Which Pen had heard of, yes. Quadrenes must believe they are up to their knees in ghosts. He wondered how offended he should bother to be on behalf of the Bastard, given that the god and His assenting souls danced away together quite beyond the reach of any human chicanery. It was only the living bereaved who were shortchanged. …Or relieved, he supposed.
Coin toss, agreed Des. Even in Quintarian lands.
But Pen was after more particular information. Let them tell what they know.
“She was signed by the fish of the Mother of Summer,” Lencia said at last. “The divine said. On account of her being a mother. But…” She trailed off, guarded.
Seuka, less discreet, announced sturdily, “But that wasn’t what she told us.”
Pen leaned his back against the Bastard’s altar table, the gritty flagstones cool under his haunches, and pretended to be relaxed. “Oh…? And what did she tell you, and when?”
The gloom of the chamber was receding as the sky paled over the dome’s oculus. The two girls looked at each other as if for permission or encouragement, then Lencia said, “She was very feverish.”
Memories were slippery stuff, but some were stickier than others. Pen still remembered unwanted vivid details from his own father’s feverish deathbed, and that was getting on for two decades ago. So he didn’t think it pointless to ask, “What precisely did she say?”
Seuka frowned. “She had Taspeig bring us in. She couldn’t breathe very well.”
Lencia continued, the scene plainly rising behind her pinching eyes, “She said, ‘You’re going to be all right. I’ve been bargaining with my body all my life, why not my soul? I’ve given you into his hands in exchange.’ And then she choked for a while, and Taspeig held her up to drink, and she said, ‘Best coin I’ve ever been offered, from a more reliable client.’ And then she choked some more, and waved her hand, and Taspeig sent us out.”
“We didn’t know she was going to die that night,” said Seuka, gulping a little. “Afterward, I thought she meant one of her regular fellows was going to adopt us. But that didn’t happen.”
“She didn’t say a name,” said Lencia. “Taspeig said she didn’t to her, either.”
It would be strange even for a feverish woman to entrust an oral will to two children who couldn’t possibly effect it. A servant was a barely better witness. The crow-woman appeared to have managed a decent independent life for herself and her children, by the standards of her trade; not the glamor and riches of a high-class courtesan like Mira of Lodi, but not the degradation of the streets, nor even the protection of a brothel at the cost of autonomy. But their own little house had been rented, and there could not have been much else left to them or the girls would have been snapped up by someone in Jokona. And probably stripped of their bequests in short order.
What a bold courtesan! murmured Des, sounding impressed. Even Mira never bargained with a god!
If there’s a coin that moves the gods, I’d like to know it.
You already do. Her soul, of course.
You think she threatened to sunder herself? Pen’s breath drew sharply in. The words hadn’t sounded like a woman in despair, but any soul might deny the gods that much. And some women were known to make fantastically heroic self-sacrifices for their children.
Not at all. I think there was another goddess standing near her bedside, bidding for her. For the Bastard to slip one of his best-beloved out from under the nose of the Mother of Summer at such an auction? He might promise much.
The gods, Pen was reminded yet again, didn’t value people by the same measures people did. The great-souled and the great saints weren’t found only among great men, or even very often so. Of course, the humble were more numerous to start with. Would it be possible to do some sort of holy head-count, and determine if blessedness was evenly distributed? Maybe not; the high were much better recorded than the low. Maybe no merely human eyes were fit to see why the god had so valued this daughter of His.
But in trying to guess why these two sisters seemed so prized that the god of mischance would dump one of his own sorcerers into their hold, maybe Pen had been looking in the wrong direction. Not destiny, but heritage.
An appalled grin threatened to stretch his mouth. What, so the white god has drunk up His chosen soul like a merrymaker at a tavern, and rolled out leaving me to pay His bill?
It was a rude way to think about the gods, but the Bastard could be a very rude god. And, truly, the gods could do nothing in the world of matter except through beings of matter. A doctrinal point Pen had constantly to explain to people trying to pray for good weather or no earthquakes, who never listened, he’d finally decided, because they didn’t want it to be so. The gods did not control the weather. Or the world. Or souls.
But death, oh, they own that.
Pen made the five-fold tally of the gods, touching forehead, mouth, navel, groin, and hand spread over his heart, then raised his fist to tap the back of his thumb twice against his lips—the thumb and the tongue being both the special symbols of the white god, for good or ill depending on one’s beliefs. “Your Jokonan divine lied,” he told the girls. “I think that Jedula of Raspay went into the hands of her white god as heart-high as the betrothed at a wedding feast. And found great comfort there. The rest,” he sighed, “is up to us.”
Pen wasn’t sure if the girls took this in as faith or just as proof he was benignly mad.
But, “Oh,” said Lencia, and Seuka swallowed, looking as near to tears as he’d yet seen her. Was it from their mother that they’d learned not to weep in the face of fear?
Fear is easy. Joy is hard, said Des.
Mm.
Pen levered himself to his feet. His overstrained body had stiffened while he sat, but this listening had been worth it. “I need to find a better place to hide you before people begin stirring. I’ll be back shortly.”
A door in the wall next to the Bastard’s altar led to the back premises. Pen slipped through and found himself under a short colonnade. To the left, a high gate led out. Ahead lay not so much a temple complex as a temple simplex, a typical rectangular stone building around a central court which had its own small fountain, presently dry. Stairs and a wooden gallery served a course of upper rooms.
Residents? Pen asked Des.
Only three right now, upstairs sleeping.
There should have been rather more, even for a small neighborhood temple. Pen took a quick circuit under the gallery. A room for the divine to change his robes, an office and library, a kitchen along the back, refectory, storerooms, a lecture room converted to a lumber room… that last seemed the best bet for a temporary den, or else an unused room upstairs.
Pen returned to the colonnade and checked beyond the gate. A stable for the sacred animals was built against the outer wall, with a low, slanting roof. The old timbers were sturdy and elaborately carved. New repairs were crude. The long shed seemed currently underpopulated, with a pen of chickens, a couple of nanny goats, and a dozing donkey flopped in its straw. The menagerie seemed less hallowed than practical, not that it couldn’t be both.