Seven Swords

Chapter 27

Eeryon smiled. "That's good. I've heard of them, of course. You don't seem so much different.'

To that there was no answer, and it was odd, for although she felt herself very different from Thane noisy, rude, teasing, childish, impossible Thane - she suddenly didn't seem much different from Eeryon. Or rather, he didn't seem much different from her.

'You've never seen any women?' she marveled.

'Father and I live here alone spawn, of course.' except for the cloud

The attacking beast had shrunk to hound-size and was rubbing airily against Eeryon's hip. He ran his fingers through its vaporous mane as if he could feel it. Javelle. That's the third name I've ever heard. It's nice."

She shrugged. Her own name had ceased to intrigue her since it had become common to the tongues all around her. Javelle, come here... Javelle, go... Javelle, do... oh. Javelle, don't... Javelle - now!'

"Only three names,' she mused, struck by an oddity in what Eeryon had said. You must mean yours, and your father's and now mine.' 'My father has no name,' Eeryon said abruptly, 'that I could report. Names are common, Father says. That's why I haven't named this.' He patted the cloud-creature again.

Then you and I must be equally common, Javelle said wryly.

And this Thane, Eeryon added.

'My brother.'

'Brother. I would like to meet a brother as well as a woman.'

'So would I. Can you help me find him? We came... through together.'

"Through?"

'A gate.'

'A gate? But that's what I'm looking for! Do you know of one?'

'I know only that i... we... came through a gate and are now lost in the endless darkness.' 'Oh, it's not endless, and it needn't be dark.'

Eeryon hummed something at the clouds. They clustered together, swelling and shrinking like a bellows, fanning their inner embers of light into a rampant blaze.

You have magic, Javelle accused, not knowing why disappointment stabbed her bitterly.

'Don't you?'

'No.' She wasn't about to claim the serpent's skills for her own. Besides, it was dormant now, a piece of lifeless decoration. She didn't want to make herself ridiculous by ascribing powers to an insensate thing.

'Where do you think the gate was?" Eeryon moved to her side.

The cloud-creature accompanied him, forcing Javelle to edge away. Without knowing how, she found herself strolling toward the distant lights with them both.

'I don't know,' she said, 'I only saw the lights and thought something might be there. Why do you seek a gate, Eeryon?'

"I have a mission.'

'So do we! Thane and I. For our father."

And I also! For mine. Eeryon's face expanded hap pily, as it did with every similarity found or suspicion confirmed. Yet the expression was not quite a smile.

This Eeryon was pathetically easy to please, Javelle concluded, and far more polite than Thane. She studied the young man as he paced her, his thoughtful face illuminated by a soft miasma of clouds. Suddenly, she had new hope for Thane's eventual humanity.

'Perhaps we can find my brother and the gate together, if that's all right,' she suggested. 'Of course. Besides, I am eager to learn more of women. That, again. Javelle tried a safe question.

'What do you know of women already?"

'Nothing," he answered blithely.

'But surely you had a mother."

She expected him to retort that 'mothers' weren't women. It was the sort of thing Thane would say without thinking.

Eeryon stopped walking. 'A mother? No. What is that?

'Why the opposite half of a father. The woman who bore you.' Javelle was astounded that she should have to define the elementary.

'Bore me what?'

'Bore your body, delivered it from her own; reared you from childhood, taught you to walk and talk andt to see the world around you-'

'Father did all that.'

'Not the...bearing part!'

'Perhaps. I don't know, I don't remember.

Well, he couldn't have.'

'My father can do anything.'

'Not that.'

'Yes, he could."

'Believe me, Eeryon, I know something about women, and a mother is as necessary as a father to a child, at least at the beginning. Perhaps yours died, or was lost."

The notion caught his mind and sent it bouncing after possibilities. 'Why would Father have said nothing of it, then?'

Likely her loss troubled him. I don't know what my father would do without my mother."

What does he do... with her?"

Lots of things. Rules a kingdom, rears Thane and myself, talks, argues sometimes... and other things.

Other things?

'Private things that I don't like to think about. It seems undignified. But I do know that not even magic can create a person without a mother. You had to have had one, Eeryon, though like my father's mother, she may have died at your birth. Women do that now and again."

'It must be hard to be one,' he said respectfully. "What is it like, this dying?'

Again Javelle stopped, aghast. 'Haven't you ever seen anything die? Like a bearing-beast or a butterfly? A flower?'

Eeryon's hands spread to embrace the dark. 'Everything here is... eternal. And the only things living I have seen besides Father and myself are the cloud-spawn. They change, not die.'

'Oh. Well, dying is like ... the dark, utter dark. I was just thinking that myself before you and your light came along.'

"Then it's not so bad.' Eeryon sounded relieved. He reached a finger to the serpentine bangle at Javelle's wrist.

'Careful! It's... sharp at the edges.'

'What is it?'

'A... piece of jewelry.

Eeryon seemed puzzled until Javelle gestured at his somber garments, which glittered with silver stitchwork. Decoration. She stared ahead as the lights bobbled in her view. 'Perhaps that's all those glimmers are, too decoration."

