Penric and the Shaman

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Gallin took Pen to his parlor-study and closed the door, gesturing Pen to sit. When they were knee to knee, he lowered his voice and said directly, “I prayed for help. Are you it?”

  Pen sighed unease. “If so, no One has told me. I do not suffer prophetic dreams.” He would add, Thank the gods, but that seemed to fall under the heading of what his mother had used to call coaxing lumps.

  “Still, the gods are parsimonious, they say.”

  “I understand your drift, I suppose. A Grayjay who hates to be late has arrived at the last hour, bringing me, just in time to intersect a shaman who was running away. One need not be delusory to think something is expected of us.” If Inglis had been in command of his powers, the shaman’s role would be obvious, but then, if he’d been in command of his powers, he could have cleansed Tollin’s soul on the spot back at Easthome, and be doing, well, who knew what who knew where by now. Pen’s own role so far reminded him of those caravan guards mustered in a mass not to fight off bandits, but to dissuade them from attacking in the first place. Which, he had to admit, was by far the best imaginable use of a force of arms.

  “Are Inglis’s powers truly broken, as he claimed?”

  Penric hesitated. “His powers appear to me to be intact. Only his guilt and distraught mind seem to be blocking his full access to them.”

  “Can you do something about that? With your powers?”

  “The natural directions of my skills are to mar, not to mend. And they work on things, not minds. Mainly.” And Inglis’s worked on minds, not things. A peculiar reciprocity, now that Pen considered it.

  Gallin’s fingers pulled at each other. “Then perhaps it’s not your skills as a sorcerer that are wanted, but your skills as a divine. Perhaps you are the one meant to give him spiritual counsel?”

  Penric was taken aback. “That… wasn’t a subject I spent much time on at seminary. It’s a rather horrible joke, if so.”

  Gallin half-laughed. “That’s no proof it wasn’t from your god. More the reverse.”

  And so the facetious brag he’d made to Oswyl, about being a divine five-fold, curled back to bite him now. Of all the tasks he’d imagined undertaking on the Grayjay’s wolf-hunt, whether as sorcerer or bowman-hero, sage counselor wasn’t even on the list.

  So, murmured Des. Now we see why you are so quick to leave your braids in your saddlebags.

  That wasn’t it! he began to argue back, and stopped. He raised his face to Gallin’s, again. “You’ve served here for many years. You knew Scuolla, as a friend and as a shaman. Surely you must be better fitted for such a task?”

  Gallin shook his head. “Friend, yes, I hope so. But I can’t say as I ever understood what he did with his dogs, except to observe that there seemed no malice in it, or in him. But you and Inglis kin Wolfcliff, you are both brothers in the uncanny. You see things veiled from me. Maybe you can see the way out of this tangle, too.”

  Penric cleared his throat, embarrassed. “I admit, I had an idea or two. But it was just for things to try. Not any kind of wisdom. Oswyl thought it high foolishness, in fact.”

  “Locator Oswyl wants to leave, I gather. Can you not overrule him?”

  “The princess-archdivine assigned me to him, not him to me. The task was his to start with before it grew”—Pen hesitated—“so complicated.”

  “Could he hold Inglis without your aid?”

  “Well…” Penric reflected on the possibilities inherent in that weirding voice, were it to be deployed without restraint. Not to mention the other shamanic skills. “No.”

  “It seems you are the linchpin in this wheel, then. If you elect to stay, he cannot take Inglis and go.”

  “That… would seem to be the case, yes.”

  “Then I beg you to stay. And apply your ideas. Or counsel. Or wisdom, or unwisdom, or whatever you may dub it.” Gallin drew breath. “You have to try, at least.”

  Pen imagined a prayer, or a holy whine—to the white god, either would do—If You don’t like it, give me something better.

  The silence in his head was profound. Even Des did not chaff or chatter.

  Penric managed a nod. Trying not to let his doubts show, he returned to the breakfast table to shepherd Inglis—and the two dogs—back to their bedchamber.

  * * *

  They settled cross-legged facing each other on the bedroll once more. Blood flopped down across the doorway and sighed; Arrow sat up beside Inglis and appeared to watch with more than canine interest.

