by Karen Myers
Najud glanced down at his hands, criss-crossed with torn strips of cloth. The muscle ache reminded him of defending himself against swords with his long knife which was never meant for the task. He checked but the weapons he’d carried under his robes were gone.
A thicker, blood-stained bandage covered his right forearm, but since he could still move his hands, he dismissed it for now. He still wore his robe, but underneath he was bare chested. He felt a tight harness holding a pad against his left side—wet and seeping, his probing fingers told him.
“Had to use your shirt,” Vylkar commented.
“Who else is here?” Najud asked.
“Ijumo, Mrigasba, Gen Jongto, and Char Dazu.”
“I remember Toawe being struck down.”
“Yes, and my colleagues made a glorious death, like warriors of old, fighting back to back with captured swords. Not something a middle-aged scholar can expect in this mundane time. They were smiling, before they died.”
His voice trailed off. “I believe I’ll set it to verse, as an exercise to pass the time.”
There was a pause. Najud worked his way more cautiously up to a sitting position against the wall and wished he could see Vylkar’s face.
“Where are the others? Penrys? My apprentice?”
“Chosmod and Mpeowake retreated to join Penrys and, I think, so did a couple of our students from yesterday. Last I saw, they were defending themselves well enough. The chained ones fled—wisest thing for them to do, I think.”
“But Penrys and Munraz aren’t here.”
“Don’t know about your apprentice,” Vylkar said. “But I don’t think you need to be concerned about Penrys. Something was killing our attackers. They were dropping in the hall, and the courtyard was covered in bodies as they dragged us out.”
“Penrys,” Najud said, decisively.
“Yes, I thought so.”
On Najud’s left, Char Dazu spoke out of the shadows. “This is a war that’s been started. A Char at a meeting of this sort is like the leipum—a sign of truce and parley. That’s why I came. Everyone will be hunting them.”
Gen Jongto’s voice chimed in. “The notju will be… incensed.”
“Glad you made it, Gen Jongto,” Najud said. “Where are we? Think he can find us?”
While he spoke he scanned the surroundings but found them well-shielded beyond the room. “That’s odd…”
Ijumo’s voice came from across the room. “You’ve noticed the shield, have you? I wonder how they’re doing that.”
“Any thoughts, Najud?” That was Mrigasba, the white bandage wrapped around his head showing clearly in the dimness. “I seem to remember you having some experience with wizards in groups, in Neshilik.”
What did they do, turn that into a training manual in Rasesdad?
“We did some work on it in the Temple Academy, yes. But that was on shielding ourselves, not someone else. This is something else—keeping us in instead of keeping someone out.”
He thought about it for a moment. “How many of them are there—anyone know? What do they want, and what are they doing with us?”
“What, indeed,” Vylkar murmured. “They’ve given each of us soup, bread and water—yours is up next to you, by the wall. And a bucket for… other things. The ankle shackle is an unwelcome complication.”
Char Dazu said, “They haven’t asked us for anything.” Najud could hear the affront in his voice.
“So we’re just hostages, then,” Gen Jongto commented. “That’s unfortunate—they seem to have managed to keep one from each embassy for maximum leverage.”
“We don’t know how, and we don’t know why.” Vylkar’s voice had assumed a pedagogical tone. “Maybe we can find out who.”
Najud shook his head. “I’d rather get free first, then worry about it. We are five wizards—I expect we can come up with something.”
Mrigasba lifted his leg and rattled the shackle until its chain tinkled merrily. “And what about this?”
Najud smiled in the darkness. “They left me my turban, didn’t they? My anah im-ghabr? I think I may be able to find a few things to help us out.”
CHAPTER 17
“Languages first. It’s an essential skill.”
Penrys took a deep breath and darted a half-smile at her test subject. “You’ve just met this man on the road. Who is he? Where is he from? What is he?”
They were one level down below the street in the Imperial Security building, and Penrys was working on basic education for Dar Datsu and Lai Tsumai as quickly as they could absorb it. Chosmod had spent the first part of the morning checking the basics with the two students—mind-speech and shielding—while Penrys sat in a corner of the dusty room and searched fruitlessly for Najud and Munraz, and for any foreign wizards or unusual concentrations of native ones.
When that failed, she offered to take over for the next topic, mind-scanning, and Chosmod volunteered himself as a non-Kigali subject.
She perched on one of the random pieces of furniture in the small room which had been hastily emptied for their use and tried not to sneeze at the dust in the air that had been stirred up. With only one formal Zannib set of clothing remaining, she’d opted for her everyday work clothes, in Zannib style—boots, breeches, a loose vest and a short overrobe. The two ex-prisoners were newly clad in ordinary Kigali garments, with their hair in a single braid, though neither bore a Kigali face. Only Chosmod retained any elegance of dress in his priest’s robes.
The biggest difference, however, was the exposed chains of the two students. Neither of them was wearing the high-necked style of tunic that hid the chains, and they’d decided not to cover them with any sort of fabric.
Penrys watched the aborted gestures, the hands partially lifted to check if the chains were exposed, before being dropped. It’s going to take them a while. I wonder if my example is really right for them, anyway.
