This month time spent musing about my favourite Fantasy heroes has made me want to return to Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of the Five Gods. In April 2014 I wrote about her novel The Curse of Chalion, praising its complex plot, sympathetic characters and, most of all, the fascinating religion she had created. Now I’m recommending a series of novellas and short stories set in other parts of the same world a hundred years earlier. There are currently 14 stories about scholar, sorcerer and special agent, Penric, and Desdemona, the ancient female demon he hosts. All the stories are available as ebooks (2015-2025) but some have been collected into three handsome hardbacks with splendid covers – Penric’s Progress (2020), Penric’s Travels (2020) and Penric’s Labors (2022). I shall mainly concentrate on the stories found in the first two Penric collections.

The stories are set in an invented world which, like many others in Fantasy Fiction, is loosely based on the cultures of Northern Europe and the Mediterranean countries during the Medieval period. What makes it distinctive is the religion shared by most of these countries. This involves the worship of the Five Gods – the Mother, the Father, the Daughter, the Son and the Bastard. Or Four Gods if you are from Roknari because there they regard the Bastard as equivalent to the Devil and ban his worship. Each of the Five Gods has their own temples and orders of Divines (priests and priestesses) and most souls are claimed by one of these deities when they die in a ceremony involving sacred animals. This isn’t a world in which magic is common but it can be acquired in various dangerous ways such as becoming the Rider of a Chaos Demon, one of the elemental creatures who sometimes escape from the Bastard’s Hell and take possession of the first animal or human they encounter.

The first story in the sequence, Penric’s Demon, takes place in a country not unlike medieval Switzerland. In it we meet nineteen year-old Lord Penric of kin Jurald who is unhappy with the life his impoverished aristocratic family have planned for him. Scholarly Penric wanted to go to the local university but his older brother has insisted that he must stay at home and help to repair the family fortunes by marrying a wealthy cheese-merchant’s daughter. Everything is changed by what seems like a chance encounter on the road. Penric comes upon an elderly lady, Divine Ruchia, who has been taken very ill but her attendants seem oddly unwilling to take care of her. Fearing that Ruchia is going to die alone, kindly Penric takes her hand and offers to help. After she murmers her acceptance and dies, Penric is overwhelmed by a sudden babble of voices and a flash of light which knocks him unconscious.

When Penric wakes he discovers that Ruchia was a Temple sorceress who was able to control a very ancient and powerful demon which she had intended to pass on to a suitable mature female Divine when she died. Instead the demon has jumped into Penric so he is to be escorted under guard to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge. He realizes that everyone is afraid of the demon becoming Ascendant and running amok, which might lead to Penric himself having to be destroyed. On the journey, Penric starts to listen to the voices in his head and gives them permission to speak through his lips and look through his eyes. He learns that this demon has had twelve previous hosts – a mare, a lioness and ten woman and fears that he has just acquired a council of twelve invisible older sisters. He can hear the individual voices of previous Riders, including Ruchia, but the demon has also built up a composite personality. In an unprecedented step, Penric decides that this personality ought to have a name and calls her Desdemona. It is the start of a very special relationship but Penric has to fight to save Desdemona from sinners and saints.

When we next meet Penric four years later in Penric and the Shaman he is already a fully qualified Divine of the Bastard’s Order, and employed as Court Sorcerer by the princess-archdivine of Martensbridge. Penric’s favourite occupation is using a form of printing-magic he has invented to make copies of important scholarly works. However, Princess Llewen sometimes sends Penric and Desdemona on dangerous or secret missions. One of these involves helping Oswyl, a Locator from neighbouring Wealdean, to track down Inglis, a rogue Royal Shaman who is accused of murder and, more unusually, of kidnapping the victim’s ghost. Royal Shamans draw their power from Great Beasts, creatures which take centuries to develop, and only Temple Sorcerers are a match for them. Cynical Oswyl is initially unimpressed by the eccentric young sorcerer he has been assigned but Penric uses his unique skills to sort out a complex situation involving a distraught Shaman, a haunted dagger, a patient ghost and two very intelligent dogs. In the third story, Penric’s Fox, he is reunited with Oswyl and Inglis when a Temple Sorceress is murdered and her demon goes missing. In the course of a perilous investigation, Penric learns a lot more about Shamans and the darker side of his own powers.

In Penric’s Travels, the young sorcerer is far from his original home. Penric’s beloved mentor Princess Llewen has died and, after a traumatic period serving as a cruelly overworked Temple Physician, he has taken a new post with the Archdivine of Adria. In Penric’s Mission he has been sent on a secret mission to Cedonia by the Duke of Adria. Disguised as a humble clerk his job is to liaise with the formidable General Adelis Arisaydia who may be seeking a new job in Adria. Things quickly go horribly wrong. Penric is arrested, beaten up and thrown into a dungeon that no-one can escape from – unless they happen to be a powerful sorcerer. After he escapes, Penric discovers that the general has been unjustly charged with treason, brutally blinded and released into the care of his widowed half-sister, Nikys. Penric feels responsible so he poses as a doctor sent by anonymous friends to help the general. He uses medical-sorcerery to restore the general’s sight but that puts Arisaydia in danger again. Penric has to persuade the general and his sister to let him help them flee Cedonia. There are two problems, Penric has fallen in love with Nikys and General Arisaydia doesn’t trust him.

