The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1) - Page 7

VERY NICE, RHION, he thought, surveying the shuddering brown waters of the marsh through a haze of wind-thrashed rain that had already rendered his spectacles opaque with spatterings. Have we got any other clever ideas? Like maybe drowning yourself to really throw them off the track?

He'd long ago shaken off his pursuers. With the spell-entangled poppy seed he had woven a wide pocket of disorientation, of subtle confusion, and a tendency to poor guesses and errors of judgment; in two other places he had left spell-lines of invisible brightness to tangle and turn the feet. Unfortunately, unfamiliar with the Limitations inherent in these spells and even more unfamiliar with the terrain of the marshes themselves, he was beginning to suspect that he had inadvertently stumbled back through his own spell-fields himself. He certainly seemed to have missed his way in circling back to his boat, or else the tide had begun to come in, changing the water levels around all the islets and altering or obliterating his bearing marks. It was astonishing how even six inches of water altered the appearance of a snag or root and its relationship with the shore. He'd taken as a guide mark the lights of another islet where the Priestesses of the Moon had occupied an old summer palace, but uncannily those lights seemed to have moved…

Then it had begun to rain. Rhion had already fallen through a pothole, soaking him to the waist in muddy water and tearing boot leather and the flesh of his calves on the splintery wood of a submerged branch – he had spent a panicked, agonizing half-hour in extricating himself. The cold had begun to sap his energy, making it harder still to concentrate.

And the tide was now very definitely coming in.

Emerging from the black curtains of a reed bed Rhion found that his bearing light had unaccountably shifted again. It was only when he heard laughter, thin and dry as ripping silk, seeming to drift from nowhere in the pitchy blackness all around him, that he realized that the light he had been following had been conjured by grims to lead him still further astray.

Maybe at this point drowning myself would be simpler after all.

He turned back to see grims swarming the reeds behind him like cold, glowing lice in a beggar's hair, and their pallid skeleton shapes twisted around the willow knees of the hummock he'd just quitted as he waded back to it along the submerged and slimy roots. At his approach the wraiths opened cold-burning mouths to hiss and bite, and backed away, still hissing, as he summoned a furious blaze of witchfire to the end of his boat pole and swung at them; their shrieks of laughter shivered in the streaming darkness after they had slipped out of sight into the trunks of the trees. Scrambling and slipping over the roots, Rhion reflected that coming back to the islet had done him damn little good – by the feel of the slime on the trunks the place would be chin-deep in three hours.

In the distance he thought he could hear women's voices calling out to him, but could not be sure – it might very well be the grims. Panting and shivering, he scrambled as high up the willow roots as he could, but the reed beds hemmed him in with a wall of whispering black. He called out, but gusts of wind clashed in the sedges, and the rattle of rain on the waters all around him drowned out his shouts; the wind cut through his wet clothing, chilling him to the bone, and the voices faded.

Rhion had begun to feel a little frightened. He could sense deeper cold coming in on the heels of the rain, cold enough to frost hard, even this close to the sea. His clothes were soaked and his leg throbbed, and he knew he had to find shelter before morning. He did not know how deep into the marshes he was, but he guessed, from the grims' propensity for leading travelers astray, that he was miles from the nearest habitation – even if he called a bright blaze of witchlight, he wasn't sure the Ladies, if they were searching, would follow it. They, too, would be familiar with the ways of the grims.

He fished his scrying-crystal from his pocket and squinted at it in the pelting rain. Even calling witchlight over his head to create the needed reflection in its surface, he had to hold it inches from the end of his nose to see anything – a gust of wind blew rain into his eyes, and he edged around towards the lee side of the willow…

Beneath his feet the tangle of heather and vines gave downward with a sodden, splintery crack. Rhion yelped and clutched at the roots as he fell past them, but the whole footing caved in around him, dropping him down into blackness and freezing water. Bark tore at his palms as he grabbed the willow knees; with a hard jerk, he broke his fall, dangling by his hands in pitch blackness, the rain falling on his face and the coal-black water lapping and gurgling around his armpits and chin.

And below the water, a faint glow of blue passed through the blackness, and cold fingers closed around his ankles and pulled.

