Penric's Demon (3 page)

He was not, upon reflection, at all sure what the real ones did for a living, either when subjected to Temple disciplines, or gone renegade. The common saying was that a man became a sorcerer upon acquiring a demon much as a man became a rider upon acquiring a horse, with the implication that the inept horseman was riding for a fall. But what made a good horseman?

Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals, fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s Hell, a place of chaotic dissolution. Pen had a dim mental picture of something like a ball of white wool shot with a prickle of sparks. All that demons possessed of speech or knowledge or personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether
copied
or
stolen
, Pen was unclear. It had seemed a distinction without a difference if they only left with their prizes when their masters died, except . . . maybe not, if the ripped-up souls could not then go on to their god. He was growing uncomfortably sorry he had dozed or doodled through so many of those droning theology lectures in school.

Tales
not
from the nursery told of demons becoming ascendant within their masters, taking the body for some wild ride while the mind of the man was trapped as a helpless witness within. The demons were careless of injury, disease, or death, since they could jump from their worn-out mount to another like a courier riding relay. And the corrosion of such unchanneled chaos ate away at the sorcerer’s soul.

Except it seemed Learned Ruchia’s soul was expected to go to her god as usual, so maybe that varied as well? Or was it something about the mysterious Temple disciplines that made the difference? Pen had not the first idea what they might be. Was anyone going to think to tell him?

Did the hospice library have any books on the subject, and would they let Pen read them if he asked? But the Mother’s house seemed more likely to house tomes on anatomy and medicines than on the doings of her second Son and his demonic pets.

As night fell, his fretting was relieved by the return of Gans, bearing a load of Pen’s clothes and gear from home and a pair of saddlebags to pack them in. The load exceeded the capacity of the bags, yet certain necessities seemed to be missing.

“Did my brother not send me a sword?” The armory at Jurald Court could surely spare one.

The graying groom cleared his throat. “He gave it to me. Instead, I guess. I’m charged to go along with you on the road to Martensbridge, look after you and all.” Gans did not look best pleased with this proffered adventure. “We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”

“Oh!” said Pen, startled. “So soon?”

“Soonest begun, soonest done,” Gans intoned. His goal, clearly, was the
done
. Gans had always been a man of settled routines.

Pen set about extracting a view of yesterday’s events as Gans had witnessed them, but his laconic account did not add much to what Pen had already imagined, except for a strong sense leaking through that Gans considered it unjust of Pen to encounter such a disaster on Gans’s watch. But his new task, it seemed, was not a punishment; the Temple guards had requested his witness in Martensbridge of the events he had seen.

“I don’t know why,” he grumbled. “Seems to me a scribe could write it down on half a page, and save me the saddle sores.”

Gans took himself off to sleep elsewhere in the old mansion gifted to the Mother’s Order and converted to its present charitable purpose—Pen guessed his own quarantined chamber had once been some servant’s quarters. He turned to the problem of packing his bags. Someone back at Jurald Court had apparently just grabbed all the clothing he owned. The brown suit went on the impractical pile to be returned there in the morning, along with the most threadbare of his unloved hand-me-downs. How long was he to be gone? Where was he going, exactly? What would he need there?

He wondered if packing for the university would have been anything like this. ‘Sorcerer’ had certainly not been on Pen’s former list of scholarly ambitions, but then, neither had ‘theologian’, ‘divine’, ‘physician’, ‘teacher’, ‘lawyer’, or any other high trade taught there—yet another reason for Rolsch’s dubiousness about it all. The Bastard’s Order must have a separate seminary of some sort . . . ?

Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.

*
   
*
   
*

Penric carried his saddlebags down to the entry hall in the morning gloom to find a send-off he hadn’t expected in the form of Preita herself, in all her pretty roundness, escorted by a frowning brother and sister.

“Preita!” He went to her, only to have her flinch back, if with a tremulous smile.

“Hullo, Pen.” They stared uncertainly at each other. “I hear you’re going away.”

“Only to Martensbridge. Not to the ends of the world.” He swallowed, and got out, “Are we still to be betrothed?”

Regretfully, she shook her head. “Do you even know when you will return?”

“Er . . . no.” Two days ago, he’d known everything about his future. Today, he knew nothing. He was not sure this change was an improvement.

“So—so you can see how difficult that would be. For me.”

“Uh, yes, to be sure.”

Her hands started to reach out, but then retreated behind her back and consoled each other there. “I am so sorry. But surely you see any girl must be quite afraid to marry a man who could set her on fire with a word!”

He’d dreamed of setting her alight with kisses. “Any man could set a girl on fire with a
torch
, but he’d have to be deranged!”

This won only an uneasy shrug. “I brought you something. For the road, you know.”

She motioned to her brother, who handed over a large sack that proved, when Pen opened it, to contain a huge wheel of cheese. “Thank you,” Pen managed. He glanced at his bulging saddlebags, and ruthlessly turned to hand it on to the impatiently waiting Gans. “Here. Find a place to pack this. Somehow.”

Gans shot him a beleaguered look, but carried it out.

Preita gave him a jerky nod, but ventured no closer; apparently, he was not to get even one soft farewell hug to see him off. “Good luck, Pen. I will pray that all goes well with you.”

“And I, you.”

The two Temple guardsmen stood outside, holding the saddled horses. The late sorceress’s gear was packed aboard a sturdy cob, where Gans was securing the sack of cheese. Another mount awaited Pen.

He made for it, but paused at a call; it seemed he had one more painful farewell to endure. His mother and Rolsch hurried up as Preita and her siblings hurried away, exchanging awkward nods in passing. His kin looked less harried and exhausted than yesterday, but still unhappy.

