The Assassins of Thasalon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The commander put down his quill and rose to his feet. “Learned Penric, come in!” The border officer was one of Adelis’s loyal hounds, but this warm welcome wasn’t only on Pen’s brother-in-law’s behalf. Pen had first made the man’s acquaintance two summers ago, which Pen had spent tracking down and eradicating the sources of the deadly bruising fever that had played such havoc all along the western road, but especially in the duke’s forts here and at Vilnoc. The disease had been an enemy very much out of any soldier’s reckoning, but the officer had been willing to learn, which Pen had appreciated.

  “I’d received no notice of your coming,” the commander said, half apology, half plaint.

  “It could scarcely have outdistanced us.” Pen handed across the duke’s letter of authorization, which he unsealed and read standing. It was quite short, which bore its own freight of implication; his brows rose in curiosity.

  “Not contagion this time, five gods be thanked,” he said sincerely. He looked up in inquiry. “So what is the all requested aid to consist of?”

  “We need the loan of your excellent muleteers, to get us over—” A jerk of Pen’s thumb indicated the mountain trail north. “With the utmost discretion.”

  “Ah. That. But—you, Learned? Going in secret to Cedonia?”

  “Yes. I’ve ridden this route before, a few years back.”

  “I see.” Though it was obvious he didn’t, quite. “And your companions?”

  “I’m Iroki,” said the saint genially.

  Alixtra bit her lip.

  “Aaand I think that’s enough introduction,” Pen overrode further hazardous probing. “I’ll also trouble you for our lodging in some quiet corner of the fort, if you please, sir. The trek starts at dawn, as I recall.”

  “Certainly.” The fort commander was used to dealing with the duke’s special agents here, if maybe not quite as special as Pen’s odd band. He looked up with more open anxiety in his face. “We’ve heard garbled rumors of General Arisaydia being attacked in Vilnoc last week, but I’ve received nothing official or certain from him or from the duke.”

  Pen could imagine just how garbled such rumors must be, at the end of a military gossip chain stretching the length of Orbas. Trying for maximum reassurance with minimum information, Pen said, “He was attacked, but is expected to make a swift and complete recovery.”

  “Were you his physician, then?”

  “Insomuch as he needed one.”

  Broad shoulders sagged in relief. “All’s well, then.”

  No hint of rumors about Adelis’s seaborne departure, good.

  It plainly took all of the commander’s military discipline to restrain him from interrogating them further; utmost discretion started with not asking unnecessary questions. He detailed his aide to escort them to guest quarters, two adjoining rooms as simply furnished as the courier stations but equally adequate to their needs. Pen made arrangements for their evening meal to be brought to them, the better to avoid further interaction with and witness by the fort’s denizens. He still had no idea whether all this prudence was unneeded, sufficient, or too late.

  * * *

  Two stools, the edge of a cot, and the washstand cleared of its clutter turned one bedchamber into a dining room, when a soldier brought them food. Officer’s fare, Pen judged from experience. The man would have stayed to serve them, but Pen dismissed him in favor of being able to talk in private.

  The three, or five, at the table collaborated on uncovering dishes and sharing the contents around: army stew, summer fruits, cheeses, the perpetual olives and oil, good bread, and a tolerable if harsh red wine, tamed by admixture with the water needed by all in the dry inland heat of the season.

  “So,” said Alixtra, after swallowing a few bites, “whatever did happen to General Arisaydia? He wasn’t in your house when I finally arrived, though I was sure he’d been there before. I know he survived.”

  “To everyone’s great good fortune, including yours,” said Pen.

  She shrugged, not arguing. “That wasn’t fortune, there on the steps. That was you.”

  “Happy chance that he’d asked me to meet him that morning, then.” And if she wasn’t unnerved by the closeness of that call, Pen was. “You did manage to give him a mild concussion, though I judge that was more due to the aftershock of my chaos clashing with yours.” He considered the assassin. Former assassin, he hoped. He had not yet earned her trust, he was sure. He wasn’t sure whether she’d yet earned his. “He’s in a secure place, recovering. In time, it will be safe to tell you more, and you deserve to know, but I think not quite yet.”

