As their steps echoed away, Iserne turned back to the entry hall, scrubbing her hands over her face as if to drive out numbness.
“Two hours ago,” she told Penric, “I was going out of my mind trying to imagine how I was going to write my husband with the news of the death of our only son. This… I have no idea how I’m going to write this.”
“Where is Ser Richelon?” Pen inquired.
“He travels every year up to the foot of the mountains to deal for timber. We supply some instrument and cabinet makers here in Lodi who have very particular needs. He usually goes later in the summer, but this year is the first that he let Ree take the spring convoy to Cedonia alone.” She swallowed distress.
“I think you can safely put off that task till tomorrow,” Pen said. “You should have more news by then. Better news, maybe.” Risky promise.
“I suppose so.” Iserne straightened and exhaled, her eye falling on a pile of objects dropped at the side of the hallway: several cases, a poniard in a tooled scabbard, and some loose clothing. “I could go through these and put them away while I wait. I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway.”
“That was everything Ree left in our cabin,” Merin told her. “It all fit on the one cart. Your husband’s cargo is still aboard the ship, as there was no one to receive it. It will just have to wait there, since all the stevedores have gone off for the holiday by now, but I’ll take on that task for you the day after tomorrow, if you wish.”
Frowning, she waved away this offer. “I’ll send Ripol’s clerk.”
Ripol? Merchant husband’s first name, Pen decided.
She doesn’t favor this fellow Merin, Des observed.
A case of beheading the messenger?
Perhaps…
Iserne poked at the pile of cases with a tentative toe, possibly considering how much more painful her unpacking would be if their owner had been dead. Pen renewed his resolve to prevent that from becoming so.
“As far as I know,” said Merin, “all of Ree’s documents and letters of credit from the voyage are safe in there. I’m afraid his purse and money belt were on him when he went over the side. We didn’t see either among his other things, later. I thought the belt had dragged him under—he’d had a very successful trip.”
Neither item had been in the sad damp pile in the storage room, either, though sticky hands among those that had drawn Ree from the sea and delivered him to the hospice could have taken toll.
“Thank the gods he’d had the sense to drop it, rather than drown trying to keep it!” Iserne said fervently. “Just the sort of thing idiot brave boys attempt.”
Merin offered a crooked smile. “I think my employer would have chastised me roundly for that.”
“Hah.” The maternal scorn in that syllable could have weighted a cudgel. “More fool he, since he’d have had neither money nor agent, after.”
Since Iserne was as anxious as Penric for them to hurry the search, their farewells were brief.
“Blessed Chio.” Iserne offered a clumsy curtsey; her supplication could not have been made more plain if she’d fallen to her knees. “The hope of my heart and house is in your god’s hands tonight.”
“It cannot be misplaced there, Learned.” Gravely, Chio pulled her mask altogether off and returned her a full formal blessing, with the extra tap of the back of her thumb to her lips. It was the first trained gesture of their Order Pen had witnessed the girl make—Chio might have been as feral as a young elemental for all that Pen had seen heretofore.
Her face, as they descended the steps to the street again, had shed all its earlier merriment. She drew her mask back on, tightening the ties, as Merin raised his lantern and turned his head back and forth.
“Which way?”
Pen grunted. “I was hoping you might have some ideas. This wild demon, though ascendant, knew nothing of Lodi, so all the local navigation must be coming from Ree. Asking Where would Ree go when in his right mind? is probably not useful, but where would a man like him, or you, think to hide if he was in terror for his life?”
Merin blew out his breath. “Gods, what a question.” The lantern sank to his side as he cogitated. “Lodi has a thousand alleys, all with corners and cubbies, and then there are all the interiors. Even if you stick to those that are unpeopled this time of night—shops and workshops, warehouses, government offices—probably not them—the central islands are circled by docks and wharves, and then there are all the outlying islands. This seems an impossible hunt.”
“Not entirely. I only need to come within about a hundred paces of the demon to sense it, regardless of what walls or alleys or canals lie between.” A sharp spike, somewhere in this buffeting phantasmagoria of the town’s souls.
“How…” began Merin. “Never mind. But I don’t quite understand what you do if we do find him.”
Penric shrugged. “Hold Ree down as best I can without doing him injury, then let Blessed Chio call on our god. It should be a quick operation at that point.” I pray.
“Will he be all right after that?”
“Exhausted, I’m sure.” And grateful, Pen trusted. Un-Madboy had better be, after all this chase. “But then we can deliver him home and let Iserne take care of the rest.”
“I see. I think.” Merin frowned. “It sounds as if Ree was hard-battered by his ordeal in the sea. And the gods know what misadventures he’s met since he escaped from the hospice. What happens if he dies before the saint can release him?”
“A greater mess than ever. I mean, over and above what the dying part would do to his family. Because the demon would jump to the closest other person it could reach, and we’d have the whole search to do over again, with even less information.”
“But not to you? Or to Blessed Chio?” He made a newly nervy half-bow at the girl. “You’d need to be close for this, wouldn’t you?”
“We’re already occupied. Not sorcerers, not saints, not Wealdean shamans, though I wouldn’t expect to encounter any of those in Lodi.” Wealdean merchants, yes. “Anyone else in proximity would be at risk.” Merin, for example. Really, the man was very much in the way.
“That… sounds really bad. Unless someone wanted a demon, I expect.” His glance lingered, wondering, on Pen’s shoulder braids.
“No one would want this demon,” Pen assured him. “Most certainly not the Temple. Even though it would then be taking an imprint of Ree’s memories with it overtop, it’s still far too crazed to be tamed for any use.”
Merin looked properly aghast, thinking this through. “Wait. It would remember Ree?”
“The next person it jumped to would. Think of it as like having the ghosts of all its prior possessors haunt your head, although that isn’t theologically precise.” He added, “And talking to you.”
You needn’t sound so put-upon, sniffed Des. You enjoy our company.
You still took some getting used to. The ten of you.
“Do these ghosts remember their deaths?”
“Vividly.”
Merin’s shoulders twitched in a cringe. “That sounds horrifying.”
“One grows used to it.”
His thick brows drew in. “Why don’t demons go on forever?”
“Saints. And other accidents. There is attrition. Fortunately, or we’d all be up to our necks in them.” Instead of just my neck. “That said, some can live a very long time, if they’re carefully husbanded by my Order. My demon Desdemona is over two hundred years old.”