James Nicoll Reviews

Penric and the Bandit is the thirteenth volume¹ in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric & Desdemona secondary universe fantasy series, set in her Five Gods milieu.

Rozak’s life has been a long sequence of misfortunes and poor life choices. With Penric’s help, he may be able to turn that around.

First of all, Rozak’s village handed him over for a roadwork levy. Then, war having broken out, Rozak was drafted into the army. Fleeing the army, he and fellow deserters took up banditry. When that venture failed to thrive, Rozak and his surviving fellow deserter joined a bandit gang. Tiring of working for brutal criminals, Rozak stole the gang’s mules and fled, hoping to sell the mules and escape the region before his former colleagues caught up with him.

A chance encounter with a stranger presents an unexpected opportunity. This Penric is clearly some manner of scholar or clerk, a soft-handed man whose manifest inexperience with combat is matched only by his obvious naïveté. Fate has delivered to Rozak a gullible, helpless victim. The only question is how best to take advantage of Penric.

Penric is searching for an abandoned temple, one he believes contains treasure. Rozak offers his services as guide. This affords Rozak a wide range of alternative ways to exploit the hapless stranger. None will benefit Penric.

Rozak has made a number of potentially fatal miscalculations. First, Penric is no helpless scribe. Penric is a sorcerer who can cripple Rozak with a glance. Second, Penric isn’t a naïve dupe. He and his demon Desdemona understand Rozak’s game. Third, Rozak has not escaped the bandits at all. They know where Rozak is and will stop at nothing to recoup their losses.

Rozak can, of course, offer Penric and his treasure to the bandits. That will only buy a little time. Escape will require something far more dramatic.

~oOo~

I liked the Ron Miller cover on this book. It was a pleasant break from the current fashions in cover art, which I find uninteresting and off-putting.

Readers of previous Penric novellas will remember that Penric and his fellow sorcerers cannot kill humans without immediate consequences, specifically the death of their demon and loss of all their magic. Or rather, they cannot directly kill people. Nothing stops them from doling out permanent nerve damage that leaves someone immobile and helpless in an isolated cave or setting the target’s boat on fire on the open sea, or any other indirect means. Not that Penric would do that… though at times he is forced to come close.

Rozak does have two enormous bits of luck in his favor, one Watsonian and one Doylist. His Watsonian good fortune is that Penric is the sort of person who befriends his demon rather than forcing it into submission; that makes him the sort of person who would prefer to reform a would-be bandit like Rozak rather than find creative ways around the no-kill rule.

The Doylist factor in Rozak’s favor is that this story was written by Bujold, who at this stage of her career prefers to have all the really unpleasant parts of her stories out of frame, either part of the backstory or judiciously off-stage. Proximity to Penric means Rozak is almost certainly safe from graphic torture or worse… as long as he resists the urge to mug Penric, at which point he would become lamentable evidence for the folly of trying to fool a sorcerer.

The resulting novella is curiously amiable for a tale about a bandit, his patsy, and the legion of thugs who want them both dead.

If you’ve read previous Penrics and enjoyed them, congratulations! This is more of the same. If you’ve not and if you like this, know that this is part of an ongoing series. The story works on its own but could also be a suitable introduction to the rest of the series.

Penric and the Bandit is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Kobo) I did not find Penric and the Bandit at Chapters-Indigo. Words Worth Books seems to offer only the audiobook version.

1: Yes, I did just notice I somehow skipped over Masquerade in Lodi, and consequently misnumbered many volumes of the series. As long as I go fix that and don’t include some sort of revealing footnote, nobody will ever know.