The Rainbow Abyss

LATER RHION SUPPOSED HE could have thrown something - the tin basin of dishwater, a chair, anything - at Esrex' guards to slow them down. But at the moment, he didn't think of it, and it probably would have done him more harm than good. Smashing their way down the length of the room, they caught him when he was three-quarters of the way up the ladder to the room above, tearing his hands by main force from the rungs and striking him with their spear butts when he kicked at their faces. A blow caught him over the kidneys, the pain stopping his breath; as he crumpled, retching, to the stone floor he heard them in the room above. "What the..." "Look under the beds..." "Try the chest..." The sound of crashing furniture, the scrape of a bedstead on the floor. Someone kicked him in the side. The room around him was a fevered harlequin of torchlight and clawing shadows. The clay earth smell of the floor choked his nostrils, and the sweat-and-leather stink of the guards.



"Where is he?"



Rhion managed to shake his head "He went up there... if he's gone, I don't know..."



The guard kicked him again, sending him crashing against the wall. The next second he was grabbed by the front of his robe and hauled to his feet, pain stabbing him in the side so sharply that for a moment he thought one of them had put a dagger into him. The kick must have broken a rib. Two of them dragged him to the hearth, where the remains of the small supper fire still smoldered. One held him by an arm twisted behind his back while the other pokered aside the layer of ash, exposing the glowing core of embers beneath. Rhion struggled desperately as they caught his hand, forced it toward the simmering heat. "Where is he... ?"



"Don't waste time." Esrex turned his head a little toward them, fragile profile stained amber by the sudden renewal of the flames. "Get out and search the area. The old man's a cripple; he can't have gone far. And in any case," he added maliciously, as the guards paused, holding Rhion's hand so close to the coals that the heat of them seared the hairs on his fingers, "we don't want to burn his right hand. He'll need that to sign his confession."



Even in that extremity, it flashed through Rhion's mind to mention to Esrex that he was left-handed, but that, he knew, would be asking for a shovelful of coals in his palm. He was slammed back against the wall with another knife thrust of pain, but through a gray tide of sweating nausea he managed to gasp, "Confession of what?"



Guards were streaming out of the house, into the square, the alleyways around it, and across the roofs. He's blind, Rhion thought desperately. Without magic to work the voice-box he's mute, a cripple... A guardswoman came up from the cellar with surprising speed after she'd gone down. "Nobody down there - nothing but witchery, some kind of demon-magic..."



The Well would be quiescent, Rhion thought blankly - a pity. One of them might have fallen into it...



And much as he hated the thing, he felt a pang at its destruction. All Jaldis' work...



Esrex paused directly in front of him, thin and incisive as broken glass. "The confession that's going to greet his Grace when he and the Earl of the Purple Forest return to Bragenmere late tonight," he said softly. "The confession that the child my dear little cousin carries in her belly is yours."



He was already cold with shock, but still he felt as if the floor had sunk away beneath his feet. "That's impossible."



"Oh, come..."



Rhion started to speak, then bit his tongue, realizing that his blurted protest would have been a confession. I've been using spells of barrenness on her to prevent that, dammit!



"Her chamber woman is my fellow initiate in the rites of Agon, you see," Esrex went on, apparently absorbed in smoothing the pearl-stitched kid of his glove ever more closely over his thin-fingered, childlike hands, but watching Rhion from beneath colorless lashes as he spoke. "The information one learns at the Temple is well worth what one gets under one's nails. There is no question that she has put horns on the Earl. That's all I really need to prevent that traitor Prinagos from allying himself with decent families, always supposing one could describe the Muriks as decent... But it will give me considerable pleasure," he went on, and looked up with a thin little smile, teeth small as rice grains in the parting of his fieshless lips, "to see you, my arrogant little warlock, pay the fullest possible penalty for rape."



Half the population of Shuttlefly Court was gathered around the door to watch Esrex' bravos manhandle Rhion out into the darkness. The torchlight showed him their faces - the tired, dirty, or unshaven faces of the weavers to whom he'd sold herbal simples, the painted faces of the whores who'd bought luck-charms and spells of barrenness from him and the snaggle-haired brown faces of the laundrywomen who'd come to him to have their fortunes read. The faces were blank and noncommittal, like the faces of people passing by a dog dying on the side of the road. Something struck his back and he heard a child's singsong giggle: "Wi-zard, wi-zard, Turn you into a li-zard..." and shrieks of nervous laughter from the other children in the square.



