THE ORPHANS OF RASPAY
A Penric & Desdemona novella
in the World of the Five Gods
Lois McMaster Bujold
Copyright (c) 2019 by Lois McMaster Bujold
Cover art and design by Ron Miller
Map by Ron Miller, Carol Collins, Karen Hunt, and Lois Bujold
THE ORPHANS OF RASPAY
The sickening crunch threw Penric out of his coffin-sized bunk and onto the deck of his scarcely larger cabin, and from deep sleep into frantically confused consciousness in the same moment. Blackness all around him; he called up his dark-sight from his demon Desdemona without thought, though there was nothing new to see in this narrow space. Everything that could move had been tied down in the last day, as the ship had pitched and rolled its way through an unexpected tempest that had blown them, well, he hoped the crew knew where, because he certainly did not.
The horrible motions and the groaning of the ship’s timbers had tamed, which explained how he’d finally fallen asleep despite his nausea and alarm. It did not explain the shouts and cries coming from outside, in a more terrified tenor than the workmanlike bellows of the crew manhandling the ship through the storm. Had they run onto rocks?
Des, what’s happening out there?
Her reply was terse. Pirates.
In the middle of the night? …How could two ships even find each other in such murk?
It’s morning, she replied. Apart from that, unhappy chance, I expect.
Pirates were a known hazard all along the coasts and islands, but more to the north than the south where Pen’s ship should have been, just a day or two out from Vilnoc and home. Curse it, he wanted to be there. Not dealing with this.
He was a Temple sorcerer, possessing the most potent chaos demon he knew of. Long before he’d stepped aboard this modest cargo carrier in Trigonie, he had imagined any number of clever magical defenses against such evil attacks, subtle enough not to reveal his nature and calling to the men on either vessel. He now realized that he had always pictured pirates happening on a bright afternoon, in quiet seas, with a good long time to see the villains coming.
Sorcerers, and the chaos demons that gave them their powers, were considered bad luck on a ship, and many captains would not take them aboard at all. Mild-mannered Temple scholar or no, Penric thus routinely traveled incognito when he was forced to take a sea passage. Pirates, he expected, would give even shorter shrift to the hazard of him: roughly the distance from the thwart to the heaving water.
Oh, yes, agreed Des grimly. Who, with her two centuries of experiences, knew the risks firsthand. Pen fought against the panicked memories flooding his mind from one of her unluckier prior possessors. He had plenty of current panic on his plate to attend to.
Because mixed among the voices crying in Adriac and Cedonian out there, he heard shouts in Roknari. Pen rubbed his sleep-numbed face and scrambled up, listening harder.
No seamen loved sorcerers, but the Roknari heretics, who abjured the fifth god Whom Penric served as a seminary-trained divine, considered all who worshipped Him an abomination, to be either forcibly converted to their foursquare faith, or inventively executed. Not that Pen worshipped his god exactly; their relationship was more complicated than that. Pirates, Pen tried to encourage himself, were unlikely to be passionate about the fine points of theology. On the other hand, they were a superstitious lot. If there was anything more likely than his sorcery to result in him being summarily tossed overboard, with or without torture first—
Attempted torture, Des put in with a snarl.
—it was certainly Pen’s calling as a divine of the white god. Both of which would be revealed by his possessions: the garb of his Order, his Temple braids, the letters and documents he carried, all packed away tight in a sealed chest stuffed under his bunk. Plus the three ancient scrolls he’d picked up in Trigonie, which he hadn’t even had a chance to read through yet, let alone translate, of which pirates were unlikely to recognize the value at all. He shuddered.
Turning, he knocked open the tiny port at the back of his cabin in the stern of the ship, admitting a leaden illumination. He didn’t think his shoulders would squeeze through, nor had he the least desire to anticipate their assailants’ murderous actions by throwing himself overboard, but, holding his wooden case up to the aperture, he thought it just might fit. Still he hesitated.
Des, impatiently, ran a line of hot disorder around under the lid, sealing it more firmly. It’s more likely to float than we are. Get rid of it.
Thuds like sledgehammer blows against his locked door made him flinch and shove it through. Lord god Bastard, Fifth and White, if ever you loved me, let this find me again somehow. More prayer than spell, surely. Too much noise to hear a splash, though the cries out on the ship were dying away.
Who had won? was a question answered by the brutish banging. As the door burst inward he turned and fell to his knees, something between supplication, surrender, and the thought that if the pirate came in swinging, his aim would be too high.
Pen blinked in the dingy gray light framing the hammerer’s broad shoulders, and reminded himself that he could see out better than the man could see in. Confirmed at once when the pirate said, in a voice of surprise, “A woman?”
For once, Penric did not rush to correct this annoying misapprehension, though Des muttered, Being female’s not as much help as you’d think. Electrum hair shining in a mussed queue, blue eyes, fine features, a lean build that might at a glance be mistaken for slender; the error had been made before. His pale coloration, common in the mountainous cantons where he’d been born, was rare here in the lands of Cedonia, Adria, and the Carpagamon islands surrounding this sea. In any case, the man did not at once try to bash in his blond head.
Which allowed Pen time to fling up his convincingly ink-stained hands and cry in common Adriac, “I’m a scribe!” The Don’t hurt me, I’m valuable! And harmless! was implied, if the fellow wasn’t too drunk on violence to care.
If he was, Pen readied a disabling attack on his nerves, regretting, not for the first time, the theological, no, divine proscription upon using Des’s magic to kill. Directly. Not that it would help much even if Pen could slay them all, because then what? He was lost on the sea in a ship no single man, even a trained sailor, could manage by himself. If only he could stay alive until they reached some shore, although preferably not in the Roknar Archipelago, it would be a different tale.
…What a strange moment he had come to that he was wishing for slavers.
The hammer man grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him through the cabin door and out onto the still-rolling deck, though waves were no longer washing up on it. As his knees scraped the boards, Pen was glad he’d worn tunic and trousers to bed, though he was sorry his feet were bare. The gloom of his cabin gave way to a steely dawn, the ashy lid of the clouds, directionless, matched by the slate of the sea. A second fellow leaned around his comrade to stare at their catch.
“No, it’s a man,” the door-breaker corrected himself, in a tone of disappointment. Pen kept his beseeching hands raised, hoping this discovery wouldn’t just result in the hammer swinging around for a blow. “Of a sort.”