Seven Swords

Chapter 30

'It's empty, lady,' Scyvilla finally croaked.

Irissa's fingers still fumbled in the pouch.

Finally she elevated between them something answer.

Scyvilla neared a glide or two. 'A... stone, seeress?" A stone. And not a stone. You remember when I first came to Rengarth, before I had found Kendric again? Remember when we met the Hunter, that one-horned bearing-beast who was Geronfrey's creature, that had nearly gored Kendric to death in Edanvant?"

The ludborg's hood nodded unenthusiastically. Clearly he remembered all that she mentioned, and clearly he thought that Irissa had finally and fully forgotten, herself. The room was ripe with despair, with madness, with unspoken rhyme, and no reason.

Scyvilla edged closer, seeming to shrivel.

A bit of sunrise, some ray from one of Rengarth's three suns, pierced the smooth stone between Irissa's elevated fingers. The light transfixed the small cabochon, drawing a flash of blood.

'The Hunter's horn was still dyed red with Kendric's lifeblood, Irissa went on in a soft monotone that sang of memory. 'I... cleansed it of that almost-fatal coating. Then I... collected ... this remnant leeched from Kendric's body into one drop.'

'A... Bloodstone,' Scyvilla breathed.

Irissa glanced to the center finger of her right hand. 'But my ring already bears an Inlands Bloodstone among its five integrated stones. This one is ... redundant." Scyvilla's hood shuddered at the last word. 'I had almost forgotten this stone,' Irissa mused, 'after all these years. It certainly had no use. Now-' She stood briskly, throwing off her fey mood as if shrugging away a cloak that weighed too heavy.

Take it, Scyvilla.'

'No!' He backed away, his round form shivering in a way far different from its usual comical manner. 'Blood stone, lifestone, I want no part of it. Would that I had never mentioned Rengarth to either of you, would that I had never seen it again, rather than that affairs should come to this tragic pass your children lost Without the gate, Kendric mortally poisoned by the spoiled water, you... become, become-'

Irissa advanced on him, her shadow looming above her. the Bloodstone held before her like a weapon.

"Take it. It holds some portion of Kendric's lifeblood. I have decided that these matters can only be unraveled beyond Rengarth, and there I must go, whether I ever return or not."

A shadow of a smile clouded Irissa's grim features. 'I can't help but hope that if the threads of Kendric's life begin to fray completely while I am gone, Ludborg the Fanciful will find a way to use this talisman to sustain him - somehow - until Thane returns with the sword, or I find some other method to save him.'

The ludborg's long, shapeless sleeve extended inch by inch, until its end cupped into a cradle of brown serge. I... am used to bearing casting crystals, not life," Scyvilla said.

Yet you make what was broken whole again. Take this talisman. It will do me no good in the worlds beyond Rengarth. And if you find Kendric failing beyond the slow, seeping death that has been visited upon him, find some way to use it. Use it!'

The sleeve squeezed shut on the small ruby stone and Scyvilla's faceless hood bowed again, whether in sorrow or farewell it mattered not.

'You... leave now, seeress?'

'Almost. I have one last... task. Leave me, then. I would not sweep you out of Rengarth in my train.'

'It will not be Rengarth again until you are all restored to us,' Scyvilla said intently.

But Irissa had turned back to the tapestry falling across the stand. Scyvilla backed from the room, a sleeve clutched to what would be his heart were he human and arranged like one, his hood drooping until not even his vacant faceless face was visible. Irissa felt the room close around her again in solitude. Behind her back, tapestried figures shifted against the wall, watching her, friend and foe alike.

She sat again and picked up the silver thorn of her of her eyes. This time she reached to a large bag at her needle. Now she no longer wove from the coiled skeins feet. Inside shone the satin skeins of many-colored threads. She reached in and pulled a tiny snake of green thread free of the tangle. It threaded her needle, then the implement was cutting like a sword in and out through the thick fabric.

Green eyes grew in the empty black orbs that filled her shadow's eyeholes. It only took a few dozen stitches. Irissa hesitated before taking the last, then glanced around the room.

Her eyes fastened on a tapestry of the Spectral City with herself and Kendric - and farther off, Sin and Aven absorbed into its phantom architecture. She had plied that shape from gossamer thread mingled with the slight est silver of her eyes to give the Spectral City its true translucent beauty.

