Penric's Mission

IX

Penric dashed back through the house, trying to track all he must control. Too much. In addition to the assailants laid out under the pergola, and the whining senior secretary, the maid and the porter were presently cowering in an upstairs room, and the scullion had vanished. Well, first things first, then whatever else he could do, and then fly.

He passed through and collected all the weapons, not forgetting the secretary’s belt knife and also taking a moment to harvest his purse. Then he renewed the pressure on his prisoners’ selected nerves to keep them down and quiet. He didn’t suppose anyone else would appreciate how delicate and clever all this was, least of all his victims, but he was rather proud of it himself. Good work.

I could have ripped all those nerves apart much more easily, grumped Des, and we’d never have to worry about them getting up to come after us again.

Which was true, but theologically fraught. Penric dumped his heavy armload of edged steel down the privy at the end of the garden and trotted back to the pergola. The soldiers lay in whimpering heaps. One brave man made a feeble snatch for his ankle as Pen skipped around them, but missed. Pen grasped the panting Velka-Tepelen-Whoever—he decided he’d stick with Velka—by the tunic and began dragging him into the house. There were already too many witnesses to his antics. This conversation needed to be private.

A sort of lumber room off the front atrium seemed remote enough to be out of earshot. Penric laid Velka out supine on the floor and perched on his abdomen, knees up, and touched his thumb to his lips in his habitual prayer for luck. His god, he was reminded, was the master of both sorts. He leaned forward between his up-folded legs and smiled.

“Drowned, you say,” he began. Des growled aloud in memory.

“The guards reported you drowned in your cell and your body disposed of in the sea,” said Velka through his teeth. “Your skull was broken. You should be dead. Twice over!”

“And Arisaydia should be blind, aye. So many mysteries.”

“No mystery to it. You escaped, and they reported the other to hide their failure and avoid punishment.”

“Well, that’s one explanation. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if they were speaking the truth?”

Velka glared. This was not a man inclined to babble in fear, alas. Or talk much at all.

“There is so much I could do to you,” mused Pen. “Take your hearing, as you plunged me into silence in that cell…” He leaned forward and cupped both hands over Velka’s ears, then moved them to cover his eyes. “Or your vision, as you plunged me into darkness.” He sat up again, palms on his knees. “Who is your master?”

“Who is yours?” Velka shot back. “The duke of Adria?”

“Ultimately, no,” said Pen judiciously. “He just borrowed me. And when you borrow a valuable tome from a friend, it doesn’t do to carelessly drop it in the privy. But enough of that.” It occurred to him that anyone following up from Adria on Pen’s disappearance would be most likely to encounter the official tale, at least until he could make his way back to gainsay it, and believe him dead. Bastard’s tears, what will happen to my books?

Pen, he’s getting more out of this than you are, complained Des. Attend!

“So which shall it be? Ears?” Pen clapped them, but did nothing destructive. He tried to replicate Velka’s own look of bored distaste when he’d lifted his knife to Arisaydia’s face, while simultaneously mustering the intense concentration needed to compress one of the body’s most elegant nerves without permanently damaging it. He suspected he just came out looking constipated. “Or”—he moved one hand over Velka’s left eye, made carefully sure of his invisible target, pinched—“your remaining eye?”

Velka’s scream of anguish was entirely sincere, Pen thought. Despite the pain already placed in his body blocking his range of movement, he tried to thrash under Pen, his head whipping back and forth, and Pen was thrust in his imagination back to the scene of Arisaydia and the boiling vinegar. He hoped Velka was, too.

Pen leaned forward again, and hissed, “Who is your master?”

“Minister Methani,” gasped Velka.

Methani was prominent in the first circle of men around the emperor, and from a high and wealthy family, Pen recalled from his readings and conversations back in Adria; he didn’t know offhand if the man was one of those who had volunteered, or been volunteered, for emasculation so as to rise in imperial trust, or not. Pen’s lips pursed in bafflement. “Why would he want to destroy his emperor’s most effective general? Seems treasonous in itself to me. Not to mention grossly wasteful.”

Velka wheezed, “Arisaydia was a danger to us all. Too independent. Too attractive. Already military conspiracies were starting to swirl about him. We couldn’t penetrate the intrigues that had to be reaching him, so we made one to serve in their place.”

