The Chained Adept (1-4)

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Despite herself, Penrys could feel her face freeze. What can I do, is it? Well, that’s a change from Aergon and his colleagues. They just wanted to know what I was—the rest didn’t matter. Here at least maybe I can be useful.

“Um, you know about the languages.” She paused. “I didn’t think—would you rather we spoke wirqiqa-Zannib together?”

He shook his head. “I need practice with Kigali-yat.” He stopped with his mouth half open and crinkled his brow. “But you do not get Kigali-yat from me? You speak it better than I do.”

“No, I’m using them.” She pointed down at the troopers.

“Ah! So, how far can you go for language?”

Farther than I’m willing to admit. For now. “Pretty far.”

His expression told her the evasion had not gone unnoticed, but he let it pass.

*And this? You can hear this?*

She answered him just as silently. *As you know from last night.*

“Not all wizards can do this,” he commented, “to speak in this way.”

You have no idea. Almost none in the Collegium. And the few who did didn’t understand how to take it further. “Is it common among the Zannib wizards?”

He pursed his lips while he considered.

“Almost all—it’s usually how we first know we are maybe going to be nal-jarghal, apprentices. It is a great blow when a young wizard fails at this, for it is harder for him to find teachers.”

All! They’d be wasted at the Collegium.

The cry of a hawk hunting overhead drew both their gazes and gave her time to recompose her expression. “Do you study all in one place, then, like they do in Ellech?”

“No, very different. Some taghulaj, teachers, they specialize in the young ones, giving them basic instruction and keeping them from trouble—those usually live a settled life in the winter villages. As younglings, those who want to pursue the craft seek out a mentor willing to take them on, if a parent can’t do it, and they stay together until both are satisfied or the student is dismissed.” More quietly, he added, “Or the student dismisses his taghulaj.”

Penrys filed that away for later. “So, is there a place, a repository, where all, um, craft knowledge is kept?”

“Sushnib, books, you mean. Wizards have their own books and pass them along to other wizards, their friends or students. Like I said, it is not organized, the way the Collegium is.”

She could see the envy in his eyes. It’s not fair to let him cherish that illusion.

“It’s not what you think, the Collegium.” She touched the chain at her throat. “The books are there, like you’d expect, and the wizards and students can use them, but they don’t talk to each other, not about important things, and new books, serious ones, don’t get written. The senior staff, they’re mostly off working on their own narrow specialty, focused on past glories. The young ones, well, if they don’t make themselves fit in, they don’t last long.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I do not think you fit in, with your new detector.”

Devices, experiments, disruptions—no, I do not fit in.

“What do your wizards do? How are they useful?” Zandaril put the question politely but Penrys thought he was on the verge of outrage.

She spoke frankly. “I am not involved in Ellech politics, sheltered at the Collegium, but it seemed to me they do not do much of anything of worth, except produce more wizards like themselves—qualified, unimaginative, and timid. The knowledge is there, but not the will to try new things, to fail until something works. The merchants come with requests, sometimes, but not much happens.”

He laughed. “Almost you make me glad I have not gone there. If it weren’t for the books…”

“Yes, if it weren’t for the books.”

They walked on together for a few moments, upright but swaying slightly to accommodate the movements of their horses. Breakfast was beginning to seem like a distant memory to Penrys and she unhooked the canteen that was affixed to the saddle, hoping that a couple of swallows of tepid water would mollify her stomach for now.

Zandaril waited until she was done.

“You are hungry? We will all stop when the sun is high, but we can find something for you now if we ride down.”

“No, I can wait. Thanks.” She tried to remember whose turn it was, but Zandaril beat her to it.

“You knew the mind-glows last night, the ones who couldn’t bespeak. I showed you Chang and Kep, and you shielded them from the Rasesni.”

She nodded.

“What about them, below?” He c****d his head at the moving men and baggage train.

She opened her mind briefly. “Too many to count, but in range.”

“Men? Women?”

“Yes.”

He paused. “Horses?”

She smiled. He was clever. “Yes, animals, too. Have to be choosy about that—do you have any idea how many critters live in the grasslands around us?”

He grinned wolfishly at her. “Dangerous mice, must be careful or they’ll attack.” He glanced up. “Hawk would like that.”

“Can you…?” she asked.

“Not the same for me. Just the mind-glows nearby, and only people.”

He c****d his head and looked at her. “Maybe you can teach me, bikrajti.”

“I can try. Um, sometimes that gets a bit… personal. More than mind-speech gets through.”

At his expectant look, she added, “I don’t recommend that lesson on horseback.”

