Penric’s Mission Read online

  Yet here I am, practicing medicine again all unwilled. Is the Bastard laughing?

  This left the question of who in Cedonia had forged the initial letter, as the duke was fully convinced it had originated here. Clear entrapment, it seemed. Vicious both in its intent and its results. Velka might have brought it; he’d certainly escorted the very real reply back into the right wrong Cedonian hands, which had to have been outstretched waiting for it.

  Penric was really starting to want some time alone in a quiet room with Velka. He was theologically forbidden to kill with his magic, but there were other possibilities. So very, very many. And oh gods he surely now understood why physician-sorcerers were the most tightly controlled of all the discreet cadre of Temple mages.

  Desdemona couldn’t lick her lips, but she could lick his. It brought him out of his furious fugue with a start. Her little frisson of anticipatory excitement faded, and she sighed.

  Don’t tempt me, and he had no idea which of them said it.

  VIII

  As she and the physician walked Adelis around the garden between them, just two days after he’d first been persuaded up, Nikys was pleased to see how much steadier he was on his feet. It was plain that the overwhelming pain of his scalding, so precisely and cruelly placed, that had driven him close to madness was vastly reduced. He was healing with amazing speed.

  She did not know what mysterious Wealdean techniques the half-foreign physician was bringing to his task, but her respect for his skills had risen and risen. Even as he went on being rather odd. He talked to himself, for one thing, when he didn’t think he was overheard, in what she guessed was his father’s tongue, or sometimes in snatches of what she recognized as Darthacan. And then argued back. He always smiled at her, yet his bright eyes were restless and strained, as if masking a brain busy elsewhere.

  As they turned and paced along the wall, Adelis unwound his arm from Master Penric’s, but not from hers; his hand drifted up to touch his cheek just below the black mask. The sly design made him look strong, and dangerous, and not at all invalidish. It made him look quite like himself, in fact, at least when in one of his more sardonic moods. But his voice was uncharacteristically tentative as he asked, “Does my face look like a goat’s bottom?”

  Her heart clenched, but she returned lightly, “I always thought your face looked like a goat’s bottom, dear brother. It appears no different to me.”

  Penric’s brows lifted in concern as he turned to her across Adelis. But Adelis just smirked, looking mordant below the mask, and gave her arm a squeeze, returning in a matching tone, “Dear sister. Always my compass.” His voice fell to quiet seriousness. “In the darkest places. It seems.”

  She swallowed and squeezed back.

  Penric offered, “Your blisters looked much better this morning. Almost gone.”

  “Are you a connoisseur of blisters, Master Penric?” asked Adelis.

  “It goes with my trade, I suppose. Yours were superb.”

  “That’s Adelis for you,” said Nikys. “Always has to have the best.”

  A huff of laugh. “Your latest ointment has tamed the itching, thankfully.”

  “Good. I don’t want you scratching.”

  They turned once more and negotiated the steps up to the pergola, and Nikys said, “Go around again? Or rest?”

  “Go around again,” said Adelis, definitely. Nikys smiled.

  But before they could continue, a brisk knocking at the front door echoed through the atriums, and they all paused, listening intently. The gardener-porter answered and admitted the supplicant. Supplicants; two voices quizzed him. If it was a friendly visit, it was the first since they’d been plunged into this political quarantine. If it was not…

  A sharp, indrawn breath from Master Penric drew her attention. “I know that voice. One of them. I need—he mustn’t see me!” The voices approached, the aged gardener shuffling slowly in escort, the others stepping impatiently short to match. Penric looked around frantically; he was quite cut off from the house by the visitors’ entry route. “No time.”

  To Nikys’s astonishment, he scrambled up the corner post of the pergola like a cat climbing a tree to escape a dog. He swung back down to add, “He’s no friend to you. Be careful.” And then ran lightly along the top, making the grape leaves bounce and quiver. Adelis, lips parted in unvoiced question, turned his head to track the thumps and rustles. Reaching the second-floor balcony overlooking the back garden, Penric vaulted over the railing and melted to the floor. Nikys could spot one blue eye peeking back through the uprights.

