Masquerade in Lodi

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “Do you have any money?” he thought to ask Chio in turn. “On you, I mean.” Should they get separated, she should at least have the price of an oarboat back to the Isle of Gulls. Though if any oarsman would accept her promise, he supposed someone at the chapterhouse would settle up on her arrival.

  “Of course not,” she said. “The chapterhouse covers all my keep. And my travels, should I have any.”

  “Doesn’t the Temple pay you a stipend?”

  “Me?”

  “It should. Blessed Broylin of Idau is paid one, I know.” Through a different realm’s Temple administration, but still.

  “Really!” A glance up, then a thoughtful hum. “Do you know how much?”

  “Not offhand. He’s a retired baker, I believe, so has some money of his own. Any chapterhouse that wants him to travel pays his way, of course, but the stipend is separate. I don’t know if it’s his age or his calling that makes him uninterested in riches, but he’s kept decently.”

  “I had no idea saints could be paid.”

  “You are, in your way, Temple functionaries, the same as divines or sorcerers.” Well… not quite the same, murmured Des. “Your soul may belong to our god, but your body is owed any body’s wage.”

  “No one has ever suggested that before.” Her lips pursed in, Pen feared, calculation.

  Are we creating chaos, Des?

  This one is all your doing, Pen. A pause. I approve, of course.

  Chio’s mask tilted toward him in new curiosity. “Have you had your demon long, Learned Penric?”

  “Since age nineteen.”

  “Huh! That’s just a year older than I am now.”

  “So it was.” Had he really been that young?

  Yes, sighed Des.

  “Ten years ago, now. Odd. It seems longer. A third of my life.” And four years a saint made almost a quarter of Chio’s short life. He asked in return interest, “Was it lonely for you in the orphanage? After your calling came upon you?”

  Her mouth rounded in bemusement, as if no one had asked her that question before. “It was different. My old friends fell off, though everyone was scattering to their apprenticeships by then anyway. Except for Carpa, who is going to be five years old and there forever, poor girl. But the divines swarmed me. They made me read piles of theology, and I am not bookish. Teaching the orphans to sew or cook is far more fun.” She added politely, “No offense to you, Learned Penric.”

  “None taken. I admit some of those tomes can get, er, turgid.”

  “Yes, and that’s so wrong.” She made a face. “I could tell, after a while, which writers knew and which ones were reciting by rote. The divines didn’t like it when I told them so.”

  Pen grinned. “I imagine not.”

  “Do they have the saying in Wealdean about locking the stable door after the horse is stolen?”

  “In just those words, yes.”

  “It was like that. The divines and all those books.”

  He sobered, remembering that visceral, direct experience of the unimaginably vast that defeated all words. Young, guarded from the world, not bookish, all these Chio might be, but in certain dimensions profoundly not ignorant. “I’ve told the tale of how I acquired Desdemona at the death of Learned Ruchia so many times, it might as well be a rote recital by now. But when I try to describe what happened with Blessed Broylin…”

  She smiled into his lengthening silence. “Yes. Exactly that.”

  They turned the next corner into a narrower street. No canal here, but Pen linked her arm through his to prevent stumbles in the dark. The lack of animal traffic made Lodi streets cleaner than those of inland towns, and the tide carried off most of the rest of the residents’ refuse, but not, alas, all.

  “Is it lonely being a sorcerer?” she asked abruptly.

  “No, because I’m never alone.” Reflecting on his past decade of nesting in narrow chambers in other people’s palaces, he rethought this. “Although I’m never sure if people are taking my braids as a mark of rank or a plague warning.”

  She snickered. “I’ve not actually talked much to the sorcerers, despite my calling. They bring me the elementals and then leave as soon as possible.”

  He thought of the city gibbet they’d lately passed. “Desdemona once told me it’s like watching an execution. For a demon. So I’m not greatly surprised.”

  “Your demon seems calmer than most.”

  “We’ve been through something like this before. Me once, Des two centuries’ worth.”

