Penric and the Shaman

XII

Inglis, to his chagrin, had to be helped onto his horse by two guardsmen and an upturned stump by the stable door. His stick presented another puzzle. He finally set its butt upright atop his foot, which also had to be fitted into his stirrup by a guard, and held it like a banner pole. That and his reins seemed to give his hands too many things to do. The sorcerer almost floated up into his saddle, although Inglis put it down to his wiry build and horsemanship, not magic. Acolyte Gallin availed himself of the stump, however. Given the acolyte’s age, that was small consolation. Locator Oswyl frowned down from his mount at Arrow and Blood, swirling amiably around Inglis’s horse; the horse, which Inglis judged something of a slug, took only mild exception.

Gallin led the mounted party out past his temple into the street, where Learned Penric held up a staying hand. “Let us go to the bridge, first,” said Penric to him. “And over it. I want to see something.”

Gallin shrugged and turned his mount left instead of right. The rest of them followed in a gaggle. The dogs, who had darted ahead in the opposite direction, paused and vented puzzled whines. When the riders continued their retreat, they barked a few times, then ran after.

As Penric made to lead them all across the wooden span, Arrow and Blood rushed ahead, turned, and set up a furious barking. The horses shied.

“Calm them,” Penric advised Inglis.

“Hush!” Inglis tried, and then, “Sit!” The apparently-maddened dogs continued to hold the party at bay. “Hush!” Inglis tried again, more forcefully. “Settle down!”

The two dogs recoiled as if blown by a gust of gale, but then remustered their battle line and took up their din again, standing four-legged and braced, the fur rising in a ridge along their backs.

“Enough!” cried Penric, laughing for no reason that Inglis could discern, and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Gallin, staring back and forth between the dogs and him, reined his horse around to lead back up the vale once more. A few villagers arrested by the uproar who had come to their garden gates nodded at their acolyte, frowned impartially at his visitors, and turned back to their interrupted tasks.

The two guardsmen fell in at either side of Inglis, albeit not too close, scowling at him in distrust. Oswyl nudged his horse up beside the sorcerer’s, and asked, “Did you do something, back there?”

“No,” said Penric, airily, “not at all. Very carefully not at all, in fact.”

“So what was all that in aid of?”

“I had three theories about what drives those dogs. This knocks out one of them. Two to go.” He nodded in satisfaction, and pushed his horse into a trot after Gallin. Oswyl seemed as baffled by this as Inglis, for he made an exasperated face at the sorcerer’s retreating back. What, did the locator find the blond man as irritating as Inglis did?

A little while later Penric reined back beside Inglis, displacing one of the guards, who looked more grateful than otherwise for being relieved of his post. “Well,” said Penric cheerily, “shall we beguile the ride with a bit more practice?”

“No,” said Inglis, mortified. And if a No! would have worked on the man, he’d have followed up with one. “Do you want us both to look fools?”

“That still concerns you, at this stage in your career?” Penric inquired. Entirely too dryly. “Though I have to allow, working for my god tends to knock that worry out of a person fairly swiftly.” The dryness melted to an even more excoriating look of sympathy.

“I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not going to work.”

“If you don’t know the first, how do you know the second?” Penric shot back. “Although I’m afraid planning may be too grandiose a term for it. Testing, perhaps. Like the bridge.”

Inglis hunched his shoulders. Penric eyed him a moment more and then, to his relief, gave up.

The day was gray, the air damp, the mountains veiled, but the wind was light, not spitting rain or snow at them. Inglis studied the vale as they rode up the right-hand branch of the Chillbeck. The high peaks that headed it, and easterly, led only to more peaks. One would have to circle back several miles to find any western trail with even a chance of leading to a high pass over to the main Carpagamo road. It was a half-day’s ride downriver beyond that to loop south to the same road, the way Inglis had come in. Given his prior disastrous experience with trying to climb out over this valley’s walls, that seemed the best bet. If a man had a head start on a fast horse. The notion of trying to retrace his route all the way back to the Crow Road and head east to Saone after all, as winter turned from threat to certainty, was near-heartbreaking.

