“Ah, he’s a pretty beast, isn’t he? But it’s a sad tale. The old fellow who raised him was killed in a rock fall not two months back. Some of his dogs had to be dragged away from the place—after days—they mourned him so hard. It was impossible to dig him up to bury him again, so my husband held his rites on the spot. But…” She hesitated, then was interrupted when Gallin came in.
He shrugged off his five-colored robe, which at this range Oswyl could see was a bit threadbare, hung it on a wall peg, and sat to take hot tea with weary gratitude.
“These gentlemen are looking for strangers come to the vale,” she informed him, “but I’ve not heard of any. Have you?”
The familiar, frustrating headshake. “Not too many ever come up this far. We mostly take our own goods to the market at Whippoorwill. A few men from there come up in the summer to trade in animals or hides or cheese, but they aren’t strangers.”
“I was just starting to tell them about old Scuolla,” his wife put in.
Gallin straightened, setting down his mug. He asked more eagerly, “Did someone finally get my letters? Or read my letters? I’d sent to my superiors in Whippoorwill twice, but have got no reply yet. And written to the divines in neighbor vales. One said he could not help, and the other… was less helpful.” Gallin grimaced. “My prayers have fared no better.”
“Help with what?” asked Oswyl.
“My ghost problem,” said Gallin simply.
Oswyl sat back; Penric sat up. “Ghost problem?” he encouraged their host.
Oswyl was not without curiosity, but this side-issue seemed nothing to do with his ever-more-delayed pursuit. His new hope was to extract his party from this local hospitality and get back to the main road by nightfall. Yet Acolyte Gallin seized the opening like a swimmer grasping a rope.
“That luckless old man. I wasn’t sure at first, mind you, even with the behavior of his dogs. Not all of them, just his two favorites—Arrow, a fine big fellow, and Blood, that you saw. After the rockslide it seems Arrow had run to the nearest farmyard and barked his head off, till they drove him away by pelting him with stones. Blood stood guard, I suppose you could say, back at the slide, barking and howling. Then that big dog ran all the way into town and found me, and whined and carried on and wouldn’t be hushed. As the beast seldom left Scuolla’s side, it didn’t take a Cedonian sage to figure out something was badly amiss. I saddled my horse and followed him up the road, and then the hunting trail, and then, well. Big slide. Took down a lot of trees. I’d heard the crash echoing down the vale earlier that morning, but when no alarm had come, I’d dismissed it. It didn’t take me long to find the remains of Scuolla’s apprentice, and one of the other dogs, its back broken, sadly, but it had been too late for either of them from the first. A gang of men from the village, later that afternoon, had no better luck at finding Scuolla, though we did uncover one more dog, and buried both beasts properly, no skinning. I did insist on that, for respect.” He nodded to himself. Neglected by his Temple supervisors in this remote vale, Gallin had perhaps taken to self-supplying their absent discipline or praise. Oswyl tried not to sympathize.
After a long, thoughtful, silent inhalation through his nose, Penric came out with, “And how long had you known that old Scuolla was a hedge shaman?”
Intent on recapturing the conversation by offering suitable condolences and then hurrying their leave, Oswyl swallowed his words so fast he coughed. What?
Gallin cast the young man a closer look than heretofore. “I’ve served in this vale for over twenty years. I found out what he was early on, but not so early that I hadn’t had time to learn his kin and his ties, and that there was no harm in him. I take my first duty to be to souls, not laws. And to learn as well as teach, or what else do the gods put us in this world for?”
“Indeed.” Penric made the tally sign; coming from a full-braid Temple divine (even one who’d left his braids in his saddlebags), it seemed to Oswyl strangely more than a mere assenting shrug.
Reassured by this reaction, Gallin went on: “My trust was repaid five-fold, through those years. Scuolla was as pious a man as any and more than many, and he and his dogs were an aid to all in need, lost or hurt, in flood or fire or famine and a hundred smaller tasks. In time, I came to think of his as my good left hand here in the vale, without which the right could not grip half so well.”
Gossa, nodding in confirmation to all this, put in, “That’s why we don’t understand about his funeral.” She made a go on gesture at her husband.
Penric’s eyes narrowed. “It took place at the rockslide, your goodwife said?”
“Aye. There was no getting down to his body. For a time we thought the dogs might find him, or later, our noses, but he was too deep for the last and the dogs, well, the dogs never settled on a consensus. Or settled at all—very disturbed they were, right to the last. In the event, no god signed to taking up his soul, or at least none we could discern, though we made the trial five times, till the holy animals began to bite and scratch and kick and it grew dark.”
“Could he have escaped the fall somehow?” asked Oswyl, ensnared by this tale despite himself. “Run off for some reason?” The dead companion was suggestive, to a suspicious mind.
Gallin huffed out a breath. “I wondered about that, too, as things went on. But it doesn’t stand up to the witness of the dogs.”
In his past investigations, Oswyl had found many mute things to give testimony that shouted; he supposed he must now add dogs to that list. At least his superiors could not chide him for not swearing them in. “Sundered, then.”
Gossa made a fending gesture in front of her bodice, and scowled at him as fiercely as one of his aunts about to correct his legal rhetoric.
Gallin shook his head and went on, “By every sign, Scuolla was sundered, and I don’t think he should have been. I know he would not refuse the gods. And if the Son of Autumn, to Whom he’d made devotions all his life, didn’t think him good enough somehow, well, there’s still the Bastard. So where was He? Where were any of Them?”
An unanswerable question that Oswyl had confronted many times in his career. He bit his lip.
“The thing is,” put in Gossa, “everyone round about now takes that rockslide for haunted, and avoids it.”
Penric laced and unlaced his fingers a few times, then seemed to come to some decision. “So this hedge shaman, working with dogs as the medium of his art, died uncleansed of the Great Beast that must have given him his powers. And now his soul is lost between the worlds, a sundering unwilled by either the gods or the man.”
“You know so much of such things, young fellow?” said Gallin, startled.
“I’m, ah… something of a Temple sensitive myself, as it happens.” His smile had gone a little stiff. “I knew the moment I saw the red dog that there had to be a shaman in this tale somewhere. It is partway to being made a Great Beast, did you know?”
Gallin cleared his throat. “Blood’s a very intelligent dog. Well-mannered. Good with all the village children. Took to being a holy animal with no trouble at all.”
“I daresay.”
“So… you didn’t come here in answer to my letters…?” The acolyte seemed reluctant to give up this hope.
“Not to your letters, no.” Penric bared his teeth in a brief, ironic grimace, an edged look Oswyl had not seen in his face before.
Gallin confessed, “I’d thought to find another hedge shaman for Scuolla, somewhere up or down the mountains, to perform their last secret rites for him. Him seeming out of reach of my prayers. Scuolla had his Great Beast from the shaman here before him, long ago when he was a young man, and performed the cleansing for his mentor in turn when he died. He was bringing along his own apprentice, but he’d not invested the man with his powers yet as far as I know. Well, I do know, for Wen’s soul was signed taken up by the Son at his funeral the day after the tragedy.”