  “Who would I tell? Not that I would.”

  “If someone made a direct threat to Kittio? Oh, I think you’d break at once. And you might not be wrong.” He amended this to, “Morally. Maybe not tactically. But my discretion removes your dilemma.”

  By the uneasy expression on her face, she was realizing that this also left her nothing to trade in such a hypothetical crisis. She managed a neutral, “Oh.”

  She took another bite of bread, staring at Pen as if she could will herself to know if he told truth or lies. Sadly, even demon magic didn’t work quite like that. He was about to explain the nuances of this when her gaze strayed to Iroki, who’d been munching and listening contentedly. She dropped her bread and recoiled, yelping, “What is that?”

  Pen followed her pointing finger, then realized. Sight, Des. The fort’s resident ghosts had found the saint, and were beginning to collect in his vicinity. A couple of old pale smudges coiled around him. Another, still new enough to hold a grayed-out human shape, pawed at him like a supplicant beggar. Pen was on the whole glad that such revenant spirits, howsoever they mimed their wails, were soundless to human ears. Iroki waved a hand through them, like a man dispersing the smoke they resembled. They scattered, but re-formed around him.

  “Oh, good!” said Pen. “You can see ghosts now! Another breakthrough for you and Arra.”

  “I’m supposed to be able to do this?” Her voice squeaked like a rusty hinge.

  “All sorcerers can, as soon as their second sight grows secure. It’s a sign you and Arra are starting to harmonize.”

  “If this is a god-gift… it’s rather appalling.”

  “So many are,” Pen agreed cheerily.

  Her horror yielded to wary fascination. “Have they been there all this time?”

  “Yep,” Iroki told her. “That is, they’re mostly tied to the places they’ve died. So I find a new batch wherever I go, or they find me. Like mosquitoes.” He added after a moment, “Except better, ’cause they don’t suck your blood. The sundered don’t do much of anything, you realize after a bit. Being past the point of assent to any god, and all other choices with it. They just keep looping around and around, till they finally fade to nothing. Always feels sad.”

  “Do you see them all the time?” Pen asked him. “Because I knew a saint in Lodi once who said she only had Sight when the god was flowing through her, or very near.”

  Iroki pursed his lips. “They’re never not there, though they’re faint and easy enough to ignore. I see ’em way more clear when the god is in me.”

  By which, should Pen construe, the god was never far from this fisherman? Disturbingly possible. Or rather… the gods were never far from anyone, anywhere, ever. Maybe it would be more correct to say that Iroki was never far from his god.

  Pen turned back to Alixtra. “Exactly how long have you borne Arra, by now?”

  A look of inner calculation, trailing unhappy memories. “Maybe… four weeks?”

  “Hm. That sounds about right. It matches with my arrival at the Rosehall seminary, after I’d contracted Des. I first started to see the sundered shortly after. It took me a deal of persuasion to get Des to tell me how to turn the sight off, which I realize now she knew perfectly well how to do. She claimed she was forcing me to growth. I think my startled jumps and twitches just amused her.”

  It sped your ability to deal with the dead, Des put
in, blandly. You needed to become habituated before you could become adept. Holy necromancer. She spoiled this solemn homily by adding, Also, you were pretty hilarious.

  Pen ignored this to ask Alixtra, “How long had you held your prior elementals?”

  More bad memories flickered in her face, but she said, “None longer than two weeks. I’d never had to leave Thasalon for the others.”

  “Tronio really didn’t want to risk you learning very much, did he,” Pen sighed.

  She digested this for a little. “I never saw ghosts when I was…” she faltered, faced it directly: “murdering those men. I’m not sure what I saw, except that it was huge and terrifying. I don’t know if any were sundered.”

