Penric and the Shaman

II

“I’m bored,” whined Desdemona. “Bored, bored, bored.”

Penric, as soon as he regained control of his lips from her, smiled down at the page across which his quill was carefully making its way. “Destroy a flea.”

“We slew every flea in the palace precincts weeks ago. And all the lice as well.”

“And I’m sure everyone here would be grateful to you,” murmured Pen, “if they knew.” He had learned early on in his association with his demon, which had gifted him with the powers, though not yet the learning, of a Temple sorcerer, to be discreet about the deployment of their magics. He deployed his quill in the setting down of the next three words in Darthacan, glanced up at the volume in the Wealdean tongue he was copying, and translated the next line in his head, cross-checking to be sure it was the next line, and not one up or down from it. He’d ruined not a few pages by that inattention.

He pressed his lips closed to prevent interruptions while he unloaded the complex medical phrase, then rolled his shoulders and stretched. “Your part will come soon,” he said tranquilly. “Just three more lines and this page is done. You shall like that.”

“It was only diverting the first hundred times. After that, it was as bad as worms.”

Desdemona, formerly, had been the possession of a Temple physician-sorceress of the Mother’s Order, devoted to medicine and the healing arts. Two such women, actually, in her long succession of riders. Which was where she had picked up her mastery of the Darthacan tongue, passing it in turn to him, and of medicine as it related to sorcery, in which Penric was… making slower progress.

“I shall not make you treat people’s worms.”

“You made us treat bookworms.”

Penric arranged another sentence in his head, and studiously ignored her till it was transferred. She did not try to interrupt, having learned by experience that however droll fouling his lines might seem to a demon of disorder, it just sent him around to start over at the beginning, and then she had to endure her tedium twice as long.

At her next chance, she said, “At least ask the princess-archdivine if we can ride courier for her again this week.”

“Des, it’s snowing.” He glanced up at the fine glass window of his tiny, but private, work chamber on the palace’s fourth floor, which let the light in and kept the vile weather out. In his not-that-long-ago youth at Jurald Court, his family’s home at the feet of the great mountains that bounded the Cantons on the north, he’d been sent out in the snow to hunt or check the trap lines. Sitting indoors with a blanket over his lap, lifting nothing heavier than a feather, was much nicer, even as he’d discovered that the small muscles of the eyes and hands could get just as fatigued as big ones.

Last line. He sat up, read the page down once and up from the bottom once, matching it almost line-by-line to the original—Darthacan was a fluffier, if more structurally logical, tongue than Wealdean—and rose to collect the next wooden printing plate from the stack.

He had devised this process while studying at the Bastard’s Seminary at Rosehall, adjunct to the great university in that Wealdean town. Poor scholars had to rent, and share, their frightfully expensive books, which had led to much brangling over turns, a couple of memorable fistfights, and one stabbing. Which Pen could never mix into because it would have been unfair, not to mention that few fellow students, once they learned of his sorcerous-if-untrained status, challenged him…

“…more than once,” Des murmured smugly.

Des was getting disturbingly good at reading his thoughts, these days. Practice, I suppose. He was a bit peeved that the process did not seem to be reciprocal, though he had certainly grown able to sense her moods—so many, many moods—and had become almost unthinkingly fluent in their silent speech. When they were alone, he tried to let her chatter on aloud with his mouth as much as she pleased, which seemed to help keep her in a good humor. Bad idea when not alone, since their conversations all took place in his voice. To the confusion, and a few times violent offense, of their auditors.

He pulled the next prepared wooden plate off the stack at the end of his worktable, and carefully arranged his new page face-down across it. As habitually as when sitting down to dinner, he blessed the work with the tally of the gods: touching his forehead for the Daughter of Spring, his lips for the Bastard, his navel for the Mother of Summer, his groin for the Father of Winter, and spreading his hand over his heart for the Son of Autumn. And then tapped his thumb twice more against his lips, for luck. Sitting up straight, he said, “Ready, Des?”

