Paladin of Souls

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ISTA HAD JUST FINISHED WASHING, OR AT LEAST, CLEANING, HER body with a half cup of water and some rags when Liss returned to their chambers. She clutched a pile of white garments in her arms, pushing open the inner door with a twist of her hips. "These are the best Cattilara's women could find in a hurry," she announced.

"Good. Put them on the bed." Ista closed the dirty black robe back about herself and came over to examine them. It had not been, by any definition, a bath, but at least the touch of her less-sticky skin against clean clothing might not feel like some violation. "How fares the marchess?"

"She is asleep now. Or unconscious. I really couldn't be quite sure, looking at her. She was very pale and gray."

"Just as well, either way. The blood she spent on the tower buys her a favor, perhaps, in this drained slumber." Ista sorted through the piles. A linen shift the color of new cream, bordered with elaborate cutwork, looked as though it had a hem short enough that she would not trip over it. A delicate white over robe, embroidered in shining white thread that lent it weight and swing, was a Bastard's Day festival garment. The unknown needlewoman had somehow endowed the friezes of tiny dancing rats and crows with considerable charm. "Perfect," Ista murmured, holding it up. The spark, she noticed, was gone from her left hand, though the frost mark on her skin remained.

"My lady, urn... isn't it a little provocative to place yourself in Quadrene hands wearing the Bastard's own color?"

Ista smiled grimly. "Let them imagine so. Its real message is one I do not expect them to read. Haste, now. Tie the ribbons of the shift in back straightly, please."

Liss did so, cinching in the graceful waist. Ista pulled on the over-robe, shook out the wide sleeves, and fastened it closed beneath her breasts with the amethyst-and-silver mourning brooch. The meaning of the heirloom had shifted, it seemed to her, half a dozen times since it had come into her possession. All its old woes had drained out utterly, last night. Today she wore it new-filled with stern sorrow for Arhys, and for those who had ridden with him. All about her must be renewed, in this hour.

"The hair next," she instructed, sitting on the bench. "Something quick and neat. I do not mean to go out to them looking like a madwoman dragged through a hedge, or a haystack hit by lightning." She smiled in memory. "Put it in one braid."

Liss swallowed hard and began brushing. And said, for the fourth or fifth time since dawn on the tower, "I wish you would take me with you."

"No," said Ista with regret. "Ordinarily, you would be much safer as the servant of a valuable hostage than left in a crumbling fortress about to fall. But if I should fail in what I attempt, Joen would make demon fodder of you, steal your mind and memories and courage for her own. Or take you in trade for her sorcerer-slaves that Arhys killed last night, and set you on me not as my servant but as her guard. Or worse."

And if Ista succeeded... she had no idea what might happen after that. Saints were no more immune to steel than sorcerers, as her predecessor the late saint of Rauma—was no longer able to testify.

"What could be worse?" The long strokes of the brush faltered. "Do you think she has enslaved Foix and his bear? Yet?"

"I'll know in an hour." What worse might be, should Liss fall into Joen's hands, suddenly occurred to Ista. Now that would be the perfect, unholy union of two hearts: to feed Liss to Foix's bear, and let Foix's own caring drive him mad with horror and woe as their souls mixed... Then she wondered whose mind was blacker, Joen's, to do such a thing, or her own, to impute such a course to Joen. It seems I am not a nice person, either.

Good.

"There are some white ribbons here. Should I braid them in?"

"Yes, please." The pleasant, familiar yank of the plaiting went on swiftly, behind Ista's back. "If you see any chance of it at all, I want you to escape. That is your highest duty to me now, my courier. To carry away the word of all that has happened here, though they call you mad for it. Lord dy Cazaril will believe you. At all costs, get you to him."

Silence, behind her.

"Say, I promise, Royina,'" she instructed firmly.

A little mulish hesitation, then a whisper: "I promise, Royina."

"Good." Liss pulled the last bowknot tight; Ista rose. Lady Cattilara's white silk slippers did not fit Ista, but Liss knelt and tied on a pair of pretty white sandals that did well enough, binding the ribbons around Ista's ankles.

