Penric’s Mission

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “I thought about it, but it would have put one random element too many in an already complicated situation. Our attention does have limits. Actually safer to leave you where you were, temporarily.” As Adelis released him with a curse, he brushed down his scarcely rumpled green jacket, and stretched like a cat. His mouth didn’t stop smiling, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes, which flickered constantly over the scene of not-exactly-slaughter.

  Adelis seemed intent on correcting that, as he bent and snatched up a sword.

  Penric’s hand fell atop his. “No, you can’t kill them. They’re helpless, you know.”

  “So was I.”

  Penric gave him a conceding nod, but said, “You have a more urgent task right now. You have to get your sister to safety.”

  Nikys, who’d been frantically wondering how she was to get Adelis to safely, was offended by this blatant tactic, but it worked; her brother’s head cranked around to find her. Reminded of my existence, are you? Granted, Penric was a very distracting man. Adelis, still gripping the sword, hurried over to hug her to him.

  “Are you all right, Nikys?”

  “Just knocked around.”

  He glared thinly down at the guardsmen, as if reconsidering his prey. But, stepping over the bodies—Adelis kicked a few in passing—Penric hurried them both into the atrium, lowering his voice.

  “There are two horses tethered outside. Madame Khatai, if you have riding trousers, go put them on. Grab whatever moneys you have, no more clothes or treasures than will fit in a sack, and be back down here as fast as if the house was burning.”

  “The house isn’t burning.” Though it felt as if her life were on fire.

  “Yet.”

  Compelled by his infectious insanity, she ran. A stack of cloth and his medical case were already sitting at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed as she galloped up them.

  She returned to find Penric belting one of her longer gowns around a hotly protesting Adelis. He then pulled her widow’s green cloak off its peg and settled it around her brother’s shoulders, and yanked the hood up over his head. “There. Your magical cape of invisibility. Keep your face down.”

  Penric peered out the front door, then bundled them into the quiet street, dozing in the bright afternoon. He gave her a leg up onto the larger of the two horses, both marked with provincial government brands and bearing military saddles. A short delay followed while he argued in sharp whispers with Adelis about the widow’s clutch on the sword, settled by sliding it semi-discreetly back into its saddle scabbard, but inciting another dispute about getting him up behind her.

  “There are two horses,” said Adelis. “One for each of us.”

  “You are not as fit to ride as you think you are, which you are going to find out shortly when the excitement wears off, and there are three of us. I need the other to follow on.”

  “You’re coming with us?” asked Nikys. She could scarcely describe her own reaction. Though not sorry, no.

  The blond man nodded. “I wasn’t done yet, you see. Leave town at a sedate walk, nothing to draw attention to yourselves—not to mention easier on this poor horse—and take the south road. I have a few things to clean up here, and then I’ll catch up to you.”

  “How will you find us?”

  “I can find you.”

  “You and who else?” began Adelis in exasperation.

  Further protest was cut short when Penric stepped back and slapped the horse on its haunches, Nikys found her reins, and they… fled at an amble.

  They were both quiet for a little, as the reverberations of terror running through Nikys’s heart slowly died away. She could barely imagine how Adelis felt about it all, twice-betrayed as he was. She could sense it, though, as the fight began to leak out of him and he leaned more heavily against her.

  They’d threaded through three streets and found the main road before Nikys said, “I wonder if he really means to burn down the villa?”

  After a brief consideration, Adelis offered, “It’s rented.”

  “I should be sorry anyway.” And then, “What in the gods’ eyes did we see him do, back there?”

  Adelis’s voice went grim. “Something uncanny.”

  “Hedge sorcerer? Do you think? You saw him more nearly than I.”

  “It would explain a great deal. In retrospect.”

  But why had such a man come to them? She considered Penric’s airy tale of their military benefactors with a new dubiousness, but she had no better one to put in its place. His brief, bizarre first exchange with Tepelen also hung without explanation. “Do you think he’ll really catch up to us?”

