Masquerade in Lodi (Penric & Desdemona Book 4)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “I really want to go with you,” Merin told Penric, unhappily.

  “Why don’t we all escort Learned Iserne home,” suggested Chio. “Then we’ll know where it is for later.”

  This sensible compromise was adopted. With strongly worded instructions to the porter to send a message to the curia, regardless of the time, if anything new materialized here at the hospice, Pen led his enlarged party back out into the night.

  * * *

  Iserne’s house lipped its canal. They had to circle past it to find a bridge, and then the narrower street that ran up to—Pen wasn’t sure whether to think of it as the front or the back door. The dry door. They mounted steps behind Iserne to a second-story entry. The ground-or-canal floor presumably held the merchant husband’s goods, with the living spaces above. She had a big iron key in her hand, but the door opened at her pull. “I don’t suppose I thought to lock up when I ran out.” She grimaced at this carelessness. She must have been going nearly as mad as Madboy in that moment, caught between the shock of grief and the greater shock of lunatic hope.

  The entered the hallway to find it lit by dim wall sconces, and the brighter glow of a walking-lantern in the hand of a startled maidservant. Two young women clustered behind her looked equally disconcerted. “Mama,” the elder or at least taller, who looked to be about Chio’s age, said faintly. “We didn’t know where you’d gone out to, or why…”

  Best dresses, fetching white bows tied around their necks, and masks in their hands suggested this was not an incipient search party, but the other sort. Iserne had no trouble figuring it out either.

  “I leave the house for an hour, and this is what you get up to?” Her voice was sharp, grating with real anger that seemed to take all three aback. These girls, clearly, had not yet been given the news about their brother, either version, before Iserne had rushed back out with her unhappy herald Merin.

  “We were only just walking over to the party at the Stork Island chapterhouse,” the younger protested. “Taking Bikka, and staying together! The divines of the white god will be there, giving blessings! It’s safe!”

  “Not that safe,” said Iserne between gritted teeth. “And not now. I can’t deal with any more chaos tonight…” She gripped her disarrayed hair and took a deep breath.

  The elder looked up, discovering that there was a divine of the white god standing right in their hallway. She gaped only briefly at Pen and then Chio before her gaze went to Merin. “Ser Merin, you’re back!” And more eagerly, “Is Ree with you? Is he still dealing with Father’s cargo, or is he coming?”

  Merin winced and gestured helplessly, tossing these unanswerable questions back to Iserne. He did produce a pained smile for the sisters.

  “Lonniel, Lepia. Listen.” Iserne’s serious, strained voice caught both their attentions, their naughty excitement beginning to be quelled by unease. “Your brother is…” She faltered on the complexities, retreating to, “Very ill.”

  The elder—Lonniel?—gasped. “Where is he? Isn’t someone bringing him home?” As all pleasure fled from her face, Pen could mark her wondering if very ill was a euphemism for dead.

  Merin, with a glance at their hostess, cut in before Pen could. “He took a blow to the head from, from a crane as we were starting to unload. It seems to have scattered his wits. I think he might have been hallucinating, because he grew very frightened and didn’t seem to recognize us. He ran off into the town, and now we’re looking for him.”

  That’s impressively glib, murmured Des.

  Merchant. I suppose he had to learn to think on his feet. The tale did cover the essentials of the situation, erased of the uncanny and softened for the ears of the innocent.

  True, but their mother should have been the one to make that choice, said Des.

  He did take his cue from her lead-in.

  Iserne’s hands closed and opened in frustrated acceptance of this unasked-for aid. “I’ll be waiting up for news, or in case he comes back here,” she told the girls. “You two go to your beds and stay there.” A scowl at the maid Bikka promised there would be another follow-up in her direction later.

  With the perilousness of their brother’s condition and their mother’s upset impressed upon them, the sisters’ mouths closed on mutiny, their shoulders slumping.

  “I’m going out to search for him,” Merin told both sisters, though his tense smile seemed aimed especially at Lonniel. “Even the Temple is lending us its aid, with Learned Penric here.” He nodded in Pen’s direction.

