Penric’s Mission

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  That wasn’t any of the prayers he’d been taught in seminary, almost a decade ago, but it felt right. And perhaps it was heard, for at length he slept.

  * * *

  A long time, it seemed to Penric, after he had been dropped into this hole, the stone scraped back, orange light flickered, and a covered pail was lowered on a hook. At the guard’s shouted instructions, he rolled over and freed the hook, which rose upward as he could not. The cover was a crude round tray holding a small loaf of bread, only a day stale, a sticky block of dried fruit, mostly figs, and a pale square that Des assured him was pressed dried fish. He lifted the tray to reveal not a slops bucket, but a generous couple of gallons of fresh water and a wooden cup.

  Pen drank greedily, then slowed, wondered how long it would need to last.

  “I’d guess this to be a daily ration,” Des opined. “Drink up anyway. You need it to heal.”

  He managed part of the bread and some shreds of the fruit, but after one bite couldn’t face the fish, for all that Des urged it on him with the concern of an anxious mother, insisting it was common food, and strengthening. It smelled. And had bones in it, albeit as fine as stiff hairs. And, and bits.

  So he was fed, watered, and left alone which, for the first three days, was all he wanted. The cell’s diameter gave him room to stretch out fully on the floor, even as it made impossible the old mountaineer’s trick for shinnying up a crevice by bracing one’s back and feet against opposite sides.

  On the fourth day, he sat up and began to tend to his own wounds in more detail. Des could speed the healing of his abused skull and counteract infection, but it was definitely uphill magic, and she needed somewhere to dump the disorder. Normally there were enough minor vermin around to make this a trivial task, but once she’d eliminated the spiders and a few other shadowy things with far too many legs that rippled across the walls, others were slow to arrive. On the fifth day, they enjoyed a boon when a rat came up the central floor drain that doubled as Pen’s slops bucket. Des fairly pounced on it. Pen was afraid he would then be trapped in this bottle with rotting rat reek, but Des, compelled to unusual frugality by their circumstances, not only creamed off the death but reduced the corpse to dust within an hour, and he used the dregs of his daily water to rinse it back down the drain.

  For lack of other pastimes, he found himself crouching at this sink hoping for more rats like a winter fisherman back home beside his hole sawn in the lake ice. He missed a flask of warming spirits to keep him company, or friends to trade lies with, but at least there was Des. He studied the drain, which was no wider than his palm, drilled down through solid stone. Maybe he was not that desperate yet…

  “Not ever,” snorted Des. “Even you are not skinny enough to fit down that pipe. And it only goes to a borehole scarcely bigger.”

  “Empties into the sea, I expect.” The smells and occasional drafts that came from it were more estuarial than cloacal. But no, probably not the drain. Widening a passageway through it by chaos magic could be a month’s tedious labor, as lengthy and tiring a process as tunneling with the spoon that he did not have. Up was another unfavorable option. He could work apart the arch around the port, at some risk of dropping large stones on his head and making guard-attracting noises, but levitating up there would still be impossible. Waiting to be hauled up out of the dungeon for interrogation by his captors still seemed his best and easiest chance at escape, certainly until his fractures mended. He was perilously hot with their healing, masking the chill of any incipient prison fever.

  He shouted questions upward during the daily visit from his keepers to swap out his rations pail, but they were never answered.

  Three rats later, his skull, though still tender, had stopped aching in a way that made him want to cut his own head off. He dutifully managed to choke down the disgusting fish and not gag it up after. Des beguiled some time by telling him stories from her many past lives with her former riders, all women, or rather, ten women, a lioness, and a wild mare. The mare had been the point at which the demon first escaped into the world from the Bastard’s hell, or repository of chaos, or whatever it was. There had been many theological arguments back at seminary as to the exact nature of the place, which Pen thought Des should be able to settle as she was the only one who’d been there, but she’d claimed to have no memory of it because its very disorder did not allow memory to form. All her personality—personalities—was, or were, something she had acquired afterward, imprinted on her by the endurance of matter.