  “No. He’d be a fool to. Far smarter to take this chance of escape to safety.”

  She considered what safety might mean to a man who could do the things they’d just witnessed, and wondered.

  Also, fool.

  IX

  Penric dashed back through the house, trying to track all he must control. Too much. In addition to the assailants laid out under the pergola, and the whining senior secretary, the maid and the porter were presently cowering in an upstairs room, and the scullion had vanished. Well, first things first, then whatever else he could do, and then fly.

  He passed through and collected all the weapons, not forgetting the secretary’s belt knife and also taking a moment to harvest his purse. Then he renewed the pressure on his prisoners’ selected nerves to keep them down and quiet. He didn’t suppose anyone else would appreciate how delicate and clever all this was, least of all his victims, but he was rather proud of it himself. Good work.

  I could have ripped all those nerves apart much more easily, grumped Des, and we’d never have to worry about them getting up to come after us again.

  Which was true, but theologically fraught. Penric dumped his heavy armload of edged steel down the privy at the end of the garden and trotted back to the pergola. The soldiers lay in whimpering heaps. One brave man made a feeble snatch for his ankle as Pen skipped around them, but missed. Pen grasped the panting Velka-Tepelen-Whoever—he decided he’d stick with Velka—by the tunic and began dragging him into the house. There were already too many witnesses to his antics. This conversation needed to be private.

  A sort of lumber room off the front atrium seemed remote enough to be out of earshot. Penric laid Velka out supine on the floor and perched on his abdomen, knees up, and touched his thumb to his lips in his habitual prayer for luck. His god, he was reminded, was the master of both sorts. He leaned forward between his up-folded legs and smiled.

  “Drowned, you say,” he began. Des growled aloud in memory.

  “The guards reported you drowned in your cell and your body disposed of in the sea,” said Velka through his teeth. “Your skull was broken. You should be dead. Twice over!”

  “And Arisaydia should be blind, aye. So many mysteries.”

  “No mystery to it. You escaped, and they reported the other to hide their failure and avoid punishment.”

  “Well, that’s one explanation. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if they were speaking the truth?”

  Velka glared. This was not a man inclined to babble in fear, alas. Or talk much at all.

  “There is so much I could do to you,” mused Pen. “Take your hearing, as you plunged me into silence in that cell…” He leaned forward and cupped both hands over Velka’s ears, then moved them to cover his eyes. “Or your vision, as you plunged me into darkness.” He sat up again, palms on his knees. “Who is your master?”

  “Who is yours?” Velka shot back. “The duke of Adria?”

  “Ultimately, no,” said Pen judiciously. “He just borrowed me. And when you borrow a valuable tome from a friend, it doesn’t do to carelessly drop it in the privy. But enough of that.” It occurred to him that anyone following up from Adria on Pen’s disappearance would be most likely to encounter the official tale, at least until he could make his way back to gainsay it, and believe him dead. Bastard’s tears, what will happen to my books?

&nb
sp; Pen, he’s getting more out of this than you are, complained Des. Attend!

  “So which shall it be? Ears?” Pen clapped them, but did nothing destructive. He tried to replicate Velka’s own look of bored distaste when he’d lifted his knife to Arisaydia’s face, while simultaneously mustering the intense concentration needed to compress one of the body’s most elegant nerves without permanently damaging it. He suspected he just came out looking constipated. “Or”—he moved one hand over Velka’s left eye, made carefully sure of his invisible target, pinched—“your remaining eye?”

  Velka’s scream of anguish was entirely sincere, Pen thought. Despite the pain already placed in his body blocking his range of movement, he tried to thrash under Pen, his head whipping back and forth, and Pen was thrust in his imagination back to the scene of Arisaydia and the boiling vinegar. He hoped Velka was, too.

  Pen leaned forward again, and hissed, “Who is your master?”

  “Minister Methani,” gasped Velka.

