Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (13 page)

“We add to it what we can, year by year,” the Lady said, setting down two cups of egg-posset on the table near the firebasket’s warming saffron glow. She shook back the loose stream of brown hair from her shoulders. “Even in the old days, it was one of the great repositories of knowledge and the beauty of letters, the joy of tales for their own sake. Many of the volumes destroyed in the floods existed nowhere else, even in their own day. And now we know of them only through notes in the ancient catalogues and a quote or two in some commentator’s work.”

It was late at night, and the library was silent, the black fog that pressed the irregular glass windows smothering even the glowworm spots of light from the kitchen and the nearby baths. Rhion looked up from the smooth, red-and-black bowl of the cup to the Lady’s face, the strong, archaic features serene with the calm of those marble faces that clustered everywhere beneath the wild grape and wisteria or gazed half-submerged from the waters of the marsh.

“The treatises of philosophers,” she went on softly, “the histories of old border-wars, tallies of spell-fragments that do not work, even… For who can say when we will find another fragmentary work that completes them, and broadens our knowledge of what can be done with the will, and the energies sent down to Earth by the gods?”

And who can say
, Rhion thought, remembering Jaldis’ warnings,
who will have access to those spells a year from now, or two years, or ten? Who can say one of the Ladies won’t take it into her head to become a Hand-Pricker or a Blood-Mage and feel free to transmit whatever knowledge she gleans here to them
? He remembered what Jaldis had told him of the uses to which the Ebiatics had put the knowledge of demon-calling, when they had learned it; remembered Shavus’ accounts of wizards who had not the training that the Morkensiks gave in balance and restraint.

Do no harm
, Jaldis had said. But six years of brewing love-potions had taught him that the definition of “harm,” even by those without thaumaturgical power, was an appallingly elastic thing.

He started to raise the posset to his lips, the sweetness of honey within it like the reminiscence of summer flowers, then hesitated, and glanced over at the Gray Lady again.

She smiled, reading the wariness in his eyes, and said, “Would you like to see me drink it first? Out of both cups, in case I’d switched them…”

And he grinned at the absurdity of the position. “I’ll trust you.”

Her wide mouth quirked, and there was a glint in her tawny eyes. “Or hadn’t you heard we also have a reputation for dosing passersby with aphrodisiacs as well?”

Rhion laughed and shook his head. In the topaz glow of the brazier she had a strange beauty, the light heightening the strength of her cheekbones and catching carnelian threads in her eyelashes and hair. “
Now
you have me worried.”

“That Jaldis would disapprove?”

“That I’d burn my fingers playing with fire.”
He raised the cup to her in a solemn toast, and sipped the sweet mull of eggs, honey, and wine within.

As the winter wore on, he found in the Gray Lady’s company a respite from his thoughts of Tally, from the sense of futility that overwhelmed him at even the thought, these days, of having a nonmageborn friend. That she was fond of him he knew, as he was increasingly of her; now and then it crossed his mind to let her seduce him, but fear always held him back. He did not believe, as the garbled tales told, that the Ladies of the Moon lured lovers to their beds with spells and later sacrificed them to their Goddess at a certain season of the year; but he hadn’t forgotten the spells she’d laid upon his mind to try to draw from him the secrets contained in Jaldis’ books.

But her company was good. With her he practiced the art of maintaining several spells at once under conditions of duress: he would try to turn aside the acorns she hurled at him while he concentrated on holding various household objects suspended by spells in the air, and they would laugh like children when the cook’s chairs, buckets, and baskets went crashing to the kitchen floor or when she scored a fair hit between his eyes. She also showed him the secret ways of the marshes, leading him across the sunken root-lines that connected the innumerable hummocks of salt-oak, cypress, and willow when the tide was low. The watery labyrinths of the Drowned Lands changed from season to season with the rains that brought down water from upcountry and from hour to hour with the rhythm of the tides. When the waters were high, the twenty or so ancient hilltops, with their ruined shrines and overgrown villas, were cut off from one another and from the hummocks that had grown up all around, rooted to the immemorial muck beneath or to the half-submerged roofs of ancient palaces. But there were times when they could cross between them on foot, picking their way carefully over the sunken trunks and roof-trees, to hunt the rare herbs of the marshes or to find skunk-cabbages by the heat of them under the snow in the sweet marshes and, later, violets by their scent.

