The Chained Adept (1-4)

Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

Penrys and Zandaril left two mornings later. The first pair of scouts had been cast off the morning after the meeting, headed southwest to a little-used pass into Song Em.

Tak Tuzap had spent that day advising all the potential scouts about clothing, pack horses or mules, and especially directions for recognizing the blazes that marked the passes. He couldn’t help the men who would try to enter from the north over the low ridges of the Craggies, except to give them the names of the passes they should look for.

“I’ve never been there myself,” he’d told them, “but we do get traders that way, so the people on the north side should know where they are. All the famous ones will have roads leading to them, but some will be barely visible, starting at the back of someone’s farm and little used ’cause they’re less convenient.”

Zandaril had spent some time choosing saddle horses and pack mules from the squadron’s herd, and Rai Limfa had busied herself making clothing suitable for unremarkable Neshilik folk, at Tak’s direction. The animals would stand out as military issue with their brands, and so would their gear. Each scout would have to try and remain unobserved, at least while mounted.

When Penrys dropped by Rai’s wagons to pick up their clothing after that day’s march, Tak blocked her path.

“I’m going with you two,” he’d said. “I’ve done everything I can, like my uncle would have wanted. Now it’s time to go back, and I reckon you’re the ones who can maybe do the most damage, if I can get you close to the workings at the Gates.”

It had gone against the grain for her, to bring a kid into danger, one that was no more than three quarters grown.

“How old are you?” she’d asked him, but Rai intervened.

“He’s old enough. Old enough to fight for his home.”

The two women had stared into each other’s faces for a moment, then Penrys yielded. “Be at our wagon at daylight,” she’d told him.

He’d grinned and then wiped it off his face and assumed a dignified expression.

Now, under Hing Ganau’s disapproving scowl, Penrys checked the girth of her saddle horse one last time, while both Tak Tuzap and Zandaril inspected the loads on the two pack mules to make sure they were well-balanced and secure.

“Mules. Not how we do things at home,” Zandaril muttered. He hadn’t wanted to put his own pack horses at risk and was now forced to learn in a hurry from Tak.

“Ready?” Zandaril asked. He looked strange to her, no longer in his robes, with his head bare.

Penrys mounted and Tak handed her the lead rein of the first mule. Zandaril led the other.

The boy looked small on his rangy buckskin. Penrys had suggested a smaller horse for him, but Zandaril pointed out that any of them might have to ride any of the horses.

“See you in a few days,” Zandaril called to Hing. “Take care of everything for us.”

“I’ll send Chang-chi in after you, if you don’t show up.”

Penrys snorted at the unlikeliness of that. “Stay out of trouble yourself,” she told him.

They turned west, toward the river.

By the time they reached the bank, they could hear the creak and jingle of the camp behind them as it broke down and prepared to get underway.

A small break in the land here had provided a broad stretch of shallows for the river to cross and, at this time of year, in low water, it was only as deep as the horses’ hocks. This close to the mountains, the dirt had been washed away from exposed, worn rock, and the horses picked their way carefully over it.

The early morning had brightened by the time they reached the other side. When Penrys looked back, she caught the tail end of the expedition’s cattle herd, following the column. The water flowing incessantly over the riffles drowned out any sound, and then they passed out of sight.

“We should cross the old trade road soon, coming down from the north,” Tak Tuzap said.

They were three days west of the river, and finally the mountains were close enough that they could make out individual details. Penrys had extended her mind as far as she could, looking for people, but there seemed to be no one else on the land for miles.

“There’s nobody around. Why would there be a trade road?” she asked.

The boy pointed north. “Up that way is Shaneng Ferry, both sides of the river. Big ferry there. Used to send traders this way, south to the pass, but the road at the Gates stole all that traffic, and the traders didn’t have to cross the river to use it.”

“And the road is still there?” Zandaril asked.

Tak shrugged. “Not much rain, this side of the Red Wall. Takes a long time for old roads to go away.”

“The mountains don’t look that high,” Penrys said. “I’d expect there’d be lots of places to cross.”

Tak was shaking his head before she finished speaking. “Not high, not like Mratsarnag, but very, very crumpled.” He squeezed his hands together to demonstrate. “Landslides, pocket canyons, dead ends.”

He tilted his head back and scanned the mountain range that filled the western horizon, running south all the way to the sarq-Zannib border, and north to the Gates.

“All the gwatenno, the traders, have stories about people getting lost, about finding old bones.” He looked earnestly at Zandaril. “If you find old bones, people bones, it’s a very bad sign. It means they didn’t get out, from where they were, and now you’re in that same place.”

Up ahead, the dry grass was interrupted by intermittent patches of bare soil. When Penrys stopped her horse there, she could see a faint trace running away from her in both directions, parallel to the ridges in front of her.

“The road from Shaneng Ferry?” she asked Tak.

He smiled. “See, I’m a good guide.”

