Seven Swords

Chapter 31

The last glimmer she saw of it all was a sharp flash of red as Scyvilla unflexed his sleeve to contemplate the Bloodstone lying ripe with possibility and futility in the cradle of his rough robe

What monstrous beast is this?' Eeryon demanded, facing it.

His arm made a supple motion. In an instant Eeryon's velvet sleeve was stripped of its decorative gridwork of thread. Only a dark arm remained - and a braided silver whip that coiled from his hand. It hissed through the air toward the creature who guarded this unnamed world found within the swelling globe of light.

'Wait!' Javelle beseeched, lifting her hand into the path of the sinuous lash.

'What an i***t,' Thane said with disgust, turning his back on the scene.

The whip recoiled harmlessly from Javelle's inter vening arm, but Eeryon's cloud-creature was less polite. It bounded past all three to confront the world's native creature.

Tis your beast that's monstrous and unruly, Eeryon,' Javelle complained. 'Stop it before it hurts something."

'My beast?" Eeryon examined the slavering creature at their forefront. 'I don't know this creature except as a disembodied cloud."

'Oh, a fest upon you both,' Thane intervened. He step ped beyond Eeryon's snarling pet and bent to lift the creature that confronted them by the scruff of its neck.

It dangled from his hand, a four-limbed, furred beast whose ferocious maw was lined with white teeth as well strung as matched pearls.

'Horrible!' Eeryon shuddered, glancing also to the changing form of his pet at their feet. 'Awful,' he repeated. I never knew the worlds beyond Outside housed such freakish creatures. What is this alien thing called?

Felabba, Javelle answered wryly, scooping the cat from her brother's rough custody.

Eeryon watched her cradle it in her arms - jumping back when its long body twisted and sprang to Javelle's shoulder.

You must have followed us through the tapestry, hm? Javelle crooned while the white-furred face sniffed suspiciously at the metallic snakeshead festooning her ear.

Eeryon looked to Thane for explanation, but received his answer elsewhere. From the so-called cat itself.

'It may suit your self-conceit, young lady, to consider it "following," but I remind you that I preceded you here."

Eeryon found his voice rasping in surprise. 'And it... speaks?'

'Doesn't your beast? Thane asked.

Eeryon considered the fearsome yet miserable creature hunched at his feet. It shivered slightly, as if terrified of the new world's strangeness or perhaps of its own new form, as well it might be.

The creature's hairy coat was long and ungroomed, resembling an aurora of gray-brown spines. Eeryon recog nized it for his faithful cloud-companion only because of three gimlet eyes buried in a snarl-haired face - one to each side of a long-toothed muzzle... and one eye inset directly over it.

'You've met Felabba. What do you call yours? asked.

'Nothing. Why should I name it?"

'So it will come when you call."

'Why? It always has come without my calling.'

'So you can call it off' Thane explained. It seems a brutal beast. You had better tame it or it will cause us trouble in this world. This is not Without any longer.

Eeryon shrugged uneasily, the fearsome whip pouring to the ground like a silver waterfall from his hand. 'It is still your... friend, I suppose.' Javelle suggested.

The whip of waterfall flowed backward, up Eeryon's sleeve, separating into liquid threads and embroidering as it went. The sleeve resumed its previous appearance - velvet encrusted with coiling silver threads. Eeryon's empty hand uncurled. He placed a palm tentatively atop the brute's wiry-haired head.

'It's not so soft as your creature.' Eeryon eyed Felabba, who was now loftily overlooking the land from Javelle's shoulder. The young cat sniffed audibly.

'Still, it needs a name,' Javelle said.

Eeryon shook his head, looking bewildered.

'Call it Briarwhip, then.' Javelle couldn't help sounding impatient. Though you should name it yourself.'

I have no fondness for naming.' Eeryon stroked the disordered hair. 'Briarwhip.' Three dully gleaming eyes glanced ambiguously at him.

'Just see that it does what you say, or you can't continue in our company, Thane said briskly.

'Does yours?' Eeryon wondered.

'Does ours what?' 'Do as you say?"

'I should say not,' Felabba answered for herself, leaping to the ground.

'That's different.' Javelle edged over to Thane, well beyond the reach of Briarwhip's drooling maw. 'Felab ba's a mere housecat. She can't harm anyone - not seriously.'

Eeryon eyed the cat dubiously but didn't object. Instead he looked around to the wider world. 'Is this Rule, then?"

