Seven Swords

Chapter 9

Water was more a window than a mirror in Rengarth.

Clear as a coldstone, bright and chill and clean and cutting, water seemed to sharpen rather than blur the sight.

Irissa gazed down into the limpid land beneath the spring a jagged ledge of crystal-white rock tunneling down indefinitely, until even light narrowed and white became gray, and gray... black.

Water flowed over her hands, over the canteen's sub merged neck, not even distorting their images. Initially chill to the touch, it warmed or she cooled. Liquid began to feel as unheralded as air and less bothersome than wind.

Irissa paused there, dawdled there. Still water had always fascinated her - not for its sly reflections, but for its quiet depths.

Then Thundermist's nose snorted back, spraying droplets.

Irissa leaned forward to glimpse what had startled the bearing-beast - a sudden star of light deep in the black ness that was the pupil of the spring's silver eye.

'What?' Irissa wondered, reaching a hand toward the spring's center. Behind her, Thundermist's anxious hooves milled the grass.

Of course the glimmer was fathoms deep, beyond reach. Irissa stretched for it anyway, intrigued into total impulsiveness.

The water seemed colder and a shadow had fallen over the suns.

Then it came to her, what it was... the fugitive glitter bobbing suddenly within reach of her hand. Her eyes widened as they recognized the hilt of a sword - not any sword, but Kendric's.

She leaned over, into the water, determined to capture the sword. The spring's clarity made misjudging its position impossible - the lost sword was here, right under the farthest stretch of her hand..

Jewels glittered over the blade plunging into the water's dark heart, that expanding pupil of depth and dark and distance that should have stayed a mere pinprick. Gems scabbarded the sword's hidden length, reminding Irissa of another sword, another body of water, another day. and another land.

The hilt stabbed up through the water, smashing the smooth surface into drops sharp as shards of broken glass. Cold, they sprinkled Irissa's eyelashes and skin, cutting like early winter rain.

Instinct made her want to rear back; something else made her lean closer and grasp the chill hilt in her hand. Heavy; she had forgotten how heavy the weapon was. Here, in water, it weighed down again, drawing her with it. She felt her hand plunging into a substance colder than an ice-basilisk's breath.

Then the sword was spiraling through distance and time, drawing Irissa's mind behind it. She plunged to the center of the empty eyes lying in wait at the bottom blackness. A wail echoed in her ears, refracted over and ver by the icewater clarity.

Some disembodied force took her in its vacant arms. Another's purpose swathed her sense of self, her limbs, her mind, her magic. Twined as if in waterweed, Irissa's momentary weakness became another's strength.

That other was possessed of a single-minded intent Irissa had never encountered before. She felt the sword snatched from an iris of lighter darkness at the spring's deepest center, felt herself pulled up and back as if she were a blade being withdrawn from an invisible wound.

Cold and dark spun past her. She had not yet loosed the sword and it came with her. Only half her arm and all her mind - had ever been in the water. Together body and mind broke the water's surface suction; together they burst into sunlight again, a fading wall echoing in both physical and mental ears.

Irissa flourished the prize still clutched in her hand, as if to assure distant watchers of her safety. She looked up, holding it against the sun to see it. A dark cloud shaped like a bearing-beast was sliding past the third sun. In the tri-light, a dagger-long glass shard glinted sharply. The cold, leaving her fingers, allowed Irissa to feel the shard's sharp edges. Blood trickled with water down her wrist.

In the spring, the ripples died away, as if something were diving again, very deep, and should not resurface again.

The shard was a piece of casting crystal.

Irissa, her cut hand swathed in a bandage of broad leaved sagegrass, studied it that night over the small fire she had started with Kendric's flint and steel.

He had insisted she take the pieces and it seemed right to defer in a minor way, since she was set upon her own will in the major one.

Now she began to appreciate Kendric's reluctance to use magic for small wounds and smaller inconveniences. Rengarthian meadows were lonely, and not every beast on or under or over them had been catalogued. No moon softened the dark night sky. Even Thundermist overcame his kind's inbred fear of fire to hang his head closer to the sole orange spark in the darkness.

Irissa appreciated the company.

'I told you so,' she imagined Kendric telling her, although he had not told her anything. 'You think Rengarth so safe and yourself so dangerous that you go riding off on your own with no more notion than a blind-burrow of where you head or what you will find there.'

It would have been more comforting had she truly had such words to resurrect. Serving as her own critic was a chill exercise and Thundermist was not a responsive listener. Irissa snuffled dismally - her arm's immersion in the spring had given her a chill the fire of dried grasses couldn't warm.

It was time to harvest more grasses for the fire. She rose and weighed the canteen's contents. After the springside incident, she had ridden on to skim her drinking water from a shallow stream. Soon after, night overtook her with a sudden sunfall unmitigated by a moonrise.

Sighing, she swished cautiously through the surrounding grass, reaching deep to their roots to pull out older, drier blades with her left hand. Despite the grass's evergreen appearance, dead leaves tangled beneath the surface. Irissa returned with full hands to refurbish the fire. She enjoyed the bright exhalation of flame with which it greeted her offering.

Thundermist neighed and minced back, incidentally breaking off more dead grass for the next refreshing the fire needed. Irissa sighed again, this time it was more of a grunt, and settled before the fire again, her eyes returning to the shard- surely a castoff of some long-ago ludborg's foretelling session...

The shard was gone!

