Penric's Demon Read online

  This isn’t this morning anymore, Pen realized at last. This is tomorrow . . . today . . . oh gods. Had he slept the sun around . . . ?

  Lurenz, not a man to shirk a painful duty, captured Lady Jurald’s fluttering hands and straightened up into his most grave and fatherly pose. “I am so sorry, Lady Jurald.” His nod took in Rolsch as well. “It is just as we feared. Your son has been possessed by, or it seems rather, of, a demon of the white god. It revealed itself to me plain a moment ago.”

  Rolsch flinched; Pen’s mother gasped, “Lady of Summer help us! Can nothing be done?”

  Pen, now sitting up against the headboard, stared down at his body in alarm. A demon of the Bastard, inside him? Where inside him . . . ?

  Lurenz moistened his lips. “It is not as bad as it could be. The demon does not appear to be ascendant—it has not yet seized control of his body for itself. I am told that such a wrenching transference disrupts or weakens it for some time, before it becomes established in or, or accustomed to, its new abode. If Lord Penric is firm of will, and obeys, ah, all his holy instructions, there may yet be a way to save him.”

  “They go into people,” Rolsch tried; “There ought to be a way for them to go out.” He undercut this tentative optimism by adding, “Besides the person dying, of course.”

  Another nod from Lurenz, altogether too casual in Pen’s opinion. “As the unfortunate Learned Ruchia did. Which is how Lord Penric came to be in this predicament.”

  “Oh, Pen, why ever did you . . . ?” his mother flung at him.

  “I . . . I didn’t . . .” Pen’s hands waved. “I thought the old lady was sick!” Which had been, well, not wrong. “I was just trying to help!” He shut his mouth abruptly, but no strange force rose in his throat to add a sharp comment.

  “Oh, Pen,” moaned his mother; Rolsch rolled his eyes in general exasperation.

  Lurenz cut short what promised to be a lengthy round of recriminations. “Be that as it may, the harm is done, and there is no way to undo it here in Greenwell Town. I have discussed this possibility with Learned Ruchia’s escort. The late divine’s fleshly husk must necessarily be buried here, but her escort is obliged to carry her possessions on to her destination, that her Order may dispose of them howsoever she willed. That mandate must include, I have suggested”—forcefully, his tone implied—“her greatest treasure, her demon.”

  What did Lurenz mean by a way to save him? Just about to vent objections to being talked over when he was right here, Pen registered the drift of this, and eased back, alert. Transporting the demon must perforce mean transporting Pen to . . . somewhere beyond Greenwell Town, anyway. Freitten, even?

  “The Temple guards have agreed to escort Lord Penric to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge, where, I trust, they will have the scholars to . . . to decide what properly to do.”

  “Oh,” said Lady Jurald, in a dubious tone.

  Rolsch frowned. “Who shall pay for this journey? This seems a Temple matter . . .”

  Lurenz took the hint, if not cheerily. “The Temple will undertake to gift him with the rest of Divine Ruchia’s travel allowance, and the use of its remounts and hostels along the road. After he reaches Martensbridge . . . that must be for her Order to decide.”

  “Hm,” said Rolsch. It had been Rolsch, last year, who had forbade Pen’s scheme to go to the university lately founded in Freitten, on the grounds that the family could not afford it, and then stifled Pen’s protests by dragging him in mind-numbing detail through all his baronial accounts to prove it. It had been quite disheartening to find his brother not selfish, but truthful. While not Freitten, Martensbridge was even farther from Greenwell.

  Tentatively, Pen cleared his throat. It still seemed his own . . . “What about the betrothal?”

  A grim silence greeted this.

  Rolsch finally said, heavily, “Well, it didn’t happen yesterday.”

  His mother put in, “But dear Preita’s kin were kind enough to feed us anyway, as we waited here to see if . . . for you to wake up. So at least the food hasn’t gone to waste.”

  “So much cheese . . .” muttered Rolsch.

