Seven Swords

Chapter 19

Kendric's paddling left hand broke water, the ringstone shining azure in the torchlight. The dagger haft his palm just as he was about to sink again. spun into

Are there underground rivers? the burgher asked, hands braced on bent knees.

'Yes,' Kendric answered, and things that come through them."

While his words sank into their comprehension, he suddenly doused the torch flame into the water - though it was not made to fade in water now that his ringstone had spelled it.

Yet he released it, let it drift down until its burning light hit bottom and cast an aquamarine glow throughout the obsidian water.

Their faces lit by reflected azure, townspeople gathered around. Kendric's dark form dove for the sky-glow of the bottom, as if to retrieve the torch he had so blithely tossed away but moments before.

Then another dark form glided into the blue-lit grotto - man-long and swift-swimming, a shadow that spread wings wide as a cloak. 'What is it?' Javelle cried. 'No one has ever reported such a creature in Rengarth!"

'A wellwraith from the Bubblemeres,' a townsman guessed. 'One of the devouring manfish your mother bound in a fiery circle to Swanfish Lake,' the burgher said. 'Your father was ever interested in undocumented beasts of Rengarth,' the sweetshop keeper put in dryly. 'I believe he has found one he will regret discovering."

'It can't be a beast,' Javelle insisted desperately, fish. Quick, someone send for Mother

Receding footsteps told Javelle her first royal command had been obeyed. She couldn't tear her eyes from the water. Her fingernails crimped her palms. She watched the two slow shadows converge at the heart of the blue light, and there was nothing that she could do but watch.

'Why?' she berailed herself. 'Why am I here and Thane there? He at least could do something."

No one heeded her self-searching. Perhaps she had merely whispered when she thought she shouted. She finally clapped a hand to her mouth, as if to contain a scream that was only waiting for a reason to release itself.

Again time had passed in tiny accumulating grains of agony. Again it was impossible that a man could underwater so long and still breathe.

The two shadows met, then collided, the force driving them both upright, pushing them upward like dark, folded stay hands.

Together, they broke water in a spray of cerulean drops that wept back to the pond surface like rain. Kendric charged out of the water to his hips, his dagger blade flashing in and out of the mated shadow as if sewing.

The two entwined figures seemed to be dancing atop the water. For a moment Kendric was lost within the flailing black wings that beat the pond into an azure froth of splashing liquid.

"Tis feathered!' an onlooker marveled.

'No, 'tis finned,' argued another.

'Both,' suggested a third.

Kendric moved as if winged himself, the dagger plung. ing into the dark that had seized him. Javelle was reminded of the tapestry of her father among the mob of Ivrium's armed Heirlings, save that a static tapestry scene could hardly convey the motion and gracefully awkward force of true combat.

For that is what she witnessed, Javelle knew, although she had never seen its like before a duel to the death with an alien creature found cruising within the heart spring of the very palace itself.

Both contending figures crashed into the water again, shrinking as their forms struggled down to the bright blue eye of light radiating from the magically waterproof torch.

Light was Kendric's ally; clearly, the creature he fought was an aquatic beast of darkness and depths unthought of. Javelle had never suspected Rengarth hoarded such monsters. She wondered how her father had known guessed.

She continued watching, a bit less agitated. Kendric had expected and controlled this confrontation from the moment he had dashed the torch into the water and let it sink. Every move the contending forms made played against the lurid azure light emanating from the spring bottom.

Limpid blue bubbles drifted up and burst on the sur face traces of both agitation and lost air below. Veils of taint roiled around the intruder's black body, inter lacing with thin vaporous streams of red blood wafting upward.

Whose blood? Javelle wondered, wondering, too, weapons the fiend-fish employed.

A moment after, the two forms clashed again on the bottom. She saw Kendric's bare feet braced on the gritty bottom rocks, saw the demon-fish's supple length writhe like a tapestry caught in a windstorm from Without.

For a moment her father's figure appeared to waver, to grow as slack as what he fought.

Then Kendric pushed close to the creature. Once again they shot upward together until they were propelled far out of the water. The fiend-fish's flailing wings beat ponderously now, towing itself around the pool, dragging Kendric with it.

Rushing footsteps down the stairs ended in Irissa's arrival, Iridesium circlet almost coal-black with anxiety. Then she was standing by the pool edge, the circlet and her ring flashing ropes of coiling color that lashed out at the water. Even as they fell they wove into an iridescent net.

Kendric, glancing up to see the flaccid rainbow arching toward him, made one last, long dagger stroke into the heart unnamed beast and suddenly broke free of it.

The creature paused a moment, great wings thrashing water into an arch of spray that moved through the descending rainbow net. Then the water dissipated and the net fell atop its target - a sluggish, rolling mass of darkness that floated now, rather than fought.

Kendric's sleek head resurfaced several yards away, a clean silver dagger blade between his teeth.

