Penric's Demon (2 page)

Pen blinked, starting to wonder if he had fallen not ill, but into some bard’s tale. “Learned Lurenz, you know me! Penric kin Jurald—you taught me arithmetic and geography—you used to pop me on the head with your stick for inattention.” Hard enough to sting, too. That had been a decade ago, before the divine had been promoted to his present position. Lurenz was a long-time devotee of the Father of Winter, though as senior divine he supervised all five holy houses now. The growing city was angling for an archdivineship to be established here, Rolsch had said; Pen supposed Lurenz hoped for the promotion.

“Ah.” Lurenz let out a sigh of relief, straightening up. “We are not too late, then.”

“I’d better not be! Mother and Rolsch will be peeved, I can tell you. No idea what poor Preita will think, either. Where is Gans?”

“Lord Penric,” said Learned Lurenz in his stern voice, as if about to ask Pen to recite the major rivers of Darthaca, “what do you remember of yesterday?”

Pen squeezed his eyes shut and open again. They still throbbed. “Yesterday? There was nothing special about yesterday, except for Mother and my sister fussing about the fit of that stupid suit. They wouldn’t let me go riding.”

They stared at each other in a moment of mutual incomprehension. Then Lurenz muttered “Ah!” again, and continued, “On the road. You were riding into town with Gans, and you came upon the party of Learned Ruchia . . . ? She was lying ill on the ground?”

“Oh! That poor old woman, yes. Did she really die?”

“I’m afraid so.” Lurenz signed himself, touching forehead, lips, navel, groin, and spreading his hand briefly over heart, Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son, tally of the five gods. “We brought her body to lie in the Bastard’s orphanage here, awaiting burial, and some resolution to this tangle.”

“What tangle?” asked Pen, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach to add to his headache.

“Lord Pen”—the nickname was oddly steadying—maybe he wasn’t in
too
much trouble yet?—“tell me everything you remember about your encounter with Learned Ruchia, and how you came to, ah, swoon. Every detail.” Lurenz pulled up a stool to the bedside and sat, suggesting that he did not mean Pen to stint on the tale.

Pen described the events, together with what everyone had said as exactly as he could recall, strange as it had been, in case it was important—he didn’t have to cast his mind back very far, after all. He hesitated before mentioning the violet light and the babbling voices, because it made it sound as if he’d been seeing things, but finally put them in, too. “But what did she mean by saying
Accepted
? Not that you expect someone who’s busy dying to make a lot of sense, but she sounded pretty definite. And, really, I don’t like to say it, but her servants didn’t seem very loyal. Or”—a horrible new thought—“had she some contagion?” He rubbed the hand that had gripped hers surreptitiously on the sheet.

“A contagion to be sure, but not a disease,” sighed Lurenz, sitting up from his intent crouch. He frowned at Pen in a very unsettling fashion. “Did you realize she was a Temple sorceress?”

“What?” Pen gaped.

“A very senior one, I am given to understand, bearing a demon of great power. She was on her way to her Order’s main house in Martensbridge, to make some report, and seek aid in her illness for, for handling the creature. Or handing it on, in the event of her death. The Bastard’s people have some rituals to control this procedure, with which I am, ah, not familiar. Not exactly my god.”

The sinking feeling was turning into a stone. “I’ve never met a sorcerer before.” A choking arose in his throat, and without his volition his mouth added, “Well, now you are one, blue-eyed boy!” The tart cadences of the dying divine seemed to echo in the words; then the choking feeling slid back, as if the effort had exhausted it. He clapped his hand over his mouth and stared at Lurenz in terror. “I didn’t say that!”

Lurenz had jerked back, glaring. “You had better not be trying on some jape, boy!”

Pen shook his head violently, suddenly afraid to speak.

Low voices from the hallway rose in sharp argument. The door banged open, and Pen’s mother barged through, yanking her arm from the grip of one of the Temple guards Pen had met on the road. Lord Rolsch, following, held up a stern hand that daunted the man from trying to grab her again. Learned Lurenz rose and quelled the altercation by motioning the guardsman back, shaking his head in a mix of negation and assurance.

