Penric's Mission

I

“Desdemona!” Penric breathed, awed. “Will you look at that light.”

He leaned on the railing of the Adriac cargo ship coasting slowly up the narrowing Gulf of Patos, and stared eyes-wide at the rocky shores of Cedonia. The dry clarity of the air made the distant granite mountains seem as sharp-cut as glassmaker’s crystal. The angled sun of morning was the color of honey. He tilted back his head to take in the astonishing blue vault above, so deep it was dizzying; he felt he might dive up through it as into the sea, endlessly, and never drown.

It was what he imagined enchantment should be, in some myth or legend of personified elements, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Sky. Mortals, he was reminded, did not usually come out well at the ends of those tales.

“Yes, but by noon it will scorch that pale scholar’s skin of yours to blisters. Keep yourself covered. We’ll have to see about getting you a proper hat,” his demon returned, speaking through his mouth as prosaically as the bossy older sister he sometimes imagined her to be. But he thought she was not unmoved by the sight, shared through his eyes, of the light of the land of—could you call it her birth?—that she’d last departed, what, over a hundred years ago?

“Longer than that,” she sighed.

He pressed his finger to his lips, warning her not to speak aloud in company, and moved around to the prow, keeping clear of the crewmen shifting ropes and sails. Half-a-dozen other passengers clustered there to catch a first glimpse of the city that lent the gulf its name. The ship came about and tacked toward the farther shore, climbing a slight headwind.

A tumbled slope drew aside like a stage curtain, revealing their goal. Spread across the wide amphitheater of the gulf’s head, Patos seemed built of the bones of this land: stone houses with red tile roofs, stone streets, arched and colonnaded; the familiar five-fold shape, high on one hill, of a stone temple. A broad stone fortress guarded stone quays reaching out into the clear blue waters, where a dozen other cargo ships crowded, offloading.

The grove of cranes and masts made up for what seemed to Penric’s eyes a decided lack of trees, which was in part why his ship’s heavy lading of cut timber was expected to be welcomed trade. A bit slow, bulky, boring; a ship for ordinary men with ordinary purses to make passage in. Such as a lawyer’s young clerk, carrying a sheaf of unsigned merchants’ agreements and a hopeful marriage contract. All entirely bogus. He adjusted the strap on his shoulder and touched the leather case that held them, plus the second set of documents that was much less dull sewn covertly inside its lining.

Velka gave a little wave as Pen joined him on the forward deck. The man was a Cedonian mercantile agent with whom Penric had made friends, or at least friendly acquaintance, on what he had been assured was a remarkably smooth three-day sail from the Adriac city of Lodi, and on whom he’d been happy to practice his Cedonian. Smiling slightly, Velka said, “Still excited for your first trip to Cedonia?”

“Yes,” Pen admitted, grinning back, still inebriated by the morning light and not even bothering to be sheepish. The young clerk should certainly be allowed such elation.

“I expect you will find it full of surprises.”

“I expect so, too.”

Des passed no comment, even internally, but Pen felt she watched the harbor scene as keenly as he did.

Two oarsmen in Cedonian Customs’ tabards rowed a green-painted boat out from the quay and swung alongside Pen’s ship. He picked up his single valise and followed Velka with the first batch of passengers to disembark, making his way over the side and down the rope net without mishap. When it had rid itself of its human freight, the ship would go on to another quay at the Imperial naval shipyard and arsenal to discharge its timber. Penric mused on the rationale, which rather escaped him, of one country selling essentials for shipbuilding to another country when they might, some future year, be at war or at least in chronic naval clashes with each other. Well, the puzzle did not fall within the ambit of this mission.

Imperial Customs consisted of a long wooden shed housing tables, a few agents in official tunics, some bored guards, and a dull air of bureaucracy. The passengers shuffled into line and turned out their goods for inspection. His clerk, when Pen took his turn, examined his fake papers and wrote down his fake name and age and fake business with only mild interest. His valise was dumped out on the table and his possessions pawed through, as the clerk looked for Pen knew-not-what.

