Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (18 page)

She straightened her shoulders and smiled a little more convincingly. In that single gesture, he saw all the burnished self-confidence of one of those children of fortune who have not yet known defeat. Rhion had been acquainted with a lot of them, having gone to school with the offspring of the wealthy bankers and traders and merchant senators of the City of Circles. At one time he had been one himself. He still remembered what it had felt like.

She turned to go.

“Wait…” Pulling himself out of his reverie, he twisted around to grub in the debris on the table for the bits of parchment he’d purchased with the proceeds of his last toadstone. “Just a minute…”

Half closing his eyes, he dipped down within himself, calling forth the meditative light of magic. After a moment, he drew a standard sigil comprised of the second, ninth, and eighteenth runes—the first such seal he could think of at short notice—and threw in the Lost Rune for good measure, rolled it up in a small piece of cured lambskin, at ten or twelve dequins the square foot, and bound it with a slip of punched copper. “Carry this when you leave. It’ll keep people from looking at you, or recognizing you if they do see you, provided you keep quiet and don’t call attention to yourself. All right?”

She hesitated, holding it as if she feared it would somehow contaminate her soul by touch. Then she slipped it into her skirt pocket. “All right. Thank you.” She meant the charm, he could tell, as he walked her the length of the shadowy room. But when he opened the door she turned back in the mottled tabby light of the arcade’s thatched roof, and said, “Thank you,” again, meaning something more.

Then she was gone.

He climbed the ladder to the floor above and recounted to Jaldis all that had passed, not omitting that he had called Tallisett’s image in his scrying-crystal while they were in the Drowned Lands, “to make sure she and her sister got to Imber all right,” and so knew the poor state of Damson’s marriage.

“It’s a bad business,” Jaldis sighed, shaking his head. Because of the strong spring heat, worse in the upper room, he’d braided and clubbed his white hair, and his head with its narrow features and close-trimmed beard strongly resembled that of a bird, thrusting up from the loose folds of his brown cowl. Before him on the table lay his spectacles, surrounded by half a dozen fragments of flawed crystal the color of dirty water, the best they could afford.

“Not that Dinar Prinagos wasn’t perfectly right to overthrow his liege lord and keep Alvus’ ineffectual idiot of a son from inheriting,”
the old man went on, fingering each fragment in turn: reading, Rhion knew, every shear and shadow in the brittle lattices of their structure, judging how much use, if any, they would be. Every flaw meant a Limitation, or a variation of whatever spell the future talismans would hold; every shadow, a break in the energy paths of the crystal’s heart which would have to be laboriously accounted for.

“There’s bad blood in the White Bragenmeres, and I’m told Esrex, for all he’s a fop, is a dangerous young man to cross. A Solarist, he used to be, denying all the gods and magic as well. But he switched over to the Cult of Agon when it became clear that the High Queen favored them.”

The blind man shook his head, the lines of his face deepening. To a great extent he seemed to have recovered from his illness, and even the journey up from Sligo seemed to have left him little the worse. But listening to his voice as he spoke of Tally’s father, Rhion found himself comparing its tone and strength with his recollections of how it had been before the flight from Felsplex—before the strain of opening and using the Dark Well.
It draws energy
, Jaldis had said…

Lately he had caught himself watching Jaldis closely, mentally comparing with recollections and repeatedly reassuring himself,
Yes, he looks the same… his movement hasn’t slowed down any… there’s been no real change
and wondering if he was just imagining that the old man seemed slower and more halt, wondering whether his hands had always looked so thin…

“I’m not sure which is worse,” Jaldis continued, oblivious to the uneasy scrutiny. “The Solarists and their heresies or the Cult of Agon with its secrets, its spies that take every piece of information they hear back to the priests of the Veiled God. No one even knows who half its members are, though they’re supposed to be legion. You were well to send the girl away, poor chit. You don’t think she’ll go to a Hand-Pricker, do you, or to that poisonous old Ebiatic, Malnuthe, over in the Shambles?”

