Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  She found her hand disposed upon his arm while she was still trying to decide if she was convinced or just confused. He handed her down the stairs as though they advanced together in some procession, a wedding or a coronation or a feast day, or onto a dance floor in a roya’s palace.

  The illusion ended soon enough as they picked their way across the charnel wreckage of the star court—two more horses lay dead and swelling there this morning—through the shadow of the archway, and into the disorder of the entry court. A dozen men clustered on the walls in view of whatever Jokonan embassy waited without, very nearly the whole of the garrison who could stand.

  Two short, round towers bulged outward on either end of the front wall of the forecourt, allowing a covering cross fire upon the outer gate. A few more soldiers, and a broad, familiar figure in unfamiliar clothes, waited by the leftward tower that harbored the postern door. Ista and Illvin, trailed by Goram and Liss, came to a halt there.

  “Learned.” Ista favored dy Cabon with a nod. He had shed his order’s distinctive robes, not that his filthy whites hadn’t been ripe enough to burn by now, and was dressed in a hodgepodge of borrowed gear that mostly failed to fit him. In any color but white, Ista noted.

  “Royina.” He swallowed. “Before you go … I meant to beg your blessing.”

  “We are well met, then; before I went, I meant to beg yours.”

  She stood on tiptoe, leaned over his sadly reduced belly, and kissed his forehead. If the god light passed any message to him, it was too subtle even for her inner eye to read. He swallowed and placed his hand upon her brow. Whatever ceremonious benediction he’d mustered escaped him as he burst into tears: he managed only a choked “Bastard help us!”

  “Sh, sh,” Ista soothed his agitation. “It is well.” Or as well as might be, under the circumstances. She studied him narrowly. His sleepless hours with the spell-sickened, with their impossible demands made upon skills he didn’t even possess, had shaken him badly. The bloody rite on the north tower had been even more harrowing. His god, she thought, had sapped and mined his soul very nearly to the point of breakthrough, stressing him close to cracking open, little though he realized it. The gods had either been unusually lucky in driving two such mules down the road to Their task at Porifors, or else had been trying exceptionally hard … I wonder if dy Cabon is Their second sortie?

  Five gods—was it possible to pray that her burden might pass to him instead? The notion shook her, and she blinked to clear her vision. She had a hideous conviction that the answer was yes. Yes. Yes! Let the responsibility for disaster pass to another, not to her, not to her again …

  Except that dy Cabon’s chances of surviving success, let alone failure, seemed to her even less than her own. She fought back an impulse to fling herself upon him and beg him to take her place. No.

  I have paid for this place. I am emptied out with the cost of it. I will not give it up for any man.

  “Buck up, dy Cabon, or else take yourself off,” Illvin muttered, scowling. “Your weeping is unnerving her.”

  Dy Cabon swallowed again, marshaling his self-control. “Sorry. Sorry. I am so sorry that my mistakes brought you here, Royina. I should never have stolen your pilgrimage. It was presumption.”

  “Yes, well, if not you, the gods would have just had to send someone else to make the mistakes.” Who might have failed upon the road. “If you would serve me, live to testify. Your order will need to know all the truth of this, one way or another.”

  He nodded eagerly, then paused, as if finding her offer of release harder to digest than he’d expected. He bowed and stood back, brow wrinkled.

  Illvin removed his sword and passed it to Goram. “Hold this for me till I return. No point in handing my father’s blade to Sordso for a present, unless it be point first.” Goram ducked a nod and tried to look stern, but his features just came out looking contorted.

  Ista embraced Liss, who, with a glower at dy Cabon, managed not to cry at her. Then Illvin was handing her through the dark, close space under the tower. The door opened to the light, and a soldier grunted and heaved at something that fell with a muffled thump, then turned aside to let the two of them pass.

  The object turned out to be a narrow board, which he had thrown across the sharp cleft before the castle wall. Illvin hesitated, and Ista wondered if he thought of all the random breakage Porifors had suffered in the day past, and if this makeshift bridge was likewise vilely ensorcelled. But he cast her a quick, encouraging smile over his shoulder and stepped briskly across it. It bent disturbingly, in the center of its span, but held.

