The Chained Adept (3-4)

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Vylkar of Ellech was the first to report to the groups around their tables. He glanced at Penrys in apology, and began to speak.

“I encountered my first chained wizard three and a half years ago.” He gestured at Penrys, so that there would be no confusion.

“It was winter then, in the north, and I was at my hunting lodge with my family in the uplands of Asuthgrata, when I heard a loud noise, here.” He tapped his forehead. “I reached for the source, and brought men with me to look for it. And we found her, naked except for her chain, and speechless.”

Penrys clenched her teeth and looked down. This was her earliest memory, the cold, wet snow on her bare skin and the torches of the riders flickering in the trees.

“By the time we got her home and warmed up, she had our language. When I probed her to see where she might have come from, she raised a shield, and so I knew she was a wizard, as I am.”

He pursed his lips, half-hidden in his gray-shot tidy scholar’s beard, as if to consider how to abbreviate the remainder. “I took her with us back to the Collegium of Wizards in Tavnastok, and there she baffled us all. Old Aergon resurrected an antique title—Adept, hakkengenni in Ellechen guma—and she spent three years with us, mostly in the library and working on devices, ruanarys, there being little to teach her in beolrys, the mental magic.

“Six months ago she vanished, but Tun Jeju has told you something of what followed and I’ll let others carry that story. I received Penrys’s own report about it just days before I got the Kigali request for information about missing people and chained wizards.”

Vylkar cleared his throat. “At the Collegium, we thought Penrys was a unique mystery, but when we looked, thus prompted, we found we were wrong.”

He reached into a pack, pulled out a chain identical to Penrys’s, and tossed it onto his table where it clattered. “This was discovered on the remains of an unclothed man found inside a crypt in a country town, when they opened it for a new internment. He was not one of the expected inhabitants of the tomb,” he commented dryly.

“The surprised funeral party called for help from the local magistrate, and it’s from him I got the chain and the story. The conclusion was that, however the man had entered the tomb, he’d been unable to leave and so he died there. There wasn’t much left, but the hair was black and curly, rather like that of a Zan.”

Penrys swallowed. There were worse things than materializing naked in the snow.

“We do have people missing, and some of them are wizards. I’ve provided Tun Jeju with a list, but whether some of them are now wandering around some other country with a chain and no memory—which is what is being clearly implied—I have no way of knowing.”

He paused. “Perhaps they were simply murdered by unhappy spouses and cleverly disposed of.”

A nervous titter traveled around the tables.

“And so, I and my companions, Bildaer and Innurrys, came to learn more.”

Nodding to Tun Jeju, Vylkar leaned back in his seat, and Mpeowake of Ndant stood up. She smoothed the layers of blue and aqua silk that draped from her left shoulder down to the sash at her waist and thence to her ankles. A tight bodice and long narrow skirt enwrapped her body beneath the outer layer.

She was small and dark and delicately built, with long straight black hair just beginning to go gray. Her eyes pierced those of her audience as she looked around the tables.

“We wizards of Ndant are pledged to our goddess, Pume Chowe. It’s in her name that we work for our people. One who is born a wizard but will not take the oath is an abomination, a witch to be hunted and destroyed, before he can harm any of the innocent. I am the mbaewe, the leader of those who hunt, and these are my assistants.” She gestured at the man and woman on either side of her.

“We do have missing wizards—we are a populous nation—but we have discovered none of these chained wizards, living. However, in the sea cliffs to the north of Shokona Bay, we have a three-year-old mystery. A bird-nester, descending by rope from the top, followed a foul smell and found two dead bodies, a man and a woman. There was no clothing, and the boy believed that they’d fought, using rocks. The woman was dark-skinned like the Ndant, but her hair was short and curly. The man was pale, with hair like fire.” She pointed to redhaired Bildaer in Vylkar’s party.

“Both had chains. We buried them under rocks in the cave, and the cave was sealed. It’s high on the cliff and not easy of access. The chains are there—we chose not to meddle with them.”

She sat down gracefully and folded her hands.

Tun Jeju turned his head to the older of the two Rasesni, both of whom wore the robes of priests.

“I’m Chosmod, and this is Mrigasba. My superior Menchos, who had met with his counterpart in Neshilik”—he nodded at Tun Jeju—“thought it better to send mages rather than come himself. Most of us work in the temples and the schools, or out with the people, not in the security services, though some of us do both.” He gestured casually to include his companion and himself among the latter. “If nothing else, we have an easier time with Kigali yat.”

