The Orphans of Raspay: A Penric and Desdemona novella in the World of the Five Gods (Penric & Desdemona Book 7)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  The Corva girls, Pen discovered as he wheeled, were hunched together staring at him in deep dismay.

  He hardly needed his dark-sight, raking the shoreline, to spot more trouble on its way. The wavering torches were clue enough. He switched to Roknari. “We have to get off this pier and hide. If they don’t see us, chances are they’ll think we escaped on that ship, which will buy us time. There’s no going back to the ransom house now.”

  Because if the sisters took refuge there, they would presumably be separated according to the original sales agreement, one sent north, one south, despite the missing Penric. How angry, and at whom, was Falun going to be to discover he’d been sold a false scribe? It occurred to Pen, belatedly, that the revelation of his true calling might protect him from being carried off on Falun’s ship. What would happen instead was extremely unclear.

  “Are you really an evil sorcerer?” whispered Seuka. And when had she learned to understand that word in Adriac?

  Pen rubbed his face in exasperation. “I am really a Temple sorcerer. Very tame. Learned Penric. Divine of the white god, graduate almost with honors of the great seminary at Rosehall which… you’ve never heard of, right, never mind. If I were an evil sorcerer, I would have sunk those thankless Adriac scum-suckers.” Or set the ship on fire. That would have been gratifying. And spectacular. A lesson all around worth half-a-dozen sermons. He’d missed a teaching opportunity.

  Now, now, I was quite impressed with your restraint, murmured Des. Perhaps the white god knew what he was doing after all when he gifted me to you.

  I’m glad someone did, Pen fumed.

  “Weren’t you casting a spell?” said Lencia.

  “It sounded like magic words…” said Seuka warily.

  Better awkward questions than screaming and running, Pen supposed.

  “Only cursing in the ordinary way. In Wealdean. Which is an entirely unmagical language, I assure you. Magic doesn’t work like that.” Grabbing and dragging them wasn’t a good choice just now. Pen waved his hands attempting to herd them instead. “Move, move! The pirates are coming.” Beleaguered, he added, “I’ll explain all about it once we get somewhere safe.” Temporarily safe.

  It appeared they were marginally more afraid of pirates than of sorcerers, or else wildly curious about him, because they turned to stumble off the pier at last. Pen led right, angling away from the shore. As they plunged into the deeper shadows of the narrow streets, the sisters reluctantly took Pen’s hands again. It wasn’t as if they had anyone else’s hands to take.

  Where are you guiding us now? inquired Des.

  To that Quintarian temple we saw from the crow’s nest. It should be somewhere on this side of town, uphill. Help me navigate.

  To be sure, but if you are thinking of taking refuge there, you may be optimistic. For all we know it’s been reconsecrated as Quadrene. Or turned into a warehouse.

  If the latter, so much the better. I just need a place to think. Again. Two good plans, ransom and mass escape, had turned to wet paper in his hands because other people wouldn’t be sensible. Maybe he needed a plan that didn’t rely on other people. Or being sensible.

  They only had to backtrack from blind alleys twice before they came out on the narrow square fronting the temple. It featured a fountain serving the nearby streets, running feebly. Dawn nipped their heels, the sky above the eastern hills growing steely, as Pen led the way under the temple’s front portico. A lantern hook dangled, but no lantern hung on it. Brought in at night for fear of theft? Pen snorted at the irony and tested the lock on the double doors. It did not give way easily, though more due to corrosion than complexity. No people inside right now. He slid through, motioned the girls after him, and eased the door shut.

  Not a warehouse, at least. Pen counted five altars, one against each wall, and breathed relief, laced with stale incense, for Des’s other pessimism disproved. A modest clerestory between the shallow dome and the walls, an oculus above, and narrow arched windows over each altar would shed light—in the daytime. The fire on the holy plinth in the center had burned to cold ash, overdue for raking and relighting. Someone was slipshod, or else firewood was excessively dear, here. Or both.

  “Is this a safe place?” said Lencia, her voice tinged with doubt.

  “For the next hour or so, probably. Until they open up for the day.”