The riders strung out as Gallin turned off the road and up into the woods. The sorcerer rode right behind Inglis, a thorn in his back; one of the guards went ahead, looking frequently over his shoulder. The woods were difficult but not, Inglis thought, impassible. Centuries of valesmen gathering deadfall and timber from these more accessible lower slopes had left them semi-cleared, although tangled steeper ravines and erupting granite rock faces broke up the area into a maze.

At length, the trail opened out onto a fearsome-looking landslide, much larger than Inglis had been picturing, and the riders pulled up. The two dogs scampered ahead onto the debris.

Penric peered out over the waste after the bounding animals, and asked Inglis, “What do you see?”

“When I am not in my trance, my sight is the same as yours. Er, as any man’s.” This was not quite true in this moment, Inglis realized. There was a breathless pressure in his mind, as if he were plunged deep underwater. A shiver up his spine. Tollin’s spirit, wound around the knife under the sorcerer’s shirt, was so agitated Inglis could sense its hum from here. “What do you see?”

“When Des lends me her vision, I can see the spirits much, I think, as saints are said to do, matter and spirit superimposed, like seeing both sides of a coin at once. Scuolla seems a colorless image, like a reflection on glass. I see he’s changed his rock since yesterday. So he can move about, some. May be a trifle smudgier? Or maybe that’s what I expect, or fear, to find.” Penric’s gaze had alighted where Arrow and Blood circled a boulder, whining. “He’s looking over at us. At you? He perceives us on some level, certainly. If you could—when you could—achieve your trance, did you see spirits? And could they speak to you, or were they silent?”

“I’d not encountered many. The old ones were always silent. I’d not evoked a new one yet.”

“Tollin.”

Inglis winced. “Tollin is bound to the knife, and does not speak. To me. In my normal mind. I don’t know if…” He trailed off, confused. If he could have ascended to the spirit plane, might they have spoken together despite the binding? Inglis wasn’t sure if he would have raged at Tollin for this disaster, or begged his forgiveness, or what. If he had lost a friend in more ways than one, or if some peace might have been salvaged between them, at an hour beyond the last. If Tollin hated him…

Penric, Oswyl, and one of the guardsmen dismounted, the latter taking the reins of all three horses. All of Gallin’s attention was on the dogs. The second guardsman kicked his feet out of his stirrups, preparing perhaps to go to Inglis’s aid. The sorcerer’s bow was still bundled with his quiver, unstrung, tied to his saddle. For the first time in weeks, the burden of the knife was taken out of Inglis’s hands.

If ever I am to have a chance, it is now, right now.

Inglis threw back his head and HOWLED.

Every horse in the party reared in panic and bolted, including his own. He tossed away his stick, wrenched at his reins, and managed to get the beast aimed generally uphill. They plunged into the patchy forest. From behind him, curses and a thump as someone fell off, more curses fragmenting as a man still mounted was carried away back down the trail. For a few moments, all Inglis could do was hang on to his saddle and reins as the animal under him heaved and jinked. He bent low as slashing branches tried to behead him, sweep him from his precarious perch.

Uphill and to the left was his goal—circle around the top of the slide and lose himself in the lower forests, then find his way somehow back out of this trap of a valley… the stolen horse was essential, crutch to his bad ankle, he couldn’t let it break its legs here… at this pace it must grow winded soon, and then he would regain control…

He had reckoned without the dogs. They gave chase, barking and baying behind him, weaving faster through the trees than the horse could. Incredibly soon, he saw a rippling copper flash at the corner of his vision, and, already above him, heard the profound deep barks of Arrow. They began to drive his horse through the tilted woodland like a red deer, hunted, and its laboring haunches bunched and surged in fresh terror—his fault, for filling its dim head with visions of wolves, echoing and reverberating now from the dogs? But a deer was built for these hazardous slopes; a horse was not.

A gulf of light opened to his left, and the horse shied wildly, hooves slipping in the wet loam, almost stumbling over the cliff at the top of the slide. It jerked back upright.

Inglis kept going, the saddle yanked from under him. The world whirled wildly around his head. For an instant, the bed of broken boulders far below him invited him like a bed in truth, an offer of rest at the end of an impossibly long day. A branch brushed his arm, and his hand closed convulsively, unwilled. Bark and skin grated each other off like bits from a blacksmith’s file. Wood snapped, he turned again in air, grasped, arm yanked straight, held, slid, lost it, turned, and smacked hard on his side. If he’d had any breath left, the last impact would have knocked it out. His lungs pulsed and red murk flooded his vision before he was at last able to inhale again.

