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 melted in turn to bliss.
I think He takes His foot to his cat and pushes her to decision. She had no doubt she might yet dodge around that boot in either direction. But just what direction He desired was plain. The unsettling Not yet did at least suggest He did not guide her back toward a body pierced with sword thrusts. The Bastard maneuvers me into this, blast Him. It felt very comfortable, cursing her god. He was a god she might always curse, and the more inventive the invective, the more He would grin. Well suited, indeed, to true Ista.
The flickering slowed, stopped, on parched mouth, weight and pressure, din and pain. On dear, distraught, blinking, merely human eyes. Yes.
And furthermore, my god cheats. He set out this bowl of cream before ever He held the door, and He knew it well. She smiled, and tried to inhale.
Illvin pulled his frantically questing tongue from her mouth, and gasped, "She lives, oh, five gods, she breathes again!"
The crushing pressure, Ista discovered, was Illvin's arms, wrapped around her torso. She stared up into tree branches, blue sky, and his face, bent over hers. His face was flushed with heat and furrowed with terror, and a thin spattering of blood droplets marked it in an angled track from side to side. She raised a weak hand and dabbed at the red beads, and was relieved to find they did not appear to be his.
She whispered through dry, bruised lips. "What has happened?"
"That is what I prayed you might tell me," said Foix's hoarse voice. She looked up to see him looming over them. He still wore his Jokonan mail and tabard, and stood in a convincingly menacing guard stance above his apparent prisoners. She and Illvin were seated on the ground not far from the green command tents. Foix's eyes were white-rimmed, but it seemed not to be the surrounding Jokonans that disquieted him.
"You were marched into the tent," Foix continued in a lower tone. "You looked... ordinary. Helpless. Then suddenly the god light blazed from you, so brightly I was blinded for a breath. I heard Joen cry for your death."
Upon her arm, Illvin's tight clutch tightened further.
"When I could see again," continued Foix, gazing away in guard-pretense, "all the demons in the tent seemed to be rushing into you, like hot metal being drawn through a form. I saw you swallow them all down, Joen's soul as well. It was all over in an instant."
"Save one," murmured Ista.
"Eh. Ur. Yes, there was that. I felt when you freed me from Joen's geas. I almost bolted from the tent then, but I got my wits back just in time. Prince Sordso and some other officers were drawing their swords—five gods, but the scraping seemed to go on forever. Sordso's knuckles were white."
"I tried to get between them and you," Illvin said huskily to Ista. He rubbed at his nose and blinked.
"Yes," said Foix. "Bare-handed. I saw you lunge—a lot of good that was going to do. But instead Sordso whirled around and hacked at Joen."
"She was already dead by then," murmured Ista.
"I saw. She was starting to topple, but his edge caught her just in ... time. Or something. He struck so hard, he spun around and fell backward off the dais. Half the freed sorcerers were running away, but I swear half the rest had the same idea Sordso did. There was one of Joen's women had a dagger out, and was going at the body even as it fell. I'm not sure she knew or cared that it was dead—she just wanted to get in her stroke. Everyone was jostling and yelling and starting in every direction. So I jumped in front of Illvin and you and shouted, 'Back, prisoners!' and brandished my sword."
"Cursed convincingly," muttered Illvin. "I just about tried to leap on you. Except that I had my hands full."
"You fell, Royina. You just... turned gray and stopped breathing and crumpled up. I thought you had died, for your soul was gone from my sight, like a lantern blown out. Illvin tried to lift you up, fell down, then scrambled up again—I dared not help—I let him drag you out, pretending to stand guard over him. Most of the Jokonans thought you were dead, too, I think. Slain in your sorcery, some kind of death magic like Fonsa and the Golden General all over again. So, um ... lie still for a minute, there, till we think what to do next."