Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  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 spearpoint, 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CATTILARA’S CHAMBER HAD MUCH THE SAME AIR OF FEMININE refuge as when Ista had entered it on her first day at Porifors. Now, however, the marchess’s women were upset rather than welcoming: either anxious and outraged or frightened and guilty, depending on whether they had been privy to the escape plan. They stared at the royina’s present bloody, breathless, tight-lipped disarray with horror. Ista ruthlessly dismissed them all, though with orders for wash water, drinks, and food for Lord Illvin—and for the rest of her party, who had all tumbled out onto the road a lifetime ago this morning with no more breakfast than a swallow of tea and bread, or less.

  Illvin went to Cattilara’s basin and wrung out a wet towel; he glanced at Ista and politely handed it to her first. The red grime she rubbed off her face was startling. Nor was all of the blood from the horse, she realized as she dabbed gingerly at her scratches. Illvin rinsed and wrung out the cloth again and rubbed down his own bloody face and dirt-streaked torso, and accepted a cup of drinking water from Liss, draining it in a gulp. He then trod over to Ista’s side to stare at Cattilara, laid down on her bed still in her traveling dress. The right sleeve had been removed, and a compress bound about the ambiguous wound in her shoulder.

  She was lovely as a sleeping child, unmarred but for a smudge on her cheek. On her, it looked an elegant decoration. But Illvin’s finger uneasily traced the new sunken quality around her eyes. “Surely her body is too slight to support Arhys’s as well as her own.”

  And he ought to know. Ista glanced at Illvin’s hollow cheeks and ridged ribs. “For weeks or months, no. For hours or days … I think it is her turn. And I know who Porifors can least spare right now.”

  Illvin grimaced, and glanced over his shoulder at the opening door. Foix escorted an anxious dy Cabon within.

  “Five gods be thanked, you are saved, Royina!” the divine said in heartfelt tones. “The Lady Cattilara as well!”

  “I thank you, too, Learned,” said Ista, “for abiding by my instructions.”

  He regarded the marchess’s silent form with alarm. �
��She was not injured, was she?”

  “No, she is not hurt.” Ista added reluctantly, “Yet. But I have induced her to lend her own soul’s strength to Arhys for a time, in place of Lord Illvin. Now we must somehow compel her demon to speak. I don’t know if it was master or servant to Princess Umerue, but I am certain it was witness to—more, a product of—Dowager Princess Joen’s demonic machinations. Illvin was right, yesterday: it has to know what she was doing, because it was part of what she was doing. Although it seems to have escaped her … leash.” Upon reflection, an encouraging realization. “Joen’s control is evidently not inviolable.”

  Dy Cabon gazed at her in blank alarm, and Ista realized belatedly that this must seem gibberish to him. Illvin’s high brow wrinkled in nearly equal puzzlement; he said cautiously, “You said Joen seemed more uncanny than Sordso. How so?”

  Haltingly, Ista tried to describe her inner vision of the dowager princess, glimpsed so briefly and terrifyingly beside her wrecked palanquin, and of the demon-ridden Prince Sordso. Of how Sordso’s demon fire had seemed to unknit her very bones. “Demons have always cringed before me up till now, though I do not know why. I did not know I was so vulnerable to them.” She glanced uneasily at Foix.

  “This array you describe is very strange,” mused dy Cabon, rubbing his chins. “One demon battening on one soul is the rule. There is no room for more. And demons do not usually tolerate each other even in the same general vicinity, let alone in the same body. I do not know what force could harness them all together like that, apart from the god Himself.”

  Ista bit her lip in thought. “What Joen contained did not look like what Sordso contained. Sordso seemed possessed of a common demon, like Cattilara’s or Foix’s, except ascendant instead of subordinate—like Catti’s when she let it up for questioning, before, and we could barely force it back down again. It was the demon, not her son, who was answering to Joen.”

  Dy Cabon’s face bunched in distaste as he took this in.

