Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (33 page)

Tally chuckled her agreement. “You do have a point,” she said. “On the other hand, everyone has seen wizards—and still believe the lies that are told about them. And that’s illusion, if you will—the altering of perception. And people don’t even need magic to do it.”

Rhion, wrapped against the December cold in the black cloak of the Morkensik Order, with a plaid shawl the Gray Lady had given him over that, shivered. He had passed the Temple of the Eclipsed Sun on the way up from the city gates and had seen for himself the great new hall of sable pillars that spoke of the cult’s increasing riches and power. The sight of it had brought back to him, with terrifying clarity, the cold self-assurance of the High Priest Mijac’s voice from behind the veils, the hideous sense he had had of seeing men who had been released from responsibility for their deeds. Artists of illusion, Mijac had called wizards…

And yet he sensed that his growing dread stemmed from something deeper, some rotted ghost of memory connected somehow with the Dark Well, a memory that still stirred now and then in his dreams.

They passed down through the lower two rooms of the library, each larger than the one above, and through the vast, echoing spaces of the empty scriptorium below that, and so to the library’s anteroom on the ground floor of the tower, and through the great bronze doors into the colonnade that embraced the palace’s vast central court. Even in its pillared shelter, gusts of wind clutched at Rhion’s mantle and Tally’s long fur robe, and the driven snow, scudding before the wind across the granite paving blocks of the court, swirled between the columns and wet their feet.

Sheltered by a numinous aura of Who-Me? they passed through the vestibule of the palace’s marble hall. There, under the shadows of the musicians’ gallery, only a few lamps burned on the clustering pillars, but beyond, a hundred lights on tall bronze stands filled the hall with silky primrose radiance, warming the tucked and pearled velvets, the shimmering featherwork and ribbons, of the courtiers’ clothing to a moving rainbow of crimson, blue, and green. Pausing in the shadowy doorway that led up to the private apartments, Rhion wiped the mist from his spectacle lenses, then looked out into the hall, automatically picking out those he knew.

The Duke—and in any room he’d ever been in all eyes still went first to the Duke—looked a little older, a little more tired, than a man of fifty should. Even his son’s death in a practice joust—preparing for his first tournament three years ago on the eve of what would have been his seventeenth birthday—hadn’t affected Dinar of Prinagos as badly as had his wife’s last summer of a fever no one had thought much of until it was too late. The big man still had his old air of power, his easy movements which dominated everyone around him, but streaks of gray had begun to appear in his thickly curled black hair under its after supper crown of hothouse roses. Damson sat beside him, corseted cruelly into a gown whose entire front seemed to be an iridescent armor of pearls, her plump, jeweled fingers nimbly flicking at the glass spindles of a lace-making pillow.

Perhaps it was losing Tally’s friendship, Rhion thought, or perhaps it was her obsession with Esrex—but it seemed to him that over the years the steely quality of a single-mindedness in her had grown. Lines of will and watchfulness carved deep in the suety face now, aging it under its heavy paint. Despite her ladylike occupation, her shrewd gray eyes traveled over the room, missing nothing of what they saw.

She was currently watching Marc of Erralswan with considerable disapproval. Dressed in a very short blue velvet tunic with elaborately padded sleeves, he was flirting with one of her maids-in-waiting, their teasing intimacy telling its own tale. Rhion sighed and gritted his teeth. Marc had never, even on the night of his wedding to Tally, laid a hand on his bride of convenience; it was not to be expected that he remain celibate.
But
, Rhion thought, illogically angry for Tally’s sake,
does he have to be so goddam blatant about it?
As the Duke’s son-in-law and the holder of considerable wealth and estates—not to mention as a beefy champion of the tilt-yards—he found his scope had considerably widened from the days when he was the captain of the ducal guard, and his hunting field hadn’t been exactly narrow then.

Rhion glanced sideways at Tally and saw her face set in an attempt at unconcern. She shook her head comically and sighed, “That’s our Marc…” But Rhion knew that it hurt her when the court ladies giggled about her behind their feathered fans.

And Esrex…

Esrex was almost invisible, half concealed in the shadow of a pillar, talking to someone who would have been hidden by still deeper shadows from any but mageborn eyes.

Rhion shivered. He was talking with a priest of Agon.

