Paladin of Souls (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  You invited Me. Come, come, you can’t deny it: I heard you whispering over in that corner.

  She was not sure she had any emotions left for this. Not rage, in any case. Her disembodied quietude might be either serenity or shock. But the Bastard was surely a god to be approached with caution. “Why do you not appear in front of me?”

  Because I am behind you, now. The Voice grew warm and amused. The press of an enormous belly seemed to heat her back, along with an obscene implication of loins against her buttocks, and a pressure of wide hands upon her shoulders.

  “You have a vile sense of humor,” she said weakly.

  Yes, and you catch every one of My jokes, too. I love a woman with a keen ear. He seemed to breathe into hers. You should have a keen tongue to go with them, I vow.

  Her mouth filled with fire.

  “Why am I here?”

  To complete Arhys’s victory. If you can.

  The Voice was gone. The darkness faded into a streaked pale dawnlight. She found herself fallen on her knees on the tower platform, leaning into Illvin’s alarmed grip.

  “Ista? Ista!” he was saying into her ear. “Royina, dear, don’t frighten a poor naked cavalier. Speak to me, yes?”

  She blinked open blurry eyes. He was only a nearly naked cavalier, she discovered to her disappointment. The bloodstained rags of his linen trousers were still rucked up around his loins. He was a most magnificent mess otherwise, true, dark matted hair falling in a wild tangle over his face and shoulders, sweaty and soot-smeared and smelly and striped with red. But all his scars were old ones, healed and pale. He huffed with relief when he saw her looking back at him and bent his neck to kiss her. She fended off his lips with her palm. “Wait, not yet.”

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “Did you hear anything? Or see anyone?”

  “No, but I’ll swear you did.”

  “What, would you not swear instead that I am mad?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you see no god lights, hear no voices. How do you know?”

  “I saw my brother’s face when you blessed him. And yours when he blessed you. If that is madness, I would run down the road after it dressed as I am, and barefoot.”

  “I will walk slowly.”

  “… Good.”

  He helped her to her feet.

  Liss said anxiously, “Royina, what of Foix?”

  Ista sighed. “Foix went down beneath many soldiers and sorcerers. I did not see his soul arise, nor his demon flee. I fear he is taken, perhaps wounded as well.”

  “That’s … not good,” said dy Cabon, still kneeling by Illvin’s pallet. His teeth grated in a little, nervous gesture. “Do you think … do you think Joen can bind him into her array?”

  “I think yes, given time. What I do not know is how long he can resist her.” Five gods, I do not wish to lose another boy.

  “Not good at all,” Illvin agreed.

  He had barely exhaled, steadying himself upright, when a shout rang out, Goram’s voice: “Lady Catti! No!”

  Ista twisted around. Cattilara was on her feet, her bloody robe falling wide about her. Her eyes were huge, her mouth open. The demon light within her had expanded to the margins of her body, and pulsed violently.

  “The demon is ascendant!” Ista cried. “It is taking her. Seize her, do not let her run!”

  Goram, closest, attempted to take her arm. A violet light appeared in her palm, and she shoved it toward him. He fell, retching. Ista staggered toward her, stepping between her and the opening of the stairs. Cattilara started forward, then shied away, her hands raised as if to shield her eyes. She looked around frantically. Her knees bunched, and she lunged for the wall.

  Liss sprang forward and grabbed her ankle. She twisted, snarling, and yanked at Liss’s hair. Illvin danced forward, hesitated for an instant of calculation, and clipped her precisely across the side of the head. She flipped backward, half-stunned.

  Ista tottered over and fell to her knees beside her. She seemed to see the demon like a tumor spreading tendrils throughout Cattilara’s body. Winding like a parasitical vine around the tree of her spirit, sapping strength, and life, and light. Stealing the high complexities of personality, language, knowledge, and memory that it could not, in the fundamental disorder of its nature, ever make for itself.

  Oh. Now I see how to do this.

  She reached out with her spirit hands and lifted the demon, trailing recoiling tendrils, from Cattilara’s soul. It came unwillingly, flopping in panic like some sea creature drawn out of the water. Ista held out a material hand, fingers spread for a screen, and pushed back the trailing shreds of Cattilara’s soul, like carding wool, until only the demon was left in her hand. She held it up dubiously before her face.