“You hardly need me for this, anymore,” she griped, but flowed into alignment with him nonetheless.

He passed his hand above the plate. A stink of wood rot and burning arose from it, along with a puff of steam mixed with smoke. His hand heated, pleasantly taming its cramping. His carefully calligraphed page grayed into ash.

He took up his brush and whisked away the ash and crumbs. Raised upon the surface was left a perfect mirror replica of his page, ready to turn over to the palace printer for making anything from a few dozen to hundreds of copies. The work would have taken an ordinary woodcarver the better part of a week, and wouldn’t be nearly so fine. He could produce ten plates a day, and it was only that slow because he’d not yet figured out how to perform it with anyone’s writing but his own.

The trick of it was in the destruction of the handwritten page, so that there was no net gain in order. Uphill, creative magic was costly; downhill, destructive magic was cheap. What happened to the plate afterward in the hands of ordinary men did not seem to impinge on this demonic summation. He could do this all day long.

The princess-archdivine had been delighted with his new skill, when he’d first shown it to her, and now used him regularly for her official pamphlets. In between those interrupting assignments, he was permitted to get on with the task of his heart, reproducing Learned Ruchia’s two-volume work on sorcery and medicine to be distributed to the Bastard’s Order throughout the Cantons and the Weald—and, soon, Darthaca and Ibra. (And after that, perhaps Adria and far Cedonia? Des moaned in prospect.) And to which he had added a short epilogue detailing his new technique—A Codicil by Learned Penric of Martensbridge, Sorcerer, he had proudly headed it—which should multiply its effect yet further. He owed Ruchia that living memorial, he thought, for death-gifting him with her demon, however inadvertently.

Well, inadvertent from his point of view, hers, and her demon’s. He was uneasily unsure about the intentions of the white god that she, and now he, served. Though so far, Penric seemed to have been let get on with his life free of holy molestation.

At a cautious knock at his workroom door, Pen called, “Enter.”

A palace page in the blue tabard of a dedicat of the Daughter’s Order poked her head in, though only a few wary inches. She jerked back and waved a hand before her nose, grimacing, as the smoky fug of Pen’s labors wafted out into the corridor. “Learned Penric, sir. The princess-archdivine bids you attend upon her in her private cabinet.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Learned.”

Penric waved amiable acknowledgment. “Very good. I’ll follow presently.”

The girl whisked away, and Pen rose and set his tools in order.

Hurrah! said Des. Something new? An outing? An airing…?

“More chores, more likely.” Pen closed his door and made his way down the corridor.

The princess-archdivines of the royal free town and hinterland of Martensbridge were, by law and long custom, appointees in the gift of the distant Hallow King of the Weald. The town’s charter from him, and fealty to him, were what made it royal; the distance was what made it free, Penric suspected. Save for one or two lapses that they had managed to repair by strategic marriages, bribes, and a few armed clashes, the high house of kin Stagthorne had held onto the throne through the past several generations of elections. The current holder of the Martensbridge benefice had thus been, by the turning furrows of time, first daughter, then sister, then aunt to the succeeding kings.

Princess-Archdivine Llewen kin Stagthorne was now a slight, shrewd woman of sixty, who had carried out her duties to the Temple in this pocket palatine realm with the firm hand of a frugal housewife for some thirty years. As Penric knocked at the door to her private cabinet, one floor down from his own and adjacent to her chancellery, and was bade to enter, he found her dressed in the five-colored holy robes of her Temple office. Presumably she’d been caught either on the way to or from some ceremonial task. She was flanked as usual by her secretary, a woman of like age—and shrewdness—in the silks and linen and fine woolens appropriate to the palace precincts.

A strange man was also present, not nearly so finely clad. Above middle height, broad-shouldered, fit; perhaps thirty years of age? Brown hair, gray eyes. Face and hands red and chapped with cold; recently shaved but not, given his road-reek, recently bathed; riding boots cursorily cleaned of mud. Pen might have taken him for some urgent courier, but for the distinctive gray doublet with the brass buttons peeking out from beneath his thrown-back black cloak.

