Paladin of Souls

CHAPTER TWENTY

A LOW MOAN BROKE FROM GORAM'S LIPS AS HE CROUCHED, GRAY with fear, over his team's reins.

"Get back, get back," Arhys hissed to the manservant and Cattilara's woman, shoving them behind him to stumble and crouch in the bed of the wagon. His hand clapped down on Goram's shoulder. "Drive on! Drive through them, if we can." He stood up and signaled to Foix, sitting his skittering horse and staring frantically forward and back. "Go on!"

Foix gave him a salute, drew his sword, and wheeled his horse around. The forward four men from the Daughter's Order drew their weapons and fell in to either side of him, preparing to clear the way for the wagon behind them. It was not possible to see how much of the Jokonan column had already debouched onto the curving road ahead, though the number still to come, strung back through the brush on the valley's steep side to their left, seemed to go on and on. Goram whipped up his team. The wagon groaned and began to rumble forward.

The Jokonans nearest them looked over their shoulders to see what was bearing down on them from behind. Shouts, the ring of weapons being drawn, the squeals of horses jerked around and spurred forward.

Arhys grabbed Ista by the upper arm and hustled her back to relative cover in the wagon's center. The wagon bed bumped and rocked, and Ista dropped to her knees before she was pitched onto them.

Illvin's parade horse trotted beside the wagon, breaking into its rocking canter as the dray horses picked up speed. Illvin leaned over and shouted, "Arhys! I need a weapon!" His empty hand extended in demand toward his brother, who looked frantically around. Illvin glanced ahead. "Quickly!"

With a curse, Arhys snatched up the only pointed object in view, a pitchfork that had been fastened along the wagon bed's inner wall. He swung it out to Illvin, who glared at his brother in extreme exasperation but grabbed it anyway, sweeping it around prongs forward. "I was thinking of a sword."

"Sorry," said Arhys, drawing his. "It's taken. I need a horse." His head swiveled to Liss, cantering along the opposite side.

"No, Arhys!" Illvin shouted over the rumbling of the wagon, the quickening hoofbeats, and the yells rising ahead. "Stay back! Have some sense!" He pointed to the unconscious Cattilara.

Arhys's head jerked back, and he drew breath through his teeth not for air but for anguish, as he realized just whose body must now bear his battle risks.

"Stay by the royina! Ah. Here comes my sword—!" Illvin clapped his borrowed boots to his white horse's sides; the beast's broad haunches bunched, and it sprang forward with a startling bound. Illvin's linen bed robe flapped open on his bare torso and fluttered in his wake. His tied-back hair streamed out behind him.

Ista clutched the side boards and stared out openmouthed. Wrong horse, wrong weapon, wrong armor—half naked qualified as wrong armor, did it not?—yelling like a madman... Illvin wrapped his right arm around the pitchfork and pointed it like a lance at the Jokonan soldier bearing down upon him, sword upraised. At the last moment, at some hidden pressure from Illvin's knee, the heavy white horse swerved, caroming into the Jokonan's mount. The pitchfork tines slid up on either side of the enemy's descending sword wrist. A twist, a yank, a snatch, and Illvin was riding onward with the hilt clutched in his other hand while the Jokonan tumbled from his saddle and was half trampled by the horses of Foix's two rear guards galloping after them. Illvin gave a whoop of triumph and brandished the sword, but, with a thoughtful glance at the humble tool gripped under his other arm, also hung on to the pitchfork.

Although their noisy charge succeeded in driving the Jokonans immediately ahead of them off the road and scattering them to the sides, the enemy cavalrymen formed up rapidly again behind and began to give chase. There seemed nothing aboard to throw at them but four trunks and some hard bread crusts, though Arhys's page groped frantically through the gear for some better missiles. Cattilara's woman clutched her mistress's flaccid body and wailed. Galloping along on the wagon's right, Liss had drawn her new dagger, but it seemed an inequitable match for the mounted men's swords. Arhys lunged over and dragged Ista back to the center, then waited tensely, swaying on one knee, sword unsheathed, ready to dart to whatever side an enemy first tried to climb through.

