Masquerade in Lodi Read online

  “How much was in your purse?” Pen asked.

  It took bashed-man a dizzied moment to follow the question. “Less’n I’d started out with tonight. Never thought I’d be glad to lose at play.”

  “What color was your doublet?”

  The man squinted at him in further confusion. “What? …Wine-red, I sup’ose. Good cloth. Only second time I’d worn it.” He sighed regret.

  In a few minutes, Pen was able to urge the man to his feet, one arm hoisted over Pen’s shoulder, though the movement made him shudder with renewed nausea. They staggered along bumping hips up to the paved harbor street, where Pen prepared to retrace his steps, fretting. He’d traded too much time for these ambiguous clues. Though he supposed he qualified as the Bastard’s luck tonight to the robbery victim. He’d have to suggest a donation to his Order.

  They’d not limped very far when they encountered another pair of night watchmen. Relieved, Pen traded off his foundling to them with instructions to take him to the Gift of the Sea.

  “Tell them Learned Penric sent him, and that he may have something to do with a problem I’m working on for them,” he instructed the watchmen. “They’ll understand. My Order will cover his fees, if it’s required.”

  This last barely reconciled them to their unexpected and out-of-their-way chore; getting the hint, Pen tipped a couple of coins into their palms to assure the concussed fellow’s safe arrival. His slurred voice drifted back still mourning his doublet as Pen turned and strode toward the state shipyard.

  Despite the cooling night air, he was sweating from his magical exertion. Magical friction, Learned Ruchia had dubbed it in her book on fundamentals of sorcery. Which he’d planned to spend the past afternoon continuing to translate into Adriac. He gritted his teeth. “Des, a rat. Or something.”

  A brief survey. Over there. In the black shadow of a drain, a blacker movement. At least it was one of the big, ugly, corpse-chewing harbor rats, and thus not distressingly cute. The creature squeaked and died as Pen divested the healing’s dregs of disorder into it. Passing on, Pen tapped his lips with the back of his thumb in dutiful thanks to his god for the sacrifice of one of His creatures.

  Pen’s stride lengthened. Blessed Chio had been out of his sight for far too long. And while he wouldn’t have minded losing Merin, could the fool have abandoned her somewhere? Not good, not good.

  He came to his next check along the harbor street. Another canal bisected it, a stubby channel leading only to a small basin ringed by goods sheds and warehouses. The buildings shouldered tightly together, each with its own water gate closed and locked for the night. The water glimmered against their black bulks. He was just trying to see a way past when Des said tightly, Found ’em.

  Bastard be thanked! Finally! He whipped his attention around and followed her Sight.

  Three souls: Merin, Chio, and the fractured, pained, demon-ridden being he’d glimpsed so vividly at the hospice. This—no, yesterday afternoon, now. All were together. Distress, anger, and fear were as thick as a fog around them. Where…? They appeared to be within a warehouse on the opposite side of the pool. And something bad was going on. The cornered Madboy attacking the saint? Even Pen could not run across the water to get to it directly. He’d have to go around.

  He could still run. Expecting the road to ring it for access on the dry side, he snarled in frustration to find it led on into the city instead. He spotted a narrow passage between two houses and turned sideways, scuttling through it to the street opposite. This one led back to the harbor and the goods sheds on the farther arc of the basin.

  The warehouse’s double door was locked, barred from the inside. The only other visible access was a door on the second floor leading onto air, a crane affixed above it for lifting goods up and down. Des could undo locks. Bars were heavier and trickier. Winded, Pen bent to examine the mechanism.

  Chio’s screech—Pen wasn’t sure if it was in fear or rage—moved him instantly to a more brutal approach, magic and a mighty kick combined. Lock, bar, and door burst inward, followed by Pen. He looked wildly around.

  Bundles, bales, and lumber blocked his view. An orange glow rose beyond them. Pen caromed through the narrow aisles to an open space for marshaling cargo by the water door. Merin’s walking-lantern, sitting on a nearby crate, illuminated a confusing scene.

  Merin and Madboy were locked together in a furious scuffle. Not a wonder in itself; with the saint present, the demon was fighting for its life. The disheveled Chio orbited the pair just out of range. Her mask was hanging, her hair was half-down, and a fresh red bruise marred her cheek.

