The Rainbow Abyss

RHION WOKE WITH A START, from a confusion of uneasy dreams.

He was back in the Old Bridge Market in the City of Circles: a plump little dandy in a red velvet doublet whose buttons flashed with rubies and to whose carefully dressed brown curls clung the scent of cloves. Blue and yellow awnings flapped in the bright spring sunlight around the ancient bridge-temple of Bran Rhu. The air was thick with the smell of lilies and the stink of the river's sewage below. Rhion was thumbing through the old pieces of broken books piled in a used-paper seller's barrow: fragments of romances and hymnals, their illuminations faded and yellowed like desiccated leaves; scrolls of religion and philosophy with their glue cracking along the joins; old household receipt books; and the accounts of forgotten military campaigns. The lowest of kitchen slaves would come by occasionally to buy the stuff by the bagful for kindling and would look at that modishly dressed youth with curiosity and suspicion in their eyes. Rhion, even as he examined the incomprehensible glyphs of a red and green accordion-fold book from the unknown south, tried to formulate in his mind some fashionable motive - mockery, or aesthetics, or something of the kind - should one of his fashionable friends see him and laugh...

A shadow had fallen over him. "Are you hunting for secrets?" Jaldis asked.

And turning, Rhion saw him for the first time.

But this time - he had dreamed this scene before - Jaldis looked as he did now. His face was thin and gray under the stringy web of his beard, his white hair no thicker than spider-floss in the sunlit breeze. The threadbare blankets and worn black cloak which wrapped him parted to reveal the voice-box strapped to his breast, and its silvery drone was all the voice that Rhion heard.

No! he thought, his mind clutching at the receding shreds of the deep, musical tones which had originally framed those words. No, he's not like that! He wasn't like that, not then! His hair and beard were still mostly brown, he still had his eyes then, dark and luminous and kind...

But his mind could reconstruct neither the image of him as he had been, nor the sound of his voice.

As he had indeed done on that day of glassy sunlight and intoxicating flower-scents so many years ago, Jaldis reached into the paper seller's barrow and brought out a book.

But instead of the few pages of star lore and mathematics that it had actually been, it was a book with black covers, covered with dust and sticky with cobweb. The air around it seemed to quiver fitfully, half-visible spirals of light shuddering like a heat dance, and when Rhion opened it, what he held in his hands was not a book at all. Only darkness lay contained in those black covers, a darkness which dropped away into a hole of inky nothing between his hands. As he stared at it in horror, the Abyss exploded upward around him, like water gushing up from a spring; a darkness filled with colors that should not have been colors, gouging a hollow in air and light and in all sane things as if the world which he knew had merely been painted on paper, now touched to destroying flame. Airless beyond comprehension, cold as he had never understood cold could be, the darkness opened around him like the unfurling petals of a sable rose, dragging him down into it, swallowing him...

He was falling. His cry was silent.

Then he found himself in a place he had never seen before. He stood at the edge of a meadow with a forest at his back and a small hill rising before him, crowned with three ancient stones. Two had fallen and lay nearly buried in the thick, calf-deep grass; the third still reared its worn head against the azure well of the summer night. It was close to midnight, he thought - the air was laden with the peep of frogs, crinkled with the trilling of crickets, and summer constellations unrolled in a glittering banner beyond the black spikes of the surrounding pines.

The thick sweetness caught at his throat as he waded through the grass, up the hill to the stones. His feet hewed a dark swathe through the dew that glittered in the starlight, a shadowed track leading back into the coagulated gloom beneath the trees. Looking over his shoulder, he felt a kind of panic, a terror of pursuit... fear of being traced here, captured, taken... Taken where? The thought of it turned him cold but he could conjure nothing, no reason for that hideous dread.

But if he could reach the stones, he'd be safe. If he could reach them by midnight, he could escape...

Escape?

Jaldis. His mind groped for bearings in the disorientation of the dream. Where's Jaldis in all this? He can't run, he's crippled. He won't be able to get away from them...

Who?

The thought of capture turned him sick.

He sprang up on one fallen stone. Around him in the starlight the grass of the meadow lay like a silken lake, cut by the single dark line of his tracks. Overhead the sky was a glowing well of blue, an inverted morning-glory sewn with light. Raising his arms, he called down the power of the wheeling stars to him, calling strength and hope of flight...