His belongings had been carefully selected back in Adria to fit his travel persona, and included nothing of interest; most certainly not his white robes of a divine of the Bastard’s Order, or the white, cream, and silver shoulder braids marking him as a Temple sorcerer. Nor even the four-cord green braids of a teaching physician of the Mother’s Order, which had been foisted on him back home in Martensbridge even though he had declined to take oath to a second god. The faint ink stains on his long fingers might well have belonged to a lawyer’s clerk.

In any case his most secret and dangerous contraband, his chaos demon who gave him his uncanny powers, passed entirely unsuspected.

Velka, lingering to speak with some port official, waved Penric on, and Pen emerged once more into a light grown even sharper. He stepped away briskly, not wanting to be lumbered with a companion at this stage. He wondered if he should first seek out the man he’d come all this way to bargain with, or go find lodgings. Perhaps locate the fellow, then pick lodgings convenient to him. Asking around the harbor marketplace for his quarry’s address would leave a trail of witnesses to his interest. There must be something more discreet.

Good thinking, observed Desdemona. Your best bets will be up by the provincial governor’s palace, or some tavern near the army barracks where the soldiers gather.

It felt strange to have a visceral sense of the layout of a city he’d never set foot in before, but one of Desdemona’s previous riders had lived here for some years. Over a century ago, Pen reminded himself. Things would have changed, although probably not major buildings or streets, not with all this stone.

The marketplace, a semi-permanent little village of booths and awnings, smelled of fish, ropes, tar, and spices. Offerings included used clothing, domestic tinwork and ceramics, and food, exotic—to Pen—oranges and lemons, dried figs and nuts and strange bright vegetables, olives and their oils. The vendors and patrons showed nearly as much variety, men and women, and children of both sexes running about adding their notes of chaos. Clothing tended to loose linens, tunics and trousers for the men, demure draperies for the women. Skin colors ranged from almost Roknari bronze to olive to a deep brick tan on those who clearly worked outdoors.

Hair was as varied, curly to straight, sun-streaked bronze, dark copper, brown, but mostly black. He was glad he’d taken the advice to dye his own to an unassuming brown for the journey. His blond-white hair stood out even back home; here, where he found his mountain-average height suddenly half a head taller than most men around him, it would have blazed in this sun like a signal beacon. His eyes he could do nothing about, save to squint a trifle. He attempted to shrink in a clerk’s stoop.

Completing his fascinated survey of the market, he began a stroll up a street leading toward the hill hosting the governor’s palace. The noise of the harbor—seabirds crying, workmen and vendors shouting, the creak of the cranes, clack of hooves and rumbling of carts—at first eclipsed the steady double-time of booted feet coming up behind him. When he turned, the squad of half-a-dozen soldiers was almost in his face.

“Halt, you!” cried their sergeant.

Penric tensed on his toes, but obeyed, blinking and smiling, free hand out empty and unthreatening. “Hello,” he tried in a friendly tone. “Can I help you?” Only then did he see Velka running behind them, pointing at him.

“That’s the spy! Arrest him!”

His first impulse, to try to talk himself out of this contretemps, died as he reflected that a more thorough search of his leather document case must surely find its hidden compartment, and the duke’s secret letters, and then no amount of talking would help. But his well-filled purse was hung hidden on a cord around his neck, his case strap slung over his opposite shoulder, unsnatchable.

As the sergeant pulled his short sword from his sheath and swung it upward, Pen thought, Des, speed us!

From his point of view, his would-be assailants slowed. Pen flung his valise at the sergeant, knocking him backward, and ducked another man’s leisurely sword thrust. His own movements always felt as though he were fighting through oil when he did this, but he drove force through his legs and turned, taking the first few steps of a sprint away. Where, he would have to work out later.