It was a dozen breaths before he could lift his head and see where he’d landed. Raw stone blocked his vision a foot from his nose. He twisted the other way, and looked out over the gray valley. He’d come to rest on an irregular ledge about halfway up the sheer drop at the head of the rockslide. It was deeper than a kitchen chair, but only just, and several paces long, but they were paces that led only out into air at the ends.

No way to climb back up. No way… well, one way down. He eyed the broken rocks fifty feet below him, and wondered if the half-fall would be enough to kill him outright. Certain death still held attraction. Uncertain death, less so. He hurt enough already.

The skin of his hands was torn, his shoulder wrenched, his bad ankle… not improved. Spectacular bruises for sure. Amazingly, his neck and back and bones generally seemed intact.

Fifty feet above him, piteous whines sounded. A few barks, less labored or frantic than before—more puzzled yaps, really. Whatever are you doing down there? they seemed to say.

Truly, I have no idea. I have no idea about anything anymore.

He lay on his ledge and concentrated on breathing, achievement enough.

After a time, he became conscious of movement below him. He pushed himself a little up and looked over. The drop reminded him of crawling out on the roof of the kin Boarford’s Easthome city mansion, five floors above a cobbled street—Tollin had dared him, he recalled. The pale face of the sorcerer looked up at him, head back-tipped. Penric was breathing fast, but otherwise seemed unfairly unruffled.

He shook his head, and called up, “I swear, Inglis, you have a talent for disasters. …It’s not a good talent, mind you. On the other hand, I’d suspected you had help, and now I’m sure of it.”

Inglis could go neither up nor down, right nor left. He felt as exposed as a wolf pelt nailed to a stable door, and as empty. He could think of no reply, not that the sorcerer had invited one, exactly.

A hundred paces away across the scree, where the path had been cut off, Gallin cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Baar caught a horse! We’re going for ropes!”

Learned Penric waved a casual hand in acknowledgment of this news, a lot less excited than Inglis thought he should be. “That will be some time,” he said, half to himself—the over-keen hearing that had come so disconcertingly with his wolf-within had still not deserted Inglis. Penric skinned out of his heavy jacket, turned up the cuffs of his linen shirt, rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms and laced his fingers together, shook them out. “Well, then,” he muttered. “I decline to shout spiritual counsel from the bottom of a well, so I guess I’d better be about this.”

He flattened himself to the cliff wall and began to climb, barely visible handhold to barely visible foothold.

His mouth opened, and his voice emerged in a strained, sharp cadence Inglis had not yet heard from the man: “Penric! I have many powers, but I can’t make us fly!”

Penric grinned, fierce in his strain. “Then you’d best keep quiet and not interrupt for the next few minutes, eh?”

At a distance, at first, he seemed to scale the rock face like a spider. As he grew closer the illusion dropped away, and he was clearly a man, taller and heavier than he had quite seemed in his smiling affability; the tendons stood out in his hands and arms as he pulled himself up. As he gained each few feet he wheezed, “I admit… it’s been… a while…” When he at last reached the edge of the ledge, he very definitely heaved himself over, scrambling, not like the airy aplomb of vaulting on his horse. “Thank you, Drovo,” he gasped, incomprehensibly, rolling to his knees, shaking out his hands again. “I think.”

Slowly, gingerly, Inglis pushed himself upright and scooted back till his spine met the stone. His outstretched feet hung over the abyss. Breathing heavily, Penric plopped himself down beside him and stretched his legs out, too. They might have been two boys seated side-by-side on a log across a stream. Perhaps feeling the same, Penric picked up a loose stone and tossed it over the side, cocking his head as if listening for the splash. The faint crack of its landing was a long time coming.

Pinned crookedly to the left shoulder of his weskit, Inglis saw, where it had lain concealed beneath his coat, the divine sported the Temple braids of his full rank, three loops of interlaced white, cream, and silver, the hanging tails tipped with silver beads. They were stiff and clean, as though seldom worn since Penric had taken his oaths. That could not have been so many months before Inglis had been invested with his own powers. Penric’s ceremony had probably had less blood in it.

Although, considering the necessary origin of his demon, not less death, nor a lesser sacrifice. Hm.