  Musty prayer rugs and cushions were stacked beside each altar, ready for use by supplicants. Pen pulled some from the Bastard’s niche and piled them three high on the stone floor before it, placing the cushions for pillows. “Here. You can at least lie down and rest for a bit while I look around.”

  “Is that all right with the god?” said Seuka. “I’ve never been in a Quintarian temple before…”

  “It’s not so very different,” said Pen, then realized he’d never been in a Quadrene temple, either. Four-fifths true, Des assured him. “As for the white god, I have something of an arrangement with Him.” A sometimes-dubious arrangement, but certainly intimate enough to share bedding. Whether this temple’s keepers would agree was yet to be explored.

  The girls settled, but did not lie down, frowning at him though the shadows. Pen didn’t think they could make out much more than a smudge of his face and gleam of eyes and hair. Well, and his smell, drying sweat and filthy clothes, but everyone shared that. Maybe they should have taken yesterday afternoon for laundry instead of language lessons.

  “So, um,” began Lencia. “How long have you been a sorcerer?” A very grownup conversation opener, apart from the slight quaver in her voice. A ten-year-old terrified orphan, trying to be the grownup, right. Pen bit his lip and simplified.

  “Since age nineteen. I was riding down the road near my home and chanced upon a traveling Temple sorceress, elderly, who had suffered heart failure. I stopped to help, but she was dying. A creature of spirit, like a demon—or a human soul, for that matter—cannot exist in the world of matter without a body of matter to support it. Finding me agreeable, the demon jumped to me.” And my future was wholly changed.

  Improved, I trust, murmured Des.

  Don’t fish for praise. But Pen had to suppress a smile.

  “You were possessed by a demon?” whispered Seuka in shock.

  “Are you still?” added Lencia, a little swifter at the implications. She edged back on her rug, though not as far as the hard stone.

  “No, I took possession of the demon. And consequently its magic. That made me a sorcerer. Who’s in charge is a very important distinction. We call it the demon ascending when it’s the other way around. And then actual Temple sorcerers and saints have to go iron things out.” This was not the time or place to go into those messy details, Pen sensed. “After that I trained to be a divine. It’s usually the reverse order, a person trains before the Temple gifts them a demon, but our case was an emergency. She’s like a voice in my head.” Who argues with me. Best leave out the twelve-fold complications of that, too.

  “Your demon’s a girl?” gasped Seuka.

  “Mm, in a sense. Her name is Desdemona.”

  Given the tight lips and wide eyes of his audience, this wasn’t helping.

  “She gets along very well with my wife,” Pen offered in his demon’s support. “Which is good, because it can be a bit like being married to two different people living in the same body.”

  Lencia’s mouth fell open. “You’re married?” By her tone, his possessing a wife was even more startling than his possessing a demon. Well, in this case perhaps he was the one possessed, and delighted to be so. Keep simplifying.

  “Yes, we live in a little house in Orbas, together with her mother. Some men don’t get along with their mothers-in-law, but we’re quite taken with each other. It’s nice there.” Or was, before he was sent off on a fool’s errand and captured by pirates. And the sooner he remedied that, the better. He wasn’t sure if the girls were actually finding this spate of domestic detail comforting. “I really do serve the archdivine of Orbas. Who lends me to Duke Jurgo, if
there’s a problem he wishes to set me to. I can get on with my own studies in between, so that works out. But under it all, always, I work for the white god.” Will or nil. “Who is the protector of orphans, in Quintarian theology.” He waited a few moments for this broad hint to sink in.

  The wariness did not ease. Pen soldiered on. “So, I’ve told you all about me. Tell me something more about your mother.” Jedula Corva, they had let slip her name during those long hours in the pirate-ship hold. “Was she a secret Quintarian? Which god signed her at her funeral?” Both the girls’ parents had prayed for their safety, he had no doubt, but only one had certainly met a god face-to-face. Once.

  A jerk, a flinch; an increase, not a decrease, in tension. Lencia swallowed and said, “The demon god isn’t allowed to sign at a Quadrene funeral.”

