The Rainbow Abyss

by Barbara Hambly

Chapter Five

  FOR A LONG TIME AFTER Jaldis slept Rhion sat awake by the fire, staring into its silken heart and listening to the silence of the deserted inn.

  And thinking.

  You reach the point where you can't live a lie anymore, he had said. And, I tried so damn hard to be good.

  He had never spoken to a nonwizard about wizardry like that. On the whole, those who were not mageborn - those not born with the strange sleeping fire in their veins, their hearts, the marrow of their bones - found it impossible to comprehend why those who were would subject themselves to such stringent teaching and disciplines in order to achieve a state of virtual outlawry, the state of beldin nar - literally, to be dead souls, whose deaths were no more a matter for vengeance than the desecration of a dog's carcass.

  Yet he had said it to her, knowing she would understand.

  And saying it, he had remembered afresh how much it had hurt to wonder and pretend and fake being something everyone thought he should be; to live in the subconscious hope that it wasn't true or that, if it was true, he could keep people from guessing.

  On the whole, to those nonmageborn acquaintances who evinced a genuine interest in the subject - and there had been some among their patrons and clients from the court at Nerriok - he had explained his initiation into wizardry in terms of teaching, education, and eagerness to learn. To them he had recounted how he'd cooked and cleaned and run errands, fetching and carrying up and down all those long rickety stairways of the tall, narrow house in Nerriok, even in the days when they could afford a servant; made a good story of all the tedium of ritually cleansing crucibles and implements in the attic workshop, censing and sweeping the sanctum where the meditation was done, and washing the vessels before and after. That they would understand, at least in part. But never all.

  All those first years he'd been reading, absorbing almost without knowing it, all the infinite, tiny gradations of lore necessary to wizardry, gradually becoming aware, through conversation with Jaldis, with Shavus, and with other mages of the Order who stayed with them of the inter-weavings of all things in the physical world, the metaphysical, and the strange shadowland of ghosts and faes and grims that lay between them - learning how all things were balanced and how no alteration of the fabric of the world could be made without somehow affecting the rest of the universe, sometimes in rather unexpected fashions.

  After the spells of imbuing Jaldis' crystal spectacle-lenses had nearly cost him his own eyesight, Rhion had taken the concept of precautions and Limitations very seriously indeed. He had not worked a spell for a long while after that, and had been careful to make the Circles of Power and Protection absolutely correct, to study carefully the Words of Ward and Guard. Simply the study of these had taken him nearly three years of painstaking memorization, during which time he had also studied all those things that his father had never bothered to have him taught: the structure and nature of plants, and how to tell them from one another by sight and touch and smell; the names of every plant, every bird, every beast and fae and spirit and insect and stone, and how they differed from one another; and how each was its own creation, with its own secret name.

  Such things were not necessary to accounting - things not only beyond a banker's ken, but beyond even one's imaginings.

  And somewhere in those first few years he had learned the thing that he'd never been able to explain to even the most sympathetic of hearers: that magic was not something one did; it was something you were, ingrained in the deepest marrow of the soul. He remembered one of the local tavern girls in Nerriok, with whom he'd had a cozy, if casual, affair, asking why Jaldis hadn't quit being a wizard after he'd been blinded. "Would have made me quit quick enough, let me tell you," she'd said, shaking her tousled head.

  Rhion had simply said, "He's stubborn," and had left it at that.

  But the truth was that you couldn't quit, the same way he realized that it was almost impossible not to become a wizard, if you were born with the power to do so. You couldn't not be what you were.

  On the whole, that was something only other mages understood.

  Tally. . .

  The fire had sunk low; the burning log collapsed on itself with a noise like rustling silk, and Rhion fetched the poker to rearrange the blaze. The renewed flare of saffron light lent a deceptive color to Jaldis' sleeping face, an illusion of health and strength.