But as he turned he saw all around him in the encircling woods the terrible glitter of silver and steel, the closing ring of eyes...

He jolted from sleep like a man falling from a height. His heart was pounding with panic, and for one terrible second he knew that he had not escaped. Waking had only postponed the knowledge of what would happen to him next... but only momentarily. They would capture him and... and...

But it was only darkness.

Only a dream.

Only a dream, Rhion thought, breathless, trying to slow his heart and still his panic. The cold killing lust of the hunters, the poisoned fog of impersonal hate...

But those did not fade from his mind. They grew stronger than before, and he realized that those, at least, were real.

Rhion dropped his hand from beneath the covers to where he had left his spectacles on the floor by the bed. His wizard's sight let him see as well in darkness as in light, but without his spectacles what he saw, day or night, was only a blur. The metal rims were icy against his temples and for a moment the warmth of his flesh misted the thick, curved glass. The room was freezing, for it was the last hour or two of the long winter night, when the heat of the banked fires in the kitchen far below no longer warmed the chimney. Beside him, curled tight for warmth beneath their few blankets and both their shabby cloaks, Jaldis still slept; around them, the little room was as tidy, as orderly, as it had been when they had gone to bed. On the shelf above the bed Jaldis' opal spectacles stared unwinkingly into darkness; the rosewood soundbox rested like a sleeping turtle in its sparkling nest of talismans and tangle of learner straps.

But there was danger.

And it was coming closer.

Closing his eyes, Rhion slowed the panic from his breathing and listened deeply, fully, as Jaldis had taught him years ago and as he had practiced daily in meditation, stretching his senses to the somnolent city outside.

He became immediately aware of the crunch of many booted feet, the clamor of mob rage. At the same moment the urgent tug of fear redoubled, and he understood then that it was coming to him from one of the wizard's marks he had made in the streets surrounding the inn.

In none of the Forty Realms was it considered a crime to kill a wizard. In fact the cults of the gods Bran Rhu, Agon, Kithrak, and Thisme considered such an activity an act of merit and likely to win either the god's favor or promotion to a higher plane of spiritual being, depending on the cult, and Rhion had been a wizard long enough and had talked to enough of his professional colleagues on the subject, to have a healthy wariness about settling down to sleep.

For this reason, within the first week of moving into the Black Pig Inn, Rhion had drawn wizard's marks - barely visible signs imbued with a trace of his personal power - on house walls, fountain railings, and doorposts in a loose ring, perhaps half a mile wide with the Black Pig at its center, marks that would awaken and whisper to him if passed by a large number of people with that particular species of determined, impersonal hatred in their hearts.

It was far from a perfect warning system, of course. Wizard's marks had to be renewed periodically - Rhion's more frequently than Jaldis' would have to be, because of Rhion's lesser strength - and were by no means accurate in what stirred them to life. Time after time Rhion had been called from his meditations, from sleep, or from consultations with clients by bar fights, matrimonial disputes, and, on one occasion, by an angry mob of local fishwives out to storm the house of a particularly unpopular moneylender. At this hour of the night - or morning, for dawn was at most two hours away - it was more likely that the problem was some kind of drunken brawl.

But still, Rhion slipped from beneath the covers and, breathless with cold, hastily pulled on his robe over the knitted pullover and hose he'd worn to bed and laced up his boots. His father had been a man with a motto for every occasion - "Better to be safe than sorry," had been one of his favorites. Having seen just how sorry it was possible to become, Rhion was willing to opt for an uncomfortable safety every time.

The cold in the attic was breathtaking, and Rhion hadn't the heart to take his cloak from the top of the piles of blankets over Jaldis. Moving swiftly, his breath a trail of white behind him, he unbolted and slipped through the crazy door, pausing long enough to work the bolt back into place by magic behind him in case someone tried to break in while Jaldis was still lost in his exhausted slumber. The staircase, which rose like a flue through the inn, was warmer, and Rhion concentrated on whispering the words of a generalized sleep-spell as he hurried down the elliptical spiral of the steps, not sure whether he was getting the spell right or whether it was working. It was one he hadn't practiced lately, and half his mind was on the danger that had - he was almost certain now - shaped the fears of his dream.