Another clear little treble crowed, "Witch, witch, Give you the itch..." and a rotting peach squished soggily against his sleeve. The two guards who weren't searching the neighborhood for Jaldis roped his wrists together and mounted their horses. Nobody even called out, What'd he do? They all knew what he'd probably done, having heard it traded back and forth in taverns all their lives: poisoned an old man to get his money, seduced an honest woman by means of spells, blackmailed a woman who came to him for help, and ruined someone - businessman, baker, farmer - by putting an Eye on their shop or stove or cattle...



Jaldis, dammit, get the hell out of town if you can... The men kicked their horses to a trot and he stumbled after them, grimly determined to keep up and wondering if he could. The pain in his side was unbelievable, turning him queasy and faint, but he knew if he fell there would be no getting up. As they disappeared around the corner into Thimble Lane he saw from the tail of his eye two of the local loiterers, pine-knot torches in hand, go curiously, cautiously into the house he and Jaldis had shared, looking to see what pickings they could find.



The horsemen avoided the main streets where farm carts would be clattering to the markets until dawn, taking instead the crisscrossing mazes of smaller alleys and back lanes, dark as pitch save for the light of the torches they bore. Rhion managed to stay on his feet through the dirt lanes of the Old Town, though the dust thrown up by the hooves nearly choked him and the pain in his side brought him close to fainting. He fell on the steep cobbled rise that led to the golden lamps and walled mansions of the Upper Town. Unable to get on his feet again, he concentrated what strength he had on keeping his head clear of the granite chunks that paved the street and not passing out. It wasn't far - at most a hundred feet - but he was nearly unconscious when they came to a stop in a granite-paved court.



"Where's the other one?" a voice demanded, and Rhion moved his head groggily, trying to see where he was. It was useless. His spectacles had been knocked off somewhere during the journey, and all he had was a blurred impression of towering dark walls. But the smell of the place was enough to tell him. Not a tree, not a fountain, not a statue broke the dark monolithic walls around him - no smell on the turgid night of water, flowers, grass, or any of the dungs people paid for when they bought houses in the Upper Town... Only stone. And far-off, the mingled scents of incense and blood.



And terrible silence, the silence of the brooding god.



The Temple of Agon.



"Got out through a roof-trap," Esrex' light, steely voice said. A slim pillar of white in the flare of the torchlight, he stood surrounded by three or four - it was difficult to tell without spectacles - pillars of shrouded black. The pearls braided into his hair gleamed dimly as he turned his head. "He won't get far; anyway, this is the one we need."



Rhion barely heard the sound of footfalls as one black figure detached itself from the group and walked to where he lay, torn flesh bleeding through the tatters of his torn robe. Looking up he saw nothing, only the pale hands protruding from beneath the cloudy black layers of veiling. But he felt the eyes. The voice was high and epicene - it could have been male or female, chilled and frigid with self-righteous spite.



"I suspect the Duke will have a different opinion of wizardry when faced with a man who used those powers to seduce his daughter."



Rhion turned over, his body hurting as if he had been beaten with clubs, to look across at where Esrex still stood. "And what about a woman who used those powers to seduce her own husband?" he asked, fighting for breath, surprised at how changed his voice sounded in his own ears - slurred like a drunkard's. He tasted blood as he spoke. "Or did you think that fit of lust you had for Damson last spring was the result of some new perfume she wore?"



The priests of Agon looked at one another for a moment, and for that moment, Esrex did not move. Then, without hurry, he walked to the nearest doorway, where a painted clay lamp burned upon a stand. Taking it, he blew it out and came back to where Rhion lay. The priest standing near-by stepped aside, and Esrex removed the lamp's top and poured the oil deliberately down over Rhion's face, hair, and the front of his robe. Then he took a torch from the nearest guard.



"Repeat that lie again," he said quietly, "and you'll discover that there are worse things than the penalty for forcing a virgin to open her legs to you by means of your spells. For myself I don't care - a true man cannot be affected by such tricks - but you have slandered a good and loyal woman for whom my love has never wavered since first I saw her face. As she will attest." And he slashed down with the torch.



Rhion twisted aside as well as he could, covering his face with his oil-soaked arms and thinking, Nice. Got any other clever ideas...? He felt the heat of the flames, flickering inches from his cheek, tried desperately not to think about what would happen next... Opening his eyes after a hideously long moment he could see Esrex' feet, close enough to his face to be more or less clear to him. With bizarre irony, he saw that Esrex still wore the long-toed shoes of embroidered ivory satin he'd had on the day of their confrontation in the grotto.



