Seven Swords

Chapter 7

A phantom fish trolled by an undulating length of fluted fins and serpentine muscle. Its rippling side butted the boy sideways. He saw that more than starry fish-eyes lit the depths. Far below, sand sparkled like ground jet beads and obsidian coral coiled into the frame of a mirror. The mirror made up the whole bottom - one vast, smooth, shining plane of perfect darkness. Intrigued, he stroked for the emptily reflective mouth that yawned wider the nearer he flailed.

Then he saw the mouth shrink. He spotted two darker wells above it. Sharks cruised out of the cavern eyes - sleek and silver, seeming almost emissaries of some mammoth being's hidden expression.

A giant face resolved from the bottom sand and coral - a woman's visage writ large in the element of hectic water, floating within it, on it, beneath it. Ghostly ropes of the w**d called seaspit pooled around its black-featured face.

Then it came swooping up for him - all face and all mournful expression. All-consuming. Possessing in the simple cold-blooded way of a fish only an open mouth and then darkness, inner darkness.

Terrified at last, he tried to cry out. At least, his lungs and muscles and mouth moved in that manner. As in a nightmare, no sound came forth here, only the silent, rhythmic delving of the deep in its complacent and eternal turmoil.

No, he shrieked soundlessly as the great swallowing mouth expanded beneath him, around him. No

He was being rapidly withdrawn from the depths grasped in the jaws of some beneficent leviathan driving a tunnel to the surface. Below him the phosphorescent face of water and seaspit pursued, its gigantic features screwed into mask of anger and loss, bottomless loss

Screaming, he broke the water's olly surface. True alt filled his lungs, not the bubble of fraudulent air that had belled him below.

The boy gasped, flailing to stay afloat, then realized he thrashed in an ankle-deep puddle. The water ran rings around him; expanding ripples shrieked to match the cry within his mind. The silver reflection of a face-eyes and mouth and nose - evaporated into reflected candle flames on a jet-dark surface. He looked up, gasping.

A man stood there at the mero's edge, water lapping at the hem of his long robe like some spirit-broken dog The boy heard his own canine panting slow to regular breathing.

"Why?' the man asked. He was more than a man, though the boy didn't know how he knew it, having never seen anyone less than this man.

The sword,' the boy croaked, feeling toadlike squatting there in the shallow water and getting uncomfortably damp at last. I thought it was important. I almost called it up from the Well of the Worlds.'

'It is important. The man withdrew gloved hands from the wide-hemmed sleeves he habitually folded them into. 'It will be even more important when I say so. Get up, my son, and trod on Dark Mirrors no more. And bring your ..pet... with you."

The man turned into the darkness and vanished. The boy didn't move until he shared the darkness with nothing human. Then he stirred and looked around. A detached thunderhead with three lightning-bright eyes cowered near the mirror's congealing edge. The liquid had the consistency of tar now.

The boy pulled himself free limb by limb and backed away from the black spot on the floor.

The cloud-creature rubbed his legs like a cat, then puffed itself higher than a man. The boy patted a curve of cloud, even though his hand passed through it as through fog.

"There'll be much to say,' he told his familiar. It seemed a substantial thing to bear no name, but the boy never knew what to name it. In some ways, he found the cloud creature more real than himself. At least, it did not suffer from his terrible affliction.

Sighing, all triumph washed away by the drowning in the Dark Mirror turned black water, the boy slogged through the formless waste, looking for the shapeless door to what he called home.

Ludborgs by the dozen flocked outside the palace of Solanandor Tierze. In their dun-colored robes amid the colorfully dressed populace - and given their nearly circular dimensions - they resembled nothing so much as walking mudballs.

Still, a ludborg was the center of attention wherever he went, and a flock of ludborgs expanded the center of attention into a circumference.

Cityfolk circled them, as they always did when these bizarre beings moved in a mass from their countryside caves into the public byways. In a land noted for strange forms of nature, ludborgs remained strangely unnatural forms.

Javelle watched them gather from the shadow of the palace swangate. After a moment, she flung herself through the heart-shaped doorway made by facing swans, their long necks arched, into the sunlight beyond.

The palace boasted many entrances and exits, each more exotic than the last. But swangate, constructed by some long-ago Swan Clan Ruler, had always been Javelle's favorite point of departure. Each feather on the giant swans' graceful bodies had been carved from rare black wood and buffed until it glowed with an almost natural sheen. Wood was a luxury in a land where trees were singular.

Not only Javelle had grown fond of swangate. As she left its shelter, a new shadow clung to the puffed swan's breast at the archway's side, then darted after Javelle. She sensed the shadow before she saw it. Whirling, her crinkled locks flew into narrowed eyes.

'Thane! You always follow me!"

He bowed. 'You always precede me, that's all."

'Liar,' she casually countercharged. Her attention had already been distracted by a flurry among the ludborgs. 'Go home,' she ordered.

He shrugged, having anticipated both the order and his subsequent disobedience. Once Javelle had joined the crowd clustering around the ludborgs, Thane slowly circled the gathering, trying to peer through thick bodies and akimbo elbows.

Javelle, a half-head taller, stood on tiptoe and ignored him with great success.

An 'ahhh' from the crowd made Thane challenge the heedless wall of backs with small success. He continued to circle the knotted bodies, unworried about losing sight of Javelle.

