Paladin of Souls

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A WAVE OF LIGHT PASSED ALONG THE DEEP VIOLET CORD between Joen and Ista, and its color and brilliance seemed to intensify. Was Joen's first shocked impulse to strengthen her line? For a dizzy instant, Ista wondered who was the fisherwoman and who the fish. Then she felt the struggling, panicked young demon pass firmly into the Bastard's hands, within her.

You have hooked a god, Joen. Now what shall you do? It was as though a galley had thrown a grappling hook onto a continent, thinking to tow it away.

"She bears the demon-god!" Joen screamed. "Kill her now!"

Yes. That would do...

Yet even as Joen cried out, time seemed to stretch in Ista's perceptions like cold honey spinning off a spoon on a winter morning. She did not think it would stretch indefinitely.

Where should I begin? Ista asked the Presence within her.

Begin at the center, It replied. The rest will follow perforce.

She opened her material hands and let her spirit hands flow out along the violet cable. Enter Joen's body through that channel. Wrap the dark mass, and pull it out toward her. It came resisting, surging and spitting, streaming corrosive violet shadows like water spilling. It burned her spirit hands like vitriol, and she gasped with the unexpected pain, which seemed to strike down into the center of her being and pulse back out to every extremity, the way the shock of a great wound reverberated in a body. The creature was very dense, and ugly. And large. And old, centuries old, rotten with time.

It is hideous.

Yes, said the god. Go on anyway. Finish Arhys's ride.

Ista's material hands were too sluggish to keep up with her streaming will. With her spirit hands alone, she combed back the strands of Joen's soul tangled with the demon. Yet as fast as she did so, Joen flung out tendrils of cold white fire to wrap the demon round again and pull it back. The demon shrieked.

Let go, Ista urged. Let it go, and turn to some better task. Even now, you have a choice.

No! Joen's mind returned. It is my gift, my great chance! No one shall wrest it from me, least of all you! You were so feckless, you couldn't even keep your own son alive! Mine shall have his place; I have promised it!

Ista flinched, but the Presence sustained her. If she will not stay, she must come, It said. Continue.

Your wrongful attempts to impose order create yet vaster destruction, said Ista to Joen. You torment and demolish the very souls you most desire to make grow and love you. You possess truer gifts, stunted though they have been. Let go, find them instead, and live.

The whipping white fire was a visible scream of denial. In it Ista could discern not the faintest whisper of assent.

So.

Ista brought the great violet-black demon to her lips, and pulled it inward. It seemed to stretch and distort in its passage, its screeching becoming pain in her mouth, fire in her gullet. There are souls inside it, she realized. Many pieces of old souls, all digested and smeared together. Souls of the dead, and the long dead. What is to be done about them?

The dead belong to Us; sorting them is beyond your calling. The souls of the yet living, torn apart untimely while still trapped in the realm of matter, those are your care on Our behalf.

And this? Ista asked. Joen's live white soul-fire, tangled with the demon, was passing into her now. It clawed and burned.

Comes out of your hands and into Mine.

This is not the quiet damnation of sundering. Indeed, the white fire seemed to howl, splitting Ista's ears from within. Neither is this heaven's healing.

No, said the Voice regretfully. This is will-not. So it shall pass with its demon to the place of be-not.

Ista had a vision of a strange, dimensionless void, the picture leaked, perhaps, from His mind to hers: a roiling pool of demon energy, without form, without personas, without minds or wills or song or speech or memories or any gift of higher order—the Bastard's hell. Reservoir of pure destruction. Spilling from that pool into the world of matter, a thin controlled flow. Returning to it, an erratic stream. Balancing the life of the world exactly midway between the hot death that is chaos and the chill death that is stasis. She realized at last why the concatenation of Joen's demons had made her edgy, on a level separate from their direct threat to Porifors. Was it possible that such a vortex of disorder might create its own rip between the two realms, one that even the gods might be hard-pressed to mend again? So much divine attention in one small place...

Some human attention now would gratify Me greatly, the Voice murmured. It did not, Ista noticed, either confirm or deny her guess. Bring me in the rest of my little brethren, sweet Ista, as swiftly as you may. It will no doubt take practice before it comes easily.

So therefore my first trial is a dozen at once? The pain flaring in her stomach felt as though she had been forced to swallow molten lead. Along with that sickening, twisted thing?

