Seven Swords

Chapter 8

The flowers - broad-petaled, fist-sized blooms of oddly dull colors - were dormant now. They cast only a thin, silvery hum into the air that Irissa found more soothing than their normally boisterous vocalizations.

'Seeress.' Scyvilla was bowing in the doorway, a posture that was noticeable only in that his body now resembled a half-moon instead of a full one. Still, his tone had been suitably serious.

Irissa came quickly to the central table supported wheel of polished weepwillowwood she had imported from Rule by means she never discussed.

'Lay it here.'

Scyvilla complied, unfolding a thin iridescent rag in the table's center. "This is all?' There was considerably more - I was compelled to enlist a full dozen of my kind to help convey the whole here.'

"Then what happened?'

'Your son.'

'Oh. Dare I ask?'

'In his eagerness to see it, he raised a ruckus around it. Dust, direct sunlight, wind - singly or together, they were too much for a thing of such elusive delicacy. I saved what few ... shards I could.'

Irissa's long fingers smoothed the wrinkled tissue, which was skin-thin. 'He is-'

'Ignorant,' Scyvilla obliged. 'And a festy, high-spirited lad who should learn some responsibility.' 'Easier said than done,' she replied. 'Have you offspring, Scyvilla?"

The hood was silent. 'We do not... quite... do things that way. No doubt from observing others.'

'Observe this fragment,' Irissa suggested. 'I would have been grateful for the whole, but if this is all we have-'

'Hmmm.' Scyvilla's hood hovered over the remnant. The table's tight woodgrain pattern could be seen through the diaphanous stuff. Some other, opposite pattern moved in the gossamer threads, but faintly.

And then the fabric melted... or rewove itself. A subtle rearrangement of threads evoked a face in the cloth - a face shaped in whorls much like the grain of watered silk. It was a face seen in water, through water - moving water.

'Neva?' Irissa wondered.

The fabric is pale, so it reminds you of that white miened woman,' Scyvilla cautioned her. 'But it could be anyone. How long since you have seen Neva?'

'Not since... Javelle's birth, when the Spectral City over laid its image on Solanandor Tierze so Neva and Aven could be with me, though both were only specters then

Irissa frowned, then sighed, putting a hand to the Iridesium that braceleted her brow as if it bound her.

'I know not the price they paid to perform that wonder I was... too weary and too wonder-worn myself at the time. But I have never seen them since, nor any trace of the Spectral City.

'Yet it comes... and goes. We ludborgs have seen it a time or two - though never near and never very clear. It fades, Reginatrix."

'Forever?'

'Do not all things?"

Irissa wrapped her hands about her arms and paced, her midnight hair rippling with cobalt highlights in the glow given by the distant blue-worms.

The Spectral City has always been part of Rengarth, she declared as if also asking. 'As far as we know.'

If it fades now, then my... our arrival has caused it. She paused at the fragment, at the glimmer of a face watching from within the delicate weave. 'I must go there. I must find it again."

To save them?' Scyvilla wondered. The look Irissa gave him conveyed all her one thing else - her shame.

"To save myself again, as before.

'Some outer force threatens?"

Irissa smiled wearily.

'No, inner." "What then?'

'Life,' she said, 'and death."

'A journey alone?'

Kendric had sought Irissa in her greeting chamber. He had not sought the news she gave him.

She sat at her tapestry stand, tranquilly embroidering a moonweasel into the design, which represented bestiary of places they had visited.

He studied the cool blue of her profile as the blue-worms painted it.

And you call me stubborn.

You haven't even argued yet.'

"Why should I?' He slapped his hands to his sides. "Yet I must point out that you propose to commit the offense for which you berated Javelle.

She eyed him over the point of the slender silver needle gleaming in the unnatural light.

How? I will take nothing that is not mine, and cer tainly not your sword. I am not leaving without first leaving word of my departure. And I go armed with more than a sword - my mature magic. What have I to fear in Rengarth?"

'Geronfrey,' Kendric reminded her brutally.

'We have heard or seen nothing of him since he slipped into a gate to the world Without with his... spawn."

'Nineteen years ago,' Kendric snorted. 'An eyebat to a life-prolonging sorcerer like Geronfrey. He called Rengarth his for more years than a Torloc lives. I doubt we've seen the last of him.'

'Nevertheless, I must go.'

'Why? You still cannot present a reason strong And why can't I go with you?' enough.

'Geronfrey,' she retorted. 'If he lurks, someone must stay and guard the children, the kingdom.'

The kingdom! I rule everything but my own family."

Irissa's head tilted. 'Would you want to?' He thought, then laughed. 'No, you are more interesting unruly. But, Irissa, tell me at least the need for this sudden quest of yours. Does some danger threaten that you wish to spare us?'

Her face tightened.

'If you believe you spare us, you are wrong. You can never spare us our caring, our worry."

She almost answered, and what that answer would have been neither he nor she could have said. Instead, she pointed to the table, to the wafer of fabric lying there, dissolving there into the whorls of woodgrain sup porting it.

'It's an... imprint of the Spectral City, Kendric. Of the Spectral City's soul, I think. The image fades even as w eye it. Can you not still read a plea for aid, even when is inscribed on a cloud?"

'Who pleads? The face is familiar, but... unreadable

Irissa watched Kendric hover over the fragile wisp his strong hands braced heel-down on the table edge, his shoulders hunched. Her own face fractured - as if torn into emotions too various to fit into a single frame.

She stared at him staring at the fragment, then saw the blue light strike a silver glint off the hairs upon his knuckles.

Irissa's needle plunged into the tapestry and stayed there, like a sword driven home, a question asked and answered in the same breath..

'Whose face?' he asked again, racking his remembrance. She rose and went to stand beside him. 'A citizen of the Spectral City who is ... was . . . very close to us.'