  Yes, said the Voice. That’s right. Go ahead.

  She shrugged, popped the demon in her mouth, and swallowed it.

  “Now what? Are You going to extend this metaphor to its logical conclusion? It would be just like You, I think.”

  I shall spare you that, sweet Ista, said the Voice, highly amused. But I do like your vile sense of humor. I think we shall get along well, don’t you?

  There was no cranny in her armored spirit for the demon to wedge itself within, to clutch, to hold; and it wasn’t only that she was filled by the god. She felt the demon, knotted up in terror, pass out the other side of her soul. Into the realm of the spirit. Into the hands of the god its Master. Gone.

  “What will happen to the pieces of the other souls who are tangled up in it?” she asked in worry. But the Voice had vanished again or, at least, didn’t choose to answer.

  Cattilara was crouched on the tower platform, panting and hiccuping in little short sobs.

  Illvin cleared his throat apologetically, and shook out his hand. “The demon tried to fling you to your death, and its freedom,” he told her.

  She stared up at him with a ravaged face. In a ragged voice she said, “I know. I wish it had succeeded.”

  Ista motioned the sewing woman, Goram, and Liss to her. “Get her to a bed, a real bed, and call her women to her. Find her what comforts this castle can yet yield. Don’t let her be left alone. I’ll come to her when I can.” She saw them down the spiral stairs, Cattilara, weary beyond weeping, leaning on the sewing woman and shrugging away from Liss.

  Ista turned back to find Illvin and dy Cabon slumping worriedly on the eastern parapet, staring down at the Jokonan camp in the growing light. It roiled with activity, half hidden beneath the trees. Wisps of smoke still rose from the tents that had been burned. A stray saddled horse trotted away from a man trying to catch it; his Roknari curses carried faintly through the moist dawn air. Ista craned her neck in hope, but it did not appear to be Illvin’s red stallion.

  “So what has happened, Royina?” asked dy Cabon, gazing down in perplexity. “Have we won or lost?”

  “It was a very great hunt. Arhys slew seven sorcerers before they brought him down. He stumbled at the eighth. I think it was a sorceress. I wonder if she was young and beautiful, and he could not force his hand swiftly enough to the task?”

  “Ah,” said Illvin sadly. “That would be Arhys’s downfall, wouldn’t it.”

  “Perhaps. The Jokonans had realized how few were his numbers and were combining against him by then, anyway. But the freed demons are fled away in all directions; Joen did not recover any.”

  “Alas that we do not have two more Arhyses to complete the task,” said Illvin. “Perhaps ordinary men must try now.” He hitched his shoulders and frowned.

  Ista shook her head. “Joen has hurt us, and now we have hurt her back. But we have not defeated her. She still holds eleven sorcerers on her strings and an army barely scratched. She is in a rage; her assault will redouble, without mercy.”

  Dy Cabon slumped on the parapet, thick shoulders bowed. “Then Arhys rode in vain. We are lost.”

  “No. Arhys has won us everything. We have only to reach out our hands to collect it. You didn’t ask me
what I did with Cattilara’s demon, Learned.”

  His brows went up, and he turned toward her. “Did you not bind it in her, as before?”

  “No.” Ista’s lips drew back on a smile that made him recoil. “I ate it.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look at me; it’s your god’s metaphor. I have finally penetrated the mystery of the Bastard’s second kiss. I know how the saint of Rauma accomplished her task of booting demons out of the world and back to their holy commander. Because it seems the trick of it has now fallen to me. Arhys’s parting gift, or rather, something he made possible.” She shivered with a sorrow to which she dared not yet give way. “Illvin.”

  Her voice was sharp, urgent; it jerked him from the grieving lassitude that seemed to be overtaking him, as he leaned all his weight on the wall and stared into nothing. He had lost, she reminded herself, a worrisome amount of his own blood in the past hour, for such an already-depleted man. Muddled with Cattilara’s, it was spread out in clotting pools across half the tower platform. His wounds had all closed as if they had never been, except for the row of scabbed needle holes bound with thread across his shoulder. He looked back at her and blinked owlishly.

