The Rainbow Abyss

"I DON'T UNDERSTAND." The slurred drag of the voice-box was intelligible only by those who knew Jaldis well - to an outsider, Rhion thought, it would be only a seesaw of notes, like an expert musician playing a viol in an inflection to mimic human speech. The talismans of crystal and glass and the great gold sun-cross in their midst, flashed like the shattered fragments of a broken sun against the worn sheets and the hand that lay like bleached driftwood in their midst.

"They called out for help. I heard their voices at the Winterstead..." Jaldis sighed painfully and turned his face away. "I don't understand."

"The turn of winter was six months ago," Shavus replied, the roughness of his deep voice not quite successful in covering his concern for his friend. "God knows, a man's whole life can change in a week - in a day."

Silent at his elbow, Rhion had to agree.

"What makes you think any of them are still alive by this time?"

"If ever they existed at all," Gyzan murmured, from where he sat on the painted leather chest at the bed's foot.

"It exists." Jaldis stirred as if he would sit. Rhion, too unnerved by the grayness of his face and the ragged way he'd been breathing that morning to stand on ceremony, put out a hand and forced him gently down again.

"It exists," the old man insisted. "That I know. I heard them crying out..."

"I don't disbelieve you, old friend." The Archmage shook back his ragged hair, like tangled gray wool around his dark, scarred face. "But whether those people are still alive to call, let alone have enough power in 'em to reach out across the Void and guide us there..."

"I will find them," the old man said stubbornly. "I will. I must." And for all the weakness of his body, Rhion saw in that sunken face the indomitable determination of a dream.

"Can't you do anything for him?" he asked quietly, when he, the Archmage, and the Archer had climbed down the rough ladder to the kitchen. "Spells to give him strength, to steady his heart..."

"Something you can do as well as I." The big warrior grumbled the words over his shoulder as he rooted through the collection of fine porcelain bottles on the plank shelf - all gifts from the Duke - in search of brandy. Rhion picked up the nearly empty water jar and crossed the length of the kitchen to the door.

In the square outside the water seller whose beat covered this court was walking along the dense blue shade of the arcade, singing mournfully "Wa-a-a-a-a-ter, cool fresh wa-a-a-a-a-ter..." She eyed Rhion suspiciously but uncovered one of the buckets which dangled from her shoulder yoke and filled up his jar, then bit the halfpenny he gave her and made the little crossed square of Darova's Eye on it, in case he'd given her a pebble witched to look like a coin. Wizards were always being accused of doing that, though Rhion had never met anyone to whom it had actually happened.

"Don't be silly." He set the jar down again near the hearth in the kitchen's cool gloom. "Your spells..."

"My spells malarkey," Shavus retorted. "You know as well as I do, my partridge, that there's no spell can go against nature, not forever. What Jaldis needs isn't a spell, but to quit doing things like this to himself. Magic comes from the flesh as well as the will - I've seen you goin' after dates and honey and any sweet thing when you've done some bit of spell-weaving that's beyond you, same as I fall asleep like I'd been clubbed over the head, once the kick of the magic itself wears off. Jaldis can't keep goin' from spell to spell to keep himself on his feet any more than a man can keep himself goin' forever chewing cocoa leaves."

He pulled the cork from the brandy bottle with his teeth and slopped one of the red-and-black cups half-full, while Rhion heaped a little handful of charcoal in the brazier and touched it with a fire-spell even as he worked the coffee mill.

They were all tired, for they had worked the rites of the summoning of power for an hour or two after midnight, trying to find some sign, some clue, in the darkness of the Well. After the shortest night of the year, dawn came far too soon.

In any case, Rhion had slept very little. Fatigued as he was by the calling down of power, no sooner had his head touched the pillow than the dream of Tally lay down beside him, hair like seed-brown embroidery silk and long cool limbs like ivory. In sleep he could have tasted her lips again, but sleep, like the coy girls he'd flirted with in his youth, had played hard to get.

It had been just as well. Waking with the first slits of light through the louvers, he had heard the stertorous rasp of Jaldis' breathing and had realized that the old man had suffered something akin to a mild stroke in his sleep.

"He uses too much power as it is," Shavus grumbled, pouring another generous dollop of brandy into his coffee and taking a handful of the cheese and dates Rhion had brought to the table. The dates were another gift from the Duke, like the coffee and the wine the three senior mages had drunk last night at dinner. The graceful clay bottle, stamped with the Duke's seals, still adorned the sideboard and reminded Rhion that he had had no supper last night. No wonder, he thought, he was starving. "Tampering with that damn Well of his will be his death."

