Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (34 page)

“I’ll look in on him again tonight,” Rhion said quietly, more worried than he cared to admit. He slung his cloak around his shoulders and the Gray Lady’s plaid on top of that. “And he still won’t have a slave to look after him?”

Tally shook her head. “And do you know,” she said after a moment, “with what they say about the cult of Agon—about not knowing who is in it, who their spies are—sometimes I think that’s just as well.”

The palace bulked dark and silent as Rhion stepped out onto the ice-slick terrace, a sleeping beast with all its hues of terra cotta and peach and gold, its bronzes and its porcelains and its columns of porphyry and marble, drowned in the depths of night. Even so, Rhion chose to take the long way around from Tally’s rooms, moving in silence through the barren, wind-lashed garden and surrounded once more in a cloudy haze of spells. What Damson and Esrex had had to say to one another on the day after his brush with the priests of Agon he had never found out, but he knew Esrex still sought proof that he was the father of Tally’s children—sought revenge for the fool he had made of himself before the court and the priests that day. And in spite of the Duke’s deep friendship for Jaldis, his fondness for Rhion and his love for his younger daughter’s children, Rhion never felt quite safe in Bragenmere.

In his rooms in the octagonal tower, Jaldis was asleep. Standing in the curtained door arch of the old man’s chamber, Rhion listened to the soft hiss of his breathing and reflected that he’d heard that sound almost nightly for eleven years of sharing quarters in some of the worst accommodations in the Forty Realms. And looking around at the tidy cubicle, with its warm fire and fur robes, its books neatly shelved—two more had returned to Jaldis only last year, brought by travelers who’d found them in middens or estate sales, men who’d known the Duke was a collector—its small jars of herbs, crystals, and silver powder, he felt a vast relief that the old man had found shelter at last. The years had been hard on him. He had a fragile air these days that Rhion did not like.

The thought stirred in his mind, an uneasy whisper in the darkness.

Moving soundlessly, Rhion let the thick wool curtain fall and went into the tiny study. It was pitch dark there and cold—he moved easily through it, smelling the new-cured parchment, seeing, in the dark, how every crystal, every inkpot, and every piece of chalk and wax was in place and ready for Jaldis’ hands. In the far corner a ladder led to the attic above, waste space under the tower’s conical roof cap. As his hand touched the rungs a hideous sense of danger seized him, the sudden, overpowering conviction that Tally and his sons were in peril, immediate and terrible, from which only he could save them and only if he got there in time…

It was a spell, of course. And the fact that even here, in the heart of his own rooms, Jaldis would feel such a spell was necessary troubled him deeply.

Brushing aside the phantom dreads, he ascended the ladder and opened the trap door.

It was bolted from the other side, of course—there were even spells on the bolt. Rhion remembered Jaldis’ warnings, when the Gray Lady had sought to probe the secrets of the making of the Well. The key to what magic
is
, he had said. Something indeed to be protected at any cost, even at the cost of losing it entirely.

Then he stood in the dark of the loft, looking into the Well itself. It was quiet now, closed, a vague whisper of brownish shadow, a column of darkness within the scribbled circles of silver, blood, and light unpierceable even by mageborn eyes, a hidden whisper of primordial fear.

The attic had been closed for a week and, huge as it was, it smelled stuffy and cold, lingering traces of dust and incense clinging to the great wheel of the rafters overhead. Even the heat that rose from the rooms below did not warm it, and thin drafts worked bony fingers through the folds of Rhion’s cloak and the robe beneath.

A world without magic
, he thought. A world where all things were mechanical, sterile, even those which sounded most fantastic, like the wagons which traveled without beasts to draw them and the artificial lightning, or the flying machines. A world where beauty had been forgotten, and where the men and women born with wizardry in their blood and the gnawing conviction that other possibilities existed beyond the invisible curtain of dreams were unable to put their hand through that curtain to touch what lay on the other side.

A world that had begged for help.

A world of Jaldis’ children, as Rhion was his child—a world to whom to pass his power, as he had passed it to Rhion. He would not turn aside from it.

Fear of the Dark Well—fear of what he half-remembered, of what he half-guessed—was growing in Rhion, but he forced himself to remain where he was, gazing into that darkness as Jaldis had gazed for seven years now, seeking what lay beyond.

