Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (8 page)

“Did the Circle hold?” He groped for his spectacles, finding them by memory, muttering a curse as the lenses misted from the warmth of his flesh.

Jaldis, still deep in his meditative listening, shook his head.

“Damn inflationist idiots on the municipal council passing off silver-washed copper…”

“They’re going by,” the voice of the box hummed. “They come from all directions, but they all go in one direction, and that is not here. They cross over the Circle on their way…”

Even through the heavy shutters, Rhion heard a woman scream.

He was on his feet and heading for the door almost before he could think—he and Jaldis both had been sleeping booted and clothed. He had his hands on the heavy door bolt before he remembered that grims frequently counterfeited the voices of women and children crying for help, to trick victims into opening shutters and doors and breaking what field of power the silver nails might generate. He thought the scream sounded genuine, but still…

“
Alseigodath, amresith
, Children of the Dusky Air…” he muttered, collecting the first of the demon-spells Jaldis had long ago had him memorize and hoping he could call accurately to mind the long catalogue of the names of demons and grims and the strange pain-spells that held such creatures in check. He caught up his walking staff and flung the door open as a second scream cut the air. Hearing it, he knew it was no grim that made that sound.

Calling up within him all the power that he could, he ran.

Foul with ice and half-melted snow, the road dipped beyond the inn’s little hill to the thicker woods and broken jumble of ground that was the first frontier of the Drowned Lands of Sligo. In this season the pools and marshes which six hundred years ago had filled in the upper end of the Morne
Valley were frozen, black cattails and the twisted stems of sunken oak and hornbeam protruding like skeleton fingers from the gray sheet of starlit ice. But with the recent thaw, even the shallow ponds were treacherous. Rhion’s foot broke through what had appeared to be solid ice in the roadside ditch as he scrambled across, soaking him to the knees in freezing water.

Far off, amid the tangled bog-hummocks and leafless willows, he could see a flickering greenish light.

There were hundreds of them, thick as flies above a midden in summer. As he whispered the words of the spells within his mind he could smell them, queer and cold and bodiless; see them through their own ghastly weavings of semivisibility and shifting forms. Like the intermittent hallucinations of migraine, grims flitted through the bare boughs of maple and ash, skeletal forms with huge eyes and dangling feet, strange organs heaving luminously through transparent skin, eyes and faces and limbs, human and bestial, materializing one moment, then vanishing or becoming, hideously something else. A thing came loping out of the black underbrush beside him in the form of a huge black dog, to snap and tear at his legs with teeth suddenly solid and real; Rhion struck at it, his staff ablaze with blue-white witchfire, and the creature screamed at him with a human face and went gibbering back into the dark.

As he had suspected, they were driving the women toward the frozen sloughs.

Through snow-clotted fern and bracken, it was easy to trace the rucked hoof-tracks of her panicked horse; far off he could hear it neighing with terror. They were out on pond ice already, though, from the high ground where he stood, Rhion could see the rider fighting to rein back to safer footing. He scrambled down the scarp bank, black tangles of wild ivy and vine snagging his feet like rabbit snares under the snow, swinging his flaming staff at the grims when they came too close. Their claws raked at his face and his hands—
If they get my specs off me I’m a dead man
, he thought detachedly—shrieking like the soulless damned, while ahead of him clouds of them blew like poisoned green smoke around the frantic dark forms wheeling in the starlight.

They were far out on the ice, the horse’s hooves skidding and slipping, and underfoot Rhion felt the ice buckle and crack. The Drowned Lands were a maze of fen and swamp and pond, deep even this far inland, in these sweet marshes, two days’ journey from the salt marshes where the heart of the realm of Sligo had lain. By the bulrushes that fringed the gray glimmer of ice, Rhion guessed this pond was deep. Ahead of him he saw by the noxious ur-light the face of the rider, a girl of no more than seventeen, taut and scared as she tried to force her mount back into the driving swarms of eyes and claws that lay between her and the safety of the shore. Fingers like thorn-branches snagged and lifted a huge cloud of pale hair; another grim tore the long, full train of her riding skirt, and she lashed at it with her quirt, clinging to the rein as the terrified horse twisted out of control.

Then the ice cracked beneath them and they plunged, forehooves-first, into the heaving brown water beneath.

