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 . . .
Some human attention now would gratify Me greatly,
the Voice murmured. It did not, Ista noticed, either confirm or deny her guess.
Bring me in the rest of my little brethren, sweet Ista, as swiftly as you may. It will no doubt take practice before it comes easily.
So therefore my first trial is a dozen at once?
The pain flaring in her stomach felt as though she had been forced to swallow molten lead.
Along with that sickening, twisted thing?
Well,
said the Voice affably,
there is this; if you survive this, no other demon astray in the realm of matter should pose too onerous a challenge to you hereafter . . .
Ista considered a wealth of objections starting with
What do you mean, if?
but abandoned the impulse. Starting an argument with this Presence was likely to do nothing but spin her in endless circles till she was dizzy, and make Him laugh.
You will not abandon me again
? she asked suspiciously.
I did not abandon you before. . . . nor you Me, as I have marked. Persistent Ista.
She turned her second sight outward again. Trying to see the god with it had been as futile as trying to see the back of her own head. Joen's mouth was open, her eyes rolling back, her body slumping. Somewhere under Ista's breastbone, the first burst of pain was diminishing, as the god drew the ancient demon and its clawing mistress back into His realm. Following after it, but now running to her and not to Joen, a dozen tangled, writhing cords of light jerked and yanked, as the demons fettered upon them tried to flee the feared presence of their god. The human bodies in which they were lodged were only just beginning to move under their riders' frantic lashings.
One at a time or all together? Ista reached out with her spirit hands and plucked one cord at random, and slid her light-palms along it to the demon within one of Joen's attendant women. This one was well cultivated, with parts of three or four different souls whirling within it. The white soul-fire of the living host was more readily discernible, and she combed it back toward the woman, imperfectly. Ista swallowed the demon. The woman's back arched, and she began to collapse. The demon passed through into the god's hands more easily this time, almost immediately.
These cords. I recognize them. I pulled Arhys safe to shore last night with something very like one.
They were stolen from Us, long ago. The demon could not have created them, you know.
The Voice was edged with wrath, though only the faintest reflection of it glimmered through to Ista, else she would have been crushed flat.
Ista reached for another cord, repeating the gesture of plucking and combing. It was a man, one of the officers; his mouth opened on a beginning scream.
I'm not getting it all sorted,
she worried.
I'm not getting it right.
You are brilliant
, the Voice reassured her.
It is imperfect.
So are all things trapped in time. You are brilliant, nonetheless. How fortunate for Us that We thirst for glorious souls rather than faultless ones, or We should be parched indeed, and most lonely in Our perfect righteousness. Carry on imperfectly, shining Ista.
Another, then, and another. The demons flowed to her, through her, faster, but it was an undeniably sloppy process. The next demon was Sordso's, and it was the most complex construct Ista had yet encountered. Layer upon layer of souls and their talents were interpenetrated with the young man's agonized, constricted soul-fire. It was a weirdly loving fabrication. Ista thought she perceived bits of soldiers, scholars, judges, swordsmen, and ascetics. All the Golden General's public virtues, collected and concentrated: the purified pattern of perfect manliness. It was horrifying. How could something made of souls be so coldly soulless?
No poets, though. None at all.
This dark piece of soul here is different,
she realized, as one fragment began to flow through her fingers.
Yes
, said the god.
The man still lives, in the realm of matter
.
Where? Is it. . . ? Should I attempt to . . . ?
Yes, if you think you can endure it. It will be uncomfortable.
Ista rolled up the patch of darkness and bundled it aside in her mind. It pulsed there, hot and thick. Somewhere off the edge of her material vision, the bronze-skinned Jokonan officer was lifting his sword, beginning to turn. A motion in black was Illvin, beginning to move with—no, after—him. Ista ignored it all and kept on combing. Sordso's mouth was opening on a wordless howl, but not, she thought, of a man bereaved by his dispossession. It might be rage. It might be triumph. It might be madness.
Then the next cord, then . . . the last.
She glanced upward with both material and inner sight at the ashen Foix in his green tabard, standing among the startled Jokonan officers. The violet shadow within him was no longer bear-shaped, but distributed unevenly throughout his body. It seemed both to cringe from her, and stare in fascination.
She considered the final cord in her spirit hand. Lifted it to her lips. Bit it through.
Good
, said the Voice.
Oh. Should I have asked?
You are my Door-ward in the realm of matter. A lord's appointed porter does not run to him to ask if each beggar, whether in rags or silks, should be admitted or turned away, else he might as well stand at his gates himself The porter is expected to use his judgment.
My judgment?
She let the end of the cord go. It snapped back into Foix, and he was free. Or ... whatever Foix was now, was free.
Foix's face flickered; his lips parted, firmed. Then, after a bare second, stretched again in that horrible strained smile of perfect assent. False falseness; treachery turning in air.
He is much less simple than he looks.
Ista was barely aware of the cries and turmoil erupting throughout the tent. The voices grew faint and far off, diminishing, the figures dimmer and dimmer. She turned to follow the entrancing Voice.
* * *
SHE SEEMED TO COME TO THE DOOR OF HERSELF, AND LOOK through. An overwhelming impression of color and beauty, pattern and complexity, music and song, all endlessly elaborated, bewildered her senses. She wondered how confusing the world looked to a newborn infant, who had neither names for what she saw nor even the concept of names. The child began, Ista supposed, with her mother’s face and breast, and from there worked outward—and in a lifetime could not come to the end of it all.
This is a world greater and stranger than the one of matter that gave my soul birth, and even the world of matter was beyond my comprehension. How now shall I begin?
Well, Ista,
said the Voice.
Do you stay or go? You cannot hang forever in My doorway like a cat, you know.
I have not words for this. I would see Your face.
Abruptly, she was standing in an airy room, very like a chamber in Porifors. She quickly glanced down, and was relieved to discover she was granted not only a body, healed and light and free of pain, but clothes as well—much as she had been wearing but cleansed of stains and mended of rips. She looked up, and rocked back.
This time, He wore Illvin's body and face. It was a healthy, full-fleshed version, if still tall and lean. His courtier's garb was silver embroidered on white, his baldric silk, his sword hilt and signet ring gleaming. His hair, pulled back in Roknari braids and a long, thick queue, was pure white. The infinite depths of His eyes destroyed the illusion of humanity, though, even as their darkness recalled the man.
"I should have liked," she admitted faintly, "to see what Illvin looked like with white hair."
"Then you will have to go back and wait a while," the Bastard replied. His voice was scarcely deeper or richer than the original's; it even adopted those northern cadences. "You would take your chances, of course; by the time all his hair is white, will there be any left?"
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.