  “All right.” Penric took a breath. “What I’m going to do here is give you a clean new chant to gate your entry into your spirit space.”

  Inglis shot him a stare of surprise and offense. “What makes you think you can do the first thing about it? Sorcerer.”

  “I’m the one who’s here. That seems to be the most vital point at present.” Refusing to wilt under Inglis’s frown, Penric forged on, “My call shall be, ‘Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other.’ And your response shall be, ‘Bless this work and let me serve another.’ ”

  “Is that supposed to be the blessing?”

  “No, that’s your chant. I thought I’d combine the two and save steps.”

  Inglis met his bright smile with a deepening glower. “It’s a stupid rhyme.”

  “I’m a sorcerer, not a poet.”

  “Evidently. It’s not even a quatrain.”

  “Repeat it, and it will turn into a quatrain.”

  Inglis looked ready to rebel. Or at least to refuse to cooperate. And what Penric would do then, he had no idea.

  Des muscled into brief control of his mouth, and said in honeyed tones, “Or you could pray, ‘Other, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. Thwack my head and make me less a blister.’ ” Pen failed to control the upward crook of his lips as she fell back.

  After a long, black silence Inglis said, “Use the first one.”

  “Good,” said Pen. And a firm, No more interruptions now, to Des. She settled back, falsely demure. “I’ll begin. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other…”

  They began to repeat the call and response much as Inglis and his possibly-not-that-long-ago mentor had. The mindful if simple (or simple-minded, Des put in) prayer really did grow boring after enough repetitions. A while after that, the syllables began to lose any meaning or connection at all, a steady, soothing double drone. Pen did not let up until both their tongues started stumbling, when he called a break.

  Nothing had happened. Well, he hadn’t expected it to, Pen lied to himself. All right, he’d been hopeful.

  “How often did your shamanic master repeat your practice sessions?” asked Pen.

  “It varied, depending on his duties and mine. Sometimes, once or twice a day. Sometimes dozens.”

  “And how long did you drill at a time?”

  “Much as now, till our tongues grew too tired to fruitfully go on. That, too, varied.”

  “Hm.” Penric slapped his knees and stood up. “Rest your tongue, then. And your leg.”

  Inglis at least did not argue with this injunction.

  Pen found one of their guards seated at the top of the staircase. “Where is Oswyl?”

  “He walked over to the temple, I think, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Penric threaded his way through the house and turned onto the street. The temple stood as quiet and dim as yesterday when they’d surprised Inglis inside. Once again, the hall held only one supplicant. Oswyl sat upon his knees before the altar dedicated to the Father, tucked up against its one-fifth portion of the wooden walls. His head turned at the sound of Penric’s steps.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” said Pen. And then, incurably curious, asked, “What do you pray for?”

  Oswyl’s lips thinned. “Guidance.”

  “Oh? I thought everything we’ve encountered here shouts our course at us. Or are you just angling for a different answer?”

  Oswyl turned back toward his chosen god’s altar once more, the very set of his shoulders
sturdily ignoring Pen.

  Pen walked to the hall’s opposite side and studied his god’s niche. The shrines here had a profusion of woodcarvings, common in country temples in this region. On the lintel, the carver had placed a well-observed flight of crows; in a lower corner, some earnest-looking rats. The Daughter’s shrine, to Penric’s right, was decorated with an explosion of wooden flowers and young animals, painted in their proper colors, a muted glow in the shadows. A supplicant prayed before a shrine, Penric’s teachers had made clear, not to it. He lowered himself to his knees. Emptying his mind was not an option, but he didn’t need to badger the gods, either. He waited.

  After a while, Oswyl’s voice came from across the hall: “Did you get anywhere with your tutoring?”

  Not turning, Pen answered, “Not yet.”

  A wordless grunt.

  After a little, Pen said, “He’s not really a murderer, you know.”

  A pause: then, “My task is to bring a fugitive to justice. Not to judge him.”

  “Yet you must use your judgment. You followed your own line on the Crow Road.”

  A considering silence.

  “I have another trial in mind,” Penric continued. “I want to take Inglis out to the rock fall, and see what he can make of old Scuolla.” And what Scuolla would make of him?

