The Rainbow Abyss

"IT MAY NOT HAPPEN HERE."

"That's what they said about the Plague."

Shavus Ciarnin, Archmage of the Order of the Morkensik Wizards, flashed an irritated look at his old friend's pupil - Rhion the Brown merely pushed his spectacles a little more firmly into place on the bridge of his nose with one pudgy forefinger and returned the glare calmly. Old Jaldis the Blind brushed a tendril of milk-white hair from the tattered blanket that wrapped his thin shoulders and moved a little closer to the brown wall of chimney bricks which was the tiny attic's only source of heat. "So they did," he observed mildly. "I do not see how it can happen here... or how it could have happened at all. But this lack of understanding on my part does not alter the fact that it has happened there..."

"Don't be a fool," Ciarnin snapped irritably. His scarred, sun-darkened face seemed to darken still further, cold blue eyes appearing very light in their deep sockets. "Magic can't just cease to exist! Magic is! It's an element, like the light of the sun, like the air we breathe! Men could no more stop it from existing than they could keep the sun from rising by shaking their fists at it."

"To our knowledge," the blind mage replied in his curiously sweet, toneless voice.

Huddled in his threadbare cloak at his master's feet - the room only boasted two chairs - Rhion could barely recall what Jaldis' true voice had been like. He'd only heard it upon one occasion, when he was sixteen, a few months before the old king's troops had arrested Lord Henak, Jaldis' then-patron, and torn out Jaldis' tongue and eyes to keep him from witching them while they'd brought the traitor earl and his court mage to trial in the High City of Nerriok. The only reason they hadn't cut off the wizard's hands as well was because they'd feared he'd die of gangrene before judgment could be passed.

For the eleven years since his acquittal, Jaldis had spoken by means of a curved rosewood box which hung strapped to his chest, a sounding-chamber filled with intricate mechanisms of silver, reed, and gut, even as he saw - after a fashion and with head-splitting concentration - by means of a pair of massive spectacles wrought of opal, crystal, and gold. Charging the left lens with spells of seeing had been Rhion's first attempt at major magic, and he still remembered the shuddering surge of joy he'd felt when he'd seen the lattices of the crystal's inner structure shift and change, seen life stir deep in the opals' pale, fiery wells. The sense of release had been almost like the physical breaking-open of some locked core of bone deep in his chest, the realization that all those dreams, all those longings, all the strange madnesses which had whispered in his mind since childhood had been real...

He remembered, too, the week of vomiting and delirium which had followed, for of course he'd been far too young to attempt anything like the power needed for such spells. He'd tried desperately to keep his illness hidden - it had been his parents' first clue to their only son's abilities, and he'd come back to consciousness to the news that they had published, in all the temples of the Forty Realms, the notices of his death.

Though he'd never told Jaldis, Rhion's own extreme shortsightedness dated from the casting of those spells.

"And yet you must admit, Shavus," that thin, buzzing drone went on, "that there are places in this world where there is no air - in the depths of oceans and rivers - and no light, in caves and crevices... indeed, for half the turning of the day there is no light anywhere. And there are places, as we all know, where magic does not exist."

"Bah," the Archmage grunted, and the back of his cracked and much-mended chair creaked with the uneasy movement of his shoulders. The attic room above the Black Pig Inn, which had served Jaldis and Rhion as lodgings for the last two and a half years, was unheated, save for the warmth which radiated from the bricks of the kitchen chimney. On snowy midwinter evenings like this one it saved them from freezing to death, but when the turgid warmth of the low-plains summers held the city of Felsplex in its grip, the room was unspeakable. There was no fireplace in the room itself, nor any kind of candle or brazier - the landlord having an almost hysterical fear of fire - but, despite the fact that the windows were closed against the bitter cold by heavy wooden shutters, the lack of light posed little problem for wizards. Though the three men - young, middle-aged, and old - sat in complete darkness, Rhion could see the Archmage's square, ugly face and coarse shock of iron-gray hair as easily as if the room were flooded with daylight. And he saw how the pale eyes shifted at the mention of such things. "Any fool knows about those."