  Ista glanced across at the Jokonan embassy drawn up before the gate to accept her surrender. Some dozen horsemen were assembled—mostly soldiers, together with three officers. Ista recognized Prince Sordso instantly. The translator-officer rode nervously by his side. The other officer, a heavy, leathery, bronze-skinned man with gray-bronze hair, was also a sorcerer-slave, Ista saw by the ascendant demon light that filled his skin. As with Sordso, a twisting ribbon of light floated from his belly back toward the distant green tents.

  Also tethered thus was the one horsewoman, or rather, a woman who rode pillion Roknari-style behind a servant, sitting sideways on a padded chair atop the horse’s haunches with her feet demurely disposed on a little shelf. The sorceress wore courtly, trailing garments, and a broad-brimmed hat tied below her chin with dark green ribbons. She was a much younger woman than Joen, though neither maidenly nor beautiful. She stared intently at Ista.

  Ista stepped out after Illvin, keeping her eyes upon his face and not the dark drop below, which was deliberately lined at the bottom with sharp rocks and glinting broken glass. Cattilara’s sandals slipped on her sweating feet. Illvin reached to clasp her hand, a hard grip, and pulled her to stand upon the dusty ground beyond. Instantly, the board was jerked back, scraping through the postern door, which was then clapped shut.

  The woman rode closer. Even as Ista looked up to return her glower, the demon light within her faded, until Ista only saw skin and clothing. The mere expression of a face, not the colors of a soul. Ista’s breath caught, and she looked again at Sordso. Now he appeared no more than a golden-haired young man upon a prancing black horse. Not one of the sorcerers flung up their hands, wincing at the glare of Ista’s god light, nor did the demons cringe within them—she could not see the demons within them.

  My inner sight is stolen. I am blinded.

  Something else was missing. The pressure of the god upon her back, which had borne her forward floating as if in a dream since that bloodstained dawn upon the north tower, was gone as well. Behind her, only an empty silence loomed. Infinitely empty, since so infinitely filled just moments before. She tried frantically to think when she had last felt the god’s hands upon her shoulders. She was certain He had been with her in the forecourt, when she had spoken with dy Cabon. She thought He had been with her when she’d stepped onto the board across the cleft.

  He was not with me when I stepped off.

  Her useless outer eyes blurred with terror and loss. She could barely breathe, as though her chest was bound tight with heavy cords. What have I done wrong?

  Who is this? asked Prince Sordso, pointing at Illvin.

  The bronze-skinned sorcerer pushed his horse up next to the prince’s and stared down in surprise at Illvin, who looked back coolly. I believe it is Ser Illvin dy Arbanos himself, Your Highness—Lord Arhys’s bastard brother, the bane of our borders.

  Sordso’s blond eyebrows went up. The new commander of Porifors! What does he here? Ask him where is the other woman. He gestured at his translator.

  The officer rode nearer to Illvin. “You, dy Arbanos! The agreement was for the dowager royina and the daughter of the march of Oby,” he said in Ibran. “Where is Lady Cattilara dy Lutez?”

  Illvin favored him with a slight, ironic bow. His eyes were icy black. “Gone to join her husband. When, watching last night from the tower, she felt him die, she flung herself from the
parapet and gave her grief to the stones below. She lies now waiting to be buried, when you withdraw as you agreed and we can again reach our graveyards. I come in her place, and to serve Royina Ista as warder and attendant. Since, having seen your armies and their dubious discipline once before, the royina did not desire to bring her handmaidens among you.”

  The translator’s brows drew down, and not only at the oblique trailing insult. He repeated the news to Sordso and the others. The sorceress nudged her rider to bring her closer. Is this true? she demanded.

  Look yourselves for what you really seek, then, said Illvin, with a bow in her direction. I should think Prince Sordso could recognize the remnants of his own sister Umerue from this distance, if she were still … well, alive is not quite the right term, now, is it? If she were still residing within Lady Cattilara behind those walls.

  The translator jerked in his saddle, though whether in surprise at Illvin’s message or at the tongue in which it was spoken, Ista was not sure. Sordso, the bronze-skinned officer, and the sorceress all turned their heads toward Porifors, their expressions growing intent and inward.

