Seven Swords

Chapter 29

The piece was many-angled, with five sides, none of them even. Irissa elevated it, looked through it, into it. She nodded. "Thane. I see him reaching for a sword set high on a wall! Then he will find Rule, find the first sword that Kendric carried-!'

Irissa's excitement ebbed. She looked into the deep well of Scyvilla's shadowed hood, wishing for once to see a spark of light or life there. What passed for his face remained blank and her eyes were drawn bitterly to the glass again.

'But... all in altered now. What good is the possession of a sword reputed to prolong life if that life has already met its end? Thane risks himself, Javelle endangers herself, on a pointless mission one I prodded them to. In seoking to save one, I have lost all, perhaps forever."

Scyvilla's sleeve and nudged the glass pile, making the fragments chime together. "You have yourself still, seeress Pick a shard and read your own fate. Perhaps that one you will see the clearest."

"Perhaps.' Irissa glanced to the bed. "That is touchword of all magical hopes. Perhaps. Kendric was right; perhaps is a fragile pillar to build a life upon.' 'Still, the shards are here, as you are. And he... as well, still. Perhaps you should not let your pessimism predict the future but allow your eyes to glimpse some vista you will like better than "perhaps."'

'Even Kendric could not slice a hair with a sword, yet the rituals of magic sliver hopes finer than any thread. Irissa sighed doubly deeply and lifted a last shard an hourglass-shaped piece that glittered madly as she moved it.

'Time is the key to my riddle, that the glass knows,' she admitted. 'And within my time I see... She stared into the fragment for moments that became minutes.

Scyvilla finally stirred and spoke, a note of pleading in his voice. Seeress. Share your private view. You have never read the shards for yourself. There should be great revelation there."

'Revelation.' Irissa laughed a bit angrily. 'A reveling in revisitation, more like it. This narrow slice' - she shook the piece admonishingly - 'unfolds a panoply of visions - Rule, Rengarth, Edanvant; Geronfrey, long-dead Wrath men, as-yet-unborn forms that flutter at the edges of my eyes.'

Irissa threw the shard to the glass floor, where it shat tered on the sharp edges of its counterparts. Fish scattered silently from the violence done above them.

Too many visions, tainted by too many colors,' she complained, 'too many times and places devouring one another until little clear remains. I have learned nothing, Ludborg, except that I know... nothing.'

The ludborg's brown sleeves swept inward, herding shards into a shining heap. The crystal reassembled between the points of fabric, but its surface was glazed with a thousand minute fracture lines.

'My crystals have always come together seamlessly before,' he remarked.

The rosy end of Irissa's needle-pricked forefinger touched the globe. 'This one won't. Our four fates have been cast into the seams between many worlds - Ken dric's and Thane's and Javelle's and mine - perhaps even into the crooked seam that unravels forever between life and death. And still, I don't know what to do.'

Scyvilla left her there, sitting on the floor with her limbs and garb fanned around her like petals, her head bowed. The ludborg glanced last to Kendric lying in state upon the bed, as stiffly formal in his way as Irissa was limp and disarrayed.

His homely brown hood shook with distress. Dire news, as I feared,' he mumbled as he retreated, and a direr casting.

Candles shortened and fattened in their candelabras, weeping slow, waxen tears.

Tapestries stirred against the stone walls they clothed, setting their woven scenes in faint motion.

Shutters, cast open to the empty, moonless Rengarthian night, made windows into empty-eyed, blind witnesses.

Irissa's shadow fell humped against the wall, only the thin lines of her fingers moving.

Beneath her in the tapestry, shifting like reflection upon water, a figure swelled in the weaving herself, worked in sheer silver.

The threads she wove appeared between her flashing fingers as needed an endless supply so long as she kept her seeress's eyes stitched to her work, so long as she drew on her own inner magical silver and pulled it thin and fine enough to thread any eye of any needle.

So she spun her power into filaments of thread. Then her fingers shaped it into a design atop a background of more common manufacture.

What she wove lay there, not quite within the tapestry. not quite independent of it. Herself she wove, as the surface of that self had been skimmed in Geronfrey's Dark Mirror. Herself as Irissa had confronted that shadow self in the person of Issiri, the consort whom Geronfrey had consigned to dissolution when he had stripped away the unborn son she bore.

Nothing remained of Issiri - here in Rengarth, in Geronfrey's schemes, in the world Without where he had fled, in any world. She had died in a phantom tower at the Paramount Athanor almost twenty years before -if anything so... . ephemeral ... could be said to have lived enough to have died. -

Irissa's eyes and fingers and magic resurrected her in life-size form, in a gossamer of silver thread laced over alapful of coarse tapestry fabric.

Only the eyes remained to be done.

The candle flames were deadening one by one in their sockets. An aurora of thin light was dawning at the open windows. Irissa stared for a moment at the two black eyeholes she had left vacant from the first, then straight ened, rubbed her neck, and sighed.

The tapestries echoed her aspiration with their own gentle sloughing as they swayed to the constant interior draught that laced through the palace like a dry current. Something else stirred, a drape of fabric that was quite walls, not quite door.

Scyvilla, Irissa said without turning to look at the open doorway.

The sad globe of fabric shuffled forward without speaking.

'I have a task for you.'

'Anything.'

Irissa turned to the footstool she had shoved aside hours before. An old falgonskin pouch lay on it, limp and shapeless, the feather-sheen dulled to a faint gleam.

Irissa's numb fingers picked it up and painfully worked it open. Then they blundered for some moments within.

Scyvilla's capacious hood bowed lower. The ludborg knew that that pouch had borne the Overstone egg, emptying only at the moment of Javelle's birth when it had disgorged its own offspring - a silver Iridesium snake that had attached its mobile, metal self to the infant girl.