Penric’s Mission Read online

  “Pursuit?” asked Nikys. Could they get off the road and hide?

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  She stood in her stirrups to look, but then eased back when she recognized the single horseman, puffs of pale dust kicking up in his wake on the dirt track that ran alongside the paved military road. In a few minutes, Master Penric trotted up beside them, both he and his horse sweating and winded. His face was flushed pink under a countryman’s straw hat.

  “Ah, good! I caught up with you.”

  “If it was that easy for you,” said Adelis, “it will be that easy for them.”

  “Ah, probably not right away. They’ll be quite a while sorting themselves out back there. And I had the advantage of knowing which road to try.” He smiled cheerily, but it won him only dual glowers of suspicion. “But they know what they’re dealing with in me now, which is, mm, unfortunate. Doubt they’ll come so unprepared again.”

  “You didn’t kill them while you could,” said Adelis. It wasn’t a question. “You left witnesses.”

  “Well, really, that would have been a problem. Would you have had me slay the maid and the porter, too? The scullion? The laundress? The butcher’s lad? How about the apothecary…?”

  Adelis scowled and looked away, discomfited.

  “Take heart,” Penric advised. “The next best thing to no witnesses is many, who will all contradict each other. Or else arrive at a consensus that has more to do with their needs than with what they’ve seen.”

  “Did you burn down the villa?” Nikys asked, thinking morbidly of her good floor loom, left behind along with so many of the tools of her life.

  “What? Oh. No.”

  “So was his name Velka or Tepelen?”

  “You know, I forgot to ask. He was the same man as—” Penric broke off, smiled, waved a hand as if to drive off a fly.

  “Same man as who?” asked Adelis.

  “Doesn’t matter. He did say his master was a Minister Methani. Does that name mean something to you?”

  Adelis shrugged. “Methani? Yes, that’s very likely.”

  Penric looked disappointed at this tepid response. “Not a surprise, I take it.”

  “Not especially. We’ve been clashing at court for a couple of years, now.”

  “Had you ever done anything to anger him personally? Traduce his mother, steal his slippers, ravish his goat?”

  Adelis cleared his throat. “I may have said a few intemperate things. From time to time.”

  Nikys snorted. She looked again sidelong at the strange blond man. “So you’re really a sorcerer?” Was he really a physician, for that matter? “Why did you follow after us?”

  He lifted a hand from his reins and tilted it back and forth. “A number of reasons. Mostly because I hadn’t finished treating your brother’s eyes. It was upsetting to be so close to bringing off… what I mean to bring off, and be so rudely interrupted.”

  Adelis blew out a non-laugh, short and sardonic.

  Penric turned in his saddle and added to him, “Also, I promised Des I would try to restore your eyebrows. She was rather set on it.”

  “Des?” said Adelis, beating Nikys to the question.

  “Ah, ha, Desdemona, my demon. I suppose it’s about time you were all introduced, given she’s been living with you right along, within me, for the past week.” He looked at them both, hopefully. “You do know that it’s the acquisition, the possession, of a chaos demon that turns a person into a sorcerer, yes?”

  Nikys didn’t think she’d reacted visibly, but their horse yawed farther from Penric’s.

  Adelis said warily, “Is it… ascendant? That’s a great danger for hedge sorcerers, I’ve heard.”

  “No, certainly not. I mean, yes, it’s a significant hazard, but it’s not the case here.”

  “How can you tell?” said Adelis. “That is… how can we tell?”

  “A sorcerer or sorceress whose demon has become ascendant will exhibit far more chaotic—erratic—behavior.”

  A long silence. Twin, level stares.

  Penric seemed stung. “No, really, not! Though Des does leak out from time to time. You’ve both heard her speak. With my voice, of course. It would be quite unkind to keep her wholly prisoned.”

  Adelis said slowly, “You… share your body… with this unnatural being?”

  “Share and share alike, yes. It’s an intimate relationship.”

  Adelis looked revolted; Penric was beginning to look offended by his reaction.

  Nikys put in hastily, “It seems natural to me. Every mother does it, and every unborn child. Even Adelis and I once had to share another’s body and blood.”

