Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (36 page)

“Sleep… yes,” Jaldis murmured. “To rest… to meditate… Rhion, I’m trusting you not to try to stop me. I’m trusting you not to… to damage the Dark Well, or try to, while I sleep. I need to sleep, will need it so badly. I trust you, my son.”

Trust me
, Rhion thought a little bitterly, when fifteen minutes later he stood looking down at Jaldis’ slumbering form, like a paralytic child’s among the dark quilts of his bed.
Trust me to stand back and let you walk into danger. Trust me to enable you to get yourself killed in pursuit of your dream
.

Jaldis, he remembered, had once done the same to him. When it would have been far more sensible for him to have remained home and learned accounting from his father, Jaldis had taught him, even in pain and disorientation and new mourning for sight and voice and freedom; had helped him to pursue his own perilous dreams.

Maybe all dreams end in death
, Gyzan had said.

That was the worst thing about being a wizard, he thought, as he moved around the little rooms, tidying them from habit, exhausted but unable to sleep yet, washing the supper dishes and setting the books to rights in the places where he knew Jaldis always kept them. Eventually, one saw too much. One knew too many things, and no decision was ever clear anymore.

No wonder some wizards went a little mad.

He looked across the room at the ladder which led up to the attic. His eyes strayed to the broom, its shattered pieces still lying where they had been flung by the force of Jaldis’ rage. The handle was charred and splintered, but the business end could still be used. It took at least three days to weave a Dark Well’s outer circles, to create that terrible flaw in the fabric of the Universe through which its dark interstices could be seen. If anything happened to it now, Jaldis would be crushed with grief, shattered with anxiety and sorrow for those young men whose voices he had heard in the Void…

But Jaldis would be alive.

Yet Rhion had sworn. Jaldis trusted him. And there was always the chance that Shavus would, in fact, show up at the last minute, as he had shown up so many times before.

Rhion opened the window shutters and stood looking out over the sleeping palace below him and the city—its mazes of roof tiles and arcades, balconies and squares and pillared temples—lying huddled under the scudding grimness of charcoal clouds. Deep in his bones he could feel the stirring of the equinox’s approach, as he could sometimes in meditation feel the pull of the moon.

And as strong, as deep, as silent as that awareness, was the knowledge in his blood that Shavus would not come, that come tomorrow’s midnight, he and Jaldis would face the darkness of the Void themselves.

IT RAINED THE FOLLOWING DAY. AFTER A FEW HOURS OF
troubled dreams Rhion walked out through the Lower
Town, where he and Tally had used to go, past the Temple of Agon with its windowless granite walls, and out to the marshes, like beaten steel under a flat silver sheet of sky. There was a shrine there, to some forgotten god, crumbled almost back to its native stones now, but built upon the invisible quicksilver track of a ley. In a corner of its old sanctuary, Rhion angled the facets of his scrying-crystal to the thin, cool light, and concentrated all his power and everything he could draw up from the ley and down from the first-stirrings of the equinox-tide into the calling of Shavus’ name.

While gray rain whispered in the hollows of the broken floor and the wild herons rose crying from the reeds, he summoned every foot of the road between Nerriok and Bragenmere into the crystalline lattices of the stone’s heart, scrying every footbridge, every gully, every curve of the mountain track where the rain sometimes washed stones down to block the way.

But he saw no sign of the Archmage. And the light grew broad in the sky.

All over the Forty Civilized Realms, men and women would be drawing and heating water for ritual baths, shaking out the soot-colored cloaks of penitence, preparing to go masked to the shrines of Mhorvianne to ask that bright-haired Lady’s forgiveness for the sins of a year. The Solarists, of course, serenely confident that there was no other god than the Sun in Mid-Heaven, would undoubtedly stay home tonight and play cards; the priests of Agon, behind their windowless walls, would hold their own smoky and terrible rites. In the Drowned Lands of Sligo the ancient rituals of the Moon would go forward, as they had gone forward for three thousand years, treading out the Maze in a shifting aura of blood and starlight.

And in the octagonal tower at Bragenmere…

Rhion shivered and blew on his cold-reddened fingers, though he knew it was not the cold that touched his flesh.

