Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (23 page)

For a moment they stood there in silent impasse, Esrex almost trembling with anger, Rhion with his head inclined in solemn respect. Then furiously the younger man turned away, lashing his way through the curtain of vines and striding off across the lawn in the sunlight beyond.

“That was foolish of me,” Rhion said quietly. He took a rag from his pocket, and began to wipe up the violated chalk-lines. “ Now I’ll be stuck here for the rest of the day guarding the thing.”

“Tally,” Damson said in her high, rather squeaky voice, “you’d better come away.”

“He won’t be here tonight,” Tally said, disregarding her. “The cult of Agon has their own rite tonight. That’s where he’ll be.”

“
Tally
…” Damson’s eyes flicked nervously from her sister to the sturdy little form in the patched brown robe. “Come with me. Please. Esrex didn’t mean any harm—not really. You know how prejudiced he is, and he is under a good deal of strain.”

“Are you saying his ‘prejudice’ is an excuse for…”

“Tally,
please
!”

Tally hesitated for a long moment, her fine-boned face held deliberately expressionless, and Rhion guessed that things were not as they had been between the sisters. Then with a quick graceful stride she gathered her skirts and sprang up the steps. And as the two sisters crossed the lawn outside together, Rhion heard Damson’s high, clipped tones floating back on the balmy stillness: “It doesn’t do for you to be unattended with such a man. You know what they say about wizards seducing young girls with love-spells…”

Rhion sighed and shook his head. “A love-spell,” he muttered to himself, digging his chalk out of his pocket again, “under the circumstances, is about the last thing I need.”

The fête itself was a dazzling success. In addition to the masking and allegorical dances, there was a carousel dance of gaily caparisoned horses in which, Rhion later heard, Marc of Erralswan distinguished himself sufficiently to win the hearts and eventually the corset ribbons of several of the young ladies of the court. At the first chime of the trumpets Rhion lighted the candles of the fire circle which activated the resonator and, in the night’s windless stillness, heard, like the drift of sea-roar, the gasp of admiration and delight from the assembled guests. Coming out of the grotto a few moments later, he saw the whole of the enormous garden with every tree and leaf and grass blade outlined in a fine powder of bluish light, as if the Milky Way, stretched like a banner overhead, had been gently shaken to release a carpet of diamond dust upon the world beneath. Even the lily pads and the waxy yellow blooms upon the water were touched with light, and the glowing shapes of the trees were repeated, like the magic echo of a song, in the still sable mirrors of pool, fountain, and canal.

A beautiful spell, he thought, leaning against the mottled bark of a sycamore trunk to watch the weaving of colored lights on the far-off terrace that signaled the masque. Tally would have been standing in one of the places of honor. She would have seen that first moment when the brightness began to spread, like dye in water, to the far ends of the velvet dark.

But later, when strollers passed the lightless, leafy bulk of the grotto hill, he overheard a woman mutter what a shocking thing it was that the Duke had caused magic to be used on a night originally consecrated to the Sun God, and a man grumble, “Well, you know what they say about wizards. I only hope his Grace weighted out the silver he gave them to work the trick and made sure they used it all as they said.”

Esrex’ insinuations came back to his mind a few days later as he and Jaldis were on their way up from the Old
Town toward the palace on its rise, where the Duke had asked them to supper. They had spent the afternoon in the making of talismans from a crystal the Duke had sent them and the gold melted down from several of his coins, reveling in the ease with which power flowed into the unflawed materials.

“Why gold?” he asked now, as they passed through Thimble Lane where all the tailors and embroiderers were putting up their shutters in the gathering gloom and the lights of lamps made great ochre squares of warmth in the liquid blue dark. “I mean, why do certain materials—gold, silver, and gemstones—hold magic that way? What is it about them that makes them better than copper or tin?”