  Lonniel touched her mouth, forming an oh at this explanation of their more baffling visitors. Looking over Pen and Chio, she said, “I’m sorry we have interrupted your holy eve with our affairs, Learned, and um—” Pen watched her trying to place Chio, and coming up with the notion they must be a couple out on the town, though uncertain whether the young lady’s affections for the evening were paid or gratis. She settled on, “Miss. But please help Ser Merin all you may.”

  An attempt to straighten out this misconception of Pen’s chain of command was not worth the delay, given the saint was merely smiling below her mask. She granted the other girls a friendly nod, returned with slight confusion.

  Lepia put in, “But where could he have gone, hurt like that?”

  “Not far, we hope,” Merin told her. “With luck, we should have word by the time you wake in the morning.”

  Her face scrunched in her effort to imagine where her injured brother might try to den up. Pen would have liked to tax both sisters for ideas, given they’d probably know, hm, not more but different things of their sibling than even their mother did. Merin, since he was colleague, peer, and apparently family friend of Ree’s, would possess yet another set.

  But Iserne, reaching the limits of what Pen suspected was long patience, sternly drove the sisters up the stairs under the questionable supervision of their maid. Chio watched them ascend, her expression curiously covetous. A mother’s chiding was still caring of a sort. Surely a saint was not subject to… envy?

  As their steps echoed away, Iserne turned back to the entry hall, scrubbing her hands over her face as if to drive out numbness.

  “Two hours ago,” she told Penric, “I was going out of my mind trying to imagine how I was going to write my husband with the news of the death of our only son. This… I have no idea how I’m going to write this.”

  “Where is Ser Richelon?” Pen inquired.

  “He travels every year up to the foot of the mountains to deal for timber. We supply some instrument and cabinet makers here in Lodi who have very particular needs. He usually goes later in the summer, but this year is the first that he let Ree take the spring convoy to Cedonia alone.” She swallowed distress.

  “I think you can safely put off that task till tomorrow,” Pen said. “You should have more news by then. Better news, maybe.” Risky promise.

  “I suppose so.” Iserne straightened and exhaled, her eye falling on a pile of objects dropped at the side of the hallway: several cases, a poniard in a tooled scabbard, and some loose clothing. “I could go through these and put them away while I wait. I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway.”

  “That was everything Ree left in our cabin,” Merin told her. “It all fit on the one cart. Your husband’s cargo is still aboard the ship, as there was no one to receive it. It will just have to wait there, since all the stevedores have gone off for the holiday by now, but I’ll take on that task for you the day after tomorrow, if you wish.”

  Frowning, she waved away this offer. “I’ll send Ripol’s clerk.”

  Ripol? Merchant husband’s first name, Pen decided.

  She doesn’t favor this fellow Merin, Des observed.

  A case of beheading the messenger?

  Perhaps…

  Iserne poked at the pile of cases with a tentative toe, possibly considering how much more painful her unpacking would be if their owner had been dead. Pen renewed his resolve to prevent that from becoming so.

  “As far as I know,”
said Merin, “all of Ree’s documents and letters of credit from the voyage are safe in there. I’m afraid his purse and money belt were on him when he went over the side. We didn’t see either among his other things, later. I thought the belt had dragged him under—he’d had a very successful trip.”

  Neither item had been in the sad damp pile in the storage room, either, though sticky hands among those that had drawn Ree from the sea and delivered him to the hospice could have taken toll.

  “Thank the gods he’d had the sense to drop it, rather than drown trying to keep it!” Iserne said fervently. “Just the sort of thing idiot brave boys attempt.”

  Merin offered a crooked smile. “I think my employer would have chastised me roundly for that.”

  “Hah.” The maternal scorn in that syllable could have weighted a cudgel. “More fool he, since he’d have had neither money nor agent, after.”

  Since Iserne was as anxious as Penric for them to hurry the search, their farewells were brief.

  “Blessed Chio.” Iserne offered a clumsy curtsey; her supplication could not have been made more plain if she’d fallen to her knees. “The hope of my heart and house is in your god’s hands tonight.”

