Penric and the Shaman

VII

The day’s ride was slowed by several stops at likely places to inquire after their quarry, all frustratingly fruitless. But it brought Oswyl’s troop at length to the village where the local road split off to the valley of the Chillbeck. At the inn there, at last, Oswyl found report of a silent, dark-haired stranger who had spent the night and headed off into the hills, not four days ago. But also of a couple of parties making one final try for the main road north, and one whose destination was the last town within the hinterland’s borders.

After a brief debate with the sergeant and the sorcerer, Oswyl made the decision to send two men up the main road tomorrow with strict instructions, if they found the fugitive, not to approach the dangerous man, but to set one guard to follow him and the other to double back and collect their forces. It wasn’t a compromise that delighted him in any way, but no one could sensibly go farther this afternoon, with darkness impending and the horses due a rest. Oswyl gritted his teeth in endurance, and made plans to use the evening inquiring of everyone there on the nature of the country roundabout.

A little later, he tracked his sorcerer out to the field behind the inn, where the man had taken it into his strange head to seize the last light and indulge in a stint of archery. It was not a skill in which town-bred Oswyl had much experience, and he watched with reluctant respect as Penric put a dozen arrows into a distant straw bundle, then sent the inn’s potboy off to collect them.

“Out of practice.” Penric frowned at the straw man, at this range now resembling a pincushion, and shook out his bare hands in turn.

“They all hit,” observed Oswyl.

Penric rolled his eyes. “Of course they did. The target is standing still. If this is to turn into a hunting party in the hills, I need to do better.”

“Have you hunted much?”

“In my youth.” He delivered this as if his youth had been a half-century ago.

The potboy returned with the arrows, and Penric inquired of Oswyl, lifting his weapon in tentative invitation, “How are you with a bow?”

Not good enough to make a fool of himself in front of this fellow. “I’ve not had much chance to handle one.”

“What, did your father never take you out hunting?”

“My father is an Easthome lawyer. He never passes the city gates if he can help it.” Oswyl offered instead, in pointless defense, “I have some training with the short sword.”

“Huh.” Penric looked nonplussed, as if the very concept of a father who did not dash around in the woods slaughtering animals personally was a novelty. “We didn’t hunt for sport, mind you. We needed the game for our table.”

Oswyl allowed himself a trace of amusement. “Poaching?”

“Er, no, they were all our lands. My father was Baron kin Jurald. My eldest brother is, now.”

“Oh.” That was a surprise. It was wrong, of course, to assume that every person of the Bastard’s Order was a bastard or an orphan, or some other odd thing. But it was true often enough. Though this Penric might be one of those acknowledged by-blows with which lords littered the world. Hesitant to pursue that rude curiosity, Oswyl substituted, “How came a kin honorific to be attached to a Darthacan name?” The sorcerer’s light coloration made him look entirely a creature of this craggy country.

Penric shrugged. “Some last kin land-heiress met a younger son with few prospects back home in Saone, some generations ago. His dowry didn’t last, but the name and the land did.” He broke off to send the dozen retrieved arrows flying back into the distant target.

Oswyl wondered if this connection with the minor nobility would give the sorcerer added insight into their outlaw. As the countryside deepened, the palace clerk seemed to be dropping away, to be replaced by… what? Did Penric consider himself a kin warrior, or at least half a one?

Penric might have been entertaining some similar speculation, for as the potboy trotted off again, he asked, “How much of a countryman is our murderer, do you know? Or was he also one of those men who doesn’t pass the city gates?” He narrowed his gaze at the peaks that were catching and reflecting the last high light, looming much larger and closer now than back at Martensbridge.

A reasonable question. The great kin lords had town mansions, as well as distant lands like little realms. Increasingly, they also kept more convenient country estates around the capital, such as the kin Boarford manor where all this disaster had started. “I believe he grew up somewhere on the south slopes of the Raven Range, though he’s been living with kinsmen in Easthome in late years.”

“Hm. I was rather hoping for a city mouse, out of his reckoning in the hills. No such luck for us. A city wolf? Seems a bit contradictory.” He glanced at Oswyl. “Or maybe not.”

Oswyl had no idea how to respond to that. “Have you ever hunted wolves?”

“A few times, when they came down out of the hills in a starving season.”

“Winters like this?”

“Oddly, not so much. Winter is a bad time for the grazers and browsers, weakening them, but for that very reason an easier one for the fanglings that hunt them.”

“Did you get them? Your wolves?”

“Oh, yes. We made rugs of the skins.”

