James Nicoll Reviews

2020’s Masquerade in Lodi is the ninth entry in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona series.

Seconded to the city of Lodi to provide translation services, Penric and his demon Desdemona are fortuitously available to assist in a local mystery involving a babbling madman found washed ashore. Penric, being both a physician and a sorcerer, is able to diagnose the unfortunate’s problem.

Demonic possession.

Demons in this world are not necessarily bad. Indeed, sorcerers like Penric gain their powers from the demons with whom they share their minds. However, the human is supposed to be in the driver’s seat. The demon in the castaway shows every sign of being on the brink of taking its host body for its own.

That would be bad enough but this demon is quite mad. Before it jumped into the current host, it was in a dolphin. Its experiences before that involved a would-be sorcerer (executed), an unfortunate servant (murdered), and a couple of birds. Jumping from animal minds to human does not trouble demons but going from a human to an animal, even one as bright as a dolphin, broke the demon.

Alas, the demon is too badly damaged for a cure to be possible. All that can be done is to secure the services of a saint, Chio, to remove and destroy the demon. This will at least restore the human host to sanity.

Lodi is a major city. Unlike some small communities, Lodi has an abundance of saints. Securing the services of one is not difficult. The identity of the sailor is determined as well, Ree Richelon, lost overboard while shepherding his father’s cargo.

All this discovery and saint search takes some time, enough time for the possessed sailor to somehow escape the room in which he is confined and then the building itself.

Finding the missing man would not be hard… if only Lodi were not as large as it is. If only Ree had not gone missing during a major festival. If only there weren’t factors of which Penric and Chio are utterly unaware that impose a time limit after which Ree will be too dead to cure.

~oOo~

I think part of the reason I failed to notice that I missed Lodi is because the plot resembles in some ways the plot of a Penric I did review, 2024’s Demon Daughter and a glance at the description led me to think I’d read it. Although that doesn’t explain the expanse between 2020 and 2024…

This novella only narrowly avoids being an extremely linear short story thanks to Ree’s escape. Well, and also because there’s entire B‑plot of which Penric and Chio are utterly unaware. Still, if Ree had remained in his bed, his situation would have been decisively resolved by the next morning.

In retrospect, Lodi seems like the first take on a situation whose resolution Bujold later rethought. A running theme in the Penric books is that Penric always opts for the most humane solution open to him, guiding bandits back to virtue or assisting the demons and demon-possessed people to come to terms with each. In this case, however, there’s no cure for the demon save for euthanasia. Did Bujold get a better idea after Lodi appeared?

While the Penric stories have a definite order, Bujold constructs them to be read in any order. In this case, however, I’d definitely recommend against doing what I did; I read Demon Daughter before Lodi. You want to reverse that order.

But, either way you read these stories, you’re in good hands. Bujold knows what she wants to do with these stories and how to do it. Readers will enjoy.

Masquerade in Lodi is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).