Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (9 page)

“It’ll be all right,” Rhion said softly. “It’ll be all right.”

The gesture of Jaldis’ fingers, the movement of his head, were clear as a murmured,
Ah
! He made a pass or two above the crystal with his crippled hand, the tracing of runes too quick, too subliminal, for Rhion to identify them all. “Now,” he said, reaching for his crutches and rising from the bench beside the fire. “Let us go.”

From the inn doorway they faced out into the dark. Something swift and glowing flickered by just beyond the out-streaming bar of magelight—Rhion couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was only a marsh-fae, tiny and naked and curious about all the hullabaloo. Around them, the blue-white glow of witchlight softened and dimmed until it was little brighter than the ghostly powder of starlight on the snow. “Look out across the trees, both of you,” said the old mage softly. “Can you see light?”

The starlight was unsteady, the woods thick and wild, a tangle of bare black willow, of ash and maple and laurel thickets. The earthquake which six centuries ago had sunk the Drowned Lands and thrown down the walls of every city from Nerriok to Killay had left the Morne
Valley a jagged ruin of fault scarps and banks, broken ground difficult to navigate even where it was not studded with potholes and ponds.

Rhion shook his head. “No.”

“And now?”

Far off, a gleam of blue witchlight flickered bright among the knotted trees. “Yes…”

“Then come.”

They found the little girl where the grims had abandoned her when they’d grown bored with driving her here and there in the haunted woods. With the self-preservative instincts of a little animal she’d crawled into a hollow log; over this log, Rhion saw as they came nearer, Jaldis with his scrying-crystal had called a glowing column of magelight, a moving rope of disembodied, unearthly brightness, whose light made the snow all around glitter as if strewn with diamonds. Rhion had brought extra blankets; Tally snatched them from his hands and fell to her knees, wrapping the half-conscious child in them, her face solemn, as if she worked to save the life of a kitten found drowning in a stream.

“She’s alive…”

Rhion knelt in the snow beside her and felt the baby’s hands and cheeks. Cold as the silken skin was, he felt blood moving beneath. Gently he called the spells of healing and warmth, and the aversion of ills. The child herself was thin and small, not pretty, but with a porcelain-doll delicacy and a soft tangle of blond-brown hair ridiculously like that of her young aunt.

“She’ll be all right,” he murmured, the words half-embodying the charm in themselves, both promise and invocation as his fingers traced the signs of Summer Queen and Sun, the signs of health and longevity and light, on the forehead, the cheeks, and across the energy-paths of the child’s face and neck which governed lungs and skin. It seemed incredible to him, touching that skin which in its texture, its softness, and its newness was so absolutely unlike anything else of the mortal earth, that something so small could have those same paths of energy that traced the adult body, perfect in miniature, like a baby’s fingernails or the veins of the tiniest leaf.

Holding the child cradled to her shoulder Tally looked across at him as they knelt side-by-side in the slush, their faces mottled by tree-latticed starlight and darkness. She drew in her breath to speak, to thank him… But by the soft glow of the flickering witchlight their eyes met, and silence fell between them, a silence in which Rhion was conscious of the almost unheard sibilance of her breath, of the way her dust-colored hair stuck in dark strings to the hollows of her cheekbones, of the small, upright line of puzzlement between her brows as her eyes looked into his…

Clumsy with sudden haste he got to his feet. “Jaldis will… will be able to help if she’s taken any hurt.”

A moment later he realized he should probably help Tally, overburdened with the child as she was, to her feet. But she had already risen, not noticing or not thinking anything of this omission. “She’s all right, I think. Thank you,” she added shyly.

The two wizards walked with her back to the campsite on the southward road. Jaldis moved along behind on his crutches, the witchlight that wavered in rippling sheets all around them flashing coldly off the bulging spectacle-lenses and dancing like strange blue fire on the mud and snow of the roadbanks. Rhion and Tally, walking ahead, traded off carrying the child Elucida and leading the horse. “How did you become a wizard?” Tally asked as they passed beneath the black shadows of a grove of naked elms, and Rhion laughed and shook his head.

“Have you got till spring?”

