The Rainbow Abyss

by Barbara Hambly

Chapter Fourteen

  THE HORSES WERE WAITING for them in the street outside. "There is only one litter and two bearers," the Duke said, nodding toward the curtained chair and its two muscular, fair-haired slaves. "Even with his crutches, Jaldis could barely walk when he met us. Do you think you could back a horse, Rhion?"

  Rhion nodded, though he had private mental reservations about his ability to get into a saddle unaided. "After being dragged up here," he said, pushing back his blood-streaked hair from his eyes, "believe me, if you just let me walk to your gates at my own pace, I'd be glad. "

  The Duke's mouth hardened and he glanced back over his shoulder at the featureless black doors which had swung shut, silent and unnoticed, behind them. The torch-blown shadows of the guards jerked and lurched over the undressed granite wall; bronze mail flickered darkly and voices rose, relieved to be out of the Temple's oppressive gloom, as Jaldis was helped into the litter. For the moment Rhion and the Duke stood in a little island of stillness in the crowd.

  Now, he thought, and his stomach curled into a tight, cold ball within him. He swallowed hard.

  "My lord. " He reached out to touch the red learner sleeve, and the Duke looked back down at him, hearing the change in his voice.

  "My lord," Rhion said, "thank you - thank you beyond words for saving us - for believing in us over Mijac. . . "

  The big man sniffed. "I think I'd believe a gypsy horse coper over Mijac. . . "

  Rhion shook his head, knowing there was no way out of what he had to say, and forced his eyes to meet the Duke's. "You shouldn't," he said quietly, his voice pitched low to exclude the guards. "That's what makes this all the worse. That confession is true. "

  The Duke regarded him in a silence which seemed to stretch out endlessly and seemed to drown even the restless snorting of the horses and the uneasy mutter of the guards. Rhion tried not to think of what the betrayal would do to this friend of Jaldis' - only what penalty Tally would have to pay for giving herself willingly to any man while her father was negotiating in good faith for her marriage.

  At last he spoke. "All of it?" His voice was quiet, his face showing nothing.

  "All of it," Rhion whispered, looking away. He had begun to shake all over, with exhaustion and dread and wretchedness - he had to force his voice steady. "Jaldis knew nothing. He warned me not to. . . not to betray you. Not to let my feelings for Tally get the better of me. . . "

  They'll drown the child when it's born, he thought. He'd heard of that happening on those rare occasions when a woman did bear a wizard's offspring. Or Jaldis or Ranley, the court physician, could doubtless bring on a miscarriage. . .

  He shut his eyes, unable to bear it, unable to bear the thought of what it would do to her.

  His son. If it was Jaldis' tincture that was responsible for the failure of his spells, it would indeed be a son. Around them, the guards in their red-crested helmets fell quiet and glanced questioningly at one another, unable to hear what their master had to say to this battered and filthy little man, but aware of the forbidding stillness of the Duke's stance that kept even the stupidest of them from asking about the delay.

  There was still no expression in the Duke's voice. "And is she with child?"

  Still not looking up, Rhion nodded. "I think so. I don't see that Esrex could make a case for any of this if she were not. " Keeping his voice level with an effort, he explained what he thought had happened, without mentioning how or from whom Damson had obtained the tincture - only that she had given it to Tally, meaning nothing more than a wedding night successful in Damson's own terms of motherhood and dynasty.

  When Rhion finished, the silence was so deep he could hear a slave woman singing in the garden of some big walled house down the street and the endless rattling hum of the cicadas in the trees. He could not meet the Duke's eyes or look him in the face - even close as they stood he could have distinguished little but a blur in the fidgeting cresset glare. Overhead, the moon stood high, its whiteness shimmering on the curtains of Jaldis' litter as they stirred in a stray drift of wind.

  The Duke folded his heavy arms. His voice was so quiet as to exclude even Marc of Erralswan, holding the two horses four feet away, but calm as if he were hearing the suits of strangers in his own law courts. "And you seduced her by means of a spell?"

  Rhion nodded. "She. . . " he began, but could not go on. He was shivering, as if with bitterest cold.

  "That is not," the Duke said, "what Jaldis told me. "

  Rhion looked up at him, the blood in his veins turning to dust.

