Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (26 page)

Dear God, what have I done?

But there was nothing he possessed, or ever had possessed, that he would not have traded for this time.

“Father needs the alliance,” she said, quite some time after she woke up. “And I can’t… I can’t tell him I won’t. Because there’s no reason to—I mean, the Earl has never been anything but polite to me, courtly and gracious. But…” She hesitated, struggling with her fear that what she would say sounded silly. But at length she blurted out, “Rhion, his
dogs
are afraid of him! We all went hunting one morning—I could see. But he’s never said a wrong word… Father likes him…”

And she clung to him again, as if he had saved her from drowning.

Still later she said, “I didn’t want this to be something that had never happened.”

Rhion nodded, his lips pressed to her hair. Their talk covered hours, a sentence or two at a time, and then long spaces where the only sound was the mingled sibilance of their breathing, the clucking of the fountain, and the occasional stir of breezes in the vines.

Gently, he pointed out, “He’s going to know about it. At least, he’ll know there was someone…”

“Do you really think he’s going to give back the dowry over a little blood?”

Rhion remembered the Earl’s sensual lips and cynical eye.

“No,” he said slowly, thinking how much of her naïveté Tally had lost even since he’d met her in the icy winter woods. To himself he added,
But
he’s going to hold it over you for as long as you live.

“And so long as I’m not with child…”

“Don’t worry.” Rhion managed a faint grin. “That, at least, is something wizards know how to prevent.”

“Oh, Rhion…”

He gathered her hands together in one of his, and held them against his chest. The dog padded over to the fountain’s edge, sniffed about a little, and settled itself leggily down onto Rhion’s crumpled brown robe. The rim of light on the grass drew farther and farther away, then began to fade.

It was two or three hours short of midnight when Rhion reached home, to find Shavus pacing angrily, muttering oaths, back and forth down the length of the narrow kitchen, while Jaldis sat very quiet in his chair near the cold hearth.

“God’s teeth, boy, where were you?” the Archmage exploded when Rhion let himself in. “Bird-nesting? I haven’t spent three days weaving spells in a hole in the ground to have you spoil things by not showing up in time!”

“But I am in time,” Rhion pointed out. From long watching of the stars he knew subliminally to within a few moments when midnight was, even on ordinary nights, and Shavus knew he knew. And to a wizard, the night of the solstice was not even a matter of subconscious calculation. He could feel the tide of the sun and the stars turning, pulling at his blood and could feel the draw of magic flowing along every energy-path on the earth, in the grass, or in his body, in a glittering whisper of half-heard music in the sky.

All over the city, as he had made his way home, he had been conscious of the magic in the night. Most of the great cults were holding some kind of special rite on this, one of the major turning points of the year. He had passed procession after procession in the streets: the golden image of Darova in her glittering boat, surrounded by torchlit banners and by the shaking tinkle of sistrums; and the white-draped priestesses of Shilmarglinda with roses in their hair and their little boy dolls in their hands ready to be tossed onto the temple fires. Every tavern where the warriors who followed Kithrak forgathered blazed like a bonfire, and in even the windowless granite monolith of Agon’s temple there had been the suggestion of hidden movement.

Every wizard in the city would be preparing some special ceremony, the charging of talismans or the deep scrying for some sort of knowledge, taking advantage of the additional power that moved in the air that night. Children raced excitedly about the streets, eyes bright under tousled hair, waving candy or flowers in their grubby fists. The very air seemed to crackle.

And Tally had come into his arms.

It took all Rhion’s training, all the concentration disciplined into him by years of meditation, to tear his mind from the image of her rising from the bench in the grotto’s darkness, walking to him… It took all his will not to return again and again to the memory of her lips first pressing his. Of her hair untangling from its pearled net beneath his fingers…

She was his.

Only for two months, part of his mind said. Only until the dowry negotiations are complete.

But a part of his soul knew that she would always be his.

And he was aware of Gyzan the Archer looking at him with a kind of pitying sadness as they descended the ladder to the black of the cellar below.

