Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (2 page)

From a pocket in his robe he took a twist of paper containing the herbal powder that was the basis of all love-philters, a supply of which he kept made up beforehand. From another pocket he drew the piece of red chalk he always carried and a goose-feather. He explained, “For a love-potion to work, it has to carry the… the scent, the essence, of your flesh.”

“I know.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “They said you… you would mix it upon my naked body.”

Before he could stop himself Rhion said, “Well, generally we do, but this table’s awfully hard and the fire’s gone down…”

“I would not mind the cold.” Her eyes smoldered, and Rhion bit his tongue in exasperation, both at himself for making the joke and at her for not realizing it
was
one.

“A hand will be fine.”

She removed her glove and offered her soft little palm, scented with attar of roses. Rhion turned her hand over and poured a quantity of the powder on the back. “If you’ll keep silent now,” he remembered to say. He’d never had a client yet, male or female, who, if not silenced beforehand, didn’t feel compelled to relate the details of the affair while he was trying to concentrate on the spells.

She let out her breath, looking a little disappointed.

He took the woman’s thumb and little finger gently in his own two hands, which rested on the table on either side of hers. Closing his eyes, he slowed his breathing and stilled his thoughts, calling up and focusing the power that rose from within himself like the slow expansion of a single candle’s light gradually illuminating some enormous, darkened room. This was the part of spell-weaving that he loved and the part that made him most uneasy at times like this, the most vulnerable in the presence of these representatives of the mundane world for whom wizardry was a matter of rumor and whisper and dread.

Though his eyes were shut, he could see the woman’s hand still, lying between his own. The green-gold powder sparkled against the creamy flesh in the candles’ limpid light. In time, eyes still shut, he moved his hands, making the correct passes in the air above the powder, drawing with the thin, glimmery air-traces that only a wizard could see the runes of binding, the symbols of oneness, that imbued the dried rose petals and shamrock leaves with the essences of the woman’s well-cared-for flesh. His mind blended with the scents of the powdered sandalwood and salts, the smell of her perfume, the warmth of her hand, and the perfect shape of those cowlike brown eyes. He heard the high, delicate sweetness of her voice in his mind as a lover would hear it, finding its childish accents endearing rather than annoying, seeing in those wonderful eyes heart-touching innocence rather than—as was his private opinion—self-centered stupidity.

You must love them when you weave the spells
, Jaldis had said to him years ago…
Seven?
Six?…
when he had taught him the spells for the drawing of the heart.
Love them for their own sake, as a true lover does, whatever your private self may think. See charm in their imperfections, as the shadows of flowers mottle a sunlit wall. You must understand what beauty is before you can wake desire for it in another mind
.

It had taken him a long time to learn that, he recalled. Months of watching flowing water and the shadows of flowers. He still wasn’t sure he understood.

Opening his eyes, he gently brushed the table before him with the goose-feather, then tipped the woman’s hand so that the powder spilled off. Delicately he feathered the last residue from her skin, then with the chalk drew a small Circle of Power around the grains, and closed his eyes again. With the feather, with his fingers, with his mind, he shaped in the air above it the runes necessary for the spell, calling down the constellations of power and the clusters of invisible realities related to each archetypical sign.

The Cup, the rune of the heart, filled with clear water and utterly mutable, ruled by the Moon and the tides.
The sixth rune, of caring and giving and duality, of two voices blending in harmony, and of the warmth closed in between two hands. The fifteenth, ugly and dark, the rune of obsession that chains the will and blurs the senses, sculpting reality to what one wishes it to be. And all the while the woman sat across from him, gazing with those huge, affrighted eyes, or glancing nervously back into the lights and laughter of the common room as if she feared that among the dock workers and fishwives gathered there she’d see one of her fashionable friends, someone who’d recognize her and tell. Rhion was not a particularly strong wizard, and after ten and a half years of study he’d come to understand that, even if he attained the level of learning Jaldis and Shavus had, he’d probably still never have their terrible strength. But he did weave a very pretty love-spell, though he said it himself.

“Sprinkle this into his cup or his food, if you can,” he said later, handing her the ensorcelled powder done up in a twist of cheap yellow paper. “If you can’t get access to his food, sprinkle it on his clothing, or his bed.”