Well, said the Voice affably, there is this; if you survive this, no other demon astray in the realm of matter should pose too onerous a challenge to you hereafter...

Ista considered a wealth of objections starting with What do you mean, if? but abandoned the impulse. Starting an argument with this Presence was likely to do nothing but spin her in endless circles till she was dizzy, and make Him laugh.

You will not abandon me again? she asked suspiciously.

I did not abandon you before... . nor you Me, as I have marked. Persistent Ista.

She turned her second sight outward again. Trying to see the god with it had been as futile as trying to see the back of her own head. Joen's mouth was open, her eyes rolling back, her body slumping. Somewhere under Ista's breastbone, the first burst of pain was diminishing, as the god drew the ancient demon and its clawing mistress back into His realm. Following after it, but now running to her and not to Joen, a dozen tangled, writhing cords of light jerked and yanked, as the demons fettered upon them tried to flee the feared presence of their god. The human bodies in which they were lodged were only just beginning to move under their riders' frantic lashings.

One at a time or all together? Ista reached out with her spirit hands and plucked one cord at random, and slid her light-palms along it to the demon within one of Joen's attendant women. This one was well cultivated, with parts of three or four different souls whirling within it. The white soul-fire of the living host was more readily discernible, and she combed it back toward the woman, imperfectly. Ista swallowed the demon. The woman's back arched, and she began to collapse. The demon passed through into the god's hands more easily this time, almost immediately.

These cords. I recognize them. I pulled Arhys safe to shore last night with something very like one.

They were stolen from Us, long ago. The demon could not have created them, you know. The Voice was edged with wrath, though only the faintest reflection of it glimmered through to Ista, else she would have been crushed flat.

Ista reached for another cord, repeating the gesture of plucking and combing. It was a man, one of the officers; his mouth opened on a beginning scream. I'm not getting it all sorted, she worried. I'm not getting it right.

You are brilliant, the Voice reassured her.

It is imperfect.

So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.

Another, then, and another. The demons flowed to her, through her, faster, but it was an undeniably sloppy process. The next demon was Sordso's, and it was the most complex construct Ista had yet encountered. Layer upon layer of souls and their talents were interpenetrated with the young man's agonized, constricted soul-fire. It was a weirdly loving fabrication. Ista thought she perceived bits of soldiers, scholars, judges, swordsmen, and ascetics. All the Golden General's public virtues, collected and concentrated: the purified pattern of perfect manliness. It was horrifying. How could something made of souls be so coldly soulless?

No poets, though. None at all.

This dark piece of soul here is different, she realized, as one fragment began to flow through her fingers.

Yes, said the god. The man still lives, in the realm of matter.

Where? Is it... ? Should I attempt to... ?

Yes, if you think you can endure it. It will be uncomfortable.

Ista rolled up the patch of darkness and bundled it aside in her mind. It pulsed there, hot and thick. Somewhere off the edge of her material vision, the bronze-skinned Jokonan officer was lifting his sword, beginning to turn. A motion in black was Illvin, beginning to move with—no, after—him. Ista ignored it all and kept on combing. Sordso's mouth was opening on a wordless howl, but not, she thought, of a man bereaved by his dispossession. It might be rage. It might be triumph. It might be madness.

Then the next cord, then... the last.

She glanced upward with both material and inner sight at the ashen Foix in his green tabard, standing among the startled Jokonan officers. The violet shadow within him was no longer bear-shaped, but distributed unevenly throughout his body. It seemed both to cringe from her, and stare in fascination.

She considered the final cord in her spirit hand. Lifted it to her lips. Bit it through.

Good, said the Voice.

Oh. Should I have asked?

You are my Door-ward in the realm of matter. A lord's appointed porter does not run to him to ask if each beggar, whether in rags or silks, should be admitted or turned away, else he might as well stand at his gates himself The porter is expected to use his judgment.

My judgment? She let the end of the cord go. It snapped back into Foix, and he was free. Or ... whatever Foix was now, was free.

Foix's face flickered; his lips parted, firmed. Then, after a bare second, stretched again in that horrible strained smile of perfect assent. False falseness; treachery turning in air. He is much less simple than he looks.

Ista was barely aware of the cries and turmoil erupting throughout the tent. The voices grew faint and far off, diminishing, the figures dimmer and dimmer. She turned to follow the entrancing Voice.