Which was… pretty much what Arisaydia had said. For all his theatrics, Pen didn’t feel he was moving forward, here. Though he wondered if that too independent translated to wouldn’t lie down under the thumbs of the right men.

“Didn’t it occur to any of you people that the reason you couldn’t find a line was that there wasn’t one? That you weren’t destroying a disloyal man, but creating one?”

“If he wasn’t disloyal yet, he was ripe to fall,” Velka snarled back. “And then the cost of stopping him would be much higher.”

Well, one couldn’t say Velka didn’t believe in his mission. Not the wholly cynical tool of some wholly cynical master, quite.

Cynical enough, said Des. Spies have to be.

I suppose you would know. Ruchia.

A touch. Des aimed a grimace at him, and subsided.

“Also,” Pen added a bit more tartly, “if you didn’t treat your armies so badly in the first place, they wouldn’t go out looking for some poor sod to stick up on a standard in front of them and fight you for their favor. It doesn’t seem to me the root of this is Arisaydia’s fault. It’s, it’s, it’s… just your own masters’ bad management. Circling back to bite them. If you’d spend half this effort fixing the real problems, you could stop all the disaffected generals before they started, instead of, of blinding them piecemeal one by one. You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.”

Velka stared at him through his one good eye, so taken aback he stopped whimpering. “What are you really sent to Cedonia for?”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Penric admitted ruefully. If he was sent to be Velka’s spiritual advisor, it seemed a supremely unfunny joke on Someone’s part. Which didn’t make it unlikely.

He also thought of the unexpected treasury found in the Father of Winter’s offering box in the temple. Maybe the duke of Adria wasn’t the only one who has borrowed me? The suspicion was simultaneously heartening and horrifying.

The Father wasn’t Penric’s god, but He might be Velka’s. “Do you have children?” he asked, then, at Velka’s flinch, added hastily, “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

Revenge was tempting, but not his mandate.

I don’t know why not, said Des. Arisaydia was ready to slay them all, and leave no witnesses. A sense of reluctant admiration. No… not reluctant.

You know we can’t do that.

I can’t, with our sorcery. You could, with your right arm, if you hadn’t thrown all the blades down the jakes.

Penric decided to ignore this. He sat up, considering his congregation of one.

“My time is short,” he said at last, “so my sermon will be, too. When a man witnesses a miracle of the gods, the prudent first response should not be to try to undo it.” A long finger reached out to tap Velka between the eyes; he jerked back. It had actually been a lot of meticulous, tricky, uncomfortable chaos-sluffing uphill sorcery, but Velka didn’t need to know that. Though given Desdemona’s ultimate source, perhaps it was true after a fashion. “So consider me a messenger from a higher power than a duke, and let me help you to remember this. To use the machineries of justice to commit injustice is the deepest offense to the Father of Winter.”

He pressed his thumb to the middle of Velka’s forehead. As he knew so well from his mountain childhood, cold could burn as brutally as fire. The work was vastly finer than his ice floe, not nearly as subtle as the labor he’d been doing all week. He lifted his thumb to reveal thin, frozen white lines in the shape of a stylized snowflake, surrounded by a red bloom of hurt. It would heal, ultimately, to a red then a white brand on Velka’s skin.

It didn’t come close to the amount of scarring Arisaydia would bear. But as a pointed memento, Pen fancied this wintery mark might serve.

He dismounted from Velka, collected the man’s purse to keep company with that from the provincial secretary, and pressed himself to his feet, suddenly very tired. Time to go.

Past time, Des agreed.

As he made for the door, Velka wrenched himself around on the floor and cried, “Hedge sorcerer! You’re insane!”

Your fine sermon doesn’t seem to have taken, Learned Penric, said Des. She was much too amused.

Pen took two steps out, aiming to collect his medical case and his soon-to-be-stolen horse, then whipped around. He stuck his head through the lumber room door and yelled back, “I’m not a hedge sorcerer. And your government policies are stupid!”

He was still fuming when he rode to the end of the street. From the edge of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the scullion coming back, leading a pelting posse of guardsmen. Which answered the question of who had been the spy among Madame Khatai’s servants, he supposed, rather too late to do any practical good. He pressed his horse into a quick trot, rounding the corner safe from their view.