  Her tales were good, but in this lightless, soundless place, began to take on a hallucinatory quality. He’d usually experienced them as words, if inside his own head, and an impression of animated gestures like a storyteller in a marketplace. Now he began to see flickering pictures. It was much like those disturbing nights when he dreamed not his own dreams, but hers.

  The more disturbing as it became harder and harder to tell day from night in here, or dreams from waking.

  II

  The shadows in the municipal magistrates’ court-and-prison at midnight made Nikys want to crawl inside her own skin. She drew her dark green cloak closer about her and padded as silently as she could after the jailer she’d bribed to let her in to see her brother. This jailer would do more—or rather, see even less—if she could bring her plan about.

  He led her up stone stairs and out onto the third-floor gallery overlooking the courtyard. In the night silence the boards creaking under their feet seemed screams, not mouse-squeaks. No dank dungeon cells with iron bars on this level, just a row of small rooms that could as well have been civic offices, apart from their heavy locked doors with narrow, iron-bound slots.

  Nikys tried to extract the political meaning from this choice of confinement: more austere than house arrest; not so vile as, say, those oubliettes down at the old harbor fortress. Maybe it was mere prudence. If they’d attempted to arrest and hold the young general out at the army barracks or in the shore fortress, he’d likely have been smuggled aid before this. For all that he’d commanded in Patos for barely half a year, he was already starting to grow popular with his men, if only for his diligence in getting them paid on time.

  Although on the lately disputed southwestern borders, men had followed him for much less. Victory is the best pay an officer can give his men, Adelis had once remarked. And vice versa.

  A brilliant campaign of maneuver and strike, it was said, turning back the Rusillyn incursion with half-forces, wits, and spit. (Adelis himself had called it the Bastard’s Own Dysentery.) In any just world, in any other country, his labors should have resulted in promotion and reward. Not semi-exile to a minor provincial post, and heightened political suspicion. Doubtless exacerbated by his mother’s blood ties to the Imperial House, for all that several prior too-successful army generals had ridden on the shoulders of their soldiers to Cedonian imperial power without such bonds. But if Adelis had such ambitions, she’d never seen a hint, and she’d known him from the day of their births.

  The jailer peered through the door slot. He did not startle the night by knocking, but just called softly, “General Arisaydia? You have a visitor.” Handing Nikys the shaded dark-lantern, he unlocked the door and let her slip within, but stayed nervously on guard outside.

  Adelis, dressed only in a loose shirt and string-tied trousers, sat on his cot, blinking in the sudden spear of light. As Nikys set the lantern on a little table and swept back her hood, he swung out bare feet and bolted upright to embrace her, the power of his grip silent witness to his anxiety. She embraced him just as hard, then pushed away to search his face, hands, arms for signs of torture. Bruises, yes… but no worse than he might have picked up at sword practice.

  As his wits caught up with the rest of him, he shoved her back, though not loosening his drowning-man’s clutch on her shoulders. “What are you doing in here at this hour?” he said through his teeth. “Or at all? Five gods, Nikys! I prayed you’d have the sense to stay clear of all this!”

  “All
this came to me. The day you were arrested, the governor sent men to search my house. They took all my letters from you, and my old letters from Kymis, what could they want with those I was so furious—”

  His jaw tightened. “Did they hurt you?”

  She shook her head. “Just shoved me back when I protested.”

  Despite it all, the corners of his lips twitched. “Did you hurt them?”

  “Gods witness I tried,” she sighed. “They knocked down my servants, ransacked the house. Tore up floorboards and pried apart paneling and furniture, especially in your chamber. Turned out all the clothes chests and left everything in piles. Although they were clearly after, oh, I don’t know what they were after, but they didn’t really pillage us, and no one was raped. A lot of small valuables turned up missing after they left, but you’d expect that.” She drew breath. “Adelis, where did this all come from? All I could find out is that you are accused of plotting treason with Adria, which is nonsense.”

