Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (25 page)

“What are they doing?”

“Weaving a Dark Well.”
He folded his arms, regarded Rhion with wise, ironic, gentle brown eyes.

Rhion had heard it said of Gyzan the Archer that if the Blood-Mages had possessed an Archmage, it would have been Gyzan. He studied him now, noting how the long brown hands were marked all over with scars like a Hand-Pricker’s, the upper joints of both little fingers missing; his lips, too, and ear lobes were scarred where spell-cords had at one time been threaded through. But unlike the Hand-Prickers he was scrupulously clean, his head shaved—there were Hand-Prickers in the Lower Town that one couldn’t get near for the smell of the old blood matted in their waist-length hair—and his nails cut short; unlike them, he seemed as sane as any wizard ever was.

“Shavus is going, then?” Rhion started to unpack his satchel and, as he did so, stole a glance at the cover of the book Gyzan had been reading—not one of Jaldis‘, after all, but a catalogue of star-spells he recognized from Shavus’ library.

“So he says. Knotweed—very nice,” he added, picking up a spiky stem from among the tangle of foliage. “Good for dysentery… And I’m going with him.”

After the first moment of surprise that Shavus would have asked a non-Morkensik—even one who had been his lifelong friend—Rhion breathed a sigh of relief. He had once offered to accompany the Archwizard through the Void, but every instinct he possessed warned him that beyond it lay dangers with which he would be absolutely unable to cope.

“A curious thing, the Dark Well,” the Blood-Mage went on, turning the herbs over in his scarred fingers, feeling the texture of root and blossom and leaf as he spoke. “Is it true that it shows other worlds, other universes, than our own?”

“I don’t know,” Rhion said warily. “I’ve only seen it once, and then it was quiescent, closed in on itself. But I don’t know what else it could be.” The Gray Lady had questioned him about it also, before they had left the Drowned Lands, and he had his suspicions about why Jaldis had begun the rites of its making on a day when he, Rhion, was away—well-founded suspicions, when he thought about them. Both the Gray Lady and the Archer were far stronger mages than he, and he wasn’t quite sure what he might be likely to tell them under the influence of a really heavy drug or spell.

The Archer shrugged, long lashes veiling his eyes. Like many Blood-Mages, he’d had the eyelids and the flesh around them tattooed, giving them a bruised and slightly ominous appearance. “A reflection—a projection—of the way his own mind conceives the shape of the universe,” he guessed. “Or an illusion, perhaps, designed by spirits whose very nature we can only vaguely guess.”

Rhion knew the Blood-Mages believed in such spirits, wholly unlike grims and faes and the other bodiless Children of the Dark Air, and attributed their own magic to communication with them. As far as he’d ever heard, every Order except the Blood-Mages themselves and a few of the less sane Hand-Prickers described this belief as balderdash.

“But if it is what he says it is,” Gyzan went on, raising his glance once more, “I consider it rather foolish of him—of them—to keep the means of its making and use so deep a secret. What if Jaldis were to fall ill while Shavus and I are on the other side of this Void they speak of? There is an unsteadiness to the aura he carries about his body; I do fear for his health. He is a very old man.”

“I’d be here,” Rhion pointed out, a little miffed.

Gyzan set down the stem of dragon arum he’d been examining and studied him for a very long time. In their blue-black bands of shadow his brown eyes narrowed, limpid and beautiful as a woman’s—Rhion remembered uneasily the rumors that the man had second sight. But he only said, “Well… perhaps.”

“Nonsense,” Shavus blustered later, when he and Jaldis had emerged from the tiny cellar, long after Gyzan had gone up the ladder to the room above to sleep. “By looking into the Void—by looking into the darkness
outside
our universe—the Dark Well may very likely contain the clues as to what magic
is
. Its true essence, its reality. The Void seems to be filled with a magic of its own, a dreadful and powerful magic, and we’d be fools to let a Blood-Mage, or those Earth-witches in Sligo, anywhere near it.”

‘“They’re not Earth-witches,” Rhion pointed out, annoyed at the Archmage’s prejudice.