  "According to Jaldis," the Duke went on, "my daughter loves you very much. How much you love her I think you have just demonstrated by your willingness to shoulder the blame. " And for all the quietness of his voice, his dark eyes were grim. "But half the scandals in the world are based upon sincere love, and it is scandal with which we now have to deal. Marc. . . "

  At his gesture the young captain came forward with the horses.

  "Come. Let's not keep Esrex waiting any longer than we have done. "

  Early summer dawn was just beginning to tint the sky as the cavalcade mounted the rise to the palace gates. The houses of the Upper Town crowded close here, not the villas of the rich - not on a street which bore so much traffic - but tall blocks of expensive flats owned by the wealthier civil servants or their mistresses, built over shops that sold jewelry, spices, and silk. The alley where Jaldis had waited for the Duke's approach could have been any of a dozen near here, Rhion thought, clinging to the saddlebow of his led horse - the alley where he'd waited, listening for just this clatter of hooves on the cobble, this creaking of leather and armor, this smell of torches made up with incense to keep mosquitoes at bay. Waited and, still blind, still mute, had dragged himself out on his crutches, with the terrible, broken groans of a mute which had not passed his throat in eleven years.

  Waited to save him. To save them.

  No servants were about in the great court yet, save the grooms who'd slept half the night in the shelter of the colonnade awaiting the Duke's arrival from the hills. Awakened an hour earlier by the advent of the Earl of the Purple Forest and the Duke's servants and baggage horses, they came running briskly as the gates were opened once again. Overhead, the sky was losing its darkness, the late moon huge and white, a solitary lily floating upon a still lake of lilac-gray.

  "My lord!" Esrex came striding rapidly down the shadow-clotted length of the pillared hall as the door guards bowed the Duke in. Rhion noted that the young man had changed into a court suit of ash-colored velvet on which rubies gleamed like splashed blood. "I have been telling the Earl of the shocking crime which has been. . . " And he stopped, seeing Jaldis at the Duke's side, leaning on his crutches with his opal spectacles flickering eerily in the long, filthy frame of his white hair. Then his eyes went to Rhion, his torn robe stained with lamp oil and blood, standing at his other hand. Up at the other end of the hall, around the two or three bronze lampstands which remained lit, a handful of courtiers self-consciously tried to pretend that staying up until the bakers were taking the bread from the ovens was their usual practice; but, in the sudden hush, the soft pat of a final card being turned was like the smack of a leather belt, and the clink of glass lace-spindles like the clatter of kitchen pans.

  Lazily, the Earl of the Purple Forest rose from the pear-wood couch where he had been flirting with one of Damson's maids-of-honor. He, too, had changed out of his traveling dress, though his red hair was still braided back from the journey. Opal and sardonyx gleamed on the midnight velvet of his sleeves and breast. "Really, Dinar, I think you owe me some kind of explanation about what Lord Esrex has been saying. "

  "Even so," the Duke said. Neither his voice nor his demeanor gave the smallest of his thoughts away. "Marc - fetch my daughter. "

  "She is with my wife, my lord," Esrex hastened to inform him with a mixture of offic
iousness and spite. His pale eyes darted uncertainly from Rhion's face to Jaldis' and back to the Duke's. "We thought it better to know where she was. If this man still holds her under his spells. . . "

  "A matter you are most qualified to judge, of course," the Duke responded, and the young man's thin skin reddened with sudden anger. Then he turned and looked around him at the hall, and every head bowed quickly over fashionable needlework, lace-making, or cards, and voices rose with exaggerated brightness.

  "Oh, pounds thinner, darling, but the way she goes on about eating vegetables, you'd think she invented them. . . " ". . . Everything - house, horses, lands, the town investments - on a single cut. The man has more guts than brains, if you ask me. . . " ". . . horse couldn't run if you lit its tail on fire. . . " A weary-looking corps of musicians in the gallery, who had been frantically discussing what part of their repertoire hadn't already been played four times since the conclusion of supper, struck up a light air on viols and flutes, as incongruous in that tense atmosphere as a fan dancer at an auto-da-fe

  The Duke raised his voice, not much, but enough to carry the length of the hall. "Good people, I bid you good night. "

  There was no mistaking the dismissal in his tone. The hall was cleared in five minutes, and Rhion, leaning wearily against the strap work marble column that supported the gallery, half-smiled to himself. If I could sell scrying-crystals that worked for anyone, he thought wryly, I could retire tonight on the proceeds.

