The Chained Adept (3-4)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

The guard who had accompanied Tun Jeju on this level unlocked the entry to the prison and stood back to let the foreigners and the notju’s staff enter. A narrow corridor ran to left and right along the walls and another stretched before them.

It was quiet and much drier than Penrys expected. She looked up and thought she spotted ventilation openings in the low ceilings. The light was provided by oil lanterns hung at regular intervals between each pair of iron-barred cells, and the rest of the space was dark. No light glimmered from the rows on either side, so perhaps this central row was the only one occupied.

There was an odd scent in the air—not the stench of human occupation she had anticipated, but something she couldn’t place.

Tun Jeju paused in front of the first cell on the left and pulled open its unlocked door. Two of the guards pushed past the rest of them and raised their lanterns high to hook them from the ceiling on the inside, and then returned to the corridor to let the others into the small cell, two or three at a time.

The Ndanum were the first to look. Tun Jeju stood outside and spoke to them all. “Our colleagues from Rasesdad traveled from Dzongphan and came almost all the way by river. This let them bring with them the fruits of their investigations.”

Penrys couldn’t interpret the expression on Mpeowake’s face when she stepped out of the cell. She steeled herself and walked in with Najud and Munraz.

She had expected bedframes inside, but instead two tables filled most of the space. On each was a body, embalmed and preserved—the source of the unidentified odor. One male, and one female, she noted. Nude and chained. She knew that embalming could change the appearance, but neither looked like a Rasesni. When she reached down to push the hair aside, she found small, pointed, animal ears in the same place hers were.

It wasn’t clear to her how either one had died, and that was disturbing. There were neither scars nor wounds on the front of the bodies. She glanced over at Najud and found his face locked into an impassiveness that gave nothing away, and his mind was a mirror of his face. Munraz looked distraught, and she laid a hand on his shoulder and told him, “There’s likely to be worse coming. Prepare yourself.”

She ducked back out of the cell to make room for Vylkar and nodded at him as they passed.

Silently she walked along to the next cell as Mpeowake left it and stepped in. The tables held chains this time, small neck-sized loops. There were no fragments, only intact circles of anywhere from twelve to sixteen links. Like her own chain, there were no stains, no marks of wear, no corrosion—they looked fresh and new, in some yellow metal neither brass nor gold, as though they’d just been made.

She shuddered. There had been living people inside each of these chains, like her. These two little piles spread casually on the tables represented more than twenty people.

She backed out of the cell and waited for Najud and Munraz to join her before moving to the next cell. This time the wrinkled nose on Mpeowake’s face prepared her for something worse. Two more bodies, both male, but these weren’t peacefully laid out. One had been killed at a moment when most but not all of his body had been covered in a thick white fur. His limbs were fully human, and his face, and his belly was still bare, as though the change had been interrupted.

But it was the other body that made her ears move back on her scalp. A long tail, like that of a miniature whale, extruded from the base of his spine, above the legs, and the rest of his skin seemed thicker, somehow, though the embalming process made it hard to judge. There were two unhealed wounds on his back, as though he had been struck with… with what, she wondered—a harpoon? Both had the pointed ears she expected.

When she rejoined Tun Jeju in the corridor, she saw he wanted to hold them all there before proceeding. They waited in silence for the last of the foreign guests to exit the third cell.

The notju spoke somberly. “When the villages and even some of the smaller cities received our request for information about chained people, it raised a panic. They seized whoever they could find, in the belief that they were dangerous, and weren’t overly careful about it. Many died.

“The problem was, they were mostly foreigners. A village would have welcomed someone who had wandered in a couple of years ago, of presumably mixed blood. They would labor in the fields, or help with the fishing, or work as a servant. They tended to live alone—no one would marry a foreigner. They spoke Kigali yat without an accent, which was reassuring, but they had no ties, no family.

“So when we asked about them, suddenly all their suspicions were aroused. Many were captured and delivered already dead. Many more fled, and the news traveled quickly. We don’t know where they went, but some are here, in the city.”