  A mere pained sigh was all that this elicited. What, was he finally wearing Oswyl down? It occurred to Penric that Oswyl was not so rigidly rules-bound as his stiff jaw suggested; only doubt need pray for guidance. He hoped Oswyl would get his answer. Penric went on speaking to his own wall: “Inglis is in less pain than yesterday. Calmer, if not less bleak. I expect I should take Gallin. And the dogs. We’ll need one of the guardsmen’s horses. Do you wish to come? Given you’ve no hand in the uncanny.”

  Oswyl’s voice returned, distantly, “Having spent this long and come this far to find him, I’m not losing sight of him again.”

  “Well, then.” Penric bowed his head and signed the tally, and they both rose together.

  XII

  Inglis, to his chagrin, had to be helped onto his horse by two guardsmen and an upturned stump by the stable door. His stick presented another puzzle. He finally set its butt upright atop his foot, which also had to be fitted into his stirrup by a guard, and held it like a banner pole. That and his reins seemed to give his hands too many things to do. The sorcerer almost floated up into his saddle, although Inglis put it down to his wiry build and horsemanship, not magic. Acolyte Gallin availed himself of the stump, however. Given the acolyte’s age, that was small consolation. Locator Oswyl frowned down from his mount at Arrow and Blood, swirling amiably around Inglis’s horse; the horse, which Inglis judged something of a slug, took only mild exception.

  Gallin led the mounted party out past his temple into the street, where Learned Penric held up a staying hand. “Let us go to the bridge, first,” said Penric to him. “And over it. I want to see something.”

  Gallin shrugged and turned his mount left instead of right. The rest of them followed in a gaggle. The dogs, who had darted ahead in the opposite direction, paused and vented puzzled whines. When the riders continued their retreat, they barked a few times, then ran after.

  As Penric made to lead them all across the wooden span, Arrow and Blood rushed ahead, turned, and set up a furious barking. The horses shied.

  “Calm them,” Penric advised Inglis.

  “Hush!” Inglis tried, and then, “Sit!” The apparently-maddened dogs continued to hold the party at bay. “Hush!” Inglis tried again, more forcefully. “Settle down!”

  The two dogs recoiled as if blown by a gust of gale, but then remustered their battle line and took up their din again, standing four-legged and braced, the fur rising in a ridge along their backs.

  “Enough!” cried Penric, laughing for no reason that Inglis could discern, and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Gallin, staring back and forth between the dogs and him, reined his horse around to lead back up the vale once more. A few villagers arrested by the uproar who had come to their garden gates nodded at their acolyte, frowned impartially at his visitors, and turned back to their interrupted tasks.

  The two guardsmen fell in at either side of Inglis, albeit not too close, scowling at him in distrust. Oswyl nudged his horse up beside the sorcerer’s, and asked, “Did you do something, back there?”

  “No,” said Penric, airily, “not at all. Very carefully not at all, in fact.”

  “So what was all that in aid of?”

  “I had three theories about what drives those dogs. This knocks out one of them. Two to go.” He nodded in satisfaction, and pushed his horse into a trot after Gallin. Oswyl seemed as baffled by this as Inglis, for he made an exasperated face at the sorcerer’s retreating back. What, did the locator find the blond man as irritating as Inglis did?

  A little while later Penric reined back beside Inglis, displacing one of the guards, who looked more grateful than otherwise for being relieved of his post. “Well,” said Penric cheerily, “shall we beguile the ride with a bit more practice?”

  “No,” said Inglis, mortified. And if a No! would have worked on the man, he’d have followed up with one. “Do you want us both to look fools?”

  “That still concerns you, at this stage in your career?” Penric inquired. Entirely too dryly. “Though I have to allow, working for my god tends to knock that worry out of a person fairly swiftly.” The dryness melted to an even more excoriating look of sympathy.

  “I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not going to work.”

  “If you don’t know the first, how do you know the second?” Penric shot back. “Although I’m afraid planning may be too grandiose a term for it. Testing, perhaps. Like the bridge.”