  Then he thought of Tally again, and his heart seemed to die in his chest.

  "Really," the Earl said, when the last reluctant gossip had collected her feather tippet, her snoring lapdogs, and her long yellow silk train and departed. "If the chit's pregnant, as Esrex claims, I'm afraid our negotiations are going to have to be. . . renegotiated. Not that I wish to spoil sport, but there is the succession to be thought of. "

  "How did you know it was Esrex?" Rhion stepped back to where Jaldis had unobtrusively sunk down on one of the spindle-legged couches set among the pillars which flanked the hall. In the smoky glare of a near-by lamp, the old man looked drained and gray under the coating of grime. Rhion sat down next to him, his legs still feeling weak. Between lamp-oil, blood, and the miscellaneous sewage that covered both their robes, the servants would probably have to burn the cushions, but that was something they could take up with Esrex. "And how did you know what it was about?"

  "I remained to listen, of course. " Jaldis raised his head from his hands, making an effort to shake off the exhaustion that all but crushed him. "After getting out through the roof trap I hid for a few minutes near the door that leads out to the midden in the back. They were hunting for me across the roofs and down the alleys, not up next to the house itself. "

  Rhion was aghast. "You could have been. . . !"

  "I knew we had been poisoned with pheelas root, of course," that soft, droning voice went on. "But it did not interfere with the senses of a mage. They waited, of course, for it to take effect before coming within the theoretical range of wizard's marks. . . As soon as I heard Esrex' voice, I guessed what it was about. If one is in the habit of storing grease beside the stove, one does not have to look far for a cause when the house catches fire. "

  Rhion bowed his head, grief and guilt washing back over him in a sickening wave. His passion for Tally - his yielding to hers for him - had brought ridicule and shame upon the man who had just saved his life, disgrace - almost certainly banishment - on Jaldis and probably Tally as well. . . He shied from thinking about what he had brought on himself. The Duke was a just man, but he had needed that alliance with the In Islands to guard against the White Bragenmere faction at home. He had saved Rhion from the priests of Agon, but, as he had observed, scandal was scandal.

  Intent and terrible, the silence deepened in the room. For the first time, Rhion understood why the very rich, in palaces this size, maintained musicians to fill up the resounding hush. The guards had left, Esrex' liverymen as well as the Duke's mailed troopers, and the huge quiet seemed to echo with the breathing of those few who remained. Once Rhion looked up to see the Earl's dark eyes turned his way, though whether he was studying the man whom Esrex had described as his rival, or merely curious about the two grubby fugitives huddled together on the couch, his eyesight was not good enough to determine.

  "What can be keeping them?" Esrex muttered through his teeth. The Duke, his arms folded and his face a careful blank, did not even look at him, but Rhion could almost feel the seethe of conjecture, of anger and disappointment, of possible salvage operations, options, scenarios, and covering lies that went on behind those dark eyes.

  At length, Rhion's quick hearing detected the rustle of skirts in the stairway that led from the vestibule up to the palace's private suites and the firmer tread of Marc of Erralswan's gold-stamped military boots. All eyes in the room were on the archway as shadow played suddenly across its lamplit pillars. Then the pillars framed them: the tall Captain with his bronze armor and scarlet cloak, curly dark hair falling to his shoulders; Damson in plum-black velvet that flashed with jewels; and Tally like the flame of a candle, a blurred, slender column of dull gold.

  She's with child, he thought again, and shivered with wonder and dread and grief. My child. Her child.

  A wizard's child.

  A child they won't allow to live.

  Without his spectacles, her face was only a blur to him as she crossed the vestibule, to sink to her knees at her father's feet. Damson remained by the door, rigid and silent - one could only guess what had passed between the sisters in the hours since Esrex had ordered his wife to lock her one-time follower and champion in her room.

  "Father, I'm sorry. . . " Tally whispered, holding out her hands. "So sorry. Please, I beg you. . . "

  The Duke stepped forward and took her hands, raising her, his face suddenly strained. "My child. . . "

  "No. " Shaking her head she stepped back quickly, as if to study his face, and, by the flash of the jewels on her rings, Rhion saw she had squeezed his hands. Though her features were a blur to him, Rhion saw how tense she stood, like a warrior ready to go into a fight - a novice warrior, into her first fight, with no confidence of victory.

