Penric and the Shaman (Penric & Desdemona Book 2) by Lois McMaster Bujold Read Free Book Online Page A

“Why should I think your advice better?”
    Oddly, Penric didn’t sense that the question was rhetorical. “Because this is my home country, not his? Because why would Inglis, if the man was Inglis, ask all those questions and not pursue the pointers they gained him? Because Inglis, being a stranger here, will try the most easily reached routes first?”
    “ Time ,” said Oswyl, though his teeth.
    “Is it so desperate? He is no less or more trapped by the snow on the passes than he would be by Chillbeck Vale. It’s not as though he’s been leaving a trail of bodies.”
    Oswyl was surprised into a noise that came as close to a laugh, if a black one, as Penric had yet heard from him. “I suppose I should not wish it.”
    An oil lantern hung over the Order’s gates, its yellow light glittering from the snow sifted in between the street’s cobbles. Oswyl motioned Baar ahead of them into the warm, with a clap to his shoulder and a low-voiced, “Well done, man.” But he did not at once follow, and Penric paused with him.
    “As a Temple sensitive, have you ever gone out, or been taken out, to check accusations of hedge sorcery?” Oswyl asked abruptly.
    Penric, curious at this sudden turn in the talk, folded his arms against the night chill and replied, “Three times, when I was at seminary at Rosehall, I was taken along for training. Not for the working of the thing, since any sorcerer recognizes another as readily as I can tell you are a tall man, but to get a grasp on the legalities, which can become complex. For one thing, just because the accused is not a sorcerer, and they almost never are, it doesn’t necessarily mean no crime has been committed, by other means or persons. I did think the false accusations, if the accuser knew them false, to be especially heinous.”
    Oswyl nodded grimly.
    “I’ve not been sent out since I was made court sorcerer, as Tigney has others to call on for such routine duties. But Desdemona, after she became a Temple demon, went with her riders on hundreds of such inquiries, and found a real sorcerer involved, what—”
    Twice .
    “Only twice.”
    “As a locator, I’ve seen the same from the other side,” said Oswyl. “In ten years, only a single case sustained, and the poor man, who’d thought he was going mad, flung himself upon the Temple’s mercy and found it. But one time…”
    He hesitated so long, Penric nearly prodded him with a, But one time…? except that Desdemona quietly advised, Wait .
    Oswyl glowered down the street at nothing, and finally said, “One time, we were laggard on the road. The reasons seemed sufficient—bad weather, a bridge washed out. Howsoever. We arrived at this dismal village out in the country to discover the accused woman had been burned to death by her frenzied neighbors the night before. No sign found that any demon had jumped from her pyre. She was almost certainly innocent, and if we had arrived timely, we could have disposed of the false charges forthwith, and given stern warnings to the slanderers. As it was, we faced the dilemma of trying to charge an entire village with murder. It all broke down in a sickening morass, and in the end… well, no justice was done there, in the Father’s sight or any other.”
    While Penric, taken wholly aback, was still trying to come up with something to acknowledge this that didn’t sound fatuous, Oswyl yanked open the door and made to step within. But as he did he growled over his shoulder, “So I do not like being late.”
    The door thudded shut like the end of an argument.
    After a moment, Penric sighed and reached for the handle. This isn’t going to be so easy, is it?
    The Father’s cases seldom are , noted Desdemona. Else they wouldn’t need Him.
    They rode out of Whippoorwill very early the next morning.

VI

    Twenty-seven .
    Inglis controlled his pained panting, and stropped the knife blade carefully over the shallow cut across his right thigh. When it was well-coated, he set it