Broken Devices Read online

  She glanced at Najud to see if he’d rather tell the story himself, but he shook his head faintly.

  “To keep it brief, this was a young girl, maybe thirteen, who we think found animals, and only animals, for her first years and bonded with them, and then when she finally met people, tried to bond them to her like another kind of beast. It was disastrous for the people—hundreds died, most of an entire clan—but it wasn’t an intentional slaughter, in my opinion, just a case of not understanding what would result.”

  “What happened to her?” Vylkar asked.

  “She was captured and killed.” Penrys carefully avoided looking at the rigid Munraz. “The Zannib wizards have a tradition of banding together to overwhelm and defeat a rogue wizard, what they call a qahulaj.”

  Mpeowake gave a sharp nod of approval at that.

  “This girl was more powerful than any ordinary Zannib bikraj, of course. Stronger than me in some ways. But in the end she died.”

  She reached into the pouch in front of her one more time, and laid the loop of chain before her, stretching it out into a smooth circle. “Fourteen links, as you see. She wasn’t full-grown yet so it hung loose on her. But tight enough.”

  Vylkar asked, “Did you recognize her nation?”

  “She might have been from Ellech. Light brown hair, freckles, pale eyes.”

  Tun Jeju waited to see if she was done, and then spoke. “Our latest guests came from a direction and over a distance that made coordination with the the capital of sarq-Zannib difficult, but Ussha has sent us a separate report directly, via the ambassador. They disclaim knowledge of any other chained wizards, other than Penrys and the one who wore that chain, but they’re looking now. Perhaps there will be other news, soon.”

  Penrys heard Najud’s suppressed snort. She herself had difficulty picturing how people of foreign appearance with unremovable chains could possibly go unremarked in Zannib, but the country was large and the cities were small and few, so perhaps the reports hadn’t yet traveled to the capital.

  But news about her would travel at the same time. The whole country would know what she was. It was all too easy to imagine the reaction the next time she met Najud’s people.

  Tun Jeju pushed away from his table and stood up, and the rest followed his lead. “This is all just a start, and you have yet to hear the Kigali side of the story. We have things to show you, and things to tell you, before we can truly examine the problem. We’ll start with the showing, if you will please follow me.”

  One of Tun Jeju’s staff hastened to open the door ahead of the notju, and two of them lingered behind to monitor the last of the guests as they followed their host through the door.

  Munraz opened his mouth to say something, but Najud shook his head sharply to silence him. “Later,” he murmured. “Not here. Save it.”

  The exotic procession returned to the ground floor of the building, but not to the guarded entrance. Instead, they turned down one of the back corridors. There was a brief delay at some sort of internal guard post with a locked and barred entry.

  Penrys was too far back in the line, and too short, to see exactly what was going on, and her audible frustration turned Najud’s head. “Don’t be so eager to look,” he said, without his characteristic grin. “Might not like what you find.”

  He pointed down, as if to indicate where they were going. He must have some idea. What would be below this, in the Imperial Security headquarters, behind bars? Prisoners? Special prisoners?

  Penrys reined in her impatience. True to Najud’s prediction, they encountered another stairway that began in front of them and went down. The texture of the steps was coarse, and the rough stone of the walls was in sharp contrast to the smooth and polished surfaces she’d seen so far in this heavily guarded building.

  When she reached the lower landing, she glanced at the barred and guarded entrance into deeper recesses of the structure. Her sense of direction told her that they were not only below street level, into the embankment that was built from the stone of Tegong Him, but outside the above-ground walls of the building. Does it extend outward in all directions, like an iceberg?

  They descended three levels altogether, and when they finally passed through the guards and another barred entrance, Penrys felt nothing but apprehension from all the members of their party, even Tun Jeju and his staff. The marks on the walls below the first level were mute but unmistakable witnesses to highwater that had reached up through the embankment at various times, and it painted a picture for her of stone underpinnings that were solid but not waterproof, not when the Mother of Rivers decided to stretch herself in a flood.

