Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (3 page)

And in the center of that circle was darkness, a column of shadow that even Rhion’s dark-sighted eyes could not pierce: a darkness which filled him with uneasy horror.

“It took me three days to call it into being.” The voice of the box was no more than a thread of sweetness in the terrible silence of that tiny room. “With the strength that magic can call from the solstice’s power I sent my mind deep into that Well, seeking to learn something of the nature of magic, the nature of the Cosmos that divides universe from universe in an infinity of colors and dark.”

Staring into the darkness, Rhion barely heard him. It seemed to draw him, as some men are drawn with terrible vertigo to the edge of a precipice. Staring into it, he thought he saw movement there, strange iridescences as if blackness had been refracted into shuddering rainbows of something other than color, anomalous stirrings that trailed lightless fire.

Behind him, Jaldis’ voice went on. “I caught glimpses of things I do not understand, of worlds whose natures and substructures are incomprehensible to me: ships that whirled flashing between stars; clouds of terrible and free-floating power, drifting eternally in the abyss. And somewhere in that chaos I heard a voice crying out, ‘Magic is dead… magic is dead. If any can hear us there where magic thrives, magic is dead here, dead… magic is dead. It has been gone for two hundred years.’ ”

Rhion looked back at him, seeing in the soft blue glow of the witchlight the desperate tension in the old man’s withered face, the mingled grief and eagerness, as if he heard again that thin voice crying. “Over and over it called, and I called back, ‘I hear you! I will help you!’ ” His hand trembled on the crutches; his voice would have, too, had the forces of law left him with one. “I do not know whether they heard me or not.”

With a sigh he turned away, as if he could no longer bear to stand so close to the place where he had heard those terrible pleas. Slowly he limped from the room, Rhion following thankfully at his heels. The witchlight drifted after them; looking back over his shoulder as he closed the door, Rhion could see that even the soft clarity of that light could not pierce the dreadful shadow held prisoned within the ensorcelled rings.

“He might have been speaking of some kind of—of field effect, the kind of thing you’d get with a spell of silence and a talismanic resonator.”

“No.” Jaldis shook his head as he sank once more back into his chair by the chimney wall, gathering his patched blankets about his rawboned frame. Among the rafters, the wind groaned, the whole building shuddering faintly, like a horse twitching flies from its skin. In the silence that followed, Rhion could hear the dry skitter of ice fragments, blown like sand across the tiles overhead. “He would not have spoken so, calling into the Void for help, were there any hope of help within his own world.”

Below them, the inn’s guests were preparing for bed. Muffled voices and the scrape of furniture came dimly through the floor, a woman’s laugh. Had he concentrated, as wizards were trained to do, Rhion could have pinpointed and identified the inhabitants of every room.

“Men hate magic, Rhion,” Jaldis continued very softly, his twisted hands rubbing his shoulders for warmth. The witchlight that had rippled like a sheet of blown silk in the darkness was growing small and dim—it caught a final gleam on Jaldis’ sun-cross talisman, on the gold lettering of a book’s worn spine and the staring, ironic crystal rounds of the spectacles still balanced beside his chair. “They hate magic and hate those of us born with the ability to work it. That woman who paid you tonight, she too will hate you in her heart, for you can do something which she cannot. If magic has perished in some other world—in an entire world, an entire universe—we must learn why. I must go on seeking, go on scrying in the Well no matter what the cost to me, to you, to anyone. I must convince Shavus to help me, to go to that world in spite of all the peril of crossing the Void.

“Don’t you see?” He turned desperately toward Rhion with his sunken eyelids, his closed and scar-torn lips, wreckage left by the hatred of magic which only magic could now relieve. “If men found some way to cause this to happen, how long will it be before those in our world, in this world, learn to do so, too, and destroy magic here forever?”

RHION WOKE WITH A START, FROM A CONFUSION OF UNEASY
dreams.

