"Jamal wants to know where you come from," Kelyan continued. "That's his first question."
Shana thought fast; she didn't want to inadvertently lead these warriors anywhere near the Citadel! "North," she said briefly, waving in that general direction. "The river." That was a lot of territory—vague enough to be useless as a direction, specific enough that if these Iron People did trade with Collen, the direction might ring a bell.
Kelyan translated; Jamal pondered the answer, and barked another question. "He wants to know why you were here." A sardonic smile. "He assumes that you are spies, of course. He's a War Chief; it's his job to be suspicious."
The truth would serve the best. "Looking for people to trade with," she said, trying to look clever and harmless. "We aren't warriors—well, look at our hands if you don't believe me; there're no scars or sword-calluses. We trade; that's how we get what we need, and we're always looking for new people to trade with."
:Laying it on a bit thick, aren't you?: Kalamadea asked.
Kelyan snorted disbelief, but translated anyway.
Jamal made a bark of equal disbelief and said something else, something long and complicated. Kelyan nearly choked; his companion Haldor looked completely disgusted. "He wants to know why you paleskin demons have taken to trade instead of warfare!" Kelyan said. "Unbelievable! He thinks you halfbreeds are really elves!"
Before Shana could say anything, Kelyan turned back to Jamal, chattering at high speed, apparently just as eager to convince the Iron Chief that they were not elves as Shana was. Jamal, however, was not going to be convinced. He kept pointing at Shana's ears and eyes, and no matter what Kelyan told him, he clearly didn't believe it. Finally he shook his head and rattled out a series of orders.
"You're going to be imprisoned with us," Kelyan said with resignation, as Haldor looked even more disgusted than before. "He wants the Iron Priest to have a look at you—meanwhile you're going in with us. Ah well, at least you'll be someone to talk to—"
Before he could finish, two more warriors came from outside the tent and picked up the chains to lead them all away. Kelyan and Haldor were taken out first; the second warrior led out Shana and her group.
A spectacular sunset painted the western sky in colors as vivid as the colors of the clothing about them, as the warriors took them all to another wagon-tent, this one just outside the innermost circle, one that bore no decorations at all. At the entrance, the warriors suddenly dropped the chains and walked off, leaving the six of them alone.
Haldor turned his back on all of them and climbed into the tent; Kelyan seemed disposed to continue talking to them, at least.
"Pick up your chain," he directed, "and come on inside. We've got food and water, and the Chief's servants will be bringing more later. And don't even bother to think about using that as a weapon and making a run for it—" he added, as Shana hefted her chain experimentally. "These people all learn to fight with chain-weapons from the time they can crawl. They'll have you before you get more than two circles away. By leaving you here, they've signified that you are on your own recognizance and you have the freedom of the camp, but if you try to escape, believe me, you'll regret it"
"Sounds as if you learned from experience," Mero ventured, as Kelyan climbed the narrow stairs into the wagon. Kelyan waited until they were all inside before answering.
"Let's just say that I've seen what they can do," he said, as Haldor flung himself down on a pallet with his back to them.
The inside of this wagon was furnished simply, but with surprising comfort: pallets, cushions, and piles of blankets and spare clothing in baskets, all arranged around the edge of the round tent. A lantern (iron, of course) hung from the center, and there was an iron brazier in a flat box of sand in the middle of the tent below it.
Kelyan helped himself to a cushion and sat down on it, inviting them with a gesture to do the same. Mero was the first to take the invitation, sitting himself down next to the elven lord with a defiant air. "You seem very friendly towards us," Mero said with heavy irony. "I have to wonder what your motive is. There's not a lot of love between your kind and mine. I'd give a great deal to know how you ended up out here."
Kelyan shrugged. "It hardly matters whether you lot are wizards or elves, does it? It doesn't matter what I am, either. We're not home, any of us. We're all prisoners—and if you have half the powers your type is supposed to, at least you can take some of the burden of entertaining these barbarians off the backs of myself and my companion."
Haldor grunted, but kept his back to them.
"Entertaining?" Keman asked, puzzled. "How? We aren't musicians or anything—"
"Follow us later and you'll see." Kelyan advised, and turned back toward Mero. "I'll tell you the truth, because I don't have a thing to gain by lying to you. We're both useless second sons of hangers-on. The most we can do is make pretty illusions. We went off looking for something to make our fortunes with, and this is what we found." He gestured at his collar and chain. "We've been prisoners here for decades. No one knows where we are, and if they knew, they wouldn't care."
"Speak for yourself," Haldor growled, the first time he'd actually said anything.
"You can live in a constant daydream of being rescued by an army, but I have better things to do," Kelyan snapped, and turned back to Mero. "Right now, I'm just happy to see someone with a veneer of civilization, someone who might be able to tell me what's been going on without me back home." He glanced over his shoulder at Haldor. "Someone who can speak my tongue—and is willing to do so." His expression took on an unmistakable air of hunger. "I want news. I'm starved for news of home."
"You won't like it," Shana warned.
Kelyan grimaced. "Probably not, but then, you never know. It's been a long time since I left. You might tell me that—overbearing brute Lord Dyran got skewered by an alicorn or something, and that would make me very happy. He's half the reason I ended up out here."
At the mention of Dyran's name, both Shana and Mero started, and Kelyan flashed an unexpected smile. "You know him! So something did happen to the boor? How pleasant! I hope it was nasty."
"It—was," Shana managed. "It's very complicated, though. It will take a while in the telling."
