Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (6 page)

For God’s sake, your daughter’s honor is safe with me
… “Of course,” said Rhion, bowing with hand over heart.

“Are there wizards in Imber?” he asked Jaldis later, as the two men carried their meager possessions across the town square and down the cobbled lane to the western gate. The snow that had been drifting down all last night had ceased, leaving the sky overhead a high, nebulous roof of pewter. Farmers had set up their barrows under the wide arcade surrounding the market square, and housewives in yellows and greens, and the dark-dressed household slaves of the rich, were picking over bundles of beans and yams and prodding the rabbits and chickens which hung dead by their feet like grotesque tassels from hooks on the beams overhead. The square itself was a palimpsest of tracks in the churned-up snow, and now and then a mule litter or sedan chair would pass, carrying a rich man on his way to one of the town’s gymnasia or baths, or a brown-robed priest of the great temple of Ptorag, archaic gold amulets flashing and temple secretaries trotting obediently in his wake.

“They are Selarnists.” Jaldis’ voice was incapable of expression, but by the pause before his reply and by the way he held his shoulders, he might have been identifying them as a species of roach. “A small House of them, I believe.”

“Oh,” Rhion said. He had met few members of the Selarnist Order of wizardry in his years of apprenticeship with Jaldis, mostly because members of the White Order, as it was called, tended to live cloistered in Houses wherever the local authorities would let them, shunning contact with politics, the public, and members of other Orders alike.

“Worthy enough mages, I suppose,” the old man went on, the voice of the soundbox smooth and strong now that he had rested, the rhythm of his arms and back as he limped along steady and sure. “And their methods of teaching are, on the whole, sound.” When he had taught Rhion to observe insects he had found several good things to say about the lowlier members of the grasshopper tribe as well. “But one must admit that their Order’s studies have become considerably corrupted and filled with errors since first they split away from the Morkensiks, six hundred years ago.”

They passed a school, thickly attended now that it was winter, boys and girls crowded eight to a bench and peering over one another’s shoulders at the hornbooks they had to share. Warmth blew out of the open store front in which it was being held, pleasant on Rhion’s face as he walked along under his blanketful of books. It was astounding how much easier they were to carry on the relatively level surface of the street, the packed and slippery snow underfoot notwithstanding. Jaldis, too, had insisted upon splitting the load with him, and though Rhion watched him carefully, the old man seemed strong and fit enough.

“You could do worse than go to the Selarnists for some teaching while we are here,” Jaldis added as he and his pupil turned down the length of Westgate Lane, past the towering walls of the temple complex, beyond which the soft groaning of horns and of the bronze sounding-bowls could be heard, accompanying chanted prayers in languages few people understood anymore. “Though they tend to put too much emphasis on breath-control and physical orientation, they could teach you far more of the finer nuances of herbalism than I.”

“If they’re Selarnists they might not want to teach a Morkensik their secrets,” Rhion pointed out, shifting his burden from one aching shoulder to the other. His muscles hadn’t recovered yet from the scramble across the roofs or from the hours of rowing up the white-banked black silence of the river with the sleet stinging his face. “But it’s worth a try. There’s still a whole lot I don’t understand about herbal metaphysics…”

“Much of it is practice, my son.”

“True. But in any case, if the priests who rule this town let a whole Houseful of
them
stay here, they won’t have any objections to the two of us.”

And indeed, it was not the priests of Ptorag who were responsible, two days later, for having Rhion and Jaldis thrown out of town.

It was a morning warmer than the preceding week had been, warm enough that the river had begun to thaw. Clouds hung low over the hill country to the south, and a faint mist turned the air to pearl as Rhion crossed the farmyard from helping their landlady with the milking, and found Jaldis sitting at the little table under their room’s wide window, arranging his books by touch.

When Rhion had first become Jaldis’ student, he had known nothing of wizardry—only the desperate sense of the magic within his veins, and the insistent, terrifying, disorienting need to learn to use that ability, the need to know that he was not insane for wanting to. But he had assumed, meeting Jaldis, that magic was something one learned, like accounting. When one was done learning, one was a bookkeeper.