He was back in the Old Bridge Market in the City of Circles: a plump little dandy in a red velvet doublet whose buttons flashed with rubies and to whose carefully dressed brown curls clung the scent of cloves. Blue and yellow awnings flapped in the bright spring sunlight around the ancient bridge-temple of Bran Rhu. The air was thick with the smell of lilies and the stink of the river’s sewage below. Rhion was thumbing through the old pieces of broken books piled in a used-paper seller’s barrow: fragments of romances and hymnals, their illuminations faded and yellowed like desiccated leaves; scrolls of religion and philosophy with their glue cracking along the joins; old household receipt books; and the accounts of forgotten military campaigns. The lowest of kitchen slaves would come by occasionally to buy the stuff by the bagful for kindling and would look at that modishly dressed youth with curiosity and suspicion in their eyes. Rhion, even as he examined the incomprehensible glyphs of a red and green accordion-fold book from the unknown south, tried to formulate in his mind some fashionable motive—mockery, or aesthetics, or something of the kind—should one of his fashionable friends see him and laugh…

A shadow had fallen over him. “Are you hunting for secrets?” Jaldis asked.

And turning, Rhion saw him for the first time.

But this time—he had dreamed this scene before—Jaldis looked as he did now. His face was thin and gray under the stringy web of his beard, his white hair no thicker than spider-floss in the sunlit breeze. The threadbare blankets and worn black cloak which wrapped him parted to reveal the voice-box strapped to his breast, and its silvery drone was all the voice that Rhion heard.

No!
he thought, his mind clutching at the receding shreds of the deep, musical tones which had originally framed those words.
No, he’s not like that! He wasn’t like that, not then! His hair and beard were still mostly brown, he still had his eyes then, dark and luminous and kind
…

But his mind could reconstruct neither the image of him as he had been, nor the sound of his voice.

As he had indeed done on that day of glassy sunlight and intoxicating flower-scents so many years ago, Jaldis reached into the paper seller’s barrow and brought out a book.

But instead of the few pages of star lore and mathematics that it had actually been, it was a book with black covers, covered with dust and sticky with cobweb. The air around it seemed to quiver fitfully, half-visible spirals of light shuddering like a heat dance, and when Rhion opened it, what he held in his hands was not a book at all. Only darkness lay contained in those black covers, a darkness which dropped away into a hole of inky nothing between his hands. As he stared at it in horror, the Abyss exploded upward around him, like water gushing up from a spring; a darkness filled with colors that should not have been colors, gouging a hollow in air and light and in all sane things as if the world which he knew had merely been painted on paper, now touched to destroying flame. Airless beyond comprehension, cold as he had never understood cold could be, the darkness opened around him like the unfurling petals of a sable rose, dragging him down into it, swallowing him…

He was falling. His cry was silent.

Then he found himself in a place he had never seen before. He stood at the edge of a meadow with a forest at his back and a small hill rising before him, crowned with three ancient stones. Two had fallen and lay nearly buried in the thick, calf-deep grass; the third still reared its worn head against the azure well of the summer night. It was close to midnight, he thought—the air was laden with the peep of frogs, crinkled with the trilling of crickets, and summer constellations unrolled in a glittering banner beyond the black spikes of the surrounding pines.

The thick sweetness caught at his throat as he waded through the grass, up the hill to the stones. His feet hewed a dark swathe through the dew that glittered in the starlight, a shadowed track leading back into the coagulated gloom beneath the trees. Looking over his shoulder, he felt a kind of panic, a terror of pursuit… fear of being traced here, captured, taken… Taken where? The thought of it turned him cold but he could conjure nothing, no reason for that hideous dread.

But if he could reach the stones, he’d be safe. If he could reach them by midnight, he could escape…

Escape?

Jaldis
.
His mind groped for bearings in the disorientation of the dream.
Where’s Jaldis in all this? He can’t run, he’s crippled. He won’t be able to get away from them
…

Who?

The thought of capture turned him sick.

He sprang up on one fallen stone. Around him in the starlight the grass of the meadow lay like a silken lake, cut by the single dark line of his tracks. Overhead the sky was a glowing well of blue, an inverted morning-glory sewn with light. Raising his arms, he called down the power of the wheeling stars to him, calling strength and hope of flight…

But as he turned he saw all around him in the encircling woods the terrible glitter of silver and steel, the closing ring of eyes…

He jolted from sleep like a man falling from a height. His heart was pounding with panic, and for one terrible second he knew that he had not escaped. Waking had only postponed the knowledge of what would happen to him next… but only momentarily. They would capture him and… and…

But it was only darkness.