  He shook his head. “I swear I don’t know. They said they’d seized my correspondence with the Duke of Adria, detained his agent, but I’d never made any contacts with Adria. They didn’t let me see the evidence—said it had gone in a courier pouch to Thasalon days before, and this arrest order was the result. Not that they need be authentic letters for this sort of move.”

  “Forgeries to entrap you, do you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  She flung up a hand. “Later. We can talk later. Dress, gather your things. I have to get you out of here, right now.”

  “What?” Instead of obeying, he stepped back and stared. “Nikys, is this some sort of hare-brained rescue scheme?”

  “Yes,” she snapped, declining to waste time arguing about the embedded insult. “Hurry!”

  Instead, he shook his head. “Bad idea.”

  “Staying here is a worse one.”

  “I agree it’s not good, but nothing would convict me in my accusers’ eyes—in the emperor’s eyes—faster than fleeing like a guilty thief.”

  “Do you imagine they haven’t convicted you already?”

  “There has been no trial, no hearing.”

  “When did you grow so naive?”

  He smiled sadly. “If I didn’t run from four thousand screaming Rusillyn tribesmen, I’m not going to run from this.”

  “They attacked from the front. This is an ambush from behind, in the dark.”

  “Oh, the Rusylli did that, too.”

  She grimaced, fierce in her frustration. “What in the world is your plan, then?”

  “Stand my ground. Argue my case. Continue to speak the truth.”

  “And if that ground has already been cut from under you?”

  “I did not commit treason, and I will not. I am not without friends, as well as enemies, at court.”

  “Argue your case from a safer place!”

  “There isn’t a safer place, not within the bounds of the empire. And to leave it would turn the false charge true.”

  She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, so frenzied she nearly bit his shirt. “Adelis. It has to be tonight. I can’t do this again. I spent all I had on the bribes just to get this far, and the horses. Suborned men don’t give refunds.”

  He sank down on his cot and did a good simulation of a boulder, stolid and immobile. Stubborn. It ran in the family. If she’d brought four men, whacked him over the head, and carried him out in a sack, she might have been able to do this. But when that look grew on his face, nothing less would shift him. She’d sometimes admired the trait, but not when it was aimed at her.

  “You have to leave,” he argued in turn, “and stay well away. You’re bound to be watched, but you’re not enough threat to anyone in your own right for them to go after you without provocation. For the love of all the gods and goddesses, for the love of me, don’t give that provocation.”

  “You’re saying I should do nothing, just freeze to the ground like a hare menaced by a hawk?”

  “That would be a good start, yes.” He swiped his hands through his dark disheveled hair, clenched them on his knees. “Please don’t try to engage with something so far over your head as this. The last thing I need is for my enemies to realize how effective a lever on me you could be.”

  Tears were leaking down her cheeks, and she hated their wet helplessness. “Curse all men, and their pride, and their greed, and their envy, and their idiocy.” And their fear.

  He grinned at her, his rich brown eyes crinkling. “Ah, that’s my Nikys.”

  She couldn’t scream here. She couldn’t even yell. Another ten minutes of ferocious undervoiced argument moved him no further. He should have been made a siege commander, she thought.

  Only the frightened jailer stopped it. He cracked the door and hissed, “That’s enough. Madame Khatai, you must come away now. I can’t stay out here any longer.”

  Adelis pushed, the jailer pulled, and she found herself once more on the gallery, bewildered in the dark.

  He led her back down the stairs. Out the side archway to the entry with the postern door.

  Where they found a troop of six guardsmen and a senior captain waiting for them.

  The jailer had not revealed her; he whimpered, too, as they were roughly seized. Another lantern was unveiled and raised, pushing back the shadows.

  “Where is he?” asked one of the guardsmen, sounding confused.

