The Rainbow Abyss

IT WAS CARNIVAL WHEN RHION came next to Bragenmere, the Feast of Mhorvianne. Ribbons and bunting decorated the tenement balconies of the Lower Town, yellow and red and green, lining the route of what had obviously been a procession. Garlands of roses, hyacinth, and cyclamen still twisted round the porch pillars of the temples in the squares and the pediments of the public baths. The remains of pink and white petals could be discerned, trampled in the muck of the brimming gutters, and the public fountains of the markets still smelled faintly of the more inexpensive varieties of wine.

"You could have knocked me over with a feather," Tally said, after their first kisses had been exchanged in the deserted shadows of the library vestibule, where even on the gray spring afternoon the slaves had already kindled the lamps. It was coming on to rain again - Rhion wondered whether Jaldis had been asked to keep the skies clear for the procession. Tally wore an unlikely geranium-hued gown whose hanging clusters of ribbons were tipped with bells, haloing her every movement in a starry glister of sound. "Father's getting married again."

"Getting married?" Rhion paused, startled and amused, in the act of cleaning his spectacle-lenses, which had gotten rather smudged in their initial embrace.

"Yes. To the heiress of Varle, who's about as old as I am. Esrex is furious."

"What business is it of his?" Hand in hand they ascended the long curve of the library stairs, surrounded by what Rhion - in reminiscence of a joke as old as the hills - thought of as the Nobody-Here-But-Us-Chickens Spell. Rhion had guessed from the bustle in the palace courtyard below that the library would be deserted; their footfalls echoed with small, sharp music in the tall vaults of the marble ceilings. "I mean, except that it's finally the foreign alliance he's been after all these years..."

"Poor father." She half-laughed at the irony of it - two marriageable daughters, each determined to have the man she wanted and not the alliance their father craved. "But it's more than that. Since Syron's death..." Her voice still flawed a little on the name of the young brother she had loved, "I think Esrex has gotten used to the idea that Dinias would naturally be Father's heir. And with offers coming in from all sides for Elucida's hand... Did you know the High Queen even sent her astrologer to take the aspects of her birth and cast a horoscope?"

"You mean, to marry Elucida to the little Prince?" Rhion's eyebrows tweaked upward - quite a fate, he thought, for that tiny fair-skinned child, sleeping in a hollow log where the grims had abandoned her. "Esrex better not count on that one. Shavus tells me the boy's sickly and suffers from convulsions. Besides, I thought the High Queen was one of Agon's initiates and didn't hold with astrologers."

"Well," Tally said, "when it comes down to it, nobody's supposed to go to astrologers and necromancers and people who make love-potions..."

"Don't look at me; I've retired."

"But all that will change," she finished simply, "if Elucida is no longer going to be sister to the Duke of Mere one day. Not to mention the White Bragenmeres being cut out of the succession entirely."

Rhion was silent, remembering Esrex' overwhelming, bitter pride. Upon occasion, he wondered whether what really angered that young scion was the suspicion that any kinswoman of his had mingled her blood, not with a wizard, but with a banker's son.

Jaldis rose from his chair as they entered his study and hobbled to greet them, the huge, opal rounds of his spectacle-lenses flashing strangely in the witchlight that burned like marshfire above his head. Rhion frowned, seeing how bent and frail the old man looked, and wondered if he'd been working with the Dark Well since the winter solstice, probing at its shadowy secrets with whatever power of his own he could raise.

Or was it merely, he thought, that he was getting old?

"Have Shavus and Gyzan come?"

Jaldis shook his head. "They will be here late tonight." The fox-fur wrap which covered his shoulders and chest slightly muffled the voice of the box. The chamber was warm, but still the old man clung to it, and now and then Rhion saw him shiver. "Shavus said that with things as they have been, it was best..."

"Things?" Rhion's frown deepened. "What things?"

"You have not seen these, then?" The old man turned and limped back to the table. From the side of his eye, Rhion saw Tally's somber face and realized that the sheet of cheap yellow paper which the old man held out was not news to her.

