Penric’s Mission

  It couldn’t have been Adelis’s voice… could it? Even at age ten when he’d broken an arm falling off his pony, he’d vented no more than an odd little Eh! Perhaps it was only some thief, convicted for a fifth time and paying a hand in penalty? Such punishments were sometimes administered here, she thought. Please, please, let it be some thief…

  The remaining soldiers had stopped looking at her, or around, or at each other. To a man, they stared at the ground. Afraid? Who wouldn’t be, after hearing that unholy sound? She was terrified, her body shuddering as if in the winter wind, though sweat dampened her all over.

  No. Stranger than that, she realized. They stand ashamed.

  At length, silhouettes appeared in the bright archway to the inner court, two men supporting a third stumbling between them. Adelis? Not a corpse on a litter, to be sure, but relief didn’t wash through her. The solid form was familiar, its constricted posture not. His body was hunched, lurching, as though he were overtaken with wine-sickness.

  It was only as they came near that she saw the pale bandage wrapped around his head, and realized why they were now willing to release the genius general to no more stern a warder than his sister.

  Oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods oh gods…

  They’ve put out his eyes.

  III

  Penric guessed it might have been ten days when the stone was dragged back and not replaced, but no hooked rope dropped to collect his empty pail. Instead, a few feet of a leather hose were pushed over the edge of the hole, though not far enough to be anywhere near in reach. The guards were silent shadows in the wavering torchlight, its wan glow grown as brilliant as the sun’s in Pen’s staring, dark-adapted eyes.

  “Now what?” he called up, not expecting a reply.

  “Mercy for you, madman,” someone growled back down.

  “I’m not mad.” Rather angry by now, though.

  “You babble to yourself all the time.”

  “I’m not talking to myself.” Just to the voices in my head. All ten of them. Not, he knew from long experience, a useful thing to mention.

  A snort, and the—pair?—of sandaled feet shuffled away.

  A few minutes later, the hose bulged, coughed, and began to disgorge a steady stream of what Pen hoped was water. He tested it by thrusting a hand in the flow. Yes, seawater, not, say, rainwater or sewage. Odd…

  “Are they giving our little home a washing and flushing? It certainly needs one.”

  His throat constricted strangely as Des replied, “No. That’s not it.”

  The water was coming in faster than the drain was leaking it away. Had they blocked the far end of the borehole? Pen splashed his bare feet uncertainly in the growing puddle.

  Des continued, “They mean to drown us in our cell. Like a mouse trapped in a bucket. A means of disposing of a prisoner without leaving a mark on his body.”

  Why should they care about that? And… “Don’t they know we can swim?”

  “For how long?”

  “Hours? Days?”

  “They have days.”

  “If they have days, they could just stop feeding us, and wait.” This suggested… what? Something has changed, out there.

  After a few minutes, when the water topped his ankles, Pen said in aggravation, “They never even questioned me.” That had remained his primary hope of escape—let him only be lifted out of this stone bottle, and whatever bindings or tortures or hulking guards were offered, he’d have been through them and gone from this fortress like an egg through a hen. Although he’d planned to endure through the first few questions, to gain some idea of the shape of his situation. “It’s going to take a lot of water to fill this cell.”

  “They have the whole sea as a reservoir.”

  The fortress was above sea level, although only just, and so was the cell, or high tide would have come up twice a day to flush his wastepipe. The hose-water flowed steadily, not in spurts like a ship’s bilge pump. It was draining from some prefilled tank, perhaps, not being lifted on the spot by men with muscles, or animal power. His mind darted down a tangent, calculating by his hard-won geometry the volume of the cell and the probable rate of flow from above. Thank you, Learned Lurenz, and he never thought he’d remember the sharp tap of that rod on his woolgathering young head with gratitude. “Six hours, maybe? Eight?”

  “They won’t fill it to the top, just to over your head. Pen, attend! Should I burst the hose?”

  That would certainly delay things, although one of those things seemed to be ‘the inevitable.’ About to assent, he paused.

