The Chained Adept (1-4)

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

“We’re moving out.”

Hing Ganau’s head popped into the back of Zandaril’s wagon and vanished before a startled Penrys could look up.

“I’m not ready yet,” she muttered, and Zandaril, lying flat on a pallet surrounded by boxes and sacks grinned at her.

“Maybe you better tell Chang to wait for you,” he said.

She glared at him and did a quick look around to see if everything was tied in place, nothing in danger of tumbling down onto Zandaril.

“Wish I could have taken that one specimen with me,” she told him, “but it was just too dangerous.” She’d probed the device inside the charm as slowly and carefully as she could to identify its structure, but it had exploded almost immediately, like all the others.

The rest of the Rasesni’s possessions were stored in four large packs, stashed at the back entrance of the wagon where they would be accessible as they traveled. The charm blanks were harmless, and contained no power sources.

“Weren’t they surprised when a herdsman turned up with three extra horses and their packs?” Zandaril wondered.

“Apparently some of them do that work year-long and bring all their possessions. It wasn’t that unusual,” Penrys said. “We’re lucky we caught him on duty and he had to leave it all behind.”

“What happened to the horses?”

She was amused by the greed in his eyes. The Zannib, the horse-hungry.

“Mine,” she said, “by right of, um, conquest.”

She laughed at his disappointment. “I might be persuaded to share them with you. The three he left are running with yours for now. Alas, he took his saddle with him.”

A knock from the front bench through the opening was a warning they were about to set off.

Zandaril called out, “We’re ready.”

His words were followed by an unanticipated lurch that jerked the standing Penrys off balance. She swore when her left shoulder hit a box, and groped with her good hand for one of the more stable bean sacks. Carefully she lowered herself to sit cross-legged on the wagon bed between the foot of Zandaril’s pallet and the back of the wagon.

“Today we’re going to learn about devices,” she told Zandaril, in her most pedantic tones. “We’re going to go through all his stuff, however long it takes us, and see what we can discover.”

Zandaril thought the bouncing of the wagon had to be worse than riding a horse, but he was under strict orders to stay flat all day. He’d suborned Penrys into helping him get propped up with a sack as a backrest, on the pretext that he couldn’t watch what she was doing otherwise.

She lost no time in claiming the space where his feet had been. The first pack had yielded clothing in the Kigali style and personal gear. Neither of them could find anything notable in that, but buried in one of the shirts were three small books. One was in Ellechen-guma, and she recognized it.

“I’ve read this already. The Principles of the Physical. It’s good, well beyond the basics.” She handed it back to him. “D’ya know it?”

“I’ve heard of it,” he said, dryly. And quite a denunciation went with the hearing, too.

She glanced at him as if she’d heard the thought. “Read Ellechen-guma, do you?”

“Well enough. Most of the great books have not been translated, so if you want to study them…”

“It’s the standard edition,” she said. “Could have come right off the shelves at the Collegium.”

She hefted the next tome—paper bound between carved wood, like the first one, but when she held it up to her nose, the smell was different. The ink, maybe. “D’ya know the language of this one?”

“That’s Rasesni. Can’t you read it?”

“Not any more—my source is gone. That’s a weakness of borrowed knowledge. Make it your own or lose it.” She shook her head. “How about you? Can you read it?”

He shook his head. “I can speak it a bit, but there’s little need for us to learn the writing, beyond the letters. Don’t see many books, don’t know if anyone has.”

“This one, too?” she said, holding up the third book.

“Same.”

“Well, we can puzzle through them together as best we can. There are lots of illustrations.”

She sat back on her heels, balancing as the wagon swayed. “Somehow I think we’ll have some Rasesni in range again before we’re done, and then we’ll see what we can find out.”

She flipped to the front. “Looks like there’s a name written inside the cover, on the first page.”

She showed Zandaril, and he puzzled out the letters. “Veneshjug, I think. That’s a Rasesni name,” Zandaril said. “Do you suppose it’s his?”

He looked at the titles again. “Seems that ‘Venesh’ word is in both of them.”

Penrys laid the two books aside.

“Let’s see what else we’ve got.” She waved her hand at the other three packs. “I just skimmed through them in a hurry before breakfast, to get a quick idea of what there was.”

She reached into the second pack and pulled out a soft leather drawstring pouch, the size of a human head. “Ah, here it is. There’s another one around somewhere.” She loosened the drawstring and spilled some of the contents onto the unoccupied foot of Zandaril’s pallet. Several handfuls of pea-sized faceted stones gleamed dully in the daylight filtering through the white canvas top of the wagon.

He leaned forward to look. The colors were various and muted, and they looked nothing like valuable gems. If he’d seen them on a beach at Shimiz, he would have ignored them. But the hand of man was evident in the care with which they had been cut.

When he sat back and looked up at Penrys, he found her watching him quizzically.

“D’ya know what these are?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Power-stones.”

He could feel his nose wrinkle at the name. So these were hadab makhtab. Such small things.

There was no way to avoid unhallowed knowledge. Not if the enemy was using it. He made himself ask. “How do they work?”

“What do you know about raunarys, thing-skills?”

“Not much. We don’t test for it, and if a wizard has it, he doesn’t speak of it.” And I don’t want to know if I have it. The very idea made him feel dirty.

“Hmm.” She thought for a moment, eying him and his obvious discomfort.