  "How you can dare. . . " Esrex began, but a gesture from the Duke stilled him.

  "Go ahead, daughter. "

  She swallowed. The huge amber beads around her throat gleamed softly in the lamplight as she turned to the Earl of the Purple Forest.

  "My lord, I can only beg your pardon as well. They say you are a man who understands love and lovers. . . "

  If you want to call it that, Rhion thought cynically, and saw the Earl's head tilt a little, with detached interest. Esrex drew in his breath, but, at a glance from the Duke, held his peace. Tally, it was clear, was going to be given her say.

  "Your pardon also I ask, Rhion the Brown. . . " She gave him his formal title, setting distance between them ". . . for this shocking misunderstanding. "

  She turned back to the Duke. There was a small bunch of pheasant-plumes on the back of her bodice, the ribbons that hung down from it against her skirt tipped with a crystal set in gold. Rhion could see the facets of it flash with the trembling of her knees.

  The hall was utterly silent.

  "As usual Esrex was only half-right," she went on, her voice very clear and steady in the hush. "Father. . . and my lord. . . " She inclined her head toward the Earl, who was watching them with folded arms and an ironic gleam in his eye. "To my shame I admit it is true that I am with child. I beg your pardon, beg it abjectly, for having fallen in love with a man other than the one you, Father, would have chosen. But I have fallen in love. "

  Half-turning, she stretched out her hand. . .

  . . . and with only the barest perceptible hesitation, Marc of Erralswan stepped forward, took it, and put a protective arm around her waist.

  "My lord," he s
aid to the Duke, bowing his handsome head. "It is I, too, who must beg your forgiveness. "

  Rhion, who had risen to his feet when Tally had briefly addressed him, had just enough sense to keep his mouth shut and his eyes straight ahead. But Esrex was far too stunned to look at him. Tally. . . Rhion thought despairingly, his hand groping for the support of the couch. Oh, Tally, no. . .

  Stiffly, as if she spoke with a knife-point in her back, Damson stepped forward and said, "It's true, Father. " She kept her eyes averted from her husband, whose dropped jaw and twitch of startled outrage were visible even to Rhion. Her high, childlike voice sounded strained but firm. "I learned of this two days ago. I would have spoken to you of it tomorrow. Esrex," she went on, her gaze fixed determinedly upon the gold ornamentation of her father's sleeve, "said that you must be told about Tally being with child, and so bade me lock her in her room tonight. But he never told me who he thought her lover was, nor what would be done to. . . to these innocent men. "

  "No wizard is innocent!" Esrex sputtered, completely losing his usual aplomb and looking suddenly many years younger, pale eyes blazing like a furious boy's. "And as for. . . "

  "Esrex, be silent!" Damson's head snapped around and for a moment their eyes locked. Something in her look, either its urgency or its deadly venom, stopped his words as if with a garrote.

  Rhion sank back to the couch, his legs suddenly weak. After the first stunned moment he could see the logic - and, in fact, the brilliance - of the solution. Esrex might or might not choose to believe that the story of the love-philter was a lie. But its corollary - that the tincture to make sure she conceived, the tincture that lay at the heart of this whole hellish night - was something whose existence Damson could never let him even suspect. It was perfectly possible that Esrex, to remain on terms with the cult of Agon, would repudiate a child so conceived; it was almost certain that he would repudiate Damson. But only if the matter became public knowledge.

  Tally couldn't have known it would be Marc who would be sent to fetch her, Rhion thought, with a curious, despairing detachment. The plan must have come to her when she saw him. One had to admit that it cut through all the problems.

  Except that Tally would now marry Marc.

  It was fortunate that Esrex was still staring at his wife in stupefied rage as Rhion looked away, unable to endure the sight of that slim, dull-gold form in the brawny brown clasp of the young Captain's arm.

  The Duke regarded his daughter for some moments in grave silence, seeing in the set ivory face, the desperate gray eyes, the mute plea for him to understand and to help. At her side, Marc was trying to appear noble, but had the air of one who has laid everything he owns on the table and awaits the cut of the cards. Rhion wondered distractedly how Tally had talked him into this. If he failed, he would surely be banished, though it was clear that the Duke was under no illusions about what was going on. But then, Rhion's impression of Marc had always been that he was rather easily led. She probably had not told him the name of the child's true father. If he succeeded. . .

  "My children. " The Duke held out his hands.

