“That would make sense,” said Inglis, trying to follow this. “The older anyone gets, the more people are junior, and the fewer senior.” He frowned. “It must be strange to be oldest, to outlive all one’s generation. Yet some person in the world must be that one, at every moment. Do you think you could be eldest among demons, Desdemona?”
“Certainly not!” she said tartly. But Pen sensed an unspoken hesitance in her.
“So what happens to the eldest demons?” pursued Inglis, logically. “Do you suppose they reach a point where no head can hold them, and they jump one time too many, and, ah…” His finger pointed to the exploded earthworm.
“Eeeww,” said Penric and Desdemona together. “Really, wolf-boy!” said Des, and Pen went on, “I should think if that were the case, the Temple would know of the hazard, and it would have been part of my training in seminary.”
“I suppose so,” said Inglis, giving up his horrifying hypothesis with apparent reluctance. He took another swallow of wine, then jiggled his pole.
I would place a bet, murmured Des, which of you gives up first and starts using your magics to cheat the fish, but I’ve no one to bet with.
What, you have your whole sisterhood in there, Pen returned. You could start a pool.
There’s a thought… but she broke off and glanced at Inglis, who had sat up and turned his head, listening intently. Penric discerned nothing but the pleasant summer sounds of the woodland and stream, but he knew Inglis’s Great Wolf gave him preternatural hearing. Soon enough, the thump of trotting hooves sounded from the rutted road where they’d left their hired cart. The hoofbeats stopped, a low voice soothed the animal, and then quick footsteps approached on the path to the pool.
“Ah. There you are.” Locator Oswyl’s voice sounded strained as Pen twisted around to wave. “Five gods be thanked.”
“Oswyl!” Inglis greeted his unlikely friend as well. “You made it after all!”
The senior locator from the Father’s Order had been invited to make the third of their fishing party this morning, but he’d sent a note at the last minute saying that he’d been called out on an urgent new inquiry, and not to expect him. He still wore the gray vest with the brass buttons that caused Easthome inquirers to be dubbed Grayjays, but it hung open over his sweat-damp shirt. Done for the day, or just surrendering to the heat?
“Did you wrap things up so soon?” asked Penric cheerily.
Oswyl made his way to the streambank, planted his fists on his hips, and sighed. “No. Unfortunately. Quite the opposite. I am in urgent need of a Temple sensitive, a sorcerer even more, and you two are the closest. I am sorry, but I must conscript you.”
“No time to even take a cup?” Pen asked, looking with regret at the second jug cooling in the stream.
“No time for anything. Not six miles from here, I have a dead sorceress on my hands. Murdered, I think. Sometime late yesterday or last night.”
Pen, startled, stood up. “That,” he said slowly, “would be a very hard trick to bring off. Speaking from personal experience.”
“Someone did. One arrow through a person could be a hunting accident. Not two. And I don’t think she could have shot the shafts into her own back, not even with sorcery.”
“Ah.” Penric gulped, and called to Inglis, “I’ll harness the carthorse, then, while you gather up things?”
Inglis nodded, already bringing in their poles. It was the best division of labor, since despite his excellent horsemanship Inglis’s wolf-within tended to make even such slugs as the livery nag nervous.
Oswyl, jittering with impatience, followed Pen out to the narrow hill road where his own sweating mount was tied to a sapling. “I will give it this. The scene is fresh. Usually, help from the Father’s Order is called in days late, after the local authorities have strangled all sense in a mess of their own making. This improves the chances of you or Inglis sensing something useful, yes?”
Pen had no idea. But as he strode over to untether their hired horse and back it into the shafts, his most alarmed question was not who had killed a sorceress, or how, or even why, but rather, Where is her demon?
Oswyl’s six miles cross-country turned out to be closer to nine back, by the time they’d retraced their cart track, cut across some farm ways, and found a better road leading up toward a hill village. They turned aside before they reached it, then were forced to leave their cart when the side track into the steep woods dwindled to a path. But only a few hundred panting paces along it the trees opened up into a clearing.
It was a pleasant-enough glade, the by-now early afternoon light filtering down green-gold through the leaves. Less pleasant was the slumped, muddled figure toward the far edge, and the buzzing of the flies being waved off by the anxious junior locator left on guard. She was using a long, leaf-tipped branch to do so, leaning back as far as possible. Not due to any rotting reek yet, Pen thought as they drew closer; she was more likely spooked by the triple braid in white, cream and silver pinned to the figure’s shoulder marking a sorceress.
“My assistant, Junior Locator Thala.” Oswyl gestured, by way of introduction, and asked her, “Anything occur since I left you?”
“No, sir,” said the guard, rising with obvious relief. She was much younger than Oswyl’s thirty or so years, looking even more fresh-faced than Pen.
“Where’s that dedicat?”
“He went home to fetch us both something to eat. He should be back soon.”
“The body was found early this morning by a lay dedicat from the temple at the village of Weir,” Oswyl explained over his shoulder to Pen and Inglis, “sent out into the woods to check snares. This tract belongs to Baron kin Pikepool, they tell me, but he grants the temple-folk gathering rights to deadfall and small game in it, by way of quarter-day dues.”
Penric squatted in the place the young locator gladly yielded to him, and peered.
The woman lay on one side, as if sleeping. Her coils of brown hair were fallen loose, a beaded cloth cap snagged awry among them. Neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, comely nor ugly; she might be in her early forties. Whatever mind had enlivened her face—and the divine’s braids testified it must have been a keen one—was gone now, leaving her features bland, waxy and still. Enigmatic.
She was not dressed in formal robes, but rather, everyday garb, an ordinary dress with a thin blue coat thrown atop, to which her braids were pinned. It had not protected her clothing from the flood of blood that had soaked it and dried brown. Almost as much had gushed around the arrowhead that protruded from her stomach as from the two fletched shafts standing in her back. By the blood trail on the ground, she had fallen only a few feet from where she had been shot. A quick death. That, at least, thought Pen, trying to control his dismay. No sign that she had been otherwise molested.
Inglis looked over Pen’s shoulder, his nostrils flaring, possibly at the disturbing smell of the blood. Thick enough for Pen to discern, it was likely overwhelming to Inglis’s wolf-within, or at least his face had gone a little rigid.
Oswyl cleared his throat, pointedly, and Pen, rising to look around, thought, Des, Sight, please.
Pen half-hoped to find the woman’s ghost still lingering, fresh enough to still appear much as she had in life; a sudden and violent death was very apt to produce that effect. Most ghosts could not speak, but a sufficiently distressed one, still reverberating from its abrupt separation from its sustaining body, might sometimes grant to a sighted sensitive a sort of dumb-show. It was a very dangerous liminal state, as the soul could slip into a permanent sundering from its waiting god that was unwilled by either party. So Pen also half-hoped not, for the woman’s sake. More usually, soul and god found each other at once, and the only function of a funeral rite was to confirm the destination.