“Then they’re the next thing to ’em, same way the Blood-Mages are only Hand-Prickers who bathe.” Shavus did not bother to lower his voice. Presumably he did not express sentiments behind his friend’s back that he had not also said to his face. His thick, gray hair was plastered with sweat to his massive skull, and his broad face, usually clean-shaven despite its scars, was gritty with stubble. Jaldis said nothing, only sat, bent with exhaustion, his spectacles lying on the table before him, massaging the bridge of his nose with one crippled hand. He looked, as Gyzan had said, very old, and rather unwell. Rhion came quietly around the table and rubbed the old man’s shoulders and back, feeling, not tension there, but a kind of dreadful limpness.

“Besides,” the Archmage added, “who’s to say one of ’em won’t spread the knowledge to others, the Earth-witches or some Bone-Thrower who chances by? The Gray Lady didn’t seem to have any qualms about
you
making free with their library.”

He tore off part of the loaf Rhion had set in front of the two of them—it was well past midnight, the court outside steeped in the silence of sleep—and sopped the bread in the honey pot. “You ask Gyzan how willing he’d be to let me have the spells to contact that ‘familiar spirit’ of his and see what he’d say,” he went on around a sticky mouthful. “Is there a baths in this neighborhood that’d be open at this hour, my little partridge? Ah, well—the Duke likes to pretend his town’s a cosmopolitan city, but when all’s said you can tell you’re not in Nerriok. We’ll be at it again in a few hours…”

“Will you need my help?”

“In that gopher-hole?
Only if you bring your own space with you.”

Rhion found himself remembering again that Shavus knew he’d been the Gray Lady’s lover and that he’d been up here fraternizing with Gyzan; he felt a kind of obscure anger stir in him. But Jaldis only reached up to grasp Rhion’s hand in thanks.

Whatever Shavus’ reasons, Rhion did not see the Dark Well until it was completed, two days later, the day before the summer solstice itself.

It was as he first remembered seeing it in the attic of the Black Pig. Hellishly complicated circles within circles, spirals leading out of spirals, the interlinking lines of fire-circle and water-circle, blood and smoke and silver, woven together with the intricate tracings of pure light that floated above the floor and seemed to lie, glowing, several inches beneath the surface of the hard-packed damp clay. Within those circles, like a dark and beating heart, lay the strange shuddering gate of colors, as though darkness, like light, had been refracted into a rainbow…

And within the colors was—nothing. Quiescent, closed upon itself, the darkness had a brownish cloudiness that reminded him of nothing so much as an eye shut in sleep. Standing between Jaldis and Shavus, with his back to the crude ladder upon which Gyzan was forced to perch, Rhion felt the sweat start on his face, not so much from the stifling heat of the cellar as from a deep, primordial fear that the eye would open, would look at him and know him…

“Tomorrow night.” Jaldis’ voice was so weak with weariness as to be barely intelligible, the crippled hand clinging to his arm for support. “Tomorrow night, when midnight tilts the Universe to its balance point and lets its powers be turned by humankind… Then the wizards in that other world will have the power to make their voices heard. Then
we
shall open the Well, and search within.”

“Ay,” Shavus muttered, fingering the battered hilt of the sword at his waist. “But what we’ll find—now, that’s another tale.”

Jaldis spent the rest of that day, and all of the one following, either sleeping or deep in meditation, gathering his strength for the night. Shavus and Gyzan, having a standing invitation to the Duke of Mere’s palace from other years, went to pay their respects, and Rhion went with them. In part he only sought to avoid the uneasiness that whispered in the back of his mind whenever he thought about the Dark Well—the dread, not of the terrible unknown of that Void of chaos, but of something he sensed he had once known and then forgotten. It was a dread impossible to leave behind, exacerbated by his growing awareness of the pull of the sun-tide in his blood. But in addition to that, Tally’s last visit had been four or five days ago, and he had begun to be concerned.

They found the palace in a flutter of excitement over the state visit by the Earl of the Purple
Forest. This lord, who ruled the greatest of the In Islands and a whole archipelago of minor isles beyond it, was one of the most powerful in the Forty Realms: garlands were being strung in the gardens again, and among the pillars of the great entryhall. As the three wizards climbed the shallow steps and passed beneath the musicians’ gallery they encountered squads of slaves with wicker tubs of flowers, trailing scent like rags of gauze in their wake, and the excited talk among the courtiers in the long pillared hall nearly drowned the floating sweetness of lyre and flute.

