The Prisoner of Limnos

XVII

Pen followed his fellows into the women’s chamber at dawn, for breakfast and for Bosha to put the finishing touches on their papers. There was nothing more to pack, but Nikys pulled Pen’s Temple braids from his medical case and held them up in doubt.

“The customs officers may search our baggage. Is there some better way to hide these, Pen?”

Pen sighed and took them from her. “I suppose I’d better abandon them. They can be replaced when we get home.” And when had he started thinking of Orbas, of all places, as home? “It’s more imperative just now to hide that I’m a Temple sorcerer than to prove I am.”

The other side of Bosha’s lip curled. “Give them to me for a moment.” A bit reluctantly, Pen handed them over, and Bosha examined the knot holding the loops. A few moves of those deft, pale fingers, and the cord fell into one long length. “Madame Khatai, might you sit here?” He gestured to the stool.

Her eyes rolling in curiosity, Nikys sat as instructed. Bosha plucked her hairbrush from her valise and busied himself about her head. Idrene drifted over to watch. Within a few minutes, he had somehow turned her hair into a raised confection with the braids visible as no more than a few fashionable glints holding the black curls.

“Oh, that’s charming!” exclaimed Idrene. Pen had to agree.

Nikys smiled, reaching up for an uncertain prod. The arrangement held firm. “Very clever, Master Bosha. Thank you!”

“Do encourage General Arisaydia in his quest for Lady Tanar’s hand, Madame Khatai.”

“Do you favor him for her, then?” Nikys’s smile didn’t alter, but Pen thought she was listening for every nuance in the answer. Because Bosha would have them. And Bosha’s opinion in this affair mattered far more than was obvious.

“She’s had much worse, sniffing about her.” He rubbed his neck beneath his white braid. “You know, her latest interest is in going up onto the roof to learn celestial navigation. She conscripts one of Lady Xarre’s captains for her lessons, when he stops in to give his reports. If she’s not married to your brother, or some man of like merit, with her vast vitality diverted to children, I’m afraid she will insist on apprenticing as an officer on one of Lady Xarre’s ships. And if denied, would run off to become a pirate queen.”

This was probably a joke, Pen thought. Probably. Hard to tell with Bosha. Or with Tanar, for that matter.

Nikys dimpled. “Do pirate queens keep secretaries?”

“I dread finding out.” His smile faded altogether. “Although childbed is the one place even I cannot go to defend her. Perhaps the high seas would be better after all.”

Idrene said gently, “We cannot protect anyone from being alive, Master Bosha. No matter how much we might wish to.” Her eyes fell on her own children.

His lips stretched in an expression Pen would hesitate to call amused. “I can try.”

And then it was time for final farewells, teary when Idrene and Nikys embraced the sheepish, but gratified, Ikos. Pen stifled his jealousy. He, after all, would be the one getting to keep the women.

If I can. He hoisted the baggage and shuffled after them to the stairs.

The blue Cedonian sky was hazier this morning as they walked down to the harbor. If this heralded some change in the fine weather, Pen thought, eyeing it, it wasn’t going to be soon enough to impede their departure.

The squawks of white gulls played over the clatter of men and equipment on the two piers readying ships for sea. Crates of goods from last night’s unlading were piled up ashore, waiting for their carriers to come take them to their inland destinations. A crew of men unpacked an arriving wagon, lifting long ceramic flasks of wine from their straw bed and carting them off to a dock. Another crew wrestled with ingots of copper, distinctive with their green patina and red scratches, stacking them on a handcart. Ikos watched it all with great professional interest, as he and the behatted Bosha, mismatched sightseers, veered off to loiter on a low wall as if enjoying the maritime spectacle.

“All this way,” mourned Pen, “and I never saw great Thasalon.”

“Since any view we’re like to get would be from inside an imperial prison,” said Idrene, “best not to make that wish.”

“Aye,” Pen sighed.

Idrene clutched the packet with their papers as they approached the Customs shed. Nikys raised her chin and inhaled.

At a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones behind them, Penric wheeled around. And froze.

