Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (32 page)

The living on the islands was not wealthy and in some ways it was painfully primitive, but he found to his surprise that it suited him. Among the crumbling pillars and morning-glory vines of the Island library, he studied the mysteries of healing handed down from the ancient priestesses of An. The Gray Lady, with whom he remained fast friends, though they never again became lovers, instructed him further in the lore of herbs and bonesetting; all his love of human beauty and all the understanding he had gained in the workings of the body and the mind when he had made love-spells for his living flowed into this new learning.

In time he came to have a reputation as a healer in the lands round about. Three or four times his visits to Bragenmere were in response to urgent summonses from the Duke, for Damson’s son Dinias, born four months before Kir, was a peaked and sickly child, unable to keep food down and susceptible to chest complaints. As for Damson herself, it appeared she had judged her husband rightly. Having broken the spiteful pride which had kept him from her, she knew indeed how to hold him at her side. Whether by obligation, by her father’s wealth, by ambition, or some perverse understanding of his body’s needs—or who knew, perhaps even by love, Rhion could only guess… but the two infants she bore after Dinias died within days.

And time drifted by.

In the Drowned Lands, time was a deceptive matter at best, the seasons passing like the slow stroke of a gigantic wing and leaving no shadow behind. In the summers Rhion studied the birds of the marshes, coots, herons, geese, and loons with their spotted backs and vacant laughter, watching their nesting and their mating and when they departed in fall. He harvested herbs, mallows, and lichens and experimented with their properties; he spent night after night with boat and lantern, watching grim and goblin and water-fae by the milky moonlight and made another spiracle charged with the element of air to wear around his head when he swam through the murky jungles of duckweed and cattail roots. He followed the goblins into their watery realms, but he never learned where they went. In the winters, he spent whole afternoons and nights listening to the whisper of the rain on the ivy that blanketed the library walls, reading the long, slow histories of the kings and priestesses of the realm of Sligo and the In Islands and the lore of the wizards who, throughout the Forty Realms, were popularly credited with the earthquake that brought its doom. He learned the deeper magics of the Ladies, and the effects of the moon’s phases and the passage of certain stars upon spells and healing and the movements of birds; he learned small illusions to twist men’s minds and strange little cantrips involving tangled string and braided straw.

And in the times of the spring equinox, he would sometimes preside over the rites at the half-drowned ring of stones, calling down the power of the turning stars to the victim who lay bleeding on the altar, feeling that power spread out to all corners of the earth.

They were days of peace. In his scrying-stone, almost nightly, he would summon Tally’s image, or his son’s—it was not the same as being with them, but at least he knew that they were happy and well. Going down to the noise and bustle of Bragenmere, visiting Shavus in his house in the Beldirac Wood, and listening to the arguments there about the latest enormities of the Selarnist or Ebiatic Orders or the insolence of the Blood-Mages and Earth-witches, he would return home to this ruinous, vine-cloaked silence, wondering if he wasn’t beginning to comprehend for the first time what magic really was.

Then one winter morning in the library, while painstakingly translating an ancient scroll so black with age and decay that he had to lay spells on the crumbling linen in order to make the glyphs rise to visibility at all, he felt the scrying-crystal he carried calling to him.

Taking it from the inner pocket of his robe, he gathered his cumbrous woolen shawl about his shoulders and walked out onto the terrace, where the light would be better. It was only a few days after winter solstice and the chowder-thick fogs of the season lay like cotton wool over the estuary’s watery mazes. The chipped balustrade seemed no more than a pale-gray frieze against a whitish wall, beyond which gulls could be heard dimly crying. Rhion’s breath was a clouded puff of steam which fogged his spectacles in the raw cold, and the ends of his fingers, where they protruded from his woolen writing mitts, were red and numb.

“Jaldis?”
He turned the faceted lump of raw amethyst over in his palm.

In the facets of the jewel, as if the old man stood behind him, reflected tiny in the smooth surface, he saw his master’s face.

