Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (11 page)

He was up with Jaldis, trying to work healing spells without the wherewithal to aid the physical body, for most of the following night.

“Look, I need to get you to some help,” Rhion said to him, during one of the intervals in which the fever had been reduced by means of a spell which had left Rhion himself feeling ill and shaky. He took from the pouch at his belt his own scrying-crystal, a lump of yellowed quartz half the size of his fist, and held it to the wan light from the single window he’d unshuttered when daylight came. “I’m going to try to contact the Ladies of the Moon. They’re the closest place we can take you.”

Jaldis sighed, and his groping hand touched the voice-box long enough for it to whisper the word, “… corrupt…”

But the shake of his head was only of regret, not refusal, and Rhion settled himself into a corner of the old kitchen with his crystal to work.

He chose the kitchen hearth—which he suspected had been the main hearth of the original inn—because at that point a minor ley crossed through the building. Though he couldn’t yet, like Jaldis, simply close his eyes and hear the silvery traces of energy like thin music in the air, he had had the suspicion that the inn was built upon a ley, and a brief test with a pendulum-stone confirmed it. He guessed it was the one connecting the Holy Hill beyond Imber with one of the now-inundated shrines of the ancient city of Sligo. Cradling the crystal in his hands with its largest facet angled to the pallid window-light, he slipped into meditation, and after a few minutes saw, as if reflected in a mirror from over his shoulder and a great distance away, the Gray Lady’s face.

He had never met the Lady of the Drowned Lands, though he had heard of her, from Jaldis, Shavus, and travelers who had passed through the fogbound mazes of swamp and lake and cranberry bog that tangled the Valley of the Morne. She looked puzzled, to see in her scrying-mirror a stranger’s face; but when Rhion explained to her who he was and that Jaldis the Blind was ill and in need at the old inn on the Imber road, she said immediately, “Of course. The Cock in Britches…” Her wide mouth flexed in a smile. “Once the God of Bridges, though I think the sign has a rooster on it these days. There are Marshmen who serve us living near there. I shall send them to fetch you here.”

In the days before the earthquake the city of Sligo, built on a cluster of granite hills where the Morne estuary narrowed to its valley between the hills of Fel and the great granite spine of the Mountains of the Sun, had been among the richest of the Forty Realms, rivaling the inland wealth of Nerriok and ruling most of the In Islands and wide stretches of valley farmland along the great river’s shores. Now all that remained of those fertile farmsteads were the marshy hay meadows and lowland pasturage for the thick-wooled, black-faced sheep, isolated oases among the sweet marshes and salt marshes, thick miles-long beds of angelica and cattail, bog-oak and willow, a thousand crisscrossing water channels where the tall reeds met, rustling overhead, and redbirds and water-goblins dwelled as if the place had been theirs from the foundations of the world. For the rest, Mhorvianne the Merciful, Goddess of Waters, had claimed her own. But whether An, the Moon as she was worshipped in Sligo of old—in Nerriok they worshipped Sioghis, Moon-God of the southern lands—was in fact merely an aspect of Mhorvianne as some said, no one these days knew.

As for the Lady of the Moon, some said she ruled the Marshmen by ancestral right, descended as she was from the Archpriestesses of the ancient shrine; some, that she held sway over them by means of her enchantments. Others claimed that she and her Ladies traded their magic for foodstuffs and wool—still others claimed they traded their bodies as well.

Crouched uneasily beside Jaldis’ head in the stern of the long canoe, watching the black silhouette of the Marshman on the prow, poling with uncanny silence through the dense, fog-locked silence of the salt marsh, Rhion understood why no one could say anything for certain about the Drowned Lands. To enter here was to enter a whispering, sunken labyrinth, where the bulrushes and water weeds grew thick and the footing was uncertain—where the water was never open water, the land never dry land. Hummocks of maple, willow, and moss-dripping salt-oak loomed like matte gray ghosts through wreaths of coiling fog. Now and then, nearly obliterated by tall stands of reeds and almost indistinguishable from the root snags of dead or dying trees, the moss-clotted tips of stone spires and gables could be discerned, rising up through the brown waters, the decaying remains of the buildings sunk deep underneath.