  “Which actually makes sense, from more than just the inexperience of your elementals. Before the victims died, no ghosts to see; after, no Sight to see with. Sudden death can be disorienting, but spirits who are just shaken, and not actually refusing their god, are usually eased on their way by their funeral rites.”

  At her troubled look, he added, “Each soul makes their own choice, when they stand at their god’s gate, whether to step through. And that will be entirely between them and their god. The person who may have hurried them to the gate—whether assassin or soldier on the battlefield or author of some fatal accident—has no part in this most private of transactions. Their deaths might be another’s choice. Their sundering is all and only their own.”

  “You have seen this? Yourself?”

  “I’ve been very close, a few times. The closest—I once met a ghost that was tied to the knife that had killed him. That was a very special case. He wasn’t entirely sundered yet.”

  Iroki, as usual, wanted the whole of the tale. Pen, realizing that this gave him the opportunity to explain all about Wealdean shamans and their magics to an audience who knew next to nothing of them, was readily persuaded. Also, he could describe his home country. The complications of both filled the time till bed, which needed to be early for sake of the mules looming with the dawn.

  At the last, before they blew out the lamps—which Pen had made Alixtra practice lighting, earlier—and she closed the door between the two bedchambers, Pen offered suddenly, “About spirit-sight, and second sight generally—”

  “Yes?” said Alixtra.

  “This is how demons see the world all the time. They only see the physical world, the surfaces of things, when they are looking out through our eyes. That they share their inward sight with us is, is a very great gift, like being granted a tiny piece of god-sight. A privilege. Never a curse, unless the human makes it so. But if you are overwhelmed by its newness… so a young demon may be, too.”

  “And…?” said Alixtra, when his silence seemed to let this lesson hang without conclusion.

  “And so, be… kind…? I suppose?” Pen felt himself floundering for words. “The self-interested mechanical kindness you would give to an animal you’re trying to tame would be, well, better than nothing. But if you want Arra to give you real joy, you have to give it to her first.”

  The notion of her murderous tool having anything at all to do with joy seemed utterly alien to her. She finally said, “Oh,” it sounding more for escape than in agreement, and closed the door between them.

  I did not say that well, Pen fretted.

  No, said Des thoughtfully as they turned away, but you said it true. Which is better, and more rare.

  * * *

  It might have been possible to read atop a mule ambling down a level road. On the ragged track up to the spine of the long ridge that divided Orbas from Cedonia, it was all anyone could do to stay in the saddle, so Pen’s book remained stowed in Alixtra’s saddlebags. They rode single file, which would have thwarted conversation even without the inhibiting presence of the two army muleteers shepherding the little string of riders and a baggage mule. Pen was just as glad. It felt as if he’d been talking for three days straight in the dusty coach; his throat was more tired than any other part of him.

  At the crest of the first foothill, he turned to glance back at the sunlit garrison town below, and the main road it guarded at the narrow head of the river valley from the coast. There would be, he recalled, more-dizzying views later. His companions, both country-bred, seemed adequate riders, at least up to the task of clinging and climbing. No one would be galloping.

  They stopped and made camp while it was still light, just below the part of the route where even these sure-footed mules could not be trusted to carry them, and they would have to dismount and lead them over the most difficult ledges. Iroki took one muleteer and went off down the nearby shaded stream, returning in a while with half-a-dozen fat fish and an unnerved escort. They’d carried no pole or net.

  Not to be outdone, Pen led Alixtra out among the scrubby boulders, the clear dry air scented with sage and thyme, to ambush a few mountain hares. She managed to drop one from a distance just short of spooking the creature into haring off. Pen bopped her gently atop the head with the edge of his hand, for want of a painted fan, and they scrambled silently over the scree to collect the corpses.

  She was uncomfortable with the task, perhaps remembering her elemental that had been in that meat rabbit, but Pen had made very sure that she would not be leaking uncontrolled chaos into the mules or their harness tomorrow. He attempted to ease her by demonstrating some of those promised small domestic magics while neatly skinning and preparing their hares to grill alongside the fish. Interested, she was; eased, not as much.

