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."
Page 209
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]