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.
He was not, upon reflection, at all sure what the real ones did for a living, either when subjected to Temple disciplines, or gone renegade. The common saying was that a man became a sorcerer upon acquiring a demon much as a man became a rider upon acquiring a horse, with the implication that the inept horseman was riding for a fall. But what made a good horseman?
Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals, fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s Hell, a place of chaotic dissolution. Pen had a dim mental picture of something like a ball of white wool shot with a prickle of sparks. All that demons possessed of speech or knowledge or personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether copied or stolen, Pen was unclear. It had seemed a distinction without a difference if they only left with their prizes when their masters died, except . . . maybe not, if the ripped-up souls could not then go on to their god. He was growing uncomfortably sorry he had dozed or doodled through so many of those droning theology lectures in school.
Tales not from the nursery told of demons becoming ascendant within their masters, taking the body for some wild ride while the mind of the man was trapped as a helpless witness within. The demons were careless of injury, disease, or death, since they could jump from their worn-out mount to another like a courier riding relay. And the corrosion of such unchanneled chaos ate away at the sorcerer’s soul.
Except it seemed Learned Ruchia’s soul was expected to go to her god as usual, so maybe that varied as well? Or was it something about the mysterious Temple disciplines that made the difference? Pen had not the first idea what they might be. Was anyone going to think to tell him?
Did the hospice library have any books on the subject, and would they let Pen read them if he asked? But the Mother’s house seemed more likely to house tomes on anatomy and medicines than on the doings of her second Son and his demonic pets.
As night fell, his fretting was relieved by the return of Gans, bearing a load of Pen’s clothes and gear from home and a pair of saddlebags to pack them in. The load exceeded the capacity of the bags, yet certain necessities seemed to be missing.
“Did my brother not send me a sword?” The armory at Jurald Court could surely spare one.
The graying groom cleared his throat. “He gave it to me. Instead, I guess. I’m charged to go along with you on the road to Martensbridge, look after you and all.” Gans did not look best pleased with this proffered adventure. “We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”
“Oh!” said Pen, startled. “So soon?”
“Soonest begun, soonest done,” Gans intoned. His goal, clearly, was the done. Gans had always been a man of settled routines.
Pen set about extracting a view of yesterday’s events as Gans had witnessed them, but his laconic account did not add much to what Pen had already imagined, except for a strong sense leaking through that Gans considered it unjust of Pen to encounter such a disaster on Gans’s watch. But his new task, it seemed, was not a punishment; the Temple guards had requested his witness in Martensbridge of the events he had seen.
“I don’t know why,” he grumbled. “Seems to me a scribe could write it down on half a page, and save me the saddle sores.”
Gans took himself off to sleep elsewhere in the old mansion gifted to the Mother’s Order and converted to its present charitable purpose—Pen guessed his own quarantined chamber had once been some servant’s quarters. He turned to the problem of packing his bags. Someone back at Jurald Court had apparently just grabbed all the clothing he owned. The brown suit went on the impractical pile to be returned there in the morning, along with the most threadbare of his unloved hand-me-downs. How long was he to be gone? Where was he going, exactly? What would he need there?
He wondered if packing for the university would have been anything like this. ‘Sorcerer’ had certainly not been on Pen’s former list of scholarly ambitions, but then, neither had ‘theologian’, ‘divine’, ‘physician’, ‘teacher’, ‘lawyer’, or any other high trade taught there—yet another reason for Rolsch’s dubiousness about it all. The Bastard’s Order must have a separate seminary of some sort . . . ?
Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.