SHE SEEMED TO COME TO THE DOOR OF HERSELF, AND LOOK through. An overwhelming impression of color and beauty, pattern and complexity, music and song, all endlessly elaborated, bewildered her senses. She wondered how confusing the world looked to a newborn infant, who had neither names for what she saw nor even the concept of names. The child began, Ista supposed, with her mother's face and breast, and from there worked outward—and in a lifetime could not come to the end of it all.

This is a world greater and stranger than the one of matter that gave my soul birth, and even the world of matter was beyond my comprehension. How now shall I begin?

Well, Ista, said the Voice. Do you stay or go? You cannot hang forever in My doorway like a cat, you know.

I have not words for this. I would see Your face.

Abruptly, she was standing in an airy room, very like a chamber in Porifors. She quickly glanced down, and was relieved to discover she was granted not only a body, healed and light and free of pain, but clothes as well—much as she had been wearing but cleansed of stains and mended of rips. She looked up, and rocked back.

This time, He wore Illvin's body and face. It was a healthy, full-fleshed version, if still tall and lean. His courtier's garb was silver embroidered on white, his baldric silk, his sword hilt and signet ring gleaming. His hair, pulled back in Roknari braids and a long, thick queue, was pure white. The infinite depths of His eyes destroyed the illusion of humanity, though, even as their darkness recalled the man.

"I should have liked," she admitted faintly, "to see what Illvin looked like with white hair."

"Then you will have to go back and wait a while," the Bastard replied. His voice was scarcely deeper or richer than the original's; it even adopted those northern cadences. "You would take your chances, of course; by the time all his hair is white, will there be any left?"

His body and face shifted through a hundred possible Illvins at a hundred possible ages, straight or bent, thin or fat, bald or not. The laughter on His lips remained the same, though.

"I desire... this." It was unclear even to Ista if her hand gesture indicated the god or the man. "May I come in?"

His smile softened. "The choice is yours, my Ista. As you do not deny Me, I will not deny you. Yet I would still await you, if you chose the long way home."

"I might become lost upon the road." She looked away. A great calm filled her. No pain, no terror, no regret. Their immense absences seemed to leave room for ... something. Something new, something never dreamed of before. If this was what Arhys had experienced, it was no wonder he'd never looked back. "So this is my death. Why did I ever fear it?"

"Speaking as an expert, you never seemed to Me to fear it all that much," He said dryly.

She looked back. "There may be more to paradise than the cessation of pain, but, oh, it seems almost paradise enough. Might a next time... hurt?"

He shrugged. "Once you return to the realm of matter, the protection I can offer you is limited, and its bounds, alas, do not exclude pain. This death is for you to choose. The next may not be."

Her lips curved up despite themselves. "Are you saying I might find myself back at this same gate in another quarter of an hour?"

He sighed. "I do hope not. I should have to train another porter. I quite fancied a royina for a time." The eyes glittered. "So does my great-souled Illvin. He's prayed to Me for you, after all. Consider my reputation."

Ista considered His reputation. "It's dreadful," she observed.

He merely grinned, that familiar, stolen, heart-stopping flash of teeth.

"What training?" she added, feeling suddenly cantankerous. "You never explained anything."

"Instructing you, sweet Ista, would be like teaching a falcon to walk up to its prey. It might with great effort be done, but one would end with a very footsore and cranky bird, and a tedious wait for dinner. With a wingspan like yours, it's ever so much easier just to shake you from my wrist and let you fly."

"Plummet," Ista growled.

"No. Not you. Granted, you tumble and complain halfway down the abyss, but eventually you do spread your wings and soar."

"Not always." Her voice went lower. "Not the first time."

He tilted his head in a sliver of acknowledgment. "But I was not your falconer then. We do suit, you know."

She glanced away, and around the strange, perfect, unreal room. Antechamber, she thought, boundary between the inside and the outside. But which door was which? "My task. Is it done?"

"Done and well-done, my, true, foster, laggard child."

"I have come very late to everything. To forgiveness. To love. To my god. Even to my own life." But she bowed her head in relief. Done was good. It meant one could stop. "Did the Jokonans slay me, as Joen ordered?"

"No. Not yet."

Smiling, He stepped up to her and tilted her chin up. He lowered His mouth to hers as boldly as Illvin had, that afternoon—yesterday?—on the tower. Except that His mouth tasted not of horsemeat but of perfume, and there was no uncertainty in His eyes.

His eyes, the world, her perceptions, began to flicker.

