Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

“Liss,” Ista choked, and cleared her throat. “Liss,” she began again. “Attend on me. We must get to the tower.”

  Both Liss and Illvin fell in beside her, and they started back through the archway. Behind them, Ista could hear Porifors’s gates begin to creak open, the iron ratcheting of the drawbridge chains echoing among the dying flowers. Illvin walked backward a moment, staring into the fire-streaked dark, but Ista schooled herself not to turn around.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ISTA’S ACHING LEGS PUSHED HER UP THE NARROW TOWER STAIRS, the curving stone wall harsh beneath her groping hand, into a square of unexpected radiance. Rows of candles were lined up at the base of the parapet walls on the north and south sides, stuck into blobs of their own wax, burning clear and unwavering in the breezeless night air. The heat seemed to stream upward into the starry night sky, but withal the air of the tower was much less close and stale than that of the forecourt.

  With their arrival, the platform seemed crowded. Ista surveyed the arrangements she’d ordered and breathed satisfaction. At one side Lady Cattilara, dressed in a robe, lay silently upon a straw pallet that was covered with a sheet. Another pallet, also covered with old linens, lay empty beside her. The sewing woman with her basket, Goram, and Learned dy Cabon, his robes now very stained indeed, all waited anxiously. The little company would have to suffice; the few physicians and acolytes of the Mother left alive in the beleaguered town were felled by fevers, or worse, and in any case could not be smuggled up the collapsed tunnels to their castle’s aid.

  Illvin, emerging from the stair’s blackness, shielded his eyes against the candle glow. “Royina, will you be able to see out, to track my brother’s progress?”

  “It won’t be these eyes I use to follow him. And your attendants must be able to see you.” Her material hand reached to touch the invisible reassurance of the gray thread, which seemed to spin out from her heart into the darkness below. “I will not lose him now.”

  He grunted somewhat disconsolate acquiescence, drew a breath, and seated himself upon the empty pallet. Laying his sword aside, he peeled out of his speckled and sweat-stained shirt and rolled up his loose trouser legs. Goram helped pull off his boots. He swung his long legs out straight and lay back, face not so much composed as rigid, his dark dilated eyes looking up at the stars. Wisps of cloud, moisture out of reach, crossed the spangled vault in gray feathers. “I am ready.” His voice sounded parched, but not, Ista thought, just from lack of water.

  From the castle below, she heard the faint ratchet of the drawbridge chains being pulled up again very slowly, and a jingle of harness and thump of hooves passing away from the walls, fading with distance. The gray thread was moving in the pool of darkness below, very like a fishing line taken by a pike. “We have not much time. We must begin.” She dropped to her knees between the two pallets.

  Illvin took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She caressed his slick brow as she took it back. Composed herself. Shut out the confusing sight of her eyes and brought up the tangle of lights and shadows by which the realm of spirit represented itself to her now. She suspected the gods simplified it for her, and that the reality beneath this was stranger and more complex still. But this was what she was given; it must do.

  She undid her ligature around the white trickle coming from Illvin’s heart, opening the channel wide. Soul-fire poured out, joined the sluggish, sullen stream from Cattilara, and flowed away into the night, winding around the gray thread but not touching it. The life drained from Illvin’s face, leaving it stiff and waxen, and she shuddered.

  She turned away and studied the sleeping Cattilara. The demon swirled in agitation beneath her thin breastbone. Enormous stresses propagated here, straining toward some cataclysmic breakage. Ista’s next task was dangerous indeed, dangerous to them all, but she could not shirk from it. So many souls were at risk in this ride …

  She tightened Cattilara’s ligature, pushing the soul-fire up from her heart toward her head. The demon tried to follow it. She laid her snow-spangled left hand upon Cattilara’s collarbone, stared in fascination at the gray glow her fingers suddenly shed. The demon shrank again, crying with new terror. Cattilara’s eyes opened.

  She tried to surge upright, only to find her body still paralyzed. “You!” she cried to Ista. “Curse you, let me go!”

  Ista let out her tight breath. “Arhys rides out now. Pity his enemies, for death on a demon horse descends upon them out of the darkness, bringing sword and fire. Many will bear him company on his journey to his Father’s keep tonight, their souls like ragged banners borne before his echoing feet. You must choose now. Will you aid him or impede him, in his last journey?”

