Chained Adept Page 8

  She lowered her voice. “Physical magic is just another tool, like a knife, or a loom, or the ability to read, or the skill to lead men.”

  He heard her words, but the strictures of his youth were resistant, and he knew how his colleagues would react. He wanted to reach an understanding with her—she had so much to teach him.

  “Let us agree to not agree,” he said. “I think well of you. I’ve never met a jarghal with your strength—maybe they are all like you in Ellech, how would I know? But that’s not what matters.”

  He spoke as sincerely as he could. “I’ve tasted your mind, and it is not unclean or unnatural. I can’t explain how that is, but I know what I’ve seen in you. I will try to learn whatever you care to teach me, bikrajti.”

  He bowed at the end of his little speech, from his backrest, and when he lifted his face he was shocked to discover her bent away from him, her face hidden. A delicate probe revealed a roil of emotions, more than he could name.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, gently. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer.

  “Perhaps I am unnatural,” she said. “Not because of physical magic,” she waved her hand dismissively, “but because of what I am.”

  “Yes?” he said, encouragingly.

  “I am not like the wizards at the Collegium. They don’t learn the languages and knowledge of the people they are near. They can’t power a stone as easily as I just did. They grope at the principles of powered devices which seem clear as glass to me. To some ways of thinking, I’m only three years old! That’s all I remember. How is this possible? What am I? What happened to me?”

  Her voice shook.

  “They certainly don’t have furry ears. Or…” she trailed off.

  He wondered what she’d stopped herself from saying.

  “I’m not in any of the books, none of this is—I’ve looked. They named me an Adept because they couldn’t think what else to call me. Made it easier to deal with me without thinking about it.”

  She swayed, and he remembered that she’d been assaulted by the blast just as he had, and how little sleep she’d gotten, how little time to recover. Her control was unraveling.

  “You know what I think, sometimes?” she said.

  “What?” he murmured.

  “I think someone made me, maybe, constructed me, to be a sponge and suck up knowledge. And when I have enough, he’ll take me back and wring me out, and start my memory over again. The world’s a big place—maybe he’s done it before. I think that’s where the chain comes from.”

  She paused a moment. “You know who wears chains? Slaves do.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “Who knows? I’m not possible, either. And I demonstrated just a couple of nights ago how a body can be transported a long distance.”

  She leaned against the pile of the Rasesni’s packs, and set her face to the back of the wagon, away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, over her shoulder. “Let’s pick the lesson up later.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Why did I reveal myself like that?

  Penrys was dismayed at her breakdown before Zandaril. She took a few deep breaths to steady herself, disturbed at the quaver in her throat, as if she were near to tears. None of this was his fault, and he was doing his best to keep an open mind about raunarys.

  I must be more tired than I realized, and I wasn’t prepared for his offer of friendship, of respect. No one back home at the Collegium had been half so welcoming, and she’d been there three years, not just three days.

  Back home, was it? Nothing home-like about it. Do I really want to go back? What for, besides the books I haven’t read yet? That’s not much of an excuse for a life.

  What do I really want? To find out what I am and where I came from, I guess. They had no answers, so where will I find them? From other wizard communities? Like the Zannib?

  She leaned on the packs and rested her head on her folded right arm, staring out over the tailgate at the receding plains and the wagons that were further back in the column. She’d gotten comfortable, and the view presented to her eyes was restful. She half-closed them to keep out the dust.

  A jolt from the wagon woke Penrys and she clutched at the packs to stay upright. She ran her hand over her face and swung around to see how Zandaril was doing. He was reading, a book propped up on his knees, and he stuck a finger in it to hold his place.

  “Must’ve fallen asleep,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “You needed it,” he said. “Too bad it wasn’t longer.”

  He looked down at the pallet of blankets. “I was thinking… There’s enough space here, I could scoot over and give you room to stretch out.”

  She flushed. “No, no, that’s all right.”

  He looked at her earnestly. “I wish you would. Better for you.”

  She spoke past her embarrassment over her loss of composure earlier. “I still need to go through the remainder of these packs. Chang’s expecting a report.”

  “Chang can wait,” Zandaril said, hotly, and she raised her eyebrows.

  “Bikrajab aren’t made of steel, any more than the rest of his men. And if we make mistakes, it costs too much.”

  She paled at her recollection of the triggered mirror, and he exclaimed, “No, I didn’t mean that—no one could have suspected that. But what if you’d been too tired to find all those traps yesterday?”

  He drew himself upright from the backrest and intoned, “Bikrajab have a duty to keep themselves fit, and you’ve been violating that.”

  She smiled. He had a point.

  He seized the advantage. “It’s almost lunchtime. Afternoon naps for both of us, then back to teaching. Yes?”

  “All right,” she said, and began gathering up the power-stones from the foot of the pallet. “What are you reading?”

  “The Principles,” he said, showing her the book he’d avoided when she’d pulled it from the Rasesni’s pack.

  “Will your friends still speak to you, after?” she teased.

  “I don’t plan to tell them,” Zandaril replied.