It was a crudely block-printed handbill, labeled, The God of Wizards. It depicted a grossly goat-headed man in a wizard's long robe - in the print there was no attempt to show what color, or what Order, only that it was hung all over with sun-crosses, gods-eyes, and other symbols of magic - copulating with a naked woman whose mouth was open in a protesting scream. A dead baby, its throat slit, sprawled beside them.

"According to Shavus, these have been appearing in the streets of Nerriok for weeks."

Rhion's hand was shaking with anger as he set the leaflet down. Artists of illusion... "Did Shavus say anything else?"

"Only that he would speak to me more of it when he arrives tonight." The blind wizard removed his spectacles, laying them down upon the desk. Beside the leaflet, Rhion saw a scrap of paper bearing a few lines of the Archmage's explanatory scrawl. He glimpsed Gyzan's name and remembered that the Blood-Mage had his house on one of the capital's outlying islets. The leaflet could very well have been found shoved under his door.

"Have you shown the Duke?"

"It only arrived today." Jaldis hobbled to the hearth and stood there, holding out his crooked hands to the coals. "I fear it may mean they shall have to cut short their visit to the other world..."

"Cut short?" Rhion stared at him, shocked to realize the extent of Jaldis' obsession with the project. "What makes you think he'll be willing to go at all?"

Jaldis turned back; by the startled ascent of his white eyebrows, Rhion realized the old man was equally shocked that the question would even have been raised. "Cancel our plans? I have sought them - Eric and Paul, his helper and fellow student - for seven years. I am not going to put the matter off over a few pieces of paper."

"It's not a few pieces of paper. It could be preparation for something, some major stroke..."

"Indeed it could." Jaldis limped back to him and took his arm, his thin face in its frame of white hair as grave, as earnest as Rhion had ever seen it. "Don't you see? It is because of this that he must go. The enemies of magic are moving, my son. And what happened in one universe could just as easily happen here."

But Rhion was uneasy as, unseen in the gallery's shadows, he watched the feasting in the palace's great hall that night. The Duke, when he had seen him before dinner, had apologized for not asking Rhion or his master to the feast or the masking afterward. It was a state occasion, and the priests of all the Great Cults would be there. As Tally had said, since losing the possibility of foreign marriage alliances the Duke had become more careful of the opinions of the cults.

They were all present, seated in places of honor, from Darova's gold-robed Archimandrite and the red-gowned Archpriestess of Mhorvianne down to the local Solarist Holy Woman in unadorned white who regarded the whole scene with the polite interest of an adult at a children's party. It was not lost on Rhion that Esrex, costumed for the masking in the simple black pantaloon and white mask of a juggler, was sitting next to Mijac.

His eye traveled as it had three months ago to others he knew around the board and to the Duke, recognizable despite his red leather huntsman's costume and spiked black-and-gold mask. The way he moved, the warm charm of his manner, as much as the broad shoulders and strongly curled black hair, would have identified him had he been in rags. At his side was his new bride, blond and pretty and, as Tally had said, younger than the Duke's own daughters, costumed in a pearl-sewn gown supposed to represent a shepherdess. The plump little lady in the improbable goddess robes beside her, being gracious and kind and welcoming, was unmistakably Damson. On the Duke's other side sat Dinias, a thin pale boy in scarlet who looked as if his chest was hurting him again, and, gowned as a woman for the first time in jewel-plastered brocade and clearly embarrassed about the visible expanses of flat white chest, Elucida, promoted to womanhood on this, the feast of the Goddess of Love. As usual when she was nervous Elucida was taking refuge in her formidable erudition, and arguing theology with the Archimandrite, at whose left hand she sat.