Only a dream.

Only a dream
, Rhion thought, breathless, trying to slow his heart and still his panic. The cold killing lust of the hunters, the poisoned fog of impersonal hate…

But those did not fade from his mind. They grew stronger than before, and he realized that those, at least, were real.

Rhion dropped his hand from beneath the covers to where he had left his spectacles on the floor by the bed. His wizard’s sight let him see as well in darkness as in light, but without his spectacles what he saw, day or night, was only a blur. The metal rims were icy against his temples and for a moment the warmth of his flesh misted the thick, curved glass. The room was freezing, for it was the last hour or two of the long winter night, when the heat of the banked fires in the kitchen far below no longer warmed the chimney. Beside him, curled tight for warmth beneath their few blankets and both their shabby cloaks, Jaldis still slept; around them, the little room was as tidy, as orderly, as it had been when they had gone to bed. On the shelf above the bed Jaldis’ opal spectacles stared unwinkingly into darkness; the rosewood soundbox rested like a sleeping turtle in its sparkling nest of talismans and tangle of leather straps.

But there was danger.

And it was coming closer.

Closing his eyes, Rhion slowed the panic from his breathing and listened deeply, fully, as Jaldis had taught him years ago and as he had practiced daily in meditation, stretching his senses to the somnolent city outside.

He became immediately aware of the crunch of many booted feet, the clamor of mob rage. At the same moment the urgent tug of fear redoubled, and he understood then that it was coming to him from one of the wizard’s marks he had made in the streets surrounding the inn.

In none of the Forty Realms was it considered a crime to kill a wizard. In fact the cults of the gods Bran Rhu, Agon, Kithrak, and Thismé considered such an activity an act of merit and likely to win either the god’s favor or promotion to a higher plane of spiritual being, depending on the cult, and Rhion had been a wizard long enough and had talked to enough of his professional colleagues on the subject, to have a healthy wariness about settling down to sleep.

For this reason, within the first week of moving into the Black Pig Inn, Rhion had drawn wizard’s marks—barely visible signs imbued with a trace of his personal power—on housewalls, fountain railings, and doorposts in a loose ring, perhaps half a mile wide with the Black Pig at its center, marks that would awaken and whisper to him if passed by a large number of people with that particular species of determined, impersonal hatred in their hearts.

It was far from a perfect warning system, of course. Wizard’s marks had to be renewed periodically—Rhion’s more frequently than Jaldis’ would have to be, because of Rhion’s lesser strength—and were by no means accurate in what stirred them to life. Time after time Rhion had been called from his meditations, from sleep, or from consultations with clients by bar fights, matrimonial disputes, and, on one occasion, by an angry mob of local fishwives out to storm the house of a particularly unpopular moneylender. At this hour of the night—or morning, for dawn was at most two hours away—it was more likely that the problem was some kind of drunken brawl.

But still, Rhion slipped from beneath the covers and, breathless with cold, hastily pulled on his robe over the knitted pullover and hose he’d worn to bed and laced up his boots. His father had been a man with a motto for every occasion—“Better to be safe than sorry,” had been one of his favorites. Having seen just how sorry it was possible to become, Rhion was willing to opt for an uncomfortable safety every time.

The cold in the attic was breathtaking, and Rhion hadn’t the heart to take his cloak from the top of the piles of blankets over Jaldis. Moving swiftly, his breath a trail of white behind him, he unbolted and slipped through the crazy door, pausing long enough to work the bolt back into place by magic behind him in case someone tried to break in while Jaldis was still lost in his exhausted slumber. The staircase, which rose like a flue through the inn, was warmer, and Rhion concentrated on whispering the words of a generalized sleep-spell as he hurried down the elliptical spiral of the steps, not sure whether he was getting the spell right or whether it was working. It was one he hadn’t practiced lately, and half his mind was on the danger that had—he was almost certain now—shaped the fears of his dream.