"But this is more than the Chambers of Silence," Jaldis went on, "that lords build into the dungeons of their palaces to hold a wizard's power in check - more than the pheelas root that numbs our skills, more than the spells of silence, the fields of silence, that a powerful mage can weave to cripple his mageborn foes." Behind sunken and shriveled eyelids ruined muscles moved, as if his destroyed gaze could still encompass the gray-haired old ex-soldier opposite him and the short, sturdy young man at his feet. From the top of a stack of books beside his chair, Jaldis' opal spectacles seemed to review the room with a bulging, asymmetrical gaze, and the old man's hand, deft and shapely before arthritis had deformed it, stroked subconsciously at the talismans of power which festooned the rosewood soundbox like queer and glittering seaweed upon a rock.

"I am speaking of a world, a universe, where magic does not exist at all, and has not existed for many years."

"And I'm saying such a thing's preposterous," Shavus retorted. "What you think you heard... what you might have seen..." He shook his head again, angry and dismissive, but Rhion saw the heavy, corded hand fidget uncomfortably with the snagged brown wool of his robe.

"I know what it is that I felt." Jaldis' thin face hardened with a flash of angry pride, though the monotonous voice of the soundbox did not alter. "I have opened a Dark Well and through it have seen into the Void which lies between all the infinite number of universes of which the Cosmos is made! And in that Void..." The sweet, shrill tones sank. "In that Void I heard a voice crying out of a world where magic had once existed, but now exists no more."

"Jaldis, old friend..." Shavus leaned forward placatingly, causing the ruinous chair to emit an alarming creak. "I'm not saying you didn't see it, didn't hear it. But I am asking how, if magic has ceased to exist in some other universe, someone there could make his voice heard in the Void? I've studied the Void as well, you know. I've opened Dark Wells into it, to try to glimpse something of how the Cosmos is formed..."

"I'm glad someone has," Rhion remarked, folding his arms around his knees and huddling a little more deeply into his faded black cloak. "The other night when Jaldis asked me to get a message to you about this was the first I'd even heard of the things."

"Which is as it should be," the Archmage snapped irritably. "It is not a branch of knowledge for the young - or the light-minded."

He turned back to face the blind man, bundled like a drying skeleton in cloak and quilts which all but hid the tattered brown robes of the foremost Order of Wizards in the world. His tough, seamed face softened. "Old friend, in all my studies of the Void, in all my communications across it and through it, I've never encountered a world where magic in some form didn't exist. I'm not denying that you heard something. But one piece of hearsay is damn little grounds to risk the hideous danger of crossing the Void itself, as you're asking me to do..."

"Not asking, Shavus," the old man said softly. "Begging. Someone must go there. Someone must help them. Don't you see that..."

Heavy footsteps on the narrow wooden spiral of the stairs made the whole building shudder. The Black Pig rose four floors above the common rooms and kitchens, a rickety inverted ziggurat of ever-protruding balconies and upper floors seemingly supported by a mystifying web of clotheslines and makeshift bridges over the streets and by the surrounding buildings against which it leaned. Rhion frequently wondered what would happen if any of the overcrowded tenements, taverns, countinghouses, or gimcrack temples of unpronouncable foreign gods that made up the river quays quarter of Felsplex were to disappear. Beyond a doubt the entire district would come crashing down like a house of cards.

It was the landlord. Rhion recognized the tread. Pulling his cloak tighter about him, he got to his feet and navigated delicately among the few pieces of furniture which cluttered even that tiny chamber, summoning a blue-burning shred of magelight to flicker like will-o'-the-wisp above his head. The wavery gleam only served to make the room appear dingier, its moving shadows outlining with pitiless emphasis the cracks in the plaster of the walls, the stained beams from which bunches of winter mallow and stork grass hung drying, the chipped cups and water-vessels, and the precious books and scrolls arranged neatly along the table's rear edge. Darkness would have been less depressing, but Rhion had long ago learned that those who were not mageborn found wizards' ability to see without light disproportionately unnerving.

"Lady to see you," the landlord grunted, scratching his crotch.