The tables had been set in a big U around the sides of the hall to accommodate courtiers, merchants, and nobles of town and country; Rhion scanned the gaily costumed figures around them for a glimpse of Tally. She had told him Ranley the physician was coming as the God of Ocean complete with the Ocean's Twelve Daughters, and Rhion wondered where they'd found eleven other girls of Tally's height and build. They had, however - all were moving about the hall, up and down the tables as they were cleared after the final course, flirting with this man or that, absurdly gowned in identical pearls and green silk, with long green wigs like braided seaweed hanging down their backs. Rhion smiled, trying to guess which one of them was Tally.

Then his eyes passed over Esrex again, and his smile faded. Esrex, too, was watching, clearly trying to determine the same thing.

Overhead in the musician's gallery, a trumpet shrilled. A procession of young men trooped into the hall, clothed in the fantasy regalia of barbarian knights, dancing in time to the martial music and swinging their gold-hilted swords. Among them Rhion recognized his son Kir, garbed as a chieftain's squire, flourishing his weapon with a firm adeptness well beyond his years. He'd seen Brenat earlier, costumed as a baby sprite and sound asleep on what appeared to be Kithrak the war-god's cloak - at least, he thought with wry amusement, there was no doubt about his paternity. Where Kir got his streak of ferocity he couldn't imagine.

But looking at the boy, solemn and blazing with controlled excitement among the tall mock-warriors around him, Rhion felt the stirring of pride in his heart, a delight in his son's perfection, even at something as incomprehensible as weaponry...

Raising his eyes, he saw Esrex' son Dinias again, slouched at the High Table, watching with sweetmeats clutched in his sticky hand.

And it came to Rhion for the first time that Esrex sought to expose Tally's iniquity, not out of revenge for past slights or hatred for him as a wizard, but in order to discredit the boys whom the Duke favored far above his unprepossessing heir.

Better, maybe, he thought with a chill, that the Duke marry again, to father another son and put both his grandsons out of the running...

A hand touched his arm. He spun around, startled, and found himself looking up into the face of one of the Ocean's Twelve Daughters, whose gray eyes laughed at him from behind an explosion of green feathers. "I had to look for you five or six times before I saw you standing here," she said softly, leading him through the half-hidden doorway and toward the dark of the stair. They paused to kiss in the shadows, the down of the mask trim tickling his nose, and all considerations of the Duke and Shavus and Esrex - of wizardry and danger and the perils of the Dark Well - slipped for a time into insignificance.

"Come," she breathed, "I think by this time everyone's lost track of whether there are eleven Daughters of Ocean out there or twelve."

The last of the fireworks were blossoming like chrysanthemums against the tar-black sky when Rhion again reached the library tower. He'd left Tally sleeping, and the sight of her closed eyelids, her face in the braid-crimped swatches of her hair relaxed as a child's, had filled him with both tenderness and guilt. I shouldn't have left her alone in this place, he thought, drawing his knitted pullover on over his head. And then, Don't be absurd. Her father's the Duke, for gods' sake - Marc may be a casual husband but he wouldn't let anything happen to her, or to the children...

The smell of coming rain was thick in the air - the rockets cast red and gold flares against the louring bellies of the clouds. The fragile sweetness of spring, of new grass and damp earth, breathed about him as he made his way through the darkness of the gardens, conscious of soft giggles and silken rustlings in grove and thicket as couples celebrated the coming of spring in the age-old fashion. Between the Carnival of Masks and the celebrations of the Duke's new wedding, the courtiers had already had a week and a half of continuous feasting and dancing, to culminate in tomorrow night's procession to Mhorvianne's shrine on the edge of Lake Pelter - Rhion could only shake his head wonderingly at their stamina.

And tomorrow night, he thought, climbing the curving marble stairs - when the Sea Lady's worshipers knelt masked in her precinct, to be cleansed of their sins so that crops could grow again in the lands and when the Gray Lady's husband stretched himself on the granite altar to receive both the knife and the power of the stars - the Dark Well would open. And Shavus and Gyzan would step into the abyss.

And after that...