  Merin had his belt-knife in hand, gripping a pewter pitcher in the other by way of a makeshift shield. Madboy was armed with a longer poniard, no doubt lifted from the same source as the red doublet, breeches, and boots he now wore.

  “You murderer. You cowardly thief,” snarled Madboy. As accusations went, this seemed to Pen oddly turned-around. Steel clanged off pewter.

  “Chio!” Merin bellowed desperately. “Do it, do it, you idiot bitch! Hurry!”

  She yelled back, “I don’t call the god like a dog! He comes when He chooses! I’ve explained that!”

  To, or through, tranquil, emptied souls, Pen had thought. Which Chio’s wasn’t, in this frenzied moment.

  Exhaustion and despair can work as well as tranquility, Des put in.

  Aye, not those either.

  As the wrestling pair turned, Merin’s eye fell on Pen. “Oh, gods, he’s here!”

  Not the joy at rescue Pen would have expected; more a voice of loathing. Mad demon first, mysteries later.

  At least nothing was on fire, yet. This demon seemed slow to deploy even the most basic magics, but maybe dolphins didn’t think in terms of arson.

  The two fighters sprang apart, gasping for air. Circled for another opening as if revolving on a rope.

  As the demon fought his friend Merin, Ree ought to be impeding it as best he could, beyond just the bodily fatigue of his sea ordeal sapping demonic speed and strength. Jerks and feints and stumbles, other hindrances. Instead, the two seemed of one mind, equally intent upon their attacker. When both surrender to one desire…

  This demon likewise should have been attending to its greater threat from the Temple sorcerer, not following its mount’s impassioned focus on Merin. It was leaving itself wide open, and Pen did not delay.

  Two anatomically expert nerve twists, one to the right hand and the other to the left leg. The poniard dropped from paralyzed fingers, and Madboy’s leg folded under him, dumping him to the floor. He cried out in pain.

  Merin lunged for him. Pen lunged faster, wrapping his arms around the man and trapping his knife hand. “That’s enough, Merin! It’s over. He’s down.”

  Merin wrenched, then went still. After a cautious moment, Pen released him.

  “Oh,” said Chio in a peeved tone. “Now He shows up.” She shoved back her hair and braced her spine, as if lifting a burden.

  Stepping forward, she placed her hand on Madboy’s brow. Pen could track the arrival of the god by the departure of Des, who, with no other escape, curled into a tight, terrified ball inside him. He granted her the retreat, but he wished she wouldn’t take most of her perceptions and all of her powers along, leaving Pen disarmed of his magics.

  Chio took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and gulped. Pen had just enough Sight left to feel the demon being drawn out of Ree and into her, and on to the god, in a hideous, frantic, spiky stream. Madboy’s anguished howl ran down abruptly as his possessor was torn from him, turning into Ree’s very human groan.

  “Ugh,” choked Chio. “That’s a bad one. Just awful.” She swallowed and swallowed again, as if trying not to throw up.

  With all the hours and sweat and shoe leather spent getting Blessed Chio into position for this confrontation, the actual… miracle, Pen conceded, was the work of a moment. Miracle, murder… putting-to-dissolution, he supposed. The saint was an executioner who wasn’t getting this Bastard’s Day
off.

  A flash in Pen’s mind, but not his eyes, a sense of endless vertigo an instant in duration but infinite in depth, and the god departed with His prize, a strange perfume lingering in His wake that might have been a whispered, Well done, my lovely Child.

  Pen wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been to his address. He couldn’t have withstood any more direct exposure than that. But Chio’s plain face shone with a fleeting inner light of heartbreaking beauty. Numinous, Pen supposed, was the precise theological term. The word seemed wholly inadequate.

  Single-minded again, Ree gaped up in awe at Blessed Chio, swaying on her feet. “Oh…!” Breathed like a prayer. As it should be.

  Merin swung his head back and forth as if expecting Madboy to rise and attack again. Penric knelt to the de-demoned youth, hoping he hadn’t hurt him too severely. He knew he hadn’t snapped the throbbing nerves, so they should settle down in a while, an hour or a day, he wasn’t sure. His back half-turned, his demon not recovered from her brush with the holy, he only barely caught Merin’s motion as he raised his knife and dove forward. At Penric.

  “What—!”