"Perhaps," Gyzan said, speaking for the first time, "death is the inevitable conclusion of all dreams."

In the weeks that followed, Rhion visited the cellar seldom, though he was always conscious of the Well's presence there, like something dark and terrible living in the ground beneath his feet. Even after Shavus and Gyzan had returned to Nerriok, between his own spells of healing and his pupil's, Jaldis had rallied. For all his fragility there was an odd, stubborn toughness to him; he was on his feet within days, though he moved more slowly than he had. Nevertheless Rhion was uneasy. He knew that while he himself was gone, his master would descend the perilous ladder to the cellar and open the Well, sitting for hours before it, gazing into the enigma of its abyss.

The Duke was deeply concerned to hear that his friend was ill and would dispatch a sedan chair and four bearers to Shuttlefly Court whenever he wanted the old man's company. Between times, his gifts multiplied: fruits, game birds, and the light, pale wines of the high country. When Rhion came to court without Jaldis, the Duke would invariably ask after the old man and send back with Rhion some small token - a book from the library or good quality soap from the palace savonneries, or sometimes just summer flowers from the water gardens to brighten the little adobe rooms.

And Rhion was often at court. The Duke had offered both him and Jaldis free use of his library, and it would be foolish, Jaldis scolded, not to take advantage of this freedom to make notes of anything of value he might find. Thus Rhion spent much of the summer in those big marble rooms - three of them, stacked one atop the other in the stumpy octagonal tower - reading by the white, diffuse light that streamed in through the high latticed windows or browsing through the racks of ancient scrolls and shelves of books whose sheer numbers were famous throughout the Forty Realms as second only to the High King's library in Nerriok.

"And personally, I think ours is better," Tally remarked, one afternoon as she and Rhion, catalog and note tablets in hand, were engaged in one of their long paper chases through book after book, tracking down a reference by the rhetoritician Giltuus in his Ninth Book of Analects to spells by a wizard named Greigmeere. "The High King's library has been gone over a dozen times for orthodoxy by the priests of Darova. You can bet anything 'unfit' or 'unseemly in the sight of the gods' went for kindling years ago."

"And this hasn't?" Rhion balanced on a tall-legged stool to pull scrolls from the highest compartment of a rack between two windows: Greigmeere, according to Worgis' Compendium, had been a philosopher; though codex-type books had been in use for four hundred years, priests and philosophers still tended to regard them as newfangled and queer, making it far likelier that Greigmeere's writings, if they existed in the library, would be in the more ancient form. Tally, dressed in the plain green gown she wore when she was tending her dogs or hiding from court occasions, looked up at him where she held the stool steady as he sorted through the wax identification tags on the scrolls' ends.

"Well, more from pride than from intellectual merit, I think," she admitted. "I mean, the White Bragenmeres - Mother's family - always collected anything that came to hand and would never let anyone interfere with anything of theirs for whatever reason. I know Grandfather is supposed to have taken a whip to the Archimandrite of Darova when she came to him complaining his dog had bitten her - then turned around as soon as she had gone and beat the dog."

"Charming fellow." Rhion stretched out to the next compartment, nearly overbalancing himself in his effort to read the tags without climbing down and moving the stool. Tally laughed and put a hand on his calf to steady him, a touch that almost had the opposite effect; it was with great difficulty that he kept himself from springing down upon her then and there. He had found that sometimes, for hours at a time, they could be friends as they had been before, like two children playing in a garden - other moments he was consumed by consciousness of her, aware of every finger end, every pearl upon her headdress, and every eyelash, wanting nothing more from life than to crush her in his arms.

They had made love almost daily since midsummer afternoon: in the grotto at the end of the garden; in the hayloft above the Duke's stables; and in the little deserted pavilion with the painted rafters where Rhion and Jaldis had come to make spells for the saving of Damson's marriage. Of the love-philter and of Esrex and Damson, they did not speak.

Rhion was, in fact, about the court far more than anyone realized, coming silently under the cloudy aura of spells of Who-Me? and Look-Over-There. The places where he and Tally met, where they clung in passionate joy or lay drowsing in an aftermath sweet beyond words, were always hazed about by illusions which woke in chance passersby the dim sensation that there was something urgent to be done immediately elsewhere in the palace. The vines which covered the front of the garden grotto grew long and untended as a beggar's hair; the pavilion by the postern gate acquired a neglected air that came of not having its steps washed or its windows cleaned.

