Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (4 page)

In the huge kitchen, low-ceilinged, shuttered, silent, and dark but for the feeble glow of the banked embers on the hearth, Rhion pulled the landlord’s heavy green cloak from its peg and slung it around his shoulders. Outside the noise was clearer—definitely armed and angry men, definitely headed this way.

He paused on the threshold, panting, to collect his thoughts. It still took him a long and meticulous time to work any kind of spell, though he practiced diligently, and Jaldis told him that speed and mental deftness would come with time. Against the rising shiver in his breast, the inner clamor of
There isn’t time for this… !
he closed his eyes, calmed his breathing, and reaching out with all the senses of wizardry, realized that the mark the mob had passed was the one he’d put on the side of a little shrine of Shilmarglinda, goddess of grain, over on the corner of Sow Lane.

Clutching the landlord’s cloak about him, he ducked and wove through alleyways choked with half-frozen garbage and no wider than the span of his arms. As he ran he shoved resolutely from his mind all the thousand questions trying to heave to its surface like porridge on the boil, questions like
Who’s
behind this?
and
Where the hell can we go? The landlord’ll never bolt the door against them
… Instead he concentrated on forming a spell to cloak him against the notice of people who might very well know him for the wizard’s apprentice. Unlike the sleep-spells at the inn, tossed hastily about him like a sower’s seeds, this one had better keep him from being recognized or he stood in grave danger of having to choose between a very severe beating—if nothing worse—and some defensive action that might trigger further mob violence. In situations like this it was axiomatic that the wizard—or the wizard’s friends and acquaintances—could never really win.

The mob had spilled into Suet Lane. It was nearly fifty strong, though its core of two dozen men in the dark-blue livery of some town nobleman’s household bravos was being added to all the time by the kind of tavern idlers and day laborers who could always be counted upon to join an affray. Rhion recognized two of the magistrate’s constables among them and a couple of lesser officials of the local Temple of Kithrak, the war-god whose cult was strong in Felsplex. One of these was yelling something about servants of evil and insulters of the names of the gods, and Rhion had a sinking certainty about whose honor this assemblage was in.

Nevertheless he fell into step with one of the local wastrels, a little female stevedore he’d seen drinking frequently in the Black Pig. Hoping his spell of Who-Me? would hold, he asked, “What’s going on?”

The woman barely glanced at him. A torch in one hand, an ax-handle in the other, she appeared to be—and, by the workings of the spell, in fact was—momentarily absorbed in keeping an eye on the thickly quilted back of the liveried bravo in front of her. If later challenged to describe the man who had spoken to her, she would have been able only to arrive at a vague recollection of someone about her husband’s height and build. “Gonna kill them witch scum,” she grunted, and spat through gaps in her teeth into the frozen sewage underfoot.

The word she used for “kill” wa
s fruge
, a verb which had application only to animals, almost a technical term except that it was used so commonly. It denoted a killing which meant nothing and which demanded no explanations—a self-evident axiom. One never asked why someone would
fruge
a rat, or a cow for beef. One did it because that was what one did with rats and cows.

“Yeah?”
Rhion said in the local slang, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “What’d the bastards do this time?”

“Sold a love-potion to that whore wife of Tepack the moneylender so’s she could drag her husband’s partner’s innocent son into bed with her.” His companion nodded toward the solid core of liverymen, like a knot of lead poured into a wooden club to make of it a killing weapon. “Only sixteen, he is, and his daddy—Lord Pruul—says he’s gonna
fruge
them wizards, since Tepack’s not gonna let anyone say a word against his wife…”

But Rhion was already gone, holding the landlord’s cloak-hem up out of the mud and thinking,
Real smart, Rhion. Didn’t think to ask if the bint was married, did we?

But of course the question would only have elicited a lie. Perhaps a lie that the woman herself believed. He was familiar with Lord Pruul’s son, having sold that raped and innocent victim enough lover-philters and clap-cures to stock a pharmacy over the past thirty months.
Dammit, we really did need the money
…

He ducked into the doorway of one of the huge, gray-timbered tenement blocks that made up the neighborhood, pressed his hands to the door to work back the bolt by magic, then darted through the downstairs hall where beggars slept in rags and garbage. Cutting through the filth in the yard behind the place, he was able to reach the junction of Suet Lane, Goat Lane, and Cod Alley before the mob did, only a few hundred feet from the Black Pig. Amid the towering walls of tenement houses, wineshops, and the vast bulk of the St. Plomelgus Baths, the little square was like a deep cistern full of shadow, only the tiny brick-and-iron shrine of St. Plomelgus—a demi-god of the Thismé cult—catching the wan starlight on the iron spikes of its roof.