  Methani was prominent in the first circle of men around the emperor, and from a high and wealthy family, Pen recalled from his readings and conversations back in Adria; he didn’t know offhand if the man was one of those who had volunteered, or been volunteered, for emasculation so as to rise in imperial trust, or not. Pen’s lips pursed in bafflement. “Why would he want to destroy his emperor’s most effective general? Seems treasonous in itself to me. Not to mention grossly wasteful.”

  Velka wheezed, “Arisaydia was a danger to us all. Too independent. Too attractive. Already military conspiracies were starting to swirl about him. We couldn’t penetrate the intrigues that had to be reaching him, so we made one to serve in their place.”

  Which was… pretty much what Arisaydia had said. For all his theatrics, Pen didn’t feel he was moving forward, here. Though he wondered if that too independent translated to wouldn’t lie down under the thumbs of the right men.

  “Didn’t it occur to any of you people that the reason you couldn’t find a line was that there wasn’t one? That you weren’t destroying a disloyal man, but creating one?”

  “If he wasn’t disloyal yet, he was ripe to fall,” Velka snarled back. “And then the cost of stopping him would be much higher.”

  Well, one couldn’t say Velka didn’t believe in his mission. Not the wholly cynical tool of some wholly cynical master, quite.

  Cynical enough, said Des. Spies have to be.

  I suppose you would know. Ruchia.

  A touch. Des aimed a grimace at him, and subsided.

  “Also,” Pen added a bit more tartly, “if you didn’t treat your armies so badly in the first place, they wouldn’t go out looking for some poor sod to stick up on a standard in front of them and fight you for their favor. It doesn’t seem to me the root of this is Arisaydia’s fault. It’s, it’s, it’s… just your own masters’ bad management. Circling back to bite them. If you’d spend half this effort fixing the real problems, you could stop all the disaffected generals before they started, instead of, of blinding them piecemeal one by one. You’re worse than evil. You’re inefficient.”

  Velka stared at him through his one good eye, so taken aback he stopped whimpering. “What are you really sent to Cedonia for?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” Penric admitted ruefully. If he was sent to be Velka’s spiritual advisor, it seemed a supremely unfunny joke on Someone’s part. Which didn’t make it unlikely.

  He also thought of the unexpected treasury found in the Father of Winter’s offering box in the temple. Maybe the duke of Adria wasn’t the only one who has borrowed me? The suspicion was simultaneously heartening and horrifying.

  The Father wasn’t Penric’s god, but He might be Velka’s. “Do you have children?” he asked, then, at Velka’s flinch, added hastily, “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  Revenge was tempting, but not his mandate.

  I don’t know why not, said Des. Arisaydia was ready to slay them all, and leave no witnesses. A sense of reluctant admiration. No… not reluctant.

  You know we can’t do that.

  I can’t, with our sorcery. You could, with your right arm, if you hadn’t thrown all the blades down the jakes.

  Penric decided to ignore this. He sat up, considering his congregation of one.

  “My time is short,” he said at last, “so my sermon will be, too. When a man witnesses a miracle of the gods, the prudent first response should not be to try to undo it.” A long finger reached out to tap Velka between the eyes; he jerked back. It had actually been a lot of meticulous, tricky, uncomfortable chaos-sluffing uphill sorcery, but Velka didn’t need to know that. Though given Desdemona’s ultimate source, perhaps it was true after a fashion. “So consider me a messenger from a higher power than a duke, and let me help you to remember this. To use the machineries of justice to commit injustice is the deepest offense to the Father of Winter.”

  He pressed his thumb to the middle of Velka’s forehead. As he knew so well from his mountain childhood, cold could burn as brutally as fire. The work was vastly finer than his ice floe, not nearly as subtle as the labor he’d been doing all week. He lifted his thumb to reveal thin, frozen white lines in the shape of a stylized snowflake, surrounded by a red bloom of hurt. It would heal, ultimately, to a red then a white brand on Velka’s skin.

  It didn’t come close to the amount of scarring Arisaydia would bear. But as a pointed memento, Pen fancied this wintery mark might serve.

