Ista blinked, seeing Joen for the first time without inner sight, without the vast dark menace of the demon glowering from her belly like some pitch-black pit into which one might fall forever. Without her demon, she was just ... a little, sour, aging woman. Unable to command respect or compel loyalty; easy to escape. Small. Five gods, but she was small, all her possibilities shrunken in upon herself: her only recourse, force. Stubborn will without scope of mind.
Ista's mother had once filled her household with her authority from wall to wall. The Provincara's husband had ruled Baocia, but within his own castle even he had lived on her sufferance. Ista's eldest brother, upon inheriting his father's seat, had found it easier to move his capital to escape the permanent childhood that awaited him in his mother's house than to attempt to claim rule there. Yet even at her direst, the old Provincara had known her limits, and had chosen no space larger than what she could fill.
Joen, it seemed to Ista, was trying to fill Jokona with her authority as a woman filled a household, and by the same techniques; and no one could stretch herself that far. In an unbounded world of infinite space, one might move at will, but perforce must leave room for the wills of others. Not even the gods controlled it all. Men enslaved each other's bodies, but the silent will of the soul was sacred and inviolable to the gods if anything was. Joen was seizing her slaves from the inside out. What Joen did to her enemies might be named war; what she did to her own people was sacrilege.
Prince Sordso took his high seat, flinging himself into the chair with a habit of body not yet eradicated by his new demonic discipline. He grimaced around the chamber. His mother's gaze fell on him, and he sat up straight, attentive.
Ista's eye was drawn again to the moonfaced princess at Joen's feet. The girl seemed to be about fourteen, but stunted for her age, with the stubby fingers and odd eyes of one of those late-life children born sadly lack-witted, and who often did not live long. She was one princess who would not escape her mother's household via marriage to some distant country. Joen's hand fell upon her head, although not in a caress, and it came to Ista: She's using the girl for a demon repository. Her own disdained daughter's soul is made a stall for it.
The demon that she intends next to set in me.
Joen stood up, facing Ista. In heavily accented Ibran, she said, "Welcome to my gates, Ista dy Chalion. I am the Mother of Jokona." Her hand lifted from the girl's head, flicked out, fingers spreading.
Within Ista, the god unfolded.
Her second sight burst anew upon Ista's mind like a dazzling lightning stroke, brilliant beyond hope, revealing an eerie landscape. She saw it all, at one glance: the dozen demons, the swirling, crackling lines of power, the agonized souls, Joen's dark, dense, writhing passenger. The thirteenth demon, spinning wildly through the air toward her, trailing its evil umbilicus.
Ista opened her jaws in a fierce grin, and took it in a gulp.
"Welcome to mine, Joen of Jokona," said Ista. "I am the Mouth of Hell."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A WAVE OF LIGHT PASSED ALONG THE DEEP VIOLET CORD between Joen and Ista, and its color and brilliance seemed to intensify. Was Joen's first shocked impulse to strengthen her line? For a dizzy instant, Ista wondered who was the fisherwoman and who the fish. Then she felt the struggling, panicked young demon pass firmly into the Bastard's hands, within her.
You have hooked a god, Joen. Now what shall you do? It was as though a galley had thrown a grappling hook onto a continent, thinking to tow it away.
"She bears the demon-god!" Joen screamed. "Kill her now!"
Yes. That would do...
Yet even as Joen cried out, time seemed to stretch in Ista's perceptions like cold honey spinning off a spoon on a winter morning. She did not think it would stretch indefinitely.
Where should I begin? Ista asked the Presence within her.
Begin at the center, It replied. The rest will follow perforce.
She opened her material hands and let her spirit hands flow out along the violet cable. Enter Joen's body through that channel. Wrap the dark mass, and pull it out toward her. It came resisting, surging and spitting, streaming corrosive violet shadows like water spilling. It burned her spirit hands like vitriol, and she gasped with the unexpected pain, which seemed to strike down into the center of her being and pulse back out to every extremity, the way the shock of a great wound reverberated in a body. The creature was very dense, and ugly. And large. And old, centuries old, rotten with time.
It is hideous.
Yes, said the god. Go on anyway. Finish Arhys's ride.
Ista's material hands were too sluggish to keep up with her streaming will. With her spirit hands alone, she combed back the strands of Joen's soul tangled with the demon. Yet as fast as she did so, Joen flung out tendrils of cold white fire to wrap the demon round again and pull it back. The demon shrieked.
Let go, Ista urged. Let it go, and turn to some better task. Even now, you have a choice.
No! Joen's mind returned. It is my gift, my great chance! No one shall wrest it from me, least of all you! You were so feckless, you couldn't even keep your own son alive! Mine shall have his place; I have promised it!
Ista flinched, but the Presence sustained her. If she will not stay, she must come, It said. Continue.
Your wrongful attempts to impose order create yet vaster destruction, said Ista to Joen. You torment and demolish the very souls you most desire to make grow and love you. You possess truer gifts, stunted though they have been. Let go, find them instead, and live.
The whipping white fire was a visible scream of denial. In it Ista could discern not the faintest whisper of assent.
So.
Ista brought the great violet-black demon to her lips, and pulled it inward. It seemed to stretch and distort in its passage, its screeching becoming pain in her mouth, fire in her gullet. There are souls inside it, she realized. Many pieces of old souls, all digested and smeared together. Souls of the dead, and the long dead. What is to be done about them?
The dead belong to Us; sorting them is beyond your calling. The souls of the yet living, torn apart untimely while still trapped in the realm of matter, those are your care on Our behalf.
And this? Ista asked. Joen's live white soul-fire, tangled with the demon, was passing into her now. It clawed and burned.
Comes out of your hands and into Mine.
This is not the quiet damnation of sundering. Indeed, the white fire seemed to howl, splitting Ista's ears from within. Neither is this heaven's healing.
No, said the Voice regretfully. This is will-not. So it shall pass with its demon to the place of be-not.
Ista had a vision of a strange, dimensionless void, the picture leaked, perhaps, from His mind to hers: a roiling pool of demon energy, without form, without personas, without minds or wills or song or speech or memories or any gift of higher order—the Bastard's hell. Reservoir of pure destruction. Spilling from that pool into the world of matter, a thin controlled flow. Returning to it, an erratic stream. Balancing the life of the world exactly midway between the hot death that is chaos and the chill death that is stasis. She realized at last why the concatenation of Joen's demons had made her edgy, on a level separate from their direct threat to Porifors. Was it possible that such a vortex of disorder might create its own rip between the two realms, one that even the gods might be hard-pressed to mend again? So much divine attention in one small place...