Penric peered out the front door, then bundled them into the quiet street, dozing in the bright afternoon. He gave her a leg up onto the larger of the two horses, both marked with provincial government brands and bearing military saddles. A short delay followed while he argued in sharp whispers with Adelis about the widow’s clutch on the sword, settled by sliding it semi-discreetly back into its saddle scabbard, but inciting another dispute about getting him up behind her.
“There are two horses,” said Adelis. “One for each of us.”
“You are not as fit to ride as you think you are, which you are going to find out shortly when the excitement wears off, and there are three of us. I need the other to follow on.”
“You’re coming with us?” asked Nikys. She could scarcely describe her own reaction. Though not sorry, no.
The blond man nodded. “I wasn’t done yet, you see. Leave town at a sedate walk, nothing to draw attention to yourselves—not to mention easier on this poor horse—and take the south road. I have a few things to clean up here, and then I’ll catch up to you.”
“How will you find us?”
“I can find you.”
“You and who else?” began Adelis in exasperation.
Further protest was cut short when Penric stepped back and slapped the horse on its haunches, Nikys found her reins, and they… fled at an amble.
They were both quiet for a little, as the reverberations of terror running through Nikys’s heart slowly died away. She could barely imagine how Adelis felt about it all, twice-betrayed as he was. She could sense it, though, as the fight began to leak out of him and he leaned more heavily against her.
They’d threaded through three streets and found the main road before Nikys said, “I wonder if he really means to burn down the villa?”
After a brief consideration, Adelis offered, “It’s rented.”
“I should be sorry anyway.” And then, “What in the gods’ eyes did we see him do, back there?”
Adelis’s voice went grim. “Something uncanny.”
“Hedge sorcerer? Do you think? You saw him more nearly than I.”
“It would explain a great deal. In retrospect.”
But why had such a man come to them? She considered Penric’s airy tale of their military benefactors with a new dubiousness, but she had no better one to put in its place. His brief, bizarre first exchange with Tepelen also hung without explanation. “Do you think he’ll really catch up to us?”
“No. He’d be a fool to. Far smarter to take this chance of escape to safety.”
She considered what safety might mean to a man who could do the things they’d just witnessed, and wondered.
Also, fool.
IX
Penric dashed back through the house, trying to track all he must control. Too much. In addition to the assailants laid out under the pergola, and the whining senior secretary, the maid and the porter were presently cowering in an upstairs room, and the scullion had vanished. Well, first things first, then whatever else he could do, and then fly.
He passed through and collected all the weapons, not forgetting the secretary’s belt knife and also taking a moment to harvest his purse. Then he renewed the pressure on his prisoners’ selected nerves to keep them down and quiet. He didn’t suppose anyone else would appreciate how delicate and clever all this was, least of all his victims, but he was rather proud of it himself. Good work.
I could have ripped all those nerves apart much more easily, grumped Des, and we’d never have to worry about them getting up to come after us again.
Which was true, but theologically fraught. Penric dumped his heavy armload of edged steel down the privy at the end of the garden and trotted back to the pergola. The soldiers lay in whimpering heaps. One brave man made a feeble snatch for his ankle as Pen skipped around them, but missed. Pen grasped the panting Velka-Tepelen-Whoever—he decided he’d stick with Velka—by the tunic and began dragging him into the house. There were already too many witnesses to his antics. This conversation needed to be private.
A sort of lumber room off the front atrium seemed remote enough to be out of earshot. Penric laid Velka out supine on the floor and perched on his abdomen, knees up, and touched his thumb to his lips in his habitual prayer for luck. His god, he was reminded, was the master of both sorts. He leaned forward between his up-folded legs and smiled.
“Drowned, you say,” he began. Des growled aloud in memory.
“The guards reported you drowned in your cell and your body disposed of in the sea,” said Velka through his teeth. “Your skull was broken. You should be dead. Twice over!”
“And Arisaydia should be blind, aye. So many mysteries.”
“No mystery to it. You escaped, and they reported the other to hide their failure and avoid punishment.”
“Well, that’s one explanation. But wouldn’t it be more interesting if they were speaking the truth?”
Velka glared. This was not a man inclined to babble in fear, alas. Or talk much at all.
“There is so much I could do to you,” mused Pen. “Take your hearing, as you plunged me into silence in that cell…” He leaned forward and cupped both hands over Velka’s ears, then moved them to cover his eyes. “Or your vision, as you plunged me into darkness.” He sat up again, palms on his knees. “Who is your master?”
“Who is yours?” Velka shot back. “The duke of Adria?”
“Ultimately, no,” said Pen judiciously. “He just borrowed me. And when you borrow a valuable tome from a friend, it doesn’t do to carelessly drop it in the privy. But enough of that.” It occurred to him that anyone following up from Adria on Pen’s disappearance would be most likely to encounter the official tale, at least until he could make his way back to gainsay it, and believe him dead. Bastard’s tears, what will happen to my books?
Pen, he’s getting more out of this than you are, complained Des. Attend!
“So which shall it be? Ears?” Pen clapped them, but did nothing destructive. He tried to replicate Velka’s own look of bored distaste when he’d lifted his knife to Arisaydia’s face, while simultaneously mustering the intense concentration needed to compress one of the body’s most elegant nerves without permanently damaging it. He suspected he just came out looking constipated. “Or”—he moved one hand over Velka’s left eye, made carefully sure of his invisible target, pinched—“your remaining eye?”
Velka’s scream of anguish was entirely sincere, Pen thought. Despite the pain already placed in his body blocking his range of movement, he tried to thrash under Pen, his head whipping back and forth, and Pen was thrust in his imagination back to the scene of Arisaydia and the boiling vinegar. He hoped Velka was, too.
Pen leaned forward again, and hissed, “Who is your master?”
“Minister Methani,” gasped Velka.
Methani was prominent in the first circle of men around the emperor, and from a high and wealthy family, Pen recalled from his readings and conversations back in Adria; he didn’t know offhand if the man was one of those who had volunteered, or been volunteered, for emasculation so as to rise in imperial trust, or not. Pen’s lips pursed in bafflement. “Why would he want to destroy his emperor’s most effective general? Seems treasonous in itself to me. Not to mention grossly wasteful.”
Velka wheezed, “Arisaydia was a danger to us all. Too independent. Too attractive. Already military conspiracies were starting to swirl about him. We couldn’t penetrate the intrigues that had to be reaching him, so we made one to serve in their place.”