Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (14 page)

And grinned.

His grin faded. As deliberately as he would turn from a painful sight, he pushed the image of her thin, elfin face from his mind and forced himself to pursue that line of thought no further. As soon as spring cleared the roads, he and Jaldis would return to Nerriok, the City of Bridges. With luck he’d never see the Duke of Mere’s young daughter again.

The boat’s shallow keel scraped on snags and bars as he tried to negotiate the twisting channels through house-high beds of dripping reeds; twice he had to pull the little craft up over root mats, his feet sinking to his boot calves in icy ooze.
Thank God it’s winter, and night
, he thought, bending his back to the pole as he tried to force a passage through jungles of blackened cattail.
In summer the midges would eat you alive. You can’t hold spells that make them think you’re made of garlic all day
.

At last he hit the long, sunken ford that led to the islet of the books. He left the boat, keeping the long pole for balance, and made his way gingerly along the dripping, snakelike strands of exposed roots, hearing the water lap and gurgle, black and shining as obsidian beneath his feet. These sunken hummocks, treacherous with slime, wound for miles through this part of the marsh, the islets widening and rising from them like knots in a string.

Even if the Ladies had seen me coming this way
, he wondered,
how the hell would they have known which islet I went to? They’re all pretty much alike. They can’t have searched every tree
…

A flash of bluish light behind him caught his eye, and he swung around, remembering the goblins. Clouds like stealthy assassins were already putting pillows over the pale face of the baby moon; he smelled the sea and rain. In the growing darkness, a lantern would have burst upon his eyes like an explosion.

But it was only a half-dozen marsh-faes, fragile, naked sprites darting away in every direction from something which had startled them in a reed bed. A fox, perhaps.

But there were no birds as yet in the winter-still marshes. No prey and no predators.

As if he had turned a page in a book and seen it written there in full, Rhion realized,
The Ladies. They’re following me now
.

He could have hit himself over the head with the boat-pole.
Idiot!
he cursed himself,
numbskull, dupe, goon! If the Gray Lady didn’t want to be seen by you in the library, do you think you’d have been able to glimpse her, even if she walked up and hit you over the head with the silly book?
He remembered the subtleness of the Archpriestess’ magic, the coercion which had operated, not through force, but through the slightest of whispered illusions.

He wondered now how he could possibly have been so sure that the book in her arms was the
Lesser Demonary
—at that distance there had been nothing but its size and shape to go on. But she’d known that, if he thought she had it, he’d run immediately to the cache to check…

I’ll strangle the bitch.

Oh, yeah
, he thought a moment later with a grin at both his own outrage and at his thoughts of vengeance.
Fat chance.
You’d spend the rest of your life hopping from lily-pad to lily-pad catching flies with your tongue
.

Though there might be some advantage
, he reflected, looking around him at the dripping desolation of snags and roots,
to being a frog in these circumstances
.

His mouth set in a grim smile and he turned with elaborate casualness back along the snag toward the eyots and reed beds in the whispering dark.
Well, my lady, if you want to go wading tonight, we’ll go wading. I’ve got a pocketful of poppy seed and I’ll use it just as soon as I’ve got you well and truly pointed in the wrong direction. We’ll see who spends a soggier night
.

Balancing himself with the pole with great and gingerly care he began to work his way up the snag-line, crossing the islet where the books were hidden and angling away along another ford towards the murkiest and wettest part of the marsh.

And in very short order, as he should have known he would, he got lost.

VERY NICE, RHION
, HE THOUGHT, SURVEYING THE SHUDDERING
brown waters of the marsh through a haze of wind-thrashed rain that had already rendered his spectacles opaque with spatterings.
Have we got any other clever ideas? Like maybe drowning yourself to
really
throw them off the track?

