PENRIC’S FOX
A novella in the World of the Five Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold
“No, you can’t make a Great Earthworm!” said Inglis, sounding indignant. Although not indignant enough to rise from his comfortable recline on the mossy bank, fishing pole propped on his bare toes.
“I just did. See?” Penric held out the rosy writhing creature, flecked with moist soil, on his palm. “Isn’t he cute?”
“No,” said Inglis, grumpily.
The shaman’s grimace failed to honor, Penric thought, the loveliest morning to escape all duties and go fishing that Pen could imagine. The quiet pool in the hills above Easthome was everything Inglis had promised his visitor: cool, tree-shaded, gilded with sun ripples. Possibly a little short of fish, but as the hazy day warmed, very inviting for a man to strip and swim. Penric had plans.
“Anyway,” said Inglis, craning his neck to peer at the worm in Penric’s hand, “how do you know it’s a he? It might be a she.”
Penric wrinkled his nose in doubt. “I’ve heard earthworms are both in one body.”
“Oh, just like you, then,” murmured Inglis, smirking.
Good to see the glum boy’s not above getting his own back, commented Desdemona, amused. The Temple demon who lived inside of Penric and gave him the powers of a sorcerer was decidedly female, after all, which as he came to know Pen better had been a cause of increasing bemusement to Inglis. Inglis kin Wolfcliff, Fellow of the Royal Society of Shamans (on probation) as he signed his correspondence, though he hoped to be rid of the unfortunate postscript soon.
Penric tried to return a suitable sneer, but the country light was too fine to allow him to sustain the effort; it came out a grin.
Inglis shook his head. “I can’t believe you mastered the technique just from watching that one sacrifice in the menagerie yard yesterday.”
“That, atop reading the book you sent, your letters, talking to your Royal Fellowship and you over the past two weeks, examining, well, a few other works, half of which turn out to be rubbish. Always a problem with written sources, which frequently tell you far more about the person who wrote them than the subject addressed.”
“You are a more bookish scholar than me,” Inglis granted. “It seems unfair that… never mind. All right, I can see it is indeed on its way to being a Great Earthworm”—a finger reached out to dubiously prod the creature—“two souls, if you can call them that in a worm, piled into one body, but it won’t arrive, and anyway, where is the point? No one would wish to be invested with a worm-spirit, and the powers it might grant wouldn’t persuade a flea to jump onto a dog.”
“Practice for the student shaman,” Penric returned promptly. “Or student sorcerer, anyway. Earthworms are theologically neutral creatures, as far as I know. Tomorrow, I might try mice, if their tiny souls prove not too heavy for me to shift. They’re vermin of the Bastard—as a learned divine of the white god I should be able to make free with them.”
“Brother forfend,” sighed Inglis. “Anyway, such tricks have been tried before, by people with more time than sense. After a few iterations, such lowly creatures cannot accept the overload of spirit, and die of the attempt to do so.”
“Really?” said Penric, fascinated. “I must test that.”
“Of course you must,” muttered Inglis, with a defeated air. But he set his pole aside and sat up to watch all the same.
Pen pulled half-a-dozen more earthworms out of their bait pail and strove to get them lined up in a row on a flat stone. They resisted this fate, squirming about in a disordered manner that Pen’s god the Bastard might approve, but a brief tap of uphill magic stilled them into a more military rank, temporarily. He set his first attempt at the end of the row, and rather regretfully sacrificed it into the next, persuading his conscience that it couldn’t be a worse death for a worm than being impaled on a hook and tossed into deep water to drown. Four more worms down the row, Inglis was proved right, as the recipient of all this effort more-or-less ruptured when Penric tried to tip the accumulating life-magic into it. “Oh,” he said, sadly. “There’s a shame.”
Inglis rolled his eyes.
Penric abandoned his first semi-successful effort at mastering whatever of shamanic magics he could—given that his possession of a demon of disorder would block a Great Beast of any species from ever being sacrificed into him to give him the powers of a shaman proper. Raising his rod, he squinted at his dangling hook, which seemed to have lost its bait. He sniffed and tipped the pole up to swing the line back to him, rebaiting it with one of his late sacrifices, taking consolation that the humble deaths occasioned by his imitation-shamanic efforts would not be totally wasted. He plopped his line back into the pool beside Inglis’s.
After a few minutes, he observed, “We are both Temple mages, though of different sorts. Why are we fishing in such an inefficient manner?”
“Because if we applied our magics, we’d be done before the wine gets cold,” said Inglis, amiably gesturing at the glazed jugs set to bathe in the rippling shallows.
“Point,” agreed Penric.
“Refill?”
Securing his pole with a couple of stones, Pen rose to retrieve a jug. He topped up both their beakers, tapping out the last drops into his host’s cup, then rummaged in the basket for a bite more of that good bread to go with it. The purpose of going fishing was not, after all, only to catch fish.
After a little still-fishless silence, beguiled by the local wine that lay like liquid gold upon their tongues, Inglis mused, “I wonder if such limits apply to demons as well? Is there an upper range of accumulating lives, or souls, that a demon can take up and transfer along with it, as it is handed off from rider to rider at the ends of their lives?”
Penric blinked. “Good question. Although it is not souls, exactly, that a demon accumulates from its successive sorcerers. Or not usually, unless the transfer goes badly and rips the dying person’s soul apart. Because any number of sorcerers and sorceresses are signed at their funeral rites as being taken up by our god just like anyone else. Not sundered from Him, certainly, or the creation of Temple sorcerers would be the blackest sacrilege. I prefer to think of my demon’s personalities as images of my predecessors, like printed pages pulled off an inked plate and bound into a codex, except… more so. Else my head would be very haunted.”
Inglis turned toward Penric, cleared his throat, and came out with, “Desdemona, do you know?”
It was rare that Inglis attempted to talk to Des directly, like another person, and Pen smiled in approval. He’d get the shaman trained yet. He yielded control of his voice to his permanent passenger, quite as interested in the answer as Inglis.
Des was quiet for so long Pen began to think she would not reply, but at last she spoke, necessarily through Penric’s mouth. “You children ask the most bizarre questions. There is a steady attrition of demons in the world, either hurried out of it by certain Temple rites while a young elemental, barely formed, or removed with more difficulty by a saint should they ascend and go rogue when they grow older and stronger. In over two hundred years, I have shared twelve lives with my riders, ten of them human—”
“Twelve half-lives, really,” Penric glossed for Inglis’s benefit, “since you have never jumped to an infant or child.”
“Jumping to an infant would be a recipe for disaster,” opined Des. “Instant ascendance, since the mewling creature would not have the developed will and knowledge to control its demon. Very bad choice. Anyway, as I was about to say before you interrupted me—”
“Sorry.”
She nodded with Pen’s head. “I have not met a demon older than myself for a long time.”