PENRIC’S FOX
A novella in the World of the Five Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold
2017
Copyright © 2017 by Lois McMaster Bujold
Cover by Ron Miller
Penric’s Fox
“No, you can’t make a Great Earthworm!” said Inglis, sounding indignant. Although not indignant enough to rise from his comfortable recline on the mossy bank, fishing pole propped on his bare toes.
“I just did. See?” Penric held out the rosy writhing creature, flecked with moist soil, on his palm. “Isn’t he cute?”
“No,” said Inglis, grumpily.
The shaman’s grimace failed to honor, Penric thought, the loveliest morning to escape all duties and go fishing that Pen could imagine. The quiet pool in the hills above Easthome was everything Inglis had promised his visitor: cool, tree-shaded, gilded with sun ripples. Possibly a little short of fish, but as the hazy day warmed, very inviting for a man to strip and swim. Penric had plans.
“Anyway,” said Inglis, craning his neck to peer at the worm in Penric’s hand, “how do you know it’s a he? It might be a she.”
Penric wrinkled his nose in doubt. “I’ve heard earthworms are both in one body.”
“Oh, just like you, then,” murmured Inglis, smirking.
Good to see the glum boy’s not above getting his own back, commented Desdemona, amused. The Temple demon who lived inside of Penric and gave him the powers of a sorcerer was decidedly female, after all, which as he came to know Pen better had been a cause of increasing bemusement to Inglis. Inglis kin Wolfcliff, Fellow of the Royal Society of Shamans (on probation) as he signed his correspondence, though he hoped to be rid of the unfortunate postscript soon.
Penric tried to return a suitable sneer, but the country light was too fine to allow him to sustain the effort; it came out a grin.
Inglis shook his head. “I can’t believe you mastered the technique just from watching that one sacrifice in the menagerie yard yesterday.”
“That, atop reading the book you sent, your letters, talking to your Royal Fellowship and you over the past two weeks, examining, well, a few other works, half of which turn out to be rubbish. Always a problem with written sources, which frequently tell you far more about the person who wrote them than the subject addressed.”
“You are a more bookish scholar than me,” Inglis granted. “It seems unfair that… never mind. All right, I can see it is indeed on its way to being a Great Earthworm”—a finger reached out to dubiously prod the creature—“two souls, if you can call them that in a worm, piled into one body, but it won’t arrive, and anyway, where is the point? No one would wish to be invested with a worm-spirit, and the powers it might grant wouldn’t persuade a flea to jump onto a dog.”
“Practice for the student shaman,” Penric returned promptly. “Or student sorcerer, anyway. Earthworms are theologically neutral creatures, as far as I know. Tomorrow, I might try mice, if their tiny souls prove not too heavy for me to shift. They’re vermin of the Bastard—as a learned divine of the white god I should be able to make free with them.”
“Brother forfend,” sighed Inglis. “Anyway, such tricks have been tried before, by people with more time than sense. After a few iterations, such lowly creatures cannot accept the overload of spirit, and die of the attempt to do so.”
“Really?” said Penric, fascinated. “I must test that.”
“Of course you must,” muttered Inglis, with a defeated air. But he set his pole aside and sat up to watch all the same.
Pen pulled half-a-dozen more earthworms out of their bait pail and strove to get them lined up in a row on a flat stone. They resisted this fate, squirming about in a disordered manner that Pen’s god the Bastard might approve, but a brief tap of uphill magic stilled them into a more military rank, temporarily. He set his first attempt at the end of the row, and rather regretfully sacrificed it into the next, persuading his conscience that it couldn’t be a worse death for a worm than being impaled on a hook and tossed into deep water to drown. Four more worms down the row, Inglis was proved right, as the recipient of all this effort more-or-less ruptured when Penric tried to tip the accumulating life-magic into it. “Oh,” he said, sadly. “There’s a shame.”
Inglis rolled his eyes.
