Seven Swords

Chapter 44

Javelle's and Thane's heads lifted in unison, în mutual puzzlement and defense.

But Eeryon hardly looked up, only mumbling shame facedly as if he gagged on the words more than he

could on any seawater. 'Greetings, Father,' he said.

Kendric was drowning in a sea of potent poison. A rainbow arched the water, stewing in the light of a bilious sun. He reached for the sky-borne bands of color, hoping those airy ropes could pull him from the seething ocean of his own tainted blood.

Javelle and Thane floated by in an oarless boat - skim

ming the surface of his misery, their faces white and lost,

their hands hidden.

Kendric thrashed long arms and legs. The water was warm, thick. It swirled with the colors of borgia and Bloodstone, with other shades too various to name.

He glimpsed Irissa in the form of a flying fish. Silver scales broke the lethal water, then flashed down into it

again like a dagger buried at sea. He had thrown a flaming dagger once and had never seen it land. He would have such a dagger back. Perhaps

it could burn the poison from him.

Tossed and turned, Kendric could see nothing but the bottomless dark, could smell nothing other than the stink of his own mortality. Everything moved around him. Everything shifted with the waves, the wind. There was no stillness here, no peace.

Scenes of earlier days were mirrored in the walls of waves crashing over him. He tried to focus on them, to grasp and cling to these straws of the past as a wrecked sailor would cleave to a piece of sturdier flotsam. But the insubstantial worlds within the waves' glassy walls foamed away, taunting Kendric with a glimpse of Rule here, a slice of Edanvant there...

Walls. Not water, but walls. The walls were moving shifting in waves. Tapestries. He knew himself - briefly - knew that he lay in Irissa's receiving chamber in Rengarth

A ludborg hovered near too vague to be named Danger hovered, too, not near. Not here, Kendric battled upward from the ensnaring sickness, retching phantom The ludborg thundered closer. Ludborgs were silent, but sewater. any motion agitated his senses now. Irissa's tapestries

whipped against the walls, slapping the stones Borgia, Kendric croaked. Instantly, a green glass goblet hovered before him. Did nothing keep decently still anymore? Bloodstone," he ordered. Dust the color of dried blood flaked into the libation

'All!' Kendric said.

Motion stopped. A ludborg sleeve hung slack, the re

maining Bloodstone still unshed within it.

'Alll' Kendric thundered. Someone murmured of husbanding the medicine, of waiting until someone should return. Kendric could no longer wait for someone other than himself to return. 'All. His voice had weakened to the squawl of a seabird.

but he meant the command.

Murmurs of sure and terrible death, of nothing more to

be done.

Kendric reached for the tossing flotsam of his death world for goblet and withholding sleeve and precious grains of life-preserving Bloodstone ....

The last red motes trickled from the lurid sky, fanning like a flock of birds that drowned in an emerald sea.

Kendric drank it, drank the bottomless goblet down thrice. Blood pounded redly in the poisonous green stream of his veins. Sound retreated, motion smoothed.

He was half-sitting on a cot in a room he knew, and it was indeed Scyvilla's sleeve that soothed his brow. He brushed away the fabric and almost overturned the bottomless cup of borgia as he rose with new - and bitterly bought strength.

'Get out,' he said. Scyvilla stiffened.

He had not the strength to soften the words.

Out,' he repeated.

For a moment all hesitated. Kendric's strength abided wholly in his will now his body and magic were drained to the bone, to the marrow. He could not make his small finger obey.

Scyvilla retrieved the fallen goblet - full again, green again and scuttled away. A wave of gratitude almost knocked Kendric back on the bed, but he struggled upright, alone in the room.

Something was wrong beyond his own slow dissolution, he knew. Something had gone awry with Irissa and the children. He stumbled toward the walls, his weaving steps mocking the weavings themselves.

If Thane could unravel a gate in a tapestry and Irissa could weave herself into Without, then he could find... some... way of finding them, Kendric thought.

Through the tapestries. He lurched back and forth

along the walls, trying to read sense into woven images,

struggling to spy an exit among three blank walls hung

with figured scenes. He paused at a glittering depiction of the Empress Falgon he and Irissa had ridden in Rule. Would a myth fly him free of Rengarth now? No... He stood, swaying before the woven forms of Mauvedona and Verthane. Could dead sorcerers resurrect his powers now?

He leaned forward to study the scene of Finorian, his old adversary, reaching into the clouded sky of Edanvant, the emerald touchstone shattering on her breast as she prepared to throw herself to the winds and repel Geron frey's evil from Without.

Even Finorian he would ask for aid, for mercy, but she was gone now - unhappy Eldress and was able to offer neither aid nor opposition.

Who? What? Someone, something must help him! How? The floor reeled. Kendric clutched a drapery to remain standing, then looked what his hand had fallen upon. It almost made him laugh ... or cry.

His trembling fist had Felabba by the throat

old Bitterbones, gone these twenty years and now back

again in younger form. Where was she when needed? If her younger self were of any use to the children he wouldn't feel this cutting edge of danger honing all his warrior's instincts... Kendric's fist tightened on the tapestry and twisted. His arm swung back to wrench it from the wall, the past -

so he would not have to see the awful future.

Something squealed.

Kendric called upon his ears to hear that sound again. It repeated, faint and protesting a call like a seabird's distant scream, an infant's cry. A cat's yowl.