It had come as both a shock to him and, once the shock was over, a delight, that magic was a learning, a pursuit—that one never finished learning magic. The learning had been longer, a deep foundation against whose painstaking meticulousness he had rebelled more than once in screaming boredom: for the first year and a half he hadn’t realized Jaldis had been teaching him anything. All the old man did was command the boy to do things like prepare the floors of rooms where magic was done, ritually cleansing every corner and ritually laying wards on every door, window, pot, knife, and vessel, and in betweentimes simply enjoined him to observe insects and plants, clouds and stars and rain… It was only after he had amassed years’ worth of information, of tiny detail—until he could tell at a glance the seed of the amaranth from that of the millet—that it came to him how necessary all this information was to the weaving of spells that could change poison to harmless sap, or steer the cumuli by altering the temperature of the air beneath them.

For Jaldis, he knew, learning had never stopped. There were always new plants to study, whole new families of them from the jungles of the south or the bare rock plains of the north and west; spells that had been woven, and written, and lost again; unknown properties of gems or salts or different types of animal blood. He’d seen Jaldis bouncing up and down like a schoolboy one afternoon when they’d visited Shavus at his queer stone house in the forest of Beldirac, and the Archmage had shown off a century-old scroll containing fifty or sixty alterations to spells which strengthened or lessened their effects, depending on the position of certain stars. Rhion had spent a month copying it out—it was one of the books that had been left in the attic.

“I meant to ask you,” Rhion said, untucking the folds of his robe from his wide leather belt. “Was there a reason you couldn’t summon fog to cover us, when we were getting out of Felsplex? Did working with the Dark Well hurt you that much? Or was there just not enough time?”

“The Dark Well… tired me, yes.” Jaldis half turned in his chair. “It saps power, drinks it…” The diffuse white light that came through the window’s oiled parchment panes lent a matte yellow-gray tone to his lined face, making him look tired and ill. He’d been wearing his spectacles to accustom himself to his new surroundings; they lay now on the table beside his hand, and the air was permeated with the bittersweet pungence of lime and rue he’d burned to relieve the headache that was the result.

“That was one reason why it so grieved me that the Well was destroyed—that we had to leave it and that men, in fear, will rub out the Circles of Power which hold its darkness in place. It will be some time before I regain the strength to undertake the making of another.”

The longer, the better, as far as I’m concerned
, Rhion thought, a little guiltily.

“At the equinox, perhaps,” Jaldis went on, turning back to the ordering of his books with crooked, groping hands. “The turning of the spring, when I can use the momentum of the forces of the stars to help me. The evening star will be in transit then, too, which should help—there are spells which call down its power at such times which I must teach you. It is imperative…” He broke off, and shook his head, a quick, small gesture, dismissing the preoccupation which, Rhion knew, had been gnawing at him all through their flight.

Then he looked up again, a small, closed smile flexing the scarred corners of his lips. “But as for the fog… I could not work two spells at once, Rhion. Not two spells as dissimilar as weather-spinning and summoning.”

“Summoning?” Rhion perched one flank on the corner of the table and frowned. “Summoning what?”

“Summoning the books back to us.”
And his smile widened as if he could see his pupil’s expression of startled, enlightened delight. “Have I never shown you the sigils to draw, the spells to weave, to convince an object that its proper place is in your possession?”

“I didn’t even know such spells existed, but tell me more.” He drew up another chair. Compared to the Black Pig, the room was hopelessly primitive—damply cold, so that both of them wore their cloaks and kept their blankets wrapped around them most of the time, the beds only platforms built of planks and covered with straw, and the whole place smelling of the barnyard onto which it looked. Rhion suspected from the stains on the scoured stone floor that the thatch would leak come spring. But it was clean, and the landlady was liberal in her interpretation of the word
board
.

“I thought the books were burned.”

Jaldis sighed, and nodded. “And indeed, they probably were.” The sweet voice was incapable of tone, but his eyebrows drew down in a faint twinge of pain, like a man who speaks of friends rumored dead in some catastrophe. Then he shook his head, gestured the thoughts aside with the two fingers still mobile upon his right hand.

