Penric’s Mission

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  At the third change they downed a hot meal at the tavern associated with the livery, then fitted themselves into the coach for the next stage. It really wasn’t possible to keep up the morning’s tension when Nikys wanted no part of it and Penric folded himself in a boneless slouch, vaguely amiable once more. When he offered to fill the time with another healing session, Adelis wavered.

  “What if I pledge to stick to restoring your eyebrows?” Penric said.

  “How can I tell what in the Bastard’s hell you’re doing anyway?” asked Adelis, though his aversion was plainly flagging.

  “What does it feel like?” asked Nikys, curious.

  Adelis shrugged and admitted, “Strangely soothing, usually.”

  “This is going to be a long ride,” Nikys pointed out, and Adelis allowed himself to be persuaded. They switched seats, and the two men worked themselves awkwardly around to give Penric’s hands access to Adelis’s head. This left rather a lot of sorcerous leg to be disposed of somehow; his feet ended up nearly on Nikys’s lap.

  At length, Adelis’s eyelids drifted closed.

  “Is he asleep?” Nikys whispered.

  “No,” growled Adelis, and the corner of Penric’s mouth tweaked up. So, his guard was not so far down as that. But the bonelessness seemed to drain out of Penric and into his patient. Penric, by contrast, seemed to grow tenser and more jittery, his brow sheened with sweat.

  At their next change, Penric gave them both a tight smile. “I need to take a turn around the stable. Back in a bit. Don’t leave without me, heh.”

  Nikys, inquisitive, got down and followed after him. The stable was cool and dim, pleasant with the bulks of the horses resting in their stalls, munching rhythmically at their fodder. She saw his lean silhouette pass out the far doors.

  She emerged at the manure pile, its acrid aroma saturating the air, where the buzz of flies was dying down. Along with the flies. Penric leaned against the stable wall with his arms folded, watching their devastation somewhat glumly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “The disorder harvested from the healing has to go somewhere, and death makes the most efficient sink of chaos. Killing flies, or fleas, or any other vermin assigned to the Bastard, is theologically allowable sacrifice. Most red-blooded animals are the province of the Son of Autumn, but there are a few exceptions. Rats, mice, other creatures making pests of themselves where they shouldn’t be. My god’s elder Brother may owe me a favor or two, but I shouldn’t like to presume. Thus, flies. Which are tedious but always abundant.”

  It was possibly the most bizarre conversation she’d had in her life but, oddly, not frightening. She leaned against the wall beside him and folded her arms too, a silent offer of company. He cast her a quick, grateful smile.

  “But never people.” It was comforting to reflect on that.

  His smiled faded. “Well…”

  She glanced up, letting her eyes speak her doubt.

  “Not quite never. For the Bastard is the god of exceptions, after all, and the son of His Mother. In the highest levels of medical sorcery, there are a few exemptions. Not at all the sort of him versus me contests your brother pictures, so don’t tell him. He’d get excited and try to make something of it that it isn’t. When the choices are one life or another, or one life or none…” He trailed off.

  She let her silence stand open, waiting to be filled with whatever he chose. Or didn’t. Not for all the world would she press him. It might be like pressing too hard on glass.

  “After which the physician gets to spend his nights face down on the temple floor, praying for a sign and receiving silence. Not devotions I’d wish on… anyone.”

  “I…” Could she honestly say I see? She changed it to, “I’m sorry.”

  The yard before them had fallen deathly still.

  He drew breath. “Aye, me too.” He shoved off from the wall, his smile carefully reaffixed, and they turned back through the stable.

  And what, exactly, did this erratic-seeming, young-seeming man know about the highest levels of medical sorcery?

  She was beginning to suspect that the answer might be Everything.

  Which trailed the question, like a net behind a boat, How?

  * * *

  In the late afternoon the Patos plains gave way to climbing hill country, and their progress slowed. Nikys’s only consolation was the reflection that the rugged slopes would delay pursuers equally. A third pair of horses was hitched to their little coach, at a price, to haul them over the highest pass.