“No, really.
I mean, everybody talks about wizards as if the first thing a wizard has to do is spit on Darova’s altar—and then everybody turns around and goes to wizards for spells and horoscopes and things. And the wizards I’ve met at… at my father’s house…” She hesitated there. Rhion saw her hand steal to the amber beads she wore, which announced her to all the world as a marriageable virgin of truly substantial dowry, and wondered if somebody had told her—as his parents had repeatedly told his sister—not to reveal her father’s name to chance-met strangers for fear of being carried away for ransom.

She recovered quickly and went on, “The wizards I’ve met at my father’s house have all seemed—well, very decent, if a little strange. And you didn’t have to come out to help me.” She reached out, and touched the puffy red welt on the side of his face, left by a grim’s stinging tail. “So I just wondered… Why you did it? Become a mage, I mean. Because I refuse to believe, as the philosophers say, that wizards were born without souls and have to become what they are.”

Rhion sighed. “I don’t know if I was born without a soul, because, if I was, I wouldn’t know what really having one feels like.” He glanced back over his shoulder, at Jaldis stumping sturdily along behind the exhausted horse. “But yes… We have to become what we are.”

It was something he’d never been able to explain to anyone not mageborn. He remembered, back in the days when he was still one of the most fashionable young dandies who hung around the perfume shops and flower boutiques, standing with several of his friends watching a pack of children tormenting an old Earth-witch who’d set up shop on a blanket on the steps of one of the great downtown baths. The children had been throwing dung and rotten vegetables at her, chanting obscene songs. Furious as the old woman was, she had borne it in silence, and Rhion knew instinctively that she dared not do anything that would cause the children to run to their parents crying,
The
lady hurt us
… And his friends had joked about why anyone would want to be a witch in the first place.

And he, Rhion, had been silent.

Because even then he had known.

Very softly, he said, “You reach a point where you can’t live a lie anymore. Where the pain of not—not using what you
know
you have, of not reaching out to take that power—becomes so intolerable that you don’t care what happens to you afterward. It’s like sex…”

Oh, great!
he thought in the next instant,
Go ahead and shock this poor virgin
…

But the great gray eyes were not shocked.

“When I was a little boy,” he went on, his voice still low, as if he spoke to himself, “I used to see pictures in the fire. Simple things, like my mother putting her make-up on, or my friends eating breakfast… One day my parents went to the shrine of St. Beldriss, and I mentioned to my nurse that I’d seen in the fire that a wheel had come off a cart in the narrow streets around the shrine and caused a hell of a traffic jam and that they’d be late coming back. She beat me.” His eyebrows flinched together over the round lenses of his spectacles. “She said that nobody saw things in the fire, that it was just daydreams that were no good for little boys. She told me not to say anything about it to my mother, but of course I did, and Mother punished me for lying.”

He still remembered the dark of the attic closet where he’d been locked, the furtive, terrible scurryings of the rats he knew lurked just behind the walls. It was not something he would ever have done to a child of four. He remembered other things as well.

“For years I convinced myself she was right—that I had lied. And I tried so damn hard to be good.”

There was a silence, in which their feet squeaked a little in the packed snow and mud of the road. The child Elucida slept, a warm, muffled burden against Rhion’s chest, beneath his patched black wool cloak. The last of the grims had faded back into the earth and trees where they lurked in daylight, and the frozen swamps, the sheets of gray ice, and the dirty piebald snow, all broken with the iron stems of naked shrub and willow, seemed to have lain locked in that sleeping enchantment since the beginnings of time.

“What were you doing traveling at this time of year, anyway?” Rhion asked after a little time, looking back across at the tall girl who strode at his side.

Tally seemed to shake herself out of some private reverie and smiled ironically across at him. “We were going to Imber to meet Damson’s husband. He has property near there and interest in shipping… he says.” She hesitated, as if debating whether to say more, her hands tucked into her armpits for warmth. A small tired line, the wry foot track of a passing thought, flicked into existence at the corner of her mouth and then as quickly fled.

“And a mistress, too?”

Her gray eyes slid sidelong at him, then away. The bitter dimple reappeared, all the comment necessary.

“And you?”