In the huge kitchen, low-ceilinged, shuttered, silent, and dark but for the feeble glow of the banked embers on the hearth, Rhion pulled the landlord's heavy green cloak from its peg and slung it around his shoulders. Outside the noise was clearer - definitely armed and angry men, definitely headed this way.

He paused on the threshold, panting, to collect his droughts. It still took him a long and meticulous time to work any kind of spell, though he practiced diligently, and Jaldis told him that speed and mental deftness would come with time. Against the rising shiver in his breast, the inner clamor of There isn't time for this... ! he closed his eyes, calmed his breathing, and reaching out with all the senses of wizardry, realized that the mark the mob had passed was the one he'd put on the side of a little shrine of Shilmarglinda, goddess of grain, over on the corner of Sow Lane.

Clutching the landlord's cloak about him, he ducked and wove through alleyways choked with half-frozen garbage and no wider than the span of his arms. As he ran he shoved resolutely from his mind all the thousand questions trying to heave to its surface like porridge on the boil, questions like Who's behind this? and Where the hell can we go? The landlord'll never bolt the door against them... Instead he concentrated on forming a spell to cloak him against the notice of people who might very well know him for the wizard's apprentice. Unlike the sleep-spells at the inn, tossed hastily about him like a sower's seeds, this one had better keep him from being recognized or he stood in grave danger of having to choose between a very severe beating - if nothing worse - and some defensive action that might trigger further mob violence. In situations like this it was axiomatic that the wizard - or the wizard's friends and acquaintances - could never really win.

The mob had spilled into Suet Lane. It was nearly fifty strong, though its core of two dozen men in the dark-blue livery of some town nobleman's household bravos was being added to all the time by the kind of tavern idlers and day laborers who could always be counted upon to join an affray. Rhion recognized two of the magistrate's constables among them and a couple of lesser officials of the local Temple of Kithrak, the war-god whose cult was strong in Felsplex. One of these was yelling something about servants of evil and insulters of the names of the gods, and Rhion had a sinking certainty about whose honor this assemblage was in.

Nevertheless he fell into step with one of the local wastrels, a little female stevedore he'd seen drinking frequently in the Black Pig. Hoping his spell of Who-Me? would hold, he asked, "What's going on?"

The woman barely glanced at him. A torch in one hand, an ax-handle in the other, she appeared to be - and, by the workings of the spell, in fact was - momentarily absorbed in keeping an eye on the thickly quilted back of the liveried bravo in front of her. If later challenged to describe the man who had spoken to her, she would have been able only to arrive at a vague recollection of someone about her husband's height and build. "Gonna kill them witch scum," she grunted, and spat through gaps in her teeth into the frozen sewage underfoot.

The word she used for "kill" was fruge, a verb which had application only to animals, almost a technical term except that it was used so commonly. It denoted a killing which meant nothing and which demanded no explanations - a self-evident axiom. One never asked why someone would fruge a rat, or a cow for beef. One did it because that was what one did with rats and cows.

"Yeah?" Rhion said in the local slang, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "What'd the bastards do this time?"

"Sold a love-potion to that whore wife of Tepack the moneylender so's she could drag her husband's partner's innocent son into bed with her." His companion nodded toward the solid core of liverymen, like a knot of lead poured into a wooden club to make of it a killing weapon. "Only sixteen, he is, and his daddy - Lord Pruul - says he's gonna fruge them wizards, since Tepack's not gonna let anyone say a word against his wife..."

But Rhion was already gone, holding the landlord's cloak-hem up out of the mud and thinking, Real smart, Rhion. Didn't think to ask if the bint was married, did we?

But of course the question would only have elicited a lie. Perhaps a lie that the woman herself believed. He was familiar with Lord Pruul's son, having sold that raped and innocent victim enough lover-philters and clap-cures to stock a pharmacy over the past thirty months. Dammit, we really did need the money...

He ducked into the doorway of one of the huge, gray-timbered tenement blocks that made up the neighborhood, pressed his hands to the door to work back the bolt by magic, then darted through the downstairs hall where beggars slept in rags and garbage. Cutting through the filth in the yard behind the place, he was able to reach the junction of Suet Lane, Goat Lane, and Cod Alley before the mob did, only a few hundred feet from the Black Pig. Amid the towering walls of tenement houses, wine shops, and the vast bulk of the St. Plomelgus Baths, the little square was like a deep cistern full of shadow, only the tiny brick-and-iron shrine of St. Plomelgus - a demi-god of the Thisme cult - catching the wan starlight on the iron spikes of its roof.

