The Rainbow Abyss

by Barbara Hambly

Chapter Fifteen

  "I SPOKE TO THEM, RHION. " The mechanical voice in its rosewood box was steady, but Jaldis' crippled hands trembled where they rested on the arms of his chair. "I spoke to them, and they begged me for help. They said they had been seeking a way to project their minds into the Void for all the years since first we heard them. . . "

  "Did they say what had happened to magic in their world?"

  Outside, the wind groaned around the tower's eaves, driving hard little pellets of ice against the shutters. Stray drafts plucked at the lamp flames and made Jaldis' shadow tremble like a blown banner on the creamy plastered wall. For the last two days of his journey from Sligo, Rhion had been holding the storm at bay with spells, struggling over roads choked already with snow and mud and praying to Rehobag and Pnisarquas, those untrustworthy dilettante sons of the all-seeing Sky, that he could manage to keep the snow winds from blowing down the mountain passes long enough for him to reach Bragenmere's gates. It had been exactly eight years since he'd had to travel in the dead of winter, and, as he recalled, he hadn't liked it then either.

  "He - Eric - his name is Eric - He said he did not know. "

  On the hearth, the hanging kettle boiled with a small rumbling like the purring of a cat. Tally rose soundlessly to her feet, raked the fire a little to one side, and tipped the water into a teapot, the fragrance of brewing herbs rising in summery sweetness among the room's winter smells of lamp oil and damp wool.

  "That magic once existed in their world there is no question, no doubt, he says. Document after document attests its presence and its strength. Three hundred years ago there was a period of unrest, of anger, and many mages and many books were burned, both by civil authority and by angry mobs. Then two hundred years ago. . . " The old man shook his head. "Eric says he does not know what happened, why, or whether it was a single act, or an accumulation of unknowable events, chance, or the moving courses of the universe. He knows only this: that no documents of magic can be authenticated later than two hundred years ago. And beginning in that time, magic has been regarded as no more than silliness, superstition, the games of children, or the delusions of madmen. "

  "All over the world?" Rhion tried to picture it, to grasp that deathly silence, and failed. But the thought of it turned his heart sick.

  Jaldis nodded. His twisted hands gently cradled the blue porcelain cup Tally had set before him, seeking the warmth of the clear green liquid inside.

  "So he has said. He said that in place of magic there is a thing called 'science'. . . " He used an alien word for it, the Spell of Tongues carrying the term to Rhion's mind as meaning simply 'knowledge,' but with curious connotations of exactness and close-mindedness and other things besides.

  "By this science," Jaldis went on, "they have done many things in these two hundred years: the wagons which travel without beasts to draw them, by the burning of an inflammable liquid; the winged ships which journey through the air; something called a telephone, by which they speak over vast distances - anyone, not just mages; and artificial light, which glows without burning anything but which is the product of. . . of creating lightning at their will. But whether this 'science,' or some element of it, arose only after magic's disappearance, or whether magic's failure was somehow connected to its arising, Eric cannot be sure. No one can be sure. "

  The old man leaned forward, his pale face hollowed and gray looking in the scrim of steam curling from the cup between his hands. "But whatever the cause, they have become a world of mechanists, of bureaucrats, of slaves, working each for his own living and not looking farther than the filling of his belly every day. It is a world where magic is not only despised, but hated. There is only one ruler now in whose realm mages - those who study magic though they can no longer work it, those who seek the true secrets that lie at the heart of the universe - are honored. And against this ruler, a coalition of these other monarchs, petty and corrupt bureaucrats, ruled by wealthy merchants and narrow of soul, is gathering for war. If they succeed - if they win - then even the memory of magic will die. And then the darkness will truly triumph. "

  "And they want help?"

  Jaldis nodded. "I have contacted Shavus," he said. "Shortly before the equinox of spring he and Gyzan will come here. They have long been preparing for this, knowing that one day I would find this world, these mages, again. Your help, too, I will need, my son. It is perilous and needs magic on both sides - the less is there, the greater it must be here, to protect them as they cross. "

  "But if there's no magic there at all," Tally said doubtfully, perching beside Rhion on the sheepskin-covered bench, "how can they reach out to guide our men?"