“I don’t think so,” Rhion said. The window was shuttered with a pair of dried and splintery jalousie shades; sitting in the embrasure of the thick adobe wall, he was able to peer through a couple of the missing louvers into the blindingly bright sunlight of the square. With the ending of the spring rains, the lush weeds and thorn-bushes growing all around the courtyard arcade were turning brown. The mountains that towered over Bragenmere were taking on their wolfish summer hues: by August the sheep and cattle ranges would be coarse brown velvet, the pine trees blackish tangles in the rock clefts that marked the springs. Children too young to be working the looms were playing knucklebones in the dust, their voices rising shrilly to Rhion’s ears; across the square, one of the whores lay on her balcony, a damp towel spread over her face and her hair, nearly the color of the summer hills, spread out to bleach in the sun.

“I think she understands now why it isn’t a good thing to make a decision like that for someone else, no matter what
she
thinks should be done.”

“We can but hope. Listen, Rhion…” The old man set aside his crystals and half-turned in his twig-work chair. “I have been making calculations. It is my belief that a Dark Well could be wrought in the cellar beneath the kitchen here.”

Rhion tried not to shiver at the thought of Jaldis’ tampering once more with the Void. “That little hole? It’s so small you’d have to climb back up to the kitchen if you wanted to scratch…”

“Not if we removed the shelves there—they are probably rotted in any case—and cleared the wood-stores up into the kitchen.” He leaned forward, the talismans dangling from the voice-box clinking with the dry silvery sound of moving wind. “Rhion, it is six weeks until the summer solstice. The solstice or the equinoxes are the only time that the wizards in that other universe—the wizards without magic—might just be able to raise enough power to reach through the Void and contact us here. Even if we can get only an image, a glimpse of their world, something to guide our search in the blackness of eternity, we will know at least in which direction to look the next time we search, and the next…”

Something flicked through Rhion’s mind and was gone, like movement glimpsed from the tail of the eye. Something evil and cold, something… A dream? Night sky and standing stones… ?

Turning his mind from his vague fear of what danger Tally might run herself into he said, “Yes, but… how likely is it they’ll still be calling? By the time of the solstice, it’ll have been six months. That’s a long time. Anything can happen in six months.”

Jaldis smiled, sweet and wise in spite of the ruin of scars. “My son,” he said quietly, “they may have been calling into darkness for six years. And to help them in their isolation—to learn what robbed their world of its magic, to prevent such a thing from coming to pass here, I would listen for six, or for sixty.”

Not children of the blood
, Jaldis had said…
children of the fire
. As he had been.

“I have sent for Shavus Ciarnin,” the blind man went on, turning back to the table and picking up the bits of crystal, placing them one by one in a crude little painted clay pot he’d padded with bits of fleece. “We must have his help, his power, to find this world. We need his power to contact those wizards in that other universe, to tell them what they must know in order to guide us across…”

“
US
?”
Rhion swung sharply from the window. “Wait a minute, I think that box of yours has developed a flaw, old friend. I thought I heard you say the word
us
.”

“I can scarcely ask Shavus to undertake a journey I am not willing to make myself.”

“The hell you can’t,” Rhion retorted. “That world has no magic. What’s going to happen to that voice box and those spectacles when you get there?”

“Nothing,” the old man replied serenely. “The spells that imbue them and the talismans that give them power were wrought here and should hold their magic no matter what.”

“You care to bet your life on that hypothesis?”

“I would,” he said soberly, “if it would help.”

“Look,” Rhion said in subconscious imitation of his father at his most reasonable. “I’m willing to go with Shavus…” And he shivered as he said it. “…though I’m not thrilled about leaving you here alone and even less enthusiastic about traveling with the Archmage for any length of time. But I’m not going to let you go. Besides,” he added more calmly, for his light, quirky voice had risen with his fears, “Shavus will need someone on this end to guide him back, if what you say is true.”

“You have reason,” the old man conceded. “And the less power there is there, the more there will be needed from here. But even so…”

From the kitchen downstairs came the swift, hard rapping of someone knocking at their door. Rhion flung open the jalousies and leaned out over the bleached gray thatch of the arcade. “COMING!” he bellowed.