'Neva?'

She nodded.

'Or... Aven?"

She nodded again.

'Both?'

Again.

'And more than they?"

'I believe so, but I cannot say. Unless I go.'

He nodded then, putting a hand to her shoulder. 'You never stopped me from meeting my fate, even when you thought the means crude and bloodsome. I find magic too refined and soul-curdling, but it is your medium, seeress. Make of it what you must.'

They stood for a while like that, then Kendric turned and left the room.

Irissa bowed her head and put her hand to the tabletop, gently, upon the disintegrating shimmer. Her fingertips hushed the voiceless oval of the open, wailing mouth. Around her, the floating flowers keened like a faraway wind.

She had traced, finally, the features, between the time that Scyvilla had left her and Kendric came to her. She knew the face now, and knew the name.

It was herself. Or a phantom of herself, or of that phantom. Had Kendric not been surprised by her decision, and sorely troubled, he would have noticed, Irissa thought, both glad - and sad that he had not.

Her thumb reached to the betraying band of iridescence across the fading brow and erased it with a stroke.

From any tower in Solanandor Tierze, one could see Rengarth stretching willy-nilly in every direction and looking, in any direction, the same.

Yet the land exuded a wild abandon that made it mora than magical. Wreaths of grass and singing flowers carpeted hill and vale. Hills cradled ponds and lakes and streams in thousands of amiable dimples. The land went on forever, and kept its secrets well.

After nearly twenty years to reclaim it, Kendric, who had been conceived but not born here, still found Rengarth alien. He brooded while watching Irissa guide Javelle's mount into the hock-high grasses that grew a spear's throw past the city gates.

Those who mowed the grass from the city fringes were ancestrally appointed guardians of a sort, more revered than gatekeepers. Some instinct told them to barber just so far and no more. And from that invisible point on, the grasses sprang up unfettered, hissing like snakes in the wind, hiding bog and burrow and the real, n***d face of Rengarth.

Now Irissa rode alone into that deceptively open wilder ness, on an errand she was uncharacteristically close mouthed about.

'Mother need fear nothing in Rengarth,' Thane offered in that odd blend of boast and empathy so common to lads his age.

Javelle, on Kendric's other side, simply bit her lip. Kendric glanced to her white fists on the rampart stones and smiled. She might not have shared her mother's magical powers, but Javelle had full measure of Irissa's passionate self-control.. He suspected that what rode

Javelle was not worry for her mother's safety, but a fierce wish to be in her place.

Kendric ruffled Thane's smooth hair and shook Javelle's knotted shoulder. It was comforting to have partners in puzzlement when confronted with another's eternal mystery.

Your mother is a seeress,' he reminded their children. There are times when that ... calling . . . overrides all else. It has never slain her yet.'

His words comforted himself as much as any other. Once, long ago, he had presumed to spare Irissa knowl edge of a hidden hazard he saw better than she. Now, he feared, the scale had counterbalanced, the boot was on the other foot. And it pinched.

At the brow of the hill dusted with the dawn's golden pollen, the rider paused. A silhouette against the rising suns, Irissa seemed to look back. Those on the tower top strained to see her daily familiarity in that tiny image about to plummet into unbridled Rengarth all three - and failed.

Irissa, far below and far away, discerned little more of her watching family - just a distant peak bracketed by a foothill on either side standing dark against Solanandor Tierze's pale stones. The familiar juxtaposition made her smile.

She drew her shortsword and waved the bare blade in the glare of Rengarth's three rising suns. Whether the watching figures saw anything was impossible to tell, but Irissa felt more optimistic for her exuberant gesture.

'Come, Thundermist,' she urged Javelle's dainty mount, and it plunged down the hill into a sea of grass.

Before her Rengarth stretched, a blue-green carpet kept rolled too long and therefore lying lumpily over the earth. Several glistening trails overlaid the emerald grasses - pathwindings of the normally nocturnal grass weavers.

Irissa had no desire to encounter these huge translucent worms and reined the bearing-beast west, away from the dew-drenched grasslands. Where the Spectral City might lie now that it had proven shy was something only instinct would determine.

She rode most of the day, relishing the solitary pleasure of her own company and feeling a bit ashamed of that luxury. The only shadow on the earth was that cast by herself and her bearing-beast- a two-headed, many-footed monster that shrank or elongated as the suns swung high and then low again in the sky.

A selection of foodstuffs plumped out the bags that hung almost ornamentally from Thundermist's saddle. For drink there was an empty canteen fashioned from tough-scaled skin. Rengarth bubbled with water, as if situated over some constant wellspring. Irissa had only to dismount and fill her canteen at a nearby stream, pond, or lake. The water would be fresh and pure; nothing spoiled in Rengarth unless someone made it spoil. Poison was the greatest violation of Rengarth's nature, hence its people's favored weapon.

Irissa pondered this as she rode, remembering that a poison-taunt from Rengarth had laid her low in Edanvant for a time. Hungry, she nibbled a tawny longcake left over from Scyvilla's celebration dinner. Dry, she scanned the rippled horizon for a glint of water.

There!" she confided to Thundermist's obligingly pricked ear. 'You'd fancy a drop, too, I think.' She brushed her trousered calves against the sun-warmed belly and the bearing-beast cantered forward.

The promised water turned out to be one of those solitary springs that sprinkled the land for no discernible reason. Irissa happily hurled herself off Thundermist's swelling sides - she was unused to going beast-back, and her leg muscles were protesting already.

The animal instantly dipped its muzzle to the water, unperturbed by the constant ripples that raced from the spring's ice-white center. No twin image of Thundermist's long, large-lipped head floated on the water's surface, Water was unreflective in Rengarth, not even the blue of the sky found reproduction there.