Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [182]
It seemed to her that some great black glacier, some ice dam in her soul, was melting, as if a hundred summers’ heat had fallen on it in an hour. Cracking, coming apart. And that in the mile-deep, mile-long lake of icy green water backing it up, an expectant surge rippled from bank to bank, from the surface to the uttermost depths, troubling the waters. I passed blessing to you in the forecourt. But you passed blessing back to me, too. Trading rescues. Five gods watch us ride out together in this breaking dawn.
You Five may awe us. But I think we must awe You, too.
“Seven,” she whispered aloud.
Then something went wrong. A hesitation, a turning away. Too many, far too many, soul-sparks swirled around that gray flame. Now he is surrounded, cut off. Dozens who ran away now run toward, encouraged by their own numbers, daring to take him down.
In the midst of your enemies, your Father has prepared a feast for you, on a table your father set long ago. Here it comes . . .
Another thunk, and another. From behind her, Liss’s sharp voice cried, “Lady, there are too many wounds splitting open! You must stop this!”
Dy Cabon’s strained rumble, “Royina, remember you promised Arhys that Lady Cattilara would live—!”
And a certain fat white god has promised Illvin to me, if I did not mistake Him. If we both live. A god-given lover, importunate and bold as a scarred stray cat, rubbing past my guard into my good graces. If I can keep him fed.
She glanced over her shoulder. Illvin’s body jerked upward with the transferred force of some massive blow to Arhys’s back, and Goram, his face frantic, rolled him over to reach the red rent. Cattilara’s white hand half split from its wrist, and Liss pounced to staunch the spurting.
Now. Oh yes, now. Ista clenched her hand about the torrent of white fire running past her shoulder. The flow stopped abruptly. Wild shocks pulsed back in both directions from her grip. The violet channel shattered. The white fire, the constant companion of her inner eye for days, winked out.
A hushed hesitation: then, in the shadowed grove, a grotesque roar of hysteria-tinged triumph went up from half a hundred Jokonan throats.
The ice dam exploded. A wall of water towered, bent, and broke, thundering forward, bursting its banks, blasting her soul wide, wider, scouring and flushing a lifetime of stones, rubble, rotted and clotted trash before it. Boiling, roaring outward. Ista spread her arms wide, and opened her mouth, and let it go.
The gray thread, almost lost to view in the violent blazes, stiffened to a taut rope. It began to move back through her new dilation, faster and faster, until it seemed to smoke with the heat of its passage, like an overstrained fiber rope about to char and burst into flame. For an instant, Arhys’s astonished, agonized, ecstatic soul moved through hers.
Yes. We are all, every living one of us, doorways between the two realms, that of matter that gives us birth, and that of spirit into which we are born in death. Arhys was sundered from his own gate, and lost the way back to it forever. So it was given to me to lend him mine, for a little time. But so great a soul does need a wide portal; so knock down my gates and breach my walls and burst them wide, and pour through freely, by my leave. And farewell. “Yes,” Ista whispered. “Yes.”
He did not look back. Given what he must be looking on toward, Ista was not in the least surprised.
It is done, Sire. I hope You find it was done well.
She heard no voice, saw no radiant figure. But it seemed to her she felt a caress upon her brow, and the ache there, which had throbbed for hours as though her head were bound in a tight iron band, stopped. The end of the pain was like a morning birdsong.
There was a real morning birdsong, she realized muzzily, here in matter’s lovely realm, a cheery, brainless warble from the bushes below the castle walls. The gray cloud-feathers among the fading stars were just beginning to blush a faint, fiery pink, color creeping from east to west. A little thread of lemon light lined the eastern horizon.
Illvin