Through the odd clarity of deep meditation, Rhion watched Shavus step to the edge of the earth circle, where the great sun-cross of magic’s eternal power had been drawn, and lift his scar-seamed hands. Within the woven circles, something seemed to shudder and move, the blackness deepening, clarifying, and breathing of matters unsuspected and better left unsuspected in the realms of mortal kind. Panic struggled to surface in Rhion’s heart as he saw the Dark Well opening, the livid rainbow of refracted darkness parting, widening, like the opening heart of a black crystal rose. Darkness opened into greater darkness, abysses at whose bottom new abysses gaped. A dream…

Cold wind stroked his face, and he shut his eyes. Midnight was upon them, the power of it crying in his blood; all his will, all his strength, he concentrated into the rite of summoning that power, calling it from the bones of the earth, from the silver tracks of the leys, and from the shuddering air and the turning stars. From the four corners of the hollow earth the wizards called it, feeding it into the crippled old man who limped forward to the edge of the chasm, opal spectacles reflecting the hellish rainbow of darkness as he gazed within, listening, seeking…

But whether it was because Rhion’s concentration was distracted by what had passed that afternoon or because Jaldis himself was exhausted by the three days of spellweaving which had gone before—or for some other cause that none of them knew—the power of the solstice midnight came and went. But in the Void there was only silence. No light, no movement stirred within that terrible chaos, to show them in which direction the universe without magic might lie.

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” THE SLURRED DRAG OF THE VOICE-BOX
was intelligible only by those who knew Jaldis well—to an outsider, Rhion thought, it would be only a seesaw of notes, like an expert musician playing a viol in an inflection to mimic human speech. The talismans of crystal and glass and the great gold sun-cross in their midst, flashed like the shattered fragments of a broken sun against the worn sheets and the hand that lay like bleached driftwood in their midst.

“They called out for help. I heard their voices at the Winterstead…” Jaldis sighed painfully and turned his face away. “I don’t understand.”

“The turn of winter was six months ago,” Shavus replied, the roughness of his deep voice not quite successful in covering his concern for his friend. “God knows, a man’s whole life can change in a week—in a day.”

Silent at his elbow, Rhion had to agree.

“What makes you think any of them are still alive by this time?”

“If ever they existed at all,” Gyzan murmured, from where he sat on the painted leather chest at the bed’s foot.

“It exists.” Jaldis stirred as if he would sit. Rhion, too unnerved by the grayness of his face and the ragged way he’d been breathing that morning to stand on ceremony, put out a hand and forced him gently down again.

“It exists,” the old man insisted. “That I know. I heard them crying out…”

“I don’t disbelieve you, old friend.” The Archmage shook back his ragged hair, like tangled gray wool around his dark, scarred face. “But whether those people are still alive to call, let alone have enough power in ’em to reach out across the Void and guide us there…”

“I will find them,” the old man said stubbornly. “I will. I must.” And for all the weakness of his body, Rhion saw in that sunken face the indomitable determination of a dream.

“Can’t you do anything for him?” he asked quietly, when he, the Archmage, and the Archer had climbed down the rough ladder to the kitchen. “Spells to give him strength, to steady his heart…”

“Something you can do as well as I.” The big warrior grumbled the words over his shoulder as he rooted through the collection of fine porcelain bottles on the plank shelf—all gifts from the Duke—in search of brandy. Rhion picked up the nearly empty water jar and crossed the length of the kitchen to the door.

In the square outside the water seller whose beat covered this court was walking along the dense blue shade of the arcade, singing mournfully “Wa-a-a-a-a-ter, cool fresh wa-a-a-a-a-ter…” She eyed Rhion suspiciously but uncovered one of the buckets which dangled from her shoulder yoke and filled up his jar, then bit the halfpenny he gave her and made the little crossed square of Darova’s Eye on it, in case he’d given her a pebble witched to look like a coin. Wizards were always being accused of doing that, though Rhion had never met anyone to whom it had actually happened.

“Don’t be silly.” He set the jar down again near the hearth in the kitchen’s cool gloom. “Your spells…”

“My spells malarkey,” Shavus retorted. “You know as well as I do, my partridge, that there’s no spell can go against nature, not forever. What Jaldis needs isn’t a spell, but to quit doing things like this to himself. Magic comes from the flesh as well as the will—I’ve seen you goin’ after dates and honey and any sweet thing when you’ve done some bit of spell-weaving that’s beyond you, same as I fall asleep like I’d been clubbed over the head, once the kick of the magic itself wears off. Jaldis can’t keep goin’ from spell to spell to keep himself on his feet any more than a man can keep himself goin’ forever chewing cocoa leaves.”

