The Rainbow Abyss

RHION COULDN'T HELP HIMSELF. "Is it for you?"



"Of course!" But the quickness of her reply, and the hot blush that suddenly suffused her cheeks, told their own story and the relief that went through him almost made him laugh. "That is..." she began, and peered suddenly into the shadows of the room. "Rhion?" And recognizing him, she smiled.



He thought, quite clearly, as if warning someone else against inevitable tragedy: Don't do this. But it was already done.



"Come in." He stepped back to let her pass, then hurried before her to the plank table - one he'd scrounged in one of the many rubbish stores of the district - to shove aside the books and papers that strewed its stained and battered surface. "Don't tell me your governess lets you come to this part of town," he added as he did so. "If I were your father, I'd sack her."



"My governess thinks I'm in the mews helping Fleance with the young hawks..." She gazed around her as she spoke: at the rough-hewn rafters from which every herb they could buy or gather in the Kairn Marshes hung drying; at the round little beehive of a tiled stove; at the plank shelf of dishes, the cool red-and-black-work done in the Drowned Lands. "Don't you have a crocodile? A stuffed one, I mean, hanging from the rafters? Wizards are supposed to."



"Wizards do if they can afford them," Rhion replied with a grin. "The ones you see in spell-weavers' shops aren't stuffed but drying, and when they're properly dried you cut them up and store them for potions and mummify the skin in camphor oil, for talismanic work. But the baby crocs are tremendously expensive and you have to import them from Mindwava. Jaldis and I are still working on cheaper things like saffron seed and glass and getting a decent crucible." He leaned against the corner of the table and scratched a corner of his scruffy beard, realizing he hadn't trimmed it lately and wishing he had. She walked around the bare little room, looking at the herbs and books and cheap clay pots with their careful labels in frank wonder and delight. He remembered the grace with which she moved, surprising in a girl so tall, but he'd almost forgotten the husky, boyish alto of her voice.



"Does it have to be?" She turned back to him, her gray eyes shadowed. "A love-potion, that is. I mean, does it have to be for... Could someone get one that would work for two other people?"



When she had come in, Rhion had seen, as well as the smile that stopped his heart, the purplish prints of sleeplessness in the tender flesh around the eyes and the puffy spoor of last night's tears.



He sighed, wishing he didn't have to be the one to tell her. "A love-potion won't save your sister from unhappiness, Tally."



Her mouth flinched, but she didn't ask him how he knew. Perhaps she expected that, as a wizard, he simply would know.



"They don't last," he went on, as gently as he could. "Even if you were to give her husband several in succession, in time the effects would wear away. And if he hates her now, what do you think he'll feel after a few weeks, or a few months, of being impelled by his own body, by needs he doesn't understand, to make love to her?"



She was silent, digesting that. It was clearly something she hadn't thought of. Rhion remembered she was a virgin - remembered what it had been like to be seventeen.



At length she said, "I don't think... that is... He isn't indifferent. At least Damson says..." She hesitated, an inexperienced and well-bred girl sorting hastily through all the precepts of good breeding for what it was and was not proper to say. She took a deep breath, and plunged in. "Damson says - and I think she's right - that Esrex isn't indifferent to her. If he was, he wouldn't be trying to hurt her, he wouldn't be flaunting his mistresses the way he does. But he's very proud, and very bitter. He sees in her the daughter of the man who took the realm away from his grandfather - our grandfather, because his aunt is my mother - the man who humbled his family. And he's spiteful. Loving her could change that, couldn't it?"



The anxious look in her gray eyes, after her tomboy incisiveness and the courage she'd shown in the snowbound woods, went to his heart. Her voice was almost timid as she asked, "Are they really not permanent?"



"Love isn't permanent, Tally," Rhion said quietly. "It renews itself, from day to day - sometimes from hour to hour. And lust and longing, which create their own illusions - and illusion is what the potions really arouse - are more evanescent still. I'm sorry..."



