Penric's Fox: Penric and Desdemona Book 3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Ah.” There’s a thought I should have had sooner. “Quite so, Learned.” Pen touched his thumb to his lips in a parting salute, and took his leave.

  *

  Penric, Oswyl, and Thala rendezvoused with Baron Wegae, trailed by his porter-and-groom Jons, in the street before his townhouse while the morning air was still dew-damp. They rode through Kingstown in sleepy silence to the north gate, and out it to the main installation of the Royal Society of Shamans. This had once been a farm beyond the city walls, but the town had grown up around it since, the original wattle-and-daub buildings shouldered aside by more substantial structures. The old rustic fences along the street were replaced by an imposing wooden palisade, shielding the Society’s secrets.

  They threaded through it all to the menagerie yard, formerly extensive royal stables. Penric had visited here a few days ago at Inglis’s invitation to witness the sacrifice of an elderly and tame lynx spirit into a half-grown lynx cub, on its way to making a great beast rather more desirable than a worm. The young shaman performing the ritual cuts under the close supervision of his elders had been visibly nervous, but the animal had been strangely serene, and Penric had been put in mind of those tales of people on their deathbeds going gladly to their gods. Except messier, Pen supposed.

  No bloody rituals going on this morning, but the last of the short night’s cobwebs blew off Penric’s brain as he took in the unexpected group that awaited them. Not just Inglis, but three more, yes, shamans were sitting together on the mounting blocks, holding their horses’ reins and chatting. All dressed for a day in the country like Pen’s party—riding trousers and sturdy boots, with light shirts or sleeveless tunics in anticipation of the day’s heat.

  Inglis looked up, waved, and rose to make introductions.

  “These are my friends Nath”—a big burly fellow, perhaps Oswyl’s age—“Kreil”—the bouncy-looking young man in question gave a cheery salute—“and Lunet.” The last was a young woman with sandy-red hair and a smattering of freckles across her sharp cheekbones. “They’ve volunteered to help you hunt for your haunted fox, Penric.”

  Penric grinned in surprise, instantly envious of the shamanic skills of collaboration, although working alone suited him well for the most part. “Ah, so this is what you went off to find last night. Outstanding idea. Thank you!” Pen took over the task of introducing the Grayjays and Wegae. The shamans, royal pets as they were, seemed not in the least daunted by Wegae’s rank, and Wegae in turn appeared openly fascinated by them. He wasn’t the only one, although Thala stared more covertly. Lunet eyed her with like interest.

  They all mounted up and took the road toward the hills, a substantial cavalcade of nine. A lone murderer, however dangerous, must surely be intimidated by these numbers? Penric hoped so. Readily overcome by his curiosity, Pen turned in his saddle and thought, Des, Sight.

  Inglis’s wolf was its usual more-than-wolfish self. The burly, dark-haired Nath certainly bore a bear, deceptively placid within him. If the eager Kreil didn’t house a Great Dog, enthusiastic for this outing, Pen would very surprised. Of them all, only the ruddy Lunet lifted her chin and glanced keenly back at him, poised in stillness, instantly conscious of his more-than-gaze. Great Fox, indeed. That might prove handy.

  Penric wondered if their Beasts had been matched to their persons in advance, or if the young shamans had taken on aspects of their possessions after acquiring them. Aspirants worked in the menagerie for some time before being paired with their powers, Inglis had mentioned, so perhaps it was more a matter of the two compatible spirits finding each other. Like a person and their god.

  Or their demon, Des put in, slyly.

  So what does that reveal about me?

  You possess the Bastard’s own luck?

  Eee. And then wondered how literally true that might be.

  Lunet looked as if she might be wondering, too.

  Thala rode for a while next to Lunet, the two women quietly talking. At a turn onto a wider road, Thala said, “Well, we have one of each right here. Let’s ask,” and pushed her horse up between Penric and Inglis. Inglis, after a glance back over his shoulder at his foxy colleague, returned the young Grayjay’s look of inquiry.

  “I am curious,” she said to the air between them, like a woman fairly dividing a cake. “Which came first, sorcerers or shamans?”

