Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss (7 page)

“That’s very nice,” said Rhion grimly. “Who pays your rent?”

“Investments,” the White Mage replied, with a dismissive gesture of one gloved hand. “But the fact remains that our living depends upon the sufferance of the local authorities. And this… ” He took Rhion’s hand in his, and placed the talisman in the plump palm. “…we cannot have.”

Rhion heard Jaldis come up behind him; a swift glance back showed him the cold flash of daylight on the opal-and-crystal spectacles that the old man had donned.

“You cannot deny us our right,” the old man said, “to make a living.”

“Ah.” Under a long flow of herb-scented beard, Chelfrednig’s mouth flexed in a small, tolerant smile. “I had forgotten that when the Morkensiks split off from the Selarnist Order they conveniently dropped the portion of the Oath not to concern oneself in the affairs of humankind…”

“It was the Selarnists who split off from the Morkensiks,” retorted Jaldis, with a frown of anger and what would have been a deadly edge to his voice, had it been capable of anything except a sweet, buzzing monotone. “And the Oath was and always has been, to do no harm…”

“Be that as it may.”
The Selarnist’s tone was clear:
What is the point
, it asked,
of bandying words with a heretic
? “We cannot, alas, deny you what you consider to be your right to ‘make a living,’ as you say; but we can deny you your freedom to do so in tins town. Now, you are welcome to stay in our House for a time if poverty is a problem…”

“So that you can tell me what I can and cannot do?” Jaldis demanded. “So that you can sequester my books, and my crystals, and the implements of my art, in your own library, for the good of the magistrates of this town?” And Rhion saw Chelfrednig’s eyes shift. “Thank you,” the old man went on stiffly, “but we will earn our bread in some other fashion while we are here, and study as we please.”

“I am afraid,” Chelfrednig said, “that that is not an option open to you either. The guilds in Imber are quite strict about wizards entering businesses or trades. Quite understandably, seeing how an unscrupulous mage—one not bound by
proper
rules—could take an unfair advantage of lesser men.”

Hesitantly, the landlady said, “I’m sorry. But you see, I sell most of my greens to them, and milk…” Her bright, worried eyes went nervously from Jaldis’ face to Rhion’s, torn between her liking for them, her need for money, her sense of justice, and her fear that, as wizards, they would cause a scene of the kind she could barely guess at and draw down still more trouble upon her head.

“Right…” Rhion muttered furiously, and Jaldis placed a staying hand upon his shoulder from behind, and inclined his head.

“Very well,” he said. “My good woman… ” He turned his disconcertingly insectile gaze upon her, and she shrank back in spite of herself. “My sincerest apologies for the trouble we may have caused you, and…” With a very slight motion of his head he indicated the two Selarnists, “… my apologies to you on behalf of all wizardry, that these persons considered it incumbent upon themselves to interfere in your life.” He turned to face Chelfrednig fully. “We shall be gone by sunset. Is that sufficient?”

“Noon would be better,” the old woman with the ashstaff said, speaking for the first time, “if you want to come to shelter before night.”

“That,” replied Jaldis chillingly, “is our business. I bid you good day.”

They were on the road again by noon. “The nerve of them!” Rhion fumed, picking his way cautiously along the most solidly frozen and least cut-up side of the main highroad that led from Imber south through the hills toward the steep-sided Valley of the Morne, and so on to the Mountains of the Sun, and to Nerriok beyond. “I mean, it’s not like we were Hand-Prickers or Earth-witches selling cut-rate horoscopes and conversations with your dead ancestors on the street corners, you know! We’re Morkensiks! We were the original founding line of wizardry… !” His foot slipped where a cartwheel earlier in the day had sliced through the snow and into the frozen clay beneath. He caught himself on the walking staff he’d cut, and put out a hand to guide Jaldis around the place.

Beyond the brown hedges and drainage cuts that hemmed in the road the fields lay empty under the silence of winter. Even this short a distance from the town walls the hedges were overgrown, the ditches silting up, and sedges prickling thick and black through the blanket of dirty snow. The road itself was narrow and unkept; for a long time the township of Imber had been disregarding the corvee laws of its titular liege, the Earl of Way. At least, thought Rhion, hunching deeper into the hood of his cloak and scanning the deserted and overgrow fields nervously, if they were attacked by bandits out here, or in the stony hills or the wilderness of the Drowned Lands that lay beyond, they had the option of fighting back without concern about future retaliation against wizardry in general.