“And it will bring him to me?” She raised those childlike eyes to his. Standing with her on the threshold of the common room, Rhion was uneasily conscious of the way the chair men were watching him, as if they suspected him of laying witcheries on this woman to draw her back to his bed some night against her will. “It will make him love me?”

“It will bring him to you,” Rhion said wearily, pushing his spectacles up more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. “He will desire you for a few hours, a few days, and forget about the others in the intensity of his desire. But unless you can win his real love, his genuine affection and care—unless you can be someone that he
can
love—it won’t last. It never does. There is no counterfeit for love, and over love, magic has no power.”

But in her sparkling eyes he saw she wasn’t listening.

Rhion climbed the stairs again feeling tired and rather old. His sense of alienation from the nonmageborn world hadn’t been lessened by an encounter with the landlord, a massive man with a stubbled chin and the broken nose of a prizefighter, who had intercepted him on his way through the kitchen and relieved him of half the silver royals the woman had paid. “For use of the room,” he’d growled, and Rhion hadn’t argued. It had been difficult enough finding anyone willing to rent to wizards in the first place.

Jaldis was still sitting, wrapped in cloak and blankets, in his wobbly chair near the chimney wall. The sharp point of his chin was sunk on his breast so that his short-trimmed silver beard touched the soundbox at his chest. At the creak of Rhion’s foot upon the floorboards he raised his head, his long white hair catching the wan glimmer of the witchlight that his pupil called into being among the slanting rafters overhead. The talismans dangling from the soundbox clinked and glittered faintly with the movement: pendants wrought of silver and crystal, discs of animal bone, scraps of parchment enclosed in glass or gold and the single great golden sun-cross which Shavus had made for him, symbol of the living strength of magic and its eternal renewal—objects imbued with power by all the wizards who had given him them, so that the magic which set the box’s delicate chords and whistles vibrating would not fail when Jaldis’ own strength became exhausted by other spells.

“Shavus is gone?”

The old man nodded. “I had hoped that I could prevail upon him to help me,” he said softly, the whisper of the instrument like the sigh of harpstrings when the wind passes through. “But he sees nothing… nothing.”

“I’m not sure my own vision of the subject is noticeably more acute.” Rhion turned up the sleeves of his brown robe and those of the rough-knitted pullover he wore beneath it and began to clear the tiny coffee cups the three wizards had drunk from earlier in the evening. The dreamy velvet bitterness of the coffee and the sweet pungence of cinnamon still flavored the air, mingling with the astringent scent of the overhead herbs and the smoke that seeped from the bricks of the chimney wall. “You’re saying it’s possible to… to
cross
this Void you’re talking about? To go to other… ” He hesitated. “Other universes?”

“Not only possible,” the old man murmured, “but necessary.”

Rhion paused in the act of dipping wash-water from the half-empty bucket, placed near the chimney bricks to keep it from freezing, and cocked an eyebrow at his mentor. “Necessary… but not safe.”

“No.” The word was no more than a drawn-out buzz of strings, a vibrating inflection of weariness and defeat. “Not safe.”

Rhion was silent, unable to picture a world so incomprehensibly separated from that which he knew.

In the ten years he had followed Jaldis, learning from him the whole tangled complex of facts and lists, spells and metaphysics, meditation and mental technique that constituted what the mundane world called “magic”, Rhion had known the old man kept certain secrets, certain knowledge, to himself. In the books and scrolls Jaldis had so painfully collected over the years Rhion had found references to things he did not understand, things Jaldis sometimes explained and sometimes evaded on the grounds that his student had not been studying long enough…

But the night before last—when the old man had stumbled, exhausted, from the tiny chamber hidden under the eaves in which he had been closeted since the early winter sundown and had whispered to him to bring the Archmage—had been the first time that Rhion had heard of the Dark Well, the Void, or other universes besides the one he knew.