“Tonight, then, after dinner.” He nodded briskly as if it were all set. “Language, too?”

What have I started? “I don’t know if that can be taught.”

“Maybe we can practice on your language.”

Her muscles tensed. “And what would that be?” she muttered, bitterly. At his look of puzzlement, she continued, “Do you know Ellechen-guma? We can try that.”

Zandaril closed the sushnibtudin and retied the heavy cords over the leather wrapping that enfolded the trunk. Putting aside the volume he’d extracted, he shifted it back into its place in the corner of the wagon and evaluated the cleared area he’d left free for lessons, in front of the sacks of beans that still made up most of its load. The square carpet that filled it, with its border pattern of intertwining vines in a riot of colors brought a fond smile to his face. It was good that the jimiz, the scholar’s rug, could serve its proper purpose, even if this would be a meeting between bikrajab, not a lesson from taghulaj to irghulaj, teacher to student. This is my first offer of nibar, hospitality, as one bikraj to another. Not what I expected.

He could have used their tent, but he’d wanted more privacy for this. He’d sent Hing Ganau off and now all he was waiting for was his guest. Or prisoner. Or even, if Chang’s worse fears had any basis, a spy.

He didn’t think the latter was true, any longer, not after a day in the saddle together, exchanging stories, asking careful questions. He wanted to know much more, but better to go at it slowly, in these long days covering the vast distances, feeling his way, rather than damage, by clumsy interrogation, what he thought could become an alliance of colleagues. For all her peculiarities, he thought Penrys might have much to teach him.

He did, however, take his responsibilities seriously, and Chang had put her in his charge. He kept a mind-touch on her while she took care of “private matters” after dinner, just to confirm her location. She’d offered as much when she brought it up. “Better a mind-touch than a tether,” she’d said.

He felt her approach now and moved forward to greet her as she came to the back of the wagon and walked up the steps that Hing had placed there.

“Come in,” he said. “I’ve made us a place. You can lean against that.” He pointed at a partly filled bean sack over which he had draped his red uthah, the printed mythical animal figures seeming to move in the lantern’s light.

“This is for you, for now.” He presented the sushnib to her with both hands, pleased with her obvious delight. She ran a hand over the cover and held it up to her face to sniff at it, then she opened it to look at its contents while walking blindly to her place, and stumbled a bit over the sack as she settled herself cross-legged on the rug, still intent on the pages.

Zandaril smiled to himself. Anyone that clumsy should walk first and read later.

She looked up as he seated himself and leaned against another sack draped in his sky-tree uthah, all blues and greens.

“This is a basic primer on magic, for a young student, isn’t it?” she said. “What are you doing with something like that? Did you learn from it, yourself?”

“Yes, it’s the one I used. Good to be prepared when you meet a new student.”

“It’s cut down from a scroll, isn’t it? Don’t see many like this at the Collegium.”

“It’s sturdier, as pages between boards. Hard to get rid of the curl, though—it’s an art, flattening the parchment of an older work to bind it like this.”

She grunted, and lifted a page to note the absence of text on what would have been the back of a scroll.

He baited his trap. “But I thought you would need help with the letters.”

“Not when you’re so close,” she said, absently, buried again in the first few paragraphs. Then she started, and shifted her glance to him in alarm.

“Ah. So it is more than language, is it?” he asked, mildly, and watched her cheeks redden. Through his soft mind-touch he could feel her chagrin. The flickering light from the lantern hanging low overhead from the central bow supporting the canvas cast deceptive shadows over her face, but her mind was not so easily disguised.

“So,” he said. “Can you show me?” More softly, “Will you show me?”

She exhaled and lifted a finger as if to ask him to wait a moment. “When you said it was hard for a student to find a mentor if he couldn’t mind-speak, what did you mean? How do you use it with your teacher?”

“The teacher shows the student what to do, how it looks, from the…”

“From the inside?” she suggested.

Zandaril nodded.

“What about private thoughts?” she said. “Unintentional sharing?”

“That is not done,” he said, drawing himself up.

“Isn’t done, or can’t be done?” she persisted.

On the point of sputtering a reply, Zandaril caught himself. She deserves an honest answer.

“It is not proper to try, but I cannot say that it is impossible. There are rumors of wedded couples, close friends…”

She smiled faintly.

“But there are also rumors of powerful men, misuse…”

She nodded as if he had confirmed something for her.

“When Aergon and the others began to examine me, three years ago, they asked me to show them what I could do. I should have asked them to go first, but I didn’t know any better. I… scared them.”

She looked away from him and cleared her throat. “After that, I couldn’t find anyone willing to learn from me or to teach me, not in that way.”

