Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (5 page)

Then came the slithery agony of edging along the slanted roofs, easing their way around gables and ornamental turrets, clinging to gargoyles and rain gutters slick with ice and rotten with age and neglect. For the most part, the buildings in this crowded riverside quarter were close enough together, with their projecting upper stories and jutting eaves, to make leaping over the gaps a relatively easy matter, in theory at least. But theory did not take into account the hellish cold and slippery footing, the yawning blackness of forty- and fifty-foot drops to the cobblestones below, nor the storm gusts that came whipping unexpectedly around the corners of those tall black roof trees to pluck at their clothes and claw their faces.

The coming storm had killed whatever dawnlight had been rising. Rhion hoped it would also discourage their pursuit, but he could still hear the angry voices in the streets below as the men fanned out through the whole district, torches leaping in the charcoal shadows of those twisting chasms, curses echoing against the crowding walls. One of the first things Jaldis had taught him, ten years ago—and he’d been studying it on his own even before that—was to read the weather; he could tell that the sleet wouldn’t hit soon enough to drive Lord Pruul’s bravos indoors. It would only soak and freeze him and Jaldis once they got clear of the town… if they could manage to do so without breaking their necks.

Thanks a lot
, he muttered, addressing the gods Rehobag and Pnisarquas, Lords of the Storm. According to the Bereine theologians who strolled in the pillared basilicas of Nerriok, Rehobag and Pnisarquas were only aspects of the Lord Darova, the Open Sky, God of the Blue Gaze, the Lord Who Created Himself… a god notoriously antithetical to wizardry and all its works.
It figures
.

Rhion was trembling with exhaustion by the time they reached their goal: a tenement by the river whose five-storey bulk jutted out on pilings over the dark waters, a tenement whose inhabitants, like all those of the riverside community, routinely fished off crooked platforms that clung like swallows’ nests to the building’s side, connected by a thready tangle of ladder no more substantial than spiderweb and straw. As he helped the exhausted Jaldis down that suspended deathtrap of sticks and rope, Rhion thanked whatever gods listened to wizards that the river was deep enough at Felsplex not to have frozen, and that the intense cold had damped the smell of it here under the pilings where every privy in the district emptied.

There were several boats tied among the piers beneath the tenement, where a single lantern hanging from a crossbeam threw hard yellow scales of light on the oily water. Rhion’s gloves had been torn to pieces by the scramble over the roofs, and his hands were so stiff they would barely close around the oars. At this season the water was low. Had it been spring, he did not think he would have had the strength to row against the current.

“I don’t see any smoke,” he commented after a time, as they approached the city’s water gate with its thick portcullis—half-raised now like a dog’s snarl—where the river ran out westwards into the flat open country beyond, dirty-white and mud-brown beneath a livid sky. Wind tore at his face, the first sleet snagging in his beard. It was, he knew, nearly impossible for even a mage of Jaldis’ powers to turn a storm aside when it was this close. But he knew, too, that they’d have to try, or they’d never make the upstream market town of Imber alive.

Jaldis, sitting huddled in the boat’s prow under his own cloak and Rhion’s, his hood drawn up over his face, did not raise his head. White hairs flicked from beneath the edge of the hood, like snow blowing from the crest of a roof; muffled by the cloaks that covered it, the voice of the box was nearly inaudible. “That few books would not make much smoke,” he said softly. “They would cast them into the kitchen stove… it will easily accommodate so small a number. No…” And he sighed, a soundless, aching breath of regret. “My great sorrow is that they will have destroyed the Well.”

“The Dark Well?”
Bending his aching back to the oars, Rhion tried to remember what it was about the Dark Well that had frightened him so badly, why the very name of the thing made his scalp creep. But he could remember nothing, other than standing and looking into the eldritch, shifting colors of blackness… that terrible hollow… A vague impression tugged at his mind that perhaps he had dreamed something…

And then it was gone.

But, grieved as he could see Jaldis was at the loss, he himself could work up very little in the way of regret.

