Dzantig led Penrys along the tunnels. They walked enwrapped in the limited sphere of light shed by the lantern. Everywhere outside of its reach was blackness.
It seemed to Penrys that she was back in the endless abyss, that she had found its bottom and it extended forever over her head.
She stopped, occasionally, lost in the nightmare, and Dzantig came back and tugged at her gently to get her started again.
He shuttered the lantern when they reached a door, no different in character than any of the others they had passed. He opened it softly and peered outside, and drew her through after him.
They had emerged above ground behind a work shed. She could see the lights of very late travelers crossing the bridge south into the main city.
“We’re well south of the market square,” Dzantig told her. “You can stay here for a while. No one comes here.”
He pushed at her until she sat down on the path behind the shed, and squatted down beside her.
“Is there anywhere you can be safe? I must be back by dawn, but that’s still a couple of hours away.”
Safe? Who do I know?
“Can you find Kor Pochang? He sits on the town council. Do you know who that is?”
Dzantig nodded. “We’ve met them all, the councilors.”
“Tell him… Tak Tuzap’s friend needs help. Careful, there are Rasesni quartered there.”
“I can do that,” he said. He caught his underlip in his teeth. “I won’t be back this way unless I fail—I’ll enter the tunnels at a different point. If they catch me and question me…”
He leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “Don’t come back. Our strongest wizards are in the mage council. You can’t kill them—we’re going to need them.”
He glanced at her bloody rags. “I’m sorry for what they did to you, whatever it was.”
On his knees, he made a formal bow, arms outstretched. “Help us, brudigna, please. In spite of this. In spite of Zandaril.”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t know if I can. I’ll… try.”
As he stood to leave, she focused on his face and nodded. “Thank you, tsevog, for your care. You have been a worthy student.”
After his footsteps faded away down the path, a little time passed while she sat unmoving. Pump the heart. Breathe.
The fading of the starlight in the pale light of pre-dawn roused her.
Too much light. I’ll be found.
She glanced at the deep shrubbery across the path. Dense bushes hid her view of the interior, their leaves still clinging to the branches. Near the ground, the stems rose leafless before they converged, and small animals had made trackways there.
She stretched out on all fours across the path and crawled into the gaps between the bushes until she found a hollow all the way in, still lined with last year’s leaves. There she curled up on her side with her head on her arm. She couldn’t see the path or the work shed from there.
She wanted to sleep, but she couldn’t. Her brain hurt, aching from the inside.
Here and there the first birds woke and began their morning songs. She could feel their mind-glows, dimly. She tightened her shield around herself like a blanket, fearing the searches of the enraged wizards.
Wherever there was a gap in her rags, she felt the cold damp of the leaves against her skin, but it soon warmed up and the sensation faded.
Help him, he said. Help the Rasesni. As if I care about them. The Voice is welcome to them all. Some of them already work for him.
She shuddered involuntarily, and raised her arm to remind herself she was no longer lying paralyzed and powerless on a stone bench underground. She flexed her hand in front of her eyes, marveling at the complex movements it could make, the smoothness of its gestures.
It must have been Veneshjug that had Zandaril taken. Not dead, maybe, not when Dzantig saw him. Wouldn’t need a guard if he were dead. But now?
Sent him north. To intersect the Voice? Payment for Zandaril spotting him, weeks ago, as a false herdsman? Or just a random gift—“Here, have another wizard.”
If her thoughts were correct, he was hours away. She couldn’t reach him in time to stop anything. She tried her wings for a moment, in the enclosed space, but nothing happened.
He can’t be dead! She reached out for him, but all she could find were the few mind-glows nearby.
They didn’t care about him, except maybe Veneshjug—just wanted him out of the way. I put him in this danger. This is my fault.
A cold thought intruded, that Zandaril was lost to the Voice, or dead, and a chill washed over her. If he’s gone, what stops me from leaving, once the drugs wear off? What do I care about captured wizards or Kigali soldiers?
Unbidden, her memory presented a glimpse of Zandaril laughing at something she’d said, saying something earnestly with that deep voice, blinking owlishly up at her from the bed and leering suggestively.
Her breath caught in her throat.
And there were others in the path of the Voice. Tak Tuzap, even Dzantig, the enemy who had defended her when she was vulnerable in class, who went drinking with Zandaril, who waited through her ordeal and led her to safety.
I have no duty to these people, no vows. But if I’m not connected to them, what am I connected to? Not the Collegium. Not my unknown or maybe nonexistent family. Not my theoretical maker, the one responsible for that hideous hollow inside me—never that. If I don’t make my own connections, fight for something, what am I? A monster, in truth?
Is that’s what’s wrong with the Voice? He must have some purpose, but what? To what end? Does Veneshjug know? It can’t just be survival, can it? And yet, how easy it was to kill Vladzan, to watch with him as he died. And how little I care about it.
The birds in the predawn were all awake, now. Surrounded by music, she gathered her rags around her and shivered.
She was tired, and her head hurt, and her heart ached.
The knock on the window of the room where Tak Tuzap slept woke him. His uncle’s house quartered two Rasesni officers, and he had taken a small back room on the ground floor for his own use. Kor Pochang’s scullery maid waited nervously for him to throw on his clothes. He armed himself with what was at hand, and then he slipped out the window and crept with the maid through the streets to Kor’s house. Once inside the compound, they separated, and Tak made his way to the stable before the stars were even extinguished.
Hearing voices up in the hayloft, he climbed cautiously and froze when he found not just Kor Pochang himself, but a young Rasesni man. When his hand fumbled at his belt knife, Kor hissed at him and whispered harshly, “Never mind that nonsense. Get over here.”
“This is Tak Tuzap,” he told the stranger, hauling him forward to present him. “‘Tak Tuzap’s friend,’ you said.”