He’d long ago shaken off his pursuers. With the spell-entangled poppyseed he had woven a wide pocket of disorientation, of subtle confusion, and a tendency to poor guesses and errors of judgment; in two other places he had left spell-lines of invisible brightness to tangle and turn the feet. Unfortunately, unfamiliar with the Limitations inherent in these spells and even more unfamiliar with the terrain of the marshes themselves, he was beginning to suspect that he had inadvertently stumbled back through his own spell-fields himself. He certainly seemed to have missed his way in circling back to his boat, or else the tide had begun to come in, changing the water levels around all the islets and altering or obliterating his bearing marks. It was astonishing how even six inches of water altered the appearance of a snag or root and its relationship with the shore. He’d taken as a guide mark the lights of another islet where the Priestesses of the Moon had occupied an old summer palace, but uncannily those lights seemed to have moved…

Then it had begun to rain. Rhion had already fallen through a pothole, soaking him to the waist in muddy water and tearing boot leather and the flesh of his calves on the splintery wood of a submerged branch—he had spent a panicked, agonizing half-hour in extricating himself. The cold had begun to sap his energy, making it harder still to concentrate.

And the tide was now very definitely coming in.

Emerging from the black curtains of a reed bed Rhion found that his bearing light had unaccountably shifted again. It was only when he heard laughter, thin and dry as ripping silk, seeming to drift from nowhere in the pitchy blackness all around him, that he realized that the light he had been following had been conjured by grims to lead him still further astray.

Maybe at this point drowning myself would be simpler after all.

He turned back to see grims swarming the reeds behind him like cold, glowing lice in a beggar’s hair, and their pallid skeleton shapes twisted around the willow knees of the hummock he’d just quitted as he waded back to it along the submerged and slimy roots. At his approach the wraiths opened cold-burning mouths to hiss and bite, and backed away, still hissing, as he summoned a furious blaze of witchfire to the end of his boat pole and swung at them; their shrieks of laughter shivered in the streaming darkness after they had slipped out of sight into the trunks of the trees. Scrambling and slipping over the roots, Rhion reflected that coming back to the islet had done him damn little good—by the feel of the slime on the trunks the place would be chin-deep in three hours.

In the distance he thought he could hear women’s voices calling out to him, but could not be sure—it might very well be the grims. Panting and shivering, he scrambled as high up the willow roots as he could, but the reed beds hemmed him in with a wall of whispering black. He called out, but gusts of wind clashed in the sedges, and the rattle of rain on the waters all around him drowned out his shouts; the wind cut through his wet clothing, chilling him to the bone, and the voices faded.

Rhion had begun to feel a little frightened. He could sense deeper cold coming in on the heels of the rain, cold enough to frost hard, even this close to the sea. His clothes were soaked and his leg throbbed, and he knew he had to find shelter before morning. He did not know how deep into the marshes he was, but he guessed, from the grims’ propensity for leading travelers astray, that he was miles from the nearest habitation—even if he called a bright blaze of witchlight, he wasn’t sure the Ladies, if they were searching, would follow it. They, too, would be familiar with the ways of the grims.

He fished his scrying-crystal from his pocket and squinted at it in the pelting rain. Even calling witchlight over his head to create the needed reflection in its surface, he had to hold it inches from the end of his nose to see anything—a gust of wind blew rain into his eyes, and he edged around towards the lee side of the willow…

Beneath his feet the tangle of heather and vines gave downward with a sodden, splintery crack. Rhion yelped and clutched at the roots as he fell past them, but the whole footing caved in around him, dropping him down into blackness and freezing water. Bark tore at his palms as he grabbed the willow knees; with a hard jerk, he broke his fall, dangling by his hands in pitch blackness, the rain falling on his face and the coal-black water lapping and gurgling around his armpits and chin.

And below the water, a faint glow of blue passed through the blackness, and cold fingers closed around his ankles and pulled.

“Dammit!” Rhion yelled, genuinely frightened now. “You scum-eating… Celfriagnogast, dammit… CELFRIAGNOGAST…” He yelled one of the few words of power known to be effective against water-goblins, but other hands gripped his feet, tugging and scratching; he felt things pick and tear at his robe, felt stirring in the black waters all around him.

Don’t panic
, he thought desperately,
if you panic you can’t make it work
…

It was perhaps one of the hardest things he’d done, to calm his mind and enter the mental state where magic can be made, to draw power from within himself, to repeat the words of power, the illusions of light and pain. The goblin fingers slacked—keeping the magic in his mind he kicked viciously at the underwater things, and felt them slither away with a few final, angry bites. His hands clawed at the roots and vines over his head, feeling them shift and sag with the swaying of his weight…

Lady of the Moon, please don’t let the grims come back to chew my hands…

Somewhere above him, distant across the water, he heard a voice crying, “RHION!”