'I'll reel this unnatural fish in, Irissa said, the strands of her power even now drawing the beast to the stony pool rim.

It lay bound at her feet in a net of many pulsing colors when Kendric churned alongside.

'I'd already given it a death blow,' he said. 'Better that it should not blow back,' Irissa answored unperturbed.

She watched as he lumbered out of the water, grunting Droplets puddled around his bare feet. His breath came ragged and his words exploded singly, like beads he was spitting out.

This thing. There's the... taint. Found its way here... from somewhere... deep and dark."

'Rest awhile,' Irissa advised softly.

Kendric shook his head, spraying her and several by. standers with water. 'Later. I want see-' He bent to examine the catch, extending a hand for a torch some townsperson immediately and reverentially provided. His beringed left hand brushed away Irissa's iron-woven net as if dislodging cobwebs.

He lifted one of the massive wings.

'Feathers!' chortled an onlooker.

'Fins!' a neighbor retorted just as gleefully.

'Both,' Kendric mediated. He rose slowly, and every one remained silent until he spoke again.

'Scaled and feathered, finned and winged. It's a swanfish.'

'No!' someone protested. 'We've seen such fish, eaten them they're white as the Frostrim and beautiful in their way. This thing is ugliness incarnate.'

'A swanfish tainted,' Kendric insisted. 'A demon swan fish gone black and bad. True swanfish are docile, else why would we prey on them so successfully? This is their darker brother, who found its way here from who knows what black underworld stream.'

'From beyond Rengarth?' Irissa asked quickly.

Kendric turned to stare at her oddly. 'From beyond? No. I only meant that water underlies all this land, and surely there must be dark pools somewhere. Why are you so eager to look beyond Rengarth?"

"No... particular reason, except

He shook his head, this time dousing Javelle, who watched without blinking.

This is natural evil... the decay that all things good and true come to in their time. Remote as it is, even Rengarth cannot escape such processes. That is all it is, simple degeneration."

Irissa and Javelle stood still, hearing these words with no answer. Their glances crossed. For the first time, mother and daughter regarded each other with an awful, shared, secret understanding.

'Come,' Kendric carelessly told the townsfolk. 'Bundle up your demon-fish and bury it in some deep remote place. Perhaps good grass will come of it. Well you were so eager to seek the source of the taint, take it! The blue flame will purify the water and, that done, fade as flame always does. Home with you and your prize."

They obeyed, gathering around to lift the sodden black carcass and carry it up the dark stairs into the streets.

'A good day's work. Kendric amiably draped each damp forearm over Irissa's and Javelle's shoulders. 'Nothing like a bit of successful... plumbing to make a man or a Ruler feel useful. Javelle, fetch my boots. And if you, Irissa, will bear my belt, I think I may actually manage to climb all these stairs to the rest I so well deserve.'

Leaning on them both, he made good his word.

Wet and shaken, Javelle left her parents on the way to their bedchamber. She hurried through the dim hallways to Irissa's room of tapestried retreat. She met no one - not even a stray ludborg or a serving person.

Thankful that she would see Thane alone, Javelle let her mind string and restring the words she would say to him - words that would adequately convey her shock, her fear, her sudden sense that the center of their lives was slipping away. She could confide in no one else what she had just seen.

For Kendric, despite vanquishing the beast in suitably doughty fashion, had been winded and racked. His limp at the dungeon stairs' bottom had become a hobble by the top.

He had never quite caught his breath, even on attain ing the hall. And though he made light of his weakness, Irissa had not teased him in return, but simply drew more deeply into silence. Not long before, Javelle had claimed such moody withdrawals for her own emotional territory. It shocked her now to see her powerful mother resorting to her own feeble defenses against confusion.

Amazed, Javelle felt herself the pivot of a spinning multifaceted world that reflected her parents in odder and more fragmented guises. At least Thane would understand, she thought, racing toward the room. He had warned her of this very thing. Of their father... fading.

Javelle burst across the threshold to Irissa's chamber. By night the room was womb-dark. The shutters still hung ajar, but the impervious cloak of evening that lay beyond obscured the view more firmly than hand could.

Thane?" she demanded of the dark.

No answer came.

Had he left? Impossible! He hadn't even heard about the battle below. Thane would never miss such a stir had he known, Javelle thought. He must still occupy the room ... dreaming in the darkness.

Light. Where? Javelle wished at such times that she could clap some tongue of flame into existence as her family could. Snap her fingers - candelabras by the bank. Toss her head - a magical metal circlet spews out fireflies of candescent quickness. Draw the sword and the hilt's glow warms eyes and hands and everyone around ..

No, she needed to find a servant, Javelle concluded unhappily - just when she didn't want witnesses - someone to light the fire with tinder, or bear one lit candle to all the unlit ones and pollinate the dark with brightness as bees bow to flowers one by one.

Something brushed against her legs and she shrieked.