  Uncertain, Nikys guided Adelis to the outdoor table. He seated himself stiffly. The porter and his charges arrived, a pair of men in civil dress followed by a sharply turned-out provincial guard. If Penric had recognized one voice, Nikys recognized one man: the provincial governor’s senior secretary, Master Prygos. Neither friend nor enemy, she would have thought, just a punctilious functionary, his ambitions restricted to his own domain. The gray-haired, dyspeptic bureaucrat half-bowed to each of them, more habitually polite than truly respectful, as Adelis could not see it. Prygos cursorily introduced his trailing clerk as Tepelen. This was a younger man, shrewd-faced, evidently not in his trade long enough for his body to soften and grow pale like his superior’s.

  “I am charged today to deliver your copy of your bill of attainder,” he told Adelis, formally. He nodded to Tepelen, who rummaged in his documents case and withdrew a thick sheaf, evidently a list of all the property Adelis no longer owned. Tepelen handed it to Prygos, who turned to hand it to Adelis, then paused and said, “Er.”

  Penric, by whatever impulse, had lined the eyeholes of the mask with a double layer of black silk, giving it an unsettling effect of gleaming bird eyes. The light played over the silk as Adelis nodded toward her. “Pray give it to Madame Khatai,” he murmured. “She is my scribe these days.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  Nikys took it, glanced through the cramped governmental calligraphy and legal cant, and set it down under her elbows.

  Adelis inquired shortly of Prygos, “Do I have anything left to live on, or should I find a begging bowl for the marketplace?”

  Prygos cleared his throat. “Madame Khatai’s pension was left alone, as was the property of her mother that your mother left to her. Your dependents will not be houseless.”

  “Small mercies,” said Adelis.

  “They suffice,” murmured Nikys. It would be a constrained little life, the pair of them crammed back into her aging mother’s house in its small inland town. Betrayed. Defeated. But not dead. Therefore, not hopeless. Call it, in Adelis’s lexicon, a retreat to regroup.

  Prygos’s hand rose, then fell; he looked to his clerk, who cast him a steely frown. He cleared his throat again, and said, “My apologies, but I am also charged to inspect and report on General Arisaydia’s injuries and recovery.” Adelis’s military title was a slip, Nikys thought, unusual for so precise a man. “Uh, Madame Khatai, might I trouble you to help remove his mask?”

  Adelis’s jaw set; his hands clenched on the tabletop. She let her own hand reach out to cover his fist in silent inquiry. Barely perceptibly, he shook his head. “If humiliation is to be my bread,” he murmured to her, “best I grow accustomed to the taste.”

  She sighed, sickened, and rose to step behind him and unlace the strings holding his mask and dressings in place. She reached around him to lift it as gently as she had seen Master Penric do; she felt a slight tug as the ointment released, but his skin seemed much less fragile today. He didn’t even flinch, reverting to that stubborn I-am-a-boulder stolidity.

  Then he gasped.

  She flitted instantly around to his side. “Oh, gods, did I hurt you?”

  A flash of startled red gleamed between his shrunken lids as he turned his head toward her, then his eyes squeezed closed again. His hands tightened on the table’s edge, knuckles paling. His teeth set and his body trembled. “Maybe a little,” he managed.

  She sank back down i
n her seat, setting the mask on the table. Prygos gulped and looked away. Tepelen, by contrast, sat up with a muffled oath. He leaned forward, eyes narrowing as he stared into the half-wreck of Adelis’s face.

  “Pray excuse us for just a moment.” He rose, and his hand fell to Prygos’s shoulder, gripping it, pressing him to rise and follow. Prygos looked up, surprised, but obeyed, and wasn’t that odd? Tepelen motioned at the impassive guard, who had propped himself against the pergola post. “Stay. Keep them here.” The two men trailed away through the house and out the front. Nikys pricked her ears, but neither spoke till the door closed between, cutting off sound.