The white horse shimmered by, heading to the rear; with a sun glitter, a sword spun into the wagon and clanged on the floorboards. Arhys kicked it over to the barefoot manservant, who snatched it up gratefully and took up a guard position on the wagon's end. A few minutes later, the white horse overtook them at a gallop on the other side, and Illvin leaned in to toss yet another sword aboard. His grin flashed past like a streak of light as he brandished the pitchfork and hurtled onward once more.

From the driver's box, Goram cried out. Arhys plunged forward. Ista could see only the back of Arhys's legs as he braced himself and swung at some unseen assailant riding alongside. He moved with power, speed, and utmost sureness. But the white line of soul-fire pouring out of Cattilara and into him seemed to have doubled in speed and density. Too fast, thought Ista frantically. She cannot sustain this rate for long. It will empty her...

The wagon rumbled around a tight curve. Ista slid across the rough boards on hands and knees, collecting splinters in her palms, tumbling into Cattilara on her pallet. The waiting girl's tear-streaked face was mottled red and white with heat and terror. Beyond Liss, one of the men of the Daughter's Order fell back along the roadside, bleeding and toppling from his saddle, his horse limping and slowing. Ista tried to spin around and mark his fate, but she was bounced again as a wheel smacked through a pothole, and by the time she found her balance and looked up again, he was lost to her view. A galloping Jokonan was poking his sword rather clumsily through the space between the wagon's side and the half-rolled-up canvas top, and being parried equally clumsily by Arhys's page, fighting from his knees with Illvin's captured sword.

Louder cries and curses came from ahead, in two languages. A flash of red-violet demon light seared across Ista's inner vision as she crouched, staring downward. A scream of tortured metal sounded from beneath the wagon. The wagon wobbled, then jerked down on the left rear side. The three women slithered across the wagon bed in a heap; even Ista yelped. She heard the snap of the rear axle, then the back end dropped altogether and began dragging. With a cry, the manservant fell out. Arhys slid back in from the driver's box, barely avoiding spearing the weeping waiting woman on the point of his blade.

Arhys stared around wildly. "Liss!" he called.

"Here!" The palomino had held to its position on the wagon's right side and was now slowing with them.

More cries rose from up ahead, along with crashing noises and a scream of a horse. The lurching wagon slewed off the crown of the road and grated to a tilted stop. Arhys dropped his sword and snatched up his wife's limp body, heaving her out and across into startled Liss's arms. "Take her, take her! Ride, if you can. On to Porifors."

"Yes, yes!" Ista endorsed this. Foix's horse flashed into Ista's view,

sliding to a rearing halt. Ista pointed downward. "Foix, did your demon do that?"

"No, Royina!" He leaned over his pommel to stare in at her; his eyes were very wide. The bear shadow was not curled tight within him, but on its seeming-feet, its head swinging dizzily from side to side.

"Royina... ?" Liss's hoarse voice called uncertainly, as she struggled to get a better grip on her limp load.

"Yes, take Cattilara and ride, or all are lost together! Foix, go with her, get them through!"

"Royina, I can't—"

"Go!" Ista's scream nearly burst her lungs. Both horses wheeled away. Foix's sword, swinging past, shed a spatter of dark wet drops. Cries, scraping metal, the twang of a crossbow, and the thunk of a heavy blade biting flesh—whose?—echoed back to Ista's ears. But the dual echo of their horses' hooves dwindled in the distance without slowing or diverting.

Ista climbed forward to grab the rear edge of the driver's seat and peek over. Dropped across the road in front of them was a large palanquin with green cloth hangings and gold trim. One of the foremost dray horses plunged and kicked, its front legs tangled with the palanquin's rear boards and braces. The splintered wood had ripped its skin. The other lead horse was down in its traces, bleeding and making dreadful noises. A dozen bearers in heavily embroidered green uniforms were scattered about, shouting and screaming, the ones who could still walk trying to help their injured comrades. Three of them tried to control the rearing horse and drag a moaning fourth man out from under the wreckage.

They had descended perhaps half the height of the slope to the river bottom, where the road made its last turn for Porifors. If not for this ghastly obstruction, Ista realized, they might well have burst through the front of the column, though whether they could have outdistanced the enemy thereafter was an open question.

