Seven Swords

Chapter 10

The kitten was another matter. It sat at her feet, regard ing her with sober eyes, slightly crossed.

'What shall I do with you whatever you be?'

It rubbed against her booted leg, almost toppling in its eagerness to ingratiate. Surely this... adorable... little creature was not Felabba, Irissa thought firmly.

Full daylight saw Irissa mounted and riding again. She had knotted her sash around her neck. In the cradle of that sling the kitten rode, curled into a sweetly sleeping ball. Irissa petted its downy head from time to time, attracted by such unprecedented feline docility even as she was annoyed by its helpless presence on a mission of some importance. She began to understand Kendric's long ago impatience with the tag-along Felabba.

Despite Irissa's hopes, no magical instinct was guiding her to the Spectral City. Not only was the city wont to appear and disappear without rhyme, reason, or prior warning, but it seldom occupied the same location. Already Irissa saw the white jagged line of the Frostrim Mountains grinning on the horizon and she had seen no sign of the city.

If she rode much farther, she would likely see the towers of the f*******n northern city of Liderion, whose mysterious inhabitants dealt with the rest of Rengarth only through cryptic delegations.

Kendric had often threatened to mount a company, ride to Liderion, and demand entrance, but he had never done it. Even the ludborgs believed that Liderion was best left alone. Irissa was no more eager to confront alone the last of Rengarth's mysteries.

She reined Thundermist, who immediately lowered his head to gather grass sheaves. A quiet pond nearby thrummed with a flotilla of singing flowers. Falgonflies with yard-long wingspans glided over the lazy water. The kitten yawned and flared tiny claws on all four feet as it stretched.

'An idyllic day for a pleasure ride,' Irissa announced to both mute animals. 'But hardly what I sought. Where is that come-and-go city, hmm, kitty? Farsee and speak or forever eat grassweaver eggs.

She tickled the kitten's chin. If it really was Felabba in infantile form, such indignities would certainly flush out its true nature.

The only responses she got were typical: the kitten's pink tongue lashed its pristine bib of white fur and Thundermist stamped a shining hoof. Irissa rolled her eyes. She was used to danger finding her, not to riding to meet the unknown and encountering only a crystal borne kitten.

Irritated by her guest's futility so far, she nudged Thundermist into pounding the rippling turf in wide, spiraling circles. The kitten, bath interrupted, jolted safely in its sling.

Grasses fell beneath Thundermist's hooves until Irissa could look back and presume grassweavers had been at work. As the bearing-beast made its looping rounds, Irissa let her mind coil into the past. She recalled her first passage through the ghostly city on the Hunter's back. Her memory repeated every sensation - clattering up the spiraling steps, along the misty ramparts, through the crooked, foggy streets.

Thundermist's route began to invoke that old reality to the same degree it echoed ever new in Irissa's memory. Dust from the pulverized grass coughed into the air behind the beast - cloudbanks of dust, drifting up, spinning in the sunlight, engendering phantom shapes in a mobile whirlwind.

Neva, Irissa remembered, her mind conjuring the white woman of Rengarth half-specter, half-dream... who - had returned to her Rengarthian birthland from Edanvant through a Spectral City well, drawing her brother, Ilvanis, with her.

Irissa recalled Neva's reawakened Rengarthian other self - blíthe, red-haired Aven and her scrappy brother, Sin. Aven and Sin were specters now, too, despite their youth and color, rejoined with their paler counterparts when the revived fire-salamander had lifted momentarily above the Frostrim and caught all Rengarthian things that had outlived their time in its fiery claws.

Irissa's thoughts screwed deeper and deeper into the past, into Rengarth's roots, grinding her memories into the very earth as Thundermist galloped in tighter and tighter circles against the tauter pull of the reins.

She lost sense of time, then place. Thundermist finally protested her instructions, rearing until his silver mang riffled like dry grass across Irissa's face. She saw only the glittering dust around her and smelled the sun-heated odor of bearing-beast and crushed grass. Against her breast, the kitten mewed helplessly.

Then ... a sheet of dust glimmered into a tapestry woven with the pale outlines of arch, lintel, stair, street, and roof. Moths fluttered against the dust-mote curtain people-sized moths clothed in ghostly raiment.

At last the Spectral City lay before Irissa, revealed by the dust as the dew betrays a near-invisible cobweb. Still, it was flat- unreal, hanging on the air rather than occupying a space within it.

Irissa urged Thundermist into the diaphanous image, but the bearing-beast balked, planting stiff legs. His hooves backstepped until Irissa felt likely to slide over the cantle and down his glossy hindquarters.

In the confusion, the kitten slipped its sling. It plummeted to Thundermist's withers, where it clung with every tiny claw and howled piteously at the motion and dust and its precarious perch.

Spurred by the panicked kitten, Thundermist kicked his heels to the sky and bolted straight into the settling dust.

Irissa felt a soft prickle, like warm snow. The sunlight grew cooler, if no less bright. The dusty veil retreated before her as if pushed back by Thundermist's intrusion. As the party penetrated the image, it in turn wrapped around them, gaining depth and distance.

Breathless, Irissa reined the mount and tore the kitten from his blood-pricked withers. Thundermist's head jerked as a phantom figure passed but a hand's width from his rolling eyes. More forms emerged from doors and byways brushing by Irissa and her bearing-beast as if they did not exist.

