The Assassins of Thasalon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “He’s dressed like a villager, not a Temple courier, though.”

  “I’ll come down.” Regretfully, Pen abandoned his letter in progress. Despite what ought to be known, that he was the duke’s personal retainer and blast it not practicing medicine, random supplicants for his services still turned up on his steps. Lin, Nikys, and Idrene had become adept at hearing their plaints and directing them on to their next best hope. Or, once in a great while, upstairs. The guards were not so experienced, but their mere presence had fended off most would-be callers.

  Pen scuffed down the atrium stairs and put his head out to find the other guard suspiciously regarding the fellow who stood on the front steps, his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, looking genially up. His plain sleeveless tunic, trousers, and sandals could belong to any workman, village or town. Dark, tousled hair; the lighter, more bronze version of Cedonian skin; clean-shaved; skinny, vaguely weedy; his only striking feature was his eyes, a clear greenish hazel. He might be around thirty.

  Only Des’s reaction, cringing much the way Maska cringed before her, gave anything away. Pen had never seen the man before in his life, but given what he was, the name followed at once. “Oh! You must be Blessed Iroki. I wasn’t expecting you to come in person, sir. Please, come in.”

  With only a faint smile, the saint sailed in past the disconcerted guards, whom Pen waved hastily back to their posts. “Lin! Nikys!” Pen bellowed up as they entered the atrium. “I need you!”

  Pen turned back to his visitor. “Did the chapterhouse at Dogrita pass on my letter?”

  For answer, the man pulled Pen’s missive from his sash, the stained cream and white cloth the only hint to his allegiance, and twiddled it between thin fingers. “Two nights ago.”

  “The same day I sent it—the couriers made excellent time.” Pen’s brows drew in. “So did you.” The aroma of horse and summer sweat that hung about the man testified to a recent fast ride.

  “Ayup. Most of it yesterday, the rest this morning.”

  “Have you no attendant?” Who should also be receiving Pen’s hospitality?

  “Dogrita gave me a Temple courier for groom, who’s proved right handy. He’s just took the horses on to the Vilnoc chapterhouse. They’ll settle both, I daresay. I stopped straight here. It was the door, y’see. Nice paint, that orangey red. Easy to pick out.”

  Nikys and Lin came down, both inquisitive. Idrene peeked over the balcony, one firm hand restraining Rina from trying to climb for a better view; the child bent and squeezed her face to the uprights instead. Pen trusted her head was too large to get stuck like her knee.

  “Nikys, Lin, may I introduce Blessed Iroki, saint of the white god’s Order come from Dogrita. My wife, Nikys Arisaydia kin Jurald, and our most excellent retainer Lin.” Iroki offered a friendly wave; Nikys and Lin both curtsied, Lin looking daunted. Pen didn’t think saints had come her way before.

  “I think we had better take this conversation to my study. Lin, please bring up a hand basin and something to drink. The saint is road-parched. Nikys, join us.”

  “Are you sure? Isn’t this confidential Temple business?”

  “Adelis’s business as well, and you’re his best representative.” Also her brother’s legal executor, among her array of responsibilities for him outside his military chains-of-command. She nodded.

  “Isn’t that general fellow here?” Iroki asked, as they followed Pen up the gallery stairs.

  “Not anymore,” said Nikys, “but I’m glad to hear you thought so. We’re pretending he still is, just in case we’re being spied on by unfriendly eyes. So if anyone asks, you’ll have to make up some tale. Maybe before you leave, so we all can tell the same one.”

  Iroki’s brows rose at these deep doings. Impressed? Or just unfamiliar? Saints, as Pen had learned, could come from any walk of life, and the people to whom it was sometimes given to channel a god came embedded in their own upbringings like anyone else. The Blessed were held by the Temple to be in a class by themselves, outside all hierarchies religious or secular; the gods were notably indifferent to such human fixations as ranks, a queen and her chambermaid being all the same to Them. Over time that attitude tended to rub off on Their profoundest servants, so perhaps Iroki had only come into his calling recently.