  “No!” shrieked Chio, and threw her shoulder forward into Merin as though trying to batter down a door. It unbalanced him enough that his first stab missed, grazing Pen’s sleeve instead of plunging into his back. Pen fell to his hands, scrambling.

  Eyes white-rimmed, teeth bared, Merin turned to this unexpected hazard from his flank. His knife flashed in the lantern light, gripped for a lethal thrust. Weaponless, Chio whipped her remaining hair stick out of her braid and brandished it. Merin looked at it and scoffed.

  Pen regained his feet. Des, blast it—! “What are you doing, you lunatic?” he yelled at Merin. Was the man overcome by some blinding battle frenzy, unable to tell friend from foe? He seemed to have gone wilder than Madboy. “This fight is over!” He started forward to again restrain him.

  “Not nearly,” Merin gasped, and lunged once more at Penric. Pen had only his own speed to evade the blade, and maybe he’d been sitting in libraries too much lately—

  Whereupon both combatants discovered that a thin, six-inch-long steel rod, with the full weight of an angry young woman behind it, had quite enough power to go completely through a man’s upper arm and tack it to his torso. Unsharpened point or not. Merin yowled and dropped his knife, clawing at the glittering glass knob with his other hand. Chio yelped and retreated as Merin staggered and swung his free arm viciously at her.

  At last, Des’s powers flooded back into Penric. Pen reached out with her magics and twisted both of Merin’s sciatic nerves, just to be sure. As excruciating agony seized his legs, he flopped to the floor, screaming.

  You’re late, Pen panted to his demon.

  Sorry…

  “What,” Penric began, but doubted he could be heard over Merin’s cries echoing off the wooden rafters. He grimaced, bent forward, and touched the man’s throat, then had to reach again as he thrashed away. Paralyzing the vocal cords without blocking breath was a delicate task that he wouldn’t have dared from any greater distance. The screaming didn’t exactly stop, but it grew unvoiced, a wheezing series of gasps.

  “That’s better,” said Chio in a shaken voice.

  “Yes,” rasped Pen as his ears stopped ringing. He stood catching his breath and his scattered wits.

  “I’d wondered why I didn’t like him.” She touched the red mark on her face. Wait, was that the work of Madboy or Merin? Until the god is upon me, and then I see everything, she’d said, and Pen believed her. What inner worlds had she just seen here?

  Pen turned to her, his eye taking in Ree as well, who was clumsily sitting up trying to work his numb hand. “But Bastard’s teeth, what was going on here? No, start with—why did you two run off from me at the marketplace?” He pointed one cautious toe at Merin, squirming and mouthing like a landed fish.

  “He suddenly said he’d guessed where Ser Richelon would be hiding,” Chio said, vexation coloring her voice. “Then he grabbed me”—she rubbed her forearm; Pen scowled to see young bruises forming up in the pattern of fingerprints— “and bundled me into an oarboat that had just pulled up to let off another passenger. He told the boatman to take us to the harbor. I expected you to follow on with your Sight, so I didn’t cry out or protest—I didn’t think I needed to. I mean, I wanted to get to the demon, and he was taking me to the demon.” She looked around, and asked Ree, “What exactly is this place, Ser Richelon, and why were you here? Because Ser Merin was right about that part.”

  Still shaky with pain, Ree gestured distractedly. “This warehouse is shared by my father and my uncle. His cousin, but I call him my uncle. When Merin was employed by him, we both worked here, sometimes. Then he left, and we didn’t meet again till we were thrown together on the spring convoy. You two know about that?” He twisted toward Pen. “You’re that scary sorcerer from the hospice—of course you must, if you came for me. You and the god. And the… saint?”

  From the stunned-ox air Ree bore as his gaze returned to Chio, Pen grasped that he’d had an intimate view of his miracle. And of that holy execution. How much had he felt of his ascendant demon’s destruction? And had it been release, horror, awe, or all three inextricably mixed?

  Des shuddered.

  “This felt like a safe place to hide, and I knew how to get in,” Ree went on.

  Looks like Merin remembered how, too, said Des. With less destruction to doorways. Her regret for the front entry was entirely feigned, Pen judged.