Goram sat frozen, his hands in the air; Ista followed his frightened gaze to a Jokonan soldier standing in the road with a cocked crossbow, trained upon the groom. Another and another ran up, until the wagon was surrounded by a dozen tense men, their fingers tight, and sometimes trembling, on the release catches.

A Jokonan soldier sidled up cautiously and pulled Goram down off his box. Goram stumbled onto the road and stood with his arms wrapped tightly around his torso, sniveling uncontrollably. The soldier returned to grab at Ista and manhandle her down. She went unresisting, the better to keep to her feet. Arhys emerged upon the box and stood a moment, sword out but held still. His jaw tightened as his gaze swept over the bowmen. One corner of his mouth turned up in a weird smile, as it apparently crossed his mind just how little those gleaming quarrels might affect him, should he choose to leap in an attack, to the consternation—truncated consternation—of his enemies. But the smile grew sour, and his teeth set, as he followed out the rest of the inevitable consequences. Very slowly, he lowered the tip of his blade.

A crossbowman motioned him to throw down his weapon. Arhys's eyes coolly considered the quarrels aimed at Ista, and he did so. The blade clanged on the gravel. A Jokonan snatched it up, and Arhys stepped deliberately down off the box. For just a moment longer, the Jokonan soldiery forbore—or feared—to seize him.

Two more green-uniformed bearers assisted a small, shaken-looking woman clad in dark green silks out from under the drunkenly angled canopy of the palanquin. Ista's breath drew in.

Her inner vision revealed a soul the like of which Ista had never seen before. It roiled and boiled with violent colors in the confines of the woman's body, but darkened toward the center, till Ista seemed to be looking down a black well at midnight. Black, yet not empty. Faint colored lines radiated out from the bottomless pit in all directions, a tangled web that writhed and pulsed and knotted. Ista had to forcibly blink away the overpowering second sight in order to take in the surface of the woman.

On the outside, the woman was a bizarre mix of delicately decorated and aged and drab. She was only a little taller than Ista herself. Dull, gray-brown curling hair was braided up in an interlaced Roknari court style, bound with strings of glittering jewels in the shapes of tiny flowers. Her face was sallow and lined, without paint or powder. Her dress was many-layered, embroidered with thread of gold and brilliant silks picturing interlocking birds. The body it covered was slight, with slack breasts and sagging belly. Her mouth was pursed and angry. Her pale blue eyes, when they turned at last on Ista, burned. Seared.

A young officer on a nervously capering horse rode near; he pulled it to a halt and swung down beside the woman, abandoning his reins, which were snatched up at once by a soldier hurrying to assist him. The officer stared at Ista as if transfixed. His high rank was signaled more by the gold and jewels decorating his horse's gear than by elaborations on his own clothing, but he bore a gold-trimmed green sash across his chest decorated with a string of flying white pelicans. High cheekbones graced a handsome, sensitive face, and the hair braided tightly to his scalp was bright crinkled gold in the blazing noon. His soul... was lost in an intense violet haze that extended to the margins of his body.

They have a sorcerer. The origin of the flash of chaotic power that had popped the wagon's axle pins and burst the rear wheels off seemed revealed to Ista's inner eye, for the color in his body still pulsed and shivered as if in some aching reaction or echo. Yet even as she stared across at him, the demon light seemed to shrink in on itself, retreating.

The page and the waiting woman, clinging to each other, were prodded out of the back of the wagon at sword's point and made to stand near Arhys. The march's eyes flicked to them, half closed as if in some attempt at reassurance, and returned to the old woman and the officer. Illvin and the Daughter's men had all disappeared from sight. Scattered? Captured? Slain?

Ista grew conscious of her plain riding costume, stripped of decoration or marks of rank, of her flushed face and sweat and dirt. Too-familiar calculations raced through her mind. Might she pass for a waiting lady or a servant? Conceal from her captors the value of their prize, effect some escape from their inattention? Or would they just throw her to their troops for a cheap tidbit, to be tormented and discarded like that unfortunate maidservant of the rich woman from Rauma?

The sorcerer-officer's eye took in Goram, and widened briefly, then narrowed in thought. Or even... recognition? Thought, but not confusion. He sees Goram's ravaged soul. Yet it does not surprise him. His eyes traveled on to Arhys, and his lips parted in true astonishment.