  Nothing down here but prisoners? Something that can be easily moved, if necessary. Or, perhaps, not moved at all.

  The dankness of the atmosphere added to the sense of being underwater, though she knew the surface of the river south of her was still further down—the embankment was taller than a mere three flights of stairs. Still, the stairway descended beyond them to lower levels yet, obscure in the gloom. If you go down far enough, do the walls become river mud?

  The first rooms on this level that they passed through were given up to the guards and their needs. Tun Jeju held up his hand when they reached one more barred and guarded door, and his staff faded away to the back of the crowd. “We asked throughout Kigali for news of chained people, and we miscalculated the effect. When Imperial Security asks for something, everyone assumes the worst. And there were many more of them than we expected.”

  Penrys felt her blood chill. What would it have been like, if the whole town of Gonglik knew who she was, because of her chain, and suddenly the dreaded and feared attention of Imperial Security had fallen upon her?

  “Local authorities were zealous in their efforts to please us. Disastrously so, as you’ll see.” He waved his hand at whatever lay behind the door. “This was not what we intended.”

  Penrys thought his eyes flicked in her direction briefly, but she might have been wrong.

  “Worse,” Tun Jeju said, “some unknown number of people fled in alarm as the news spread of the local reactions. Some of them have appeared here, in the city, and they have no reason to trust us.”

  “Are they a threat?” Penrys asked. Am I? She suspected her undertone carried the rest of her meaning.

  “Not so far, not that we know.”

  Penrys felt the walls closing around her, and pictured the gates between here and the outside, all three of them. The wizards around her, of unknown strengths and alliance, watched silently. She didn’t know how much of her concerns appeared on her face, but something must have, because Tun Jeju looked her in the eye and spoke, just to her. “I make you an oath before these witnesses, Penrys-chi, that you’ll leave this building as freely as you entered.”

  “Or you will answer to sarq-Zannib,” Najud said. Penrys pictured the ancient ally of Kigali, small and disorganized, throwing itself valiantly at an indifferent, massive Kigali army.

  Tun Jeju nodded to Najud, as if his warning carried weight. “Just so. The Zannib ambassador will be expecting your visit this evening, after we’re done here.”

  She felt nothing but truth in her superficial scan of the notju, and let her rigid posture relax.

  “All right, then. Let’s see your collection, Tun-chi.”

  CHAPTER 6

  The guard who had accompanied Tun Jeju on this level unlocked the entry to the prison and stood back to let the foreigners and the notju’s staff enter. A narrow corridor ran to left and right along the walls and another stretched before them.

  It was quiet and much drier than Penrys expected. She looked up and thought she spotted ventilation openings in the low ceilings. The light was provided by oil lanterns hung at regular intervals between each pair of iron-barred cells, and the rest of the space was dark. No light glimmered from the rows on either side, so perhaps this central row was the only one occupied.

  There was an odd scent in the air—not the stench of human occupation she had ant
icipated, but something she couldn’t place.

  Tun Jeju paused in front of the first cell on the left and pulled open its unlocked door. Two of the guards pushed past the rest of them and raised their lanterns high to hook them from the ceiling on the inside, and then returned to the corridor to let the others into the small cell, two or three at a time.

  The Ndanum were the first to look. Tun Jeju stood outside and spoke to them all. “Our colleagues from Rasesdad traveled from Dzongphan and came almost all the way by river. This let them bring with them the fruits of their investigations.”

  Penrys couldn’t interpret the expression on Mpeowake’s face when she stepped out of the cell. She steeled herself and walked in with Najud and Munraz.

  She had expected bedframes inside, but instead two tables filled most of the space. On each was a body, embalmed and preserved—the source of the unidentified odor. One male, and one female, she noted. Nude and chained. She knew that embalming could change the appearance, but neither looked like a Rasesni. When she reached down to push the hair aside, she found small, pointed, animal ears in the same place hers were.

