The Rainbow Abyss

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

"Did the Circle hold?" He groped for his spectacles, finding them by memory, muttering a curse as the lenses misted from the warmth of his flesh.

Jaldis, still deep in his meditative listening, shook his head.

"Damn inflationist idiots on the municipal council passing off silver-washed copper..."

"They're going by," the voice of the box hummed. "They come from all directions, but they all go in one direction, and that is not here. They cross over the Circle on their way..."

Even through the heavy shutters, Rhion heard a woman scream.

He was on his feet and heading for the door almost before he could think - he and Jaldis both had been sleeping booted and clothed. He had his hands on the heavy door bolt before he remembered that grims frequently counterfeited the voices of women and children crying for help, to trick victims into opening shutters and doors and breaking what field of power the silver nails might generate. He thought the scream sounded genuine, but still...

"Alseigodath, amresith, Children of the Dusky Air..." he muttered, collecting the first of the demon-spells Jaldis had long ago had him memorize and hoping he could call accurately to mind the long catalogue of the names of demons and grims and the strange pain-spells that held such creatures in check. He caught up his walking staff and flung the door open as a second scream cut the air. Hearing it, he knew it was no grim that made that sound.

Calling up within him all the power that he could, he ran.

Foul with ice and half-melted snow, the road dipped beyond the inn's little hill to the thicker woods and broken jumble of ground that was the first frontier of the Drowned Lands of Sligo. In this season the pools and marshes which six hundred years ago had filled in the upper end of the Morne Valley were frozen, black cattails and the twisted stems of sunken oak and hornbeam protruding like skeleton fingers from the gray sheet of starlit ice. But with the recent thaw, even the shallow ponds were treacherous. Rhion's foot broke through what had appeared to be solid ice in the roadside ditch as he scrambled across, soaking him to the knees in freezing water.

Far off, amid the tangled bog-hummocks and leafless willows, he could see a flickering greenish light.

There were hundreds of them, thick as flies above a midden in summer. As he whispered the words of the spells within his mind he could smell them, queer and cold and bodiless; see them through their own ghastly weavings of semivisibility and shifting forms. Like the intermittent hallucinations of migraine, grims flitted through the bare boughs of maple and ash, skeletal forms with huge eyes and dangling feet, strange organs heaving luminously through transparent skin, eyes and faces and limbs, human and bestial, materializing one moment, then vanishing or becoming, hideously something else. A thing came loping out of the black underbrush beside him in the form of a huge black dog, to snap and tear at his legs with teeth suddenly solid and real; Rhion struck at it, his staff ablaze with blue-white witchfire, and the creature screamed at him with a human face and went gibbering back into the dark.

As he had suspected, they were driving the women toward the frozen sloughs.

Through snow-clotted fern and bracken, it was easy to trace the rucked hoof-tracks of her panicked horse; far off he could hear it neighing with terror. They were out on pond ice already, though, from the high ground where he stood, Rhion could see the rider fighting to rein back to safer footing. He scrambled down the scarp bank, black tangles of wild ivy and vine snagging his feet like rabbit snares under the snow, swinging his flaming staff at the grims when they came too close. Their claws raked at his face and his hands - If they get my specs off me I'm a dead man, he thought detachedly - shrieking like the soulless damned, while ahead of him clouds of them blew like poisoned green smoke around the frantic dark forms wheeling in the starlight.

They were far out on the ice, the horse's hooves skidding and slipping, and underfoot Rhion felt the ice buckle and crack. The Drowned Lands were a maze of fen and swamp and pond, deep even this far inland, in these sweet marshes, two days' journey from the salt marshes where the heart of the realm of Sligo had lain. By the bulrushes that fringed the gray glimmer of ice, Rhion guessed this pond was deep. Ahead of him he saw by the noxious ur-light the face of the rider, a girl of no more than seventeen, taut and scared as she tried to force her mount back into the driving swarms of eyes and claws that lay between her and the safety of the shore. Fingers like thorn-branches snagged and lifted a huge cloud of pale hair; another grim tore the long, full train of her riding skirt, and she lashed at it with her quirt, clinging to the rein as the terrified horse twisted out of control.