The story of the threesome’s escape from Cedonia is continued in Mira’s Last Dance. They face many drawbacks and dangers and Penric has to draw on the unique talents of one of his demon’s former Riders, the famous courtesan, Sora Mira, to get them across the border into the neighbouring Duchy of Orbas. When General Arisaydia insists on entering the service of the Duke of Orbas, Penric decides to stay too so he can continue his courtship of Nikys. In The Prisoner of Limnos Penric finally wins the trust of the Arisaydia family by helping them rescue Nikys’ mother who is being held hostage in Limnos where no man is allowed to set foot. After marrying Nikys, Penric settles in Vilnoc, the capital of Orbas, to raise a family and live as a scholar but his peace is often interrupted. Extraordinary mysteries and problems arise that only the combined forces of Penric and Desdemona can solve…

In her introductions to the collected volumes of Penric stories, Bujold notes that the rise of Ebook publishing allowed her to treat the life of her central character in a new way. Instead of of having to write a Fantasy Epic or a formal series of novels, she could dip in and out Penric’s life turning some episodes into short stories and expanding others into novellas. So far, about 25 years of Penric’s life has been covered, with the more recent stories featuring his natural and adopted children and their demons. There remain tantalizing gaps in Penric’s biography, such as his student years, which may get filled in at some point. Bujold had to spend much of her career writing from the viewpoint of young men because that is how publishers saw the main readership for Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has confessed that the Penric stories enabled her to enjoy herself writing about cranky older women while still having a young man as the central character. Publishers now seem to have shifted to seeing the readership for Fantasy as mainly female, so Desdemona has become more of a selling point than Penric.

The main attraction though is the way in which the young man and the demon who identifies as female learn to live together and function as a very effective unit. Penric has to cope with a cacophany of voices in his head as the former Riders bicker with each other or chip in with conflicting advice. He also has to keep a being whose natural element is chaos under control and prevent her from doing harm. Desdemona responds to her new sorcerer’s gentle and courteous approach with maternal affection but she remains mischievious and easily bored, sometimes playing naughty tricks such as exploding a shrew to get Penric’s attention. He must endure the lack of privacy and the former Riders’ keen interest in his love life – or lack of it. One of the side-effects of hosting a demon is that Penric doesn’t age physically. Inspite of all the mental and emotional traumas he goes through, he continues to look like a beautiful teenage boy. Eventually, the author kindly introduces her hero to a woman sensible and generous enough to share Penric with his demon. They become a most unusual family group.

One of Bujold’s most successful techniques as a storyteller is often to show us Penric from the viewpoint of other characters. People who meet Penric for the first time usually grossly underestimate him, failing to realize how dangerous he is. Others find this chatty and cheerful young man very irritating. Everyone agrees that Penric talks too much, especially if you get him started on one of his favourite scholarly topics. In one story, Penric’s response to another sorcerer trying to kill him is to give the guilty man a lengthy lecture on ethics and theology. Luckily Bujold is one of the few authors capable of making theology fascinating. People who get to know the sorcerer are soon able to tell whether it is Penric or Desdemona speaking to them. Those with the capacity to sense demons are usually horrified by the dark chaotic power they can see within Penric.

As in most of the best Fantasy stories, power like this comes with a heavy price. Physician-sorcerers are rare because it is difficult and physically taxing to use the powers of a chaos demon in benevolent ways. This leads to Penric suffering from frequent nosebleeds and sometimes dangerous overheating. He often has to explain the concept of downhill (destructive) and uphill (constructive) magic. Downhill magic is natural to demons like Desdemona but uphill magic isn’t and has to paid for with a release of chaos. One theologically approved method is to use this chaos to kill vermin such as fleas, bedbugs or rats. This makes Penric a popular travelling companion for anyone forced to stay in dubious inns. A demon who kills a person will automatically be destroyed by the gods but Desdemona can disable people in various very unpleasant ways.

So Penric, unlike most superheroes, constantly has to deal with physical and ethical limitations and this makes his adventures much more exciting. There are few easy wins. He has to use his magic ingeniously to get out of dangerous situations and protect the innocent. Many of the Penric stories simply work as first-rate murder mysteries or thrilling adventures. If you want to sample one, I’d suggest starting with Penric’s Mission – a novella that has everything from vicious court intrigue and brutal jeopardy to fascinating magic and the start of a unique love story. I suspect that once you have met Penric and Desdemona you will be hooked and want to read everything that Lois McMaster Bujold writes about them. Long may the series continue. Until next month…..

Geraldine Harris

September 2025