Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (27 page)

“Well, more from pride than from intellectual merit, I think,” she admitted. “I mean, the White Bragenmeres—Mother’s family—always collected anything that came to hand and would never let anyone interfere with anything of theirs for whatever reason. I know Grandfather is supposed to have taken a whip to the Archimandrite of Darova when she came to him complaining his dog had bitten her—then turned around as soon as she had gone and beat the dog.”

“Charming fellow.”
Rhion stretched out to the next compartment, nearly overbalancing himself in his effort to read the tags without climbing down and moving the stool. Tally laughed and put a hand on his calf to steady him, a touch that almost had the opposite effect; it was with great difficulty that he kept himself from springing down upon her then and there. He had found that sometimes, for hours at a time, they could be friends as they had been before, like two children playing in a garden—other moments he was consumed by consciousness of her, aware of every finger end, every pearl upon her headdress, and every eyelash, wanting nothing more from life than to crush her in his arms.

They had made love almost daily since midsummer afternoon: in the grotto at the end of the garden; in the hayloft above the Duke’s stables; and in the little deserted pavilion with the painted rafters where Rhion and Jaldis had come to make spells for the saving of Damson’s marriage. Of the love-philter and of Esrex and Damson, they did not speak.

Rhion was, in fact, about the court far more than anyone realized, coming silently under the cloudy aura of spells of Who-Me? and Look-Over-There. The places where he and Tally met, where they clung in passionate joy or lay drowsing in an aftermath sweet beyond words, were always hazed about by illusions which woke in chance passersby the dim sensation that there was something urgent to be done
immediately
elsewhere in the palace. The vines which covered the front of the garden grotto grew long and untended as a beggar’s hair; the pavilion by the postern gate acquired a neglected air that came of not having its steps washed or its windows cleaned.

Once, while Rhion hunted for milkwort in the wolf-yellow fields above the olive groves, he heard the horns of the hunters ringing in the hills and caught a glimpse of the Duke, all in crimson, Tally in her familiar red riding dress with her dogs bounding about her, and the flame-haired Earl of the Purple
Forest coursing after stag. Watching as the horses plunged out of sight into one of the thick knots of woodland that tangled these high gullies, it came over him in a sweeping rush of despair how terribly short time was. He could see, too, that Tally was right: the Earl’s dogs, though too well-trained to shy when he came near, lowered their ears and moved restlessly when he was among them, cracking his whip against his boot.

Upon another occasion, he heard the horns ringing, very distantly, while he was in the Kairn Marshes, putting into practice the spells he had learned from Greigmeere’s scrolls—a little-known cantrip to make a thing called a spiracle. Theoretically at least, a spiracle charged with the element of air would hold that element about it even when plunged into water; after a few tries, he found that he could, in fact, so imbue a spiracle that, with it bound around his brow, he could walk about and breathe at the bottom of the river, watching the fish slipping through the dark jungles of cattail roots. When he emerged from the water, his body dripping but his hair and beard and spectacles dry, he found Tally sitting on his clothes.

That was one of the best afternoons. The gnats, under the impression that the air was unaccountably filled with the smoke of lemon grass, hung in perplexed clouds upriver and down, the air clean of them in the thick yellow-green sunlight among the willow roots where Rhion and Tally lay. Afterward Tally insisted on trying the spiracle—a little iron circlet no bigger around than a child’s bracelet, tied to a leather thong—and explored the murky greenish waters herself, breathing the bubble of trapped air which hovered around her head.

Later still, lying again on the spread-out bed of their clothing, she spoke of her upcoming marriage, the only time she had done so throughout that long summer.