  Rhion closed his eyes again, shaking all over with relief and grief. He was saved - Tally was saved - their son would be allowed to live. And if Esrex had thrust the torch into his oil-soaked robes in the courtyard of the Veiled God, he thought it would have been easier to stand than this.

  The rest of the scene seemed to pass over his head, an exchange of voices at some huge distance, almost meaningless.

  "It is not me that has been most wronged, but our cousin and friend, the Earl of the Purple Forest. . . "

  "My lord. . . " Without opening his eyes, Rhion knew that Marc had gone to kneel at the Earl's feet. That was another thing rich young men or youths of noble family like Marc were taught - how to kneel with grace and when. "I can only beg of you as a lover that you release the girl I adore from her obligation to you. . . "

  It was a comedy of manners, with all the stock characters present: the handsome but impecunious young lover; the stern father; and the glamorous roue with noblesse oblige and a heart of hidden gold. The Duke - and the Earl - must both have known from the start that any hope of an alliance was irreparably shattered. The rest of Marc's manly apology, of the Earl's gracious speech of agreement, of the ducal blessing upon the young lovers, and his gift to Marc of sufficient lands and estates to honor his soon-to-be-bride - undoubtedly why Marc, the son of penniless nobility, had agreed to the gamble in the first place - went unheard. Tally had seen a way out and had taken it, as she would have sprung from the roof of a burning building across a wide gap to safety.

  But she would always now be another man's wife.

  Of course, Rhion told himself, he had known from the start that this was how it must be. This grief he must have - he had - foreseen from the moment their eyes had met in the snowy, grim-haunted woods. There was no reason to feel this pain. . . no reason. . .

  He lowered his head to his hand, his temples throbbing, feeling sick and cold and alone to the marrow of his bones.

  After a time he felt Tally's hands on his shoulders, smelled the perfumes of her hair and gown, sweetgrass and dogs. He startled up. Esrex would see, would know. . .

  But Esrex was gone.

  The huge hall was empty save for Tally, Jaldis, the Duke, and himself. Gray light leaked through the window-lattices, making the whole gigantic space an echoing symphony of dove and pewter and white in which the few lamps still burning had a sleazy air. The Duke, his role in the comedy played, was regarding his daughter with grave respect tinged with deep sadness, fully aware of what she had done. Jaldis, at the other end of the couch, his head bowed upon his hands again, looked like something fished dead from a gutter.

  Tally caught Rhion's face between her palms and knelt to kiss him. "Watch it. . . " He caught her wrists. "I'm covered with oil. "

  Something in that mundane remark served to shatter the brittle air of tragedy that hung between them. It came upon him that he really was alive, that they really were saved, that their son would be born, and that Tally's solution had been brilliant, decisive, and far better than he had ever expected. "To hell with it," he added, and crushed her tight to his chest.

  It was only after a few minutes that he realized she was crying.

  "Oh, Rhion, I'm sorry," she whispered, as their mouths finally parted. "I'm so sorry. . . "

  "Ah!" Rhion cried, pressing a melodramatic hand to his brow. "I always knew you'd throw me over someday for some hunk of beef in a bronze breastplate. . . "

  "You. . . !" She almost choked with laughter on top of her tears and, still laughing, pulled away and pummeled him on the shoulder, drawing a gasp of genuine pain. . . he'd forgotten the bruises that covered him.

  "Oh!" she cried, horrified and contrite. "Oh, Rhion, I am sorry. . . !"

  "You already said that. "

  And they both looked up, to see the Duke standing over them, his face grim, weary, and infinitely sad.

  Hesitantly, Tally got to her feet, the front of her golden gown all blotched with grime. Her father caught her hand before she could sink once more to her knees. "No," he said gently, and touched her cheek.

  She looked away from him, her eyes flooding again with tears of shame and remorse. In the heart of her deception, the show she was putting on for others, she had been brave. She whispered despairingly, "Father. . . "

  He shook his head and removed with his thumb the tear that crept slowly over her cheekbone. "I can manage somehow without the alliance," he told her. "You haven't cost me my realm, you know. It will only mean. . . care and negotiation. And some plans which must now be postponed. The Earl is man of the world enough not to take personal offense, which is what I most greatly feared. "

  From what he had heard of the Earl, Rhion guessed his words had been, Better learn now than later she's a slut, accompanied by a casual shrug. Bu
t he kept his silence. Tally, who knew her suitor better than he, would have known perfectly well what he'd say.