"Are you - er - a wizard?"

Rhion was awfully tired of the question and of the dubious look that invariably accompanied it. He'd grown his beard as soon as he was old enough to do so, but the short-clipped, scruffy brown tangle evidently did nothing to dispel the boyishness of his face nor the way his wide-set blue eyes were magnified by the lenses of his spectacles. Short, unobtrusive, and of the compact, sturdy build which slips so easily into chubbiness, even without a wizard's ability to move unobserved he would have been the last person anyone noticed in a crowd.

The lady who was waiting for him in the smallest of the inn's private parlors had obviously been expecting someone a little more impressive.

He considered responding with Are you - er - a lady? but suppressed the impulse. He and Jaldis needed the rent. Instead he smiled genially and said, "We come in all shapes and sizes, mistress. Would you trust me more if I had horns and a tail?"

She let out an unsteady titter and her eyes, above a concealing veil of purple-embroidered silk, strayed to the hem of his robe as if she really expected to see the jointed tail of a scorpion-grim peeking out.

Inwardly, Rhion sighed. Gold pieces to barleycorns she wants a love-potion...

"And how may I serve you?" he asked, still with a smile and the reflection that asking the question in his capacity as wizard was an improvement upon doing so in the capacity of bar-boy, a position he'd occasionally filled at the Black Pig when things got bad. If my father could see me now...

She leaned forward, her little purple-gloved hands clenched upon the scrubbed oak tabletop. "There is... a man."

Rhion sat down on the opposite side of the table, folded his hands, and nodded encouragingly. Above the edge of the veil, her eyes were dark, enormous, and painted with green kohl and powdered gold; her cloak was lined with marten fur. From his days of loitering in the most fashionable scent shops in the City of Circles, he could price her perfume to within a few royals, and it wasn't cheap.

She went on, softly and simply as a child, "He must love me or I shall die."

"And he doesn't."

The delicate brows above those immense eyes puckered tragically. "He doesn't know I'm alive. He is fickle, frivolous... his affections turn on a whim. Give me something that will draw him to me, something that will make him love me..."

Rhion had never, personally, been able to fathom why human beings persisted in craving the love of people who didn't know they were alive, but this was far from the first time he'd encountered the phenomenon, or used the proceeds to put food on the table.

"Look," he said gently. "Are you sure he's the kind of man you want? If he's that fickle, that frivolous... A love-potion won't change what a person is. Only - and only temporarily - whom they want."

"That is enough," she breathed, and clasped her hands at her breast as if to contain the throbbing of her heart. Her cloak, falling back a little, showed strand upon strand of filigreed silver beads at her throat, gleaming against a ground of ribbon and featherwork like a field of summer flowers. "If only I can have the chance to win his regard, I know I can make him love me. If once I hold him in my arms, I know he will come back." She swayed forward and clutched his hand, as if fearing he would rise to his towering five-feet-five and denounce her as a strumpet. "Oh, name your price!"

They always said, Name your price, but Rhion had learned over the years what the going rate on love-philters was and had also learned that the rich especially would be screaming for the magistrates if the sum quoted were so much as a dequin above it.

He fetched candles from the mantelpiece, noting automatically as he passed the door of the common room the two chair bearers and the linkboy, drinking wine from boiled-leather cups beside that room's enormous hearth. Unlike the attics, the commons and the private parlors downstairs were pleasantly warm, redolent of beer and woodsmoke, sweat, onion stew, and the sawdust that strewed the floor. Judging by their clothes, the chair bearers were hired men, probably ex-slaves who'd bought themselves free and gone into business, for of course his client, no matter how rich she was, would have used hired bearers to bring her here, rather than her own household slaves.

No lady of respectable family would let her own servants know about coming to a place like the Black Pig, let alone to visit a wizard. People did visit wizards, of course, and pay for their services, in spite of the fulminations of every priest of every god in the landscape, the same way his father had visited the more expensive prostitutes and his mother had visited those skilled in the dyeing of hair. They just didn't talk about it. As he brought the tapers back to the table, he was aware of the way his client clutched her cloak about her and of the apprehension in the doelike eyes gazing at him from above the veil. She flinched when he sat down again, drawing as far from him as the high-backed chair would allow; and when he said, "Take off your glove," her painted eyelids made as great a play as if he'd asked her to remove her dress.

