Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (24 page)

AS A RESULT OF THE FÊTE OF THE SUMMERFIRE, THE DUKE
of Mere extended a formal offer to Jaldis the Blind of an apartment in the palace, along with his pupil and servant, Rhion, called the Brown.

And Jaldis, just as formally, thanked him and refused.

“But
why
?”
Tally blurted, intercepting them in the great pillared hall of the palace as they emerged after the audience. “I know you said you were an old man, and unused to courts… But you can’t be
that
unused to them if you knew about the silver-dust trick you used for the fête!”

And Jaldis smiled, pausing in his limping stride down the flight of shallow steps to the main floor of the long marble room, regarding her as he would have looked upon his own daughter while the next set of petitioners, like enormous butterflies in court dress of green and white, ascended past them to the bronze doors. “True, my child.” His monstrous opal spectacles flashed in the diffuse light that came down through the traceried windows of marble and glass. “But I could not well have said that I declined because I knew courts too well to want to become a part of one again, not even his.”

The girl, realizing she had blundered, flushed pink, a color which suited her, Rhion thought. Against the elaborate doublets and gowns of the courtiers, alive with featherwork, ribbons, and beads, the plain brown robes of the two wizards stood out like hens in a coopful of ornamental pheasants; Tally’s butter-yellow gown with its embroidery of carnelian and jet must have cost the price of a good horse. She stammered, “I only thought it would be more comfortable for you here. And safer.”

“And so it would be.” The old man propped his crutch beneath his arm and reached out to take her hand. Looking down the length of that high-ceilinged marble room, Rhion caught a glimpse of Esrex and Damson in the shadows of the pillared space beneath the musicians’ gallery and felt the young man’s pale impersonal gaze like the prick of a knife in his side.

“Your father is a true friend to me and a generous one,” Jaldis went on, his sweet artificial voice blending into the underwhisper of viols and flutes from the gallery. “But did I live at court, I would be under an obligation to him—how could I not be, were he my host and protector? What I gave to him last week was a gift freely and joyfully given. Though I would never feel such gifts to be a duty, still I would hesitate to put myself in a position where either of us would ever feel that it was less than spontaneous. And you know that in the celebrations for the birth of your sister’s son, or when your brother enters his first warrior lists as a man, or on the occasion of your lady mother’s birthday, there will be those who will expect something equal… or greater.”

Not to mention the fact
, Rhion thought dryly,
that the last time you were a court wizard, you ended up getting arrested in your patron’s downfall and losing your eyes and your tongue and the use of your legs into the bargain
.

“And it is a fact,” Jaldis went on, as they continued their descent toward the groups of brightly clad courtiers gossiping in the pillared hall, “that many of the great feasts of the year—the Winterfeast, the Rites of Summer, the Festival of Masks in the spring—fall upon the solstice or equinox-tides, when certain spells are possible and certain powers available, as at no other time. I know your father would not see it as a conflict, but gossip would be inevitable.”

They passed beneath the shadows of the vestibule, and Esrex, rather pointedly, escorted Damson away from danger of contamination. Even upon court occasions, Rhion noticed, Damson had abandoned the corsetry that had always given her the look of a gem-encrusted sausage, and curiously the flowing eggplant-colored silk that she now wore bestowed upon her an infinitely greater dignity.

“As I told your father, my child, I hope sincerely that my choice will not make my welcome here any the poorer, or change his friendship toward us.”

“I don’t think it will,” Tally said frankly. “Father is just and he likes you very much. I don’t think he’s ever—How do they phrase it? ‘Ejected from his favor’, I think the term is—anyone who disagreed with him. That would be like refusing to speak to someone who outran you in a race. And in any case,” she added, as they came to a halt before the great outer doors, “it won’t change
my
feelings toward you.”

Jaldis inclined his white head, the sunlight streaming in from outside making hair and beard sparkle like snow. “Then, my child, you have indeed relieved one of my fears.”

And as the red-cloaked guards in their bronze mail bowed them through, Rhion’s eye met Tally’s again.

