Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [115]
“Very well.” Ista sighed. “Come back up, Lady Cattilara.”
The violet tide seemed to slosh back and forth within the confines of Cattilara’s spasming body. The tint receded, but then flooded back. Cattilara unable to regain control? Ista hadn’t expected this. Oh, no. And I promised her I would hold it . . .
“Stay,” said Ista. “I was sent by the god to cut this knot. Release Arhys, and I will release you.” Would it believe her? More important, would the threat jolt Catti into ascendancy again?
The demon-Catti froze in its fight, staring through wide eyes. The soul-stuff in the conduit gushed back toward Illvin. Abruptly, the horrified expression drained from Arhys’s face, to be replaced with—nothing at all. A slack, pale stillness. He toppled over on his side like a rag doll falling. Like a corpse collapsing. Porifors’s brilliant champion turned to a carcass, a mass of dubious meat it would take two men to drag away.
But his spirit was not uprooted in the white fire Ista had seen in the dying before. His ghost merely drifted apart, shifting from the locus of his body but scarcely otherwise changed. A shock of horror raced through Ista. Five gods. He is sundered already. His god cannot reach him. What have I done?
“Mmmmmm PUT HIM BACK!” Cattilara raged up to full control of her body like an unleashed mastiff taking down a bull by its nose. The violet light snapped closed into a tight, defensive ball, the channels reappeared, the fire flowed again. Arhys’s breath drew in with a jerk; he blinked and opened his jaw to stretch his face, and pushed himself back into a sitting position, looking half stunned.
Ista sat shaken. The ploy had worked on Cattilara as her impulse had guessed, but had revealed . . . something she scarcely understood. No more ploys. I have not the stomach for them.
Cattilara hung wheezing in her bindings, staring malignantly at Ista. “You. You horrid old bitch. You tricked me.”
“I tricked the demon, too. Are you sorry?” She signed to Goram and Liss, and they began cautiously unwinding the marchess’s restraints.
Illvin, who had been peeking worriedly over the side of his bed at his brother, leaned back again and stared in disquiet at Ista. “How are you doing this, lady? Are you perchance a sorceress, too? Are we to trade one demon enemy for a stronger one?”
“No,” said Ista. “My unwelcome gifts stem from another source. Ask Catti’s . . . pet. It knows.” Better than I do, I suspect. If possession of or by a demon made one a sorcerer, and the hosting of a god made one a saint, what ambiguous hybrid did one become in the hands of the demon-god?
“God-touched, then—you claim?” he asked. Neither believing nor disbelieving yet, but watchful.
“To my everlasting sorrow.”
“How came this about?”
“Some suffering bastard prayed to a god too busy to attend to him, and He delegated the task to me. Or so He feigned.”
Illvin sank down in his sheets. “Oh,” he said very quietly, as her meaning sank in. After a moment, he added, “I would speak more with you on this. In some, um, less busy hour.”
“I’ll see what I may do.”
Arhys moved his nearly nerveless hand to caress his wife’s ankle. “Catti. This can’t go on.”
“But love, what shall we do?” She rocked her head to favor Ista with a heartbroken glare. “You cannot take him now. It’s too soon. I will not give him up now.” She rubbed at the red marks on her arms as her ties fell away.
“He’s already had more time than is given to many men,” Ista chided her. “He accepted the risks of his soldier’s calling long ago; when you bound yourself to him in marriage, you accepted them, too.”
But what of his sundering? Death of the body was grief enough. The slow decay of the ghosts, souls who had refused the