"Dammit!" Rhion yelled, genuinely frightened now. "You scum-eating… Celfriagnogast, dammit… CELFRIAGNOGAST…" He yelled one of the few words of power known to be effective against water-goblins, but other hands gripped his feet, tugging and scratching; he felt things pick and tear at his robe, felt stirring in the black waters all around him.

Don't panic, he thought desperately, if you panic you can't make it work…

It was perhaps one of the hardest things he'd done, to calm his mind and enter the mental state where magic can be made, to draw power from within himself, to repeat the words of power, the illusions of light and pain. The goblin fingers slacked – keeping the magic in his mind he kicked viciously at the underwater things, and felt them slither away with a few final, angry bites. His hands clawed at the roots and vines over his head, feeling them shift and sag with the swaying of his weight…

Lady of the Moon, please don't let the grims come back to chew my hands…

Somewhere above him, distant across the water, he heard a voice crying, "RHION!"

"HERE!!!" he bellowed, squirming as carefully as he could to readjust his hold of the vines; gingerly, painfully, he pulled himself up through the crackling, soggy mess into the air again. Rain lashed at his face and whipped the head-high reeds all around the islet into a churning sea of invisible movement; he flung upwards the illusion of a ball of witchfire, climbing like a carnival rocket to burst in the black air.

"Rhion… !"

"Over here, Rhion!" cried another mocking voice from somewhere in the reeds, imitating words and thoughts with the uncanny mimicry of the Children of the Dusky Air.

"Rhion my love…"

"Here, my darling…"

"This way, beautiful princess…" A scattered coruscation of lights flared, small and blue and cold, among the impenetrable sedges, sparkling in the pelting rain.

Cursing at the grims, Rhion groped for the boat pole which he'd let fall – it was seven feet long and hadn't dropped through the roots into oblivion, which was more than could be said of his scrying-crystal – and, using it to probe the muck in front of him, he waded out through the reeds again.

The bobbing yellow glow of lantern light swung out over the pounded water; behind it, he made out a shallow punt and a cloaked figure poling, bent under the downpour. Rhion flung up a bright glow of magelight all around him – the grims hissed and shrieked with laughter, and the figure on the prow of the punt straightened up, slashing at the air with her open hands.

"Go!" The flute-sweet voice was no longer rosewood, but jade, or what music would be if diamonds could be wrought to create it, hard and sparkling and blazing with a dreadful power. "Get thee gone, Alseigodath, Children of the Second Creation… Go!" And her voice scaled up into a drawn-out cry, cold and strong and flaming with power, shaping words Rhion did not understand. Through the darkness he could see her face, knowing it for hers, though the features were unclear, reflecting a lightless glory like levin fire on silver. Her long hair swirled in the rain. The laughter in the darkness around them turned to cries of terror; Rhion felt the air thrum, as if under the beating of a holocaust of wings.

Then there was only the driving silence of the rain and the dark woman in the sodden cloak poling her boat toward him, shading her eyes to peer past the lantern's light.

"Are you all right?"

"I feel like a drowned mole, but other than that… Is there a way to get on one of those things without tipping you over?"

"Lie flat over the gunwales and turn… There!" She bent and caught a handful of sodden robe, pulling him up amidships with a soggy splash. Rhion saw that the punt was little better than a narrow raft, and already half-full of rain. Stoically, his drenched robe dragging at his every joint, he found the small bucket and began to bail while the Lady poled around the edge of the reed bed, and out across the black waters again.

It wasn't until they reached an island that promised a core of solid rock that either one spoke, except to exchange information about the water level in the punt, or instructions regarding its beaching among the clustering snags. The Lady led the way up a short path to what had been a hilltop shrine, its airy pillared walls now blocked in with rough-mortared stone. Inside, a small quantity of dry wood and sea coal were heaped upon a crude hearth; beside them lay dry blankets.

"There are a number of such places, refuges for lost travelers," the Gray Lady said, wringing out her wet hair as Rhion kindled fire on the hearth. "There are spells laid on them of summoning those who are cold and frightened – we were hoping you'd come to one eventually. Rhion, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry. We never thought you'd see us, much less…"

"Much less try to lead you astray in your own back garden?" He grinned up at her, shaking the rainwater out of his tangled curls. "I admit it takes a special kind of stupidity to try a trick like that." He fumbled in his pocket for his spectacles, all blotted and smeared with the greasiness of being wrapped in soaked wool – he wondered how he'd ever get them clean and dry and simply gave up on it, replacing them where they had been.

