Penric's Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold Read Free Book Online

have them.”
    Tigney cast him a sharp look. “Not opened, I trust?”
    “No, sir,” said Trinker fervently. “She was a sorceress, after all. We didn’t dare.”
    Tigney’s posture of relief was short-lived; he tensed again. “But—what happened to her demon? Did it go to her god with her, then?”
    “Uh, no.” He nodded toward Pen.
    Tigney’s head whipped around. Pen offered a weak smile and a little wave of his fingers. “Here, sir. I’m afraid.”
    “Who . . . ?” Tigney gave him a long, pole-axed stare. “You had better come inside.”
    He told off the porter to take Ruchia’s things to his chambers, which resulted in a bustle of unloading from the packsaddle into the hall, then sent him off with Gans and Wilrom to deliver the horses to some nearby mews that kept a place for Temple beasts.
    “This way.” He led Penric and Trinker up one flight to a small, well-lit room overlooking the street. Seeming a cross between a scholar’s study and a counting house, it held a table cluttered with papers and writing tools, a scattering of chairs, and some jammed shelves. Pen eyed them and wondered why a divine of the Bastard should have twenty or so courier dispatch cases lined up.
    Tigney scrubbed his hand through his beard and gestured them to sit. “And you are . . . ?” he continued to Pen.
    “Penric kin Jurald of Jurald Court, near Greenwell Town, sir.” He wondered if he was obliged to introduce Desdemona. “My eldest brother Rolsch is lord of that valley.”
    “How came you to—no. Begin at the beginning, or there will be no making head nor tail of things.” He turned to Trinker, and efficiently extracted an account of his doings from the time he was assigned to escort the divine at Liest until the disaster at Greenwell. The party seemed to have traveled rather more slowly than with Pen.
    “But why were you on that road at all?” asked Tigney, a plaintive note in his voice. “It’s not the most direct route from Liest to Martensbridge.”
    Trinker shrugged. “I know, sir. The divine told us to go that way.”
    “Why?”
    “She said she’d shuttled back and forth from Liest to Martensbridge on the main road three dozen times in her life, and wanted a change of scene.”
    “Did she say anything else about why she chose that course? Or was it just caprice? Any hint or strange comment?”
    “No, sir . . . ?”
    Tigney’s lips twisted, taking this in, but then he blew out his breath and went on. “There was a woman servant, you say? But then why didn’t—where is she?”
    “Went back to Liest, sir. The Greenwell divine took her sworn deposition, first. Should it go to you?”
    “Yes, for my sins.”
    Trinker pulled out this document and handed it across; Tigney unsealed and read it, his frown deepening, then set it aside with an unsatisfied sigh.
    Pen ventured, “Learned, do you know of these things? Sorcerers, and demons and . . . things?”
    Tigney began to speak, but then turned his head at a knock on the door. It proved to be Wilrom and Gans, delivered back. With all the witnesses present, the divine turned to their accounts of Ruchia’s death, each offered with slightly different details but clearly congruent. Pen thought Gans’s description of him “flopped over as gray and limp as a dead eel,” was unduly blunt. Tigney collected Pen’s own testimony last: final words, purple flashes, and mysterious voices dutifully not left out, even though it made everyone stare at him in alarm except his interrogator, who seemed to take them as a matter of course.
    Tigney then asked an intent string of questions ascertaining that there was no way Pen or anyone else at Jurald Court could ever have met Ruchia before, or known about her in any way, before the chance meeting on the road. The divine compressed his lips and turned to Pen once more.
    “Since you awoke from that long swoon, have you felt or experienced anything unusual? Anything at all.”
    “I had a very bad