Paladin of Souls (44 page)

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. "Urn, 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 more 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."

Dy Cabon and Illvin looked equally sick; Foix had hardly any expression at all. Dy Cabon said, "You mean Princess Joen somehow pulls demons from their mounts while the mounts still live? Separates them from the victim souls as the saint of Rauma did?"

The demon's lips curved up in an unpleasant smile. "Exactly the reverse. For Joen, the purpose was binding, not separation. When we'd fed enough, she pulled us out, tearing the souls apart. Taking what she desired for us, leaving the rest as waste. A process equally painful to both parties, we can assure you, though it helped keep us off-balance and servile, we suppose."

Ista was uncertain why the demon had suddenly grown so forthcoming, but she determined to press on while its mood lasted. "The
old
demon," she repeated. "What is this?"

"Ah. Joen's legacy," said the demon. It spoke now, Ista thought, in the scholar's voice, precise and dry, its Ibran of a pure native accent from somewhere in central Chalion, not at all like Cattilara's softer northern speech. Nor did the young marchess speak in quite such rounded periods. "Shall we tell you all the tale of it? The enemies of our enemy are no friends to us. And yet, why not? We know what awaits us, why shouldn't you? Fools." This last was delivered in an oddly dispassionate tone.

It waited for the body to supply it with breath again, and continued, "In the days of the Golden General's glory, men swarmed in from the Archipelago, seeking advancement in his court and spoils on his battlefields. Among them was an old, old sorcerer, who had long plied his demon magic in the islands among the Quadrenes, passing among them subtly and uncaught. His demon was older still, dozens of lives old. The chaos and disorder of the promised war attracted them like perfume. It was a vast mistake, for the Lion of Roknar was beloved of the Father Himself, and possessed many god-gifts, among them the inner sight.

"The old sorcerer was perceived, accused, convicted, and burned. In its immense accumulated craft, the ancient demon jumped from its dying mount and evaded the Quadrene divines' precautions. Yet it could not jump so far as to reach safety, so it chose for its new mount a person whom the Golden General would not burn—his three-year-old daughter, Joen."

"Princess Joen has been a sorceress all these years?" cried dy Cabon in astonishment.

"Not quite." The demon smiled briefly, bitterly, with Cattilara's lips. "The Golden General was wild with rage and grief. He turned to his god in prayer, and yet another gift was granted to him. The Father gave it to him to encapsulate the demon, to put it to sleep within the little girl. It was the Lion's intention, then, when Chalion was conquered, to secretly seize and bring back a saint of the Bastard, if any such could be found, to excise the demon safely from his daughter according to the forbidden Quintarian rites. And then he rode off to his war.

"But by Roya Fonsa's great work of sacrifice, the Lion of Roknar died before he could accomplish his aims, or return. The disunited princedoms settled into another generation of border war with the Quintarian royacies. And the sealed demon waited for its mount's death, that it might be released again into the world of men. For fifty years, it waited.

"Then, some three years past, something
happened.
The capsule broke open, releasing the demon into Joen. But not into the malleable child the demon had chosen. Into the harsh, determined, embittered, and embattled woman."

"How?" asked dy Cabon.

"Yes," said Illvin. "Why hold fifty years, then fail? Unless it was set so . . ."

"I know how," said Ista, her mind burning with cold satisfaction. "I believe I could name the very day and hour. I will tell you in a moment. But hush, let it go on. Then what?"

The demon's eyes narrowed at her in something like respect. "Joen was in a desperate quandary, then. She was co-regent for Prince Sordso with her two closest enemies, the general of Jokona and her late husband's brother. Sordso was a surly young sot who hated them all. The general and his uncle were conspiring to seize Sordso and put his uncle on the throne of Jokona in his place."

"Ah," said Illvin in a disconsolate tone.
"That
was when I'd wanted to strike at Jokona. What excellent timing it might have been, just as their palace coup began . . . oh, well."

"Joen was frantic," said the demon. "She believed—or convinced herself—that the old demon was a legacy from her great father, given to her in secret to rise up in just such an unhappy hour and save his grandson from traitors. So she kept it in secret and began learning from it. The old demon was pleased to have such an apt pupil, and taught her everything, thinking it would soon turn the tables and mount her. It underestimated the iron strength of her will, tempered through four decades of swallowed rage. It became even more her slave."

"Yes," whispered Ista. "I follow that."

"Joen's co-regents were her first enemies to earn her attention. Easy because so intimate, we suppose. The uncle, well, he died quietly. The general underwent a subtler fate, and soon became Joen's fondest supporter in all things."

"Joen is a Quadrene, if fallen into blasphemy by their lights," said dy Cabon, his face knotting with consternation. "But a bad Quadrene is not the same thing as a good Quintarian. She can't possess the correct theological background to handle
any
elemental safely, let alone a troop of them."

"Indeed," breathed Ista, "not."

The demon-Catti continued, "Her leashed demons soon became more to her than salvation for Sordso; they became her joy. At last, at last, she could exert her will and force a compliance that smiled as it hurried to obey. Her family was not last, but first to fall to her binding. Except for Sordso."