Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [180]
“No!” screamed Cattilara.
“Very well.” Ista reached to open the ligature, one eye on the restive, mutinous demon.
Cattilara turned her head away, and whispered, “Yes.”
Ista paused, exhaled. Murmured, “So I pray the gods may hear even me, and let my whispered yes tower above my shouted no and mount all the way to their fivefold realm. As I would be heard, so I hear you.” She swallowed hard. “Hold your demon on its course. It will not be an easy one.”
“Will I feel much pain?” asked Cattilara. Her eyes met Ista’s at last. Her voice would have been almost inaudible, but for the silence on the platform. Not even cloth rustled, from the people standing watching.
Yes, no, I have no idea. “Yes, I think so. All births have some.”
“Oh. Good.” She turned her head away again, but not in denial. Her eyes were wet, but her face was as still as carved ivory.
Ista lifted her hand, but her intervention was not needed. As Cattilara’s face went slack, the white fire burst redoubled from her heart, to join the flow from Illvin in a torrent, roaring down over the parapet. So, you do not ride alone, Arhys. The hearts of the two who love you best go with you now. She hoped his body received their outpouring as an exaltation, at the other end of that white line.
She rose and hurried to the parapet, motioning the others to make ready with pads, cloths, and tourniquets. She stared out into the darkness, the roads like gray ribbons, the open spaces rucked like mist-shrouded blankets across an unmade bed, the trees of the grove black and silent. A few watch fires burned in the enemy camp, and Jokonan horsemen slowly patrolled back and forth out of bowshot. A clot of moving shadows reached the trees, slipping between the patrols.
She glared out with all the strength of her other eyes, following the white flood and thin gray thread to where a dozen soul-sparks moved, atop the lesser life-blurs of their horses. Arhys’s gray glow was distinctive, Foix’s violet-tinged double shadow even more so. She could see clearly through all the moving masses that lay between, when Arhys kicked the demon-lit shape of his horse into a canter. He closed rapidly on a quiescent, colored thread of sorcerer light, like a hawk swooping on unsuspecting prey.
“Can you see Foix?” Liss’s breathless voice sounded by her ear.
“Yes. He rides by Arhys’s side.”
The shouts of alarm didn’t go up till the first tent went down. As more cries and a ring of steel split the night, the mounted patrols wheeled about and began galloping back toward the camp. Abruptly, the snake of sorcerer fire stretched and snapped. A bluish gout of soul-fire shot aloft, separating even as Ista watched from a violent purple streak, which sped away trailing soul shreds in torn-off, fluttering rags. The bluish gout writhed in agony, and faded into elsewhere. The purple streak grounded itself in a moving soul-spark somewhere beneath the trees; both the recipient and the demon dropped flat in the shock of that arrival. But the snake did not renew itself.
“That’s one,” said Ista aloud.
The attackers made no cries or calls at all, moving in grim, determined silence. The pale blur of another tent, sheltering the head of another colored snake, swayed, shook, and collapsed. The Jokonan sorcerer gathered energy for some strike at his attacker; Ista could see the flash of a bolt of demon magic pass through Arhys, and hear the wail of the sorcerer’s surprise and woe, cut off. She rather thought that faint, distant, liquid thunk might have been a beheading. Another violet streak