Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [190]
~Nothing,~ breathed Sordso after a moment. ~It is gone.~
The sorceress eyed Illvin. ~That one knows too much.~
~My poor sister-in-law is dead, and the creature you lost is fled beyond your reach,~ said Illvin. ~Shall we get this over with?~
At a nod from the prince, two soldiers dismounted. They first took the precaution of checking Illvin for concealed blades in his sash and boots; he suffered their hands with a look of bored displeasure. Tension flowed into his long body when one of the soldiers approached Ista, relaxing only slightly when the man knelt by her white skirts.
“You are to take off your shoes,” the translator called to her. “You will walk barefoot and bareheaded into the presence of the August Mother, as befitting a lesser woman and a Quintarian heretic.”
Illvin’s chin went up and his jaw set. Whatever objections he had been about to voice, though, he closed his teeth upon. It was an interesting subtlety, Ista thought, that they did not also demand Illvin’s boots. The disparity only drove home his impotence to protect her.
The man’s hot hands pawed at the ribbons Liss had so lately tied around Ista’s ankles. She stood rigidly, but did not resist. He pulled the light sandals away from her feet and threw them aside. He stood, backed away, and remounted his horse.
Sordso rode up to her, his eyes searching her from head to foot. He smiled grimly at what he saw—or possibly at what he didn’t see. In any case, he did not fear to turn his back on her, for he gestured her sharply to take position directly behind his horse in the procession forming up. Illvin tried to offer her his arm, but the bronze-skinned officer pulled his sword and pointed with it for him to walk behind her. Sordso’s hand rose and fell in signal, and they started off across the dry, uneven ground.
Ista was barely conscious of the brass-bright noon through which she stumbled. She groped inside her mind, within an echoing darkness. Called silent curses to the Bastard. Then, silent prayers. Nothing came back.
Were the Jokonan sorcerers doing this? Defeating a god in the realm of matter? Surely these opponents could not overwhelm this god . . . ?
Not the god’s failure, then, but hers; her spirit gates had somehow been shut again, broken and tumbled in, choked with stones of fear, anger, or humiliation, denying the new-dilated passage . . .
She had made a mistake, some monstrous mistake, somewhere in the past few fleeting minutes. Maybe she had been supposed to give this task, to give the god, to dy Cabon after all. Maybe keeping it for herself had been the great presumption, a huge and fatal presumption. Overweening arrogance, to imagine such a task was given to her. Who would be stupid enough to give such a task to her?
The gods. Twice. It was a puzzle, how beings so vast could be so vastly mistaken. I knew better than to trust them. Yet here I am—again . . .
Sharp stones bit her feet along the road. The procession turned aside toward the grove, angling through a low space of dark muck that sucked at the horses’ hooves and stank of stagnant water and horse piss. They scrambled up a slight rise. She could hear Illvin’s long footfalls behind her, and his quickening breath, his uneven puffing revealing more of his debilitation than his face ever would. The grove loomed before her, its shade a blessed relief from the hammering sun overhead.
Ah. Not so blessed after all, nor any relief. They marched up past an aisle of the dead. Laid quite deliberately along the left side of their route, as if made witnesses to this procession, were the bodies of the men of Porifors killed last night in Arhys’s sortie. All were stripped naked, their wounds exposed to feed the iridescent green flies that buzzed about them.
She glanced up the row of pale forms, counted. Eight. Eight, of the fourteen who had ridden out against fifteen hundreds. Six must still live somewhere in the Jokonan