Penric and the Shaman

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In Oswyl’s prior investigations, requisitioning support from the local Temple usually meant finding his bed and board at a chapterhouse of one of the Orders, or a pilgrim hostel attached to the main center, or at least a recommended inn. Linkbeck did not boast any of these, nor a jail, nor a secure lockup in some outbuilding, nor even manacles on the cellar wall of a crumbling stronghold. His prisoner must needs remain under the direct supervision of the sorcerer at all times. This resulted in their having to impose on the domestic hospitality of Gallin and Gossa; mostly, as it turned out, Gossa.

Oswyl was deeply uncomfortable with bringing a maybe-murderer-mage into their home, but the couple seemed to take it in stride. An extra trestle table to increase the seating by six was swiftly set up by Gallin and his sons. Gossa had apparently handled sudden refugees from disasters in the vale this way many times before, driving her children and the servant girl, whom Oswyl had last seen leading the Bastard’s white pony at the funeral, this way and that. It didn’t take her long to draft the guardsmen as well, easing Oswyl’s conscience slightly. Oddments of food appeared spontaneously, as if in a tale of an enchanted castle, dishes sent over by neighbors to supplement the family’s fare.

All the chaos coalesced in a surprisingly short time in seating twelve to dinner, plus the two dogs lurking under the table, whether following Inglis or in hope of scraps. Learned Penric looked discomfited when asked by the acolyte to bless the meal, but he delivered the formula with a seminary-trained grace, which seemed to please their hosts. The soup was hardly watered at all.

Inglis was a blot of silent misery in this active company. Perhaps feeling the contrast, he did exert himself to politeness, belying his unkempt brigand’s looks. Someone had taught him table manners, certainly. Oswyl grew aware that Gallin, too, was watching the shaman closely. His dark presence was daunting enough that no one tried to draw him into the table talk, more to Oswyl’s relief than otherwise. Perhaps to make up for this, Penric, seated on his other side from Oswyl, contributed an unexceptionable tale or three, especially after the women found out he served at the princess-archdivine’s court in what they evidently thought of as exotic, distant, romantic Martensbridge. The sorcerer seemed as much an object of muted wonder as the murderer; Oswyl was not used to his inquirer’s menace being so eclipsed.

After a brief post-dinner consultation with Oswyl, Gallin and Gossa sensibly sent the children off to find the beds with the neighbors, and kept Oswyl’s party all together in their house. Gossa faltered at a social dilemma: Learned Penric obviously had to be offered the best bedchamber, but Inglis perforce must accompany him there, Oswyl wanted to keep a close eye on both, and the dogs would not be parted from the prisoner. Gossa almost drew the line at the dogs, but Penric charmed her into a reprieve, promising her they would not leave fleas in her beds.

Oswyl pulled Penric aside on the staircase. “Do you think he could control those dogs? They could prove as much a weapon as his knife.”

“I suspect the dogs may have their own design. Or someone’s design,” Penric returned in matching quiet tones. Earlier, he had tied the thongs of the knife sheath around his neck and tucked the knife out of sight in his shirt; he now touched his chest. “And Gossa has bigger knives in her kitchen. This is a hostage, not a weapon.”

“Do you think Inglis may attempt escape? He claims to have lost his shamanic powers, but he could be lying.”

“Or mistaken,” murmured Penric. “Or have mislaid them. I’m rather counting on mislaid, but we’ll have to see. Anyway, with that bad leg of his we could catch him at a leisurely stroll.”

“Unless he steals a horse.”

A weird little smile turned Penric’s lips. “I think such a ride could prove strangely unlucky for him. Don’t fret yourself, Oswyl. He may be the best-guarded prisoner you’ve ever taken.”

Penric sounded a bit full of himself on this point to Oswyl’s ear, but there were also the three temple guardsmen now being variously distributed with bedrolls between their room and the doors. And the shaman was plainly exhausted. The real danger might well come later, as he regained strength and balance. Oswyl shook his head and followed Penric up the stairs.

Although the bedchamber to which Gossa conducted them was a tidy-enough refuge, no room in this house was spacious. Now containing a washstand, wardrobe, bed, pulled-out trundle bed, bedroll, three men and two large dogs, it seemed even smaller. Gossa handed Oswyl the taper, pointed out the brace of candles on the washstand, bade them goodnight, and shut the door upon them. Oswyl improved the lighting somewhat when he lit the candles, although not the smell, as they were tallow.

Penric politely yielded first turn at the washstand to Oswyl. The prisoner came a pointed third. The sorcerer, who moved like a cat in the shadows, also preempted Oswyl’s intent to assign beds by plumping himself down on the trundle, and the dogs capped it by nosing Inglis to the bedroll and disposing themselves to either side of it. Inglis lowered himself awkwardly, with a pained grunt. Oswyl would have put the sorcerer on the floor in front of the door, and the prisoner between them.

“So, Inglis,” Penric began. “I am something of a physician, although not presently sworn to practice. I think I might do a little for that leg of yours, if you’ll let me have a look at it.”