At such times she seemed to him like a creature of the marshes herself, born of the silent waters and fog; when she spoke of the ancient days of Sligo, she spoke as if she remembered them herself, of what the ancient kings and wizards had said and done, of how they lived and how they died, as if she had been there and seen what they wore, where they stood, and whether their eyes had been brown or blue.

Some nights they would sit out, shivering in a Marshman’s canoe that she handled as easily as Tally had handled her horse, watching the water-goblins play around candles set floating in bowls. “Does anyone know what they are?” Rhion asked on one such night, in the wind-breath murmur that wizards learn, scarcely louder than the lapping of the incoming tide against the boat’s tanned skin. “I mean, yes, they’re goblins… but what
are
goblins?” He pushed up his spectacles and glanced sidelong at her, seeing how the bobbing brightness of the candle intermittently gilded the end of her snub nose. “Like faes, they don’t seem to have physical bodies… Are they a kind of fae? Do they sleep? Do they nest in the ground or in the trees, the way grims seem to do? Why do they take food, if they have no bodies to nourish? Why do they steal children and drown them? Why are they afraid of mirrors?” They’d had to cover the one on the boat’s prow before the goblins would come to the candle, though the straw luck-dollies still dangled, like misshapen corpses on the gallows, from the bowsprit. “Is there any work of the ancient wizards in the library that says?”

She shook her head. “There are some that ask the same questions you ask, but none that gives an answer. Curious in itself—they are in their way much more an enigma than the grims, whose names at least can be known. The Marshmen think they fear mirrors because they can’t stand the sight of their own faces, but look… You can see they aren’t afraid of one another. And they really aren’t that ugly, if you get close to them…”

“Well, I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one.”

She laughed at that, but she was right… outlined in the flickering candle glow the goblins were queer looking, with their huge, luminous eyes and froglike mouths, but the translucent, gelid forms did not shift, as the grims did; and if their limbs were numerous and strange, at least they remained constant.

“I think it may have something to do with the glass itself, or the quicksilver backing,” the Gray Lady went on softly, as the long, thready hands reached up from the water to snatch at the flame, “You know you can put spells on fern-seed and scatter it behind you to keep them from dogging your steps in the forest…”

“I’ve heard poppyseed works, too. At least, according to the scroll I read in the library last week, it can be spelled to confuse human pursuit.”

“I’ve tried to follow them a dozen times in a boat or across the root-lines on foot—twice I’ve tried swimming after them. But they always vanish, and it’s dangerous, swimming down underwater among the pondweed and the roots.”

On the whole, Jaldis seemed to regard the spells which the Lady taught Rhion as little better than the pishogue of Earth-witches, but approved of his learning the lore of the marshes and the Moon. “To be a wizard is to learn,” he said, looking up from the tray of herbs he was sorting by scent and touch. He was able to sit up now, wrapped in the thick woolen blankets the Ladies wove, beside the green bronze firebaskets in his sunny stone room. On the afternoons of rare pale sunlight he would sometimes sit outside on the crumbling terrace that fronted their house, overlooking the silken brown waters of the marsh. For weeks now they had been remaking their supply of medicines and thaumaturgical powders, Rhion hunting them in the marshes as he learned a little of the mazes of islets, Jaldis ensorcelling them to enhance their healing powers.

“Though I don’t suppose,” the old man added, “they let you have access to the inner rooms of the library, or the inner secrets of their power.” He rubbed the bandage that covered the empty sockets of his eyes. Etsinda, the chief weaver of the island, had knitted gray mitts specially for his bent and crippled hands, easy to draw on and keeping the useless fingers covered and warm.

“I haven’t been told to stay out of any room.”

“I doubt they would need to tell you,” Jaldis replied, with a faint smile. “You would simply never notice the doors of those rooms, though you might pass them every day; or if you did notice them, your mind would immediately become distracted by some other book or scroll, and you would forget immediately your intention to pass that threshold till another day.”