What’s a Wealdean Grayjay doing here?

The man eyed him in turn, then palpably dismissed him. Penric advanced to kiss the archdivine’s ring, held out perfunctorily to his inky fingers, and murmured, “How may I serve you, Your Grace?”

“Well, let us find out. Pull up a chair, Penric.” She nodded to the wall, where a few stools for favored visitors or supplicants were lined up. Unfavored ones were kept standing. The Grayjay had already been granted one, and the secretary another; the princess-archdivine occupied her carved seat, perhaps not accidentally reminiscent of a throne, and the only one supplied with a cushion. Supplicants were not encouraged to linger, not out of any high-nosed pride on the princess’s part, but because there were always other supplicants waiting.

Llewen went on mildly, “How goes your latest translation?”

“Well, Your Grace. Another two weeks of uninterrupted”—Penric made sure to emphasize that last word; Desdemona snickered silently—“work should see it ready to send out into the world after its sister volumes. I’m starting to think about its Ibran-language edition. Some recent medical texts in that tongue would be useful for reference, if they might be obtained for me. Helvia and Amberein gave me the Wealdean and Darthacan terminology, but Aulia of Brajar was no physician. And also, she may be out of date.”

The strange man’s hand clenched in impatience upon his knee. “Your Grace…” squeezed out between his lips, protest constricted by politeness, or perhaps the prudence of a man who hadn’t yet had his wish granted.

“Ah,” said the princess. “Permit me to introduce Senior Locator Oswyl, agent of the Father’s Order in Easthome. He is here, he tells me, on a mission of close pursuit, complicated by some very peculiar aspects, for which he earnestly begs the support of a sorcerer.”

Senior Locator was a title of a Temple Inquirer of middle rank; not the lowly man-at-arms of a mere Locator, nor the heights of an Inquirer or, more dizzyingly, Senior Inquirer, who were normally learned divines, but something betwixt and between. Although the name of his Order’s home chapter, from the royal capital itself, added some tacit clout. Penric sat up, interested, and offered the man a friendly smile and a little wave of his fingers. He did not smile back.

“And this is Penric, my sorcerer,” Princess Llewen went on, with a nod Pen’s way.

Oswyl’s eyes widened. In a voice of unflattering surprise, he said, “That’s your court sorcerer? I was expecting someone… older.”

And better dressed, perhaps? Penric was very fond of his hard-earned white robes of the Bastard’s Order, and wildly proud of his shoulder braids marking him as a divine and a sorcerer, but he had quickly learned not to wear them while at work. At least not when yoked with a demon of disorder with a questionable sense of humor. As a result, most days he went about the palace precincts looking the tattered clerk Oswyl had evidently taken him for. Since the palace denizens knew who he was by now, this was not usually a problem. He could turn himself out as a showy, and laundered, ornament to the court well enough when someone gave him warning…

Thinking of his incomplete translation, Pen stifled his leaping curiosity and offered, “You could try Learned Tigney of the Bastard’s Order on Stane Street. He is the master and bailiff of all Temple sorcerers in this archdivineship.” Not that this secretive company numbered many. Nor did that number include Penric, who owed fealty directly to the princess-archdivine in return for his late schooling.

“I started with Tigney. He sent me here,” growled the Grayjay, sounding frustrated. “I told him I needed someone powerful.”

“I trust,” murmured the princess, “you do not judge so quickly by appearances in your inquiries, Locator.”

Oswyl went a little rigid, but swallowed any attempt at answering this observation, yes or no being equally hapless choices.

Feeling faintly sorry for the man—he’d run into the sharp side of the princess’s tongue himself a time or two, though never without having earned it—Penric offered peaceably, “So what do you need this powerful sorcerer for, sir?”

The princess waved her beringed hand. “Tell the tale again, Locator. With a bit more detail this time, if you please. If something so dangerous has entered my lands, I need to understand it.”

