Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (17 page)

The other occupants of the court were mostly weavers, with the exception of the usual two or three dramshops to be found in every court in the city, a pawnbroker, who was also subsidized by the Temple of Darova, seven free-lance prostitutes and an embroiderer who hadn’t been able to afford the higher rents of Thimble Lane a dozen yards to the east. There was a school at one corner, thinly attended since most of the neighborhood children spent their days on the loom. The schoolmistress, a sturdy gray-haired woman with a voice like a war gong, descended upon Jaldis and Rhion the first day and informed them in no uncertain terms that they were not to interfere with any of her pupils, several of whom had already pelted Rhion with goat dung on his way back from the market. Three nights later the woman was back to purchase a remedy for a headache as if neither the pelting nor the confrontation had ever taken place.

Ah, what it is
, Rhion thought, watching her departing back dart furtively from shadow to shadow of the cottonwood posts supporting the court’s rudely thatched arcade,
to be a working mage again
.

The business of actually earning one’s living by wizardry, he had long ago discovered, was transacted mostly in the first two or three hours after sunset. It was the time when people—like Mistress Prymannie—had the impression they would not be seen. This was an advantage as spring warmed to summer and the dust kicked up from the unpaved court frequently made the downstairs kitchen unlivable. There were spells that would draw down dust out of the air and collect it in the corners, but these tended to vary so much with weather, with the phases of the moon and the ascensions and declensions of various stars that they were never really effective. In his reading and study, Rhion was constantly on the lookout for others that worked better and wondered if the Gray Lady would have given him a good one if he’d thought to ask. Even in a city as relatively friendly to wizards as Bragenmere, few people would be seen openly going to a mage’s door in the daytime.

Thus he was startled one afternoon, while sitting in the kitchen roughing out calculations for a talisman that might work in attracting wealth their way, by a knock on the door. Jaldis was upstairs reading, for the light was better there and it was easier to make his spectacles work. Rhion got to his feet and walked the length of the corridorlike adobe room, thinking,
Not
the local magistrates telling us to move on. Please, Darova, give us a break for once. After all, we’re paying our rent
…

He opened the door.

Framed against the bright spring sun of the court outside, her taffy-colored hair braided back under a virgin’s stiffened gauze cap, was Tally.

She blinked into the dimness of the kitchen, her eyes clearly not used to the splintery blue shade under the courtyard arcade, much less to the unmitigated gloom of the kitchen itself.

She said, “Excuse me—I have heard that you’re a… a wizard? I want… I want to purchase a potion, to win the love of a man.”

RHION COULDN’T HELP HIMSELF. “IS IT FOR YOU?”

“Of course!”
But the quickness of her reply, and the hot blush that suddenly suffused her cheeks, told their own story and the relief that went through him almost made him laugh. “That is…” she began, and peered suddenly into the shadows of the room. “
Rhion
?”
And recognizing him, she smiled.

He thought, quite clearly, as if warning someone else against inevitable tragedy:
Don’t do this
. But it was already done.

“Come in.” He stepped back to let her pass, then hurried before her to the plank table—one he’d scrounged in one of the many rubbish stores of the district—to shove aside the books and papers that strewed its stained and battered surface. “Don’t tell me your governess lets you come to this part of town,” he added as he did so. “If I were your father, I’d sack her.”

“My governess thinks I’m in the mews helping Fleance with the young hawks…” She gazed around her as she spoke: at the rough-hewn rafters from which every herb they could buy or gather in the Kairn Marshes hung drying; at the round little beehive of a tiled stove; at the plank shelf of dishes, the cool red-and-black-work done in the Drowned Lands. “Don’t you have a crocodile? A stuffed one, I mean, hanging from the rafters? Wizards are supposed to.”

“Wizards do if they can afford them,” Rhion replied with a grin. “The ones you see in spell-weavers’ shops aren’t stuffed but drying, and when they’re properly dried you cut them up and store them for potions and mummify the skin in camphor oil, for talismanic work. But the baby crocs are tremendously expensive and you have to import them from Mindwava. Jaldis and I are still working on cheaper things like saffron seed and glass and getting a decent crucible.” He leaned against the corner of the table and scratched a corner of his scruffy beard, realizing he hadn’t trimmed it lately and wishing he had. She walked around the bare little room, looking at the herbs and books and cheap clay pots with their careful labels in frank wonder and delight. He remembered the grace with which she moved, surprising in a girl so tall, but he’d almost forgotten the husky, boyish alto of her voice.