Liss led the way to the outer chamber, opening the door to the gallery for Ista to step through.

Lord Illvin was leaning against the wall outside, arms folded. It seemed he had also found half a cup of water to bathe in, for though he still reeked more than slightly, his hands and fresh-shaved face were clean of blood and dirt. He was dressed in the colors of court mourning, in the light fabrics of this northern summer: black boots, black linen trousers, a sleeveless black tunic set off with thin lines of lavender piping, a lilac brocade sash with black tassels wrapped about his waist. In the hot noon, he had dispensed with the weight of the lavender vest-cloak, though an anxious Goram hovered with the garment folded over his arm. Goram had arranged his master's hair in the pulled-back, elegant braiding in which Ista had first seen it; the frosted black queue down the back was tied with a lavender cord. Illvin straightened as he saw her and gave her a sketch of a courtier's bow, truncated, she suspected, by bloodless dizziness.

"What is this?" she asked suspiciously.

"What, I had not thought you slow of wit, dear Royina. What does it look like?"

"You are not going with me."

He smiled down at her. "It would reflect exceedingly oddly upon the honor of Porifors to send the dowager royina of all Chalion-Ibra into captivity without even one attendant."

"That's what I said," grumbled Liss.

"The command of the fortress has fallen to you," Ista protested. "Surely you cannot leave it now."

"Porifors is a shambles. There is little in here left to defend, and not enough men left standing to defend it with, though I would prefer to conceal that fact from Sordso for a while yet. The parley for your transfer this morning has bought us hours of precious delay, which we could not have purchased with blood. So if this is to be Porifors's last sortie, I claim it by right. By the unfortunate logic of the situation, in my last bad idea, I could not ride along to correct my strategy in mid-leap. But such logic does not prevail here."

"Your riding would not have changed the outcome."

"I know."

Disconcerted, she studied him. "Do you, in some fey mood, seek to outdo your brother?"

"I never could before; I see no need to try now. No." He took her hand and made little soothing circles on her palm with his thumb. "In my youth, I was apprenticed to my god's order, but I missed the whisper of my calling. I will not miss that calling twice. Well, I scarcely see how I can, when it smacks me on the side of the head and bellows, Attend! in a voice to bring down the rafters. I spent the years of my manhood aimlessly, though well enough in my brother's service, for the lack of a better direction. I have a better direction now."

"For an hour, perhaps."

"An hour will suffice. If it is the right hour."

Arhys's forlorn page padded into the stone court, and cried from the foot of the stairs, "Royina? They are come for you now at the postern gate."

"I come," she called down gently to him. She hesitated, frowning at Illvin. "Will the Jokonans even let you go along with me?"

"They will be glad enough to have another prisoner of rank, at no further cost to themselves. It is also the perfect disguise by which I might scout their camp and number their forces."

"How much scouting do you think you can do as a prisoner?" She squinted at him. "What are you disguised as?"

His lips twitched. "A coward, dear Ista. As they believe we betray you in terror to save our property, so they will think I have attached myself to you to save my skin."

"I don't think they are going to think any such thing."

"So much the better for my poor reputation, then."

She blinked, beginning to feel light-headed. "If I fail, they will make demon food of you. A very banquet for some Jokonan officer-sorcerer. Maybe Sordso himself."

"Ah, but if you succeed, Royina! Have you given thought to what you will do after?"

She looked away uncomfortably from that dark, intent gaze. "After is not my task."

"Just as I thought," he said in a tone of triumph. "And you accuse me of being fey! I rest my argument. Shall we go?"

She found her hand disposed upon his arm while she was still trying to decide if she was convinced or just confused. He handed her down the stairs as though they advanced together in some procession, a wedding or a coronation or a feast day, or onto a dance floor in a roya's palace.

