The Chained Adept (1-4)

Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

“Zandaril, I know how he did it,” Penrys said.

It was mid-morning, and she needed to take a break. If she explained it all to Zandaril, it would solidify her own understanding before she went on. She had what hours of daylight remained to learn as much as she could from the two stolen books.

Zandaril leaned over the stall door. “Show me.”

“Well, I can’t quite do that without making things go boom, but I can explain it all and I understand the steps.”

Tak Tuzap slipped into the stall and stood in a corner.

He’s bored. Let him stay—it’s not like it’ll make much sense to him.

“Remember how the power-stones are used, for control or for power?”

Zandaril nodded.

“They found a way to combine all that.”

She held up two small power-stones, the smallest she could find. She didn’t know how to separate them again after the demonstration, and she hated to waste any of the larger ones.

“If I put these face-to-face, along the widest part of the cut stone, see, like this… and then bind them directly to each other, the way I showed you, with raw physical magic… I can attach them together along the surface in a way I don’t know how to break again. Maybe there’s some method for it.” She waved her hand at the open book on the bench beside her.

“Now the goal is—you were right, by the way—to make them pull in opposite directions. But not at once, or it blows up in your face! What you do is…” She lifted one of the simple wooden blocks with its pre-drilled holes.

“You put them there and for each one, separately, you tell it to pull on the wooden edge.” She laid the joined stones down on their side, with the outer points directed at the raised border of the slab. “You don’t give them any power, yet, you understand? So they can’t do much.”

“Under tension, like a crossbow,” Zandaril said.

“Yes, something like that. So you make a trigger, like for a crossbow. This one’s a simple detect sensor. If it feels a touch…” She tapped her forehead. “And what that does is let a powered stone pour into the bound ones. Maybe more than one—I’m not sure how many it takes. It was the powered stones I could sense.”

Zandaril said, “But what does that do? It’s not strong enough, is it? Rotating the wagon, remember?”

“That’s not where the energy comes from. All the power does is make it possible for the joined stones to pull themselves apart to opposite sides of the framework. Once it’s been set up, then if you focus enough power on the edge of the bond, it rips apart the rest of the bond and destroys the stones, like one rock starting an avalanche. The bond bursting, according to the book, is what creates the explosion. Apparently there’s nothing left afterward.”

“Easy to join,” Zandaril said, “Hard to break, destruction when it breaks. The crossbow string shatters.”

“That’s it. I don’t know why that works, maybe it’ll be explained further on, but that’s the principle.”

“Can you disarm them, once they’re set, like uncocking a crossbow?”

“Not by magic. You’d have to physically remove the trigger or the bound stones.”

“This is very good,” Zandaril said. “You make progress.”

Penrys held up her hand. “I still don’t know how the mirror communication worked. That’s something completely different. And if one of those devices was attached to the mirror, how did Veneshjug or whoever it was keep from triggering it at the same time? And why didn’t he just blow it up right then, and kill the officers, decapitate the command of the expedition?”

“Maybe the device was on the storage box for the mirror, not the mirror itself, where it might have been noticed,” Zandaril said.

Penrys turned that thought over in her mind. “You could be right—that would fit.”

She looked down at the book. “But I still have a lot to do. I have to read through both of these books before we go tonight and memorize as much as I can. I don’t dare take them with us, and I can’t leave them behind—they’re priceless, whole new approaches to physical magic. What they would give for these in the Collegium! But if we’re caught with them…”

Tak Tuzap spoke up from his corner. “If they catch you, you’re in trouble anyway. You don’t look right. They’ll know you don’t belong.”

Zandaril said, “He’s right. If we don’t get out, it doesn’t matter. If we do, you’ll want them with you. Keep them in your pack, with the stones. Maybe you’ll get to use them.”

I don’t want to leave them behind, that’s for sure.

“One thing, though,” she said. “You told me there weren’t Rasesni wizards, but it’s not true. These books aren’t beginners’ work, they’re sophisticated and clever. There’s nothing like them in the Collegium.”

“What does the front matter of the book say?”

She turned to the beginning. “The language is Rasesni, or I couldn’t read it, drawing on the locals here. It’s an older version of the language that they speak. There’s a date.” She pulled the knowledge of the current year in the Rasesni dating system from the occupiers in the village. “Seems to be about twenty-five years old. Name but no description of the author, no information about his sources.” She sniffed at the leather binding. “Doesn’t smell all that new.”