“Is that wise?” asked Oswyl, startled. To him, Inglis’s injury had seemed as good as a leg-iron.

“Oh, yes,” said Penric cheerily. “We’ve destroyed enough fleas in this household to balance a week of healing.” He glanced at Inglis, made a brief wave of his hand, and added, “And lice.”

Inglis, sounding stung, said, “I slept in some vile inns. And I haven’t had a chance to bathe properly for a month.”

All right, he sleeps on the floor, Oswyl revised his plan. And then wondered if Penric had misunderstood him deliberately.

Inglis scrubbed a hand through his ragged hair, then swallowed a startled oath. In this light Oswyl couldn’t see the rain of dead bugs, but he could hear the faint patter as they hit the floorboards.

Fluidly, Penric slipped to Inglis’s right side, shoved Blood out of the way, and sat cross-legged. Inglis eyed him in doubt, but did not object, though he winced when Pen rolled up his trouser leg. The limb was impressively empurpled and swollen. The sorcerer hummed tunelessly to himself as he ran his hands up and down it. The rigidity of Inglis’s body eased. “Oh,” he murmured, sounding surprised. Penric’s face was bent over his work, but Oswyl could see his lips twitch up.

“A little ragged crack in one bone, but it’s not propagating despite your abuse of it. The rest is pulled muscles and some very unhappy tendons. The usual instruction would be to abandon ambition, put your leg up, and rest for about three weeks.”

Inglis snorted. Oswyl frowned.

“Indeed. But I may be able to supply a few more treatments as we go along, to replace some of that.” Penric straightened his back. There was no visible difference in the leg, but as Inglis sat up in his bedroll, Oswyl was reminded of those nursery stories where the hero removed a thorn from the wolf’s paw and was rewarded with the beast’s trust. Did Penric and Inglis know those tales, too? From the wry cast to Inglis’s face as he watched the sorcerer, Oswyl thought he might.

Penric added casually, “Did the Old Weald shamans have much in the way of healing arts or practices, do you know?”

“It is believed so.” Inglis shrugged. “They were largely lost with the rest of their histories. Most shamanic teaching was by word of mouth, mentor to aspirant, and died with its possessors. What little was written, the Darthacans burned, if they could find it. What was hidden fell to the worm and rot and lack of understanding. One of the tasks that the fellowship of the royal shamans has set itself is to try to recover those skills.”

“Are they making any more progress, in this new generation?”

“Mm, it seems the women tribal shamans worked the bulk of healing practices. They either wrote less, or were less recopied, as most of what survives tends to tales of spirit warriors and battle magic, and the rites surrounding the hallow kingship.”

Penric—or was it Desdemona?—vented an ironic snort. “No surprise there.”

“The hints are maddening, cast-away remarks in the midst of accounts about greater matters. There is a small cadre of royal shamans working to try to recreate the skills, relying less on old tales and more on new practices. The skills must have been developed in the first place by such trial and error, after all. Except that error… is a problem for an Easthome city shaman in a way it could not have been in the old forest tribes.” Inglis had straightened up during this recitation, growing more animated, as if briefly forgetful of his woes. “A couple of the senior shamans have attempted healings of animals, to try to get around that. Some of their recent results have been very exciting.”

It came to Oswyl that the reason Inglis had possessed such luck passing for a poor scholar at those inns was that he was one. Well, perhaps not poor. And Learned Penric was another, officially even. Two of them. Dear gods, help me.

“Is the Mother’s Order taking an interest in the work?” asked Penric.

“Some, yes.”

“Helpful, or hostile?”

Inglis’s lips twitched in dark appreciation. “Some of each, but since the fellowship hit upon the idea of becoming physicians to animals, their oversight has grown more favorable.”

“Does this work interest you?”

Inglis slumped again. “What does it matter now? I can’t.”

“Back when you could,” said Penric, blithely ignoring this burst of despair, “how did you go about it? How do you go into your shamanic trance? Meditation, medication, smokes, bells, smells…? Songs, prayers, twirling…?”

Something not quite a laugh puffed Inglis’s lips. “All of that, or any. My teachers said they are training aids, to form habits, and so, arbitrary. Nothing forces it. Or works like a machine, without fail. The more senior shamans make do with less and less, and some without any. Slipping in and out of the plane of symbolic action as silently as a fish swimming, and seemingly with as little effort.” His sigh sounded suspiciously like envy. Or loss, perhaps.

“So how were you taught? Exactly? I have a professional interest in such things, you know.”

Oswyl wasn’t sure what Penric was about with this line of inquiry—the divine was proving more slippery than he’d seemed at first—but Inglis appeared to accept this at face value. Which said something about Inglis, right enough. But the shaman was going on.

“We always began each training session with a short prayer.”

“To invoke the gods, or to placate the Temple?”

Inglis stared at him. “Invoke? Scarcely.”

“Yes, everyone talks to the gods, no one expects them to answer. …Almost no one. Then what?”

