Penric and the Shaman (Penric & Desdemona Book 2) (2 page)

Well, inadvertent from his point of view, hers, and her demon’s. He was uneasily unsure about the intentions of the white god that she, and now he, served. Though so far, Penric seemed to have been let get on with his life free of holy molestation.

At a cautious knock at his workroom door, Pen called, “Enter.”

A palace page in the blue tabard of a dedicat of the Daughter’s Order poked her head in, though only a few wary inches. She jerked back and waved a hand before her nose, grimacing, as the smoky fug of Pen’s labors wafted out into the corridor. “Learned Penric, sir. The princess-archdivine bids you attend upon her in her private cabinet.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Learned.”

Penric waved amiable acknowledgment. “Very good. I’ll follow presently.”

The girl whisked away, and Pen rose and set his tools in order.

Hurrah!
said Des.
Something new? An outing? An airing…?

“More chores, more likely.” Pen closed his door and made his way down the corridor.

*
   
*
   
*

The princess-archdivines of the royal free town and hinterland of Martensbridge were, by law and long custom, appointees in the gift of the distant Hallow King of the Weald. The town’s charter from him, and fealty to him, were what made it royal; the distance was what made it free, Penric suspected. Save for one or two lapses that they had managed to repair by strategic marriages, bribes, and a few armed clashes, the high house of kin Stagthorne had held onto the throne through the past several generations of elections. The current holder of the Martensbridge benefice had thus been, by the turning furrows of time, first daughter, then sister, then aunt to the succeeding kings.

Princess-Archdivine Llewen kin Stagthorne was now a slight, shrewd woman of sixty, who had carried out her duties to the Temple in this pocket palatine realm with the firm hand of a frugal housewife for some thirty years. As Penric knocked at the door to her private cabinet, one floor down from his own and adjacent to her chancellery, and was bade to enter, he found her dressed in the five-colored holy robes of her Temple office. Presumably she’d been caught either on the way to or from some ceremonial task. She was flanked as usual by her secretary, a woman of like age—and shrewdness—in the silks and linen and fine woolens appropriate to the palace precincts.

A strange man was also present, not nearly so finely clad. Above middle height, broad-shouldered, fit; perhaps thirty years of age? Brown hair, gray eyes. Face and hands red and chapped with cold; recently shaved but not, given his road-reek, recently bathed; riding boots cursorily cleaned of mud. Pen might have taken him for some urgent courier, but for the distinctive gray doublet with the brass buttons peeking out from beneath his thrown-back black cloak.

What’s a Wealdean Grayjay doing here?

The man eyed him in turn, then palpably dismissed him. Penric advanced to kiss the archdivine’s ring, held out perfunctorily to his inky fingers, and murmured, “How may I serve you, Your Grace?”

“Well, let us find out. Pull up a chair, Penric.” She nodded to the wall, where a few stools for favored visitors or supplicants were lined up. Unfavored ones were kept standing. The Grayjay had already been granted one, and the secretary another; the princess-archdivine occupied her carved seat, perhaps not accidentally reminiscent of a throne, and the only one supplied with a cushion. Supplicants were not encouraged to linger, not out of any high-nosed pride on the princess’s part, but because there were always other supplicants waiting.

Llewen went on mildly, “How goes your latest translation?”

“Well, Your Grace. Another two weeks of
uninterrupted
”—Penric made sure to emphasize that last word; Desdemona snickered silently—“work should see it ready to send out into the world after its sister volumes. I’m starting to think about its Ibran-language edition. Some recent medical texts in that tongue would be useful for reference, if they might be obtained for me. Helvia and Amberein gave me the Wealdean and Darthacan terminology, but Aulia of Brajar was no physician. And also, she may be out of date.”

The strange man’s hand clenched in impatience upon his knee. “
Your Grace
…” squeezed out between his lips, protest constricted by politeness, or perhaps the prudence of a man who hadn’t yet had his wish granted.

“Ah,” said the princess. “Permit me to introduce Senior Locator Oswyl, agent of the Father’s Order in Easthome. He is here, he tells me, on a mission of close pursuit, complicated by some very peculiar aspects, for which he earnestly begs the support of a sorcerer.”