  "There's magic and magic," Rhion explained quietly. "Even someone who isn't mageborn can use a scrying-crystal after a fashion, under the influence of the proper drugs. But to reach out across the Void. . . I still don't see how. . . "

  "Only with the power of the solstice-tide, the sun-tide, or to a lesser extent with the momentum of the equinox's balance," the old man said, pulling one corner of the fur he wore about his shoulders more firmly around his arms. He's too old for this, Rhion thought, watching the careful way he moved, seeing how thin those blue-veined wrists were in the gap between gloves and soft-knitted arm warmers. So old. . .

  "Even so it will be a great gamble, my daughter," the blind mage went on. "But it is one we must take. Shavus, Gyzan, myself. . . all of us. Or else all of this. . . " His stiff hand, its fingers barely mobile now at all, moved to take in the scrupulous neatness of the study, with its potted herbs, its small shelf of books - even, Rhion noticed with a faint smile, its tremendously expensive, half-grown crocodile drying in a glass case near the fire. . . "All that we have lived for and have accumulated over the centuries will be for nothing. It will be in danger of vanishing like frost upon the grass with the sun's rising, and our world will be left with nothing but the might of the strong against the strong, the unscrupulousness of those both clever and wicked, and the demagogues who lead the mobs. "

  "You don't think it's an illusion of some kind, do you?" Tally asked softly, as she and Rhion descended the narrow stair that led from Jaldis' rooms down to a discreet door hidden away in a corner of the topmost chamber of the library. "Something he's convinced himself he's heard because he's hunted so long or because he wants it so badly?"

  Rhion considered this as he worked the bolt on the other side of the heavy oak door back into place with a spell. "I don't think so," he said at length. "I've dealt with people whose illnesses stemmed from that kind of self-delusion. . . he's obsessed, but he doesn't have that air. "

  They crossed through the high-ceilinged marble chamber with its shelves of books and racks of scrolls, the floating ball of blue witchlight over Rhion's head making the gilt bindings wink and the shadows dart and play among the lightless pendules of the hanging lamp.

  "A trick, maybe, or a trap. . . ?"

  "Set by whom?" Rhion asked sensibly. "And for what purpose?"

  Tally shrugged, uneasy at the thought herself, and pulled closer around her shoulders the thick robe of red wool and fur which covered her court-dress of green and white - the Erralswan colors.

  "You hear about the - the Great Evils, the priests of Agon call them - spirits who try to lure people into danger and wickedness, the same way grims try to lure you into getting lost in the woods. " She glanced sidelong at him as they descended the wide terrazzo stairs to the floors below, as if not sure how he'd react.

  "Maybe they do exist," Rhion said. "Only everyone who's been out in wild country at night has seen grims for themselves, and knows how they act. From what I understand only the priests of Agon claim to have seen the Great Evils, and then they pretty much seem to be whatever will fit Agon's purposes at the time. "

  Tally chuckled her agreement. "You do have a point," she said. "On the other hand, everyone has seen wizards - and sti
ll believe the lies that are told about them. And that's illusion, if you will - the altering of perception. And people don't even need magic to do it. "

  Rhion, wrapped against the December cold in the black cloak of the Morkensik Order, with a plaid shawl the Gray Lady had given him over that, shivered. He had passed the Temple of the Eclipsed Sun on the way up from the city gates and had seen for himself the great new hall of sable pillars that spoke of the cult's increasing riches and power. The sight of it had brought back to him, with terrifying clarity, the cold self-assurance of the High Priest Mijac's voice from behind the veils, the hideous sense he had had of seeing men who had been released from responsibility for their deeds. Artists of illusion, Mijac had called wizards. . .

  And yet he sensed that his growing dread stemmed from something deeper, some rotted ghost of memory connected somehow with the Dark Well, a memory that still stirred now and then in his dreams.