"Mother, she shines with a terrible light, and her guardian is a dead man!" he said in Roknari to the woman at his side. His stare at Ista intensified, grew fearful, as if he wondered if she were performing Arhys's appalling marvel of revivification. As if he imagined she concealed some further bodyguard of walking corpses, about to erupt from the dirt of the road beneath their feet.

This must be the Dowager Princess Joen herself, Ista realized with a shock. And Prince Sordso. The erect, slender young man looked anything but a sot right now. And yet—was it Sordso, in that alert body? The demon light seemed utterly ascendant. He took a step backward; the woman grabbed his arm, her fingers pinching fiercely.

"She bears a god, we are undone! " he cried in rising terror.

"She does no such thing." the woman hissed in his ear. "Those are nothing but smears. She has barely enough capacity to channel a little sight. Her soul is choked with scars and disruption. She is afraid of you." That much was surely true. Ista's mouth was dry, her head pounding; she seemed to float on a rocking sea of panic.

The woman's blue eyes narrowed, flared with triumph. "Sordso, look at her! This is Ista herself, just as she was described! Half the prize we came for, delivered into our hands! This is a gift from the gods Themselves!" She hurts to look upon!" No, she is nothing. You can take her. I'll show you. Take her now!" The clawed grip shook the young man's arm. "Undo her." One of the coiling strings of light writhing from her dark belly seemed to brighten, blaze. Its distal end, Ista saw, terminated in Sordso's body like some obscene umbilicus.

The young man moistened his lips; the violet light returned to the margins of his body, and intensified. He raised a hand, using the dense habits of matter to direct a force that had nothing to do with matter at all. A purple glare boiled off his palm and wound around Ista like a coiling snake.

Her knees went first, buckling beneath her, dropping her into the dust. Her cracked scabs split open altogether, and she could feel the blood trickle and soak, slick beneath the battered, sweat-stained, loosening bandages. Her spine seemed to unhook itself, bone from bone, and she bent forward helplessly. Hideous knots of spasming pain began beneath each shoulder blade. Almost, her bowels seemed loosened as well, if that was not just by her own horror. She had a glimpse of Arhys's bearded lips parting, of his eyes darkening with dismay, as she sank down before all assembled here for no cause that fleshly eyes could see. Her hands went out to catch herself, then her arms grew limp as well. Her head grew heavier still, and she was barely able to turn it aside so that her soft cheek and not her slackening mouth smeared into the sharp-edged gravel and the dirt.

"You see? So will all Chalion and Ibra bow before us." Joen's voice dripped with satisfaction. Ista could see her green silk slippers, peeping from beneath her skirts, and Sordso's polished boots. The boots shifted uneasily. In some dizzied distance, Ista could hear Goram's low,

choked, liquid sobbing. Blessedly, the injured horse's screams had stopped; perhaps some merciful man had cut its throat. Perhaps some merciful man will cut mine.

"I admit," Princess Joen's voice went on above Ista's head, "I do not understand the dead man ... " The slippered footsteps shuffled through the gravel, approaching Arhys. Ista found herself unable to even moan. She could barely blink; a drop spun from one eyelash to plop into the dust before her nose.

From the slope above echoed sudden shouts. Ista's head was turned the wrong way, looking out over the brim of the road into the valley beyond. Around and behind her, men's booted feet suddenly scuffled. She heard a crossbow twang, and caught her breath in fear for Arhys. Hoofbeats. Many hoofbeats, pounding, scrambling, sliding down from the ridge above. A lunatic whoop in a suddenly dearly familiar voice.

Sordso gasped. His boots crunched across the gravel; grunting, he swung those green slippers up out of sight. The boots staggered past Ista's face; nearby hooves scraped. Ista managed to turn her head a little more. The prince's horse, with Joen in her elaborate dress clinging awkwardly to its saddle, was being towed forward at a sudden trot by a running bearer, who shot a look of fear over his shoulder, upslope.

A thump sounded. The invisible weight like a huge hand pressing Ista to the earth lessened. The rasp of Sordso's sword being drawn from its scabbard sliced across her hearing, and she flinched, and at last jerked her head around the other way. Some crossbowman had been careless enough to take his eyes off Arhys for a moment, and the march was now locked in struggle with him. Several nearby bowmen had fired upward, and were frantically recocking. Arhys yanked a dagger from the sheath of the man he wrestled and flung him aside just in time to parry Sordso's thrust. The thrust of steel, that is. A violet light collected in Sordso's palm. He shoved it forward.