Oswyl’s voice called from the rubble below: “Is he all right? Or were you prophetic about precipices?”

Penric swung around on his belly and hung his head over the edge, a move which made Inglis shudder. He did stretch and crane till he could just make out the locator, standing below looking up as Penric lately had.

Penric waved back. “Seems to be little the worse. Shaken up, though.”

“Fools and madmen,” Oswyl muttered, and sat down on a handy boulder, heaving an exhausted sigh. A bigger man, he did not seem inspired to hoist himself up what Inglis had taken for a sheer rock wall after the divine. Sorcerer. Whatever he was. He raised his face and voice and added, “Remember what I said about putting him on a horse?”

Penric grinned, and called back, “Remember what I said about the luck of such a ride?”

“Huh.” Oswyl grimaced like a man sucking vinegar. “Carry on, O Learned One.”

“I intend to. Is he not what every Temple divine desires, a captive audience?”

“I still want him back when you’re done with your lessons.”

“Pray for us, then.”

The gesture Oswyl made back at this was not in the least holy. Penric, still grinning, spun around and sat back up, and Inglis’s spine sought the reassuring rock again.

The grin faded to a thoughtful look, and Penric began to edge away, then stopped himself. “Scuolla has joined us,” he said quietly.

“Is that”—Inglis’s hands went to his temples—“why I feel this horrible pressure in my head?”

“Did you hit it, in your fall?” A look of medical concern flitted across Penric’s features, and he leaned across the space to lift his palm and press against Inglis’s forehead; Inglis flinched.

“Not much,” said Inglis, as Penric murmured, “No…”

His hand falling back, Penric went on with maddening obscurity, “Then I think it must be your other visitor.”

Inglis uncompressed his lips, and said, “What does Scuolla look like? To you?”

Penric stared at the empty space between them. “A plain old mountain man in a sheepskin vest, rudely interrupted when he went out to feed his animals. Not at all what I would have taken as a great-souled one, beloved of the gods. Lesson to me.”

“Great-souled? I thought that was kings, and, and generals.”

“No, those are merely great men.” Penric kept on gazing curiously at nothing. “He is very patient. Well, he would have to be, wouldn’t he, to work his art in a medium that takes more than a man’s lifetime to complete. …Another who waits here is not so patient, I think.” The pressure in Inglis’s head throbbed; the divine made the five-fold tally. “So let us pray, too.”

“Pray? Are you serious?”

Penric turned his hands out in a shrug. “It’s my job. My other job, I was lately reminded. From my very first oath, three years before these”—he touched his braids—“were tacked on me.”

“So what do we pray for, ropes? Pulleys?”

“Such material aids are the purview of men, not gods.” He held up his hand and spread out his fingers. “The five theological purposes of prayer, I was taught, are service, supplication, gratitude, divination, and atonement. You could easily go five-for-five up here, I think.” He dropped his hand and smiled faintly out over the valley; the dreary view did not seem to rate such approval.

“What do you pray for?” Inglis thrust back, growing surly with this elliptical… humor, if it was humor. At his expense, of course. He was feeling entirely destitute, just now.

“I try not to bother the gods any more than I can possibly help,” returned Penric, unperturbed. “Once, One answered me back. It was an experience to make a man cautious.”

“Twice, I think,” growled Inglis.

“Hm?”

He leaned his aching skull back against the stone and recited, “Other, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister…”

Penric’s lips twitched. “Are you feeling, ah, thwacked?”

“If I were any more thwacked right now, I don’t think I could sit upright.” Inglis sighed. “You go right on being stingy with your prayers, Learned.”

“Let us practice yours some more, then.”

“Will that be any safer?”

“I trust not. Begin. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other…”

Their recent drill made his reluctant response fall inevitably: “Bless this work and help me serve another.” He eyed the empty space Penric had left between them. Had the couplet’s wording not been so simple and silly as he’d thought?

“Continue on your own.”

“Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other…”

It was foolish. He was a fool. So was Penric. They were all great fools, here. He should just give up and live with the fact. The other choice was the rock bed, which had already killed one shaman, which could cap a lifetime of foolery. Did the gods take fool souls, as well as great ones? No, They couldn’t, for the fools ran away. Gods, but he was tired of running away.