“I wanted to get away. I like to travel.” They came within sight of the camp, five or six pavilions at the top of a steep bank, twenty feet high above the swerve of the road where it ran across a dilapidated stone bridge. Even in the icy night, the smell of blood, both fresh and nauseatingly stale, breathed from the round little stone hut on the nearer end of the bridge, where offerings to the guardian troll had been left. The thing’s tracks were visible in the trampled snow, shambling along the bank of the marsh which the causeway spanned and so into the rocks of the glen. Lamps in the red and orange tents high on the bank turned them into glowing treasure-boxes in the bitter darkness, and Rhion could hear voices and glimpse the flash of steel by the jittery flare of torches.

He revised his estimate of the girl’s social position upward. A wealthy merchant or banker could have bought those great amber beads and the silver bullion that stitched her breast and sleeves, but a camp like that meant old nobility, at least.

On the threshold of the bridge Tally halted and took her sleeping niece from Rhion’s arms. Elucida murmured a little and cuddled deeper into her aunt’s breast. For a moment Rhion saw Tally’s face, as she turned to look down at the child, filled with a solemn tenderness, the deep, protective affection that had sent her out into the woods herself when she could have detailed grooms and liverymen to the task.

She looked up again and shrugged, her breath a misty vapor as she spoke. “When I’m married, I won’t be able to journey,” she said.

“Is that going to be soon?” he inquired, not nearly lightly enough.

“I suppose. Father needs an alliance, you see.” Her voice was trying hard to be matter-of-fact. She glanced at Jaldis, surrounded by the nimbus of the witchfire that protected them, then back at Rhion, small and battered with his scratched face and his round-lensed spectacles and his rough ashwood walking staff gripped in one mended glove. Behind her, the lights and voices of the camp rose like a wall of color, warmth, and security within call.

“My father is the Duke of Mere,” she said quietly. “So it isn’t a question of what I want, really. Just when. And who.”

Shaking back the filthy strings of her oak-blond hair, she turned a little too quickly and hurried across the bridge, back to her father’s servants and troops. But after a step or two, almost against some inner inclination, she turned back, still holding the child cradled on one hip like a peasant woman, the rein of the exhausted horse hooked through her arm. Her face was a pale oval in the frosty gloom.

“Rhion… You will… Will you ever be coming to Bragenmere? Father… he’s a scholar, you know. And he does invite wizards to Court.”

Then as if fearing she’d said too much, she turned swiftly away and hastened across the bridge, her boots leaving deep tracks in the crusted muck of snow and dirt. For a few moments Rhion stood watching the spangled dusk of her hair and the moving white blob of the horse’s off hind stocking blur with the dark of the ascending road. Then torches and colored lanterns came streaming out of the camp and down the path to greet her and to take her back among them again.

“Dinar of Mere may be a scholar,” Jaldis’ soft, artificial voice buzzed from the freezing dark behind him, “but as for the wizards he invites to his Court…! Ebiatics trying to transmute lead into gold and call the wind by means of silver machines; Blood-Mages stinking like troll huts with demons and grims squeaking in their hair like lice… Why, his court mage for years, when he was still land-baron of the Prinag marshes before he overthrew the house of the White Bragenmeres and married the old duke’s daughter, was a foul old Hand-Pricker who could barely talk for the spell-threads laced through his lips and tongue. Go to Bragenmere indeed!”

Looking back, Rhion saw that the old man, though draped in the heavy black cloak and surcoat that marked them both as members of the most ancient of the Orders of Wizardry, was shivering in the cold, all the talismans of power at his breast twinkling in the witchlight and his pale face lined with the strain of using his spectacles to see. Rhion walked back to him and said quietly, “Let’s go back to the inn.”

The witchlight faded from above their heads. They turned away, an old cripple and a young pauper, bearded, scruffy, and insignificant in the leaden darkness before the winter’s dawn. But looking over his shoulder, Rhion could see, on the edge of the camp, a plump little woman in a dress scintillant with opals and featherwork come running out to embrace Tally and the sleeping child, and lead them toward the largest of the lighted pavilions. And he saw how Tally turned to look out into the darkness, and it seemed to him for a moment that their eyes met.