  “What is the swiftest, most efficient possible way by which I might come face-to-face with Joen?”

  With unthinking brilliance, he replied simply, “Surrender.” Then stared at her aghast, and clapped his hand to his mouth as if a toad had just fallen from his lips.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ISTA HAD JUST FINISHED WASHING, OR AT LEAST, CLEANING, HER body with a half cup of water and some rags when Liss returned to their chambers. She clutched a pile of white garments in her arms, pushing open the inner door with a twist of her hips. “These are the best Cattilara’s women could find in a hurry,” she announced.

  “Good. Put them on the bed.” Ista closed the dirty black robe back about herself and came over to examine them. It had not been, by any definition, a bath, but at least the touch of her less-sticky skin against clean clothing might not feel like some violation. “How fares the marchess?”

  “She is asleep now. Or unconscious. I really couldn’t be quite sure, looking at her. She was very pale and gray.”

  “Just as well, either way. The blood she spent on the tower buys her a favor, perhaps, in this drained slumber.” Ista sorted through the piles. A linen shift the color of new cream, bordered with elaborate cutwork, looked as though it had a hem short enough that she would not trip over it. A delicate white overrobe, embroidered in shining white thread that lent it weight and swing, was a Bastard’s Day festival garment. The unknown needlewoman had somehow endowed the friezes of tiny dancing rats and crows with considerable charm. “Perfect,” Ista murmured, holding it up. The spark, she noticed, was gone from her left hand, though the frost mark on her skin remained.

  “My lady, um … isn’t it a little provocative to place yourself in Quadrene hands wearing the Bastard’s own color?”

  Ista smiled grimly. “Let them imagine so. Its real message is one I do not expect them to read. Haste, now. Tie the ribbons of the shift in back straightly, please.”

  Liss did so, cinching in the graceful waist. Ista pulled on the overrobe, shook out the wide sleeves, and fastened it closed beneath her breasts with the amethyst-and-silver mourning brooch. The meaning of the heirloom had shifted, it seemed to her, half a dozen times since it had come into her possession. All its old woes had drained out utterly, last night. Today she wore it new-filled with stern sorrow for Arhys, and for those who had ridden with him. All about her must be renewed, in this hour.

  “The hair next,” she instructed, sitting on the bench. “Something quick and neat. I do not mean to go out to them looking like a madwoman dragged through a hedge, or a haystack hit by lightning.” She smiled in memory. “Put it in one braid.”

  Liss swallowed hard and began brushing. And said, for the fourth or fifth time since dawn on the tower, “I wish you would take me with you.”

  “No,” said Ista with regret. “Ordinarily, you would be much safer as the servant of a valuable hostage than left in a crumbling fortress about to fall. But if I should fail in what I attempt, Joen would make demon fodder of you, steal your mind and memories and courage for her own. Or take you in trade for her sorcerer-slaves that Arhys killed last night, and set you on me not as my servant but as her guard. Or worse.”

  And if Ista succeeded … she had no idea what might happen after that. Saints were no more immune to steel than sorcerers, as her predecessor the late saint of Rauma—was no longer able to testify.

  “What could be worse?” The long strokes of the brush faltered. “Do you think she has enslaved Foix and his bear? Yet?”

  “I’ll know in an hour.” What worse might be, should Liss fall into Joen’s hands, suddenly occurred to Ista. Now that would be the perfect, unholy union of two hearts: to feed Liss to Foix’s bear, and let Foix’s own caring drive him mad with horror and woe as their souls mixed … Then she wondered whose mind was blacker, Joen’s, to do such a thing, or her own, to impute such a course to Joen. It seems I am not a nice person, either.

  Good.

  “There are some white ribbons here. Should I braid them in?”

  “Yes, please.” The pleasant, familiar yank of the plaiting went on swiftly, behind Ista’s back. “If you see any chance of it at all, I want you to escape. That is your highest duty to me now, my courier. To carry away the word of all that has happened here, though they call you mad for it. Lord dy Cazaril will believe you. At all costs, get you to him.”

