Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [159]
“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