  Inglis hunched his shoulders. Penric eyed him a moment more and then, to his relief, gave up.

  The day was gray, the air damp, the mountains veiled, but the wind was light, not spitting rain or snow at them. Inglis studied the vale as they rode up the right-hand branch of the Chillbeck. The high peaks that headed it, and easterly, led only to more peaks. One would have to circle back several miles to find any western trail with even a chance of leading to a high pass over to the main Carpagamo road. It was a half-day’s ride downriver beyond that to loop south to the same road, the way Inglis had come in. Given his prior disastrous experience with trying to climb out over this valley’s walls, that seemed the best bet. If a man had a head start on a fast horse. The notion of trying to retrace his route all the way back to the Crow Road and head east to Saone after all, as winter turned from threat to certainty, was near-heartbreaking.

  The riders strung out as Gallin turned off the road and up into the woods. The sorcerer rode right behind Inglis, a thorn in his back; one of the guards went ahead, looking frequently over his shoulder. The woods were difficult but not, Inglis thought, impassible. Centuries of valesmen gathering deadfall and timber from these more accessible lower slopes had left them semi-cleared, although tangled steeper ravines and erupting granite rock faces broke up the area into a maze.

  At length, the trail opened out onto a fearsome-looking landslide, much larger than Inglis had been picturing, and the riders pulled up. The two dogs scampered ahead onto the debris.

  Penric peered out over the waste after the bounding animals, and asked Inglis, “What do you see?”

  “When I am not in my trance, my sight is the same as yours. Er, as any man’s.” This was not quite true in this moment, Inglis realized. There was a breathless pressure in his mind, as if he were plunged deep underwater. A shiver up his spine. Tollin’s spirit, wound around the knife under the sorcerer’s shirt, was so agitated Inglis could sense its hum from here. “What do you see?”

  “When Des lends me her vision, I can see the spirits much, I think, as saints are said to do, matter and spirit superimposed, like seeing both sides of a coin at once. Scuolla seems a colorless image, like a reflection on glass. I see he’s changed his rock since yesterday. So he ca
n move about, some. May be a trifle smudgier? Or maybe that’s what I expect, or fear, to find.” Penric’s gaze had alighted where Arrow and Blood circled a boulder, whining. “He’s looking over at us. At you? He perceives us on some level, certainly. If you could—when you could—achieve your trance, did you see spirits? And could they speak to you, or were they silent?”

  “I’d not encountered many. The old ones were always silent. I’d not evoked a new one yet.”

  “Tollin.”

  Inglis winced. “Tollin is bound to the knife, and does not speak. To me. In my normal mind. I don’t know if…” He trailed off, confused. If he could have ascended to the spirit plane, might they have spoken together despite the binding? Inglis wasn’t sure if he would have raged at Tollin for this disaster, or begged his forgiveness, or what. If he had lost a friend in more ways than one, or if some peace might have been salvaged between them, at an hour beyond the last. If Tollin hated him…

  Penric, Oswyl, and one of the guardsmen dismounted, the latter taking the reins of all three horses. All of Gallin’s attention was on the dogs. The second guardsman kicked his feet out of his stirrups, preparing perhaps to go to Inglis’s aid. The sorcerer’s bow was still bundled with his quiver, unstrung, tied to his saddle. For the first time in weeks, the burden of the knife was taken out of Inglis’s hands.

  If ever I am to have a chance, it is now, right now.

  Inglis threw back his head and HOWLED.

  Every horse in the party reared in panic and bolted, including his own. He tossed away his stick, wrenched at his reins, and managed to get the beast aimed generally uphill. They plunged into the patchy forest. From behind him, curses and a thump as someone fell off, more curses fragmenting as a man still mounted was carried away back down the trail. For a few moments, all Inglis could do was hang on to his saddle and reins as the animal under him heaved and jinked. He bent low as slashing branches tried to behead him, sweep him from his precarious perch.

  Uphill and to the left was his goal—circle around the top of the slide and lose himself in the lower forests, then find his way somehow back out of this trap of a valley… the stolen horse was essential, crutch to his bad ankle, he couldn’t let it break its legs here… at this pace it must grow winded soon, and then he would regain control…