Her breath escaped her in a soft laugh, half with amusement at his self-mockery and half with relief. "We were worried about you…" With a simple natural modesty she gathered a blanket to her and, turning her back on him, pulled off her sodden dress and the shift underneath, letting them fall with a wet splat on the marble floor. While her back was turned Rhion likewise stripped off his robes, wrapping himself in a blanket and sitting down before the coin-bright newness of the fire to pick apart the torn ruin of his boot.

"Let me see that… We meant to trick you into moving the books to a new place – a place we'd be watching, of course – but never that you'd come to harm." She reached over to her wet clothes and disentangled her belt-pouch from the mess, drawing out several small packets of herbs wrapped securely in waxed cloth. "We didn't even know we'd been seen until we ran into your spells of misdirection…"

"Well, they must have been pretty good, since I walked back through them and got lost myself," Rhion sighed. "At least, I'd like to think that was what happened and not that I just got lost like any other fool who goes wading around the marshes at night… Ow! If that cut didn't get sufficiently washed in three hours of wading I don't know what it would take to get it clean…"

"That should hold till we get back in the morning." She bent over the bandaging of the makeshift poultice, murmuring herbwife spells; at the touch of her fingers, Rhion felt the pain lessen. Reaction was stealing over him, with the warmth of the little stone room and the fatigue that follows prolonged exertion in the cold. He leaned back against the wall and listened to the low, sweet voice as he would have listened to the rain, without trying to disentangle the spells she wove, only hearing in them the sounds of healing and of peace. He found himself wondering what her name had been and whether, if she had been born in some inland village or hill march, she would have found apprenticeship to some Earth-witch and eventually have become a village healer…

Or would the call of the Goddess have brought her to this place, wherever she had been born?

What would have happened to him, he wondered, had he been born a farmer's son a hundred miles from the nearest city, with no way to learn of wizardry and magic, no way to meet Jaldis. Or was it like the summoning spells on the books, he wondered. But then who was the summoner, and whom the summoned?

In the firelight, without his spectacles, her face seemed younger but very tired, the face of the girl she had been.

And if she had been born the daughter of a Duke?

Father needs an alliance… It isn't a question of what I want…

But that was something of which he could not bear to think.

She raised her head, her eyes seeming darker, like blue amber, mingled browns and russets, and treacle golds. "The books would have been returned, you know," she said. There was apology in her voice.

She moved around to sit beside him, the rough stone-wall poking them both in the back. "You would not even have known they'd been taken, read, the major spells copied…" An expression almost like pain drew at the corners of her generous mouth, and her broad brow darkened.

"The Goddess enjoins us to welcome sojourners in need, to help them. I know that what I have done is not the act of a host." She sighed, and passed a hand across her face, shaking aside the wet trail of hair from the blanket where it lay across her shoulder.

"But you have told us how you live and what became of Jaldis' other books in Felsplex. You've seen the books in our Library – old and crumbling, some of them, and some of them the only copies left of certain volumes, certain spells, certain knowledge… And of some books we know only their names, know only that they existed once. Paper is only paper, Rhion. Flesh is only flesh."

Profiled in the amber nimbus of the fire her face was tired, and infinitely sad. Perhaps it was that which broke the wall of his mistrust: the hunger, the sadness, and the yearning that were his own birthright of wizardry. The fire burned out of its first leaping brightness and settled down to a steady, crackling warmth, the rain's drumming eased as the sea-wind carried the somber clouds west to the stony uplands of Way, and their talk turned to other things. He had not forgotten the cold, bright power of her voice as she drove the grims away, nor the dreadful strength of the spells she had cast upon his mind – but he perceived that the power she held was only a part of her, and that at heart, within, she was very like himself. In the warmth and pleasant weariness as they sat together he put his arm around her shoulders, and later, when she turned to him, he did not turn away.

Rhion was the Gray Lady's lover until the equinox of spring. He never did quite trust her where the books were concerned, but he liked her enormously, both as a lover and as a friend. In an odd way he felt safer, sensing that she was not a woman to weave the secrets of a man's bed and body into spells of coercion; there were magics, too, that wizards used in the bedroom which nonwizards – the tavern girls in Felsplex, or the Marshmen – found unnerving.