Infinite depths became dark eyes reddened with frenzied weeping. Perfume became parched, salt flesh, then fragrance, then flesh. Sweet silence became noise and cries, and then silence, and then din again. Painless floating turned to a crushing pressure, headache, thirst, which melted in turn to bliss.

I think He takes His foot to his cat and pushes her to decision. She had no doubt she might yet dodge around that boot in either direction. But just what direction He desired was plain. The unsettling Not yet did at least suggest He did not guide her back toward a body pierced with sword thrusts. The Bastard maneuvers me into this, blast Him. It felt very comfortable, cursing her god. He was a god she might always curse, and the more inventive the invective, the more He would grin. Well suited, indeed, to true Ista.

The flickering slowed, stopped, on parched mouth, weight and pressure, din and pain. On dear, distraught, blinking, merely human eyes. Yes.

And furthermore, my god cheats. He set out this bowl of cream before ever He held the door, and He knew it well. She smiled, and tried to inhale.

Illvin pulled his frantically questing tongue from her mouth, and gasped, "She lives, oh, five gods, she breathes again!"

The crushing pressure, Ista discovered, was Illvin's arms, wrapped around her torso. She stared up into tree branches, blue sky, and his face, bent over hers. His face was flushed with heat and furrowed with terror, and a thin spattering of blood droplets marked it in an angled track from side to side. She raised a weak hand and dabbed at the red beads, and was relieved to find they did not appear to be his.

She whispered through dry, bruised lips. "What has happened?"

"That is what I prayed you might tell me," said Foix's hoarse voice. She looked up to see him looming over them. He still wore his Jokonan mail and tabard, and stood in a convincingly menacing guard stance above his apparent prisoners. She and Illvin were seated on the ground not far from the green command tents. Foix's eyes were white-rimmed, but it seemed not to be the surrounding Jokonans that disquieted him.

"You were marched into the tent," Foix continued in a lower tone. "You looked... ordinary. Helpless. Then suddenly the god light blazed from you, so brightly I was blinded for a breath. I heard Joen cry for your death."

Upon her arm, Illvin's tight clutch tightened further.

"When I could see again," continued Foix, gazing away in guard-pretense, "all the demons in the tent seemed to be rushing into you, like hot metal being drawn through a form. I saw you swallow them all down, Joen's soul as well. It was all over in an instant."

"Save one," murmured Ista.

"Eh. Ur. Yes, there was that. I felt when you freed me from Joen's geas. I almost bolted from the tent then, but I got my wits back just in time. Prince Sordso and some other officers were drawing their swords—five gods, but the scraping seemed to go on forever. Sordso's knuckles were white."

"I tried to get between them and you," Illvin said huskily to Ista. He rubbed at his nose and blinked.

"Yes," said Foix. "Bare-handed. I saw you lunge—a lot of good that was going to do. But instead Sordso whirled around and hacked at Joen."

"She was already dead by then," murmured Ista.

"I saw. She was starting to topple, but his edge caught her just in ... time. Or something. He struck so hard, he spun around and fell backward off the dais. Half the freed sorcerers were running away, but I swear half the rest had the same idea Sordso did. There was one of Joen's women had a dagger out, and was going at the body even as it fell. I'm not sure she knew or cared that it was dead—she just wanted to get in her stroke. Everyone was jostling and yelling and starting in every direction. So I jumped in front of Illvin and you and shouted, 'Back, prisoners!' and brandished my sword."

"Cursed convincingly," muttered Illvin. "I just about tried to leap on you. Except that I had my hands full."

"You fell, Royina. You just... turned gray and stopped breathing and crumpled up. I thought you had died, for your soul was gone from my sight, like a lantern blown out. Illvin tried to lift you up, fell down, then scrambled up again—I dared not help—I let him drag you out, pretending to stand guard over him. Most of the Jokonans thought you were dead, too, I think. Slain in your sorcery, some kind of death magic like Fonsa and the Golden General all over again. So, um ... lie still for a minute, there, till we think what to do next."

It was not a difficult suggestion to follow. Following any other instruction, now that would have been hard. Illvin was staring down into her face, looking like a man whose kisses had just brought his beloved back from the dead and was now too terrified to move least he shed unexpected miracles in all directions. Ista smiled up muzzily at his delicious confusion.