Penric abandoned his first semi-successful effort at mastering whatever of shamanic magics he could—given that his possession of a demon of disorder would block a Great Beast of any species from ever being sacrificed into him to give him the powers of a shaman proper. Raising his rod, he squinted at his dangling hook, which seemed to have lost its bait. He sniffed and tipped the pole up to swing the line back to him, rebaiting it with one of his late sacrifices, taking consolation that the humble deaths occasioned by his imitation-shamanic efforts would not be totally wasted. He plopped his line back into the pool beside Inglis’s.
After a few minutes, he observed, “We are both Temple mages, though of different sorts. Why are we fishing in such an inefficient manner?”
“Because if we applied our magics, we’d be done before the wine gets cold,” said Inglis, amiably gesturing at the glazed jugs set to bathe in the rippling shallows.
“Point,” agreed Penric.
“Refill?”
Securing his pole with a couple of stones, Pen rose to retrieve a jug. He topped up both their beakers, tapping out the last drops into his host’s cup, then rummaged in the basket for a bite more of that good bread to go with it. The purpose of going fishing was not, after all, only to catch fish.
After a little still-fishless silence, beguiled by the local wine that lay like liquid gold upon their tongues, Inglis mused, “I wonder if such limits apply to demons as well? Is there an upper range of accumulating lives, or souls, that a demon can take up and transfer along with it, as it is handed off from rider to rider at the ends of their lives?”
Penric blinked. “Good question. Although it is not souls, exactly, that a demon accumulates from its successive sorcerers. Or not usually, unless the transfer goes badly and rips the dying person’s soul apart. Because any number of sorcerers and sorceresses are signed at their funeral rites as being taken up by our god just like anyone else. Not sundered from Him, certainly, or the creation of Temple sorcerers would be the blackest sacrilege. I prefer to think of my demon’s personalities as images of my predecessors, like printed pages pulled off an inked plate and bound into a codex, except… more so. Else my head would be very haunted.”
Inglis turned toward Penric, cleared his throat, and came out with, “Desdemona, do you know?”
It was rare that Inglis attempted to talk to Des directly, like another person, and Pen smiled in approval. He’d get the shaman trained yet. He yielded control of his voice to his permanent passenger, quite as interested in the answer as Inglis.
Des was quiet for so long Pen began to think she would not reply, but at last she spoke, necessarily through Penric’s mouth. “You children ask the most bizarre questions. There is a steady attrition of demons in the world, either hurried out of it by certain Temple rites while a young elemental, barely formed, or removed with more difficulty by a saint should they ascend and go rogue when they grow older and stronger. In over two hundred years, I have shared twelve lives with my riders, ten of them human—”
“Twelve half-lives, really,” Penric glossed for Inglis’s benefit, “since you have never jumped to an infant or child.”
“Jumping to an infant would be a recipe for disaster,” opined Des. “Instant ascendance, since the mewling creature would not have the developed will and knowledge to control its demon. Very bad choice. Anyway, as I was about to say before you interrupted me—”
“Sorry.”
She nodded with Pen’s head.
“I have not met a demon older than myself for a long time.”
“That would make sense,” said Inglis, trying to follow this. “The older anyone gets, the more people are junior, and the fewer senior.” He frowned. “It must be strange to be oldest, to outlive all one’s generation. Yet some person in the world must be that one, at every moment. Do you think you could be eldest among demons, Desdemona?”
“Certainly not!” she said tartly. But Pen sensed an unspoken hesitance in her.
“So what happens to the eldest demons?” pursued Inglis, logically. “Do you suppose they reach a point where no head can hold them, and they jump one time too many, and, ah…” His finger pointed to the exploded earthworm.
“Eeeww,” said Penric and Desdemona together. “Really, wolf-boy!” said Des, and Pen went on, “I should think if that were the case, the Temple would know of the hazard, and it would have been part of my training in seminary.”
“I suppose so,” said Inglis, giving up his horrifying hypothesis with apparent reluctance. He took another swallow of wine, then jiggled his pole.
