Seven Swords

Chapter 20

'Hush! Great baby of a girl ... Have you never felt a cat rub before?' a voice grumbled at her feet.

'Felabba! What are you doing here?"

'The same as you. Looking for a beam of light.'

. 'I thought cats could see in the dark.'

'Perhaps I search for a beam of light you can't see.'

'I don't like riddles. They're . . . underhanded."

'But you like light. I could get you some if you're nice.' 'I can get some, too."

'Not so speedily, nor so... privately.'

.Javelle stared into the darkness at her ankles, not really surprised when the alien embers of two green eyes glowed into view. 'You call that light?' she jeered. 'Not enough to see by.'

'Odd... I can. Now.'

Javelle heard a soft bound, then the cat's voice came from table height.

'What would you have? Gilothian fireworms linked into garlands and draping the chamber? A subdued circle of luminescent waxweed? Schools of glimmerfish in a cast ing crystal? A simple torch or two, on stands of curdled ambert '

Just ordinary, decent light, please!'

Have you ever considered, child, that imagination is the tinder of magic? Oh, very well ordinary light it shall be.'

A white tail flicked in the darkness. Actually, a white tail waved in the now gently ebbing blackness. All the room's wall torches and standing candles flickered into simultaneous life. The cat's eyes faded to bright, overyday green.

"That's better." Javelle wasn't sure whether she meant the light or the restored normalcy of the cat's eyes.

Then she examined the chamber in the light Folabba had evoked, and suffered her second shock of the day.

Thane was not there.

'Oh, no' She turned in the empty room as if to surprise him hiding in a corner.

'What's the matter?" Pertly, from the cat.

Thane... I wanted to speak to him.'

'Perhaps I can suffice.'

Javelle inspected Felabba skeptically. You never did before, to hear the tales my parents and these tapestries tell. Why start now?"

'Ah, you've been listening to Kendric again. I seem to recall him always rubbing me the wrong way or perhaps it was vice versa. Let me set the stories straight."

'No!' Javelle didn't want any more illusions toppled this day. Annoyed, she spun again, as though to trick Thane into revealing himself. 'Where is he? If he's not here, he never would have missed the crisis in the dungeons."

'I did,' the cat pointed out, yawning.

'Small use you would have been. Mothe say you are not the real Felabba, anyway, but only an ignorant shadow.' and Father

That sounds like the description of a child as com pared to its parent. If I am an offspring of the creature you call Felabba, at least I bear some of my progenitor's magic. I made light. What have you made, child, besides mistakes?' Javelle gasped.

'You are . . . rude.'

.Satisfied as to my true pedigree, then?" the cat asked with an oblique look as it shifted position. If you want to find your brother, you had better speak more gently to me.' Why should I soft-speak a fraud?" 'Because I know where what you seek is.'

Thane?' Again Javelle questioned the room's flickering shadows. He must be here, she told herself, unless... She turned to the cat, her tone softer. Felabba, has Thane found a gate and opened it? Has he left Rengarth?'

'Not hardly!' If a cat could be said to hoot, this one had. 'On the other hand... he is, so to speak, somewhat out of this world-'

'Sense!' Javelle's fist pounded the table, making the cat's ears flatten in surprise. 'Make sense, you aggravating palavering creature, or-'

'I recognize the tone, if not the words. Such impatience. It took your mother many hundreds of hours of exquisite patience to weave these hangings. It would behoove her daughter to learn a lesson by reexamining them for a few paltry moments.'

'I have not time for such lessons!' Javelle insisted pas sionately. 'Something is changing beyond all my ability to understand it, much less halt it. Something... I.. oh, it is not the same! It will not ever be the same again!"

The cat watched Javelle put her fingertips to her temples to contain the thoughts violently overflowing her mind. It lifted an admonitory forefoot.

'Study the tapestries,' it advised quietly, then began to wash its paw in long sweeps of its barbed tongue.

Calming in the face of such sublime indifference, Javelle picked up a green-gold candelabra and stomped un graciously to the wall. She let the flickering light sweep the brittle threads, catching on every metallic snag.

When she had illuminated the first tapestry, she moved to the next - and flinched. Never again would she be able to view these pictorial hangings as a source of wonder, as an unreal parchment upon which her father's and mother's lives were scribed with intricate stitches instead of lettering.

The weaving itself showed no age- nor did Irissa. but Kendric did. With new, uneasy eyes, Javelle saw a natural inequity recorded, beyond the past events the tapestries were meant to commemorate.