'Rule? Oh, Thane, wouldn't it be... magical... if we should happen on it through the first gate!' Javelle smiled tremulously at her brother.

'You want Rule, too?" Thane suspiciously asked Eeryon.

Yes.' Eeryon looked from brother to sister, some trouble tugging at his features, then he smiled stiffly, as if unused to the expression, but ensnared by Javelle's optimism. for one, breathed easier for it. Silver eyes were her mother's

His aqua eyes looked less silver in this world, and Javelle, exclusive coinage, Javelle liked to think, though she knew that any other true Torloc seeress would wear them.

Still, so far, only her mother could claim that distinction. If Javelle herself didn't share it, she wanted to find no other who did.

'I doubt this is Rule,' Felabba pronounced in a cross between an elongated mew and a yawn, ending their speculation.

'Not Rule?' Thane was indignant. 'It could be. We haven't seen for ourselves yet.'

'Then do, and be quick about it,' the cat returned tartly. 'For nothing of Rule that my muddled brain remembers looked like yonder stone outcropping. Now, there's a monster to make much of.'

They inspected the direction in which the cat jerked its whiskers. A broken prominence of stones thrust through the mist, looking like the standing bones of a huge rock ribbed creature. 'How have we missed noticing that landmark?" Eeryon wondered.

Briarwhip's hair stiffened along his ragged spine and a sound part growl, part gurgle bubbled in his throat. 'This world is assembling around us,' Javelle declared, her brow wrinkled in concentration, 'as if seen through mist."

'Perhaps we are mist here,' Eeryon answered, 'as Briar whip was in Without.'

'It's true, Thane said sharply, grudging Eeryon his insight and Javelle her sudden wisdom. For a moment she had reminded him of Irissa. 'We've passed a gate, and an odd one at that. It must take time for the world and us to make ourselves plain to one another.'

'Mother never mentioned such a gap between arrival and the awareness of a new land,' Javelle said. 'And Father arrived with bone-bruising speed in the Inlands."

'Mother and Father are not here now,' noted the cat. It paused in cleaning after the journey to stare intently in a new direction, then resume its l*****g. Its advice continued between licks. 'Best find shelter before you find that this world... holds uglier surprises... than that mangy abomination... you call by the singularly. uninventive... name of Briarwhip.'

The creature thus named jerked at the word. Eeryon's hand smoothed its bristled head until its growls lapsed into a muffled whine.

'At least that one appears to mind,' Javelle commented, regarding the cat. 'I suppose, being a creature of habit, you wish a ride?"

Of course, but not with you.'

Strong back legs catapulted the lithe body atop Thane's shoulder, where its plume of white tail switched past his nose and mouth.

'Mother's familiar prefers you,' Javelle said. 'You're welcome to its weight."

Thane's slight shrug did not unseat the cat. He pointed to the sullen stones in the distance. 'Let's make for shelter. Whoever's cat she is, Felabba knows the way of unknown lands,'

Javelle let her brother take the lead. The magical moment when the birth-snake had come alive to open the gate to Without seemed a dream and a futile one at that. Now it remained a dormant ornament, reminding Javelle of power glimpsed but never truly shared. Eeryon fell into step with her behind Thane, Briarwhip loping at his rear.

'So your mother had a ... familiar.' He nodded at the brush of tail jolting up and down in the twilight murk before them.

Felabba is everyone's better and no one's familiar, to hear Father talk, Javelle answered. After a bit she added less bitterly, 'She or the original Felabba, at least - attached herself to our mother years before we were born."

'What is that like?'

To have a pet or a familiar?'

"To have a mother."

Javelle's dark eyes tilted inquisitively at Eeryon, but he was serious. You ask me to describe what everyone knows - each in his or her own way. For me to have a mother like mine...'

'Yes?'

' ... is to know failure early. She has great powers, my mother.'

'I know,' Eeryon nodded soberly. 'I know what it is to answer to one with command over everything around you.'

'Command? Oh, Mother's power is not in command

'Then why is she mighty?'

'Because she is what she is. And knows it.' Javelle's eyes narrowed. 'Maybe that's my weakness. I know not what I am or rather, I know all too well I am not magic blessed like my mother.'

'You don't have magic?' Eeryon sounded even more. amazed at this revelation than the possession of a mother.

'No. Most people don't, you know. Father didn't, though it was inborn, until he met Mother.'

'Maybe you'll meet someone.'