  “A fifth of the time, that ought to be a problem. How do the Quadrene divines in Jokona prevent the white god’s sign from being received?”

  “He doesn’t have a fish,” said Seuka, with an everybody-knows-that shrug.

  Aye, said Des cheerily. Fiddle the actions of the funeral animals, which granted is easier when it’s four fish swimming in a tub and the divine calling interpretations. Or, if they can’t do that, feign the soul is sundered. They’ll only admit the truth if they are very annoyed with the deceased or their family.

  Which Pen had heard of, yes. Quadrenes must believe they are up to their knees in ghosts. He wondered how offended he should bother to be on behalf of the Bastard, given that the god and His assenting souls danced away together quite beyond the reach of any human chicanery. It was only the living bereaved who were shortchanged. …Or relieved, he supposed.

  Coin toss, agreed Des. Even in Quintarian lands.

  But Pen was after more particular information. Let them tell what they know.

  “She was signed by the fish of the Mother of Summer,” Lencia said at last. “The divine said. On account of her being a mother. But…” She trailed off, guarded.

  Seuka, less discreet, announced sturdily, “But that wasn’t what she told us.”

  Pen leaned his back against the Bastard’s altar table, the gritty flagstones cool under his haunches, and pretended to be relaxed. “Oh…? And what did she tell you, and when?”

  The gloom of the chamber was receding as the sky paled over the dome’s oculus. The two girls looked at each other as if for permission or encouragement, then Lencia said, “She was very feverish.”

  Memories were slippery stuff, but some were stickier than others. Pen still remembered unwanted vivid details from his own father’s feverish deathbed, and that was getting on for two decades ago. So he didn’t think it pointless to ask, “What precisely did she say?”

  Seuka frowned. “She had Taspeig bring us in. She couldn’t breathe very well.”

  Lencia continued, the scene plainly rising behind her pinching eyes, “She said, ‘You’re going to be all right. I’ve been bargaining with my body all my life, why not my soul? I’ve given you into his hands in exchange.’ And then she choked for a while, and Taspeig held her up to drink, and she said, ‘Best coin I’ve ever been offered, from a more reliable client.’ And then she choked some more, and waved her hand, and Taspeig sent us out.”

  “We didn’t know she was going to die that night,” said Seuka, gulping a little. “Afterward, I thought she meant one of her regular fellows was going to adopt us. But that didn’t happen.”

  “She didn’t say a name,” said Lencia. “Taspeig said she didn’t to her, either.”

  It would be strange even for a feverish woman to entrust an oral will to two children who couldn’t possibly effect it. A servant was a barely better witness. The crow-woman appeared to have managed a decent independent life for herself and her children, by the standards of her trade; not the glamor and riches of a high-class courtesan like Mira of Lodi, but not the degradation of the streets, nor even the protection of a brothel at the cost of autonomy. But their own little house had been rented, and there could not have been much else left to them or the girls would have been snapped up by someone in Jokona. And probably stripped of their bequests in short order.

  What a bold courtesan! murmured Des, sounding impressed. Even Mira never bargained with a god!

  If there’s a coin that moves the gods, I’d like to know it.

  You already do. Her soul, of course.

  You think she threatened to sunder herself? Pen’s breath drew sharply in. The words hadn’t sounded like a woman in despair, but any soul might deny the gods that much. And some women were known to make fantastically heroic self-sacrifices for their children.

  Not at all. I think there was another goddess standing near her bedside, bidding for her. For the Bastard to slip one of his best-beloved out from under the nose of the Mother of Summer at such an auction? He might promise much.

  The gods, Pen was reminded yet again, didn’t value people by the same measures people did. The great-souled and the great saints weren’t found only among great men, or even very often so. Of course, the humble were more numerous to start with. Would it be possible to do some sort of holy head-count, and determine if blessedness was evenly distributed? Maybe not; the high were much better recorded than the low. Maybe no merely human eyes were fit to see why the god had so valued this daughter of His.

  But in trying to guess why these two sisters seemed so prized that the god of mischance would dump one of his own sorcerers into their hold, maybe Pen had been looking in the wrong direction. Not destiny, but heritage.