Oswyl took a long breath, of a man about to recount the same story for, by Pen’s guess, the third time in a day. At least it ought to be well-practiced. He at last addressed Penric directly: “What do you know of the Wealdean royal shamans?”

Penric sat back, or aback. “Not… a great deal. I’ve never met one in person. Their society is engaged in an attempt to recover something of the Old Weald forest magics, thought to be stamped out in the conquests of Great Audar. Except brought under the disciplines of the Temple, this time.”

The Darthacan conquest of the Weald had taken three hard-fought generations, five hundred years ago; three generations later, Audar’s empire had all fallen apart again in internal discord. But when the Darthacan tide receded, the Temple remained, and the old forest tribes, shattered and scattered as much by the passage of time and the progress of the world as by Darthacan arms, never reestablished themselves. Why the restored, if much changed, Wealdean hallow kings had sponsored this antiquarian revival when they had perfectly good Temple sorcerers at their disposal, Penric did not know, although the interested scholar in him felt a sneaking approval.

“The shamans’ magic is a human creation, or at least, rising from the world instead of descending, or escaping, from a god as demons do,” Penric went on. “In the old forests, tribal shamans were said to invest their warriors with the spirits of fierce animals, to endow them with that strength and ferocity in battle. The making of a shaman partook of this, only more so. The spirits of animals were sacrificed into others of the same kind, generation after generation, piled up until they became something more, Great Beasts. Invested at last into a person, the spirit of such a creature brought its powers to him not”—he cleared his throat—“not unlike the way a demon of the white god does for a sorcerer. Despite the very different origins of the gifts.”

Humph, said Desdemona, but did not contradict this.

As Penric drew breath, the princess held up a stemming hand. “Penric is quite fond of reading, and will happily share all he learns. But perhaps not all at once? Go on, please, Locator.”

The Grayjay pressed his forehead, as though it ached, and grimaced. “Right. The first the Father’s Order at Easthome was told of this case was after that mess at the funeral, which was late off the mark. We should have been called out when they first found the body. Howsoever. I was dispatched to investigate and report on a suspicious death at the estate of one of the minor branches of the kin Boarford family, about ten miles outside of the capital. Not home of the earl-ordainer, thankfully, although for that I suppose they would have sent a more senior man.

“As I—eventually—worked out the chain of events, one of the scions of the family, a young man with military ambitions named Tollin kin Boarford, had purchased a wild boar captured alive from some hunters. He’d kept it for some weeks in a sty on the estate. His older brother thought that he had plans for some boar-baiting show, because instead of making any attempt to tame it, he teased it to make it wilder. Although I suppose either plan would have been equally stupid. But when Tollin was found one morning in the sty, shirtless and with his belly ripped open, and the boar bled dry with a knife in its throat, it seemed to the servants and family death by plain misadventure. The boar was butchered and fed to the dogs. Tollin’s body was washed and wrapped and made ready for his funeral rites at the old family temple on the estate, conducted by the local divine.

“Which was where everything went wrong, because none of the funeral animals signed that any god had taken up his soul, not the Son of Autumn, which would have been expected, not the Bastard, nor any other. As far as his family could tell, he had become a sundered ghost, and no one knew why. The divine, finally, sent for help.”

But instead, they got this Grayjay, Desdemona quipped. Penric pressed his lips closed.

“There was not much to see in the sty, and the boar was eaten by then, but I did, with some argument, get the family to allow me to unwrap and examine the body. Where I was apparently the first to notice that, in addition to the ghastly goring of his abdomen, there was a slit of a knife wound just under his left breast. Shifting the event from misadventure to murder.”

“Huh,” said Pen, impressed.

“At that point, I reexamined the knife, and determined that it was not only too wide to have made the wound, it was too wide to fit in Tollin’s belt sheath. Not his blade at all. And after a search of the sty, its environs, and pretty much the whole estate, no other knife of the right dimensions was found. Carried off, it seemed, by whoever had stabbed him to the heart.”