Penric changed his stance, kneeling, moving, turning, as he sent the next flight of arrows on its way. One missed, and he muttered an oath. “I’d have won a cuff on my ear for that one.”

“Your father’s love?” Oswyl asked dryly.

“Eh, or Old Fehn, his huntsman. Who’d trained Father. They were pleased to take turns on my ears. Both very keen on taking down the quarry with a first killing shot, if possible. I thought at first it was pious mercy to the Son of Autumn’s beasts, but eventually figured out no one wanted to chase all over after a wounded one. Not even me, after I’d tried it a few times.”

The foot-weary potboy trudged back, handing over the arrows with a poorly concealed sigh. Penric took his stance and raised his bow once more.

The straw target burst into flames.

The potboy gave a startled yelp. Oswyl jerked back.

Penric merely looked miffed. “Oh, for—! Des, we don’t set game on fire!” He lowered his bow and glowered at the licking orange flicker, merrily glowing in the gloaming.

“What was that?” Oswyl kept his voice level and didn’t let it come out a squeal, barely.

“Desdemona thinks my hunting skills are inefficient. Also, she is bored and wants to go in.” He sighed and returned his unloosed arrow to its quiver. His mouth opened and vented a voiceless laugh. He added, peevishly, “I don’t know how Ruchia put up with you, really, I don’t.”

Penric pulled his purse off his belt, dug into it, and handed over a coin to the potboy, now quivering like a restless pony. “Practice over. Off you go.” The boy absconded the instant his fingers closed over his payment, looking worriedly back over his shoulder a couple of times in his hasty retreat to the inn yard.

Oswyl wondered to what god he should be praying for luck in his chase. Not that any god had ever answered his pleas, whether on his knees by his bed as a boy, or prone in the Temple as a man. He stared glumly at the sorcerer’s braided blond queue, pale in the growing shadows, as the man unstrung his bow and reordered his gear, then followed him back inside.

The village of Linkbeck lay high up its vale, past what seemed to Oswyl’s Wealdean eye impoverished farms, tending to rocky, tilted pastures rather than grain fields. The cows were fat enough, though, the barns big and solid in fieldstone and dark-stained timber, the houses in a like style, with pale stones scattered over their wood-shingled roofs. The excessively tall mountains loured over all, winter white at their tops, while the valley road was still sodden with autumn mud beneath a crunching, frozen crust. The aspiring river ran green and foaming beneath the wooden span that gave the settlement its name.

The sorcerer pushed his horse up beside Oswyl’s as they approached the outskirts, if the half-dozen houses on this side of the river could be so grandly dubbed. “So what is your plan?” Penric inquired—diplomatically, since coming this way at all had been his plan.

Oswyl shrugged. “Start with the local Temple divine. Such shepherds tend to be most knowing of the folk about, and will have what news there is.” In this backwater, not much, Oswyl suspected, but Penric was right that strangers would stand out; a few villagers working around their places turned to stare as the party rode past. The guard sergeant cast polite, reassuring salutes at them.

Penric cleared his throat. “It might be best not to mention my calling, at first. Or my rank. The former tends to make me a distracting novelty in places like this, rather like a performing bear, and the latter would get either daunted deference from rural Temple folk, or elicit every complaint they have of their superiors who neglect them. As if they could draft me as their messenger.”

And neither would speed Oswyl’s inquiries. “What should I name you, then?”

Penric tilted his head. “Your assistant, I suppose. Your local guide. Not untrue.”

It seemed a curious reticence, from a young man who had seemed proud enough of his rank back in the princess-archdivine’s palace. Better, Oswyl supposed, than the off-balance swagger one sometimes observed in those newly promoted to tasks above their weight. They clopped over the bridge and turned onto the main street, where they soon found the local temple. It was built in a style not unlike the barns and houses, fieldstone and dark timber, if taller and six-sided. A little crowd was gathered under a broad portico running the full length of the front, and Oswyl stopped his horse short, flinging up a hand to halt his party. After another moment, Oswyl dismounted to wait more respectfully. Penric followed his lead, coming to stand beside him and watch.

A funeral was in progress, and had reached its most delicate stage, the signing of the gods, or god. Upon a bier decorated with evergreen boughs, a shrouded figure lay. At the head stood a middle-aged man in the five-colored robes of a divine—no, an acolyte, by the single braid looping at his left shoulder. At his sign, what was plainly the family of the deceased shuffled back out of the way to stand attentively along the wall, and the holy animals and their grooms waiting at the side came alert.