  Pen was beginning to get the picture of all that must have happened while he’d been lying here like a warmish sort of corpse in this bed, and it wasn’t merry. His body brought back in a wagon alongside that of a dead woman, Mother and Rolsch somehow found—Gans, of course—the celebration broken up just as it began, his anxious kin, quite obviously, up all night . . . “How is Preita . . . taking it?”

  “She grew quite horrified, when we saw your body,” said Rolsch.

  “Her mother has her in charge now,” said Lady Jurald.

  “Someone should send to her, and tell her I’m all right,” said Pen, dismayed at this.

  The silence following this lay a little too long.

  Lady Jurald sighed. She was not a woman to shirk a painful duty either, or she could not have stayed married to their father all those years. “I had better go to her myself. There is a great deal to explain. And discuss.”

  Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess. Cravenly, he let his mother go off without any messages from himself, necessarily under Rolsch’s escort though she plainly didn’t want to leave Pen alone.

  “Is there anything else you need right now, Lord Penric?” Learned Lurenz inquired, also preparing to take his leave.

  “I’m quite hungry,” Pen realized. And no wonder, if he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast. “May I go down to the refectory?”

  “I’ll have a dedicat bring you a meal on a tray,” the divine promised him.

  “But . . . I’m really not hurt.” Pen rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs, beginning to feel more at home in his body again, as though recovering from a bout of fever. “I can get dressed and go down. No need to trouble anyone.”

  “No, please stay in this room, Lord Penric,” said Lurenz more firmly. “At least for now.”

  He let himself out, the door closing as he paused to speak with the Temple guardsman still standing before it. Despite being safe in the Mother’s hospice, the man bore all his weapons that he had carried on the road. What in the world did he think he needed to guard against in here . . . ?

  Oh.

  The hunger pangs in Pen’s belly seemed to congeal, and he huddled down in his sheets.

  * * *

  After Pen ate, and a dedicat came to take his tray away, Pen dared to poke his head out into the hallway. The big Temple guard he had seen earlier was gone, replaced by an even bigger fellow in the uniform of the Greenwell Town watch. He looked less like a candidate for the mercenary recruiters than a veteran back from the wars, hard and grim.

  “Where did the fellow go who came with . . .” Pen wasn’t sure what to call her, dead sorceress seeming disrespectful though definitive. “With the late Learned Ruchia?”

  “The dead sorceress?” said the watchman. “They both went off to witness her funeral, so they pulled me in to stand their post.”

  “Should—should I not attend?”

  “I was told you are to stay in this room. Lord Penric. Please?” He looked down at Pen and offered an apprehensive smile that took Pen utterly aback.

  Helplessly, Pen returned the smile, in the same false measure. “Of course,” he murmured, and retreated.

  There being no more comfortable seat in the little chamber than the stool, Pen went back to bed, to sit up hugging his knees and trying to remember everything he’d ever learned about sorcerers and their demons. It seemed meager.

  He was fairly sure real ones weren’t much like the ones in children’s tales. They did not call castles to sprout out of the ground like mushrooms for passing lost heroes, or enchant princesses to hundred-year sleeps, or, or . . . Pen was not sure about poison princes, but it seemed to him unlikely to call upon a sorcerer for something an apothecary could do better. Pen’s life so far had been sa
dly free of heroes, princesses, or princes, in any case.

  He was not, upon reflection, at all sure what the real ones did for a living, either when subjected to Temple disciplines, or gone renegade. The common saying was that a man became a sorcerer upon acquiring a demon much as a man became a rider upon acquiring a horse, with the implication that the inept horseman was riding for a fall. But what made a good horseman?

  Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals, fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s Hell, a place of chaotic dissolution. Pen had a dim mental picture of something like a ball of white wool shot with a prickle of sparks. All that demons possessed of speech or knowledge or personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether copied or stolen, Pen was unclear. It had seemed a distinction without a difference if they only left with their prizes when their masters died, except . . . maybe not, if the ripped-up souls could not then go on to their god. He was growing uncomfortably sorry he had dozed or doodled through so many of those droning theology lectures in school.

