Seven Swords

Chapter 36

You should not have left bere but old memories. She There is nothing she seeks You must preserve what is here until she can returs with a remedy

You mean preserve mysel Scyvilla's hood nodded sobe

ignoble

No, but- Kendric leased forward, his hands braced on the tapestry frame. The hole- the hum shaped hole in the fabric - was blank, en utter absence. He could not see through it to the tapestry table beneath. If he brought his hand to it, some force kept his flesh from passing through, from even contacting that flat black s

Kendric drew upright and walked - fairly steadily to the wall where a tapestry swagged low an uns end. He lifted the draping fabric, smiling sadly at how much effort even such a feeble gesture took

T'll have that rehung by tomorrow, Scyvilla was scurty ing after him, like a palace flunky or any random ludborg. That is how people served him these days. Kandrit thought ruefully, they scurried after waiting to catch

him when he fell. It was not a warrior's end. But then, he had not been a warrior for some time.

He paused at another tapestry. He studied another black blot of Irissa's making the midnight-dark rectangle outlined by a windowframe in the scene of a many windowed tower. He blinked several times to make sure his eyes were not bewitching him. 'Gone,' he repeated, less dolefully. 'Gone,' he said, even

hopefully. 'Ruler?'

'Call me Kendric,' he growled over his shoulder. The least you can do for the dying is to call them by name." Scyvilla was silent. People often were nowadays when Kendric spoke the truth. His truths used to be less blunt and loomed much smaller.

Kendric ignored Scyvilla and concentrated on the woven window. "Gone. All three. Even that cursed cat. They must be somewhere else." Kendric began striding back and forth along the room's

four tapestry-hung walls. Every so often his steps faltered.

He stopped, swayed, caught hold of a fistful of fabric.

Tapestry and Kendric swayed drunkenly together against

the wall.

Scyvilla's drooping hood almost covered his hidden face, like an eyelid shutting out a sight too painful to view. Kendric kept muttering to himself, single words, meaning less phrases.

'Where? First, Without. Then-? Not Inlands - or the Cincture? Delevant? No... His fingers traced the threads, passing over whole worlds in a few moments. Like one blind he pawed the tapestries until they shivered under his raw, searching touch.

In the center of the room, Scyvilla moaned helplessly. 'By Finorian's great horned toenail!' Kendric roared, stopping as if thunderstruck. Scyvilla jumped, quivering under his robes until he

seemed struck by palsy. 'Look!' Kendric's eyes turned to him. Their warm golden brown had darkened to a rusty black in recent

days, but no alteration in Kendric's aspect could disguise the tremor of pure excitement that shivered through him now.

His palm hit the tapestry, drove it to the wall several times, until a veil of dust shimmered forth. 'Here,' Kendric insisted. 'And not here before. Here -

in Rule, of all places. Clymerind! Sunken Clymerind. Do

you see it?' Scyvilla edged morosely over. 'An island, Ru - Kendric, Only an island.'

A new island. Or an old island become new. Clymerind. They change, don't you see? Change to reflect reality elsewhere. And here these... dots. Javelle and Thane and that cursed cat. Don't you see?'

In his excitement, Kendric caught the scruff of Scyvilla's robe and pulled the hood to face directly at the small cluster of threads that represented the island.

'Don't you see?' he demanded again. Scyvilla shrugged politely and wriggled fruitlessly in Kendric's grasp. 'I see that you are optimistic again. That is good. Now if you would rest and let the Bloodstone

work to restore you-' 'Rest?' Kendric spit the word out like a curse. He stared at the island. For the first time since his illness, a smile touched his sharpened features. 'Rule. Then they will find a gate back to Rengarth. But Irissa? Why is she not with them? And what are those... His forefinger prod ded the island. ... those dark dots with the three light ones. Three dark dots... one for each gatetaker.'

'Simply knots in the weave, old friend,' Scyvilla said in anguished tones. 'Now come back with me to your bedchamber and rest."

'No! Bring bedchamber here, then, if you must have me there. Bring a bed, anyway. I will not leave this room."

'But-'

'I will not leave my one set of windows on the landscape without, where all I hold dear moves like motes through interwoven worlds.'

Scyvilla's robe collapsed as if deflated. "As you wish, so long as you rest."

Rest.' Kendric tasted the word. Who are the "rest" with my children? The others. One might be Irissa, but He hardly noticed the ludborg easing away on a liquid gelt. His hand smoothed the tapestry and cupped the tiny island of Clymerind. "Moving," he murmured, chuckling a

little. 'On the move, small island, as of old. His expression darkened. 'Trissa. Where? Already the benefits of the Bloodstone Scyvilla had crushed into the borgia were ebbing. Kendric sighed and stumbled painfully to Irissa's abandoned tapestry. He stared Into its central void, his clearer eye shaping the outline.

Something in his heart or mind told him that Thane and levelle and even the cursed cat were alive and moving in a world he once knew well. Nothing reassured him similarly about Irissa.

She seemed to have dropped into a well, into the hole of her own construction. Not since he had known her had Kendric sensed such utter absence, as if part of his magic had fallen away, leaving the rest of it shored up only by his will.

The sickness, he told himself, repeating the word again, as though finding himself fatally ill were some reassurance. If fading faculties were the only reason for his unease, for the hollow core of loss within him, then

be could die happy. If it were not if he believed, suspected, that Irissa and their children were caught in some dangerous worlds-wide web-why, then he refused to die at all! It would be just like Irissa, be thought, to leave him

alone in the dark in hopes that he would turn terminally

stubborn and live.