Huh, said Des, less unimpressed. She seized Pen’s mouth to inquire, very much in Learned Ruchia’s cadences, “Could you tell which injury came first, the knife wound or the goring?”

Oh, now that’s an interesting question, Pen commented, deciding to forgive her for the unauthorized interruption, not least because Oswyl glanced across at him with a shade more respect.

“I could not. I’m not sure it would have been apparent even if I had been able to see the body when it was first found. But I took the knife and my inquiry to Tollin’s friends. None of them recognized the blade, but at last I learned that Tollin had also been comrades with a royal shaman, one newly invested with his powers. A younger son of the northern kin Wolfcliffs.”

The princess nodded. “That branch of their kin has been noted for supplying royal shamans since Good King Biast revived the practices, a century before my birth. Or so it was when I last lived at the king’s hall in Easthome.”

The Grayjay nodded back. “It’s still so. This shaman, Inglis kin Wolfcliff, was said by his friends to have been trying to court Tollin’s sister, without much success. When I went looking for him, I discovered that he had vanished out of Easthome, without leave from his superiors, the day after Tollin’s death. No one knew where or why. They did identify the knife found in the boar as a ritual sort, but with no signs of the uncanny on it.

“Which is when I persuaded my superiors to issue an order for Inglis’s arrest. And the wherewithal to carry it out, which was harder to extract. Inglis seems to be an ordinary-looking fellow—middling stature, dark hair and eyes, early twenties—of which I found there is a vast brotherhood on the roads this season, none of them well remembered by anyone. Fortunately, he rode a fine flaxen mare, a gift from his family upon the occasion of his investiture I was told, which was noted by every ferryman and inn stable boy from the lower Stork to the Upper Lure all the way to the Crow. Which was where we found the mare, lamed, sold to an inn hoping to resell her to a breeder. And our quarry vanished into air.”

Penric cleared his throat. “Knowing what you pursued, shouldn’t your superiors at Easthome have requisitioned you a sorcerer before you started out?”

Oswyl’s jaw tightened. “They did. A sorcerer, six royal guardsmen, and three grooms. Upon the Crow River Road, we had a… strong difference of opinion as to which way Inglis might have fled. Learned Listere held out for his having made for Darthaca or Saone, to the east, to cross the border out of any jurisdiction of the Weald. I thought north, if for the same reason, making for the mountain passes out of these hinterlands into Adria or Carpagamo.”

The princess raised her chin. “If so, the shaman is out of his reckoning. The passes were blocked by snow a week ago. They don’t normally open again until spring. Unless you think he outraced our late-autumn blizzards?”

Oswyl’s lips unpressed unhappily. “From the Crow? If so, he would have had to be flying, not walking. My hope is to find him bottled up above your lake somewhere, stranded like a laggard merchant.”

“So where is your Easthome sorcerer now?” Penric prodded.

“Halfway to Darthaca, I suppose,” growled Oswyl. “And all the troop with him, as they refused to be divided.”

That is a very determined Grayjay, Penric observed to Desdemona, to follow his own line though his whole pack hares off without him.

Or a typical devotee of the Father’s Order, she returned, with a rod up his fundament and an obsession with his own rightness.

Who is judging by appearances now? Really, the man had just covered, what, four hundred miles between Easthome and Martensbridge, along muddy roads as winter whistled in, pushing ten men to ride as fast as a man alone. And losing his race and chase by very little margin. No wonder he seemed vexed.

Penric asked cautiously, “What exactly are the powers of this shaman, Locator? As you and your Order in Easthome understand them to be? If I am to be assisting you in this arrest?” Or making it for you, sounds like.

Oswyl turned out his chapped hands. “Shamans are said to have great powers of persuasion or compulsion—in the strongest form, to be able to lay a geas upon a person that can last for weeks. The weirding voice, they call it.”

Penric’s lips twitched. “Sounds as if the hallow king should be making them royal lawyers, not royal warriors.”

This got him a grim glare from the Grayjay. No jokes, right. Oh, well.

“I am also told that this voice does not work on sorcerers. Or rather, does not work on their demons.”

