Pen hunkered down by the distressed men’s heads. “The poison won’t kill you,” he told them. “You won’t need an antidote. You’ll just need to wait out the sick. It will help to lie very still with your eyes closed.” He added after an inspired moment, “And don’t try to talk or cry out. That would make it worse.”
Ungrateful glares, fair enough.
Pen considered, doubtfully, the inadvisability of gagging a vomiting person versus the risks of their shouting for help. Of course, the only people in the building who could hear them were Pen’s fellow prisoners still sleeping upstairs. If any woke, and came down, would they be foolish enough to untie the guards? He wanted at least till sunup for a lead-time. Maybe leave a note?
Just go, snapped Des.
Pen nodded and started to shepherd the girls to the back door, the bolt quietly shearing off beneath his concealing hand. At the last moment, he darted back to kneel over the younger guard.
“You really need to get yourself off this dreadful island while you still can,” he advised the youth, while helping himself to his sandals and donning them. Pen’s long toes stuck out over the soles, but the other guard’s boots were even shorter. “Before the life here ruins you. Adria would do. Go to Lodi, and present yourself to my friend Learned Iserne in the curia of the archdivine. Tell her Penric recommended you. She can find you some decent work that doesn’t rest on theft, kidnapping, murder and rapine.”
A pie-eyed groan was his only reply. Pen patted the young fellow encouragingly on the shoulder and hurried out after the Corva girls.
Wary of taking a wrong turn in the narrow, crooked streets of Lanti, Pen hugged the harbor shore. The sisters kept a good grip on him. Very few lights relieved the darkness: a mere slice of setting moon, and the lanterns glimmering above the doors of a scattering of inns or brothels that faced the waters. A pair of drunken men making their way home paid them no heed at all. The night air was cool and moist, thick with the dubious smells of the port, fish and salt and tar and dung.
As he led the girls around occasional piles of drying nets and other boat gear, Penric meditated upon rats. Quite by chance, he had lately hit upon a way of brushing light chaos across one spot in the backs of their little rat brains that had dropped them into deep sleep instead of killing them. Sometimes he could repeat the effect. Sometimes the poor creatures just died. Helvia, one of the two prior physician-sorceresses who had possessed Des, had failed to see the value of producing well-slept rats, but Amberein, the other, had been intrigued. She had once treated, with indifferent success, a man who had been brought to her afflicted with sudden, uncontrolled sleeping. That the two effects shared a cause, making the trick extendable to humans, was a plausible guess.
When he reached home again, he must cultivate some Vilnoc knacker to let him experiment on his stock of larger beasts. Because if Pen could work out how to do that to people without killing them, it might replace his cruder and more painful tricks, more reliably.
And then practice, because chances were that enemies wouldn’t agreeably hold still while he felt their heads, one by one. More likely he’d find himself facing a whole gang of rowdies trying to murder him, and, thus, jumping about erratically. …The alternative of never leaving his house and Nikys again seemed ever-more-attractive.
Meanwhile, he supposed he had better go back to his proven standby of roughing up the big sciatic or axillary nerves, inducing pain so excruciating that the victim could not move. And if he misjudged the force and snapped a nerve, at least it would only cripple, not kill.
The whisper—and not from Des—that some men deserved death, he did his best to ignore. Even as a learned divine, it was not his place to judge men’s souls. The gods in Their time would do so without fail, and with much fuller knowledge.
Lencia, whose face had been tight since they’d left the ransom house, finally asked, “What did you do to those men?”
“Drugged their olives,” Pen offered. He added after a fraught silence, “Not ours, of course.” He trusted that questions like how? and when? would take further reflection that no one would have time for. You didn’t witness magic, no, of course not.
“Oh.”
The bulk of the slave prison loomed at last. Pen led the girls into the nearest side street till he found a niche between two houses, and tucked them into it.
“Lie up here and wait till I come back,” he murmured. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take. But if it works, you’ll see some activity starting on the pier.”
“What if you don’t come back?” whispered Seuka.
“If I haven’t returned for you by daylight… sneak back to the ransom house. At least they’ll feed you there.”
Doubtful silence greeted this. He ruffled each of their heads, mute goodwill in lieu of lies, and slipped away into the darkness.
Now it grew tricky, as he’d need to scout and act in the same pass. He began by circling the building, one hand tracing the scabrous stucco, all Des’s senses extended. Old ghosts were common in old buildings, sundered souls drifting down into oblivion, but this place seemed to harbor more than its share. He brushed his hand, pointlessly, at one vague shape that pulsed in front of his face like some smoky jellyfish. It had dwindled far past the point of being able to assent to any god; Pen had no means canny or uncanny to affect it. And vice versa, he supposed. Yes, agreed Des, so best attend to what we can do something about.
On the prison wall above, a few high, iron-barred windows would be susceptible to rusting the rods. At the back, steps led down in shadows to a heavy door with a sturdy lock and a wooden bar, which likely gave onto whatever holding cells lay within. Pen silently unlocked it, unshipped the bar from its clamps, and set it aside, just in case. A higher section of the building, jutting out parallel to the shore, might house administrative offices, unpeopled now. Pen edged around it to the main front door facing the sea and the pier a hundred paces off, where the prize ship creaked sleepily in the lapping of the harbor waves.
Rather more than the thirty sailors Pen had seen enter earlier lay inside; perhaps forty? Residue of an earlier catch? Most dozing, some awake and in pain, none happy. The front doors, also reached by a few steps down, were double, of iron-bound oak so old it might have been iron itself. All susceptible to the three kinds of fire at Pen’s command: rot, rust, and flame. But the ornate iron lock was presently unlatched. Pen lifted the handle quietly and slipped inside.
No vestibule; the door opened directly onto a wide front room. To his right was an archway and stairs up to the record-keeping section. Directedly ahead lay a locked, barred door to the prison proper. To his left, four men sat around a table under the light of an oil lantern suspended from a roof beam. Passing the dull night playing cards, plainly. Pen blinked his dark-accustomed eyes at the yellow glare.
They twisted around on their stools at his entry, curious but unalarmed when they saw he was alone. The wine carafe seemed mainly there to make their water safer to drink, because they did not look in the least inebriated. One fellow was older, stringy and grizzled. Two were big rowdies. A fourth was a skinny youth. Sergeant, muscle, and runner, Pen pegged them.
Without the girls to safeguard from sudden violence, this time Pen wasn’t stopping to chat.
The sergeant had barely laid his cards face-down upon the table and opened his mouth as Pen began to methodically disable the squad. The muscle-men appeared the most alarming, but Pen thought the runner, who could race for reinforcements, was his greatest hazard. One, two, three, four around the table Pen blasted each sciatic nerve with strong chaos, barely short of a severing. He was halfway around again for the work on the opposite legs before the sergeant, rising with a frown, yelped and stumbled to his knees. While the rest attempted to leap up but instead discovered the sabotage coming from their own limbs, Pen made a third pass, stinging the big nerves to their tongues. It wouldn’t silence them altogether, but it would certainly muffle their pained noises.