A young man had a pet raven perched upon his shoulder, clearly intended as the representative of the Father. A youth, surely a close relative, held a copper-red dog on a leash, its long fur brushed to a silky shimmer, as plainly the emblem of the Son. A leggy girl gripped the lead of a fat white pony, its shaggy hide curried as well as it could be at this season, looking quite appropriate as a beast of the Bastard. An older woman cradled a placid mama cat, marked only by the green ribbon signifying the Mother around its neck, and a younger girl clutched a squirming kitten, objecting to a like ribbon in blue for the Daughter.

One by one, the acolyte motioned the handlers to the bier. The raven, held out hopefully on the young man’s arm, evinced no interest in the proceedings, and hopped back to its shoulder perch. The kitten continued its war with its ribbon. The pony sniffed briefly, causing the people lined up against the wall to stiffen in dismay, but then pulled away, tugging to get its head down and crop some weeds growing up at the corner of the portico. The red dog also sniffed, waving its tail genially but without any obvious excitement. The mama cat jumped down from the woman’s arms and curled up neatly upon the chest of the deceased—an elderly grandmother, apparently—and blinked placid gold eyes. A general ripple of relief ran through the mourners, briefly stayed when the dog pulled back, but it was evidently attracted by the cat, not the dead woman, and was swiftly discouraged by a possessive hiss and a swipe of claws.

In great city temples like the ones at Easthome, the signing of which god had taken up the soul of the dead had economic as well as theological significance, as Orders devoted to individual gods took possession of the family’s monetary offerings for prayers for the dead. Here, there was likely only one altar table, the colors of its coverings changed out seasonally. It was perhaps shrewd showmanship that had inspired the acolyte to offer the Mother’s beast last, rather than cutting things short by beginning with the obvious. Poor these people might be, but not, therefore, paltry.

“That red dog…” muttered Penric out of the corner of his mouth to Oswyl.

“What about it?”

“I think we’ve come to the right place.”

“How so?”

But the sorcerer only made a wait wave of his hand, vexingly, although he continued to look around with keen interest.

The acolyte intoned a short prayer, and signed the tally of the gods. The half-dozen burliest men of the family took up the bier and bore it off up the street, and the grooms collected their animals and headed in the opposite direction, quickly losing their formal demeanor. The acolyte, making to follow the bier, glanced uncertainly at Oswyl’s party and paused. The woman who had repossessed the mama cat came to his side.

“May I help you, sirs?” he said.

“My name is Locator Oswyl, and I am on a mission of inquiry from Easthome,” Oswyl began. As the man jerked his head back in alarm, Oswyl quickly added, “I want to ask after any strangers you may have lately heard about in your district, but we can wait till your duties are done, Acolyte, ah…?”

“Gallin,” said the acolyte, looking less alarmed but more curious. “Uh, perhaps my wife, Gossa, can take you in and make you comfortable till I return?”

It wasn’t clear which of them he was asking, but the woman, looking equally curious, relieved the cat of its ribbon and set it down, shooing it away with her foot. She bobbed a curtsey at the unexpected visitors. “Indeed, sirs. Follow me.”

The children with the animals also paused to stare. Penric cast a special smile at the girl with the white pony, touching his thumb to his lips in a blessing of the white god; the girl looked surprised at this courtesy. Gossa directed what were ever-more-obviously her offspring in assorted directions, the girl with the kitten to stop playing and run ahead to put the kettle on.

The guardsmen with all their horses were sent in the wake of the girl with the pony. Oswyl stepped aside to instruct them, once they had settled the beasts in the temple’s stable around back, to spread out through the village and make inquiries as they had done at every stop so far, then hurried to catch up with his reticent sorcerer and the acolyte’s wife. Such Temple spouses were often as much the servants of the gods as their mates, if through their mates. She must be a source of local news as good as Gallin.

The acolyte’s house was next to the temple, and had little to distinguish it from others along the village street, although the front windows were set with glass, not parchment. It held a cramped but cheerful air suggesting more children than money. The kitchen was set to the back with a sort of parlor-study in front, doubtless where the acolyte performed his spiritual counseling, and to which the visitors were conducted. Oswyl had thus to wait till his hoped-for informant returned from her domestic domain to begin his inquiries. The young girl approached the smiling Penric to show off her kitten, which the sorcerer duly held in his lap and admired. Stroked by his long fingers, it purred like a cogwheel. Oswyl trusted no one else noticed the faint patter of dead fleas drifting off the beast when it was handed back. Oswyl attempted a smile as well, but it apparently lacked the blond man’s magic; he was offered no kitten.