  Ista glanced at Foix, standing behind him and looking even less pleased. He was as sweat-soaked and grimed from the morning’s work as any of them, but he, at least, seemed to have escaped any bloody wound. “Foix.”

  He jerked. “Royina?”

  “Can you help me? I wish to push Cattilara’s soul-fire down into her body, and the demon light up into her head, that it may speak and answer and yet not seize her. Without allowing it to break the net by which it sustains Arhys. This not being a convenient moment to drop Porifors’s commander down dead… . More dead.”

  “Are you just waiting till Lord Arhys is ready, then, Royina, to release his soul?” asked Foix curiously.

  Ista shook her head. “I don’t know if that is my task, or even if I could if I tried. I fear to leave him a ghost, irrevocably cut off from the gods. Yet he hangs by a thread now.”

  “Waiting till we are ready, more like,” muttered Illvin.

  Foix frowned down at Cattilara. “Royina, I stand prepared at your command to do anything I can, but I don’t understand what you want of me. I see no fires, no lights. Do you?”

  “I did not at first. My sensitivity was but a confused wash of feelings, chills, intuitions, and dreams.” Ista stretched her fingers, closed her fist. “Then the god opened my eyes to His realm. Whatever the reality may be, my inner eye now sees it as patterns of light and shadow, color and line. Some lights hang like a net, some flow like a powerful stream.”

  Foix shook his head in bewilderment.

  “Then how did you work the flies, and the stumbling horse?” asked Ista patiently. “Do you not perceive anything, perhaps by some other metaphor? Do you hear, instead? Or touch?”

  “I”—he shrugged—“I just wished them. No—willed them. I pictured the events clearly in my mind, and commanded the demon, and they just happened. It felt … odd, though.”

  Ista bit her finger, studying him. Then on impulse, stepped in front of him. “Bend your head,” she commanded.

  Looking surprised, he did so. She grasped his tunic and pulled him down yet farther.

  Lord Bastard, let Your gift be shared. Or not. Curse your Eyes. She pressed her lips to Foix’s sweaty brow. Ah. Yes.

  The bear whined in pain. Briefly, a deep violet light seemed to flare in Foix’s widening eyes. She released him and stepped back; he staggered upright. A barely perceptible white fire faded on his brow.

  “Oh.” He touched the spot and stared around the room, at all his company, openmouthed. “This is what you see? All the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is it that you do not fall down when you try to walk?”

  “One grows used to it. The inner eye learns, just as the outer ones do, to sort out the unusual and ignore the rest. There is seeing without observing, and then there is attending. I need you to attend with me to Cattilara now.”

  Dy Cabon’s mouth pursed in awe and alarm; his hands rubbed one another uncertainly. “Royina, this is potentially very bad for him …”

  “So are the several hundred Jokonan soldiers moving in around Castle Porifors, Learned. I leave it to your reason to decide which danger is more pressing just now. Foix, can you see—” She turned back to find him staring down at his own belly in a sort of horrified fascination. “Foix, attend!”

  He gulped and looked up. “Um, yes, Royina.” He squinted at her. “Can you see yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Just as well, maybe. You have these odd little sputtering flashes flaring off your body—all sharp edges, I can see why the demons cringe …”

  She took him by the hand and led him firmly to Cattilara’s bedside. “Look, now. Can you see the light of the demon, all knotted in her torso? And the white fire that streams from her heart to her husband’s?”

  Foix’s hand hesitantly traced the white line, proof enough of his perceptions.

  “Now look beneath that stream to its channel that the demon maintains.”

  He glanced along the line of white fire, then to the trickle still leading from Lord Illvin, and back to Cattilara. “Royina, isn’t it coming out rather fast?”