Or rather... it was. . . altered. Irissa hovered over what remained of the wedge-shaped blade - a lopsided, swollen blob of opaque white glass.

'It's melting... she began, but even as she spoke, the glass stretched like skin, in every direction, so that gradu ally a globe came into circular being on the crushed grass.

Flames danced in its reflective curves until two-tongued serpents appeared to be cavorting in the vicinity. This globe was smaller than those customarily conjured by Scyvilla and his kind. Perhaps, Irissa guessed, it was an instrument of another day.

Not quite transparent, the cloudy surface swirled, melding rainbow colors until it mocked a soap bubble. Then, like a bubble, it lofted into the air. It lifted slowly. Irissa rose from her heels to her knees. The upborne crystal passed her waist, then her shoulders. Directly opposite her eyes, it paused, spinning.

Startled, heeding an interior baritone voice of caution, Irissa veiled her eyes from any magic. Yet the bauble was so light and lovely, so... enchanting.

It drifted over the fire as if heat-drawn, the glass skin tautening, thinning, until it became translucent. Irissa's face and eyes followed it, studying the image she discerned within it only a cloud, lumpish and unremarkable.

Then an emerald winked into being. Irissa blinked and pulled back. Another emerald, cut into a pointed oblong, paired the second.

Irissa felt her world reel. All Rengarth seemed to have leaped sideways, leaving Irissa plunging through un supported space. Her right hand clasped her sword hilt, a slice of pain reminding her a moment too late of her injury.

The crystal floated higher. Irissa rose to her feet with it, keeping herself eye to eye with the emeralds. Still it ascended, until there was no action possible but the rash one. Just as the crystal threatened to waft into the roof of night's tenebrous mouth, Irissa's hands reached out of their own volition, both well and wounded, and snatched it back.

Light as air the brittle glass rested between her palms. She felt the breath-held responsibility a ludborg must feel for his casting crystal. At her feet, the fire stretched feeble fingers of light through the globe, illuminating a network of crimson and blue threads.

A living thing? The eye-bright emeralds seemed to read her thoughts. At least, one winked lazily shut. Irissa almost dropped the crystal. Speculation found an answer too unbelievable, too bizarre, too... likely . . . to be true.

The crystal's uncanny lightness affected Irissa's head. It went to her feet, too. She felt that if she didn't do something quickly, she would waft skyward with the globe, forever to be pointed out to her own children and their children's children as the 'woman with the moon.' Remember Hariantha of the Inlands, she warned herself; sheathe magic at your own risk.

Decided, Irissa bent her memory to the last occasion she had shattered a crystal eighteen years before when Kendric had been subsumed into the Crux Crystal. As she had delivered him from his brittle womb, so she would release... what she would release.

In her hands, the crystal warmed - half-heated by the fire, half-fired by its native resistance to her invasive magic. Then the glass chilled until her fingertips whitened and seemed ready to break off like ice daggers.

Despite the ardures, Irissa clung with her hands and eyes to the crystal, penetrating it with a glance that ranhot against the cold and icy against the heat. Slowly, a spiderweb of fissures cracked the surface until only the pressure of her five fingertips held the ball whole.

Blood oozed out of fine black capillaries - whether hers or another's or simply illusion she couldn't say. The pressure became unbearable; her entire being squeezed the globe into the shape of itself.

It finally burst with a sizzle, glass bits sleeting past her into a glittering whirlwind above the fire. Irissa felt fire in her hands, and something heavy. She dropped it when it became too hot and gravid to hold the fire.

A white kitten landed on four splayed feet, its crossed green eyes blinking in the bright ground-level light of the dying fire.

Irissa crouched on all fours to regard it, disregarding her throbbing hands, the thin tracery of claw marks on her palms.

'Felabba?' she whispered, hoping no one could hear, no one could see her being so ridiculous. Of course no one could! And of course it was not it couldn't be - Felabba.

The kitten's face tilted on its scrawny neck. Under the enormous ears, the eyes were a mature, deep green. A small mouth yawned open to reveal tiny teeth and a pink pad of tongue. The kitten regarded Irissa seriously and spoke.

'Merow,' it said, quite clearly. 'Merow.'

Sunrise came abruptly to Rengarth. One moment night in all its opaque darkness draped the land; the next moment blades of fresh-forged light obliquely sliced the grasses.

Irissa stirred stiffly, surprised - and worried - that she'd slept on the open ground. She had spent most of the night repulsing the kitten, which wanted to wreathe her neck in search of a warm nest of breath and hair.

Irissa had repeatedly thrust the small hot body to her cold feet, which could use a draping of fur. But the creature with the blind, stubborn instincts of the young of any kind - persisted in clawing its way up her clothes to her head again, where it purred loud enough to wake a grassweaver. Now it slept, limp as death, in a crease of her tunic.

Sitting so as not to disturb the animal, Irissa looked around for signs of the giant nocturnal spinners called grassweavers. Not even their gossamer trails showed on the lilting grasses. She rummaged her food pouch and found a handful of dried meat for the kitten, not her - self. The scent wakened it, and it proved mature enough to gobble down the stringy meat, l*****g absurdly short whiskers afterward.

Thundermist had a whole world to graze and needed no feeding the smallish bearing-beast stood at the end - of his rein-weight, ready to bear again. Irissa lifted blanket and saddle to his back and drew leather girth straps through the Iridesium rings that secured them.