“The Dark Well,” the old man again echoed. “They will wipe out the lines that bound it, trample away the symbols that gave it power, that held it in place. It will vanish, and all its secrets with it. Those who cried out to me from its depths…”

“You’ll be able to create another one, in time,” Rhion said, manufacturing as cheerful a tone as he could. “As soon as we get to Imber and find someplace to stay… ” He tried to recall if he’d pocketed their money in their haste to get out, and couldn’t. “You’ll be able to find them again, and help them.”

“No, my son,” Jaldis softly said, and shook his head. “No… If someone has found a way to destroy magic, to end it, make it cease to exist, in an entire universe—it is
we
who may need
their
help.”

BUT IT WAS TO BE A LONG TIME BEFORE JALDIS THE BLIND
and his pupil found the peace and security necessary for the weaving of another Dark Well.

It took them two days to reach Imber, a good-sized market town twenty-five miles upriver from Felsplex, built around the temple complex of Ptorag, God of Grain. In most of the Forty Realms Ptorag’s worship had been supplanted by that of Shilmarglinda—the north-desert deity of all the fruits of the earth—but in Imber it was still strong and the cult owned most of the vineyards lining the hill slopes above the river. Rhion, having ascertained that he
had
, in fact, dropped the little velvet pouch which Tepack the Moneylender’s wife had given him—brainless trollop!—into the blanket’s load of books and spare clothes, figured resignedly that if worst came to worst he could always seek employment corking and sealing bottles when the vintage was laid down toward winter’s end.

“But on the other hand,” he added, extending numb hands toward the small brazier of coals which the landlady of the Red Grape Inn had sent up to their miniscule—though extremely costly—chamber, “if everyone in this town is as calm about wizards as the innkeeper here, I can probably find work as an accountant. That would make my father proud.” He grinned a little as he said it, his beard crackling with ice, and began gingerly unwrapping the frozen rags he’d tied around his hands. They hadn’t the money to remain more than a night or two at this inn, and he’d have to sell the tiny amount of gold they kept for talismanic work in order to obtain permanent lodgings; but, for the moment, Rhion was glad to have found a warm room out of the wind, with prospects of food.

He flexed his fingers in the glow exuded by the little copper dish of coals. “Here, let me see your hands…” In the river-bank cave where they’d spent part of yesterday morning, sheltering from the worst of the sleet, he’d cut strips from the hem of their former landlord’s cloak—which was too long for him anyway—to wrap around Jaldis’ arthritic fingers and his own. He’d hauled stones up from the river-bank and had been able to call sufficient spells to them to heat them up so that their radiant warmth had kept him and his master from freezing to death, but the effort had exhausted him; Jaldis had worked for nearly two hours, drawing and redrawing the figures of power in the air, before he had been able to turn the sleet storm aside. After that the old man had collapsed and slept; when they’d pushed on later in the day and all through the next southward along the banks of the frozen stream, he had the strength to say very little.

Or perhaps, Rhion thought now, stealing a worried glance at his master’s face, the delicate cords of gut and silver wire, the tiny vibrating whistles and membranes within the voice-box itself, had simply frozen fast.

Now the old man said softly, as Rhion chaffed his crippled fingers in a basin of cold water, “I am sorry, my son.”

“Sorry?” Rhion looked up at him in genuine surprise. Outside the windows, the short winter day had ended in slate-colored gloom. In the kitchen directly beneath their room, the innkeeper’s husband was singing a midwinter carol as he prepared supper for the Red Grape’s few guests: roast lamb with rosemary for those wealthy enough to pay for it, lentils and mutton-fat for itinerant mages out of work. “
I
was the one who sold that silly woman a love-potion without asking if she was married or whom she was going to use it on.” Gently he removed the two cloaks and the blanket from Jaldis’ shoulders and laid them over the backs of the room’s various chairs and table to dry. While it was possible to dry clothes, as it was to heat rooms, with magic, under ordinary circumstances it took far more energy than it was worth. In the long run it was cheaper to pay for coal.

For a moment he stood looking down at Jaldis’ sunken cheeks and scarred eyelids, gray as fishbelly with fatigue and with long weeks indoors at the Black Pig. He remembered as from a dream how his white teeth had flashed in a smile, how his voice had boomed with laughter, the day of their first meeting on the bridge. Down to the ends of his long white braids, he had seemed to crackle with energy, with life and delight… with magic. And Rhion had known, as unquestioningly as if he had recognized his own face in a mirror, that that was what he wanted, and had always wanted, to be.

