Seven Swords

Chapter 24

'Irissa,' Scyvilla said absently upon being questioned. 'No, not here. I've been alone here all the night." That distracted Kendric. 'Alone here, all night? Why?'

Scyvilla's long sleeve - the pointed ends were soaking wet, Kendric noticed - lifted lugubriously to point to the swanfish carcass.

The townsfolk must have been too superstitious to cart it away. I'll have it removed at once,' Kendric said. 'I would have seen to it yesterday, but was ...

Fatigued,' the ludborg put in mournfully.

'Yes.'

'Worn to bone.'

"Tired, but that is only to be expected

"When one wrestles a demon.'

'Yes.' Kendric heard a defensive edge in his voice he didn't like. 'What are you doing here?'

"Testing the water to see if the taint prevails.'

Kendric pointed at his vanquished foe. "The source is dead and gone."

'But it infected the water, you know. Of course you know. You must have swallowed some of it." Scyvilla's faceless hood twisted to angle directly toward Kendric's face, as if confronting him about something.

'Some.' Kendric frowned to remember the bitter taste that had coated his mouth after the encounter... still tainted his mouth and throat. 'Your experiments can wait, Scyvilla. I must find Irissa before I worry about swanfish taint."

'I do not conduct experiments. I know the damage that has been done. I seek merely to discover if the city folk are in danger as well.'

'Perhaps you do not understand me. Irissa is missing. Irissa is not to be found in any of the places she would be on arising."

'Have you looked in places where she would not be at such a time?'

Kendric studied Scyvilla's perpetually eclipsed face. In the ludborg's dark empty visage he read his own slow thoughts.

'Where she would not be! Of course... Thank Scyvilla!'

Kendric forced his leaden legs up the dungeon stairs three at a time. He raced, through the pounding of his pain, up narrower and narrower sets of stairs until he reached Irissa's receiving room. It was only in mid afternoon that she came here, but this was also the only place he had not looked for her.

And he found her.

'Irissa!' Relief lightened his steps as he crossed the threshold. 'You are up and weaving as early as a spider.'

She started guiltily, half-rising from behind her tapestry stand. He saw a length of rudely woven fabric, saw an amerald-green glitter among the pattern.

You must have risen early,' he restated.

'Yes,' she agreed, sinking back onto her stool as if weary to stand.

Kendric felt more than ordinarily winded himself. He leaned against the central stone-based wooden table and too regarded her.

The room, with its windows still shuttered, was lit by guttering candles. In that ebb and flow of sickly light, Kendric saw that Irissa's hands and face were both a cold wax-white. Her silver eyes shone dully in a tarnished setting - the shadows hollowed out around them.

'Sudden inspiration,' he suggested, nodding at the rumpled cloth before her. 'One cannot argue that. But' - Kendric twisted his stiff neck to survey the tapestries on the chamber walls 'where will you put another hanging? There is no room. And I thought the series complete?'

"The past is never complete as long as there is a present. And I will find a place, Irissa answered tightly.

He turned back to the walls, trying to locate a space for an addition. Behind him, Irissa rustled over.

'You needn't scout a vacancy. That's my worry. And you know these scenes by heart, don't waste your time eyeing them when you should be below seeking breakfast.'

The words reminded Kendric that something empty occupied his center. Ordinarily, the mere suggestion of breakfast would have sufficiently diverted him. He knew that, and Irissa knew that too well.

He looked into her eyes, which immediately away. She smoothed the lay of his tunic.

'A sudden inspiration,' Kendric said.

Go to breakfast, I'll be down in a bit. You went to bed without dinner last night."

'And when did you dine or breakfast?'

'Before,' she said lightly, moving away.

'Irissa!' He thundered her name, standing, even though needles of discomfort pierced every inch of his body. You have never not quite lied to me before.'

She turned back. 'You think I'm lying?'

'I know you're not lying. But you've never been so... careful... to not lie to me before. It doesn't make sense, but I sense it, Irissa, what is wrong??

Her face shattered like one of Scyvilla's casting crystals at the moment when it destroyed itself to reflect a few narrow splinters of truth.

'Irissa-?' He wanted her to tell him that wrong.

'Everything,' she admitted.

'Everything?" Kendric was bewildered. "That is so unlike you, to talk of trouble in such blanket terms. You are the one who can reach into a knapsack of sunshine at every dark crossroad, who can weave the world around you to the shape of your will. You are the one who accepts nothing as a barrier. How can you say everything is wrong?'

'Because it's all my fault.'

Kendric sat again, against the table edge that was pressing a groove into his bruised buttocks. 'Tell me,' he said simply.

She returned to the tapestry stand, as if looking for words woven there that had escaped her. Her fingers treaded the ridges of interwoven thread. Kendric sud denly realized that this fresh swatch of tapestry was a prodigious amount of work for Irissa to have accomplished so quickly, even if she had sat up all night.

'You are right,' she began, 'the walls are full.' Her eyes took bittersweet inventory of the hangings all around them.

Kendric couldn't take his eyes off Irissa, not even to refresh his memory of the hangings. He had never seen her so hopeless before, so . . . wearily ashamed.

'And yet, the walls are empty,' she continued, her voice as vacant as her words. 'I didn't want you to see it, what I was doing. But you might as well. I knew you would have to know eventually. I just hoped the over and the end would be so joyous that you would overlook the means.'

He had arrived beside her by the time this speech was done, worry gnawing harder on his stomach than hunger. Irissa was not one for slow speeches, either. Kendric knew. Then he glanced down and saw the awful, familiar figure shaping itself in her work.

You've never-' he began.

'I know.'

'Why now?'

'I... need it.'

'Why?'

'To do that which you won't like.'

'Which is-'

"To pass through a gate from Rengarth.'

"To where?"

'Rule, I thought.'

'Rule? And aren't you certain?'