  Jaldis. For ten and a half years, teacher and father and friend. It had taken Rhion over a year to realize that Jaldis was also one of the most prominent of the Morkensik wizards, renowned throughout the Order for the depth of his wisdom and the strength of his spells.

  He had taught Rhion thoroughly, patiently, and from the ground up, riding easily through the petulance, temper-tantrums, and fits of impatience and sarcasm that the older Rhion still blushed to think about. As a rich man's son, he had been less than an ideal pupil. "What the hell does that have to do with magic?" had been his constant refrain - sitting by the fire, Rhion could still hear himself, like a stubborn child refusing to see what the alphabet has to do with being a poet of world renown. And Jaldis would always say gently, "Do you have anything else you're doing today?"

  Personally, Rhion would have taken a stick to that plump and spoiled youth.

  To philosophers, the metaphysical division of essence and accidents - of true inner nature and the chance combination of individual differences - was a matter of theoretical debate; to magicians it was the very heart of spells. It was easy, Jaldis had pointed out, to change accidents - easier still to simply change the perceptions of the beholder. But to change the essence - truly to alter a poisonous solution into harmless plant-sap, to transform the physical structure of gangrene into inert scab-tissue - required greater power. And anything above that, far more power still.

  And so from metaphysics he had gone on to study the nature of power.

  Jaldis had taken him to the places where the paths of power moved over the earth, deep silvery tracks pulsing invisibly in the ground: "leys" the mages called them, "witchpaths," "dragon-tracks" . . . straight lines between nodes and crossings at ancient shrines and artificial hills, marked sometimes by ponds and shrines. On these lines, spells worked more quickly, more efficaciously. Scrying was easier, particularly at certain seasons of the year. Everything related to everything, and the balances of power were constantly shifting: the pull of the moon and the tides, the waxing and waning of the days, the presence or absence in the heavens of certain stars - all these had their effects, to be learned and dealt with.

  And like the earth, and the heavens over the earth, the human body was traced with leys of its own, paths that could be used to promote healing, or create illusion, or draw or repel the mind and heart. Animals, birds, insects, fish, every tree and blade of grass - all these had their paths. In his deep meditations on summer nights Rhion had often seen the faint silver threads of energy glowing along the veins of weeds and flowers, the tiny balls of seeds within their pods shining like miniscule pearls; looking into crystals, he had seen the leys shimmering there, utterly different from those of plant and animal life, but there nevertheless, whispering strange logics of their own.

  All of this Jaldis had taught him, forcing him to memorize, to meditate, to strengthen his skills while building the colossal foundation of magic itself. And all the while magic was opening before him like a gigantic rose, drawing him in to deeper and ever deeper magics hidden within its heart.

  He learned the runes, the twenty-six signs capable of drawing down constellations of power, clusters of coincidence, to themselves, and how these runes could be combined into sigils and seals, to affect possibility and chance. He learned the art of talisman making, how to imbue an inanimate object with a field of altered probability or to cause it to have an effect upon the mind or body or perceptions of those it touched; learned which metals, which minerals, which materials would hold power, and which would shed it like a d
uck's feather shedding water.

  He learned Limitations and which spells were dangerous to work because of strange and unexpected effects - there were spells which would turn a man's entire body into a field of blazing good fortune, so that luck would inevitably fall his way, but which were never used because the side effect was that the man would go mad; other spells of protection that, at certain seasons of the year which could never be accurately predicted, would call upon their wielder every grim and demon for miles around, attacking and attacking in a biting cloud; or spells that transformed ugliness into astonishing physical beauty, but which brought with them unspeakable dreams.

  He learned also Illusion, the wizard's stock-in-trade: how to make a man or woman believe that a cup was made of gold and gems, instead of cheap wood, and how to make them continue in that belief for hours or days; how to make them believe that the cup was filled with wine when it contained only water, and to make them not only taste the wine but get drunk on it, though it took a very clever wizard to engineer a convincing hangover the following morning; how to make a guard fall asleep, or believe that someone entering the room was a dog or a kitten, or someone else he knew and who had legitimate business there; the spells of Who-Me? and Look-Over-There that Rhion had used in dealing with the Felsplex mob.

