Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (21 page)

Desperately, he flung a spell of pain at them, the tearing and spasming of the organs of their bodies, but it took a powerful mage to do real damage in a short time. One of the men swore sharply, and he saw blood begin to trickle from the woman assassin’s mouth, but her eyes hardened to an iron fury and she redoubled her attack. He’d now put them in a position of having to kill him to end the pain—and they knew it.

The Magic of Ill sapped his concentration, too. A sword-blade, slicing through the longer guard of the staff, cut his arm before he could catch its wielder on the side of the head; he had to whirl to block on the other side, ducking and weaving and hoping none of them had a projectile. If he didn’t have to carry Jaldis, he might just be able to escape, he thought… if he wasn’t defending a corpse already…

One of the men stepped back from the fray and unshipped a weighted chain from his belt. It lashed out at Rhion like the tongue of a hellish frog, and he was only barely able to avoid having his weapon pulled from his hand. As he turned to block another sword cut, the chain snaked out like an iron whip and crashed across his ankles, dropping him to his knees. He struck back hopelessly, knowing he was finished…

And the assassin lunging down at him cried out suddenly and turned, cutting at the two men who had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the alley behind them.

The newcomers were both big men and clearly trained to arms. The shorter of the two, a black-and-red ribbonwork doublet bulging over shoulders like a bull, drove his blade through the woman assassin’s chest and shoved her aside like a straw training dummy; the other man, wearing a soldier’s short crimson tunic, pulled off one of the two men bearing down on Rhion, and Rhion struck upward at the remaining one, catching him in the solar plexus with the end of his staff and sending him crashing against the wall. In the dark of the alley there was a momentary confusion of struggling shapes. Then the assailants collected their wounded and fled, vanishing around the corner or swarming over the nearest wall, leaving behind only a few splashes of blood in the dirt, vegetable parings, and mucky straw of the porch.

Rhion, still crouched gasping over Jaldis’ body, realized dimly that blood was streaming from a cut on his own arm, hot against the cold of suddenly opened flesh. The back of his neck burned where the arrow barbs had slit it, and he felt sick and faint. The man in the ribbonwork doublet came swiftly to him, calling back over his shoulder “Don’t bother, Marc!” to his companion, who had started to go in pursuit.

Rhion pulled his arm away from his savior’s investigating hand, and shook his head. “Jaldis… ” he managed to say, turning his master over and feeling at the lined, slack face.

Jaldis still lived. Rhion felt quickly at the veins in his throat to make double sure, then fumbled at the arrow still in the old man’s shoulder. Waves of faintness were sweeping him, his vision narrowing to a tunnel of gray at the end of which stood the arrow, like a signpost on some strange dream path rising out of the little mound of blood-soaked brown wool.

“Poison…”

“Easy,” the big-shouldered man said, kneeling at his side.

Again Rhion shook off his help, forcing his racing heart to slow with an effort of will, collecting a spell of healing around himself. His hands were shaking as he pulled his knife from his belt and slashed Jaldis’ cloak and robe to reveal the blue-veined white flesh, smeared with the dark welling of blood. Marc, the soldier, had come back, much the younger of their two rescuers, tall, handsome, and good-natured, if rather stupid-looking. He wore the crimson cloak, tunic, and gilded leather cuirass of the Duke of Bragenmere’s guards, and Rhion remembered where he’d seen him before: in the crystal last winter, hunting with Tally on the Imber hills.
Marc
, Tally had said.
Marc of Erralswan
.
He was carrying a small bronze lantern, and its light splashed over the porch behind them. Rhion realized for the first time that it was—by the straw and oat-grains everywhere on the pavement—the rear porch of the Duke’s stables.

The older man was helping him pull aside Jaldis’ gore-soaked robes. He paused at the sight of the rosewood soundbox with its tangle of talismans glittering in the lantern-glow and looked across at Rhion with surprise in his handsome, fleshy face. “You are wizards,” he said.

Rhion nodded, and raised a shaky hand to straighten his spectacles. “But don’t worry,” he dead-panned. “Even wizards don’t turn around and put curses on people who’ve saved their lives.”

“Don’t they?” The man’s teeth were very white against his healthy tan when he grinned; his black hair, carefully curled and smelling of expensive pomade in spite of the sweat that dripped from its ends, still retained a milk-white narcissus or two from an aftersupper crown. “Aren’t they like other men after all, then? Marc, call a couple of the guards and get these two inside. Call Ranley, too… my personal physician,” he explained, as Marc, leaving the lantern, disappeared through a postern into the stables themselves.

