The Assassins of Thasalon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Frontnote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note: A Bujold Reading-Order Guide

  About the Author

  Copyright 2021 © by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Cover art and design by Ron Miller, 2021

  Books by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The Vorkosigan Series

  Falling Free

  Shards of Honor

  Barrayar

  The Warrior’s Apprentice

  The Vor Game

  Cetaganda

  Ethan of Athos

  Borders of Infinity

  Brothers in Arms

  Mirror Dance

  Memory

  Komarr

  A Civil Campaign

  Diplomatic Immunity

  Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance

  CryoBurn

  Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

  The Chalion Series

  The Hallowed Hunt

  The Curse of Chalion

  Paladin of Souls

  Penric & Desdemona

  “Penric’s Demon”

  “Penric and the Shaman”

  “Penric’s Fox”

  “Masquerade in Lodi”

  “Penric’s Mission”

  “Mira’s Last Dance”

  “The Prisoner of Limnos”

  “The Orphans of Raspay”

  “The Physicians of Vilnoc”

  The Assassins of Thasalon

  The Sharing Knife Tetralogy

  Volume One: Beguilement

  Volume Two: Legacy

  Volume Three: Passage

  Volume Four: Horizon

  “Knife Children"

  Other Fantasy

  The Spirit Ring

  Short Stories

  Proto Zoa

  Nonfiction

  Sidelines: Talks and Essays

  Frontnote: This novel-length story takes place two years after the events of “The Physicians of Vilnoc”.

  The internal chronological order of the Penric & Desdemona tales is presently:

  “Penric’s Demon”

  “Penric and the Shaman”

  “Penric’s Fox”

  “Masquerade in Lodi”

  “Penric’s Mission”

  “Mira’s Last Dance”

  “The Prisoner of Limnos”

  “The Orphans of Raspay”

  “The Physicians of Vilnoc”

  The Assassins of Thasalon

  “Demon”, “Shaman”, and “Fox” are collected in the paper volume Penric’s Progress, and “Mission”, “Mira” and “Limnos” are collected in the paper volume Penric’s Travels.

  Chapter 1

  As he paced the sun-drenched streets of Vilnoc, Penric once more studied the note in his brother-in-law’s scrawling handwriting. It had been brought to his house this morning by a military courier, who’d had no enlightenment to add to the typically General-Arisaydia-curt message: Meet me in an hour at the duke’s palace. I need your ear.

  Ear, as attentive judgment, his demon, Desdemona, pointed out in their silent speech. Not ears, as a grisly Rusylli tribal war trophy.

  Pen’s lips twitched in amusement. I can’t think of anything I’ve done lately that would peeve Adelis that much. He tucked the note back into the sash of his summer vestments.

  As he—or they, always a little challenge how to describe two persons sharing one body—turned onto the palace square, Pen glanced down the busy main avenue toward the slice of blue harbor revealed at its far end. A better vantage could be gained from Duke Jurgo’s roof: merchants’ quays, the customs buildings, the naval shipyard, the enclosing sweeps of headlands to the south and north that protected the river’s ever-silting mouth running down from the rugged hills of Orbas behind.

  Oh, but here was Adelis himself, just dismounting from his cavalry nag at the base of the wide marble steps that were the latest addition to the ducal seat. Palace was something of a misnomer for what was originally three old merchants’ mansions knocked together. In his five years of residence here, Pen had never seen the place not undergoing some renovation or another at Jurgo’s direction.

  Adelis had not ridden in alone from his fort at Tyno that guarded the landward approaches to Vilnoc. A groom in military kit was taking charge of the horses, helped by a servant in the duke’s tabard. Dismounting also were two men new to Pen’s eyes. A fit-looking fellow of perhaps forty was flanked by an even more robust attendant, both sharing the regional coloration of black hair, brown eyes, and skin the hue of some rich reddish wood, very similar to Adelis. Despite their modest civilian riding dress, suitable for well-to-do merchants traveling rough, Pen fancied he was looking at a high-ranking officer and an aide—though not from the legions of Orbas. Curious.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” said Adelis to Pen in turn. Despite the heat, he wore his boiled leather cuirass and the red cloak of his rank, thrown back over his shoulders. The cloak might be a formality to honor the duke; the uncomfortable armor was less explicable.

  Pen nodded greeting. “Though I was somewhat delayed by your niece. Rina’s latest trick was to wedge her plump little knee through the atrium gallery balustrade, and get it thoroughly stuck. Screamed her head off, though I think more in anger than sorrow. We had to ease it out with kitchen oil. I believe she was trying to climb over. On the third floor! Five gods, I’ve never been so terrified by architecture before. How do children here survive?”

  Adelis snickered. “I don’t remember being aged two, but I do remember Nikys and me devising a rope ladder off the gallery of one of our houses when we were a bit older. I believe we were scaling an imaginary fortress wall, though we mainly fought over whose turn it was to be left defender. Our mothers objected, when they discovered us, which we thought poor-spirited of them.”