“HERE!!!”
he bellowed, squirming as carefully as he could to readjust his hold on the vines; gingerly, painfully, he pulled himself up through the crackling, soggy mess into the air again. Rain lashed at his face and whipped the head-high reeds all around the islet into a churning sea of invisible movement; he flung upwards the illusion of a ball of witch-fire, climbing like a carnival rocket to burst in the black air.

“Rhion… !”

“Over here, Rhion!” cried another mocking voice from somewhere in the reeds, imitating words and thoughts with the uncanny mimicry of the Children of the Dusky Air.

“Rhion my love…”

“Here, my darling…”

“This way, beautiful princess…” A scattered coruscation of lights flared, small and blue and cold, among the impenetrable sedges, sparkling in the pelting rain.

Cursing at the grims, Rhion groped for the boat pole which he’d let fall—it was seven feet long and hadn’t dropped through the roots into oblivion, which was more than could be said of his scrying-crystal—and, using it to probe the muck in front of him, he waded out through the reeds again.

The bobbing yellow glow of lanternlight swung out over the pounded water; behind it, he made out a shallow punt and a cloaked figure poling, bent under the downpour. Rhion flung up a bright glow of magelight all around him—the grims hissed and shrieked with laughter, and the figure on the prow of the punt straightened up, slashing at the air with her open hands.

“Go!” The flute-sweet voice was no longer rosewood, but jade, or what music would be if diamonds could be wrought to create it, hard and sparkling and blazing with a dreadful power. “Get thee gone, Alseigodath, Children of the Second Creation… Go!” And her voice scaled up into a drawn-out cry, cold and strong and flaming with power, shaping words Rhion did not understand. Through the darkness he could see her face, knowing it for hers, though the features were unclear, reflecting a lightless glory like levin fire on silver. Her long hair swirled in the rain. The laughter in the darkness around them turned to cries of terror; Rhion felt the air thrum, as if under the beating of a holocaust of wings.

Then there was only the driving silence of the rain and the dark woman in the sodden cloak poling her boat toward him, shading her eyes to peer past the lantern’s light.

“Are you all right?”

“I feel like a drowned mole, but other than that… Is there a way to get on one of those things without tipping you over?”

“Lie flat over the gunwales and turn… There!” She bent and caught a handful of sodden robe, pulling him up amidships with a soggy splash. Rhion saw that the punt was little better than a narrow raft, and already half-full of rain. Stoically, his drenched robe dragging at his every joint, he found the small bucket and began to bail while the Lady poled around the edge of the reed bed, and out across the black waters again.

It wasn’t until they reached an island that promised a core of solid rock that either one spoke, except to exchange information about the water level in the punt, or instructions regarding its beaching among the clustering snags. The Lady led the way up a short path to what had been a hilltop shrine, its airy pillared walls now blocked in with rough-mortared stone. Inside, a small quantity of dry wood and sea coal were heaped upon a crude hearth; beside them lay dry blankets.

“There are a number of such places, refuges for lost travelers,” the Gray Lady said, wringing out her wet hair as Rhion kindled fire on the hearth. “There are spells laid on them of summoning those who are cold and frightened—we were hoping you’d come to one eventually. Rhion, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. We never thought you’d see us, much less… ”

“Much less try to lead you astray in your own back garden?” He grinned up at her, shaking the rainwater out of his tangled curls. “I admit it takes a special kind of stupidity to try a trick like that.” He fumbled in his pocket for his spectacles, all blotted and smeared with the greasiness of being wrapped in soaked wool—he wondered how he’d ever get them clean and dry and simply gave up on it, replacing them where they had been.

Her breath escaped her in a soft laugh, half with amusement at his self-mockery and half with relief. “We were worried about you…” With a simple natural modesty she gathered a blanket to her and, turning her back on him, pulled off her sodden dress and the shift underneath, letting them fall with a wet
splat
on the marble floor. While her back was turned Rhion likewise stripped off his robes, wrapping himself in a blanket and sitting down before the coin-bright newness of the fire to pick apart the torn ruin of his boot.