As the weeks advanced toward midsummer, Rhion and Tally met more and more frequently. Sometimes Tally would angle to be seated near him when the Duke invited Jaldis to supper or find him working in the Duke’s great library in the octagonal tower which overlooked the main palace square; sometimes they met when a hunting or hawking party of young courtiers would encounter the two wizards as they gathered herbs in the marsh.

Or, as often chanced, Tally would steal out of the palace at first light in the summer dawns to have breakfast with Rhion in the long adobe kitchen in Shuttlefly Court.

Those times were the best. With the deep warmth of summer evenings, Rhion would frequently stay up all night, reading or studying the plants he’d gathered, working on mathematics or sigil making, and sleep in the heat of the day. In the early mornings, when he suspected Tally might be coming to visit him, he’d call to his scrying-crystal the image of her mare; if the mare was contentedly dozing in her stall, he himself would go to bed or sally forth to do the early shopping while the teeming produce markets were still torch-lit and the vegetables in the barrows wet with dew. But at least once a week—which quickly became twice, and now and then thrice—the image in the crystal would be of the rangy bay hunter trotting quietly along the streets of the Upper Town, all the little glass chips that swung from her bridle flashing softly in the pearly light; or else he’d see her standing outside the Bakery of a Thousand Joyful Buns, which stood at the foot of the palace rise, while Tally bought hot rolls.

And they would talk: of magic, of dogs; of music and mathematics, for Tally, like many musicians, had a bent that way; or she would play her flute for him softly, so as not to wake Jaldis sleeping overhead.

And after she left, to return to her dancing lessons and music lessons and dress fittings at the palace, Rhion would tell himself that these meetings had to stop before the inevitable happened. But a few mornings later she’d be back.

“They want me to get married, you know,” Tally said softly one morning as the two of them sat with their backs propped on either side of the kitchen doorjamb, consuming bread and coffee and listening to the water sellers’ cries in the strange, breathing coolness of summer dawn. “Father needs the alliance. He doesn’t trust the White Bragenmeres, who still keep their own men-at-arms, a private army, almost. They have support among the old land-barons, the ones Father took power from when he passed laws saying they couldn’t punish their serfs at their whim. And some of the priesthoods are angry at him for entertaining wizards the way he does.”

Rhion said nothing. He had been awake all night; going up through the trapdoor to the flat, tiled roof, he had practiced the spells which summoned beasts by their true and secret names, calling and dismissing geckos and sand lizards and drawing down the bats which feasted on night-flying moths. Later, as the night deepened, he had slipped into long meditation, breathing the dark luminosity of the night until every whisper of sage scent from the looming mountains, every movement of the night winds, was as clear to him as song, and he could identify the position of every rat, every lizard, every chicken and pig, and every sleeper in the crowded courts that spread all around him like a lake of grubby humanity, by the colors of their dreams.

And all that calm, all that sense of wisdom and knowledge and peace that lay like shimmering light within his hand, was sponged away as if it had never been by the thought of Tally in some other man’s arms.

She was tearing the roll she’d bought into smaller and smaller fragments, not eating any of it. He knew she never ate when she was upset. Trying to keep her voice steady, she went on, “It was stupid of me to think it wouldn’t happen—that I’d be able to stay here, to live at Father’s court, the way Damson is doing because Esrex and his family live on Father’s allowance, and to think I could go on just… just practicing my music, and training the dogs, and…” She shook her head quickly and did not finish the thought.

Her voice shifted quickly over Damson’s name. Rhion knew that Tally’s relations with her sister had been strained since that night in the pavilion, and his altercation with Esrex had not helped matters. For many years, the younger girl had been the self-appointed protector of the older. But now that all Damson’s will was bent upon Esrex—now that Tally was seeing a side of her she could not champion—she was left, Rhion guessed, feeling a little bereft.

“Every few weeks another nobleman from somewhere in the Forty Realms appears at court, and there are dances, maskings, new dresses to be fitted, the same tedious small-talk, and all my friends saying, ‘Well,
he
isn’t so bad.’ And I can’t get away. I can’t think. I can’t just… just be still. I used to be able to talk to Damson about it, but…” She turned her face to him, her gray eyes dry but desperately sad. “There are days when I wish I had never been born.”