  She nodded. “Dispatching elementals for the Order had started to feel more like killing chickens for the god’s kitchen than anything holy, even leaving out that real chicken. But then there was the horse. Speaking of horses.”

  “Hypothetical absent horses. I take it this was a real one?”

  She waved her free hand in sudden delight. “It was the first demon the god refused to take from me. It was a very good horse, so beloved, trained for parades and for children to ride. And beautiful! The glossiest beast I ever saw. The god sent it back to be raised as a Temple demon, to go to some learned sorcerer-candidate next. Its family was very relieved to be told it could live out its life with them.”

  “That was remarkably kind of the Order. And wise.”

  “Your demon must know of this. She’s stood at the gate of her riders’ deaths for such judgment and been told to go back, what, twelve times you said?”

  Pen hadn’t said. “That’s right.” After so many passages, did it feel to Des as if that gate was narrowing upon her?

  Yes, she muttered.

  Pensive, Chio went on, “I’d always felt the god’s sorrow, before, when I did His work. Never His joy. I finally knew what I was here for. I keep hoping for another one like that lovely horse.”

  “The Order does, too,” said Penric. “Though I’m afraid this mad boy’s demon isn’t going to be one.”

  No, agreed Des grimly.

  The vague scent of canal sewage gave way to a more estuarial tang as they came out at the big northwest harbor. Not many lights here; should he have acquired a linkboy’s lantern at the marketplace?

  “Can you see in the dark, as sorcerers do?” he thought to ask Chio.

  She shook her head. “I see the same as everyone else. Until the god is upon me, and then I see everything. Whether I want to or not.”

  “Ah.”

  Helpfully, a bright lamp over the main entry of the hospice guided them in.

  The wooden door was half ajar. Raised voices leaked from within. Pen opened it to hand Chio into the spacious vestibule, well-lit by lamps and wall sconces for receiving night emergencies.

  The person arguing with the night porter was not some injured or, more likely tonight, wine-sick poor seaman. To Pen’s astonishment, it was Learned Iserne. But a very different Iserne than the trim, brisk official he’d met this afternoon. Her black coat was hanging open over her dress, her sleek hair was escaping its pinned-up braids, and her face was drained and distraught. She near-vibrated with tension as she stood before the porter with all the air of a dog about to launch an attack.

  She was accompanied by a young man apparently acting as her linkboy, for he held a walking-lantern in uneasy hands. He was dressed as a sober merchant, not a servant, though, in a gray jacket with pleated skirts to the mid-thigh, tight trousers, and a silver-studded leather belt for his knife. Lanky, typical Adriac coloration. His lips were pressed closed in distress, but he opened them to say, “Perhaps we should come back tomorrow, Learned Iserne.”

  She shot him a scorching look that silenced him again, and returned to the porter: “If Master Linatas is not here, there must be someone who has seen him. Night staff. Anyone.”

  Penric thought to pull his lion mask down, turning it to hang from the back of his neck. Chio kept her mask tied, pressing his arm and stepping half behind him. It seemed unlikely this was a sudden attack of shyness, but who knew. He gave her a reassuring nod and moved forward, interrupting the scene.

  �
�Good evening. I’m Learned Penric, the Temple sensitive who was sent to Master Linatas to examine your mad castaway this afternoon, the one who ran off. I stopped in to see if he has been found or came back, or if you had any other word.”

  Iserne spun and stared at him in surprise. “Learned Penric! I was just thinking I might try to find you next.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  Iserne waved her expressive hands, but hardly seemed to know where to begin. A lawyer, at loss for words?

  Her companion gave her a pitying glance, and cut in, “My name is Aulie Merin. I was riding share on the spring convoy to Cedonia, shepherding a mixed cargo for my employer. Learned Iserne’s son Ree Richelon was aboard doing the same for his father. Our ship just returned home to Lodi this afternoon.”

  He inhaled, as if steeling himself. “I was charged with the heavy task of bearing the news to his family that Ree had been lost overboard in the night. Nearly a week ago, when we were beating up to our last stop in Trigonie. It seems heartless to encourage hope at this point, but…” He made a frustrated gesture at Iserne. “The shock. His mother.”