From a pocket in his robe he took a twist of paper containing the herbal powder that was the basis of all love-philters, a supply of which he kept made up beforehand. From another pocket he drew the piece of red chalk he always carried and a goose-feather. He explained, "For a love-potion to work, it has to carry the... the scent, the essence, of your flesh."

"I know." Her voice sank to a whisper. "They said you... you would mix it upon my naked body."

Before he could stop himself Rhion said, "Well, generally we do, but this table's awfully hard and the fire's gone down..."

"I would not mind the cold." Her eyes smoldered, and Rhion bit his tongue in exasperation, both at himself for making the joke and at her for not realizing it was one.

"A hand will be fine."

She removed her glove and offered her soft little palm, scented with attar of roses. Rhion turned her hand over and poured a quantity of the powder on the back. "If you'll keep silent now," he remembered to say. He'd never had a client yet, male or female, who, if not silenced beforehand, didn't feel compelled to relate the details of the affair while he was trying to concentrate on the spells.

She let out her breath, looking a little disappointed.

He took the woman's thumb and little finger gently in his own two hands, which rested on the table on either side of hers. Closing his eyes, he slowed his breathing and stilled his thoughts, calling up and focusing the power that rose from within himself like the slow expansion of a single candle's light gradually illuminating some enormous, darkened room. This was the part of spell-weaving that he loved and the part that made him most uneasy at times like this, the most vulnerable in the presence of these representatives of the mundane world for whom wizardry was a matter of rumor and whisper and dread.

Though his eyes were shut, he could see the woman's hand still, lying between his own. The green-gold powder sparkled against the creamy flesh in the candles' limpid light. In time, eyes still shut, he moved his hands, making the correct passes in the air above the powder, drawing with the thin, glimmery air-traces that only a wizard could see the runes of binding, the symbols of oneness, that imbued the dried rose petals and shamrock leaves with the essences of the woman's well-cared-for flesh. His mind blended with the scents of the powdered sandalwood and salts, the smell of her perfume, the warmth of her hand, and the perfect shape of those cow-like brown eyes. He heard the high, delicate sweetness of her voice in his mind as a lover would hear it, finding its childish accents endearing rather than annoying, seeing in those wonderful eyes heart-touching innocence rather than - as was his private opinion - self-centered stupidity.

You must love them when you weave the spells, Jaldis had said to him years ago... Seven? Six?... when he had taught him the spells for the drawing of the heart. Love them for their own sake, as a true lover does, whatever your private self may think. See charm in their imperfections, as the shadows of flowers mottle a sunlit wall. You must understand what beauty is before you can wake desire for it in another mind.

It had taken him a long time to learn that, he recalled. Months of watching flowing water and the shadows of flowers. He still wasn't sure he understood.

Opening his eyes, he gently brushed the table before him with the goose-feather, then tipped the woman's hand so that the powder spilled off. Delicately he feathered the last residue from her skin, then with the chalk drew a small Circle of Power around the grains, and closed his eyes again. With the feather, with his fingers, with his mind, he shaped in the air above it the runes necessary for the spell, calling down the constellations of power and the clusters of invisible realities related to each archetypical sign.

The Cup, the rune of the heart, filled with clear water and utterly mutable, ruled by the Moon and the tides. The sixth rune, of caring and giving and duality, of two voices blending in harmony, and of the warmth closed in between two hands. The fifteenth, ugly and dark, the rune of obsession that chains the will and blurs the senses, sculpting reality to what one wishes it to be. And all the while the woman sat across from him, gazing with those huge, affrighted eyes, or glancing nervously back into the lights and laughter of the common room as if she feared that among the dock workers and fishwives gathered there she'd see one of her fashionable friends, someone who'd recognize her and tell. Rhion was not a particularly strong wizard, and after ten and a half years of study he'd come to understand that, even if he attained the level of learning Jaldis and Shavus had, he'd probably still never have their terrible strength. But he did weave a very pretty love-spell, though he said it himself.