The illusion ended soon enough as they picked their way across the charnel wreckage of the star court—two more horses lay dead and swelling there this morning—through the shadow of the archway, and into the disorder of the entry court. A dozen men clustered on the walls in view of whatever Jokonan embassy waited without, very nearly the whole of the garrison who could stand.

Two short, round towers bulged outward on either end of the front wall of the forecourt, allowing a covering cross fire upon the outer gate. A few more soldiers, and a broad, familiar figure in unfamiliar clothes, waited by the leftward tower that harbored the postern door. Ista and Illvin, trailed by Goram and Liss, came to a halt there.

"Learned." Ista favored dy Cabon with a nod. He had shed his order's distinctive robes, not that his filthy whites hadn't been ripe enough to burn by now, and was dressed in a hodgepodge of borrowed gear that mostly failed to fit him. In any color but white, Ista noted.

"Royina." He swallowed. "Before you go ... I meant to beg your blessing."

"We are well met, then; before I went, I meant to beg yours."

She stood on tiptoe, leaned over his sadly reduced belly, and kissed his forehead. If the god light passed any message to him, it was too subtle even for her inner eye to read. He swallowed and placed his hand upon her brow. Whatever ceremonious benediction he'd mustered escaped him as he burst into tears: he managed only a choked "Bastard help us!"

"Sh, sh," Ista soothed his agitation. "It is well." Or as well as might be, under the circumstances. She studied him narrowly. His sleepless hours with the spell-sickened, with their impossible demands made upon skills he didn't even possess, had shaken him badly. The bloody rite on the north tower had been even more harrowing. His god, she thought, had sapped and mined his soul very nearly to the point of breakthrough, stressing him close to cracking open, little though he realized it. The gods had either been unusually lucky in driving two such mules down the road to Their task at Porifors, or else had been trying exceptionally hard... I wonder if dy Gabon is Their second sortie?

Five gods—was it possible to pray that her burden might pass to him instead? The notion shook her, and she blinked to clear her vision. She had a hideous conviction that the answer was yes. Yes. Yes! Let the responsibility for disaster pass to another, not to her, not to her again...

Except that dy Cabon's chances of surviving success, let alone failure, seemed to her even less than her own. She fought back an impulse to fling herself upon him and beg him to take her place. No.

I have paid for this place. I am emptied out with the cost of it. I will not give it up for any man.

"Buck up, dy Cabon, or else take yourself off," Illvin muttered, scowling. "Your weeping is unnerving her."

Dy Cabon swallowed again, marshaling his self-control. "Sorry. Sorry. I am so sorry that my mistakes brought you here, Royina. I should never have stolen your pilgrimage. It was presumption."

"Yes, well, if not you, the gods would have just had to send someone else to make the mistakes." Who might have failed upon the road. "If you would serve me, live to testify. Your order will need to know all the truth of this, one way or another."

He nodded eagerly, then paused, as if finding her offer of release harder to digest than he'd expected. He bowed and stood back, brow wrinkled.

Illvin removed his sword and passed it to Goram. "Hold this for me till I return. No point in handing my father's blade to Sordso for a present, unless it be point first." Goram ducked a nod and tried to look stern, but his features just came out looking contorted.

Ista embraced Liss, who, with a glower at dy Cabon, managed not to cry at her. Then Illvin was handing her through the dark, close space under the tower. The door opened to the light, and a soldier grunted and heaved at something that fell with a muffled thump, then turned aside to let the two of them pass.

The object turned out to be a narrow board, which he had thrown across the sharp cleft before the castle wall. Illvin hesitated, and Ista wondered if he thought of all the random breakage Porifors had suffered in the day past, and if this makeshift bridge was likewise vilely ensorcelled. But he cast her a quick, encouraging smile over his shoulder and stepped briskly across it. It bent disturbingly, in the center of its span, but held.

Ista glanced across at the Jokonan embassy drawn up before the gate to accept her surrender. Some dozen horsemen were assembled— mostly soldiers, together with three officers. Ista recognized Prince Sordso instantly. The translator-officer rode nervously by his side. The other officer, a heavy, leathery, bronze-skinned man with gray-bronze hair, was also a sorcerer-slave; Ista saw by the ascendant demon light that filled his skin. As with Sordso, a twisting ribbon of light floated from his belly back toward the distant green tents.

