Penric and the Shaman (Penric & Desdemona Book 2) (14 page)

A considering silence.

“I have another trial in mind,” Penric continued. “I want to take Inglis out to the rock fall, and see what he can make of old Scuolla.” And what Scuolla would make of him?

A mere pained sigh was all that this elicited. What, was he finally wearing Oswyl down? It occurred to Penric that Oswyl was not so rigidly rules-bound as his stiff jaw suggested; only doubt need pray for guidance. He hoped Oswyl would get his answer. Penric went on speaking to his own wall: “Inglis is in less pain than yesterday. Calmer, if not less bleak. I expect I should take Gallin. And the dogs. We’ll need one of the guardsmen’s horses. Do you wish to come? Given you’ve no hand in the uncanny.”

Oswyl’s voice returned, distantly, “Having spent this long and come this far to find him, I’m not losing sight of him again.”

“Well, then.” Penric bowed his head and signed the tally, and they both rose together.

XII

Inglis, to his chagrin, had to be helped onto his horse by two guardsmen and an upturned stump by the stable door. His stick presented another puzzle. He finally set its butt upright atop his foot, which also had to be fitted into his stirrup by a guard, and held it like a banner pole. That and his reins seemed to give his hands too many things to do. The sorcerer almost floated up into his saddle, although Inglis put it down to his wiry build and horsemanship, not magic. Acolyte Gallin availed himself of the stump, however. Given the acolyte’s age, that was small consolation. Locator Oswyl frowned down from his mount at Arrow and Blood, swirling amiably around Inglis’s horse; the horse, which Inglis judged something of a slug, took only mild exception.

Gallin led the mounted party out past his temple into the street, where Learned Penric held up a staying hand. “Let us go to the bridge, first,” said Penric to him. “And over it. I want to see something.”

Gallin shrugged and turned his mount left instead of right. The rest of them followed in a gaggle. The dogs, who had darted ahead in the opposite direction, paused and vented puzzled whines. When the riders continued their retreat, they barked a few times, then ran after.

As Penric made to lead them all across the wooden span, Arrow and Blood rushed ahead, turned, and set up a furious barking. The horses shied.

“Calm them,” Penric advised Inglis.

“Hush!” Inglis tried, and then, “Sit!” The apparently-maddened dogs continued to hold the party at bay.
“Hush!”
Inglis tried again, more forcefully.
“Settle down!”

The two dogs recoiled as if blown by a gust of gale, but then remustered their battle line and took up their din again, standing four-legged and braced, the fur rising in a ridge along their backs.

“Enough!” cried Penric, laughing for no reason that Inglis could discern, and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Gallin, staring back and forth between the dogs and him, reined his horse around to lead back up the vale once more. A few villagers arrested by the uproar who had come to their garden gates nodded at their acolyte, frowned impartially at his visitors, and turned back to their interrupted tasks.

The two guardsmen fell in at either side of Inglis, albeit not too close, scowling at him in distrust. Oswyl nudged his horse up beside the sorcerer’s, and asked, “Did you do something, back there?”

“No,” said Penric, airily, “not at all. Very carefully not at all, in fact.”

“So what was all that in aid of?”

“I had three theories about what drives those dogs. This knocks out one of them. Two to go.” He nodded in satisfaction, and pushed his horse into a trot after Gallin. Oswyl seemed as baffled by this as Inglis, for he made an exasperated face at the sorcerer’s retreating back. What, did the locator find the blond man as irritating as Inglis did?

A little while later Penric reined back beside Inglis, displacing one of the guards, who looked more grateful than otherwise for being relieved of his post. “Well,” said Penric cheerily, “shall we beguile the ride with a bit more practice?”

“
No
,” said Inglis, mortified. And if a
No!
would have worked on the man, he’d have followed up with one. “Do you want us both to look fools?”

“That still concerns you, at this stage in your career?” Penric inquired. Entirely too dryly. “Though I have to allow, working for my god tends to knock that worry out of a person fairly swiftly.” The dryness melted to an even more excoriating look of sympathy.