  Silence, behind her.

  “Say, ‘I promise, Royina,’ “ she instructed firmly.

  A little mulish hesitation, then a whisper: “I promise, Royina.”

  “Good.” Liss pulled the last bowknot tight; Ista rose. Lady Cattilara’s white silk slippers did not fit Ista, but Liss knelt and tied on a pair of pretty white sandals that did well enough, binding the ribbons around Ista’s ankles.

  Liss led the way to the outer chamber, opening the door to the gallery for Ista to step through.

  Lord Illvin was leaning against the wall outside, arms folded. It seemed he had also found half a cup of water to bathe in, for though he still reeked more than slightly, his hands and fresh-shaved face were clean of blood and dirt. He was dressed in the colors of court mourning, in the light fabrics of this northern summer: black boots, black linen trousers, a sleeveless black tunic set off with thin lines of lavender piping, a lilac brocade sash with black tassels wrapped about his waist. In the hot noon, he had dispensed with the weight of the lavender vest-cloak, though an anxious Goram hovered with the garment folded over his arm. Goram had arranged his master’s hair in the pulled-back, elegant braiding in which Ista had first seen it; the frosted black queue down the back was tied with a lavender cord. Illvin straightened as he saw her and gave her a sketch of a courtier’s bow, truncated, she suspected, by bloodless dizziness.

  “What is this?” she asked suspiciously.

  “What, I had not thought you slow of wit, dear Royina. What does it look like?”

  “You are not going with me.”

  He smiled down at her. “It would reflect exceedingly oddly upon the honor of Porifors to send the dowager royina of all Chalion-Ibra into captivity without even one attendant.”

  “That’s what I said,” grumbled Liss.

  “The command of the fortress has fallen to you,” Ista protested. “Surely you cannot leave it now.”

  “Porifors is a shambles. There is little in here left to defend, and not enough men left standing to defend it with, though I would prefer to conceal that fact from Sordso for a while yet. The parley for your transfer this morning has bought us hours of precious delay, which we could not have purchased with blood. So if this is to be Porifors’s last sortie, I claim it by right. By the unfortunate logic of the situation, in my last bad idea, I could not ride along to correct my strategy in mid-leap. But such logic does not prevail here.”<
br />
  “Your riding would not have changed the outcome.”

  “I know.”

  Disconcerted, she studied him. “Do you, in some fey mood, seek to outdo your brother?”

  “I never could before; I see no need to try now. No.” He took her hand and made little soothing circles on her palm with his thumb. “In my youth, I was apprenticed to my god’s order, but I missed the whisper of my calling. I will not miss that calling twice. Well, I scarcely see how I can, when it smacks me on the side of the head and bellows, Attend! in a voice to bring down the rafters. I spent the years of my manhood aimlessly, though well enough in my brother’s service, for the lack of a better direction. I have a better direction now.”

  “For an hour, perhaps.”

  “An hour will suffice. If it is the right hour.”

  Arhys’s forlorn page padded into the stone court, and cried from the foot of the stairs, “Royina? They are come for you now at the postern gate.”

  “I come,” she called down gently to him. She hesitated, frowning at Illvin. “Will the Jokonans even let you go along with me?”

  “They will be glad enough to have another prisoner of rank, at no further cost to themselves. It is also the perfect disguise by which I might scout their camp and number their forces.”

  “How much scouting do you think you can do as a prisoner?” She squinted at him. “What are you disguised as?”

  His lips twitched. “A coward, dear Ista. As they believe we betray you in terror to save our property, so they will think I have attached myself to you to save my skin.”

  “I don’t think they are going to think any such thing.”

  “So much the better for my poor reputation, then.”

  She blinked, beginning to feel light-headed. “If I fail, they will make demon food of you. A very banquet for some Jokonan officer-sorcerer. Maybe Sordso himself.”

  “Ah, but if you succeed, Royina! Have you given thought to what you will do after?”

  She looked away uncomfortably from that dark, intent gaze. “After is not my task.”

  “Just as I thought,” he said in a tone of triumph. “And you accuse me of being fey! I rest my argument. Shall we go?”