  It was only parlor-magic. When he’d first moved over the mountains a year ago—along with six mule-loads of books and two of clothing—to take up his duties with a new archdivine, he’d found the heat of Adria's humid coastal plains oppressive. Lighting fires with a muted spark was the first destructive magic he’d ever learned, and the easiest. Running the process backward was a much subtler challenge. But with practice, and some thinning out of the vermin in the archdivine’s palace in Lodi, he’d devised a trick for pulling water out of the air into a large hailstone, to drop in his tepid drinks. Prudently, he’d not shown off his novel skill, not wanting to be pressed into work as a magical ice machine for the pleasure of his superior’s many highborn guests.

  It hadn’t kept the archdivine’s cousin the duke from purloining him anyway, when he’d wanted a secret envoy with a reputation for cleverness and a native’s command of the Cedonian language to effect… a disaster, it seemed.

  Don’t think about that now. You haven’t time.

  Had that been Des, or himself? In any case, yes, he did have time. Several hours of it, he guessed.

  “How soon do you think they’ll be back to check the cell for drowned mice?”

  “No idea.”

  If they expected him to flounder in immediate panic, maybe not that long? No controlling that. He leaned his shoulders against the cell’s curving wall and composed himself in patience, forming his plan.

  Your plan is to freeze us to death before we can drown? Des asked plaintively.

  His lips curled up for the first time in days. “Have you never watched the mountain raftmen in the spring, breaking the winter-cut logs loose from the river ice for their journey downstream?” Both Ruchia, his demon’s immediate prior rider, and Helvia before her had been cantons-born just like Penric. “It’s like a dance.”

  “A dance with death! …Have you ever done that?”

  “A few springs, in my youth, I helped the local men in the valley of the Greenwell.” Pen reflected on the memory. “Didn’t tell my mother, though.”

  Hah. She added grimly after a while, as the water lapped his knees, “This is going to be costly.”

  “Yes. But consider the alternative.”

  As the seawater reached his thighs, he wondered aloud, “Do you suppose they know I am a sorcerer?”

  Des hesitated. “It’s not sure proof, but I’d think if they did, there would be a goat or a sheep or some such tethered at the top.”

  His head cocked back in momentary mystification, but then the answer slotted in. Oh. “To contain you safely after you jumped, till they could decide how to dispose of you?”

  “It’s an old trick when executing a sorcerer, yes.”

  “You wouldn’t like that.”

  “No. So kindly stay alive, Penric.”

  When the water reached his shoulders, he commenced, starting a thin sheet of ice in the center of the cell. Hand to the wall and pushing, he walked slowly around the perimeter, to keep the water moving and his tiny ice floe centered. His body grew warm with the working of his magic, welcome this time since the Cedonian seawater, while tolerable by Penric’s standards, was still much cooler than a man’s blood, and had been leaching his strength away in increments. Hunger and thirst, too, would start to sap him if he let this drag out.

  And Desdemona was growing… he was never sure what to name it. More excitable, perhaps, in these early stages. They were still a long
way from the uncontrollable mania that overtook her when they tried to work too much uphill magic too fast, but it seemed discourteous to stress her beyond need.

  Also dangerous.

  Des muttered an obscene agreement, sign of sorts. “But you realize,” she said in sudden cheer, as he plowed through water past his chest, “with this skill, you need never die of thirst in a desert.”

  Pen coughed a seawater-laced laugh. “Not my most pressing concern, here, Des…”

  His ice disk grew thicker, descending downward in the middle; he tried to keep the top surface relatively flat. He needed to generate rather more than his own body weight, he guessed. As the water reached his chin, he clambered aboard.

  And up…

  The hose end was just beyond his reaching fingers. His bare feet on his floe were chilling, and, worse, melting potholes. He attempted a jump, missed, slipped, and ended up splashing into the water, barking his elbow painfully on the wall and being pinched against it by the pitching ice-brick. Brine in his eyes and nose stung, the taste bitter and metallic in his mouth. He came up spitting and heaved himself atop his float once more.