Once, while Rhion hunted for milkwort in the wolf-yellow fields above the olive groves, he heard the horns of the hunters ringing in the hills and caught a glimpse of the Duke, all in crimson, Tally in her familiar red riding dress with her dogs bounding about her, and the flame-haired Earl of the Purple Forest coursing after stag. Watching as the horses plunged out of sight into one of the thick knots of woodland that tangled these high gullies, it came over him in a sweeping rush of despair how terribly short time was. He could see, too, that Tally was right: the Earl's dogs, though too well-trained to shy when he came near, lowered their ears and moved restlessly when he was among them, cracking his whip against his boot.

Upon another occasion, he heard the horns ringing, very distantly, while he was in the Kairn Marshes, putting into practice the spells he had learned from Greigmeere's scrolls - a little-known cantrip to make a thing called a spiracle. Theoretically at least, a spiracle charged with the element of air would hold that element about it even when plunged into water; after a few tries, he found that he could, in fact, so imbue a spiracle that, with it bound around his brow, he could walk about and breathe at the bottom of the river, watching the fish slipping through the dark jungles of cattail roots. When he emerged from the water, his body dripping but his hair and beard and spectacles dry, he found Tally sitting on his clothes.

That was one of the best afternoons. The gnats, under the impression that the air was unaccountably filled with the smoke of lemon grass, hung in perplexed clouds upriver and down, the air clean of them in the thick yellow-green sunlight among the willow roots where Rhion and Tally lay. Afterward Tally insisted on trying the spiracle - a little iron circlet no bigger around than a child's bracelet, tied to a leather thong - and explored the murky greenish waters herself, breathing the bubble of trapped air which hovered around her head.

Later still, lying again on the spread-out bed of their clothing, she spoke of her upcoming marriage, the only time she had done so throughout that long summer.

"I'm saving times like this," she whispered, turning her head toward him, so that her long hair lay tangled over the worn brown robe beneath it. Out on the marsh, a fish leaped at a dragonfly, a silvery plop in the stillness; the air that moved above the water stirred the thick curly hair of Rhion's back and chest and thighs and murmured in the reeds which surrounded the lovers like a translucent green bed curtain, canopied with sky. "They're saying now it will be August, just before we leave for the summer palaces in the hills. Mother's been telling me to stay out of the sun so my skin will beautify and making me take baths in milk. They've been bleaching my hair and clarifying my complexion with distilled water of green pineapples, and Damson's been plying me with every kind of herb and tea and potion she knows to make me beautiful. And time is so short..."

She propped herself to her elbow and reached across to take his spectacles - all that he was wearing - from his face, then drew him to her, silken skin, bones like ivory spindles, beneath his hands. "This is my dowry," she murmured, holding fiercely to him, her face pressed to his shoulder. "When a noble woman marries, she has a jointure to live on, if worst comes to worst - these days are mine."

He gathered her to him, closer and closer still. His beard against her hair, he breathed. "Then we'd better make it a good one."

"I wish there was something I could do."

"Oh, Rhion." Jaldis sighed, and put his wine cup aside, to reach out and grasp his pupil's plump hand in his crippled one. The noise of the summer evening came dimly through the open door from the square: from both taverns, voices lifted in song, old ballads strangely sweet in the lapis dark and torchlight despite the rough voices that framed them. Children shrieked with laughter, whirling the big green-backed beetles they'd caught around their heads on strings to hear them buzz, and crickets creaked in the long weeds around the edge of the arcade. Two streets away the jarring rattle of the market carts rose like a clumsy staccato heartbeat to time the night's mingled sounds. On the rough wooden table between Jaldis and Rhion the supper dishes lay, and among them, like a nobleman gone slumming, stood the three-quarters-empty bottle of wine which the Duke's messenger had brought them that evening. Turning it in his hand, Rhion reflected that the Duke must have returned - he and his guest had been gone for two days, inspecting the summer-palace to which the whole court would soon move.

"I keep thinking..." He gestured helplessly across the ruined battlefield of plates. "I keep thinking about sailing across to Murik, the Island of the Purple Forest... about maybe settling there. But I don't want to leave you." It was the first time he had voiced such a choice aloud. "And I think, 'Well, he doesn't look like the kind of man who's going to get songs sung about his fidelity...' As long as I don't get her with child, why should he care? But I care. I hate the thought of her bearing his children. But that's why he's marrying her. I hate the thought of what he'll do to her."

