Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (29 page)

“Hell…” Another guard came over, bored with dicing, not drunk enough to be careless, but drunk enough to have the wicked inventiveness of drunks. He took the nearest torch from the wall and brought it down close to Rhion’s face. “Let’s light his beard on fire anyway. We don’t got any water down here, but we all been drinkin’ that wine, and maybe if he begs us real pretty we could put out the fire by… ”

“Heads up!” another by the door called, and the man with the torch turned swiftly, putting it back in its holder in the wall as a priest entered, black clouds of veils billowing eerily around him like the smoke of a fire without light.

“Bring him.”

The cell they took him to was small, hotter if anything than the watching room. But if the priest who waited for him, sitting behind the single table of spare dark wood, felt any discomfort in his long robes of black wool and the veils that shrouded his face, he gave no sign of it. By the way the guards and the other priests bowed—by the height of the headdress that supported the cloudy frame of veils—Rhion guessed this must be Mijac, Agon’s High Priest in Bragenmere, though it was impossible to be sure.

Was that, he wondered with exhausted detachment, one of the strengths of the cult? That its servants served in secret, even from one another? That the masks that covered the faces of the guards in the watchroom, the veils that hid the priests, concealed them, not only from outsiders, not only from each other’s witnessing, but from themselves?

He looked up at the men beside him and behind him, whose strength, he suspected, was the only thing keeping him on his feet. They might be slaves of a man, of the city, or certainly of economic realities, but their wills had once been their own. Now they had given their wills to Agon, and it was Agon who acted through them—they could spy upon their benefactors, they could betray their friends, they could torture the weak, prostitute themselves, beat a helpless old cripple to death in an alleyway, and remain, in their hearts, good people, kindly people, men and women worthy of regard, because it was, after all, the Veiled God who was acting, not them.

They shoved him forward, and he had to catch the edge of the table in his bound hands, his legs shaking under him. Without his spectacles, he wouldn’t have been able to see the priest’s face at this distance, anyway, but there was something unnerving about those blowing curtains of black, through which only a white blur was dimly visible, and the gleam of eyes.

A gloved black hand thrust a sheet of paper across the polished tabletop and offered him a quill. “Sign it.”

He picked up the paper, his numb fingers barely able to close around the edge, and held it where he could read it, about a handbreadth from his nose. He caught the words,
by means of potions forced her to yield to my lusts
… before a guard ripped it from his grasp.

“He said sign it, not read it.”

“It’s lies,” Rhion said quietly.

Mijac’s voice, behind the veils, was startlingly deep, a beautiful bass, like the deep boom of distant thunder. “What does that have to do with it?”

“Oh, I forgot,” Rhion said, still holding himself up by the edge of the table, blood, lamp-oil, and sweat dripping down his matted hair and onto the paper before him. “Lies are the common coin of Agon.”

Mijac reached out and wiped the droplets carefully from the document with one gloved fingertip. “As they are of wizards,” he returned calmly. The veils shuddered and moved as he leaned back in his chair again. “You are the architects of lies, the artists of illusion—the thieves of matters which should be left to the gods. When a man sees a monkey running about with a man’s dagger in its hand, does he stop to inquire of the animal what it intends to do with the weapon? Of course not. And when other men begin to turn to that monkey in respect, bow to it with hand on brow and ask its advice… then it is time for sane men to step in and correct matters. Is it true that the Lady Damson used a love-philter to bring her husband to her bed last spring?”

Rhion’s arms had begun to shake with fatigue—he stiffened them desperately, feeling darkness chew on the edges of his vision, a strange, detached numbness creeping over his chest.
Don’t faint now, dammit
.

“Why don’t you ask her husband?”

“Lord Esrex has his uses,” the priest replied in a mild tone. “He and his wife are holding the Lady Tallisett now, awaiting his Grace’s return. But knowledge is always a helpful thing to have.”

“Provided you get your facts straight.
Who told you I was supposed to be the girl’s lover?”

“The girl herself,” Mijac said. “And Jaldis confirmed it before he died.”

Rhion looked up quickly, his face ashen.

