by Karen Myers
Behind them came the five captives, now apparently released, interspersed with several foreigners and one prosperous Kigali man, quite young, who placed himself with the woman’s husband, as if for reassurance.
Dar Datsu and Goi Ofa smiled as they spotted their friends, but the other three captives looked about warily. Rin Tsugo suppressed a sigh—hard enough to bring in any new member, but three at once, in the midst of this disruption… Well, there was no point worrying about it, the chirmurno would just have to handle it while he concentrated on the real threat.
He waited until the gates were closed again and all the guests were quiet and attentive, then he bowed deeply to them. “I am Rin Tsugo, and this is my… household. We’re grateful for the return of our lost ones and welcome their companions in… duress.” Idiot, there’s a shaibo who was probably responsible for that. The less said about it, the better.
While he paused to recover his composure, hopeful that the lapse hadn’t been observed, the woman bowed deeply as well. “M’name’s Penrys. You can see what I am, well enough.” A smile flickered across her face. “I apologize for this invasion of your… home by so many, unwarned, but we’re being pushed by events and it’s in everyone’s interest to try and control as much as we can for fear of something worse. May I introduce my companions?”
He nodded, and she began with the captives, rather than the most important members of her party. It marked her out clearly as no Kigalino, but he liked her the better for it. When Dar Datsu stepped away to join his friends gathered around the edge of the courtyard, he bowed to her and the wizards with her, first, in a show of gratitude that seemed to surprise her. A couple of the new ones did the same, before Dar Datsu took them in charge and walked them over to the chirmurno to take them in and teach them the rules.
Then Penrys named the shaibo who nodded neutrally and stepped aside. “He’s here to witness for Tun Jeju, a notju of Imperial Security,” she said. “We’ll speak about that in a moment. All of these here are witnesses, in fact—wizards for their countries, like my husband Najud. And Char Dazu, here, witnessing for the local wizards.” This was the young Kigalino.
She waved her hand in a circle around her head. “We didn’t ask for all that out there to come with us, but there was no easy way to stop it. I told them we’d talk to them next and asked them to wait.” She paused and looked at him directly. “Let’s hope they do, eh?”
A nervous laugh traveled around the courtyard.
“I’m afraid we don’t make very good hostages,” she commented “all us foreigners, but maybe that won’t be necessary.”
It was outrageous, speaking of such a thing so baldly, and he feared the unexpectedness of it had shown on his face. No diplomat, this one. Why was she the one with the leipum, instead of the brown-robe? Just because she was chained like they were?
“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, gesturing to the young Zannib man. “This is Munraz, our apprentice. He wanted to come and see what would happen.” The young man blushed at the notice. “Me, too. Could we go inside and sit down? I’ll tell you all about it.”
Rin Tsugo blinked. She was making a claim on his honor, that he would not hold them as hostages, that the young and innocent were not at risk, no matter what the stakes might be. It was masterful, and he could see now why she held the leipum.
“Please, Penrys-chi,” he said. “We would be honored to hear you, and to introduce you to some of our… community.”
He beckoned Sek Seto over while the visitors filed past him. “Call in the outer guard and bar the gate—they should hear this, too.”
“But what about our security?”
“Sek-chi, there must be a hundred wizards out there, or more. What exactly do you think we could do, eh?”
At Sek Seto’s stubborn expression, he added, “We can’t keep them out. Ready all the bolt-holes—if we must, we’ll scatter and try to hide. I’ll do what I can to keep it from coming to that.”
Penrys could see that the cavernous hall with its scarred wooden floor had clearly been some sort of work area once. It stretched to the left and right, and there were small chairs and individual tables stacked the length of the inner wall, no two of them precisely the same. Already some of the people inside had fetched a chair and spaced themselves out along the farther side, well-separated from each other, looking toward the narrow end at the left, where three empty chairs faced into the room.
Kit Hachi, their guide, picked up a chair. “Come sit here,” she said, and Penrys followed her toward the left front of the room, near the three empty chairs. Najud, unprompted, picked up a chair and followed, and the rest of her party did the same, though Ijumo carried two chairs, one for himself and the other for Mpeowake.
Penrys made a show of making sure everyone in her party was comfortable while she concentrated on the minds around her, both in the room and outside. The mob of wizards outside was still in place and gradually growing, and this Rin Tsugo seemed to have pulled in his perimeter guards. There were two elsewhere in the compound moving about, and she recognized one of them as the guard at the gate.
Their leader was standing at the end of the hall where everyone could see him, waiting for the noise to die down. When Penrys looked around the hall for herself before sitting down, she marveled at the even spacing between the seated people, all but her own group. It reminds me of something… what? Of course—honeycomb, like a bee hive. It’s as close as they can get to each other, with a little space left for passage.
She caught Najud’s eye and nodded behind them for him to look for himself. “Think we can get any honey out of this hive without getting stung?”
He appreciated the reference and grinned. “Baijuk is even better than khimar.”
Mead over honey, is it? I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.
Rin Tsugo moved to the empty chairs and faced the room. He raised his hand, and everyone quieted. “We welcome back our comrades and greet three new ones.” He gestured to the front along the inner wall, where all five were seated together, appropriately spaced.