She shook her head quickly, as if to say, Not your fault, her eyes not meeting his. For a time she leaned half-perched upon the corner of the cluttered table, head bowed beneath the drying jungle of mallows and milkwort overhead, looking down at her hands in her lap. But when she spoke again she raised her gaze to his.



"It's his pride, you see," she said. "Damson has always loved him, from the time he was sixteen and she was twenty; I think they... they slept together... in spite of the fact that he always blamed Father for the fact that he - Esrex - isn't Duke of Mere now. But he never wanted to marry her for that reason. Then he found out she was behind his family forcing him to do so - and right after that she miscarried his son. He hasn't been near her since. But if he could just be drawn back to her, even for a little while... if she could just bear him a son."



Was that her wishful thinking, he wondered, or her sister's? Running an idle finger along the worn grain of the table corner on which he perched, Rhion remembered the chilly-eyed young man he'd seen in the scrying-crystal. Good-looking in his way - though Rhion had long since given up trying to decide what kind of looks drew men and women to one another - lace-gloved hands fastidiously turning bunches of expensive winter flowers, his face expressionless as a cat's. His power over Damson had been clear in the way she'd flinch from his words, in the way her eyes would follow him when he'd stalk from the room.



"You think it would help?"



Something stiffened in her shoulders as she tucked a strand of seed-colored hair defiantly back under her cap. "It might."



And so it might, he thought. With loving and hating, one never knew. But too many people had come to him and Jaldis over the years, asking for magic to fix their lives. He knew of no spell which could not be twisted out of its purpose by fate, no potion which would for better or for worse change a human soul's inner essence. No sigil he'd made had ever altered the words that rose automatically to a person's lips when they weren't thinking.



Yet people kept acting as if someday the laws of magic would spontaneously change and spells would do all these things.



He felt suddenly very old. "Does your sister know you've come?"



Tallisett shook her head. "Damson says wizards make most of their money blackmailing the people who come to them for love-potions or potency drugs or abortions..."



"Damn!" Rhion smote his forehead with the heel of his hand. "So that's what we've been doing wrong! I knew there had to be a better way to make money out of this... Ow!" She'd come around the table in a stride and smacked him hard on the shoulder, but she was laughing as she did so.



"No," he added gently, shaking his head. "That's part of the oath of our order. Secrecy, as physicians must swear it."



Tally frowned. "But there was a wizard just a few years ago who was doing that over in Way..."



"So he was probably a Blood-Mage or an Ebiatic or one of the cheapjack astrologers you get on the street-corners..."



She shook her head, baffled, like most people completely ignorant of the differences between the orders of wizardry. "All I know is that they burned him for it, and before they burned him he confessed to having blackmailed hundreds of people. He'd get the women to sleep with him and the men to kill or beat up people who disagreed with him... and anyway," she added, as Rhion groaned at the retelling of those hoary rumors, those accusations which had been leveled at every wielder of magic who had ever lived, "Esrex belongs to the Cult of Agon. If he ever thought there was wizardry involved between him and Damson he'd probably stay away from her for good, out of fear of what they'd say."



"And you're willing to risk that for her without her knowledge?" He cocked an eyebrow at her, and pushed up his spectacles again. Her color heightened.



"He'd never find out..." But he could see that, even as she said the words, she was aware of how childish they sounded. She looked down again, for a few moments concentrating on picking precisely identical quantities of gauze undersleeve to puff out between the embroidered ribbons of her oversleeve. "She loves him, you see," she said at length, not meeting his eye. "I don't see how she could, after all the cruel things he's said to her - he really is a spiteful little prig. But she does. If she didn't... If she didn't need his approval the way she does..."



"And if we didn't all have to eat to stay alive," Rhion sighed, "think how much money we'd save at the market." Her profile, half averted, was like a line of alabaster behind the stiffened wing of her cap; the pearl that hung from the cap's point was less smooth than the forehead beneath it. He felt a certain amount of sympathy for Damson's impossible position.



