Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [160]
“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