The searing purple line passed through Arhys's body without effect, to bury itself in the soil beyond. Sordso yipped with surprise and scrambled frantically backward as a riposte from the dagger nearly swept his sword from his grip. The scramble became a run.

What seemed a very avalanche of horses overwhelmed them. The Jokonan bowmen were knocked aside, ridden down. Swords clanged and spears thrust, fiercely wielded by yelling men in gray-and-gold tabards. In front of Ista's face, a set of hooves that seemed the size of dinner plates suddenly materialized, and danced. Three long equine legs were silk-white, the fourth soaked scarlet with blood.

"Got you that horse you were wanting," Illvin's voice, would-be laconic but for its gasping, sounded from above. Beyond the dinner plates, another set of hooves crunched and slid. And, more sharply, "Five gods! Is she hurt?"

"Ensorcelled, I think," Arhys gasped back. He knelt beside Ista, gathered her up in cool, unliving, welcome hands. Heaved to his feet, and boosted her upward still farther, into his brother's arms. She landed with a limp grunt, stomach down across Illvin's lap.

Illvin cursed, and grabbed a thigh through her skirt to hold her there. He bellowed over his shoulder to someone, not Arhys, "Get Goram!"

"They're re-forming!" shouted Arhys. "Go!" The loud slap of his hand across the white horse's rump was scarcely needed to speed them on their way; the animal was already pirouetting. They plunged down slope, away from the road.

The source of the terrifying gore was revealed, before Ista's bouncing nose, as an ugly cut across Feather's right shoulder, bleeding freely. The ground swept past dizzily. The horse hesitated, its body bunching; Illvin leaned far back in his saddle, his clutch on her leg tightening to a vise. Abruptly, they were sliding straight down the steep hillside in a spray of dirt and stones, the horse's front legs braced; it seemed nearly to squat on its broad haunches behind. Illvin whooped again. Whipping bushes slapped and scratched Ista's face. The least loss of balance, and they would all three be tumbling heads over tails together, bones shattering and guts smashed...

The endless slide terminated not in disaster, but in a wild splash across Porifors's little river. Other horses were galloping up around them now. Illvin released his death grip on her thigh and gave her buttocks a distracted, reassuring pat.

Ista found her control of her body returning, and she spat out a mixture of bloody river water and dirt. What had happened to the sorcerer prince? His attention had been diverted altogether from her, evidently. For the moment. Along with control, unfortunately, came sensation. "I think I'm about to vomit," she mumbled into the horse's red-lathered shoulder.

For a blissful instant, they came to a halt. Illvin bent and wrapped his long arms around her, and heaved her upright and over, to sit across his lap. Weakly, she wrapped her arms around that bony sweat-slick torso, itself laboring for breath. His bed robe had been lost somewhere along the route, along with the pitchfork. His mouth was bloodied. His streaked dark hair was a wild tangle across his face. His live body was hot with exertion. But he bore no serious wounds, her testing hands reassured her.

His own shaking hand rose to her face, gently wiping at whatever ungodly mixture of horse blood, sweat, and dirt smeared it. "Dear Is'— Royina, are you hurt?"

"No, that's all from your poor horse," she assured him, guessing it was the blood that alarmed him. "I am a little shaken."

"A little. Ah." His brows arched, and his lips grew less thin, curling up once more.

"I think I am going to have bruises on my stomach from that ride."

"Oh." His hand, across her belly, gave it an awkward little rub. "Indeed, I am sorry."

"Don't apologize. What happened to your mouth?" She reached up with one finger to touch the lacerated edge.

"Spear butt."

"Ouch."

"Better than a spear point, trust me." They started forward once more. He glanced over his shoulder. They were on a minor road, hardly more than a track, that ran along the opposite side of the river from the main one. Other gray-tabarded soldiers now rode all around them. "This is a bad time to linger out-of-doors. That Jokonan column we overtook is one of three closing in on the castle just at the moment, the scouts say. No siege engines sighted in their baggage trains yet, though. Can you hang on to me if we canter?"