To most people, he knew, a wizard was a wizard was a wizard—as had been the case with himself before he’d become Jaldis’ pupil—a mysterious figure in a long robe who acted from unknown motives and held strange and dangerous powers. And from that standpoint, he supposed, Chelfrednig’s argument was correct: his sale of potions would contradict what the Selarnists had been laboriously working to convince the town authorities was the nature of wizardry.
Though it was only their opinion of what it should be, dammit!
And thus, though he and Jaldis could have summoned lightning from the sky to blast Lord Pruul’s liverymen and their volunteer helpers out of existence, or even have caused the stairs at the Black Pig to collapse under their weight long enough to have given them time to make a getaway, in the long run it would mean more trouble for other wizards they knew, who would have suffered the retaliation.

It was, in fact, the reason that Jaldis had left the house where he had lived for so many years in Nerriok—that tall, narrow house on one of the dozen tiny islands that made up the city, where Rhion had first learned the nature of magic and had first seen what it was to be a mage. When the old High King had died and his brother had briefly taken the scepter, the brother had hated wizards due to some bad financial dealings with an Ebiatic mage who, in Rhion’s opinion, should have known better. As a result all mages, from respected masters of the Great Art like Jaldis down to the Figure-Flingers throwing painted bones on the street corners, had been banished from the city and the realm, to earn what livings they could in places like the Black Pig.

The old High King’s brother had died at the turning of autumn, of dysentery contracted while besieging the stronghold of a rebellious vassal in the Clogreth Hills in the west. On the night of the winter solstice, even as Jaldis had been listening in the Dark Well to the clamor of voices crying of the death of magic, the High King’s daughter had been crowned in the great Temple of Darova in Nerriok, and had received the homage of all the lords of the Forty Civilized Realms.

It was, Jaldis had said quietly, time to return home.

Night fell early. Owing to the rucked and muddy condition of the winter roads and to Jaldis’ lameness, the two wizards were far from the inn which even in summertime lay a good day’s journey from Imber’s gates. They pressed on long after it grew fully dark. Throughout the day the cloud cover had been thinning under the creeping dryness of the north wind; rags of moonlight filtering through the bare trees which pressed ever more closely about the road through the hills eventually showed Rhion the inn itself, perched on a little rise where the road up from the Drowned Lands divided to run northwards to Imber, and to Felsplex in the east.

Snow lay heavy on the bare hilltops above the road and among the trees that grew thick as a bear pelt about their feet. Against its luminous pallor, the inn’s gray stone walls bulked heavy and dark. Every shutter was fastened, every door bolted; every stall in the snow-blanketed stableyard was empty and smelled of fox-mess and field mice, and the tracks of deer and rabbits were a scribbled message all about the walls:
Not at Home
.

Rhion swore fluently for a short while, then walked with what caution he could muster—a city boy born and raised, he had little woodcraft—all around the inn and its outbuildings, sniffing, listening, searching with the hyperacute senses of a wizard for the least sign of danger. But all he heard was the scurrying of mice across bare wooden floors, and the chewing of beetles in the walls. Coming nearer, he found some evidence that a small troop of horses—maybe the mounts of bandits—had occupied the stables a week or so ago, but had been gone before the fall of the snow. No smoke curled from the chimneys, no track broke the snow crust around the woodpile outside the kitchen door.

“There was sickness, I think,” Jaldis said sometime later, pressing his hands to the stones of the chimney breast in the dark and deserted common room. “It is hard to read. So many griefs and joys, so much talk and laughter have seeped their way into the stones here. But I feel most recently bad news from somewhere, early in the autumn… fresh apples. They had just picked the apples, the smell of them was strong in the room. Ullana… Ullata… some name like that. Ullata is sick, they said.”

He shook his head, the white strands floating around his thin face rimmed with the new-coined brightness of the fire Rhion had kindled in the hearth. The warm light turned the rosewood voice-box the color of claret, and flickered in the talismans that hung from it, dancing chips of green and gold and red. He had put his spectacles away, and wore instead, as he frequently did when he went abroad, a linen bandage over the collapsed and sunken lids of his empty eyes.