“I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not going to work.”

“If you don’t know the first, how do you know the second?” Penric shot back. “Although I’m afraid
planning
may be too grandiose a term for it. Testing, perhaps. Like the bridge.”

Inglis hunched his shoulders. Penric eyed him a moment more and then, to his relief, gave up.

The day was gray, the air damp, the mountains veiled, but the wind was light, not spitting rain or snow at them. Inglis studied the vale as they rode up the right-hand branch of the Chillbeck. The high peaks that headed it, and easterly, led only to more peaks. One would have to circle back several miles to find any western trail with even a chance of leading to a high pass over to the main Carpagamo road. It was a half-day’s ride downriver beyond that to loop south to the same road, the way Inglis had come in. Given his prior disastrous experience with trying to climb out over this valley’s walls, that seemed the best bet. If a man had a head start on a fast horse. The notion of trying to retrace his route all the way back to the Crow Road and head east to Saone after all, as winter turned from threat to certainty, was near-heartbreaking.

The riders strung out as Gallin turned off the road and up into the woods. The sorcerer rode right behind Inglis, a thorn in his back; one of the guards went ahead, looking frequently over his shoulder. The woods were difficult but not, Inglis thought, impassible. Centuries of valesmen gathering deadfall and timber from these more accessible lower slopes had left them semi-cleared, although tangled steeper ravines and erupting granite rock faces broke up the area into a maze.

At length, the trail opened out onto a fearsome-looking landslide, much larger than Inglis had been picturing, and the riders pulled up. The two dogs scampered ahead onto the debris.

Penric peered out over the waste after the bounding animals, and asked Inglis, “What do you see?”

“When I am not in my trance, my sight is the same as yours. Er, as any man’s.” This was not quite true in this moment, Inglis realized. There was a breathless
pressure
in his mind, as if he were plunged deep underwater. A shiver up his spine. Tollin’s spirit, wound around the knife under the sorcerer’s shirt, was so agitated Inglis could sense its hum from here. “What do you see?”

“When Des lends me her vision, I can see the spirits much, I think, as saints are said to do, matter and spirit superimposed, like seeing both sides of a coin at once. Scuolla seems a colorless image, like a reflection on glass. I see he’s changed his rock since yesterday. So he can move about, some. May be a trifle smudgier? Or maybe that’s what I expect, or fear, to find.” Penric’s gaze had alighted where Arrow and Blood circled a boulder, whining. “He’s looking over at us. At you? He perceives us on some level, certainly. If you could—when you could—achieve your trance, did you see spirits? And could they speak to you, or were they silent?”

“I’d not encountered many. The old ones were always silent. I’d not evoked a new one yet.”

“Tollin.”

Inglis winced. “Tollin is bound to the knife, and does not speak. To me. In my normal mind. I don’t know if…” He trailed off, confused. If he could have ascended to the spirit plane, might they have spoken together despite the binding? Inglis wasn’t sure if he would have raged at Tollin for this disaster, or begged his forgiveness, or what. If he had lost a friend in more ways than one, or if some peace might have been salvaged between them, at an hour beyond the last. If Tollin hated him…

Penric, Oswyl, and one of the guardsmen dismounted, the latter taking the reins of all three horses. All of Gallin’s attention was on the dogs. The second guardsman kicked his feet out of his stirrups, preparing perhaps to go to Inglis’s aid. The sorcerer’s bow was still bundled with his quiver, unstrung, tied to his saddle. For the first time in weeks, the burden of the knife was taken out of Inglis’s hands.

If ever I am to have a chance, it is now, right now.

Inglis threw back his head and
HOWLED
.

Every horse in the party reared in panic and bolted, including his own. He tossed away his stick, wrenched at his reins, and managed to get the beast aimed generally uphill. They plunged into the patchy forest. From behind him, curses and a thump as someone fell off, more curses fragmenting as a man still mounted was carried away back down the trail. For a few moments, all Inglis could do was hang on to his saddle and reins as the animal under him heaved and jinked. He bent low as slashing branches tried to behead him, sweep him from his precarious perch.