“Are there many of them at Court these days?” Rhion asked softly, as he and Tally moved through the small door and up the stairs. Their hands sought one another automatically—he had not seen her for nearly three months, since his last visit to Bragenmere in September. Even had he lived with her daily, he suspected he would have craved her touch. “Priests of Agon?”

“Was that who Esrex was talking to? I’m afraid so.” Tally, like the rest of her family, had changed, her coltish skinniness maturing into spear-straight, graceful strength, her long features settling into serene beauty. Rhion knew that, over the years, Tally had patched up a working relationship with Damson—as two ladies of the same court must—but that never again had the sisters been friends. The isolation and the caution of leading a double life had left their mark on her—a kind of measured steadiness, sadness tinged with golden strength.

“Since the High Queen has had a shrine built to the Eclipsed Sun in the palace at Nerriok you see them more and more,” she went on somberly. “Esrex is supposed to be very high in their hierarchy, though of course no one knows. And Father… he’s had to be more careful with the cults, as you know.”

That, Rhion also knew, had been the fruit of the aborted alliance with the Earl of the Purple
Forest. The death of the Duke’s son had destroyed the last chance of union with one of the other great Realms. With only a minor nobleman for a son-in-law Dinar of Mere had to take support where it could be found.

“With most of the priesthoods, it doesn’t matter.” Bars of tawny light from below crossed Tally’s face as they climbed through the shadows of the columns, like two shadows themselves in the dim upper reaches of the great stair. “But they’re not the same, are they?”

“No.” Rhion remembered the masked men in the watchroom of the Temple, the words of the priest on the threshold:
As for lepers, and beggars, and slaves, Agon has a welcome for them, as he has for all who serve him
… And how many served him, he wondered, for the sake of that welcome, which relieved them of responsibility for what they did? He didn’t know.

No one knew.

But he suspected that Esrex was not that kind of servant. With the lies of Agon’s priests as his main source of information—lies, perhaps, that he wanted badly to believe—it might well be that Esrex was not aware of being a servant at all.

Glancing back down through an opening in the wall, he could see the ivory-fair head—losing, he could also see, its hairline’s long struggle with destiny. Esrex’ face, too, was prematurely lined, with petty stubbornness and will, and his eyes had a kind of restless glitter to them. Rhion knew that Esrex took drugs upon occasion, either on his own or as part of his involvement with the priests of the Eclipsed Sun, who gave them to their chosen followers; Rhion wondered what his consumption was up to these days.

“No, I’m afraid they’re not.”

Halfway down the gallery were the doors to the nursery wing, clear-grained red wood inlaid with patterns of silver wrought into intricate protective seals. The window shutters, Rhion knew, were silver, also—Damson had had them made—though it had been fifty years since there’d been a case of grim harrowing in Bragenmere. There were some these days who believed that silver was proof against a wizard’s spells as well, but Rhion had no trouble reaching with his mind into the locks and shifting the silver pins.

A sentry dozed in the anteroom, and Rhion imperceptibly deepened the man’s sleep with a whispered charm. From around the shut door of the room where the sickly Dinias slept came the drift of eucalyptus steam and the snores of a nurse. Elucida, at the age of eleven the biggest matrimonial catch in the Forty Realms, had her own suite and her own chaperon and maid. But the two sons of the Duke’s younger daughter shared a smaller chamber, and there was no nurse whose dreams needed thickening as Rhion and Tally ghosted inside.

Brenat had been born when Kir was three—“Jaldis makes a good potion,” Rhion had joked at the time. Standing in the doorway of the dark chamber and looking at the night-lamp’s fretted red glow playing across those two double handfuls of brown curls, he felt a curious sense of unalloyed delight in these sons of his, a desire to whoop and shout, an almost uncontrollable yearning to touch… though he knew, as he had known the first time he had taken Tally in his arms, that it was madness.

The problem was that he could not now imagine a world that did not include his sons.

Kir’s hand, clutching the hilt of the toy sword he’d fought tooth and nail to take to bed with him, was big in spite of its childish chubbiness. He would have the Duke’s height when he grew up, as well as Tally’s long, delicate features and gray eyes. That, Rhion thought in his moments of cynical despair, was fortunate—Marc was tall, too. Brenat’s eyes were also gray. Tally, who adored the boys, sometimes spoke of another child, but they both knew they had been fools to have these.