Goodwife Gossa, assisted by her dekittened daughter, bustled back in to offer ale, tea, and bread and butter. Penric politely made the sign of the tally before they partook, by way of blessing, which won a smile from Gossa this time. Oswyl’s hopes that she might also offer information were quickly dashed, however. At his now-well-practiced queries, she shook her head in regret. No strangers that she’d heard of had arrived in the vale in the past week, or month for that matter. Oswyl cast Penric a reproaching glance.

Penric, undaunted, said to Gossa, “That red dog of your son’s. Where did he come by it?”

“Ah, he’s a pretty beast, isn’t he? But it’s a sad tale. The old fellow who raised him was killed in a rock fall not two months back. Some of his dogs had to be dragged away from the place—after days—they mourned him so hard. It was impossible to dig him up to bury him again, so my husband held his rites on the spot. But…” She hesitated, then was interrupted when Gallin came in.

He shrugged off his five-colored robe, which at this range Oswyl could see was a bit threadbare, hung it on a wall peg, and sat to take hot tea with weary gratitude.

“These gentlemen are looking for strangers come to the vale,” she informed him, “but I’ve not heard of any. Have you?”

The familiar, frustrating headshake. “Not too many ever come up this far. We mostly take our own goods to the market at Whippoorwill. A few men from there come up in the summer to trade in animals or hides or cheese, but they aren’t strangers.”

“I was just starting to tell them about old Scuolla,” his wife put in.

Gallin straightened, setting down his mug. He asked more eagerly, “Did someone finally get my letters? Or read my letters? I’d sent to my superiors in Whippoorwill twice, but have got no reply yet. And written to the divines in neighbor vales. One said he could not help, and the other… was less helpful.” Gallin grimaced. “My prayers have fared no better.”

“Help with what?” asked Oswyl.

“My ghost problem,” said Gallin simply.

Oswyl sat back; Penric sat up. “Ghost problem?” he encouraged their host.

Oswyl was not without curiosity, but this side-issue seemed nothing to do with his ever-more-delayed pursuit. His new hope was to extract his party from this local hospitality and get back to the main road by nightfall. Yet Acolyte Gallin seized the opening like a swimmer grasping a rope.

“That luckless old man. I wasn’t sure at first, mind you, even with the behavior of his dogs. Not all of them, just his two favorites—Arrow, a fine big fellow, and Blood, that you saw. After the rockslide it seems Arrow had run to the nearest farmyard and barked his head off, till they drove him away by pelting him with stones. Blood stood guard, I suppose you could say, back at the slide, barking and howling. Then that big dog ran all the way into town and found me, and whined and carried on and wouldn’t be hushed. As the beast seldom left Scuolla’s side, it didn’t take a Cedonian sage to figure out something was badly amiss. I saddled my horse and followed him up the road, and then the hunting trail, and then, well. Big slide. Took down a lot of trees. I’d heard the crash echoing down the vale earlier that morning, but when no alarm had come, I’d dismissed it. It didn’t take me long to find the remains of Scuolla’s apprentice, and one of the other dogs, its back broken, sadly, but it had been too late for either of them from the first. A gang of men from the village, later that afternoon, had no better luck at finding Scuolla, though we did uncover one more dog, and buried both beasts properly, no skinning. I did insist on that, for respect.” He nodded to himself. Neglected by his Temple supervisors in this remote vale, Gallin had perhaps taken to self-supplying their absent discipline or praise. Oswyl tried not to sympathize.

After a long, thoughtful, silent inhalation through his nose, Penric came out with, “And how long had you known that old Scuolla was a hedge shaman?”

Intent on recapturing the conversation by offering suitable condolences and then hurrying their leave, Oswyl swallowed his words so fast he coughed. What?

Gallin cast the young man a closer look than heretofore. “I’ve served in this vale for over twenty years. I found out what he was early on, but not so early that I hadn’t had time to learn his kin and his ties, and that there was no harm in him. I take my first duty to be to souls, not laws. And to learn as well as teach, or what else do the gods put us in this world for?”

“Indeed.” Penric made the tally sign; coming from a full-braid Temple divine (even one who’d left his braids in his saddlebags), it seemed to Oswyl strangely more than a mere assenting shrug.

Reassured by this reaction, Gallin went on: “My trust was repaid five-fold, through those years. Scuolla was as pious a man as any and more than many, and he and his dogs were an aid to all in need, lost or hurt, in flood or fire or famine and a hundred smaller tasks. In time, I came to think of his as my good left hand here in the vale, without which the right could not grip half so well.”