I would place a bet, murmured Des, which of you gives up first and starts using your magics to cheat the fish, but I’ve no one to bet with.
What, you have your whole sisterhood in there, Pen returned. You could start a pool.
There’s a thought… but she broke off and glanced at Inglis, who had sat up and turned his head, listening intently. Penric discerned nothing but the pleasant summer sounds of the woodland and stream, but he knew Inglis’s Great Wolf gave him preternatural hearing. Soon enough, the thump of trotting hooves sounded from the rutted road where they’d left their hired cart. The hoofbeats stopped, a low voice soothed the animal, and then quick footsteps approached on the path to the pool.
“Ah. There you are.” Locator Oswyl’s voice sounded strained as Pen twisted around to wave. “Five gods be thanked.”
“Oswyl!” Inglis greeted his unlikely friend as well. “You made it after all!”
The senior locator from the Father’s Order had been invited to make the third of their fishing party this morning, but he’d sent a note at the last minute saying that he’d been called out on an urgent new inquiry, and not to expect him. He still wore the gray vest with the brass buttons that caused Easthome inquirers to be dubbed Grayjays, but it hung open over his sweat-damp shirt. Done for the day, or just surrendering to the heat?
“Did you wrap things up so soon?” asked Penric cheerily.
Oswyl made his way to the streambank, planted his fists on his hips, and sighed. “No. Unfortunately. Quite the opposite. I am in urgent need of a Temple sensitive, a sorcerer even more, and you two are the closest. I am sorry, but I must conscript you.”
“No time to even take a cup?” Pen asked, looking with regret at the second jug cooling in the stream.
“No time for anything. Not six miles from here, I have a dead sorceress on my hands. Murdered, I think. Sometime late yesterday or last night.”
Pen, startled, stood up. “That,” he said slowly, “would be a very hard trick to bring off. Speaking from personal experience.”
“Someone did. One arrow through a person could be a hunting accident. Not two. And I don’t think she could have shot the shafts into her own back, not even with sorcery.”
“Ah.” Penric gulped, and called to Inglis, “I’ll harness the carthorse, then, while you gather up things?”
Inglis nodded, already bringing in their poles. It was the best division of labor, since despite his excellent horsemanship Inglis’s wolf-within tended to make even such slugs as the livery nag nervous.
Oswyl, jittering with impatience, followed Pen out to the narrow hill road where his own sweating mount was tied to a sapling. “I will give it this. The scene is fresh. Usually, help from the Father’s Order is called in days late, after the local authorities have strangled all sense in a mess of their own making. This improves the chances of you or Inglis sensing something useful, yes?”
Pen had no idea. But as he strode over to untether their hired horse and back it into the shafts, his most alarmed question was not who had killed a sorceress, or how, or even why, but rather, Where is her demon?
* * *
Oswyl’s six miles cross-country turned out to be closer to nine back, by the time they’d retraced their cart track, cut across some farm ways, and found a better road leading up toward a hill village. They turned aside before they reached it, then were forced to leave their cart when the side track into the steep woods dwindled to a path. But only a few hundred panting paces along it the trees opened up into a clearing.
It was a pleasant-enough glade, the by-now early afternoon light filtering down green-gold through the leaves. Less pleasant was the slumped, muddled figure toward the far edge, and the buzzing of the flies being waved off by the anxious junior locator left on guard. She was using a long, leaf-tipped branch to do so, leaning back as far as possible. Not due to any rotting reek yet, Pen thought as they drew closer; she was more likely spooked by the triple braid in white, cream and silver pinned to the figure’s shoulder marking a sorceress.
“My assistant, Junior Locator Thala.” Oswyl gestured, by way of introduction, and asked her, “Anything occur since I left you?”
“No, sir,” said the guard, rising with obvious relief. She was much younger than Oswyl’s thirty or so years, looking even more fresh-faced than Pen.
“Where’s that dedicat?”