  “It had to be sorcerers,” said Penric.

  Inglis’s mouth took a noncommittal twist.

  Lunet called up, “How can you say? The tradition of shamans in the old forest tribes goes back centuries, maybe millennia, and is lost in the fog of time. The traditions of sorcery can hardly go back farther.”

  “Do a few thousand years seem like a long time to you?” asked Penric. “I think that must be an eyeblink, in god-sight.”

  “Then no one can really say either one?” prodded Thala.

  “I don’t get to it by any historical record, missing or not. I get to it by logic,” said Penric.

  Oswyl had taken over Thala’s stirrup-place beside Lunet: the shamaness looked the senior locator up and down with fresh interest. Amusement tinging his voice, he said, “Logic, Learned? I thought that was my Order’s task.”

  “Task it might be, but not sole dominion. Think about it. Shamans may create other shamans, through the slow building of Great Beasts, but who created the first shaman? Or the first spirit warrior, for that matter, since the simpler creation likely came before, and the more complicated later, probably through some trial and error.” Penric reflected on this. Wait, maybe not? There seemed an uncomfortable circularity involved. “The period of error must have been a frustrating time, for those involved. Anyway, the gods, and the gifts of the gods, surely came before people.” He hesitated in uncertainty at that last sentence. But this was not the place for the deeper debate on the origins of the gods, in all its subtleties. And heat. He forged on, “Since sorcerers are created by the gift, of sorts, of a demon from the Bastard, those powers must have come first.”

  “The oldest forest stories would have it that the first shaman was a blessing of the Son of Autumn,” said Inglis. “No sorcerer required. Those shamanic practices that sorcerers can replicate, and I’ll grant you a few—”

  You’d better, thought Pen, recalling his Great Earthworm with, well, not pride exactly, but certainly provisional satisfaction.

  “—could as well have been learned the other way around.” As you did, his eye-glint implied.

  “And the Bastard, it is said, was the last of the gods,” put in Oswyl, though Penric didn’t see how he had a stake in the debate.

  Thala frowned. “It’s all starting to sound like hearsay evidence to me,” she said, eliciting a muffled choke of, possibly, laughter from Oswyl. She did not turn in her saddle to check.

  “Welcome to the study of history,” said Penric genially.

  “And theology?”

  A sudden silence fell from all three men.

  “Maybe… not so much,” said Penric at length. Although that was not a conviction based on his seminary studies for a divine. Nor hearsay. “But there is no question people can get theology wrong, too.”

  “People can get almost anything wrong,” sighed Oswyl. “Theology cannot be an exception.”

  “Mm,” Penric conceded.

  At the next turn, the road narrowed, and the riders strung out and resorted themselves. The early summer sun was making its slow climb into a blue sky, but their shadows still stretched long across the nearby fields, the strokes of the horses’ legs sweeping like scissors. From passing farmsteads, cows released from their morning milkings made their clanking way into pastures, and distant voices echoed around the byres and coops and granaries.

  Penric took the opportunity to drop back beside Oswyl, displacing Lunet, though not out of earshot, and detailed to him his new theory from last night’s inspiration. Well, from Des. He wasn’t sure if naming his source would lend weight to his words or not. As Pen had guessed, his argument about the alternate vic
tim elicited more scowls than smiles from the senior locator.

  “What did Learned Hamo think of this… idea?” asked Oswyl. That last word seemed deliberately neutral, replacing something tarter, but at least he seemed to be turning Pen’s words over in his mind rather than spitting them back outright.

  “He didn’t think it was impossible. I mean, from the point of view of the sorceress—either one—or their demon. The actual identity of the murderer being another matter.”

  Oswyl mulled as their horses plodded up the steepening road. “It seems almost a distinction without a difference, from where I stand. Magal’s murder is the crime that will go to court. Her killer must still be secured. Everything must still be proved.”

  “It might cut down your list of suspects. Or at least redirect it.”

  “Oh? It seems to me it just lengthens it.” After a little silence, he added, “I’m not sure it even is a crime to injure or kill a demon. I mean, doesn’t your Order dispose of them routinely?”