  They passed down through the lower two rooms of the library, each larger than the one above, and through the vast, echoing spaces of the empty scriptorium below that, and so to the library's anteroom on the ground floor of the tower, and through the great bronze doors into the colonnade that embraced the palace's vast central court. Even in its pillared shelter, gusts of wind clutched at Rhion's mantle and Tally's long fur robe, and the driven snow, scudding before the wind across the granite paving blocks of the court, swirled between the columns and wet their feet.

  Sheltered by a numinous aura of Who-Me? they passed through the vestibule of the palace's marble hall. There, under the shadows of the musicians' gallery, only a few lamps burned on the clustering pillars, but beyond, a hundred lights on tall bronze stands filled the hall with silky primrose radiance, warming the tucked and pearled velvets, the shimmering featherwork and ribbons, of the courtiers' clothing to a moving rainbow of crimson, blue, and green. Pausing in the shadowy doorway that led up to the private apartments, Rhion wiped the mist from his spectacle lenses, then looked out into the hall, automatically picking out those he knew.

  The Duke - and in any room he'd ever been in all eyes still went first to the Duke - looked a little older, a little more tired, than a man of fifty should. Even his son's death in a practice joust - preparing for his first tournament three years ago on the eve of what would have been his seventeenth birthday - hadn't affected Dinar of Prinagos as badly as had his wife's last summer of a fever no one had thought much of until it was too late. The big man still had his old air of power, his easy movements which dominated everyone around him, but streaks of gray had begun to appear in his thickly curled black hair under its after supper crown of hothouse roses. Damson sat beside him, corseted cruelly into a gown whose entire front seemed to be an iridescent armor of pearls, her plump, jeweled fingers nimbly flicking at the glass spindles of a lace-making pillow.

  Perhaps it was losing Tally's friendship, Rhion thought, or perhaps it was her obsession with Esrex - but it seemed to him that over the years the steely quality of a single-mindedness in her had grown. Lines of will and watchfulness carved deep in the suety face now, aging it under its heavy paint. Despite her ladylike occupation, her shrewd gray eyes traveled over the room, missing nothing of what they saw.

  She was currently watching Marc of Erralswan with considerable disapproval. Dressed in a very short blue velvet tunic with elaborately padded sleeves, he was flirting with one of her maids-in-waiting, their teasing intimacy telling its own tale. Rhion sighed and gritted his teeth. Marc had never, even on the night of his wedding to Tally, laid a hand on his bride of convenience; it was not to be expected that he remain celibate. But, Rhion thought, illogically angry for Tally's sake, does he have to be so goddam blatant about it? As the Duke's son-in-law and the holder of considerable wealth and estates - not to mention as a beefy champion of the tilt-yards - he found his scope had considerably widened from the days when he was the captain of the ducal guard, and his hunting field hadn't been exactly narrow then.

  Rhion glanced sideways at Tally and saw her face set in an attempt at unconcern. She shook her head comically and sighed, "That's our Marc. . . " But Rhion knew that it hurt her when the court ladies giggled about her behind their feathered fans.

  And Esrex. . .

  Esrex was almost invisible, half concealed in the shadow of a pillar, talking to someone who would have been hidden by still deeper shadows from any but mageborn eyes.

  Rhion shivered. He was talking with a priest of Agon.

  "Are there many of them at Court these days?" Rhion asked softly, as he and Tally moved through the small door and up the stairs. Their hands sought one another automatically - he had not seen her for nearly three months, since his last visit to Bragenmere in September. Even had he lived with her daily, he suspected he would have craved her touch. "Priests of Agon?"

  "Was that who Esrex was talking to? I'm afraid so. " Tally, like the rest of her family, had changed, her coltish skinniness maturing into spear-straight, graceful strength, her long features settling into serene beauty. Rhion knew that, over the years, Tally had patched up a working relationship with Damson - as two ladies of the same court must - but that never again had the sisters been friends. The isolation and the caution of leading a double life had left their mark on her - a kind of measured steadiness, sadness tinged with golden strength.