But the Dark Well held its secrets. And in time his fear overcame him, as he felt the refracted blackness of the rainbow abyss drawing him into itself. He backed to the trap door and climbed down the ladder, bolting the door behind him.

But the thought of it pursued him into his sleep, and troubled his dreams.

IT WAS CARNIVAL WHEN RHION CAME NEXT TO BRAGENMERE
, the Feast of Mhorvianne. Ribbons and bunting decorated the tenement balconies of the Lower
Town, yellow and red and green, lining the route of what had obviously been a procession. Garlands of roses, hyacinth, and cyclamen still twisted round the porch pillars of the temples in the squares and the pediments of the public baths. The remains of pink and white petals could be discerned, trampled in the muck of the brimming gutters, and the public fountains of the markets still smelled faintly of the more inexpensive varieties of wine.

“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Tally said, after their first kisses had been exchanged in the deserted shadows of the library vestibule, where even on the gray spring afternoon the slaves had already kindled the lamps. It was coming on to rain again—Rhion wondered whether Jaldis had been asked to keep the skies clear for the procession. Tally wore an unlikely geranium-hued gown whose hanging clusters of ribbons were tipped with bells, haloing her every movement in a starry glister of sound. “Father’s getting married again.”

“Getting married?” Rhion paused, startled and amused, in the act of cleaning his spectacle-lenses, which had gotten rather smudged in their initial embrace.

“Yes. To the heiress of Varle, who’s about as old as I am. Esrex is
furious
.”

“What business is it of his?” Hand in hand they ascended the long curve of the library stairs, surrounded by what Rhion—in reminiscence of a joke as old as the hills—thought of as the Nobody-Here-But-Us-Chickens Spell. Rhion had guessed from the bustle in the palace courtyard below that the library would be deserted; their footfalls echoed with small, sharp music in the tall vaults of the marble ceilings. “I mean, except that it’s finally the foreign alliance he’s been after all these years…”

“Poor father.”
She half-laughed at the irony of it—two marriageable daughters, each determined to have the man she wanted and not the alliance their father craved. “But it’s more than that. Since Syron’s death…” Her voice still flawed a little on the name of the young brother she had loved, “I think Esrex has gotten used to the idea that Dinias would naturally be Father’s heir. And with offers coming in from all sides for Elucida’s hand… Did you know the High Queen even sent her astrologer to take the aspects of her birth and cast a horoscope?”

“You mean, to marry Elucida to the little Prince?” Rhion’s eyebrows tweaked upward—quite a fate, he thought, for that tiny fair-skinned child, sleeping in a hollow log where the grims had abandoned her. “Esrex better not count on that one. Shavus tells me the boy’s sickly and suffers from convulsions. Besides, I thought the High Queen was one of Agon’s initiates and didn’t hold with astrologers.”

“Well,” Tally said, “when it comes down to it,
nobody’s
supposed to go to astrologers and necromancers and people who make love-potions…”

“Don’t look at me; I’ve retired.”

“But all that will change,” she finished simply, “if Elucida is no longer going to be sister to the Duke of Mere one day. Not to mention the White Bragenmeres being cut out of the succession entirely.”

Rhion was silent, remembering Esrex’ overwhelming, bitter pride.
Upon occasion, he wondered whether what really angered that young scion was the suspicion that any kinswoman of his had mingled her blood, not with a wizard, but with a banker’s son.

Jaldis rose from his chair as they entered his study and hobbled to greet them, the huge, opal rounds of his spectacle-lenses flashing strangely in the witchlight that burned like marshfire above his head. Rhion frowned, seeing how bent and frail the old man looked, and wondered if he’d been working with the Dark Well since the winter solstice, probing at its shadowy secrets with whatever power of his own he could raise.

Or was it merely, he thought, that he was getting old?

“Have Shavus and Gyzan come?”

Jaldis shook his head. “They will be here late tonight.” The fox-fur wrap which covered his shoulders and chest slightly muffled the voice of the box. The chamber was warm, but still the old man clung to it, and now and then Rhion saw him shiver. “Shavus said that with things as they have been, it was best…”

“Things?”
Rhion’s frown deepened. “What things?”

“You have not seen these, then?” The old man turned and limped back to the table. From the side of his eye, Rhion saw Tally’s somber face and realized that the sheet of cheap yellow paper which the old man held out was not news to her.