  The Duke's fingers moved to her lips as she began to apologize once more.

  "That was very quick thinking," he went on, forcing cheer and comfort into his voice to cover his weariness and his anger at the miscarriage of all his carefully laid plans of alliance. "You forced my hand very nicely - no, I mean that as a compliment. Courage and resolution are the mark of a statesman, and the ability to use what the gods send. I'm only sorry it has to be Erralswan - not that he won't treat you well, but his family's a poor one and they have very little position. . . "

  "It had to be someone," Tally said, her voice very small. "I mean, I had to find someone willing to say, right then, that he was my lover, that my child was his. . . And I could never. . . " Her voice faltered. "I knew I'd have to marry someone else and that I could never marry Rhion. And even without Esrex, I don't think I could have gone to the Earl pregnant by another man. "

  "No," the Duke said quietly. "Many women would have tried, but that he would never have forgiven. " He sighed heavily, and by the expression in his eyes Rhion guessed his mind was already at work, re-shaping the possible concessions he'd have to make to the land-barons to salvage the wreck of his policies, now that he'd lost his chance of a foreign alliance.

  "No," he went on. "And I expect Erralswan jumped at the chance to improve his fortunes. But if I'd known that's the way out you were going to take," he finished, with forced lightness that almost succeeded in being genuine, "believe me, I'd have sent someone of more fortune and better family up to fetch you. "

  Tally laughed and gulped, trying to keep back tears of relief, and the Duke turned to Rhion, who got slowly to his feet to face him, teeth gritted against the agony of his broken ribs. Cold and frightened, Tally's fingers stole around Rhion's in the concealing folds of gown and robe.

  "You'll have to go away, you know. "

  "I know. " Exhaustion, pain, and the aftermath of shock and grief were blurring into one vast, aching desolation of weariness. It would be enough, he thought, to know that his son was safe, no matter who the boy learned to call father. Enough to know that Tally was safe. . .

  "I'll send you word," the Duke went on, "when the child is near to being born. I think that will be long enough to quiet tongues. But even after that, it is probably best that you do not live in Bragenmere. "

  It took Rhion a long moment of silence to realize that he was not being banished for good, but that he was being told that he could, eventually, re-enter the city gates. He started to speak, but the Duke raised his hand quickly, cutting off his words.

  "Further than that I do not wish to know," he said. "And indeed, I cannot know. Not with what you are - not with most of the cults against such as you. I will not speak now of the decision that a scandal will force me to make, if one comes, but I warn you. . . " His eyes went from Rhion's face to his daughter's, the bitter grief in them the grief that only rulers bear. "I will make it. "

  Tally bowed her head, unable to meet his eye, but her hand tightened around Rhion's, and he felt it tremble.

  "Until that day comes," the Duke went on, "you, Rhion, will be welcome in my city and under my roof. I trust you will remember. " And before Rhion could speak he turned away; going to where Jaldis sat at the other end of the couch, he went to one knee and touched the crippled hand.

  "Old friend," the Duke said softly, "half a dozen times I've offered you the hospitality of my household, to pursue your studies in quiet - and, I might add after tonight, in safety. I've banished Rhion for the time being - you understand that I had to banish him. But please understand that my offer to you - my affection for you, old friend - still stands as it has always stood. Will you come?"

  Jaldis raised his head and, with the back of one twisted finger, adjusted the set of the heavy opal spectacles upon his face. He was thinking, Rhion guessed, of the elaborate preparations for the feast of Summerfire, and how they had taken him away from other matters dearer to his heart; of the constant small demands that drew energy from the great studies of magic; and of his days at the court of Lord Henak, and what had come of them.

  Then he sighed, the brittle shoulders relaxing as he released what Rhion knew to be the last free years of his life. "I am an old man," he said, "and have been a wanderer for many years. Rhion my son. . . " Rhion released Tally's hand, limped stiffly to grasp the fingers his master held out to him. The surprising, powerful grip brought back to him the memories of the flight across the roofs of Felsplex, the rain in the Drowned Lands. . . a thousand memories, back to a bright morning heavy with the scent of flowers on the bridge of the City of Circles, a tall, straight old man and a young dandy in jeweled red velvet by the stalls that sold pieces of old books. Are you hunting for secrets. . . ?