She suspected that she would come to know the tragedy well inequality in her parents' life spans. Perhaps, she thought, even her own. -

Her shoulders slumped. As she lowered the candelabra, the light sank on an Edanvant scene like the sun setting on its woven landscape. The past did not glimmer so glamorous when the future was even less livable. There are more pages in the lesson,' the cat prompted from the table.

Javelle turned, light casting her own shadow across its form. It sat as if eaten by the dark, a pale hummock of fur floating atop the table's burnished woodgrain sea.

Its legs were tucked in for warmth, its front paws folded like a ludborg's sleeves flattened against its body proper.

At the moment it appeared to have no limbs - just a vague body and an aloofly observant face, each whisker a rapier of trembling silver spidersilk in the dimly lit room.

Still, something undeniable inhabited the cat's still form. Something that would not be gainsaid. With a sigh reminiscent of her father when forced against his better judgment, Javelle turned back to the wall and continued her circuit of the tapestries.

One by one the storied scenes passed in review - the bridge Irissa and Kendric had made in Edanvant to reunite the severed Torloc sexes. . . the icy lair of Delevant, first Torloc man to seize magical power for himself - and to lose it utterly ... Felabba herself entoiled by a moonweasel in Rule, and Kendric about to dissect the murderous furred snakelike form with the edge of his mighty sword.

Then came the series' sole unpopulated scene the empty tower room of this very Rengarthian palace where Geronfrey had opened his windows to eight alien vistas one leading even to the dread world Without. From here Geronfrey had fled and left Rengarth to its legitimate heir, Kendric.

No wonder the chamber was shown unoccupied. Empti ness spoke most eloquently of its dire power. And to think, Javelle marveled, that this forgotten room existed still somewhere atop one of the palace towers...

An intriguing array of views,' the cat commented loudly.

Javelle started, then turned. Felabba had deserted her tabletop and sat on the floor just behind Javelle, tail coiled around her forefeet for warmth or perhaps merely neatness.

I've seen these empty landscapes before, Javelle answered, ready to move on.

Have you?' The inflection was as pointed as one of the cat's translucent claws.

Javelle studied the tapestry again, narrowing her eyes at the eight tiny vistas framed by each window. Miniature creatures cavorted in the land and skyscapes represented there. In one - a thunderstorm land apparently on the brink of an eternal lightning flash - Javelle saw some thing else, something... someone... new! Thane? It's...

Thane! He's balanced on the windowsill, about to fall into the world beyond the window - what world is that?"

'Where is it?' the cat asked in turn.

Her eyes frozen to the frozen scene, Javelle responded numbly. "There, can't you see? There, in the stitching he's no longer than my do? He must have found a gate - but to where?" ... my thumb. Oh, what shall I What lies outside the window?'

Why repeat me?" Javelle was stricken frantic. 'What lies outside the window is... whatever lies without. I wish to know the name of what I see!"

"You have named it, the cat said.

Stunned, Javelle tore her gaze from her brother's tiny woven form to the pale puddle of fur on the dark floor.

'Named it? Just now?' Then she understood what even Felabba would not be guilty of telling her. 'What lies without the window, outside it... is Without! Thane has not found a gate, he has mistaken a gate. He teeters on the brink of Without. I must help him!'

'How? You have no magic.'

The cat's indifference didn't madden Javelle, as it should have. It steadied her. Hearing it was like listening to a cold, sere voice within herself, a voice that had always been there but she had never heeded until this moment. A voice she had never truly needed until this moment.

I'll find the original site of this tapestry. This... Her free hand traced the shape of the tower room as if she were blind and memorizing every thread. ... this lost tower room.'

Javelle whirled so quickly that the tree of candle flames in her hand snuffed out into a smudge of smoke. A nervous flicker from the other candelabra still lit the room, the cat.

'I will find Geronfrey's tower room,' she announced as much to herself as the cat. 'Mightn't it be hard?' Felabba called after her.

'Mightn't it be magic-hid?'

'Coming?' Javelle threw the lone word behind her heels as she snatched up a single fresh candlestick and rushed from the quiet room of dormant tapestries. 'You don't want to miss anything.'

She never looked back to see if the cat followed. Instead, she bolted up long-forgotten stairs to long-f*******n places - places that seemed permanently shrouded beneath a child's elaborate pall of dread.

Whether soft padded footsteps trailed her was irrelevant She heard only the creaks and scrapes and long hushed silences of childish fears, felt the warnings reechoing in her ears: 'You mustn't go-' 'Stay away from-''Never take this stair, that turning; never darken that threshold...