As the fifth repetition left his lips, he broke through. As sudden and astonishing as his very first ascent ever, he was there. But this time he could hold his place, like a falcon gripping the air and, miraculously, rising without even beating its outstretched wings.

The ledge, the stone behind and the vale in front, the material world, were still present, but barely, as a great undefined space seemed to open out all around him. Undefined, yet seething with potential. But he was not alone in it.

Sitting next to him indeed was an old mountain man in a sheepskin vest, his feather-decked hat pushed back on his head. He wasn’t an image on glass, though, but full of color, vastly more intense than the faint gray valley around them. His spirit-density was the very opposite of transparent. The beautiful Great Dog he bore within him had made its home in this kennel for so long, the two were nearly one, intertwined. He smiled in a friendly way at Inglis, with a strange pure kindness unalloyed by irony or judgment. He didn’t even seem to say, You are very laggard, though Inglis thought he had a right.

Penric sat beyond him, staring head-tilted with concern at Inglis’s body. The blond man’s solid self was grayed out as well, along with all the other surfaces of the world, but for the first time Inglis saw under the sunny exterior. The sorcerer’s interior was terrifying, its layered complexity reaching back through time like a cavern passageway descending deep into the earth, dark with secrets. His demon. And he lives with this? Every day?

Then he looked up, farther.

A tall figure leaned casually against the ledge wall beyond Penric. It seemed a young huntsman in the poor men’s dress of this country, much like the fellows who had brought Inglis in off the trail that first morning, or like Scuolla. A triangular sheepskin cap topped his glowing copper curls, which were the color of Blood’s fur. His face was a light much too strong to look at directly, and Inglis shaded his spirit-eyes with his spirit-hands, then clapped them over his face altogether. All else was blocked, but not the burning light. He let his hands fall, and found himself gasping as though he had been running.

He thought the face smiled at him, like the sun through the cool air on a mountain’s side, warming, welcome. And far, far more terrifying than the demon.

The figure waved a casual hand. Go on.

“How, lord?”

Call it out of him. For you, it will come. It was a very good dog, after all.

It couldn’t be that simple. Could it? Here, it can. This is a simple place, after all. And Inglis wasn’t even sure whose thought that was.

Inglis inhaled the no-air of the plane, held out his hand as if to a strange dog to sniff, and called, “Come, boy.” Then felt stupid for the trailing endearment, for surely the beast was far older than he was…

Stop that, said the figure’s voice, amiably, like a man commanding his pet to stop scratching. This is the time for my judgments, not yours.

The response was slow, like an old dog or an old man getting up, one-half at a time. Stiffly, but obediently, the shape flowed out of Scuolla. Slipping through Inglis’s hands, like a whisper of fur as a dog wriggled out of his grasp. And gone. Where? Surely not into utter dissolution?

“Will it be well?” Inglis asked timidly.

All will be well, in my hands. But you see now why all hunts, however exciting, must end with respect for the creature hunted. That is your hope, too, after all.

Inglis had no idea what to say to that. In terror lest the figure would vanish again, as if—no, he neither summoned nor dismissed this like some mere apparition, but he blurted, “Lord, there is one other.”

I do not forget. But that is your task, now.

At some point, Penric had drawn the knife from its sheath and held it ready on his lap. He squinted in concern at Inglis’s body, still sitting up against the rock wall: more motionless than sleep, too tense for death. With a huge effort, Inglis flopped out its hand, open. Cautiously, Penric laid the knife on its palm. The hand convulsed around the ivory hilt; Penric quietly lifted hand and knife back into Inglis’s lap.

For the first time, Inglis realized he had appeared on the plane in his human form—not as wolf, or even as man-with-wolf’s-head. It might be a good thing. The stretched-out boar spirit was, he saw now through its ferocity, quite frightened enough. This time, he coaxed it out softly, gently. He had hated it for what it had done to Tollin, and through Tollin to himself, but it was one of the Son’s creatures with the rest. He handed it off to the waiting god, and bowed his head in respect, and spread his fingers wide over his heart in His sign.

Tollin unwound from the knife and stood up, looking dizzied and bewildered. His colors were ragged, paler than Scuolla’s, who sat taking it all in like a satisfied onlooker to some beloved campfire tale. Tollin’s mouth opened as he saw Inglis, though no sound came out, but then his face rose to the figure by the wall, and he stood stunned.