"The demons are all gone," she reported in a vague, dreamy voice, in case they still harbored doubts. "It was what I was sent to do, and I did it. But the Bastard let me come back." To where she was now, it occurred to her—sitting on the hard ground in the midst of an enemy camp surrounded by several hundred very live and agitated Jokonans. Vile sense of humor. Hers had been a timeless interlude, but for everyone else, she realized, bare minutes had passed since Joen's sanguinary end. But however dismasted their high command, not all of the enemy officers were going to stay confused for long. It was hard to summon fear of anything, in her lingering bliss, but she managed a flash of mild prudence. "I think we should leave now. Right now."

"Can you walk?" asked Illvin uncertainly.

"Can you?" she asked, curious. Crawling, now, she would believe crawling of him, in his present interestingly debilitated state. He should be in bed, she decided. Hers, by preference.

"No," muttered Foix. "Got to drag her again. Or carry her. Can you go on pretending to be a corpse for a little longer, Royina?"

"Oh, yes," she assured him, and sank back gratefully into Illvin's grip.

Illvin flatly refused to drag her, on the grounds that it would scrape her already-bleeding legs and feet further, but carrying her in his arms proved still beyond his strength. A short argument, in which Ista, as a corpse, declined to participate, resulted in Foix helping Illvin rise to his shaking legs with her butt-upward over his shoulder, her arms and legs dangling down in an appropriately lifeless manner. It reminded her of the ride on Feather. She tried not to smile in memory, on the grounds that it would be out of character for her part. Her white gown was even splashed with blood, a continuation, she suspected, of the same spray that had crossed Illvin's face. She could guess its source, and shuddered.

They staggered away. "Turn left," Foix directed. "Keep walking." More Jokonan soldiers ran up to them; Foix pointed backward with his sword toward the command tents and cried, "Hurry! You are needed!" The soldiers sped away as their apparent-officer directed.

Illvin muttered through his teeth, "Foix, you may speak a glib camp Roknari, but I beg you will leave sentences of more than one syllable to me. That tabard can't cover everything."

"Gladly," Foix returned under his breath. "Go right here. We're almost to the horse lines."

"Do you think they're just going to let us walk up and steal horses?" asked Illvin. His wheeze sounded more curious than objecting. Ista peered upside down through slitted eyes to take in the guards loitering in the shade. Some of the men were standing and staring toward the uproar around the green tents.

"Yes." Foix tapped his green tabard. "I'm a Jokonan officer."

"You're relying on more than that," observed Ista, her tone almost as detached as Illvin's.

"Yes, why are you so certain they will not stop and question us?" asked Illvin, a hint of nervousness entering his voice as a few heads turned to follow their progress.

"Did you stop and question Princess Umerue?"

"No, not at first. What has that to do with anything?"

Ista mumbled from Illvin's hip, "I spoke imprecisely, before. There is one sorcerer left in this camp. He's on our side, however. Seemed a good idea. The god did not object."

Illvin tensed, turning to stare, presumably, at Foix.

"Two left," said Foix. "Or a sorcerer and a sorceress. If that is your proper classification, Royina. I am not sure."

"Neither am I. We'll have to ask dy Cabon," she returned agreeably.

"Right," said Foix. "Don't do anything that looks too exciting, though. I'd rather not attempt anything gaudier, and there are limits to mild misdirection."

"Indeed," murmured Illvin.

They trod on for a few more steps.

"Well," said Foix, stopping before the lines, "have you a preference, horse-master?"

"Anything already saddled and bridled."

One choice was made for them. At the end of the line, a tall, ugly chestnut stallion suddenly lifted its head and nickered in excitement. It began shifting its haunches from side to side, disturbing the horses tied not-too-closely to it. Ears pricked, it practically danced as they neared, and raised and lowered its head, snorting.

"Bastard's eyes, Royina, can you shut that stupid monster up?" Foix muttered. "Men are starting to stare."

"Me?"

"It's you it wants."

"Set me down, then."

Illvin did so, letting her slide through his arms to her feet, gazing into her face with a searching look that was, for an instant, as good as a kiss, and holding her upright on his arm. She was very glad for the arm.

She approached the possessed animal, who lowered its head again and laid its face flat to her bloody bodice in what might be submission, love, or dementia. She looked it over in fascination. It still wore the bridle with the deep curb bit. A dozen cuts scored its body, but they were already starting to heal with unnatural speed. "Yes, yes," she murmured soothingly. "It's all right. Where he went, you could not follow. You did what you could. It's all right now." She tried to shake off her dreamy lassitude, saying to Illvin, "I believe I had better ride this one. If you don't want it following after us whinnying its heart out." She stood on tiptoe and glanced along the serrated ridge of its backbone. "Find a saddle, though," she added.