Rhion flung up his staff and cried “
ALSEIGODATH
! Children of the Dark Air… !” in a voice of power, the trained, booming shout completely unlike his normal light tenor, and the grims, screaming with laughter as they swirled around their struggling victims, scattered in all directions in a vicious, glittering cloud. Summoning about him the essences, the true names, of silver and fire and burning sunlight, Rhion strode forward, blazing and flashing and crying out the tale of the demon lists he had memorized over the years, the true names of as many as these flickering, amorphous things as had been gathered by wizards of the past, weaving them into a net of illusion and power and ruin.

And he tried not to show—and indeed, tried not to feel—his surprise that they did retreat, since as far as anyone could tell the power of the grims increased the more of them there were.

The girl sprang from the saddle as soon as the grims whirled back, tearing off her jacket and throwing it around the head of the terrified horse. Its forelegs were still trapped in the ice and its frantic pitching threatened to drop them through what remained; she caught the bit, trying to drag the animal free, and Rhion, still shouting the names of power and pain and light, ran to her and caught the bridle on the other side.

“
Malsleiga, Brekkat, Ykklath—
say when…” he panted. “
Rinancor
and
Tch ’war, Flennegant the Pig-Faced . . .”

“Now!”

Both hauling in unison, they pulled the terrified beast’s forefeet clear, icewater showering everywhere and soaking them both to the skin. The horse tried to bolt, demons still eddying around their heads like flaming leaves in a whirlwind, and through that hellish storm Rhion and the girl managed to drag it across the sagging floe. Only when they reached the more solid packs among the reed-beds did the wickering ring thin, swirling away like blown smoke into the darkness and melting into cruel, luminous laughter among the silent trees.

“Thank you,” the girl gasped, brushing back her tangled hair with a hand that shook. Even etiolated by starshine, Rhion could see it was mingled brown and fair, the color of burned sugar, where it wasn’t soaked dark with marsh water. Her cap had been torn away, but its gemmed pins remained, flashing coldly in the streaming mess like phosphorous in seaweed.

“…
Filkedne the Black, Qu’a’htchat
… What the hell were you doing riding alone in the woods at night?! You could have been killed out there!”

The gratitude in those huge gray eyes turned to anger, and for a moment he thought of a very young hawk, bating against a clumsy hand. “I wanted a little exercise!” she snapped sarcastically. “And nobody had
ever
told me about grims haunting the wild places at night, so I thought I’d be
perfectly
safe!” She jerked the rein from his hand. “And since it’s such a lovely night and I’ve had such a wonderful time so far I think I’ll just…”

Rhion realized that his question had included an unspoken,
Are you stupid or something?
and blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, catching back the girl’s hand, his breath drifting in a silvery cloud around his head. “That was a stupid thing to say. What’s wrong, and can I help?” The girl’s face had been cut by a claw or tail-stinger—the wound was already beginning to puff. His own face was torn and welted, his robe, like the girl’s dark-red riding dress, soaked and dragging with water. “I’m Rhion the Brown…”

“Tallisett… Tally…” She swung around at the sound of a man’s voice shouting in terror, far off in the woods, the neighing of terrified horses and laughter like the sparkle of corrosive dust. The fear returning to her eyes as she looked swiftly back at him made her suddenly seem very young, despite the fact that she stood a good two inches taller than he.

“It’s my sister’s child,” she said, trying to keep her husky young voice steady. With a sudden move, she pulled the jacket from the horse’s head and drew it on, shivering at the touch of the sodden wool. “They’ve taken her.” She caught the stirrup preparatory to mounting again.

“Wait…” Rhion caught her elbow, pointy and delicate in his grip. “We’ll get my master.”

“Why didn’t you push on and take shelter in the inn, by the way?” he asked a few minutes later, as the two of them half strode, half ran up the frozen slush of the road back toward the deserted public house, their breath puffing in silver clouds with exertion, the exhausted and shivering bay gelding stumbling between them. “You do know there’s an inn here…”

“A peddler we met this afternoon coming from Imber said it was shut up and barred. We hadn’t been able to get fresh litter mules at the last inn and when we knew we couldn’t get a change here, either, we decided to make camp. We lit fires all around the camp…”

“That doesn’t always work if there’s a lot of them.”

