CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ISTA'S ACHING LEGS PUSHED HER UP THE NARROW TOWER STAIRS, the curving stone wall harsh beneath her groping hand, into a square of unexpected radiance. Rows of candles were lined up at the base of the parapet walls on the north and south sides, stuck into blobs of their own wax, burning clear and unwavering in the breezeless night air. The heat seemed to stream upward into the starry night sky, but withal the air of the tower was much less close and stale than that of the forecourt.
With their arrival, the platform seemed crowded. Ista surveyed the arrangements she'd ordered and breathed satisfaction. At one side Lady Cattilara, dressed in a robe, lay silently upon a straw pallet that was covered with a sheet. Another pallet, also covered with old linens, lay empty beside her. The sewing woman with her basket, Goram, and Learned dy Cabon, his robes now very stained indeed, all waited anxiously. The little company would have to suffice; the few physicians and acolytes of the Mother left alive in the beleaguered town were felled by fevers, or worse, and in any case could not be smuggled up the collapsed tunnels to their castle's aid.
Illvin, emerging from the stair's blackness, shielded his eyes against the candle glow. "Royina, will you be able to see out, to track my brother's progress?"
"It won't be these eyes I use to follow him. And your attendants must be able to see you." Her material hand reached to touch the invisible reassurance of the gray thread, which seemed to spin out from her heart into the darkness below. "I will not lose him now."
He grunted somewhat disconsolate acquiescence, drew a breath, and seated himself upon the empty pallet. Laying his sword aside, he peeled out of his speckled and sweat-stained shirt and rolled up his loose trouser legs. Goram helped pull off his boots. He swung his long legs out straight and lay back, face not so much composed as rigid, his dark dilated eyes looking up at the stars. Wisps of cloud, moisture out of reach, crossed the spangled vault in gray feathers. "I am ready." His voice sounded parched, but not, Ista thought, just from lack of water.
From the castle below, she heard the faint ratchet of the drawbridge chains being pulled up again very slowly, and a jingle of harness and thump of hooves passing away from the walls, fading with distance. The gray thread was moving in the pool of darkness below, very like a fishing line taken by a pike. "We have not much time. We must begin." She dropped to her knees between the two pallets.
Illvin took her hand and pressed it to his lips. She caressed his slick brow as she took it back. Composed herself. Shut out the confusing sight of her eyes and brought up the tangle of lights and shadows by which the realm of spirit represented itself to her now. She suspected the gods simplified it for her, and that the reality beneath this was stranger and more complex still. But this was what she was given; it must do.
She undid her ligature around the white trickle coming from Illvin's heart, opening the channel wide. Soul-fire poured out, joined the sluggish, sullen stream from Cattilara, and flowed away into the night, winding around the gray thread but not touching it. The life drained from Illvin's face, leaving it stiff and waxen, and she shuddered.
She turned away and studied the sleeping Cattilara. The demon swirled in agitation beneath her thin breastbone. Enormous stresses propagated here, straining toward some cataclysmic breakage. Ista's next task was dangerous indeed, dangerous to them all, but she could not shirk from it. So many souls were at risk in this ride...
She tightened Cattilara's ligature, pushing the soul-fire up from her heart toward her head. The demon tried to follow it. She laid her snow-spangled left hand upon Cattilara's collarbone, stared in fascination at the gray glow her fingers suddenly shed. The demon shrank again, crying with new terror. Cattilara's eyes opened.
She tried to surge upright, only to find her body still paralyzed. "You!" she cried to Ista. "Curse you, let me go\"
Ista let out her tight breath. "Arhys rides out now. Pity his enemies, for death on a demon horse descends upon them out of the darkness, bringing sword and fire. Many will bear him company on his journey to his Father's keep tonight, their souls like ragged banners borne before his echoing feet. You must choose now. Will you aid him or impede him, in his last journey?"
Cattilara's head yanked back and forth in an agony of denial. "No! No! No!"
"The god himself awaits his coming, His own holy breath held in the balance of the moment. Arhys's heart flies ahead to his Father's hand like a messenger bird. Even if he could be dragged back now, he would spend the rest of his life, and I think it would not be long, hanging at that window, longing for his last home. He would not thank you. He could not love you, with all his heart anchored in that other realm. I think he might even grow to hate you, knowing what glory you denied to him. For one last moment, the last instant of time and choice, think not of what you desire, but of what he does; not of your good, but of his greatest good."
"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.