Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (12 page)

Now the Lady was watching him again, with sharp interest in her face. “The most ancient scrolls in the Library make mention of something called a Well of Seeing,” she continued. “It was said to ‘grant sight into other worlds and other times.’ Not ‘other lands’… the glyph is very clear. ‘Other worlds.’ ”

“I…I don’t…” Rhion stammered, wanting to avoid the clear, water-colored gaze and unable to look away. “He found reference to it in some notes he’d inherited from another wizard in Felsplex. He was searching through them when the mob broke into the inn. We got out with our lives, but the notes were destroyed. ” The story sounded lame and thin even to him. He cursed the exhaustion that seemed suddenly to weight his tongue and clog his brain, as if the inventive portion of his mind had taken the equivalent of
pheelas
root and subsided into numbed oblivion.

The Lady leaned one broad shoulder against the marble hip of a caryatid nearly hidden within the vines beside her, and her hand, still enclosing Rhion’s, had that same quality that Jaldis’ sometimes did, as if through her grip she could read the bones within his flesh and plumb the shallow, sparkling shoals of his soul. “You escaped with your lives—and with the books?”

“With what we could seize.”
He felt a kind of confusion creeping over him, his mind distracted by the question of whether it would be worse to avoid her eyes or to try to hold that clear, tawny gaze… wanting to will himself to meet her eyes but obliquely aware that if he did she could read his heart. And through it all her sweet alto voice drew at his concentration as it had drawn back Jaldis’ wavering will to live.

“The books, but not the notes, that so filled his fevered dreams?”

“I… That is…” He knew he should make some reply but could not frame anything even remotely believable. He felt tangled, enmeshed in his own evasions, between the strength of her hand and the strength of her gaze and the gentle, drawing sweetness of her voice. To lie seemed, not useless, but unspeakably trivial, like a child lying about the size of a fish it has seen. She waited quietly, watching him, as if they had been there together, with her watching and waiting for the truth, since the foundation stones of time were laid…

For an instant it seemed as if that were, in fact, the case—a moment later it flashed through his mind,
Nonsense, if we’d been here since the beginning of time we’d have felt the earthquake
… and somehow that gave him the last foundering grasp of logic needed for him to look away from her eyes. He found he was panting, his face clammy with sweat in the raw dampness of the morning. Desperately he fixed his thoughts on Jaldis’ buzzing voice:
They are greedy for knowledge… greedy for knowledge
… the gentle coaxing did not seem to him like greed, but that, he understood now, was part of the spell.

He pulled his hand from her grasp and it came easily—he had to catch himself against the caryatid opposite the one she leaned upon, as if she had drawn him off balance physically as well as in his mind.

After a moment that flute-soft voice said, “I see. A thing of great power… a thing to be kept hidden at all costs.”

Face still averted, Rhion managed to whisper, “I don’t know about that.”

There was silence, filled with the scents of water and fog, but he felt her mind still bent upon his, surrounded by the implacable strength of her spells.

He took a deep breath. “Please let me go.”

Her fingers, firm as the fingers of the caryatids would be, but warm and vibrant, touched his brow, feeling the perspiration that wet his skin. “You work very hard for a man who claims nothing to protect.” But she was teasing him now. Instead of the heart-dragging beauty of her spells, her voice was light, like a healer’s magic flute playing children’s songs for joy.

He looked around at her again and saw only a sturdy brown-haired woman with one braid plaited and the other still undone upon her shoulder, and a smile, half mocking, half affectionate, in her eyes. Abstractedly he identified the crewelwork flowers on her homespun gown as marigold, lobelia, thistle and iris; a thin strand of blue spirit-beads circled her throat.

“Go back and sit with him,” she said gently. “I’ll send someone over with bread and honey—and I promise you I won’t dose it to question you further or to send you to sleep.” And she smiled again at his blush. “You may sleep, if you will. No one will trouble you.”