Also tethered thus was the one horsewoman, or rather, a woman who rode pillion Roknari-style behind a servant, sitting sideways on a padded chair atop the horse's haunches with her feet demurely disposed on a little shelf. The sorceress wore courtly, trailing garments, and a broad-brimmed hat tied below her chin with dark green ribbons. She was a much younger woman than Joen, though neither maidenly nor beautiful. She stared intently at Ista.

Ista stepped out after Illvin, keeping her eyes upon his face and not the dark drop below, which was deliberately lined at the bottom with sharp rocks and glinting broken glass. Cattilara's sandals slipped on her sweating feet. Illvin reached to clasp her hand, a hard grip, and pulled her to stand upon the dusty ground beyond. Instantly, the board was jerked back, scraping through the postern door, which was then clapped shut.

The woman rode closer. Even as Ista looked up to return her glower, the demon light within her faded, until Ista only saw skin and clothing. The mere expression of a face, not the colors of a soul. Ista's breath caught, and she looked again at Sordso. Now he appeared no more than a golden-haired young man upon a prancing black horse. Not one of the sorcerers flung up their hands, wincing at the glare of Ista's god light, nor did the demons cringe within them—she could not see the demons within them.

My inner sight is stolen. I am blinded.

Something else was missing. The pressure of the god upon her back, which had borne her forward floating as if in a dream since that bloodstained dawn upon the north tower, was gone as well. Behind her, only an empty silence loomed. Infinitely empty, since so infinitely filled just moments before. She tried frantically to think when she had last felt the god's hands upon her shoulders. She was certain He had been with her in the forecourt, when she had spoken with dy Cabon. She thought He had been with her when she'd stepped onto the board across the cleft.

He was not with me when I stepped off.

Her useless outer eyes blurred with terror and loss. She could barely breathe, as though her chest was bound tight with heavy cords. What have I done wrong?

"Who is this?" asked Prince Sordso, pointing at Illvin.

The bronze-skinned sorcerer pushed his horse up next to the prince's and stared down in surprise at Illvin, who looked back coolly. "I believe it is Ser Illvin dy Arbanos himself, Your Highness—Lord Arhys's bastard brother, the bane of our borders". Sordso's blond eyebrows went up. "The new commander of Porifors! What does he here? Ask him where is the other woman." He gestured at his translator.

The officer rode nearer to Illvin. "You, dy Arbanos! The agreement was for the dowager royina and the daughter of the march of Oby," he said in Ibran. "Where is Lady Cattilara dy Lutez?"

Illvin favored him with a slight, ironic bow. His eyes were icy black. "Gone to join her husband. When, watching last night from the tower,

she felt him die, she flung herself from the parapet and gave her grief to the stones below. She lies now waiting to be buried, when you withdraw as you agreed and we can again reach our graveyards. I come in her place, and to serve Royina Ista as warder and attendant. Since, having seen your armies and their dubious discipline once before, the royina did not desire to bring her handmaidens among you."

The translator's brows drew down, and not only at the oblique trailing insult. He repeated the news to Sordso and the others. The sorceress nudged her rider to bring her closer. "Is this true?" she demanded.

"Look yourselves for what you really seek, then," said Illvin, with a bow in her direction. "I should think Prince Sordso could recognize the remnants of his own sister Umerue from this distance, if she were still... well, alive is not quite the right term, now, is it? If she were still residing within Lady Cattilara behind those walls." The translator jerked in his saddle, though whether in surprise at Illvin's message or at the tongue in which it was spoken, Ista was not sure. Sordso, the bronze-skinned officer, and the sorceress all turned their heads toward Porifors, their expressions growing intent and inward.