"Remember," Esrex' voice said above him, "that we don't really need you alive." He handed the torch back to the guard. "Now take him away."



They put him in a sort of watching room in the temple's vaults, tying his hands to an iron ring in the wall. Three or four men were on guard there, wearing the rough tunics and baggy trousers of laborers or slaves. Masks covered their faces, but Rhion guessed, looking near-sightedly at the hard-muscled brown arms and thighs, that two of them at least were "liverymen" - household guards - of noble or wealthy families, either freedmen or slaves on a night off doing service at the beck of the priests whose followers they were. Others might have been city ditch diggers, or chair bearers - the cult of Agon welcomed men and women, children, too, of all classes, anyone who could be of use. All of these, to judge by their conversation, were ignorant, foulmouthed, and delighted to have someone helpless and in their power.



It was a hellish night. The room was smotheringly hot, the smoldering torches set all around the walls not only adding to the accumulated heat of the day but contributing smoke as well. The men joked, diced, and passed a skin of cheap wine among themselves, but never took their eyes from their prisoner. The ring in the wall was just high enough that Rhion was unable to lie down. Though his wrists had stopped bleeding, the pain and cramps in his arms and shoulders grew steadily worse until he had to set his teeth to remain silent. The reek of the smoke, of the guards, of stale wine, and of the oil that still soaked his hair and beard and clothes turned him faint and sick, and he wondered if the priests of Darova were right and there was a hell, and he'd somehow ended up there without either dying or being judged...



The guards sprang to their feet, bowing in obeisance. Silent as the shadow of a crow, a black-veiled priest glided in. They must train them to walk that way, Rhion thought distractedly. The priest said no word, but, at a sign from him, two of the guards pulled Rhion to his feet and held his arms and his head while the priest drew from his robes a steel needle and a tiny vial of some liquid with which he coated the needle's tip before stabbing it, hard and accurately, into the big veins of Rhion's neck.



Then he left again, without speaking a word.



More pheelas, Rhion thought groggily, as he sank back to the floor. Did that mean Jaldis might, by this time, be regaining some of his power to use his spectacles - if he had his spectacles with him - or his voice-box? Or had they caught him already and kicked him to death against some alley wall like men frugeing a rat? And anyway, where could he go? Criminals frequently sought sanctuary in the temples, but no cult offered sanctuary to wizards. Wizardry was an offense to the power of all gods. There was not one, not even Mhorvianne the Merciful, who would let the mageborn hide in the smallest fold of their robes.



He thought about Jaldis, hauling himself painfully along the smelly back streets of Bragenmere, blind and voiceless, about the gangs of drunkards who prowled the streets on summer nights, beating up anyone they saw, and about the pickpockets and thieves who haunted the alleyways, who would kill a man for his boots...



And Tally? What the hell had happened to Tally?



Could she really be with child?



It had to be a trap, he thought frantically. Even if she had another lover besides himself - which he knew down to the marrow of his bones she had not - the spells by which he prevented her from conceiving would have worked, no matter who she lay with. Dammit, I know I'm not that powerful a mage, but I can at least get that spell right. It's not as if she were using a counterspell against it...



And then the warm sweetness of the marshes of the Kairn River came back to him, the green, musky smell of the reeds and the silken murmur of the water, striped sunlight playing over Tally's creamy skin. Damson's been plying me with every kind of herb and tea and potion she knows...



Damson.



...she keeps saying, 'Oh, when you bear your husband's child you'll know what true happiness is...'



He remembered how, long ago, Tally had come to him to buy a philter to make Damson's life better without her sister's knowledge. It would not have taken malice - only Damson's eager good will. The wedding coming up, Damson aglow in the joy of her own pregnancy... the tincture Jaldis had mixed for her in the candlelit dimness of that painted room...



"Hey!"



Rhion looked up, startled, as a rough hand seized his hair and cracked his head back against the stonewall behind him. One of his guards stood over him, a vast blur against the torchlight, cheap wine stinking in his sweat.



"You quit that, you hear?"



"Quit what?" Rhion demanded, too startled to realize that he should simply agree and profusely apologize.



The man kicked him. "You know what, you little witch-bitch. I haven't won a pot in fifty throws and I want you to quit witching the goddam dice or I'll light that goddam beard of yours on fire, and we'll see how fast you can witch it out."



Exasperated, Rhion snapped, "Look, moron, if I had the ability at the moment to work any magic at all, why the hell would I waste my time screwing up your dice game when I could use it instead to untie these festering ropes and get myself the hell out of this mess?"