Rhion wasn’t sure he could believe her on that score—he’d been badly shaken by the spells she’d cast—but as he stumbled back into the dimness of the house, he reflected that he probably didn’t have much choice in the matter. He stood for a moment in the doorway of Jaldis’ room, looking at the cracked black-and-white mosaic of the ancient tile floor, the frescoes of birds and dancers on the walls, faded now to cloudy shapes, like music heard too far away to distinguish the tune. His body hurt for sleep, and more than that for food, particularly sweets; he knew, too, that any circle or spell of protection he might lay around the books stacked in the corner beyond the bed would be, at this point, no more potent than the chalk scribbles around the bed itself, smudged by feet and bereft of their power.

Propped upon pillows, Jaldis lay in the narrow bed of cottonwood poles, deeply asleep, a vessel of gently steaming water on either side. For some time Rhion stood looking down at the ruined face, too exhausted to feel much beyond a tremendous sadness for which he could find no name.

In time he picked up Jaldis’ cloak and mashed it into a rude pillow and, wrapping himself in his own cloak, lay down in front of the books on the floor. He slept almost at once and dreamed of starlight and witchfire and snow-clad silence, all reflected in shy gray eyes.

Jaldis mended slowly. The Gray Lady and the other Ladies of the Moon whom Rhion quickly came to know well nursed the old man by turns, not only with the healing spells and herb-lore for which they were famed throughout the eastern realms, but with a patient diligence and unstinting sympathy that, he suspected, had more to do with healing than all the medicines in the world. After that first morning, the Gray Lady made no further effort to question him regarding the Dark Well, though Rhion would generally volunteer to sit with his master at night, when his fever rose and he sometimes spoke in his dreams.

“You did rightly,” Jaldis said, when Rhion told him about why he had taken the voice-box from him that night. “It is not well that the Witches of the Moon learn the secrets of the Morkensik Order.” His voice was a fragile thread; his hand stroked restlessly at the silky curve of the dark red wood, toyed with the glittering flotsam of talismans among the faded quilts.

“I don’t think she learned any secrets.” Rhion glanced across at the books, still heaped in their corner with his discarded blankets and the empty bowl from his breakfast. In spite of the Gray Lady’s assurances, he’d been a little dubious about the breakfast; much as it was his instinct to like her, he wouldn’t have put it past her to dose his porridge with
pheelas
root; and several times in the course of the morning, he’d summoned a little fleck of ball lightning to the ends of his fingers, just to make sure he still could.

“But you were speaking of things you had seen—of boats with metal wings that flew through the sky, of carts that moved without horses. Of magic things without magic.”

“Magic things without magic,” the blind wizard echoed and his powerful chest rose and fell with his sigh. “Things that can be used by anyone, for good or ill, for whatever purposes they choose, without the training or restraint of wizardry. And the wizards themselves, born with magic in their bones, in their hearts, in their veins, even as we were born, for whom no expression of such power is possible. Wizards who are taught to forget; who, if they cannot forget, go slowly insane.”

Rhion was silent, remembering his own days of slow insanity.

“They are calling to us, Rhion,” that soft, mechanical drone murmured. “We must find them again, somehow. We must go and help. For their sakes, and for our own.” Then the arthritic claws slipped from the silky wood, and Jaldis drifted back into his dreams.

In those days Rhion had to contend with dreams of his own.

The first time he summoned Tally’s image in his scrying-crystal he told himself that it was simply to ascertain that she and her sister and her sister’s baby did, in fact, reach Imber in safety. The crystal had shown him the image of Tally, very properly attired in a rust-colored gown stitched with silver and sardonyx, sitting quietly in a corner of a painted marble hall while the short, plump woman who must be her sister argued in polite hatred with a colorless young man in gray. Though the crystal, used in this fashion, was silent, he could read frigid spite and contempt in every line of the young man’s slender body, while all the jewels on the plump woman’s sleeve fluttered in the burning lamplight with the trembling of her stoppered rage. Tally was looking away into the noncommittal middle distance of an unwilling witness forcing herself neither to see nor hear, but her hands, all but concealed under the pheasant feathers which trimmed her oversleeves, were balled into white-knuckled fists.

After that he told himself—for a time, at least—that he only wanted to make sure that this wretchedness, whatever it was, had passed. That she was all right. That she was happy.

