“There was one other task for the forest mages. That was to bring back the souls of their slain spirit-warrior comrades from the battlefield, to undergo certain cleansing rites necessary for them to go to the gods. To prevent them from being sundered and lost.”
“I’ve read a little of that,” said Penric. “Those were the banner-carriers, right? As ghosts are sometimes bound to a place, they would bind them to their banners, to carry away to safety. That was real?”
“I… maybe. The thing is…” Oswyl hesitated. “As signed or, more correctly, not signed by his funeral miracle, Tollin was taken up by no god. He might have refused the gods out of despair, or been refused by them, and been sundered. Doomed to dissolution as a fading ghost. Or worse, involuntarily polluted by some incomplete rite, prevented from reaching his god reaching for him.” Oswyl grimaced at this sacrilege.
Pen had to agree with that sentiment. To murder a man was a crime. To deliberately sunder his soul from the gods, stealing not a life but that mysterious, eternal afterlife, was sin of the darkest, cruelest sort, a theft of unfathomable enormity.
“I requested a Temple sensitive to search the estate for any evidence of his lingering ghost. She found nothing. Well, not nothing, there were a few sad revenants faded beyond recognition, dozens or hundreds of years old. But the distraught sundered ghost of a freshly murdered man should have been livid in her Sight, she said. Tollin’s soul simply was not there.”
Oswyl drew a long breath. “As Inglis took nothing on his flight that he did not own, he is not accused of theft. I think that belief may be… mistaken.”
Penric’s jaw unhinged. “You think the man stole a ghost?”
Or should that be abducted? Ravished away? Taken hostage? This crime was going to need a whole new law devised to cover it. Just the sort of hair-splitting argument the Father’s Order reveled in, Pen supposed.
Hang the Father’s Order, murmured Des in new alarm. There will be more fearsome Powers than the gray company with an interest in this pilferage…
The princess-archdivine, too, was staring in amazement at the tight-lipped locator. Had he not ventured quite so far in his prior testimony to her? He stirred uncomfortably, making a truncated wave as if to distance himself from his own deduction, but then that hand clenched closed. “None of my superiors think so. But I do.”
III
To Oswyl’s relief, the princess-archdivine took his tale seriously enough to gift him with both the loan of her court sorcerer, and of a small troop of her palace guards, local men of the Daughter’s Order whose calling was to protect Temple property and pilgrims. To his frustration, the expanded party was not readied until the morning.
He’d used the time as well as he could, canvassing the lower town across the Linnet River where merchants and caravans stopped, and where the inns, taverns, smithies, saddlers, liveries, and other businesses catering to the trade of travelers were congregated. The docks and quays servicing the lake traffic were growing quieter with the advancing season, although the lake had not yet frozen over. But in neither venue was he able to unearth any sure report of a lone traveler matching his quarry’s description.
The laggard winter sun was rising gray and gold as they cleared the town gates and at last took to the main road north, skirting the lake’s western margin. It had stopped snowing, leaving no more than a finger’s width of dirty white trampled on the half-frozen ruts. As the town fell behind and the long valley lake widened, Oswyl stared across doubtfully at the farther shore, dark against the dawn. All farm tracks and rugged scrubland climbing the heights on that side, he’d been told, a route unlikely to be chosen by a fugitive in a hurry. But what about a fugitive wishing to hide? For all that this realm had looked small on a map, it seemed much more spacious on the ground.
No, take it logically; search the most likely possibilities first, then the lesser. He stared between his horse’s bobbing ears, and tried not to feel so tired.
Turning in his saddle, he checked their outriders, a sergeant-at-arms and four men, all looking sturdy enough bundled against the cold, then glanced aside at his new sorcerer. At least this one rode better than the last one, who had been a town-bred man of considerable seniority but also age and girth. This Penric looked a lean youth, with fine blond hair now tied back in a braid at his nape, and deep blue eyes whose cheer, at this hour, Oswyl found far more irksome than charming. It was hard to believe that he held the rank of a learned divine. Or the powers of a Temple sorcerer, either.
To top it off, the princess-archdivine had divided the purse for this venture, for which he was grateful, between the sergeant and the sorcerer, for which he was not. They were her own trusted men, to be sure, but just such a split in authority had been a chief source of infuriating delays in his ride from Easthome. The Temple remounts were a plain blessing, though, and he composed a prayer of thanksgiving in his mind to the Daughter of Spring for Her mercies, howsoever conveyed through Her prickly handmaiden the princess. Archdivines had seldom come Oswyl’s way, princesses never; both combined in one person, who reminded Oswyl unnervingly of his most forcible aunt, had been daunting. Though her sorcerer had seemed entirely at his ease in her company, as if she were his aunt indeed.
Some ten miles down the road the cavalcade approached a handsome castle, built on an islet a little out from the lakeshore, that had had been growing in Oswyl’s eye and interest. As they drew even with it, Learned Penric twitched his horse aside and rode out on the causeway. The drawbridge was fallen in, its timbers blackened. The interior was shadowed, deserted and dismal.
Penric stared meditatively, then muttered, “Huh,” and turned his horse back.
“What was this place? What happened to it?” Oswyl asked, looking over his shoulder as he followed.
“Castle Martenden. The clan of kin Martenden used to be something of a force in this region, for good or ill, but four years ago last spring the fortress was gutted with fire. Its lord had been charged with an, er, attempted murder, but fought his way free of the town guard and fled north over the mountains with a remnant of his men. He was reported to have raised a mercenary company in Carpagamo, but, happily, instead of returning to make trouble here, he took them on to the wars on the Ibran peninsula, where he may well have better hopes of restoring his fortunes.”
The endemic wars against the Roknari Quadrene heretics in those far realms were a noted sink of landless men, both honorable ones and rogues. Oswyl nodded understanding. “But why hasn’t it been repaired and put back into use by the town, to guard the road?”
“Tied up in litigation. Lord kin Martenden managed to be both attainted by the town council for his crime, and interdicted by the Temple for, er, certain impieties, so both claimed the spoils. The law courts of Martensbridge have been as good as a cockpit ever since. Townsmen take bets on the outcomes of the latest appeals.”
Oswyl considered this tale, lips pursing. “Was he actually guilty of the crime charged, do you have any idea? Because… interests can have strange effects on such disputes.” He frowned in speculation.