A man in the uniform of an imperial courier dismounted from his sweating horse and tied its reins to a bollard, looking over the docks and ships with sharp, flashing eyes. Turning to his saddlebags, he withdrew a leather dispatch case. He began to walk purposefully toward the Customs shed.

“Keep smiling, don’t panic, and play along,” Pen muttered through his teeth to Nikys and Idrene as they paused to see what had distracted him, and stiffened in turn. “I can take care of this.”

Nikys gripped Idrene’s hand. In caution? In reassurance?

This one is going to be costly, warned Des, fully alert. It wasn’t an attempt to dissuade him.

Not nearly as costly as failing, Pen thought grimly back.

Aye.

Sight, Des.

Pen set down their baggage and moved to intercept the courier, plastering a smile on his features. That strange, compelling, colorful interior view of a soul’s essence, hidden within the outer material form, flickered into focus in Pen’s mind’s eye. “Oh, officer!” he called, the reverberations of the shamanic weirding voice entering his tones even as he pushed the words out. They touched the man like tendrils, barely catching on that firm sense of duty. His head jerked toward Pen, and he frowned, but stopped.

“Good morning,” Pen continued. “Have you ridden from Guza?”

Pen felt the assent swirling within the man even as he returned in a quelling growl, “What is it to you?”

“I think you want to let me see that paper,” Pen purred, holding out his hand as though such an exchange were the most natural thing in the world. The fellow shook his head as if throwing off an insect, but, slowly, opened his case. “You need to deliver that paper to me.”

The courier extracted a document, stood at some echo of attention, and held it out. Pen took it and ran his eyes hastily through what he guessed was some standard Cedonian bureaucratic preamble—Bosha would know—to the critical paragraph, a description of Idrene in much the same terms as the sailor had given them yesterday afternoon. The official detainment order for the customs inspectors, clearly.

Pen twitched it behind him and set it alight. It was a puff of ash before it reached the cobbles.

“You have delivered your urgent message to the Customs-shed officer,” Pen continued, driving the words, and the geas of persuasion, as deep into his target as possible. The tendrils set like hooks, like sucking mouths, into the officer’s spirit, and Pen winced. Geases could be nasty almost-organisms, at times, parasitizing the life of their victim for their own prolongation. A true shaman could create one that would last for weeks. Pen hoped for a day. “You have done your duty. Now you need to take care of your loyal horse.” A geas worked best when laid in alignment with the subject’s natural inclinations. “And then go drink a flagon of wine. You’ve earned it. You delivered your message in Akylaxio just as ordered.” Pen simulated a Cedonian military salute, which the man, his eyes slightly dazed, returned.

Blinking, the man returned to his horse, untied it, and led it off. By the time he reached the street, his steps were a firm stride again. He didn’t look back. He might bear other copies of the circular to deliver further along the coast, but their existence did not concern Pen.

Still sitting on the wall overlooking it all, both Bosha and Ikos swiveled their heads in worry to watch the officer. Not looking back at them, Pen managed an it’s all right, stand down wave, which he hoped they interpreted correctly.

It wasn’t entirely all right. Memory alteration fiddled not only with free will but with the very essence of a soul, and thus bordered on sacrilege. Good intentions and even good results were valid theological defenses only up to a point. Pen could hope he’d not transgressed beyond it. He wouldn’t say pray, as he’d decided long ago not to bother the gods with questions when he didn’t really want to hear the answers.

The blood was already starting to trickle. Pen snorted and sucked it back to send down his throat. “Now I need to get out of sight for a few minutes,” he told the women. “Quickly.”

Nikys, who had watched him with the sacred dogs, understood at once. She dropped Idrene’s hand and grabbed Pen’s, towing him back toward the stacks of crates as the trickle turned into a flood and Pen choked, gasped, and choked again. His eyes watered wildly. He clapped his other hand to his mouth as he coughed out blood. It stained his palm in quick stripes as he reached the shelter and dropped to his knees, then his hands and knees, coughing wetly. The scarlet splattered onto the stones, spreading.