Their own dark heads stood out among the lighter Rengarthian ones like a wren-brown ludborg in a peacock pen. Most Rengarthians were pale, wit hair so flaxen it sometimes shone slightly green in sunlight. At most a Rengarthian might boast a cinnamon-dust shade of hair - or the rare red head of the Brenhall Clan.

Thane finally returned to Javelle from the circle's opposite side to ask her outright. 'What is it?'

Utterly absorbed, she no longer begrudged his presence. 'Something from the Spectral City - a veil of spirit-spray, I think.'

'Let me see!' His request went unheeded, despite his rank. Custom made Rengarthian heirs highly dispensable. And Javelle preceded him there as well.

Thane braced himself on his sister's hips and leaped so high his boot bottoms smarted when he came down again.

'Let go!' Javelle complained.

'I can't see.'

'Then use your magic.'

She shrugged him off, terribly adult for a moment in her superior height and irritation. Thane considered the situation. Thoughtless invitations were the kind he most liked to accept, especially when his sister issued them.

He squatted on the ground, observing a forest of vari ously clad calves. Feet scented by everything from bearing beast dung to new-mown grass and crushed ebonberries milled in a manner expressive of their owners' health and gender.

Ground level, at least, offered a break in the solid circle of bodies - Thane could even glimpse the ludborgs' robes pooling on the dusty cobstones and something sinuous shimmering among them.

Another universal 'ah' of delight above spurred his ambitions. He began looking at his nose until his op positely colored silver and gold eyes crossed a feat that had made his sister shriek with disgust since he was nine.

There was more to the trick than Javelle ever knew - or at least, had seen lately. His intent stare produced a visible beam of light frail as mist from each eye. At first blade-straight, the emanations bent and kissed with an almost-metallic hiss, then twined. A slim gilt and silver rope began snaking along the ground among the forest of rooted legs.

It wove between the stately, swollen ankles of market. bound dames, around the thin, knobby joints of children and old men. It hobbled maiden and man, granddam, and even the odd infant set to the ground and temporarily overlooked.

In and out the glittering serpent of Thane's sight wove. sly yet slack, moving more by some interior stretching than an outward motion.

At last the questing tongue of thread came wagging back to him. Thane glanced up. Everyone was still ab sorbed, oblivious of each other and the lacing at their feet.

Thane grinned and leaped upright- and back. The rope his sight had woven jerked back with him. Amid shrieks and curses and much dust, people lurched into one another and then toppled. Javelle went down with satisfying plop, already looking around for him with a sisterly instinct for brotherly mischief.

Thane sank back on his heels, the threads of his vision misting and reeling back into his eyes. Laughing, he easily saw over the fallen heads to the circle's n***d center where rotund ludborgs buzzed in confusion.

"Ah,' Thane said, seeing at last what everyone else had all along - a sheet of shimmering light dappled with rainbow colors on which figures moved and objects took fantastical shape.

Even as he watched, the veil stirred and collapsed, leaving a swarm of dust motes blinking out in the com monplace daylight.

'Satisfied, young sir?' a voice rasped behind him.

Thane swallowed a chortle in mid-glee and twisted his head over his shoulder. Scyvilla stood there, rocking like a disconsolate nursemaid.

Javelle scrabbled over. 'You did it!'

I saw what everyone else did,' Thane answered Scyvilla.

You had an opportunity to see more,' Scyvilla reproved. 'Instead you ended all sight.'

'It was marvelous, Scyvilla, what was it?'

'A piece of the Spectral City. Wherever the city pauses, it leaves a web upon the grasses with its going. Like dew, such remnants fade in sunlight. This fragment refused to fade; hence we conveyed it here to consult our Reginatrix, who alone among us forges some link to the phantoms that inhabit the Spectral City. But overexposure ended it. A pity. I believe it held something that you would one day give a great deal to know.'

Thane remained quiet as the hood bowed deeply to point its eternal inner shadow directly at him. 'I wanted to see it, that's all,' he finally said.

'So did your mother. That is why we . . . er, ludborgs, as they call us now, brought it hither.' Thane shrugged and tried to look indifferent.

'Did Thane's stupid magic banish it?' Javelle asked hopefully.

Just his curiosity, I think,' Scyvilla answered. 'We may yet convey some tatters of this tissue to your lady mother. I will see to what remains.

Scyvilla glided away on unseen, and apparently unshod, Feet

'Midge-mind!' Javelle hissed at Thane. 'I have never known anyone so set on ruining everything.'

'You're just jealous because you couldn't make a flea jump from one end of Thundermist to the other.'

'I can't do any harm, either,' she reminded him.

'Certainly not,' he sneered, 'with a sword.'

His comment had the desired effect. Javelle deserted seniority and dignity to chase him wrathfully through the tangled streets of Solanandor Tierze until they both should so tire of it that they would forget their quarrel.

Irissa stalked the limits of her greeting chamber wrapped in icy dread. She was alone. Rengarth, more than most lands, recognized that its Ruler's spouse had a role in public affairs. Every Reginatrix had her own official chambers in which she could conduct whatever business she wished.

Irissa's greeting chamber had been more of a retreat from rule than an outpost of it. Her tapestry screen commanded a corner, glowing softly blue. Intrigued by the ludborgs' ever-present blue-worms, Irissa had received a supply she was interweaving with more common threads to create an experimental blend that would shed light as well as magic.

She kept a pelt-draped couch there, strewn with Rengarth ian reading matter from the city archives. The tabletops carried several flat glass bowls in which floated some of the rare singing flowers gathered from the empty grasslands.