  The muleteers looked worried by all this uncanny campcraft, but they did help eat the aromatic catch.

  * * *

  The last climb and descent the next day was more grueling than Pen remembered, or maybe the past years of crouching over his writing table had sapped his fitness. Or they were taking a steeper track. He was unwilling to allow that it was due to his being five years older.

  A sense of amusement.

  Didn’t invite comment from you, Des.

  Did I say a word?

  In the late afternoon, they came upon the Cedonian patrol road that ran along below the far side of the ridge where the sheerer slopes lessened. Their muleteer-guides concealed their mounts in a shallow defile while one man scouted ahead. Pen followed, trailed by Alixtra. They took shelter behind a rockfall, a mess of boulders and snapped bushes, that overlooked the military track.

  The muleteer, peering anxiously around, abruptly raised his hand for silence.

  In a moment, Pen heard what he’d heard, the faint echo of hooves. A patrol of Cedonian mounted soldiers came riding along the road, four sets of eyes slowly scanning the sparse slopes above and below them. The lurkers in the rockfall all kept as still as nervous hares until they’d passed out of sight.

  The muleteer blew out his breath. “We should be good now.” He made to rise.

  Alixtra caught his arm. “No. Wait.”

  He glanced at Pen, who nodded an endorsement, though Pen had no more idea what was in her mind than the muleteer did. After about ten minutes, the man was growing restive, but then froze again at the clack of more hooves. Another pair of watchful soldiers rode in the wake of their fellows. Tense moments followed till they had gone by.

  “That’s new,” muttered the muleteer. Pen followed his gaze up and down the road with Des’s sight at its fullest extension, but there didn’t seem to be a second such trap. They hurried back to the others.

  “How did you know?” Pen asked Alixtra as they hastily mounted up again. “Did you come this way with Rach, before?”

  She shook her head. “We came over the ridge farther east, much closer to Vilnoc. But Rach said the patrols had been increased lately.”

  Not, Pen realized, because the Cedonians were watching for everyday spies. Because they were watching for Adelis.

  They crossed over the road as quickly as they could, one muleteer delaying to brush away their tracks, and down out of sight once more.

  * * *

  It was after dusk when they came to the farm where they wer
e handed off to the guide on this side, a grizzled old man who rented out his handful of horses and did not ask questions. The muleteers and their string faded away into the shadows, not lingering. A night sleeping in the stable spared Pen’s party from a brief misting rain, rare at this season. They departed in the morning as silently as the fog that swirled around them, which burned off in pearly tendrils as the sun rose higher.

  It was a very long day’s ride down to the wide valley floor, its river now running west not east, and the major road that followed it. It was the first such artery north of the border along which coaches might be hired, and it drove all the way to the heart of Thasalon, a hundred miles on. To Pen’s mind, it marked the end of the easy part of this strange trip.

  The coaching inn where their taciturn guide let them off was the busiest in this not-very-large town, where Pen hoped they would not stand out memorably among the steady stream of guests. The crowd also meant that he was only able to rent one room, with a bed for the master and pallets lugged in for his two servants. Or, Pen privately resolved, the saint and his two supporters, but they could argue about that apportionment later.

  He was just as glad to keep Alixtra close under his eye. She had been growing tenser even faster than he had as the goal of their journey grew nearer. Goals. His, her, and the saint’s aims all adjoined, but they were by no means identical. He wished for another year to tutor her in demon-keeping and theology, but they weren’t going to get it. The need to plan what they were going to do once they arrived in Thasalon loomed inescapably, eclipsing all other wants.

  In aid of this, and to avoid the crowded taproom, the shy Wealdean book dealer had paid extra for an inn servant to bring their dinner to their room. Making shift with the washstand, the bed edge, a stool, and the room’s one chair served as well for the meal as it had back at the Orban garrison. Pen was able to send the maid off happy with a coin to make up for the one she wasn’t going to earn by hovering and serving. The food was decent enough, and everyone was hungry after the physically demanding mountain trek.