“You’re bleeding,” said Nikys uneasily, wondering if she should fetch him a cloth out of her sack. She would have to sacrifice one of her few garments.
“Yes,” he said, muffled. “Don’t be alarmed. It will stop in a moment. A sorcerer pays for magic, uphill magic, in some greater amount of disorder. A shaman pays in blood. The shedding of which, I argue, is also a form of disorder. Shaman Inglis and I tried to work out the implications of that…” He glanced up to check their reactions. Nikys leaned forward, a hand tentatively raised but with no idea what she could do. Adelis had retreated a pace, the tree guarding his back, fists clenched. “Ah, I might as well be talking in Wealdean to you, I suppose. Never mind.”
The gush tailing away, Penric rubbed his upper lip with the back of his hand, straightened, and smiled rather flatly. “Let’s go find that inn. I’m tired, aren’t you?”
At a lodging place on a side street in Doara, Master Penric negotiated for two adjoining rooms, while Adelis kept his head down in surly silence and pretended to be a stout, standoffish widow. The awkwardness of concealing the sword under the cloak lent him a convincing aged hunch. The moment their chamber door shut behind them he shucked out of the cloak and Nikys’s dress, tossing them aside with a muffled oath. Nikys rescued her abused clothing and nobly refrained from comment. Feigning that his female employer’s widowed mother was ill, Penric had arranged for their dinner to be brought up, which happened thankfully soon. It was eaten mostly in tense silence.
After the meal was cleared away from the small table, Penric, growing serious, laid out his medical kit and turned at last to Adelis. He first carefully cleaned away the day’s grime from his patient’s face, a sticky mess from the ointment, sweat, and road dust, and from around his eyes, but Nikys didn’t think it was just from the firm touch that Adelis flinched away.
Penric evidently didn’t think so either, for he said lightly, “Oh, come now. I’ve been helping you to your chamber pot for a week. If you trusted me in the darkness, you can trust me in the light.”
Adelis grunted and, rigidly, endured the ministrations. After a while, he said, “You’re a hedge sorcerer.”
“Something like that.”
“With a talent for healing.
Penric’s voice went dryer. “Something like that.”
“Not a physician at all.”
“I said I’d taken no oath. It’s… complicated. And not relevant here.”
Nikys, seated closely and watching it all, said, “I would like to understand.”
Penric hesitated, then shrugged. “Two of my demon’s prior riders—possessors—were Temple-trained physicians. Their knowledge came to me as part of the same gift as their languages. Plus what I’ve added myself since acquiring Desdemona. Which she will carry on in turn someday to a new rider, after my death, which is a strange thought. Rather more useful than being a ghost, sundered souls not being good for much. They mostly won’t even talk to you.”
Nikys blinked at this last offhand observation; Adelis shifted his swollen red eyes.
“Have you tried to talk to ghosts?” she couldn’t help asking.
“A few times. One feels they could answer so many questions, starting with Who killed you? but they almost never do.” Standing behind the seated Adelis, Penric spread his fingers over his patient’s scalp and paused in his chatting, though he sent her a faint smile evidently meant to be reassuring.
Nikys thought about all she’d seen. “Why do you call this… creature of chaos her?”
“Desdemona’s prior ten human riders all chanced to be women. Plus the lioness and the mare, however you count them, but that goes back to her very beginnings. Right here in Cedonia, as it happens. This resulted over time—two hundred years of time—in a sort of composite personality that I named Desdemona, when she came down to me.” His gaze grew pensive. “Your first gift to me, Penric. Though not your last.”
Nikys, listening to the subtle shifts in his tone, was torn between fear and fascination. Had he always been doing this, disregarded? “Could—could I talk to her? Directly?”
Penric stared in surprise over Adelis’s head. “I don’t think anyone has ever asked us that before.” His lips twitched. “Well, why not?”
Nikys swallowed, looked him in the eyes, and tried, “Hello… Desdemona.”
Penric’s smile transmuted to something more bemused. “Hello, Nikys.”
“So… so you really live inside Master Penric? Like another person?”
“Or another dozen persons. It is our nature.”
“How long, um, have you been… in there?” It felt absurdly like asking a new neighbor, So, how long have you lived in Patos?
“Since he was nineteen, and stopped to help my former mistress, Learned Ruchia, when she fell mortally ill upon a roadside in the cantons. Ruchia called him the Bastard’s last blessing. We… thought we needed to learn what better to do about bad hearts.”
“How long have you been together, then?” As if the neighbors were a married couple.
“Eleven, twelve years?” Master Penric—or was it the demon?—waved a dismissive hand.
To be certain the man wasn’t just having an arcane jape at her expense, Nikys supposed she should think of some question to which the demon would know the answer and Penric would not, but none at once occurred to her. Do you like being a demon? Is Penric a good master? What is it like to live for centuries? Not to mention, What was it like to be a woman, and then a man? Did demons even think that way? She tried for something that seemed more answerable. “Why is Master Penric—Penric—not a proper physician?”
His expression seemed to conduct a brief war with itself, but he—or she?—replied, “A good question, child, but not mine to answer. Though if he ever does explain, you’ll know he’s come to trust you.” His voice went sharper. “I think that’s enough, Des.”
Adelis, still sitting stiffly, rolled his eyes as best he could, as though he considered this offering dubious coin, and his sister a gull for accepting it. Nikys, watching those long fingers barely move through her brother’s hair, wondered if she was witnessing some delicate sorcery being done right now. By Penric’s abstraction, maybe so?
But Adelis, after a while, had a question of his own. “Can you kill with your demon magic?”
Penric grimaced—yes, this was Penric again now, and was this going to be like learning to tell two identical twins apart? “No.”
“Fight?”
“Within limits. Did you think all those soldiers trying to arrest you earlier today tripped over their own boots?”
“What if your attackers were more than you could overcome?”
“Running away is always my first choice. After that, disable and run away. As you saw.”
“What if you were truly cornered? A you-or-him contest?”
Penric’s eyebrows pinched. “You’ve killed in warfare, presumably.”
Adelis nodded shortly.
“Have you ever murdered? Slain one helpless before you?”
Adelis shrugged. “There were cleanups on the battlefield. More speeding a death already underway than a killing. Not a pretty business, nor heroic, but needful sometimes.”
Penric, after a thoughtful moment, gave a conceding nod, and said, “I suppose. But every death, howsoever accomplished, opens a doorway to the gods. If I die, my soul goes to my god, if He’ll have me. But should my demon murder, whether under my command or ascendant and rogue, she would be stripped from me through the victim’s soul-door by her holy Master, her two hundred years of life and knowledge boiled back down to formless chaos in an instant. Worse than burning down a great library. So my mortal calculation is never just me or him. It’s me or him or her. Do you see the conundrum?”