  The captain stepped forward. Cornered, she yanked back her hood and raised her chin. Protests and subterfuge and lies jammed up in her mouth, choked by fear. Wait. Give nothing away.

  “Madame Khatai.” The captain grimaced. “Imagine meeting you here at this hour.”

  Oddly, his ironic tone steadied her. This was a man who would talk, not strike. Or at least talk before he struck. “If anyone here had possessed the common courtesy or holy mercy to let me see my own brother in the daytime, I would have. I took what I could get.”

  His glance seared the shrinking jailer. “So it seems.”

  “You mustn’t blame him. I cried at him, you know.” Which was true, if incomplete. The captain, she suspected, was not a man whom feminine tears would soften. But let him think this was just an anxious visit from kin, not an escape attempt, and perhaps the poor man would get off more lightly.

  “And where is your brother?”

  “Right where you people put him. Unjustly.” Her lips drew back in something that was hardly a smile. “He claims the Father of Winter will support him in his innocence.”

  The captain vented a faint snort, but stepped aside to murmur to two of his men, who departed at a run. They returned in a few minutes to report, “The general is still locked in, sir.”

  The captain stared at her in some frustration. Had he hoped to catch her in the act? He said, conversationally, “We have your horses and your servant, you know. Rather a lot of baggage for an evening jaunt through town, don’t you think?”

  It wasn’t as though she’d left them waiting at the prison’s front gate. So, she’d been spied upon—make that, more effectively spied upon—than even she had suspected. Not that anyone who’d really known the general and his widowed sister could have been too surprised at this turn of events, but how many people in Patos was that, really? She lived retired by choice, and seldom taxed Adelis at camp; he in turn was respectful of her privacy.

  Betrayed from before the beginning, it seemed.

  Her dead silence was apparently not the reaction for which the captain had rehearsed, so he gave up trying to draw her out, replacing his heavy irony with sternness.

  “You efforts on your brother’s behalf are understandable, Madame, but pointless. If you return here at midday tomorrow, the general will be given back to you freely, without impediment. In fact…” He narrowed his eyes at her. “In fact, we will escort you home now, and guard your rest. And escort you back tomorrow. Just to make sure of it.” He added after a moment, “We will, however, be keeping the horses.”

  “He is to be released?” The soaring t
hrill his words engendered died in her chest. That Adelis was innocent—or, be frank, something like innocent—she had no doubt. But he might mean only that her brother was slated to be summarily executed, yet have, as a pious mercy, his body returned to his family, such as she was, for burial instead of being hung on a gibbet outside the city gates as a lesson to other would-be traitors. Whatever the answer, the captain already knew. And the pity in his face frightened her far more than the sternness.

  He didn’t reply, but just surrounded her with his men and marched her out into the winding streets of Patos.

  So, they’d both been right, she and Adelis. Her pathetic escape scheme was doomed to failure. And his remaining in his captivity was a horrible, horrible mistake.

  * * *

  At noon the next day the soldiers came once more for her, as threatened, and escorted her in reverse back to the same side entrance of the municipal prison.

  The captain swept through, saw them, and grimaced. “You’re too early. Keep her here. You three, come with me.” And to Nikys, “Wait.”

  So they waited, shifting from foot to foot. No one spoke to her—nor to each other, no small talk or barracks chaff or crude complaint. They offered her neither insult nor reassurance. The unnatural silence stretched. Her head throbbed, as if it held too much blood, as if she’d been hung upside down.

  One of the soldiers returned leading a saddled horse—one of her own hiring that she’d thought lost last night. He joined the wait, as wordless as the horse, which blew through its nostrils and cocked a hip.

  The stillness was abruptly shattered by the most inhuman scream Nikys had ever heard. Even muddled by intervening walls, it rose high and piercing, then broke, then rose again. Then cut off sharp, as if the raw throat from which it reverberated had clenched closed, or been sliced though. The horse tossed its head and sidled uneasily.