  Nothing, breathed Sordso after a moment. It is gone.

  The sorceress eyed Illvin. That one knows too much.

  My poor sister-in-law is dead, and the creature you lost is fled beyond your reach, said Illvin. Shall we get this over with?

  At a nod from the prince, two soldiers dismounted. They first took the precaution of checking Illvin for concealed blades in his sash and boots; he suffered their hands with a look of bored displeasure. Tension flowed into his long body when one of the soldiers approached Ista, relaxing only slightly when the man knelt by her white skirts.

  “You are to take off your shoes,” the translator called to her. “You will walk barefoot and bareheaded into the presence of the August Mother, as befitting a lesser woman and a Quintarian heretic.”

  Illvin’s chin went up and his jaw set. Whatever objections he had been about to voice, though, he closed his teeth upon. It was an interesting subtlety, Ista thought, that they did not also demand Illvin’s boots. The disparity only drove home his impotence to protect her.

  The man’s hot hands pawed at the ribbons Liss had so lately tied around Ista’s ankles. She stood rigidly, but did not resist. He pulled the light sandals away from her feet and threw them aside. He stood, backed away, and remounted his horse.

  Sordso rode up to her, his eyes searching her from head to foot. He smiled grimly at what he saw—or possibly at what he didn’t see. In any case, he did not fear to turn his back on her, for he gestured her sharply to take position directly behind his horse in the procession forming up. Illvin tried to offer her his arm, but the bronze-skinned officer pulled his sword and pointed with it for him to walk behind her. Sordso’s hand rose and fell in signal, and they started off across the dry, uneven ground.

  Ista was barely conscious of the brass-bright noon through which she stumbled. She groped inside her mind, within an echoing darkness. Called silent curses to the Bastard. Then, silent prayers. Nothing came back.

  Were the Jokonan sorcerers doing this? Defeating a god in the realm of matter? Surely these opponents could not overwhelm this god … ?

  Not the god’s failure, then, but hers; her spirit gates had somehow been shut again, broken and tumbled in, choked with stones of fear, anger, or humiliation, denying the new-dilated passage …

  She had made a mistake, some monstrous mistake, somewhere in the past few fleeting minutes. Maybe she had been supposed to give this task, to give the god, to dy Cabon after all. Maybe keeping it for herself had been the great presumption, a huge and fatal presumption. Overweening arrogance, to imagine such a task was given to her. Who would be stupid enough to give such a task to her?

  The gods. Twice. It was a puzzle, how beings so vast could be so vastly mistaken. I knew better than to trust them. Yet here I am—again …

  Sharp stones bit her feet along the road. The procession turned aside toward the grove, angling through a low space of dark muck that sucked at the horses’ hooves and stank of stagnant water and horse piss. They scrambled up a slight rise. She could hear Illvin’s long footfalls behind her, and his quickening breath, his uneven puffing revealing more of his debilitation than his face ever would. The grove loomed before her, its shade a blessed relief from the hammering sun overhead.

  Ah. Not so blessed after all, nor any relief. They marched up past an aisle of the dead. Laid quite deliberately along the left side of their route, as if made witnesses to this procession, were the bodies of the men of Porifors killed last night in Arhys’s sortie. All were stripped naked, their wounds exposed to feed the iridescent green flies that buzzed about them.

  She glanced up the row of pale forms, counted. Eight. Eight, of the fourteen who had ridden out against fifteen hundreds. Six must still live somewhere in the Jokonan camp, then, wounded and taken. Foix’s muscular body was not among the still forms. Pejar’s was.

  She looked again, and recalculated: five still live.

  There was a ninth here, but not a body. More of a … pile. A spear was driven into the ground behind the shambles, with Arhys’s disfigured head displayed atop the shaft, peering out sightlessly over the Jokonan camp. The once-ravishing eyes had been cut out by whatever fear-maddened soldier had sought revenge upon the emptied form.

  Too late. He was gone before you got there, Jokonan. Her bare feet faltered over some root, and she gasped in pain.