The silence lengthened. Outside in the courtyard a couple of drunks were arguing in front of the Skull and Bones, and even through the weight of the adobe wall he could hear the steady beat of the looms in the chambers next door. The air smelled thickly of dust and lanolin, of the pigs foraging in the court, and of acrid soap being boiled a few courts over in Lye Alley. He remembered the way Tally had jerked the wet leather of the reins from his hand, the defiant flash of her gray eyes in the gibbous reflected ghost light of the grims. He remembered how she had charged without a second thought to seek for her sister's child.



"If I don't help you," he said, not asking it as a question, "you'll look for someone who will."



She didn't look at him but he saw her mouth flinch again.



"Tally," he sighed softly, "don't do it. Leave her free to choose her own road."



She raised her eyes then, like a child's, hoping, not that authority would relent, but that the world was in fact not constituted as it was. The stiffness went out of her back with the release of her breath. "Damn you." Her small voice was utterly without rancor, a friend's casual railery at a friend. "Are you always right about things?"



"No," he told her sadly, for he wanted to be able to help her, wanted to free her from the grinding pressure of misery he had seen in the crystal. "But this time I'm afraid I am."



Dammit, he thought, all those weeks in the Drowned Lands wondering if there were some way I could make her happy, and it turns out it's this.



"There are ways to do it, yes. But really and truly, it's against our ethics to make a love-spell or any other kind of spell for someone who isn't present and consenting. Can you see why that is?"



And she nodded, not liking it, but seeing. She didn't, like many girls of that age, say, This is different... If she thought it, it was not for long.



"I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry."



"It's all right." She sighed again, and produced a crooked smile for him, manufacturing cheer in her voice as he had so recently manufactured it for Jaldis. "If she weren't so afraid of word getting back to Esrex... or of being blackmailed..." She shook her head, chasing the thought away. "He's trying very hard to curry favor with the priests of Agon, you see. Though the gods only know why anyone would want to belong to that cult. But I'll think of something."



She straightened her shoulders and smiled a little more convincingly. In that single gesture, he saw all the burnished self-confidence of one of those children of fortune who have not yet known defeat. Rhion had been acquainted with a lot of them, having gone to school with the offspring of the wealthy bankers and traders and merchant senators of the City of Circles. At one time he had been one himself. He still remembered what it had felt like.



She turned to go.



"Wait..." Pulling himself out of his reverie, he twisted around to grub in the debris on the table for the bits of parchment he'd purchased with the proceeds of his last toadstone. "Just a minute..."



Half closing his eyes, he dipped down within himself, calling forth the meditative light of magic. After a moment, he drew a standard sigil comprised of the second, ninth, and eighteenth runes - the first such seal he could think of at short notice - and threw in the Lost Rune for good measure, rolled it up in a small piece of cured lambskin, at ten or twelve dequins the square foot, and bound it with a slip of punched copper. "Carry this when you leave. It'll keep people from looking at you, or recognizing you if they do see you, provided you keep quiet and don't call attention to yourself. All right?"



She hesitated, holding it as if she feared it would somehow contaminate her soul by touch. Then she slipped it into her skirt-pocket. "All right. Thank you." She meant the charm, he could tell, as he walked her the length of the shadowy room. But when he opened the door she turned back in the mottled tabby light of the arcade's thatched roof, and said, "Thank you," again, meaning something more.



Then she was gone.



He climbed the ladder to the floor above and recounted to Jaldis all that had passed, not omitting that he had called Tallisett's image in his scrying-crystal while they were in the Drowned Lands, "to make sure she and her sister got to Imber all right," and so knew the poor state of Damson's marriage.



"It's a bad business," Jaldis sighed, shaking his head. Because of the strong spring heat, worse in the upper room, he'd braided and clubbed his white hair, and his head with its narrow features and close-trimmed beard strongly resembled that of a bird, thrusting up from the loose folds of his brown cowl. Before him on the table lay his spectacles, surrounded by half a dozen fragments of flawed crystal the color of dirty water, the best they could afford.