  It had all been like playing in a field of flowers.

  He had learned, too, that simply knowing a spell, or having learned it once, was not enough. There were many who called themselves wizards who thought that it was, but usually these did not survive. Shavus had taught him, by the rough-and-ready expedient of chasing him around the room, beating him with a stick, that certain spells must become second nature, so that they may be cast accurately in an emergency, or when the mind is clouded with panic or sleep or - sometimes - poison or drugs.

  And he had learned the Magic of Ill.

  Jaldis had been unwilling for many years to teach him the spells to cause pain to another human being, spells to pierce certain portions of the brain like slivers of glass, spells to inflame the joints and the bowels with agony, spells which could, if wielded by a mighty enough mage, suffocate a man or rip his organs within him. "They are the obverse of healing spells," he had said, "the dark side of our ability to shift the small workings of the body, and they must be used only in the gravest, the direst emergencies. There have been wizards who have allowed themselves to be beaten to death, rather than work such spells upon their killers. "

  "Why?" Rhion had asked, remembering the old woman sitting on her blanket, with a smear of dog turd on her cheek. He'd been in his early twenties then, and still in the stick phase of his education, nursing a dozen bruises under his robe. "I mean, if it's a choice of your life or theirs. . . "

  "It isn't simply your life," Jaldis had said quietly. That had been at Shavus' house. The big old warrior-mage and the two apprentices he'd had at that time, fair-haired brother and sister from Clordhagh who bickered constantly and affectionately, had been sitting at the scrubbed oak table with them, the dark book of those spells lying on the table between. "For the mageborn, for such as we, the world is an infinity of divisions. . . it is not so for everyone. Even for us, Shavus, if you found that a fox had come into your hencoop and killed your chickens, and if the following evening you sighted a fox in the woods, would you not fruge it immediately, without asking whether it was the one who had done the damage?"

  "Aye," the big man growled. "If it wasn't the one had done it before, it's only a matter of time till it does. "

  "Precisely," the sweet, buzzing voice said, that was all the King's men had left him with. "And so it is with humankind, and wizards. They may use our services, but they will never truly trust us. They fear our powers over them - our powers to deceive them, if you will; our powers to make them act against their wills, or under the compulsion of illusion or threat. It takes very little to rouse them against us. Rumor of a wizard having used his powers to advance his own speculations in trade against other merchants', or to seduce a woman he wanted, is enough for all wizards in a town, or a Realm, to be driven out of their homes, deprived of their power with the pheelas root and executed, shot from ambush. . . Only from people's fear. "

  They will use our services, Rhion thought, staring into the heart of the fire on the inn's great hearth, but they will never truly trust us. . .

  He recalled how Tally had hesitated to mention that her father was one of the richest, the most powerful, lords of the Forty Realms. Had that been because her father, as a usurper, had enemies who would not hesitate to kidnap her if they found her alone? Or had it been reflex caution against those whom every priest of every god declared excommunicate, creatures other than human?

  Yet he remembered how she had turned to look out into the darkness; remembered the way their eyes had met.

  Not that there was any possibility of anything existing between the Duke of Mere's daughter and himself, he hastened to add. Even had he not been a mage, even had he remained his father's douce and respectable son and inherited the biggest counting house in the City of Circles, he could no more have. . . His mind shied from the first phrase that sprang to it, and he hastily substituted, have spoken seriously. . . He could no more have spoken seriously to Tallisett of Mere than he could have spoken seriously to the High Queen of Nerriok.

  And rising stiffly from his seat beside the chimney breast, he mended the fire a final time and stood for a moment listening, extending his senses out into the stillness of the woods beyond the gray stone walls for any sign, any hint of danger. Hearing none, he lay down in his blankets by the hearthstones, took off his spectacles, and fell asleep.