Seven Swords

Chapter 23

The ludborg's hood gave a departing jerk that was meant to convey confidence or farewell or simply an itch within its commodious robes. Then it was gone and Irissa was

alone with greater foreboding than she had sensed before.

Almost immediately she noticed a snuffed candelabra on the floor, its wicks like tiny wrought-iron tines joust ing the air. She bent to retrieve it and ran her fingertips over the burnt ends. Cold and ashy, they smudged her fingers.

She knew why it - and the other candelabra flickered that still had been lit: to lighten the room as sunfall darkened it. Thane must have still been in residence then. Then why had these candles snuffed? And when? - and they alone - been

Deliberately, she moved to a wall-mounted sconce. One by one the blackened wicks growing from her hand bowed to take flame from the lit taper.

She could have used a more magical and therefore more spectacular method to relight the candles, but she didn't want her magic to overpower any traces that remained of what had recently transpired in the room. She sought a kind of common logic that had naught to do with magical shortcuts.

Returning to the central table, Irissa set the candelabra down. Its flickering light revealed several fresh, fine white scars curving into the glossy dark wood. Her wetted fingertip elevated one to the light.

A white cat hair. Irissa smiled. Better. Thane had not been alone. The cat that claimed to be Felabba had been with him. The restless chamber wind whipped past, forcing the candle flames sideways until they pointed like long-nailed fingers - pointed to the walls.

Not magic again, but instinct, made Irissa regard her tapestries. She had purposely kept this room bare and self contained.

The hangings she had woven from her fingers and memories were the only furnishings beyond a few tables and chairs and the tapestry screen itself.

The only life in the room wavered among the gently stirring tapestries, in the woven images that trembled under the candles' nervous illumination.

Memories shifted there, coming to eerie life more than they ever had before... simply because some gatein Irissa was open wider - threads and thoughts for her son before. as she skeined through than it ever had been

Perhaps her worry over Kendric, broadened now by her unease at the children's absence, Thane's absence from this room, had opened a chasm in her emotions into which thoughts, insights, magical impulses, and some awful overwhelming dread were pouring in a jumble of glancing images.

A Swallowing Cavern of the self spawned and spit out and blended the images interchangeably, so Irissa found herself lost in the past scenes she had woven, standing under the suns of other days and dreaming through the moons of other nights in rapid succession.

The heavy hangings drifted around her like veils. She saw through their muted shades, her vision pierced by the metallic twang of threads that rang particularly true - the sound of a moonweasel slither across the forest floor recalled exactly, the way Kendric's laughter echoed from everything around him no matter what the world... the sun glancing off of Ivrium's Iron Tents, the glint of Chaundre's seeing devices slipping down his long and crooked nose . . . the smell of the burning forest of Edanvant, of her mother Jalonia's salad-scented hands, of black-mouthed Javelle when she had ravished the ebonberry preserves when she was three..

Above all, Irissa sensed the sight, sound, scent, feel of Thane's sympathetic magic woven into the air of Rengarth since he had been born

She stiffened, ignoring the tapestries' unreal swell as if she drew their specters to herself, or they drew her own ghosts into themselves. Amid the many things sensed and seen and simply remembered, one vital unique thread was gone, had snapped. The lead of her son's magic, so linked to hers by birth, by nature gone. - was

Thane was gone.

Irissa beat her way through the distance between the walls and herself, flailed through shifting

memory and magic. A ghost among the ghosts she had woven from her past, she moved toward a Spectral City of her own creation.

Transparent as samite scarves, the tapestries billowed around her. Kendric brushed her arm in the Inlands. Felabba bounded against her knee in Rule. Finorian tapped her shoulder with a long, bony finger in Edanvant. Her father, Orvath, shrugged and shoved her toward an open window in Citydell

Yet none of it was true contact, not even with the tapestries themselves. Irissa flailed around the room, reaching blindly for some trace of Thane, some thread that she could pull and reel him back to her by.

.All threads intertwiney of horn in mid-forehead treading the clouds... behind it all a darkness, a telling absence, a Thing that even she had not dared to weave directly into the tapestry.

Thane, she thought, hearing the word echo within her head like a plea. She peeled away several more veils to seek the emptiest of her reconstructions, and thus the most dangerous.

She had paused in weaving the tapestry of the tower room, she remembered. She had wondered if she should include at least the sinister flat oblong of the birthing box. No... better forgotten. A vignette of that unnatural foursome - she and Kendric and Geronfrey in all his velvet-gloved power and that ... Other? No... all better banished.

So she had left the tower room empty, caught some where between who and what had contended there and what would happen there after ... if ever.

Irissa numbered the woven windows, glimpsing all the worlds she and Kendric had visited - and shared with the sorcerer Geronfrey, sometimes unwittingly including this one of Rengarth. At the last, the eighth window, her eyes stopped their anxious roving.

Something pulled her to it. Instinct again, pure and not so simple. The window to Without was Iridesium-black and stormy. No wonders lurked beyond it, only darkness. Except... Irissa came close enough to warm the interlaced threads with her breath.

Two pale motes a mere cluster of stitches finer than gnat legs lay embedded against the darkness Without. They were delicately done, enough to show detail in wondrous miniature, beyond the skill of an ordinary needle, beyond Irissa's intention or ability.

. Two infinitesimal, lost figures drowning in the dark sea of Without. Thane - falling. Javelle falling. And one last pale stitch, hardly bigger than a period in a parch ment, too small to even name.

Realization swathed Irissa, wrapping her in skeins of the past, skins of herself peeled from many moments in many worlds. She grew too tangled to move. Her mouth opened to scream but only a sigh came.

And then blackness came, only blackness yet not black enough... because it was not from the world without, but the world Within. Irissa darkened to her own specu lations, and hid from them inside herself.

Kendric wakened in the morning to the birds stirring above the ceiling-hung cradle of netting. They moved in the air like fish in the water, darting past in flocks, weaving in and out the open windowslits as if dodging constructions of coral.

. It was a particularly peaceful way to awaken, but even twenty years in Rengarth had never made Kendric feel quite, well... certain . . . that birds that roosted in the palace eaves would remember to exit before relieving themselves..

He stirred and made the usual motions to rise. This morning every gesture rubbed him the wrong way. Every muscle, every joint, every scrap of flesh seemed reluctant to do its part in the common task of rising.

He forced himself upright and began to dress, observing the lurid bruises blossoming on his limbs and torso. He rushed into his clothing, hoping that Irissa wouldn't notice these badges of a battle she would regard as rashly undertaken in the first place.

Then he glanced at the bed, at the bunched feather quilt he had taken for Irissa's sleeping form.

She wasn't there.

He pulled back the quilt, rifled the bedlinens, unwilling to believe his eyes. Irissa had always been there, every morning of their lives together in Rengarth. Always. Some things were as immutable as sunrise and always woke first, and Irissa was always there.

Today she was not.

He finished dressing, unmindful of the snaps and strains of hasty movement. Then he went, ice in his veins, to find Irissa. 'No, no, we haven't seen her,' the cook and helpers chorused in the kitchens. 'Not in the larder, either.'

'Not in the garden,' said the slightly shriveled lud borg who tended to such matters.

'Scyvilla? I know not, Ruler.' Kendric finally found the ludborg in question crouched at the lip of the dungeon spring, holding a candle over the murky water.