Penric's Demon Read Online Free PDF Page A

front of mirrors since he’d grown big and fast enough to evade older sisters bent on using him as a large doll. His own features, in the glass, suddenly grew strange to him. But his vision did not go black; it seemed the two of them shared his eyes together.
    His face, as lean as his body, had good bones, he’d been told. His fair skin was redeemed from its youth by what he hoped was a reasonably assertive nose. Long lashes framed what Mama had fondly called lake-blue eyes. In Pen’s experience lakes were more often gray, green, blinding white with snow, or black glass if frozen on a cold, still night. But on a rare bright summer day lakes could be that color, he supposed.
    Nobody else had been talking to him; nobody else had been telling him anything . Had he been missing a chance? He exhaled, relaxed his throat, tried to soften the set of his tired, tense shoulders. To make himself open. “Can you answer questions?”
    A snort. “If they’re not too witless.”
    “I can’t guarantee that.”
    The Hmm from his throat answering this did not seem hostile, at least.
    Pen began in the simplest way he could think of. “What’s your name?”
    A surprised pause. “My riders call me Demon.”
    “That’s like calling your horse Horse, or me Boy. Or Man,” he hastily revised this. “Even a horse gets a name.”
    “How would we get a name—Boy?”
    “I . . . suppose most names are given. By people’s parents. By creatures’ owners. Sometimes they are inherited.”
    A long silence followed this. Whatever the entity had been expecting from him, it evidently hadn’t been this.
    His mouth said, hesitantly, “I suppose we could be Ruchia .”
    Another voice objected, “But what about Helvia ? Or Amberein ?”
    Yet another voice said something in a language Pen didn’t even recognize , though the cadences seemed to tease his understanding; he thought Umelan might have been another name. More unknown words spouted from his mouth, three voices, four; he lost track till it all ended in an inarticulate growl and a weird squeal.
    “How many are you?” asked Pen, startled. “How many . . . generations?” How many riders had this old demon attached itself to, and copied—or stolen—life from?
    “You expect us to do arithmetic?”
    Pen’s brows went up. “Yes,” he decided.
    “There will be a price. He doesn’t know about the price.” That accent was . . . Darthacan?
    “Ruchia has lately paid,” said Ruchia’s voice. “That reserve will be long, drawing down.”
    A surly pause. “Twelve,” said a voice.
    “Only if we count the lioness and the mare,” muttered another. “Must we?”
    “So . . . so are you twelve persons, or one?” Pen asked.
    “Yes,” said the Ruchia-voice. “Both. At once.”
    “Like, um, like a town council?”
    “ . . . We suppose.” The voice was not impressed.
    “Are—were—you all, er, ladies?”
    “It is customary,” said a voice. Though another added, “ She was no lady!”
    Customary, Pen gathered, for a demon to be handed on to another rider of the same sex. But not, obviously, theologically required, or he wouldn’t be in this fix. Dear gods. Have I just acquired a council of twelve invisible older sisters? Ten, he supposed, if he didn’t count the mare and the, what, lioness ? Did either of them have names in their animal tongues to argue about?
    “I think you had better have one name,” said Pen. “Though if I want to speak to, to a particular layer of you, that one could have—inherit—her old rider’s name, I suppose.” Twelve? He would sort them out somehow.
    “Hmm.” A most dubious noise, of uncertain origin.
    “I have two names,” he offered. “Penric, which is my particular name, and Jurald, which is my kin name. The name for all of you could be like your kin name.”
    Pen hoped no one was listening to this—all in his voice, ultimately—through the walls. No wonder Marda had believed the sorceress’s utterances