Seven Swords

Chapter 17

Hiding behind your breed isn't good enough. What do you specifically possess?"

The tail flicked airily. 'An instinct. Good manners. Impeccable timing.'

That's not magic, that's conceit!' Javelle leaped up. dislodging the cat. I'm tired of your implications and your silly, sly face. Go away!'

The cat, which had landed on its feet, stood its ground. "You go. I like this spot. It leaped into the cushion dent that had been warmed by her body and curled up into instant oblivion.

Javelle stood motionless, feeling anything but tranquil within. A round of ugly speculations was roiling her heart and mind until the pale metal snake, which had remained wound around her wrist for several days, sensed her turmoil.

Whip-quick it untangled itself, then migrated up her arm and into her hair, almost hiding at her neck rather than circling it. The metal had warmed to her body heat; for a moment Javelle, almost hopefully, took the ornament for a living thing.

'There,' she said, patting it. 'You mustn't be frightened. Surely there's more to this than meets the eye, especially the eye of a sleeping cat.'

Felabba remained still, except that one green iris swelled open before slitting shut again.

The unusual act of addressing her birth-token had made Javelle play comforter to herself as well. She had never before confronted the idea of her father declining, had never noticed nor expected change in either of her parents in all the years she had known them.

She slowly descended the stairs, thinking as hard as Thane had. Irissa hadn't changed. She looked exactly like the self-portraits she had woven into the tapestries. In many ways, Irissa looked a great deal like Javelle.

Javelle took the more public turning of the stair, pausing when she saw her parents at the center of a knot of gilt haired Rengarthians in the hall below, their dark heads making the pupil in a pale saffron eye.

Kendric, of course, loomed above the rest. Light lanced from the narrow windows at the hall's highest, striking silver highlights from the crown of his head just as Irissa' hair radiated blue.

Silver. Javelle leaned against the stone wall, upheld by its cold shoulder...not crimson, as in the tapestries, but silver. She noticed no silver among the flaxen heads of aging Rengarthians, and ludborgs had no hair to show She'd never confronted the signs of aging in her kind - or any other. Somehow she thought it would all be as eternal as Rengarth's unending summer. Her mother had looked the same from the days when Javelle's infant eyes could barely focus on her until now.

But Kendric did not.

And what was worse, for some reason, Thane, who was blithely indifferent to such matters, had known it before Javelle had.

Irissa paused before entering her room, a hand at her Iridesium circlet, as though she had a headache. Then she looked up, her silver eyes shrinking as her dark pupils swelled to meet the dimness.

'Thane! We wondered where you were. Why-?"

He nodded toward the hangings with a new terseness. 'If you've been to the Spectral City and found no gate, then this world is indeed sealed. I shall have to look in other worlds.'

'But how shall you get there without a gate?"

'Perhaps I can make one."

'From these?' Irissa moved toward her own creations

'You made them from the magic of your memory. Perhaps I can use that as the key to my magic.

'Use a hanging as a gate?' Irissa smiled wearily. An innovative notion, but surely such potential would have called to me. Her hand smoothed the tapestries' shimmer ng folds as if greeting old friends by strokes along their sleeves. These hangings are as spectral as the city in their way. I have never mistaken them for portals to any thing but pleasant memories and some not so pleasant.

Perhaps you cannot double back on your own past. Perhaps I can because I never lived it."

Irissa went to Thane, Intrigued by his new resolve, his almost merciless sense of mission. 1 had not thought life in Rengarth was so pallid, that it offered so little challenge. Kendric said-'Thane waited. He said you didn't find obstacles enough to interest you here. I see now that he was right."

Have you ever thought, Mother, Thane said, "that Father might not welcome an extended lifespan in so static a place? That it is no service you do him if I return the sword?

No. No! An idea illuminated Irissa's face. "Besides, if you do find ..make... a gate, we can all use it to come and go by. We will be trapped here no longer.

"You've never said that before, that we were trapped.

I suppose I never thought it. What was, was. And my life was changing so much within i bore Javelle, then you shortly after I never looked without myself."

What's the real Without like?

Irissa leaned against the table edge. "The Without beyond the worlds, you mean? It much resembles the vast, un explored territory within each of us, I believe. Yet it is a realm composed of all things unwelcome in our own worlds."

"Evil?

"Perhaps. Or perhaps these things could be... better than the things of our world. It isn't worth the risk of invoking Those Without simply to discover if they will devour or delight us."

'Are... Those Without people? Rulers? Monsters?"