  Penrys spent the early part of the afternoon dozing on the side of the pallet, her back to Zandaril. For a while, trying to balance without touching him in the narrow space kept her restless, but eventually the swaying of the wagon did the job, and she slept solidly for a couple of hours.

  The world seemed brighter when she woke up and she looked over her shoulder cautiously to see if Zandaril was still reading. He’d dropped off himself, the book fallen from his hands, and he himself still sitting half-upright.

  Didn’t want to wake me by sliding down. She shook her head and pried herself up carefully, trying not to disturb him. She slid over to the Rasesni’s packs at the back of the wagon.

  As quietly as she could, she finished laying out the contents of the second pack. She looked up when she was done and found Zandaril awake and yawning.

  “You were right,” she told him. “Things seem better now.”

  “I am always right,” he said, thumping his chest outrageously.

  “Hmm.” She waved at the pile beyond the foot of the pallet. “Shall we continue?”

  He stretched in place and nodded. “Tomorrow we ride. Nicer outside. No more lying down.”

  “Better do demonstrations today, then—hard to do on horseback.”

  Penrys ran a hand over her mouth and returned to lecture mode. “So, when we stopped, I showed you how a powered stone makes physical magic stronger. But how do you put power into a stone?”

  She lifted a finger. “It’s like lifting a weight with a rope and pulley. Instead of lifting it a little way and then dropping it, over and over, you lift it all the way up, and drop it all at once. Same effort, but concentrated release. You understand?”

  Zandaril nodded.

  “Power-stones are rare. Wizards who have them carry them around and spend spare moments acting on them without really acting. They don’t move the stones, but they fill them with the effort of movement,
if you see what I mean.”

  Zandaril stirred. “But when you did that, it only took you a moment to power the stone.”

  “That’s right. Good for you for noticing.”

  He smiled at the praise.

  “That’s because I cheated,” she said, soberly, and his smile vanished.

  “I tapped this.” She rested a finger on the chain around her neck. “You can’t tell a powered stone from an unpowered one, but some other wizards can. What they can’t see is that this chain is powered. I can’t see it myself—mirrors don’t work for this—so I don’t know if it might be visible to someone else like me.”

  If there were anyone else like me.

  Zandaril said, “I saw the powered stone get dimmer for you as you used it. Didn’t look like it would last very long.”

  “That’s right. There’s a limit to how much power you can stuff into a power stone. Some of them are better than others. I didn’t spend long filling that one, and over time it would gradually leak out.”

  She cleared her throat. “I could have filled it to destruction, from this.” She tapped the chain. “And quickly.”

  He hesitated. “And how do you refill the chain?”

  “I don’t. It has never seemed diminished.”

  Silence fell for a moment while Zandaril considered that.

  “Then can you pick up this wagon with your mind and spin it around?” he ventured.

  Her mouth quirked. “Mules and all? I suppose the chain might have enough power, but there’s a connection issue. For physical magic, wizards can use their natural power, which is weak, or amplify it with a power-stone, and I have the same limitations. What the chain helps me do is overcome the inherent disadvantages of power-stones, with near-instantaneous replenishment.

  “So, to answer your question, I would have to find and fill a very large power-stone to transfer that much power. And keep it filled, or drop the wagon.”

  He said, slowly, “Or maybe a bunch of small stones?” He pointed at the sack next to her knee.

  “Yes, maybe. I used an array of them to power my detector device, borrowed from the Collegium resources.” She ran her hand over the smooth leather of the bag. “This many in one place is quite a treasure. He must have used one or two on every device. A good one was probably worth the value of the wagon it was used to destroy.”

  She hoisted the sack in her hand. “He has two full bags of these stones. Expensive sabotage,” she said. “Wasn’t there any cheaper way?”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “And that’s not the only puzzle. The traps that were set are still a mystery. You can fill a stone to failure. There’s a sort of… resistance that tells you when that’s close, but when it happens, the stone just breaks. Might cause a little fire, maybe. You can prepare a stone in a device to make a thing happen when it detects some other thing, so you could make a trigger that would react to a probe. Those traps probably had something like that. But I don’t know any way to make them give up their power all at once to cause the… explosions. A sudden drain wouldn’t do that, and the energy in them wouldn’t be enough, I think.”

  “Maybe the Rasesni books…?” Zandaril suggested.

  “I hope so, because I’m not looking forward to random experimentation. Too dangerous, for one thing.”

  She looked down at the contents of the second pack lying at her feet. “The rest of this is tools and raw materials.”

  She opened a small rectangular box and revealed a set of nested lenses and a stand. “That’s for fine work, making the devices.”

  “The charms, you mean.”

  “Actually, no. Those are just shells. He brought hundreds with him—he must have just gotten started planting them because one of those packs contains nothing but the painted exteriors. I have to unpack them completely to be sure there’s nothing else, but that’s all I saw.”

  She waved at the fourth pack. “That’s where the devices are, small pre-built frameworks, more than enough for all those charms, and a good bit more.”

  She stood up and unlashed the top of the pack. Then she groped inside and brought out a flat wooden rectangle, about the size of two little fingers side by side. Holes were sunk along the surface.