  It wasn’t clear to her how either one had died, and that was disturbing. There were neither scars nor wounds on the front of the bodies. She glanced over at Najud and found his face locked into an impassiveness that gave nothing away, and his mind was a mirror of his face. Munraz looked distraught, and she laid a hand on his shoulder and told him, “There’s likely to be worse coming. Prepare yourself.”

  She ducked back out of the cell to make room for Vylkar and nodded at him as they passed.

  Silently she walked along to the next cell as Mpeowake left it and stepped in. The tables held chains this time, small neck-sized loops. There were no fragments, only intact circles of anywhere from twelve to sixteen links. Like her own chain, there were no stains, no marks of wear, no corrosion—they looked fresh and new, in some yellow metal neither brass nor gold, as though they’d just been made.

  She shuddered. There had been living people inside each of these chains, like her. These two little piles spread casually on the tables represented more than twenty people.

  She backed out of the cell and waited for Najud and Munraz to join her before moving to the next cell. This time the wrinkled nose on Mpeowake’s face prepared her for something worse. Two more bodies, both male, but these weren’t peacefully laid out. One had been killed at a moment when most but not all of his body had been covered in a thick white fur. His limbs were fully human, and his face, and his belly was still bare, as though the change had been interrupted.

  But it was the other body that made her ears move back on her scalp. A long tail, like that of a miniature whale, extruded from the base of his spine, above the legs, and the rest of his skin seemed thicker, somehow, though the embalming process made it hard to judge. There were two unhealed wounds on his back, as though he had been struck with… with what, she wondered—a harpoon? Both had the pointed ears she expected.

  When she rejoined Tun Jeju in the corridor, she saw he wanted to hold them all there before proceeding. They waited in silence for the last of the foreign guests to exit the third cell.

  The notju spoke somberly. “When the villages and even some of the smaller cities received our request for information about chained people, it raised a panic. They seized whoever they could find, in the belief that they were dangerous, and weren’t overly careful about it. Many died.

  “The problem was, they were mostly foreigners. A village would have welcomed someone who had wandered in a couple of years ago, of presumably mixed blood. They would labor in the fields, or help with the fishing, or work as a servant. They tended to live alone—no one would marry a foreigner. They spoke Kigali yat without an accent, which was reassuring, but they had no ties, no family.

  “So when we asked about them, suddenly all their suspicions were aroused. Many were captured and delivered already dead. Many more fled, and the news traveled quickly. We don’t know where they went, but some are here, in the city.”

  He paused for questions but no one spoke.

  “These few cells are the exceptional specimens. There seemed little point showing you the rest.” He gestured to either side of them, to the rows beyond this one. “We’ll give you the counts when we go back upstairs.”

  He had started to turn to take them to the next cell, when Penrys stopped him.

  “No. I want to see them all.” She choked it out as her voice thickened. “Every last one of them, you hear me? They died out of your carelessness, your indifference, not because they’d harmed anyone.”

  She noted the looks of distaste on the faces of most of the others and spoke to them directly. “I don’t care if you want to skip them—fine. It’s an ugly business. But these are ordinary people—they didn’t ask for this. I want to look at their faces, people like me. I want to store that up, for the day I find our… makers.”

  She took a breath and tried to keep her fury from distorting her speech. “They can’t get justice any more—they’re gone. But I’m still here. By all that you hold sacred, I’ll present a reckoning and make them accountable. If I live, I’ll do it.”

  Stepping aside from the rest of them into the middle of the corridor, she turned her back and worked on controlling her shaking hands that itched for a throat to throttle. She made herself turn and rejoin Najud, so that they could see what was in the next cell.

  There were four more cells of “exceptional specimens” to examine. Penrys gritted her teeth and maintained a chilly silence. One had a pair of wings like a bat. The worst was the woman with tentacles like an octopus emerging from the base of the spine. All of them had the ears—Penrys checked each one.

