Seven Swords

Chapter 47

Even as he trembled on the brink of the watery solution to his quest, an image began rippling over the pond. Circles of silver reflection surfaced and shattered, spread ing wider. Again and again he saw the features of a face assemble and dissolve.

A mouth that seemed on the verge of speaking dissipated and blew rings of expanding silver bubbles. Eyes widened to horror, or fear, and burst - only to grow again from pinpricks of light, like flaring pupils.

Finally the tendrils of reflection pooled into a single bright spot at the pool's center. They lifted from the liquid surface like fog until the silver-drenched figure from the sea hovered across the water.

Mine, this apparition spoke, unseen arms spreading misty sleeves wide. Whether she meant the water, or the sword, or himself, Eeryon couldn't say.

'Where?' he asked.

Her finger, as ghostly as a skeleton's, pointed downward.

'How?'

Her arms swept wide, indicating the pond's edges. Eeryon studied the vacant forest, the fringe of under brush between water and woods. He shook his head mutely. Her foot tapped water, raising no spray. But ghostly ripples flared from her shimmering figure. Eeryon's eyes

helplessly followed their rhythmic outward progress.

At the pond's edge, beneath his unreflected figure, he

saw something more

architectural facade.

- a doorway, a wall, an entire

He jerked around. Under the intent scrutiny of his eyes, forms were shaping against the wall of trees, like a tapestry being woven from unseen threads. Phantom facades erected themselves all around the pool, each image as different from the one that sat beside it as many doors opened from many walls into many places.

The cat was trotting self-importantly along the frag mented walls and gateways, naming what it recognized. 'Lost Ashasendra. Old Clymerind before it sank. Soon to-be Zelamizzary.'

Each archway echoed in the water, as did its neigh boring gates. All doorways opened on a furtive glow of many colors. 'Mine,' said the water apparition, sighing.

Eeryon asked. 'I almost had it in the palm of

'But the sword is in the water. Can't you bring it to me?" my hand once, when I was in Without. Some silver figure severed me from it. Was that you?'

The woman's tendriled head shook violently. 'I know you mean to help me-'

She nodded with equal animation.

Eeryon clapped empty hands to his sides and began walking along the dozens of doors, glimpsing agitation within, yet nothing more recognizable than that. He sensed his insubstantial guardian behind him, waiting and watching.

Every door beckoned with elusive color and light and life. Only one would lead to a sword and the end of his quest. Some doors were timbered, others soldered from stained glass. Some were wafting veils of light or constant shimmers of sound like falling rain. Some were Iridesium-sheathed or wood-carved. Only one was plain - a rectangle

some dull wood or unembellished metal. It promised nothing but the fulfillment of curiosity. Remembering his father's caution against seduction, Eeryon lifted his palm to the unadorned surface. A glow

of

reflected there - not from the door, but from his flesh.

The living lines of his hand emblazoned their simple

patterns on the door's surface the upright central

fateline crossed by horizontal head- and heartlines. They reflected the shape of a sword on the door and then it opened on a dark, undifferentiated space beyond. Eeryon pushed through, into the dark, his flaming palm

held before him as a lamp.

Briarwhip and Felabba watched in silence while the misty figure at the pond's center silently sank into ripples of stagnant water.

'Now,' snarled the reborn Felabba, her head jerking up as If caught in a noose tightened worlds away. 'We must make our way through the fibers of a gate. Where is your sword?'

'In Rule. In Rindell Pond. Kendric found himself con fused beyond surviving. The Bloodstone potion's power was waning, leaving only poison waxing in his veins. He had hardly the strength to answer the cat. "The other one! Your mind-made one. We must have it,'

the cat replied.

'Here, then. You carry it. I have not the strength. Kendric scraped the sword from the table where it lay. 'Have the strength,' the cat advised unsympatheti cally. 'We must reach the prism-gate if your family is to survive."

Kendric straightened, as if infected with some of the

sword's enduring steel. 'How? I am not as gifted as

my son or his mother in fashioning fabric into gates of

passage."

Fortunately, Felabba said, flexing her claws, 'I am a master at unraveling fabric webs and a mistress of gates.' She paced along the floor, staring intently at the wavering tapestries. 'Surely Irissa did not neglect to weave the crux event into a tapestry... !'

Kendric bent and lifted the cat by the scruff of its neck so it could see the scenes at human height. "Tell me what you seek and I shall show you it.'

'Softly, softly, Wrathman. My noble neck ruff, scant as it is, is delicate stuff.' But the old cat dangled from Kendric's one-handed grip - the sword dragged from his other hand - its tail curling kittenishly between its legs, and perused the tapestry designs.

'Here!' it announced at last.