  Tales not from the nursery told of demons becoming ascendant within their masters, taking the body for some wild ride while the mind of the man was trapped as a helpless witness within. The demons were careless of injury, disease, or death, since they could jump from their worn-out mount to another like a courier riding relay. And the corrosion of such unchanneled chaos ate away at the sorcerer’s soul.

  Except it seemed Learned Ruchia’s soul was expected to go to her god as usual, so maybe that varied as well? Or was it something about the mysterious Temple disciplines that made the difference? Pen had not the first idea what they might be. Was anyone going to think to tell him?

  Did the hospice library have any books on the subject, and would they let Pen read them if he asked? But the Mother’s house seemed more likely to house tomes on anatomy and medicines than on the doings of her second Son and his demonic pets.

  As night fell, his fretting was relieved by the return of Gans, bearing a load of Pen’s clothes and gear from home and a pair of saddlebags to pack them in. The load exceeded the capacity of the bags, yet certain necessities seemed to be missing.

  “Did my brother not send me a sword?” The armory at Jurald Court could surely spare one.

  The graying groom cleared his throat. “He gave it to me. Instead, I guess. I’m charged to go along with you on the road to Martensbridge, look after you and all.” Gans did not look best pleased with this proffered adventure. “We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”

  “Oh!” said Pen, startled. “So soon?”

  “Soonest begun, soonest done,” Gans intoned. His goal, clearly, was the done. Gans had always been a man of settled routines.

  Pen set about extracting a view of yesterday’s events as Gans had witnessed them, but his laconic account did not add much to what Pen had already imagined, except for a strong sense leaking through that Gans considered it unjust of Pen to encounter such a disaster on Gans’s watch. But his new task, it seemed, was not a punishment; the Temple guards had requested his witness in Martensbridge of the events he had seen.

  “I don’t know why,” he grumbled. “Seems to me a scribe could write it down on half a page, and save me the saddle sores.”

  Gans took himself off to sleep elsewhere in the old mansion gifted to the Mother’s Order and converted to its present charitable purpose—Pen guessed his own quarantined chamber had once been some servant’s quarters. He turned to the problem of packing his bags. Someone back at Jurald Court had apparently just grabbed all the clothing he owned. The brown suit went on the impractical pile to be returned there in the morning, along with the most threadbare of his unloved hand-me-downs. How long was he to be gone? Where was he going, exactly? What would he need there?

  He wondered if packing for the university would have been anything like this. ‘Sorcerer’ had certainly not been on Pen’s former list of scholarly ambitions, but then, neither had ‘theologian’, ‘divine’, ‘physician’, ‘teacher’, ‘lawyer’, or any other high trade taught there—yet another reason for Rolsch’s dubiousness about it all. The Bastard’s Order must have a separate seminary of some sort . . . ?

  Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.

  * * *

  Penric carried his saddlebags down to the entry hall in the morning gloom to find a send-off he hadn’t expected in the form of Preita herself, in all her pretty roundness, escorted by a frowning brother and sister.

  “Preita!” He went to her, only to have her flinch back, if with a tremulous smile.

  “Hullo, Pen.” They stared uncertainly at each other. “I hear you’re going away.”

  “Only to Martensbridge. Not to the ends of the world.” He swallowed, and got out, “Are we still to be betrothed?”

  Regretfully, she shook her head. “Do you even know when you will return?”

  “Er . . . no.” Two days ago, he’d known everything about his future. Today, he knew nothing. He was not sure this change was an improvement.

  “So—so you can see how difficult that would be. For me.”

  “Uh, yes, to be sure.”

  Her hands started to reach out, but then retreated behind her back and consoled each other there. “I am so sorry. But surely you see any girl must be quite afraid to marry a man who could set her on fire with a word!”

  He’d dreamed of setting her alight with kisses. “Any man could set a girl on fire with a torch, but he’d have to be deranged!”

  This won only an uneasy shrug. “I brought you something. For the road, you know.”