Then the ice cracked beneath them and they plunged, forehooves-first, into the heaving brown water beneath.

Rhion flung up his staff and cried "ALSEIGODATH! Children of the Dark Air... !" in a voice of power, the trained, booming shout completely unlike his normal light tenor, and the grims, screaming with laughter as they swirled around their struggling victims, scattered in all directions in a vicious, glittering cloud. Summoning about him the essences, the true names, of silver and fire and burning sunlight, Rhion strode forward, blazing and flashing and crying out the tale of the demon lists he had memorized over the years, the true names of as many as these flickering, amorphous things as had been gathered by wizards of the past, weaving them into a net of illusion and power and ruin.

And he tried not to show - and indeed, tried not to feel - his surprise that they did retreat, since as far as anyone could tell the power of the grims increased the more of them there were.

The girl sprang from the saddle as soon as the grims whirled back, tearing off her jacket and throwing it around the head of the terrified horse. Its forelegs were still trapped in the ice and its frantic pitching threatened to drop them through what remained; she caught the bit, trying to drag the animal free, and Rhion, still shouting the names of power and pain and light, ran to her and caught the bridle on the other side.

"Malsleiga, Brekkat, Ykklath - say when..." he panted. "Rinancor and Tch'war, Flennegant the Pig-Faced..."

"Now!"

Both hauling in unison, they pulled the terrified beast's forefeet clear, ice-water showering everywhere and soaking them both to the skin. The horse tried to bolt, demons still eddying around their heads like flaming leaves in a whirlwind, and through that hellish storm Rhion and the girl managed to drag it across the sagging floe. Only when they reached the more solid packs among the reed-beds did the wickering ring thin, swirling away like blown smoke into the darkness and melting into cruel, luminous laughter among the silent trees.

"Thank you," the girl gasped, brushing back her tangled hair with a hand that shook. Even etiolated by starshine, Rhion could see it was mingled brown and fair, the color of burned sugar, where it wasn't soaked dark with marsh water. Her cap had been torn away, but its gemmed pins remained, flashing coldly in the streaming mess like phosphorous in seaweed.

"...Filkedne the Black, Qu'a'htchat... What the hell were you doing riding alone in the woods at night?! You could have been killed out there!"

The gratitude in those huge gray eyes turned to anger, and for a moment he thought of a very young hawk, bating against a clumsy hand. "I wanted a little exercise!" she snapped sarcastically. "And nobody had ever told me about grims haunting the wild places at night, so I thought I'd be perfectly safe!" She jerked the rein from his hand. "And since it's such a lovely night and I've had such a wonderful time so far I think I'll just..."

Rhion realized that his question had included an unspoken, Are you stupid or something? and blushed. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, catching back the girl's hand, his breath drifting in a silvery cloud around his head. "That was a stupid thing to say. What's wrong, and can I help?" The girl's face had been cut by a claw or tail-stinger - the wound was already beginning to puff. His own face was torn and welted, his robe, like the girl's dark-red riding dress, soaked and dragging with water. "I'm Rhion the Brown..."

"Tallisett...Tally..." She swung around at the sound of a man's voice shouting in terror, far off in the woods, the neighing of terrified horses and laughter like the sparkle of corrosive dust. The fear returning to her eyes as she looked swiftly back at him made her suddenly seem very young, despite the fact that she stood a good two inches taller than he.

"It's my sister's child," she said, trying to keep her husky young voice steady. With a sudden move, she pulled the jacket from the horse's head and drew it on, shivering at the touch of the sodden wool. "They've taken her." She caught the stirrup preparatory to mounting again.

"Wait..." Rhion caught her elbow, pointy and delicate in his grip. "We'll get my master."

"Why didn't you push on and take shelter in the inn, by the way?" he asked a few minutes later, as the two of them half strode, half ran up the frozen slush of the road back toward the deserted public house, their breath puffing in silver clouds with exertion, the exhausted and shivering bay gelding stumbling between them. "You do know there's an inn here..."

"A peddler we met this afternoon coming from Imber said it was shut up and barred. We hadn't been able to get fresh litter mules at the last inn and when we knew we couldn't get a change here, either, we decided to make camp. We lit fires all around the camp..."