She had never known such despair. Iron, the windows were buckled shut with alien iron and would not bend to her magic. The one window's black tunnel to Rengarth was haunted

by the ghost of her own being. To plunge into it would be to embrace full spirithood.

Geronfrey had not appeared again. She suspected his absence had more reason than an intent to disturb her peace of mind. She suspected he was... busy... elsewhere.

Irissa moaned and slapped one fist into the other palm. So she had seen Kendric chafe at inaction - and had never understood it. She paced the round chamber, growing angrier, thinking in circles, too.

Thane and Javelle had found Without and then a way from Without, that she knew. And so had Geronfrey's shadow son.

found

What was he - this ill-conceived twin to Javelle's conception - this awful... twice-stolen being? First Geronfrey had skimmed Irissa's reflection from the surface of his Dark Mirror; then he had nurtured his shadow Irissa into a shadow wife and finally the mother of a shadow son. Now that shadow son pursued Irissa's and Kendric's son, haunted his unshadowed twin, Javelle, who had

no notion of her terrible kinship to a twisted thing, a

purloined soul.

Irissa bit her knuckles and paused at the black mirror. The ghost she had assumed radiated around her image, soft as mist over the moon. She would almost risk the plunge, if it would do some good.

But something prevented her - some impulse not purely her own. Some shadow force moved on behalf of the shadow son-moved within her, subverted her will. She sat suddenly on the floor. This iron room iced

her joints, made her mind stiff as well. Her magic had

congealed into an impotent fist inside her.

Something else resided within her, she admitted ner vously the resurrected Issiri she had woven from the silver of her eyes and donned like a cloak. Even Geronfrey had not perceived that subtle ... addition. Why should he? Issiri had been only a tool to him, a vacant repository of his ambition, his vanity. He presumed her destroyed these many years.

But she was not dead, friss had met the hom of a ghost and paradoxically felt it stir within her - faintly, as wind on water. Irisse turned her face toward the Dark Mirror. Her own face

met her-phosphorescent as waterwand She saw the sad features disperse in widening rings of motion that dissolved like shivered moonlight on the ripples. Like a wailwraith glimpsed through many fathoms

Relense. A wallwraith always sought release from its wet

environs why else would it wail?

Irissa heard a thin keening now watery, woeful. She recognized it for an echo of her own - a mother mourn ing a lost son. Who else would find a lost magical son if not the magical mother? Or- the idea made Irissa sit up straighter and breathe

harder - if one mother might not go, perhaps another

could. If one son could not be followed into the abyss,

perhaps the other could.

She stared into her reflected face lapping at the edges of the mirror frame. The dark tide that had borne Irissa here underlay all the worlds, so Kendric thought. If so, it could sweep a spirit away, all the way to... Rule.

And if that spirit sought its own, its lost son, it would find Irissa's lost also- son and daughter. For Irissa knew with every mote of magic in her mind that where Thane and Javelle would go to fetch Kendric's forsaken sword, so Geronfrey's shadow son would ultimately come.

And the shadow Irissa? To whose aid would she go with her minor magic and her spectral emotions? She would help the other, Irissa knew that, the shadow like herself. But she would not assist Geronfrey, not he who had torn the half-life and the shadow spawn from her with one twofold blow of possession and destruction.

Issiri- or what remained of her would not help Geronfrey. And that was who Irissa really feared. She lifted her hands to the Dark Mirror, watching ghostly

palms return the gesture. Her self-control loosened.

An airy tension lifted from Irissa's mind and body. She

almost saw it emanate along her fingertips and wreathe the mirror, infusing the semblance of herself. A moment's regret made Irissa cry out. "Wait!' Wai-ai-ai-ai-t, the echo came within her veins.

The pale reflection was spreading into the darkness of a single open mouth, screaming. Issiri - the remnant of Issiri - streamed away on the dark current, so rapidly its parting wail became a memory before Irissa's ears could even discern it.

Irissa felt suddenly hollow, even of hope. Unfelt as Issiri had been, her absence left a core of Dark Mirror in her host. Irissa saw deeper and darker into herself than she ever had before. What had she released and to where? Issiri could have dissipated into the dark river that underlies all worlds. Issiri could have flown like a death raven to pick the bones of Thane and Javelle and screech

exultation at the survival of her own shadowy son. Or, Issiri could have gone as Irissa would have had she been able to spare her own son while destroying nothing other.

It was all could and no certainty, at a time ringed round with ugly realities - Kendric mortally ill, and mortal besides; the children lost on a mission of Irissa's devising; Irissa exiled to one of Without's most confining corners. Enemies free ... and allies all endangered.

Irissa lowered her head until the Iridesium circlet touched her knees. She shut her eyes until she could no

longer see what she wished not to see. She was prisoner to Geronfrey for now, yes. But most of all, she was prisoner to her own hope.

The black buzzing mote that was Goronfrey dashed itself at the pillar's transparent wall. Again and again it met the glowing disc of Thane's magic. Thane pushed the circle closer on each attack, until the core of darkness in the pillar's heart narrowed like a cat's

iris. As it sealed, Thane thrust the disc edgewise in the

seama gilded scar to mark the place forever.

Is it shut now?' Javelle worried."