“We also welcome our… unexpected visitors, both foreign and official. I for one would like to hear what they’ve come to tell us.”
He sat down, and Penrys stood up, the leipum in her hand. She cocked her head at one of the empty seats near Rin Tsugo with a question on her face, and he gestured an invitation to her. She picked her way carefully between chairs to get there, trying to avoid the contact warnings of her chain, and then faced the audience—almost forty chained wizards.
For a moment she multiplied her memories of the Voice and the young qahulajti in sarq-Zannib by twenty and shuddered inwardly. No. These are untrained, and no more hostile than you would expect of any other banned civic group. They’re not monsters, any more than you are. Not yet.
“M’name’s Penrys, and I appeared out of nowhere, in Ellech, a bit more than three years ago, like all of you did, I imagine. No clothes, no memory, no name.”
Heads were nodding slightly all over the room.
“I was very lucky. I found myself in wizard hands. And then, a few months ago—it’s too long a story for right now—I ended up in Neshilik, in the west, and there I met a notju, one Tun Jeju. That’s another long story, but we ended up defeating, and killing, a chained wizard who had raised an army and killed hundreds in Rasesdad and Kigali.”
It was silent in the room.
“After that, Najud and I,”—she gestured at him in the forefront of the audience—“we traveled into the west of central sarq-Zannib, and there we encountered another chained wizard, this one a youngster who’d been very unlucky, meeting only animals and not people in her short, new life. She caused the death of more than two hundred people once she came out of hiding. She, too, was caught and killed.”
She could feel the dismay in the room.
“I tell you this not to alarm you, but to explain what has happened since. Tun Jeju, on behalf of Imperial Security and the emperor, sought to discover more about these chained
wizards. He knew of three—two disasters, and me. Were there others? Were any of them in Kigali?
“In the belief that there were no wizards in Kigali…” She allowed a little time for the nervous chuckles to die away. “He sent for wizards from his neighbors, and for the only other living chained one he knew.”
She pointed to the wizards seated in front of her. “To Rasesdad, Ndant, Zannib, and even far Ellech.” At each name, the emissaries stood up briefly.
“Meanwhile, he sent a notice to the village headmen, to identify anyone dwelling among them with an unremovable chain. And this was a terrible mistake.”
Anger was the emotion uppermost in most of their minds. And who could blame them?
“He didn’t understand how many of you might be foreign in appearance, as I was in Ellech, and the villagers and townspeople were frightened by Imperial Security interest in strangers with no family ties. He never meant for a wholesale slaughter to be the result. But that’s what happened, and it can’t be remedied.
“When his invited emissaries arrived, they brought both information and evidence of chained wizards in their own countries. Ask them what they’ve seen—empty loops of chain and preserved bodies, some of them in transition to strange forms.” She waved at the five liberated captives.
“Worse,” she said, “Only now does Imperial Security realize that wizards have been active in Kigali for a very long time, hiding their abilities, the way you’ve been doing for this short while. There are hundreds and presumably thousands of them, and they’ve been watching you wondering where you come from and what you can do. And the official government of Kigali has no knowledge of their leaders, their power, or their interests.”
She took a deep breath. “I have an official mission, from Tun Jeju.” She brandished the leipum until the silk petals rustled. “He wants to bring the Kigali wizards and all of you out into the open and normalize relations. Wizards operate as part of society in the neighboring countries, so why not here? He has the emperor’s backing to make this happen. That’s why we’re here, all of us.”
Licking her lips, she said, “And I have another goal, one of my own. I want to find whoever made us and scattered us around the world. I want to have a talk with him.
“But that’s for later. Right now, there are more than a hundred wizards around your compound, wondering what’s going on. I don’t know who they are, or what they think about any of this. I’m going to talk to them next, but the whole thing is unstable and dangerous.”
*Pen-sha! They’re at the gates.*
Najud’s warning brought her head up at the same time as a loud crack sounded from the gates across the courtyard.
She whipped her head around and scanned the situation. Dozens were pouring into the courtyard, well-shielded. Behind her, she heard Rin Tsugo calling to his people over the noise, “Get out, get out. Run!” They scattered to the doors at the back end of the hall and further into the maze of the buildings in the compound.
These untrained people couldn’t defend themselves against an attack of armed wizards. She’d have to try and hold the rear for them. Dar Datsu and Lai Tsumai were frozen in place instead of running with the others, but her call broke them out of their trance. “Stand with me,” she told them, then she turned to the first wave of attackers coming through the door and took their power, all of it except for the merest remnants.
It staggered them, and they jammed up in the entrance to the hall, after the first few slipped through. The foreign wizards stood indecisively, as if their neutrality would protect them, and she saw Char Dazu place himself in front of them to divert the mob, before they were overrun. Chosmod monitored what she was doing, and escaped to join her, and Mpeowake did the same, but the rest were overwhelmed.
She could feel Najud fighting, feel the slash that he ignored, only thirty feet away, but she couldn’t get to him, and there were more wizards coming in from other entries. She caught a glimpse of his turban, and then she couldn’t see it any longer. I’ll make them sorry, I swear it.