  Illvin, striding forward, caught her arm before she tripped and fell headlong.

  “They bait us. Look away,” he instructed through clenched teeth. “Do not faint. Or vomit.”

  He looked ready to do both, she thought. His countenance was as gray as any of the corpses’, though his eyes burned like nothing she had ever seen in a man’s face.

  “It’s not that,” she whispered back. “I have lost the god.”

  His brows flickered in consternation and confusion. The bronze-skinned officer, his sword out, gestured them along toward the far edge of the grove, though he did not force Illvin from her side. Maybe she, too, looked as though she were about to faint.

  She thought Illvin’s judgment of baiting to be precise. If either of them had still concealed any uncanny power—or any strength at all—that display might well have drawn it out of them, in some furious, futile lashing at their complacent enemies. If she had been either a sorceress or a swordsman, she swore the prince would not have survived the smirk he had cast over his shoulder as she’d stumbled past Arhys’s remains. From a failed saint, the Jokonans were quite safe, it seemed.

  “They meant to march Catti past that,” Illvin muttered under his breath. “Add it to their tally, and five gods grant I may be the one to come collect …” His eyes didn’t stop glancing from tent to tent, tracing the path of last night’s destruction, summing the condition of the men and horses that they passed. Thin silver tracks slid down his face, but his hand scorned to wipe at them, under the gaze of the few dozen jeering soldiers crowded up to watch their little parade. Ista did not know enough vile Roknari to translate the insults, though Illvin no doubt did. His dogged mutter continued, “They’re not preparing to strike camp. They’re preparing an assault. Are we surprised? Ha. One thing shows—they don’t know how weak we’ve grown. Or they’d be preparing for a romp …”

  Was he trying to distract his senses from the Jokonan desecration of his brother’s corpse? She prayed the ploy might serve him. She tried to extend her own blinded senses for any breath of the god, anywhere. Nothing. Joen and Sordso had placed Arhys’s head along her path to be a symbol of her failure, a hammerblow of despair. I wonder if Arvol dy Lutez felt as bereft as this, when his dangling hair touched the water for the second time?

  And yet the symbol turned beneath her enemies’ feet, for the reminder of defeat was also a reminder of triumph. A presence in an absence. Strange.

  The god may be absent, but I am still present. Maybe this is a task for dense
matter, to do what matter does best: persist. So. She took a breath and kept on walking.

  They arrived before the largest of the green tents. One side was rolled up, revealing what appeared to be nothing so much as a portable throne room. Rugs were strewn thickly across the ground. A dais ran along the back, supporting a pair of carved chairs decorated in gold leaf, and a scattering of cushions for lesser haunches. The pious dark green of staid and stern maternal widowhood was everywhere, overpowering even the sea-green of Jokonan arms, and never had Ista loathed the color more.

  Dowager Princess Joen, dressed in a different but equally elaborate layering of stiff gowns from when they had—five gods, was it only this time yesterday that they had met upon the road?—sat in the smaller, lower of the two chairs. Her woman attendants knelt upon the cushions, and a drab, moonfaced young woman who might be another daughter crouched at her feet. Ista could not tell how many of them were sorceresses. A dozen officers stood at painful attention along each side. Ista wondered if all eleven of Joen’s surviving leashed demons were present for this … demonstration.

  Twelve. Foix stood rigidly among the Jokonan officers. His face was bruised and cut, but cleaned, and he was dressed anew in Jokonan garb and a green tabard with white pelicans flying. His expression was dazed, his weird smile forced and unnatural. Ista didn’t even need her lost sight to be certain that a glittering new snake floated from the woman on the dais to him, and that its fangs were sunk deeply into his belly. Illvin’s eyes, too, passed across Foix; and his jaw set, if possible, even more tightly.

  The possibilities for more cruel baiting were endless. Fortunately, perhaps, time was not. The bronze-haired officer gestured Ista forward to the middle of the carpets, to the center of this brief set piece of power, facing Joen. Illvin was stopped at sword’s point a few paces back, behind Ista’s right shoulder, and she was more sorry that she could not see him than that he could see her. She wondered what final stamp of humiliation had been prepared for her.