That is actually correct, murmured Desdemona. Remind me to tell you of the one Ruchia met on one of her missions to Easthome, who tried to seduce her.

Did he succeed?

Yes, but not for that reason…

With some difficulty, Penric wrenched his attention back to the Grayjay. Later. And very much not only for the salacious tale.

“It’s unclear to me,” continued Oswyl, frowning in untrusting speculation at Penric, “what happens should the weirding voice fail with the demon but work on the sorcerer.”

I will save you, Penric! Desdemona promised, in a dramatic tone. …Unless, like Ruchia, you should not care to be saved.

That one, Pen ignored. “What else?” asked Pen.

“Like their ancestors, they are supposed to be savage and merciless in close combat.”

Hence the six royal guardsmen, Pen supposed. Now on their way to Darthaca. How could he face down a desperate murderer possessing, presumably, trained martial skills, in a maniacal battle-frenzy? Not that Pen didn’t possess certain powers of speed and evasion, not to mention distraction, in his own right, but… he thought perhaps he might take his hunting bow along. The one with the heavy draw and the really long range.

Sound thinking, said Des. I should not in the least care to replace you with whatever stray passerby happened to be around if you became careless.

When their person died, a demon, unbound by this dissolution, perforce jumped to another nearby. Temple rites for a dying sorcerer assured that the approved recipient would be prepared and standing ready. Alas that not every sorcerer died to schedule… Could you jump to this shaman?

No. He’d be full-up.

Huh. I suppose that would leave the Grayjay…

Desdemona shuddered, delicately.

Confident that his demon would do everything in her very considerable powers to keep him alive—and, Pen confessed to himself (and us, put in Des), stirred to keen curiosity by all this lurid tale—he straightened on his stool, preparing to volunteer the services that everyone here so clearly was about to ask of him. But the Grayjay was going on.

“There was one other task for the forest mages. That was to bring back the souls of their slain spirit-warrior comrades from the battlefield, to undergo certain cleansing rites necessary for them to go to the gods. To prevent them from being sundered and lost.”

“I’ve read a little of that,” said Penric. “Those were the banner-carriers, right? As ghosts are sometimes bound to a place, they would bind them to their banners, to carry away to safety. That was real?”

“I… maybe. The thing is…” Oswyl hesitated. “As signed or, more correctly, not signed by his funeral miracle, Tollin was taken up by no god. He might have refused the gods out of despair, or been refused by them, and been sundered. Doomed to dissolution as a fading ghost. Or worse, involuntarily polluted by some incomplete rite, prevented from reaching his god reaching for him.” Oswyl grimaced at this sacrilege.

Pen had to agree with that sentiment. To murder a man was a crime. To deliberately sunder his soul from the gods, stealing not a life but that mysterious, eternal afterlife, was sin of the darkest, cruelest sort, a theft of unfathomable enormity.

“I requested a Temple sensitive to search the estate for any evidence of his lingering ghost. She found nothing. Well, not nothing, there were a few sad revenants faded beyond recognition, dozens or hundreds of years old. But the distraught sundered ghost of a freshly murdered man should have been livid in her Sight, she said. Tollin’s soul simply was not there.”

Oswyl drew a long breath. “As Inglis took nothing on his flight that he did not own, he is not accused of theft. I think that belief may be… mistaken.”

Penric’s jaw unhinged. “You think the man stole a ghost?”

Or should that be abducted? Ravished away? Taken hostage? This crime was going to need a whole new law devised to cover it. Just the sort of hair-splitting argument the Father’s Order reveled in, Pen supposed.

Hang the Father’s Order, murmured Des in new alarm. There will be more fearsome Powers than the gray company with an interest in this pilferage…

The princess-archdivine, too, was staring in amazement at the tight-lipped locator. Had he not ventured quite so far in his prior testimony to her? He stirred uncomfortably, making a truncated wave as if to distance himself from his own deduction, but then that hand clenched closed. “None of my superiors think so. But I do.”