His hands shaking with panic, Rhion forced his mind to calm as he drew the sigils for a spell of misleading on the shrine itself, the corner of the baths, the corner timbers of a tenement house. The Lady, the Fool, the Dancer at the Heart of the World… runes twined together, calling into themselves and radiating forth, in their proper combination, the certainty that one turned right instead of left, that Goat Lane was in fact the street which led to the Black Pig; a line of light stretched across the mouth of Cod Alley, glowing visible for a moment, then sinking back into the air. To throw a little twist on things Rhion added a spell of argumentativeness to the governing Seals upon the shrine, then, as torchlight flickered over the stiff lead saint in her pigeon-desecrated niche and voices echoed against the high walls, he gathered his cloak around him and fled.

Jaldis was already dressed, patiently, with twisted fingers, lacing his boots. He raised his head inquiringly as Rhion fumbled the latch open with his mind from the other side.

“Lord Pruul’s men,” Rhion gasped, crossing immediately to the table and beginning to shove things into his pockets—packets of herbs, precious bits of bronze and gold and rare woods for the making of talismans, scrying-crystals, and bread. “That woman I sold a philter to earlier tonight was the wife of his business-partner. She used it to seduce his son, though from what I know of Pruul Junior I wonder that she needed to bother.”

Jaldis slipped into the leather harness that bound the voice-box to his breast, found his spectacles without groping for them, and hooked them onto his face. The talismans on the voice-box clinked with fragile music as he erected his crutches and climbed to his feet. “My books…”

Rhion turned to view the row of volumes along the back of the table, the stacks on the floor beside the chimney wall, the little bin of scrolls beside his master’s customary chair, and cursed. It was appalling how much impedimenta they’d picked up in two and a half years here. They’d come to Felsplex with twenty-one books of various shapes and sizes—grimoires, demonaries, herbals laboriously copied from volumes in Shavus’ little library in that stone house in the forest—and in the years they’d been here they had, at great pain and expense, acquired a dozen more. Precious volumes, some of them irreplaceable. While court mage for the traitor Lord Henak, Jaldis had collected a library of nearly a hundred volumes of magic and wisdom over the years, added to what had been passed on to him by his own master. The High King’s men had burned them all. Rhion had heard Jaldis say that he regretted that loss more than he did the loss of his eyes.

He cursed again, feeling already exhausted and defeated, and cast a quick glance at the window that he already knew would be their means of egress. The shouts of the mob were audible through the walls, furious and frustrated as they wandered helplessly in the maze of twisting streets. If he’d had time to cast a more elaborate spell…

Swiftly he tore the blanket from the bed. “It’s going to be close,” he warned, and crossed to the window at a ran. Once the shutter was thrown back, the cold was brutal, making his eyes water and his numbed fingers ache, even with both gloves and writing-mitts on his hands. The wind had died down; the sky was iron-black above the slanting jumble of tiled roofs. Most were too steep to hold snow, but moisture had frozen on them and they’d be slick and treacherous. Rhion thought about negotiating them with forty or fifty pounds of unwieldy paper on his back, not to mention trying to guide a blind man on crutches, and shuddered.

“We can’t take all of them.” The words cut like a wire noose—Jaldis loved those books like children, and there were several that Rhion had not yet studied. But he knew as surely as he knew his name that if he tried it, they would both fall to their deaths. “I’m sorry. We just…”

A spasm of sorrow contorted the old man’s face. “Then you choose.” The arthritic hands passed, trembling, along the volumes on the table, touching them as he would have touched the faces of people he loved. “For they will be yours now longer than they will be mine.”

“Don’t say that!” Rhion spread the blanket on the bed and dove back toward the table, steeling himself against the agony of decision and thinking desperately,
That
spell won
’
t hold them long
… “We’re going to get out of here just fine… Can you call fog?”