He opened the small door in the topmost of the library's rooms, and ascended the winding little stair. But even as he climbed he knew something was wrong.

No sound met his ears from the room above. No hospitable thread of firelight rimmed the tiny upper door. And as he came closer, he heard the thin drone of Jaldis' voice scraping like a cricket at the syllables of Shavus' name.

Goddess, no. He can't stand another failure - another three months of searching, of waiting...

And who knew what would happen in those three months?

Alone in the dark of the workroom, Jaldis sat with his brownish crystal cradled in his hand. A wan feather of blue witchlight flashing off the scrying-stone's facets prickled the rounds of his spectacles with tiny fire. Rocking back and forth with concentration he crooned, "Shavus... Shavus Ciarnin, Archmage..." over and over as he channeled all his will, all his strength, into reaching out to his friend's mind and getting him to look into his own crystal, wherever he might be.

"What happened?" Quietly Rhion brought up the other chair.

Raising his head tetchily, Jaldis snapped, "If I knew do you think I'd be doing this? I'm sorry," he added immediately, and stretched out his hand in apology. "I have been seeking word since before midnight. I scried the road between Nerriok and Bragenmere, even tried to scry Gyzan's house... and saw no closer than three streets away from it as usual, I might add."

"Dammit!" Rhion whispered. "It's been raining on and off, yes - the roads are muddy and the creeks swollen. But I'd have thought Shavus would have left enough time..."

"No," Jaldis corrected him softly. "No. When I said that I had scried that road, I mean that I have scried, to the best of my knowledge, every mile of it. And everywhere it appears passable. It is not a question of... simple delay."

He set down his crystal. Up until a year or so ago his hands had had enough mobility for him to cut his own fingernails - latterly Rhion or Tally had done it, but one or two of them still had the look of claws in the wavery magelight.

Rhion was silent as the implications of his words sank in. The memory returned to him, like a haunting thread of music, of the poster of the God of Wizards, and his uneasy conviction that something else was afoot. "It might still be something simple," he said hesitantly. "Illness or something that has nothing to do with... with their being wizards. They could have met bandits. A horse could have gone lame..." His voice trailed off. All those things sounded weak and unlikely. Such things happened - but they seldom happened to the Archmage of the Morkensiks or to the Blood-Mage Gyzan.

"Look," he went on after a moment. "We'll speak to the Duke, first thing in the morning. He can have men out on the road..."

"Indeed." With the rumbling care of the old, Jaldis removed his spectacles and laid them beside the scrying-crystal, then bowed his head so that the bridge of his nose rested against the hooked edge of his fingers. "Indeed, that... that is what he must do. Surely he will find them by nightfall..."

"Or the following day," Rhion agreed. "In rains like we've been having it takes four days, easy, to get to Nerriok. Seven or eight from the forest of Beldirac, if that's where Shavus was. If one of the bridges washed out..."

Without raising his head, the blind mage said, "It cannot wait four days." He spoke as simply, as steadily, as if the subject under discussion were some cantrip for his patron's entertainment, some magical toy of fires and smokes. "If he has not come by the stroke of midnight, then I must go myself."

For one long beat Rhion was silent, though it would not have been true to say that he was shocked or surprised. But it took a moment, before he could speak.

"The hell you will!"

The old man raised his head and seemed to regard him from the collapsed ruin of his eyes. "Of course I will go. Rhion, I have waited seven years to find them again. Searched seven years, solstice after solstice, equinox after equinox. The last time I waited they were gone from me, vanished... There is no question of waiting another three months."

Rhion was on his feet now, cold with a panic that was partly anger, partly something he did not want to look at too closely just yet. "As far as I'm concerned, there's no question of not waiting another three months, or six months, or as long as it takes to locate Shavus and Gyzan! You see by magic, you speak by magic..."

"I've told you before that it should make no difference."

"And what if it does?" He was shouting now, his quick anger covering the terrible chill of fear; the fear for Jaldis covering that other fear that his mind turned away from, refused to see even in itself...