  The sorcerer alternated between more healing sessions, growing intense now that his patient seemed soon to be parted from him, and staggering out to shed his chaos however he could at every stop. With her packed so close, and the labors so relentless, Nikys began to see the effects not only on Adelis but on Penric. He’s draining himself.

  Freed at last to talk about his craft, Penric did. He didn’t sound much like a spy, but he did sound quite like a frustrated scholar with a favorite subject and a captive audience. She wondered if he was one of those inexplicable people who talked more, not less, as they grew tireder. Adelis was bestirred to open curiosity at last, despite his reservations, although his probing questions tended to revolve around military applications.

  No, no one could muster a troop of sorcerers. Demons did not well tolerate each other, which was also why one only heard of a single court sorcerer at a time. No, one sorcerer did not differ greatly from another in raw power; all were limited by the amount of chaos a human body could safely hold and shed at a time. The differences in skill were mainly due to cleverness and efficiency, which age and experience enhanced. The inefficient working of magic generated, among other things, heat; a clumsy sorcerer might pass out from the heat or (a vile grin) perhaps burst like a grilled sausage, who knew? Nikys wasn’t sure she believed that one, nor, from the look on his face, did Adelis. If the latter were true, Penric temporized, no one had lived to report on it, so proof was hard to come by.

  No (a wistful sigh), no sorcerer could shoot fireballs from his or her fingertips. The two men looked equally disappointed at this. “Although I’m a pretty fair hand at shooting flaming arrows,” Penric added. “But that’s archery, not sorcery.”

  No, no, no, and through repeated discouragement Penric gently led Adelis away from hypothetical military schemes involving sorcery, or at least this sorcerer.

  Nikys wondered how all this negative certainty sat with the god of exceptions and exemptions. Slippery as a fish, indeed.

  Her own questions seemed to fall on more fertile ground. Yes, physician-sorcerers were rare. Only the tamest and most domesticated of Temple demons, cultivated over several demon-lives, or rather, the lives of their learned riders, were considered suitable and safe to be paired with an already-trained and skilled physician. Yes, two hundred years was unusually old for any demon. Most new elementals did not last so long in the world, being hurried out of it by a saint of the Bastard’s Order dedicated to the task, or some other accident. The longer a demon survived, the more likely it was to seize ascendance in its rider’s body, and without its rider’s disciplines its fundamental chaos would come to the fore, to disaster all around. Yes, demons took the imprints of their personalities from their human partners, for good or ill. Given some humans, this could turn out very ill indeed, making it quite unfair that it was the demon who suffered instantaneous sundering and utter destruction when its god caught up with it at last.

  Nikys wasn’t sure if this last gloss came from Penric or Desdemona, though it was delivered quite fiercely.

  As night fell in the rocking coach even the chatty Penric ran down to miserable endurance. Adelis put on his campaign face and went stolid. Nikys drooped.

  She and Adelis took turns leaning on each other, napping badly. Penric folded himself this way and that in his seat, each position looking more uncomfortable than the last, finally lifting his legs to prop near the roof, more-or-less bracing himself in place.

  She might
have brought more comforts if this flight had been planned, conducted in suitable secrecy, instead of forced pell-mell, with pursuit pelting hot. If wishes were horses, we all would ride, the old nursery saw went, and remounts were another thing she was going to be wishing hard for when they reached Skirose.

  Where they would be running out of time, money, stamina… everything.

  * * *

  They came to Skirose at the next day’s dusk. Stumbling out of the coach at last, Nikys wondered if Penric had felt anything like this escaping the bottle dungeon. At a cheaper, grubbier inn they found only one room to share, but it offered water to wash with and a flat, unmoving bed to fall into. The innkeeper dragged in a thin, wool-stuffed pallet to lay on the floor. Penric grimaced and casually rid it of crawling, biting wildlife, for good measure passing his hand over the bed. She and Adelis took the bed and Penric took the pallet. Her head was swimming, Penric’s blue eyes were clouded with fatigue, and Adelis’s stolidity was ossifying. Danger or no, a few hours of sleep could no longer be put off.