But now, he bounded directly into the other half of the squad who’d turned onto the street just above him, bearing down upon him with raised truncheons.

He evaded four languid blows as sinuously as any striking snake. Jerking successfully away from a fifth swing smashed the side of his head into a sixth, with a lot more power than even the man who wielded it had probably intended.

The world turned to stars and snow as he gasped and dropped, cracking his head on the stones again as his flailing hands missed catching himself. Nauseating black clouds bloomed in his vision as he did not, quite, pass out.

Passing out would have allowed him to evade the pain and misery that followed. Plenty of strong hands combined to hoist his long body up and hurry him back down the hill and through the gates of the shore fortress. Shadows flickered overhead, then stone. At first he thought he was swooning for certain as the world darkened, despite the continued drumming in his skull, but they were just going underground; an orange blur of torchlight wavered past him. The passage narrowed, widened, narrowed again. Widened again.

He was held down and efficiently stripped of case, boots, purse, belt and belt-knife, and his outer garments. Someone grabbed him by the hair and growled, “What is your real name?” Pen couldn’t even groan in reply, though he panted and then, suddenly, vomited on his interrogator. As defenses or even revenges went, it seemed weak, but at least the man leapt back, swearing.

“Bosko, you hit him too cursed hard. He can’t talk in that state.”

“Sorry, Sergeant! But it was his fault—he ducked into me!”

“Never mind,” said Velka’s voice. “I daresay this will answer all the questions anyone has.” Velka, yes, seemed to have taken loving possession of the leather case. A smile of satisfaction curled his lips. Pen grew sorry he hadn’t let Des cheat the man at dice after all, shipboard.

“I don’t suppose he can climb down the ladder on his own, now,” said a soldier.

“We could just drop him in.”

“Aye, if you want to break both his legs.”

“So is he going to be needed for anything, later? Aside from his execution?” asked the sergeant of, Pen guessed, Velka.

“Too soon to know. Best preserve him for the moment.”

A brief, professional debate among the soldiery resulted in Pen, dressed only in his shirt and trousers, being lowered into darkness by a rope wound painfully under his arms, shepherded by a soldier on a twisting rope ladder. His bare feet, then knees, then the rest of him found cold, raw rock as he collapsed. Rope, soldier and ladder all disappeared upward. The scrape of a heavy stone overhead cut off both the voices, and the last faint reflections of the torch. Utter silence. Utter darkness.

Utter aloneness.

Only… not for him.

“Des,” he groaned. “Are you still with me?”

A shaken pause. “They’d have had to spatter your brains all over the street for me to be anywhere else.”

Despite his current throbbing pain, his curiosity prompted him to ask, “Where would you have jumped?”

A sense of surly thought. “Velka.”

All else being equal, a demon forced to jump by the death of its rider usually went to the strongest other person in the vicinity. “Really?”

“He would not have lived long.” A pause. “And he would have died in all the lingering agony I could arrange.”

Pen wondered if that was how a chaos demon said I love you.

More or less, Des said in their silent speech, as his lips grew harder to move. Pen, pay attention. You mustn’t swoon. Your skull is cracked and you’re bleeding inside it. We can burn closed the blood vessel, but we have to open a hole to let out the clot before the pressure kills you.

You want me to trepan myself?

I’ll do it, but you have to stay conscious. I can’t work it if you… if you…

Understood.

Destructive medicine. Sometimes, it saved lives.

Sometimes it didn’t…

His head was in so much pain already, exploding open a hole the size of his fingertip hardly made a difference. The spurt of blood seemed small, but a little of the numbness left his lips. Yes, that’s right, and he wasn’t sure which of them said it.

Can I pass out now? Hurts…

No. Stay awake. We have to finish shifting the clot.

That, too, was right. Familiar. And a very unpleasant prospect. Was Des in as much pain as he was? Maybe not, but if his mind and body broke down, she would fragment, too. Can’t be fun for you either.

No.

After a little, he asked, Des, can you still light my eyes?