It would have been different, had he not known that Tally could never be his.

He knew that the Lady had had other lovers. Indeed, two of the children who sometimes accompanied the Marshfolk to the Islands had her square face and snub nose, and he had heard Channa the cook speak matter-of-factly of "the Lady's husband." But it wasn't until shortly before the equinox that he saw this man, a slender, gray-haired Marshman with a deeply lined face and twinkling eyes, when he came to the Islands to speak to her about the forthcoming spring rites.

"The chieftain of the Marshfolk is always the Lady's husband," Jaldis explained on one of the rare clear evenings when he and Rhion sat on the ruinous stone terrace along the water, observing the movement of the stars. The Moon had not yet risen – sprinkled with diamond fire, the huge arch of darkness seemed hard and shatteringly deep. "I'm told sometimes another man – or occasionally a woman – will ask to take the husband's place in the rites, but it's usually the Lady's husband… Have they asked you to preside over their rites at the turning of spring?"

The old man spoke without taking his concentration from the silver astrolabe he held, sighting above the lacy clouds of trees on the next island for the first appearance of the star called the Red Pilgrim. But there was, in spite of his efforts to conceal it, an edge to his voice. Across the marshes, the duck-like quacking of the first wood frogs could he heard; farther upriver, Rhion knew, in the wet meadows the sheep would be starting to lamb. The old man had only shaken his head when Rhion had told him about the Lady, but Rhion was aware these days that Jaldis was keeping a rather close eye on the hidden books. As soon as he'd been strong enough to go there himself Jaldis had marked the place with his own seals and, Rhion knew, had fallen into the habit of checking on them often.

This stung him a little, though he perfectly understood the concern. He didn't think the Gray Lady would – or could – use magic on him without his knowledge, but that conviction in itself, he was well aware, might have been induced by some spell more subtle than he could fathom. That she was stronger than he, he had always known.

He sighed and propped his spectacles back into place with his forefinger, keeping his attention on identifying the positions of various changeable stars. "They asked me if I'd attend, but they didn't say anything about presiding. Wouldn't the Lady herself do that?"

"Male magic and female work differently in their system," the old man replied, "as I'm sure you know. Here, see? The Pilgrim star is in twenty degrees of ascension, in the constellation of the Child." Since both of them knew that a quarrel would be based, at heart, in completely irrational feelings, neither was willing to step over the tacitly drawn lines. Thus many of their conversations had an oddly informational quality these days, something Rhion guessed would pass in time, when they left Sligo.

"Talismans of protection seem to be influenced by this position, those made while that star is in ascendance having a greater efficacy, especially against poison, though conversely poisons, too, brewed in conjunction with death-spells, have greater strength… Very curious."

He turned to regard his student, pinpricks of starlight twinkling deep within the bulging plates of jewels which hid what remained of his eyes. "Certainly men and women are trained in different techniques. They generally have a man to preside over the rites."

"Is it something you don't advise?"

"There is no reason why you shouldn't attend." The old man flicked back a spider-floss strand of his hair, and cocked his head like a bird. "You'll find it interesting. The principles of magic per se have become deeply corrupted here and mixed with what was, originally, a religious cult, as I'm sure you've seen. The equinox rites clearly have their roots in what elsewhere came to be celebrated as the Carnival of Mhorvianne – the powers evoked at the turning of the four balance-points of the celestial year they attribute to the favor of their goddess rather than to the strength of their own wizardry and the nature of the cosmos itself. But it is never an ill thing to witness the raising of power, nor the shapes taken by the human soul."

Still, it was with an irrational sense of disharmony, almost of guilt, that Rhion made his way in company with the Ladies and nearly all the folk of the marshes along the curved, gray beach of the Holy Isle at sunset of the equinox eve. Jaldis had remained behind in the main cluster of the islands, perhaps the only man in the lands of Sligo to do so, in order to work his own conjurations, calling the powers generated by the stars' balance to strengthen the spells on their medicinal herbs.

Without a word being said, Rhion knew that what Jaldis had really wanted to do was weave another Dark Well and search in its depths for the wizards who had begged their help, but he knew also that the old man was not about to do such a thing where there was a risk of having his secrets discovered, particularly by those whom he considered little better than Earth-witches. Jaldis was certainly capable of imbuing herbs with healing-spells unassisted – such was his power that he could probably have cured the plague with common grass – and, in any case, he would never have given Rhion an ultimatum of any sort.