  By the time Pen had excavated the two good chairs from his filing system, Lin, breathless, arrived with the basin and pitchers of cold lemon water and tea, and a plate of what snacks the kitchen might immediately yield. The saint seemed grateful to wash the road dirt from his hands, thanking her nicely. Nikys poured out drinks, and Lin, with obvious regret, withdrew and closed the door quietly behind her.

  Iroki extracted the crumpled letter again from his sash. “This gave the main of it—sounded pretty wild, must say—but Learned Master Ravana said you could be trusted to fill in the rest all right when I got here.”

  “Ah, you’ve met her? Does she continue well?”

  “Oh aye.” Iroki’s Cedonian speech held much the same cadence and accent as Dubro’s; Pen wondered if they shared a home locality. “Seemed to think highly of you, too.” His interested gaze at Pen was only with his eyes, barely tinged with some lingering deeper perception. If the god had been immanent within him at this moment, Des would have known, and Pen would have known by her conniptions.

  Be nice, said Des tartly. You have your own terrors.

  More every day, he agreed by way of apology.

  Pen took a swallow of tea, and a breath. Not leaving out, this time, the preamble of the palace conclave that had brought him to Adelis’s side, because otherwise this whole escapade would seem to be hanging in air, Pen gave an account of events from the encounter with the sorceress-scrubwoman on the steps through to her capture and incarceration in the bottle dungeon. He wasn’t sure if his bald synopsis of her subsequent story really brought out the subtle horror it had engendered in him, but Iroki was very sober when he wound up.

  Listening today for the second time to Pen’s account, after he’d vented it to her in a much less organized fashion that first afternoon, Nikys’s initial outrage over the uncanny assassination attempt had muted. She remarked, “I still can’t muster much sympathy for a thief who tried to murder my brother, but if there is any god Methani has left unoffended by this, I can’t think which.”

  “The Bastard, obviously, for misuse of His gift of demons,” said Pen. “How do you figure the others?”

  She counted them off on the correct fingers, folding each one in as she progressed. “The Mother of Summer, for this hideous abuse of a mother’s love. The Son of Autumn, for helpless Kittio. The Father of Winter, for the perversion of justice in every way. The Daughter of Spring, for Alixtra herself, because one does not stop being a daughter after one becomes a mother. The goddess still cares for us even when we move from Her house, the way Her Lady-school teachers care about their old pupils grown up, and hope for their well-being.” She turned her remaining thumb down. “And the Bastard as you say.”

  “Whew. That’s a fair complete list, all right,” allowed Iroki, sounding much struck.

  They were all silent for a moment as Nikys returned her hands to her ample lap. Pen was inescapably reminded of his own Order’s motto that appeared on its seal: No Hands But Ours. It was taken from a larger quote which fewer knew, its source lost: ‘The gods have no hands in this world but ours. If we fail Them, where then can They turn?’ When Pen had first encountered it as a young seminary student, it had seemed quite inspiring.

  His further study of humanity had revealed just how much people could convince themselves that their own needs were those of the gods, and not the other way around. He now thought the dictum double-edged and dangerous and thus most surely the property of the Bastard, so, well-placed on His escutcheon. Did Methani and Tronio imagine they were doing some great patriotic service by this heinous method?

  What’s good for Minister Methani is good for Cedonia? Des said dryly. Undoubtedly.

  “And what’s to happen to the wo
man after the god takes back this stolen demon?” Iroki asked.

  “That will be up to Duke Jurgo’s judges,” said Pen. “And Jurgo, because this is as much political as it is criminal. She’ll be off our Order’s hands and into theirs, and the Father of Winter’s. At least she can be kept in an ordinary prison after that, out of that dire hole.” The new cell might have a window, if barred, and a bit of sun, and a slice of the blue summer sky, the same celestial riches shared alike by dukes and scrubwomen.

  “I confess,” he added, “I thought my response from Dogrita would be instructions to bring the hedge sorceress to you, and I’d been puzzling over how to safely accomplish it. I’m relieved you’ve spared me trying. Even apart from the chaos her ill-controlled magics might spew along the way, on purpose or by accident, I’ve a feeling she might be suicidal.”

  “Hnh.” Iroki took in this last as seriously as Pen thought it deserved. “Aye, there’s a poser. It does explain… or maybe it don’t.”