  "Since the High Queen has had a shrine built to the Eclipsed Sun in the palace at Nerriok you see them more and more," she went on somberly. "Esrex is supposed to be very high in their hierarchy, though of course no one knows. And Father. . . he's had to be more careful with the cults, as you know. "

  That, Rhion also knew, had been the fruit of the aborted alliance with the Earl of the Purple Forest. The death of the Duke's son had destroyed the last chance of union with one of the other great Realms. With only a minor nobleman for a son-in-law Dinar of Mere had to take support where it could be found.

  "With most of the priesthoods, it doesn't matter. " Bars of tawny light from below crossed Tally's face as they climbed through the shadows of the columns, like two shadows themselves in the dim upper reaches of the great stair. "But they 're not the same, are they?"

  "No. " Rhion remembered the masked men in the watch-room of the Temple, the words of the priest on the threshold: As for lepers, and beggars, and slaves, Agon has a welcome for them, as he has for all who serve him. . . And how many served him, he wondered, for the sake of that welcome, which relieved them of responsibility for what they did? He didn't know.

  No one knew.

  But he suspected that Esrex was not that kind of servant. With the lies of Agon's priests as his main source of information - lies, perhaps, that he wanted badly to believe - it might well be that Esrex was not aware of being a servant at all.

  Glancing back down through an opening in the wall, he could see the ivory-fair head - losing, he could also see, its hairline's long struggle with destiny. Esrex' face, too, was prematurely lined, with petty stubbornness and will, and his eyes had a kind of restless glitter to them. Rhion knew that Esrex took drugs upon occasion, either on his own or as part of his involvement with the priests of the Eclipsed Sun, who gave them to their chosen followers; Rhion wondered what his consumption was up to these days.

  "No, I'm afraid they're not. "

  Halfway down the gallery were the doors to the nursery wing, clear-grained red wood inlaid with patterns of silver wrought into intricate protective seals. The window shutters, Rhion knew, were silver, also - Damson had had them made - though it had been fifty years since there'd been a case of grim harrowing in Bragenmere. There were some these days who believed that silver was proof against a wizard's spells as well, but Rhion had no trouble reaching with his mind into the locks and shifting the silver pins.

  A sentry dozed in the anteroom, and Rhion imperceptibly deepened the man's sleep with a whispered charm. From around the shut door of the room where the sickly Dinias slept
came the drift of eucalyptus steam and the snores of a nurse. Elucida, at the age of eleven the biggest matrimonial catch in the Forty Realms, had her own suite and her own chaperon and maid. But the two sons of the Duke's younger daughter shared a smaller chamber, and there was no nurse whose dreams needed thickening as Rhion and Tally ghosted inside.

  Brenat had been born when Kir was three - "Jaldis makes a good potion," Rhion had joked at the time. Standing in the doorway of the dark chamber and looking at the night-lamp's fretted red glow playing across those two double handfuls of brown curls, he felt a curious sense of unalloyed delight in these sons of his, a desire to whoop and shout, an almost uncontrollable yearning to touch. . . though he knew, as he had known the first time he had taken Tally in his arms, that it was madness.

  The problem was that he could not now imagine a world that did not include his sons.

  Kir's hand, clutching the hilt of the toy sword he'd fought tooth and nail to take to bed with him, was big in spite of its childish chubbiness. He would have the Duke's height when he grew up, as well as Tally's long, delicate features and gray eyes. That, Rhion thought in his moments of cynical despair, was fortunate - Marc was tall, too. Brenat's eyes were also gray. Tally, who adored the boys, sometimes spoke of another child, but they both knew they had been fools to have these

  "Will you be here to see them tomorrow?" Tally asked quietly, stepping closer to Rhion as he put his arm around her waist. She still had to bend her head just a little for him to kiss her temple.

  "Oh, yes - till the storm lets up, in fact. That should be sometime tomorrow. " The wind groaned along the gallery as they stepped out again, closing the door behind them. The quilted red hangings which kept the chill from the walls in winter rippled uneasily with the scurrying draughts, as if bodiless monsters raced behind them to some unknown goal.

  "I'm glad. They ask after you when you're not here, you know. "

  In spite of himself Rhion smiled. He'd seen his boys with Marc, polite and respectful and in awe of their putative father, but on his last visit in September Kir had said something to him about, "Father chasing lightskirts all around the court," with a disapproving look in his gray eyes.

