Seven Swords

Chapter 51

'What do you tell me now, young Bitterbones?'

'Only to wait and watch, as I do, as we... beasts do. Our time passes, yours and mine, even as Kendric's candle melts to its wick-end." The cat closed its eyes slowly. 'Let us rest and let the children do it.'

At least it's a fortress, Thane said as he inspected the dim halls beyond the door. 'Swords are often kept in such places."

'So are people for many years, even lifetimes,' Javelle answered glumly. 'At least Rule still exists. It has not sunk into the sea

with Clymerind. We have a chance.' Javelle nodded, not liking the way Thane's words echoed from the great stones mortared into the soaring walls. Nothing magical clung to those walls or this place.

Stones were stones cut into table-sized blocks and smoothly piled until they upheld a ceiling too high and dark to see. The floor was inset with smaller stones, more rounded to

the foot. There were no windows within only shafts of murky light lancing the infinite dark from high above. The two moved through another looming archway- and almost collided with an eight-foot figure that clanged its weapons, 'An ice-wraith! Thane swore as his hand jerked back from a cold metal greave as if it were hot.

Javelle retreated enough to survey the guardian. It stood upon a pedestal of some alien wood and wasn't eight feet tall at all. 'Father would dwarf it. Don't be afraid. It's ... mounted, like a lorryk head in the Inlands. Remember poor Bounder?' 'Will this thing speak, too? Thane wondered.

'No...it's merely the skin of the monster. It's empty. Dead.' Thane cautiously touched jointed metal fingers, then darted back again. Then they who keep the place have set this here as a warning of what metal-made beasts

prowl the halls.'

'Or of what beasts used to prowl such halls,' Javelle said more practically. I've seen no one here but our own selves. Not even-'

'He could be unseeable,' Thane put in, 'your fine threaded friend. He could be lurking behind every pillar, around every corner. He could kill us with our father's sword and only one of us would know and neither of us would like to tell.'

'Don't... frighten me like that.' Javelle shivered. 'It's cold in here and where are the fireplaces? A hall this size should have hearths with mouths as high as an Empress Falgon's eye.'

You don't believe in Empress Falgons? That was just a tale Father and Mother told to embroider their travels. Besides, they rode the last one, anyway.'

'And Felabba vanished in Edanvant, never to be seen

again.'

Thane was silent. He followed Javelle through the forthright, foursquare rooms, never noticing that he had subsided into his standard place behind her. It wasn't that she was braver than he. Yet ever since she had been forcibly reminded of their father's fatal illness. Javelle seemed to have forgotten about fear.

She paused on a fresh threshold, putting a hand back to stop Thane. What?" he whispered, the word hissing back into his ears like surf cast back from the hard stones.

Swords. I see swords.' Swords? How many?'

Hundreds,' Javelle whispered back. Thane stepped around her to see for himself. His mouth dropped to realize she was right. Not dozens - not swords by the foot, not hilts by the tens and twenties - but hundreds of swords hung n***d against the walls, reaching up as high as the eye could see. Perhaps these doughty blades flashed their edged smiles even higher, but the upper darkness hid them.

Thane edged into the chamber - more like a great hall it was. No furniture impeded him - only more swords, suspended in air by some spell, or impaled in solid blocks of stone.

The air twinkled with swords, as a sky does with stars. Dim light glanced off polished blue blades and shiny gilt ones. It softly caressed old rust-sheathed blades, finding some winking luster under the dust of ages past. Light burnished hilts shaped like fishes and deer and dogs hung alongside simpler ones fashioned from plain pommels and upright grips and curved crossguards.

""Tis an armory,' Thane complained. "What an army this lord must command.' Yet they sleep,' Javelle put in. 'It must be night here.

Be glad we happened to come in darkness." 'In darkness we will fail. How will we find one sword among so many in such dusk?'

from suspended blades as she would summer stars. The lavelle turned around slowly, counting the glimmers

serpentine circlet loosened on her temples, only then reminding her how taut it had coiled. It clung lazily just above her eyebrows, and she sensed bright snake eyes searching the interior haze for its long, stiff, metal cousins.

'We've seen the sword before,' she answered, 'that's how we'll find it. We have the advantage of Eeryon. And we know it's longer than most. Even in this array, Father's sword would outmeasure the longest by a foot or more. Thane was silent as he circled the room in the reverse

direction to Javelle. They met at an opposite archway.

'Anything?' she asked. 'Not that I could see, although I've seen so many styles of blade and hilt I can hardly remember what Father's looked like.'

"Then through here.' Again, Javelle led. Again, Thane followed and stopped. He groaned, softly but eloquently. 'Nothing but more weapon-hung walls,' he complained.

'Have these folk never heard of tapestries?"

Javelle pointed silently. On an end wall hung a fabric scene perhaps six times the size of their mother's weav ings. A party of well-dressed people gathered around a white-wood fence in which capered a one-horned bearing beast.

'An Edanvant scene!' Thane greeted it.

"These folk don't look like Torlocs, and the beast is too dainty to be the Hunter that skewered Father. It's as if the weaver had heard of us and Edanvant and depicted us from memories so worn that they have become lies."

