“Is he asleep?” Nikys whispered.
“No,” growled Adelis, and the corner of Penric’s mouth tweaked up. So, his guard was not so far down as that. But the bonelessness seemed to drain out of Penric and into his patient. Penric, by contrast, seemed to grow tenser and more jittery, his brow sheened with sweat.
At their next change, Penric gave them both a tight smile. “I need to take a turn around the stable. Back in a bit. Don’t leave without me, heh.”
Nikys, inquisitive, got down and followed after him. The stable was cool and dim, pleasant with the bulks of the horses resting in their stalls, munching rhythmically at their fodder. She saw his lean silhouette pass out the far doors.
She emerged at the manure pile, its acrid aroma saturating the air, where the buzz of flies was dying down. Along with the flies. Penric leaned against the stable wall with his arms folded, watching their devastation somewhat glumly.
“What are you doing?”
“The disorder harvested from the healing has to go somewhere, and death makes the most efficient sink of chaos. Killing flies, or fleas, or any other vermin assigned to the Bastard, is theologically allowable sacrifice. Most red-blooded animals are the province of the Son of Autumn, but there are a few exceptions. Rats, mice, other creatures making pests of themselves where they shouldn’t be. My god’s elder Brother may owe me a favor or two, but I shouldn’t like to presume. Thus, flies. Which are tedious but always abundant.”
It was possibly the most bizarre conversation she’d had in her life but, oddly, not frightening. She leaned against the wall beside him and folded her arms too, a silent offer of company. He cast her a quick, grateful smile.
“But never people.” It was comforting to reflect on that.
His smiled faded. “Well…”
She glanced up, letting her eyes speak her doubt.
“Not quite never. For the Bastard is the god of exceptions, after all, and the son of His Mother. In the highest levels of medical sorcery, there are a few exemptions. Not at all the sort of him versus me contests your brother pictures, so don’t tell him. He’d get excited and try to make something of it that it isn’t. When the choices are one life or another, or one life or none…” He trailed off.
She let her silence stand open, waiting to be filled with whatever he chose. Or didn’t. Not for all the world would she press him. It might be like pressing too hard on glass.
“After which the physician gets to spend his nights face down on the temple floor, praying for a sign and receiving silence. Not devotions I’d wish on… anyone.”
“I…” Could she honestly say I see? She changed it to, “I’m sorry.”
The yard before them had fallen deathly still.
He drew breath. “Aye, me too.” He shoved off from the wall, his smile carefully reaffixed, and they turned back through the stable.
And what, exactly, did this erratic-seeming, young-seeming man know about the highest levels of medical sorcery?
She was beginning to suspect that the answer might be Everything.
Which trailed the question, like a net behind a boat, How?
In the late afternoon the Patos plains gave way to climbing hill country, and their progress slowed. Nikys’s only consolation was the reflection that the rugged slopes would delay pursuers equally. A third pair of horses was hitched to their little coach, at a price, to haul them over the highest pass.
The sorcerer alternated between more healing sessions, growing intense now that his patient seemed soon to be parted from him, and staggering out to shed his chaos however he could at every stop. With her packed so close, and the labors so relentless, Nikys began to see the effects not only on Adelis but on Penric. He’s draining himself.
Freed at last to talk about his craft, Penric did. He didn’t sound much like a spy, but he did sound quite like a frustrated scholar with a favorite subject and a captive audience. She wondered if he was one of those inexplicable people who talked more, not less, as they grew tireder. Adelis was bestirred to open curiosity at last, despite his reservations, although his probing questions tended to revolve around military applications.
No, no one could muster a troop of sorcerers. Demons did not well tolerate each other, which was also why one only heard of a single court sorcerer at a time. No, one sorcerer did not differ greatly from another in raw power; all were limited by the amount of chaos a human body could safely hold and shed at a time. The differences in skill were mainly due to cleverness and efficiency, which age and experience enhanced. The inefficient working of magic generated, among other things, heat; a clumsy sorcerer might pass out from the heat or (a vile grin) perhaps burst like a grilled sausage, who knew? Nikys wasn’t sure she believed that one, nor, from the look on his face, did Adelis. If the latter were true, Penric temporized, no one had lived to report on it, so proof was hard to come by.
No (a wistful sigh), no sorcerer could shoot fireballs from his or her fingertips. The two men looked equally disappointed at this. “Although I’m a pretty fair hand at shooting flaming arrows,” Penric added. “But that’s archery, not sorcery.”
No, no, no, and through repeated discouragement Penric gently led Adelis away from hypothetical military schemes involving sorcery, or at least this sorcerer.
Nikys wondered how all this negative certainty sat with the god of exceptions and exemptions. Slippery as a fish, indeed.
Her own questions seemed to fall on more fertile ground. Yes, physician-sorcerers were rare. Only the tamest and most domesticated of Temple demons, cultivated over several demon-lives, or rather, the lives of their learned riders, were considered suitable and safe to be paired with an already-trained and skilled physician. Yes, two hundred years was unusually old for any demon. Most new elementals did not last so long in the world, being hurried out of it by a saint of the Bastard’s Order dedicated to the task, or some other accident. The longer a demon survived, the more likely it was to seize ascendance in its rider’s body, and without its rider’s disciplines its fundamental chaos would come to the fore, to disaster all around. Yes, demons took the imprints of their personalities from their human partners, for good or ill. Given some humans, this could turn out very ill indeed, making it quite unfair that it was the demon who suffered instantaneous sundering and utter destruction when its god caught up with it at last.
Nikys wasn’t sure if this last gloss came from Penric or Desdemona, though it was delivered quite fiercely.
As night fell in the rocking coach even the chatty Penric ran down to miserable endurance. Adelis put on his campaign face and went stolid. Nikys drooped.
She and Adelis took turns leaning on each other, napping badly. Penric folded himself this way and that in his seat, each position looking more uncomfortable than the last, finally lifting his legs to prop near the roof, more-or-less bracing himself in place.
She might have brought more comforts if this flight had been planned, conducted in suitable secrecy, instead of forced pell-mell, with pursuit pelting hot. If wishes were horses, we all would ride, the old nursery saw went, and remounts were another thing she was going to be wishing hard for when they reached Skirose.
Where they would be running out of time, money, stamina… everything.
They came to Skirose at the next day’s dusk. Stumbling out of the coach at last, Nikys wondered if Penric had felt anything like this escaping the bottle dungeon. At a cheaper, grubbier inn they found only one room to share, but it offered water to wash with and a flat, unmoving bed to fall into. The innkeeper dragged in a thin, wool-stuffed pallet to lay on the floor. Penric grimaced and casually rid it of crawling, biting wildlife, for good measure passing his hand over the bed. She and Adelis took the bed and Penric took the pallet. Her head was swimming, Penric’s blue eyes were clouded with fatigue, and Adelis’s stolidity was ossifying. Danger or no, a few hours of sleep could no longer be put off.