  “Did you search the water for him?” Pen asked.

  Merin shook a regretful head. “Between the time he was last seen in the evening, and the time he was first missed in the morning, the convoy must have made fifty or sixty miles. There was no way.”

  “Was there a storm?”

  “No, the night was clear, though the wind was brisk. No moon, so the deck was very dark.”

  Demanding a physical description of Merin’s lost companion was going to be unhelpful, given Madboy’s common looks. Pen had decanted the basics in front of his—maybe mother?—Iserne this afternoon without triggering recognition or alarm. Some hours before this news had arrived, to be sure, shattering her calm belief that her son was safely on his way home to her. Pen doubted the Bastard’s Day was strongly celebrated in Iserne’s household, as she had taken oath to a very different god, but likely any of her domestic thoughts had been pleasantly bent on a welcome-back dinner or some such thing. Pen had barely noticed Madboy’s exterior, although he would recognize his demon-splintered soul at a hundred paces through a stone wall.

  Pen turned back to the night porter. “Master Linatas has gone home for the day, you say? He left no messages for me, I take it?”

  “That’s right, Learned,” he replied, relieved to face a less frantic interrogator.

  “There must be others who worked directly with the shiplost patient you took in.” The other men in the ward he’d so disrupted yesterday could also bear witness, but staff were more likely to handle distraught relatives smoothly. “Is Orderly Gnade still about?”

  “I can send upstairs and see.” The porter rose to call through one of the archways leading from the entry, to be answered by a young dedicat interrupted swallowing down a snack of bread. The lad scampered off up the stairs willingly enough.

  Chio watched, quiet and attentive—aware?—as Pen extended his senses. Through the opposite archway, past closed doors, a few souls moved in a treatment room: a physician, hurting patient, assistant, and some anxious companion. No demons of any kind, so not Pen’s affair.

  Footsteps scuffing, plural; Pen looked up to find, thankfully, the page leading Gnade down to them.

  “Oh,” said Gnade, recognizing Penric. “You’re the sorcerer fellow who came this afternoon and scared that poor mad boy into running off.”

  Pen ignored the second half of this, and hoped Iserne would, too. “I gather you’ve had no further word of him here?”

  Gnade shook his head. “We did look, sir.”

  Pen turned to Iserne, whose slim hands were working in an anxious urge to interject, barely suppressed. “Did your son Ree have any particular identifying scars or tattoos, Learned?”

  “Not—not when he left home.” She looked to Merin. “Unless he acquired something on the voyage?”

  “None I know of.”

  “What about clothing?” asked Chio, winning a curious glance from Merin, who had barely given notice to her till now.

  Madboy had been dressed in, hm, a clean but worn shirt and trews with the look of the charity castoffs hospices reused for their patients. Pen asked, “He must have been wearing something when the fishermen brought him in, yes?”

  “Not much,” said Gnade, “but what the sea left you’re welcome to examine, to be sure.”

  He was looking in puzzlement at Iserne, so Pen put in, “Learned Iserne here may be your patient’s mother. She should see them.” Although if Madboy had been wearing newer garments when he went overboard, that wasn’t going to help either.

  Gnade extracted a key from the porter, picked up a lamp, and motioned them through the left archway. The four visitors shuffled awkwardly after him, Chio again hanging back. Her silence masked a close listening, Pen thought.

  Down the corridor, Gnade unlocked a door to what proved a small storage room, lined with shelving of plain sanded boards holding a miscellany of clothing and other possessions parted from their original owners. He set the lamp on the plank table in the middle and counted down the shelves. “I think we put them… ah, here.”

  He turned back with a scant pile of cloth and leather smelling of sea damp, and dumped them out. Iserne’s companion stood back looking sick, but she dove upon them, hands rapidly sorting. She bit her lip, scowling in disappointment at an anonymous torn pair of trousers, a plain leather belt, the shreds of a shirt, and one stiff, rank sock. Her hand stopped short holding a salt-crusted embroidered handkerchief, and she bent to shove it into the pool of light and spread it out. “This was his. This was Ree’s.”