  “Nikys,” said Adelis, his voice taut, “I’m getting a little tired. Perhaps you could escort me back up to my bedchamber.”

  “Of course.”

  She started to rise again, but the guard put in sternly, “Please stay seated, General.”

  Adelis’s hands wavered out, found her, patted their way up to her head. He turned her face close to his. His eyes slitted open again. The whites were bloodshot nearly solid red, his irises were a strange garnet color, but the tight black circles of his pupils looked back at her. “Dear Nikys,” he said. “In that case, perhaps you could fetch refreshments for our guests, and for me. Get my attendant to help you.” The lids pinched closed once more, concealing… a terrible wonder. And an exactly equal terrible danger.

  Her head felt so bloodless with shock that she feared she might pass out, but she said, “Certainly,” and scrambled to her feet. The guard frowned, but evidently decided that her mouse-self, mere nursemaid to the important man, was too frail a threat to concern him.

  She walked firmly into the house, not looking back. She did not turn aside toward the kitchen, though she mentally reviewed the residue of wine in the pantry, fit only for servants and therefore too good for these visitors, and her stock of ready poisons, sadly lacking. She walked, did not run, don’t run, up the stairs to the gallery. Master Penric was no longer lying prone on the back balcony, but she heard faint noises coming from Adelis’s chamber.

  She entered and closed the door behind her to find him swiftly packing the last of his medical kit. He’d pulled on trousers under his tunic. He looked up and cast her the most contrived smile yet.

  Of the dozen alarms jostling her mouth, one escaped first: “He can see!”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?

  “Since yesterday. Or if you mean when did I know I could recover his eyesight, since nearly the beginning, or I’d have been gone long ago.”

  She gaped at him. “Are you leaving now?”

  “No… I don’t know. I’m not finished.” He grimaced and snapped his case closed. “More to the point, Velka saw. Worst possible time for the man to show up, I swear.”

  “Who?”

  “Tepelen. The clerk who isn’t. I don’t know which is his real name. Maybe neither. He’s a high-level agent from the cabal in the capital who entrapped your brother. I don’t know how high, but he isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t waste time.” He looked around. “And neither should we. Is there any money in this room? Anything Adelis or you would want to aid your flight from the city?”

  She would cry What flight? but his intent, and their need, were too plain to argue. “We haven’t enough coin left to pay the laundress tomorrow. I was hoping she would take something in trade.”

  “Can you ride?”

  “Yes. But I haven’t a horse.”

  “Hnh.” He stood up and tapped his lips with his thumb. “I would so prefer to be discreet about this. May not be possible.” They both froze as the sound of the front door slamming, and the tread of too many heavy feet, penetrated faintly from the atrium. “Bastard’s hell, no good. Go back and stay by your brother. I won’t be far away. Don’t panic.”

  If her glare could have blasted him where he stood, he would be floating ash. She whirled and ran for the stairs.

  She made it back to the table barely before the new invasion. Prygos and his not-clerk were followed by four guardsmen, the two who’d been posted at her doors and two more. The one who’d been left on watch pushed off from his pergola support and looked his inquiry not at the senior secretary, but at Tepelen. Or Velka. Or whoever the cursed man was.

  Tepelen gestured at Adelis. “Seize and bind him.”

  Adelis’s chair banged over backward as he surged up out of it. No question of tame surrender this time. Nikys realized too late that she should have detoured by the kitchen to grab a carving knife, or two, but she snatched up her own chair and used it to charge at least one of the men. She caught him so by surprise she actually managed to knock him backwards, but he grabbed the legs and yanked and nearly took her down with him. When she tried to stomp him with her feet, he clutched her ankle and toppled her. She landed painfully, the world spinning, and then he seized her hair.

  Adelis was more adept, and more professionally vicious, but the four other guardsmen and Tepelen combined against him. And while it was plain he could see something now, it was equally plain his sight must still be blurred and indistinct, and when one of the men managed a hard blow against his tender upper face, he gasped and staggered, and then they were all upon him.