His hands shaking with panic, Rhion forced his mind to calm as he drew the sigils for a spell of misleading on the shrine itself, the corner of the baths, the corner timbers of a tenement house. The Lady, the Fool, the Dancer at the Heart of the World... runes twined together, calling into themselves and radiating forth, in their proper combination, the certainty that one turned right instead of left, that Goat Lane was in fact the street which led to the Black Pig; a line of light stretched across the mouth of Cod Alley, glowing visible for a moment, then sinking back into the air. To throw a little twist on things Rhion added a spell of argumentativeness to the governing Seals upon the shrine, then, as torchlight flickered over the stiff lead saint in her pigeon-desecrated niche and voices echoed against the high walls, he gathered his cloak around him and fled.

Jaldis was already dressed, patiently, with twisted fingers, lacing his boots. He raised his head inquiringly as Rhion fumbled the latch open with his mind from the other side.

"Lord Pruul's men," Rhion gasped, crossing immediately to the table and beginning to shove things into his pockets - packets of herbs, precious bits of bronze and gold and rare woods for the making of talismans, scrying-crystals, and bread. "That woman I sold a philter to earlier tonight was the wife of his business-partner. She used it to seduce his son, though from what I know of Pruul Junior I wonder that she needed to bother."

Jaldis slipped into the leather harness that bound the voice-box to his breast, found his spectacles without groping for them, and hooked them onto his face. The talismans on the voice-box clinked with fragile music as he erected his crutches and climbed to his feet. "My books..."

Rhion turned to view the row of volumes along the back of the table, the stacks on the floor beside the chimney wall, the little bin of scrolls beside his master's customary chair, and cursed. It was appalling how much impedimenta they'd picked up in two and a half years here. They'd come to Felsplex with twenty-one books of various shapes and sizes - grimoires, demonaries, herbals laboriously copied from volumes in Shavus' little library in that stone house in the forest - and in the years they'd been here they had, at great pain and expense, acquired a dozen more. Precious volumes, some of them irreplaceable. While court mage for the traitor Lord Henak, Jaldis had collected a library of nearly a hundred volumes of magic and wisdom over the years, added to what had been passed on to him by his own master. The High King's men had burned them all. Rhion had heard Jaldis say that he regretted that loss more than he did the loss of his eyes.

He cursed again, feeling already exhausted and defeated, and cast a quick glance at the window that he already knew would be their means of egress. The shouts of the mob were audible through the walls, furious and frustrated as they wandered helplessly in the maze of twisting streets. If he'd had time to cast a more elaborate spell...

Swiftly he tore the blanket from the bed. "It's going to be close," he warned, and crossed to the window at a run. Once the shutter was thrown back, the cold was brutal, making his eyes water and his numbed fingers ache, even with both gloves and writing-mitts on his hands. The wind had died down; the sky was iron-black above the slanting jumble of tiled roofs. Most were too steep to hold snow, but moisture had frozen on them and they'd be slick and treacherous. Rhion thought about negotiating them with forty or fifty pounds of unwieldy paper on his back, not to mention trying to guide a blind man on crutches, and shuddered.

"We can't take all of them." The words cut like a wire noose - Jaldis loved those books like children, and there were several that Rhion had not yet studied. But he knew as surely as he knew his name that if he tried it, they would both fall to their deaths. "I'm sorry. We just..."

A spasm of sorrow contorted the old man's face. "Then you choose." The arthritic hands passed, trembling, along the volumes on the table, touching them as he would have touched the faces of people he loved. "For they will be yours now longer than they will be mine."

"Don't say that!" Rhion spread the blanket on the bed and dove back toward the table, steeling himself against the agony of decision and thinking desperately, That spell won't hold them long... "We're going to get out of here just fine... Can you call fog?"

"In a moment." Jaldis remained beside the table, head bowed, hands touching this book or that as Rhion worked hurriedly around him... Dammit, that one's got the Summoning of Elementals in it! I hadn't learned that yet...