“Does it have to be?” She turned back to him, her gray eyes shadowed. “A love-potion, that is. I mean, does it have to be for… Could someone get one that would work for two other people?”

When she had come in, Rhion had seen, as well as the smile that stopped his heart, the purplish prints of sleeplessness in the tender flesh around the eyes and the puffy spoor of last night’s tears.

He sighed, wishing he didn’t have to be the one to tell her. “A love-potion won’t save your sister from unhappiness, Tally.”

Her mouth flinched, but she didn’t ask him how he knew. Perhaps she expected that, as a wizard, he simply would know.

“They don’t last,” he went on, as gently as he could. “Even if you were to give her husband several in succession, in time the effects would wear away. And if he hates her now, what do you think he’ll feel after a few weeks, or a few months, of being impelled by his own body, by needs he doesn’t understand, to make love to her?”

She was silent, digesting that. It was clearly something she hadn’t thought of. Rhion remembered she was a virgin—remembered what it had been like to be seventeen.

At length she said, “I don’t think… that is… He isn’t indifferent. At least Damson says…” She hesitated, an inexperienced and well-bred girl sorting hastily through all the precepts of good breeding for what it was and was not proper to say. She took a deep breath, and plunged in. “Damson says—and I think she’s right—that Esrex isn’t indifferent to her. If he was, he wouldn’t be trying to hurt her, he wouldn’t be flaunting his mistresses the way he does. But he’s very proud, and very bitter. He sees in her the daughter of the man who took the realm away from his grandfather—our grandfather, because his aunt is my mother—the man who humbled his family. And he’s spiteful. Loving her could change that, couldn’t it?”

The anxious look in her gray eyes, after her tomboy incisiveness and the courage she’d shown in the snowbound woods, went to his heart. Her voice was almost timid as she asked, “Are they really not permanent?”

“Love isn’t permanent, Tally,” Rhion said quietly. “It renews itself, from day to day—sometimes from hour to hour. And lust and longing, which create their own illusions—and illusion is what the potions really arouse—are more evanescent still. I’m sorry…”

She shook her head quickly, as if to say,
Not
your fault
, her eyes not meeting his. For a time she leaned half-perched upon the corner of the cluttered table, head bowed beneath the drying jungle of mallows and milkwort overhead, looking down at her hands in her lap. But when she spoke again she raised her gaze to his.

“It’s his pride, you see,” she said. “Damson has always loved him, from the time he was sixteen and she was twenty; I think they… they slept together… in spite of the fact that he always blamed Father for the fact that he—Esrex—isn’t Duke of Mere now. But he never wanted to marry her for that reason. Then he found out she was behind his family forcing him to do so—and right after that she miscarried of his son. He hasn’t been near her since. But if he could just be drawn back to her, even for a little while… if she could just bear him a son.”

Was that her wishful thinking, he wondered, or her sister’s? Running an idle finger along the worn grain of the table corner on which he perched, Rhion remembered the chilly-eyed young man he’d seen in the scrying-crystal. Good-looking in his way—though Rhion had long since given up trying to decide what kind of looks drew men and women to one another—lace-gloved hands fastidiously turning bunches of expensive winter flowers, his face expressionless as a cat’s. His power over Damson had been clear in the way she’d flinch from his words, in the way her eyes would follow him when he’d stalk from the room.

“You think it would help?”

Something stiffened in her shoulders as she tucked a strand of seed-colored hair defiantly back under her cap. “It might.”

And so it might, he thought. With loving and hating, one never knew. But too many people had come to him and Jaldis over the years, asking for magic to fix their lives. He knew of no spell which could not be twisted out of its purpose by fate, no potion which would for better or for worse change a human soul’s inner essence. No sigil he’d made had ever altered the words that rose automatically to a person’s lips when they weren’t thinking.

Yet people kept acting as if someday the laws of magic would spontaneously change and spells would do all these things.

He felt suddenly very old. “Does your sister know you’ve come?”