“You’ve awoken! Thank the gods!” The senior Lady Jurald rushed to the bedside and seemed about to fling herself on Pen, but then, to his relief, stopped short. She clutched the sleeve of Lurenz’s robe, instead, tugging it in her urgency. “What has happened to him? Can you tell yet?”

Rolsch detached her from the divine and restrained her, but after a worried glance down at Pen, turned a face almost as anxious as hers upon Lurenz. They both seemed startlingly changed from this morning’s ceremonial tidiness, though still in the same best clothes. Lady Jurald’s face was puffy, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair awry with random wisps escaping from her braids. Rolsch looked exhausted, too, his face . . . unshaven?

This isn’t this morning anymore
, Pen realized at last.
This is tomorrow . . . today . . . oh gods.
Had he slept the sun around . . . ?

Lurenz, not a man to shirk a painful duty, captured Lady Jurald’s fluttering hands and straightened up into his most grave and fatherly pose. “I am so sorry, Lady Jurald.” His nod took in Rolsch as well. “It is just as we feared. Your son has been possessed by, or it seems rather,
of
, a demon of the white god. It revealed itself to me plain a moment ago.”

Rolsch flinched; Pen’s mother gasped, “Lady of Summer help us! Can nothing be done?”

Pen, now sitting up against the headboard, stared down at his body in alarm. A demon of the Bastard, inside him?
Where
inside him . . . ?

Lurenz moistened his lips. “It is not as bad as it could be. The demon does not appear to be ascendant—it has not yet seized control of his body for itself. I am told that such a wrenching transference disrupts or weakens it for some time, before it becomes established in or, or accustomed to, its new abode. If Lord Penric is firm of will, and obeys, ah, all his holy instructions, there may yet be a way to save him.”

“They go into people,” Rolsch tried; “There ought to be a way for them to go out.” He undercut this tentative optimism by adding, “Besides the person dying, of course.”

Another nod from Lurenz, altogether too casual in Pen’s opinion. “As the unfortunate Learned Ruchia did. Which is how Lord Penric came to be in this predicament.”

“Oh, Pen, why ever did you . . . ?” his mother flung at him.

“I . . . I didn’t . . .” Pen’s hands waved. “I thought the old lady was sick!” Which had been, well, not
wrong
. “I was just trying to help!” He shut his mouth abruptly, but no strange force rose in his throat to add a sharp comment.

“Oh,
Pen
,” moaned his mother; Rolsch rolled his eyes in general exasperation.

Lurenz cut short what promised to be a lengthy round of recriminations. “Be that as it may, the harm is done, and there is no way to undo it here in Greenwell Town. I have discussed this possibility with Learned Ruchia’s escort. The late divine’s fleshly husk must necessarily be buried here, but her escort is obliged to carry her possessions on to her destination, that her Order may dispose of them howsoever she willed. That mandate must include, I have suggested”—forcefully, his tone implied—“her greatest treasure, her demon.”

What did Lurenz mean by
a way to save him
? Just about to vent objections to being talked over when he was
right here
, Pen registered the drift of this, and eased back, alert. Transporting the demon must perforce mean transporting Pen to . . . somewhere beyond Greenwell Town, anyway. Freitten, even?

“The Temple guards have agreed to escort Lord Penric to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge, where, I trust, they will have the scholars to . . . to decide what properly to do.”

“Oh,” said Lady Jurald, in a dubious tone.

Rolsch frowned. “Who shall pay for this journey? This seems a Temple matter . . .”

Lurenz took the hint, if not cheerily. “The Temple will undertake to gift him with the rest of Divine Ruchia’s travel allowance, and the use of its remounts and hostels along the road. After he reaches Martensbridge . . . that must be for her Order to decide.”