  Why did so many of them die in their hidden forms? If she were suddenly killed here, her wings would still be secret. Ah, but not if I had warning and was trying to get away. Then I might try anything.

  “How were they killed?” she asked Tun Jeju, when they reached the end of the row.

  “It varies,” he said, expressionlessly. “Some were seized and, when they resisted, they were harmed in the capture, or hung by terrified villagers. Or burned. That’s where the loose chains come from, when there was nothing left to preserve.

  “Each has his own history which I’ll share with you, upstairs.”

  “I want a copy of that,” Penrys said. “For all of them.” She glared at Tun Jeju, until he nodded.

  Munraz asked her, quietly, “Weren’t any of them taken alive?”

  Tun Jeju overheard him. “Yes, some were captured alive. And some have been caught here, in the city.”

  “Where? Where are they?” Penrys demanded.

  He glanced at Chosmod. “Our colleagues from Rasesdad have provided the expertise to keep them alive but harmless.”

  He gestured across the aisle to the cells they hadn’t seen yet. “We tend them, and none have died.”

  “Sedchabke. You’ve drugged them.” Her voice was flat.

  “You know it?” Chosmod asked.

  “Oh, yes. I know it. Vladzan and Veneshjug saw to that, in Gonglik.”

  Something in her tone caused all of them to look at her as if she were a sudden threat.

  “Vladzan died, in the Temple Academy,” Chosmod said.

  “Actually, it was in a basement storage room, under the stable,” she said, blandly, “while he was conducting an experiment. On me. Veneshjug didn’t die until he tried to use the Voice’s chain for himself.”

  Najud positioned himself next to her, as if anticipating a fight that had any hope of being won, here, sublevels below ground under the Imperial Security building, surrounded by other wizards.

  Penrys walked over to one of the guards holding the extra lanterns, and took it out of his hand. He was wise enough not to resist. She stalked over to the last cell on the other side of the aisle and held it high. It was empty, and she continued down the row until she found one occupied.

  There were two women there, lying supine, under blankets,
with their eyes closed. Penrys could feel the pressure of their chains against hers from a few feet away, not fiery as it had been with the Voice, but still perceptible.

  “Najud, look at their necks. Please.” She’d known from his footsteps that he had followed her. The cell door was locked, and she turned to Tun Jeju and stared at him, without a word.

  He nodded to a guard, and the man produced a key and unlocked the cell. Penrys backed up two steps, and Najud stepped inside.

  When he bent over the woman on the left, she saw him lift the chain, and then the hair around the ears. He checked the other one the same way and rejoined her.

  “There’s some damage, but you have to look for it,” he said.

  Penrys closed her eyes for a moment, and then turned to face the rest of the wizards. “Sedchabke is a drug used in Rasesdad to punish wayward mages, or so I understand. It paralyzes the body and, for wizards, it suppresses all powers, leaving the victim vulnerable to whatever might be done to him in that helpless state.”

  She looked at Chosmod. “Did you know that a chained wizard can’t get near another one? The chains heat up and burn the flesh.

  “These women are too close to each other. Their necks are burning, and healing, and no one noticed, no one looked for it. How long have they been there?”

  She directed the last question at Tun Jeju. She didn’t quite catch him wincing, but there was some hidden reaction there.

  “Some of them for three months,” he said.

  “And you don’t consider this torture. Or didn’t it matter, because you were planning to kill them anyway?”

  She unclenched her fists and turned away from whatever response he planned to make. She didn’t feel like informing him that they could hear everything around them, when they were awake. Let him make his own discoveries.

  Chosmod walked into the cell to make his own inspection. “She’s right,” he called out to Tun Jeju. “We need to move them all further apart.”

  Turning to Penrys, he asked, “Brudigna, would one per cell with an empty cell on either side be sufficient space?”