Quietly, he added, “I’m sorry about the books.”

The hard, arthritic grip closed with its surprising strength upon his hand. “It was not your business to ask her if she would use the philter to commit adultery,” Jaldis said. “No more than it is the business of a stationer to ask of a man buying paper and ink if he plans to use them to betray a friend’s trust. Magic is only magic, Rhion.”

The sparse white eyebrows drew down over the bridge of his nose, the thin face filled with urgency, willing him to understand. “It is neither evil nor good, it is neither health nor a sickness. It is only what it is—like a knife, or a man’s life, or a new name for God. We cannot begin to judge what will be done with any of these things, for we ourselves can only hold opinions, and we cannot be sure that the information we are given on any of these is complete or correct.

“It is enough that we do no harm, as our vows enjoin us; that we do not presume to decide things for which there is no proof.” The crooked, clawlike fingers tightened; as the blind face looked up into his, Rhion had the sensation that through those deformed hands the old man could feel, not only his bones and flesh and the warmth of his blood, but the soul within him, reading it like a handful of colored silk ribbons braided into some elaborate code, feeling the texture of his thoughts as he would feel the petals of a flower, the grit of granite, or the cold strength of steel.

“I am only sorry,” Jaldis went on, “that having promised you the wisdom of the universe, the knowledge of balance and truth, I have caused you to leave your family and the world that would have made you comfortable, and then have given you only this: dream weaving, philter brewing, and casting horoscopes and luck-charms, the toys of magic rather than its substance. It is not magic, Rhion…”

Rhion was silent, remembering the soul-deep shiver he had felt when he had first understood the true name of light, the name by which fire is summoned—the true reality of what true reality is. The moment in meditation when all the component parts of the world fell suddenly together, showing that there was, in fact, sense to what happened… He remembered, too, all that long and gaudy parade of nobles, burghers, farmers, and slaves who had come to him and Jaldis over the past ten years, asking for what they thought was magic: medicines or luck-charms or to have their fortunes read. And every one, he reflected, had taught him a little more about what men dreamed.

“No,” he said, squeezing those crippled old fingers in return. “But it sure beats working for a living.”

And Jaldis laughed, sniffing through his high-bridged nose. Laughter was the one sound that it was impossible for the voice-box to make.

Acting on the advice of the innkeeper’s husband, a little brown sparrow of a man whom he instinctively trusted, Rhion sought out the best of the local pawnbrokers the following day and sold the little gold and silver he and Jaldis possessed. With the proceeds, again on their landlord’s advice, he found a widow who owned a garden farm a few hundred yards down the road outside Imber’s gates, who had a room to rent.

“Now, I don’t mind myself that you’re witchylike,” she said, pouring the milk bucket she carried into setting pans—Rhion had found her in the dairy behind the small, half-timbered box of the farmhouse. She turned to face him, tucking hard brown hands into the armpits of her quilted coat for warmth. She was a young woman of about Rhion’s own twenty-seven years, though her face was leathery with outdoor work. Under the close-fitting cap widows wore in the low countries of the Fel
Valley her braids were bright yellow; she wore a blue ribbon around her neck with a green spirit-bead upon it and a little fragment of mirror glass to scare away grims. “It’s just that I don’t want no trouble, see.”

“We’ll try to keep the orgies down to four or five a week,” Rhion replied gravely, and then added, “joking… joking…” as her eyebrows dove down into a worried frown. “It’s just myself and my old master; we may have clients coming from time to time but I promise you we’re well behaved.”
And one of these days I’ll even learn to have some sense about what I say
.

She grinned, showing a gap where childbearing had cost her a tooth. “Well, as to that, if the magistrates ask why I rented to such folk, I can always say you put a Word on me, can’t I? I’ve sold milk and greens to the wizards in the town enough to know they don’t cut up children, no matter what my granny said. But, not meaning it personal, I’ve got a girl—three she’ll be come Agonsfire Night—and I’d appreciate it if you’d stay clear of her. Just for the sake of what the neighbors say.”