Chained Adept

by Myers, Karen

  The time flashed by, and soon she was back at the level of the Gates, turning to the east to start her next pass outward in the second loop.

  Maybe I can finish early. Maybe I’ll find them on this loop, and skip the northern one.

  She hugged the thought to herself as she counted out the new lap.

  There! There they were.

  Penrys was about ten miles east of the Gates, just after her turn west again at the extreme end of her loop. She felt the horses first, then the cattle, as she came up on the camp from behind, and then the people. The glint of water marked a stream headed for the Seguchi, a few miles to their southwest.

  She thought of landing now and taking two horses with her back to Zandaril, but they weren’t much more than half a day from the Gates—the two of them could be here by mid-afternoon tomorrow, and that was good enough. The camp wasn’t boiling with activity, as though they were about to go into action, and it would be better for the two of them to report together.

  She overflew it, undetected in the night, and broke off to fly directly back to their hiding place north of the Gates by the shortest route, starting her count afresh to help guide them in the morning. She made careful note of any people along their proposed path as she passed, but none seemed to be Rasesni.

  She would be back early, after all.

  Zandaril woke before the birds, in the dim light of false dawn. His left arm was cramped under Penrys’s head, but he did nothing to disturb her sleep, curled up and snuggled into his chest, wingless.

  He brushed her hair back from her face and tucked it behind an ear, smoothing the black fur of it as he did so. Feathers, fur, and skin—so strange. And so wonderful.

  She murmured as he touched her ear, and he smiled.

  He didn’t know her well, nor she him. He had stories to tell her, and she had none. No family.

  He’d thought he was afraid of her, but he realized she was afraid of herself, not knowing what she might find, what strange feature might materialize, what the chain around her neck meant. That’s what he feared, as well, not Penrys the woman. That person he found intriguing. They could survive the rest of it as it came, together.

  Did she have some other family, as she suspected? He decided it didn’t matter to him. If she did, they were dead to her. If she remembered them suddenly… Ah, there was something to fear after all.

  Well, he would have to give her new memories, then, wouldn’t he, something to compete with.

  He leaned down to kiss her ear and breathed on it warmly. Let’s start now.

  CHAPTER 33

  Penrys felt two of Chang’s screen of scouts while they were still a couple of miles away from the encampment.

  “Shall we let them find us?” she asked Zandaril

  “Seems kinder than shaming them by slipping past.”

  They walked into the open, and Zandaril put his fingers to his mouth and gave a piercing whistle. Penrys could sense their sudden change of direction.

  “They heard you,” she said.

  She shrugged her pack off to give her back a rest, and rotated her shoulders to loosen some of the stiffness. Surprised by a huge yawn, she caught Zandaril grinning at her.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t get much sleep last night?” he asked, trying to look innocent, and failing.

  She examined him—hair finger-combed, beard coming in, clothes dirty and torn, a rag holding up the top of one boot, and a smug leer on his face.

  “You’re no better off,” she retorted, and smiled. His pride in pleasing her was obvious, and very touching.

  She’d known the basics of what to expect last night, of course. What she hadn’t expected was the tenderness of it, the way they’d kept exchanging casual affectionate pats as they packed up the cold camp in the morning. Would it be even better, if we let our minds be intimate in the same way? If his people hadn’t told him that was wrong? She wanted to know what her touch felt like to him.

  Getting back to the expedition would change everything. No more privacy, just the two of them. She hated to see that end.

  The sound of hooves alerted her.

  “Show your face,” Zandaril said, and he made sure the hood of his own cloak was well back.

  One scout circled behind so that they came in together from different directions, with their lances at the ready.

  The nearest one reined in abruptly when he got a good look at them, as they waited with their packs at their feet. “You’re back!”

  He waved the other one off. “You go return to patrol. I’ll escort them in.”

  “D’ye need any help?” the scout asked them, as he looked them over.