  Deep in the night she awoke to see Penric, who like all of them had lain down half dressed, pull on his jacket and slip out through the shadows. Adelis was snoring. Was the sorcerer making his escape to Adria? Planning some final, belated betrayal? Alarmed, she slid into her shoes, whipped her cloak around her, and followed him on tiptoe.

  He exited silently through the inn’s front door; she waited a moment and did the same, flattening to the wall and looking around for that narrow form, without torch or lantern, flickering in and out of the moonlight. She pulled up her hood and tracked him down the street and around a corner. He crossed a paved square and disappeared under a temple portico. She waited for the second creak of a heavy door, then dared to run to catch up. What did he want inside?

  He’d left the door ajar; she eased it open with no betraying sound, and found a deeper shadow to stand in. The moon, just past full, shone directly down into the sacred atrium, pulling short the blue shadow of the fire plinth. A few red coals gleamed in its ashes. As her eyes adjusted, she spotted Penric making his slow way around the perimeter from altar to altar, signing himself, then cursorily opening what she’d thought were supposed to be locked offering boxes and helping himself to the contents, tipping the coins into his purse. Which did explain how he’d been finding funds since his escape from the bottle dungeon, apart from pickpocketing provincial officials. He skipped the Mother’s offering box, although he signed himself and bowed his head before Her place all the same.

  At the Bastard’s offering box, he murmured, “Hm. They must love You better in these hills.” He topped off his purse, but, instead of merely bowing, went down on his knees before the altar with its white cloth. He raised his hands palms-out in an attitude of supplication; after a minute, he instead lay prone on the tiles, arms out in the attitude of deepest supplication. Or possibly exhaustion.

  Quiet fell. Yet not, she thought, quietude, for in a minute he mumbled, “Who am I fooling, kindest-and-cruelest Sir? You never answer me anyway.”

  His voice went acerbic. “Fool indeed, to invite His attention. This is not something we want. Really.”

  Nikys had no wish to interrupt a prayer, but this seemed more like an argument. She walked over and sat herself down cross-legged beside the… physician, sorcerer, divine? Which of his bewildering multiplicity of selves had laid itself down in such hope-starved humility?

  He rolled over on his back and smiled at her, seeming unsurprised. “Hullo, Nikys. Come to pray?”

  “Maybe.”

  He bent his head back toward the white-topped altar. “Is this your god too? I think you said so, once back in Patos.”

  “For lack of answers to my prayers from any others, yes.”

  “My condolences.”

  She wasn’t sure how to take that. “I’ve been wanting to tell you. I had another idea, back in the coach.”

  “Oh?”

  “Instead of Adelis going to Adria with you, which he will not, why don’t you come to Orbas with us?”

  The little noise he made was altogether uninformative, although it sounded vaguely like a man being hit. Then he paused, doubtful. “Does Arisaydia endorse this?”

  “I’m sure I could talk him around,” said Nikys, a little airily. “Once we are established there, Adelis could help you to some honorable appointment. Maybe even court sorcerer.”

  “Likely the duke already has one. That’s how I lost my last position, you know. When Princess-Archdivine Llewen died so suddenly, the replacement archdivine brought her own trusted sorceress from Easthome. I offered to stay quietly apart among my books and papers—I wasn’t even done with my latest translation—but no one seemed to think there was room in the palace for two chaos demons. Not even the chaos demons.”

  Wait, was that last delivered in his other voice? But he was going on, speaking his reminiscence to the night sky framed by the inner architrave.

  “They all tried their hardest to shift me into the Martensbridge Mother’s Order, which wanted me as much as the Palace suddenly did not. Very tidy. Everyone happy but me. No man should have to bury two mothers in one year.”

  Her neck felt wrenched with this last turn. “What?”

  He waved a hand, dismissing she-knew-not-what. “Princess Llewen had been like a second mother to me. My own mother’s death happened not long after, back at Jurald Court. I wasn’t there for either one. Not sure if that was a blessing or a curse.”