Tally had tucked up her heavy skirts through her belt to run—because of her height her stride was long, though unlike so many tall girls she was not gawky, but moved as gracefully as a dancer. Heavy silver earrings swung in the tangle of her hair, gleaming coldly in the ragged blue witch-glow; her boots, the wool of her dress, and the many strands of barrel-shaped amber beads around her neck proclaimed her a rich man’s child. Her hand in its buckskin glove, gripping the horse’s cheekstrap, though slender, was as large as a man’s.

“How many were you?”

“A dozen.
One of the grooms rode with me to search. We had torches, but they fell into the snow when the horses got spooked… What was that you shouted at them?”

The magelight that shivered and flickered above their heads as they walked would have left her in no doubt as to what he was. But there was no apprehension in her wide, inquiring eyes. Probably, Rhion thought wryly, because no woman is ever really afraid of a man who’s shorter than she is.

“Their names—or names that might have been theirs.
There are lists of them, different lists for different parts of the country, lists that have been accumulated, handed down, passed on by other wizards who in one way or another have gotten some specific grim or demon in their power long enough to get it to rat on some of its fellows.”

“Is that easy to do?”

“Oh, yes. They’re all cowards, and half of them hate each other anyway—they feel no loyalty to anything as we understand loyalty. Since you weave spells with a thing’s true name, the name of its soul, grims will generally retreat if they know you know their names. Because they don’t have true bodies, you can put a
hell
of a pain-spell on a demon… Were you hurt?”

She shook her head. The dark blood gleamed where it was drying on her temple, and Rhion made a mental note to apply a poultice later. The uneasy feather of witchfire threw fluttering shadows over the gray trunks of the maples along the roadbed and made the snow flash like salt rime where it squeaked beneath their boots. Far off in the darkness, the dreadful slips of light still wavered, and the night was rank—to Rhion’s hypertrained nostrils at least—with the nauseating ammonia muskiness of the grims’ smell. Blood dripped to the snow from the horse’s torn flanks and bitten hocks—they must have driven it here and there through the woods, laughing and egging one another on, delighting in its fear and in Tally’s anger, trying to get it to throw her so they could chase her through the dark.

Jaldis was waiting for them in the open door of the inn, witchlight streaming out around him. As if they had discussed the matter—which they hadn’t—they led the horse inside as a matter of course, and it stood, head down and shivering, while Rhion rubbed its coat dry and Jaldis listened, nodding, opal spectacles flashing weirdly in the firelight, while Tally told him of her niece’s disappearance.

“What is her name?” the old man asked at length, and the girl glanced, startled, from the closed, scar-crusted mouth to the soundbox upon his chest.

But she only said, “Elucida. She’s three. I still don’t understand how they can have taken her. Damson—my sister—and I put a mirror over her cot and a silver chain around it in a circle…”

“Beyond a doubt they lured her forth in her sleep,” the wizard replied, stroking the gold sun-cross talisman thoughtfully. “She crossed the silver herself, to where they could come to her. Unlike the water-goblins, they seek to frighten, not to kill, though it does not matter to them if the victim dies in the process. But goblins haunt these marshes, and if they can find a way to get her through the ice they will. My cloak, Rhion…”

Rhion slung a rug over the horse’s back and fetched his master’s cloak, while Jaldis dug in the purse at his belt and produced his scrying-crystal, whose long, irregular facets he angled to the fire’s light. The reflection of the blaze, which had been built up high, glanced sharply off the brown quartz and repeated itself endlessly in the chips of crystal worked into his spectacle-lenses, and echoed in the girl Tally’s worried gray eyes.

Softly, as if following his thoughts without his conscious volition, the box murmured, “Elucida, Damson’s child… Little Elucida, daughter of daylight…”

Tally glanced over at Rhion, as if for help or guidance. Rhion signed to her with his fingers that all would be well. As he stepped over close to her she breathed, “We have to hurry. She was only wearing a nightdress, she’ll freeze…” Her own clothes were steaming in the warmth of the fire, bullion embroidery sparkling faintly under the mudstains, the crisscrossed maze of ribbonwork on the sleeves discolored and sodden, save for here and there, where creases had protected and now revealed startling squares and slips of bronze and blue.