Seven Swords

Chapter 26

Then she turned and saw the tiny circle of lights in the impenetrable distance. She almost toppled, the sight so startled her after the solid darkness.

But the lights were small, like the thick-clustered stars of other worlds that her parents had spoken of. She blinked, then shut her eyes. The lights' pinpoint bril liance pricked the dark behind her closed lids. She could follow their spark-lit path through her own inner dark as easily as through the vast outer dark of the world Without.

She began walking, each step a nervous assumption that the black surface beneath her feet would not fall away into greater darkness. Her thoughts grew as dark as Without

I never should have meddled with Thane, she lectured herself. Never should have taken his mission so seriously. Never should have followed. Where is he now? More to the point, where am I? What will Father say when he finds out? Will he find out?

Perhaps Mother will come after and fetch us. But do I want to be fetched? Oh, yes! No-! It's all right, Javelle, you silly, the dark doesn't bite...

Something nipped the outer rim of her ear. Javelin gasped and froze. Then something spoke.

'Don't fret. That was a pinch, not a bite. If I bit you, you would die, for I still bear the borgia taint I drew from your mother before both our births and will until I can release it into something deserving of it.

'Die?' Javelle was beginning to think that darkness was as close as anyone could get to death and still live. Yet any voice, however lethal, was welcome in it.

Think of me as your guardian,' the dry voice continued. I will only bite in your defense, or my own. Ah, it's so good to be... alive, however briefly.

Javelle felt the serpentine circlet tighten around her temples. The snake's blunt metal head lifted off the ledge of her ear as if straining to survey the blackness.

'Biting is no doubt useful at times,' Javelle ventured. But what is there to bite here in this lightless land? LHave you any other useful habits?'

'I should think opening a gate to Without was enough."

'You did that?"

'I and no other, not even your brother.'

'Where is Thane?'

'I am not a cat. I do not see in the dark and some times not even in the light.'

'So you are only good for getting us into the dark, but not out of it. To be so arbitrary, you must be magical, as Father would say.' Javelle didn't wish to admit it, but she found it comforting to converse with something while treading the featureless murk.

'On the other hand,' the snake hissed back. 'I hear very well, even when . . . dormant. I have heard your father's theories on magic. For one so long-bodied, he is most short-sensed.'

'Ah, but you do not say it to his face, do you? Why do you carry a borgia taint - and why speak now after such long silence?'

"The taint was passed to me by the Rengarthian poison leeches who squeezed it from your mother long ago. She still carried you within her, and then just barely. The bad borgia flooded into my very birthing vessel. I, being a poison-leech myself, was untouched by the toxin. It shall stay safe within my scales until I find occasion to bite someone perhaps in your defense. Then, if something venomous bites you, I shall be free to sip your poison away and hoard it until I find opportunity to rid myself of it again."

'Most generous.' Javelle was impressed. But what if I am bitten before you find reason to transmit your present poison elsewhere?"

"That would be... unfortunate. I would be unable to aid you, except to bite that which bit you in return. It would die a terrible death."

I'm sure I'd be terribly grateful,' Javelle said dryly. The serpent took her thanks at face value and answered modestly, 'Your mother bore me at her breast through three lands and many perils; it behooves me to avenge her daughter.'

'Let's hope I don't require avenging for a while. Do you think those lights are getting larger?'

'No.'

'Closer, I meant."

'I doubt it, but distances are not my strength. Nor is talking. The power of the gate ebbs and so must my voice."

Javelle sighed. A speaking snake that swallowed and spit out poison and also arranged itself artistically on her person was an amusing companion, but apparently not too useful a one.

She trudged on. The serpent subsided, apparently having exhausted its supply of chitchat after so many years of silence.

'At least I had more to do with opening the gate than Thane did, for all his inbred magic, Javelle mused aloud. aware also that no one would know to credit her for the deed or, rather, her familiar's deed. Still, if she could find Thane and crow over him, it might be worth the risk of this catapult into Without.

'Wait!' The snake roused itself to drone authoritatively in her ear.

Javelle waited, wistfully eyeing the far ellipse of lights. She became aware of something eddying around her knees something like a breeze or a current. What moved in the dark so silently?

A great piece of that darkness erupted into sudden form a massive, shapeless form that pushed her down and then rolled her over and over. All she could see were the occasional winks of spinning stars far away and three mean bright lights twinkling amber-red above her.

Air-hot, heavy, sulfurous - belched over her fallen form. It panted all around her and seemed to suck the breath from her body. At her ear, the snake hissed furi ously, retreating with icy speed down her shoulder to her wrist.

Light seeped into the darkness - the murky red-gray glow of drying embers. Javelle saw clouded forms roiling at a distance and one great prowling cloud that stalked her with calculated aggression.

The cloud gathered into a huge, hump-shouldered shape, its brutish head lowered and the three eyes spark-hot among the stormy clouds. A s***h of lightning seared from its opening maw, turning a murky world to a forge-bright furnace of heat and light.

Javelle threw her arm before her eyes without thinking. On her wrist, the serpent's coiled form gleamed in many pale, poisonous colors against her eyelashes. Its tiny jaws unhinged to reveal the silhouetted scimitars of its matched fangs.

On such a small scale, Javelle found this savage defense pitiful. And how could the snake strike something as insubstantial as a cloud-creature? She braced for the amorphous monster's full attack.

'Wait!' someone shouted. Someone. A person with a voice much like Thane's.

Javelle uncoiled from her defensive curl even as the cloud-beast rolled into its stormcloud self, its fire and lightning dampening.

The ember-glow persisted, radiating from the visible flock of clouds bouncing along the obsidian floor, Javelle stood up amid them, looking for the newcomer. Looking for Thane.

A gilt-haired boy came through the huddled mists taller than Thane, a bit older than Thane, almost old enough to begin to call a man.

You're not Thane.' She hadn't meant to sound accusing

He wasn't offended. 'Are you sure?'

'Aren't you?" Now she sounded incredulous.

He thought a moment, narrowing eyes of light, silvery aqua. 'My... father called me Eeryon."

'Earion.'

'Air-ion,' he corrected. "My father named me Javelle. And my mother had some thing to do with it, too."

'Mother?" Eeryon sounded politely disinterested in Javelle's words, if not herself. His hand reached for her long hair. The serpent raised a hiss that sent chills down Javelle's spine.

The young man's hand retreated, but not the question in his eyes. "You're a woman," he said abruptly.

Of course I'm not, she almost answered. I'm just Javelle, she was about to explain, my father and mother's daughter. Thane's sister, someday heir to Rengarth. ...perhaps, and someday woman. Woman sounded far more serious than Javelle considered herself, or wished to.

She suddenly realized that to a stranger, seen apart from her family, she might indeed be considered a woman. She nodded uneasily, wondering where this interrogation would take her.