“Ullata is sick… and so we have to go.”

Rhion looked up from adjusting massive iron firedogs meant to uphold wood enough to heat the enormous room. “Maybe Ullata was going to leave them some money.” Behind the blaze, tiny in the midst of all that acreage of blackened hearth bricks, a torture chamber ensemble of spits, hooks, and pot-chains loured in the shadows of the huge chimney. “At least Ullata didn’t get sick before they cut the winter’s wood.”

Nevertheless, when he straightened up again he placed his own hands to the stone of the overmantle, and sent his mind feeling its way through the tight-crossed, gritty fibers of the granite, touching the voices, the images, and the fragments of other days which permeated the stone. The inn had stood for hundreds of years: he glimpsed a red-haired woman washing a new-born baby on the hearth and weeping bitterly, silently, as she worked; saw a young man sitting with his back to the iron firedogs, every window open into the heart-shaking magic of summer evening, greedily reading a scroll stretched between his up-cocked knees; saw an old man shelling peas and talking to a blond-haired child whose brown eyes were filled with a hungry wonder and the shadows of strange destinies. But he had not Jaldis’ fineness of perception. He could not separate ancient from recent—all these people might well have been dead for centuries—nor could he make out words. Only the smells of smoke and beer and roasting meats came to him, the echoes of bawdy songs and the clink of the little iron tavern puzzles that hung silent now in a neat row from spikes driven into the chimney’s stones.

The widow woman had given them bread and cheese for the journey, as well as most of Rhion’s money back; there were yams, dried beans, and sweet dried apples from the trees along the inn’s west wall to be found in the cellar. After a meal of these, while Jaldis sat with his opal spectacles on his nose and his scrying-crystal—a chunk of spell-woven quartz the color of bitterroot tea—between his palms, Rhion put on his cloak once more and left the inn to make another circuit of it and draw wizard’s marks upon the surrounding trees.

As he came back across the moonlit stillness of the yard, he noticed a gleam like a fleck of quicksilver near the door-handle, and, looking more closely, saw that a silver nail had been driven into the heavy oak. Thoughtfully, he picked his way over the slippery drifts to the nearest of the shuttered windows. Silver nails had been driven into the sills of them all—tiny, almost like pinheads, for the metal was expensive. The inn’s protection had doubtless owed more to its roaring fires and the lamps in their iron sconces which had ringed the yard and to the noise of its customers and the smells of their massed bodies and blood. But standing in the snow that lay glittering like marble all around the inn, listening to the forest silence pressing so close about its walls, Rhion remembered that in waste places at night there were more things to be feared than human prejudice and human spite.

He hated the thought of risking the only thing that stood between him and starvation. Nevertheless, he swept the crusted snow from the bench beside the door, and sat on it to draw from his pocket the little velvet bag of coins. There were seven or eight silver royals among the copper.
Minted in Felsplex
, he reflected dourly, biting one.
God knows if it’s even as pure as it’s stamped
. His father, one of the wealthiest bankers in the City of Circles, had always held the Felsplex municipal council’s fiscal policies in utter contempt, and having seen them at medium-close range for two and a half years now Rhion couldn’t blame him. However, it was all the silver they had, even if it was less pure than the buttons of some doublets Rhion had worn back when he was still his father’s son.

“Alas for lost opportunities,” he sighed to himself, and went to work laying small words of Ward on each silver coin. Then he buried them in the snow—with suitable, and invisible, marks over each so he could find them in the morning—in a loose ring around the inn, and drew a tenuous thread of spells from coin to coin, forming the protection of a Circle of Silver.

And thus it was that in the dead of night he was awakened by the chittering whisper of attacking grims.

HE CAME AWAKE AT ONCE OUT OF A FAR DEEPER SLEEP THAN
he’d meant to allow himself. By the dull ochre of the banked firelight he could just make out Jaldis, seated on a bench beside the shuttered window, listening with bowed head. Pulling his blankets tightly around his shoulders Rhion sat up, for it was the deep of night, and even here beside the common room fireplace the chill was like iron.