"Nothing," breathed Sordso after a moment. "It is gone." The sorceress eyed Illvin. "That one knows too much." "My poor sister-in-law is dead, and the creature you lost is fled beyond your reach," said Illvin. "Shall we get this over with?" At a nod from the prince, two soldiers dismounted. They first took the precaution of checking Illvin for concealed blades in his sash and boots; he suffered their hands with a look of bored displeasure. Tension flowed into his long body when one of the soldiers approached Ista, relaxing only slightly when the man knelt by her white skirts.

"You are to take off your shoes," the translator called to her. "You will walk barefoot and bareheaded into the presence of the August Mother, as befitting a lesser woman and a Quintarian heretic."

Illvin's chin went up and his jaw set. Whatever objections he had been about to voice, though, he closed his teeth upon. It was an interesting subtlety, Ista thought, that they did not also demand Illvin's boots. The disparity only drove home his impotence to protect her.

The man's hot hands pawed at the ribbons Liss had so lately tied around Ista's ankles. She stood rigidly, but did not resist. He pulled the light sandals away from her feet and threw them aside. He stood, backed away, and remounted his horse.

Sordso rode up to her, his eyes searching her from head to foot. He smiled grimly at what he saw—or possibly at what he didn't see. In any case, he did not fear to turn his back on her, for he gestured her sharply to take position directly behind his horse in the procession forming up. Illvin tried to offer her his arm, but the bronze-skinned officer pulled his sword and pointed with it for him to walk behind her. Sordso's hand rose and fell in signal, and they started off across the dry, uneven ground.

Ista was barely conscious of the brass-bright noon through which she stumbled. She groped inside her mind, within an echoing darkness. Called silent curses to the Bastard. Then, silent prayers. Nothing came back.

Were the Jokonan sorcerers doing this? Defeating a god in the realm of matter? Surely these opponents could not overwhelm this god... ?

Not the god's failure, then, but hers; her spirit gates had somehow been shut again, broken and tumbled in, choked with stones of fear, anger, or humiliation, denying the new-dilated passage...

She had made a mistake, some monstrous mistake, somewhere in the past few fleeting minutes. Maybe she had been supposed to give this task, to give the god, to dy Cabon after all. Maybe keeping it for herself had been the great presumption, a huge and fatal presumption. Overweening arrogance, to imagine such a task was given to her. Who would be stupid enough to give such a task to her?

The gods. Twice. It was a puzzle, how beings so vast could be so vastly mistaken. I knew better than to trust them. Yet here I am— again...

Sharp stones bit her feet along the road. The procession turned aside toward the grove, angling through a low space of dark muck that sucked at the horses' hooves and stank of stagnant water and horse piss. They scrambled up a slight rise. She could hear Illvin's long footfalls behind her, and his quickening breath, his uneven puffing revealing more of his debilitation than his face ever would. The grove loomed before her, its shade a blessed relief from the hammering sun overhead.

Ah. Not so blessed after all, nor any relief. They marched up past an aisle of the dead. Laid quite deliberately along the left side of their route, as if made witnesses to this procession, were the bodies of the men of Porifors killed last night in Arhys's sortie. All were stripped naked, their wounds exposed to feed the iridescent green flies that buzzed about them.

She glanced up the row of pale forms, counted. Eight. Eight, of the fourteen who had ridden out against fifteen hundreds. Six must still live somewhere in the Jokonan camp, then, wounded and taken. Foix's muscular body was not among the still forms. Pejar's was.

She looked again, and recalculated: five still live.

There was a ninth here, but not a body. More of a ... pile. A spear was driven into the ground behind the shambles, with Arhys's disfigured head displayed atop the shaft, peering out sightlessly over the Jokonan camp. The once-ravishing eyes had been cut out by whatever fear-maddened soldier had sought revenge upon the emptied form.

Too late. He was gone before you got there, Jokonan. Her bare feet faltered over some root, and she gasped in pain.

Illvin, striding forward, caught her arm before she tripped and fell headlong.

"They bait us. Look away," he instructed through clenched teeth. "Do not faint. Or vomit."

