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

It didn’t take me long to find the remains of Scuolla’s apprentice, and one of the other dogs, its back broken, sadly, but it had been too late for either of them from the first. A gang of men from the village, later that afternoon, had no better luck at finding Scuolla, though we did uncover one more dog, and buried both beasts properly, no skinning. I did insist on that, for respect.” He nodded to himself. Neglected by his Temple supervisors in this remote vale, Gallin had perhaps taken to self-supplying their absent discipline or praise. Oswyl tried not to sympathize.
    After a long, thoughtful, silent inhalation through his nose, Penric came out with, “And how long had you known that old Scuolla was a hedge shaman?”
    Intent on recapturing the conversation by offering suitable condolences and then hurrying their leave, Oswyl swallowed his words so fast he coughed. What?
    Gallin cast the young man a closer look than heretofore. “I’ve served in this vale for over twenty years. I found out what he was early on, but not so early that I hadn’t had time to learn his kin and his ties, and that there was no harm in him. I take my first duty to be to souls, not laws. And to learn as well as teach, or what else do the gods put us in this world for?”
    “Indeed.” Penric made the tally sign; coming from a full-braid Temple divine (even one who’d left his braids in his saddlebags), it seemed to Oswyl strangely more than a mere assenting shrug.
    Reassured by this reaction, Gallin went on: “My trust was repaid five-fold, through those years. Scuolla was as pious a man as any and more than many, and he and his dogs were an aid to all in need, lost or hurt, in flood or fire or famine and a hundred smaller tasks. In time, I came to think of his as my good left hand here in the vale, without which the right could not grip half so well.”
    Gossa, nodding in confirmation to all this, put in, “That’s why we don’t understand about his funeral.” She made a go on gesture at her husband.
    Penric’s eyes narrowed. “It took place at the rockslide, your goodwife said?”
    “Aye. There was no getting down to his body. For a time we thought the dogs might find him, or later, our noses, but he was too deep for the last and the dogs, well, the dogs never settled on a consensus. Or settled at all—very disturbed they were, right to the last. In the event, no god signed to taking up his soul, or at least none we could discern, though we made the trial five times, till the holy animals began to bite and scratch and kick and it grew dark.”
    “Could he have escaped the fall somehow?” asked Oswyl, ensnared by this tale despite himself. “Run off for some reason?” The dead companion was suggestive, to a suspicious mind.
    Gallin huffed out a breath. “I wondered about that, too, as things went on. But it doesn’t stand up to the witness of the dogs.”
    In his past investigations, Oswyl had found many mute things to give testimony that shouted; he supposed he must now add dogs to that list. At least his superiors could not chide him for not swearing them in. “Sundered, then.”
    Gossa made a fending gesture in front of her bodice, and scowled at him as fiercely as one of his aunts about to correct his legal rhetoric.
    Gallin shook his head and went on, “By every sign, Scuolla was sundered, and I don’t think he should have been. I know he would not refuse the gods. And if the Son of Autumn, to Whom he’d made devotions all his life, didn’t think him good enough somehow, well, there’s still the Bastard. So where was He ? Where were any of Them?”
    An unanswerable question that Oswyl had confronted many times in his career. He bit his lip.
    “The thing is,” put in Gossa, “everyone round about now takes that rockslide for haunted, and avoids it.”
    Penric laced and unlaced his fingers a few times, then seemed to come to some decision. “So this hedge shaman, working with dogs as the medium of his art,