  She and Adelis both struggled and fought to the last, but the last came swiftly when swords were drawn. They were roped tightly to two opposite pergola posts, panting and bruised, staring at each other in dismay. And where was Master Penric and his promises in all this? Not that the skinny physician could have been much more help in a fight than she had been, but he might have dropped the odds against Adelis from five down to four.

  Tepelen, out of breath, huffed upright and straightened his clothes. Prygos, who had stood back from the brawl in understandable terror, came up to his side, and both approached the bound Adelis. Adelis’s head jerked back as Prygos lifted his hand to touch his burns.

  “As you said,” Prygos remarked, apparently to Tepelen. “The man who administered the vinegar must not have had his heart in the task. Someone is going to have to question him, later.”

  “He seemed diligent to me,” Adelis gritted between his teeth. His mouth was bleeding, but then, so was Nikys’s. She licked the metallic tang from her swelling lips. “But by all means, feel free to question him. To the last extremity.”

  “Enough of this,” said Tepelen. “Let us amend the lapse and go. No merit in dragging it out. The fine judicial show was all over a week ago.” He gestured to a guard. “You—no, you two—hold his head still.” Two guardsmen came up to either side of Adelis and grasped his head. The tendons stood out on Adelis’s neck as he strained against their hands, and his breath whistled through his teeth. Prygos stepped well back, gesturing assent though looking rather ill. Tepelen grimaced in distaste, drew his belt knife, and raised it toward Adelis’s eyes.

  Nikys screamed.

  “Oh, now,” came a soft voice from above. “I really can’t allow that.”

  For no reason that Nikys could see, Tepelen hissed and dropped the knife as though it seared him. Clutching his hand, he whirled and stepped back to look up.

  Master Penric stood atop the end of the pergola above Adelis’s head, one hand cocked on his hip, looking peeved.

  Tepelen’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “You! You’re supposed to be drowned!”

  “Really?” Penric’s head tilted as he contemplated this. “Perhaps I was.”

  Horror flashed in the man’s face, to be replaced swiftly with dawning anger. His mouth clopped closed, opening again to shout to the bewildered guardsmen, “Seize him!”

  That sounding a more reasonable order, they all started forward. Penric’s features set in a look of inward concentration, and one pale hand waved, fingers tapping like a man directing a group of musicians. One after another, the five guardsmen dropped to the floor with cries of pain, their legs sprawling out every which way, helpless to stand as a new foal. Tepelen lurched and followed them down.

  Prygos, his eyes bulging, yelped and turned to run.

&nbs
p; Penric bent to gaze after him. “Oh. Forgot about you.” He waved his hand again, and the secretary tripped and fell, seeming unable to get up again, although he attempted to row himself along the floor with his arms, casting terrified looks over his shoulder.

  Penric heaved a sigh and climbed down from the pergola. His face shifted and he vented a weird, silent laugh. “So much for discreet, Penric.” He strode among the guardsmen, now flopping feebly like dying fish, and kicked swords away. As he bent to touch each man’s throat, their cries squeezed to squeaks, although his hand drew back from Tepelen’s, who was the only man not screaming. “Not you, yet.”

  All the clamor died away. Nikys’s ears rang with the silence. Penric stood up straight. He grimaced and gestured again, and the ropes binding Nikys and Adelis to their respective posts loosened and dropped around their feet.

  Nikys thudded to her knees. Adelis staggered forward, grasped Penric by the shirt, and slammed him up against another post. His face was wild, and not just from his squinting, bright red eyes, as he shoved into Penric and cried—wailed, almost—“What are you?”

  “Now, now.” Penric favored him with his sunniest grin. “Mustn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “That’s not an answer!” He shook the physician, who allowed himself to flop bonelessly, unresisting. Nikys suspected him capable of resisting very effectively indeed, if he chose.

  Shaking, she used her post to haul herself to her feet, and rubbed at her bleeding mouth, her numb jaw. “Why didn’t you let us loose sooner?” Or do anything sooner?