The guard struck him, hard, across the face - definitely a chair carrier, Rhion thought, tasting the blood as the cuts on his mouth opened up again. "Don't you get smart with me, you little..."



"Hell..." Another guard came over, bored with dicing, not drunk enough to be careless, but drunk enough to have the wicked inventiveness of drunks. He took the nearest torch from the wall and brought it down close to Rhion's face. "Let's light his beard on fire anyway. We don't got any water down here, but we all been drinkin' that wine, and maybe if he begs us real pretty we could put out the fire by..."



"Heads up!" another by the door called, and the man with the torch turned swiftly, putting it back in its holder in the wall as a priest entered, black clouds of veils billowing eerily around him like the smoke of a fire without light.



"Bring him."



The cell they took him to was small, hotter if anything than the watching room. But if the priest who waited for him, sitting behind the single table of spare dark wood, felt any discomfort in his long robes of black wool and the veils that shrouded his face, he gave no sign of it. By the way the guards and the other priests bowed - by the height of the headdress that supported the cloudy frame of veils - Rhion guessed this must be Mijac, Agon's High Priest in Bragenmere, though it was impossible to be sure.



Was that, he wondered with exhausted detachment, one of the strengths of the cult? That its servants served in secret, even from one another? That the masks that covered the faces of the guards in the watch room, the veils that hid the priests, concealed them, not only from outsiders, not only from each other's witnessing, but from themselves?



He looked up at the men beside him and behind him, whose strength, he suspected, was the only thing keeping him on his feet. They might be slaves of a man, of the city, or certainly of economic realities, but their wills had once been their own. Now they had given their wills to Agon, and it was Agon who acted through them - they could spy upon their benefactors, they could betray their friends, they could torture the weak, prostitute themselves, beat a helpless old cripple to death in an alleyway, and remain, in their hearts, good people, kindly people, men and women worthy of regard, because it was, after all, the Veiled God who was acting, not them.



They shoved him forward, and he had to catch the edge of the table in his bound hands, his legs shaking under him. Without his spectacles, he wouldn't have been able to see the priest's face at this distance, anyway, but there was something unnerving about those blowing curtains of black, through which only a white blur was dimly visible, and the gleam of eyes.



A gloved black hand thrust a sheet of paper across the polished tabletop and offered him a quill. "Sign it."



He picked up the paper, his numb fingers barely able to close around the edge, and held it where he could read it, about a handbreadth from his nose. He caught the words, by means of potions forced her to yield to my lusts... before a guard ripped it from his grasp.



"He said sign it, not read it."



"It's lies," Rhion said quietly.



Mijac's voice, behind the veils, was startlingly deep, a beautiful bass, like the deep boom of distant thunder. "What does that have to do with it?"



"Oh, I forgot," Rhion said, still holding himself up by the edge of the table, blood, lamp-oil, and sweat dripping down his matted hair and onto the paper before him. "Lies are the common coin of Agon."



Mijac reached out and wiped the droplets carefully from the document with one gloved fingertip. "As they are of wizards," he returned calmly. The veils shuddered and moved as he leaned back in his chair again. "You are the architects of lies, the artists of illusion - the thieves of matters which should be left to the gods. When a man sees a monkey running about with a man's dagger in its hand, does he stop to inquire of the animal what it intends to do with the weapon? Of course not. And when other men begin to turn to that monkey in respect, bow to it with hand on brow and ask its advice... then it is time for sane men to step in and correct matters. Is it true that the Lady Damson used a love-philter to bring her husband to her bed last spring?"



Rhion's arms had begun to shake with fatigue - he stiffened them desperately, feeling darkness chew on the edges of his vision, a strange, detached numbness creeping over his chest. Don't faint now, dammit.



"Why don't you ask her husband?"



"Lord Esrex has his uses," the priest replied in a mild tone. "He and his wife are holding the Lady Tallisett now, awaiting his Grace's return. But knowledge is always a helpful thing to have."



"Provided you get your facts straight. Who told you I was supposed to be the girl's lover?"



"The girl herself," Mijac said. "And Jaldis confirmed it before he died."



Rhion looked up quickly, his face ashen.



"They found him in an alley behind the Temple of Darova. I had given them no specific instructions - perhaps the men thought it would be easier than carrying him here. The lower orders are lazy that way. Now sign."



Sickness and grief washed him like rising tide; even his blurred myopia was darkening. His voice sounded oddly distant through the ringing in his ears. "It's a lie." Tally would never have betrayed him... there was no way of telling whether anything Mijac said was the truth...