  “Hah. I can picture Idrene’s harassed look.” Having just witnessed her grandmotherly version this morning.

  Adelis’s brief humor faded as he wheeled back to his… guests? “Gentlemen, may I introduce Learned Penric kin Jurald, court sorcerer to the duke of Orbas and husband to my twin sister Nikys. And as deep in my councils as any man alive.”

  Pen blinked at this unexpected endorsement. The two—Pen was almost sure they were Cedonians—stared back in wary fascination, though whether at his best vestments or his person Pen was not sure. His Temple calling was signified by his sleeveless white tunic, its high collar held up at his neck by the formal silver torc, sash at his waist in the pale colors and silver cord of the fifth god. Slim tan trousers topped Orban-style summer sandals. The whole covering a lean fellow with white-blond hair wound up in a knot at his nape, eyes the blue of the harbor waters, milk-pale skin: a type common in Pen’s home mountains, but rare around here. Apart from the lacing of pink sunburn, contribution of the local climate.

  “And… I think I will continue the introductions not in the street,” Adelis went on, glancing up to where the duke’s secretary, Master Stobrek, had appeared at the top of the shallow steps.

  Oohh boy, Des murmured in Pen’s mind. And if that isn’t warning of someone venturing out onto deep waters. Imperial couriers, d’you think?


  Or not-imperial couriers, which might be worse. Considering the recent spates of lurid news from Orbas’s uncomfortable neighboring realm. We’ll find out shortly, I expect. But this couldn’t be anything good. Or safe.

  As they mounted the entry, Adelis returned the stern salutes of the door-flanking palace guards, a tap of the fist over the heart that signified the virtues of loyalty and courage sacred to the Son of Autumn. The visitors barely caught themselves from repeating the military gesture; Des muffled dry demonic amusement. Affably, Pen cast each guardsman a five-fold blessing in passing, which always seemed to reassure them a trifle.

  Master Stobrek, who neither asked for nor was offered names either, nodded to Adelis and conducted them at once through the central atrium, all mosaics and marble and frescoes, and up the graceful branched staircase. Passing onto the gallery of a courtyard, he rapped on the carved door of the duke’s writing cabinet. “Come,” the familiar voice sounded through the wood.

  Duke Jurgo, clad informally for the weather in a long unbelted tunic and sandals, looked up from the mess of papers before him as they trooped within. The younger visitor, at a gesture from his fellow, took up a guard’s stance outside the door as it swung shut. This was to be a very private conclave, it seemed. Well, five was a theologically auspicious number, but Pen’s curiosity began to edge into alarm.

  Stobrek arranged three chairs in front of the writing table, and a stool for himself discreetly off to the side. Adelis stepped forward and saluted his liege lord.

  “So what’s this about, Adelis? Your note was, hm, short.” The crow’s feet at the corners of the duke’s eyes deepened, possibly in consideration of matters that one might not wish to commit to writing. Jurgo owned a pleasantly ugly face, his sturdy body thickening a trifle as he approached his fiftieth year. Two decades of holding precarious independence from the reduced Cedonian empire, which still remembered Orbas as one of its late provinces, had etched shrewdness and caution into his leathery features.

  Pen shoved his chair back and a little around as he settled, that he might watch both his companions’ profiles. The visitor appeared profoundly ill-at-ease. Adelis just looked grim.

  “My lord duke. May I make known to you General Gria, of the Eighth Legion of the Imperial Western Army, who has brought me a message out of the present confusion in Cedonia. Gria, please tell Jurgo all you told me last night.”

  “My message was meant for your ear alone, General Arisaydia.”

  “And if my answer was a flat no, it might have stayed so. It still could. Your choice.”

  Gria grimaced.

  Adelis added bluntly, “I have never betrayed an oath or deserted a post in my life. It was Cedonia that betrayed me.”

  He touched the burn scars that marred the upper half of his face, red and white sprays framing his strange garnet eyes like owl feathers, relic of the attempt to blind him with boiling vinegar following the false treason charges. Blinding was an old Cedonian imperial shift, to get men out of the way who were too powerful or popular to execute. Pen had formed a surpassing intimacy with that injury, as without his magics Adelis would have remained sightless in truth; as Nikys had once put it, carrying his imprisonment with him.

  Adelis went on, “I am not going to begin with the man who took in me and mine when we had nothing.” A terse nod to the duke, who raised his eyebrows at this avowal.

  Penric had been head-down in his own scholarly work in the past months, but visits by Adelis to his sister’s household had come with unsettling news from their home country that both Nikys and her mother Idrene had followed avidly. Seventeen years of stability in the capital city of great Thasalon had ended, some eight months back, upon the death of the emperor, apparently of natural causes—a fall from a horse followed by lung fever. Rumors always swirled around such high takings-off, but Adelis, at least, had judged the tale true. Minister Methani and his cabal, the men who had betrayed Adelis to this Orban exile, would certainly not have welcomed or sped such an end to their grip on power.

  Indeed, Des agreed, growing as intent as Pen. Thasalon politics were a snake-pit that Pen had considered his brother-in-law very well out of. Maybe not far enough…?