"That doesn't always work if there's a lot of them."

Tally had tucked up her heavy skirts through her belt to run - because of her height her stride was long, though unlike so many tall girls she was not gawky, but moved as gracefully as a dancer. Heavy silver earrings swung in the tangle of her hair, gleaming coldly in the ragged blue witch-glow; her boots, the wool of her dress, and the many strands of barrel-shaped amber beads around her neck proclaimed her a rich man's child. Her hand in its buckskin glove, gripping the horse's cheekstrap, though slender, was as large as a man's.

"How many were you?"

"A dozen. One of the grooms rode with me to search. We had torches, but they fell into the snow when the horses got spooked... What was that you shouted at them?"

The magelight that shivered and flickered above their heads as they walked would have left her in no doubt as to what he was. But there was no apprehension in her wide, inquiring eyes. Probably, Rhion thought wryly, because no woman is ever really afraid of a man who's shorter than she is.

"Their names - or names that might have been theirs. There are lists of them, different lists for different parts of the country, lists that have been accumulated, handed down, passed on by other wizards who in one way or another have gotten some specific grim or demon in their power long enough to get it to rat on some of its fellows."

"Is that easy to do?"

"Oh, yes. They're all cowards, and half of them hate each other anyway - they feel no loyalty to anything as we understand loyalty. Since you weave spells with a thing's true name, the name of its soul, grims will generally retreat if they know you know their names. Because they don't have true bodies, you can put a hell of a pain-spell on a demon... Were you hurt?"

She shook her head. The dark blood gleamed where it was drying on her temple, and Rhion made a mental note to apply a poultice later. The uneasy feather of witchfire threw fluttering shadows over the gray trunks of the maples along the roadbed and made the snow flash like salt rime where it squeaked beneath their boots. Far off in the darkness, the dreadful slips of light still wavered, and the night was rank - to Rhion's hypertrained nostrils at least - with the nauseating ammonia muskiness of the grims' smell. Blood dripped to the snow from the horse's torn flanks and bitten hocks - they must have driven it here and there through the woods, laughing and egging one another on, delighting in its fear and in Tally's anger, trying to get it to throw her so they could chase her through the dark.

Jaldis was waiting for them in the open door of the inn, witchlight streaming out around him. As if they had discussed the matter - which they hadn't - they led the horse inside as a matter of course, and it stood, head down and shivering, while Rhion rubbed its coat dry and Jaldis listened, nodding, opal spectacles flashing weirdly in the firelight, while Tally told him of her niece's disappearance.

"What is her name?" the old man asked at length, and the girl glanced, startled, from the closed, scar-crusted mouth to the soundbox upon his chest.

But she only said, "Elucida. She's three. I still don't understand how they can have taken her. Damson - my sister - and I put a mirror over her cot and a silver chain around it in a circle..."

"Beyond a doubt they lured her forth in her sleep," the wizard replied, stroking the gold sun-cross talisman thoughtfully. "She crossed the silver herself, to where they could come to her. Unlike the water-goblins, they seek to frighten, not to kill, though it does not matter to them if the victim dies in the process. But goblins haunt these marshes, and if they can find a way to get her through the ice they will. My cloak, Rhion..."

Rhion slung a rug over the horse's back and fetched his master's cloak, while Jaldis dug in the purse at his belt and produced his scrying-crystal, whose long, irregular facets he angled to the fire's light. The reflection of the blaze, which had been built up high, glanced sharply off the brown quartz and repeated itself endlessly in the chips of crystal worked into his spectacle-lenses, and echoed in the girl Tally's worried gray eyes.

Softly, as if following his thoughts without his conscious volition, the box murmured, "Elucida, Damson's child... Little Elucida, daughter of daylight..."

Tally glanced over at Rhion, as if for help or guidance. Rhion signed to her with his fingers that all would be well. As he stepped over close to her she breathed, "We have to hurry. She was only wearing a nightdress, she'll freeze..." Her own clothes were steaming in the warmth of the fire, bullion embroidery sparkling faintly under the mud stains, the crisscrossed maze of ribbon work on the sleeves discolored and sodden, save for here and there, where creases had protected and now revealed startling squares and slips of bronze and blue.