  Cattilara’s head yanked back and forth in an agony of denial. “No! No! No!”

  “The god himself awaits his coming, His own holy breath held in the balance of the moment. Arhys’s heart flies ahead to his Father’s hand like a messenger bird. Even if he could be dragged back now, he would spend the rest of his life, and I think it would not be long, hanging at that window, longing for his last home. He would not thank you. He could not love you, with all his heart anchored in that other realm. I think he might even grow to hate you, knowing what glory you denied to him. For one last moment, the last instant of time and choice, think not of what you desire, but of what he does; not of your good, but of his greatest good.”

  “No!” screamed Cattilara.

  “Very well.” Ista reached to open the ligature, one eye on the restive, mutinous demon.

  Cattilara turned her head away, and whispered, “Yes.”

  Ista paused, exhaled. Murmured, “So I pray the gods may hear even me, and let my whispered yes tower above my shouted no and mount all the way to their fivefold realm. As I would be heard, so I hear you.” She swallowed hard. “Hold your demon on its course. It will not be an easy one.”

  “Will I feel much pain?” asked Cattilara. Her eyes met Ista’s at last. Her voice would have been almost inaudible, but for the silence on the platform. Not even cloth rustled, from the people standing watching.

  Yes, no, I have no idea. “Yes, I think so. All births have some.”

  “Oh. Good.” She turned her head away again, but not in denial. Her eyes were wet, but her face was as still as carved ivory.

  Ista lifted her hand, but her intervention was not needed. As Cattilara’s face went slack, the white fire burst redoubled from her heart, to join the flow from Illvin in a torrent, roaring down over the parapet. So, you do not ride alone, Arhys. The hearts of the two who love you best go with you now. She hoped his body received their outpouring as an exaltation, at the other end of that white line.

  She rose and hurried to the parapet, motioning the others to make ready with pads, cloths, and tourniquets. She stared out into the darkness, the roads like gray ribbons, the open spaces rucked like mist-shrouded blankets across an unmade bed, the trees of the grove black and silent. A few watch fires burned in the enemy camp, and Jokonan horsemen slowly patrolled back and forth out of bowshot. A clot of moving shadows reached the trees, slipping between the patrols.

  She glared out with all the strength of her other eyes, following the white flood and thin gray thread to where a dozen soul-sparks moved, atop the lesser life-blurs of their horses. Arhys’s gray glow was distinctive, Foix’s violet-tinged double shadow even more so. She could see clearly through all the moving masses that lay between, when Arhys kicked the demon-lit shape of his horse into a canter. He closed rapidly on a quiescent, colored thread of sorcerer light, like a hawk swooping on unsuspecting prey.

  “Can you see Foix?” Liss’s breathless voice sounded by her ear.

  “Yes. He rides by Arhys’s side.”

  The shouts of alarm didn’t go up till the first tent went down. As more cries and a ring of steel split the night, the mounted patrols wheeled about and began galloping back toward the camp. Abruptly, the snake of sorcerer fire stretched and snapped. A bluish gout of soul-fire shot aloft, separating even as Ista watche
d from a violent purple streak, which sped away trailing soul shreds in torn-off, fluttering rags. The bluish gout writhed in agony, and faded into elsewhere. The purple streak grounded itself in a moving soul-spark somewhere beneath the trees; both the recipient and the demon dropped flat in the shock of that arrival. But the snake did not renew itself.

  “That’s one,” said Ista aloud.

  The attackers made no cries or calls at all, moving in grim, determined silence. The pale blur of another tent, sheltering the head of another colored snake, swayed, shook, and collapsed. The Jokonan sorcerer gathered energy for some strike at his attacker; Ista could see the flash of a bolt of demon magic pass through Arhys, and hear the wail of the sorcerer’s surprise and woe, cut off. She rather thought that faint, distant, liquid thunk might have been a beheading. Another violet streak separated from another white gout. Shocked and tumbling, the violet blur fell helter-skelter into a horse being ridden toward the fray by a Jokonan cavalryman. The animal stumbled, jerked sideways, dumped its rider, and wheeled to run at a hard gallop away down the Oby road. The loose snake head seemed to quest after it as if seeking to strike, but then fell back in on itself, disintegrating in a stream of sparks.