  The late emperor’s reign had been a success in the field, beginning with his victory in the short civil war that had put him on his throne. But it had been a failure in the marriage bed, only two of the imperial offspring surviving: an elder daughter by the first wife, and a now nine-year-old boy by the third. The adult daughter, Princess Laris, had been passed over, and the boy Mikal declared emperor under a regency council consisting of his father’s half-brother, his mother, the husband of the princess, and, no surprise, Minister Methani and his nephew Lord Bordane.

  In Cedonia’s many centuries of history, such succession-pacts had sometimes worked, sometimes failed. The current ill-assorted version was creaking badly. The uncle-regent, Prince Ragat Lafoni, had died abruptly of no visible cause, no poisons being found by the very thorough autopsy conducted by the Mother’s Order in Thasalon under the direct supervision of its archdivine and the imperial magistrate. The public verdict was stroke. Adelis had wished aloud that Penric, skilled though not practicing as a physician-sorcerer, could have been there, or at the very least, read the reports for him, but those were being closely held in Thasalon. Also no surprise.

  The ill-fated Ragat’s own son Lord Ello, himself a highly plausible candidate for the throne as he was both adult and army, had met his end two months ago in an appalling military disaster that had left Adelis cursing with vicarious rage. That it was at the hands of a Rusylli tribal coalition which Adelis himself had pushed north from the Uteny River in a series of campaigns for Jurgo had to be a vicious bur under Adelis’s saddle. But no question the regency council was shrinking in Methani’s favor.

  So much for the public version of events. It seemed they were about to get a look behind the curtain. Pen couldn’t quite tell if Adelis was eager or averse.

  I don’t think Adelis knows either, murmured Des.

  Gria sighed and steeled himself, straightening on his seat like a man about to make a military report. He might have felt more comfortable standing at parade rest, Pen suspected. “How much have you heard, my lord duke, about the disaster to the Sixth Legion at the Vytymi Valley?”

  Jurgo waved a hand. “Rumor has run ahead of you, but few details. The expedition under the command of Lord Ello Lafoni was surrounded, cut off, and cut up by the Rusylli, and Ello, not well-advised, surrendered on terms. In violation of the agreement, Ello and most of his officers were executed. You can’t say his surviving men weren’t granted their lives, but they were stripped of arms, docked of their ears—six thousand men mutilated!—then and sent walking naked and barefoot back to the border. Many died on the march.”

  Adelis said, through gritted teeth, “Ello’s was a punitive expedition, well into its depredations. Of course the Rusylli wouldn’t honor the terms. And the tribes are not set up to keep large numbers of prisoners. Those they can’t sell promptly as slaves, they kill. One does not surrender to the Rusylli!”

  Gria rubbed his forehead. “The Western Army”—Adelis’s old comrades—“is in an uproar about it all. The city of Thasalon as well.” He looked up at Adelis and Jurgo. “The opportunity to unseat Methani and the regency council he controls is now. Princess Laris and her husband Lord Nao are willing to stand against him, but Nao, however fine a minister—not that diligence and honesty are much rewarded in Thasalon—does not command the loyalty of the military faction. They cannot move unless they have secured a man to join with them who could. They think that man is Arisaydia.”

  Unspoken: that Arisaydia could very well command that loyalty on his own behalf, if he chose.

  Aye, said Des. Adelis is like a threatening piece at the edge of a gameboard, that must either be conscripted or removed. And Laris and Nao can’t be the only ones to realize that.

  Hence the attempt five years ago at blinding him. Methani had been beforehand, but not
wrong, from a certain point of view.

  “Do they think to make Laris a ruling empress?” asked Jurgo. “Or merely take control of her brother’s regency?”

  Gria’s lips twisted unhappily. “That would depend upon how events play out. The empress-mother appears to be in Methani’s pocket.”

  “Hard to tell,” Des observed through Penric’s mouth, “if she volunteered to lodge there, or just found it the only available refuge.”

  Adelis glanced aside, familiar enough with Penric and his passenger to be unsure who’d just spoken. The others present no doubt assumed it to be Penric. That Adelis had not introduced her separately as Madame Desdemona, as he sometimes did to her gratification, suggested he’d wanted her to stay discreet, so Pen let the comment stand unglossed.

  Gria went on: “So this is Princess Laris’s offer to General Arisaydia. Return with me to Cedonia, swear loyalty to her, and command of the Western Army would be restored to him.”

  “It would be tantamount to a declaration of civil war in Thasalon,” said Adelis.

  “It is hoped, if enough of the army were to swing to Laris, that violence might be limited to no more than a palace coup.”

  “With a nine-year-old boy among my targets?” Adelis frowned in distaste. “I could stay right here in Orbas, and have nothing to do with any of it. Which is certainly what I swore when I arrived five years ago.”

  “Laris and Nao do not have that choice,” Gria said heavily. “The mysterious death of Ello’s father Prince Ragat weighs hard upon them. The message you’re next could scarcely be more clear.”