Fluidly, Penric slipped to Inglis’s right side, shoved Blood out of the way, and sat cross-legged. Inglis eyed him in doubt, but did not object, though he winced when Pen rolled up his trouser leg. The limb was impressively empurpled and swollen. The sorcerer hummed tunelessly to himself as he ran his hands up and down it. The rigidity of Inglis’s body eased. “Oh,” he murmured, sounding surprised. Penric’s face was bent over his work, but Oswyl could see his lips twitch up.
“A little ragged crack in one bone, but it’s not propagating despite your abuse of it. The rest is pulled muscles and some very unhappy tendons. The usual instruction would be to abandon ambition, put your leg up, and rest for about three weeks.”
Inglis snorted. Oswyl frowned.
“Indeed. But I may be able to supply a few more treatments as we go along, to replace some of that.” Penric straightened his back. There was no visible difference in the leg, but as Inglis sat up in his bedroll, Oswyl was reminded of those nursery stories where the hero removed a thorn from the wolf’s paw and was rewarded with the beast’s trust. Did Penric and Inglis know those tales, too? From the wry cast to Inglis’s face as he watched the sorcerer, Oswyl thought he might.
Penric added casually, “Did the Old Weald shamans have much in the way of healing arts or practices, do you know?”
“It is believed so.” Inglis shrugged. “They were largely lost with the rest of their histories. Most shamanic teaching was by word of mouth, mentor to aspirant, and died with its possessors. What little was written, the Darthacans burned, if they could find it. What was hidden fell to the worm and rot and lack of understanding. One of the tasks that the fellowship of the royal shamans has set itself is to try to recover those skills.”
“Are they making any more progress, in this new generation?”
“Mm, it seems the women tribal shamans worked the bulk of healing practices. They either wrote less, or were less recopied, as most of what survives tends to tales of spirit warriors and battle magic, and the rites surrounding the hallow kingship.”
Penric—or was it Desdemona?—vented an ironic snort. “No surprise there.”
“The hints are maddening, cast-away remarks in the midst of accounts about greater matters. There is a small cadre of royal shamans working to try to recreate the skills, relying less on old tales and more on new practices. The skills must have been developed in the first place by such trial and error, after all. Except that error… is a problem for an Easthome city shaman in a way it could not have been in the old forest tribes.” Inglis had straightened up during this recitation, growing more animated, as if briefly forgetful of his woes. “A couple of the senior shamans have attempted healings of animals, to try to get around that. Some of their recent results have been very exciting.”
It came to Oswyl that the reason Inglis had possessed such luck passing for a poor scholar at those inns was that he was one. Well, perhaps not poor. And Learned Penric was another, officially even. Two of them. Dear gods, help me.
“Is the Mother’s Order taking an interest in the work?” asked Penric.
“Some, yes.”
“Helpful, or hostile?”
Inglis’s lips twitched in dark appreciation. “Some of each, but since the fellowship hit upon the idea of becoming physicians to animals, their oversight has grown more favorable.”
“Does this work interest you?”
Inglis slumped again. “What does it matter now? I can’t.”
“Back when you could,” said Penric, blithely ignoring this burst of despair, “how did you go about it? How do you go into your shamanic trance? Meditation, medication, smokes, bells, smells…? Songs, prayers, twirling…?”
Something not quite a laugh puffed Inglis’s lips. “All of that, or any. My teachers said they are training aids, to form habits, and so, arbitrary. Nothing forces it. Or works like a machine, without fail. The more senior shamans make do with less and less, and some without any. Slipping in and out of the plane of symbolic action as silently as a fish swimming, and seemingly with as little effort.” His sigh sounded suspiciously like envy. Or loss, perhaps.
“So how were you taught? Exactly? I have a professional interest in such things, you know.”
Oswyl wasn’t sure what Penric was about with this line of inquiry—the divine was proving more slippery than he’d seemed at first—but Inglis appeared to accept this at face value. Which said something about Inglis, right enough. But the shaman was going on.
“We always began each training session with a short prayer.”
“To invoke the gods, or to placate the Temple?”
Inglis stared at him. “Invoke? Scarcely.”
“Yes, everyone talks to the gods, no one expects them to answer. …Almost no one. Then what?”
“After some experimenting, we settled on a chant for my doorway. It seemed to me the most portable possible aid. And it could never be lost, like objects, or not be around when I needed it. Master Firthwyth first taught me in call and response, like two bards sharing the lines of a long poem back and forth. Except mine was short, just a quatrain. We sat across from each other, with a candle burning between us for me to stare at, and just repeated it over and over. And over and over and over, till my mind grew calm, or at least so bored I could scarcely bear it. We went through nearly a box of good wax candles. I worried about the waste. I can’t imagine how Firthwyth endured.
“After several days of this, one afternoon when I’d been at it so long we both were hoarse, I… broke through. To the plane. Just for a few moments. But it was a revelation. This, this is what I, my wolf-within and I, had been straining for all this time. All the descriptions in words I’d been given weren’t… weren’t false. But it was like nothing I’d imagined from them. No wonder I’d been unable to reach it.
“After that, it quickly grew easier. We dispensed with the candle flame. It took less and less time to break through, and then I began reciting it all by myself. I was working on doing so silently when…” Inglis broke off. He added lamely, “My teacher said I was good.”
“So what’s it like for you? To be in this spiritual space.”
Inglis’s lips parted, closed, thinned. He turned his hands palm-out. “I can give you words, but they won’t teach you any more than they did me. I don’t know if you can understand.”
“Inglis.” For such a gentled tone, it was oddly implacable. “From the strangest hour of my life, on a roadside four years ago, I have been sharing my mind with a two-hundred-year-old demon with twelve personalities speaking six languages, and an underlying yen to destroy everything in her path, and I expect to go on doing so till the hour of my death. Try me.”
Inglis recoiled slightly. And Oswyl wondered at what inattentive point on this journey Penric had started seeming normal to him.
Penric sighed and came about to another tack. “Is it intrinsically pleasurable, this trance state?”
“It is a place of wonders.” Inglis hesitated. “Some find it fearful.”
“And you?”
“I was exhilarated. Maybe too much so.” Inglis frowned. “The material world does not vanish from my perceptions, but it is… overlain, set aside. Non-material things appear as material ones, symbols of themselves, but not just hallucinations, because in my wolf-form—I appear there as a wolf, or sometimes a hybrid between wolf and man—because I can grasp them. Manipulate them. Arrange them to my will. And in the material world, they are made so.