Tallisett shook her head. “Damson says wizards make most of their money blackmailing the people who come to them for love-potions or potency drugs or abortions…”

“Damn!” Rhion smote his forehead with the heel of his hand. “So
that’s
what we’ve been doing wrong! I
knew
there had to be a better way to make money out of this… Ow!” She’d come around the table in a stride and smacked him hard on the shoulder, but she was laughing as she did so.

“No,” he added gently, shaking his head. “That’s part of the oath of our order. Secrecy, as physicians must swear it.”

Tally frowned. “But there was a wizard just a few years ago who was doing that over in Way…”

“So he was probably a Blood-Mage or an Ebiatic or one of the cheapjack astrologers you get on the street-corners…”

She shook her head, baffled, like most people completely ignorant of the differences between the orders of wizardry. “All I know is that they burned him for it, and before they burned him he confessed to having blackmailed hundreds of people. He’d get the women to sleep with him and the men to kill or beat up people who disagreed with him… and anyway,” she added, as Rhion groaned at the retelling of those hoary rumors, those accusations which had been leveled at every wielder of magic who had ever lived, “Esrex belongs to the Cult of Agon. If he ever thought there was wizardry involved between him and Damson he’d probably stay away from her for good, out of fear of what they’d say.”

“And you’re willing to risk that for her without her knowledge?” He cocked an eyebrow at her, and pushed up his spectacles again. Her color heightened.

“He’d never find out…” But he could see that, even as she said the words, she was aware of how childish they sounded. She looked down again, for a few moments concentrating on picking precisely identical quantities of gauze undersleeve to puff out between the embroidered ribbons of her oversleeve. “She loves him, you see,” she said at length, not meeting his eye. “I don’t see how she could, after all the cruel things he’s said to her—he really is a spiteful little prig. But she does. If she didn’t… If she didn’t need his approval the way she does…”

“And if we didn’t all have to eat to stay alive,” Rhion sighed, “think how much money we’d save at the market.” Her profile, half averted, was like a line of alabaster behind the stiffened wing of her cap; the pearl that hung from the cap’s point was less smooth than the forehead beneath it. He felt a certain amount of sympathy for Damson’s impossible position.

The silence lengthened. Outside in the courtyard a couple of drunks were arguing in front of the Skull and Bones, and even through the weight of the adobe wall he could hear the steady beat of the looms in the chambers next door. The air smelled thickly of dust and lanolin, of the pigs foraging in the court and of acrid soap being boiled a few courts over in Lye Alley. He remembered the way Tally had jerked the wet leather of the reins from his hand, the defiant flash of her gray eyes in the gibbous reflected ghostlight of the grims. He remembered how she had charged without a second thought to seek for her sister’s child.

“If I don’t help you,” he said, not asking it as a question, “you’ll look for someone who will.”

She didn’t look at him but he saw her mouth flinch again.

“Tally,” he sighed softly, “don’t do it. Leave her free to choose her own road.”

She raised her eyes then, like a child’s, hoping, not that authority would relent, but that the world was in fact not constituted as it was. The stiffness went out of her back with the release of her breath. “Damn you.” Her small voice was utterly without rancor, a friend’s casual raillery at a friend. “Are you always right about things?”

“No,” he told her sadly, for he wanted to be able to help her, wanted to free her from the grinding pressure of misery he had seen in the crystal. “But this time I’m afraid I am.”

Dammit
, he thought,
all those weeks in the Drowned Lands wondering if there were some way I could make her happy, and it turns out it’s this
.

“There are ways to do it, yes. But really and truly, it’s against our ethics to make a love-spell or any other kind of spell for someone who isn’t present and consenting. Can you see why that is?”

And she nodded, not liking it, but seeing. She didn’t, like many girls of that age, say,
This
is different
… If she thought it, it was not for long.

“I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

“It’s all right.” She sighed again, and produced a crooked smile for him, manufacturing cheer in her voice as he had so recently manufactured it for Jaldis. “If she weren’t so afraid of word getting back to Esrex… or of being blackmailed…” She shook her head, chasing the thought away. ‘He’s trying very hard to curry favor with the priests of Agon, you see. Though the gods only know why anyone would want to belong to that cult. But I’ll think of something.“