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at the top of the steps. Ista descended and paced across the pavement at
Arhys's side. He handed his torch to his page, but the boy
could not reach the bracket high on a carved pillar, and Arhys smiled briefly
and took it back to set therein. He dismissed the page to keep Liss company.
Ista and he settled themselves on either end of the stone slab, still not
wholly cooled from its day's baking. The starry depths of the sky, bounded
above by the roofs' rectangle, seemed to swallow the golden glow of Liss's
candle and the torch, and give back nothing. Arhys's face was a gilded shadow
against the deeper shadows, but his eyes gleamed.
"A busy day, your restored companions and their Jokonan tailpiece have brought
us," he began. "Two of my patrols, to the south and the west, have returned
with nothing to report. Two have not yet come back, and they concern me." He
hesitated. "Cattilara did not greet my return. She is angry with me, I
think."
"For riding out on your duties? She will surely forgive you."
"She will not forgive my dying. I am become her enemy in this, as well as her
prize."
Have you, now?
"She still thinks she can get you back. Or at least prevent you from going.
She does not, I think, perceive the wasting effect of this delay upon you,
being blinded by the surfaces of things. If she sees the disintegrating ghosts
at all, I do not think she understands the nature of their damnation."
"Damnation," he breathed. "Is that what my state is. That explains much."
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"Theologically, I do believe that is precisely what it is, although perhaps
Learned dy Cabon could refine the term. I do not know the scholars' language,
but I have seen the thing itself. You are cut off from the nourishment of
matter, but blocked from the sustenance of your god.
And yet, not by your own will, as the true and mercifully sundered spirits
are. By another's interference.
This is ... wrong."
He stretched and clenched his hands. "It can't go on. I don't even bother to
pretend to eat, now. I drink only sips. My hands and face and feet are growing
numb. Just within the past ten days I've noticed it, faintly at first, but
it's getting worse."
"That does not sound good," she agreed. She hesitated. "Have you prayed?"
His hand went to his left sleeve, and Ista remembered the black-and-gray
prayer cord bound secretly there. "Need for the gods comes and goes in a man's
life. Cattilara longed for a child, I made my obeisances . . . but if the
Father of Winter ever heard me, He gave me no sign. I was never the sort to
receive portents, or to delude myself that I had. Silence was always my
portion, in return for my prayers.
But of late it seems to me the silence has grown . . . emptier. Royina" his
gaze, sparking out of the shadows, seemed to pierce her "how much longer do I
have?"
She was about to say, I don't know.
But the evasion smacked of cowardice. No Mother's physician could answer him
with any better knowledge than hers.
What do I know?
She studied him, with both outer and inner sights. "Of ghosts, I have seen
many, but more old than new. They accumulate, you see.
Most still hold the form of life, of their bodies, for some two or three
months after death, but drained of color, and of caring. They slowly erode. By
a year after, second sight can usually no longer distinguish human features,
though they still have the form of a body. By several years old, they are a
white blur, then a fainter blur, then gone. But the time varies greatly, I
suspect, depending on the strength of character the person had to begin with."
And the stresses of their dwindling existence? Arhys was unique in her
experience. The demands upon his spirit would be huge for a living man. How
could his starveling desolate ghost sustain them?
The great-souled give greatly, from their abundance. But even they must come
to the end of themselves, without the upholding hands of. . .
Her mind shied from completing the thought. She reined it round.
Their god.
"So what is my appearance now?"
"Almost wholly colorless." She added reluctantly, "You are beginning to blur
about the extremities."
He rubbed his face with an exploring hand and murmured, "Ah. Much comes
clear." He sat silent for a little, then tapped his knee. "You once told me
you had promised Ias not to speak of my father's true fate to any living soul.
Urn. Well. Here am I, before you now. Royina, I would know."
Ista was surprised into a snort. "You are a most excellent lawyer, for a dead
man. This counterthrust would be a very good, sharp point, if it weren't that
I'd lied to you in the first place. Ias never asked me for any such promise.
He was scarcely speaking to me by then. The tale I told you was but a shield,
to hide my cravenness."
"
Craven is not how I'd describe you, lady."
"One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every
wound and scar, one learns."
"Then I ask the truth of you now, as my bier gift. More desirable to me than
flowers."
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"Ah." She let out her breath in a long sigh. "Yes." Her fingers traced over
the smooth, cool amethysts and silver filigree of the brooch beneath her
breast.
Dy Lutez wore it in his hat. He wore it there on his last day, I do recall.
"This will be but the third time in my life to make this confession."
"Third time pays for all, they say."
"What do they know?" She snorted again, more softly. "I think not. Still, my
auditors have been of the best, as befits my rank and crime. A living saint,
an honest divine, the dead man's dead son . . . so." She had told it over in
her mind enough times; it needed no further rehearsal. She straightened her
back, and began.
"All men know that Ias's father, Roya Fonsa, in despair at the loss of his
sons and his royacy before the onslaught of the Golden General's alliance,
slew his enemy by a rite of death magic, giving up his own life in the
balance."
"That is history, yes."
"Fewer men know that the rite spilled a residue, a subtle curse afflicting
Fonsa's heirs, and all their works. First Ias, then his son Orico. Teidez.
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