Before leaving the tower, he had made another effort to talk Jaldis out of his resolve, hoping against hope that the light of day might make the old man more amenable. Obsession, he well knew, like many things, worsens with the night.

But Jaldis had only shaken his head. “When I spoke to them—to Eric and to Paul—” And the voice of the box slid and gritted over the alien names, “—at the Solstice, I told them how to create a Dark Well, that they may see into it, and guide us through. Even that will cost them all they can raise. I cannot abandon them.”

Rhion took a deep breath, knowing the words he had to say and fearing them as he had not feared the faceless soldiers of Agon. “All right,” he said shakily. “I agree that someone has to go. But it doesn’t have to be both of us.”

Rain had wept against the shutters, the wind groaning in the rafters, hair-raisingly like the voice of something coming from the Dark Well itself. Jaldis had sat for a long time, his untouched bread and coffee before him, looking up with sightless eyes into the face of the young man who had followed him, had cared for him, and had learned from him all that he had to teach. His hand found Rhion’s unerringly, as it had always done. “My son…” the voice of the box began, the voice that could embody no emotion, none of the feeling that tugged at the muscles of his face. Then, for a long moment, a pause.

“My son,” he said again, more steadily. “Thank you—for I know how little you want to undertake this quest at all. But it cannot be. A cook knows by the smell of the broth what herbs are lacking. A farrier can tell what ails a horse by a glance at the stable muck. I have studied the nature of the Universe, the structure of magic, for sixty-five years, and Shavus has for thirty-five, even though for part of that time he was not aware what it was he learned. Even Gyzan, or the other great ones of our own order—Nessa the Serpentlady of Dun, or Erigalt of Pelter—might stare at the solution in that other universe and not realize that it was anything which pertained to magic at all. My son…”

His grip tightened, like a hard-polished root over the younger man’s soft palm and pudgy fingers. “My son, I love you, and no more now than when you have offered to go in my stead. But yours is not a powerful enough wizardry to do what needs to be done. Maybe not even to cross the Void alive. A strange and terrible magic fills that darkness, and I do not know its strength. You simply have not the experience.”

Quietly, Rhion said, “I don’t want you to die.”

The old man smiled. “Then I may not. It is only an hour past sunrise—there is an entire day for Shavus to reach us. And then all our fears, all our endeavors on this subject, will be for naught, and we’ll laugh about them over the steam of tomorrow’s coffee. But thank you. I will never forget.”

Listening to the thrumming of the rain on the tower’s sand-colored walls, Rhion had felt only a sinking darkness of despair. If Shavus had been delayed, the rain would delay him further. It had been too late even then to do much in the way of turning the storm aside.

And now, huddled in the sheltered corner of the old shrine under what was left of its crumbling tile roof, that despair returned, bringing panic and a hundred imagined scenarios of disaster like camp followers in its train.

Toward noon, before he left the shrine, Rhion called to the Gray Lady through the crystal and, after a few moments, saw her face in its facets, more beautiful, more ageless than in true flesh, like a crystal herself filled with hidden light.

“I don’t know what I can do,” Rhion concluded, having told her of Shavus’ nonappearance and Jaldis’ resolve to cross the Void, come what may, that night. “I can’t let him go alone. He says he’ll be all right, that Eric and Paul—the two wizards on the other side—will take care of him. But I can’t know that.”

“No,” the Lady said softly. Her hazel eyes clouded, and Rhion felt a stab of guilt for laying upon her a new trouble, when, with the difference his absence could make to the power of the rites, she had sufficient worries already. “No—I understand your fears. But Jaldis is right in saying that Shavus may yet appear. He’s a wily old man, and very powerful, trained in the skills of war. Neither is Gyzan to be reckoned lightly. They both know your master’s resolve. If they could not come, Shavus would contrive to send word.”

“To what purpose?”
Rhion sighed and straightened his water-flecked spectacles with one plump forefinger. “If he tells Jaldis not to undertake the quest to this other world—which he will if he sends word at all—Jaldis will only ignore it. He is—obsessed.”

“Then you must make your choice,” the Lady said, and there was sadness in her eyes. “But Rhion, if you both go… What will become of Jaldis’ books?”

