Rolling over, he peered one last time down into the watery, deadly well. “You realize,” he wheezed, “that once that ice melts”—which it was already starting to do, and swiftly—“they’re going to have no idea what we just did.”
Desdemona borrowed his mouth for a black laugh that echoed very demonically indeed. He clapped his hand across it, but grinned back.
He was still sprawled wet, barefoot, brimming with hot unshed chaos on the prison floor of a guarded fortress. Alone, on the edge of an unknown country. No idea if it was day or night outside. Not the time to plan a triumphal celebration yet, I don’t think.
Three bottle dungeons lay in a row in this close corridor, the other two thankfully unoccupied, so how special a prisoner had he been? A locked door at one end led, probably, to a guard post. The lock would be easy, the guards perhaps not. He followed the leather hose back the other way to where it issued partway up the wall from a small window, its normal barring unbolted and set aside for the occasion.
“Can we get out this?”
“Maybe. Better chance than the drain. Seems to run about two feet through the wall and open into a window well. I can’t sense what’s beyond that.”
Pen leaned backward, reached through, turned his head sideways, and fitted himself in. A great deal of undignified wriggling later, and he was able to sit up in the outer well without actually snapping his spine. His long legs nearly trapped him, but at the cost of some contusions he managed to extract them without having to break bones. He stood up in the well.
He’d reached a sort of porch overlooking the sea. The stone tank rose nearby, a silent bilge pump standing near; unmanned at this hour, which was night five gods be thanked. He’d feared the sudden sunlight might have blinded him as effectively as the black below.
Something scuttled along the edge of the porch, and then exploded with a pop.
He’d not seen a rat do that before. Quieter, Des!
Hurts, she complained. Also, how many times have I sat in the latrine with you sick when—
Even after a decade, she could still make him blush. Howsoever. How do we get out of this place?
Your job now.
The obvious way out was to slip over the wall, swim quietly around to the harbor in the dark, and creep up over one of the jetties.
They stared down at the black, lapping sea with equal disfavor.
“No help for it,” said Des at last, “unless you want to go back to the bottle dungeon. Carry on.”
Penric sighed and climbed down into the foam-laced waters.
An hour later, salt-crusted and footsore, Penric sat in a stone laundry trough that drained a modest marble fountain, sited in a square fronting a middle-sized temple. He’d drunk his fill of blessedly clean water, and now faced the next task. He tried not to think about the several harbor rats and a luckless sleepy seagull they’d sacrificed in their wake down at the shore; Des, calmer, seemed back to visiting chaos only on less theologically questionable insects. One couldn’t call it necromancy, exactly…
Lie back, said Des, in her practical Ruchia-voice, and I’ll get rid of your hair dye.
“Really?”
They’ll be looking for a brown-haired escapee. Also, your blond roots are growing out. It will be easier to lift the stain altogether than to try to work it around to match.
He decided to take her word, and besides, the fresh water was something very like a bath. He would have preferred to burn his prison-reeking shirt and trousers, but until he could replace them, this impromptu laundering would have to do.
So it was, after almost falling asleep in the trough, that he sloshed up and squeezed out his hair, letting it fall down his back—the ribbon for his queue was long lost. Not much time left till first light and people about, he gauged. He left a trail of wet footprints to the shadowed temple portico. Opening a simple lock was so routine by now that he didn’t even pause in swinging the tall door ajar and slipping within. After that, it was rather like going shopping in the marketplace. In reverse.
The layout within was similar to home, with altar niches spaced around the walls and a central plinth for the holy fire, banked to coals for the night. Timber-built temples in the cantons boasted fine woodcarvings; here, the plastered stone walls were graced with frescos, their subjects ambiguous in the shadows, and mosaic tiles enlivened the floor. This was a neighborhood temple, he judged, serving the folk in the immediate vicinity, not so large or so well-guarded as the main provincial temple atop some higher hill. Nor so wealthy, alas. He found the Bastard’s niche, perfunctorily signed himself, and checked the altar table for offerings. Swept bare for the night, unfortunately.
But this was the sort of prudent place that featured locked offering boxes in each niche. He flipped this one open and peered within. If it, too, had been emptied for the night…
A scant scattering of coins and other oddments lay within. His long fingers rapidly picked out the coins and left the less identifiable prayers, such as a coil of hair.
He contemplated his meager take. “The white god must not be much loved here. Or much feared.”
“You wouldn’t accept any of my suggestions for targets through town.”
“Stealing from the poor is inefficient, and stealing from the rich is dangerous. Anyway, this isn’t stealing. It’s just… collecting my pay more directly than usual.”
Des snickered. “I didn’t think the Cedonian and Adriac Temples practiced such reciprocity.”
“Same god.” He’d known from the beginning that he served his god first, and the Temple second. So far, he’d not found them often in conflict, and prayed it would stay that way.
Slowly, he circled the chamber. His hand hovered over the box at the Mother of Summer’s altar, but then passed on. While he’d no doubt She would not begrudge a loan to her second Son’s divine, Pen had refused Her his oath back in Martensbridge; it felt, if nothing else, rude to ask for Her aid now. He’d abandoned service to the Son of Autumn years ago, and the Daughter of Spring had never been his goddess. He finally stopped before the Father’s altar.
“Pen,” said Des uneasily. “Nobody steals from the god of justice.”
“Borrows,” he corrected. “I expect my collateral is good here. Maybe Locator Oswyl would vouch for me.” He smiled to remember his friend back in Easthome, the most earnest devotee of the Father of Winter he’d ever encountered. He flipped open the box and raised his brows. “Goodness me.”
“Somebody must be anxious for their lawsuit,” Des suggested.
“Possibly both sides. Though trying to bribe the god of justice seems missing the point.” Or he supposed some poor—evidently not-so-poor—call it distraught man might be praying for a child, or for ease for a dying father. He signed himself and bowed his head in any case. I shall try to use it well, Sir.
He doubled back to collect the cloth from the Bastard’s altar to carry it all in, relocked all the boxes, and slid back out to the portico, closing the door quietly. Sky and sea were growing a strange clear gray. He could hear the clop of a donkey and creak of a cart, and, from open widows roseate with lamplight, people stirring and pots rattling.
Find a used-clothing vendor, find a cheap inn, find a breakfast that did not include dried fish; after that…