"Sprinkle this into his cup or his food, if you can," he said later, handing her the ensorcelled powder done up in a twist of cheap yellow paper. "If you can't get access to his food, sprinkle it on his clothing, or his bed."

"And it will bring him to me?" She raised those childlike eyes to his. Standing with her on the threshold of the common room, Rhion was uneasily conscious of the way the chair men were watching him, as if they suspected him of laying witcheries on this woman to draw her back to his bed some night against her will. "It will make him love me?"

"It will bring him to you," Rhion said wearily, pushing his spectacles up more firmly onto the bridge of his nose. "He will desire you for a few hours, a few days, and forget about the others in the intensity of his desire. But unless you can win his real love, his genuine affection and care - unless you can be someone that he can love - it won't last. It never does. There is no counterfeit for love, and over love, magic has no power."

But in her sparkling eyes he saw she wasn't listening.

Rhion climbed the stairs again feeling tired and rather old. His sense of alienation from the nonmageborn world hadn't been lessened by an encounter with the landlord, a massive man with a stubbled chin and the broken nose of a prizefighter, who had intercepted him on his way through the kitchen and relieved him of half the silver royals the woman had paid. "For use of the room," he'd growled, and Rhion hadn't argued. It had been difficult enough finding anyone willing to rent to wizards in the first place.

Jaldis was still sitting, wrapped in cloak and blankets, in his wobbly chair near the chimney wall. The sharp point of his chin was sunk on his breast so that his short-trimmed silver beard touched the soundbox at his chest. At the creak of Rhion's foot upon the floorboards he raised his head, his long white hair catching the wan glimmer of the witchlight that his pupil called into being among the slanting rafters overhead. The talismans dangling from the soundbox clinked and glittered faintly with the movement: pendants wrought of silver and crystal, discs of animal bone, scraps of parchment enclosed in glass or gold, and the single great golden sun-cross which Shavus had made for him, symbol of the living strength of magic and its eternal renewal - objects imbued with power by all the wizards who had given him them, so that the magic which set the box's delicate chords and whistles vibrating would not fail when Jaldis' own strength became exhausted by other spells.

"Shavus is gone?"

The old man nodded. "I had hoped that I could prevail upon him to help me," he said softly, the whisper of the instrument like the sigh of harp strings when the wind passes through. "But he sees nothing... nothing."

"I'm not sure my own vision of the subject is noticeably more acute." Rhion turned up the sleeves of his brown robe and those of the rough-knitted pullover he wore beneath it and began to clear the tiny coffee cups the three wizards had drunk from earlier in the evening. The dreamy velvet bitterness of the coffee and the sweet pungence of cinnamon still flavored the air, mingling with the astringent scent of the overhead herbs and the smoke that seeped from the bricks of the chimney wall. "You're saying it's possible to... to cross this Void you're talking about? To go to other..." He hesitated. "Other universes?"

"Not only possible," the old man murmured, "but necessary."

Rhion paused in the act of dipping wash-water from the half-empty bucket, placed near the chimney bricks to keep it from freezing, and cocked an eyebrow at his mentor. "Necessary... but not safe."

"No." The word was no more than a drawn-out buzz of strings, a vibrating inflection of weariness and defeat. "Not safe."

Rhion was silent, unable to picture a world so incomprehensibly separated from that which he knew.

In the ten years he had followed Jaldis, learning from him the whole tangled complex of facts and lists, spells and metaphysics, meditation and mental technique that constituted what the mundane world called "magic," Rhion had known the old man kept certain secrets, certain knowledge, to himself. In the books and scrolls Jaldis had so painfully collected over the years Rhion had found references to things he did not understand, things Jaldis sometimes explained and sometimes evaded on the grounds that his student had not been studying long enough...

But the night before last - when the old man had stumbled, exhausted, from the tiny chamber hidden under the eaves in which he had been closeted since the early winter sundown and had whispered to him to bring the Archmage - had been the first time that Rhion had heard of the Dark Well, the Void, or other universes besides the one he knew.