  “I didn’t have much control, but I dreaded the demon getting any nearer to my mother and sisters. Do you know about them? Oh…” Ree looked down at his red sleeve in fresh worry, then up at Penric. He quavered, “Learned sir, I think… I think I might have killed a man earlier tonight. I know I robbed him.”

  So, Ree remembered Madboy’s acts. This was going to be interesting. “Put your heart at ease,” Pen advised him. “The man survived, and will recover. You may even get a chance to return his things.” As Ree continued to look distraught, he added, “The Temple, or at least my Order, will know it wasn’t you, and will speak on your behalf if it comes to that.”

  Chio wrinkled her nose. “How do you even know that the man… never mind.”

  Ree blew out his breath in a mixture of turmoil and relief. “It was all so confusing till just now. Like the worst fever dream ever.” His gaze caught again in wonder on Chio.

  “I daresay,” said Pen. “Ah—why was Merin trying to kill you?”

  “Trying to kill me again, rather.” Ree’s black brows drew down in anger. Wrenching aside from his worship, he glared in Merin’s direction. “He’d thrown me off our ship to drown.”

  “Why?” asked Chio. She didn’t sound shocked.

  “I’d spotted him stealing his master’s funds.” His voice heated. “More fool I, I’d thought I could talk him into putting the money back, and then I wouldn’t tell anyone, and all would be right again. That’s why I took him out on the deck alone in the night. First he tried to bribe me, as if I would—! Then he saw a more certain way to shut me up.”

  “In the panic of a fight?” asked Pen.

  “We did fight, but he knocked me woozy. He was cool enough to take my purse before he tipped me over the side rail, though.” His lips tightened in remembered outrage.

  “How frugal.” Premeditation enough, I daresay. “A money belt was mentioned—did he take that too?”

  “I kept that locked in a chest in my cabin. I don’t know if he found it later.” Ree looked suddenly even more worried. “Its key was in my purse. He knew that.”

  “If he filched it, it should be discovered in his things when this incident is investigated,” Pen suggested. “I don’t know about your father, but if it’s lost I can promise you your mother won’t care.”

  “You’ve met my mother?” Ree’s eyes sprang wide, and he gasped in new alarm. “Oh gods, they’ll have told my family I drowned!” He lurched, trying to rise. “I have to get home!”

&n
bsp; Chio knelt to him and made soothing murmurs, patting his shoulder as if he were a restive horse till he settled back, still panting anxiously.

  The disjointed tale laid bare Merin’s formerly baffling motives, though. Cold greed, and hot fear of being found out. Should fear be added to the list of great sins?

  It can do as much harm, I’ll grant, said Des.

  * * *

  A stiff voice called from the wrecked doorway, “Hey! What’s going on in there?” Wary footsteps resolved into two men in the tabards of the state shipyard—its lords administrative kept a full roster of watchmen in the area, even or perhaps especially on holiday nights, so Pen was less taken aback than they were. One held up a lantern; the other had his short sword out and ready. “We heard screaming.”

  Well, here’s trouble, said Des.

  Not necessarily. It all depends on how I play it.

  I yield this hand to you, Temple-man. By all means go be Learned Sir at them.

  Chio shrank back beside Ree. Pen stepped forward, and said heartily, “Five gods be thanked you’re here!” The sword sank only slightly. Lantern-man put his other hand on the truncheon hung at his hip.

  “We interrupted an attempted murder,” Pen went on, which didn’t seem to reassure them. Leaving aside the question of who had been trying to murder whom when Pen first had come in. Merin had certainly been bent on getting rid of witnesses, but had been blocked by the problem of the demon until the saint had done her deed—Pen had to give him credit for paying attention to his demon-lectures.

  The whole growing, teetering pile of lies and crime tonight must have been cobbled together impulsively as Merin tried to work around the unexpected god-gift of Ree’s survival and demonic possession. Add rashness to his list of defects. If he’d managed to dispatch Ree, would he have gone on to Chio? Where would he hide the bodies? was hardly a problem in canal-laced Lodi. The picture made Pen sick. My Lord Bastard, you trim your timing far too fine.

  For this audience, Pen decided to stick with more recent and clear events. “This man”—he pointed down at Merin—“just made an ill-advised attempt to stab me.” True enough. “Ah, permit me to introduce myself. I’m Learned Penric kin Jurald, court sorcerer to Archdivine Ogial.”