“Ask, Pen,” she repeated, a little impatiently. “We just need an answer, not an argument.”
“Aye.” He changed directions and began striding toward the Bastard’s chapterhouse, recalculating people’s bedtimes and willingness to be visited at them by a grubby, overexcited sorcerer. Within a few paces, he was jogging. He wasn’t actually sure if Hamo lived in at the chapterhouse, the way Magal had. Well, the porter would know his address if not. If anyone else besides Pen and Oswyl was likely to be haunting the night over this matter, it was Hamo.
He arrived breathless to be scrutinized by the night porter, whom they’d briefly interviewed yesterday, and who thus recognized and admitted him even without his whites and his braids. The man tried to make Pen wait in the stone-paved hall while he went to inquire if Hamo would receive him, but Pen dogged his heels, and he hadn’t quite the nerve to insist. Their first stop was Hamo’s work chamber. Pen was not too surprised to see yellow candlelight sifting through the doorway.
Hamo squinted up from his writing desk, his quill paused in air. He was still dressed in his most formal white tunic from the funeral, although his outer robe and braids hung on a peg on the wall. “Ah. Learned Penric. What brings you to me at this—”
Pen blurted, “The sorceress who held Learned Magal’s demon before her. Was it a Learned Sverda?”
Hamo’s gray brows rose in surprise. “Svedra, but yes. Why do you ask?”
Pen let his shoulders thump against the doorframe. The name felt like a stone thrown into a murky pond, creating agitation but no clarity. “Mention of her came up earlier this evening, in connection with an investigation she once performed as a Temple sensitive.”
“She performed many such, in her time,” said Hamo. “Why don’t you come sit down? You look a little, ah…” He did not complete the description, but Pen didn’t doubt it. Hamo waved the anxious, and curious, porter back to his post. Deprived of his chance to eavesdrop, the man seemed to depart in some disappointment.
Pen pulled a chair around and sank into it. And then felt at a loss, his thoughts all so newly disarrayed.
“What brought up Svedra?” Hamo prompted him, setting aside his quill and papers.
“I hardly like to say yet. It’s all wild supposition.”
Hamo’s eyes narrowed. “Go on anyway.”
“What if—” Penric paused, Oswyl’s remarks about not leading a witness dancing in his head. “Do you remember any of her assignments as particularly fraught?”
Hamo leaned back in his chair and tapped his fingers against each other. “Not especially, but I don’t know them all. I’d only been her supervisor for five years before she had her fatal stroke a few months ago. She’d held her demon for over three decades. I may have been her appointed Temple bailiff, but she was much my elder in age and experience. She mostly chose her own tasks and went where she pleased. Which tends to be the way of senior sorcerers. Sorceresses even more so.” He winced in some memory he did not confide.
This wasn’t getting there—fast enough—Pen led anyway. “About three years ago, she was called out to lend her Sight and expertise to a domestic murder inquiry involving Baron Halber kin Pikepool, yes?”
Hamo’s attention sharpened. “An unpleasant fellow, by her remarks. Yes, she was in and out on that several times. Trips to the country, and much back and forthing to the Father’s Order, the city magistrates, and the Hallow King’s court. There were disputes over jurisdictions, which we tried our best to leave to them. The gods having no such boundaries.” He hesitated. “But I thought the man was dead. All disposals in the hands of higher Powers now.”
“There was a letter. But not a body, nor any eyewitness account of one.”
“Mm…?”
“Imagine…” When out on thin ice, move fast, had been a lesson of Pen’s canton mountain boyhood. Did it apply here? “Picture a proud, hard man who has lost everything, and been brought as low as humanly possible, facing an ignoble death. Who did it to himself, but only blamed others.” Indeed, there’s only half a chance his wife was the infertile one, Des put in. “Fled from justice into self-exile, but then, for whatever reason…” Yes, why? Pen was having a hard time positing why a fellow who had got away clear would put himself back at such risk. That’s because you don’t think like that, said Des. Thankfully. “This is all utter speculation, you understand.”
“Go on, Learned Penric,” said Hamo, more tightly.
“Suppose he came back for revenge on those he blamed and hated for his downfall. And found the sorceress whose accusation had destroyed him beyond his reach, but her Temple demon… not.” Pen took a gulp of air. “Maybe Magal was no one to him, just a barrier he had to get through to reach his real target.”
Hamo gripped the table edge, bent his face down, and swore. Short, horrible, heartfelt words.
Ah. Maybe telling Hamo all this so soon had not been such a good idea. Although witnessing Magal’s body had been dismaying, Pen had to admit there had been an element of stimulating intellectual puzzle to it all. For Hamo, this had to be a much more personal outrage.
The more so, Des pointed out, as Hamo himself put Magal in this harm’s way, by choosing her to receive Svedra’s demon.
Ouch, thought Pen weakly. He swallowed, feeling a bit sick.
When Hamo raised his face, it was gray with new tension. “That is a grotesque idea.”
“Truly. But it may explain why a woman whom no one disliked…”
“Yes.” Hamo drew a long breath, letting it out slowly. He lowered his hands from the table edge to his lap, where he clenched them, perhaps to conceal their shaking. After a moment, he said, “Do you really imagine Baron Halber kin Pikepool is still alive? Why?”
“Well… One hears of such things. There was such a case in Greenwell Town, when I was a boy. A man came back from the wars after his wife had remarried. It was something of a mess. Or men reported lost at sea, who turn up years later.”
“And how many cases where no one came back, making nothing to remark? No tale worth repeating? One hundred to one? Five hundred to one? The exception always gets more attention than the rule. I’m not sure you should race off down this road too quickly.”
“I’m not sure I should, either,” Pen said frankly. “But I don’t think I would have evolved the notion at all without Halber’s tale to start the trail of thought.” Des sent him an impression of a throat-clearing noise, and he corrected, “We would have,” which only caused Hamo to squint at him.
“What does Locator Oswyl think of your theory?”
“I haven’t tried it on him yet. I can’t imagine it will please him. He prefers firmer evidences.”
“I thought you were seeking such, today?”
“Oh.” Getting practiced, Pen made short work of describing his and Inglis’s day in the woods, the encounter with Treuch, and the elusive scattering of the kin Pikepool foxes. It did not make Hamo look any happier.
“As a suspect, or at least a man engaged in suspicious activities, this forester Treuch does have the advantage of being certainly alive, and present in the area,” Hamo pointed out.
“There is that. Baron Wegae didn’t seem to see him as a, a plotting sort of fellow, but who knows? Maybe…” Pen hesitated. “Would you be able to look back over any records the chapterhouse may maintain of Learned Svedra’s assignments, and see if there is anything, mm, overlooked? Other possibilities?”
Hamo grimaced. “Tomorrow. In full light, yes. I will.”
“Tomorrow,” Pen went on, “we’re all going up again to look around the old kin Pikepool manor and forest. If the demon is indeed in a fox, and we find it, maybe… it will tell us some more.” How, Pen couldn’t guess.