"That's one," said Ista aloud.
The attackers made no cries or calls at all, moving in grim, determined silence. The pale blur of another tent, sheltering the head of another colored snake, swayed, shook, and collapsed. The Jokonan sorcerer gathered energy for some strike at his attacker; Ista could see the flash of a bolt of demon magic pass through Arhys, and hear the wail of the sorcerer's surprise and woe, cut off. She rather thought that faint, distant, liquid thunk might have been a beheading. Another violet streak separated from another white gout. Shocked and tumbling, the violet blur fell helter-skelter into a horse being ridden toward the fray by a Jokonan cavalryman. The animal stumbled, jerked sideways, dumped its rider, and wheeled to run at a hard gallop away down the Oby road. The loose snake head seemed to quest after it as if seeking to strike, but then fell back in on itself, disintegrating in a stream of sparks.
"That's two," said Ista.
From the trees a wavering glow blazed up, yellow and bright, as a tent caught fire. Beyond the grove, lights were being lit in the big green command tents. Ista had no doubt that those sorcerers asleep when the first blow fell were now astir, yanked awake by Joen if they'd slept through the noise. How quickly could the surprised Jokonans coordinate their defenses? Their counterattack? Another spurt of soul-fire, without a demon this time, seared past her eye. An ordinary enemy soldier slain, or one of Arhys's defiant volunteers? From a god's-eye view, she realized, it made no difference. All death-births were accepted equally into that realm.
"Three," she counted, as the attack pressed forward.
"Are we winning?" gasped Liss.
"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."