'No one knows. No one goes Without until forced to. Why ask such... morbid questions? Have you felt the empty touch of Without?

Thane shook his head. 'Since I began staring at these tapestries, I find questions writhing in my mind like blue worms. I... sense a pattern beneath the design of your weaving that even you have never sensed. I feel the tug of a new thread being braided onto the warp and wool of an old loom.'

Now you talk like a Torloc.' Irissa rested a hand on his shoulder, surprised by how it had broadened recently. The sudden growth spurts of youth made Thane seem like some forced flower in the palace gardens - delightful but a bit nonplussing. 'Can you do it? Find a gate?'

'I will do it,' he answered with that peculiar intensity only she had ever seen, for it only manifested itself when he talked about magic. 'What will you tell Father when I am gone?" "The truth,' she answered without hesitation. Then she laughed at her own temerity.

"The truth. He will be-'

"Angry?'

Irissa nodded bleakly. That. And wild to follow you. and worried and ... wounded.'

In the silence Thane cleared his throat.

'I am not afraid, Mother, but I wonder that you are not.

"Sometimes we must do things that others will not understand.'

'For their own good?'

'For their own - and our - good.'

'I wonder which will be harder,' Thane mused. 'Which what?" 'My finding a gate from Rengarth - or your telling Father that I have done so."

'Scyvilla!"

The ludborg stopped, then c****d his hood at Javelle. Yes, little Lady Longitude?" Javelle's nose wrinkled at the nickname.

Scyvilla had begun slyly using it in the past two years, ever since

Javelle's height had begun to rival her mother's. If she disliked comparisons in height, she didn't blanch at borrowing her mother's most no-nonsense tone.

'Where is my father?'

Scyvilla shrugged, then clapped his sleeves together. A limpid glass ball appeared between the prayerfully folded ends. 'Does little Lady Longitude require a casting?"

'No, not the crystals, Javelle said. 'A simple question requires only a plain answer. Where is Father? I saw him with some townspeople below, but by the time I arrived, he had vanished. Do you know where he went?"

During the ensuing pause the ludborg's hood leaned nearer to inspect her face. Javelle couldn't help fidgeting at this unnerving inspection, thus ruining her hard-won air of authority.

'Well,' Scyvilla said at last, 'you must have dawdled a good long while to miss the exit of that crowd. No doubt you had weighty matters on your mind.'

'Yes, I did.'

'Then a crystal casting is just the thing- The wings of coarse fabric buoying the globe moved eagerly.

'No' Javelle implored. A long silence and the tilted hood, dark as death within its oval, forced her to elaborate.

'The... crystals never work for me, anyway.' "The crystals always work - whether as we would wish them to or not is another matter."

"The crystals lie!' she burst out, wishing Scyvilla had not forced her to such heartfelt heresy. Which was won - the heresy or her high feeling, she couldn't say.

How so?" Scyvilla's voice was soft, grave, and too calm.

Having committed to truth, Javelle outdid herself w frankness.

'Father is right; your crystals are a fraud! At my birth your casting predicted that I would bear a magic greater than any in Rengarth had known. People were fond of repeating this, this... tale... to me, until it became obvious that I bore no magic at all.'

Scyvilla rocked back and forth on whatever he used for locomotion under the skirts of his gathered robe. Javelle, already regretting her confession, tried to maintain dignity by remaining absolutely silent.

Scyvilla's sleeve unexpectedly brushed her arm, an oddly comforting touch. She flinched.

'You have been thinking hard thoughts, young woman and thus say hard words. Did my tal casting at your birth say you would bear magic from your birth?"

'Not specifically, but when else-?' The hood tilted. 'Are you dead, then?"

'No-! But...

'Why, then, if you are yet living, you may yet see the crystals prove their truth."

'So I am to live my whole life on a "maybe"?"

'It is better than many have. Besides, be grateful for being spared the burden of magic, since my crystals..... lied."

'That's what Father advises,' Javelle conceded.

"Then heed your father and not the crystals. He is a doughty fellow who has seen magic work much pestilence. And I'm sure he never lies.'

'Never! But... perhaps your crystals didn't predict an impossible future for me. Perhaps they took me for Thane. He should have been firstborn...

Something caught Javelle and shook her- a wind, a phantom, a disembodied outreach of the ludborg's will. Scyvilla's voice came high-pitched and yet stern from the fog of surprise enveloping her.

'No. Say what you wish of the crystals, but never deny yourself.