  “Are you sure, ma’am?” asked the orderly. His even tone spoke of due care stemming from experience with upset relatives, rather than disbelief.

  “I embroidered it myself. Then he’s alive!” If Madboy—Ree, Pen corrected his thought—had been raised from the dead in front of them, her eyes could not have glittered more brightly with jubilant tears unshed. Her parted lips caught breath like a woman surfacing from drowning. “Saved from the sea, oh it is a miracle! One I didn’t even know to pray for!”

  If it was, it came with the kind of ambiguous catches for which Pen’s god was noted. He cleared his throat. “This puts us very much further forward, but we still need to find him.”

  Merin looked up from the handkerchief and said plaintively, “I don’t understand any of this! I thought the news I’d brought had turned her wits, and I shouldn’t let her run off into the night here alone, but what’s all this babble of demons and madness?”

  “My wits are fine,” snapped Iserne. “It’s my world that’s turned upside down.”

  The god of chaos and mischance, Pen reminded himself. He should know. “The man you lost overboard was found by a bedemoned dolphin, whose demon jumped to him. This is the one part of all this that was probably not an accident. Though you’ll have to take my word for that. Ree would have experienced this invasion of his mind as a kind of madness. Maybe his exhaustion from trying to swim made him more susceptible, but in any case, the demon has ascended—possessed him. Long story, but while Temple demons are a benefit to their recipients, this wild one is effectively insane. When the fishermen picked Ree up, I’m sure it seemed he’d lost his reason altogether.”

  “Five gods.” Merin signed himself, looking unnerved. “That’s bizarre.” He turned to Gnade. “Could he even talk?”

  “Aye,” said Gnade, “but there was no getting any sense out of him. Not even his name.”

  Merin huffed in horror. “Can he be cured?”

  Pen glanced at Iserne, hanging on his words. He returned a firm “Yes,” and concealed his gulp. We’ll make it so. Somehow. “When he’s found.” He motioned Chio forward. She pushed up her feathered mask, baring her sobered face, and made a curtsey to Iserne, regarding the older woman intently. Less daunted by all these surging maternal emotions than Pen was? Orodd perception—fascinated by them? Orphan, after all. “This is Blessed Chio
, saint of the Bastard’s chapterhouse on the Isle of Gulls, and my, er, colleague. When we find Ree, she will”—eat the demon maybe didn’t sound reassuring.

  No lie, muttered Des.

  “Draw the demon from him,” Pen continued smoothly, “by the grace of the white god. It may take him a while to recover from his physical ordeal and the shock to his mind, but with rest and quiet at home I’m sure he’ll be all right in time.” He nodded encouragement at Iserne.

  Iserne stared at Chio in a surprise that turned to ferocious hope. “Really…?”

  “Yes, Learned Iserne,” said Chio with earnest politeness—rising to the occasion, or previously schooled by experience in dealing with distraught, confused… clients? Supplicants? Her usual guardians had likely handled the details. “I’ll do all I can to help your son.”

  “Thank the gods.”

  Thank the white god, technically. But maybe not too soon.

  “I’ll help you search,” Merin volunteered. He grimaced in guilt. “In exchange for the search I did not insist upon a week ago, at sea.”

  “I as well,” said Iserne, her chin rising in determination.

  Penric did not need the parade. Or even a linkboy. He temporized, “I think it would better serve if you were to return home, in case your son finds his way there.”

  Her head went back; her face lit. “Do you think he might?”

  “By no means impossible. Ah…” The caution was painful but necessary. “There is a chance his ascended demon might feign to be him. If he does turn up, you should do nothing to alarm him, but secretly send for me at once.”

  She didn’t like that one bit, but he thought she understood.

  “Merin here can escort you home. Which is where, by the way?”

  “It’s not too far. We have a house on the Wealdmen’s Canal, which empties out to the harbor between here and the state shipyard.”

  A decent address; not so elevated as the palaces of the merchant princes lining the main canal of the city, but an abode of hardworking men on the way up, or sometimes down.