  “It cannot be misplaced there, Learned.” Gravely, Chio pulled her mask altogether off and returned her a full formal blessing, with the extra tap of the back of her thumb to her lips. It was the first trained gesture of their Order Pen had witnessed the girl make—Chio might have been as feral as a young elemental for all that Pen had seen heretofore.

  Her face, as they descended the steps to the street again, had shed all its earlier merriment. She drew her mask back on, tightening the ties, as Merin raised his lantern and turned his head back and forth.

  “Which way?”

  Pen grunted. “I was hoping you might have some ideas. This wild demon, though ascendant, knew nothing of Lodi, so all the local navigation must be coming from Ree. Asking Where would Ree go when in his right mind? is probably not useful, but where would a man like him, or you, think to hide if he was in terror for his life?”

  Merin blew out his breath. “Gods, what a question.” The lantern sank to his side as he cogitated. “Lodi has a thousand alleys, all with corners and cubbies, and then there are all the interiors. Even if you stick to those that are unpeopled this time of night—shops and workshops, warehouses, government offices—probably not them—the central islands are circled by docks and wharves, and then there are all the outlying islands. This seems an impossible hunt.”

  “Not entirely. I only need to come within about a hundred paces of the demon to sense it, regardless of what walls or alleys or canals lie between.” A sharp spike, somewhere in this buffeting phantasmagoria of the town’s souls.

  “How…” began Merin. “Never mind. But I don’t quite understand what you do if we do find him.”

  Penric shrugged. “Hold Ree down as best I can without doing him injury, then let Blessed Chio call on our god. It should be a quick operation at that point.” I pray.

  “Will he be all right after that?”

  “Exhausted, I’m sure.” And grateful, Pen trusted. Un-Madboy had better be, after all this chase. “But then we can deliver him home and let Iserne take care of the rest.”

  “I see. I think.” Merin frowned. “It sounds as if Ree was hard-battered by his ordeal in the sea. And the gods know what misadventures he’s met since he escaped from the hospice. What happens if he dies before the saint can release him?”

  “A greater mess than ever. I mean, over and above what the dying part would do to his family. Because the demon would jump to the closest other person it could reach, and we’d have the whole search to do over again, with even less information.”

  “But not to you? Or to Blessed Chio?” He made a newly nervy half-bow at the girl. “You’d need to be close for this, wouldn’t you?”

  “We’re already occupied. Not sorcerers, not saints, not Wealdean shamans, though I wouldn’t expect to encounter any of those in Lodi.” Wealdean merchants, yes. “Anyone else in proximity would be at risk.” Merin, for example. Really, the man was very much in the way.

  “That… sounds really bad. Unless someone wanted a demon, I expect.” His glance lingered, wondering, on Pen’s shoulder braids.

  “No one would want this demon,” Pen assured him. “Most certainly not the Temple. Even though it would then be taking an imprint of Ree’s memories with it overtop, it’s still far too crazed to be tamed for any use.”

  Merin looked properly aghast, thinking this through. “Wait. It would remember Ree?”

  “The next person it jumped to would. Think of it as like having the ghosts of all its prior possessors haunt your head, although that isn’t theologically precise.” He added, “And talking to you.”

  You needn’t sound so put-upon, sniffed Des. You enjoy our company.

  You still took some getting used to. The ten of you.

  “Do these ghosts remember their deaths?”

  “Vividly.”

  Merin’s shoulders twitched in a cringe. “That sounds horrifying.”

  “One grows used to it.”

  His thick brows drew in. “Why don’t demons go on forever?”

  “Saints. And other accidents. There is attrition. Fortunately, or we’d all be up to our necks in them.” Instead of just my neck. “That said, some can live a very long time, if they’re carefully husbanded by my Order. My demon Desdemona is over two hundred years old.”

  Merin’s expression hovered between impressed and appalled.

  “Two directions, right or left,” Chio prodded. “Pick one.” She glanced back up the steps, her mouth pursing. “Needless delay seems much too cruel, right now.”