"What is not a lie," the priest's voice came from, it seemed, farther and farther away, "is that a man can live a long time while his bones are being broken and the splinters pulled out of his flesh, so I advise you to sign before you have cause to find out how much truth I can speak..."



"My lord!"



Rhion's hands slipped from the table, and he felt someone catch him, supporting him as the rising darkness closed over his head. Voices came from out of that darkness, dim and muffled, like words heard underwater. He struggled to surface again, to breathe...



"It's the Duke! He's at the gates..."



A chair scraped as it was pushed back. Dimly, Rhion reflected that it was the first sound of agitated movement he'd heard from the priests of the Veiled God. "Right," Mijac said softly, and there was a momentary pause. Then, "There's no help for it. Finish him."



A huge hand gripped him under the chin and forced his head back.



"Not here, you fool - in the cellar where the blood can drain. And hurry..."



Rhion lashed out feebly with his bound hands, with some idea of struggling, fighting, delaying until the Duke could reach them, until he could tell him... Tell him what? That Tally had cuckolded his prospective ally?



But before he'd thought that far, something hard and heavy cracked over the back of his skull.



He came to lying on a stone floor, thinking, Well, so much for that idea...



Arthritis-twisted hands touched his face. In his dazed exhaustion the buzzing voice sounded no louder than a mosquito's hum. "Rhion? My son..."



And above him, as his mind slowly cleared and he thought, He did lie... he heard Mijac's deep, ringing tones. "We have broken no law, my lord."



Rhion opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor halfway down a dark stone hallway, through which he cloudily recalled passing on the way to Mijac's cell. A door at the far end had been opened - the movement of the tepid night air broke the stifling heat.



And surrounded by torchlight and soldiers in cloaks the color of new blood, the Duke stood framed against the heavy trapezoid of the opened doors, hands upon his hips and traveling clothes flashing with tiny mirrors and knots of gold.



"No," he said quietly. "You have broken no law, my lord Mijac. But you have disrupted my pleasure and you have done injury to my friends."



He walked forward, his gilded boots creaking faintly in the absolute hush. The priests and the masked volunteers surrounding Rhion where he lay retreated a little, leaving only Jaldis and Mijac near him.



"I met him on the rise of land before the palace gates," Jaldis murmured swiftly, beneath the voices of Duke and High Priest. "I knew he must pass by there - I listened for the sound of many horses..." Even without his spectacles, Rhion saw how torn and filthy the old man's brown robe was, how gutter-slime smutched his face and beard and matted the ends of his thin white hair, as if he had fallen - or been kicked - over and over into the Old Town's garbage and dust. His hands were trembling as he pulled the bonds from Rhion's wrists, the dirty orange lamplight in the hall making a hundred juddering reflections in the crystal facets of his spectacle-lenses.



"Your friends?" Mijac's inflection twisted irony from the word like spilled wine wrung from a rag. "No more than they have done injury to you, Lord Duke." He stepped forward, holding out the yellow paper. "You see that it is signed."



The Duke took the confession and read it through. The priests and their followers murmured in the shadows at the inner end of the hall. Gently Jaldis helped Rhion to sit up. Marc of Erralswan, like a shining bronze god in his armor, made a move as if to assist and then seemed to think better of committing himself. At that distance, five or six feet, Rhion could not see Dinar of Mere's fleshy features well enough to judge his thoughts - only a stylized blocking of light and shadow, bronze and blue and black. Of course Mijac would sign it himself, he thought, with a resigned weariness that made him wonder objectively if he was going to faint again. He was only surprised they'd bothered to try forcing him actually to sign in the first place. As Esrex had said, they didn't really need him to.



Without speaking, the Duke came over to where the two wizards sat, filthy, bloody, and ragged as beggars, on the polished floor, and it seemed to Rhion that Agon's faceless servants fell back a little further, leaving him and his master completely alone. For a time the Duke stood looking down on them, the old man he had befriended and to whom he had sent gifts and publicly shown his regard and the young one to whom he'd confidently given the freedom of his house. His eyes went from them to the confession in his hand, a confession of betrayal, cynicism, and rape. Then he reached down, took Rhion's left hand and turned it over in his, all streaked as it was with blood and sweat and lamp oil. Straightening up, he looked again at the paper, clean and unstained from top to bottom. And, still without a word, he held the confession to the flame of the nearest torch.



"Bring him to the palace," he said quietly, after he had dropped the burning scrap to the floor and trodden it underfoot. "I think we need the truth."



The smell of smoke hung in the air behind them as they left the silent priests of shadow and went out into the night.