"It'll be all right," Rhion said softly. "It'll be all right."

The gesture of Jaldis' fingers, the movement of his head, were clear as a murmured, Ah! He made a pass or two above the crystal with his crippled hand, the tracing of runes too quick, too subliminal, for Rhion to identify them all. "Now," he said, reaching for his crutches and rising from the bench beside the fire. "Let us go."

From the inn doorway they faced out into the dark. Something swift and glowing flickered by just beyond the out-streaming bar of magelight - Rhion couldn't be sure, but he thought it was only a marsh-fae, tiny and naked and curious about all the hullabaloo. Around them, the blue-white glow of witchlight softened and dimmed until it was little brighter than the ghostly powder of starlight on the snow. "Look out across the trees, both of you," said the old mage softly. "Can you see light?"

The starlight was unsteady, the woods thick and wild, a tangle of bare black willow, of ash and maple and laurel thickets. The earthquake which six centuries ago had sunk the Drowned Lands and thrown down the walls of every city from Nerriok to Killay had left the Morne Valley a jagged ruin of fault scarps and banks, broken ground difficult to navigate even where it was not studded with potholes and ponds.

Rhion shook his head. "No."

"And now?"

Far off, a gleam of blue witchlight flickered bright among the knotted trees. "Yes..."

"Then come."

They found the little girl where the grims had abandoned her when they'd grown bored with driving her here and there in the haunted woods. With the self-preservative instincts of a little animal she'd crawled into a hollow log; over this log, Rhion saw as they came nearer, Jaldis with his scrying-crystal had called a glowing column of magelight, a moving rope of disembodied, unearthly brightness, whose light made the snow all around glitter as if strewn with diamonds. Rhion had brought extra blankets; Tally snatched them from his hands and fell to her knees, wrapping the half-conscious child in them, her face solemn, as if she worked to save the life of a kitten found drowning in a stream.

"She's alive..."

Rhion knelt in the snow beside her and felt the baby's hands and cheeks. Cold as the silken skin was, he felt blood moving beneath. Gently he called the spells of healing and warmth, and the aversion of ills. The child herself was thin and small, not pretty, but with a porcelain-doll delicacy and a soft tangle of blond-brown hair ridiculously like that of her young aunt.

"She'll be all right," he murmured, the words half-embodying the charm in themselves, both promise and invocation as his fingers traced the signs of Summer Queen and Sun, the signs of health and longevity and light, on the forehead, the cheeks, and across the energy-paths of the child's face and neck which governed lungs and skin. It seemed incredible to him, touching that skin which in its texture, its softness, and its newness was so absolutely unlike anything else of the mortal earth, that something so small could have those same paths of energy that traced the adult body, perfect in miniature, like a baby's fingernails or the veins of the tiniest leaf.

Holding the child cradled to her shoulder Tally looked across at him as they knelt side-by-side in the slush, their faces mottled by tree-latticed starlight and darkness. She drew in her breath to speak, to thank him... But by the soft glow of the flickering witchlight their eyes met, and silence fell between them, a silence in which Rhion was conscious of the almost-unheard sibilance of her breath, of the way her dust-colored hair stuck in dark strings to the hollows of her cheekbones, of the small, upright line of puzzlement between her brows as her eyes looked into his...

Clumsy with sudden haste he got to his feet. "Jaldis will... will be able to help if she's taken any hurt."

A moment later he realized he should probably help Tally, overburdened with the child as she was, to her feet. But she had already risen, not noticing or not thinking anything of this omission. "She's all right, I think. Thank you," she added shyly.

The two wizards walked with her back to the campsite on the southward road. Jaldis moved along behind on his crutches, the witchlight that wavered in rippling sheets all around them flashing coldly off the bulging spectacle-lenses and dancing like strange blue fire on the mud and snow of the road banks. Rhion and Tally, walking ahead, traded off carrying the child Elucida and leading the horse. "How did you become a wizard?" Tally asked as they passed beneath the black shadows of a grove of naked elms, and Rhion laughed and shook his head.