Yes…

In a moment, the blackness pulled back. With no light at all to work with the effect was peculiar, oddly colorless, but his sense of the space and the shapes around him grew secure. They seemed to be in a round chamber quarried out of the bedrock, about fourteen feet high and seven wide, its chiseled walls curving steadily inward to the small port at the top presently blocked by the heavy stone.

Penric studied the cruel angles, and meditated on the mountain-climbing experiences of his youth. No. I don’t think even I could scale this one. And certainly not in this condition. In his imagination, on the trip over, he’d confidently posited that no locked door could hold them. Is this place meant to be proof against sorcerers? Had Velka penetrated that secret, as well as his others?

It’s a standard Cedonian bottle dungeon. A place they put prisoners they want to forget, it’s said.

Ever been in one before? And, unsaid, Ever got out of one before? Except the hard way, he supposed, minus her rider.

No.

In a little while, he crawled to the wall and clawed up far enough to turn and brace his shoulders against it. They paused to tease out the last of the clot, and he felt gingerly at the spreading wetness behind his ear, soaking his walnut-dyed queue. It wasn’t going to add up to enough blood loss to kill him. At least, not on this side of his skull.

He sat up and concentrated on keeping breathing. As ambitions went, it seemed much reduced from this morning’s, but it was challenge enough for now.

An unmeasurable time later he began to wonder how he had betrayed himself to Velka, how he had failed in discretion or simply in acting, not that he’d cast a hard role for himself. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember. Velka hadn’t been another sorcerer. Nor a shaman. Nor, certainly, a saint. He’d not used any uncanny means to flush out Pen’s secrets.

For that matter, who was Velka really? The patriotic Cedonian merchant he seemed? Or an agent of another kind?

For what it’s worth, said Des, I can’t see our mistake either.

It was kind of her to try to make him feel less stupid, Pen thought. This, his first confidential diplomatic mission, had been supposed to be a simple one, and, if he brought it off ably, bore the promise from both duke and archdivine of more such opportunities for travels to new places. A bottle dungeon hadn’t been on his imagined itinerary.

Some period after that, he began to wonder if he would die; then, as time ground formlessly on, just how he would die. Executed in some frightful manner? Or simply forgotten to death in the dark? Which wasn’t the dark for him. Nor would he die alone; Des was a friend he couldn’t outlive. He could grow reconciled to that, he guessed.

I should have liked to see that sky again, though.

It was a shamefully long time after that when he finally thought, What will happen to the man I was supposed to meet? The full cost of his failure began to sketch itself to his vivid and well-stocked imagination, and he cursed some dozens of histories he’d read that suggested exactly how, in gruesome detail. Five gods. What will happen to General Arisaydia? It wasn’t just Pen who might pay for this fiasco with his life.

But not Des. That, at least.

And another small blessing: “No sun blisters, anyway!” He giggled. But his mouth was too dry, and then he choked.

Pen, said Des uneasily. You’re starting to fray, down here. If you can’t hold yourself together, you won’t be able to hold me. Hold!

How? He laid his aching head upon his knees, reminded of why people trapped in unbearable pain sought death at their own hands.

Des said reluctantly at last, Pray to your god. He’s the only other one in here besides us.

Pen considered this. For a long time. Then whispered, “Lord Bastard, Fifth and White,” and faltered. He held up his hands in the black, fingers spread wide in supplication. “Master of all disasters out of season.” Indeed. “I lay this day as an offering upon your altar. If it please you, take it from me.”

That wasn’t any of the prayers he’d been taught in seminary, almost a decade ago, but it felt right. And perhaps it was heard, for at length he slept.

A long time, it seemed to Penric, after he had been dropped into this hole, the stone scraped back, orange light flickered, and a covered pail was lowered on a hook. At the guard’s shouted instructions, he rolled over and freed the hook, which rose upward as he could not. The cover was a crude round tray holding a small loaf of bread, only a day stale, a sticky block of dried fruit, mostly figs, and a pale square that Des assured him was pressed dried fish. He lifted the tray to reveal not a slops bucket, but a generous couple of gallons of fresh water and a wooden cup.