For a moment, to Inglis’s horror, Tollin held back. Guilt, grief? Fear of not being good enough, strong enough… it had not just been youthful arrogance that had led him to beg for the boar spirit, after all. A mixture of motives not savory, but so, so understandable to Inglis now. Tollin stood silent, and small, and ashamed.

The Son of Autumn held out His hand, close but not touching. Tollin’s face turned away, suffused with misery, but his hand jerked out, once, twice. On the second, his hand was grasped, and all anguish fled from his features, because the astonished awe left no room for it.

And then he was gone.

The Hunter turned then, bent, and extended his hand to Scuolla. Who, to Inglis’s surprise, spoke, and in the affectionate voice of a man to a long-time comrade: “But will there be good beer?”

The Hunter’s voice returned, in like humor: “If there is beer, it will be very good. If there is not, it will be because there’s something better. It’s not a wager you can lose. Come on, old man.”

As the Hunter heaved Scuolla up, the old man said, “You took your time, getting here.”

“I did My best with what I had,” the god answered him back.

“Seems so.” Scuolla looked warmly down at Inglis. “Take good care of my dogs, lad.”

Inglis nodded, breathless. “I will, sir.”

Scuolla dipped his chin in pleased acceptance. “Now I can go.”

“About time,” his Friend murmured, amused. “Who is dawdling now?”

Inglis found himself on his knees, holding up both hands palm-out, fingers spread. He hardly knew what he meant to say. Is that all, am I done? Instead it came out, “Will we meet again?”

The Hunter smiled. Once, for certain.

And then Inglis let go, and he was falling, falling, back into the world, laughing so hard he was crying, or crying so hard he was laughing, or some other reaction much too large for any human frame to hold.

Fortunately, Learned Penric was waiting to catch him before he rolled off the ledge that he’d forgotten was before him.

“There, there…” Penric clutched his shaking body and patted his back as if calming a hysterical child, prudently dragging him over to the wall again. “You’ve seen a god, I know, I know,” he soothed. “You’ll be drunk on it for days. No doubt Oswyl will be highly offended, which will be entertaining in its own way…”

Gasping, Inglis rolled over in his lap and grabbed up at his collar. “What, what did you see? Just now?”

Penric gently undid his clenching fingers before he tore the fabric. “I saw you go into your trance. It was a bit alarming. Might have been taken for a stroke—you should warn your companions about that. Your nose bled. I saw when Tollin came unbound, and when he went off. Scuolla, too. It was hard to get much more, because Des went into retreat. Since she has nowhere to go but inward, this results in her curling up into this sort of impenetrable, useless ball—” his voice rose on this last, not, apparently, to Inglis’s address, for he added aside to Inglis, “Gods terrify demons. They are the one power that can destroy them. Understandable.” Inglis wasn’t sure who was supposed to understand what, but Penric hesitated for a long moment. He held up his hand, fingers spreading as if miming a man pressing on a glass, except that it also recalled his five kinds of prayers. Supplication, Inglis thought. “Otherwise… otherwise, it was like standing outside a window in the rain, looking in on some harvest party, to which I knew I was not invited.”

“Oh,” said Inglis, stupidly. And at an echo in his mind of Stop that, grinned uncontrollably despite it all. He rubbed at his upper lip, and his hand came away sticky and red, but the bleed seemed to have stopped on its own.

Penric held his hair and peered down into his face with a curiosity…medical? theological? magical? or just the inquisitive scholar? Voices and barking echoed from below, and Penric craned his neck. “…Right. So, here comes Gallin, and a lot of excited men with ropes. I hope they brought enough. Arrow and Blood are running over to greet them, or maybe hurry them along. Or trip them and break their legs, hard to tell with dogs. Are you going to give us any more trouble?”

“I am in your hands,” Inglis said, limply. And truthfully. And thankfully.

Rescue. I am rescued. Of all men to be lost in these mountains, he had to have been the most lost, and the most rescued. Such rescues had been Scuolla’s calling, had they not? him and his brave band of dogs. The shaman’s last rescue, and the shaman rescued, hand to hand to hand to hand in a long, long chain of help beyond hope. Reaching how far back?

…And how far forward?