He paused for questions but no one spoke.

“These few cells are the exceptional specimens. There seemed little point showing you the rest.” He gestured to either side of them, to the rows beyond this one. “We’ll give you the counts when we go back upstairs.”

He had started to turn to take them to the next cell, when Penrys stopped him.

“No. I want to see them all.” She choked it out as her voice thickened. “Every last one of them, you hear me? They died out of your carelessness, your indifference, not because they’d harmed anyone.”

She noted the looks of distaste on the faces of most of the others and spoke to them directly. “I don’t care if you want to skip them—fine. It’s an ugly business. But these are ordinary people—they didn’t ask for this. I want to look at their faces, people like me. I want to store that up, for the day I find our… makers.”

She took a breath and tried to keep her fury from distorting her speech. “They can’t get justice any more—they’re gone. But I’m still here. By all that you hold sacred, I’ll present a reckoning and make them accountable. If I live, I’ll do it.”

Stepping aside from the rest of them into the middle of the corridor, she turned her back and worked on controlling her shaking hands that itched for a throat to throttle. She made herself turn and rejoin Najud, so that they could see what was in the next cell.

There were four more cells of “exceptional specimens” to examine. Penrys gritted her teeth and maintained a chilly silence. One had a pair of wings like a bat. The worst was the woman with tentacles like an octopus emerging from the base of the spine. All of them had the ears—Penrys checked each one.

Why did so many of them die in their hidden forms? If she were suddenly killed here, her wings would still be secret. Ah, but not if I had warning and was trying to get away. Then I might try anything.

“How were they killed?” she asked Tun Jeju, when they reached the end of the row.

“It varies,” he said, expressionlessly. “Some were seized and, when they resisted, they were harmed in the capture, or hung by terrified villagers. Or burned. That’s where the loose chains come from, when there was nothing left to preserve.

“Each has his own history which I’ll share with you, upstairs.”

“I want a copy of that,” Penrys said. “For all of them.” She glared at Tun Jeju, until he nodded.

Munraz asked her, quietly, “Weren’t any of them taken alive?”

Tun Jeju overheard him. “Yes, some were captured alive. And some have been caught here, in the city.”

“Where? Where are they?” Penrys demanded.

He glanced at Chosmod. “Our colleagues from Rasesdad have provided the expertise to keep them alive but harmless.”

He gestured across the aisle to the cells they hadn’t seen yet. “We tend them, and none have died.”

“Sedchabke. You’ve drugged them.” Her voice was flat.

“You know it?” Chosmod asked.

“Oh, yes. I know it. Vladzan and Veneshjug saw to that, in Gonglik.”

Something in her tone caused all of them to look at her as if she were a sudden threat.

“Vladzan died, in the Temple Academy,” Chosmod said.

“Actually, it was in a basement storage room, under the stable,” she said, blandly, “while he was conducting an experiment. On me. Veneshjug didn’t die until he tried to use the Voice’s chain for himself.”

Najud positioned himself next to her, as if anticipating a fight that had any hope of being won, here, sublevels below ground under the Imperial Security building, surrounded by other wizards.

Penrys walked over to one of the guards holding the extra lanterns, and took it out of his hand. He was wise enough not to resist. She stalked over to the last cell on the other side of the aisle and held it high. It was empty, and she continued down the row until she found one occupied.

There were two women there, lying supine, under blankets, with their eyes closed. Penrys could feel the pressure of their chains against hers from a few feet away, not fiery as it had been with the Voice, but still perceptible.

“Najud, look at their necks. Please.” She’d known from his footsteps that he had followed her. The cell door was locked, and she turned to Tun Jeju and stared at him, without a word.

He nodded to a guard, and the man produced a key and unlocked the cell. Penrys backed up two steps, and Najud stepped inside.

When he bent over the woman on the left, she saw him lift the chain, and then the hair around the ears. He checked the other one the same way and rejoined her.

