Seven Swords

Chapter 38

hunger. Now she would find. Her reflection twinkled back

at her in the somber twin walls on either side.

Pretty, pretty, pretty. Pretty freedom.

Kendric awoke from fevered dreams-misplaced. The room, lit by low-burning tapers, shivered around him, its geography alien, elusive.

Then he remembered. He slept in a new, makeshift bed

in Irissa's tapestry room. Even now the hangings swam before his eyes, then wavered into familiar shapes around him, stirred by the faint interior wind that never ceased. But... a vague revenant of dream tickled his unease. He would have sworn he saw a wink, a quick silver wink

along the wall!

Perhaps he dreamed of his former bedchamber, where

immured fish glinted through an aquatic glow. Perhaps

he should be there now instead of camping stubbornly in

this empty room where Irissa had been long absent. For nothing had changed in the tapestries in days, despite moving his sickbed here, despite his vigilance. He pushed himself up, trailing the robe that weighed damp with his sweat, and lumbered to the wall.

No. He stared at the tapestry that depicted the mosaic map of Rule inlaid in the Circle of Rule's floor. Except for the sudden reappearance of the tiny isle of Clymerind - and he had spotted that days ago - nothing else had altered.

The white dots of the children and Felabba had become motes too small to distinguish against a mottled back ground once they had left the black rectangle of Without. Even the three dark cinders that dogged them had sunk

into the variegated weave - light or dark, his kin or his

enemy, each entity made a single stitch invisible in the

overall pattern.

Still his dream sighting had been so vivid, so real Kendric pushed his weary body along the walls, studying the tapestry designs in the low candlelight, hunting a glimmer of change.

A thread winked at him from the Inlands. He rushed there to find a silver worm wriggling through Ivrium's red sands. And there! Another tapestry, another trace of silver, no larger than a blue-worm and less bright. Like a single white hair woven into a head of midnight

tresses, the silver thread trailed through a tangle of

tapestries and worlds. Kendric paced it now seemed

to see

streak ahead, stitching through water, burrowing

under buildings.

He wondered if he seized it and pulled, would all the tapestries curdle and draw tight? He wondered if he could rip it from its roots. He was pursuing it around the room until he stumbled against the leg of Irissa's tapestry table and paused, panting.

He braced himself on the frame's side struts, staring down at the great human-shaped hole in the center of her work. From that she had raised the spirit of Issiri. The vacancy remained impenetrable to the point of solidity. If Irissa's needlework had conjured Issiri's soul, what lingered was the opposite of soul, yet necessary to it, as the dark at the back of a mirror makes its silvery face reflective.

He almost touched it, the tangible emptiness, though he dreaded to... but then he saw that the black portion was shrinking, that tapestry threads were growing inward, together, as flesh mends after a wound.

Fascinated, Kendric watched the healing tapestry close upon itself. He wished he could aid the task, that he possessed any power now beyond the ability to falter. Painfully, he reached for the boarskin purse on the cord of his robe flat, unused, worn for old times' sake, as a medal is after a war. Still, he never loosed it, as he never gave up his sillac-hide boots no matter how scuffed they became..

Turning the pouch inside out, he waited for flint and

steel to fall to the crumpled fabric, then remembered he'd given them to Irissa on her quest to the Spectral City. His swollen fingers prodded the flat purse. Once he had carried a Quickstone one of Irissa's coldstone tears transmuted to silver in his custody.

He had spent that rare, that unique coinage of Irissa's eyes and his faith, too, he recalled - given it to a dying shadow, to Issiri because she liked bright things, being born of a Dark Mirror. A single silver pence for the eyes of the dead.

He wished he had kept it now. He wished he still held some talisman to light his way into the dark, slow death poison offered... some hope of change in a hopeless and unchanging situation...some mirror to show where his children were, and how they fared. Where Irissa kept, and what she did there.

The shadow in the tapestry was swelling shut, or shrinking like the pupil of an eye when it sees too much light. Only a platter-size gap remained. Kendric leaned forward to stop it.

In a way, he felt it shut him away from Irissa even more than he had been. When this dark anomaly had dotted out, no trace would remain of what she had done, and how. No trace of Irissa's magic would linger in this room.

His fingers hesitated at the reweaving edge. Then he saw the dark had light - a fleeting cluster of silvery highlights. The dark eddied between his hands, as if he had shaken a bowl of water. Dancing light flickered into the semblance of a face - silver eyes and streaming shining hair, nose, mouth - Irissa's face! Or Issiri's

The face surfaced in the center of the tapestry, pushed up as if breaking water for air. But the black skin of Without held. Kendric could see a nose, chin, forehead swelling out the darkness and sinking back.