  This time, he waited a little, letting the floe and himself settle as much as they could under the ongoing spout of water from above. Tested his balance more carefully. Gauged. Stretched. Coiled. And UP…

  One hand closed around the slippery leather, then the next. The jet of water in his face cut off as his hanging weight pulled the hose closed over the edge of the port. One hand over the other, don’t let go, don’t fall back… He flopped an arm over the keystone circle. Then he was out altogether, collapsing across the dungeon’s paved floor. He lay gasping for a moment.

  Rolling over, he peered one last time down into the watery, deadly well. “You realize,” he wheezed, “that once that ice melts”—which it was already starting to do, and swiftly—“they’re going to have no idea what we just did.”

  Desdemona borrowed his mouth for a black laugh that echoed very demonically indeed. He clapped his hand across it, but grinned back.

  He was still sprawled wet, barefoot, brimming with hot unshed chaos on the prison floor of a guarded fortress. Alone, on the edge of an unknown country. No idea if it was day or night outside. Not the time to plan a triumphal celebration yet, I don’t think.

  Three bottle dungeons lay in a row in this close corridor, the other two thankfully unoccupied, so how special a prisoner had he been? A locked door at one end led, probably, to a guard post. The lock would be easy, the guards perhaps not. He followed the leather hose back the other way to where it issued partway up the wall from a small window, its normal barring unbolted and set aside for the occasion.

  “Can we get out this?”

  “Maybe. Better chance than the drain. Seems to run about two feet through the wall and open into a window well. I can’t sense what’s beyond that.”

  Pen leaned backward, reached through, turned his head sideways, and fitted himself in. A great deal of undignified wriggling later, and he was able to sit up in the outer well without actually snapping his spine. His long legs nearly trapped him, but at the cost of some contusions he managed to extract them without having to break bones. He stood up in the well.

  He’d reached a sort of porch overlooking the sea. The stone tank rose nearby, a silent bilge pump standing near; unmanned at this hour, which was night five gods be thanked. He’d feared the sudden sunlight might have blinded him as effectively as the black below.

  Something scuttled along the edge of the porch, and then exploded with a pop.

  He’d not seen a rat do that before. Quieter, Des!

  Hurts, she complained. Also, how many times have I sat in the latrine with you sick when—

  Even after a decade, she could still make him blush. Howsoever. How do we get out of this place?

  Your job now.

  The obvious way out was to slip over the wall, swim quietly around to the harbor in the dark, and creep up over one of the jetties.

  They stared down at the black, lapping sea with equal disfavor.

  “No help for it,” said Des at last, “unless you want to go back to the bottle dungeon. Carry on.”

  Penric sighed and climbed down into the foam-laced waters.

  * * *

  An hour later, salt-crusted and footsore, Penric sat in a stone laundry trough that drained a modest marble fountain, sited in a square fronting a middle-sized temple. He’d drunk his fill of blessedly clean water, and now faced the next task. He tried not to think about the several harbor rats and a luckless sleepy seagull they’d sacrificed in their wake down at the shore; Des, calmer, seemed back to visiting chaos only on less theologically questionable insects. One couldn’t call it necromancy, exactly…

  Lie back, said Des, in her practical Ruchia-voice, and I’ll get rid of your hair dye.

  “Really?”

  They’ll be looking for a brown-haired escapee. Also, your blond roots are growing out. It will be easier to lift the stain altogether than to try to work it around to match.

  He decided to take her word, and besides, the fresh water was something very like a bath. He would have preferred to burn his prison-reeking shirt and trousers, but until he could replace them, this impromptu laundering would have to do.

  So it was, after almost falling asleep in the trough, that he sloshed up and squeezed out his hair, letting it fall down his back—the ribbon for his queue was long lost. Not much time left till first light and people about, he gauged. He left a trail of wet footprints to the shadowed temple portico. Opening a simple lock was so routine by now that he didn’t even pause in swinging the tall door ajar and slipping within. After that, it was rather like going shopping in the marketplace. In reverse.