Uphill and to the left was his goal—circle around the top of the slide and lose himself in the lower forests, then find his way somehow back out of this trap of a valley… the stolen horse was essential, crutch to his bad ankle, he couldn’t let it break
its
legs here… at this pace it must grow winded soon, and then he would regain control…

He had reckoned without the dogs. They gave chase, barking and baying behind him, weaving faster through the trees than the horse could. Incredibly soon, he saw a rippling copper flash at the corner of his vision, and, already
above
him, heard the profound deep barks of Arrow. They began to drive his horse through the tilted woodland like a red deer, hunted, and its laboring haunches bunched and surged in fresh terror—his fault, for filling its dim head with visions of wolves, echoing and reverberating now from the dogs? But a deer was built for these hazardous slopes; a horse was not.

A gulf of light opened to his left, and the horse shied wildly, hooves slipping in the wet loam, almost stumbling over the cliff at the top of the slide. It jerked back upright.

Inglis kept going, the saddle yanked from under him. The world whirled wildly around his head. For an instant, the bed of broken boulders far below him invited him like a bed in truth, an offer of rest at the end of an impossibly long day. A branch brushed his arm, and his hand closed convulsively, unwilled. Bark and skin grated each other off like bits from a blacksmith’s file. Wood snapped, he turned again in air, grasped, arm yanked straight, held, slid, lost it, turned, and smacked hard on his side. If he’d had any breath left, the last impact would have knocked it out. His lungs pulsed and red murk flooded his vision before he was at last able to inhale again.

It was a dozen breaths before he could lift his head and see where he’d landed. Raw stone blocked his vision a foot from his nose. He twisted the other way, and looked out over the gray valley. He’d come to rest on an irregular ledge about halfway up the sheer drop at the head of the rockslide. It was deeper than a kitchen chair, but only just, and several paces long, but they were paces that led only out into air at the ends.

No way to climb back up. No way… well, one way down. He eyed the broken rocks fifty feet below him, and wondered if the half-fall would be enough to kill him outright. Certain death still held attraction. Uncertain death, less so. He hurt enough
already
.

The skin of his hands was torn, his shoulder wrenched, his bad ankle… not improved. Spectacular bruises for sure. Amazingly, his neck and back and bones generally seemed intact.

Fifty feet above him, piteous whines sounded. A few barks, less labored or frantic than before—more puzzled yaps, really.
Whatever are you doing down there?
they seemed to say.

Truly, I have no idea. I have no idea about anything anymore
.

He lay on his ledge and concentrated on breathing, achievement enough.

After a time, he became conscious of movement below him. He pushed himself a little up and looked over. The drop reminded him of crawling out on the roof of the kin Boarford’s Easthome city mansion, five floors above a cobbled street—Tollin had dared him, he recalled. The pale face of the sorcerer looked up at him, head back-tipped. Penric was breathing fast, but otherwise seemed unfairly unruffled.

He shook his head, and called up, “I swear, Inglis, you have a
talent
for disasters. …It’s not a
good
talent, mind you. On the other hand, I’d suspected you had help, and now I’m sure of it.”

Inglis could go neither up nor down, right nor left. He felt as exposed as a wolf pelt nailed to a stable door, and as empty. He could think of no reply, not that the sorcerer had invited one, exactly.

A hundred paces away across the scree, where the path had been cut off, Gallin cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Baar caught a horse! We’re going for ropes!”

Learned Penric waved a casual hand in acknowledgment of this news, a lot less excited than Inglis thought he should be. “That will be some time,” he said, half to himself—the over-keen hearing that had come so disconcertingly with his wolf-within had still not deserted Inglis. Penric skinned out of his heavy jacket, turned up the cuffs of his linen shirt, rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms and laced his fingers together, shook them out. “Well, then,” he muttered. “I decline to shout spiritual counsel from the bottom of a well, so I guess I’d better be about this.”