  She motioned to her brother, who handed over a large sack that proved, when Pen opened it, to contain a huge wheel of cheese. “Thank you,” Pen managed. He glanced at his bulging saddlebags, and ruthlessly turned to hand it on to the impatiently waiting Gans. “Here. Find a place to pack this. Somehow.”

  Gans shot him a beleaguered look, but carried it out.

  Preita gave him a jerky nod, but ventured no closer; apparently, he was not to get even one soft farewell hug to see him off. “Good luck, Pen. I will pray that all goes well with you.”

  “And I, you.”

  The two Temple guardsmen stood outside, holding the saddled horses. The late sorceress’s gear was packed aboard a sturdy cob, where Gans was securing the sack of cheese. Another mount awaited Pen.

  He made for it, but paused at a call; it seemed he had one more painful farewell to endure. His mother and Rolsch hurried up as Preita and her siblings hurried away, exchanging awkward nods in passing. His kin looked less harried and exhausted than yesterday, but still unhappy.

  “Pen,” said Rolsch, gravely. “The five gods protect you on your road.” He thrust out a small bag of coin, which Pen, surprised, took.

  “Wear it around your neck,” his mother told him anxiously. “I hear those cutpurses in the cities can have away with a purse off a man’s belt and he never feels a tug.”

  The cord had been lengthened for such prudence; dutifully, Pen obeyed, sneaking a peek within before tucking the soft leather into his shirt. More copper than silver, and no gold, but it made him not quite entirely a beggar at the Temple’s table.

  Pen steeled himself to endure the embarrassment of a tearful maternal embrace, but, though Lady Jurald started forward, she stopped much like Preita. She raised her hand in a farewell wave, instead, as though he were turning out of sight and not standing a pace away.

  “Be more careful, Pen!” she begged, her voice breaking. She turned back to Rolsch.

  “Yes, Mama,” Pen sighed.

  He went to his horse. Gans offered him no leg up, not that Pen had any problem lifting his wiry body into a saddle. As he did so, he had the quelling realization that not one person had touched him since whoever had carried him up and dumped him into that bed day before yesterda
y.

  The senior guardsman motioned them forward, and the party rode off up the cobbled main street beneath the whitewash and half-timbering of the houses lining it. No flowers yet brightened their window boxes, in the chill of early spring. Pen turned in his saddle to wave one last time, but his mother and Rolsch were entering the hostel, and did not see.

  Pen cleared his throat, and asked the senior guardsman, whose name was Trinker, “Did the Learned Ruchia’s funeral go all right, yesterday afternoon? They didn’t let me attend.”

  “Oh, aye. Taken up by her god, all right, signed by that white dove and all.”

  “I see.” Pen hesitated. “Can we please stop where she is buried? Just for a moment.”

  Trinker grunted but could not gainsay this pious request, so nodded.

  The graveyard where the Temple-sworn were buried lay beyond the walls, on the road out of town; they turned aside, and Trinker escorted Pen to the new mound, as yet unmarked, while Gans and Wilrom waited atop their horses.

  Nothing much to see, now, in the dawn damp; nothing much to feel, though Pen extended all his exacerbated senses. He bowed his head and offered a silent prayer, the wording haltingly remembered from services for his father, and that other brother who had died when Pen was little, and some aged servants. The grave returned no answer, but something inside him seemed to ease, as if pacified.

  He mounted again, and Trinker urged them into a trot as they crossed the covered wooden bridge over the river and the town fell behind.

  The bright sunshine of the past two days, like a misplaced breath of summer, was gone, replaced by a more usual misty damp, which would likely turn to a chill drizzle before the morning was out. The high mountains to the north hid their white heads in the clouds, which lay like a gray lid over the wide uplands of Pen’s country. The road followed the river downstream, into what passed in these parts for flatter lands—or at least the valleys widened and the hills shrank. Pen wondered how soon they would catch a glimpse of the Raven Range, that other long stone hedge on the opposite side of the plateau , dividing the Cantons from the great realm of the Weald to the south.