"I fear so small a stroke as steel through the chest will not kill so puissant a witch," the Rat Raiser said bitterly. "We should have some few minutes ere she wakes - but waken she shall." Frisson backed away from Suettay, trembling.
"Would she would not," the Rat Raiser said, lips tight. "Nay, if I find any way to injure her at no risk to myself, I shall do it!"
"Even if it means repenting your sins and adhering to God?" The cell was very quiet as the two of us stared at each other across a gulf of tension.
"Aye," the Rat Raiser breathed. "Even that."
"Even if it means devoting yourself to the good of your fellow man? Becoming the servant of the poor and weak?"
The silence was even longer this time, but I saw the Rat Raiser's countenance begin to lighten, eyes widening at a new concept. "Aye, even that," he breathed. " 'Twould hurt the queen grievously, would it not? So that is the meaning of the 'coals of fire upon his head'!"
"I can think of better motives for taking up a life of goodness," I said "but I'll take what I can get. Who knows? Maybe it'll grow on you, after a while."
"You do not mean he shall accompany us!" Gilbert protested. Angelique touched his arm and said, "Aye, he must. Ask me not why, but I feel the rightness of it."
Gilbert opened his mouth to protest further, but saw her face and fell silent.
"Shall I swear?" the Rat Raiser demanded.
"What good would that do? If you're secretly holding fast to a life of evil, you'll break an oath without even thinking. No, I can feel the rightness' Angelique is speaking of. I'll take a chance on you, Rat Raiser."
The bureaucrat cracked a smile. "I thank you, Wizard. You shall not regret it."
"I hope not - because if I do, you will, too." I gazed into his yellowed eyes a moment longer, then turned back to my friends. "Okay, time to leave, before the posse arrives."
"But who can know?
"Suettay's second in command. I'll bet she had six kinds of magic alarms rigged to our cell. When they find us gone, they're bound to try here. No, don't try to kill her by magic - you'll just trigger some kind of ectoplasmic guardian that will be really rough to handle."
" 'Tis even as he says," Angelique quavered. "I ken not what they may be, but I sense some dark and lingering presence that awaits any threat to her body."
"But I slew her!" Frisson cried.
"Nothing fatal, I'm afraid," I sighed, "which is why the guardian didn't respond. She doesn't keep her heart within her chest. Don't let it worry you, Frisson - you'll get another chance. Remember, the idea right now is to escape - we'll figure out a way to kill her some other day."
The poet looked crestfallen, but he squared his shoulders-and his chin.
"Okay," I said, "everybody hold hands, now." I took the Rat Raiser's paw myself - after all, I already had once, hadn't I?
Knowingly or not. Everybody else linked up on my right hand. "Here we go, folks!
Frisson, the parchment, please?"
The poet held up the sheet of foolscap, and I read it, chanting,
The door was opening, and soldiers were bursting into the torture chamber, just as it faded and sank into the void.
Chapter Sixteen
There was no world and no time, and no sight but light. There were colors swirling about me, but mostly what there was, was Angelique.
I wasn't alone in the mist this time. I was a separate identity, but I was also integrated with Angelique. Somehow, her soul was interleaved with mine, touching me far more intimately than any embrace of bodies could achieve, in contact with me at every point, and the thrill of her touch was ecstasy. I couldn't see her, but I could perceive her, perceive the memories of horror, the aftershocks of agony, but all of it was muted now, numbed and faded, far less important than her joy at having found a man who loved her deeply. Because I couldn't hide that from her, now-our souls were open to each other. The only way I could have hidden my feelings was to have locked her out entirely, and to do that I would have had to become catatonic, completely cutting off perception of everything but myself. But I didn't want to hide my feelings, somehow.
Maybe it was because she couldn't hide anything from me, either, and I could perceive her love for me, ardent and deep. I realized that the spell had only made her see my good qualities before-but now she saw all my faults, too-the temper, the mulishness, the hypocrisy, the sprees, the sordid little affairs, the chip on my shoulder. But my virtues were so important to her, so much of what she needed and admired, so much like her own ideas of what was good and right, that my harshness and abrasiveness seemed unimportant to her. She knew them for the front, the shield, that they were, and knew also that they didn't really matter-but that what they protected, did. As for me, I was a total goner. I'd been able to see beneath the bruises and see in her glowing ghost that her face and body were beautiful, the most beautiful I had ever seen-but I began to realize now that her beauty was only partly physical, that what raised her above every other woman I'd ever known was the sweetness and steadfastness of her soul. Her spirit was far more beautiful than her body could ever have been, than any woman's body could ever have been. My own lack of purity saddened but did not repel her. I could feel, through the beating of her energy field against mine, her urge to heal my soul of the rifts made by the women who had hurt me, the men who had ground at me until I had learned to strike back. Her touch, if the contact of spirit with spirit can be called that, was cool and soothing, then heating, inflaming. It crossed my mind that this beat sex all hollow, until I realized that this was sex, in the ultimate - or rather, that this intimacy was what we poor, fumbling men of clay are trying to achieve, through the use of our physical extensions.
That's when I really began to believe in the soul - and with it, I began to suspect that there might be an afterlife.
Then, suddenly, there was a rude pain - or no, not a pain, really, but a jolting shock that made Angelique cry out soundlessly and made me grapple her to me more tightly, trying to surround her, to shield her, anger kindling against the being who had disrupted our idyll, defaced our Eden. But the anger did no good; a stern voice was echoing all about us, commanding,
With a soundless cry, Angelique disengaged herself from me, breaking apart at the horror of the thought. Raging with anger, I surged up, snapping to alertness, body in fighting stance, eyes open
...
I saw Frisson's face, staring right into mine not six inches away, with a grimness that I hadn't even suspected he had in him. Then the room spun, and so did I, with a dizzy spell unlike anything I'd ever had before. A hand caught me, a hard arm braced me, and as the stars faded from my vision, I saw that Frisson and Gilbert had propped me up between them.
"What ... what happened?" I croaked.
"You did blend your soul with Angelique's ghost," Frisson explained. "In our journey through that realm that is and is not, from one place to another, your soul loosed itself from your body, as it ever does, and clasped Angelique's soul, as your hand did hers - for that was the only way in which you could carry her from one place to another."