“Father’s balls and Mother’s tits,” the second man swore, rudely. In Adriac, they were both speaking an island dialect of Adriac, so where had those Roknari shouts come from? Penric’s own ship’s crew had mostly spoken Cedonian, and he wasn’t hearing them anymore. “If that skinny arse was ten years younger, it’d fetch a fortune.”
Twenty years, Pen thought irritably. It didn’t take much of a stretch to manage an authentic quaver: “Spare my hands!” Along with eyesight, hands were a scribe’s main tool and value. He wasn’t going to even suggest his eyes.
“Hah. Behave, or we’ll cut ‘em off,” the hammer man threatened, fulfilling Pen’s assessment. He bent and undid Pen’s belt, shoved the belt-knife sheath into his own trouser band, and efficiently used the leather strap to hitch Pen’s wrists painfully behind his back. Pen barely mourned the loss of the knife, slim and sharp more for mending quills than sticking into people. Stripped naked, he’d still be the least disarmed man on this vessel.
Vessels, he emended, finally getting a chance to look around.
The pirate ship was smaller and slimmer than the cargo coaster, jammed up with its starboard bow grappled to the coaster’s midships. One mast to their two, yet probably faster, given that most of the coaster’s sails were lashed down to deal with the storm, its hull lumbering with a bulk lading of timber and cheap ceramics. Their attacker wasn’t a military oarship, anyway, nor some government-appointed privateer. It had the grubby look of a typical all-trades Carpagamon-islands build, suitable for a bit of fishing, a bit of transport… a bit of opportunistic theft and lucrative kidnapping. Not the sort of arrogant venture that seized valuables from some rich merchanter, then sank the target and its passengers to be done with the trouble. Granted, such ships were much better defended. Pen found himself hoping for more-frugal pirates.
Still-wet blood smeared the damp deck here and there, but no dead bodies. Valueless corpses already stripped and tossed overboard? Up at the bow, the survivors of the crew, which by Des’s headcount and to Pen’s relief seemed to be most of them, were being shoved together and secured by a larger and presumably more vicious group of attackers.
His census was not done. Pen sighed inwardly and thought, Des, Sight.
A couple of fresh ghosts, still bearing the crisp if colorless forms of life and agitated by their deaths, whirled around the deck. Pen could not tell which sides they had been on. He mentally readied a prayer for their succor, though even as he watched one was drawn up and away to the Elsewhere by its god—the Father, Pen judged by a wintry tinge that he almost expected to trail a gust of snow in the damp, warm air. The other spirit seemed more lost.
The Bastard was, among many other things, the god of leftovers, last home to all the souls that no other of the Five would take. Criminals, executioners, orphans, whores, bastards, sorcerers, some artists and musicians, those with odd loves, and, yes, pirates. (On the whole, Pen much preferred to deal with prostitutes, with whom he got along fine.) Theologically, a divine of the Bastard was obliged to care for them all. He didn’t have to like them all, fortunately. Just fulfill his duties to them, if no one else could.
The dead could be sundered from the gods in two—no, three ways. A soul might refuse the union, through fear or hate or despair. Rarely, a soul might be so rank and spoiled from the sins of its life that even the Bastard wouldn’t take it. Or a soul might become mazed in that brief liminal space between life and the life beyond: looking back too hard to look forward, disoriented and confused, or trapped by uncanny events—Penric had untangled a few of those, memorably.
There was nothing especially uncanny about this darting ghost. He seemed to be a bandy-legged youth, late teens or early twenties, wearing the memory of the clothes he’d just died in: a sailor’s trousers and tunic that might have come from either crew. It was disorientation and despair that mired him here, in Pen’s reasonably practiced diagnosis.
Pen was already on his knees, though his hands, tied behind his back, could not sign the tally of the gods. He could tap his fingers to his thumb, and did, mutely naming a deity for each digit. He dared not speak the prayers for the dead aloud, revealing his calling to his captors. But such eulogies were mainly for mourners. Silent speech would do for the gods. And for the dead.
The ghost drew near as he began to unwind the words in his head, his tongue moving behind closed lips. More a warm-up than anything else yet, till he could guess what this snag was. The boy just looked bewildered. Pen switched from Adriac to the Cedonian language and started again. Still no dice. The boy’s attention tightened as it dawned on him that Pen was the only person here who could see him. Though Pen could not hear him; the bodiless mouth pushed no sounds through the air. But its shapings gave Pen the clue he sought.
Pen switched to Roknari. His Roknari accent was a little archaic, Des had informed him, though intelligible to those commanding either the high or the vile versions of the language. Ah. He’s a Roknari Quadrene. Refused by the Father of Winter or the Son of Autumn, the preferred and expected gods, so presumably one of the pirates. What are you? the boy’s wide eyes cried, taking in the peculiar spiritual aura of the blond stranger who held a demon. Which with Des, Pen knew, likely looked fathoms deep.
“If you were going to hold to your foursquare faith,” Pen found himself whispering aloud, “you should have picked a different line of work. Or the other way around. Too late now. The white god invites you—though not for long.”
Pen could feel, though not see, never see, that huge Presence, somewhere on the other side of the air. So could Des, for she retreated within him, muttering, I wish at least you wouldn’t bait Them.
Not my doing, Des. Death opened a door to the gods as nothing else could—except for saints, Pen supposed, which he certainly was not. The gods in turn were the only force that could destroy chaos demons, once they had anchored themselves in some living being, hence Des’s swallowed fear.
Sometimes, Des, I actually have to do the job I vowed to do. Though not for the Temple.
Yes, yes… she grumbled, but—valiantly, Pen thought—held her powers available to him in the teeth of this divine gale. She had grown worlds better at this in the thirteen years he’d held her. Confident in his protection?
“It will be all right,” Pen told the boy, on exactly no evidence. Pen wasn’t sure if staring fiercely at people until they believed him was a skill of divines or of dissemblers, or if there was a difference. Point was, someone who’d let other people tell him what to think all his young life might need permission to change even at the last gasp. And this one wasn’t going to get more chances now to grow into his gods, was he? “It will be very well. Five gods bless you on your journey.”
Do they? the distraught boy mouthed.
“Yes,” said Pen. “Though only one holds out His hand, I promise His grip is sure, and will not drop you into any imagined hell.”
Into strangeness, yes; Pen had seen hints enough of the strangeness of the world on the other side of reality. One of his seminary masters had argued that it was as impossible to truly grasp as for a child still in the womb to imagine its breathing life beyond the pains of birth. Pen still meditated occasionally and uneasily on that metaphor.