That drew appreciative smiles from all of Tun Jeju’s foreign visitors, and Penrys mentally kicked herself for not realizing that they were all wizards, every one of them—all shielded and buttoned down. She’d been so busy shielding herself against the overwhelming quantity of people in the city that she hadn’t looked for anything more intimate than surface emotions from the people here in the room. She glanced briefly at Munraz, glad that Najud and she had worked hard on improving his own shield. His eyes were wide in this company, even as his body shrank in on itself and tried to disappear.

Chosmod c****d his head in Penrys and Najud’s direction. “Tun Jeju has told you of our recent chained wizard, the one that was stopped in Neshilik, with their help.”

Penrys reluctantly turned to Najud and held out her hand. He pulled out the small suede pouch from the inner pocket of his tunic, the one she’d given him to hold, since there was no place for it with her formal Zannib robes, and handed it to her.

She placed it on the table in front of her where it drew all eyes, and Chosmod waited for her to untie it. Her hand reached in and settled on the small fragment of chain, just three links, and she pulled it out and laid it quietly on the table. “This is what is left of the Voice’s chain.”

She looked at Chosmod. “Were other pieces found, afterward? I never asked.”

“The area was searched and we turned up four individual links, but no partial links, no broken ones. And not enough to account for them all, though we’re not sure how many that should be.”

“Mine has thirteen links,” Penrys said in a controlled voice. “I’ve seen another, with fourteen. I never counted the Voice’s. The links themselves—all the ones I’ve seen—appear to be the same size.”

Unexpectedly, Vylkar spoke up, waving his hand at the loop of chain before him on the table. “This has fifteen. The man was large.”

Chosmod resumed his story. “After the threat of the Voice was eliminated, Menchos formalized the frantic information-gathering that we had been doing in Dzongphan. We consolidated the archives in the capital and pulled fresh information from the satellite temples.”

“And from the harbors,” Mrigasba interjected. “We heard many interesting stories there.”

Tun Jeju nodded. “As did we.”

“In our ports, as well,” Mpeowake contributed.

Chosmod picked up the thread again. “The sailors had tales to tell from other ports. Nothing very believable, nothing different from other tales of demons and monsters hiding as humans.”

Penrys tried not to wince at that.

“But the country folk had much to tell their priests, now that we were casting a wider net,” Chosmod said. “We tracked down every report, and several of them yielded results. We brought those with us.”

He glanced at Tun Jeju who said, “We’ll be looking at that shortly, all of us.”

“Alive?” Penrys asked Chosmod.

“No. None of them. And all recent—in the last three years.”

There was a pause, and Penrys intercepted a significant look from Tun Jeju. Must be my turn.

“You’ve heard the story of my being found in Ellech. A… miscalculation while working with devices brought me unexpectedly to western Kigali, where I met Najud, with everything that followed with the Voice.” She kept her tone bland as she recalled whacking the malfunctioning device framework she was building with the back of her hand in frustration and ending up in a Kigali military tent while they were under attack from a Rasesni device. Power calling to power, she assumed, though that was no real explanation.

“What happened after that… Najud invited me to see his country, his home. We traveled to central sarq-Zannib by way of the High Pass. And that’s when we crossed the track of another chained wizard.”

She glanced at Najud to see if he’d rather tell the story himself, but he shook his head faintly.

“To keep it brief, this was a young girl, maybe thirteen, who we think found animals, and only animals, for her first years and bonded with them, and then when she finally met people, tried to bond them to her like another kind of beast. It was disastrous for the people—hundreds died, most of an entire clan—but it wasn’t an intentional slaughter, in my opinion, just a case of not understanding what would result.”

“What happened to her?” Vylkar asked.

“She was captured and killed.” Penrys carefully avoided looking at the rigid Munraz. “The Zannib wizards have a tradition of banding together to overwhelm and defeat a rogue wizard, what they call a qahulaj.”

Mpeowake gave a sharp nod of approval at that.

“This girl was more powerful than any ordinary Zannib bikraj, of course. Stronger than me in some ways. But in the end she died.”

She reached into the pouch in front of her one more time, and laid the loop of chain before her, stretching it out into a smooth circle. “Fourteen links, as you see. She wasn’t full-grown yet so it hung loose on her. But tight enough.”

Vylkar asked, “Did you recognize her nation?”

“She might have been from Ellech. Light brown hair, freckles, pale eyes.”

Tun Jeju waited to see if she was done, and then spoke. “Our latest guests came from a direction and over a distance that made coordination with the the capital of sarq-Zannib difficult, but Ussha has sent us a separate report directly, via the ambassador. They disclaim knowledge of any other chained wizards, other than Penrys and the one who wore that chain, but they’re looking now. Perhaps there will be other news, soon.”

