Penric and the Shaman (Penric & Desdemona Book 2) (6 page)

“It’s not so different from my home country, just a hundred miles east of here.”

Oswyl eyed him dubiously. “There will be more people on the main road.”

“Strangers stand out more in the vales. People notice them. And besides, if that tapster spoke true, you’ve made up a few days on Inglis’s lead since the Crow.”

“Time I do not care to waste by haring off up blind alleys.”

“Unless the blind alley turns out to be a hunter’s bag.”

“Hm.” Oswyl paused and stared to the north where the high peaks glimmered in the night, a pale wall across the world. “I believe I was right to hold to my reasoning back on the Crow Road. I’d wager that stout Easthome sorcerer is saddle-sore and empty-handed now, somewhere in Saone.” The vision seemed to give him a certain understandable satisfaction. “Why should I think your advice better?”

Oddly, Penric didn’t sense that the question was rhetorical. “Because this is my home country, not his? Because why would Inglis, if the man was Inglis, ask all those questions and not pursue the pointers they gained him? Because Inglis, being a stranger here, will try the most easily reached routes first?”

“
Time
,” said Oswyl, though his teeth.

“Is it so desperate? He is no less or more trapped by the snow on the passes than he would be by Chillbeck Vale. It’s not as though he’s been leaving a trail of bodies.”

Oswyl was surprised into a noise that came as close to a laugh, if a black one, as Penric had yet heard from him. “I suppose I should not wish it.”

An oil lantern hung over the Order’s gates, its yellow light glittering from the snow sifted in between the street’s cobbles. Oswyl motioned Baar ahead of them into the warm, with a clap to his shoulder and a low-voiced, “Well done, man.” But he did not at once follow, and Penric paused with him.

“As a Temple sensitive, have you ever gone out, or been taken out, to check accusations of hedge sorcery?” Oswyl asked abruptly.

Penric, curious at this sudden turn in the talk, folded his arms against the night chill and replied, “Three times, when I was at seminary at Rosehall, I was taken along for training. Not for the working of the thing, since any sorcerer recognizes another as readily as I can tell you are a tall man, but to get a grasp on the legalities, which can become complex. For one thing, just because the accused is not a sorcerer, and they almost never are, it doesn’t necessarily mean no crime has been committed, by other means or persons. I did think the false accusations, if the accuser knew them false, to be especially heinous.”

Oswyl nodded grimly.

“I’ve not been sent out since I was made court sorcerer, as Tigney has others to call on for such routine duties. But Desdemona, after she became a Temple demon, went with her riders on hundreds of such inquiries, and found a real sorcerer involved, what—”

Twice
.

“Only twice.”

“As a locator, I’ve seen the same from the other side,” said Oswyl. “In ten years, only a single case sustained, and the poor man, who’d thought he was going mad, flung himself upon the Temple’s mercy and found it. But one time…”

He hesitated so long, Penric nearly prodded him with a,
But one time…?
except that Desdemona quietly advised,
Wait
.

Oswyl glowered down the street at nothing, and finally said, “One time, we were laggard on the road. The reasons seemed sufficient—bad weather, a bridge washed out. Howsoever. We arrived at this dismal village out in the country to discover the accused woman had been burned to death by her frenzied neighbors the night before. No sign found that any demon had jumped from her pyre. She was almost certainly innocent, and if we had arrived timely, we could have disposed of the false charges forthwith, and given stern warnings to the slanderers. As it was, we faced the dilemma of trying to charge an
entire village
with murder. It all broke down in a sickening morass, and in the end… well, no justice was done there, in the Father’s sight or any other.”

While Penric, taken wholly aback, was still trying to come up with something to acknowledge this that didn’t sound fatuous, Oswyl yanked open the door and made to step within. But as he did he growled over his shoulder, “So I
do not like
being late.”

The door thudded shut like the end of an argument.

After a moment, Penric sighed and reached for the handle.
This isn’t going to be so easy, is it?

The Father’s cases seldom are
, noted Desdemona.
Else they wouldn’t need
Him.