“They found him in an alley behind the Temple of Darova. I had given them no specific instructions—perhaps the men thought it would be easier than carrying him here. The lower orders are lazy that way. Now sign.”

Sickness and grief washed him like rising tide; even his blurred myopia was darkening. His voice sounded oddly distant through the ringing in his ears. “It’s a lie.” Tally would never have betrayed him… there was no way of telling whether anything Mijac said was the truth…

“What is not a lie,” the priest’s voice came from, it seemed, farther and farther away, “is that a man can live a long time while his bones are being broken and the splinters pulled out of his flesh, so I advise you to sign before you have cause to find out how much truth I can speak…”

“My lord!”

Rhion’s hands slipped from the table, and he felt someone catch him, supporting him as the rising darkness closed over his head. Voices came from out of that darkness, dim and muffled, like words heard underwater. He struggled to surface again, to breathe…

“It’s the Duke! He’s at the gates…”

A chair scraped as it was pushed back. Dimly, Rhion reflected that it was the first sound of of agitated movement he’d heard from the priests of the Veiled God. “Right,” Mijac said softly, and there was a momentary pause. Then, “There’s no help for it. Finish him.”

A huge hand gripped him under the chin and forced his head back.

“Not here, you fool—in the cellar where the blood can drain. And hurry…”

Rhion lashed out feebly with his bound hands, with some idea of struggling, fighting, delaying until the Duke could reach them, until he could tell him… Tell him what? That Tally had cuckolded his prospective ally?

But before he’d thought that far, something hard and heavy cracked over the back of his skull.

He came to lying on a stone floor, thinking,
Well
, so much for that idea
…

Arthritis-twisted hands touched his face. In his dazed exhaustion the buzzing voice sounded no louder than a mosquito’s hum. “Rhion? My son…”

And above him, as his mind slowly cleared and he thought,
He did lie
… he heard Mijac’s deep, ringing tones. “We have broken no law, my lord.”

Rhion opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor halfway down a dark stone hallway, through which he cloudily recalled passing on the way to Mijac’s cell. A door at the far end had been opened—the movement of the tepid night air broke the stifling heat.

And surrounded by torchlight and soldiers in cloaks the color of new blood, the Duke stood framed against the heavy trapezoid of the opened doors, hands upon his hips and traveling clothes flashing with tiny mirrors and knots of gold.

“No,” he said quietly. “You have broken no law, my lord Mijac. But you have disrupted my pleasure and you have done injury to my friends.”

He walked forward, his gilded boots creaking faintly in the absolute hush. The priests and the masked volunteers surrounding Rhion where he lay retreated a little, leaving only Jaldis and Mijac near him.

“I met him on the rise of land before the palace gates,” Jaldis murmured swiftly, beneath the voices of Duke and High Priest. “I knew he must pass by there—I listened for the sound of many horses…” Even without his spectacles, Rhion saw how torn and filthy the old man’s brown robe was, how gutter-slime smutched his face and beard and matted the ends of his thin white hair, as if he had fallen—or been kicked—over and over into the Old Town’s garbage and dust. His hands were trembling as he pulled the bonds from Rhion’s wrists, the dirty orange lamplight in the hall making a hundred juddering reflections in the crystal facets of his spectacle-lenses.

“Your
friends
?”
Mijac’s inflection twisted irony from the word like spilled wine wrung from a rag. “No more than they have done injury to you, Lord Duke.” He stepped forward, holding out the yellow paper. “You see that it is signed.”

The Duke took the confession and read it through. The priests and their followers murmured in the shadows at the inner end of the hall. Gently Jaldis helped Rhion to sit up. Marc of Erralswan, like a shining bronze god in his armor, made a move as if to assist and then seemed to think better of committing himself. At that distance, five or six feet, Rhion could not see Dinar of Mere’s fleshy features well enough to judge his thoughts—only a stylized blocking of light and shadow, bronze and blue and black.
Of course Mijac would sign it himself
, he thought, with a resigned weariness that made him wonder objectively if he was going to faint again. He was only surprised they’d bothered to try forcing him actually to sign in the first place. As Esrex had said, they didn’t really need him to.

