Seven Swords

Chapter 28

Linked, swaddled in mist and filtered light, the three felt the darkness lift and scatter, flap away like a great dark bird. Beneath their feet the ground grew warts and bumps. Sounds bleated in the distance and overtook them.

And air - cold air slipped through their mutual fog, sharp as frozen knives. At their feet, the cloud that was Eeryon's pet congealed into a coarse-haired form that juggled a growl at the back of its throat.

Something else took shape in the new world - or appeared - as the clouds of Without vanished.

Kendric lay abed, engulfed by a fever that did not flush him so much as tarnish him.

Irissa paced and wrung her hands white, the gesture putting into red relief the measles of needle pricks in fecting her fingertips.

Even Scyvilla paced, in a queer rolling motion that seemed like the hushing of some deep sorrow.

Kendric's collapse had coincided with Scyvilla's arrival and Irissa's bleak hysteria in the room of many tapestries. Now only aimlessly fanning fish stirred on the surround. ing bedchamber walls, where a party of ludborgs had smoothly borne Kendric's unconscious form.

Irissa paused, lifting one of Kendric's hands. Finger prints mottled the skin - gloriously colorful bruises black as ebony and blue as night skies and green as foreign seas and yellow as a sunfall horizon. Poisonous, venemous bruises tricked out in the hues of many shades of toxicity. His body was tattooed with them.

'No one, Irissa swore, pacing, 'can convince me that this great thrashing ... feathered fish... could inflict so many subtle hurts."

"The bruising is a symptom,' Scyvilla put in wearily, of what I saw reflected in my casting crystal. 'Tis a pity he sleeps. I wanted to do a personal reading. It might... make matters clearer.'

Irissa swirled to a stop before the ludborg's ambiguous figure. Its overall rotundity framed the smaller circle of a silver-blue casting crystal rife with other colors, just as swelling colors bruised the black Iridesium banding Irissa's forehead. Hair tendrils twisted around her face like serpents.

With one blow, her fist crashed into the crystal's fragile surface.

Read now. For me.'

Scyvilla's hood opening cinched as if to squeeze out the of fragmenting glass and sight flying drops of blood.

Not so harsh and so hasty, seeress," he moaned, bending to watch the settling shards. 'Better the crystal break of sown inner tension than be broken. I can't say good will come of such a forced scrying.'

Irissa paced and sucked her pierced fingertips with a heedless, childish intensity. Read, anyway. There is no Eye of Edanvant here and I dare not delve into my own laner self, it is so torn in so many directions. Read, I beg you. Ludborg,' she urged, forgetting that he had not borne that name in almost two decades.

She finally crouched alongside him, her silver eyes knife sharp in their edged despair. Her voice cut, too, low and vibrant, painful as broken glass.

"What must I do?' she whispered. Complete the blas phemy of my weaving and revive my shadow self from the tapestry to pass a well-gate to Without? Follow Thane and Javelle? Or cast myself in another direction to pre serve Kendric from this alien taint? Or... stay here and save him better? Whom do I serve best - and how, and where?"

Even the dark within a ludborg's hood seemed to shrink from Irissa's penetrating agony of indecision. Scyvilla lowered his hood to the shattered glass, then spoke.

'Pick one shard," he advised, 'for each person you seek to save, including yourself.'

Irissa's hand hesitated over the glittering array, the ring on her middle finger wheeling through its range of colors. Everything within and without her seemed in flux, as liquid as her will and as quicksilver as her eyes.

She finally seized a long, wedge-shaped splinter. 'Read for Kendric first, as you intended to do when you found us.

The hood nodded noncommittally. "Blade-shaped, like word. A good choice. But you must read for all."

'I?' Irissa glanced over her shoulder to the bed as if haunted. 'I am empty now of all but anxiety. That does not make for accurate future-telling, Seyvilla.

'I am a mere crystal-bearer. You know that, Lady Longitude. I carry the crystals and shepherd the shards to wholeness again when the violence of reading is done I myself have never seen more in the glass than a remote twinkle.'

'But this time you saw something! This time you brought the globe to us, bearing dire news with it.'

'Bearing dire fear, Scyvilla corrected. All I saw was the clear blue of the glass run riot with a rainbow of other colors. I saw the taint, that's all, not any specifics of that toxicity. Read, seeress, the scenes you see in this broken carnival of glass."

Irissa reluctantly bowed her head to the long triangular shard that lay across her b****y palm like an ice dagger. First, she saw that Scyvilla was right: the glass, once a translucent crystal blue, had gone gaudy. Ghostly bruises marred its silvery surface, as if it had been fumed by some poisonous plume of vapor. Yet... even in this diminished state, Irissa could spy a small scene trembling within the limpid colors. 'A bier,' she said. This shard is bier-shaped and that is what I see, a bier with Kendric on it, Kendric wear ing an Iridesium skin as if it were mail and as still as death."

'And... nothing more?'

'Is that not enough?" Irissa had not raised her head or her voice, but the words were sufficiently terrible to make Scyvilla's hood quiver.

There was no answer. She lay the shard softly down. Her fingers hesitated over the other splinters, as if the mere chance of her choice could influence the reading's outcome.

In a moment she had elevated another glass sliver, one needle-fine.

'You narrow your field of view, Scyvilla commented.

'I have seen too much already,' she replied. Then she gathered herself and lifted the thread of glass to the aquatic light glowing from the fish-filled walls.

Javelle,' she said, and sighed. She stared deep into that silvery stiletto of glass. It seemed like peering through the narrowest windowslit onto a countryside she to see in more than such mere slivers of view.

Irissa nodded. 'I see Javelle at a mirror - a thin dark mirror that holds her shadow. Or is it myself I see? I am the one who once was held in t****l to a Dark Mirror! I am the one with shadows - why should Javelle be thus plagued? Is there no end to the consequences set in motion so many worlds and years ago?

There is no end to consequence,' Scyvilla whispered hoarsely, and if you have assigned this shard to your daughter, be assured that what you see in it relates to her.

'Impetuous Javelle,' Irissa said sadly, 'always flying in the face of her own future to shape it to her wants instead of her needs. Why must she tread the dark paths of Without and meet herself in mirrors? Without magic she is a voice keening in the night.'

'You see nothing but darkness in these shards?'

Irissa nodded. There is a slim silver thread that shifts within the shard. Sometimes it shapes the shadow in the mirror, sometimes it wraps Javelle in lightning strokes of illumination. She lay the second shard beside the first. 'I fear it is nothing more than a flaw within the glass."

Scyvilla nodded his lowered hood to the piled shards. 'Again.'

Irissa picked up another quickly, as if drawing lots. "Thane,' she declared, a tremor in her voice, Hope, perhaps.'