“Will you be here to see them tomorrow?” Tally asked quietly, stepping closer to Rhion as he put his arm around her waist. She still had to bend her head just a little for him to kiss her temple.

“Oh, yes—till the storm lets up, in fact. That should be sometime tomorrow.” The wind groaned along the gallery as they stepped out again, closing the door behind them. The quilted red hangings which kept the chill from the walls in winter rippled uneasily with the scurrying draughts, as if bodiless monsters raced behind them to some unknown goal.

“I’m glad. They ask after you when you’re not here, you know.”

In spite of himself Rhion smiled. He’d seen his boys with Marc, polite and respectful and in awe of their putative father, but on his last visit in September Kir had said something to him about, “Father chasing lightskirts all around the court,” with a disapproving look in his gray eyes.

“Well,” Rhion had said at the time, “it probably wouldn’t do to say that to him.”

Kir’s mouth had hardened. “But it’s wrong. He’s married to Mother. And it makes her sad when the other ladies laugh. You’re a wizard, Rhion. Can’t you make him stop?”

Rhion had groaned. “What, you, too?” This conversation had taken place in the mews, where Rhion had gone to help Tally doctor a sick goshawk and the boys had tagged along to see what trouble they could get into in the room where the varvels and jesses were stored and the lures repaired. “Look, Kir, you might as well find out early that magic can’t make people do things differently than they do. It can’t change what people are like.”

“Dinias says it can.” The boy had picked up a long tail-feather from the floor, where Brenat sat placidly arranging straws in order of their length, and dug among the leather-scraps near the workbench for a thong to wind around it like a simple lure. “Dinias says that a wizard can cast a spell on a man that will take away his brains and make him cut up his own wife with an ax, and when he wakes up in the morning he won’t remember what he did, but they’ll hang him anyway.” He looked hopefully up into Rhion’s face for corroboration of this gory program.

“ ’Fraid
not.” Rhion sighed, realizing that it was a tale every child in the city heard as soon as they reached school.

Kir’s face fell. “Oh. Dinias said you were a wizard and didn’t have a soul, but I beat him up.”

“Thus changing his opinion of me and endearing yourself to his father in one—er—blow.”

And Kir had said, “Hunh?” and had looked at him with the baffled exasperation of a child confronted by adult nonsense.

Thinking back on the scene Rhion sighed again, and shook his head. Tally looked at him inquiringly, the glow of the small votive-light near the nursery-door turning her lashes to ginger and leaving her eyes in shadow.

“It’s just—they grow so fast,” he said softly. “And I envy you the time you have with them.”

She reached over and gently scratched his beard, then drew his mouth to hers. “If I were anyone else,” she murmured, “I would envy myself.”

But much later, as he was dressing again by the low throb of ember light that glowed from the hearth in her room, he returned to the earlier topic—something they did with subjects discussed hours, weeks, or even months previously. Wind still savaged the window shutters behind their quilted hangings, its howling sounding louder now that the small noises of servants passing in the corridors had dwindled.

“It should be quieting down by noon,” Rhion said, struggling into his shabby brown robes. “Then we should have nearly a week’s clear weather, enough for me to get back to the Drowned Lands before the next big storm.”

She held out his spectacles to him. Without them, kneeling among the sheets, he saw her only as an upright column of shadowy gold in the firelight, wreathed in points of light—her jewels, all that she now wore. “Will the Gray Lady be angry, if you leave at the equinox?”

“Not angry,” Rhion said quietly, carefully hooking the metal frames over his ears. “She’ll understand. But the rites need a lot of power. If I’m not presiding, they get Cuffy Rifkin, an Earth-witch from up the marshes, to do it, and his strength isn’t as great even as mine, which is only average. It puts the victim’s life at greater risk. But the Gray Lady knows what I owe to Jaldis. Even at midnight of the equinox, getting Shavus and Gyzan across the Void is going to take more power than he should be trying to use these days. Maybe more than he has.”

“He was very ill, the day after Winterstead.” Behind the tawny halo of her hair the emblems of the house of Erralswan gleamed on the bed hangings amid a thicket of heraldic gingerbread, as if Marc’s name and station covered the lovers literally as well as metaphorically. “I was afraid he’d had a stroke, or his heart had failed him. But he said no, it was only that he’d overtaxed himself.