She stuck two fingers inside the front of her collar chain as though it were too tight and she wanted to loosen it, and then glanced back his way. “I wouldn’t want to scare you, too.”

Zandaril’s skin chilled. Do I trust her in this? How badly do I want to know? What secrets do I have that really matter? I don’t know what she can do—maybe she can kill me and escape. Do I think that likely?

He tasted her mind again and felt a stubborn loneliness and the bitterness of old failure, but not deception.

“We will try this thing, bikrajti,” he said. “Please, can you describe it?”

“I can’t tell you what it will be like for you, only for me,” she said.

“Of course.”

“For me, it’s as though there were different layers. At the top, I can touch a mind, over a distance, and know something of the person by its flavor. If I’ve met him already, I can identify him.”

This was familiar, and he nodded. “I showed you Chang last night that way, and you picked him out of the others.”

“That’s right. That’s simple. Then, if they are capable, I can mind-speak with them, as I have done with you. Most can’t, and it’s like talking to a deaf man—the inability to hear is obvious.”

Zandaril squeezed the corner of his bean sack in a clenched fist, on the side she couldn’t see. “Not the same for me. I cannot know a person is mind-deaf—only he himself knows when the mind-speech fails to come to him.”

“So, someone could lie about it, claim to be mind-deaf and then eavesdrop on a conversation?”

That was a disturbing thought. “Maybe he could pretend, but you can’t overhear mind-speech the way you can spoken words.”

“Are you sure about that?” she asked.

“Yes, of course. I mind-speak to someone, not to the air.”

“Hmm,” she said, noncommittally. “Perhaps.”

“You do not agree?”

“I haven’t tested it, but I wonder if a mind-cry for help to whomever could hear it wouldn’t work.”

That jolted him. Ah, like in the old tales. “There are stories, for children…”

She nodded. “I wanted to experiment with that in the Collegium, but…”

“They wouldn’t allow it.” He could picture prim and affronted elderly bikrajab reacting to such a request.

“It would’ve been like shouting in the library. I just couldn’t do it.”

They shared a smile.

“And, then,” she continued, “there aren’t very many there who can mind-speak at all.”

“No?” he asked, startled.

“Hardly any. In fact, you’ll find if you terrify half a dozen, you’ve pretty much run out of experimental subjects.” A sardonic grin flickered across her face.

Oh. This paints an unflattering portrait of the great school of wizardly knowledge. Mind-deaf like the Kigaliwen.

“Truly?”

“Truly,” she confirmed. “Anyway, what I’ve described is the top layer, as I think of it. Below that…”

She looked at him directly as if to judge his reaction. “I cannot see a man’s thoughts, only his emotions, because he doesn’t know enough to suppress them successfully. Like a deaf man babbling, he doesn’t realize he’s giving himself away. But the things he’s learned by rote, the things he’s an expert in—those things are deeply part of him. And I can share in that, to some extent.”

No man I know can read another’s thoughts, but how would I know if she is different?

“Language,” he said.

“Yes, the earliest thing he learns that way. Reading, too. But only m’mind knows it, not the body. I can read your wirqiqa-Zannib script, because you can, but writing it would be difficult, my fingers clumsy and the letters ill-made. I speak with an accent, because my mouth is not accustomed to forming the sounds the same way that you do.”

He nodded. “Compared to your native tongue.”

“I have no native tongue,” she spat. “I have nothing more than three years old. I’ve had to work all this out experimentally.”

She pulled at her collar chain again.

“Why not take that off if it bothers you?” he suggested.

“Ha! How?” She leaned toward him and held her hair up off her neck. “I would be grateful if you could remove it, believe me.”

Zandaril bent forward at the waist and ran his fingers along the outside of the chain, careful to avoid touching anything else. He could feel no clasp, no break in the perfect links. It was between gold and bronze in color, but did not have quite the feel of either metal. It left no mark on her bare skin, as brass might. The thick links hugged her neck without apparently impeding her ability to breath.

“Jewelers cannot cut it?” he asked, as he sat back again.

“No, nor blacksmiths. Nor any devices we could come up with. It came with me.”

“What about your clothes? Any clues there?”

“It was me, a collar, and a great deal of cold, wet snow. Quite the spectacle.”

She grimaced and gathered her hair again, finger-combing it off her face and holding it back with both hands. “And before you can think of a polite way to ask, the ears came with me, too.”

She sat stoically while he leaned forward again for his first good look. They were furred all over, the outside dark brown and dense as her hair and the inside paler and sparser. They stood upright and pricked, but attached to her skull where normal ears would be, not high on her head like a hound, and not too large to be hidden by her thick hair. As he watched, one swiveled to focus on a footstep passing by outside.