  An appalled grin threatened to stretch his mouth. What, so the white god has drunk up His chosen soul like a merrymaker at a tavern, and rolled out leaving me to pay His bill?

  It was a rude way to think about the gods, but the Bastard could be a very rude god. And, truly, the gods could do nothing in the world of matter except through beings of matter. A doctrinal point Pen had constantly to explain to people trying to pray for good weather or no earthquakes, who never listened, he’d finally decided, because they didn’t want it to be so. The gods did not control the weather. Or the world. Or souls.

  But death, oh, they own that.

  Pen made the five-fold tally of the gods, touching forehead, mouth, navel, groin, and hand spread over his heart, then raised his fist to tap the back of his thumb twice against his lips—the thumb and the tongue being both the special symbols of the white god, for good or ill depending on one’s beliefs. “Your Jokonan divine lied,” he told the girls. “I think that Jedula of Raspay went into the hands of her white god as heart-high as the betrothed at a wedding feast. And found great comfort there. The rest,” he sighed, “is up to us.”

  Pen wasn’t sure if the girls took this in as faith or just as proof he was benignly mad.

  But, “Oh,” said Lencia, and Seuka swallowed, looking as near to tears as he’d yet seen her. Was it from their mother that they’d learned not to weep in the face of fear?

  Fear is easy. Joy is hard, said Des.

  Mm.

  Pen levered himself to his feet. His overstrained body had stiffened while he sat, but this listening had been worth it. “I need to find a better place to hide you before people begin stirring. I’ll be back shortly.”

  * * *

  A door in the wall next to the Bastard’s altar led to the back premises. Pen slipped through and found himself under a short colonnade. To the left, a high gate led out. Ahead lay not so much a temple complex as a temple simplex, a typical rectangular stone building around a central court which had its own small fountain, presently dry. Stairs and a wooden gallery served a course of upper rooms.

  Residents? Pen asked Des.

  Only three right now, upstairs sleeping.

  There should have been rather more, even for a small neighborhood temple. Pen took a quick circuit under the gallery. A room for the divine to change his robes, an office and library, a kitchen along the back, refectory, storerooms, a lecture room converted to a lumber room… that last seemed the best bet for a tempora
ry den, or else an unused room upstairs.

  Pen returned to the colonnade and checked beyond the gate. A stable for the sacred animals was built against the outer wall, with a low, slanting roof. The old timbers were sturdy and elaborately carved. New repairs were crude. The long shed seemed currently underpopulated, with a pen of chickens, a couple of nanny goats, and a dozing donkey flopped in its straw. The menagerie seemed less hallowed than practical, not that it couldn’t be both.

  Pen returned to the temple hall. His breath caught and his steps quickened as he heard a voice grumbling, “Who left this door unlocked? …Hey! You street rats can’t sleep in here!”

  Dawn light leaked through the oculus, the arched windows, and, now, the front door, shoved wide. A fellow—townsman or peasant, hard to tell by his plain garb—stood beside the fire plinth with his hands on his hips. He bore a rack on his back holding a bundle of trimmed branches, which he doffed and swung down to the floor. He opened his mouth to shout again at the trespassers, but his jaw hung slack as Penric came up beside the girls, who were pushing themselves up from their rugs, sleepiness warring with fright.

  The wood-carrier stepped back, his hand going to the knife at his belt. Pen could see the calculation on his face as he attempted to average the threat: tall strange man, danger; small children, not. And Pen bore no visible weapons; better. The firmness returned to his spine.

  “You can’t sleep in here. Off with you quick, now, and I’ll say no more.” His strong island Adriac accent went with his sawed-off, sturdy island build.

  Pen suppressed his frustrated curses and let the cultured tones of Lodi infuse his own voice. “But I have quite a lot to say. To begin with, who are you?” Temple servant, obviously, to be bringing in the morning’s firewood for the plinth. Or the kitchen, as might be.

  The man’s face pinched in suspicion. “Brother Godino. I run this place, as much as it gets run.”

  “I need to speak with the divine.”

  “You already are. As much as there is one.”