"Not that Dinar Prinagos wasn't perfectly right to overthrow his liege lord and keep Alvus' ineffectual idiot of a son from inheriting," the old man went on, fingering each fragment in turn: reading, Rhion knew, every shear and shadow in the brittle lattices of their structure, judging how much use, if any, they would be. Every flaw meant a Limitation, or a variation of whatever spell the future talismans would hold; every shadow, a break in the energy paths of the crystal's heart which would have to be laboriously accounted for.



"There's bad blood in the White Bragenmeres, and I'm told Esrex, for all he's a fop, is a dangerous young man to cross. A Solarist, he used to be, denying all the gods and magic as well. But he switched over to the Cult of Agon when it became clear that the High Queen favored them."



The blind man shook his head, the lines of his face deepening. To a great extent he seemed to have recovered from his illness, and even the journey up from Sligo seemed to have left him little the worse. But listening to his voice as he spoke of Tally's father, Rhion found himself comparing its tone and strength with his recollections of how it had been before the flight from Felsplex - before the strain of opening and using the Dark Well. It draws energy, Jaldis had said...



Lately he had caught himself watching Jaldis closely, mentally comparing with recollections and repeatedly reassuring himself, Yes, he looks the same... his movement hasn't slowed down any... there's been no real change and wondering if he was just imagining that the old man seemed slower and more halt, wondering whether his hands had always looked so thin...



"I'm not sure which is worse," Jaldis continued, oblivious to the uneasy scrutiny. "The Solarists and their heresies or the Cult of Agon with its secrets, its spies that take every piece of information they hear back to the priests of the Veiled God. No one even knows who half its members are, though they're supposed to be legion. You were well to send the girl away, poor chit. You don't think she'll go to a Hand-Pricker, do you, or to that poisonous old Ebiatic, Malnuthe, over in the Shambles?"



"I don't think so," Rhion said. The window was shuttered with a pair of dried and splintery jalousie shades; sitting in the embrasure of the thick adobe wall, he was able to peer through a couple of the missing louvers into the blindingly bright sunlight of the square. With the ending of the spring rains, the lush weeds and thorn-bushes growing all around the courtyard arcade were turning brown. The mountains that towered over Bragenmere were taking on their wolfish summer hues: by August the sheep and cattle ranges would be coarse brown velvet, the pine trees blackish tangles in the rock clefts that marked the springs. Children too young to be working the looms were playing knucklebones in the dust, their voices rising shrilly to Rhion's ears; across the square, one of the whores lay on her balcony, a damp towel spread over her face and her hair, nearly the color of the summer hills, spread out to bleach in the sun.



"I think she understands now why it isn't a good thing to make a decision like that for someone else, no matter what she thinks should be done."



"We can but hope. Listen, Rhion..." The old man set aside his crystals and half-turned in his twig-work chair. "I have been making calculations. It is my belief that a Dark Well could be wrought in the cellar beneath the kitchen here."



Rhion tried not to shiver at the thought of Jaldis' tampering once more with the Void. "That little hole? It's so small you'd have to climb back up to the kitchen if you wanted to scratch..."



"Not if we removed the shelves there - they are probably rotted in any case - and cleared the wood-stores up into the kitchen." He leaned forward, the talismans dangling from the voice-box clinking with the dry silvery sound of moving wind. "Rhion, it is six weeks until the summer solstice. The solstice or the equinoxes are the only time that the wizards in that other universe - the wizards without magic - might just be able to raise enough power to reach through the Void and contact us here. Even if we can get only an image, a glimpse of their world, something to guide our search in the blackness of eternity, we will know at least in which direction to look the next time we search, and the next..."



Something flicked through Rhion's mind and was gone, like movement glimpsed from the tail of the eye. Something evil and cold, something... A dream? Night sky and standing stones... ?



