"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."