The Marshmen themselves were a silent folk, wiry and small, impossible to track and difficult to speak to even when they consented to be seen. They used the Common Speech intelligibly enough, though with a strange, lilting inflection, but Rhion had to invoke the Spell of Tongues, the magic of hearing words mind to mind, to comprehend what they whispered to one another in their own dialect. Eyes green as angelica or the uncertain hazel which was no identifiable color—the color of the sea where it ran to the salt marsh’s edge—peered watchfully from beneath loose thatches of thick brown hair at the two wizards. Often during the three-day journey, by sled across the frozen sweet marshes, and down here among the brown reed beds of the salt, Rhion had felt the sensation of those strangely colored eyes watching him from somewhere just out of sight.

It was a land of strange superstitions, Jaldis had told him, and beliefs which elsewhere had long since died out. Wrapped in the gray-green plaid of the native blankets, Rhion could see the curling line of blue tattoo marks on the boatman’s hands and ears, and could count half a dozen little “dollies” woven of feathers and straw dangling from the lantern on the canoe’s long prow.

“Rhion…” The voice of the sounding-box was soft as a single viol string, bowed in an empty room. The fog down here in the salt marshes was raw and thick, especially now that night had fallen; in spite of the blankets in which the Marshmen had wrapped him, Jaldis’ breathing sounded bad.

“They will try to take the books,” he murmured, as Rhion bent down close to him to hear. Rhion cast a quick glance up at the Marshman on the prow, then at the bundles of volumes stacked behind Jaldis’ head: books containing the secrets of the Dark Well, the means to look behind the very curtains of Reality; scrolls of demon-spells, and the Magic of Ill.

Like twists of driftwood wrapped in rags, the cold fingers tightened urgently over Rhion’s hands. “The Ladies are greedy for knowledge, stealing it where they can from other mages, other Orders. Do not let them do this…” The voice of the box paused, while Jaldis bent all his attention on stifling a cough, the sound of it deep and muffled with phlegm. He turned his head, feverish again and in pain, as he had been throughout the journey despite all that Rhion could do. “Do not… whatever they may offer. Whatever they may do.”

A drift of salt air stirred the clammy fogs, shifting them like the shredded remains of a rotted gray curtain. Blurs of daffodil-yellow light wavered in the mists. Before them Rhion descried the huge, dim bulk of a domed island, dark masses of trees rising from the waters like a cliff. Below them was a floating platform, designed to rise and fall with the seasonal level of the marshes and the inundations of the tides. Just beyond the circle of the lamplight which surrounded it, marsh-faes skimmed like silver dragonflies above the mist-curled surface of the fen. Looking up at the island, Rhion could see where the long roots of trees and dangling, winter-black vines gripped the ancient blocks of hewn stone walls just visible above the waters; everything seemed thick with moss and slimy with dripping weed.

On the platform itself stood four women, dressed not in the robes of any order of wizardry, but like the Marshwomen themselves, in belted wool tunics of dull plaids or checks, or brightened by crewelwork flowers. The Gray Lady he recognized. Even if he had not seen her in the scrying-stone three days ago, he would have known at first sight of her that she was, like Jaldis, a mage.

“Welcome,” she said, stepping forward. “You are most welcome to the Islands of the Moon.”

When communicating through scrying-crystal, a wizard’s appearance was not the same to another wizard as it was in the flesh; Rhion noted that the Lady was older than she had appeared in the crystal’s depths. Certainly ten years older than he, if not more, her square, homey face was framed in heavy streams of malt-brown hair. There were blue tattoos on her ears, and her hands were knotted and strong from bread bowl, distaff, and loom. The ladies behind her were clearly as used as she to manual tasks, for they lifted Jaldis from his bed in the canoe as easily and deftly as if he had lain on a couch and carried him up the zigzagging wooden stair.

Another lady stepped forward to take the books… “I’ll get those,” Rhion said and shouldered once again the heavy sack. Deeply as he regretted the volumes left behind in Felsplex, he had become very grateful he hadn’t let the impulse to take them all overcome his better judgment.

“As you will,” the Gray Lady said, and he thought he detected a deep-hid flicker of ironic amusement in her hazel eyes.