  “Unmanly, then,” Adelis muttered.

  Penric touched his thumb to his lips and gave a little bow in his saddle. “There are compensations. As you… can see.” His thin smile put the point to the wordplay.

  Nikys tried again to divert the tension: “Did Adelis’s officers know you were a sorcerer when they hired you for him?”

  “Ah, not exactly. By the way, do you know how far we are from the nearest largish town? Because we would be more remarked in a small village. And I’d prefer to find some inn that’s quiet and clean to continue the eye treatments tonight.”

  “Doara is about eight miles off,” said Nikys. “We should be there by sunset.”

  “Perfect. That will be a good time to get rid of these incriminating horses, too.”

  “You have a plan for that?” said Adelis, sounding distrustful.

  “Oh, yes.”

  * * *

  They were in sight of Doara, and dusk was closing in, when Master Penric pulled them off the road into the cover of some scrubby trees and had them dismount.

  “I believe the best, and most confusing, thing will be to send these beasts back to their own stable. Better than just turning them loose to be found along our route.”

  As Adelis detached the saddle scabbard, Penric unbridled his mount, scratched its ears, and began rubbing its forehead, crooning under his breath in a strange tongue. Turning away to secure the bridle to the saddle, he remarked, “I once spent a year in Easthome, the capital of the Weald, studying their style of magic with the Royal Fellowship of Shamans. A geas of persuasion doesn’t come at all naturally to a chaos demon, but we learned to simulate it. A real shaman can lay a geas lasting weeks or months. The best I can do is hours. Well, it’s only a horse, and the compulsion lies in line with its own inclinations. I expect this will do.”

  He repeated the mystifying performance with the other animal, then turned them both loose with friendly slaps to their haunches. “Off you go, now.” They snuffled and trotted away down the road together. “Ah.” He bent over, looking distracted. A patter of wet red fell from his sunburned nose into the dry dirt.

  “You’re bleeding,” said Nikys uneasily, wondering if she should fetch him a cloth out of her sack. She would have to sacrifice one of her few garments.

  “Yes,” he said, muffled. “Don’t be alarmed. It will stop in a moment. A sorcerer pays for magic, uphill magic, in some greater amount of disorder. A shaman pays in blood. The shedding of which, I argue, is also a form of disorder. Shaman Inglis and I tried to work out the implications of that…” He glanced up to check their reactions. Nikys leaned forward, a hand tentatively raised but with no idea what she could do. Adelis had retreated a pace, the tree guarding his back, fists clenched. “Ah, I might as well be talking in Wealdean to you, I suppose. Never mind.”

  The gush tailing away, Penric rubbed his upper lip with the back of his hand, straightened, and smiled rather flatly. “Let’s go find that inn. I’m tired, aren’t you?”

  * * *

  At a lodging place on a side street in Doara, Master Penric negotiated for two adjoining rooms, while Adelis kept his head down in surly silence and pretended to be a stout, standoffish widow. The awkwardness of concealing the sword under the cloak lent him a convincing aged hunch. The moment their chamber door shut behind them he shucked out of the cloak
and Nikys’s dress, tossing them aside with a muffled oath. Nikys rescued her abused clothing and nobly refrained from comment. Feigning that his female employer’s widowed mother was ill, Penric had arranged for their dinner to be brought up, which happened thankfully soon. It was eaten mostly in tense silence.

  After the meal was cleared away from the small table, Penric, growing serious, laid out his medical kit and turned at last to Adelis. He first carefully cleaned away the day’s grime from his patient’s face, a sticky mess from the ointment, sweat, and road dust, and from around his eyes, but Nikys didn’t think it was just from the firm touch that Adelis flinched away.

  Penric evidently didn’t think so either, for he said lightly, “Oh, come now. I’ve been helping you to your chamber pot for a week. If you trusted me in the darkness, you can trust me in the light.”

  Adelis grunted and, rigidly, endured the ministrations. After a while, he said, “You’re a hedge sorcerer.”

  “Something like that.”

  “With a talent for healing.

