"It depends on what you think is the prize."
At the fourth tent the attackers began to come to grief at last. Three sorcerer snakes had somehow combined there. Possibly Arhys was weirdly invisible to them, for they chose to concentrate on Foix. Of course—they must imagine another sorcerer as the greatest danger to them, mistake Foix for the heart or head of the enemy strike. Soul-lights swayed, jerked, spun in Ista's dizzied perceptions. The bear went down, roaring, under a net of fire. But the fourth and fifth snakes were beheaded, ribbon-bodies lashing furiously in their death throes before shredding apart in a streaming aurora. From that far green-glowing tent, Ista could hear a woman fiercely screaming, but the Roknari words were blurred to unintelligibility by distance and rage.
"I think they have taken Foix," said Ista.
Behind her, a triple gasp. "Help!" cried the sewing woman. White-faced, Liss whirled and dropped back to her post by Cattilara's side.
On both Cattilara's right thigh and on Illvin's, long dark slices had opened up. A brief glimpse of the red-brown of pulsing muscle, a pale streak of tendon, then both the twin wounds were flooded with red. The sewing woman and Liss, and Goram and dy Cabon, hastened to pad and bind each cut and slow the stream.
Yes. Yes, thought Ista. Her strategy was good. On one recipient, that sword cut would have gone to the core. The half wounds were half as dire. She almost laughed aloud, if blackly, imagining the dismay of Arhys's assailant, knowing from the shock of contact, the jerk of blade from the bone, the ringing up his arm, how hard he'd struck, yet seeing that wound close up again before his eyes... Indeed, the wild wail that echoed up now from the grove might well be the very man. You thought you'd dropped all the horrors of nightmare down upon Porifors, while you sat safe. Now, watch Porifors return the favor. We hold, we hold.
For a very little while longer.
She turned again to try to peer beneath the trees. She could mark Arhys's striding progress across the camp by the sounds of terror, she thought, as his enemies flew screaming before his pale face and deadly blade. And by the streams of white fire rising in his wake. He was unhorsed; she was uncertain when that had happened. She hoped he was not yet alone, without one comrade left to guard his back.
I think he is alone now.
A weird wet thunk sounded behind her. She glanced back to see her helpers rushing to press pads to Illvin's and Cattilara's stomachs. That was a crossbow bolt. She wondered if Arhys had plucked it out to throw back at his dazed enemies, or left it in place like a badge. It would have been a killing strike, on any other man, at any other time. Soon there will be more. By the gods, a dy Lutez does know how to die three times, and three times three if needed.
She fell to her knees behind the parapet, clinging to the stone.
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 groaned. Ista turned to find him sitting up in dy Cabon's grip, pulling blood-soaked bandages from his unmarked body. His lips parted with dismay as he took in the extent of the mess, starting to glow scarlet as color seeped back into the world. "Five gods." He swallowed against a surge of bile. "That was bad, at the end. Wasn't it." It was no question.
"Yes," said Ista. "But he's gone, now. Safe and gone." In the grove below, the fear-crazed Jokonans, she somehow knew, were hacking Arhys's body to bits, pulling it apart, terrified that it might yet reassemble and rise once more against them. She did not see any merit in mentioning this to Illvin just now.
Cattilara lay on her side, curled up. She cried in quiet, stuttering sobs, almost unable to breathe, clutching the sponge that had stanched her stomach so hard that the blood bubbled through her fingers. The sewing woman patted her clumsily and uselessly on the shoulder.