And he recoiled in shock. When wizards communicated by scrying-stone it was not the same as simply calling someone’s image; there were differences between how a mage appeared in the lattices of the crystal and what he or she might look like in actual fact. But even so, Rhion could see that Jaldis was far from well. He seemed faded and wrung out, like a worn rag, his thin face sunken, fallen-looking behind the monstrous crystalline rounds of his spectacles. The heat of a midsummer morning years ago leaped vividly to Rhion’s mind, Shavus digging through the bottles of brandy the Duke had sent them in that little kitchen on Shuttlefly Court, saying savagely, “What Jaldis needs isn’t a spell, but to quit doing things like this to himself…”

But through the exhaustion, the old man’s spirit coruscated like a sunlit fountain of triumph.

“Rhion, I’ve done it!” Even in his mind, now, Rhion heard the sweet, mechanical tones of the box—he could no longer bring back to mind what the old man’s voice had been. “I have opened the Dark Well with the turning of the solstice of winter. I reached in, as I have reached at every solstice-tide, at the midnight of every equinox, for seven years now…”

He was trembling with excitement, with vindication. It might have been a trick of the light where the old man was sitting, in the small and comfortable study in the octagonal tower, but his spectacle-lenses, even, seemed to blaze with a kaleidoscope of fire.

“I reached across the Void, seeking in the darkness for the universe without magic, calling out to them…

“And they answered me! At midnight of the night of the solstice,
they answered
!”

“I SPOKE TO THEM, RHION.” THE MECHANICAL VOICE IN ITS
rosewood box was steady, but Jaldis’ crippled hands trembled where they rested on the arms of his chair. “I spoke to them, and they begged me for help. They said they had been seeking a way to project their minds into the Void for all the years since first we heard them…”

“Did they say what had happened to magic in their world?”

Outside, the wind groaned around the tower’s eaves, driving hard little pellets of ice against the shutters. Stray drafts plucked at the lamp flames and made Jaldis’ shadow tremble like a blown banner on the creamy plastered wall. For the last two days of his journey from Sligo, Rhion had been holding the storm at bay with spells, struggling over roads choked already with snow and mud and praying to Rehobag and Pnisarquas, those untrustworthy dilettante sons of the all-seeing Sky, that he could manage to keep the snow winds from blowing down the mountain passes long enough for him to reach Bragenmere’s gates. It had been exactly eight years since he’d had to travel in the dead of winter, and, as he recalled, he hadn’t liked it then either.

“He—Eric—his name is Eric—He said he did not know.”

On the hearth, the hanging kettle boiled with a small rumbling like the purring of a cat. Tally rose soundlessly to her feet, raked the fire a little to one side, and tipped the water into a teapot, the fragrance of brewing herbs rising in summery sweetness among the room’s winter smells of lamp oil and damp wool.

“That magic once existed in their world there is no question, no doubt, he says. Document after document attests its presence and its strength. Three hundred years ago there was a period of unrest, of anger, and many mages and many books were burned, both by civil authority and by angry mobs. Then two hundred years ago…” The old man shook his head. “Eric says he does not know what happened, why, or whether it was a single act, or an accumulation of unknowable events, chance, or the moving courses of the universe. He knows only this: that no documents of magic can be authenticated later than two hundred years ago. And beginning in that time, magic has been regarded as no more than silliness, superstition, the games of children, or the delusions of madmen.”

“All over the world?”
Rhion tried to picture it, to grasp that deathly silence, and failed. But the thought of it turned his heart sick.

Jaldis nodded. His twisted hands gently cradled the blue porcelain cup Tally had set before him, seeking the warmth of the clear green liquid inside.

“So he has said. He said that in place of magic there is a thing called ‘science’… ” He used an alien word for it, the Spell of Tongues carrying the term to Rhion’s mind as meaning simply ‘knowledge,’ but with curious connotations of exactness and close-mindedness and other things besides.

“By this science,” Jaldis went on, “they have done many things in these two hundred years: the wagons which travel without beasts to draw them, by the burning of an inflammable liquid; the winged ships which journey through the air; something called a telephone, by which they speak over vast distances—anyone, not just mages; and artificial light, which glows without burning anything but which is the product of… of creating lightning at their will. But whether this ‘science,’ or some element of it, arose only after magic’s disappearance, or whether magic’s failure was somehow connected to its arising, Eric cannot be sure. No one can be sure.”