  Penric’s voice went dryer. “Something like that.”

  “Not a physician at all.”

  “I said I’d taken no oath. It’s… complicated. And not relevant here.”

  Nikys, seated closely and watching it all, said, “I would like to understand.”

  Penric hesitated, then shrugged. “Two of my demon’s prior riders—possessors—were Temple-trained physicians. Their knowledge came to me as part of the same gift as their languages. Plus what I’ve added myself since acquiring Desdemona. Which she will carry on in turn someday to a new rider, after my death, which is a strange thought. Rather more useful than being a ghost, sundered souls not being good for much. They mostly won’t even talk to you.”

  Nikys blinked at this last offhand observation; Adelis shifted his swollen red eyes.

  “Have you tried to talk to ghosts?” she couldn’t help asking.

  “A few times. One feels they could answer so many questions, starting with Who killed you? but they almost never do.” Standing behind the seated Adelis, Penric spread his fingers over his patient’s scalp and paused in his chatting, though he sent her a faint smile evidently meant to be reassuring.

  Nikys thought about all she’d seen. “Why do you call this… creature of chaos her?”

  “Desdemona’s prior ten human riders all chanced to be women. Plus the lioness and the mare, however you count them, but that goes back to her very beginnings. Right here in Cedonia, as it happens. This resulted over time—two hundred years of time—in a sort of composite personality that I named Desdemona, when she came down to me.” His gaze grew pensive. “Your first gift to me, Penric. Though not your last.”

  Nikys, listening to the subtle shifts in his tone, was torn between fear and fascination. Had he always been doing this, disregarded? “Could—could I talk to her? Directly?”

  Penric stared in surprise over Adelis’s head. “I don’t think anyone has ever asked us that before.” His lips twitched. “Well, why not?”

  Nikys swallowed, looked him in the eyes, and tried, “Hello… Desdemona.”

  Penric’s smile transmuted to something more bemused. “Hello, Nikys.”

  “So… so you really live inside Master Penric? Like another person?”

  “Or another dozen persons. It is our nature.”

  “How long, um, have you been… in there?” It felt absurdly like asking a new neighbor, So, how long have you lived in Patos?

  “Since he was nineteen, and stopped to help my former mistress, Learned Ruchia, when she fell mortally ill upon a roadside in the cantons. Ruchia called him the Bastard’s last blessing. We… thought we needed to learn what better to do about bad hearts.”

  “How long have you been together, then?” As if the neighbors were a married couple.

  “Eleven, twelve years?” Master Penric—or was it the demon?—waved a dismissive hand.

  To be certain the man wasn’t just having an arcane jape at her expense, Nikys supposed she should think of some question to which the demon would know the answer and Penric would not, but none at once occurred to her. Do you like being a demon? Is Penric a good master? What is it like to live for centuries? Not to mention, What was it like to be a woman, and then a man? Did demons even think that way? She tried for something that seemed more answerable. “Why is Master Penric—Penric—not a proper physician?”

  His expression seemed to conduct a brief war with itself, but he—or she?—replied, “A good question, child, but not mine to answer. Though if he ever does explain, you’ll know he’s come to trust you.” His voice went sharper. “I think that’s enough, Des.”

  Adelis, still sitting stiffly, rolled his eyes as best he could, as though he considered this offering dubious coin, and his sister a gull for accepting it. Nikys, watching those long fingers barely move through her brother’s hair, wondered if she was witnessing some delicate sorcery being done right now. By Penric’s abstraction, maybe so?

  But Adelis, after a while, had a question of his own. “Can you kill with your demon magic?”

  Penric grimaced—yes, this was Penric again now, and was this going to be like learning to tell two identical twins apart? “No.”

  “Fight?”

  “Within limits. Did you think all those soldiers trying to arrest you earlier today tripped over their own boots?”

  “What if your attackers were more than you could overcome?”

  “Running away is always my first choice. After that, disable and run away. As you saw.”

  “What if you were truly cornered? A you-or-him contest?”

  Penric’s eyebrows pinched. “You’ve killed in warfare, presumably.”