“I’m saving times like this,” she whispered, turning her head toward him, so that her long hair lay tangled over the worn brown robe beneath it. Out on the marsh, a fish leaped at a dragonfly, a silvery
plop
in the stillness; the air that moved above the water stirred the thick curly hair of Rhion’s back and chest and thighs and murmured in the reeds which surrounded the lovers like a translucent green bed curtain, canopied with sky. “They’re saying now it will be August, just before we leave for the summer palaces in the hills. Mother’s been telling me to stay out of the sun so my skin will beautify and making me take baths in milk. They’ve been bleaching my hair and clarifying my complexion with distilled water of green pineapples, and Damson’s been plying me with every kind of herb and tea and potion she knows to make me beautiful. And time is so short…”

She propped herself to her elbow and reached across to take his spectacles—all that he was wearing—from his face, then drew him to her, silken skin, bones like ivory spindles, beneath his hands. “This is my dowry,” she murmured, holding fiercely to him, her face pressed to his shoulder. “When a noble woman marries, she has a jointure to live on, if worst comes to worst—these days are mine.”

He gathered her to him, closer and closer still. His beard against her hair, he breathed. “Then we’d better make it a good one.”

“I wish there was something I could do.”

“Oh, Rhion.”
Jaldis sighed, and put his wine cup aside, to reach out and grasp his pupil’s plump hand in his crippled one. The noise of the summer evening came dimly through the open door from the square: from both taverns, voices lifted in song, old ballads strangely sweet in the lapis dark and torchlight despite the rough voices that framed them. Children shrieked with laughter, whirling the big green-backed beetles they’d caught around their heads on strings to hear them buzz, and crickets creaked in the long weeds around the edge of the arcade. Two streets away the jarring rattle of the market carts rose like a clumsy staccato heartbeat to time the night’s mingled sounds. On the rough wooden table between Jaldis and Rhion the supper dishes lay, and among them, like a nobleman gone slumming, stood the three-quarters-empty bottle of wine which the Duke’s messenger had brought them that evening. Turning it in his hand, Rhion reflected that the Duke must have returned—he and his guest had been gone for two days, inspecting the summer-palace to which the whole court would soon move.

“I keep thinking…” He gestured helplessly across the ruined battlefield of plates. “I keep thinking about sailing across to Murik, the Island of the Purple
Forest… about maybe settling there. But I don’t want to leave you.” It was the first time he had voiced such a choice aloud. “And I think, ‘Well, he doesn’t look like the kind of man who’s going to get songs sung about his fidelity… ’ As long as I don’t get her with child, why should he care? But
I
care. I hate the thought of her bearing his children. But that’s why he’s marrying her. I hate the thought of what he’ll do to her.”

“And what will he do to her?” his master asked softly. “She’s the daughter of his ally. He can’t very well take a whip to her.”

Very quietly, Rhion said, “He’ll make her unhappy.”

Jaldis sighed and did not reply.

Rhion got to his feet and paced to the open door. For a time he stood looking out into the unearthly blue of the deepening night, his arms folded tight across his body as if to contain a bleeding wound. Above the mountains, a swollen cantaloupe-colored moon shed light brilliant enough to cast blurred shadows on every sage and juniper bush there, to silver every roof tile of the city beneath. In that drenched indigo world, the taverns stood out like tawdry carnivals; elsewhere in the square, two of the local prostitutes sat on their balcony, having a night off, their quiet-voiced conversation about hair styles and fashionable gamblers mingling with the smell of their perfume and the thick green scent of the marijuana they smoked. The day had been stifling, the last of July raging down like a furnace over the brown hills. Before the doors of their rooms, all round the arcade, men and women sat arm in arm in companionable silence, watching children playing in the dark.

Rhion whispered, “Dammit. Other people—people who aren’t born to magic, who don’t have it in their blood—think magic solves things. They come to us for potions, philters, talismans, amulets, and advice to solve some problem or other. But it doesn’t, really. It doesn’t change what we are. It doesn’t change what we do.”

“No,” Jaldis said, from the soft glow of witchlight that haloed the table where he sat.

Rhion chuckled ironically. “Magic isn’t… isn’t magic. I keep telling myself every time I see her that it’s just one more memory to hurt after she’s gone. But I keep grabbing those moments, devouring them as I used to eat cookies… Damn, I make the best love-potions in the Forty Realms, but can I make one that’ll fall me
out
of love?”

“Would you truly want to?”

His voice was nearly inaudible. “No.” The witchlight flashed across the lenses of his spectacles as he turned back to the room. “No.”

