Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [179]
Illvin, emerging from the stair’s blackness, shielded his eyes against the candle glow. “Royina, will you be able to see out, to track my brother’s progress?”
“It won’t be these eyes I use to follow him. And your attendants must be able to see you.” Her material hand reached to touch the invisible reassurance of the gray thread, which seemed to spin out from her heart into the darkness below. “I will not lose him now.”
He grunted somewhat disconsolate acquiescence, drew a breath, and seated himself upon the empty pallet. Laying his sword aside, he peeled out of his speckled and sweat-stained shirt and rolled up his loose trouser legs. Goram helped pull off his boots. He swung his long legs out straight and lay back, face not so much composed as rigid, his dark dilated eyes looking up at the stars. Wisps of cloud, moisture out of reach, crossed the spangled vault in gray feathers. “I am ready.” His voice sounded parched, but not, Ista thought, just from lack of water.
From the castle below, she heard the faint ratchet of the drawbridge chains being pulled up again very slowly, and a jingle of harness and thump of hooves passing away from the walls, fading with distance. The gray thread was moving in the pool of darkness below, very like a fishing line taken by a pike. “We have not much time. We must begin.” She dropped to her knees between the two pallets.
Illvin took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She caressed his slick brow as she took it back. Composed herself. Shut out the confusing sight of her eyes and brought up the tangle of lights and shadows by which the realm of spirit represented itself to her now. She suspected the gods simplified it for her, and that the reality beneath this was stranger and more complex still. But this was what she was given; it must do.
She undid her ligature around the white trickle coming from Illvin’s heart, opening the channel wide. Soul-fire poured out, joined the sluggish, sullen stream from Cattilara, and flowed away into the night, winding around the gray thread but not touching it. The life drained from Illvin’s face, leaving it stiff and waxen, and she shuddered.
She turned away and studied the sleeping Cattilara. The demon swirled in agitation beneath her thin breastbone. Enormous stresses propagated here, straining toward some cataclysmic breakage. Ista’s next task was dangerous indeed, dangerous to them all, but she could not shirk from it. So many souls were at risk in this ride . . .
She tightened Cattilara’s ligature, pushing the soul-fire up from her heart toward her head. The demon tried to follow it. She laid her snow-spangled left hand upon Cattilara’s collarbone, stared in fascination at the gray glow her fingers suddenly shed. The demon shrank again, crying with new terror. Cattilara’s eyes opened.
She tried to surge upright, only to find her body still paralyzed. “You!” she cried to Ista. “Curse you, let me go!”
Ista let out her tight breath. “Arhys rides out now. Pity his enemies, for death on a demon horse descends upon them out of the darkness, bringing sword and fire. Many will bear him company on his journey to his Father’s keep tonight, their souls like ragged banners borne before his echoing feet. You must choose now. Will you aid him or impede him, in his last journey?”
Cattilara’s head yanked back and forth in an agony of denial. “No! No! No!”
“The god himself awaits his coming, His own holy breath held in the balance of the moment. Arhys’s heart flies