'Who cares with what deceptions they hang their walls as long as they have our father's sword? Shall we make our round again?'

Javelle nodded and the two split to either side, pacing

along the cold stones, sharpening their gazes on the cutting

edges of an eternity of swords.

At the next threshold Thane took hold of Javelle's arm 'We could be at this forever. There must be a bette approach.'

'What?'

His eyes cast around for a hook to hang his magic on. He found one in a great round shield hung low enough to touch.

'Quick!' He urged Javelle over to the circle of polished steel. 'You seem to know the ways of the boy from Without. Think of him and I'll cast his reflection into this metal mirror.' She didn't have to try too hard; Eeryon's presence - or

his absence had dogged her steps through these deserted

halls like a phantom Briarwhip. As the water-borne semblance of her father's sword reflected the real weapon, so she felt Eeryon's duty to his father's quest - no matter the sorcerer's nature - echoed her loyalty to her own father. She couldn't quite regard Eeryon as a deadly rival, as Thane did, but as a fellow sufferer. 'Are you thinking?' Thane demanded.

Javelle smiled at his impatience. 'Yes, of course. If you

want to skim my thoughts, you must allow me the time and quietude to have them." 'Something's not working,' Thane admitted. 'I conjure

a vision of another room, but it is empty.' 'May I see?' Javelle brought her face before the gently curved steel surface. Her own reflection distorted, pulled her features apart like a wailwraith's shattered on the water.

Through the rended veil of her reflected face, Javelle glimpsed another room, smaller than these others, with a more intimate collection of weaponry glinting from the gray stones.

It was empty.

Your thoughts and my magic make a disappointing blend,' Thane said. 'I only see more of the same.' 'Yes, but... but, Thane - look! A sword lifts off the

wall. By itself!'

Her brother's face dropped like a stone into the mirror image - pushed Javelle's reflection aside. They looked like twins joined at the jaw, and both jaws agape. Yet their own distortion was easy to see right past as they watched

a sword levitate from its upholding pegs and float down the wall.

It hung in midair and turned this way and that, as if offering itself for their inspection.

It's not the right one. Thane noted immediately, but

it might be worth having, anyway - a sword that wields

itself. We must find that room."

'Yes, we must."

Thane suspiciously studied his sister's face, leory of such heartfelt agreement. It was more serious than his but then, it often was. Thane," she said, her brown eyes narrowing. That

sword doesn't wield itself. Eeryon holds it."

'But I saw no one. Then he realized the truth Javelle saw. He is invisible again? How will we ever stop him il he has the sword? "Well, he hasn't, or he wouldn't still be looking. How is he to tell it? He's never seen it. He must be relying on his

magic. We have our eyes. But I think we should hurry,

So they did, racing through vast chamber after chamber. Their eyes rapidly inventoried all the swords they en countered - none were long enough to be one of the legendary Six, none were familiar enough to stop their headlong rush from room to room to room. At last the chamber sizes diminished. As the rooms

shrank, Javelle and Thane noticed a different progression in the weaponry. These chambers held more exotic pieces - great, curved swords with coiled handguards; short, thick double-edged swords that could sever an arm or a leg at the joint; thorn-headed spears. It seemed likely that their father's lengthy sword would be among these other unusual weapons.

Yet in all the space and for all the mounted swords, had seen no sign of Eeryon.

they

"There! Thane indicated a sword high up on a wall. "That is the one we saw dancing by itself. He must be ahead of us-'

They dashed together through a doorway into another room, then paused as one.

Eeryon stood, his black velvet back to them as if dark itself had turned away from them, near the door leaving the chamber they had just entered. He was motionless, unheeding.

Javelle was the first to approach him. 'Eeryon?" He turned without surprise, smiling distractedly to see her. Then he turned back to the room before him.

'What's wrong?" she asked.

'Nothing.' His voice was distant, as his manner was - not from coldness, but confusion. 'I think the sword we seek rests in here - I've been through every other room. But-' He stepped back from the threshold.

Javelle and Thane crowded into his former place - eager and possessive, according to their natures. The chamber before them was circular, the very navel of the boxy maze of rooms they'd passed through. Its walls were also weapon-hung - Javelle spied a great long s***h of rusty steel on the wall opposite and gasped.

Thane had seen it, too. But when Javelle leaned forward to cross the threshold, to hurl herself at the wall and the sword and haul it down somehow as she had done once before, Thane caught her arms hard with both hands and restrained her. 'Don't look at me,' he urged, 'look at the floor. Why do

you think he waited?'

Javelle glanced down to her feet. Thin intersecting beams of blue light lanced across the opening, lacing it shut a third of the way up. Javelle's eyes followed the barrier upward.

She couldn't see anything immediately before her, but as her gaze lifted, she saw again the thin, deadly-looking blades of blue light that sealed the opening as effectively as Thane's golden disc had closed a pillar to Without.

Irissa edged around the contained pond, wary of Wail wraiths. The cat padded after her while Briarwhip kept faithful guard at the doorway through which his master had disappeared.

'Dogs are loyal,' Irissa commented obliquely. 'Are you sure yon monster is a dog?'

'No.' Irissa stopped and turned to confront the cat with a wry look. But then, I'm not so certain you're a cat, either.'