  He had certainly found them. One or two, he realized, he wished had remained beyond his ken.

  "I'll be all right. " He felt the old man's hand tighten over his. "I'll be back as soon as I can to see you. . . "

  "And that will be soon," the Duke promised, his eyes traveling from Rhion's face to Jaldis' and on to his daughter's.

  "Eleven years isn't long to study wizardry, you know," Jaldis said, straightening up a little as Tally flung herself convulsively into her father's arms. The talismans hanging from the voice-box made small, metallic music as he sat up, the golden sun-cross amulet catching a feeble glint of the dawn light. "But you have had a good start. "

  "Where will you go?" Tally broke away from the Duke's embrace as Rhion turned, stiff and aching - she had to catch his arm to keep him from falling when he tried to take a step. Every muscle in his body hurt without in the smallest measure detracting from the grinding pain in his side.

  "First," he said a little shakily, "to have a bath. And then to get another pair of spectacles. And then," he said, sighing and putting an arm around her shoulders, "someplace where I'll never make another love-potion again as long as I live. "

  So it was that Rhion returned to the Drowned Lands of Sligo, to become the Scribe for the Ladies of the Moon.

  And seven years slipped by with no more sound than sunlight makes upon the grass.

  His son was born in April, a fat, robust baby named Kir. By that time Jaldis was settled comfortably in three small rooms on the top floor of the octagonal library tower and was looking better than Rhion had seen him in years. Of the few things stolen by neighbors from the house in Shuttlefly Court, nothing had been destroyed, and the Duke had managed to get everything back except the small quantities of gold and silver, which, to Jaldis, scarcely mattered. It was the books which had been his chief concern. Surprisingly, Prymannie the schoolmistress had kept them for him - perhaps out of gratitude for headaches cured or because, as a schoolmistress, she could not bear that books be destroyed; perhaps because, more intelligent than her neighbors, she had read the situation more clearly and was betting on a return to favor and a reward.

  When Rhion saw Jaldis again, his brown robes were made of good-quality wool, warm against the sharp spring chill, his beard trimmed and his long white hair neatly cut.

  "He misses you," Tally said, on one of the evenings when Rhion had come to sit beside her bed in the Erralswan apartments overlooking the palace garden, while the baby slept at her breast. "Father offered to give him a slave to look after him but he refused. He keeps house for himself well up there, but when I go up to talk to him, he usually talks about you. "

  "He hasn't. . . " Rhion hesitated, troubled for a moment out of his delighted contemplation of the round pink cherub curled like a puppy in the linen nest of Tally's nightdress. "He hasn't talked about something called a Dark Well, has he? Or about a world without magic?"

  Tally frowned, thinking back, and shook her head. "Not to me. "

  Rhion returned to Bragenmere fairly frequently afte
r that, often four or five times in the course of a summer, before the snows and rains of winter closed the roads. Though Jaldis still sometimes instructed him and though they still spent nights until dawn, talking of new learning he had found, or old learning rediscovered, in the ancient books of the palace library, Rhion gradually came to think of himself as Jaldis' former pupil instead of Jaldis' student. Among the wizards and in the countryside between Imber and the Mountains of the Sun, he came to be known as Rhion of Sligo, Scribe of the Drowned Lands.

  The living on the islands was not wealthy and in some ways it was painfully primitive, but he found to his surprise that it suited him. Among the crumbling pillars and morning-glory vines of the Island library, he studied the mysteries of healing handed down from the ancient priestesses of An. The Gray Lady, with whom he remained fast friends, though they never again became lovers, instructed him further in the lore of herbs and bonesetting; all his love of human beauty and all the understanding he had gained in the workings of the body and the mind when he had made love-spells for his living flowed into this new learning.

  In time he came to have a reputation as a healer in the lands round about. Three or four times his visits to Bragenmere were in response to urgent summonses from the Duke, for Damson's son Dinias, born four months before Kir, was a peaked and sickly child, unable to keep food down and susceptible to chest complaints. As for Damson herself, it appeared she had judged her husband rightly. Having broken the spiteful pride which had kept him from her, she knew indeed how to hold him at her side. Whether by obligation, by her father's wealth, by ambition, or some perverse understanding of his body's needs - or who knew, perhaps even by love, Rhion could only guess. . . but the two infants she bore after Dinias died within days.