  “Explain…?”

  “I don’t travel much. Never cared to. I thought she’d be brought to me, too. All my other elementals have been, even the one in the bear. D’y’see, I’ve never set foot in Vilnoc, but I saw your nice front door once before. Night I got your letter. In a dream. Gave me a bit of a turn to see it again, right there on the street.”

  Pen was silent for a fraught moment. “I don’t suppose,” he sighed at last, “there was anything more informative said?” He would ask Were there any messages for me? but the last time he’d prayed in bitter earnest to his god for guidance, the answer had come in the form of a plague-carrying fly bite. The Bastard’s Order was a fine one to serve, but its god a hazardous one to bother, and Pen tried to do so as seldom as possible.

  “Pack light for a long journey.” Iroki delivered this with the air of a direct quote. “Didn’t sleep much after that. I was at the chapterhouse doors with my saddlebags over my shoulder, asking for a horse, at dawn yesterday. Hence the good time we made.”

  “I see.” He wondered if the distance from Dogrita to Vilnoc counted as a long journey to country-man Iroki. Pen blew out his breath, and rose. “I suppose we’d best be about this.” Once the saint had been brought face-to-face with the assassin, the removal of her demon would be the work of a moment.

  “Aye,” said Iroki, putting down his beaker and following Pen up with a near-equal lack of enthusiasm, but a similar air of wanting to get it over with.

  Nikys saw them to the front steps. With searching look, she reached up to grip Pen’s shoulders. “Pen. Be careful.”

  “There’s nothing here to worry you, Madame Owl. It’s a deeply unpleasant task, but easy.”

  The saint, as they paced away together down the street, murmured, “Speak for yourself, Learned Sir.”

  “I’ve seen this done before. Desdemona, several times. Des says it’s like watching a hanging, for a demon.”

  “I daresay. None of the creatures I’ve freed from their demonic possessors have had words to tell about it, though.”

  “Is this your first time removing an elemental from a person?”

  “Aye.”

  “Are you going to be, um, all right with it?”

  Iroki shrugged. “It’s not a task done by me, but through me. Ask the god if He can do His job, eh?”

  “No, thanks,” said Pen fervently. His curiosity lured him on. “So I take it you’ve not been in this trade long?”

  “Three or four years. I was a fisherman in the village of Pef, upriver from Dogrita. Still am. Do you fish?”

  “I did as a boy, back in the cantons where I’m from. In the winter, we’d chop a hole in the lake ice and set up a leather tent around it, and fish through it.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” said Iroki in a voice of sincere amazement. “I’ve never even seen a puddle frozen over, though they tell me there are tarns up in the mountains that do that in winter. The ridges around Pef aren’t high enough to show snow.”

  “In the deep winter, we could drive a horse and sledge over the canton lakes.”

  “Now that is a tale,” said Iroki, in a voice of much less sincere wonder.

  “S’true. If they tried it too late or too early in the season, though, the whole rig could fall through. You couldn’t help thinking the idiot driver earned it, but I always felt sorry for the horses.”

  Pen gestured, and they turned the indicated corner to pass through a busy day-market. Iroki eyed its abundance in approval. At the next turning, into a narrower alley, Pen offered, “I liked pole fishing. People would leave me alone to think.”

  Iroki grinned. “Ayup. Though for me, less to think than to just be, there in the shade by the river. Sometimes, to save interruption, I wouldn’t bait the hook. When fish took it anyways, I tried weighting my line with a pebble. When they started swallowing it down pebble, line, and all, I tried no line. When the fish started jumping out onto the bank at my feet, it got a little disturbin’. But I never went hungry.”

  Revenge for Pen’s unlikely fish story? It would be proper fishermen’s etiquette, to be sure. But Pen had an unnerving feeling the saint’s tale might be as true as his own. “How did you come to”—Pen made a vague encompassing gesture—“your calling?”

  Iroki’s smile was oddly secret. “There was this sick fawn I stumbled across, lying in the sedges. I went over to try to help it, somehow. When I petted it… this… thing happened. When it scrambled up and trotted away, I thought for a moment it’d been a miracle of healing, except that sure hadn’t felt like any mother I could imagine, of summer or anything else. Almost made me throw up. I didn’t tell anyone about it, because it just seemed too crazy. And I’d had maybe a bit too much to drink that afternoon, and I didn’t want folks getting on me about that, either.”