Shavus will have it, he told himself firmly. But the book seemed to cling to his hand like a child he was trying to abandon in the woods. Hell, Jaldis was searching for that Book of Circles when I met him...

"Jaldis..." With the window open the noise of the mob came to them quite clearly. It was growing louder again. They must have gotten their bearings.

"In a moment. You're leaving these?"

"Yes. Come ON...!" He piled the fifteen or so books that he could not possibly bear to let slip from their possession in the center of the blanket, threw in some spare clothing and food, and tied the corners, then bent and pulled from beneath the bed a long, cleated plank - the gangway, in fact, of one of the hayboats that came to the quays from upriver in spring. He'd appropriated it two years ago when he'd first mapped out this route of escape, foreseeing the possibility of just this event, even as he'd made wizard's marks that would glow at a word on the various chimneys, turrets, and crudely carved roof-tree gargoyles - designed to frighten goblins and grims, these decorated every roof in the city - along their chosen route...

But the thought of actually doing it still turned him queasy.

At that time he'd practiced manhandling the plank down the roof tiles to the gap where the alley separated them from the next building. But that had been two summers ago, when the steeply sloped tiles were dry. Black ice cracked under the soles of his boots, and the wind froze his face, his heart hammering so hard it nearly sickened him. Eastward across the pitchy jumble of roof trees and gargoyles, his mageborn eyes could make out, like a dirty fault-scar in the wilderness of grimy plaster and half-timbering, the line of the river. The noise of the mob was louder, down in Cod Alley now, certainly - there was no note in it of the baffled fury of a mob confronted with a locked door.

Of course the landlord would let them in. His only request would be that they not break anything downstairs. "He'll probably sell them drinks on their way up," Rhion muttered savagely, as he struggled back through the window again.

Jaldis was still standing beside the table, head bowed and long white hair hanging down over his face as he passed his hands lightly across the covers of each of the rejected books in turn. For an instant, watching him, Rhion's heart constricted with grief - it was as if the old man was memorizing one last time the touch of the bindings, the whisper of the things within that now would be destroyed. But the building was already shaking with the pounding of fists upon the doors, of feet upon the stairs...

He pulled the blanket-wrapped bundle onto his back, tangling it with the landlord's green cloak, and girded up his robe through his belt. "Now," he said, as gently as he could through the hammering urgency of panic, and took Jaldis by the arm. He saw the old man's forehead pucker with the agony of concentration as he called the spells of sight into his opal spectacles.

"Did you call the fog?" Rhion whispered as he eased himself out the window again, praying with all that was in him that the weight of the books on his back wouldn't overbalance him on the slippery roof.

Jaldis, leaning out the window to take his pupil's steadying arms, shook his head. He was using all his strength, all his attention, to see. He could seldom operate both eyes and voice at the same time, much less call unseasonable weather conditions like fog in winter, even when he was rested - certainly not in the exhausted aftermath of working with the Dark Well.

Instead he had been saying good-bye to his books. Scared as he was, Rhion could not feel anger. The Grand Demonary had been given Jaldis by his own old master Xiranthe, Archmage of the Morkensik Order for forty years, who had gotten it from hers - it was one of the few which had escaped the High King's men. The collection of the wizard Ymrir's personal notes had been copied nearly a hundred years ago and was the best redaction of those notes either of them knew about, the least corrupted...

But, Rhion thought despairingly as he started to ease his way down the steep tiles, with the old man's tall weight on one shoulder and the shifting, awkward sack of books on his back, we surely could have used that fog.

The flight from Felsplex was a nightmare that in later years Rhion would look back upon with a kind of wonder, amazed that he'd been scared enough even to think about trying it. Wind had started up by the time they'd crossed the gangway, blowing from the north and arctically cold. Rhion could smell sleet on it but knew that neither he nor Jaldis could spare the concentration needed to turn the storm aside. With the books overbalancing him, he didn't have the leverage to pull the gangway across after them, but had to tip it over into the deserted alley below.