  And time drifted by.

  In the Drowned Lands, time was a deceptive matter at best, the seasons passing like the slow stroke of a gigantic wing and leaving no shadow behind. In the summers Rhion studied the birds of the marshes, coots, herons, geese, and loons with their spotted backs and vacant laughter, watching their nesting and their mating and when they departed in fall. He harvested herbs, mallows, and lichens and experimented with their properties; he spent night after night with boat and lantern, watching grim and goblin and water-fae by the milky moonlight and made another spiracle charged with the element of air to wear around his head when he swam through the murky jungles of duckweed and cattail roots. He followed the goblins into their watery realms, but he never learned where they went. In the winters, he spent whole afternoons and nights listening to the whisper of the rain on the ivy that blanketed the library walls, reading the long, slow histories of the kings and priestesses of the realm of Sligo and the In Islands and the lore of the wizards who, throughout the Forty Realms, were popularly credited with the earthquake that brought its doom. He learned the deeper magics of the Ladies, and the effects of the moon's phases and the passage of certain stars upon spells and healing and the movements of birds; he learned small illusions to twist men's minds and strange little cantrips involving tangled string and braided straw.

  And in the times of the spring equinox, he would sometimes preside over the rites at the half-drowned ring of stones, calling down the power of the turning stars to the victim who lay bleeding on the altar, feeling that power spread out to all corners of the earth.

  They were days of peace. In his scrying-stone, almost nightly, he would summon Tally's image, or his son's - it was not the same as being with them, but at least he knew that they were happy and well. Going down to the noise and bustle of Bragenmere, visiting Shavus in his house in the Beldirac Wood, and listening to the arguments there about the latest enormities of the Selarnist or Ebiatic Orders or the insolence of the Blood-Mages and Earth-witches, he would return home to this ruinous, vine-cloaked silence, wondering if he wasn't beginning to comprehend for the first time what magic really was.

  Then one winter morning in the library, while painstakingly translating an ancient scroll so black with age and decay that he had to lay spells on the crumbling linen in order to make the glyphs rise to visibility at all, he felt the scrying-crystal he carried calling to him.

  Taking it from the inner pocket of his robe, he gathered his cumbrous woolen shawl about his shoulders and walked out onto the terrace, where the light would be better. It was only a few days after winter solstice and the chowder-thick fogs of the season lay like cotton wool over the estuary's watery mazes. The chipped balustrade seemed no more than a pale-gray frieze against a whitish wall, beyond which gulls could be heard dimly crying. Rhion's breath was a clouded puff of steam which fogged his spectacles in the raw cold, and the ends of his fingers, where they protruded from his woolen writing mitts, were red and numb.

  "Jaldis?" He turned the faceted lump of raw amethyst over in his palm.

  In the facets of the jewel, as if the old man stood behind him, reflected tiny in the smooth surface, he saw his master's face.

  And he recoiled in shock. When wizards communicated by scrying-stone it was not the same as simply calling someone's image; there were differences between how a mage appeared in the lattices of the crystal and what he or she might look like in actual fact. But even so, Rhion could see that Jaldis was far from well. He seemed faded and wrung out, like a worn rag, his thin face sunken, fallen-looking behind the monstrous crystalline rounds of his spectacles. The heat of a midsummer morning years ago leaped vividly to Rhion's mind, Shavus digging through the bottles of brandy the Duke had sent them in that little kitchen on Shuttlefly Court, saying savagely, "What Jaldis needs isn't a spell, but to quit doing things like this to himself. . . "

  But through the exhaustion, the old man's spirit coruscated like a sunlit fountain of triumph.

  "Rhion, I've done it!" Even in his mind, now, Rhion heard the sweet, mechanical tones of the box - he could no longer bring back to mind what the old man's voice had been. "I have opened the Dark Well with the turning of the solstice of winter. I reached in, as I have reached at every solstice-tide, at the midnight of every equinox, for seven years now. . . "

  He was trembling with excitement, with vindication. It might have been a trick of the light where the old man was sitting, in the small and comfortable study in the octagonal tower, but his spectacle-lenses, even, seemed to blaze with a kaleidoscope of fire.

  "I reached across the Void, seeking in the darkness for the universe without magic, calling out to them. . .

  "And they answered me! At midnight of the night of the solstice, they answered!"