She looked up at Zandaril. “This one’s all about experimental techniques. The other one’s theory.”

Penrys pulled the second book out of the pack. “I haven’t tackled this one yet, but I’ve got to. Different author, three years more recent, no context.”

“Doesn’t make any sense. We’d have heard of wizards there before now. I think that’s why Yenit Ping is so alarmed.”

“Look at the titles,” she said. “Venesha Zhablig, Venesh’s Secret Way” and “Venesha Chos, The Glories of Venesh.” What are the Rasesni religions like?”

“Gods jealous of each other, with dedicated worshipers. Priests everywhere, and the Hand of the Mountains—that’s the name of a group of hill-tribes—enforcing their will. Assassins, secret cults.”

Zandaril’s hand stroked his shaven cheeks. “We’ve heard rumors about this, in sarq-Zannib. Every now and then a small caravan returns through the High Pass in Song Em with news of a wizard born in Neshilik. Twice that I know of the child has been found and sent to us for fostering, but usually they live their lives untrained or, worse, they are discovered and killed. And there is much Rasesni blood in Neshilik.”

He slapped the books on the table. “No one can visit Rasesdad—foreigners are not allowed, outside the ports. The summons from Kigali seemed like an opportunity to learn more about this. And now we know they have wizards.”

“And esoteric knowledge, apparently. Maybe no one’s supposed to know about their wizards. I guess that’s part of what we have to find out,” she said, as she rotated her head on her neck until the joints cracked.

Sitting back down on the bench, she picked up the first book again and opened it where she’d slipped a bit of straw to marked the page. “Back to work.”

Zandaril spent much of the afternoon dozing in preparation for their travel in the evening. Part of the time he lay awake in the loft, casually monitoring Penrys’s activity below. It was quiet—she’d laid aside actual experiments and was trying to read as much as she could before they had to pack up and go. The rain gradually subsided, giving way to an autumn chill.

She’d invited him to watch over her shoulder, as it were, but little of what she skimmed made much sense to him, not without her knowledge of physical magic.

And the puzzle she presented to him…

When she forgot herself in her work, it made him smile, much as he tried to hide it from her. Her enthusiasm was infectious—there was an actual gleam in her eye. It woke an echo in him, a memory of being a young irghulaj, a student. But she wasn’t that young, not really. She seemed to him about his own age, or perhaps a little less.

It’s the lack of memory, the shallowness of her remembered life. Things are still fresh to her.

His smile faded. The truth is, she scares me, too.

It made him uncomfortable with her. Her casual experimentation with physical magic spoke to his own childhood, when it was made clear to him that a proper Zan had nothing to do with physical magic, that it was both shameful and destructive.

Well, they were right about destruction. He was beginning to doubt them about the rest, however. He suspected he could learn, if she’d teach him, and he thought he wanted to. Why not be as strong as possible, in all the ways I can?

This was his tulqiqa, his wandering time, when he’d finished with his teachers and sought to create a nayith, a masterwork of his own. He wanted to see if one could work together in an organized way with other wizards. His own countrymen weren’t interested in the question, and so he’d looked for foreigners with different ways, to learn from them. He’d postponed settling with his clan, finding a wife, taking students.

And fate had given him something very strange—a wizard who might be able to work with him, but was nothing like his countrymen. She was stronger than he was, in magic, and more broadly educated. In just three years. Why can’t we build something like the Collegium and learn as quickly? Or maybe it was her special gifts.

She was his student, as much as he was hers, and he understood that relationship.

But was she even human? You forget, when you look at her, but those ears, those animal ears… His fingers twitched involuntarily and his mouth quirked. I wonder what they feel like. Are they moving around all the time under that hair, swiveling to catch the sounds?

And there was something else, he was sure of it, even if it wasn’t the tail he’d joked about. Eventually she’d tell him, he thought, when she was less self-conscious about her differences. You wanted foreign, you did, and that’s surely what you got.

Crippled, she is, with that chain around her neck, as long as she thinks it so. He remembered her bitter words that day in the wagon, when she was exhausted. Is that all she wants, to know her own story?

He felt her fascination with something she was reading. No, not so—the love of learning surely drives her.

As it does me.