Nevertheless, Rhion knew the old man hadn't liked being left alone.

In many ways it had been an uneasy winter.

Jaldis was right about one thing. The rituals practiced by the Ladies of the Moon were those of a religious cult rather than of wizardry, cluttered with curious practices having no apparent bearing on magic as Rhion understood it.

They were profoundly unnerving nevertheless.

The sun sank over the green-brown wall of the sweet marshes. Shadows flowed forth across the murky tangle of sawgrass and salt-oak that lay in long, uneven crescents seaward of the Holy Isle as the Marshmen began to assemble in the sacred place. The flotilla of canoes had left the Ladies' islands in the black dark long before dawn – at one time, Rhion guessed, soon after the days of the earthquake, this islet had been the last point of land facing out over the sea. From the crumbling double circle of menhirs on the beach, twin lines of unshaped standing stones extended out into the brack brown waters of the marsh, their heads gradually vanishing beneath the surface like the Sea-God's silent armies; a cloud-streaked mauve twilight lay upon the black, decaying shapes like a smoky shroud. When darkness was fully on them, the tapping of a drum began, and the men and women of the Marshfolk took hands, forming long winding chains that wove between the stones of circle and lines, looped far out onto the beach and into the waters and so back again, treading in the sand and the water the ancient shapes of the Holy Maze which had been passed down the years. Chill salt wind stirred their tangled hair and coarse garments, shredded the torch smoke and carried over the desolation the single, hoarse cry of a bird; Rhion, seated alone on a small boulder just above the tide line, drew his cloak about him and shivered. The lines of the dancers passed by him unseeing, though the stars that came to shine through the wispy clouds gleamed silver in their open eyes.

The dance began, and ended, and began again, now walking, now hastening, now bending down with long, shuddering ripples that passed through the lines like waves of the sea or the turning of a serpent's tail. Though torches ringed the stone circle thrust upright in the sand, the dancers carried none – as the darkness deepened their forms seemed more and more like the passing of a spirit host, lost between the realms of the living and the dead. The music was oddly random, strange knockings and dronings broken by shrill bird cries, and yet, through it all, moved a rhythm that eluded the seekings of Rhion's mathematical mind. More than ever, he had the sense of visiting a world that was half-invisible half the time, a world where things appeared to make little sense and yet moved to patterns unguessable – where things that seemed common were lambent with power. In other parts of the Forty Realms tonight was the Carnival of Masks, the feast of Mhorvianne the Merciful, the rite of forgiveness. Here, it seemed, atonement involved something beyond a sheltered remorse.

The night drew on. The sea's whisper was hardly louder than the dragging of hundreds of feet through the heavy gray sand. Soft wind herded the clouds westward and the stars turned their courses unimpeded above the headless stones. The tide of the equinox lifted and stirred in Rhion's blood.

Beside the altar in the midst of the ring of stones and torchflame the presiding mage raised his arms to the sky – an old Hand-Pricker from up the marshes who looked ancient enough to be Jaldis' grandfather. It was close to midnight; Rhion felt it in his bones. He could feel, too, the spiral whisper of magic that floated now like a glowing mist all around the holy place. Magic rose from the dancers, from the sea, from the maze they had trodden into the sand, and from the ley that crossed through the island and plunged down the lane of stones to drown itself in the waters of the marsh; magic closed tighter and tighter about the altar-stone like the wool winding on a distaff, like the twisting ropes of a catapult's spring. In a high, shaky voice the mage was chanting the words of the raising and concentration of power, and the lines of the dancers changed their pattern and drew the circles smaller yet, giving him the power they raised.

Though Rhion had not seen her approach, the Lady stepped forward out of darkness into the bloody glare. He saw that she wore the garments of the bygone priestesses of An, red as the anemones that grew in the sweet marshes in spring, sewn with plates of pierced gold. Her face was painted white and black after the ancient fashion, framed in the smoky rivers of her hair; she wore the old diadem of the priest-queens on her head, the white moon jewel, the flowers and the bones. And to the altar her husband came, as the husbands of the Lady of Sligo had come for centuries past, naked to the waist with his silvery hair unbound and his twinkling eyes solemn.