The Earl was seated in an ivory chair of honor beside the Duke when the three wizards were presented, a handsome, muscular man in his early forties, his red hair braided and crowned with jasmine, his mouth sensual, scornful, and hard when he forgot to smile. He expressed delight at meeting so notable a mage as Shavus Ciarnin, but, Rhion noticed, Gyzan was silent in his presence. The Duke invited them to keep the feast of solstice that night among his household. As Shavus declined gracefully, Rhion reflected again that Jaldis had been right: many of the great feasts did fall upon the occasions of solstice and equinox. Had Jaldis been a member of the Duke’s suite, he could not always have had those occasions to himself.

It was only when they were descending the marbled spaces of the outer hall once more that Rhion overheard a woman saying, “Well, I’m sure he was worth waiting for—so handsome! I knew she could have no fault to find with
him
…”

And he realized what was going on.

The Earl of the Purple
Forest had come to offer for Tally’s hand.

And Tally, to judge by the Duke’s relieved affability and the sheer magnificence of the decorations going up, must have accepted.

He felt as if his body were filled with broken glass. That he could not move—he could not breathe—without pain.

Why are you surprised?
he thought, as the blue gloom of the vestibule closed around him like the darkness veiling the sun.
She said it, the first time you met
… “
So it isn’t a question of what I want… just when. And who
…”

The red-cloaked guards opened the outer doors. Shavus and Gyzan descended the marble steps, brown robes and black like eagle and raven in the bright sun of summer, the bulky form and the gaunt. Rhion found he had stumbled to a halt among the pillars beneath the gallery, standing in the shadows like a milkweed-fae that fears the scorch of the sun.

Tally…

For an instant he was standing on the wharf, seeing the dust-brown hair haloed by the sunlight as the water widened between him and the ship that would take her away.

You should never have touched her. Never have taken her hand.

Of themselves his fingers had sought, in his pocket, the washed-leather bag where he kept his scrying-crystal—he let go of it in disgust.
Don’t you hurt enough yet?

The guards closed the doors, not noticing the plump, bearded little man with the flashing spectacles, who stood in the shadows of the vestibule. And he was, Rhion thought, withdrawing noiselessly to the huge square base of a drum-column where the diffuse light from the larger room behind could be caught in the crystal’s facets, inconspicuous enough, and easy to overlook.

He sat on the column base and, taking the crystal from his pocket, angled its flat purple-gray surfaces to the light.

As if she sat in a room behind him he saw her, reflected in the crystal’s heart. She sat on a bench of green porphyry and bronze, shawled in green-dappled light. Water flickered darkly in the shadows behind her. There was no expression on her face as she stared straight ahead of her, but the red-furred hunting dog lying at her feet twisted its head around to look up at her, and pawed anxiously at her skirts. Tears crept silently from her open eyes.

“Tally?”

He paused in the shadow margin between sunlight and gloom. The vines that curtained the little pavilion’s entrance had not been cut this summer and covered the space between the slender pillars like a veil of petaled green silk. The buffets, the gazebos, and the stands for the musicians were all up by the long north front of the palace, on the other side of the network of canals and linden groves. Here it was silent. The heat, though strong on Rhion’s back, lacked the dense oppressiveness it would have later in the summer; the grotto’s dimness was almost chilly, the plashing of the fountain unnaturally loud.

Tally sat on the bench before it, bolt upright in her simple green dress. The silver and amber at her throat flashed softly as she turned her head.

For a moment she did not move, but he saw her shut her eyes and breathe once, a thick, dragging sigh.

Then without a word, as naturally as if she had known that he would come—and perhaps she had—as naturally as if they had been lovers for years, she got to her feet and walked into his arms.

Though it was the longest day of the year, still it was dark by the time Rhion got back to Shuttlefly Court.

The grotto faced east, designed to be a place of morning sunlight and silent coolness in the long summer afternoons. It was the dog who waked them, stealing quietly back in to lie across the feet of the sleeping lovers, though he would have barked, Rhion knew, at anyone’s approach. Through the pillars and the gold-edged green of the vines, the hill’s shadow stretched far out over the grass, rimmed by a line of burnished light. Against his shoulder, Tallisett’s face was peaceful in sleep. It seemed to him that he had wondered half his life what her hair would feel like between his fingers. It was finer than it looked for its straight thickness, soft as a child’s hair.