Frightened by his master’s ghastly pallor and ragged breathing, Rhion had called the Archwizard’s name again and again into the strongest of Jaldis’ several scrying-crystals, until at last Shavus had answered. That night had been the night of the winter solstice, when all wizards were taking advantage of the additional power generated by the balance point of sun and stars to work deeper and stronger spells than were ordinarily possible, and Shavus had been less than pleased at the interruption. But he had come, with such speed that Rhion guessed he had not stopped for rest anywhere on the snow-covered roads between his house in the forest of Beldirac and the gates of Felsplex.

“Why ‘necessary’?” he asked, spreading out a rough towel and setting the cups to dry. “Yes, if there’s a world where magic has ceased to exist it should be investigated…”

“It must be investigated without delay.” With sudden energy Jaldis rose to his feet, his hand finding at once the crutches which leaned against the side of his chair. In addition to blinding him and cutting out his tongue, all those years ago, the old king’s soldiers had hamstrung him as well. Rhion hurried to help him, knowing he was still far from recovered from his fatigue, but leaning on the long sticks of bog-oak with their padding of leather and rags, the blind mage seemed suddenly flooded with a driven energy. Mummified in blankets, he had appeared fragile, almost tiny; standing up, he was half a head taller than his pupil. When they had first met, he had been taller still.

“
He
won’t see the urgency of it, the importance of it,” the blind man went on, turning to limp toward the tiny door nearly hidden in the shadows of the far wall. “But
you
must.”

He paused, his crippled hand on the rough wooden latch, turning back to Rhion as if the sunken eyepits still had sight, as if the dark, haughty gaze he had once had was still his to compel, to command. “Someone must go to that world to learn
why
magic failed there. If it was something that men did…”

“Could they have?” Rhion felt suddenly loath to have him open that cracked plank door, dreading what might lie beyond for reasons he did not himself understand.

Some of the furious lines of concentration and will eased, leaving Jaldis’ features sunken and old. “I do not know.” He pushed open the door, and, limping on his crutches, hobbled through, Rhion following unwillingly, wiping the wash water from his hands, the ribbon of ghostlight trailing in their wake like will-o’-the-wisp.

This second room, no more than a triangular nook of waste space under the steeply slanting roof, had never been intended for anything but storage. During their first year of residence at the Black Pig, Rhion had spent many nights surreptitiously shifting decades’ accumulation of mouse-infested junk to other sections of the attics to make of this closet an inner sanctum, a meditation chamber, a workplace of the deeper and more secret magics that comprised the true heart of the calling that was their life. It was unlighted and unbearably stuffy, and though, like their dwelling-room, ringed about with spells against the roaches and mice to be found everywhere else in the inn, it still had the dirty, musty smell of these vermin and of dry rot and smoke. From barely head-high by the door, the ceiling beams slanted sharply to the floor, forming the hypotenuse of a triangle scarcely twelve feet across the base.

In this place Jaldis—and Rhion, when he could—worked in the deepest meditations that were the foundation of the wizard’s metaphysical arts, sinking the mind into silence and stretching out the senses, scrying through fire and water, crystal, and the fine-spun fabric of the wind, to study the shape and balance and pulsebeat of the world. Here in the inky silence they practiced the magics of illusion and light, not for their own sake but for what they could teach about the nature of the mind. Here Rhion meditated and studied the nature of the runes which were the foundation of the magic as the Morkensik Order practiced it; the making of the hundreds of sigils that were built of them, and the greater, more complex seals that called together from a swirling chaos of probabilities the loci of power and likelihood, bridging the gap between the will and something more. Here Rhion practiced patiently and slowly all those spells which Jaldis had taught him over the years, memorizing their forms and painstakingly exercising the slender powers that were his, until he could call trickles of water up the slanted side of a dish, bring forth illusions of flowers and jewels, make a talisman of gold which would rob poison of its virulence, or cause dustdevils to swirl all around the shut and windless room.

And in this place, Rhion saw now, Jaldis had drawn Circles of Power on the floor, circles which occupied almost the whole of that tiny chamber: circles in chalk and silver-dust, in springwater and in blood, crossed and interwoven with rings and spirals of pure, glimmering light that only wizards could see, drawn in the air above the worn and splintery floorboards or sinking down into them, visible a few inches into their depth like light submerged in water… stars and crescents and the sun-cross of power, all feeding the energies of air and life and the turning earth into holding the circle intact.