Pen had to give Trinker credit, he stood his ground, back straight, and did not suggest they all run off. Half of why Pen had not made his escape through his window last night had been the reflection that it would be a cruel trick to play on his guards, who were only carrying out their duties and who had done him no harm. The other half was pure curiosity over what the Bastard’s Order here was supposed to do for him in his predicament, for surely he wouldn’t have been sent all this way unless there was something?
He wondered if the gruesome Roknari ploy with the cushion would work out on that lake. Probably, and swiftly, given the spring chill of the water. He tried to stop thinking.
In a few minutes, the door opened again, the porter escorting an anxious-looking man of middle years, height, and girth, his neatly trimmed beard and hair a graying brown. He wore an ordinary townsman’s gown, belted and soberly hemmed at his knees, over trousers of some dark stuff. The unbleached wool of the tunic only hinted at his allegiance, but the divine’s braid in white, cream and silver pinned to his shoulder made it plain. Easy to remove and pocket if he wished to walk about incognito, Pen wondered?
“I am Learned Tigney,” he said, his glance summing the party. Gans was clearly a groom, the two Temple guards were easy to place; Penric less so, and the gaze caught on him for a moment before going back to Trinker, waiting to speak with his hat in his hands. “I’m told you have news of Learned Ruchia? We were expecting her anytime this week.”
Trinker cleared his throat. “News, sir, but not good. Learned Ruchia was overtaken on the road with a seizure of the heart, some five miles short of Greenwell Town. She passed away before Wilrom”—he nodded at his comrade—“could return with help. The Temple of Greenwell saw her buried there with her due rites—their white dove signed her for her god, all proper. Not knowing what else to do, and being more than halfway here already, we brought on all her clothes and cases, to give to those who should have them.”
Tigney cast him a sharp look. “Not opened, I trust?”
“No, sir,” said Trinker fervently. “She was a sorceress, after all. We didn’t dare.”
Tigney’s posture of relief was short-lived; he tensed again. “But—what happened to her demon? Did it go to her god with her, then?”
“Uh, no.” He nodded toward Pen.
Tigney’s head whipped around. Pen offered a weak smile and a little wave of his fingers. “Here, sir. I’m afraid.”
“Who . . . ?” Tigney gave him a long, pole-axed stare. “You had better come inside.”
He told off the porter to take Ruchia’s things to his chambers, which resulted in a bustle of unloading from the packsaddle into the hall, then sent him off with Gans and Wilrom to deliver the horses to some nearby mews that kept a place for Temple beasts.
“This way.” He led Penric and Trinker up one flight to a small, well-lit room overlooking the street. Seeming a cross between a scholar’s study and a counting house, it held a table cluttered with papers and writing tools, a scattering of chairs, and some jammed shelves. Pen eyed them and wondered why a divine of the Bastard should have twenty or so courier dispatch cases lined up.
Tigney scrubbed his hand through his beard and gestured them to sit. “And you are . . . ?” he continued to Pen.
“Penric kin Jurald of Jurald Court, near Greenwell Town, sir.” He wondered if he was obliged to introduce Desdemona. “My eldest brother Rolsch is lord of that valley.”
“How came you to—no. Begin at the beginning, or there will be no making head nor tail of things.” He turned to Trinker, and efficiently extracted an account of his doings from the time he was assigned to escort the divine at Liest until the disaster at Greenwell. The party seemed to have traveled rather more slowly than with Pen.
“But why were you on that road at all?” asked Tigney, a plaintive note in his voice. “It’s not the most direct route from Liest to Martensbridge.”
Trinker shrugged. “I know, sir. The divine told us to go that way.”
“Why?”
“She said she’d shuttled back and forth from Liest to Martensbridge on the main road three dozen times in her life, and wanted a change of scene.”
“Did she say anything else about why she chose that course? Or was it just caprice? Any hint or strange comment?”
“No, sir . . . ?”
Tigney’s lips twisted, taking this in, but then he blew out his breath and went on. “There was a woman servant, you say? But then why didn’t—where is she?”
“Went back to Liest, sir. The Greenwell divine took her sworn deposition, first. Should it go to you?”
“Yes, for my sins.”
Trinker pulled out this document and handed it across; Tigney unsealed and read it, his frown deepening, then set it aside with an unsatisfied sigh.
Pen ventured, “Learned, do you know of these things? Sorcerers, and demons and . . . things?”
Tigney began to speak, but then turned his head at a knock on the door. It proved to be Wilrom and Gans, delivered back. With all the witnesses present, the divine turned to their accounts of Ruchia’s death, each offered with slightly different details but clearly congruent. Pen thought Gans’s description of him “flopped over as gray and limp as a dead eel,” was unduly blunt. Tigney collected Pen’s own testimony last: final words, purple flashes, and mysterious voices dutifully not left out, even though it made everyone stare at him in alarm except his interrogator, who seemed to take them as a matter of course.
Tigney then asked an intent string of questions ascertaining that there was no way Pen or anyone else at Jurald Court could ever have met Ruchia before, or known about her in any way, before the chance meeting on the road. The divine compressed his lips and turned to Pen once more.
“Since you awoke from that long swoon, have you felt or experienced anything unusual? Anything at all.”
“I had a very bad headache, but it wore off by the time we left Greenwell.” And no one will touch me, I have been summarily unbetrothed, and I have been made a prisoner even though I have committed no crime. Best leave that out. Tigney was just beginning to relax when Pen added, “Also, night before last the demon woke up and began talking to me.”
Tigney went still. “How?”
“Er . . . through my mouth?”
“Are you sure of this?”
Pen couldn’t tell what to make of that question. Did Tigney suppose him to be delirious or hallucinating? Was that common among the newly bedemoned? “I know it wasn’t me. I don’t speak Ibran. Or Roknari, Adriac, or Cedonian. She was really chatty once she got started. Also argumentative.” Ten women all stuck together, no wonder. Or their ghosts, disturbing thought. Images of their ghosts was scarcely better.
Tigney took this in, then rose and went to shout down the staircase for the porter, whose name was apparently Cosso. Or perhaps, Cosso! “See that these three men are fed,” he ordered the fellow, shepherding Gans and the guards out. “Find a place in the house for Lord Penric’s groom, tonight.” He reassured the guards, “We’ll send you two to lodge with your own Order at the palace temple, but don’t leave before I have a chance to speak to you again.”
He closed the door on them all, then turned and studied Pen. Pen looked hopefully back. At length he placed a hand on Pen’s brow and intoned loudly, “Demon, speak!”
Silence. It went on until Pen stirred in discomfort. “I’m not stopping her,” he offered. “She may sleep during the day. So far, she’s only talked to me before bed.” The only times he’d been alone?
Tigney scowled and deployed that commanding voice once more. “Speak!”