He stretched himself upon the stone and a priest and priestess came forward – the priestess, Rhion noticed distractedly, was Channa the cook – taking knives of meteor iron that the Lady gave them, the blades glinting blue in the starlight. At a word from the Lady, the torches were quenched in the sand, but the dancers continued to turn and weave along the maze's invisible tracks in the darkness, silent as wind. Even the music had stilled, but it seemed to Rhion that he could hear, along with the hiss of their feet in the heavy sand, the beating of the blood in their veins. The old Hand-Pricker stretched forth his hands to the stars. The priest and priestess moved to either side of the man who lay upon the altar. The blades glinted as they were raised – then they bent and cut the victim's throat.

Rhion shuddered, looking away as the Lady stepped forward, her crimson gown a darkness now broken only by the white shapes of dangling bones. He'd seen that the cuts were carefully made, slitting the veins, not severing the arteries or the windpipe. Still, even allowing for the added power that the turning of the equinox midnight gave to healing magic, it would take a tremendously strong spell at this point to save the victim's life. Thin, icy wind streamed up from the salt marshes of the east, carrying to his nostrils the sweet, metallic repulsiveness of the blood; the dancers' feet swished in the sand, starlight flashing on the sweat of their faces, the curled tips of the waves, their feet weaving and re-weaving the maze between sea and earth.

A flute awakened, crying wild and sad and alone; somewhere a tiny drum trembled with a skittery beat in the torchless dark. When Rhion looked back the altar was empty. Priest and priestess, Lady and mage and victim, were gone. The air seemed to sing with the aftermath of magic, drawn from the turning of the heavens, dispersed along the leys to the four comers of the sleeping world like a shuddering silver heartbeat and called back from them again. A dark thread of blood ran down the side of the stone, gleaming black in the starlight.

But whether the Lady's husband had walked away alive, or had been carried off dead – which as he later learned frequently did happen in these rites – Rhion did not hear for many days.

Spring rains had started a few weeks previously, turning the waters of the marsh to sheets of hammered steel and transforming all the familiar channels as the water level rose. Waking early, to meditate on the old stone terrace or walk to the library to study, Rhion heard among the reeds the cries of the returning birds.

One day shortly after the rite at the standing stones, Jaldis announced that enough dry weather lay ahead to permit them to take the road once again.

"It will be good," he said simply, "to be home."

Nerriok, Rhion thought, the green City of Bridges, walled with golden sandstone upon its island in the midst of ring after ring of crinas, floating eyots of dredged silt and withe anchored by roots to the bottom of Lake Mharghan and thick with trees and flowers – corrupt, sprawling, and unbelievably colorful, with its markets heavy with the perfumes of melons and bread and flowers, its majestic temples and marble baths, its periodic riots among the students of different schools of philosophy, and its huge concourses of foreigners that turned certain quarters into strange bazaars of the East or grubby, sprawling barbarian villages…

The noise, the smells, and the excitement of the place came back on him in a wave of strange nostalgia – libraries, playhouses, poetry, music, and the meeting of minds…

And at the same time he thought about the shaggy green silences of the marshes of Sligo and the faint speech of wind chimes on foggy mornings mingling with the cawing of crows.

He pushed his spectacles more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and said, "The Gray Lady has asked me to stay on here as Scribe."

Jaldis said nothing. His bent and crippled fingers turned over and over the seal-hair brush he'd been wielding, to write talismanic signs on a luck-charm. The breeze off the marsh, sniffing like a little dog across the terrace upon which Rhion had found him sitting, stirred the cream-colored parchment under its weighting of river stones. Cool sunlight flooded a cloud-patched sky overhead and glanced across Jaldis' spectacles. The vines that cloaked their crumbling old house had begun to put out leaves. Within a month the Drowned Lands would be a jungle of whispering green.

The brush made a little silvery tinck as it was set down on the pitted limestone table-top. "Perhaps you should,"

Rhion shook his head. "I couldn't leave you alone."

He made his face as noncommittal as his voice. When Jaldis was wearing his spectacles it was difficult to tell whether he was using them to see or not.

"You'll have to one day, you know." The set of the old man's back, the way he tilted his head up at Rhion as if he could see, were calm and matter-of-fact. "I do not want that it should come to it, that you would begin t