Then came the slithery agony of edging along the slanted roofs, easing their way around gables and ornamental turrets, clinging to gargoyles and rain gutters slick with ice and rotten with age and neglect. For the most part, the buildings in this crowded riverside quarter were close enough together, with their projecting upper stories and jutting eaves, to make leaping over the gaps a relatively easy matter, in theory at least. But theory did not take into account the hellish cold and slippery footing, the yawning blackness of forty- and fifty-foot drops to the cobblestones below, nor the storm gusts that came whipping unexpectedly around the corners of those tall black roof trees to pluck at their clothes and claw their faces.

The coming storm had killed whatever dawnlight had been rising. Rhion hoped it would also discourage their pursuit, but he could still hear the angry voices in the streets below as the men fanned out through the whole district, torches leaping in the charcoal shadows of those twisting chasms, curses echoing against the crowding walls. One of the first things Jaldis had taught him, ten years ago - and he'd been studying it on his own even before that - was to read the weather; he could tell that the sleet wouldn't hit soon enough to drive Lord Pruul's bravos indoors. It would only soak and freeze him and Jaldis once they got clear of the town... if they could manage to do so without breaking their necks.

Thanks a lot, he muttered, addressing the gods Rehobag and Pnisarquas, Lords of the Storm. According to the Bereine theologians who strolled in the pillared basilicas of Nerriok, Rehobag and Pnisarquas were only aspects of the Lord Darova, the Open Sky, God of the Blue Gaze, the Lord Who Created Himself... a god notoriously antithetical to wizardry and all its works. It figures.

Rhion was trembling with exhaustion by the time they reached their goal: a tenement by the river whose five-storey bulk jutted out on pilings over the dark waters, a tenement whose inhabitants, like all those of the riverside community, routinely fished off crooked platforms that clung like swallows' nests to the building's side, connected by a thready tangle of ladder no more substantial than spider-web and straw. As he helped the exhausted Jaldis down that suspended deathtrap of sticks and rope, Rhion thanked whatever gods listened to wizards that the river was deep enough at Felsplex not to have frozen, and that the intense cold had damped the smell of it here under the pilings where every privy in the district emptied.

There were several boats tied among the piers beneath the tenement, where a single lantern hanging from a crossbeam threw hard yellow scales of light on the oily water. Rhion's gloves had been torn to pieces by the scramble over the roofs, and his hands were so stiff they would barely close around the oars. At this season the water was low. Had it been spring, he did not think he would have had the strength to row against the current.

"I don't see any smoke," he commented after a time, as they approached the city's water gate with its thick portcullis - half-raised now like a dog's snarl - where the river ran out westwards into the flat open country beyond, dirty-white and mud-brown beneath a livid sky. Wind tore at his face, the first sleet snagging in his beard. It was, he knew, nearly impossible for even a mage of Jaldis' powers to turn a storm aside when it was this close. But he knew, too, that they'd have to try, or they'd never make the upstream market town of Imber alive.

Jaldis, sitting huddled in the boat's prow under his own cloak and Rhion's, his hood drawn up over his face, did not raise his head. White hairs flicked from beneath the edge of the hood, like snow blowing from the crest of a roof; muffled by the cloaks that covered it, the voice of the box was nearly inaudible. "That few books would not make much smoke," he said softly. "They would cast them into the kitchen stove... it will easily accommodate so small a number. No..." And he sighed, a soundless, aching breath of regret. "My great sorrow is that they will have destroyed the Well."

"The Dark Well?" Bending his aching back to the oars, Rhion tried to remember what it was about the Dark Well that had frightened him so badly, why the very name of the thing made his scalp creep. But he could remember nothing, other than standing and looking into the eldritch, shifting colors of blackness... that terrible hollow... A vague impression tugged at his mind that perhaps he had dreamed something...

And then it was gone.

But, grieved as he could see Jaldis was at the loss, he himself could work up very little in the way of regret.

"The Dark Well," the old man again echoed. "They will wipe out the lines that bound it, trample away the symbols that gave it power, that held it in place. It will vanish, and all its secrets with it. Those who cried out to me from its depths..."

"You'll be able to create another one, in time," Rhion said, manufacturing as cheerful a tone as he could. "As soon as we get to Imber and find someplace to stay..." He tried to recall if he'd pocketed their money in their haste to get out, and couldn't. "You'll be able to find them again, and help them."

"No, my son," Jaldis softly said, and shook his head. "No... If someone has found a way to destroy magic, to end it, make it cease to exist, in an entire universe - it is we who may need their help."