Like all the Ladies’ dwellings on what had been the tips of Sligo’s hills, the house they had prepared for Jaldis had once been a palace, now fallen into deep decay. Vine and morning-glory from ancient gardens had run riot in centuries of neglect, and the heavy pillars, wider at the top than the bottom, were sheathed thick with cloaks of vegetation that, in several rooms, had begun to part the stones themselves. The walls of the sleeping chamber were still intact, but the windows, glazed with random bits of glass like pieces of a puzzle, were nearly obscured under a thick brown jungle of creepers, an open latticework in the leafless winter, but promising to be an impenetrable petaled curtain in summer months. Throughout the night, as he sat up with the Gray Lady at Jaldis’ bedside, the faint scrape and rustle of that living cloak blended with the Lady’s murmured healing-spells and the bubble of the kettle whose healing steams filled the room with the scents of elfdock and false dandelion; in the morning, their shadows made a dim harlequin of the pearly fog-light where it fell upon Jaldis’ pillow.

“He should rest better now.” The Lady ran her strong brown fingers through her hair, and shook out the cloudy mane of it as she and Rhion stood together in the villa’s ruined porch. Through the milky fog, the glow of the community ovens, not ten yards away amid the overgrown riot of laurel and thorny bougainvillea around what had been a shrine, was no more than a saffron blur, like a yellow pinch of raveled wool, though the fragrance of baking bread hung upon the wet air like a hymn. Beneath it, Rhion smelled damp earth, water, and the sea; beyond the matted vines that enclosed the tiny chamber of the porch, the marsh was utterly silent, save for the isolated notes of stone chimes stirred by a breath of wind. It seemed to Rhion that they were cut off in that shadowy ruin—from the Forty Realms, from his life, and from the future and the past.

“You should get some rest yourself,” she added. She deftly separated and braided the streams of her hair, and her hazel glance took in the grayness of his face, the blue-brown smudges of fatigue more visible when he removed his spectacles to rub his eyes. “You look all-in.” Her voice was low and very sweet, like the music of a rosewood flute heard across water in the night. At times last night, Rhion had not recognized the spells she wove, but had had the impression that the voice was an integral part of them, a lullaby to soothe weary flesh, a bribe to tempt the wavering soul to remain.

“It was just that I’d been working healing-spells without the medicines to go with them,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t have much sleep on the way here. Thank you…” He yawned hugely. The queasiness which sometimes assailed him after he had overstretched his powers was fading, and he felt slightly lightheaded and ravenous for sweets.

“You did well with the spells alone. I’ve seen men much worse in like case.”

Rhion smiled a little. “I don’t think that was my efforts so much as just that Jaldis is too stubborn to let illness get the better of him. I did try to find some herbs—you can usually find borage if you look long enough—but in the winter it’s hard.”

“Perhaps while you’re here you’d like to speak to some of our healers, and see the scrolls and herbals we have in our library.” She gestured out into the impenetrable wall of fog, toward what Rhion had originally taken for the dim shape of a hillock of willow and vine. Now, looking again, he saw the outline of what had been a pillared porch, a few crumbling steps, and the primrose trapezoid of an uneven window, lighted from within.

“Our library goes back to the days of Sligo’s glory, though much of it was lost in the earthquake and the floods that came after. We add to it what we can.”

The words,
Yeah, I was warned about that
, were on his lips, but he clipped them back. The Gray Lady was his host and might very well have saved Jaldis’ life last night. Moreover, in spite of Jaldis’ warnings, after a night of working at her side, of seeing her patient care and her willingness to perform even the most menial of healing chores, he found himself greatly inclined to like the woman.

“Come.” She took his hand and led him to the buckled terrazzo steps. “Channa—the cook—will get you bread and honey… Or shall I have one of the girls bring it to you here?” For she saw him hesitate and glanced back into the slaty gloom of the house, where Jaldis lay helpless with his books piled in the corner near his bed.

“What did he mean,” she asked, his hand still prisoned in those warm, rough peasant fingers, stained with silver and herbs, “when he spoke in his delirium of the Dark Well?”

Rhion had taken the voice-box from him, seeing the sudden intentness of the Lady’s eyes, but not before the old man, clinging to it in fevered dreams, had stammered brokenly of the Well, of the Void, and of voices crying out to him from the iridescent dark. After Rhion had removed it, Jaldis had groped urgently amid the patched linen sheets, his movements more and more frantic, though he had not uttered a sound. Even in his delirium, his pride had flinched from the broken, humiliating bleatings of a mute; in ten and a half years of traveling with him, Rhion had never heard him break that silence.