He looked ready to do both, she thought. His countenance was as gray as any of the corpses', though his eyes burned like nothing she had ever seen in a man's face.

"It's not that," she whispered back. "I have lost the god."

His brows flickered in consternation and confusion. The bronze-skinned officer, his sword out, gestured them along toward the far edge of the grove, though he did not force Illvin from her side. Maybe she, too, looked as though she were about to faint.

She thought Illvin's judgment of baiting to be precise. If either of them had still concealed any uncanny power—or any strength at all— that display might well have drawn it out of them, in some furious, futile lashing at their complacent enemies. If she had been either a sorceress or a swordsman, she swore the prince would not have survived the smirk he had cast over his shoulder as she'd stumbled past Arhys's remains. From a failed saint, the Jokonans were quite safe, it seemed.

"They meant to march Catti past that," Illvin muttered under his breath. "Add it to their tally, and five gods grant I may be the one to come collect ..." His eyes didn't stop glancing from tent to tent, tracing the path of last night's destruction, summing the condition of the men and horses that they passed. Thin silver tracks slid down his face, but his hand scorned to wipe at them, under the gaze of the few dozen jeering soldiers crowded up to watch their little parade. Ista did not know enough vile Roknari to translate the insults, though Illvin no doubt did. His dogged mutter continued, "They're not preparing to strike camp. They're preparing an assault. Are we surprised? Ha. One thing shows—they don't know how weak we've grown. Or they'd be preparing for a romp ..."

Was he trying to distract his senses from the Jokonan desecration of his brother's corpse? She prayed the ploy might serve him. She tried to extend her own blinded senses for any breath of the god, anywhere. Nothing. Joen and Sordso had placed Arhys's head along her path to be a symbol of her failure, a hammer blow of despair. I wonder if Arvol dy Lutez felt as bereft as this, when his dangling hair touched the water for the second time?

And yet the symbol turned beneath her enemies' feet, for the reminder of defeat was also a reminder of triumph. A presence in an absence. Strange.

The god may be absent, but I am still present. Maybe this is a task for dense matter, to do what matter does best: persist. So. She took a breath and kept on walking.

They arrived before the largest of the green tents. One side was rolled up, revealing what appeared to be nothing so much as a portable throne room. Rugs were strewn thickly across the ground. A dais ran along the back, supporting a pair of carved chairs decorated in gold leaf, and a scattering of cushions for lesser haunches. The pious dark green of staid and stern maternal widowhood was everywhere, overpowering even the sea-green of Jokonan arms, and never had Ista loathed the color more.

Dowager Princess Joen, dressed in a different but equally elaborate layering of stiff gowns from when they had—five gods, was it only this time yesterday that they had met upon the road?—sat in the smaller, lower of the two chairs. Her woman attendants knelt upon the cushions, and a drab, moonfaced young woman who might be another daughter crouched at her feet. Ista could not tell how many of them were sorceresses. A dozen officers stood at painful attention along each side. Ista wondered if all eleven of Joen's surviving leashed demons were present for this... demonstration.

Twelve. Foix stood rigidly among the Jokonan officers. His face was bruised and cut, but cleaned, and he was dressed anew in Jokonan garb and a green tabard with white pelicans flying. His expression was dazed, his weird smile forced and unnatural. Ista didn't even need her lost sight to be certain that a glittering new snake floated from the woman on the dais to him, and that its fangs were sunk deeply into his belly. Illvin's eyes, too, passed across Foix; and his jaw set, if possible, even more tightly.

The possibilities for more cruel baiting were endless. Fortunately,

perhaps, time was not. The bronze-haired officer gestured Ista forward to the middle of the carpets, to the center of this brief set piece of power, facing Joen. Illvin was stopped at sword's point a few paces back, behind Ista's right shoulder, and she was more sorry that she could not see him than that he could see her. She wondered what final stamp of humiliation had been prepared for her.

Oh. Of course. Not humiliation. Control. The humiliation out there had been to gratify Sordso's sortie-stung troops. The woman in here was more practical.

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."