Senior Locator
was a title of a Temple Inquirer of middle rank; not the lowly man-at-arms of a mere Locator, nor the heights of an Inquirer or, more dizzyingly, Senior Inquirer, who were normally learned divines, but something betwixt and between. Although the name of his Order’s home chapter, from the royal capital itself, added some tacit clout. Penric sat up, interested, and offered the man a friendly smile and a little wave of his fingers. He did not smile back.

“And this is Penric, my sorcerer,” Princess Llewen went on, with a nod Pen’s way.

Oswyl’s eyes widened. In a voice of unflattering surprise, he said, “
That’s
your court sorcerer? I was expecting someone… older.”

And better dressed, perhaps? Penric was very fond of his hard-earned white robes of the Bastard’s Order, and wildly proud of his shoulder braids marking him as a divine and a sorcerer, but he had quickly learned not to wear them while at work. At least not when yoked with a demon of disorder with a questionable sense of humor. As a result, most days he went about the palace precincts looking the tattered clerk Oswyl had evidently taken him for. Since the palace denizens knew who he was by now, this was not usually a problem. He could turn himself out as a showy, and laundered, ornament to the court well enough when someone gave him
warning
…

Thinking of his incomplete translation, Pen stifled his leaping curiosity and offered, “You could try Learned Tigney of the Bastard’s Order on Stane Street. He is the master and bailiff of all Temple sorcerers in this archdivineship.” Not that this secretive company numbered many. Nor did that number include Penric, who owed fealty directly to the princess-archdivine in return for his late schooling.

“I
started
with Tigney. He sent me
here
,” growled the Grayjay, sounding frustrated. “I told him I needed someone
powerful
.”

“I trust,” murmured the princess, “you do not judge so quickly by appearances in your inquiries, Locator.”

Oswyl went a little rigid, but swallowed any attempt at answering this observation,
yes
or
no
being equally hapless choices.

Feeling faintly sorry for the man—he’d run into the sharp side of the princess’s tongue himself a time or two, though never without having earned it—Penric offered peaceably, “So what do you need this powerful sorcerer for, sir?”

The princess waved her beringed hand. “Tell the tale again, Locator. With a bit more detail this time, if you please. If something so dangerous has entered my lands, I need to understand it.”

Oswyl took a long breath, of a man about to recount the same story for, by Pen’s guess, the third time in a day. At least it ought to be well-practiced. He at last addressed Penric directly: “What do you know of the Wealdean royal shamans?”

Penric sat back, or aback. “Not… a great deal. I’ve never met one in person. Their society is engaged in an attempt to recover something of the Old Weald forest magics, thought to be stamped out in the conquests of Great Audar. Except brought under the disciplines of the Temple, this time.”

The Darthacan conquest of the Weald had taken three hard-fought generations, five hundred years ago; three generations later, Audar’s empire had all fallen apart again in internal discord. But when the Darthacan tide receded, the Temple remained, and the old forest tribes, shattered and scattered as much by the passage of time and the progress of the world as by Darthacan arms, never reestablished themselves. Why the restored, if much changed, Wealdean hallow kings had sponsored this antiquarian revival when they had perfectly good Temple sorcerers at their disposal, Penric did not know, although the interested scholar in him felt a sneaking approval.
 

“The shamans’ magic is a human creation, or at least, rising from the world instead of descending, or escaping, from a god as demons do,” Penric went on. “In the old forests, tribal shamans were said to invest their warriors with the spirits of fierce animals, to endow them with that strength and ferocity in battle. The making of a shaman partook of this, only more so. The spirits of animals were sacrificed into others of the same kind, generation after generation, piled up until they became something more, Great Beasts. Invested at last into a person, the spirit of such a creature brought its powers to him not”—he cleared his throat—“not unlike the way a demon of the white god does for a sorcerer. Despite the very different origins of the gifts.”

Humph
, said Desdemona, but did not contradict this.

As Penric drew breath, the princess held up a stemming hand. “Penric is quite fond of reading, and will happily share all he learns. But perhaps not all at once? Go on, please, Locator.”