The old man leaned forward, his pale face hollowed and gray looking in the scrim of steam curling from the cup between his hands. “But whatever the cause, they have become a world of mechanists, of bureaucrats, of slaves, working each for his own living and not looking farther than the filling of his belly every day. It is a world where magic is not only despised, but hated. There is only one ruler now in whose realm mages—those who study magic though they can no longer work it, those who seek the true secrets that lie at the heart of the universe—are honored. And against this ruler, a coalition of these other monarchs, petty and corrupt bureaucrats, ruled by wealthy merchants and narrow of soul, is gathering for war. If they succeed—if they win—then even the memory of magic will die. And then the darkness will truly triumph.”

“And they want help?”

Jaldis nodded. “I have contacted Shavus,” he said. “Shortly before the equinox of spring he and Gyzan will come here. They have long been preparing for this, knowing that one day I would find this world, these mages, again. Your help, too, I will need, my son. It is perilous and needs magic on both sides—the less is there, the greater it must be here, to protect them as they cross.”

“But if there’s no magic there at all,” Tally said doubtfully, perching beside Rhion on the sheepskin-covered bench, “how can they reach out to guide our men?”

“There’s magic and magic,” Rhion explained quietly. “Even someone who isn’t mageborn can use a scrying-crystal after a fashion, under the influence of the proper drugs. But to reach out across the Void… I still don’t see how…”

“Only with the power of the solstice-tide, the sun-tide, or to a lesser extent with the momentum of the equinox’s balance,” the old man said, pulling one corner of the fur he wore about his shoulders more firmly around his arms.
He’s too old for this
, Rhion thought, watching the careful way he moved, seeing how thin those blue-veined wrists were in the gap between gloves and soft-knitted arm warmers.
So old
…

“Even so it will be a great gamble, my daughter,” the blind mage went on. “But it is one we must take. Shavus, Gyzan, myself… all of us. Or else all of this…” His stiff hand, its fingers barely mobile now at all, moved to take in the scrupulous neatness of the study, with its potted herbs, its small shelf of books—even, Rhion noticed with a faint smile, its tremendously expensive, half-grown crocodile drying in a glass case near the fire… “All that we have lived for and have accumulated over the centuries will be for nothing. It will be in danger of vanishing like frost upon the grass with the sun’s rising, and our world will be left with nothing but the might of the strong against the strong, the unscrupulousness of those both clever and wicked, and the demagogues who lead the mobs.”

“You don’t think it’s an illusion of some kind, do you?” Tally asked softly, as she and Rhion descended the narrow stair that led from Jaldis’ rooms down to a discreet door hidden away in a corner of the topmost chamber of the library. “Something he’s convinced himself he’s heard because he’s hunted so long or because he wants it so badly?”

Rhion considered this as he worked the bolt on the other side of the heavy oak door back into place with a spell. “I don’t think so,” he said at length. “I’ve dealt with people whose illnesses stemmed from that kind of self-delusion… he’s obsessed, but he doesn’t have that air.”

They crossed through the high-ceilinged marble chamber with its shelves of books and racks of scrolls, the floating ball of blue witchlight over Rhion’s head making the gilt bindings wink and the shadows dart and play among the lightless pendules of the hanging lamp.

“A trick, maybe, or a trap… ?”

“Set by whom?” Rhion asked sensibly. “And for what purpose?”

Tally shrugged, uneasy at the thought herself, and pulled closer around her shoulders the thick robe of red wool and fur which covered her court-dress of green and white—the Erralswan colors.

“You hear about the—the Great Evils, the priests of Agon call them—spirits who try to lure people into danger and wickedness, the same way grims try to lure you into getting lost in the woods.” She glanced sidelong at him as they descended the wide terrazzo stairs to the floors below, as if not sure how he’d react.

“Maybe they do exist,” Rhion said. “Only everyone who’s been out in wild country at night has seen grims for themselves, and knows how they act. From what I understand only the priests of Agon claim to have seen the Great Evils, and then they pretty much seem to be whatever will fit Agon’s purposes at the time.”