“In a moment.”
Jaldis remained beside the table, head bowed, hands touching this book or that as Rhion worked hurriedly around him…
Dammit, that one’s got the Summoning of Elementals in it! I hadn’t learned that yet
…

Shavus will have it
, he told himself firmly. But the book seemed to cling to his hand like a child he was trying to abandon in the woods.
Hell, Jaldis was searching for that Book of Circles when I met him
…

“Jaldis…” With the window open the noise of the mob came to them quite clearly. It was growing louder again. They must have gotten their bearings.

“In a moment.
You’re leaving
these?”

“Yes. Come
ON
… !”
He piled the fifteen or so books that he could not possibly bear to let slip from their possession in the center of the blanket, threw in some spare clothing and food, and tied the corners, then bent and pulled from beneath the bed a long, cleated plank—the gangway, in fact, of one of the hayboats that came to the quays from upriver in spring. He’d appropriated it two years ago when he’d first mapped out this route of escape, foreseeing the possibility of just this event, even as he’d made wizard’s marks that would glow at a word on the various chimneys, turrets, and crudely carved roof-tree gargoyles—designed to frighten goblins and grims, these decorated every roof in the city—along their chosen route…

But the thought of actually doing it still turned him queasy.

At that time he’d practiced manhandling the plank down the roof tiles to the gap where the alley separated them from the next building. But that had been two summers ago, when the steeply sloped tiles were dry. Black ice cracked under the soles of his boots, and the wind froze his face, his heart hammering so hard it nearly sickened him. Eastward across the pitchy jumble of roof trees and gargoyles, his mageborn eyes could make out, like a dirty fault-scar in the wilderness of grimy plaster and half-timbering, the line of the river. The noise of the mob was louder, down in Cod Alley now, certainly—there was no note in it of the baffled fury of a mob confronted with a locked door.

Of course the landlord would let them in. His only request would be that they not break anything downstairs. “He’ll probably sell them drinks on their way up,” Rhion muttered savagely, as he struggled back through the window again.

Jaldis was still standing beside the table, head bowed and long white hair hanging down over his face as he passed his hands lightly across the covers of each of the rejected books in turn. For an instant, watching him, Rhion’s heart constricted with grief—it was as if the old man was memorizing one last time the touch of the bindings, the whisper of the things within that now would be destroyed. But the building was already shaking with the pounding of fists upon the doors, of feet upon the stairs…

He pulled the blanket-wrapped bundle onto his back, tangling it with the landlord’s green cloak, and girded up his robe through his belt. “Now,” he said, as gently as he could through the hammering urgency of panic, and took Jaldis by the arm. He saw the old man’s forehead pucker with the agony of concentration as he called the spells of sight into his opal spectacles.

“Did you call the fog?” Rhion whispered as he eased himself out the window again, praying with all that was in him that the weight of the books on his back wouldn’t overbalance him on the slippery roof.

Jaldis, leaning out the window to take his pupil’s steadying arms, shook his head. He was using all his strength, all his attention, to see. He could seldom operate both eyes and voice at the same time, much less call unseasonable weather conditions like fog in winter, even when he was rested—certainly not in the exhausted aftermath of working with the Dark Well.

Instead he had been saying good-bye to his books. Scared as he was, Rhion could not feel anger. The
Grand Demonary
had been given Jaldis by his own old master Xiranthe, Archmage of the Morkensik Order for forty years, who had gotten it from hers—it was one of the few which had escaped the High King’s men. The collection of the wizard Ymrir’s personal notes had been copied nearly a hundred years ago and was the best redaction of those notes either of them knew about, the least corrupted…

But
, Rhion thought despairingly as he started to ease his way down the steep tiles, with the old man’s tall weight on one shoulder and the shifting, awkward sack of books on his back,
we surely could have used that fog
.

The flight from Felsplex was a nightmare that in later years Rhion would look back upon with a kind of wonder, amazed that he’d been scared enough even to think about trying it. Wind had started up by the time they’d crossed the gangway, blowing from the north and arctically cold. Rhion could smell sleet on it but knew that neither he nor Jaldis could spare the concentration needed to turn the storm aside. With the books overbalancing him, he didn’t have the leverage to pull the gangway across after them, but had to tip it over into the deserted alley below.