Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [196]
“I should have liked,” she admitted faintly, “to see what Illvin looked like with white hair.”
“Then you will have to go back and wait a while,” the Bastard replied. His voice was scarcely deeper or richer than the original’s; it even adopted those northern cadences. “You would take your chances, of course; by the time all his hair is white, will there be any left?”
His body and face shifted through a hundred possible Illvins at a hundred possible ages, straight or bent, thin or fat, bald or not. The laughter on His lips remained the same, though.
“I desire . . . this.” It was unclear even to Ista if her hand gesture indicated the god or the man. “May I come in?”
His smile softened. “The choice is yours, my Ista. As you do not deny Me, I will not deny you. Yet I would still await you, if you chose the long way home.”
“I might become lost upon the road.” She looked away. A great calm filled her. No pain, no terror, no regret. Their immense absences seemed to leave room for . . . something. Something new, something never dreamed of before. If this was what Arhys had experienced, it was no wonder he’d never looked back. “So this is my death. Why did I ever fear it?”
“Speaking as an expert, you never seemed to Me to fear it all that much,” He said dryly.
She looked back. “There may be more to paradise than the cessation of pain, but, oh, it seems almost paradise enough. Might a next time . . . hurt?”
He shrugged. “Once you return to the realm of matter, the protection I can offer you is limited, and its bounds, alas, do not exclude pain. This death is for you to choose. The next may not be.”
Her lips curved up despite themselves. “Are you saying I might find myself back at this same gate in another quarter of an hour?”
He sighed. “I do hope not. I should have to train another porter. I quite fancied a royina for a time.” The eyes glittered. “So does my great-souled Illvin. He’s prayed to Me for you, after all. Consider my reputation.”
Ista considered His reputation. “It’s dreadful,” she observed.
He merely grinned, that familiar, stolen, heart-stopping flash of teeth.
“What training?” she added, feeling suddenly cantankerous. “You never explained anything.”
“Instructing you, sweet Ista, would be like teaching a falcon to walk up to its prey. It might with great effort be done, but one would end with a very footsore and cranky bird, and a tedious wait for dinner. With a wingspan like yours, it’s ever so much easier just to shake you from my wrist and let you fly.”
“Plummet,” Ista growled.
“No. Not you. Granted, you tumble and complain halfway down the abyss, but eventually you do spread your wings and soar.”
“Not always.” Her voice went lower. “Not the first time.”
He tilted his head in a sliver of acknowledgment. “But I was not your falconer then. We do suit, you know.”
She glanced away, and around the strange, perfect, unreal room. Antechamber, she thought, boundary between the inside and the outside. But which door was which? “My task. Is it done?”
“Done and well-done, my, true, foster, laggard child.”
“I have come very late to everything. To forgiveness. To love. To my god. Even to my own life.” But she bowed her head in relief. Done was good. It meant one could stop. “Did the Jokonans slay me, as Joen ordered?”
“No. Not yet.”
Smiling, He stepped up to her and tilted her chin up. He lowered His mouth to hers as boldly as Illvin had, that afternoon—yesterday?—on the tower. Except that His mouth tasted not of horsemeat but of perfume, and there was no uncertainty in His eyes.
His eyes, the world, her perceptions, began to flicker.
Infinite depths became dark eyes reddened with frenzied weeping. Perfume became parched, salt flesh, then fragrance, then flesh. Sweet silence became noise and cries, and then silence, and then din again. Painless floating turned to a crushing pressure, headache, thirst, which