"Certainly." Ista sat up straighter and brushed hair out of her mouth, she wasn't quite sure whose. She felt his legs tighten beneath her, and the white horse broke without transition into its long, rocking gait.

"Where did you find the troop?" she gasped, clinging harder to his slippery skin against the jouncing.

"You sent them to me, thank you very much. Are you a seeress, as well? I met them coming down the road even as I was galloping back to Porifors to raise them."

Ah. Dy Cabon had carried out his orders, then. A little early, but Ista was not inclined to chide him for it. "Only prudence rewarded. For a change. Did you see Liss and Cattilara, and Foix? We tried to send them on."

"Yes, they passed through us as we were making for the ridge to flank the Jokonan column. They should be safe within the walls by now." He twisted to glance back over his shoulder, but he did not kick his horse to greater speed, by which Ista concluded that they had, for the moment, shaken off their pursuit. The great horse's stride was shortening, its bellows-breath growing more strained; Illvin eased back in the saddle and allowed it to drop to a slow lope.

"What happened up there on the road?" he asked. "What struck you to the ground? Sorcery, truly?"

"Truly. Sordso the Sot is now Sordso the Sorcerer, it seems. How he came by his demon, I know not. But I agree with you—his dead sister's old demon must know. If we must face Sordso in battle ... does demon magic have a range, do you know? Never mind, I'll ask dy Cabon. I wonder if Foix knows by experiment? I wouldn't put it past him."

"Three sorcerers, Foix reported. At least," said Illvin. "Or so he thought he perceived, among the Jokonan officers."

"What?" Ista's eyes widened. She thought of the tangle of strange lines emanating like a nest of snakes from Dowager Princess Joen's belly. One had held its jaws clamped into Sordso, no question. "Then there may be more than three." A dozen? Twenty?

"You saw more sorcerers?"

"I saw something. Something very uncanny."

He twisted again to look over his shoulder.

"What do you see now?" Ista asked.

"Not Arhys, yet. Blast the man. He always has to be the last one out ali—the last one out. I've told him such bravado has no place in a responsible commander. It works on the boys, though, I admit it does. Bastard's hell, it works on me, and I know better... ah." He turned again, a grim smile of temporary relief tweaking up one corner of his bleeding mouth. He let his mount slow to a walk, and frowned; the horse was distinctly limping, now. But Castle Porifors loomed up almost overhead. A few last stragglers were streaming into the town gates from the country round about. The refugees' shouting sounded strained, but not panicked.

Arhys trotted up beside them on a Jokonan horse, presumably obtained by Illvin from the same convenient store as his sword collection. His white-faced page sat up behind, bravely not crying. Ista's inner eye checked the line of pale soul-fire pouring into the march's heart; clearly, Catti still lived, wherever she was. The flow was reduced from its earlier terrifying rush, but still very heavy.

Goram, Ista was glad to see, clung on behind another soldier, and Cattilara's distraught young woman behind a third. Of the barefoot manservant, she saw no sign. Arhys saluted his brother with a casual wave, as casually returned; his eyes upon Ista were grave and worried.

"Time to go in," said Illvin suggestively.

"You'll get no argument from me," returned Arhys.

"Good."

Their tired horses clambered up the switchback road to the castle gate and into the forecourt.

Liss bounded to receive Ista as Illvin lowered her to the ground; Foix followed, to offer her his arm. She leaned on it thankfully, as the alternative was to fall down in a heap.

"Royina, let us take you to your chamber—" he began.

"Where did you take Lady Cattilara?"

"Laid down in her bedchamber, with her women to take care of her."

"Good. Foix, find dy Cabon and attend upon me there. Now."

"I must look to our defenses," said Arhys. "I'll join you as soon as I can. If I can. Illvin... ?"

Illvin looked up from instructing a groom in the care of his injured horse.

Arhys's gaze flicked briefly toward the inner court, where his and his wife's chambers lay. "Do what you must."

"Oh, aye." Illvin grimaced, and turned to follow Ista. The wild excitement that had sustained him through the clash on the road was passing off. He limped like his horse, stiff and weary, as they passed under the archway to the fountain court.