  “That’s two,” said Ista.

  From the trees a wavering glow blazed up, yellow and bright, as a tent caught fire. Beyond the grove, lights were being lit in the big green command tents. Ista had no doubt that those sorcerers asleep when the first blow fell were now astir, yanked awake by Joen if they’d slept through the noise. How quickly could the surprised Jokonans coordinate their defenses? Their counterattack? Another spurt of soul-fire, without a demon this time, seared past her eye. An ordinary enemy soldier slain, or one of Arhys’s defiant volunteers? From a god’s-eye view, she realized, it made no difference. All death-births were accepted equally into that realm.

  “Three,” she counted, as the attack pressed forward.

  “Are we winning?” gasped Liss.

  “It depends on what you think is the prize.”

  At the fourth tent the attackers began to come to grief at last. Three sorcerer snakes had somehow combined there. Possibly Arhys was weirdly invisible to them, for they chose to concentrate on Foix. Of course—they must imagine another sorcerer as the greatest danger to them, mistake Foix for the heart or head of the enemy strike. Soul-lights swayed, jerked, spun in Ista’s dizzied perceptions. The bear went down, roaring, under a net of fire. But the fourth and fifth snakes were beheaded, ribbon-bodies lashing furiously in their death throes before shredding apart in a streaming aurora. From that far green-glowing tent, Ista could hear a woman fiercely screaming, but the Roknari words were blurred to unintelligibility by distance and rage.

  “I think they have taken Foix,” said Ista.

  Behind her, a triple gasp. “Help!” cried the sewing woman. White-faced, Liss whirled and dropped back to her post by Cattilara’s side.

  On both Cattilara’s right thigh and on Illvin’s, long dark slices had opened up. A brief glimpse of the red-brown of pulsing muscle, a pale streak of tendon, then both the twin wounds were flooded with red. The sewing woman and Liss, and Goram and dy Cabon, hastened to pad and bind each cut and slow the stream.

  Yes. Yes, thought Ista. Her strategy was good. On one recipient, that sword cut would have gone to the core. The half wounds were half as dire. She almost laughed aloud, if blackly, imagining the dismay of Arhys’s assailant, knowing from the shock of contact, the jerk of blade from the bone, the ringing up his arm, how hard he’d struck, yet seeing that wound close up again before his eyes … Indeed, the wild wail that echoed up now from the grove might well be the very man. You thought you’d dropped all the horrors of nightmare down upon Porifors, while you sat safe. Now, watch Porifors return the favor. We hold, we hold.

  For a very little while longer.

  She turned again to try to peer beneath the trees. She could mark Arhys’s striding progress across the camp by the sounds of terror, she thought, as his enemies flew screaming before his pale face and deadly blade. And by the streams of white fire rising in his wake. He was unhorsed; she was uncertain when that had happened. She hoped he was not yet alone, without one comrade left to guard his back.

  I think he is alone now.

  A weird wet thunk sounded behind her. She glanced back to see her helpers rushing to press pads to Illvin’s and Cattilara’s stomachs. That was a crossbow bolt. She wondered if Arhys had plucked it out to throw back at his dazed enemies, or left it in place like a badge. It would have been a killing strike, on any other man, at any other time. Soon there will be more. By the gods, a dy Lutez does know how to die three times, and three times three if needed.

  She fell to her knees behind the parapet, clinging to the stone.

  It seemed to her that some great black glacier, some ice dam in her soul, was melting, as if a hundred summers’ heat had fallen on it in an hour. Cracking, coming apart. And that in the mile-deep, mile-long lake of icy green water backing it up, an expectant surge rippled from bank to bank, from the surface to the uttermost depths, troubling the waters. I passed blessing to you in the forecourt. But you passed blessing back to me, too. Trading rescues. Five gods watch us ride out together in this breaking dawn.

  You Five may awe us. But I think we must awe You, too.

  “Seven,” she whispered aloud.