He held out a warm, strong hand to Rhion, thick with jeweled rings. “I am Dinar Prinagos, Duke of Mere.”

IN HIS SUBSEQUENT ACCOUNT OF THE AMBUSH RHION OMITTED
mentioning to the Duke just what he and his master had been doing in Halberd Alley at that time of night. He said only that they had been returning from an errand in the Upper
Town, and the Duke, a man of great courtesy, did not ask further. Rhion wasn’t sure how much either Tally or her sister had confided in their father; but, remembering his dealings with his own father, he guessed it hadn’t been much.

While the Duke listened gravely, his face crossed by the swift, purposeful shadows in the guest room’s mellow lamplight, his physician—a perfectly orthodox, black-robed little representative of Alucca, God of Healing—removed the arrowhead from Jaldis’ shoulder, and an assistant bound up Rhion’s slashed arm.

“And you have no idea who might have wanted to slay you?” If he did not, Rhion reflected, use the word “murder”—since technically it was not murder to kill a wizard—at least the word he did use was one that applied equally to man as well as beast.

Rhion shook his head. On the guest room’s narrow bed Jaldis was slowly returning to consciousness, white hair spread out over the pillow and voice-box lying under one frail hand. Though too weak to use it, he had refused to be parted from it. For years he had lived in fear of losing either it or his spectacles, mostly, Rhion suspected, because he doubted he had enough strength to create replacements. Under the bandages, his naked flesh looked almost transparent, sunk against knobby bones like damp silk draped across a pile of sticks. Though the tall windows were open upon a small garden court, the room, airy and small, smelled of herbed steams and of the medicines the physician had given to counteract the effects of the foxglove he had smelled on the arrowhead, odors which did not quite mask the smell of blood.

“Marc,” the Duke said, half-turning in his chair of silvered poplarwood. The young Captain stepped over from the door where he’d stood. “Send some of your men out to the houses of Lorbiek the Blood-Mage, and Malnuthe the Black—that Ebiatic who lives in the Shambles—and May the Bone-Thrower down in the Kairnside shanties, and let them know what happened. It’s frequently the case,” he added to Rhion, as the young soldier departed on his errand in a dramatic swirl of crimson cloak, “that when people take it into their heads to murder wizards, they attack several at roughly the same time, wanting to make a sweep of it, you know. It’s happened before, I’m sorry to say.”

Rhion nodded. In their first month in Felsplex they’d gotten a warning from another Morkensik wizard in the town that a mob was out to
fruge
wizards, but nothing had come of it. As far as he knew the woman who’d given them the warning hadn’t contacted either the local Hand-Pricker or the Earth-witch who operated in the same quarter.

“Believe me,” the Duke went on, “I’m truly sorry such a thing came to pass in my realm. I believe—I’ve always believed—that, as long as they use their powers for good and as long as they don’t interfere with other men’s affairs, wizards have every right to live and study free of interference.”

Rhion scratched at a corner of his beard. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t agree with you.”

The Duke’s eyes twinkled appreciatively. “You may have heard that I’m a scholar,” he said. “Or a dilettante, at any rate, who’d like to be a scholar and who can now afford to surround himself with scholars…”

“No,” Rhion said quietly. “No—‘scholar,’ unqualified, was the word I heard used, actually.”

And to his surprise the Duke blushed with pleasure. “Well, whether it’s true or not it’s good of you to say so.” He wore a dandy’s elaborately ribboned doublet and a broad necklace of goldwork and rubies that must have cost the price of a small house, but his weapons—dagger and short sword—were by a smith whose name and price Rhion recognized at a glance, a man whose fame stemmed not from ornamentation.

“In any case,” the Duke went on, “I know enough to know that learning, and the structure of the universe, rather than spells and cantrips, is the true study of wizards, and I also know that a man would be a fool to pass up the chance to taste a little of that knowledge. If any person threatens you again, or you have cause to believe yourself in danger—or if you learn who is responsible for the attack upon you tonight—let me know, and believe me, I will do for you all that I can.”