Zandaril! It must be about him. After a whole month he remembered me. Tak stood up straight and tried to look competent.
“That’s what she told me,” the man said, in accented but understandable Kigali-yat.
Must be Penrys, then. What would she want me for?
“I’m from the temple school, up in Kunchik. They’ve been there three days, teaching us ways to defend ourselves against…” He rubbed his forehead. “Against an enemy coming off of Nakshadzam. She was a good teacher. Strong, so strong.”
But that meant he was a wizard himself. A whole school of them!
He looked at the man more closely. He looked tired, like he’d been up all night. Scared, too.
“I don’t think I should tell you my name. I have to get back before dawn, or they’ll question me and we can’t keep secrets from the mage council if they choose to look.”
He murmured, half to himself, “Though maybe she did.”
Shaking his head in an effort to stay awake, he said, “I think they seized Zandaril last night, and sent him north, to our enemy.”
Tak heard his own indrawn breath in the silence.
“I know they captured Penrys and questioned her. She escaped, somehow, and I got her out of there.”
Kor broke in, “Where is she? What do you want from us?”
The Rasesni waved his hand, “I’ve got her stashed south of the square, and when I asked her, she told me to fetch you for help. That’s all I want.”
Tak said, “But why are you helping her? You’re not her friend.”
“It’s not that simple, boy. I have to, my god lays this task on me. It’s too hard to explain. And besides, Penrys and Zandaril were our guests.”
Tak heard outrage in his voice, and reverence for his god.
He addressed himself to Kor Pochang. “Let me go get her, Kor-chi.”
“Nonsense, it’s too dangerous”
“My uncle would have wanted me to, you know he would,” Tak said. “Besides, she knows me.”
He turned back to the messenger. “Where is she? What does she need?”
“You know the work shed behind the ropewalk, on the north side, southeast of the market square?”
“I can find that.” Tak glanced at Kor and correctly interpreted his resigned expression.
“Bring blankets, clothing, food, water, bandages.” A cloud passed over the stranger’s face.
“I think, I hope she will look for Zandaril, once she’s better. They’ll be looking for her at the bridge, so I don’t think you should take her south of the river. Don’t tell me where!”
He took a step toward the top of the ladder, sticking out into the hayloft. “Be careful of her, boy. Whatever happened to her, she’s dangerous now, and strange.”
What had the Rasesni wizard meant, when he called Penrys ‘dangerous and strange?’ That’s not how he remembered her. Intense, maybe, but he still smiled thinking about chasing caps in the air with Wan Nozu. Nothing very dangerous about that.
Tak Tuzap clucked to the horse pulling the small buckboard along the outer perimeter of the ropewalk compound. It had long since outgrown its walls, and supplemental storage buildings cluttered the open land next to it. The path curved around to the northeast and there, as the Rasesni wizard had described, was a small work shed inside the path but outside the compound.
The sun was not quite up, and few people were about yet, but Tak had already seen the Rasesni patrols guarding the north end of the bridge, searching the handful of wagons crossing to the south this early. His own buckboard, borrowed from Kor Pochang, had a piece of precautionary canvas stretched across the top, but they had ignored the northbound traffic.
He halted at the shed. Where was Penrys? Mud smeared the surface of the path, and something looked like it had been dragged into the bushes on the far side.
He set the brake, and then hopped down to look. “Penrys-chi?” he whispered. There was no reply.
Following the drag marks, he wriggled under the intertwined branches, and there he found a woman’s body in the dim shaded light of the new day.
The sight of so much blood on the clothes stopped his heart, but there was none on the ground, and her chest moved up and down steadily. Her face was hidden, and for a moment he hoped there’d been a mistake. When he shook her shoulder, she mumbled something, but subsided again when he ceased.
This was going to be a problem, he realized. He couldn’t carry her, so he would have to get her moving on her own, and quickly, before anyone saw them.
He shook her again more vigorously, but to no effect. After a little thought, he crawled out to the buckboard and fetched a stoneware bottle of water and several bandages. When he sat down beside her again he poured some water onto a bandage and wiped her face with it. That roused her, as he’d hoped, and he put the bottle in her groping hand and helped her drink.
“Come on, Penrys-chi, come follow me. Time to get you out of here.”
Her eyes had no focus, but her muttered “Takka?” encouraged him.
“Yeah, it’s me, just like you asked for. Let’s go, gotta get up.”
He pulled up on her shoulder and she half rose to support herself on her elbow. “Where’s Dzantig?”
“Is that his name?” Tak asked. “He’s gone back, he said.”
Her eyes closed again, and her head drooped.
Taking a deep breath, he said, “Sorry, minochi, but you gotta wake up,” and he leaned over and slapped her cheek.
She snatched his hand, like a snake striking, and her eyes blazed open and held his captive. For a long moment he froze, feeling something in his mind, looming over it. “Dangerous and strange” about described it, after all.
Then she blinked and released him. “Sorry, Takka. I’m… not myself.”
She rolled over on her stomach and crawled back out of the bushes and made enough room for him to follow.
He helped her up, relieved to see she could walk, and led her to the buckboard. She leaned on the side of the wagon while he dropped the tailgate, and seemed to be glad of his help to pull herself up onto the wagon bed.
Jumping up beside her, he wrapped her in a blanket, as much to cover the distressing sight of her from his view as to warm her, and laid another blanket over and around her, trying to prop her so she wouldn’t roll around too much once they got moving again. After he’d raised the tailgate and covered the whole wagon bed with the canvas cover, he paused on the ground beside the wagon seat with his head down, and shook, thinking about the clutch of her hand and those burning eyes, and the tickling sensation in his mind like threatened lightning, before regaining command of himself and mounting up to drive her away.