“Now watch what I’m doing,” she told them.
She opened her mind to both of them and let them watch while she superficially probed the cooperative Chosmod.
*First things first. He’s clearly male. Even young children usually have a firm sense of identity that includes the basics. It’s the mental equivalent of how he holds his body, how he occupies space.*
She felt the agreement of her students, and the lingering investigation by Lai Tsumai of what it felt like in a mind of a different gender.
*Now, what does his body know? What has been ingrained in the structures of his mind? Feel for the echoes of it in your own body. I feel reaching and pulling in his arms and chest. There are very high mountains in Rasesdad. Is this what it feels like to travel hill terrain as an expert, moving over rock and not just following trails?*
Chosmod was listening in to the lesson, and they all felt his amused assent. “We have competitions for climbing difficult cliffs, and I was considered well-skilled, when I was younger, of course.”
*What else?*
Lai Tsumai ventured an opinion. *His hands know subtle, coordinated movement. Rhythmic. A musician?*
*Well done. His cheeks and mouth, too. Wind instrument?*
That last question was directed to Chosmod. *Several. I’m not very good.*
*Doesn’t matter. Your mind and body still remember whatever skill you have. It’s just as much effort being a bad musician as a good one.*
His laugh which turned into a sneeze broke her concentration, and she turned that into some advice for her students. “Next time you have the opportunity, spend some time watching entertainers and craftsmen, to see how it feels from the inside. And then think about what it’s like when you yourself become an expert in anything, even if it’s only throwing knives or making bread. It’ll help you when you meet strangers.”
They both nodded.
*Let’s look at language. How does his mouth form words, his tongue and teeth chew on them? Try it out in your own mouth… what does it feel like? Does it feel like Kigali?
Dar Datsu answered tentativ
ely. *No. More movement in the back of the mouth, almost in the throat.*
*Now try and see what sounds go with that—which ones are meaningful, and which are just noise.*
Dar Datsu sputtered some random noises out loud, but the guttural feel was clear.
“That’s what Rasesni sounds like,” Lai Tsumai exclaimed.
“Neither of you know Rasesni,” Penrys said. “So watch, from the inside, while he talks. Say something, Modo.”
Chosmod obliged with a description of the sun setting behind the Mratsanag Mountains, as viewed from the temple city of Dzongphan.
“Could you follow what he said?”
Dar Datsu nodded slowly. “Yes, I think so.”
“Good. If you work on this for a while, you can learn the language this way. Even quickly, once you become expert at it.”
“Does that mean I could play his instruments, too?”
Penrys shook her head. “There’s no shortcut for your body learning what his body already knows. You can quickly understand the mechanics of how his instruments work, but your fingers and mouth and breathing would all be clumsy until your body learned it the slow way. Same for the language—your accent comes from what your mouth knows about making sounds. You can understand and speak the language you’re tapping, but you’ll garble it in your mouth until you have enough practice with it.”
They spent the next half-hour exploring Penrys’s native Ellech and Chosmod’s Rasesni and trying to generate sentences of their own in the two languages, until Penrys called a halt with a lift of her hand.
“So,” Penrys said. “What’s missing from what you know about this man?”
The two students looked at each other, then almost as one they realized. “He’s a wizard,” Lai Tsumai said. “How do we know that?”
“Chosmod, how do you tell if someone is a wizard?” Penrys asked.
“By using some of the techniques you’ve been teaching, brudigna. It’s a profession like any other.”
Penrys gave him a startled look. “Not directly?”
Chosmod slowly shook his head. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Hmm… Let me find someone nearby.”
She scanned the surrounding blocks and located one of the Kigali hidden wizards. *Here, watch, everyone. Do you see that core of power, deep inside? If we were using our eyes, we might say it shines.* She showed them what she meant, and they tried looking by themselves.
Dar Datsu naturally tried looking at Chosmod and the rest of them.
“Chosmod-chi shines like the Kigali man. But it’s hard to look at you or Lai Tsumai—too bright!”
“You three all look like that to me,” Chosmod told him. “I assume it’s the effect of the chain?” he asked Penrys.
“I’m not sure what’s cause and effect,” she said. “All the chained wizards I’ve met shine brightly, but are there wizards who shine as brightly without the chain? Were we all wizards before we were… taken? Were we bright before and that’s why we were taken? Or is the chain responsible?”
She shook her head. “I assume it’s the chain, for convenience, but it could be the other option. I’ll have to ask Mpeowake about her nephew, what he was like as a wizard before he went missing. He’s the only one whose history we know, from before.”
Now was not the time to tell them that she could pull the power from those cores into her chain, temporarily or otherwise. Don’t want them experimenting with that.
“If I shield myself…” She suited action to words.
Lai Tsumai said, “I can barely see your mind at all, even though my eyes tell me you’re there.”
“And that’s what you both need to work on, with each other.”
The little digression reminded her of why they were there.
“All right, we need to find the captives, since that way we’ll presumably find their captors. That means we need to search for wizards. Problem is, the city’s full of them. We’re going to have to take it sector by sector.”