He eyed the tension in her posture and sought a way to return the mood to the joking conversation of earlier in the day.

“Why, this is better than any story,” he said, and applauded lightly. “Tell me, quickly now, is there more? A tail, maybe? I’ve always wanted a tail.”

It startled a smothered laugh from her, as he’d hoped it would, but a shadow crossed her face. There is something else, isn’t there. What?

She let her hair drop again. “Where were we? Ah, yes, expertise. Do you play a musical instrument?”

Her eyes narrowed a moment and, before he could answer, she said, “I see that you do. I can tell what stops on the strings produce which notes, and what the positions are for certain chords, but my fingers would be like sausages, trying to play. There’s no shortcut for the body to learn things deeply, in the muscles.”

As she continued her lecture, her voice cooled. “There are other kinds of expertise. If I’m in reach of a doctor,” she tapped her forehead, “I know more about medical symptoms. A sword-smith’s mind can inform me about the folding and welding of a blade. I may not be able to do what they do, but I can know a lot about it. The longer I borrow their expertise, the more it becomes my own, at least the mental part.”

“And a military commander?” Zandaril suggested.

She assented soberly. “Yes, him, too. From someone like Chang, I can learn what to look for in junior officers, or how to read a landscape for defensive positions. But not actual troop movements, or what his orders are. Or what he had for breakfast, either.”

He smiled. “And how do we know that?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s the problem. Why should you believe me?”

She sighed, and they stared at each other a moment. “I can show you, I think, if you are willing.”

“I said I would try this,” Zandaril said, and bowed briefly from the waist.

“Then let’s begin with language.” She scooted herself around the rug until they were sitting more side by side than facing each other. He let her set the conditions as she wished.

An evening breeze rattled the canvas around them, and he tasted the remains of his dinner, the wishkaz he had added to give more flavor to the sauce. How did she scare the wizards of the Collegium?

She placed her right hand on his left knee, palm up. “It’s usually easier if we touch.”

He swallowed and laid his left hand down on top of hers, loosely. She made no attempt to clutch it.

*See. The surface of my mind touches the surface of yours. Nothing more.*

It was a strange sensation, as if their heads were joined, but there was no sense of invasion. Would I be able to tell? Did she hear me thinking that?

*Let’s look together at someone in the camp.*

Penrys sent her attention outward from the wagon, letting it unfocus to cover a wide area and bringing him along somehow with her. The mind-glows of the humans were scattered across the near landscape, in a way familiar to him, but this was more crowded. He recognized the herd of horses by its direction. So that’s what animals feel like. And horses, so different from mules, and both from cattle.

With that clue, he found the camp dogs, and even some of the smaller life, in the thatch of the grasses.

*So. Let’s pick someone.*

She settled on a person nearby. *He’s not moving. In his tent, maybe. What is he?*

Quietly she inventoried him. *Kigalino. Feel the language flow?*

It was the difference between describing a wine and drinking it, the difference between his painfully studied knowledge of the language and this unimpeded stream.

*I understand,* he told her. *But I don’t think I can do this myself, bikrajti.*

*Maybe all you need is to be shown. What else do we know about him?*

He felt her somehow weigh the man’s skills. *Whittling. He carves things, toys. And he has the common joy of singing, how to harmonize. I can feel him juggling, which might as well be magic to me. And, of course, he knows how to ride and set up a camp, how to fight, how to care for horses.*

He believed her, but he couldn’t feel it, not the way he did the language. She’d gone beyond his ability to follow. *Did your wizards of the Collegium do any better keeping up*

*They all fled in panic before getting this far. You’re doing well.*

His internal snort of disagreement was ignored.

*Let’s see if we can find another language speaker, one whose language you don’t know already.*

*That will be difficult. They will surely all be Kigaliwen in this camp.*

*But not you or me. Maybe there are other strays.*

He could feel the humor underlying the thought. He tagged along as she cast widely again, quickly filtering out all the minds whose flavor was, to her, “Kigali-yat speaker.”

*Ah. Here, near the horses. One of the herdsmen, perhaps. What language is this?*

He perceived it, as she did, but it wasn’t until he tasted the elaborate consonant clusters that began the words and felt the distortion in his mouth as he tried to pronounce them that he recognized it.

He snatched his hand up in surprise and broke their link. “That’s Rasesni,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “Can you find him, on the ground?”

She blinked at him, and he stretched out a hand to help haul her up.

“Leave the book,” he said, as she bent to pick it up. “Hurry. We can’t let him vanish on us.”