She dismounted, anyway, carrying the kitten, leading Thundermist, and in no way prepared for a hostile encounter. Her sword jolted at her hip, its emerald hilt stone shining slightly luminescent through the dust-laden murk of the Spectral City. Irissa did not remember it thus...

An odd twilight air infected the city, as if it absorbed the rays of some ancient, everlasting sunfall. Its citizens, oblivious as usual to mortal visitors, seemed shrunken. Fainter. Irissa was tempted to reach out for... or even through... a passerby beast-tending. had both hands not been busy beast- tending.

Such a handful,' she admonished the kitten. 'At least your predecessor - your ancestor? - could walk, talk, and eat under her own power. Why bother coming uncalled if you are not to be of use?"

Taunts would not bestir a possible Felabba in the white kitten. It yawned again, in Irissa's face, then peered alertly about, threatening to sink its claws into her hand and bound away. She tightened her grip on the tiny barrel chest. Who knew how a lost mortal animal might tip the Spectral City's delicate balance of reality and dream if left behind?

Thundermist whinnied hopefully, working his lips to show benign square teeth.

'A well, bright beast I think you're right. Let's see if Rengarthian water still runs real in the Spectral City.'

She led the bearing-beast to the circle of mortared stone in the middle of a ghostly square. Elusive citizens flowed past them, detectable only as outlines to her eyes, their passage felt as transient zephyrs across her skin.

Water bubbled over the well lip, creating a thin, constant veil of liquid that drained into a moat at the foundation. Thundermist drank greedily, his smacking the only sound in the Spectral City. The water seemed to revive and calm him. Irissa trailed a hand through the clear liquid - it felt dry and cool.

The kitten strained its tiny neck and sniffed until its whiskers twitched. Then its claws flailed in unison, its slip pery little body writhed - and it was falling into the well, a screech like a wailwraith's echoing off the smooth stones.

'Felabba! Oh, no... Irissa leaned after it, heedless of specters.

Bead-sized borgia-green eyes squinted up at her as the kitten frantically trod water. Only its wing-sized ears, eyes, and pink nose kept above the waterline's silver surface. Irissa grabbed for a fist of fur, but her rescue motions only submerged the creature in a tiny tidal wave.

It resurfaced, legs churning, wet hair rayed like thorns on its head and ears. Irissa reached for it again; this time it sank before she could capture it. Horrified, she watched the small white form twist and sink, then claw wildly upward again.

Irissa pounced just as the kitten broke water again, sinking her fingers into wet fur and lifting it. The effort caused quite a splashing - water droplets dry as dust motes cindered her eyes and made her shut them. The kitten, waterlogged, seemed to have grown much heavier. Irissa pulled with all her strength until she clutched a sopping, sputtering burden to her chest again. She stepped back from the well lip and blinked water motes from her eyelashes.

Unhand me,' a light voice berated her. Something squirmed in her arms, something powerful enough to push clawed back legs against her breastbone and spring off.

Gasping, Irissa pushed the damp hair strands from her face and saw a white animal perched on the well lip. It was a white cat... but not quite cat yet - a rangy, adolescent creature whom submersion had not beautified.

'Felabba?' she asked suspiciously.

The animal was occupied in methodically tonguing cowlicked coat and ignored her.

'I'm sorry you fell in-'

'Jumped,' the cat replied in dulcet tones.

Your bath seems to have... aged you.'

'I am ageless,' the cat answered between dedicated licks.

'But you speak now.'

That can be remedied. The cat gracefully leaped atop Thundermist's withers and promptly kept quiet.

Kendric, Irissa knew, would regard such silence with approval. She herself felt strangely cheated. But... her hands were empty and her quest was hers again. Irissa looked around the square. Fewer specters came and went. Perhaps her presence had tainted the area. The city did not welcome her as freely as when she had ridden the magical Hunter or visited it in the company of Neva and Ilvanis.

Irissa stood hesitating, somehow feeling as sopped and disarranged as the kit the young cat ... with about as much to say about it.

A gentle pull on her sleeve made her jerk around. Dust motes spun into a pair of silver whirlwinds - then Neva and Ilvanis were etched in coldstone glitter against the spectral street.

'Tell us,' Ilvanis said eagerly, his voice but a wind whisper, 'about your marvelous cat.'

'It's not my cat. But I think it was or will be - a creature called Felabba that Kendric and I knew in Rule and saw again in Edanvant. Somehow falling into the well hastened its growth-'

'Remarkable!' Neva drifted in a silver-white swirl toward Thundermist. 'Ilvanis and I were first drawn here by a well-window from Edanvant to Rengarth, but we have never seen a living thing enter a well without exiting it elsewhere. Your cat must be very magical.'

Drier, the creature in question sank into its haunches and began purring with a self-satisfaction Irissa found wearing already.

'It was born - unasked - of a crystal shard drawn from a dark pond,' Irissa said shortly. 'What it will make of itself is not for me to say. I came here to find you, not discuss feline pedigrees or powers.'

Another pull behind her more sensed than felt made her turn again. A duststorm of pale rose-colored particles was resolving into two figures Ilvanis's and Neva's once-living counterparts, Aven and Sin.

"You look well, seeress,' Aven greeted her. 'Neva and I were sorry we missed the birthing of your second child.'

'It was better you came for the first I didn't know what I was doing then.'

"Nor Kendric, I hear,' Sin put in with a phantom grin. Irissa felt sudden melancholy. It was hard to see those who had once been vibrant flesh and blood reduced to shadows of their former selves. It reminded her with a pang of her own mission.