Foix filched a saddle from a pile farther down the line, and Illvin tightened the girths while Foix picked out two more horses.

"What is he called?" she asked Illvin as he cupped his hands to give her a leg up. It seemed a very long way to the ground, typical of his mounts. She disposed her skirts awkwardly in the military saddle, and let Illvin's warm hands guide her ankles to the stirrups. His fingers lingered unhappily over the bruises and cuts on her feet.

Illvin cleared his throat. "I'd really rather not say. It's, um... crude. He was never a lady's mount. Actually, he was never any sane person's mount."

"Oh? You rode him." She patted the snaky neck; the horse turned its head around and nuzzled her bare foot. "Well, if he is to be a lady's mount from now on, he'd probably better have another name, then. Demon will do."

Illvin cocked his brows up at her, and a little grin flashed across his tense mouth. "Nicely."

He turned to take his own horse in hand, hesitating briefly in order to gather his strength before swinging himself up into the saddle. He settled himself with a betraying grunt of exhaustion. By mutual, unspoken assent, they started off across the bordering field together at a staid walk. Somewhere back in the grove, something had caught fire; Ista could hear the muted roar of flames and men's cries for water. How much pent-up chaos, both natural and unnatural, had been released upon the Jokonans by Joen's death? She did not look back.

"Turn left," Illvin told Foix.

"Don't we want to circle out of sight over that rise to the north?"

"Eventually. There's a gully along here that will hide us sooner. Go slowly, though, it's likely to be patrolled. That's where I'd put men, anyway."

The counterfeit calm held. The sharpening noise of the camp fell behind them, and the empty countryside began to feign the air of some other quiet, drowsy, over warm afternoon, one not given over to war, sorcery, gods, and madness.

"At the earliest chance," Ista told Illvin, "you must bring Goram to me."

"Whatever you desire, Royina." Illvin looked over the ground they traversed, turning in his saddle.

"Shall we attempt to circle back to Porifors?" asked Foix, following his gaze back over the treetops to the distant stone pile. A curl of dirty smoke still rose from somewhere in it. "I think I might be able to get us in, under cover of darkness."

"No. If we clear the gully, I am going to try to win through to the march of Oby."

"I do not know if the royina can ride that far," said Foix, clearly picturing not just Ista but the pair of them falling from their saddles at any moment. "Or do you think to meet him on the road?"

"He won't be on the road. If he's where I suspect, we've less than ten miles to cover. And if he's not there yet, his scouts will be along soon."

They dropped into the gully, where they found Illvin's predicted Jokonan patrol almost immediately. Between the unexpected direction of their passage, Foix's officer's garb and wit-fogging sorcery, their horses' Jokonan gear, and Illvin's crisp, arrogant court Roknari, they soon left the pickets bowing and scraping in their wake. Illvin returned the hapless soldiers the fourfold Quadrene sign, touching his thumb to his tongue in secret apology to the fifth god as soon as they turned again out of sight. They pressed their horses to a faster pace.

Illvin led them onward, finding what cover the country afforded in low places, little watercourses, spinneys, and groves, angling ever north and east. They had gone some four or five miles before they even stopped to water themselves and the horses. Though multiple columns of smoke still smudged the clear blue air behind them, Porifors had disappeared from sight beyond some low, rolling ridges.

"Can you still feel your bear?" Ista asked Foix, when he'd finished dipping his head in the stream.

He sat back on his haunches and frowned. "Not quite as I did before. Joen did something to us. I hope it was not vile."

"It is my impression," said Ista carefully, "that you two have been pressed together by all these events more quickly than you would have grown on your own. Without either of you becoming ascendant or enslaved, you have merged. Because, I think, your demon did not steal your soul, nor did you plunder its power. You both shared freely."

Foix looked embarrassed. "Always did enjoy feeding the animals ..."

"Drawing you apart is beyond my present skills—or your present need. You have achieved a curious theological state, but not, I suspect, a unique one. I have occasionally wondered where Temple sorcerers came from. Now I know. I expect it was one of the saint of Rauma's tasks to judge who might carry this power without succumbing to it. You will need to take training from the Bastard's Order, probably. I am sure your own order will spare you, if I request it."