We’ve got to stop living in slums and hovels
, he thought, as he clambered down the rude pole ladder to the kitchen below.
I’m starting to lose all my manners
. His father, of course, had had a slave—a Cotrian from the In Islands, for he did not believe northerners could be trained—whose sole job it was to sit in the little alcove off the vestibule and answer the door, so there had been none of this yelling out the windows business. He still remembered the blue-and-white flowered tiles of the alcove’s floor and the man’s matching blue tunic.
Now, if I put a wizard’s mark on the door that said, ‘I’m coming’ in a low, polite voice
…

But Shavus and Jaldis had known wizards who had done things of the kind. Aside from the difficulty of any long-distance spell of speaking—and fifty feet
was
a long distance for such a spell—the usual result was to fuel the fires of public uneasiness about wizards in general and add to their reputation of uncanniness and danger. Wizards who used their powers in such a fashion frequently found themselves being shot with poisoned darts from ambush or having their houses burned above their heads.

Of course
, Rhion thought wryly, hurrying down the length of the shadowy kitchen and glancing unconsciously up at the place in the rafters where Tally had expected to see a stuffed crocodile,
wizards who
don’t
use their powers thus are just as likely to have the goon squads after them, armed with weapons on which Spells of Silence have been laid, so how much odds does it make
?

He opened the door, smiling as he recalled the obsequious grace of old Minervum back home, who could make of the act a favor, a privilege, or an insult at will…

A very grubby fourteen-year-old girl stood there, clad in shabby silk obviously stolen from a much older and wealthier woman, combs of steel and tortoiseshell gleaming at careless random in the dirty snarl of her hair. In her arms she held a huge black book.

“My Mom says a customer brung this in,” she said, with a jerk of her head back toward the pawnshop a little further up the court. “She says she can’t sell the thing ’ceptin’ for kindling paper, but you witches might want to buy it. It’s thirty dequins.”

It was the
Book of Circles
that Jaldis had put a come-back spell on, in the attic of the Black Pig.

“RHION!”
THE SHARP RATTLE OF PEBBLES STRIKING THE JALOUSIES
startled him from sleep. The room was suffused with the moonstone pallor of very early morning, the window at the far end a blurred screen of silver-shot grisaille, the air tender. The voice had been human, a hissing attempt to combine a whisper with a shout, not the buzzing tones of Jaldis’ box.

And indeed, all that was visible of Jaldis was a hunched twist of bone and white hair beneath the single sheet of the other cot, rising and falling with the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.

Rhion rolled hastily to his feet and, clutching his own bedsheet about him and fumbling his spectacles onto his face, hurried to the window. Outside, Shuttlefly Court was drowned in shadows still, though the sky overhead was the color of peaches, the hills beyond the roofs like something wrought of lavender glass.

Tally was down in the square, standing up in her mare’s stirrups with trails of sugar-brown hair floating mermaidlike from under her cap.

“Could you really hit my window from down there?” Rhion asked softly, as—decently robed and scratching at his beard—he let her in downstairs a few moments later.

“Of course.
Can’t you?”

“I couldn’t hit it from inside the room with the shutters closed. You shouldn’t have brought your horse. You rarely see good horseflesh in this part of the city. People will notice…”

“I left the charm you gave me tucked under the saddle blanket.” She dropped into one of the rickety kitchen chairs and disengaged a small bag from the voluminous pocket of her green riding-habit. “I brought coffee.”

“Dinar of Prinagos has just won my unqualified support against the perfidious White Bragenmeres under any circumstances, at any time, in thought, word, deed, spell, and incantation.” Rhion tweaked open the bag and, holding it cradled in his hands, inhaled deeply and lovingly. Their small stock of coffee—copiously adulterated with dried acorns—was another of the things left behind in Felsplex. Beans like these they had not been able to afford since their days in Nerriok, when they’d been patronized by nobles of the court.

“I also brought all the little doings,” she added, getting up to fetch cups from the shelf while Rhion set the sack down and went to dip water into the kettle from the big—and now mostly empty—jar in the corner. “A grinder and a strainer and sugar and cinnamon…”

“Will you marry me?” The jest was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and she looked around swiftly, their eyes meeting, and for one flashing second it wasn’t a jest.