The old man shook his head. “To learn that,” he said quietly, “is every wizard’s dream. To understand, not only how magic works, but why. What it is…”

He sighed heavily, limping along on his crutches a half-pace ahead of Rhion, turning to lead the way up a narrow street and along an alley short cut that led to the great market square from which the main avenue to the palace rose. He wore his crystalline spectacles, but Rhion knew he wasn’t using them to see with now and probably wouldn’t do so all evening—they were worn as he sometimes wore a linen bandage, to conceal in politeness the ruin of his eyes from the other guests at supper. For the first several weeks in Bragenmere he had had Rhion take him up and down every street and every alleyway in the Old Town and the New, memorizing turnings, memorizing smells, learning to turn left just after the plashing of the fountain of Kithrak, if he wanted to reach the Joyful Buns Bakery, or that the slant of the ground immediately beyond the warm, steamy scents of the Pomegranate Bathhouse would lead him down twenty-five of his own limping steps to the herbalist from whom he bought ammonia and rue.

“We read the lists made by other wizards of what the metaphysical properties are of every herb, every metal, every jewel and fabric and wood and beast,” he went on. “We know that, if one is making a staff for the working of magic, ash is the best wood to use and elm will disperse the power in all directions—cloud and sully it as well. We know that silver will hold impressions of spells, demons, and ghosts. We know that lead is impervious to nearly all magic, that tortoise-shell is necessary in any spell involving learning or memory but that no talisman inscribed upon it will work. We know that sigils inked with the feathers of a swan or a goose will be more powerful, and of a crow, less so, unless the spells be of mischief and chaos—we know that brushes or pens made of the feathers of a pheasant or a wren, or of grasses or reeds, are likely to produce spells less efficacious, more apt to have untoward results. We know that talismans will hold their power longer if they are wrapped in silk and stored in wood, and at that, certain kinds of wood. But why this all should be…” He shook his head.

“Could it have something to do with the energy tracks or the energy fields of the body?” Rhion asked. They had left the crowded tenements of the Old
Town, and the walls on either side of the narrow streets were now those which enclosed the houses of the rich, pale pink or yellow sandstone ornamented with bright-colored tile or marble friezes and bas-reliefs white as meringues. Beyond the spikes which topped them and the blue or yellow tiles of the roofs, the heads of trees, willow and jacaranda and eucalyptus, reared like feathered clouds against the fading mauve of the sky. “I mean that there’s something in the energy of a goose or a swan, that’s more in tune with certain types of spells than a crow, for instance…”

“There is that theory,” his master replied. “But it only leads back to the question of why. Energy travels in straight paths and collects in circles; certain types of energy are drawn to certain runes… but why, Rhion,
is
energy in the first place? Why is it humans who possess magic, and not the tortoises or elephants or crocodiles themselves? Or do they, and we are simply ignorant of what manner of magic it is?”

Rhion was silent. Trained as he had been in bookkeeping, he had a mathematician’s delight in numbers and sometimes had a vague sense of seeing some kind of mathematical patterns in magic… only to have it dissolve when he looked more closely, like faces glimpsed in shadows on water. And the questions still remained.

“It is our business to ask why,” Jaldis went on quietly, “and our need. Not only to understand how to make magic work, but to understand why it works. We see its outer rules—the laws of its balance, that power must be paid for somewhere—Limitations, and the summoning of things by their true names. But we do not see its heart.”

“Yet it must have one. Everywhere we see the signs that point to it—or point to something…”

Far off, to their left and behind them, the nightly crescendo of market carts was in full swing around the big squares, where provisions, forbidden in the daytime on account of noise and traffic in the narrow streets, were being brought in. Now and then a slave would hurry by them as they made their way along the gently sloping alley, for the night was still early. From the top of a wall, a cat’s green eyes gleamed.

“That is what I sought in the Dark Well,” the old man continued softly, the talismans of his voice-box rattling with the rhythm of his hobbling stride. “A glimpse of the structure of the Void and the structure of universes that drift within it, hoping that seeing, I might understand.”

“And did you?”

The old man smiled a little and shook his head.

“And the universe without magic?”

“Yes…” The murmur of the box was no more than a drawn-out sigh. “And its very existence, perhaps, will tell me more. Perhaps it is not an uncommon thing for entire worlds to lose their magic, for the magic to draw away, to depart as light departs with the falling of the night, or water with the ebb of the tide. Since we do not know what magic
is
, any more than we know what light
is
, we cannot tell.”

“But if you
had
seen,” Rhion said worriedly, “if you
had
learned… Would you then have been able to… to summon and dismiss
magic? All magic?”