  "Well," Rhion had said at the time, "it probably wouldn't do to say that to him. "

  Kir's mouth had hardened. "But it's wrong. He's married to Mother. And it makes her sad when the other ladies laugh. You're a wizard, Rhion. Can't you make him stop?"

  Rhion had groaned. "What, you, too?" This conversation had taken place in the mews, where Rhion had gone to help Tally doctor a sick goshawk and the boys had tagged along to see what trouble they could get into in the room where the varvels and jesses were stored and the lures repaired. "Look, Kir, you might as well find out early that magic can't make people do things differently than they do. It can't change what people are like. "

  "Dinias says it can. " The boy had picked up a long tail-feather from the floor, where Brenat sat placidly arranging straws in order of their length, and dug among the leather-scraps near the workbench for a thong to wind around it like a simple lure. "Dinias says that a wizard can cast a spell on a man that will take away his brains and make him cut up his own wife with an ax, and when he wakes up in the morning he won't remember what he did, but they'll hang him anyway. " He looked hopefully up into Rhion's face for corroboration of this gory program.

  " 'Fraid not. " Rhion sighed, realizing that it was a tale every child in the city heard as soon as they reached school.

  Kir's face fell. "Oh. Dinias said you were a wizard and didn't have a soul, but I beat him up. "

  "Thus changing his opinion of me and endearing yourself to his father in one - er - blow. "

  And Kir had said, "Hunh?" and had looked at him with the baffled exasperation of a child confronted by adult nonsense.

  Thinking back on the scene Rhion sighed again, and shook his head. Tally looked at him inquiringly, the glow of the small votive-light near the nursery-door turning her lashes to ginger and leaving her eyes in shadow.

  "It's just - they grow so fast," he said softly. "And I envy you the time you have with them. "

  She reached over and gently scratched his beard, then drew his mouth to hers. "If I were anyone else," she murmured, "I would envy myself. "

  But much later, as he was dressing again by the low throb of ember light that glowed from the hearth in her room, he returned to the earlier topic - something they did with subjects discussed hours, weeks, or even months previously. Wind still savaged the window shutters behind their quilted hangings, its howling sounding louder now that the small noises of servants passing in the corridors had dwindled.

  "It should be quieting down by noon," Rhion said, struggling into his shabby brown robes. "Then we should have nearly a week's clear weather, enough for me to get back to the Drowned Lands before the next big storm. "

  She held out his spectacles to him. Without them, kneeling among the sheets, he saw her only as an upright column of shadowy gold in the firelight, wreathed in points of light - her jewels, all that she now wore. "Will the Gray Lady be angry, if you leave at the equinox?"

  "Not angry," Rhion said quietly, carefully hooking the metal frames over his ears. "She'll understand. But the rites need a lot of power. If I'm not presiding, they get Cuffy Rifkin, an Earth-witch from up the marshes, to do it, and his strength isn't as great even as mine, which is only average. It puts the victim's life at greater risk. But the Gray Lady knows what I owe to Jaldis. Even at midnight of the equinox, getting Shavus and Gyzan across the Void is going to take more power than he should be trying to use these days. Maybe more than he has. "

  "He was very ill, the day after Winterstead. " Behind the tawny halo of her hair the emblems of the house of Erralswan gleamed on the bed hangings amid a thicket of heraldic gingerbread, as if Marc's name and station covered the lovers literally as well as metaphorically. "I was afraid he'd had a stroke, or his heart had failed him. But he said no, it was only that he'd overtaxed himself. . . "

  "I'll look in on him again tonight," Rhion said quietly, more worried than he cared to admit. He slung his cloak around his shoulders and the Gray Lady's plaid on top of that. "And he still won't have a slave to look after him?"