Frightened by his master's ghastly pallor and ragged breathing, Rhion had called the Archwizard's name again and again into the strongest of Jaldis' several scrying-crystals, until at last Shavus had answered. That night had been the night of the winter solstice, when all wizards were taking advantage of the additional power generated by the balance point of sun and stars to work deeper and stronger spells than were ordinarily possible, and Shavus had been less than pleased at the interruption. But he had come, with such speed that Rhion guessed he had not stopped for rest anywhere on the snow-covered roads between his house in the forest of Beldirac and the gates of Felsplex.

"Why 'necessary'?" he asked, spreading out a rough towel and setting the cups to dry. "Yes, if there's a world where magic has ceased to exist it should be investigated..."

"It must be investigated without delay." With sudden energy Jaldis rose to his feet, his hand finding at once the crutches which leaned against the side of his chair. In addition to blinding him and cutting out his tongue, all those years ago, the old king's soldiers had hamstrung him as well. Rhion hurried to help him, knowing he was still far from recovered from his fatigue, but leaning on the long sticks of bog-oak with their padding of learner and rags, the blind mage seemed suddenly flooded with a driven energy. Mummified in blankets, he had appeared fragile, almost tiny; standing up, he was half a head taller than his pupil. When they had first met, he had been taller still.

"He won't see the urgency of it, the importance of it," the blind man went on, turning to limp toward the tiny door nearly hidden in the shadows of the far wall. "But you must."

He paused, his crippled hand on the rough wooden latch, turning back to Rhion as if the sunken eye pits still had sight, as if the dark, haughty gaze he had once had was still his to compel, to command. "Someone must go to that world to learn why magic failed there. If it was something that men did..."

"Could they have?" Rhion felt suddenly loath to have him open that cracked plank door, dreading what might lie beyond for reasons he did not himself understand.

Some of the furious lines of concentration and will eased, leaving Jaldis' features sunken and old. "I do not know." He pushed open the door, and, limping on his crutches, hobbled through, Rhion following unwillingly, wiping the wash water from his hands, the ribbon of ghost light trailing in their wake like will-o'-the-wisp.

This second room, no more than a triangular nook of waste space under the steeply slanting roof, had never been intended for anything but storage. During their first year of residence at the Black Pig, Rhion had spent many nights surreptitiously shifting decades' accumulation of mouse-infested junk to other sections of the attics to make of this closet an inner sanctum, a meditation chamber, a workplace of the deeper and more secret magics that comprised the true heart of the calling that was their life. It was unlighted and unbearably stuffy, and though, like their dwelling-room, ringed about with spells against the roaches and mice to be found everywhere else in the inn, it still had the dirty, musty smell of these vermin and of dry rot and smoke. From barely head-high by the door, the ceiling beams slanted sharply to the floor, forming the hypotenuse of a triangle scarcely twelve feet across the base.

In this place Jaldis - and Rhion, when he could - worked in the deepest meditations that were the foundation of the wizard's metaphysical arts, sinking the mind into silence and stretching out the senses, scrying through fire and water, crystal, and the fine-spun fabric of the wind, to study the shape and balance and pulse beat of the world. Here in the inky silence they practiced the magics of illusion and light, not for their own sake but for what they could teach about the nature of the mind. Here Rhion meditated and studied the nature of the runes which were the foundation of the magic as the Morkensik Order practiced it; the making of the hundreds of sigils that were built of them, and the greater, more complex seals that called together from a swirling chaos of probabilities the loci of power and likelihood, bridging the gap between the will and something more. Here Rhion practiced patiently and slowly all those spells which Jaldis had taught him over the years, memorizing their forms and painstakingly exercising the slender powers that were his, until he could call trickles of water up the slanted side of a dish, bring forth illusions of flowers and jewels, make a talisman of gold which would rob poison of its virulence, or cause dustdevils to swirl all around the shut and windless room.