And sometimes she was. When riding she was, in the brown frozen landscape of the Imber hills. He could see it in her face, and in the way she laughed with her favorite maid—a tall girl like herself, but full-breasted and bold—and the chief of her honor guard, a broad-chested and rather stupid-looking young demigod who flirted with both girls and everything else moderately presentable who came his way in skirts. She was happy with her dogs, a leggy, endlessly-circling pack of red and gold bird-hunters whose ears she would comb and whose paws she would search for thorns. Alone she was happy, curled up with a silken quilt about her beside a bronze fire-dish in her bedroom, playing her porcelain flute with two dogs asleep at her feet, the huge branch of cheap kitchen candles flaring like a halo behind her head and turning her hair to a halo of treacle and gold.

But more than once he saw her, white-lipped and silent, at table with her sister and the fair young man who must be her sister’s husband, while servants displayed herbed savories and frumentaries on painted platters for their approval, delicacies which Tally was clearly barely able to touch. On one such occasion, during yet another mannered, vicious quarrel, he saw her quietly leave the dining room and return to her chair a few minutes later, chalky and trembling, having clearly just vomited her heart out in the nearest anteroom. Once—though the image was unclear owing to the fact that the room they were in had long ago been ensorcelled to prevent scrying—he saw her and her sister holding one another tight, like two victims of shipwreck tossed on a single plank in rough waters, weeping by candlelight.

And with passionate despair he thought
Damn
him! Damn him for doing that to you… !

In time he quit watching, and put the scrying-stone away as he would have put away an addictive drug.

But like a drug it murmured to him when he was alone.

Rhion had always known that such behavior was against the ethics of wizardry and never called up her image without a pang of guilt. Among the first things that Jaldis had told him, when he had taught him to use a crystal, and later to prepare one for use, was that the powers of a scryer were not to be used for private pleasure or for private gain.

“It is not only that the evil done by one wizard redounds upon all wizards,” the blind man had said, putting aside his opal spectacles and rubbing the pain from his temples. “Not only that we are not perceived as being separate individuals, good and evil, but only as wizards, without distinction and without discrimination. But spying, peeping, prying is in itself a dirty habit, and worse for a wizard who can do it so much more efficiently. What would you think, Rhion, of a mage who uses this power to look into the bathing chambers of every brothel in the city, just for the sight of women’s breasts?”

Rhion, being at the time seventeen, had promptly answered, “That he’s saving himself some money,” and had had to wait another six months before being instructed in the scrying-crystal’s use.

But it was, in fact, a conclusion that Rhion himself had come to as a tiny child, the first time he’d called a friend’s image in the nursery fire and seen that friend being placed on the chamber pot by her nurse. It had embarrassed him so thoroughly he’d been very careful about calling images after that.

But abstaining now from its use didn’t help. He found that quasi-knowledge of Tally—knowing what her favorite jewels were, her favorite dresses and how she braided her hair, knowing that she liked to play the flute or the mandolin when she was alone, and that she loved her little niece with the delighted affection of a child—was not the same as being her friend. All he knew was that she was in pain and that he could not help. And would never be able to help.

In his hopelessness and uncertainty, Rhion turned, as he had always turned, back to the study of magic.

The library on the Island of the Moon dated back to the days before the earthquake, a small building all but buried under thickets of laurel and vine. At least a third of its score of tiny rooms had fallen into utter desuetude, the saplings that had sprouted in the earthquake’s cracks now grown to massive trees, whose roots clambered over the broken blocks like rough-scaled, gray serpents and whose branches were in many places the only roof. From these rooms the books had been moved, to crowd the other chambers, both above the ground and in the unflooded levels of the damp clay-smelling vaults below; the whole place, like the islands themselves, was a maze and a warren, shaggy with moss and choked with ancient knowledge and half-forgotten things.

Here Rhion read and studied through the rainy days of the marshlands winter and sometimes throughout the night: herb-lore and earth-lore and the deep magics of the moon and tides; the legends of the old realm of Sligo, going back two thousand years; of the islands that had sunk in the earthquake; and tales of discredited gods. Here the Lady acted as his teacher and guide, for she had been the Scribe of the place before her ascension to her current status, and if there were chambers whose thresholds he was forbidden to cross, or volumes he was forbidden to open, it was never mentioned to him.