She linked with all four of them. *Let’s start with the immediate surroundings to see what our joint range is, and then we’ll refine this down to something systematic.*
Each cluster of a few dozen people included one or more of the Kigali wizards, and every so often a chained wizard shone out as well.
Chosmod dropped out first. “Too many possibilities.”
“And that’s my problem,” Penrys said. “I can go about five miles out, but that’s not even a quarter of the city, and there are hundreds of thousands of people here. Perhaps a million or more—it’s difficult to judge.”
She hunched over and worked her shoulders. “I’ve tried looking just for Najud, but it’s so hard sorting through them. Only the chained ones are easy to find. There aren’t very many of them, but they’re scattered all over, too.”
She caught the eyes of her students. “I’ve looked in the direction of Rin Tsugo’s compound—they’re not there any more.”
Lai Tsumai said, “I don’t understand—it wasn’t chained wizards who attacked. Was it?”
“Well, no, I have no reason to think so. There were three of them in the crowd that surrounded us when I told them to back off, if you remember. But there are two or three like that wherever I look, all over the city, and they are just as likely to have been there by accident. Why would they have anything to do with the mob of wizards?”
Chosmod said, “That ‘mob’ as you call it was well-prepared and must have had leaders. Are you sure those leaders weren’t chained wizards? Isn’t that how the Voice worked?”
Dar Datsu bristled at the implication, but Penrys only shrugged. “I’m not sure of anything, though I would sooner suspect wizards with generations of knowledge than any number of chained ones, three years old.”
Her stomach grumbled audibly, reminding her of how much time had passed. “No, that’s not true,” she said. “I’m sure of something else… I’m starving.”
She could feel the lessening of tension that told her that her change of topic was successful, but Chosmod’s query set her thinking. Maybe she should pin down the locations of all the chained wizards as a first step.
Yrmur! Najud, if you’ve gotten yourself killed, I swear I’ll haunt you, rather than the other way around. How bad was that wound? Was he still alive?
She found her appetite had vanished.
Before Penrys resumed classes in the afternoon, Chosmod took an opportunity to join her for a private conversation over the remains of their meal while the other two practiced their silent speech and shields on each other at the other end of the room.
“You said the Char family wizards had devices?” he asked.
“I saw powered lights in their own areas, and there were many books on the shelves in their sanctum. I would expect they can make more than lights, but there hasn’t been time to ask yet.”
Chosmod nodded. “And that was definitely some sort of device that hurled us off the ground, at the end. You know devices, I think?”
“I was considered something of a specialist in the Collegium, Modo—it’s what I experimented in. Haven’t done much since I ended up in Kigali, and you know the Zannib don’t do physical magic.”
The Rasesni man folded his hands on the table before him. “What do the Kigali wizards know that we don’t? Where do they get their information?”
“What, not from Rasesdad? I assumed they picked up books and expertise from there, or maybe Ndant. Or even Ellech.”
“And no one heard about it? No one talked, for hundreds of years? There’s always been some intermarriage on the borders, but still…”
Penrys looked at him. “What are you suggesting, Modo? That they created their own school of physical magic and devices, based on their own discoveries?”
She held up her hand before he could reply. “Wait, maybe you’re right… The Ellech don’t read Rasesni books on the topic—you don’t let those works travel. And there’s not much from Ndant in the library at the Collegium, and I would kno
w.”
Chosmod smiled in satisfaction at making his point. “So where are they getting power-stones? I assume those devices had them.”
“Oh, yes. I could feel them. Wait a minute…”
She cast her mind out to scan the area, this time looking for power-stones instead of people. They glistened like little pinpricks of light, almost all of them in small physical concentrations that she suspected were the sanctums of compounds that held a few wizards. In the first few blocks, she found five such repositories.
*Come and see.* She invited Chosmod to share her perception of them.
“Well, that might not identify wizards for you,” he said, “but you can surely find out where they live.”
“That makes sense, doesn’t it? But why were you asking about power-stones in the first place?”
“You can’t become a senior mage in Dzongphan without some knowledge of politics and leverage.” Chosmod was truly doing his best not to seem patronizing to the much younger Penrys, and she gritted her teeth and invoked patience.
“Our notju,” he said, jocularly, “he’s worried about hidden Kigali wizards who might be pulling strings inside the government somewhere. But our bad boys from yesterday… if they’re truly not known to the Char family and, by inference, to the other hidden wizards in Yenit Ping, then who’s to say who’s pulling the strings of those wizards? And them not even necessarily aware of it?”
“Wheels within wheels,” Penrys commented. “I can see wizards hiding from the rest of Kigali, given the original imperial ban, but how would the second group hide from the first?”
“Very carefully,” Chosmod whispered, theatrically, and Penrys laughed.
“But it’s no joke. Look how many there were, and how many died. We killed a lot more of them than they did of us…”
“And that’s down to you—both groups met unexpected opposition.” Chosmod nodded in approval.
She shrugged, still unhappy at the body count, but becoming resigned to the necessity. “So everyone pauses to go lick their wounds, is that it? While the captives…”
“They have hostages—we need devices. To help us even the odds.” He pursed his lips. “Think you can find out where the wizards get their power-stones?”