Seven Swords

Chapter 49

Once through the spectral door, Eeryon found him self moving through a vast darkness shaped by stone walls. Rooms with unseeably high ceilings and doorways large enough to accommodate thunderheads went on interminably.

Their interiors were an odd blend of the emptiness of Without and the fussily accessorized worlds beyond Without the kind of worlds rife with trees and beasts and other people like Javelle and Thane.

Not that people or creatures occupied this deserted darkness, as far as Eeryon could see. Yet things did - the residue of people and beasts. Dim light fell from windows cut into the high ceilings.

By this lackluster illumination Eeryon spied metal

studded leather bindings for beasts hung against the walls.

Implements of all description, yet old and rusted, twisted into shapes so outré Eeryon wondered if they ever had been natural. And metal weapons glimmered everywhere. Those he

recognized instantly. He had charged the first sword he saw, thinking it the object of his quest. It was a sword, all right- a length of edged steel impaled in a block of pale stone, polished to the color of lightning from hilt to buried tip.

But he couldn't so much as touch, much less grasp, the sword. It and the space around it were sheathed in a slick invisible substance cold as ice. Eeryon's hands had shaped the frozen block that housed and isolated it. They shivered at the forbidding substance's touch even though his eyes were unable to see it.

Not even the heat of his magic-threaded palms could melt the unseen shield behind which the sword hid so

publicly. After attempts, Eeryon had fallen back, trusting an inner instinct he could not explain. This was not the weapon he sought it was too light, too bright, 100 recently forged, and not nearly long enough.

Now the true difficulty of his quest had lain its weight upon him. This dark castle was filled with swords. Swords gleamed dully from every wall and even hung suspended from the unseen ceiling. They displayed themselves, openly beyond reach, in more of the transparent yet impervious sheaths.

It almost seemed that Eeryon wasn't truly there. The stones beneath Eeryon's pacing feet met his every step with an absence of echo. He glimpsed no reflection as he passed mounted shields of polished metal. He made no sound and cast no shadow. If this place housed the sword he sought, he needed more than magic

to find it among so many of its fellows.

Irissa stared at the rippling pool as it quieted. She and her children had followed every twist of the wildwood until it led to this small body of abandoned water.

Look there! The wake of the wailwraith.' She pointed

to a dissolving silver reflection atop the lapping water. Something has disturbed this sequestered spot."

'Are we in Rule as it exists today?' Thane wondered. Irissa examined the timid forest drawn back from the

water, the rectangular confines of the once-wild pond.

'If this is a remnant of Rindell Pond and the Shrinking Forest, it is not as I knew it twenty years ago. Why has the water shaped itself so rigidly? Why does the forest shrink from it?"

We thought you would answer our questions,' Javelle said. Instead you ask more." Irissa smiled and would have responded, save that

someone else answered for her. 'Sowed questions are the seed of their own answers," came a familiar voice.

Felabba minced from among the underbrush. I haven't seen Felabba since I dropped her,' Javelle

realized. 'We have taken the right path. Eeryon must have come here also.' The cat was unimpressed. 'You did not drop me. I saved myself before you fell.'

"What is that?" Irissa pointed to the blur of dingy fur that

trailed Felabba from the woods.

'Eeryon's familiar, Thane said, 'a stupid beast of no particular use."

'So we could say of our cat,' Javelle pointed out. Felabba refused to acknowledge this odious comparison. Instead, she sat midway between woods and water.

Irissa would not be distracted by a debate on the merits of one animal over another. She glanced alertly around the formal clearing. "Then where is Eeryon now? Has he gone into the water?' 'Why should a shadow boy go into water that will

not even do him the honor of reflecting him? Felabba

answered obliquely.

'Well, something is in the water.' Irissa stepped nearer. "Take care, seeress.' The cat spoke so sharply that Irissa drew back. 'Water was not kind to your Wrathman recently.'

'Yet a wailwraith inhabits this unhallowed pool,' Irissa

mused from a safer distance. I wonder if the sword still

rests here?" With a defiant glance at the cat, she moved nearer again, then knelt on smooth grass verging the water.

'I lifted it once, from a murky swamp, for your father," she told the children - or herself. That was the first occasion I glimpsed my own magic. It made the heavy sword light and my arm as strong as Iridesium. Perhaps I can draw the lost sword from the water again..."

Thane and Javelle edged nearer, enmeshed by the spell of Irissa's memories, by the odd convergence of her past and their present here.

Irissa spread her fingers and swept her hand across the dark water. Five gemstone colors flitted over her ring's single cabochon, ringing the hues' Iridesium changes crimson, saffron, azure, translucent, and one indeterminate

shade that absorbed the rest. The circlet at her temples pulsed with colors of the same stripe. Disembodied sparks of colour and light seemed to dance

only watch firefly-bright above the water. Thane, though ing, felt an answering tingle in his palms and longed to add his magical reach to Irissa's. He curled his fingers into fists instead. His mother was evoking the magical pull of a time before he had existed; as much as he felt that draw, it was not directed at himself.

'Will she conjure the sword?' Javelle whispered anxiously

ts into Thane's ear.

and

le

She doesn't need to conjure it; it exists. She seeks to call it to herself.'

'But can she?' Besides her natural affinity for it- she has touched it

magically before now - she wears the Drawstone in her ring. That might be enough.' 'Could you have gotten it?' Javelle glanced quickly to his fisted hands.

I don't know,' Thane answered evenly. 'And if Mother gets it, I shan't ever wonder.'