“But in the event that some of them were not, in the event that they were thrown into the midden, or cast out the window, the spells I laid upon them—if my strength was sufficient at that point for any spell to work—would cause them to be found by someone who would see in them a source of income, and not an insult to whatever god he was taught to revere. And the spells—if they had worked thus far—would lead that woman or man to sell them to a dealer, perhaps, who might be journeying to Imber when the roads clear in summer, or to an antiquarian, or a seller of used paper, who would in turn, if chances so fell out, display them along with his other wares at a time when you or I or someone who knows us would be passing his shop. That is the reason I never neglect to examine the wares of old paper dealers—one reason of many. Here…” He reached with one stiff claw and drew the
Grimoire of Weygarth
to him, opening its crumbling leather covers to stroke the parchment within. Across the faded illuminations of the title page his finger traced a dim line of blue-white light that flickered like a live thing in the pallid gloom, then seemed to sink into the page itself, like a colored ribbon laid upon water.

“It is a spell like other sigils of summoning, but comprised of the Lost Rune, and that of the Dancer, accompanied by the words…”

Three shadows passed the soft brightness of the windows and Rhion touched Jaldis’ wrist in warning. A moment later there was a faint, polite scratching at the rough plank door.

The man who stood on the threshold was middle-aged, the woman elderly. Both were clothed in the white wool robes, the long white cloaks, and the simple wooden beads of the Selarnist Order of wizardry. Rhion’s landlady stood in the background, her skirt still tucked up from work and her muddy boots showing beneath it, her hands shoved for warmth into her sleeves.

The male wizard inclined his head. “Are you Jaldis the Blind and his pupil Rhion?”

“I’m Rhion, yes. Come in.” He stepped back from the door, but neither of the two visitors made any move to follow him inside. A moment later he heard the scrape of Jaldis’ chair legs on the stone, and then the almost soundless tap of crutches and rustle of robes.

“I am Chelfrednig of Imber, and this in Niane. We understand that you have come to stay in Imber.”

“For a time,” Rhion said, hiking his cloak a little higher over his shoulder. He mistrusted the man’s tone, the cool distance of his manner. It was something he recognized, the attitude that said,
Don’t blame ME for what’s going to happen. It’s nothing personal
…

“It’s nothing personal…”

“Fine.”
Rhion lifted a hand amicably. “At this short an acquaintance I have nothing personal against you, either. Now that we’ve established that…”

“We understand that yesterday you sold a good-luck charm to a slave named Benno, who works at the shrine of Mhorvianne.”

“He didn’t tell me his name,” he said, more cautious still, “but yes, I did make a talisman of good fortune for a man who came here, and by the way he dressed I figured him for a lower servant or a slave.”

With a quickness that reminded Rhion irresistibly of carnival-show sleight of hand, Chelfrednig produced a round billet of elderwood, roughly the size of a double-weight copper penny, from his sleeve and held it out. Rhion did not touch it. Upon it he recognized his own elaborately interwoven seals, spelled to attract circumstances of pleasantness and peace, of good feeling and fortunate coincidence. As be had explained to the man who had come to them yesterday, no magic could turn aside true misfortune, just as no magic could bring the thundering strokes of great luck that change a person’s life—and he didn’t think his first client in Imber had wanted to believe him. But as far as it went, the little emblem was good for a few extra rolls of dice, for a capricious master’s change of mood when a slave had broken a dish, or for an extra jog at the memory about a pot left on the stove. And what more, Rhion thought, could you do for a slave?

With his forefinger he pushed his spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and waited.

“We of our House, ” Chelfrednig said sententiously, “have striven over the years to achieve a harmony with the authorities of this town, the priests of Ptorag, the local magistrates, and the Earl of Way’s governor. We believe we have convinced them that those born with the powers of wizardry, if properly instructed and disciplined, are not monsters, nor are they traitors to the gods and to humankind; that we do not hold orgies at the turning points of the universe and do not slit children’s throats to make magic with their blood. And we have done this by keeping ourselves to ourselves, and by refraining from meddling with the lives of anyone in this town.”