Jaldis’ reply was so quiet that Rhion did not know whether he had spoken with the box at all, or whether he only heard the words in his mind. “I do not know.”

Emerging from the alley into a wider street, they found themselves face to face with a massive building, a gateway whose black basalt doorposts were unornamented and whose shut iron-sheathed doors were unrelieved by the smallest of decorative patterns, even the rivets pounded flush and soldered. The gray granite pylons which flanked it were windowless, bare of the marble, tile, or ornamental stone courses that made gay the houses of the neighborhood—bare even of stucco, so that the fine-hewn blocks that formed it faced the street with a hard, unblinking stare, like a skull disdaining the frivolous lingerie of flesh.

Even in the warmth of the summer evening, the place seemed to radiate cold—cold, and shadow, and the mingled smells of incense and blood.

Their way took them across the street and to the lane that led up the hill on the other side. But as Rhion and Jaldis moved onto the cobbled pavement, a man-sized slit opened in the featureless doors, and a figure draped and veiled in black stepped out and raised a black-gloved hand.

“Cross back over, witches,” it said, and its voice, thin and cold and bodiless, might have been man’s or woman’s, a blurred harsh tone like scraped steel. “This is Agon’s temple. The footfalls of devils are a pollution on the doorstep of the Veiled God.”

“I’m sure they must be,” Rhion replied, halting in the middle of the way. Against the black of the doors, the priest was rendered nearly invisible by the inky wool robes and the sable veils that fell from the top of a tall conical headdress to cover face, shoulders, and breast. Unlike the houses of this area, the temple had no lamps outside its door, and the whole street was very dark. Had he not been mageborn, Rhion would have been nearly unable to see anything. “And it must take up all your time, making judgment calls about who’s fit to walk how close to the doors—do you have a scale? Five feet for lepers, six and a half for beggars, a yard for slaves… ?”

“Do not jest with the servant of the Eclipsed Sun, witch!” warned the voice. “You should be ashamed to parade the streets like whores, and the Duke should take shame for permitting it. As for lepers, beggars, and slaves, Agon has a welcome for them, as he has for all who serve him, who are not the children and spawn of illusion. Now cross back over and go on your way!”

Rhion drew in his breath to speak again but the door behind the priest opened again, and two other forms stepped out—definitely men, this time, both tall and heavily muscled in spite of the massive potbelly sported by one of them. They wore the short tunics and heavy boots of common laborers and, over their heads, close-fitting black masks that covered them down to the chins. The masks had eye slits and mouth slits, as well, for the potbellied man used his to spit on Rhion’s face.

Jaldis’ hand tightened hard over Rhion’s arm. Rhion bowed with exaggerated respect to the priest and his two devotees. “Nice argument,” he said pleasantly. “Very convincing. It tells me so much about Agon it makes me want to convert.” And he and Jaldis crossed back over the street and went on their way. The priest and the two massive defenders of Agon’s doorstep remained where they stood to watch them out of sight.

For a long time, Jaldis did not speak. Only when they started up the last long cobbled rise to the palace gates, ablaze with torches and gay with the crimson tunics of the guards and the yellow and purple irises that decorated their helmets, did Jaldis say, “That is why we must find that world again, Rhion. That is why someone must go there.”

Rhion shivered. Part of his mind reflected that the practical upshot of all this was that he’d be moving shelves out of the cellar in the morning to make room for the drawing of the Dark Well, but part of him knew that Jaldis was right. The priests of Agon saw in wizardry what the priests of all the cults of the gods saw: a body of men and women who did not need to petition the deities for assistance, a challenge to their authority, and a living question about the way they said the world worked.

But unlike most of the other cults, which were content to thunder and jeer, the priests of Agon, if they were to hear that it was possible to do something about this situation, would bend every effort to try.

Knowing this, however, did not lift from him the nagging tug of unreasoning dread which filled him as Jaldis spoke.

“At the summer solstice,” the old man said softly, “I will weave another Dark Well. I have contacted Shavus the Archmage. He will be here, he says, to help me listen, to help me cast my power through the Void, seeking out the voices that cried. And then…” His voice sank still further, until it was little more than the crying of the crickets or the humming of the insects in the redolent night. “Then we will see.”