"Have you got till spring?"

"No, really. I mean, everybody talks about wizards as if the first thing a wizard has to do is spit on Darova's altar - and then everybody turns around and goes to wizards for spells and horoscopes and things. And the wizards I've met at... at my father's house..." She hesitated there. Rhion saw her hand steal to the amber beads she wore, which announced her to all the world as a marriageable virgin of truly substantial dowry, and wondered if somebody had told her - as his parents had repeatedly told his sister - not to reveal her father's name to chance-met strangers for fear of being carried away for ransom.

She recovered quickly and went on, "The wizards I've met at my father's house have all seemed - well, very decent, if a little strange. And you didn't have to come out to help me." She reached out, and touched the puffy red welt on the side of his face, left by a grim's stinging tail. "So I just wondered... Why you did it? Become a mage, I mean. Because I refuse to believe, as the philosophers say, that wizards were born without souls and have to become what they are."

Rhion sighed. "I don't know if I was born without a soul, because, if I was, I wouldn't know what really having one feels like." He glanced back over his shoulder, at Jaldis stumping sturdily along behind the exhausted horse. "But yes... We have to become what we are."

It was something he'd never been able to explain to anyone not mageborn. He remembered, back in the days when he was still one of the most fashionable young dandies who hung around the perfume shops and flower boutiques, standing with several of his friends watching a pack of children tormenting an old Earth-witch who'd set up shop on a blanket on the steps of one of the great downtown baths. The children had been throwing dung and rotten vegetables at her, chanting obscene songs. Furious as the old woman was, she had borne it in silence, and Rhion knew instinctively that she dared not do anything that would cause the children to run to their parents crying, The lady hurt us... And his friends had joked about why anyone would want to be a witch in the first place.

And he, Rhion, had been silent.

Because even then he had known.

Very softly, he said, "You reach a point where you can't live a lie anymore. Where the pain of not - not using what you know you have, of not reaching out to take that power - becomes so intolerable that you don't care what happens to you afterward. It's like sex..."

Oh, great! he thought in the next instant, Go ahead and shock this poor virgin...

But the great gray eyes were not shocked.

"When I was a little boy," he went on, his voice still low, as if he spoke to himself, "I used to see pictures in the fire. Simple things, like my mother putting her make-up on, or my friends eating breakfast... One day my parents went to the shrine of St. Beldriss, and I mentioned to my nurse that I'd seen in the fire that a wheel had come off a cart in the narrow streets around the shrine and caused a hell of a traffic jam and that they'd be late coming back. She beat me." His eyebrows flinched together over the round lenses of his spectacles. "She said that nobody saw things in the fire, that it was just daydreams that were no good for little boys. She told me not to say anything about it to my mother, but of course I did, and Mother punished me for lying."

He still remembered the dark of the attic closet where he'd been locked, the furtive, terrible scurryings of the rats he knew lurked just behind the walls. It was not something he would ever have done to a child of four. He remembered other things as well.

"For years I convinced myself she was right - that I had lied. And I tried so damn hard to be good."

There was a silence, in which their feet squeaked a little in the packed snow and mud of the road. The child Elucida slept, a warm, muffled burden against Rhion's chest, beneath his patched black wool cloak. The last of the grims had faded back into the earth and trees where they lurked in daylight, and the frozen swamps, the sheets of gray ice, and the dirty piebald snow, all broken with the iron stems of naked shrub and willow, seemed to have lain locked in that sleeping enchantment since the beginnings of time.

"What were you doing traveling at this time of year, anyway?" Rhion asked after a little time, looking back across at the tall girl who strode at his side.

Tally seemed to shake herself out of some private reverie and smiled ironically across at him. "We were going to Imber to meet Damson's husband. He has property near there and interest in shipping... he says." She hesitated, as if debating whether to say more, her hands tucked into her armpits for warmth. A small tired line, the wry foot track of a passing thought, flicked into existence at the corner of her mouth and then as quickly fled.

"And a mistress, too?"

Her gray eyes slid sidelong at him, then away. The bitter dimple reappeared, all the comment necessary.