"Let me just savor the moment then, and give you some useful information while I do so." Kelyan smiled again, the satisfied smile of a child surprised with a sweetmeat. "You know, for my supposedly deadliest enemies, I'm beginning to like you four quite a bit! Now—to begin with, these people are the ones the oldest chronicles refer to as the 'grel-riders,' although they haven't seen a grel for a century or more."
"Ah." Kalamadea nodded, satisfied. "I thought they might be. They certainly match what was written."
"First, a piece of really important information. They have something, and I do not know what it is, that makes them immune to magic, so don't bother trying anything on them." At Shana's grimace, he nodded. "I see you already discovered that."
"The hard way," she agreed, rubbing her arms. "At least they didn't attack back, so I suppose we're lucky."
He laughed. "Oh, they're utterly contemptuous of our magic. They have legends of it, but meeting with us has convinced them that the legends of truly powerful mages are exaggerations. Illusions do not deceive them unless it is an illusion of something that they expect to see and don't pay too much attention to—ah—" He thought for a moment "For instance, if one of them looked into this tent, I could spin an illusion of Jamal sitting here until I was blue, and they would still see me—but if I happened to manage to get into Jamal's tent and sit on his couch of state, they would believe it was Jamal there unless they looked at me very hard."
"Which means there's no point in trying to make them think we're oxen or invisible, and trying to escape that way," Keman finished for him.
He nodded. "Magical weapons—levin-bolts and the like—also do not work on them. Right now they are all very much on edge and nervous, because this is all foreign territory to them. They normally live hundreds of leagues south of here, but there has been a five-year drought in the South, and there's nothing for the cattle to graze on down there. They live by their herds; nearly everything they have or use comes from the cattle. They don't understand what's causing the drought, and that makes them nervous as well. They're afraid that their ancestor-spirits are angry with them, and nothing I can say seems to make any sense to them."
"May I assume you do know the cause of the drought?" Kalamadea hazarded gently.
"I can guess," Kelyan told him, with some evidence of interest. "That fool Dyran started meddling with the weather long before I was born, and convinced everyone else to give it a try—now there's no such thing as normal weather anymore. That was what ruined my family; what used to be a very nice little manor ended up flooded so often, it turned into a swamp, and now it's nothing but swamp and rain forest"
"And that was probably no accident, if someone in your family managed to get on Dyran's wrong side," Mero put in with a glower.
The flash of anger in Kelyan's eyes would have been answer enough, but he nodded to confirm Mero's guess. "Well, if too much rain has ended up there, it stands to reason the water had to come from somewhere else."
Kalamadea nodded, but said nothing.
"This arrangement of four tents in the center of the camp is very important," Kelyan went on. 'The easternmost is Jamal's—he's the War Chief. The westernmost belongs to the Iron Priest. Do not, no matter what, go into the northern and southern tents, unless and until a priest takes you there. Those are sacred to the spirits, and they will beat you to within an inch of your life if you desecrate the tents. Then they'll make you go through a ritual of purification that will make you wish they had beaten you to death."
He looked so grim when he said that; Shana had to wonder if he'd learned that the hard way, too.
A woman appeared at the entrance to the tent with a flat basket of finely woven grass; Kelyan rose immediately and took it from her, bringing it back to the center of the group. "Are you eating?" he called over his shoulder to Haldor, as he sat down.
Haldor shook his head.
Kelyan shrugged. "Your loss." He waved a hand at the basket; it contained a pile of flat white rounds, strips of what appeared to be grilled meat, onions, a set of round cups and a skin, and a bowl with something white in it. "The flat things are bread, more or less; the strips are beef and they are tasty enough, but tough. There's butter in the bowl, and the skin is full of fresh milk. You'll get flatbread and cheese in the morning, and more milk." He reached for a round of bread, deftly wrapped it around a strip of meat and onion, and poured himself a cup of milk. "Down south they had beer made from barley, but the barley ran out a while ago; I don't know what they'll do up here. Before the drought, the food was better than this; there were farmers to trade with, more variety." He raised an eyebrow at Shana, who was juggling a hot strip of meat from hand to hand. "I don't suppose that drivel about wanting to trade happened to be true by any stretch of the imagination?"
"Well," she said, getting the meat into the bread, and blowing on her fingers to cool them, "as it happens, it was. We—the wizards, I mean—had another confrontation with the elven lords; this time the ending was a bit more on our side, and the truce-treaty specified we could come down here and settle unmolested. We have things we can trade, and it's easier to trade for things than use up magic creating them."
Not that too many of us can create things, but let him think we can, like the greater elven lords.
"Hmm." He said nothing more, but ate, quickly and neatly, and washed his meal down with the milk. Shana did the same, finding that the fare was not at all bad—although she could see that it would be very easy to tire of it quickly.
Kalamadea and Mero took more time with their meal, as she and Keman sketched in as much as they knew of the time that Kelyan and Haldor had missed. "I always figured that they couldn't possibly be getting rid of all of you halfbreeds," he commented, when they got to the second Wizard War. "There are just too many accidents, too many times that a concubine or a human field-slave happens to be fertile when her lord takes a fancy to her. And I figured that the results were being left out on the edge of the forest or something of the like. There's always been rumors of halfbreeds in the forest, living wild as wolves. I can't say it surprises me."
Since he was being so frank, Shana decided to return the favor. "Your entire attitude towards us surprises me" she told him. "I can't understand why you aren't—well—like Lord Dyran—"