  “We’re fine,” Zandaril said. “What are we, a mile out?”

  “That’s about right,” the scout said.

  “Are the others back?” Penrys called up to him.

  The scout turned his horse as if he hadn’t heard her, and started off at a slow and lazy walk toward the army.

  She looked at Zandaril and saw the same puzzlement in his eyes.

  *Doesn’t trust us?*

  He shrugged. *Maybe wants someone else to tell us. Maybe he doesn’t know. We can wait—won’t be long.*

  In just a few minutes, Penrys heard the familiar noise of the daytime camp, talking, shouting, the clang of the farrier.

  The first troopers they met called to the scout with friendly jibes, until they saw the two wizards, one of them limping, and then they stood their ground in silence. That core of silence spread, and people assembled on the edge of the avenue between the tents and watched them walk in.

  Penrys’s ears shifted back on her scalp. What’s wrong? Didn’t they expect us? Are we that late?

  She saw runners ahead of them apparently carrying the news of their arrival back into the camp, and she exchanged a look of uneasiness with Zandaril.

  He nodded to people he knew, and a few of them made jerky acknowledgments, but the mood of the camp was tentative and uncertain.

  At last, they reached the command tent, where Chang himself stood outside the entry, waiting for them.

  He glanced up at the scout who’d escorted them in. “Thank you. Back to your duties now.”

  The scout turned his horse and walked off, and the men that had gathered behind them parted to give him room. It was so quiet, Penrys could hear when he got past the edge of the crowd and set his horse to a canter.

  Zandaril cleared his throat. “Are we the last ones back?” he asked Chang.

  Chang’s eyes flicked to Penrys’s neck, and then looked at them both for a long moment. “You’re the only ones back.”

  Penrys sat alone on a camp chair, next to Hing Ganau’s wagon. Two guards stood watch. Even Hing was kept away, though Penrys had asked the guards to let him go through the wagon and find her some clean clothes, and get soap and a bucket of water for her so she could wash.

  They wouldn’t let her inside the wagon, so she’d held her cloak wide around her and washed as best she could with a rag under it, changing into fresh clothes a piece at a time. The cold water suited her rage, kept it alive.

  Chang was still questioning Zandaril when she’d finished, so she’d begged a comb from the wagon and another bucket, and she knelt down and washed her hair, in front of the guards and the curious bystanders that they were unable to effectively disperse, angry enough that she ignored any glimpses they might have of her alien ears.

  I don’t care what they suspect. I’m going to look my best when they accuse me.

  The guards looked embarrassed at this semi-public bathing, and she was icily glad. Three weeks we spend, almost end up slaves, and this is what we get? No one’s even asked about Tak Tuzap. Let the monstrous Voice eat them all.

  Her stomach growled, but no one had offered food. She glanced up to the empty sky. I could fly away now, and who could stop me?

  Both their packs were in Chang’s tent and they wouldn’t let Hing bring her a book from the wagon, so there was nothing to do but brood. She stretched
her legs out in front of her and slid down in the chair, leaning her head back and letting her wet hair drape over the canvas to dry in the chill air.

  She closed her eyes, but she was too angry to drowse. She didn’t want to interrupt Zandaril by mind-speaking him. He knew how to reach her when he was ready.

  What was wrong with everyone? She felt the mood of the crowd—they were apprehensive and afraid, but of what? Of her? Of Zandaril? Of the two sets of enemies in front of them, that Zandaril was telling them about?

  She scanned the camp—no Rasesni natives, no other wizards besides Zandaril. What had happened while they were gone?

  Zandaril held a tight rein on his temper. No one had given him a seat, and he stood, rigid, before Chang’s table. Only Tun Jeju and the guards shared the command tent with him.

  The first blow had come when Chang ordered Penrys off, under guard, without explanation and over his protest. He’d had both of them stripped of their packs, first, and their pockets emptied, and Tun had laid out all of their possessions on the table along the tent wall, where he was now poking through them. No one said what they were looking for.