"And you?"

"I wanted to get away. I like to travel." They came within sight of the camp, five or six pavilions at the top of a steep bank, twenty feet high above the swerve of the road where it ran across a dilapidated stone bridge. Even in the icy night, the smell of blood, both fresh and nauseatingly stale, breathed from the round little stone hut on the nearer end of the bridge, where offerings to the guardian troll had been left. The thing's tracks were visible in the trampled snow, shambling along the bank of the marsh which the causeway spanned and so into the rocks of the glen. Lamps in the red and orange tents high on the bank turned them into glowing treasure-boxes in the bitter darkness, and Rhion could hear voices and glimpse the flash of steel by the jittery flare of torches.

He revised his estimate of the girl's social position upward. A wealthy merchant or banker could have bought those great amber beads and the silver bullion that stitched her breast and sleeves, but a camp like that meant old nobility, at least.

On the threshold of the bridge Tally halted and took her sleeping niece from Rhion's arms. Elucida murmured a little and cuddled deeper into her aunt's breast. For a moment Rhion saw Tally's face, as she turned to look down at the child, filled with a solemn tenderness, the deep, protective affection that had sent her out into the woods herself when she could have detailed grooms and liverymen to the task.

She looked up again and shrugged, her breath a misty vapor as she spoke. "When I'm married, I won't be able to journey," she said.

"Is that going to be soon?" he inquired, not nearly lightly enough.

"I suppose. Father needs an alliance, you see." Her voice was trying hard to be matter-of-fact. She glanced at Jaldis, surrounded by the nimbus of the witchfire that protected them, then back at Rhion, small and battered with his scratched face and his round-lensed spectacles and his rough ashwood walking staff gripped in one mended glove. Behind her, the lights and voices of the camp rose like a wall of color, warmth, and security within call.

"My father is the Duke of Mere," she said quietly. "So it isn't a question of what I want, really. Just when. And who."

Shaking back the filthy strings of her oak-blond hair, she turned a little too quickly and hurried across the bridge, back to her famer's servants and troops. But after a step or two, almost against some inner inclination, she turned back, still holding the child cradled on one hip like a peasant woman, the rein of the exhausted horse hooked through her arm. Her face was a pale oval in the frosty gloom.

"Rhion... You will... Will you ever be coming to Bragenmere? Father... he's a scholar, you know. And he does invite wizards to Court."

Then as if fearing she'd said too much, she turned swiftly away and hastened across the bridge, her boots leaving deep tracks in the crusted muck of snow and dirt. For a few moments Rhion stood watching the spangled dusk of her hair and the moving white blob of the horse's off hind stocking blur with the dark of the ascending road. Then torches and colored lanterns came streaming out of the camp and down the path to greet her and to take her back among them again.

"Dinar of Mere may be a scholar," Jaldis' soft, artificial voice buzzed from the freezing dark behind him, "but as for the wizards he invites to his Court... ! Ebiatics trying to transmute lead into gold and call the wind by means of silver machines; Blood-Mages stinking like troll huts with demons and grims squeaking in their hair like lice... Why, his court mage for years, when he was still land-baron of the Prinag marshes before he overthrew the house of the White Bragenmeres and married the old duke's daughter, was a foul old Hand-Pricker who could barely talk for the spell-threads laced through his lips and tongue. Go to Bragenmere indeed!"

Looking back, Rhion saw that the old man, though draped in the heavy black cloak and surcoat that marked them both as members of the most ancient of the Orders of Wizardry, was shivering in the cold, all the talismans of power at his breast twinkling in the witchlight and his pale face lined with the strain of using his spectacles to see. Rhion walked back to him and said quietly, "Let's go back to the inn."

The witchlight faded from above their heads. They turned away, an old cripple and a young pauper, bearded, scruffy, and insignificant in the leaden darkness before the winter's dawn. But looking over his shoulder, Rhion could see, on the edge of the camp, a plump little woman in a dress scintillant with opals and feather work come running out to embrace Tally and the sleeping child, and lead them toward the largest of the lighted pavilions. And he saw how Tally turned to look out into the darkness, and it seemed to him for a moment that their eyes met.