Without speaking, the Duke came over to where the two wizards sat, filthy, bloody, and ragged as beggars, on the polished floor, and it seemed to Rhion that Agon’s faceless servants fell back a little further, leaving him and his master completely alone. For a time the Duke stood looking down on them, the old man he had befriended and to whom he had sent gifts and publicly shown his regard and the young one to whom he’d confidently given the freedom of his house. His eyes went from them to the confession in his hand, a confession of betrayal, cynicism, and rape. Then he reached down, took Rhion’s left hand and turned it over in his, all streaked as it was with blood and sweat and lamp-oil. Straightening up, he looked again at the paper, clean and unstained from top to bottom. And, still without a word, he held the confession to the flame of the nearest torch.

“Bring him to the palace,” he said quietly, after he had dropped the burning scrap to the floor and trodden it underfoot. “I think we need the truth.”

The smell of smoke hung in the air behind them as they left the silent priests of shadow and went out into the night.

HORSES WERE WAITING FOR THEM IN THE STREET OUTSIDE.
“There is only one litter and two bearers,” the Duke said, nodding toward the curtained chair and its two muscular, fair-haired slaves. “Even with his crutches, Jaldis could barely walk when he met us. Do you think you could back a horse, Rhion?”

Rhion nodded, though he had private mental reservations about his ability to get into a saddle unaided. “After being dragged up here,” he said, pushing back his blood-streaked hair from his eyes, “believe me, if you just let me
walk
to your gates at my own pace, I’d be glad.”

The Duke’s mouth hardened and he glanced back over his shoulder at the featureless black doors which had swung shut, silent and unnoticed, behind them. The torch-blown shadows of the guards jerked and lurched over the undressed granite wall; bronze mail flickered darkly and voices rose, relieved to be out of the Temple’s oppressive gloom, as Jaldis was helped into the litter. For the moment Rhion and the Duke stood in a little island of stillness in the crowd.

Now
, he thought, and his stomach curled into a tight, cold ball within him. He swallowed hard.

“My lord.”
He reached out to touch the red leather sleeve, and the Duke looked back down at him, hearing the change in his voice.

“My lord,” Rhion said, “thank you—thank you beyond words for saving us—for believing in us over Mijac…”

The big man sniffed. “I think I’d believe a gypsy horse coper over Mijac…”

Rhion shook his head, knowing there was no way out of what he had to say, and forced his eyes to meet the Duke’s. “You shouldn’t,” he said quietly, his voice pitched low to exclude the guards. “That’s what makes this all the worse. That confession is true.”

The Duke regarded him in a silence which seemed to stretch out endlessly and seemed to drown even the restless snorting of the horses and the uneasy mutter of the guards. Rhion tried not to think of what the betrayal would do to this friend of Jaldis‘—only what penalty Tally would have to pay for giving herself willingly to any man while her father was negotiating in good faith for her marriage.

At last he spoke. “All of it?” His voice was quiet, his face showing nothing.

“All of it,” Rhion whispered, looking away. He had begun to shake all over, with exhaustion and dread and wretchedness—he had to force his voice steady. “Jaldis knew nothing. He warned me not to… not to betray you. Not to let my feelings for Tally get the better of me…

They’ll drown the child when it’s born
, he thought. He’d heard of that happening on those rare occasions when a woman did bear a wizard’s offspring. Or Jaldis or Ranley, the court physician, could doubtless bring on a miscarriage…

He shut his eyes, unable to bear it, unable to bear the thought of what it would do to her.

His son.
If it was Jaldis’ tincture that was responsible for the failure of his spells, it would indeed be a son. Around them, the guards in their red-crested helmets fell quiet and glanced questioningly at one another, unable to hear what their master had to say to this battered and filthy little man, but aware of the forbidding stillness of the Duke’s stance that kept even the stupidest of them from asking about the delay.

There was still no expression in the Duke’s voice. “And is she with child?”

Still not looking up, Rhion nodded. “I think so. I don’t see that Esrex could make a case for any of this if she were not.” Keeping his voice level with an effort, he explained what he thought had happened, without mentioning how or from whom Damson had obtained the tincture—only that she had given it to Tally, meaning nothing more than a wedding night successful in Damson’s own terms of motherhood and dynasty.