  One guard had even tried to remove Penrys’s chain, and been baffled. Zandaril had winced internally at her cold and stony expression as he’d fumbled with it.

  When Tun picked up the two arrow heads with their bloody shafts, he looked over at Zandaril and raised an eyebrow.

  “We were in a fight over on the Horn,” Zandaril said. He spoke as little as possible, but Chang’s eyes slid down to the boot flap tied around his leg.

  Tun pulled the Rasesni books and the two bags of power-stones from Penrys’s pack and favored him with another quizzical look.

  Zandaril told him. “You saw those yourself, the night we went through the Rasesni spy’s belongings.”

  Bits of the cord and rope had been saved and were stretched out on the table, and those had bloodstains, too. The remnants of their food were examined—fragments of cheese and sausage, hard bread and dried fruit.

  Spare socks, dirty clothing, a wrapped piece of soap, an iron pan. Two wooden bowls. Spoons. Knives and firestarters. Canteens. The leftover rags from Penrys’s shirt.

  Tun looked at Chang and shook his head.

  “Where is it?” Chang asked, coldly. His Kigali features struck Zandaril as stern and alien.

  “Where is what?” Zandaril replied. What are they doing to Penrys while this is going on?

  “The juk. The device.”

  “What are you talking about?” He was too angry to be polite about it.

  “The one that’s used to enslave.”

  He closed his eyes as red washed over his memory of running, as he’d thought, to his death, over the cliff. To escape enslavement.

  He opened them again and glared at Chang, all deference gone. “You can grill us all day if you like, or you can explain yourself to me. Better, you let us tell you our story, bring back Penrys. We’ve done nothing wrong, nothing!”

  He turned his head and spat on the carpet under his feet, and heard with satisfaction the indrawn breaths at the insult. This is how you treat disrespect, with a waste of precious water. I am shirqaj, warrior, as well as bikraj, and you Kigaliwen would do well to remember it.

  “I am ally, not one of your men. You can get truth from us, or whatever lies you already have,” he said. “Your choice.”

  He looked for a camp chair and took it, and sat down uninvited, crossing his arms. “I was you, I’d listen to us. Big problems over there.” He cocked his head to the west. “Very big.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The bustle at the entrance of the command tent attracted Zandaril’s attention. It resolved itself into Penrys, escorted in with two guards in front and behind. They dropped the flap shut behind her.

  She washed up. Smart.

  Her expression was masked, but he could feel the anger radiating off of her, stiffening her shoulders.

  She slid her eyes sideways as she passed the table with all their belongings, and paused, taking a moment to rhetorically pull her empty jerkin and breeches pockets inside out before the gaze of everyone there, and leave the pocket linings dangling in contempt.

  When she raised an inquiring eyebrow at Zandaril, he snorted. Then he stood up and got her another chair, inviting her to sit.

  Chang stayed silent throughout this pantomime, his fingers steepled in front of him as he watched.

  She sat and folded her hands, waiting for Chang to speak.

  “While you two were gone,” Chang said, “we received a letter.”

  Penrys said, “How, exactly?”

  Chang tucked his chin in, as if surprised at being interrupted. “Tied to a lance, stuck in the ground in the path of the patrols. Written in Kigali-yat on paper, with a brush.”

  She nodded.

  “It said, in short, that our wizards were spies returning to their master to report. That this master would send them back with his weapons for the next step, to turn us into slaves to fight against our countrymen.”

  He waited for their response.

  Penrys asked, “Signed by…?”

  “No signature.”

  “I see,” she said.

  There was a pause.

  Tun Jeju said, “It referred to the master as ‘chained.’”

  “Ah,” she said, icily. “And that got your attention.”