His hand unerring, Jaldis poured the remainder of the wine, dividing it between the two cups. Rhion shut the door, closing out the wild magic of the night, and returned to his master. As he picked up the cup, the touch of it, its graceful shape and glass-black glaze, brought back to him the still silences of the Drowned Lands, the flicker of fireflies across the blue marshes, and the marble faces dreaming in their winding sheets of vines. The Gray Lady’s face came back to him, framed in the bones of the priestess’ diadem and the pulse-beat tapping of the drums among the sacrificial stones. Magic.

The memories grounded him. Like
love, magic
was a word of many meanings: joyful or damning, hurtful or sweet, the same word describing a silly flirtation or a commitment that saved the soul.

“To magic,” he said softly, raising his cup; as if he could see him do so, Jaldis returned the salute.

“To magic, then.”

And draining the cup, the old man rose stiffly from his chair, collected his crutches, and limped off slowly to the ladder and so up to his bed.

Rhion gathered the dishes, dipped water from the jar, and washed them, reflecting with a twisting stab in his heart that, if the Duke had returned, it meant that the court would be getting ready to move up to the higher hills. Several of the wealthy merchants whose walled and decorated houses made up the Upper
Town had left already; they would not be back until the minor festival of Shilmarglinda on the equinox of fall.

That thought brought others. He glanced across at the tiny plank door of the cellar, shut and bolted against intrusion, and wondered what Jaldis would learn at the turning of autumn when he again summoned the power of the heavens to listen into the Well. And listen he would, Rhion thought uneasily, at whatever cost to himself.

By the autumn equinox Tally will be married. This will all be over.

The autumn equinox, he realized, was less than sixty days away. It was as if something within him had been squeezed suddenly in a wire net.

And then, from upstairs, he heard the sudden, heavy crash of a stick pounding the floor. Summoning him, calling him urgently…

Jaldis.

He can’t use the voice-box…

Rhion took two running strides toward the ladder and stopped, realizing belatedly that the witchlight that had illuminated the room had died. Being able to see in the dark, and being deeply preoccupied, he hadn’t noticed…

But there was only a strange, leaden muzziness in the part of his mind that he would have used to summon the light back again. Like a limb that had been numbed, or the speech that eludes a drunkard…

And it came to him, whole, cold, terrifying, and with absolute clarity, what had happened and what was about to take place.

Pheelas root. In the wine.

The Duke never sent the wine.

The Duke is still out of town.

Behind him the door crashed open. Torchlight spilled into the long room like blood from a gutted beast, framing the crowding forms of men in the gray livery of the disgraced house of the White Bragenmeres—personal soldiers with weapons in their hands.

Before them, slim as a lily in unjeweled white, stood Esrex.

LATER RHION SUPPOSED HE COULD HAVE THROWN SOMETHING
—the tin basin of dishwater, a chair, anything—at Esrex’s guards to slow them down. But at the moment, he didn’t think of it, and it probably would have done him more harm than good. Smashing their way down the length of the room, they caught him when he was three-quarters of the way up the ladder to the room above, tearing his hands by main force from the rungs and striking him with their spear butts when he kicked at their faces. A blow caught him over the kidneys, the pain stopping his breath; as he crumpled, retching, to the stone floor he heard them in the room above. “What the…”

“Look under the beds…”

“Try the chest…” The sound of crashing furniture, the scrape of a bedstead on the floor. Someone kicked him in the side. The room around him was a fevered harlequin of torchlight and clawing shadows. The clay earth smell of the floor choked his nostrils, and the sweat-and-leather stink of the guards.

“Where is he?”

Rhion managed to shake his head. “He went up there… if he’s gone, I don’t know…”

The guard kicked him again, sending him crashing against the wall. The next second he was grabbed by the front of his robe and hauled to his feet, pain stabbing him in the side so sharply that for a moment he thought one of them had put a dagger into him. The kick must have broken a rib. Two of them dragged him to the hearth, where the remains of the small supper fire still smoldered. One held him by an arm twisted behind his back while the other pokered aside the layer of ash, exposing the glowing core of embers beneath. Rhion struggled desperately as they caught his hand, forced it toward the simmering heat. “Where is he… ?”