  The layout within was similar to home, with altar niches spaced around the walls and a central plinth for the holy fire, banked to coals for the night. Timber-built temples in the cantons boasted fine woodcarvings; here, the plastered stone walls were graced with frescos, their subjects ambiguous in the shadows, and mosaic tiles enlivened the floor. This was a neighborhood temple, he judged, serving the folk in the immediate vicinity, not so large or so well-guarded as the main provincial temple atop some higher hill. Nor so wealthy, alas. He found the Bastard’s niche, perfunctorily signed himself, and checked the altar table for offerings. Swept bare for the night, unfortunately.

  But this was the sort of prudent place that featured locked offering boxes in each niche. He flipped this one open and peered within. If it, too, had been emptied for the night…

  A scant scattering of coins and other oddments lay within. His long fingers rapidly picked out the coins and left the less identifiable prayers, such as a coil of hair.

  He contemplated his meager take. “The white god must not be much loved here. Or much feared.”

  “You wouldn’t accept any of my suggestions for targets through town.”

  “Stealing from the poor is inefficient, and stealing from the rich is dangerous. Anyway, this isn’t stealing. It’s just… collecting my pay more directly than usual.”

  Des snickered. “I didn’t think the Cedonian and Adriac Temples practiced such reciprocity.”

  “Same god.” He’d known from the beginning that he served his god first, and the Temple second. So far, he’d not found them often in conflict, and prayed it would stay that way.

  Slowly, he circled the chamber. His hand hovered over the box at the Mother of Summer’s altar, but then passed on. While he’d no doubt She would not begrudge a loan to her second Son’s divine, Pen had refused Her his oath back in Martensbridge; it felt, if nothing else, rude to ask for Her aid now. He’d abandoned service to the Son of Autumn years ago, and the Daughter of Spring had never been his goddess. He finally stopped before the Father’s altar.

  “Pen,” said Des uneasily. “Nobody steals from the god of justice.”

  “Borrows,” he corrected. “I expect my collateral is good here. Maybe Locator Oswyl would vouch for me.” He smiled to reme
mber his friend back in Easthome, the most earnest devotee of the Father of Winter he’d ever encountered. He flipped open the box and raised his brows. “Goodness me.”

  “Somebody must be anxious for their lawsuit,” Des suggested.

  “Possibly both sides. Though trying to bribe the god of justice seems missing the point.” Or he supposed some poor—evidently not-so-poor—call it distraught man might be praying for a child, or for ease for a dying father. He signed himself and bowed his head in any case. I shall try to use it well, Sir.

  He doubled back to collect the cloth from the Bastard’s altar to carry it all in, relocked all the boxes, and slid back out to the portico, closing the door quietly. Sky and sea were growing a strange clear gray. He could hear the clop of a donkey and creak of a cart, and, from open widows roseate with lamplight, people stirring and pots rattling.

  Find a used-clothing vendor, find a cheap inn, find a breakfast that did not include dried fish; after that…

  After that all this was going to grow harder. It wasn’t a happy thought.

  * * *

  Penric quartered the streets of Patos near the army barracks and parade ground, trying to puzzle out his approach. Walking up to the front gate and knocking seemed a poor one. In his new retrospect, it struck him how thin his preparation for this emissary’s task had been.

  He wondered if he’d been missed from the bottle dungeon yet. Fortunately, he’d found a clothing stall and food from a street vendor before being confronted by his cot in his little inn, for he’d fallen like a tree into the linen-covered, wool-stuffed mattress, and slept in profound exhaustion. When he’d woken in the late afternoon, he’d found he’d not lost as much time as he’d imagined. Unlike home, where people seized the afternoon to get as much done as possible before the dark and the cold closed in, here the citizens evaded the bright hours, crawling into the burrows of their houses to escape the heat and emerging just about now.