And kept coming. Struggling for breath between spasms, Pen wondered if he could actually drown himself. There was a new hazard for the list…

“Mother’s tears, Pen!” gasped Nikys, holding his quaking shoulders. “This is much worse than before.”

And Idrene’s startled voice, “Is he dying?”

It must look as if he were hacking out his lungs in gobbets. Which, admittedly, sounded much more dramatic than It’s a nosebleed. Pen wheezed and shook his head. “Ugly magic,” he got out between coughs. “High cost. Des hates it.” Shamanic magics did not come naturally to a chaos demon, and Pen suspected his body paid a premium price for his use of them at all. It was as if chaos and blood were coins of two different realms, and the moneylender charged an extortionate fee for their exchange.

Should I do something? Des asked, anxious. There are harbor rats lurking about…

Don’t. Trying to divert or delay his somatic payment for this magic with some uphill healing had unpleasant side-effects, afterward. Better than dying, to be sure, but still better was to pay off the debt at once. It just looked alarming.

He studied the cup or so of blood splashed on the ground under his face. All right, was alarming. But his desperate coughing ceased, his lungs stopped pulsing, and the blood issuing from his stinging nose dwindled to mere drips, then tailed off altogether. He let Nikys roll him into her arms, smiling weakly up at her distraught face.

He should explain about the nosebleed, but her lap was such a lovely soft cushion…

Malingerer, scoffed Des.

Are you going to tell on me?

Never. He knew he was going to be all right when his demon’s temporary fright faded back into amusement. Enjoy your treat. After all, so do I.

Not thinking about that, Des. It throws me off my stride.

As you wish.

“Bastard’s teeth, is all that red gush his?” asked Ikos’s voice, much too close to Pen’s ear.

“You were supposed to steer clear of us.” Pen cracked open his eyes. “You two.” Bosha had taken up a guard stance at the entry of the space between the crate stacks. Pen added to Ikos, “This, by the way, is what happens to me when I force a geas on an unwilling person. So you see I didn’t cast one on Acolyte Hekat yesterday.”

“Huh.” His face retreated out of Pen’s sight.

“Should I follow that courier and do anything about him?” Bosha asked over his shoulder in a neutral tone.

Was he offering to assassinate the man? Dear me, he is! crowed Des. What a handy fellow to have around. Pen hastened to explain that his geas made further intervention unnecessary, which Bosha, after a considering moment, accepted.

Ikos returned with what proved to be his shirt, wetted with seawater, and handed it to Pen without comment.

“Do I look a fright?”

Nikys nodded, her clutch not slackening.

“I’d best tidy up. I don’t want to be kept from boarding because they fear I have some sort of plague. Aside from being a sorcerer.” Deciding, since it was Ikos’s shirt, that he couldn’t make it much worse, Pen wiped the gore from his face and hands—he’d managed to keep most of the splash off his tunic—then let Nikys have it to finish the job to her satisfaction.

One gives you the shirt off his back, mused Des, and the other offers to help you bury bodies. I do believe you have made some new friends, Pen!

Hush, Pen thought back. But he believed so, too. Or a brother-in-law and a… did Idrene realize they were going to acquire a eunuch-in-law?

I imagine she will, said Des. She seems quite as shrewd as Nikys.

He grinned and let Ikos and Nikys pull him to his feet. The gray dizziness passed off as he caught his breath.

When he had composed himself, the three taking ship continued the interrupted trek for the Customs shed, leaving Ikos and Bosha to lurk warily among the crates. Pen let Idrene, all assured-army-widow this morning, although of a different and fictional officer, present their papers to the clerk. They all watched in feigned indifference as their baggage was turned out onto the table, but it was soon clear this modest party bore no contraband. The clerk grew interested in Pen’s medical case, though not for any official reason, and seemed content with Pen’s explanation that he was an aspiring student of the healing arts.

Then it was time to traverse the dock to the gangplank of the Saonese ship, and be herded up it by sailors ready to get underway. Three sturdy masts, Pen observed with approval, and even larger than the cargo vessel on which he’d traveled from Lodi to Patos not four months past, which now seemed a century ago. Making this Pen’s second sea voyage ever. Would it be as life-altering as the first?