  Then something went wrong. A hesitation, a turning away. Too many, far too many, soul-sparks swirled around that gray flame. Now he is surrounded, cut off. Dozens who ran away now run toward, encouraged by their own numbers, daring to take him down.

  In the midst of your enemies, your Father has prepared a feast for you, on a table your father set long ago. Here it comes …

  Another thunk, and another. From behind her, Liss’s sharp voice cried, “Lady, there are too many wounds splitting open! You must stop this!”

  Dy Cabon’s strained rumble, “Royina, remember you promised Arhys that Lady Cattilara would live—!”

  And a certain fat white god has promised Illvin to me, if I did not mistake Him. If we both live. A god-given lover, importunate and bold as a scarred stray cat, rubbing past my guard into my good graces. If I can keep him fed.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Illvin’s body jerked upward with the transferred force of some massive blow to Arhys’s back, and Goram, his face frantic, rolled him over to reach the red rent. Cattilara’s white hand half split from its wrist, and Liss pounced to staunch the spurting.

  Now. Oh yes, now. Ista clenched her hand about the torrent of white fire running past her shoulder. The flow stopped abruptly. Wild shocks pulsed back in both directions from her grip. The violet channel shattered. The white fire, the constant companion of her inner eye for days, winked out.

  A hushed hesitation: then, in the shadowed grove, a grotesque roar of hysteria-tinged triumph went up from half a hundred Jokonan throats.

  The ice dam exploded. A wall of water towered, bent, and broke, thundering forward, bursting its banks, blasting her soul wide, wider, scouring and flushing a lifetime of stones, rubble, rotted and clotted trash before it. Boiling, roaring outward. Ista spread her arms wide, and opened her mouth, and let it go.

  The gray thread, almost lost to view in the violent blazes, stiffened to a taut rope. It began to move back through her new dilation, faster and faster, until it seemed to smoke with the heat of its passage, like an overstrained fiber rope about to char and burst into flame. For an instant, Arhys’s astonished, agonized, ecstatic soul moved through hers.

  Yes. We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death. Arhys was sundered from his own gate, and lost the way back to it forever. So it was given to me to lend him mine, for a little time. But so great a soul does need a wide portal; so knock down my gates and breach my walls and burst them wide, and pour through freely, by my leave. And farewell. “Yes,” Ista whispered. “Yes.”

  He did not
look back. Given what he must be looking on toward, Ista was not in the least surprised.

  It is done, Sire. I hope You find it was done well.

  She heard no voice, saw no radiant figure. But it seemed to her she felt a caress upon her brow, and the ache there, which had throbbed for hours as though her head were bound in a tight iron band, stopped. The end of the pain was like a morning birdsong.

  There was a real morning birdsong, she realized muzzily, here in matter’s lovely realm, a cheery, brainless warble from the bushes below the castle walls. The gray cloud-feathers among the fading stars were just beginning to blush a faint, fiery pink, color creeping from east to west. A little thread of lemon light lined the eastern horizon.

  Illvin groaned. Ista turned to find him sitting up in dy Cabon’s grip, pulling blood-soaked bandages from his unmarked body. His lips parted with dismay as he took in the extent of the mess, starting to glow scarlet as color seeped back into the world. “Five gods.” He swallowed against a surge of bile. “That was bad, at the end. Wasn’t it.” It was no question.

  “Yes,” said Ista. “But he’s gone, now. Safe and gone.” In the grove below, the fear-crazed Jokonans, she somehow knew, were hacking Arhys’s body to bits, pulling it apart, terrified that it might yet reassemble and rise once more against them. She did not see any merit in mentioning this to Illvin just now.

  Cattilara lay on her side, curled up. She cried in quiet, stuttering sobs, almost unable to breathe, clutching the sponge that had stanched her stomach so hard that the blood bubbled through her fingers. The sewing woman patted her clumsily and uselessly on the shoulder.

  The world darkened around Ista, as if dawn, appalled by the scene, retreated again over the horizon. Strolling into in her mind like some casual wayfarer, a Voice spoke: familiar, ironic, and immense.

  My Word. Spacious in here all of a sudden, is it not?

  “What are You doing here now? I thought this was become your Step-father’s battlefield.”