"And what will he do to her?" his master asked softly. "She's the daughter of his ally. He can't very well take a whip to her."

Very quietly, Rhion said, "He'll make her unhappy."

Jaldis sighed and did not reply.

Rhion got to his feet and paced to the open door. For a time he stood looking out into the unearthly blue of the deepening night, his arms folded tight across his body as if to contain a bleeding wound. Above the mountains, a swollen cantaloupe-colored moon shed light brilliant enough to cast blurred shadows on every sage and juniper bush there, to silver every roof tile of the city beneath. In that drenched indigo world, the taverns stood out like tawdry carnivals; elsewhere in the square, two of the local prostitutes sat on their balcony, having a night off, their quiet-voiced conversation about hairstyles and fashionable gamblers mingling with the smell of their perfume and the thick green scent of the marijuana they smoked. The day had been stifling, the last of July raging down like a furnace over the brown hills. Before the doors of their rooms, all round the arcade, men and women sat arm in arm in companionable silence, watching children playing in the dark.

Rhion whispered, "Dammit. Other people - people who aren't born to magic, who don't have it in their blood - think magic solves things. They come to us for potions, philters, talismans, amulets, and advice to solve some problem or other. But it doesn't, really. It doesn't change what we are. It doesn't change what we do."

"No," Jaldis said, from the soft glow of witchlight that haloed the table where he sat.

Rhion chuckled ironically. "Magic isn't... isn't magic. I keep telling myself every time I see her that it's just one more memory to hurt after she's gone. But I keep grabbing those moments, devouring them as I used to eat cookies... Damn, I make the best love-potions in the Forty Realms, but can I make one that'll fall me out of love?"

"Would you truly want to?"

His voice was nearly inaudible. "No." The witchlight flashed across the lenses of his spectacles as he turned back to the room. "No."

His hand unerring, Jaldis poured the remainder of the wine, dividing it between the two cups. Rhion shut the door, closing out the wild magic of the night, and returned to his master. As he picked up the cup, the touch of it, its graceful shape and glass-black glaze, brought back to him the still silences of the Drowned Lands, the flicker of fireflies across the blue marshes, and the marble faces dreaming in their winding sheets of vines. The Gray Lady's face came back to him, framed in the bones of the priestess' diadem and the pulse-beat tapping of the drums among the sacrificial stones. Magic.

The memories grounded him. Like love, magic was a word of many meanings: joyful or damning, hurtful or sweet, the same word describing a silly flirtation or a commitment that saved the soul.

"To magic," he said softly, raising his cup; as if he could see him do so, Jaldis returned the salute.

"To magic, then."

And draining the cup, the old man rose stiffly from his chair, collected his crutches, and limped off slowly to the ladder and so up to his bed.

Rhion gathered the dishes, dipped water from the jar, and washed them, reflecting with a twisting stab in his heart that, if the Duke had returned, it meant that the court would be getting ready to move up to the higher hills. Several of the wealthy merchants whose walled and decorated houses made up the Upper Town had left already; they would not be back until the minor festival of Shilmarglinda on the equinox of fall.

That thought brought others. He glanced across at the tiny plank door of the cellar, shut and bolted against intrusion, and wondered what Jaldis would learn at the turning of autumn when he again summoned the power of the heavens to listen into the Well. And listen he would, Rhion thought uneasily, at whatever cost to himself.

By the autumn equinox Tally will be married. This will all be over.

The autumn equinox, he realized, was less than sixty days away. It was as if something within him had been squeezed suddenly in a wire net.

And then, from upstairs, he heard the sudden, heavy crash of a stick pounding the floor. Summoning him, calling him urgently...

Jaldis.

He can't use the voice-box...

Rhion took two running strides toward the ladder and stopped, realizing belatedly that the witchlight that had illuminated the room had died. Being able to see in the dark, and being deeply preoccupied, he hadn't noticed...

But there was only a strange, leaden muzziness in the part of his mind that he would have used to summon the light back again. Like a limb that had been numbed, or the speech that eludes a drunkard...

And it came to him, whole, cold, terrifying, and with absolute clarity, what had happened and what was about to take place.

Pheelas root. In the wine.

The Duke never sent the wine.

The Duke is still out of town.

Behind him the door crashed open. Torchlight spilled into the long room like blood from a gutted beast, framing the crowding forms of men in the gray livery of the disgraced house of the White Bragenmeres - personal soldiers with weapons in their hands.

Before them, slim as a lily in unjeweled white, stood Esrex.