  Aye, agreed Des, and Pen was reminded that six of her riders had been mothers. He wondered if any of them had lost children.

  In two centuries? We outlived all of them. In a sense.

  Oh. I’d never quite thought that through.

  Even now, we do not speak of that.

  I see.

  “Any guidance from your side yet?” Pen asked the saint.

  “Not so far.”

  Of course not.

  Pen tried to think what areas of these neighborhoods he’d already covered. He was losing track. Not that Madboy couldn’t move about, so maybe it hardly mattered.

  Merin pointed. “Left.”

  Pen shrugged and turned that way, leading them toward the middle of the muddled island neighborhood. Nothing in Lodi had a regular shape. Maybe he could find the center and spiral outward?

  Scanning, walking, and talking at the same time risked stumbling over his own feet, but he asked Merin, “I take it you and Ree were thrown together as cabinmates. Had you known him and his family before?”

  “Not as well as I got to know him shipboard. I used to work for one of his father’s cousins, before I was hired away as an agent for this voyage, so I had some acquaintance.” A longing sigh.

  What’s he pining for?

  What, wasn’t it obvious to you in Iserne’s entryway?

  I was following a great many things back there.

  “So you were rivals with Ree, not partners?” Pen asked.

  “Friendly rivals this time, yes. We might expect to be partners on some future venture. I’d hoped to work for Ser Richelon, who has a good reputation, but this other opportunity came up first.”

  Chio enquired slyly, “Does your current employer also have pretty daughters?”

  Merin snorted, unoffended by the implication. “No, more’s the pity. Among his other defects. Four strapping sons. A hired agent has no chance of moving up in that clan, no matter how hard-working.”

  Nor of marrying into it, obviously. Certain long-term relationships that came under the Bastard’s thumb could be economically similar, one type of close partnership cloaked by another, but Pen hadn’t noticed Merin’s eye being caught by anyone not female, so far. To his personal relief. Pen favored round girls, given his choice—though not, alas,
the otherwise personable Chio. Her randomly channels a demon-eating god aspect was too daunting.

  Thank you, murmured Des. One of your infatuations in that direction would have been supremely awkward. Pen’s lips twitched.

  Chio observed to Merin, “I thought you fancied Sera Lonniel, just now.”

  In the glow of the walking-lantern, Merin’s cheeks darkened in a sheepish blush. He ducked his head. “Who wouldn’t? Just on marriageable age, respectable house—her parents guard her very closely, though, so it makes her hard for a poor man to court. Ree was—is—will be again, I hope, good company, but on that point he’s just as stiff as his learned mother.”

  Ah. Iserne’s distaste illuminated? Rich daughter, poor suitor, a common tale.

  Merin’s jaw set. “A sufficient fortune of my own could overcome all those barriers, if I can ever gain it.”

  “Your own family isn’t in trade?” said Pen.

  “No. I’m from a farming village in the Adriac hinterland. The usual tale, too many siblings, and the younger turned out like stray cats to seek their own fates.”

  As the seventh and lastborn in his own family, Pen could sympathize. Although his fate had sought him, as nearly as he could tell. Or perhaps his god’s left hand.

  Pish, said Des. You would never have been happy in that narrow mountain valley, even as its shabby lord.

  Less even than as its youngest scion, Pen reflected. I was entirely content to leave those dreary duties to my eldest brother. Who appeared to be content to have them, so a win all around.

  “At least,” Chio remarked to Merin, “they didn’t drown you like a sack of kittens.”

  Foundling, right. Unwanted bastards left on the white god’s doorstep were the lucky ones. The canals of Lodi swallowed many secrets, to be flushed out on the tides.

  A flash of bitterness from Merin: “No, they send us to Lodi and let the city destroy us for them.”

  Penric had read the man as an unhappy soul from the beginning, but this appeared to go deeper than the disaster to his cabinmate that had been dumped on his hands. Right now, though, Pen had other souls to attend to. Too many, everywhere, and all the wrong ones. Still. The trio—four, counting Des—fell silent for a time, pacing along the maze. Pen’s feet were starting to hurt.