If he goes you'll have to go with him.

"Holy gods, with the amount of power it takes to cross the Void, the crossing itself might kill you! You damn near had a stroke once, just working with that thing..."

"I will be well." The quiet serenity of his voice was unshakable, the depth of his dedication - his obsession - like a stone foundation immovable even by the earthquake that had drowned Sligo. "I must go, Rhion. To help them, and to..."

"No."

The old man simply faced him, his scarred mouth with its set, drooping line as stubborn as a child's.

"And if I have to go up to that loft with a scrub-brush and wipe out the circles that are holding the Dark Well open to keep you from stepping into it and killing yourself, I'll do it."

Still Jaldis said nothing. The huge crystal spectacles on the table by his elbow seemed to stare up at Rhion's face in defiant silence.

There was something so childlike in that silence, so sure of itself, that fear-born anger swept over Rhion like a wave. "Right," he gritted between his teeth, knowing that nothing would shake Jaldis from his resolve. Turning away he picked up the broom from the corner and started for the ladder that led up to the attic trap.

From the tail of his eye, he saw Jaldis move one crippled hand.

The shock-wave that struck him took his breath away, knocking him almost off his feet and wrenching the broom from his hands. It crashed against the wall and fell clattering, its shaft snapped in two pieces. The next instant pain hit him, his vision dissolving in a swirl of grayness and flakes of falling fire. Agony clamped his head and twisted his guts like a wrenching hand. His knees turned to water and he fell, pressure crushing his chest, smothering him like burning stones. In the roaring of his ears, he thought he heard the thunder of power, the scream of black rage, blind and mute for years, a sightless revenge tearing his flesh to pieces, darkening his eyes...

Then he could breathe again. As he lay gasping, he was dimly conscious of the sound of something falling, the scrabble of something crawling desperately to him across the wooden floor. Crippled hands shook as they turned him over, touched his face, the bent fingers absorbing back the last of the pain while a sweet, buzzing voice said "Rhion! Oh, Rhion, forgive me... !"

He opened his eyes. His head still throbbed with the echo of what had felt like a vise about to split his skull and his stomach flinched with nausea. Smeared and blurred by the floor dirt on his spectacles, he saw Jaldis crouching beside him, anxiety twisting his ashen face. The horrifying vision that for a moment had flashed through his mind, the terrible sight of some nightmare entity, blind and crippled and tongueless for years of resentful inner fury, retreated into a shadow and left him feeling, not frightened of the old man who had done such a thing to him, but overwhelmed with pity. Tears tracked down from beneath the scarred eyelids, the jeweled artificial eyes, glistening in the witchlight.

"Rhion, I am sorry! So terribly sorry. I don't know what came over me..."

Rhion laughed shakily, knowing perfectly well that Jaldis did know, and was scorched with shame to the bottom of his soul. He closed his plump hand on the crippled one. "Not so sorry you wouldn't do that to me again if I tried to stop you, I bet."

"Rhion..." There was pleading in his voice. Rhion sat up, all his joints tingling with the backwash of the fevered pain, and hugged the old man close. It was like embracing a bag of sticks. Past his shoulder, he saw Jaldis' crutches lying on the floor near the table. The old man had tried to run to him, forgetting them, and falling, had crawled.

"Rhion," Jaldis said softly after a few more moments. "You may come with me - indeed, I pray that you will. But it is your own choice. The peril of crossing the Void will be great, maybe greater than either of us can survive. Eric and his friends may not be able to raise sufficient power there, even with the equinox, to guide us across. But I beg you, do not try to stop me. If I must, I will sit up guarding the Dark Well - guarding you - for the next twenty-four hours. But to be ready for the crossing, I will need rest, need sleep. Swear to me, please swear to me, that you will not try."

"Of course I swear it, Jaldis," Rhion said, deeply distressed that the old man would beg him thus - in spite of the fact, he thought wryly the next moment, that he'd just demonstrated the need for such an oath.