Gossa, nodding in confirmation to all this, put in, “That’s why we don’t understand about his funeral.” She made a go on gesture at her husband.

Penric’s eyes narrowed. “It took place at the rockslide, your goodwife said?”

“Aye. There was no getting down to his body. For a time we thought the dogs might find him, or later, our noses, but he was too deep for the last and the dogs, well, the dogs never settled on a consensus. Or settled at all—very disturbed they were, right to the last. In the event, no god signed to taking up his soul, or at least none we could discern, though we made the trial five times, till the holy animals began to bite and scratch and kick and it grew dark.”

“Could he have escaped the fall somehow?” asked Oswyl, ensnared by this tale despite himself. “Run off for some reason?” The dead companion was suggestive, to a suspicious mind.

Gallin huffed out a breath. “I wondered about that, too, as things went on. But it doesn’t stand up to the witness of the dogs.”

In his past investigations, Oswyl had found many mute things to give testimony that shouted; he supposed he must now add dogs to that list. At least his superiors could not chide him for not swearing them in. “Sundered, then.”

Gossa made a fending gesture in front of her bodice, and scowled at him as fiercely as one of his aunts about to correct his legal rhetoric.

Gallin shook his head and went on, “By every sign, Scuolla was sundered, and I don’t think he should have been. I know he would not refuse the gods. And if the Son of Autumn, to Whom he’d made devotions all his life, didn’t think him good enough somehow, well, there’s still the Bastard. So where was He? Where were any of Them?”

An unanswerable question that Oswyl had confronted many times in his career. He bit his lip.

“The thing is,” put in Gossa, “everyone round about now takes that rockslide for haunted, and avoids it.”

Penric laced and unlaced his fingers a few times, then seemed to come to some decision. “So this hedge shaman, working with dogs as the medium of his art, died uncleansed of the Great Beast that must have given him his powers. And now his soul is lost between the worlds, a sundering unwilled by either the gods or the man.”

“You know so much of such things, young fellow?” said Gallin, startled.

“I’m, ah… something of a Temple sensitive myself, as it happens.” His smile had gone a little stiff. “I knew the moment I saw the red dog that there had to be a shaman in this tale somewhere. It is partway to being made a Great Beast, did you know?”

Gallin cleared his throat. “Blood’s a very intelligent dog. Well-mannered. Good with all the village children. Took to being a holy animal with no trouble at all.”

“I daresay.”

“So… you didn’t come here in answer to my letters…?” The acolyte seemed reluctant to give up this hope.

“Not to your letters, no.” Penric bared his teeth in a brief, ironic grimace, an edged look Oswyl had not seen in his face before.

Gallin confessed, “I’d thought to find another hedge shaman for Scuolla, somewhere up or down the mountains, to perform their last secret rites for him. Him seeming out of reach of my prayers. Scuolla had his Great Beast from the shaman here before him, long ago when he was a young man, and performed the cleansing for his mentor in turn when he died. He was bringing along his own apprentice, but he’d not invested the man with his powers yet as far as I know. Well, I do know, for Wen’s soul was signed taken up by the Son at his funeral the day after the tragedy.”

Gossa nodded. “Plain as plain, that one was. Greatly to his family’s relief amidst their grief.”

Oswyl began, “I should explain something more about the fugitive we hunt—” but Penric flung up his hand, interrupting him.

“Wait just a little on that, Locator, if you please.”

It didn’t please Oswyl much, but Penric was turning to Gallin. “How far is it to this maybe-haunted rockslide of yours?”

“About five miles up the East Branch road, or thereabouts. An hour’s brisk ride.” Gallin squinted intently at Penric. “You say you are a Temple sensitive. Can you sense ghosts?”

“Ah… with a bit of special help, yes.”

“Can you get that help?”

“I carry it with me.”

Gallin grew eager. “Could you—would you—would you be willing to ride out to the fall with me, and sense what you can? It would put my mind to rest.” He reflected. “Or not, but at least I’d know.”

Such an expedition couldn’t be back till nightfall, Oswyl calculated. They would be stuck in this village till tomorrow. “Time,” he gritted under his breath.

Penric’s glance flicked up. He murmured back, “You could go on without me.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Well, then.” He turned to the acolyte. “I’m willing to take a look, yes. I can’t make any promises.”

Gallin actually clapped his hands in relief. “We can be off as soon as the horses are saddled.”

“We should take the red dog,” added Penric.

Gallin stilled. “Ah. Aye.” He rose to lead the way, pausing only to grasp his wife’s hands in a farewell. At least the goodwife eyed them all more approvingly, as they clumped out after him.