“After some experimenting, we settled on a chant for my doorway. It seemed to me the most portable possible aid. And it could never be lost, like objects, or not be around when I needed it. Master Firthwyth first taught me in call and response, like two bards sharing the lines of a long poem back and forth. Except mine was short, just a quatrain. We sat across from each other, with a candle burning between us for me to stare at, and just repeated it over and over. And over and over and over, till my mind grew calm, or at least so bored I could scarcely bear it. We went through nearly a box of good wax candles. I worried about the waste. I can’t imagine how Firthwyth endured.

“After several days of this, one afternoon when I’d been at it so long we both were hoarse, I… broke through. To the plane. Just for a few moments. But it was a revelation. This, this is what I, my wolf-within and I, had been straining for all this time. All the descriptions in words I’d been given weren’t… weren’t false. But it was like nothing I’d imagined from them. No wonder I’d been unable to reach it.

“After that, it quickly grew easier. We dispensed with the candle flame. It took less and less time to break through, and then I began reciting it all by myself. I was working on doing so silently when…” Inglis broke off. He added lamely, “My teacher said I was good.”

“So what’s it like for you? To be in this spiritual space.”

Inglis’s lips parted, closed, thinned. He turned his hands palm-out. “I can give you words, but they won’t teach you any more than they did me. I don’t know if you can understand.”

“Inglis.” For such a gentled tone, it was oddly implacable. “From the strangest hour of my life, on a roadside four years ago, I have been sharing my mind with a two-hundred-year-old demon with twelve personalities speaking six languages, and an underlying yen to destroy everything in her path, and I expect to go on doing so till the hour of my death. Try me.”

Inglis recoiled slightly. And Oswyl wondered at what inattentive point on this journey Penric had started seeming normal to him.

Penric sighed and came about to another tack. “Is it intrinsically pleasurable, this trance state?”

“It is a place of wonders.” Inglis hesitated. “Some find it fearful.”

“And you?”

“I was exhilarated. Maybe too much so.” Inglis frowned. “The material world does not vanish from my perceptions, but it is… overlain, set aside. Non-material things appear as material ones, symbols of themselves, but not just hallucinations, because in my wolf-form—I appear there as a wolf, or sometimes a hybrid between wolf and man—because I can grasp them. Manipulate them. Arrange them to my will. And in the material world, they are made so.

“This does not move matter in the world, not the way chaos demons can, only things of the mind and spirit, yet mind and spirit can have strong influences on the body that bears them. The mind that moves the matter is the mind that is affected. A shaman can convince a person to perform an act, or bind two minds together, so that one person knows where the other is. Persuade a body to heal faster, sometimes. Give visions to another shaman, share thought. At full strength, move a sacrificed animal spirit to another body, bind it to that body’s nourishment. Animal to animal, to build up a Great Beast. Or animal to… to a person, to share its fierceness…” He faltered. “Making a spirit warrior was considered the most challenging of all rites, apart from the transfer of the hallow kingship itself, and is presently forbidden.”

So, it wasn’t just the Father’s Order who would be wanting a word with this young man when Oswyl returned him to Easthome. It sounded as though his assorted authorities were going to have to get in a line.

“At the sty, for the first time, I made the entry-chant work unvoiced. I was so excited, I almost lost the way again. Since I take the form of a wolf, things usually come to me in a sort of, of symbolic wolf-language. The spirit of the sacrificed boar and the spirit of a kin Boarford were already in sympathy. I chased them like a hunt even as Tollin was struggling to get his knife in, till they superimposed and became one. And then I came down and then… oh gods…” Inglis buried his face in his hands. Arrow whined and licked at him, and Blood rolled over and rested his head mournfully on his knee. Automatically, Inglis reached down and stroked the silky fur.

“Enough of that,” said Penric firmly. Inglis gulped and looked up. Penric wrapped his arms around his knees and regarded the shaman through narrowed eyes. “Maybe what you need…”

Inglis and Oswyl glowered at him in equal bewilderment.

“Is sleep,” Penric finished. “Yes. Definitely that. Go to bed, Penric.” He uncoiled and picked his way to the trundle, blowing out the smelly candles on the way.

That was Ruchia, Oswyl thought. He recognized her pithy style, and then was a little appalled that he could now do so. But the advice was certainly sound.

“We need to talk,” Oswyl murmured to Penric as he settled down just below him in the darkness.

“Yes, but not now. Tomorrow morning. I need to think.” Penric pulled up his covers. “And, the white god help me, compose. Only Mira of Adria was a poetess, and she spoke no Wealdean, apart from some rude phrases she learned from her customers. She was a famous courtesan, did I ever mention that? Now there are your bedtime stories. Although not ones for the nursery. Well, we shall contrive.” He flopped over, and whether he closed his eyes, Oswyl could not make out.

Inglis, Oswyl decided, could not get out without tripping over a dog. The darkness pressing upon him like a blanket, he, too, slept.