Kendric's fingers uncurled, one by one. The crushed tapestry slowly unsprung. Felabba's screwed-up visage smoothed into its normal, sour expression.

Kendric stepped back. If everyone else could walk through weavings, why couldn't he? Other than being weakened unto death he couldn't think of a good reason. But he knew he needed... help.

All right.' He knew he was talking to himself, but approaching death conferred some privileges. You may be deader than I, or distant in a more youthful form, but you sit here in this cursed piece of cloth looking as smug as ever you did in life. You will ... come back, old cat. Felabba.'

He couldn't believe that he was saying these words, that he was beseeching the worthless beast to come to a semblance of life, to help him.

Where would he find the magic - the will, the thoughts, the words - to make such wishful thinking true? Who knew how long the Bloodstone's restorative power would last? In his last conscious moments, was he to beg aid from a tapestry cat?

Kendric passed his hand before his eyes. The ring was cycling through its five colors, as lurid as his skin was painted from the poison. Among those five empowered stones was the Gladestone as a cat's eye... as Felabba's eye and Torloc magic. - a bit of forest green bright

He called on both Torloc magic he had garnered from Irissa. He called on - on talisman and the instinctual

memory and fortune and his belief in something as sturdy as will, pure and simple.

He called on all that he remembered, and anything he might not remember. He called for help, for the aid of anything that might assist him. He called specifically for old Felabba, because he knew her well, as he knew the sluggish thrum of danger in his slack veins... because her image was the only straw before him at this sinking moment... because the tapestry had mewed.

It was shaking now, the fabric, or his hand was. Lump ish stuff, tapestry - it thickened in his fist... or his sensation had thinned. Threads broke, parting like broken wheat before a long silver scythe... Green flared around him, like Torloc torches spitting long tongues at the darkness.

A cat's head pushed through a hole in the tapestry -

the forehead fur carved in horizontal ridges, flattened ears, slitted eyes. Paws clawed free, forefeet claws - fanned and equipped with thread-ripping scimitars of nail. Kendric reached for the illusion, grasping flailing fur. He midwived the rest of the animal free - long rangy body, the ribs like curled fingers beneath his palms;

narrow hindquarters, trailing tail.

He held a bit of warm bone and fur in his trembling

hands and was amazed at feeling so proud of himself for

so little reward.

The cat unhinged stiff jaws and yawned or snarled mightily. It looked irritated and fragile and impervious. 'At last,' it commented tartly, as if just awakened from a catnap, 'you have come to your senses, Wrathman, and

to me.' Time did not touch Geronfrey's iron-bound tower in

Without.

Yet Irissa sensed some absence. The sorcerer had not come to taunt her in some time. How much time? She couldn't say.

Perhaps she shouldn't complain. Time no longer held

much meaning for her. Apparently some suspended state

pertained here. She didn't hunger, nor need to relieve herself or sleep or eat. Her physical state had become less pressing, even as her mind and emotions sharpened. Her magic remained distressingly mute, as if its ordinary

means of expression had been bound and gagged. Worst of all, Irissa's instincts magical and maternal and just plain mortal - had been lulled to sleep. She was almost content to remain here, quietly diminishing. Almost. She roused herself, pressing Kendric's flint and steel

into her closed palm as if they were particularly sharp

nails filed to prick her drowsing senses. The distraction worked. Her vision cleared for a moment. She studied the Dark Mirror where the silver fog of Issiri had left with her spirit-self. The mirror was empty now, peerlessly black. It showed

Irissa herself in widow's weeds

That image, that

notion, was enough to bring her to her feet. No.

The room seemed to have shrunken. Her standing self pushed at the borders of it - ceiling, walls, windows. Cramped, confused, Irissa began to realize that she could no longer afford to remain a prisoner - not only for the sake of those she cared for, but for her own survival.

Yet how was she to breach this wall that separated herself from her magical foundation? Torloc magic was human magic, however unhuman Torlocs might seem at times.

Here in Without lay nothing that touched the humanness in her, nothing that reinforced it. No wonder Geronfrey had found Without hospitable; Irissa felt its empty avarice wringing her dry of everything mostly of will more than magic.

Irissa's fist tightened on the humble flint and steel again. Kendric prized these things as helpful tools, not talismans: he would not let a loss of magic daunt him, he who had braved the world without magic for so long. Flint and steel. Her palm opened as she considered their

dull, workaday forms. Perhaps they would be her last

token of Kendric- and of her children: steel for Thane's

inborn magical nature, flint for Javelle's stony rebellion at her own lack of magic.

Where were they now, her children? How did they fare? And Kendric - fading as the poison fastened on his brightening flesh... No! Geronfrey or not, Without or not, malaise of magic or not, Irissa must try something.

must win free.

Free. The word unleashed an echo in her mind, along routes that were not quite magical. Free, the word wailed. Not free, came an unbidden answer. Not enough, came the self-accusation. I have not done enough. Come help me.

Irissa shuddered, as if very cold or very hot. She looked again to the mirror. A fleeting silver form agitated there - a sliver of herself writhing in its own uncertainty, its own insufficiency. Come help

I can't! Why else send a f*******n fragment of myself? Irissa felt her mind churning these unsaid words at the mirror image. Are you worth nothing, can you do nothing?

Not alone.

We are all of us alone!

Not alone. They are no longer alone.

Who?

They we seek.

They?

Yours and mine.

Ours, you mean. Mine... and yours.