  He dismounted from Velka, collected the man’s purse to keep company with that from the provincial secretary, and pressed himself to his feet, suddenly very tired. Time to go.

  Past time, Des agreed.

  As he made for the door, Velka wrenched himself around on the floor and cried, “Hedge sorcerer! You’re insane!”

  Your fine sermon doesn’t seem to have taken, Learned Penric, said Des. She was much too amused.

  Pen took two steps out, aiming to collect his medical case and his soon-to-be-stolen horse, then whipped around. He stuck his head through the lumber room door and yelled back, “I’m not a hedge sorcerer. And your government policies are stupid!”

  He was still fuming when he rode to the end of the street. From the edge of his eye, he caught a glimpse of the scullion coming back, leading a pelting posse of guardsmen. Which answered the question of who had been the spy among Madame Khatai’s servants, he supposed, rather too late to do any practical good. He pressed his horse into a quick trot, rounding the corner safe from their view.

  X

  “We need to be moving faster,” said Adelis. Although the way his chin had sunk to Nikys’s shoulder suggested he was growing as fatigued as their doubly burdened horse. They’d come about twelve miles out of Patos, she guessed.

  The traffic had thinned from the bustle around the city, where they’d threaded their way past builders’ ox-carts, donkeys laden with vegetables for the markets, animals being driven to the butchers, sedan chairs and open chariots, and private coaches whose drivers had shouted them out of the path. They’d passed a road-repair crew whose lewd catcalls at the two unescorted women had made Adelis growl, his hand twitching for his sword, and, once, a troop of soldiers marching the other way, which had made him hunch and lower his face, squinting sidewise from the shadow of the hood trying to make out markers of regiment and rank.

  Out here, fellow travelers had dwindled to the occasional farm wain or herdsman with pigs. The sun was slanting across the countryside, spreading buttery light over the small farms and larger villas tracking the watercourses, the grapevines and flickering gray-green olive groves on the slopes, the rocky heights given over to scrub and goats and sheep.

  “We’re moving faster than your army.”

  “Anything would move faster than an army,” he returned. The spurt of remembered aggravation gave him the energy to sit up, at least.

  “How are you bearing up back there?” She hesitated. “How much can you see?”

  “It’s… blurry. I can see col
ors. It’s too bright. Makes my eyes water. Your cloak is too hot.”

  “Yes, I know.” She felt oddly glad to be out of it. She’d once imagined the widow’s green would protect her from unwanted attention, but there’d proved to be a certain cadre of men who imagined it marked her as available to them, instead. She’d quickly learned not to be unduly gentle in repelling their advances, and had held her borders where she wanted them. Of course, she’d always been backed by the tacit garrison of Adelis’s rank and reputation—that, too, now attainted. She added, “Faster to where?”

  “I’m thinking about that.”

  She said tentatively, “I was wondering if we should try to make for my mother’s.” In which case, they needed to find a different road.

  “Five gods, no.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to catch his grimace.

  “It’s one of the first places they’ll think to look, and harboring me would bring disaster down upon her.” He paused. “You could probably take refuge there unmolested.”

  She answered this with the long, unfavorable silence it deserved. He evidently took her point, for his return grunt was muted.

  He’d been alternating between keeping his face down and his eyes closed, trying to protect their inflamed sensitivity, and looking around, testing and retesting his returning sight as if fearful it would vanish away again. She interrupted this cycle to ask, “Did you realize Master Penric was uncanny? I mean, before that unholy show in the garden.”

  “I… as physicians went, he seemed more sensible than most. He had a trick of massaging my scalp that he said was for headache, and it certainly seemed to work. I don’t know.” He seemed to consider. “He could have been lying. About the healing, I mean. Perhaps I was not so badly injured as it felt like.”

  “No. I saw your face when he first lifted off the prison wrap. You were that badly injured.” And then some.

  He added somewhat inconsequently, “He didn’t look like what I’d imagined. From his speech, I never guessed he’d be barely out of his youth.” He peered around again, and stiffened.