Rhion nodded again. He had his own suspicions about who had been responsible for the attack, but it would hardly do to suggest to the man who had just saved their lives that his own daughter had hired assassins in order to prevent blackmail about a love-philter to get her errant husband to sleep with her—particularly if the father was the one who’d selected the husband in the first place. And besides, as he had told Tallisett, like physicians, the Morkensiks were sworn to secrecy by their vows.

So Rhion contented himself with their being carried home in a couple of sedan chairs by the Duke’s slaves, escorted by Marc of Erralswan and a handful of guards.

By the time they got to Shuttlefly Court, it was close to dawn. Most of the prostitutes who hung around the Baths of Mhorvianne on Thimble Street had gone, and the mazes of little courts that made up the Old
Town were silent and dark. Rhion followed Marc and the two guards who supported Jaldis up the rough ladder to the upper floor and made sure the old man was comfortable in his bed. He had amplified the physician’s tinctures with spells of healing, though he could tell the man’s remedies to strengthen the heart and cleanse the blood were sound. Jaldis already seemed better, though far too ill to speak.

He himself was shaking with fatigue and the chilled aftermath of shock as he descended once more to the stuffy darkness of the kitchen to see his escort to the door. His arm hurt damnably, and the remains of the poultice they’d put on the back of his neck where the arrow barbs had cut stung as if they’d laid a burning iron in the flesh. As the bearer slaves—eight big, strapping men with the brown complexions of southerners—were picking up the litter poles to go and the guards were exchanging a few final remarks with one of Rhion’s fair neighbors who happened to be coming home from work at that hour, Marc of Erralswan paused in the patchy, dust-smelling darkness of the arcade and, leaning down to Rhion, whispered, “The Duke mentioned love-spells… Do you deal in them? There’s a girl at Court, one of the Duchess’ waiting maids… I realize you’re probably tired now, but if I came back tomorrow evening do you think you could… ?”

After bidding him a polite good-night Rhion laughed, with genuine amusement only slightly tinged by exhausted hysteria, all the way back up the stairs.

The Duke was as good as his word. A messenger arrived the following day, his stiff politeness speaking volumes for his personal opinion of those his master chose to patronize, inquiring after Jaldis’ health and asking him to dinner at the palace the following week, so that the Duke might better apologize for the ignorance of his subjects. “And might demonstrate his protection, to anyone who is interested, while he’s about it,” Jaldis mused, who was well enough to sit up in bed, his shoulder bandaged and a sheet over his knees.

“Well,” Rhion commented, perched tailor-fashion on the other bed with the remains of his master’s breakfast tray, “he also sent this.” He bounced in his hand the small leather sack which had accompanied the message. It jingled with the comfortable sweetness characteristic of the nobler metals. “So you can afford to get yourself a new robe. I wonder why we didn’t think of hiring assassins to beat us up before?”

“Possibly,” his master returned disapprovingly, “because in most cities, passing strangers, once they knew who and what we were, would have been likelier to participate in the fray on the side of the assassins.”

The dinner was an intimate one, the company comprised of the Duke, his pale, fair-haired Duchess and one of her ladies, Ranley the physician who, like his master, was genuinely interested in the metaphysical underpinnings of the visible world, Tallisett, and Syron, the Duke’s thirteen-year-old son and heir. “You must excuse the absence of my older daughter and her husband, ” his Grace said, seating Jaldis on the spindle-legged chair at his side and himself placing the supper crown of red anemones on his brow. “Her husband, my nephew Lord Esrex, is indisposed tonight, and she has remained with him in his rooms to bear him company.”

“And on the whole,” Tally murmured as she passed behind Rhion on her way to her own seat beside her brother, “that’s probably just as well.”

Musicians played through supper, preceding each course with a trilling fanfare; afterward the talk went late. The Duchess, who despite her gracious efforts to seem interested had begun to wear the frozen-faced expression that comes of stifling yawns before the fish course was finished, departed with her lady and her son as soon as the slaves had carried out the finger bowls on the heels of the last sorbets. “My poor darling.” The Duke smiled, when the crimson door curtains had fallen softly shut after them and the pad of their slippered feet had faded on the white honeycomb of the hallway tiles. “She is an educated woman and not at all prejudiced, but her tastes run very much to poetry and political philosophy, not to the mathematics of planetary movement or variations in the forms of snails and fish. And Syron, of course, isn’t interested in anything he can’t either ride or make come after him with a sword. I suppose at his age it’s natural; all I can do is try to teach him, if not my interest in, at least my tolerance for powers and abilities he can not himself possess.”