“Pen,” said Rolsch, gravely. “The five gods protect you on your road.” He thrust out a small bag of coin, which Pen, surprised, took.

“Wear it around your neck,” his mother told him anxiously. “I hear those cutpurses in the cities can have away with a purse off a man’s belt and he never feels a tug.”

The cord had been lengthened for such prudence; dutifully, Pen obeyed, sneaking a peek within before tucking the soft leather into his shirt. More copper than silver, and no gold, but it made him not quite entirely a beggar at the Temple’s table.

Pen steeled himself to endure the embarrassment of a tearful maternal embrace, but, though Lady Jurald started forward, she stopped much like Preita. She raised her hand in a farewell wave, instead, as though he were turning out of sight and not standing a pace away.

“Be more
careful,
Pen!” she begged, her voice breaking. She turned back to Rolsch.

“Yes, Mama,” Pen sighed.

He went to his horse. Gans offered him no leg up, not that Pen had any problem lifting his wiry body into a saddle. As he did so, he had the quelling realization that not one person had touched him since whoever had carried him up and dumped him into that bed day before yesterday.

The senior guardsman motioned them forward, and the party rode off up the cobbled main street beneath the whitewash and half-timbering of the houses lining it. No flowers yet brightened their window boxes, in the chill of early spring. Pen turned in his saddle to wave one last time, but his mother and Rolsch were entering the hostel, and did not see.

Pen cleared his throat, and asked the senior guardsman, whose name was Trinker, “Did the Learned Ruchia’s funeral go all right, yesterday afternoon? They didn’t let me attend.”

“Oh, aye. Taken up by her god, all right, signed by that white dove and all.”

“I see.” Pen hesitated. “Can we please stop where she is buried? Just for a moment.”

Trinker grunted but could not gainsay this pious request, so nodded.

The graveyard where the Temple-sworn were buried lay beyond the walls, on the road out of town; they turned aside, and Trinker escorted Pen to the new mound, as yet unmarked, while Gans and Wilrom waited atop their horses.

Nothing much to see, now, in the dawn damp; nothing much to feel, though Pen extended all his exacerbated senses. He bowed his head and offered a silent prayer, the wording haltingly remembered from services for his father, and that other brother who had died when Pen was little, and some aged servants. The grave returned no answer, but something inside him seemed to ease, as if pacified.

He mounted again, and Trinker urged them into a trot as they crossed the covered wooden bridge over the river and the town fell behind.

The bright sunshine of the past two days, like a misplaced breath of summer, was gone, replaced by a more usual misty damp, which would likely turn to a chill drizzle before the morning was out. The high mountains to the north hid their white heads in the clouds, which lay like a gray lid over the wide uplands of Pen’s country. The road followed the river downstream, into what passed in these parts for flatter lands—or at least the valleys widened and the hills shrank.
 
Pen wondered how soon they would catch a glimpse of the Raven Range, that other long stone hedge on the opposite side of the plateau , dividing the Cantons from the great realm of the Weald to the south.

The Temple guards kept them mostly to a trot, walking up the hills, a rhythm designed to eat the most miles in the least time. It was not the breakneck pace of a courier, but it did assume a change of horses being available, which they took at a noon halt at a Temple way-station. They passed farm carts, pack mules, cows, sheep, and country folk in small villages. Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars.
Like Drovo
, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.

While ascending the hills, Pen coaxed their guards to talk a little. He was surprised to learn that they were not Divine Ruchia’s own retainers, but had been assigned to her at the border town of Liest, when she’d crossed out of Darthaca on her way to Martensbridge; likewise the woman servant Marda. Gans was indignant to learn that Marda had been allowed to give a deposition and then head for home. Trinker and Wilrom were quite apprehensive about what their seniors would say when it was learned that they had lost their charge on the road, helpless though they had been to prevent it. They had come prepared to fight bad men, not bad hearts. As for the fumbling of her valuable demon into the chance-encountered younger brother of a minor valley lord . . . no one seemed to be looking forward to explaining that.

At dusk, with forty miles of muddy road behind them, they halted at a modest town that boasted a house of the Daughter’s Order, which took them in. Penric was again shown to a room by himself; a smiling dedicat brought him hot water and food, and he smiled back in gratitude, but she did not linger. A check outside his door found a local guardsman standing sentry. Pen said a hesitant hello and retreated, too tired to mind.

His room was as small as the one at the hospice, but better furnished; chairs with embroidered cushions, a table with a mirror and stool clearly meant for lady guests, something a house of the Daughter of Spring was more likely to host. Pen took advantage by sitting down with his comb, undoing his queue, and attacking the day’s accumulated snarls, which his fine, pale blond hair was prone to.

When he glanced up at the mirror, his mouth said, “Yes, let’s get another look at you.”

Pen froze. Was the demon awake again? His jaw clamped shut; his throat tightened.

How did the thing perceive the world, anyway? Did it share his vision, his hearing? His thoughts? Did it have to take turns looking out, as with his voice, or was it always there, like a bird perched on his shoulder?

He breathed, unlocked his muscles. Said, “Would you like to speak?” And waited.

“Want to look,” said the demon through his mouth. “We want to see what we’ve bought.” Its speech was fairly clear, its accent the cultured Wealdean of the lands around Martensbridge, as Ruchia’s had been.

Pen had not spent much time in front of mirrors since he’d grown big and fast enough to evade older sisters bent on using him as a large doll. His own features, in the glass, suddenly grew strange to him. But his vision did not go black; it seemed the two of them shared his eyes together.