The Chained Adept (3-4) (eBook)

CHAPTER 1

The Grand Caravan arrived that afternoon in sunlight fresh enough with the spring season to ignore the dust of the travelers and settle on the bright colors of their exotic robes and turbans instead.

Outriders had preceded them into Tengwa Tep, and the merchants and citizens of that entrepôt that could spare the time gathered on the southwest outskirts of the city as soon as the news had spread that the Grand Caravan had come, as scheduled, and that the trading season with sarq-Zannib and upstream Kigali had begun for the year.

Penrys rode well back in the caravan, dressed in the riding-length robes that all the dark Zannib wore, men and women, on horseback. Najud, her husband, was near the front, but the rest of her companions, as new to the caravan as she was, chattered excitedly about their first look at a Kigali city, its yellow brick golden in the light from the west, varied by the colorful stucco of its many residential and manufacturing compounds. By comparison, the caravan’s first stop, a few days ago, had just been a large market town.

She’d seen cities before, in Ellech, across the northern seas. Here it was the children that caught her eye—dozens and dozens of them, screaming with excitement. Some were with a parent, but mostly they ran free, the littlest ones trailed by irritated older sisters or brothers. Unlike their elders, with the long single braid that almost all Kigali not in the military used, the children wore their hair loose or, at the most, gathered into a tail.

“Did they come to see the riders?” Rubti asked.

Penrys smiled at her sister-in-law’s eagerness, a ten-years-younger version of Najud. She was an apprentice herd-mistress, a dirum-malb in her own language, and she’d been fascinated by the rehearsal the night before of the entertainment the caravan would provide this first evening, to entice the crowds to trade for the five-day stop before it swung west, upstream, paralleling the Junkawa, for the longest leg of its great circular route—to Jonggep, the Meeting of Waters.

Ilzay leaned across his saddle to catch Penrys’s attention. “There’s our setup place.” The young man pointed to the left, into the open pasture that was bare of animals and clearly set aside for the use of the caravan, divided from the outermost commercial buildings on the west side of Tengwa by a well-used broad dirt road.

The caravan broke into its smaller components and the travelers began to unpack and erect their dwellings in the unchanging sequence they would maintain for the entire route. Penrys recalled Najud’s advice when the caravan started from Qawrash im-Dhal to pick their neighbors well, since they’d be living with them for four months. That wouldn’t be true for Penrys and Najud who would be leaving the caravan here tomorrow with their apprentice Munraz, but the other four would be hauling their two kazrab and trade goods on all but the final leg, parting from the caravan only once it had returned to sarq-Zannib and reached the land of clan Zamjilah on its way back home.

The six of them led their pack-strings of horses, five each, to their designated spot and began unloading their goods from the pack frames. Before the first of the three round kazrab had been raised, Najud trotted in with his own pack-string.

“Sorry, Haraq—we’ve been summoned. Can you take charge of getting our kazr up? Munraz can tell you where everything goes. I need to grab Penrys for a while, by order of our imperial… hosts.”

A grimace crossed his lively face. *Sorry, Pen-sha. They’re waiting for us. I’ll stall them until tomorrow—we don’t want to cross the river in the dark, I assure you. But they want to make sure I brought you. As, um, requested.*

Penrys felt the mix of exasperation and tension in his mind-speech. “Shouldn’t we change our clothes?” She beat her sleeve with the riding gloves clenched in her hand and let the eloquent dust rise to make her point.

“No time. They’ll have to take us as we are, at least on this side of the river where we can always just leave again.”

With a sigh, Penrys waved her hand at what was left of their unloading and smiled apologetically at Haraq. “Have fun watching the riding exhibition if we miss it,” she told Rubti.

She brushed the trail dust off as best she could and remounted her horse. Najud led her at a trot to the head of the caravan, passing the large kazr of the zarawinnaj, the caravan leader, and then crossed the road to the Tengwa side and slowed to a walk. He searched through the crowd of Kigaliwen, adults and children, who were watching the camp going up in the field, until he spotted two men, dressed somberly, and turned his horse in their direction.