  She glanced at Zandaril, then addressed Chang. “His men refer to him as the ‘Voice.’ He has enslaved dozens of Rasesni wizards, the ones we didn’t know existed. We left them at the Horn a week and a half ago and they’re headed this way—it’s why the Rasesni have fled their lands.”

  “And now, perhaps,” Zandaril said, “you’ll let us tell you the whole story, before they overrun you. Or slaughter everyone in Neshilik. Or both.”

  Penrys stayed in the command tent during a break in the debriefing, while Zandaril took the opportunity to get cleaned up. Tempers had eased somewhat in the long afternoon of reporting and questioning, but she had not forgiven Chang the treatment they had received nor, she suspected, had Zandaril. The smoking braziers at the entrance of the tent did little to melt the icy atmosphere between them.

  Real damage had been done to the relationship between Chang and his wizards and, even though she knew this was one of the goals of the letter, she found it hard to set aside the effects.

  The letter had played into the Kigaliwen suspicion of what they didn’t understand, and it risked dividing them from their Zannib allies if Zandaril couldn’t get past this.

  She was personally affronted by the indisputable fact that this “Voice” was somehow related to her, as evidenced by the chain, and that the letter exploited that. Better to save my outrage for the sender. She snorted. If only I could master my emotions at will.

  While she waited impatiently for some food to carry them into the next session—anything to distract her—Tun Jeju surprised her by breaking off from his quiet conversation with Chang and taking Zandaril’s seat next to her.

  He cocked his head at her, as if evaluating her mood. “No point being angry at what happened,” he said. “See if you can convince Zandaril-chi of that.”

  “Maybe you better convince me first,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I just walk away? Declare this not my fight?”

  “I don’t know,” Tun said, and that compelled her attention. “Why did you help find the Rasesni traps? Why did you go into Neshilik with Zandaril, and then come back and give us a warning?”

  She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.

  Tun looked at her with both sympathy and calculation. “Because that’s what you are. Zandaril, too—that’s why he joined us. That’s why I find that anonymous warning… uncompelling.”

  The chair creaked as he leaned forward to keep their conversation private. “Chang needs you both. I don’t know what that chain you wear means, and you say you don’t either, but it means something. I think you want to find out what that is.”

  He sat back again. “Don
’t let resentment rob you of what you want to do anyway.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I would rather have remained friendly.”

  Tun half-smiled at her. “That’s a luxury for civilians, not soldiers. Chang’s responsible for too many lives to let that stand in his way, nor should he.”

  Penrys grimaced, but she recognized truth when she heard it, however unwillingly. Tun Jeju stood and walked away, and left her brooding on his advice.

  When Zandaril returned, it was in his formal Zannib robes, with the more elaborate turban she recognized from the kuliqa celebration that seemed so long ago. Gone was her companion of the last three weeks, Penrys thought. I understand why he’s done it, distancing himself from these Kigaliwen who have so offended him. But Tun Jeju’s right—if we want to accomplish anything, we have to get past it.

  He surveyed the room and its little pockets of conversation coolly, but when his gaze fell upon Penrys, it softened and he made his way through the tent to take the seat next to her that Tun Jeju had just vacated.

  “Hing Ganau did quick work, I see,” she said, admiring the cleaned and restitched boots.

  “There’s still a hole in back,” Zandaril said, “not enough time to fix that right now.”

  “Listen, Zandaril…” She switched to mind-speech.

  *We’ve got to put our anger aside. Chang has a job to do, and we’re just tools. It’s not personal.*

  His reply was tinged with residual scorn. *This is not how a warrior leads his people.*

  She took a breath. *Remember how you wanted to organize wizards? This is what it means—people filling slots professionally, being led professionally. Not people deciding to follow a man. Their loyalty goes to an institution, not a man.*

  He made no overt response, but his nose wrinkled in disgust.

  *Look at you. You’re clothed in your people’s robes. You’re filling the slot of “ally,” not your individual role. You know this is how places like Kigali work, and you’re using that knowledge whether you like it or not.*