'No.' Eeryon squinted in their direction until his eyes seemed colorless. I've never seen them before. I've never seen any light here that wasn't produced by my father or the fires stoked in the cloud-bellies.'

Hopeful, Javelle increased her pace. Eeryon kept her easy company as the lights swelled into bubbles, thes became illuminated globes the size of casting crystals.

Javelle stumbled on the smooth dark at her feet. Someone else was approaching the balls of light from the opposite direction, like a vague mirror image that moved off-step

"Thane!' Her word of recognition fell leadenly in almost empty darkness.

It was her brother, she saw as the figure converged on the bright congeries just as she and Eeryon did. Thane edged around the glowing balls that hung at shoulder level, light and shadow shifting across his face as he neared, making it momentarily unfamiliar.

'You followed!' was his accusing greeting. 'Javelle, you shouldn't have. And who is this?"

'Eeryon. He lives here.'

'In Without?"

"Your "Without" is my "Within," Eeryon said calmly. "This is the lost brother you mentioned?' he asked Javelle. Before she could answer, Thane did. 'I wasn't lost. She was.' He turned back to her.

'If I find the gate back, you must return through it immediately.' 'If,' Javelle sniffed. 'And how will you open it again without my aid?'

'As I would have had your aid not interfered with me before.'

Eeryon had edged away during their debate. Now he circled the globes, staring into their inner curves.

Who is he?" Thane asked suspiciously, under his breath.

'A native of this... nothing... world. He seeks a gate to another world, just as we do.'

You didn't tell him of my mission?" Only that we wanted gates.'

'Don't trust this stranger.' But if he can help us?'

'Better we help ourselves.'

'Oh, is it "we" again?" For now.'

Thane glowered, then stalked over to Eeryon, who was staring into the most subdued of the globes. 'What do you see?'

'Nothing. Eeryon looked up curiously. All the other globes teem with tiny scenes of worlds and of alien won ders. This one is blank, empty - alone of the eight balls.'

'Eight?' Javelle came over.

There were eight windows in the tower.' 'You think these... bubbles are all that remain of those magical windows? Thane said.

"That would be nonsense. We have not grown so large simply by thrusting ourselves through a gate."

'Perhaps the worlds we left have shrunken.' Javelle leaned over a nearby globe.

'Perhaps all worlds seem this puny against the great Dark that imbues Without.' She studied the flitting scenes that sparkled inside the crystal contours of light. This looks like the Inlands, as Father described parts of it.'

'And this is likely Edanvant, this emerald glitter of forest, Thane added, eyeing another floating globe. He moved to inspect yet another and took an audible breath.

'Rule! Or what is left of it.' 'But where is Rengarth?'

Javelle was circling the clus tered balls, looking into seven wondrous eyes of light and one milky cataract of obscured vision. 'Rengarth?' Eeryon sounded startled. 'Rengarth, Thane repeated.

'Does the name mean some thing to you?' 'Not the name. I am given no names except my own. But Javelle sounded like she missed it whe CFCn she spoke, that's all. I wondered what kind of a place one would ...miss.'

'Home,' Javelle answered promptly. 'Won't you miss this when you find your gate and leave it?" 'I don't think so. But you don't want to go back already, do you?' His questing eyes moved from sister to brother.

'No!' Thane was definite.

'No.' Javelle was less certain. Not until we accomplish our task. Task.'

Eeryon's gaze left the vacant globe. Its opaque glassy stare seemed to have sucked his eyes empty of color, until they were all pupil, all dark. 'It's true, we have a similar task-'

Thane turned on Javelle. 'You did tell him-!'

'We all seek a gate from here to elsewhere,' Eeryon intervened, unaware that he did so. 'After we find it, our paths will follow their own lead.'

'I hope so.' Thane frowned at the circled globes, the only light in the ever-encroaching darkness. 'If these are the eight tower windows seen from Outside in, how will we pass to another world unless we squeeze ourselves to the size of marsh-midges?'

'We must begin by going someplace other,' Eeryon declared. Perhaps we must make that place swell to accommodate us.'

'How?' Thane challenged.

Eeryon snapped his fingers, an odd gesture, for the sound fell flat in the vast unpopulated emptiness.

A snarl of dark cloud came bounding out of the deeper darkness, its eyes glimmering in a triangle of points. Thane reached for the short dagger at his belt, uncertain whether he should draw it or not. But the form brushed past him unheeding.

Eeryon never commanded the cloud-creature aloud; it leaped as if on its own volition into the heart of the illuminated globes.

Then its mobile shape expanded and it swallowed one crystal whole - a limpid, buoyant world as brittle as a bubble. Cloud-mist swirled within the globe, stretching it.

The shiny pictured surface pulled tauter than skin. Images grew and blurred. Color dissipated. Shadow scenes and spectral figures thinned like fog.

The globe belled out beyond the other globes, pushing past the three young people - encompassing everything, even the dark. Javelle felt the brushing of a veil - and sensed a sudden hush.

They stood within the cloud, all three, within the expanding globe. She reached for Thane and instead clutched the velvet-sleeved arm of Eeryon. Another hand grasped her serpent-bound wrist from the other direction.