Don’t take her in your arms
, Rhion thought quite clearly, his concern for her sorrow, his helpless wish to make her life other than it was, almost drowned by the thought of that tall fragile body and the way those long limbs would fold against his.
If you take her in your arms, you’re a dead man. If not now, soon… very soon.

But her misery was more than he could bear.

“Father’s being so good about it,” she went on, her head pillowed on his shoulder and her hair a pearl-twisted smoky rope across his chest. “He doesn’t want to rush me, but he truly needs a foreign alliance. And he’s so… so
hopeful
… every time some good-looking peabrain or some muscle-bound martinet comes strutting around. I can just hear him thinking,
Well
, is she going to like
this
one, finally
? And I just… I just
don’t
. And Damson’s worse, since she’s been expecting. She keeps saying, ‘Oh, when you bear your husband’s child, you’ll know what true happiness is…’ until I want to slap her. I wish Jaldis had never made that silly tincture.”

She wanted comfort, not love. So Rhion kissed her hair, and held her, and in time sent her on her way, then went back to his studies as well as he could.

Then in the second week of June, Shavus the Archmage came.

Rhion had been away—not with Tally, for once—most of the day. He had wandered the olive groves beyond the city walls and climbed the dry sheep pastures and the rocky mountain beyond, drenched in the hot brightness of the sun. He had observed the swooping patterns of the swallows’ flight, and marked which plants grew in the rock-tanks high up the sheeptrails; in the black pockets of cool pine woods on the mountain’s flank he had observed the tracks of coyote, rabbit, and deer; high up, where the grass thinned over the earth’s silvery bones, he had listened to the songs of the wind. Since his stay in the Drowned Lands, a love of woodcraft for its own sake had grown in him, and he explored, observed, and practiced stillness and silence, sinking his soul into the slow baking heat and the smells of sage and dust.

He returned to the city late, though the sun had only just set; above the Old
Town’s crowded courts, the sky still held a fragile and lingering light. In every court, the thick blue shadows were patched with primrose squares of lamplight: clear as amber in which men and women could be seen talking, eating, and making love; or else patterned and streaked with lattices or shutters, as strange a diversity, in their way, as the stones of the stream-beds or the plants that grew beside the tanks. Everyone in the city seemed to be abroad that evening, crowding porches and balconies with skirts hiked up or tunics off, throwing dice or watching the children who ran about like dusk-intoxicated puppies through the luminous blue of the narrow lanes.

Rhion could feel the whisper of magic in the air as he turned from Thimble Lane into the court.

He checked his steps, uncertain. Between the curious disorientation of returning to the city after a day in the hills and the deep, restless beauty of the night itself, it was for a moment difficult to be sure it was magic being worked that he felt…

But a moment later he was sure. And looking across the court at his door, he saw the green glow of witchlight through its many cracks.

Jaldis
, he thought.

And then,
But Jaldis is blind
.

A skiff of children swirled by him, shrieking with excited laughter at their game. In the tavern at the corner of the square, someone plucked a mandolin and began to sing. With his mind Rhion reached out toward the two little rooms in the long bank of the adobe tenement, singling them from the quiet talk, the giggles, the rattling of dice, and the creak of bedropes on all sides, probing deep, listening, scenting…

A man in the kitchen downstairs.
A smell of maleness—not young, he thought—road dirt, trace whiffs of incense and old blood, and the crackling whisper of pages turning.

Jaldis’ books.

And below that was the muffled murmur of voices whispering beneath the ground.

Cautiously, Rhion approached the door.

“Come in,” a deep voice said from inside, before he’d reached it. “You must be Rhion the Brown.”

As he pushed open the door, a tall, thin, brown-faced man, head shining bald as an egg in the witchlight above the cowl of his black wool robe, rose from where he’d been sitting at the table and held out an emaciated hand. “I am Gyzan the Archer, a friend of Shavus and, alas, not to be trusted in the same room as the magic-working below.”

Rhion dropped his satchel of herbs on the table and took his hand. A huge bow of black horn reinforced with steel stood unstrung beside the cellar’s rude plank door and, with it, a quiver of arrows. The cellar door itself was shut, but through its cracks now and then flickered a ghostly, shifting light.