Rhion blinked, startled at the subtlety of such a spell… but now that he thought about it, he could easily believe the Gray Lady capable of such illusion.

“Beware of her, my son,” the blind man said softly. “Some of their knowledge is corrupt, and inaccurate, being gleaned from all manner of sources. But like us, they are wizards, too.”

And being wizards, Rhion knew perfectly well that the Gray Lady had never given up her intention of getting hold of Jaldis’ books.

On their second night in Sligo, Rhion had set out, shaking with apprehension and clutching a line of thread to guide him back to firm ground, across one of the tangled root-lines to another islet, carrying Jaldis’ books once more on his back. He’d used thread to guide him because he feared to leave wizard’s marks, guessing that the Lady would have a way of reading later where they had been. The ragged remains of his old landlord’s cloak had been ensorcelled with every sigil of preservation and concealment he and Jaldis had had the strength to imbue, and the hollow oak where he hid the wrapped volumes he had surrounded with the subtlest of his spells of warning and guard.

As often as possible he checked this secret cache, by scrying-crystal and in person, whenever he could—at least, he thought, the Lady could not call his image in a crystal, something no mage could do except for direct communication. The islet where he had hidden the books, far up the snag-lines from the Island of the Moon, was perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and no more than fifty yards across, thickly wooded and tangled with sedges and laurel, cranberry and honeysuckle, in places treacherous with potholes where vines growing between the overarching willow-roots gave the appearance to the unwary of solid ground. Several times such potholes gave way under his feet as he crossed the root-lines at low tide, and he narrowly avoided plunging through into the shadowy waters beneath. Now and then, on his surreptitious investigations of the islet, he discovered evidence that someone had been searching that island and others around it, though the books themselves remained, as far as he could tell, undisturbed.

Then one evening during the first of the winter thaws, as he sat reading in the dark library after the failing of the short winter daylight, something—a sound, he thought at the time, though later he could not recall exactly what it had been—made him look up in time to see the Gray Lady glide noiselessly between two of the massive king-pillars. Her homespun woolen cloak hood was drawn up over her face, and, moreover, she was wreathed in a haze of spells, which would have covered her from any but the sharpest eyes. She held a book cradled in her arms; though he only glimpsed it briefly, he thought that it was the red-bound
Lesser Demonary
which had been among the books in the secret cache.

Rhion froze, stilling his breath. The Lady passed without glancing his way through a lopsided doorway and down four steps into another of the library’s tiny chambers. Without so much as a rustle of robes, Rhion gathered his cloak about him and slipped out into the raw iron gloom outside.

Jaldis was deep asleep already in the big stone room with its black-and-white floors. Taking his scrying-crystal from his pocket Rhion angled a facet to the light of the room’s bronze fire bowl, calling the image of the hollow oak. But the image was unclear; he seemed to see a tree that looked something like it, but the surroundings were wrong—he had only a general impression of vines and reeds, as if fog hid the place. But the night, a rare thing for winters in Sligo, was clear, with the promise of coming rain.

“Damn her!” He shoved the crystal back and was tucking his robe up into his belt as he strode from the room. “How the hell did she know where to look? If they’re taking them to copy one at a time…”

There were half a dozen boats tied to the jetty when Rhion scrambled down the long ladder—the platform floated low on the slack tide. He took the one with the lightest draught, knowing he’d probably have to haul it over shoals and snags—he still had not acquired much of an instinct for the tides. The sluggish waters whispered around the prow as he poled away, skirting the wide beds of reeds, sedges, the silken puckers of the water’s inky surface that marked submerged snags, and the moss-crusted stone spires raised like dripping skeleton fingers from the deep. Once he saw something glowing pass under his boat and felt a tentative tug at the pole—he cut down sharply at it, and the tugging ceased. There was a mirror on the bowsprit and half a dozen woven straw dollies and god-hands; Jaldis called it all superstitious nonsense, but Rhion found himself hoping his master was wrong.

There would be grims, too, on the wooded isles, lurking and whistling in the trees. For no reason, he heard Tally’s low, husky voice:
Since it’s such a lovely night and I’ve had a wonderful time so far
…