“There’s some damage, but you have to look for it,” he said.

Penrys closed her eyes for a moment, and then turned to face the rest of the wizards. “Sedchabke is a drug used in Rasesdad to punish wayward mages, or so I understand. It paralyzes the body and, for wizards, it suppresses all powers, leaving the victim vulnerable to whatever might be done to him in that helpless state.”

She looked at Chosmod. “Did you know that a chained wizard can’t get near another one? The chains heat up and burn the flesh.

“These women are too close to each other. Their necks are burning, and healing, and no one noticed, no one looked for it. How long have they been there?”

She directed the last question at Tun Jeju. She didn’t quite catch him wincing, but there was some hidden reaction there.

“Some of them for three months,” he said.

“And you don’t consider this torture. Or didn’t it matter, because you were planning to kill them anyway?”

She unclenched her fists and turned away from whatever response he planned to make. She didn’t feel like informing him that they could hear everything around them, when they were awake. Let him make his own discoveries.

Chosmod walked into the cell to make his own inspection. “She’s right,” he called out to Tun Jeju. “We need to move them all further apart.”

Turning to Penrys, he asked, “Brudigna, would one per cell with an empty cell on either side be sufficient space?”

“Yes.” Though she wondered what the point was of removing the pain when the odds that any of them were sane after months of the drug were remote.

“How long do you usually keep a mage under sedchabke?”

“A day or two,” Chosmod said.

“So, not a few months.”

Tun Jeju spoke, “It was this or death. We had no other way to contain them.”

“Because they had attacked you? Damaged you? Threatened you? What crime had they committed?”

She took a deep breath to try and rein in her rage. “Perhaps they might have come willingly to you, offered to help. Like I did.”

“We had no way to train them. We have no trained wizards in Kigali.”

“So you just imprison them and torture them until they go mad instead.”

“Or until we could hold this council.” Tun Jeju made no effort at apology.

She closed her eyes for a moment at this. For the two months that Najud and Munraz had traveled with her from western sarq-Zannib, these… specimens had been suffering in ways she understood all too well.

“Stop the drug. Leave them alone. Imprisoned if necessary for now, but awake. Let’s find out what can be salvaged.”

“And if they choose to attack us?”

“You mean now that you’ve given them a reason to hate you?” Najud hissed at her but she wouldn’t stop. “That’s a chance you’ll have to take. The cells are secure enough.”

“Will you make yourself responsible for them?” Tun Jeju’s question acted like a bucket of cold water on her fury.

She spared a moment for the vision of complications this would make in her life, but what choice did she have?

“I will.”

Penrys avoided Najud’s eye, certain this was not a task he wanted to accept, and who could blame him. In the company of so many wizards, she thought it prudent to avoid mind-speech with him. At least, that was the excuse she gave herself.

While the living captives were relocated under Chosmod’s direction to individual and separated cells, she took a lantern from a guard and toured the other rows, the less “exceptional” specimens. There were a double handful of bodies, but she was ashamed to admit that she lost count as she went along.

Eventually she stood alone in a pool of light looking at the last one, a man, who seemed to share her ethnicity—not tall, not thin, brown-haired, pale-skinned. It had been impossible to be sure without seeing his living face, but she’d marked his resemblance to one of the captive men, and of that one to herself. There’d been one dead woman, too, that she thought was such a candidate.

There had even been an older woman that looked similar in her coloring to the teenage qahulajti that had been killed in sarq-Zannib.

The light of two more lanterns approached, bobbing in the hands of the men who carried them—Vylkar and, at last, Najud, with Munraz.

“They’re done,” Vylkar told her. “Time for us to go back.”

He made no comment on her overreach of responsibility with Tun Jeju.

Najud stood quietly and looked at her. He sighed, and then said one simple word, “How?”

Half the weight she was carrying seem to fall away. Not “why” but “how”—he understood the “why.”