"If you do not choose to come, I hold you in no blame," the old man went on rapidly, his hands closing hard around Rhion's, as if willing him to understand his obsession, his need. "Truly, I leave you with my blessing. Only guard my books while I am gone, do not let strangers or curiosity seekers like the Gray Lady or Gyzan touch them..."

"Don't be silly," Rhion said. "I'm not letting you go without me." It was as if he had meant to say it all along.

Jaldis embraced him again, his arms surprisingly strong but his body and his narrow skull with its long streamers of white hair, fragile and delicate as a bird's against Rhion's sturdy shoulder. "My son..."

"Look." Rhion took off his filthy spectacles, pulled a cotton kerchief from the pocket of his robe, and wiped at the glass, peering across at his master as he did so. "It's still almost twenty-four hours until the equinox. Shavus and Gyzan could walk through that door any minute, covered with mud and cussing out their horses. Whether we're going to another universe or staying in this one..." He forced lightness into his voice. "...we're both going to need a lot of rest between now and then."

The blind man nodded. His face in the blue glow of the witchlight was wax and ashes. The magic of ill had taken from him strength he could not well spare. Rhion had forgotten, over the years, the old man's terrible power, which Jaldis had so seldom used, and had forgotten how strong the bond between master and pupil could be, and the dreadful hold of a master-spell over the student's mind. Jaldis knew, no one better, every vein and muscle and nerve of him, had seen how the fibers of his mind wove together and how memory and spirit and soul informed his flesh. His whole body hurt, and deep in his heart, buried and deliberately unseen, was the whispered knowledge that it could have been far worse.

"Sleep... yes," Jaldis murmured. "To rest... to meditate... Rhion, I'm trusting you not to try to stop me. I'm trusting you not to... to damage the Dark Well, or try to, while I sleep. I need to sleep, will need it so badly. I trust you, my son."

Trust me, Rhion thought a little bitterly, when fifteen minutes later he stood looking down at Jaldis' slumbering form, like a paralytic child's among the dark quilts of his bed. Trust me to stand back and let you walk into danger. Trust me to enable you to get yourself killed in pursuit of your dream.

Jaldis, he remembered, had once done the same to him. When it would have been far more sensible for him to have remained home and learned accounting from his father, Jaldis had taught him, even in pain and disorientation and new mourning for sight and voice and freedom; had helped him to pursue his own perilous dreams.

Maybe all dreams end in death, Gyzan had said.

That was the worst thing about being a wizard, he thought, as he moved around the little rooms, tidying them from habit, exhausted but unable to sleep yet, washing the supper dishes and setting the books to rights in the places where he knew Jaldis always kept them. Eventually, one saw too much. One knew too many things, and no decision was ever clear anymore.

No wonder some wizards went a little mad.

He looked across the room at the ladder which led up to the attic. His eyes strayed to the broom, its shattered pieces still lying where they had been flung by the force of Jaldis' rage. The handle was charred and splintered, but the business end could still be used. It took at least three days to weave a Dark Well's outer circles, to create that terrible flaw in the fabric of the Universe through which its dark interstices could be seen. If anything happened to it now, Jaldis would be crushed with grief, shattered with anxiety and sorrow for those young men whose voices he had heard in the Void...

But Jaldis would be alive.

Yet Rhion had sworn. Jaldis trusted him. And there was always the chance that Shavus would, in fact, show up at the last minute, as he had shown up so many times before.

Rhion opened the window shutters and stood looking out over the sleeping palace below him and the city - its mazes of roof tiles and arcades, balconies and squares and pillared temples - lying huddled under the scudding grimness of charcoal clouds. Deep in his bones he could feel the stirring of the equinox's approach, as he could sometimes in meditation feel the pull of the moon.

And as strong, as deep, as silent as that awareness, was the knowledge in his blood that Shavus would not come, that come tomorrow's midnight, he and Jaldis would face the darkness of the Void themselves.