Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (37 page)

“
Fretted
is
not
how I’d describe my reaction to the prospect of throwing myself into an infinity of chaos, with nothing reaching out toward me from the other side but a bunch of half-trained wizards who can’t even work magic!”

Jaldis smiled. “All will be well,” he said softly. “They need my help, Rhion, if they are to defeat the enemies of magic in their world—if they are to return their world to the true paths of power. I cannot turn my back.”

“We can’t leave this way!” he pleaded. “Shavus could be in trouble! We have no idea what’s going on in Nerriok, in Felsplex, or anywhere…” He thought of Esrex again and of Tally and his children—a wizard’s children—floating like chips in a tailrace on the deep intrigues of court.

Jaldis’ face contracted for one moment with concern, anxiety for his friend and for all the possible permutations of what would happen in this world after they left it… then he shook his head. “We cannot think of that,” he said, and his lined face was deadly grave. “Truly, truly, we cannot. Not if we are going to call forth our entire strength, our entire concentration, to make the leap across the abysses of the Void. We can think of neither the future that we go to nor the past that we leave behind.”

From the massed shadows of the pillars of the library porch Rhion watched the Procession of Masks assemble in torch smoke and drizzle. The stone-gray cloaks of the penitents gave them a look of fantastic ghosts, the cressets’ glare picking out here the blue mask of a grim, there a lion head’s serene golden eyes. Horns, jewels, feathered dragon manes… men and women alike, no matter what god or gods they worshipped. Rhion suspected that the crowd numbered a sprinkling of Solarists—certainly he thought he had seen Esrex and Damson, discreetly masked from the eyes of other gods than Mhorvianne.

“They won’t miss me,” Tallisett murmured, standing in the darkness at his side. On either side of the bland silver face of a marsh-fae her unbound hair hung in curtains of bronze-gold silk, darkened with the rain and the bath. “The boys are with Dinias, his nurse is looking after them all.”

Rhion trusted the furtive and sickly heir no more than he trusted Esrex, but there was no time to think of more elaborate arrangements. Dread and tension were making it difficult for him to think at all; added to those, were his growing guilt at leaving Tally and his sons unprotected and the black premonition of disaster which had settled on his heart. “Tally…” he began desperately, but she touched his arm and shook her head.

Together, beneath the cloudy cloak of his spells, they made their way to the massive bronze doors, where Jaldis waited. The smoky torchlight from the court, flaring and dying between the arcade’s shadows, caught in the huge rounds of his spectacles; the voice-box with its clinking talismans seemed about to overset his fragile form, like a too-heavy yoke bound upon too young a child. Propping one crutch in the hollow of his armpit he held out his hand, and said, “My son… daughter.”

Tally pushed up her mask, stepped forward swiftly and hugged him. She had, Rhion realized, been much closer to Jaldis these last seven years than he had, looking after him and making sure he was not lonely in his little attic rooms. Then, turning, she placed her hands on Rhion’s shoulders, and all he could remember were all those afternoons when she’d play her flute for him in the grotto at the end of the gardens, and the hazy glimmer of firelight in her hair.

Clutching at any straw of hope, he whispered, “Keep watch for Shavus,” in a voice very unlike his own. “If he comes, send him up, please, fast…”

Somewhere above them, the palace clocks struck eleven, the heavy bronze note sounding leaden and dead.

“I will.” She took his face between her palms and their mouths met desperately. “I love you.” Her hands traveled down his shoulders, his arms, his back, as if to memorize the shape of muscle and flesh. “Always…”

“I’ll come back…”

She nodded convulsively, and he knew she didn’t believe him. Then she was gone, walking swiftly through the blowing curtains of rainy mist to the dark of the palace gates.