“Hm,” said Rolsch. It had been Rolsch, last year, who had forbade Pen’s scheme to go to the university lately founded in Freitten, on the grounds that the family could not afford it, and then stifled Pen’s protests by dragging him in mind-numbing detail through all his baronial accounts to prove it. It had been quite disheartening to find his brother not selfish, but truthful. While not Freitten, Martensbridge was
even farther
from Greenwell.

Tentatively, Pen cleared his throat. It still seemed his own . . . “What about the betrothal?”

A grim silence greeted this.

Rolsch finally said, heavily, “Well, it didn’t happen yesterday.”

His mother put in, “But dear Preita’s kin were kind enough to feed us anyway, as we waited here to see if . . . for you to wake up. So at least the food hasn’t gone to waste.”

“So much cheese . . .” muttered Rolsch.

Pen was beginning to get the picture of all that must have happened while he’d been lying here like a warmish sort of corpse in this bed, and it wasn’t merry. His body brought back in a wagon alongside that of a dead woman, Mother and Rolsch somehow found—
Gans, of course
—the celebration broken up just as it began, his anxious kin, quite obviously, up all night . . . “How is Preita . . . taking it?”

“She grew quite horrified, when we saw your body,” said Rolsch.

“Her mother has her in charge now,” said Lady Jurald.

“Someone should send to her, and tell her I’m all right,” said Pen, dismayed at this.

The silence following this lay a little too long.

Lady Jurald sighed. She was not a woman to shirk a painful duty either, or she could not have stayed married to their father all those years. “I had better go to her myself. There is a great deal to explain. And discuss.”

Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess. Cravenly, he let his mother go off without any messages from himself, necessarily under Rolsch’s escort though she plainly didn’t want to leave Pen alone.

“Is there anything else you need right now, Lord Penric?” Learned Lurenz inquired, also preparing to take his leave.

“I’m quite hungry,” Pen realized. And no wonder, if he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast. “May I go down to the refectory?”

“I’ll have a dedicat bring you a meal on a tray,” the divine promised him.

“But . . . I’m really not hurt.” Pen rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs, beginning to feel more at home in his body again, as though recovering from a bout of fever. “I can get dressed and go down. No need to trouble anyone.”

“No, please stay in this room, Lord Penric,” said Lurenz more firmly. “At least for now.”

He let himself out, the door closing as he paused to speak with the Temple guardsman still standing before it. Despite being safe in the Mother’s hospice, the man bore all his weapons that he had carried on the road. What in the world did he think he needed to guard against in here . . . ?

Oh
.

The hunger pangs in Pen’s belly seemed to congeal, and he huddled down in his sheets.

*
   
*
   
*

After Pen ate, and a dedicat came to take his tray away, Pen dared to poke his head out into the hallway. The big Temple guard he had seen earlier was gone, replaced by an even bigger fellow in the uniform of the Greenwell Town watch. He looked less like a candidate for the mercenary recruiters than a veteran back from the wars, hard and grim.

“Where did the fellow go who came with . . .” Pen wasn’t sure what to call her,
dead sorceress
seeming disrespectful though definitive. “With the late Learned Ruchia?”

“The dead sorceress?” said the watchman. “They both went off to witness her funeral, so they pulled me in to stand their post.”

“Should—should I not attend?”

“I was told you are to stay in this room. Lord Penric. Please?” He looked down at Pen and offered an apprehensive smile that took Pen utterly aback.

Helplessly, Pen returned the smile, in the same false measure. “Of course,” he murmured, and retreated.

There being no more comfortable seat in the little chamber than the stool, Pen went back to bed, to sit up hugging his knees and trying to remember everything he’d ever learned about sorcerers and their demons. It seemed meager.

He was fairly sure real ones weren’t much like the ones in children’s tales. They did not call castles to sprout out of the ground like mushrooms for passing lost heroes, or enchant princesses to hundred-year sleeps, or, or . . . Pen was not sure about
poison princes
, but it seemed to him unlikely to call upon a sorcerer for something an apothecary could do better. Pen’s life so far had been sadly free of heroes, princesses, or princes, in any case.