Without looking at her four companions, she cried, “Find weapons and defend us. I’ll take the wizards.”
Penrys stood in place and began disabling every attacking wizard she could find, starting with the ones around the foreign wizards. Draining them of most of their power didn’t physically stop them, but it left them so disoriented that most of them dropped out of the fighting. Her chain fairly hummed as it absorbed the energy.
It was an uneven battle on the power front—all it took was time to work through so many of them, as each one’s defeat provided power to suck the next one dry. But there were so many, an endless stream, and it took too long.
The ones nearby who could still fight wreaked havoc. A group of them had surrounded the other foreign wizards and started to drag them away, and she targeted them for death by complete power drainage before stopping their hearts, but they blew a path through their own people to get away with their prizes before she could get to them all. All around her she could hear her companions fighting and then a punch of wind sent her violently into the air. In the moment before she fell again, she sent a wave of death as far as she could reach, and then she collided with a wall and it was over.
CHAPTER 14
Penrys woke to a pounding head, a roiling stomach, and panic, opening her eyes at the sound of tense voices that she didn’t recognize.
Brown-robes. Everywhere.
I’m alive.
In sudden memory she scanned widely—no Najud, no Munraz. She sat up and groaned at the movement. She was at the base of a wall, so she squirmed until it supported her back.
“Where are they?” she croaked.
A Rasesni face swam into her sight and she flinched for a moment, recalling Neshilik, but then she recognized the man bent over her as Chosmod. “Tell me,” she said.
“You kept us alive,” he said. “You, me, Mpeowake, and those two ex-prisoners.”
“The others?” She was afraid to hear the answer.
“Innurrys and Bildaer fought and died. The Ndanwe woman, Toawe, was killed, unarmed. We think the rest were taken.”
“Najud?”
“Him, too. There’s no body here. Not sure about your young apprentice, though—no one remembers him fighting.”
“How long…”
“It’s been maybe three hours since the fight. Imperial Security arrived just a few minutes ago.” Chosmod nodded over to a cluster of people working on someone lying on the ground. “Luckily for me, I landed on someone. Not so lucky for Mpeowake however.”
Penrys shoved her body up against the wall trying to find the least painful position.
“There are other dead—some of the chained wizards, from wounds, and dozens of the attackers, most of them with no marks on their bodies.” He raised an inquisitive eyebrow at her, and she swallowed.
“Nothing else I could do,” she muttered.
“I don’t doubt it,” he replied. “Just wish you’d done it sooner, brudigna.”
“Done what?” Tun Jeju appeared, and Chosmod straightened up and made room for him.
Penrys ignored the question. “Where are the survivors? The chained wizards?”
“There are eight dead, I’m told. That means how many have escaped?”
She ignored that question, too.
He turned to one of his men. “Get her into a chair, if she’s not too damaged, and fetch some water.”
The man pulled her up and Chosmod set up a tumbled chair. She stumbled over and collapsed onto it clumsily.
Chosmod looked her over. “Your head is bloody but doesn’t seem to be still bleeding.”
“I’m well enough,” she said. “Just give me a minute.” She drained the cup of water that someone handed to her, and it was taken away again. When it returned, she sipped at it and stared out at the room. Her chain was heavy with captured power, but there was no one in her reach to use it on.
Pools of blood were scattered around, trampled by the fighters and now by th
e dozen or so brown-robes who were going through the place looking at the bodies. A few feet in front of her she spotted the leipum—broken and dusty, some of its leaves sticky with blood.
Dar Datsu appeared. His face was battered and dirty, but a very welcome sight nonetheless. He picked up another chair and made to join Penrys, then he followed her gaze to the floor and paused to go fetch her the silk-leafed branch before sitting down heavily.
She opened her hand mechanically to take it, then shuddered and took a deep breath.
“How is Lai Tsumai?” she asked him.
“She’s quite a fighter,” he said. “Took a slice to her arm, but she brought down at least two of them.”
He gestured to the side, where six bodies lay around an open circle. That must be where we were standing.
“You killed four of them?” she asked.
“No…” he said, hesitantly. “We killed a couple, but the rest just… died, somehow, at the end.”
Penrys closed her eyes. How many this time? Have I beaten the Voice’s record yet?
“All three of you were out, so we did what we could for Mpeowake and I bound Lai Tsumai’s wound. Then I left her in charge and went for help.”
“You did what?” she said.
Tun Jeju must have been hovering behind her, out of sight, while she gathered her wits. “He ran to tell us, through the streets. Walked right in and made a fuss.”
She turned her head warily to stare at Dar Datsu. “That was… brave of you.” And him only out of the prison a few hours.
Tun Jeju’s patience was clearly at an end, for he took the broken leipum out of her hand and said, “I would appreciate hearing just exactly what happened here. Who had the nerve to break a parley under the imperial leipum and assault my guests? And where is my representative?”
His fist clenched and the silk-flowered branch broke off and fell to the dusty floor. The ears moved back on Penrys’s scalp—she’d never seen Tun Jeju lose his control before.
She straightened in her seat. “And my husband, foster-father, and apprentice, notju-chi. Find a clean chair and I’ll tell you what I know.”