He pulled the cork from the brandy bottle with his teeth and slopped one of the red-and-black cups half-full, while Rhion heaped a little handful of charcoal in the brazier and touched it with a fire-spell even as he worked the coffee mill.

They were all tired, for they had worked the rites of the summoning of power for an hour or two after midnight, trying to find some sign, some clue, in the darkness of the Well. After the shortest night of the year, dawn came far too soon.

In any case, Rhion had slept very little. Fatigued as he was by the calling down of power, no sooner had his head touched the pillow than the dream of Tally lay down beside him, hair like seed-brown embroidery silk and long cool limbs like ivory. In sleep he could have tasted her lips again, but sleep, like the coy girls he’d flirted with in his youth, had played hard to get.

It had been just as well. Waking with the first slits of light through the louvers, he had heard the stertorous rasp of Jaldis’ breathing and had realized that the old man had suffered something akin to a mild stroke in his sleep.

“He uses too much power as it is,” Shavus grumbled, pouring another generous dollop of brandy into his coffee and taking a handful of the cheese and dates Rhion had brought to the table. The dates were another gift from the Duke, like the coffee and the wine the three senior mages had drunk last night at dinner. The graceful clay bottle, stamped with the Duke’s seals, still adorned the sideboard and reminded Rhion that he had had no supper last night. No wonder, he thought, he was starving. “Tampering with that damn Well of his will be his death.”

“Perhaps,” Gyzan said, speaking for the first time, “death is the inevitable conclusion of all dreams.”

In the weeks that followed, Rhion visited the cellar seldom, though he was always conscious of the Well’s presence there, like something dark and terrible living in the ground beneath his feet. Even after Shavus and Gyzan had returned to Nerriok, between his own spells of healing and his pupil’s, Jaldis had rallied. For all his fragility there was an odd, stubborn toughness to him; he was on his feet within days, though he moved more slowly than he had. Nevertheless Rhion was uneasy. He knew that while he himself was gone, his master would descend the perilous ladder to the cellar and open the Well, sitting for hours before it, gazing into the enigma of its abyss.

The Duke was deeply concerned to hear that his friend was ill and would dispatch a sedan chair and four bearers to Shuttlefly Court whenever he wanted the old man’s company. Betweentimes, his gifts multiplied: fruits, game birds, and the light, pale wines of the high country. When Rhion came to court without Jaldis, the Duke would invariably ask after the old man and send back with Rhion some small token—a book from the library or good quality soap from the palace savonneries, or sometimes just summer flowers from the water gardens to brighten the little adobe rooms.

And Rhion was often at court. The Duke had offered both him and Jaldis free use of his library, and it would be foolish, Jaldis scolded, not to take advantage of this freedom to make notes of anything of value he might find. Thus Rhion spent much of the summer in those big marble rooms—three of them, stacked one atop the other in the stumpy octagonal tower—reading by the white, diffuse light that streamed in through the high latticed windows or browsing through the racks of ancient scrolls and shelves of books whose sheer numbers were famous throughout the Forty Realms as second only to the High King’s library in Nerriok.

“And personally, I think ours is better,” Tally remarked, one afternoon as she and Rhion, catalog and note tablets in hand, were engaged in one of their long paper chases through book after book, tracking down a reference by the rhetoritician Giltuus in his
Ninth Book of Analects
to spells by a wizard named Greigmeere. “The High King’s library has been gone over a dozen times for orthodoxy by the priests of Darova. You can bet anything ‘unfit’ or ‘unseemly in the sight of the gods’ went for kindling years ago.”

“And this hasn’t?” Rhion balanced on a tall-legged stool to pull scrolls from the highest compartment of a rack between two windows: Greigmeere, according to Worgis’
Compendium
, had been a philosopher; though codex-type books had been in use for four hundred years, priests and philosophers still tended to regard them as newfangled and queer, making it far likelier that Greigmeere’s writings, if they existed in the library, would be in the more ancient form. Tally, dressed in the plain green gown she wore when she was tending her dogs or hiding from court occasions, looked up at him where she held the stool steady as he sorted through the wax identification tags on the scrolls’ ends.