  “Understandable…”

  “Next time, months later, it was my neighbor’s sick heifer, stumbling around clumsy and not eating. They were afraid they’d have to put her down. I went over, just wondering, y’know, if I could do that thing again. Sober. When the calf got up, my neighbors took it for a miracle outright, though I didn’t think it was, precisely. Not the way they were thinking. That one was not so secret, and about a week later, some Temple sensitives arrived from Dogrita to see me. Cat was out of the bag then, though I wasn’t sorry to finally get an explanation. In words that I could give to other people, that is. There wasn’t… there wasn’t any doubt in the doing.

  “The Dogrita folks near kidnapped me, and hauled me off to the city, and tried to make me learn theology, till I rebelled and walked home to my riverbank. We worked out an understanding after that. I’d come when called, and they’d leave me alone betimes. Oh, and the stipend. That was right handy. I was finally able to move out of my parents’ house, and not be nagged to do something ’cause they were tired of their son being called the laziest man in Pef. I got my own little shack up the river apiece, and went back to fishing.”

  “Or not…?” Pen suggested.

  Iroki grinned. “That, too. Bare-pole days, I always hope He’ll stop by just to sit a spell, and pass the time quiet. He’s a pretty busy fellow, I daresay. It’s got to make a nice change.”

  And so the bare pole was a prayer that asked for nothing, not even a fish? That had to be a novelty for the Recipient. “Fishing for a god? I’d be petrified.” And catching One, it sounded like. Time to time, as he suspected Iroki would put it. So, this was what a true mystic looked like…

  “Well, Miss Big Demon would be upset, sure,” Iroki allowed, with a nod in Pen’s direction that wasn’t, actually, at Pen. “That couldn’t be so restful.”

  “Ah, likely not.” In the saint’s presence, Des was doing a good job at managing terse and reserved, not hiding under the bed screaming.

  The god has not yet arrived, she pointed out grimly.

  At the fortress-cum-warehouse doors, Pen borrowed a lantern from the guard, who reported all quiet. Dubro had come around earlier so that they could carry down the prisoner’s lunch, and then l
eft again. Riverman Iroki frowned at the brooding dark walls closing in as they descended to the cellar corridor.

  “I thought the ghosts here’d be more distinct. This being an old fort and all. But there’s just these sundered smudges left.” He brushed at one fog-like tendril trying to wind around his face. Others seeped out of the walls as the saint passed, gathering like a pack of anxious hounds swirling around their master, far more than Pen had noticed on his prior visits.

  “It’s not been a fort for centuries, but it was a prison, later. I expect these are mostly left over from that period.”

  “That’d account for it,” Iroki agreed amiably.

  The hole in the floor was left open to the air as he’d ordered, Pen was pleased to see, the stone cap someone had unearthed for it still propped against the wall. The faint orange glow from the lamp that reflected up through it was less bright to Pen’s eyes than Iroki’s retinue, glowing like moonlight on mist eddying in a ditch.

  “Shoo. Shoo, go along with you,” he told the smudges, waving his hand not unkindly. “Too late to help you now.” They only drew back a little.

  Penric dropped the rope ladder. Below, a rustle, as of someone retreating to a wall, as if an arm’s length of distance could be any protection. Penric went first, setting his lantern on the floor opposite Alixtra’s huddled ball, then turned to hold the ladder for Iroki, who clambered down easily. One sweeping glance was enough to take in all that human eyes could see in this bare space. Pen didn’t think that was all he saw.

  “Don’t seem quite fair,” Iroki remarked over his shoulder to Pen as he found his feet, “that the person should be the criminal, but that little weasel-demon’s the one that gets destroyed.”

  First, Pen did not say aloud. Only first. Des wanted to be on the opposite side of the cell, or maybe the opposite side of the city, but Pen gritted his teeth and stepped forward. It might be more prudent to act immediately and explain after, to spare them all some hopeless violent outburst from the prisoner. Prisoners. But the saint was speaking.