  “I’m sorry.” Surely more inadequate words were never spoken, but his hand waved again, this time in understanding acceptance. She tried to find her way back to her proposal. “If not court sorcerer, Orbas must surely be willing to make you court physician.” Eager, once they learned what he’d done for Adelis.

  Without heat, and with some precision, Penric said, “I would rather die.” His smile grew small and strange.

  Nikys sat up, gathering her determination. “I’ve been trying to work out why a man of your obvious—extraordinary—skills would not take up the healing trade. I think I know.”

  “Do you? Tell me.” His tone was ironic, but not malicious. There didn’t seem to be a malicious bone in his body.

  “You lost a patient. Maybe someone important to you”—could it have been his princess? his mother?—“maybe just someone you tried too hard for, and it broke your heart, and your will to go on.” She tried to gauge his reaction out of the corner of her eye. Was she too bold, too offensive? Would he be angry at her probing?

  She hadn’t expected to evoke a crack of laughter, cut off sharp, and she flinched. Mad as a boot, Adelis had said. Was the observation shrewder than she’d guessed?

  “If only that.” Penric stretched back on the temple floor, folded his hands behind his head, and squinted up at the moon, which bathed his pale face in pale light until he looked carved of snow. “Try three a week. More, some weeks.”

  “What?”

  “This is a place for confessions, why not? After tomorrow we are unlikely to see each other again, even better. Like lancing an infection, and as ugly yet fascinating as what drains from one, aye. Might be good for me.”

  Three boots? She bit her lip.

  “Everything started well. I was happy in my scholar’s work for the princess-archdivine. But due to my transcription and translations of Learned Ruchia’s germinal volumes on sorcery and medicine, the Mother’s Order at Martensbridge found out that two of Desdemona’s former riders had been physicians. The princess was eager to add another string to my bow, and so was I, when she sent me over to their hospice to learn. Apprentice, we all thought, until all of Learned Amberein’s and Learned Helvia’s knowledge began to awaken in me, and suddenly I was doing as much teaching as learning. Not that every new patient isn’t a lesson for every physician, lifelong. I did enjoy instructing the apprentices in anatomy.

  “I brought off some difficult cures. It all depends, you know, on underlying conditions. If they’d taken your brother’s eyes with hot irons, it would have l
eft me too little to work with. But from the outside, no one could tell why I sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed.

  “The hospice began to ask more and more of me because, after all, it sometimes worked. Worth trying, you know? I was stretched, but still holding my own, when the princess passed away and I lost a defender I didn’t realize I’d had.

  “You see, the Order’s idea of conserving me was to save me for only the worst cases. I never got to treat, I don’t know, a hangnail, or even worms anymore, I never was allowed any easy victories. Always and only the direst injuries and illnesses, over and over. Far more died than not. When I found myself walking to the hospice each day devising… well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters to me,” Nikys dared.

  His moon-silvered brows flicked up. “Whyever? Whatever. I did promise a full confession, didn’t I. As I sit—lie down—speak before my god. Not that He doesn’t already know.” A snow-smile, barely bending. “So, when I spent my walk to work each day thinking up methods for a sorcerer to kill himself—which is not an easy thing to do, it turns out, when his demon opposes the idea—I realized perhaps it might be time to stop. I made application to the archdivine of Adria for work in translation, and other Temple scholarship, and ended my career as sorcerer-physician in Martensbridge. It was good, traveling north over the mountains. It felt like a narrow escape.”

  Nikys tried for a friendly silence. Because the alternative was to cry out in horror and protest, and that would certainly not be helpful. Just how far had that devising gone? I’d bet Desdemona could tell me.

  Penric continued, “And thus I learned the difference between a skill and a calling. To have a calling with no skill is a tragedy anyone can understand. The other way around… less so.”

  “Oh. I… see.” She took a breath and cast her own challenge. “You know, I should really like to hear Desdemona’s version of this.”