Foix's face screwed up. "Me, a Bastard's acolyte? Don't think my father will be best pleased. Or my mother. I can just see her, explaining it to her lady friends. Ouch." He grinned despite himself. "Can't wait to see the look on Ferda's face, though ..." He glanced shrewdly at her. "And will you take training, too, Royina?"

She smiled. "Tutors, Foix. A woman of my rank can demand tutors, to wait on me at my convenience. I think my convenience will be very soon, and possibly not too convenient to them."

The reminder of Ferda and the hope of finding news of his brother overcame Foix's initial urge to coddle Ista, and it was he who marshaled the horses and boosted his companions back aboard.

"Roll up that tabard and stuff it in a saddlebag," Illvin advised, settling into his saddle. "Bastard willing, the next scouts we encounter may well be dy Oby's. Baby Temple sorcerer or no, a mistaken crossbow bolt would not be good for your health."

"Ah. Yes," said Foix, and hastened to do so.

Illvin eyed his red stallion, carrying Ista with such exquisite care that she might hold a cup of water without spilling it, and shook his head in wonder, as if of all the marvels he had lately witnessed this was the most inexplicable. "Can you endure?" he asked her. "It's not much farther now."

"After walking that mile, riding a few more is nothing," she assured him. "I feared the god had abandoned me, but it seems He'd only hid Himself within." And left me to carry Him. It was one of the Bastard's little jokes, she decided, that He had appeared to her before then as such an enormous man. Had He known? Even she, who had now met three face-to-face, could not guess the limits of the gods' foreknowledge.

"All dark, you were," Foix said. "Makes sense. The Jokonan sorcerers would hardly have towed you into Joen's presence looking like some holy fire ship. They weren't that stupid. But when you lit up..." He fell silent. Foix was not, Ista thought, an inarticulate man; but she began to see why Lord dy Cazaril said only poetry could come to grips with the gods. Foix finally managed, "I have never seen anything like it. I'm glad that I did. But if I never see anything like it again, that will be all right."

"I could not see it," said Illvin, in a tone of deep regret. "But I could see when things begin to happen, well enough."

"I am glad you were there," said Ista.

"I did little enough," he sighed.

"You bore witness. That means the world to me. And there was that kiss. It did not seem such a small thing."

He blushed. "My apologies, Royina. I was distraught. I thought to draw you back from death, as you once seemed to do for me."

"Illvin?"

"Yes, Royina?"

"You did draw me back."

"Oh." He rode along very quietly for a time. But a strange smile crept across his face, and would not go away again.

At length he looked up and rose in his stirrups, summoning some unimaginable reserve of energy. "Hah," he whispered. Ista followed his glance. It took her a moment to discern the faint clear smokes of careful fires, marking a camp concealed in the watercourse that opened below them. The fires were not few. They followed the ridge around a slight bend, and yet more of the camp came into view. Hundreds of men and horses, more than hundreds—she could not count their numbers, half-hidden as they were.

"Oby," said Illvin in satisfaction. "He made excellent time. Though I thank the gods he was no faster."

"Good," breathed Ista in relief. "I'm done."

"Indeed, and we do thank you for your work, without which we would all be dead in some hideous and uncanny fashion by now. I, on the other hand, still have fifteen hundred ordinary Jokonans to remove from around Porifors. I don't know if Oby meant to wait for dawn, but if we struck more quickly ..." His eyes glazed over in a familiar fashion, alternating shrewd glances summing the men below with staring off at nothing; Ista forbore to interrupt.

A patrol galloped up to them. "Ser dy Arbanos!" cried its astonished officer, waving wildly at Illvin. "Five gods, you're alive!" The riders formed around them in excited escort and swept them into the part of the camp, marked by tents in the shade, where their commanders had no doubt set up their headquarters.

A voice rang from the trees, and a familiar form shot from the green shadows. "Foix! Foix! The Daughter be thanked!" Ferda ran toward them; Foix swung from his saddle to embrace his eager brother.

"What are these men?" Illvin inquired of dy Oby's officer, nodding toward an unfamiliar company of horsemen in black and green. The riders opened out to reveal a crowd of people approaching on foot, some running, some lumbering, some proceeding more slowly and decorously, all calling out to Ista.

Ista stared, torn between joy and dismay. "Bastard spare me, it is my brother dy Baocia," she said in a stunned voice. "And dy Ferrej, and Lady dy Hueltar, and Divine Tovia, and all."