And in this place, Rhion saw now, Jaldis had drawn Circles of Power on the floor, circles which occupied almost the whole of that tiny chamber: circles in chalk and silver-dust, in spring water and in blood, crossed and interwoven with rings and spirals of pure, glimmering light that only wizards could see, drawn in the air above the worn and splintery floorboards or sinking down into them, visible a few inches into their depth like light submerged in water... stars and crescents and the sun-cross of power, all feeding the energies of air and life and the turning earth into holding the circle intact.

And in the center of that circle was darkness, a column of shadow that even Rhion's dark-sighted eyes could not pierce: a darkness which filled him with uneasy horror.

"It took me three days to call it into being." The voice of the box was no more than a thread of sweetness in the terrible silence of that tiny room. "With the strength that magic can call from the solstice's power I sent my mind deep into that Well, seeking to learn something of the nature of magic, the nature of the Cosmos that divides universe from universe in an infinity of colors and dark."

Staring into the darkness, Rhion barely heard him. It seemed to draw him, as some men are drawn with terrible vertigo to the edge of a precipice. Staring into it, he thought he saw movement there, strange iridescences as if blackness had been refracted into shuddering rainbows of something other than color, anomalous stirrings that trailed lightless fire.

Behind him, Jaldis' voice went on. "I caught glimpses of things I do not understand, of worlds whose natures and substructures are incomprehensible to me: ships that whirled flashing between stars; clouds of terrible and free-floating power, drifting eternally in the abyss. And somewhere in that chaos I heard a voice crying out, 'Magic is dead... magic is dead. If any can hear us there where magic thrives, magic is dead here, dead... magic is dead. It has been gone for two hundred years.' "

Rhion looked back at him, seeing in the soft blue glow of the witchlight the desperate tension in the old man's withered face, the mingled grief and eagerness, as if he heard again that thin voice crying. "Over and over it called, and I called back, 'I hear you! I will help you!' " His hand trembled on the crutches; his voice would have, too, had the forces of law left him with one. "I do not know whether they heard me or not."

With a sigh he turned away, as if he could no longer bear to stand so close to the place where he had heard those terrible pleas. Slowly he limped from the room, Rhion following thankfully at his heels. The witchlight drifted after them; looking back over his shoulder as he closed the door, Rhion could see that even the soft clarity of that light could not pierce the dreadful shadow held prisoned within the ensorcelled rings.

"He might have been speaking of some kind of - of field effect, the kind of thing you'd get with a spell of silence and a talismanic resonator."

"No." Jaldis shook his head as he sank once more back into his chair by the chimney wall, gathering his patched blankets about his rawboned frame. Among the rafters, the wind groaned, the whole building shuddering faintly, like a horse twitching flies from its skin. In the silence that followed, Rhion could hear the dry skitter of ice fragments, blown like sand across the tiles overhead. "He would not have spoken so, calling into the Void for help, were there any hope of help within his own world."

Below them, the inn's guests were preparing for bed. Muffled voices and the scrape of furniture came dimly through the floor, a woman's laugh. Had he concentrated, as wizards were trained to do, Rhion could have pinpointed and identified the inhabitants of every room.

"Men hate magic, Rhion," Jaldis continued very softly, his twisted hands rubbing his shoulders for warmth. The witchlight that had rippled like a sheet of blown silk in the darkness was growing small and dim - it caught a final gleam on Jaldis' sun-cross talisman, on the gold lettering of a book's worn spine and the staring, ironic crystal rounds of the spectacles still balanced beside his chair. "They hate magic and hate those of us born with the ability to work it. That woman who paid you tonight, she too will hate you in her heart, for you can do something which she cannot. If magic has perished in some other world - in an entire world, an entire universe - we must learn why. I must go on seeking, go on scrying in the Well no matter what the cost to me, to you, to anyone. I must convince Shavus to help me, to go to that world in spite of all the peril of crossing the Void.

"Don't you see?" He turned desperately toward Rhion with his sunken eyelids, his closed and scar-torn lips, wreckage left by the hatred of magic which only magic could now relieve. "If men found some way to cause this to happen, how long will it be before those in our world, in this world, learn to do so, too, and destroy magic here forever?"