This logical plan was adopted without argument, seeming well to Pen till he came to the first cross-street. He halted in frustration.
“Des, if you were an insane demon, which way would you go?”
The sense of an offended sniff. I am not insane. And I would do something much cleverer.
Pen looked upward at the band of blue sky in vague futility.
This won a scoff outright. As we have several times established, I can’t fly, and neither can he.
Might the distraught boy try to go home, wherever that was? Would that demon be organized enough to pretend to be him? Well enough to fool people who know him? It would be the most ready camouflage.
A doubtful pause. It could submerge, let him take over and take them both home. But that would risk not being able to regain ascendancy.
If the mad fellow was indeed a Lodi native, he would know this maze of a town. That knowledge would become increasingly available to the demon as it put down its roots into him, but not instantly. Pen remembered his confusion when he’d first contracted Des—more in the sense of a disease than a legal agreement, though there had certainly been negotiations later.
If, on the other hand, the demon was trying to get as far from the sea as possible, it, he, they had to head for the big causeway from the lagoon city to the mainland. The man had been bathed and shaved and fed in the hospice, but—how far could he bolt dressed only in a loose shirt and trews, barefoot and without money?
This was not getting them forward. He set his teeth and strode right, extending Des’s perceptions to the limit of her range. Which was curtailed, in congested places like this, by the many distracting live souls around them. They came to another square where a canal intersected the street, small boats tied up supplying another busy local marketplace, loading and unloading: men, women, and children buying and selling bright vegetables, fruits, flowers, and more miscellaneous goods. The noise in his ears was merely cheerful. The glut in his Sight was near overwhelming.
Des, how can you bear it? All of us together?
A shrug. I’ve never known anything else.
There were good reasons why the very first thing Pen had sought, when this gift of Des’s had come to him in full, was how to turn it off again. And it wasn’t due to the poor sundered ghosts, much as they’d unnerved him back then. Nowadays, the worst part was when his trained brain started to diagnose. He really didn’t want to know anymore which random strangers he met were dying.
All of them, eventually, Des observed.
I suppose in two centuries you’ve earned your long view.
The hard way, aye.
The Lodi madboy must be equally spirit-assaulted about now, if without the fine discernment Pen possessed. This suggested he might seek less peopled places, not that there were many in Lodi. Which pointed back to a break for the mainland, again.
Blast it, they needed to assign their quarry a name. Two names, as there were two agendas in play. He couldn’t keep thinking of them as Lodi Madboy and Deranged Demon.
We could nickname them Mad and Dee, like Pen and Des, Des quipped. Pen rolled his eyes.
He circled the area, coming back to the front door of the hospice in time to meet Linatas and Tebi returning from their search of the shore. Alone.
At Pen’s anxious look, Linatas shrugged. “No luck our way. Any from yours?”
Pen shook his head. “I covered about half of this island.” After centuries of development, Lodi was still cut up into island-based neighborhoods, for all that some had been built out on pilings and dredgings to join up with each other. “Due to the demon, the problem of your patient has shifted from the Mother’s Order onto the Bastard’s.” In other words, into Pen’s lap. “He’ll be leaking dangers far beyond his madness that can only be handled by a sorcerer or a saint. But please send his description at once to the causeway gate guards to be on watch for him.” Which, given the fellow’s common appearance, was going to be less than useful, but Pen could only work with what he had. “Tell them not to approach him, but to send a runner to…” Pen, ideally, but if he was out combing the city, he would be as hard to locate as his quarry. “Archdivine Ogial’s office. Send there too if you learn anything more.”
Which meant he needed to report in at the curia next, and warn them of their task as his message depot. Among other things.
Pen bade Linatas farewell with a cursory gesture of blessing, and hurried back over the five bridges. He made the return journey with his Sight at full stretch, just in case. It was like trying to rapidly skim a densely written book where paragraphs kept snagging and tripping his eye. The only thing he needed to discern of passersby was that they did not bear the demon, which was pretty instantly apparent. Unexpectedly exhausting; drawing Des’s senses back in when he reached the curia, on the reasonable assumption that Madboy would not have come here, was a relief.
He scuffed up the stairs to the office on the second floor belonging to the archdivine’s secretary, Master Bizond. At the doorway, he almost collided with a middle-aged woman in the trim black robe of the Father’s Order. The black-and-gray braids of a full divine upon her shoulder were threaded with purple, marking a specialty in law. She carried a stack of papers and documents; reflexively, Pen held the door for her, which won him an abstracted nod of thanks. It inadvertently put her in line ahead of him at Bizond’s desk.
Bizond was lean and gray and with the air of a permanent fixture in the curia, like the marble staircases. He looked up at the lawyer with something as close to approval as his stony features could unaccustomedly produce. “Learned Iserne.”
The woman nodded crisply. “Here are the copies of the wills and documents for the Vindon lawsuit, together with my precis.”
“Oh, good, we were waiting for those.” His bony hands darted for them. A pause, while he sifted through in some preliminary assessment.
The woman, evidently feeling her mission discharged, eased back and eyed Pen in mild curiosity. “You are Learned Penric, are you not? Ogial’s new sorcerer?”
Pen ducked his head. “Yes, Learned. I believe we have passed each other in the library?” He remembered her, dark-eyed and rather handsome for her age, hurrying in and out of the curial archives. Her glances at him had been neither impolite nor friendly; perhaps just distracted.
“Yes, I’ve noticed you.” People typically did, with his height and eyes and hair. And braids. “Is it true you were court sorcerer to the princess-archdivine of Martensbridge?”
And now the subject of whispered curial gossip, Pen was dryly aware. “Formerly, till she sadly passed last year. The new royal appointee brought her own sorceress from Easthome, and I was encouraged to seek other employment.”
Meaning, pressed hard to take formal oath at the Martensbridge Mother’s Order as a full physician-sorcerer, in place of his unofficial service doing, actually, the same thing. But he wasn’t discussing that. His sideways escape to Lodi had been unexpected even to him.
Pish, said Des. Ogial leapt at your first note of inquiry. He considers you quite the ornament, you know. The sense of a smirk. Ornamental, too.
The stack of documents was looking as if it might take some time. Shifting from foot to foot, Pen blurted, “I’m sorry to interrupt, Master Bizond, but I have a bit of an emergency.”