It was a crudely block-printed handbill, labeled,
The God of Wizards
. It depicted a grossly goat-headed man in a wizard’s long robe—in the print there was no attempt to show what color, or what Order, only that it was hung all over with sun-crosses, gods-eyes, and other symbols of magic—copulating with a naked woman whose mouth was open in a protesting scream. A dead baby, its throat slit, sprawled beside them.

“According to Shavus, these have been appearing in the streets of Nerriok for weeks.”

Rhion’s hand was shaking with anger as he set the leaflet down.
Artists of illusion
… “Did Shavus say anything else?”

“Only that he would speak to me more of it when he arrives tonight.”
The blind wizard removed his spectacles, laying them down upon the desk. Beside the leaflet, Rhion saw a scrap of paper bearing a few lines of the Archmage’s explanatory scrawl. He glimpsed Gyzan’s name and remembered that the Blood-Mage had his house on one of the capital’s outlying islets. The leaflet could very well have been found shoved under his door.

“Have you shown the Duke?”

“It only arrived today.” Jaldis hobbled to the hearth and stood there, holding out his crooked hands to the coals. “I fear it may mean they shall have to cut short their visit to the other world…”

“Cut short?”
Rhion stared at him, shocked to realize the extent of Jaldis’ obsession with the project. “What makes you think he’ll be willing to go at all?”

Jaldis turned back; by the startled ascent of his white eyebrows, Rhion realized the old man was equally shocked that the question would even have been raised. “Cancel our plans? I have sought them—Eric and Paul, his helper and fellow student—for seven years. I am not going to put the matter off over a few pieces of paper.”

“It’s not a few pieces of paper. It could be preparation for something, some major stroke…”

“Indeed it could.” Jaldis limped back to him and took his arm, his thin face in its frame of white hair as grave, as earnest as Rhion had ever seen it. “Don’t you see? It is because of this that he
must
go. The enemies of magic are moving, my son. And what happened in one universe could just as easily happen here.”

But Rhion was uneasy as, unseen in the gallery’s shadows, he watched the feasting in the palace’s great hall that night. The Duke, when he had seen him before dinner, had apologized for not asking Rhion or his master to the feast or the masking afterward. It was a state occasion, and the priests of all the Great Cults would be there. As Tally had said, since losing the possibility of foreign marriage alliances the Duke had become more careful of the opinions of the cults.

They were all present, seated in places of honor, from Darova’s gold-robed Archimandrite and the red-gowned Archpriestess of Mhorvianne down to the local Solarist Holy Woman in unadorned white who regarded the whole scene with the polite interest of an adult at a children’s party. It was not lost on Rhion that Esrex, costumed for the masking in the simple black pantaloon and white mask of a juggler, was sitting next to Mijac.

His eye traveled as it had three months ago to others he knew around the board and to the Duke, recognizable despite his red leather huntsman’s costume and spiked black-and-gold mask. The way he moved, the warm charm of his manner, as much as the broad shoulders and strongly curled black hair, would have identified him had he been in rags. At his side was his new bride, blond and pretty and, as Tally had said, younger than the Duke’s own daughters, costumed in a pearl-sewn gown supposed to represent a shepherdess. The plump little lady in the improbable goddess robes beside her, being gracious and kind and welcoming, was unmistakably Damson. On the Duke’s other side sat Dinias, a thin pale boy in scarlet who looked as if his chest was hurting him again, and, gowned as a woman for the first time in jewel-plastered brocade and clearly embarrassed about the visible expanses of flat white chest, Elucida, promoted to womanhood on this, the feast of the Goddess of Love. As usual when she was nervous Elucida was taking refuge in her formidable erudition, and arguing theology with the Archimandrite, at whose left hand she sat.

The tables had been set in a big U around the sides of the hall to accommodate courtiers, merchants, and nobles of town and country; Rhion scanned the gaily costumed figures around them for a glimpse of Tally. She had told him Ranley the physician was coming as the God of Ocean complete with the Ocean’s Twelve Daughters, and Rhion wondered where they’d found eleven other girls of Tally’s height and build. They had, however—all were moving about the hall, up and down the tables as they were cleared after the final course, flirting with this man or that, absurdly gowned in identical pearls and green silk, with long green wigs like braided seaweed hanging down their backs. Rhion smiled, trying to guess which one of them was Tally.