  Tally shook her head. "And do you know," she said after a moment, "with what they say about the cult of Agon - about not knowing who is in it, who their spies are - sometimes I think that's just as well. "

  The palace bulked dark and silent as Rhion stepped out onto the ice-slick terrace, a sleeping beast with all its hues of terra cotta and peach and gold, its bronzes and its porcelains and its columns of porphyry and marble, drowned in the depths of night. Even so, Rhion chose to take the long way around from Tally's rooms, moving in silence through the barren, wind-lashed garden and surrounded once more in a cloudy haze of spells. What Damson and Esrex had had to say to one another on the day after his brush with the priests of Agon he had never found out, but he knew Esrex still sought proof that he was the father of Tally's children - sought revenge for the fool he had made of himself before the court and the priests that day. And in spite of the Duke's deep friendship for Jaldis, his fondness for Rhion and his love for his younger daughter's children, Rhion never felt quite safe in Bragenmere.

  In his rooms in the octagonal tower, Jaldis was asleep. Standing in the curtained door arch of the old man's chamber, Rhion listened to the soft hiss of his breathing and reflected that he'd heard that sound almost nightly for eleven years of sharing quarters in some of the worst accommodations in the Forty Realms. And looking around at the tidy cubicle, with its warm fire and fur robes, its books neatly shelved - two more had returned to Jaldis only last year, brought by travelers who'd found them in middens or estate sales, men who'd known the Duke was a collector - its small jars of herbs, crystals, and silver powder, he felt a vast relief that the old man had found shel
ter at last. The years had been hard on him. He had a fragile air these days that Rhion did not like.

  The thought stirred in his mind, an uneasy whisper in the darkness.

  Moving soundlessly, Rhion let the thick wool curtain fall and went into the tiny study. It was pitch dark there and cold - he moved easily through it, smelling the new-cured parchment, seeing, in the dark, how every crystal, every inkpot, and every piece of chalk and wax was in place and ready for Jaldis' hands. In the far corner a ladder led to the attic above, waste space under the tower's conical roof cap. As his hand touched the rungs a hideous sense of danger seized him, the sudden, overpowering conviction that Tally and his sons were in peril, immediate and terrible, from which only he could save them and only if he got there in time. . .

  It was a spell, of course. And the fact that even here, in the heart of his own rooms, Jaldis would feel such a spell was necessary troubled him deeply.

  Brushing aside the phantom dreads, he ascended the ladder and opened the trap door.

  It was bolted from the other side, of course - there were even spells on the bolt. Rhion remembered Jaldis' warnings, when the Gray Lady had sought to probe the secrets of the making of the Well. The key to what magic is, he had said. Something indeed to be protected at any cost, even at the cost of losing it entirely.

  Then he stood in the dark of the loft, looking into the Well itself. It was quiet now, closed, a vague whisper of brownish shadow, a column of darkness within the scribbled circles of silver, blood, and light unpierceable even by mageborn eyes, a hidden whisper of primordial fear.

  The attic had been closed for a week and, huge as it was, it smelled stuffy and cold, lingering traces of dust and incense clinging to the great wheel of the rafters overhead. Even the heat that rose from the rooms below did not warm it, and thin drafts worked bony fingers through the folds of Rhion's cloak and the robe beneath.

  A world without magic, he thought. A world where all things were mechanical, sterile, even those which sounded most fantastic, like the wagons which traveled without beasts to draw them and the artificial lightning, or the flying machines. A world where beauty had been forgotten, and where the men and women born with wizardry in their blood and the gnawing conviction that other possibilities existed beyond the invisible curtain of dreams were unable to put their hand through that curtain to touch what lay on the other side.

  A world that had begged for help.

  A world of Jaldis' children, as Rhion was his child - a world to whom to pass his power, as he had passed it to Rhion. He would not turn aside from it.

  Fear of the Dark Well - fear of what he half-remembered, of what he half-guessed - was growing in Rhion, but he forced himself to remain where he was, gazing into that darkness as Jaldis had gazed for seven years now, seeking what lay beyond.

  But the Dark Well held its secrets. And in time his fear overcame him, as he felt the refracted blackness of the rainbow abyss drawing him into itself. He backed to the trap door and climbed down the ladder, bolting the door behind him.

  But the thought of it pursued him into his sleep, and troubled his dreams.