Penrys heard Najud’s suppressed snort. She herself had difficulty picturing how people of foreign appearance with unremovable chains could possibly go unremarked in sarq-Zannib, but the country was large and the cities were small and few, so perhaps the reports hadn’t yet traveled to the capital.

But news about her would travel at the same time. The whole country would know what she was. It was all too easy to imagine the reaction the next time she met Najud’s people.

Tun Jeju pushed away from his table and stood up, and the rest followed his lead. “This is all just a start, and you have yet to hear the Kigali side of the story. We have things to show you, and things to tell you, before we can truly examine the problem. We’ll start with the showing, if you will please follow me.”

One of Tun Jeju’s staff hastened to open the door ahead of the notju, and two of them lingered behind to monitor the last of the guests as they followed their host through the door.

Munraz opened his mouth to say something, but Najud shook his head sharply to silence him. “Later,” he murmured. “Not here. Save it.”

The exotic procession returned to the ground floor of the building, but not to the guarded entrance. Instead, they turned down one of the back corridors. There was a brief delay at some sort of internal guard post with a locked and barred entry.

Penrys was too far back in the line, and too short, to see exactly what was going on, and her audible frustration turned Najud’s head. “Don’t be so eager to look,” he said, without his characteristic grin. “Might not like what you find.”

He pointed down, as if to indicate where they were going. He must have some idea. What would be below this, in the Imperial Security headquarters, behind bars? Prisoners? Special prisoners?

Penrys reined in her impatience. True to Najud’s prediction, they encountered another stairway that began in front of them and went down. The texture of the steps was coarse, and the rough stone of the walls was in sharp contrast to the smooth and polished surfaces she’d seen so far in this heavily guarded building.

When she reached the lower landing, she glanced at the barred and guarded entrance into deeper recesses of the structure. Her sense of direction told her that they were not only below street level, into the embankment that was built from the stone of Tegong Him, but outside the above-ground walls of the building. Does it extend outward in all directions, like an iceberg?

They descended three levels altogether, and when they finally passed through the guards and another barred entrance, Penrys felt nothing but apprehension from all the members of their party, even Tun Jeju and his staff. The marks on the walls below the first level were mute but unmistakable witnesses to highwater that had reached up through the embankment at various times, and it painted a picture for her of stone underpinnings that were solid but not waterproof, not when the Mother of Rivers decided to stretch herself in a flood.

Nothing down here but prisoners? Something that can be easily moved, if necessary. Or, perhaps, not moved at all.

The dankness of the atmosphere added to the sense of being underwater, though she knew the surface of the river south of her was still further down—the embankment was taller than a mere three flights of stairs. Still, the stairway descended beyond them to lower levels yet, obscure in the gloom. If you go down far enough, do the walls become river mud?

The first rooms on this level that they passed through were given up to the guards and their needs. Tun Jeju held up his hand when they reached one more barred and guarded door, and his staff faded away to the back of the crowd. “We asked throughout Kigali for news of chained people, and we miscalculated the effect. When Imperial Security asks for something, everyone assumes the worst. And there were many more of them than we expected.”

Penrys felt her blood chill. What would it have been like, if the whole town of Gonglik knew who she was, because of her chain, and suddenly the dreaded and feared attention of Imperial Security had fallen upon her?

“Local authorities were zealous in their efforts to please us. Disastrously so, as you’ll see.” He waved his hand at whatever lay behind the door. “This was not what we intended.”

Penrys thought his eyes flicked in her direction briefly, but she might have been wrong.

“Worse,” Tun Jeju said, “some unknown number of people fled in alarm as the news spread of the local reactions. Some of them have appeared here, in the city, and they have no reason to trust us.”

“Are they a threat?” Penrys asked. Am I? She suspected her undertone carried the rest of her meaning.

“Not so far, not that we know.”

Penrys felt the walls closing around her, and pictured the gates between here and the outside, all three of them. The wizards around her, of unknown strengths and alliance, watched silently. She didn’t know how much of her concerns appeared on her face, but something must have, because Tun Jeju looked her in the eye and spoke, just to her. “I make you an oath before these witnesses, Penrys-chi, that you’ll leave this building as freely as you entered.”

“Or you will answer to sarq-Zannib,” Najud said. Penrys pictured the ancient ally of Kigali, small and disorganized, throwing itself valiantly at an indifferent, massive Kigali army.

Tun Jeju nodded to Najud, as if his warning carried weight. “Just so. The Zannib ambassador will be expecting your visit this evening, after we’re done here.”

She felt nothing but truth in her superficial scan of the notju, and let her rigid posture relax.

“All right, then. Let’s see your collection, Tun-chi.”