Now the ghostly woven city shimmered as the wind moved it, brightening under the regard of her seeress's silver eyes. She had not thought of herself as Torloc for some time, isolated from all others of her kind as she had been here in Rengarth for twenty years.

Now Irissa was Torloc through and through again, seeress solely. She didn't even glance to the tapestry beneath her fingers as she took the final, irrevocable stitch.

For an instant, even the air held its breath. The tapestries froze. Irissa hovered, needle poised, over the semblance of herself that lay - a glistening silver mist - over her tapestry stand.

Like winter-conjured breath, the shape swirled in the atmosphere. It swelled, lifted, wafted free of the anchoring fabric.

A spectral Irissa wavered in the air before her, a white washed figure true-to-life in all its detail, down to every silver eyelash. Thin and fitful as the lightest veil, as the finest sheet of wind-sifted snow, it settled over, into Irissa, drifting over her eyes, her hair, her hands, her clothes like glitter-laden dust.

Irissa's terrible resolve, her unspoken grief, shattered momentarily under that gentle assumption of another entity's phantom substance. Her body slumped as if bowing under an unseen weight, then straightened moment after. Her entire form seemed webbed in pale gossamer, then the effect sank into Irissa's everyday presence as snow melts into the less ephemeral earth.

Her eyes gleamed green - Torloc-green - then softened to silver again. On her ring finger, the plain Drawstone beamed its dull, dun-colored glint and subsided.

The tapestries beat against the walls. A wind shook them until the green-gold rings they hung from chimed out of tune. The figure of Kendric flailed his longsword. A moonweasel from Rule wriggled into sinuous mock life. The empty tower room quavered as if struck by lightning.

And the Spectral City danced in a shimmer of silver threads until it, too, rose from its background and scintillated in the very air itself. It, too, stretched and swelled, swallowing tapestry after tapestry in its glittering, vaporous image.

Irissa turned at the agitation and the chiming to meet the Spectral City as it came open-arched to consume her. Smiling, she spread her hands. It fell upon her like rain. She blinked under the semi-invisible onslaught of spectral streets and spectral walls.

Despite the city's icy aspect, Irissa felt warmed. Her magic was working. She had taken the specter of herself into herself and now the Spectral City was infusing the ghost of itself she had long ago woven into her tapestry.

These moments of conjunction were fleeting, she knew. She must find a well and walk through it into another world while her being still housed a spirit-self. She must find Thane and Javelle, Kendric's lost sword, the secret to his mortal preservation... and return before all those quests should ring hollow in the presence of his death here in Rengarth. She must - there was so much she must do... and one quick thing that she must accomplish first ...

Irissa ran toward the misty architecture of the Spectral City, through its ghostly portals and down its evanescent streets. She ran to her own walls and through her own tapestries as if they were spirits.

She was boring through the palace walls, floating up its stairs, rushing through its stone as through air. She felt the Spectral City thinning around her, pulling her into its amorphous wake.

Irissa burst bodilessly through a familiar door, rushed over an unfelt but familiar floor, saw small finned creatures schooling undisturbed at her feet.

By the bed she paused, Kendric lying lifelessly upon it.

He had not moved since being stricken, but his skin had taken on a deeper bruising, until he seemed a metal man hammered from Iridesium - immobile, hollow.

She reached a transparent hand to his face and felt nothing. Tears pooled in her eyes and fell like feathers, wafting into nonexistence.

Scyvilla, looking shrunken, stood guard, his sleeve pinched shut on a mote of Bloodstone. What would happen here, Irissa wondered wildly, while she was gone? What would Kendric think of her mad commitment to an indefensible course?

She might never find her lost children or his lost sword. She might never be able to separate herself from the reborn shadow she had conjured. She might never be able to return in any state. She might never see him again.

But now she saw him for one last, wavering moment, and she let that image burn into her mind and her magic - Kendric poison-forged into mortal metal and only her will and wit and magic to reweave this tapestry into a brighter picture.

The Spectral City tugged on her half-human being, calling the spirit she had made herself into. The corporeal world thinned and faded, even Kendric.