“He went home to fetch us both something to eat. He should be back soon.”
“The body was found early this morning by a lay dedicat from the temple at the village of Weir,” Oswyl explained over his shoulder to Pen and Inglis, “sent out into the woods to check snares. This tract belongs to Baron kin Pikepool, they tell me, but he grants the temple-folk gathering rights to deadfall and small game in it, by way of quarter-day dues.”
Penric squatted in the place the young locator gladly yielded to him, and peered.
The woman lay on one side, as if sleeping. Her coils of brown hair were fallen loose, a beaded cloth cap snagged awry among them. Neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, comely nor ugly; she might be in her early forties. Whatever mind had enlivened her face—and the divine’s braids testified it must have been a keen one—was gone now, leaving her features bland, waxy and still. Enigmatic.
She was not dressed in formal robes, but rather, everyday garb, an ordinary dress with a thin blue coat thrown atop, to which her braids were pinned. It had not protected her clothing from the flood of blood that had soaked it and dried brown. Almost as much had gushed around the arrowhead that protruded from her stomach as from the two fletched shafts standing in her back. By the blood trail on the ground, she had fallen only a few feet from where she had been shot. A quick death. That, at least, thought Pen, trying to control his dismay. No sign that she had been otherwise molested.
Inglis looked over Pen’s shoulder, his nostrils flaring, possibly at the disturbing smell of the blood. Thick enough for Pen to discern, it was likely overwhelming to Inglis’s wolf-within, or at least his face had gone a little rigid.
Oswyl cleared his throat, pointedly, and Pen, rising to look around, thought, Des, Sight, please.
Pen half-hoped to find the woman’s ghost still lingering, fresh enough to still appear much as she had in life; a sudden and violent death was very apt to produce that effect. Most ghosts could not speak, but a sufficiently distressed one, still reverberating from its abrupt separation from its sustaining body, might sometimes grant to a sighted sensitive a sort of dumb-show. It was a very dangerous liminal state, as the soul could slip into a permanent sundering from its waiting god that was unwilled by either party. So Pen also half-hoped not, for the woman’s sake. More usually, soul and god found each other at once, and the only function of a funeral rite was to confirm the destination.
The living souls in the clearing were all vivid enough, congruent with their bodies. Inglis’s bore the added spiritual density of his Great Wolf, u
nsettling if one didn’t know what it was. Or maybe even if one did. Penric slowly turned, scanning with sight and second sight together, but found no convenient miming ghosts. Lost souls usually attached themselves to a place, rarely to their own bodies; the strange shamanic practice of carrying away the ghost of a slain spirit-warrior bound to a sacred object did not apply here. Nor was there any sign of the stray demon, not that Pen expected it. Demons could not, after all, jump to trees, which were the only other living things about. The demon must have been carried off by its new host. And there was a pressing question or five.
Pen signed himself in the tally of the gods, let his Sight fade, and turned to Oswyl. “No ghost. No demon. No help. Sorry.”
Oswyl huffed the sigh of a man perpetually unsurprised that his luck was not in. “Worth checking.”
“Very much so.”
“Can you tell anything else?”
Inglis’s hand tracked the line from the arrow shafts into the woods, seeking the archer’s vantage, but then he shook his head. “No saying how much she turned as she fell.”
Pen crossed his arms and stared down at the woman. “A few things. She’s young, to start with.”
Oswyl cocked his head. “Surely not. Middle years.”
“I mean young for a Temple sorceress. The Bastard’s Order does not usually invest a trained woman aspirant with a demon until she is done childbearing, or at least is sure she wishes no child. The chaos that demons usually shed”—Pen paused to choose a delicate term—“thwarts conception.”
Oswyl’s brows twitched up. “For some, that would be a benefit.”
“True. But a female sorcerer must be extraordinarily clever, attentive, and experienced to successfully manage a demon and a pregnancy both at once. Some few have done it, but it’s not a recommended path. So the greater likelihood is this woman has not borne her demon long.”