  “Yes. So we haven’t a lot of time. Come, see what you can do.” As before, she made passes with her hands over Cattilara’s body; then, for curiosity’s sake, dropped her hands to her sides and just willed. It was easier to make the white fire obey using the habits of dense matter, but her material hands were actually not necessary to the task, she found. Cattilara’s soul-fire collected at her heart, pouring outward as before. Ista made no attempt to interfere with the rate that Arhys was drawing on it. At least while it continued she knew he was still … functional, wherever he was.

  “Now, Foix. Try to drive her demon to her head.”

  Looking very uncertain, Foix moved around the bed and grasped Cattilara’s bare feet. The light within him flared; Ista seemed to hear the bear growl menacingly. Within Cattilara, the violet demon light fled upward. Ista’s inner eye checked for the continued maintenance of Arhys’s life-net, and she tried setting a ligature around Cattilara’s neck. It worked for the soul-fire as before, but for the demon?

  Evidently, it did, because Cattilara’s eyes suddenly opened, glittering with a sharpness alien to the marchess. The very shape of her face seemed to change, as the underlying muscles altered their tension. “Fools!” she gasped out. “We told you to flee, and now it is too late! She is come upon you. We shall all be taken back, weeping in vain!”

  Her voice was breathy and disrupted, for the pumping of the body’s lungs was not coordinated with the mouth’s speech.

  “She?” said Ista. “Princess Joen?”

  The demon tried to nod, found it could not, and lowered Cattilara’s eyelashes in assent instead. Illvin quietly brought a chair to the bed’s other side and settled himself in it, leaning forward on one elbow, eyes intent. Liss withdrew uneasily to seat herself on a chest by the far wall.

  “I saw Joen standing in the road,” said Ista. “From a black pit in her belly seemed to swarm a dozen or mor
e snakes of light. At the end of every snake, is there a sorcerer?”

  “Yes,” whispered the demon. “That is how she harnessed us all to her will. All, to her will alone. How it hurt!”

  “One such band of light ended in Prince Sordso. Are you saying this woman placed a demon in her own son?”

  Unexpectedly, the demon vented a bitter laugh. The shape it gave Cattilara’s face seemed to shift again. At last! it cried in Roknari. He would be the last to go. She always favored her sons. We daughters were useless disappointments. The Golden General could not live again in us, to be sure. At best we were bargaining counters, at worst drudges—or fodder …

  “That is Umerue’s voice,” whispered Illvin in grim dismay. “Not as she came to us in Porifors, but as I glimpsed her once before, back in Hamavik.”

  “From where is Joen collecting these elementals?” asked Ista.

  The demon’s voice shifted again, back to the Ibran tongue. “Stolen from hell, of course.”

  “How?” Dy Cabon asked. He hung over Foix’s shoulder at the foot of the bed, eyes wide.

  The demon managed to indicate a shrug with a lift of Catti’s eyebrows. “The old demon did the trick for her. We were filched from hell all mindless and confused, chained to her leashes, fed and trained up …”

  “Fed how?” asked Illvin, his voice growing apprehensive.

  “On souls. It is part of how she manages so many; she farms them out to feed on other souls than her own. At first animals, servants, slaves, prisoners. Then as Joen learned the subtleties of it, on others purpose-taken for their knowledge or gifts. She would place us in their bodies till we had eaten up the things she wanted us to know, then yank us out again. Until we grew fit to become riders upon her best sorcerer-slaves. Fit even to mate with a princess! If she were a sufficiently scorned princess.”

  “Goram,” said Illvin urgently. “Was my groom Goram such a one? Made demon fodder?”

  “Him? Oh, yes. He was a Chalionese captain of horse, we think. Never any food of ours, though. She gave us a finch, first, and then the little servant girl. Then that Chalionese scholar, the tutor. She let us eat him all up, as he was only to be executed for following the ways of the Bastard anyway. And then the Jokonan courtesan. She got along better with the tutor than we would have expected, being similarly fascinated by men. Joen despised her for the very expertise she sought to steal, so let her go alive and witless, to find her fate in the streets.”