“Ah…” Rhion looked away, unable to meet her eyes even through the crystal’s tiny image. Away across the marsh, hunting horns were ringing through the drizzly mist as a party of young nobles splashed their horses through puddles, their dogs bounding happily in their wake. Rhion thought he recognized Marc of Erralswan’s bright-green doublet, close beside a lady in a yellow gown with long cascades of raven curls. He did not want to lie to the Gray Lady, but Jaldis had ordered him strictly to say that he did not know.

“Rhion,” she said sharply, calling his gaze back to hers. “This is not a trick. Does he think I will wait until his back is turned and then come to steal them?”

It was, in fact, exactly what Jaldis thought, and something Rhion himself would not quite put past the Lady, much as he cared for her. So he only said, “He’s made provision for them. They’ll be safe—Shavus or any of the Morkensiks, will be able to get to them.”

“But not corrupt and superstitious Earth-witches, not Bone-Casters who weave little spell-dollies in straw and divine the future from the flight of ducks.
I must go,” she said, exasperation at the opinion of her fading from her face, leaving it weary and sad. “It is noon. I must rest, and prepare. And so must you, if you will do this thing tonight.”

Rhion nodded. Indeed, he thought, if the victim of the spring rite were to survive, the Lady would need all her power—even as he would need all of his, such as it was, to see the other side of the Void alive. He felt spent already from long scrying. The slow stirring of the sun-tide was rising in his veins, like the pull of the tide in his blood.

“I pray the Goddess will keep you safe.”

Her image faded. Rhion got to his feet, chilled and slightly nauseated, though, as usual, the nausea changed to an overwhelming craving for sweets before he was halfway up the muddy road to the town gates. He bought half a dozen balls of steamed sweet dough wrapped in greased paper in the Old
Town market, enough for himself and his sons; the rain had eased by this time, and the steam from the vendor’s cart blew in soft white clouds, like rags of fog in the gray air. Most of the market stands were shutting down, farmers and their wives folding up the bright-colored awnings of orange and blue, to return to their homes to prepare for the procession tonight. Not only in his own blood could Rhion feel the coming of the equinox. It was implicit in every closed shop, in every home-hurrying slave, in the steam that leaked from every window he passed on his way back to the palace. The city and all who worshipped the orthodox gods had lapsed into the time of preparation, the time of acknowledgment of their sins from whose consequences only the gods could save them. But for the mageborn there was no salvation. As he walked by the Bull and Ring Tavern in Market Lane, a glimpse of something yellow caught his eye—he saw it was the poster of the “God of Wizards” crudely pasted to the wall beside the door.

In the rooms above the library tower, he found Jaldis asleep and no sign yet of Shavus’ coming. Jaldis’ books, he noticed, were gone, entrusted already under every seal of protection the blind mage could devise to the Duke’s care. The old man must have told him that he was going away for a time, though of course not how or where. The secret of the Dark Well was too deep, too dangerous, to be shared, even with one whose lack of ability or thaumaturgical training would have made his knowledge harmless.

The afternoon passed like the slow gray wheel that crushes out the grain. Rhion knew he should sleep, should rest and meditate, but sought out Tally and his sons, instead. The boys were far too absorbed in the excitement of trying on their masks to have much attention to spare even for their favorite of their mother’s friends. It was said to be bad luck to try on one’s mask before the procession, but the boys were doing exactly what Rhion and his friends had done at their age—holding the masks to their faces with meticulous care not to touch the flesh and seeing how close they could come. In the secrecy of a loft above the mews, Rhion and Tally made love, feverishly clinging to one another amid the smells of sawdust and leather and the cinnamon of Tally’s perfume, and lay locked in one anothers’ arms in the huddle of cloaks and horse blankets until nearly dark.

The dark fell early, overcast and grim. After a final, inconclusive attempt to argue Jaldis out of his resolve, Rhion tried to sleep, but the slow fever of the spring-tide was flowing too strongly in him now, the awareness of the heavens’ turning towards their balance point… and the awareness of how increasingly unlikely it was that Shavus would arrive in time.

“You are fretted,” the old man said comfortingly and patted Rhion’s arm. He seemed rested, stronger and livelier and with the quiet serenity of one whose mind is made up. “That is understandable…”