“Here’s what we’ll do. You don’t have to try anything—you can watch through me instead. You already know I’m… hopelessly contaminated, but there’s no need for you to end up that way.” She offered him a half-smile.

“I can do that,” he said. He braced himself for the experience.

She slipped into the mode of teacher to student, familiar to him since his apprentice years. “The commonest form of raunarys is simple movement.” Off the floor of the wagon she picked a small clod of dirt, the size of a thumbnail, and laid it down near the stones, less than a yard from where she knelt.

“Watch, now.” He peered through her mind, as he’d done when she’d showed him how she found languages. She reached out to the little clod and wrapped her focus around it. Then, with significant effort, she picked it up, without touching it with her hands, and moved it a few inches to the right, setting it down gently again. He could feel that it was a strain, and he could perceive some of the work it took for her to do it smoothly.

“You see? It’s not easy. The heavier the object, or the further away, the more difficult it is to do, and the sooner you get tired.”

“But what’s it good for?” he asked, surprised to see so much forbidden effort devoted to such paltry results.

“With the unaided mind, not much. Perhaps you could turn a key in a lock.” She watched his face. “Or stop a heart.”

He felt his skin chill.

She looked away and cleared her throat.

“The power-stones are amplifiers. There are two parts to an amplifier. One is to channel power to the will of the wizard. The other is the power-source itself, usually another stone.”

She plucked a stone from the pile. “An unpowered stone provides more control, but requires just as much power as using no stone at all. Like this.”

He watched through her again as she picked up the clod and moved it. It seemed to take the same effort, but the smoothness came more easily.

“Not much good by itself. But if you add a powered stone…”

She took a second stone in her hand and concentrated on it for a moment. She didn’t invite him to watch from the inside, and he left her in privacy to do it.

“Now.” She held the two stones together and he saw the clod lift easily, sail once around his head, and return to its starting point.

His eyes widened. “How did you do that?”

She repeated the maneuver with him monitoring. The second stone glowed in her mind, nothing like its visible appearance, and she drew upon it for movement. The glow visibly diminished as he watched. When she opened her hand, he could see no difference in the stones with his eyes, nor could he tell which was powered, and which not.

He held out his hand, and she dropped one of the stones into it. “Which one is it?” she asked.

He closed his fist against the little prickle of the pointed facets. He couldn’t tell how to detect it.

He shook his head and offered it to her again on his palm. “It’s not in me, I think.” He could hear the relief in his own voice.

“Why is it forbidden to a Zan, if you can say?”

“Unclean, unnatural.” He looked at her apologetically. “Not you, of course, bikrajti.”

“Of course,” she agreed, dryly. “Dirty, perverted, action at a distance…”

He lowered his eyes.

“What is a thrown spear but action at a distance?” she said. “I can see the emotion in a man’s mind without seeing his face, but any man can see emotion in the face of another. Are these truly different in kind? We call one of them magic, but not the other.”

“I can hear a man’s language in his mind, but any man can hear it in his voice. These things are all similar.” She waved her hand in an arc. “Wizards are at one place on the map, but everyone is on the map somewhere.”

She lowered her voice. “Physical magic is just another tool, like a knife, or a loom, or the ability to read, or the skill to lead men.”

He heard her words, but the strictures of his youth were resistant, and he knew how his colleagues would react. He wanted to reach an understanding with her—she had so much to teach him.

“Let us agree to not agree,” he said. “I think well of you. I’ve never met a jarghal with your strength—maybe they are all like you in Ellech, how would I know? But that’s not what matters.”

He spoke as sincerely as he could. “I’ve tasted your mind, and it is not unclean or unnatural. I can’t explain how that is, but I know what I’ve seen in you. I will try to learn whatever you care to teach me, bikrajti.”

He bowed at the end of his little speech, from his backrest, and when he lifted his face he was shocked to discover her bent away from him, her face hidden. A delicate probe revealed a roil of emotions, more than he could name.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, gently. For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer.

“Perhaps I am unnatural,” she said. “Not because of physical magic,” she waved her hand dismissively, “but because of what I am.”

“Yes?” he said, encouragingly.

“I am not like the wizards at the Collegium. They don’t learn the languages and knowledge of the people they are near. They can’t power a stone as easily as I just did. They grope at the principles of powered devices which seem clear as glass to me. To some ways of thinking, I’m only three years old! That’s all I remember. How is this possible? What am I? What happened to me?”

Her voice shook.

“They certainly don’t have furry ears. Or…” she trailed off.

He wondered what she’d stopped herself from saying.

“I’m not in any of the books, none of this is—I’ve looked. They named me an Adept because they couldn’t think what else to call me. Made it easier to deal with me without thinking about it.”

She swayed, and he remembered that she’d been assaulted by the blast just as he had, and how little sleep she’d gotten, how little time to recover. Her control was unraveling.

“You know what I think, sometimes?” she said.

“What?” he murmured.

“I think someone made me, maybe, constructed me, to be a sponge and suck up knowledge. And when I have enough, he’ll take me back and wring me out, and start my memory over again. The world’s a big place—maybe he’s done it before. I think that’s where the chain comes from.”

She paused a moment. “You know who wears chains? Slaves do.”

“That’s not possible,” he said.

“Who knows? I’m not possible, either. And I demonstrated just a couple of nights ago how a body can be transported a long distance.”

She leaned against the pile of the Rasesni’s packs, and set her face to the back of the wagon, away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, over her shoulder. “Let’s pick the lesson up later.”