'Careful, seeress,' the cat cautioned in a hiss only the youngsters heard. 'If you see the wailwraith's wake, so it sees you...

Irissa was oblivious to watchers and advisors. She delved deep in the well of her own magic and memory. She had been transported to a day when Kendric had been only a fallen stranger ordering her to retrieve his muddied sword from the dank marshwater.

This latter-day water she had not touched yet - nor did she intend to. It glimmered with the lucid darkness of the great black sea that underlies all worlds and springs from the Well of Endless Water in Without.

Rindell was gone, Irissa knew, and the Shrinking Forest. This...phantom semblance was a revenant of past places and past magic. Perhaps even the sword was gone, beyond retrieval by any means. She would know soon. Her fingers felt chill, as if the water radiated cold just

as flames cast light and shadow. The circlet at her temples hummed its peculiar metallic tune in time with her own interior, magical melody. She remembered almost drowning in a Spectral City well, and drawing out a shard that bore the second

Felabba. She wanted another shard now, another pointed

weapon from another world....

The sword as Kendric had carried it through all of their adventures in Rule.

The sword as it had bridged them in the rainbow gate, blossoming a gemstoned sheath between their steel

separated fingers. The sword as he had dropped it, gleaming

and precious into the limpid water. The sword as some spectral hand had reached from what remained of Rindell Pond to catch and draw it

under.

The sword without its recently begemmed sheath, n***d and natural, as it had been made in Frostforge at the Paramount Athanor in Rengarth generations ago.

The sword as she had held the hilt and dredged its

heavy length from Rulian water years ago.

A needle of lambent light pierced the dark waters. It swirled in a curdled current, around and around, balanc ing on the pinprick of its fine point. It was only a vaguely glowing splinter so far below that Irissa thought she was seeing through veils many worlds thick.

Her hand trembled over the water, then the fingers

curved as the possessive palm cupped taut for its pos

session.

She called it with her mind and magic and memory. thinking not of impending death, but dawning life. She called to every optimistic moment of its making, in the name of Rengarth and Rule and everyone who had ever borne it. She called in Kendric's name, as last sword bearer; in her own.

And slowly, teasingly, rising and falling as with some underwater wind, the sword spiraled nearer. It grew to a silver thorn and then a thick splinter . . . became a

dagger of light and then a longer dagger - or a short sword. Its size swelled closer to the waiting cradle of her palm. Details shone in the dark water a hilt wrapped in rotting strips of leather, a nick halfway down the blade where it had bit into something indigestible. Ever closer

the hilt came, crowning in the dark water, pushing through the liquid barrier - it was within easy reach should she care to wet her wrist in water. Careful, seeress

A moment more, and the hilt top broke water. Behind her, Thane and Javelle gasped - and possibly the cat. Irissa did not turn to see. She kept her eyes on the sword, her fingers tenting to touch the chill wet metal...

Water rippled silver around the bobbing hilt. Broken reflections lifted like mist from the pond - five supple threads joining into five ghostly fingers. Irissa felt a bone-freezing chill to her wrist, felt frozen

in place. The fog crept up her fingernails, painting them

silver. The tendrils stole toward her first knuckles. Irissa

felt a corresponding icing of her blood, a removal of

herself from this moment, a lessening of her senses.

A foot kicked over the water and spurred Irissa's hand from the sword. Irissa fell back onto the bank, under the forms of two contending children.

"Thane! How could you? She almost had it! I saw the very hilt. Javelle pummeled the arms that he had crossed over his face, then graduated to his defenseless back. 'Why?' she shouted. Why would you doom Father? Are you possessed? Has Geronfrey overtaken you? Or Eeryon? Are you Eeryon?' Irissa struggled upright, her body separating her chil

dren so that Javelle's fury was forced into words alone. 'He did it! Broke the spell. Deliberately! The sword plunged back into the water again. Why? Do you want Father to die?"

Thane was quiet, pale. 'No. Do you want Mother to?"

Of course not."

He brushed the hair from his face, his slumped shoulders

showing that he felt the sword's loss as keenly as they. "The sword may prolong Father's life, but calling it would end Mother's instantly. Didn't you see the emanation reaching for her as she reached for it, Javelle?' 'I saw a... shadow on the water,' Javelle said. "A mist.'

'Mist doesn't rise from water without the air's warmth to call it, and shadow does not fall where sun does not shine, Thane answered. "What has possessed you, Javelle, to hold our mother in such lesser light that you would sacrifice her to an uncertainty? There must be other ways of prolonging Father's existence, and I will have many years to find them.'

"Thane. Irissa looked from her unshaken daughter to her unshakable son. 'I should have told you, as I told Javelle. Your father is dying now. We don't merely seek some means to prolong his life, but one to save it. He was poisoned by some imported taint just as you and Javelle left Rengarth. I came after in hopes of helping you and him both.'

'But-Thane had sobered to near-speechlessness. 'Didn't

you see the silver shadow, Mother? That . . . inhuman hunger... grasping for you? It would have devoured you! I had to interrupt its ravening. Was it a wailwraith?" Irissa sighed and stared into the dark water. Even her circlet had snuffed out. No rainbow reflection lit the

Iridesium. 'I saw something,' she admitted. 'I disregarded it, so eager was I to grasp the sword.' She peered darkly into the black water. 'It has sunk beyond seeing now, beyond recall.'

'But that ... upwelling... would have destroyed you,' Thane insisted. 'I saw that it would.'