He had not betrayed the slightest flinch at the question. Possibly no one had informed him yet of what had been found this morning in his woods? Oswyl, with all those closer relatives and colleagues of Magal’s to work through, might not get to him till tomorrow. Pen decided he’d better not step on the locator’s lines, contenting himself with, “Very pretty countryside.”
Wegae shrugged. “We prefer the house in town, traitorous to my forest-tribe ancestors though it may be to admit it.” His lady smiled and wrapped his arm in hers, comfortingly.
Penric tried to think of a subtle way to ask, Where were you last night? “Have you been much taken up with this royal launching?” A circling hand-wave indicated the past two weeks of name-day festivities.
Wegae shook his head. “Only to route around, mostly. But my mother insisted we come tonight. I think my inheritance gratified her almost more than me.”
“Well, mothers,” Penric offered in prudently vague sympathy. Both his auditors nodded in unison.
The princess-archdivine’s lady secretary found Pen then, to murmur, “Her Grace is ready to leave now.”
Pen was forced to make polite introductions and farewells in the same breath. He let the secretary guide him past the hazards of thanks to their highborn hosts, and, safely outside, took his place beside the sedan chair once more. Uphill, there was less breath for gossip, at least on his part, and the same problem with listening ears. So it wasn’t until Llewyn invited him to her rooms that, seated between the two women in the candlelight, he was able to recount his day’s experiences. Despite his weariness, he tried to make it all sound as interesting as possible.
He must have succeeded, for his superior finally said, mildly, “I did have other plans for you tomorrow.”
Did have not do, right. “So did I, Your Grace”—though probably not the same ones—“but I’d like to help Oswyl find justice for that poor sorceress if I can. And no one else is speaking for the lost demon. It was a victim, too, in my view.”
She gave a conceding wave of her beringed hand. “Report to me again tomorrow night, then.”
Playing on her curiosity had worked, good. Relieved, he signed himself, managed not to yawn in her face, and made his way to his own chamber.
By the time Penric and Inglis rode out from Easthome at dawn, made arrangements to leave their horses in the hill-village temple’s paddock, discouraged the lay dedicat from tagging along, and returned to the clearing, it was not as early as either had hoped. At least the light was good.
Beginning from the dried blood patch, infested now by only a few green flies, Penric walked out in a slow spiral, all his senses deployed. No ghosts today, either, and at length he conceded that any chill of unease was being supplied by his own imagination.
Inglis went off to look for telltale horse droppings or cart tracks, and found some, but, given all the animals and people that had been in and out of here yesterday, they failed to be definitive. Yet another search for where the bowman must have stood to make his killing shots found no special clues. Inglis came back to the center of the clearing, held out an arm toward the stream, and squinted along it. “He shot the woman from somewhere in that arc of woods. But he shot at the fox from here near the body.”
“If the body was even there yet. I’ll grant you the shot.”
Inglis shrugged and led some forty paces through the brush to the spot where he’d found the third arrow. The gouge in the ground where it had landed was barely visible. No sign of blood or the struggles of a dying animal.
“Can you, ah, smell a trail?” Pen asked him.
“Not exactly. My nose is no keener than any man’s. It’s just something I attend to more closely.”
As his second sight was granting him nothing, Pen was content to follow Inglis’s first nose. They wandered generally toward the hidden stream, eyes on the ground. The shaman, too, had hunted in his youth; the Raven Range from which his kin hailed was not as breathlessly high as the mountains in the cantons, but they’d been rugged enough. So Pen was not too surprised when Inglis stopped at the streambank, pointed down, and said “Ah,” in a tone of satisfaction.
Fox prints dappled the mud, though only a few. More useful were a couple of human dents, one of which lay half-atop a pawprint, plus a deep round pock that might have been from a walking stick. “Someone gave chase. Or tracked,” said Inglis.
Pen tried matching the prints with his own, off to the side, and examined the results. The original footprint was a touch longer, quite a bit wider, and deeper. “Long stride, or running. A heavier man than me.”
“Most men are, surely.” But Inglis made a similar test on the other side, and allowed, “Heavier than me, as well.”
“The arrow was undamaged, but he didn’t stop to pick it up,” Pen noted.
“Might have been dark by then.”
“Not so dark he didn’t take a long shot at a fast-moving fox. And nearly hit it.”
“Hm.”
They picked up the tracks on the other side of the stream. The fox’s were quickly lost, the man’s soon after, although a few broken branches or ambiguous scrapes in the soil led them onward. After about two miles of thrashing through the steep and treacherous undergrowth, Inglis, huffing, plunked down on a fallen log and said, “That’s it for me.”
Penric joined him, catching his breath and staring around. This tract measured some six or seven miles on a side, giving something like forty or fifty square miles of precipitous green woods. They needed a better plan than blundering around at random.
Inglis scratched his sweating chin. “So, I gather you are thinking this fox might have picked up your missing demon?”
Penric opened his hands in doubt. “Not an impossibility. Although any human, no matter how unsavory, would have been a first choice for it. A fox before a bird or squirrel, though.”
“You once told me that demons always try to jump higher, to a larger or more powerful animal, or person to a more powerful person.”
“If they can.”
“What happens if one can’t? If it is forced downward?”
Penric sighed. “What do you think would happen to you, if someone tried to force your body into a box half its size?”
Inglis’s brows twitched up. “Nothing very pleasant. Crushed, I suppose. Maybe bits cut off.”
“Something like that, I gather. Except happening to a mind instead of a body.”
“But a demon isn’t a material thing. Shouldn’t it be more… foldable?”
“ ‘Spirit cannot exist in the world without matter to sustain it,’ ” Penric quoted. “Maybe it’s more like… being forced to exist on half the food and water and air you require. Or a shrub transplanted with nine-tenths of its roots amputated. Or I-don’t-know what material metaphor. But this demon, if I understand Hamo aright, contained imprints of least three human minds and lives including, now, Magal’s, together with any animals that went before. That’s not a small demon.”
“So… somewhere out there is a very smart fox?” He added meticulously, “Assuming the fox.”
“Smart, mentally mutilated, and insane. Or worse.”
“Wait. The woman who was murdered is now in the fox?” Inglis considered this. “You might want to add angry to that list.”
“Angry, bewildered, terrified, the Bastard knows what.” Well, He probably did, at that. Pen hoped the soul of Magal had found deep comfort in His care. The image of Magal… required another caretaker. And Penric was horribly afraid he could guess just who the god had tapped for the task.