They rode out of Whippoorwill
very early
the next morning.

VI

Twenty-seven
.

Inglis controlled his pained panting, and stropped the knife blade carefully over the shallow cut across his right thigh. When it was well-coated, he set it aside and scrambled around in his fur nest to pull up and tie his trouser strings. He’d found the rest of his clothes in a pile near the hearth; his purse had been unsurprisingly missing. Left boot also there, right boot ruined, cut down the shaft. If it had come off, presumably it could come back on… no. He sighed and abandoned them both.

It took three tries to wallow upright. Arrow sat up and watched with interest. As Inglis hobbled barefoot the short distance across the hut, the dog rose and paced along. Inglis’s hand found its ruff, sturdy but not quite high enough for good support. The wooden door, secured only by a rope latch, creaked wide. He leaned on the jamb and looked around.

The morning sun was blindingly bright on the snow, which was turning slushy in some late teasing thaw, and Inglis’s eyes watered. Blinking, he found that the hut was nearly at the tree line. Dark firs and pines fell away below; he could see over their tops down into the vale. The flat valley floor narrowed here, the last farms straggling up its crooked, attenuating length. A small village clustered around a timber bridge over the barely-a-river.

A few more crude huts clung to the slope near Inglis’s refuge. One was plainly a smokehouse, from the aromatic haze rising through its thatch. A nanny goat with a bell hung from a leather strap around its neck wandered past, ignoring him. From somewhere nearby, he heard women’s voices.

He stared down at Arrow, who gazed back, soulfully attentive. It was worth a try… He caressed the dog’s head, and said,
“Fetch me a stick.”

The dog made a cheerful noise in its chest, too deep to be a yip, and bounded away. By the time Inglis had retrieved, cleaned, and sheathed his knife, and determined that no more belongings of his were in the hut, Arrow returned to the doorway, dragging a log as long and thick as a fencepost. He dropped it with a thunk at Inglis’s feet and looked up proudly, toothy grin gaping, tail swishing back and forth like a cudgel.

Inglis was surprised into a rusty laugh. It felt strange in his throat. “I said a stick, not building timber!” Though it would make fine firewood. He ruffled the dog’s head anyway. “Fetch me a
thinner
stick.”

Eagerness unimpaired, Arrow bounded away again. He returned in a few minutes towing something more sapling-like. Inglis broke off the side branches and tested it. It would do for now. The snow was almost not unpleasant on his swollen, throbbing right foot. The left was out of luck. He wondered if he could beg some coverings for them. Limping slowly, he followed the sound of the voices.

In a three-sided shelter, its open face turned to the sun, he discovered a team of women at work scraping a stretched hide. One of them was the girl Beris. The other two were older. All stopped scraping to look up and stare at Inglis, although, as the dog momentarily abandoned him to snatch a pale scrap and retreat to chew on it, the one with the gray braid spared a dispassionate, “Arrow, you fool dog. You’ll make yourself sick.” Arrow’s tail thumped unrepentantly.

“You got up,” said Beris, bright and a bit wary. “Are you feeling better now?”

Better than what?
“A little,” Inglis managed, and, belatedly, “Thank you for your aid.”

The middle woman said, “You were lucky to be found. Another few days, and we’d all have gone down to the valley, even the boys.” She eyed him in curiosity. “Where were you bound?”

He wasn’t sure he could explain his confusion of mind to himself, let alone her, nor how many times he’d switched his goal from Carpagamo to Linkbeck and back. He finally settled on, vaguely, “Up the vale, but I took a wrong turn in the dark.” He extended his empurpled foot. “I was wondering if I might beg some rags to wrap my feet. My boots are impossible.”

She made a grunt and a motion, which her companions seemed to interpret without difficulty, and levered herself up to trudge off. Gingerly, hoping he would be able to stand again without aid, Inglis lowered himself to another sawed-off chunk of tree trunk that they seemed to be using for camp chairs.