In the black loft above Jaldis’ quarters, they made the conjuration, waking the Dark Well from its shadowy quiescence, watching it deepen and clear until it stretched before their feet in an abyss of sightless chaos. Past the shuddering dark rainbow of unnamable colors, Rhion sensed things about the Void which terrified him, and it took all the discipline of seventeen years to keep his concentration unwavering upon the spells they wove in concert. For Jaldis was right: they could afford to think neither of the future nor the past, neither of what strange world they would find nor of what would befall those they loved once they had stepped through the shifting colors of that dreadful gate. He became only the spells that he worked, summoning power from air and earth and aether, watching the darkness before him deepen to blackness and to something else far beyond that, something that swallowed all matter, all light, all time.

Deep in that bottomless infinity, Rhion saw a shining pinprick of gold.

He knew instinctively that what he saw was ten or twenty times as far away as it seemed, that the flickering glimmer, the tiny sun-cross shining like a star in the blackness, had been blown huge so that they could see it at all.

And he understood that, delayed by the gods only knew what, Shavus was not going to arrive to save him from having to do this thing.

Midnight was upon them. He felt it through the shining tracks of energy which webbed the earth and carried magic forward and back to the world’s farthest corners, the balance point swinging like the fulcrum of some huge beam above their heads. Beside him, Jaldis’ face was untroubled, the withered lips and throat twitching in subconscious echo of the voice that spoke the words of power, the words that would open the Void itself, from the box upon his chest.

He held out a hand and Rhion took it, his own palm icy as death. The arthritic fingers gave his a quick squeeze of thanks, the only human thought they could spare, then transferred their astonishing grip to his forearm. Rhion focused his mind away from his terror—for his life, for his past, for the nightmare dreams of the future—and formed of it a cutting crystal lightblade of concentration. Together, the two men stepped into the Dark Well.

And fell. Fell into infinity.

Later Rhion remembered very little of it except the terror, and the cold that drank at his life in a single greedy draught. Jaldis’ mind and soul closed around his, a blazing column of strength that had nothing to do with the old man’s frail body—the splendid obverse of the strength that had swept him aside in anger when Rhion had tried to part him from his dream. It was only that, Rhion understood even then, which kept him from dying or worse than dying. He could see the tiny red beacon of the far-off sun-cross; but, as he had feared from the start, there was nothing there to touch, no magic in it, no power to draw them through.

The drag of the abyss pulled them, the black current which had never heard the name of life, and swept them away.

Then the fragile spark seemed to gleam brighter, a flare like a tiny starburst. Something, tenuous and silvery, like a single glowing spider-strand of magic came drifting towards them across the flooding spate of darkness…

He was lying on something hard. His fingers moved and felt damp stone which would have been cold had there been any warmth left in his body. A confusion of voices drifted in and out of the exhausted darkness of his brain, voices crying “Eric…
Eric
… !
”, shouting things he didn’t understand.

Eric
, he thought. The wizard born to magic in a world without it—the wizard who had summoned them, brought them here.

They’d made it. They were in this world where magic no longer existed.

And, more surprisingly, he was still alive.

He was too weary for joy or exultation, almost too weary for surprise or thought of any kind. It occurred to him that he really hadn’t expected to make it here.

But where and what was “here”? Unbidden, there crossed his mind, like the fragment of remembered magic, something—a dream?—some dread connected with this world, some terrible premonition that made him wonder suddenly what this world was, that they had come to…

Jaldis had said,
We
can think neither of the future, nor of the past we leave behind
…

The stench of blood and incense filled his nostrils, dark forms bending over him out of darkness. He heard someone say Jaldis’ name. Then he passed out.

At various times in her life, Barbara Hambly has been a high-school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, a professional graduate student, an all-night clerk at a liquor store, and a karate instructor. Born in San Diego, she grew up in Southern California, with the exception of one high-school semester spent in New South Wales, Australia. Her interest in fantasy began with reading
The Wizard of Oz
at an early age and it has continued ever since.

She attended the University of California, Riverside, specializing in medieval history. In connection with this, she spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the south of France and worked as a teaching and research assistant at UC Riverside, eventually earning a master’s degree in the subject. At the university, she also became involved in karate, making Black Belt in 1978 and competing in several national-level tournaments. She now lives in Los Angeles.