugged her knees to her chest. When I woke up, I found her there in the dark, her knife still in her hand and the smell of her blood thick in the air.”
Penrys felt Khizuwi’s grief, as strong and sharp as Ariqnas’s, if hidden from his face.
“I don’t know how long she kept me. I think she learned her control on me—the visions she sent were strange, then she settled into something like she used later, with the grasslands, and the fire, and the darkness. When she left the caves, we climbed the hills to the northeast, up onto the trading trail, and went east from there, until she found the Kurighdunaq camp.”
He bowed his head, and then turned resolutely around to face the rest of the survivors. “I and my friends, we woke this horror and brought the disaster upon you. I couldn’t tell you about it before. If my life will offer you any relief, it’s yours.”
Bimal stood up and picked her way among the seated people until she reached him. “You are no more at fault than the spark that lights a fire. If not you, then it would have been another. The fire would have come eventually anyway.” She wrapped her arms around him, and he wept like a child.
“Come back here,” she urged him, and guided him into the heart of the group, and they all touched him and welcomed him.
Najud waited a moment, then stood up and spoke to them. “We’ve heard enough for now. Please go with Jirkat and Ilzay and Winnajhubr for a little while. They’ll make you something to eat, and you’ve got the other two kazrab. We need to talk about bikrajab things now, before we continue.”