Pen drank greedily, then slowed, wondered how long it would need to last.

“I’d guess this to be a daily ration,” Des opined. “Drink up anyway. You need it to heal.”

He managed part of the bread and some shreds of the fruit, but after one bite couldn’t face the fish, for all that Des urged it on him with the concern of an anxious mother, insisting it was common food, and strengthening. It smelled. And had bones in it, albeit as fine as stiff hairs. And, and bits.

So he was fed, watered, and left alone which, for the first three days, was all he wanted. The cell’s diameter gave him room to stretch out fully on the floor, even as it made impossible the old mountaineer’s trick for shinnying up a crevice by bracing one’s back and feet against opposite sides.

On the fourth day, he sat up and began to tend to his own wounds in more detail. Des could speed the healing of his abused skull and counteract infection, but it was definitely uphill magic, and she needed somewhere to dump the disorder. Normally there were enough minor vermin around to make this a trivial task, but once she’d eliminated the spiders and a few other shadowy things with far too many legs that rippled across the walls, others were slow to arrive. On the fifth day, they enjoyed a boon when a rat came up the central floor drain that doubled as Pen’s slops bucket. Des fairly pounced on it. Pen was afraid he would then be trapped in this bottle with rotting rat reek, but Des, compelled to unusual frugality by their circumstances, not only creamed off the death but reduced the corpse to dust within an hour, and he used the dregs of his daily water to rinse it back down the drain.

For lack of other pastimes, he found himself crouching at this sink hoping for more rats like a winter fisherman back home beside his hole sawn in the lake ice. He missed a flask of warming spirits to keep him company, or friends to trade lies with, but at least there was Des. He studied the drain, which was no wider than his palm, drilled down through solid stone. Maybe he was not that desperate yet…

“Not ever,” snorted Des. “Even you are not skinny enough to fit down that pipe. And it only goes to a borehole scarcely bigger.”

“Empties into the sea, I expect.” The smells and occasional drafts that came from it were more estuarial than cloacal. But no, probably not the drain. Widening a passageway through it by chaos magic could be a month’s tedious labor, as lengthy and tiring a process as tunneling with the spoon that he did not have. Up was another unfavorable option. He could work apart the arch around the port, at some risk of dropping large stones on his head and making guard-attracting noises, but levitating up there would still be impossible. Waiting to be hauled up out of the dungeon for interrogation by his captors still seemed his best and easiest chance at escape, certainly until his fractures mended. He was perilously hot with their healing, masking the chill of any incipient prison fever.

He shouted questions upward during the daily visit from his keepers to swap out his rations pail, but they were never answered.

Three rats later, his skull, though still tender, had stopped aching in a way that made him want to cut his own head off. He dutifully managed to choke down the disgusting fish and not gag it up after. Des beguiled some time by telling him stories from her many past lives with her former riders, all women, or rather, ten women, a lioness, and a wild mare. The mare had been the point at which the demon first escaped into the world from the Bastard’s hell, or repository of chaos, or whatever it was. There had been many theological arguments back at seminary as to the exact nature of the place, which Pen thought Des should be able to settle as she was the only one who’d been there, but she’d claimed to have no memory of it because its very disorder did not allow memory to form. All her personality—personalities—was, or were, something she had acquired afterward, imprinted on her by the endurance of matter.

Her tales were good, but in this lightless, soundless place, began to take on a hallucinatory quality. He’d usually experienced them as words, if inside his own head, and an impression of animated gestures like a storyteller in a marketplace. Now he began to see flickering pictures. It was much like those disturbing nights when he dreamed not his own dreams, but hers.

The more disturbing as it became harder and harder to tell day from night in here, or dreams from waking.