  “Technically, they are given back into the hands of the white god, whence they came. The god disposes.” Or sometimes not, Pen was reminded. Des’s displeased silence at this turn in the conversation was palpable. “It is no more nor less routine than when the machineries of justice hang a criminal. Whose soul must also go on to the gods, or be sundered as the case may be. A consequence not controlled by any executioner, else justice would be sacrilege.”

  It was Oswyl’s turn to say, “Mm,” although with less concession in it.

  After a longer silence, Penric asked, “Oswyl… have you ever been only part-way through one of your inquiries and been sure you were right?”

  “Eh? Certainly.”

  “You’d push for it, yes?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because sometimes, I’m proved wrong. Later.”

  Pen digested this. “I suppose that’s all right.”

  Oswyl glanced aside at him, looked between his horse’s ears, and said, “Not if the accused is hanged first.”

  Pen opened his mouth, had just the mother-wit not to ask Has that ever happened to you? and let his jaw sink closed. As Oswyl’s was.

  No. He had no envy of Oswyl’s calling. He’d be sticking with the white god, thank you.

  How fortunate for us all, murmured Des. She might be smirking; might be serious. Or both. Pen rather thought both.

  Penric leaned into his stirrups as the road angled up and began to switch back and forth, and the lower edge of the kin Pikepool forest tract closed in around them, casting moist green shadows. He begged Des’s Sight again, stretching his senses for foxes, or rather, for one animal that might be much more. The surrounding woods grew glorious, colors seeming brighter, limned with life and movement both swift and subtle, but no foxes as such, though he was briefly distracted by the flash of birds and the musky dusk of a badger. The shamans in the party, too, grew more alert, and he wondered how strangely—or akin—they sensed all this, but no one called an alarm before they finally turned aside into the rutted lane leading to the old kin Pikepool manor house and farm.

  Approached from the front, the fortress-like house seemed nearly as brown and blank as when seen from the back. They rode around it to the stable yard before encountering any other people.

  As they dismounted, an old man emerged from the house, alarm on his features which faded as he spotted Wegae and Jons. “Oh,” he said. Pen thought he might have tugged on his forelock if he hadn’t been bald. “Young master.” His tone was respectful enough, but… ah. Young master not my lord. Old retainer, then, relict, like the rest of this place, of the prior baron.

  “Ah, Losno, good,” said Wegae, turning with an air of familiarity. “We will be here for the day. We’ll rest the horses in the pasture.”

  “I’ll fetch the lad.” The man trudged off to roust out a stable boy, or gardener’s assistant, or general young village laborer—it looked as if the one gangling youth held all such posts. He and Jons and the shamans coordinated in setting the tack in a line atop the fence and loosing the beasts. The pasture’s current equine occupants looked as dubious about this alien influx as Losno and his lad, although neither of the human hosts bit, squealed, or kicked.

  “Losno is the gardener and caretaker,” Wegae explained to Penric and the Grayjays, “along with his wife, who sees to the house. As much as it gets, these days. I’ll collect them all for you in a moment.”

  “Please,” said Oswyl.

  Pen was dismayed to spot five new fox skins tacked to the stable wall, reeking in the sun. A quick check of the stall found it empty, or emptied. Inglis and Lunet joined his examination.

  “Can you tell anything by looking at them?” Pen asked anxiously.

  “Not… especially,” said Inglis. “They all seem alike, if that helps any.”

  If anyone had killed the wanted fox already, they would likely have been jumped-to by its demon, Pen reflected uneasily. Creating a whole new problem, but clearly it had not happened to the old gardener or his lad. Nor, when they came out in a few minutes, his wife or her scullion-girl, who could have been sister to the boy. Or maybe cousin, or both, rural villages being what they were.

  Oswyl sat them all down on a bench beside the back door and, reinforced by Wegae’s weedy authority, began a systematic inquiry. Penric listened, hanging back as anonymously as he was dressed, although he did carry his braids tucked away in his inner vest pocket. The pattern of questions was starting to become familiar. The news about the dead sorceress found in the Pikepool woods induced shock and surprise in the four servants, and some haste to assure everyone listening that they’d seen or heard nothing of it. Pen had no idea if any of them were lying, even with a flash of Sight; all he could sense was agitation, and a certain amount of wriggling gruesome curiosity from the boy, which did not require magic to discern. He wondered if Oswyl could tell any more by experience.

