Two anatomically expert nerve twists, one to the right hand and the other to the left leg. The poniard dropped from paralyzed fingers, and Madboy’s leg folded under him, dumping him to the floor. He cried out in pain.
Merin lunged for him. Pen lunged faster, wrapping his arms around the man and trapping his knife hand. “That’s enough, Merin! It’s over. He’s down.”
Merin wrenched, then went still. After a cautious moment, Pen released him.
“Oh,” said Chio in a peeved tone. “Now He shows up.” She shoved back her hair and braced her spine, as if lifting a burden.
Stepping forward, she placed her hand on Madboy’s brow. Pen could track the arrival of the god by the departure of Des, who, with no other escape, curled into a tight, terrified ball inside him. He granted her the retreat, but he wished she wouldn’t take most of her perceptions and all of her powers along, leaving Pen disarmed of his magics.
Chio took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and gulped. Pen had just enough Sight left to feel the demon being drawn out of Ree and into her, and on to the god, in a hideous, frantic, spiky stream. Madboy’s anguished howl ran down abruptly as his possessor was torn from him, turning into Ree’s very human groan.
“Ugh,” choked Chio. “That’s a bad one. Just awful.” She swallowed and swallowed again, as if trying not to throw up.
With all the hours and sweat and shoe leather spent getting Blessed Chio into position for this confrontation, the actual… miracle, Pen conceded, was the work of a moment. Miracle, murder… putting-to-dissolution, he supposed. The saint was an executioner who wasn’t getting this Bastard’s Day off.
A flash in Pen’s mind, but not his eyes, a sense of endless vertigo an instant in duration but infinite in depth, and the god departed with His prize, a strange perfume lingering in His wake that might have been a whispered, Well done, my lovely Child.
Pen wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been to his address. He couldn’t have withstood any more direct exposure than that. But Chio’s plain face shone with a fleeting inner light of heartbreaking beauty. Numinous, Pen supposed, was the precise theological term. The word seemed wholly inadequate.
Single-minded again, Ree gaped up in awe at Blessed Chio, swaying on her feet. “Oh…!” Breathed like a prayer. As it should be.
Merin swung his head back and forth as if expecting Madboy to rise and attack again. Penric knelt to the de-demoned youth, hoping he hadn’t hurt him too severely. He knew he hadn’t snapped the throbbing nerves, so they should settle down in a while, an hour or a day, he wasn’t sure. His back half-turned, his demon not recovered from her brush with the holy, he only barely caught Merin’s motion as he raised his knife and dove forward. At Penric.
“What—!”
“No!” shrieked Chio, and threw her shoulder forward into Merin as though trying to batter down a door. It unbalanced him enough that his first stab missed, grazing Pen’s sleeve instead of plunging into his back. Pen fell to his hands, scrambling.
Eyes white-rimmed, teeth bared, Merin turned to this unexpected hazard from his flank. His knife flashed in the lantern light, gripped for a lethal thrust. Weaponless, Chio whipped her remaining hair stick out of her braid and brandished it. Merin looked at it and scoffed.
Pen regained his feet. Des, blast it—! “What are you doing, you lunatic?” he yelled at Merin. Was the man overcome by some blinding battle frenzy, unable to tell friend from foe? He seemed to have gone wilder than Madboy. “This fight is over!” He started forward to again restrain him.
“Not nearly,” Merin gasped, and lunged once more at Penric. Pen had only his own speed to evade the blade, and maybe he’d been sitting in libraries too much lately—
Whereupon both combatants discovered that a thin, six-inch-long steel rod, with the full weight of an angry young woman behind it, had quite enough power to go completely through a man’s upper arm and tack it to his torso. Unsharpened point or not. Merin yowled and dropped his knife, clawing at the glittering glass knob with his other hand. Chio yelped and retreated as Merin staggered and swung his free arm viciously at her.
At last, Des’s powers flooded back into Penric. Pen reached out with her magics and twisted both of Merin’s sciatic nerves, just to be sure. As excruciating agony seized his legs, he flopped to the floor, screaming.
You’re late, Pen panted to his demon.
Sorry…
“What,” Penric began, but doubted he could be heard over Merin’s cries echoing off the wooden rafters. He grimaced, bent forward, and touched the man’s throat, then had to reach again as he thrashed away. Paralyzing the vocal cords without blocking breath was a delicate task that he wouldn’t have dared from any greater distance. The screaming didn’t exactly stop, but it grew unvoiced, a wheezing series of gasps.
“That’s better,” said Chio in a shaken voice.
“Yes,” rasped Pen as his ears stopped ringing. He stood catching his breath and his scattered wits.
“I’d wondered why I didn’t like him.” She touched the red mark on her face. Wait, was that the work of Madboy or Merin? Until the god is upon me, and then I see everything, she’d said, and Pen believed her. What inner worlds had she just seen here?
Pen turned to her, his eye taking in Ree as well, who was clumsily sitting up trying to work his numb hand. “But Bastard’s teeth, what was going on here? No, start with—why did you two run off from me at the marketplace?” He pointed one cautious toe at Merin, squirming and mouthing like a landed fish.
“He suddenly said he’d guessed where Ser Richelon would be hiding,” Chio said, vexation coloring her voice. “Then he grabbed me”—she rubbed her forearm; Pen scowled to see young bruises forming up in the pattern of fingerprints— “and bundled me into an oarboat that had just pulled up to let off another passenger. He told the boatman to take us to the harbor. I expected you to follow on with your Sight, so I didn’t cry out or protest—I didn’t think I needed to. I mean, I wanted to get to the demon, and he was taking me to the demon.” She looked around, and asked Ree, “What exactly is this place, Ser Richelon, and why were you here? Because Ser Merin was right about that part.”
Still shaky with pain, Ree gestured distractedly. “This warehouse is shared by my father and my uncle. His cousin, but I call him my uncle. When Merin was employed by him, we both worked here, sometimes. Then he left, and we didn’t meet again till we were thrown together on the spring convoy. You two know about that?” He twisted toward Pen. “You’re that scary sorcerer from the hospice—of course you must, if you came for me. You and the god. And the… saint?”
From the stunned-ox air Ree bore as his gaze returned to Chio, Pen grasped that he’d had an intimate view of his miracle. And of that holy execution. How much had he felt of his ascendant demon’s destruction? And had it been release, horror, awe, or all three inextricably mixed?
Des shuddered.
“This felt like a safe place to hide, and I knew how to get in,” Ree went on.
Looks like Merin remembered how, too, said Des. With less destruction to doorways. Her regret for the front entry was entirely feigned, Pen judged.
“I didn’t have much control, but I dreaded the demon getting any nearer to my mother and sisters. Do you know about them? Oh…” Ree looked down at his red sleeve in fresh worry, then up at Penric. He quavered, “Learned sir, I think… I think I might have killed a man earlier tonight. I know I robbed him.”