She flashed a relieved smile at him, then shrugged. “I don’t know. Some sort of school, I guess. I hadn’t worked it out yet.”

“Down here. In the dark. In their cells.”

“I suppose so—don’t imagine Tun Jeju’s going to turn them loose anytime soon.”

“All by yourself?” Vylkar asked.

“If necessary.”

Najud shook his head. “Each of them will likely be as strong as you are, and there are five of them.”

“They don’t know what to do, not yet. If they did, they wouldn’t have been captured.” Or killed. Probably.

Vylkar looked down at her from his extra foot of height. She always felt short in the company of Ellech men and women. “You were freshly arrived and willing to learn. I had some idea of how strong you were, but you never gave me reason to fear you, and the others… well, they didn’t take it seriously.

“But these…” he waved negligently at the next row where they had entered. “They’ve been undiscovered for three or more years, doing who knows what, whatever it took to survive. The two you’ve already met, before—they’re dead. You know exactly what can happen.”

“The Voice was an active threat,” she said, “with a small army and some sort of plan. He had to be stopped and it could only be done by other wizards. I killed him, at the end, you know.”

“With an hand-axe. Aye, I’ve heard the tale.”

“But the girl we found in sarq-Zannib… She was just unlucky, and damaged.”

“And yet she killed hundreds,” Vylkar said. “And you killed her, too.”

The silent Munraz spoke up, from behind Najud. “It wasn’t Penrys, it was me.” His voice was thick.

Vylkar turned to stare, and Najud told him, “We had a bikraj on the hunt who wanted her, for… breeding. We will kill a qahulajti in sarq-Zannib and though there was debate about her full responsibility for the deaths that occurred, there was no doubt of the cause. Munraz did the right thing, hard as it was. It lost him his family and clan.”

“We’re making too much of this,” Penrys said. “Look, if I were imprisoned here, right now, what could I do? I can’t make the guards march in and release me. I can’t hide from the people on the various levels so that I could escape the building. I might be able to shield myself from a search by wizards, using their methods, but I’m still vulnerable to mundane attacks. And so are they.

“What’s the worst that can happen? They bind together and knock me down. How do they get out of their cells?”

She felt a twinge of conscience as she spoke. She remembered, all too well, killing Vladzan after he’d given her sedchabke and then tortured her for his own amusement for the hours it took for her to purge the drug from her system, drain all his power, and then stop his heart. If she could do that, so could they. But she could defend herself, and they didn’t know their own strength. She hoped.

“Not alone.” Najud’s voice had a tone of finality that she recognized. “You will not teach them alone. Besides, they need to meet wizards that aren’t chained, and the only ones around are Tun Jeju’s guests. I doubt the Ndanum will cooperate—I was watching them while you defied Tun Jeju. But I’m here.”

“And I’m an apprentice, a nal-jarghal like they will be,” Munraz volunteered. “I’ll help.”

She shook her head helplessly. It was one thing to take a risk herself, but something else entirely to involve them.

Vylkar spoke up. “I think the Rasesni might contribute, too. They have a long tradition of training mages in their temple system.”

He smiled down at her. “You always wanted to teach, when you were in Ellech. Here’s your first class.”

Najud added, “Tun Jeju spoke of finding ordinary people in Kigali, untrained wizards. They need teaching, too.”

Vylkar looked at him. “A school for wizards, in Yenit Ping?”

Najud shrugged. “Why not? They’re going to need it, now that they’ve recognized they have wizards among their people, like other nations.”

“How will they find them?” Penrys asked. “Can’t see them sending out a message throughout the land that says ‘If you hear voices in your head, we want you.’ And how do we keep the locals from killing them out of fear? How many bodies are here? How many chains?”

She shook her head. “The whole culture has to change. That can’t be done by one person.”

Vylkar c****d an eyebrow at her. “Still impatient, I see. Tun Jeju has a plan. He must have, or he wouldn’t have invited all these wizards. Let’s go find out what it is.”