“That’s the dark brown of Imperial Security,” he told Penrys. “Apparently they’ve been on the lookout for us.”

When they reached the two men, they dismounted. Najud bowed in the Kigali fashion and Penrys followed his lead. When she noticed the older one staring at her neck, she raised her hand and unwound the colorful scarf she’d wrapped around it, a gift from a kind tailor’s wife in far western Neshilik. At the sight of the heavy, brassy chain, settled close around her throat, with no method of removal, the official nodded.

“You are wanted as soon as possible in Mentsek Tep,” he said. “Gather your things and follow us.”

Penrys raised her eyebrows, and Najud shook his head. “We’ll cross to Yenit Ping in the morning, Nip-chi, not in the darkness of night. By the time we load goods and horses, the sun will have long set.”

He turned to Penrys. “Penrys, this is Nip Jochat, and Zep Pangwit who will be our guide into Yenit Ping, to take us to Tun Jeju. Binochiwen, this is Penrys of Ellech, my wife.”

“So they didn’t expect you to be married to my tigha?” Rubti was amused at the surprise Najud had described to her when they returned to their camp.

“News doesn’t travel all that quickly,” Penrys said. The scene of chaos that she’d left had fallen into order before she got back. The horses and other animals were tethered or herded in flocks on the far side of the camp, in the pasture set aside for the thrice-yearly visit from the Grand Caravan. In the middle rank were the kazrab of the caravan leader, the guards, and the permanent staff of the Biziz Rahr, scattered along its length, and then interspersed were all the traders traveling together in the caravan, one group after another. Some were regulars who undertook the journey every year and greeted each other like family, while others, like their own party, were strangers.

The final rank, along the frontage of the road, were the trading booths, still going up in the setting sun, bare and undecorated until the next day’s early morning would see them transformed into colorful and enticing stops for the citizens and merchants of Tengwa Tep, and for any other traders who would rendezvous here before the caravan proceeded further into Kigali. Some would be buying, for the local region, and others would consign their own items for sale. Goods that went by water traveled in Kigaliwen hands, but the overland trade, along the route of the Biziz Rahr, was handled by the nomadic Zannib, by long custom.

Penrys had seen the process a few days ago in their first village, where the kinks had been worked out for the new travelers. The caravan’s customers and trading partners would wait until tomorrow for their official business, but already they were gathering in the open space left beyond the zarawinnaj’s dwelling, waiting for the entertainment to begin.

As she pushed through the crowd with Rubti, Penrys could feel the exercise of the traders’ professional skills, as much a part of them as the skills of a carpenter or soldier would be to another. She reached out with her mind and scanned the people—hundreds of them, in addition to those with the caravan. Across the road were the thousands in Tengwa Tep, and this, she knew, was just a small city, anchored by the caravan trade. The scale was overwhelming, and she concentrated on just the activity in front of her.

*Over here, Pen-sha.*

Penrys zeroed in on Najud’s location from his silent call and steered Rubti in that direction. Along the westward-facing edge of the talkative crowd, their little group stood quietly—tall Haraq made taller by his turban, and young Ilzay, his eyes never still as they drank in and filed the behaviors of the people as though they were an exotic species of animal. Najud was there, younger than Haraq, with his face that so resembled Rubti’s, especially when a smile flashed across it as it did now upon seeing them both. Munraz, their apprentice, stood by his side and smiled shyly at Rubti.

All the men wore the turbans that marked the Zannib, and as Penrys cast her eye across the crowd, she could see the colorful headgear bobbing like the blooms of tall flowers in a field of grass. The Kigali men, some of them, sported the small emblematic caps of their rank or profession, perched moth-like on their heads. The universal single braid down the back for the adults, men and women, was in stark contrast to the exuberant curls of the Zannib women who wore their hair only casually restrained by scarves or pins,...