He swung left along it, and Penrys and Zandaril followed.

Two days later, Penrys was thoroughly sick of the twisty pack road, scarcely wider than a well-laden mule. They’d climbed, and climbed, one dusty yard after another, and nowhere a view to break the monotony.

The boy was in the lead, with Penrys immediately behind. He was right—it was a maze of short trails. If the blazes on the old trees had been erased or the rock cairns scattered, it would have been almost impossible to make their way without an endless series of dead ends.

This was the high point of the pass, Tak Tuzap had said, and Penrys wanted a view. She looked up through the narrow sides of yet another canyon, and her shoulders ached with longing. If she’d been alone, she knew what she would have done to see the view from the nearest peak. As it was… well, maybe at dusk, if I can get away for a moment.

They turned the corner around the knee of the ridge, and the trail widened out into a sparse upland meadow surrounding a small seasonal pond.

“This is the mid-point,” the boy said. “It’s always got water unless there wasn’t much snow the winter before. Everyone stops to camp here.”

The view extended to some of the ridges on the western side of the range, but not all the way out to the protected valley below. The sinking sun shone warmly on their faces, but Penrys knew the chill of the heights would be upon them when it was gone.

They fell smoothly into their camp routine. Zandaril tended to the horses and mules while Penrys fetched water, and Tak laid out the cooking gear.

Penrys looked up at the gathering twilight. “I’ll start getting wood,” she offered, anxious to get off by herself for a few minutes. She strode off to the wooded margins of the meadow and used the remaining light to pull dead branches out of the thickets into the grasses, where it would be easier for her to pick them up on her way back. Zandaril had surprised her the first night, in his refusal to use anything but fallen wood. “The trees would not like it,” was all he would say on the subject.

Done with her task, she walked upslope looking for a standpoint higher than the trees with room enough to launch.

You should tell them about this.

She’d had this argument with herself before. They already looked at her as if she had two heads. Be honest. You don’t care what the kid thinks, or the Kigali people back in camp. They don’t know what wizards can do, not in detail. Though she wondered if maybe Tun Jeju was more knowledgeable than most.

No, it’s Zandaril. He knows what’s impossible. He likes to think I’m just some sort of minor mystery.

It would be the end of their comfortable friendship, letting him see this. Can’t explain this away so easily. It was worse than the ears.

The light was fading quickly. If she was going to do it, it had to be now. She looked up and took a running step… which she stumbled over as Zandaril appeared at the upslope edge of the trees, calling her name.

Her aborted movement must have caught his eye.

His deep voice carried over the distance. “What are you doing up there? Get lost?”

She coughed. “Just looking for a view. Stay put, I’ll come back down.”

He waited on her, a puzzled expression on his face.

“Not safe to wander off by yourself,” he said. “I came to help you with the wood. Saw you found some on the way up.”

“Sure, we’ll just grab it as we go back.” She set off in front of him to keep her face hidden. That was close. I should have checked where everyone was first.

He looked at her oddly as she went by. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I thought of something.”

“Hmm?”

“Did you learn to ride in Ellech?”

She bent over to pick up the first pile of branches. “Um, no. No, I could already ride.”

“Didn’t you think that odd?”

She straightened up with her armful of wood and looked back at him, in the dusk.

“Well, where did you learn to ride? Everyone remembers that,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I told you that.”

“But your body knows. Your body remembers.”

Her stomach clenched.

“What else does your body remember?”

He picked up the loose branches she hadn’t been able to carry and passed her on the way down to the next pile, leaving her staring off after him.

She followed, slowly, lost in thought.

What skills did her body have, that first year at the Collegium? She could ride and swim, read and write, but her writing was ill-done at first, and still clumsy. Maybe that’s not the language or script I learned on. The language proved nothing—she pulled that from the people around her, and what language her first thoughts were in when they found her was gone. She couldn’t draw, but she could sing—she’d discovered she had a trained voice, but no repertoire. There was no weapon that called to her, but she knew how to wield a knife for slicing food, had a hand for kneading bread. Cloth and fiber didn’t speak to her fingers, but leather did.

All of these things she had discovered gradually, living with other people and sampling what they did. For wizardry, it was more difficult—the models she could test herself against didn’t exist. She knew how to mind-speak, how to sense the minds around her, but she’d had to find out for herself that other wizards had smaller ranges, that animals weren’t visible to them. They couldn’t even shield themselves well, as she discovered when she was first surrounded by them and her own shield popped into place. Is that true for all of them, or just the ones in Ellech? Could they have learned, if they’d been willing to?

The books had helped, then, describing things that were similar to what she could do. It was that resemblance, before she learned to be more closemouthed about the differences, that led them to call her an Adept, like one of those mythical creatures no one really thought had ever existed.

And she didn’t either, since the books never mentioned animal ears, or unbreakable chains of power.

Or flight, which she’d only discovered by accident. What else was still hidden?