Should he try the ‘poor scholar collecting stories’ ploy again? It had brought him this far. Arrow relieved him of his dilemma by making another raid on the skin scraps; the woman with the gray braid made a desultory
begone, pest
gesture at him, which he eluded.

“That is an extraordinary dog,” Inglis began. Did either of them realize how extraordinary? Two different flavors of blank faces regarded him in return. Beris’s seemed innocent. The elder woman’s might conceal more. Try manners? He attempted a smile at her, and said, “My name is Inglis, by the way.”

“So Beris said.”

“And you are, Mother…?”

“Laaxa.”

Inglis nodded, as though he cared. Her lips quirked, as though she did. “I was told one of the men who helped bring me off the trail had the dog from his uncle, Scuolla. Can you tell me where to find him to speak to?”

Laaxa snorted. “Where to find him, yes. Though I doubt he’ll be speaking to you.” She pointed up the valley. “He was killed in a landslide not two months back, poor old man.”

The blighting of Inglis’s last forlorn hope was as crushingly cold as an avalanche. “Oh.” He sat in silence for a minute, too taken aback to think. He finally tried, “Was he the man who raised dogs? I was told there was such a fellow in this vale. Or did he have Arrow from someone else?” Yes, there might be one more possibility…

“Oh, aye, it was something of his trade. His partner was supposed to have inherited them, but they were together out hunting for meat to feed the beasts.
His
body they managed to dig out, at least. The dogs were scattered about to whoever would have them, after. So if you’ve come seeking to buy one, you might still have a chance.”

“Did, uh, you know Scuolla well?”

“Only to nod to. He was no kinsman of mine. He kept to himself up the east branch.”

He tried Beris: “Was Savo close to his uncle, do you know?”

She shook her head. “Savo’s mother’s a lot younger than Scuolla. I don’t think they had much to do with each other even before she married and moved to her husband’s farm.”

He wasn’t sure how to ask,
Was your neighbor an illicit hedge shaman?
without frightening them into silence. “Was Scuolla gossips with
anybody
?”

Laaxa shrugged. “He drank with Acolyte Gallin, time to time, I think.”

Inglis prodded, “Acolyte Gallin?”

“He’s our Temple-man, down Linkbeck.” Laaxa waved in the general direction of the valley. Indeed, such a small village was unlikely to rate a full-braid learned divine. An acolyte would typically be made to do. “He serves the whole of the Chillbeck upper vale.”

“So he would have conducted Scuolla’s funeral rites?”

“Gallin buries pretty much everyone, in these parts.”

Inglis worded his next question cautiously. “Did you hear any strange rumors about Scuolla’s funeral?”

He’d hit something, because both women gave him sharp, closed looks.

“Wasn’t there,” said Laaxa. “Couldn’t say. You’d have to ask Gallin.”

Shamans came as linked chains—half shackles, half lifelines. A shaman was needed not only to culture a Great Beast, but to conduct its sacrifice into each new candidate at the commencement of his or her service. At the end of that life of service, a shaman was again needed to cleanse the comrade soul, free it of that earthly link—some said, contamination—to go on to the gods. Among the reasons for the revival of the royal shamans of the Weald, it was said, was to sustain such chains, that no soul might go sundered. Among the reasons for keeping the practices discreet and contained was to limit such risks. At his own investiture, Inglis had accepted the hazards blithely. He was anything but blithe now.

If Scuolla had indeed been a hedge shaman, as Inglis now strongly suspected, whoever had conducted his investiture was probably long dead; with luck, readied for his last journey by Scuolla himself. So who had cleansed Scuolla in turn? And might that unknown person help Inglis in his woe?
Follow the chain
.

In this high country, it was rumored, the old ways were quietly tolerated by the rural Temple hierarchies, so long as their practitioners conceded precedence and authority to the Temple, and quarter-day dues. And if the local Temple folk were not too rigidly virtuous. So was this Acolyte Gallin an enemy of the old ways, or one of the quietly tolerant? And if the latter, had he quietly helped his drinking friend’s soul along by securing the services of another hedge shaman to perform those last rites? Or at the very least known where and how, and by whom, they were brought off?