  No, no one had seen any strangers about the place in the last few days. Nor in the woods, but you’d have to ask Treuch. Who had gone off there to continue his fox-thinning project. Was this unusual? No, not especially. Wouldn’t winter be better for pelts? Well, yes. Did Treuch live in the main house, too? Oh, no, not the forester; he had his own little cottage, pointed out a double-hundred paces away at the edge of the woods. It looked more like a hut to Pen, but no shabbier than the other old wattle-and-daub structures scattered about the grounds. No, Treuch had no wife nor children, never had. No skill at courting, when he was younger, though he would have it that the girls were too picky and proud; the housekeeper sniffed. Oswyl, rather than cutting off this discursion, led them on to gossip about the absent man for a bit, but what he made of it Pen could not guess.

  They grew, oddly, less gossipy when asked about the three-year-old tragedy of the slain baroness. The two youths had not worked here then, but the old couple had, and had apparently suffered their fill of interrogation about the crime at the time. In any case, they added nothing new or startling to the tale already told. Though the housekeeper sounded grateful to the Temple sensitives who had removed the ghost from the premises, as if it had been an infestation of some especially appalling vermin. Wegae’s mouth twisted— remembering his aunt as a person, perhaps.

  They were all squirming when Oswyl finally released them back to their labors. The housekeeper did not look too pleased when he assigned Thala to look about inside the manse, taking the grounds for himself. Penric returned to the stable yard where Inglis had been organizing his squad of shamans for a search of the woods.

  “Are you sure you should split up like this?” Pen asked dubiously upon hearing the plan.

  “We’ll be able to cover more ground, faster,” rumbled Nath.

  “I was thinking of the dangers of perhaps surprising a desperate murderer,” Pen said. “He could still be about.” Something, certainly, had to account for Treuch’s out-of-season fox-obsession. Or someone? Oswyl himself had not yet closed off the notion of more than one man—person—bei
ng involved.

  “Penric,” said Inglis patiently, “we’re shamans. Would you consider yourself in danger?”

  “Er… not forewarned, I suppose. But I have certain physical powers that you all do not possess.”

  “And we have certain mental ones that you don’t.”

  Penric increasingly wanted to do something about that lack before this trip was done, if he could. But that would require some canny negotiating with the princess-archdivine, and was not the meal upon his plate this day. “Well… be careful, anyway. If you run across any strange men in the woods, don’t approach them. Come back for reinforcements first, eh?”

  There was a general, unreassuring meh in response to this.

  “Oh. And if you encounter the forester Treuch, send him back here. Tell him the baron wants to talk to him, but don’t mention the Grayjays yet.”

  It was decided to begin with the sections to the north and west of the house first, in the general direction of the village of Weir, and all meet back here in about three hours to eat and plan the next cast. Unless someone found the demon, in which case they were to inform Penric in the most expedient way they could. They all fanned out and plunged into the tangled green shade.

  *

  Two hours of blundering back and forth through his assigned sector brought Pen no prizes, although he did find and spring an iron leg-hold trap baited with pork fat, and two snares. Might the demon-ridden fox have a more-than-natural wariness of such hazards? Pen hoped so.

  Casting around the woods with his Sight fully extended was a strange experience in its own right. He could have used it when hunting as a youth, except… it was so overwhelming. It wasn’t like ghosting along with his bow trying to pick out one tasty target, disregarding all the rest; rather the reverse. The whole tapestry of the forest’s life folded in upon him, its intricacy interlocking in finer and finer stitching, so that the mere perception, after a time, grew exhausting. His range was short, half-a-hundred paces, or this god-sight would be entirely too god-like. What kind of Mind was it that could hold the whole world like this, all at once, all the time? Could the gods ever close their Eyes and rest from it, even for a short while? And what would happen if They did?