Turning his mind from his vague fear of what danger Tally might run herself into he said, "Yes, but... how likely is it they'll still be calling? By the time of the solstice, it'll have been six months. That's a long time. Anything can happen in six months."



Jaldis smiled, sweet and wise in spite of the ruin of scars. "My son," he said quietly, "they may have been calling into darkness for six years. And to help them in their isolation - to learn what robbed their world of its magic, to prevent such a thing from coming to pass here, I would listen for six, or for sixty."



Not children of the blood, Jaldis had said... children of the fire. As he had been.



"I have sent for Shavus Ciarnin," the blind man went on, turning back to the table and picking up the bits of crystal, placing them one by one in a crude little painted clay pot he'd padded with bits of fleece. "We must have his help, his power, to find this world. We need his power to contact those wizards in that other universe, to tell them what they must know in order to guide us across..."



"US?" Rhion swung sharply from the window. "Wait a minute, I think that box of yours has developed a flaw, old friend. I thought I heard you say the word us."



"I can scarcely ask Shavus to undertake a journey I am not willing to make myself."



"The hell you can't," Rhion retorted. "That world has no magic. What's going to happen to that voice box and those spectacles when you get there?"



"Nothing," the old man replied serenely. "The spells that imbue them and the talismans that give them power were wrought here and should hold their magic no matter what."



"You care to bet your life on that hypothesis?"



"I would," he said soberly, "if it would help."



"Look," Rhion said in subconscious imitation of his father at his most reasonable. "I'm willing to go with Shavus..." And he shivered as he said it. "...though I'm not thrilled about leaving you here alone and even less enthusiastic about traveling with the Archmage for any length of time. But I'm not going to let you go. Besides," he added more calmly, for his light, quirky voice had risen with his fears, "Shavus will need someone on this end to guide him back, if what you say is true."



"You have reason," the old man conceded. "And the less power there is there, the more there will be needed from here. But even so..."



From the kitchen downstairs came the swift, hard rapping of someone knocking at their door. Rhion flung open the jalousies and leaned out over the bleached gray thatch of the arcade. "COMING!" he bellowed.



We've got to stop living in slums and hovels, he thought, as he clambered down the rude pole ladder to the kitchen below. I'm starting to lose all my manners. His father, of course, had had a slave - a Cotrian from the In Islands, for he did not believe northerners could be trained - whose sole job it was to sit in the little alcove off the vestibule and answer the door, so there had been none of this yelling out the windows business. He still remembered the blue-and-white flowered tiles of the alcove's floor and the man's matching blue tunic. Now, if I put a wizard's mark on the door that said, 'I'm coming' in a low, polite voice...



But Shavus and Jaldis had known wizards who had done things of the kind. Aside from the difficulty of any long-distance spell of speaking - and fifty feet was a long distance for such a spell - the usual result was to fuel the fires of public uneasiness about wizards in general and add to their reputation of uncanniness and danger. Wizards who used their powers in such a fashion frequently found themselves being shot with poisoned darts from ambush or having their houses burned above their heads.



Of course, Rhion thought wryly, hurrying down the length of the shadowy kitchen and glancing unconsciously up at the place in the rafters where Tally had expected to see a stuffed crocodile, wizards who don't use their powers thus are just as likely to have the goon squads after them, armed with weapons on which Spells of Silence have been laid, so how much odds does it make?



He opened the door, smiling as he recalled the obsequious grace of old Minervum back home, who could make of the act a favor, a privilege, or an insult at will...



A very grubby fourteen-year-old girl stood there, clad in shabby silk obviously stolen from a much older and wealthier woman, combs of steel and tortoiseshell gleaming at careless random in the dirty snarl of her hair. In her arms she held a huge black book.



"My Mom says a customer brung this in," she said, with a jerk of her head back toward the pawnshop a little further up the court. "She says she can't sell the thing 'ceptin' for kindling paper, but you witches might want to buy it. It's thirty dequins."



It was the Book of Circles that Jaldis had put a come-back spell on, in the attic of the Black Pig.