  “There must be hundreds of these in here. They don’t weigh much. See the holes? Those are for power-stones, but I don’t recognize the configuration. The assembled device would fit nicely inside a charm, or maybe on its own, tucked away somewhere unexpected, and then triggered.”

  She tossed it back into the pack and refastened the top.

  “There are more tools here—for faceting, for cutting wood, for drilling holes. He had the setup for a regular manufacturing operation.”

  “Where did he do the work?” Zandaril asked.

  “I don’t know. Look how much of it seems to have been pre-assembled and brought with him. Maybe all they expected him to do was to put things together and then plant them where they could do the most harm.”

  “The cost of the stones, the scope of the attack—this comes from a government. It’s official.” He pursed his lips. “Only one attacker? Not likely.”

  “I didn’t find any other native Rasesni-speakers or other devices.”

  He waved that aside. “They could be ahead of us, waiting for us to get there. They could be allies of the Rasesni, speaking other languages. Who can say?” He snorted. “But I don’t believe he was by himself, this Veneshjug.”

  “You’re only three weeks out of, what’s it called, the Meeting of Waters. Maybe he was just the first and he hadn’t met up with the rest of them yet.”

  “And now he’s out there, giving them a big warning,” Zandaril remarked, glumly.

  “Worse,” she said. “Didn’t you say the Rasesni weren’t known for wizards? That they were like the Kigaliwen that way? So where is all this expertise coming from?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Tak Tuzap groped with his bare foot for the next slick rock, careful to keep hold of the cliff wall with both hands. The guards at the top of the gorge were distracted by the boats trying to run the Seguchi Norwan, the great Gates of the Seguchi River. He’d counted on that, sure that they wouldn’t be watching halfway down the southern cliff for movement in the dark.

  The shouts that trailed up faintly from the roar of water below him betrayed at least one overturned and destroyed boat. They’re dead. Told them it wouldn’t work.

  He didn’t look down. Slide one foot, and then the next. Don’t let the pack pull you away from the rock face. Keep the wet braid from getting in your face.

  I guess they couldn’t have gone this route with the little kids. Should’ve stayed and waited. Yenit Ping would be sending an army. There’d be fighting. Getting out then might’ve been easier.

  He snorted as he inched his way along. So why didn’t I stay, if I believe that?

  The truthful answer came, unbidden. Because Uncle Tak’s dead, and I couldn’t hide anymore. Because whoever’s coming is going to need another way in.

  He stopped for a moment at a slightly wider spot in the ledge to rest his muscles. Look at me, big hero. Six inches at a step. This is no way in for an army.

  He thought about the hill passes far to the south, the ones he’d heard about but never seen. The border folk had Zannib blood, they said. And there was the pack road over the Red Wall ridges, the one they used to travel before they channeled the river in the gorge a hundred years ago and sheltered the trade road alongside it. Sometimes a peddler came over the old road, instead of going the whole long way up to the Gates of Seguchi.

  Gotta keep going. Can’t afford to stiffen up.

  It was still dark when the boy reached the last ledge above the river, nearly forty feet up. The wreckage of the boats had long since passed, and he knew the guards would be patrolling the roadway on the other shore, not this side, where the river ran right along the cliff face.

  From here the going was easier, but it was almost half a mile before the pass widened enough to leave bare ground
on his side. He was confident his dark clothing would hide him if he didn’t do anything to attract attention, but he still moved cautiously, testing his footing with each step until he reached river level and solid, if muddy, soil. He stepped carefully to obscure his footprints.

  The invaders ran patrols outside the gorge, too. He’d still have to creep along once he reached the bank, but he wanted to make as much distance as he could before dawn. Then he could hole up and sleep during the day.

  He passed bits of broken planks on the left, turning in the little backwaters spun off by the main current, and he didn’t stop to look at them—what would be the point. One time he saw what he knew was a body, floating face down, drifting back and forth as though the river were debating what to do with it.

  Fish’ll take care of that one.

  The sky in front of him was beginning to lighten, and he searched for a good place to move away from the river into the scattered groves, raised slightly above the flood plain. When he turned and looked behind him, he couldn’t see any guards, and the distant far side of the river, which had broadened now that it had passed its constraint, was still in darkness, shaded by the sheer wall of the north-eastern cliff.

  Just as Tak Tuzap was about to turn away from the water, he heard a desolate cry, like the dawn song of a waterbird. He didn’t recognize it but thought of breakfast and moved stealthily left to the river shore to see what it was.

  After the second repetition he paused in mid-step. It was a person, a kid, voice hoarse and babbling.

  No one could’ve survived the gorge.

  For a moment he was tempted to turn around, but then he blushed for shame and crept forward until he could see.

  This boat was still floating, despite its damage, and was loosely wedged against the mud of the bank. The only movement he saw was the head of a seated child who was babbling desperately at something in the bottom of the boat, and hitting it with both small fists.

  He swallowed, and came out into the open. When the child saw him, she screamed incoherently at him and pointed down. Her bright red face was streaked with tears under her short black hair.