The mouth flared in a soundless cry and then the silver was sinking again, fading as the threads interwove, locked together, closed the gap. All the silver pooled into one drop, a tear at the inner

corner of a vanishing eye. Tapestry threads writhed shut beneath it, marooning it there.

Kendric studied the smooth silver cabochon that flected back in miniature the nearing impress of his trembling forefinger. It was hot to his touch then cold like stone. Like Quickstone.

He caught it in his fist and warmed it again. The door

to Irissa had been sealed shut, but perhaps some benign

or careless spirit - Issiri?- had left him a key to another

door.

Silver sea and gray sky spread in all directions. On a shingle of sand littered with dead things, a dingy ruffle of waves tossed to and fro.

Rule was... bright, Javelle complained. 'Neither Father nor Mother ever mentioned a rainy day." There must have been some, Thane said.

Perhaps, but Clymerind was fabled for its beauty. This floating bone of earth we have walked has been picked

clean. Ask the cat. It claims to know everything.'

I have known everything. There is a difference." The

animal shook fine sand from a forefoot, wrinkling its face

until the whiskers waggled. 'I admit, my girl, that I, too,

had more hopeful notions of Clymerind. But who knows

how many years have passed here since its heyday?"

'We do!' Javelle was exasperated enough to stamp an emphatic boot on the packed sand. 'Our parents wandered for some two years between leaving Rule and finally finding Rengarth. I was born within a year of their arrival in Rengarth and am seventeen. Therefore, Clymerind has only been forsaken for twenty years."

Felabba pensively watched the waves play cat and mouse with a crayfish claw. 'A pity that full laughter has not been granted to me,' it commented. 'I should be rolling upon the sand in mirth. I could use a good backscratch. Just say what you mean,' Thane said.

'Indeed.' The cat's white wedge of face lifted to Javelle, its expression excessively sweet. 'What makes you im agine, dear girl, that the years tolled upon this once magical land to the same tune that they sang into your parents' lives? Or that all worlds trickle sand through the same-paced hourglass?"

'But-' Javelle was stunned, but her brother wasn't. 'Don't try to tell us that we have to overcome time as well as gates!' he stormed. 'You walked these lands your self not more than twenty years ago. With our parents'

Felabba batted wearily at the crayfish, flexing pearly nails into dainty scimitars. 'I am Felabba, true - but somewhat more nicely preserved than your parents - or your father, at least. Even though Irissa looks as if she's stood still these twenty years, I have surpassed her. I have grown younger. Does that not... intrigue you?" 'Father did say you were a scruffier brand of feline

earlier, Javelle conceded. "Sharp-boned and sharper tongued," he said once. He didn't go into further detail, 'His restraint was commendable. Felabba licked a salty paw and made a face. 'Children, children, children! Did I not mention my ninety-nine lives? Why do you believe the world - or worlds to stand still because you seem to? I am a later... version... of Felabba, albeit younger. Your parents' Felabba has been gone these... well, many

years. Many,' it added emphatically. The cat rose and strolled down the beach while Thane and Javelle watched speechlessly.

'Not only are we saddled with a nettlesome Felabba, Thane finally commented sourly, 'but we are burdened with a fraudulent Felabba at the same time."

'You sound like Father.' 'I can see why he took the back of his tongue to the

beast. What is she doing now?'

'Digging.' 'I'm hungry, too, but not for such things as wash up

dead.' 'I don't think she's digging for food."

'What, then?' Thane looked truly annoyed. He looked exasperated. He looked like Kendric when he didn't understand something and didn't want to. Javelle pointedly examined the landscape. It is sand.

after all.' Thane's arms clapped to his side. 'And we are hungry. No matter how much sifting time lies loose around us on

this bench, it must still hoard driftwood and something to cook over it.' The two began zig-zagging between the surf's edge and

the dunes, hunting for dry wood and any wet gifts of the

see that were still living. Within half an hour, they had a pile of gnarled, bleached wood smooth as picked bones. They were just in time. Although no sunshine breached the mist, the silver sea was dimming into pewter. Even the fog darkened until they could only see a few feet ahead. Felabba was gone.

Probably dug so deep she fell in,' Thane grumbled as he helped Javelle tent the driftwood into a fire-worthy shape.

The tide could have swept her away." Don't worry. With as many lives as she claims, she'll return to bedevil our descendents." If we survive to have descendants,' Javelle amended.

shivering in the dawning darkness. 'Don't worry about food. We'll find some. First I'll

conjure a fire." Have you ever done it before?"