The Grayjay pressed his forehead, as though it ached, and grimaced. “Right. The first the Father’s Order at Easthome was told of this case was after that mess at the funeral, which was late off the mark. We should have been called out when they first found the body. Howsoever. I was dispatched to investigate and report on a suspicious death at the estate of one of the minor branches of the kin Boarford family, about ten miles outside of the capital. Not home of the earl-ordainer, thankfully, although for that I suppose they would have sent a more senior man.

“As I—eventually—worked out the chain of events, one of the scions of the family, a young man with military ambitions named Tollin kin Boarford, had purchased a wild boar captured alive from some hunters. He’d kept it for some weeks in a sty on the estate. His older brother thought that he had plans for some boar-baiting show, because instead of making any attempt to tame it, he teased it to make it wilder. Although I suppose either plan would have been equally stupid. But when Tollin was found one morning in the sty, shirtless and with his belly ripped open, and the boar bled dry with a knife in its throat, it seemed to the servants and family death by plain misadventure. The boar was butchered and fed to the dogs. Tollin’s body was washed and wrapped and made ready for his funeral rites at the old family temple on the estate, conducted by the local divine.

“Which was where everything went wrong, because none of the funeral animals signed that any god had taken up his soul, not the Son of Autumn, which would have been expected, not the Bastard, nor any other. As far as his family could tell, he had become a sundered ghost, and no one knew why. The divine,
finally
, sent for help.”

But instead, they got this Grayjay
, Desdemona quipped. Penric pressed his lips closed.

“There was not much to see in the sty, and the boar was eaten by then, but I did, with some argument, get the family to allow me to unwrap and examine the body. Where I was apparently the first to notice that, in addition to the ghastly goring of his abdomen, there was a slit of a knife wound just under his left breast. Shifting the event from misadventure to murder.”

“Huh,” said Pen, impressed.

“At that point, I reexamined the knife, and determined that it was not only too wide to have made the wound, it was too wide to fit in Tollin’s belt sheath. Not his blade at all. And after a search of the sty, its environs, and pretty much the whole estate, no other knife of the right dimensions was found. Carried off, it seemed, by whoever had stabbed him to the heart.”

Huh
, said Des, less unimpressed. She seized Pen’s mouth to inquire, very much in Learned Ruchia’s cadences, “Could you tell which injury came first, the knife wound or the goring?”

Oh, now that’s an interesting question
, Pen commented, deciding to forgive her for the unauthorized interruption, not least because Oswyl glanced across at him with a shade more respect.

“I could not. I’m not sure it would have been apparent even if I had been able to see the body when it was first found. But I took the knife and my inquiry to Tollin’s friends. None of them recognized the blade, but at last I learned that Tollin had also been comrades with a royal shaman, one newly invested with his powers. A younger son of the northern kin Wolfcliffs.”

The princess nodded. “That branch of their kin has been noted for supplying royal shamans since Good King Biast revived the practices, a century before my birth. Or so it was when I last lived at the king’s hall in Easthome.”

The Grayjay nodded back. “It’s still so. This shaman, Inglis kin Wolfcliff, was said by his friends to have been trying to court Tollin’s sister, without much success. When I went looking for
him
, I discovered that he had vanished out of Easthome, without leave from his superiors, the day after Tollin’s death. No one knew where or why. They did identify the knife found in the boar as a ritual sort, but with no signs of the uncanny on it.

“Which is when I persuaded
my
superiors to issue an order for Inglis’s arrest. And the wherewithal to carry it out, which was harder to extract. Inglis seems to be an ordinary-looking fellow—middling stature, dark hair and eyes, early twenties—of which I found there is a vast brotherhood on the roads this season, none of them well remembered by anyone. Fortunately, he rode a fine flaxen mare, a gift from his family upon the occasion of his investiture I was told, which was noted by every ferryman and inn stable boy from the lower Stork to the Upper Lure all the way to the Crow. Which was where we found the mare, lamed, sold to an inn hoping to resell her to a breeder. And our quarry vanished into air.”