Seven Swords

Chapter 21

She didn't know if Irissa or Kendric - or Scyvilla - had uttered these proscriptions...or whether some distorted twist of memory was her only refuser. Whatever the source, these palace high places these dark turning stairs... these forgotten towers and dusty rooms... these hideous, empty poignant spaces warned her away even as she plunged higher and somehow deeper into them.

She became confused. Everything above a certain level was in disuse... it had been for years - and for decades before that.

She tried to recall seeing an octagonal tower from the city streets, but could remember none. But perhaps the octagon was on the interior only.

She began to wonder which tower she climbed, even whether she climbed or descended. Her echoing footsteps became the only token of her progress, just as the candle flame's harsh sweep across age-dusted stones was her only light... and the haunting pursuit of her own shadow her only companion.

At last she had climbed so high that only one last door remained closed before her. When her palsied hand pushed on the ancient wood, it resisted opening.

Panting, she laid her cheek to its rough timber. "Thane?"

The name came out a whisper that a living person couldn't hear through fist-thick wood - why should a boy made of twisted threads two inches high in a room far below heed it?

'Louder.'

She looked down to find the cat, sides heaving and tongue hanging, beside her. That the inherently idle creature had bestirred itself impressed Javelle with the urgency of her quest.

"Thane!" she shouted in the close remoteness of the tower stair.

'Go away.' The faint reply leaked through the very woodgrain under her fingertips. You can't help. Go away." Javelle lowered her shoulders in an explosive sigh, then set the candlestick by her boot. Her shadow loomed grotesquely on the door.

Javelle pushed into it, into that dark part of herself, the hard, closed, wooden facade of the door. Her hands clawed for handles and hinges, for locks that would turn and weight that would way. She pushed so hard she felt her torso swell against the serpent belt until even the metal seemed to strain.

There was nothing for her senses to hold on to, but give perhaps something her weight, her will - balance. The door faded from her path without a sound, and she was walking into a moonlit room... in a world that had no moon, had never had one.

But this is what moonlight would look like, Javelle tipped the decided, studying the icy blue-white light that gleamed like daggers on the edges of all eight stone windowsills.

Beyond the eerily lit sills shone the dim landscapes outside. Strange sights churned beyond each opening, but one was blocked by a human form, as a fly's trapped buzz ing body interrupts the intricate tracery of a spiderweb.

Javelle ignored seven vistas of wonder and ran straight for the source of her worry.

'Thane, it is you!' She breathed relief to find him life size and wedged into the window frame. Beyond him the dark unrolled in great, noxious plumes, and eyes glimmered like dew on dawn-bright grasses. 'You've found a gate where there is none - why?' 'Go back!' he spat, as usual - or perhaps more passion ately than was usual. 'I don't need you turning tables on me, following me.

Go back, Javelle! And fear not. The gate won't take me, anyway."

"Then come back with me.'

'I... will. In a while. Just leave now - while you can! 'While I can? Then you . . . can't.'

'Of course I can.' He twisted like a fish on a line. Javelle leaned closer to the window, though the whiff of fresh sulfur repelled her. A thin transparent film lay between her brother and the night Without. In that slick. almost-invisible surface, she saw a faint shadow of Thane - and a sticky, viscous material that webbed his hands and face and body... She even saw the palest, vaguest shadow of herself.

'You can't leave, or you would have by now,' Javelle realized even as she spoke. 'You're... trapped.'

"Trapped. Yes!'

'I must get help, then. Father...

'Not Father Mother. Father doesn't-'

Doesn't what?"

Know... why. And he mustn't, Javelle, Thane pled, out of character. 'As you've always loved him best and he you, keep this secret.'

Silent, she couldn't say which assertion shocked her more - Thane's insistence that their father had no right to know of this attempt to prolong his life, or Thane's naming Javelle her father's favorite.

You think Father wouldn't risk his very life to save you? Thane, you don't know him at all-'

'He would, of course he would. He will. That's why he mustn't know of this. Javelle, this is a window to Without! Only this one would open to me, of the eight, and now it will neither open fully - nor close. Mother begged me to find a gate from Rengarth, and I have. Perhaps she can find a way to free me or at least a way to find the sword herself.'

'What sword?"

'Father's sword.' Thane panted, worn by the struggle of hanging between two worlds - and one of them deadly. 'Not the mind-made one here - the original sword he left on Rule.

'It will extend the length of his life-thread as surely as confronting the dangers Without will snap it. Now leave me to my task I got this far, I won't be stopped. Just .keep ... quiet about this. Tell Mother, if you must, but don't upset her more than she already is.'

'Mother - upset?'

'Haven't you noticed? She's worried about Father, ever since she saw that mortal years were taking their toll of him. Only the true, Rengarth-forged sword from Rule will give him a Torloc's longevity. But she can't find or cross a gate to go fetch it, not even she.'

Javelle drew back, shocked. 'You are her only hope, Father's only hope.'

Thane resisted the web, tried to push himself forward into the darkness beyond. When that failed, he struggled to wrench loose, bucking against the invisible threads, not even seeing his shadow in the translucent veil.

Javelle moved toward the door. 'I suppose I could Mother..."

Thane, rapt in his struggles, didn't answer.

She stood with her back to the threshold and those ranks of twisting stairs massed with all her childish fears behind her. There was nothing she could do. Thane had said so. She knew so. Mother would want to know, to hear, to help. As would Father, only he mustn't... for his own good. Father must hoard his own good... or die Only he wouldn't, if he knew. And if she told

Javelle shook her head. Too many shocks this one day. Too much lost. Her fingers felt ice-cold. She touched the metal snake at her waist and found it warm by com parison, even on the topmost scales.

Nothing she could do would help anyone. She was doomed to be a messenger bearing ill tidings of magic gone awry - Kendric's magic, that wouldn't do him the courtesy of extending his mortality. . . Thane's untried magic, which had ensnared him for trying too hard.... even Irissa's magic, failing at last to preserve the one thing that meant most to her.

I can't, Javelle told the windows beyond Rengarth.Can't run and tell, can't help, can't do anything, and certainly can't use a magic she didn't possess. Useless. She was the word formed in her mind like a curse - useless.

Her self-loathing found an echo. Ussselesssss. The word hissed around her like a wind, audible but disembodied. Uselessss. It keened into her mind with an alien voice - another's voice.

'Useless.'

Javelle tightened. The cat at her feet hadn't spoken. Yet she heard the word as if it emanated from somewhere very near.

At her waist, the silver serpent stirred its metal scales Her fingertips felt the cool rasp as it slithered from her waist and up her arm. Around her neck it coiled, noose like, and insinuated its sleek metal head over the fleshy coils of her ear.

'Useless,' it mourned into the seat of her hearing.

She sensed a kindred agony, much older than her own. Sssuch endlesss hopes. So many weary yearsss. Such promissse.'

She glanced to her brother, to the cat. Only she seemed to overhear this dirge. No, she thought. Nothing is as useless as all that. No one is useless unless unused. She felt a rising determination.

Thane had achieved his mission. He had found the impos siblea gate from Rengarth.