"That? That is the oldest of the hangings - and the simplest. Just Irissa and myself standing on a rock in Rindell Pond while a rainbow gate formed to take us on the first of our journeys together.' So it shall suffice for the last of them."

Kendric started, struck by the dire implications of the cat's words. "You go through alone, then, old Bitterbones full of brutal predictions. Leave me here to perish."

Cannot,' the cat replied smartly. "The sword is needed even if you are not. And I cannot carry it, though I can open a gate big enough even for a Wrathman's contrary bulk.'

Do what you must, Kendric conceded, hearing his voice unwind to a hoarse whisper. Waves of sickness spun round him like grassweaver coils tightening. 'I will do what I can.'

Then not only phantom coils were closing in on him, but loops of rainbow mist spun from the rainbow woven into the tapestry, running its colors together before his eyes. He felt cold and hot, wet and dry, awake and asleep. He felt as flat as any hanging and wavered in the weak ness of his illness like a wind-buffeted tapestry.

They wavered together he and the tapestry, he with two equally leaden weights in either hand... an old cat and a second-mind sword... drawing him down, drawing him forward into the past, into another world he once knew well.

'Rule,' Kendric muttered as everything melted into color and nonsense and multiple images of ill-groomed white cats. 'Rule."

Cloaked in a halo of fire rushing through the dark waters, Irissa sensed the sudden opening of an underwater gate. Like a flaming fish she knifed across currents and through swift shadows. Her power honed itself on the whetstone of her consciousness, shaping her into an arrowhead impelled in one direction only. She arrived with blinding speed, already centered on

the instinctive target, a shining intersection of ice. She hung there for a moment, reasserting her shape and presence, adjusting to the rapid procession of time and space that had slid by her. Finally Irissa stiffly shrugged out of her frozen setting, stepping down an icy stair pulling the tendrils of her hair free from a tangle of

crystalline spires. For a moment she feared she had returned to ice-bound Delevant's Maw in the Inlands of Ten, where her childres would never have gone in their wildest journeyings.

She moved through a forest of ice daggers, finding order among the bristling pillars, finding aisles and chambers and finally a glowing circular stair of ice that led to a cul-de-sac far below. Two dark dots clogged the funnel.

Irissa crouched at the top to see them better, cold embroidering her relieved breaths onto the air in supple threads of mist. Even as she watched, one tiny figure edged up the

icewall. It paused to draw the other up after it, then

inched upward again. Irissa pulled back from the edge

blowing warm breath over her chilled fingers. The flint

and steel still warmed her palms, glowing like dying

embers.

She longed to peer below again, certain that she had found her children and equally certain that her observation of their struggles would be unwelcome.

So she waited, wondering what inventive form Thane's hybrid magic had taken, hoping Javelle would accept he brother's aid graciously for once.

Irissa sighed. Barely had reunion become reality befor old differences resurged to exert their divisive ways.

It took a long time for Thane's dark head to surmour the edge of the ice. Irissa leaned forward to help him hat Javelle over the rim.

Both were scarlet-faced and panting, almost too wor to show proper surprise at Irissa's presence. How,' she asked Thane, 'did you climb the ice?"

He reddened more and brushed his hands behind h

back like a child concealing a f*******n tongue-wisat When Irissa's look questioned her, Javelle simply shook her head. "Don't ask me. I merely climbed up the ladder of his legs." She brushed an errant hair under the make encircling her brow. "It was I who slipped, the confessed. and tumbled both of us down the slide.

We all slip sometime,' Irissa answered, turning again to her son. Thane, I want to know as one Torloe to another, as seeress to seer. What quirk of Invention has saved your skins this time? Let me see your hands." He presented them with the evasive speed of guilt hoping to be overlooked.

Irissa took them in her own - they were raw and cold, as one would expect after a slow climb up an icewall And also expect. "Thane!" ... clawed, as one - as she - would never He snatched his hands back, fisting them. There wasn't

time for finesse. We had to get out. I thought of old

Felabba falling down the deep hole under Falgontooth

Mountain. They... just... grew. I haven't figured how

to ungrow them yet."

'I suggest you concentrate on just that purpose. Javelle and I will draw away so you may... divest yourself of your implements in peace."

Javelle, open-mouthed at the notion of a clawed brother, refused to move. 'What about his feet?"

'I didn't need hind claws; my boots were rough enough to stick, as yours did.'

'Yes, but-'

'Javelle. Irissa pulled her daughter after her until they were well out of Thane's earshot. 'You can't approve,' Javelle demanded. 'It's natural.' .. un

'It worked,' Irissa responded with a sigh. 'I had no notion Thane had shape-altering tendencies. But I cannot complain of the results and am too weary myself to spell you out of the ice-sided hole you had fallen into. Now, where is the sword?'