  Adelis nodded shortly.

  “Have you ever murdered? Slain one helpless before you?”

  Adelis shrugged. “There were cleanups on the battlefield. More speeding a death already underway than a killing. Not a pretty business, nor heroic, but needful sometimes.”

  Penric, after a thoughtful moment, gave a conceding nod, and said, “I suppose. But every death, howsoever accomplished, opens a doorway to the gods. If I die, my soul goes to my god, if He’ll have me. But should my demon murder, whether under my command or ascendant and rogue, she would be stripped from me through the victim’s soul-door by her holy Master, her two hundred years of life and knowledge boiled back down to formless chaos in an instant. Worse than burning down a great library. So my mortal calculation is never just me or him. It’s me or him or her. Do you see the conundrum?”

  “…No.”

  “Imagine… I don’t know, imagine Nikys was your demon. And, in slaying, would be not just slain but sundered. Could you see it then?”

  Reluctantly, Adelis said, “Maybe. I see that you would lose your powers.”

  “And thus, I run away.”

  Adelis, his head drooping, vented a little unconceding huff, but did not pursue the matter further.

  He did revive to protest when Penric made to place his mask—and when had he retrieved it?—relined with clean gauze and ointment, upon him for the night. “If you want to end up with working eyelids, you’ll cooperate,” said Penric sternly, and overbore him. Nikys didn’t think he’d succeed in doing that for much longer.

  When he’d finished cleaning up and restoring his supplies in their case, Penric told her, “I’m going out for a little.”

  “Why? You did that every night back at the villa, and I wondered.”

  “Ah.” He paused at the door. “It’s not a great mystery, if you recall what I told you of the price of uphill magic. Creating order, such as in healing, generates a greater burden of chaos, which I must promptly find a place to shed. The more efficiently I work out ways to do this, the more uphill magic I can safely accomplish.”

  “Wait. Does working this, these healings put you at some risk?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said cheerfully, and whisked out the door, shutting it firmly behind him.

  “Not necessarily,�
� she echoed aloud, hovering somewhere between baffled and peeved. “That’s no answer!”

  “If you haven’t yet noticed that the man is as slippery as a fish,” Adelis remarked dryly from his bed, “it’s time you did. Also mad as a boot.”

  “Fish,” Nikys returned with what dignity she could muster, “don’t wear boots.” It wasn’t much of a rejoinder, nor much of a rebuttal, but it served to see her off to her own room.

  XI

  Arisaydia’s eyes looked better the next morning, and saw better, too, Penric judged. Also more shrewdly, although that wasn’t the eyes, exactly. For the first time, he refused even the reduced dose of the syrup of poppies, and insisted that his sister, not Penric, shave him. Which suggested he hadn’t quite wrapped his military mind around how little a medically trained sorcerer needed a weapon, but it was perhaps not prudent to point this out.

  Working the lather and razor carefully around the nearly healed burns, Nikys asked, “Will the brown come back?” Arisaydia’s irises were still that peculiar deep garnet color, although the whites were clearing to merely a wine-sick sort of bloodshot.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve never done a healing this delicate before.” Pen didn’t know if anyone had.

  This triggered Arisaydia’s demand for a mirror, which Nikys had to go fetch from the innkeeper’s wife downstairs. It was good silvered glass, though, and its small circle reflected back a clear image of half of Arisaydia’s face at a time. “Huh,” he said, frowning and tilting it this way and that, but he seemed much less appalled than Penric had feared. Pen supposed the man had witnessed injuries more devastating than this in the course of his career. “I can work with this.”

  Without Pen’s labors, the upper half of his face would have become a knotted mass of yellow, ropy scar tissue, but, of course, without Pen’s labors Arisaydia would never have been troubled by the sight of it. These scars would eventually work out as flatter, paler, with redder skin between, in a sort of spray pattern not unlike an owl’s feathers. Strange, but nothing to make children scream, and any woman who would recoil likely wasn’t tough enough for Arisaydia anyway. Nikys managed to seem completely unruffled, a mirror Arisaydia had to find more reassuring than the glass one.