The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1)

The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1) Page 11

AS A RESULT OF THE fete of the summerfire, the Duke of Mere extended a formal offer to Jaldis the Blind of an apartment in the palace, along with his pupil and servant, Rhion, called the Brown.

And Jaldis, just as formally, thanked him and refused.

"But why?" Tally blurted, intercepting them in the great pillared hall of the palace as they emerged after the audience. "I know you said you were an old man, and unused to courts... But you can't be that unused to them if you knew about the silver-dust trick you used for the fete!"

And Jaldis smiled, pausing in his limping stride down the flight of shallow steps to the main floor of the long marble room, regarding her as he would have looked upon his own daughter while the next set of petitioners, like enormous butterflies in court dress of green and white, ascended past them to the bronze doors. "True, my child." His monstrous opal spectacles flashed in the diffuse light that came down through the traceried windows of marble and glass. "But I could not well have said that I declined because I knew courts too well to want to become a part of one again, not even his."

The girl, realizing she had blundered, flushed pink, a color which suited her, Rhion thought. Against the elaborate doublets and gowns of the courtiers, alive with feather work, ribbons, and beads, the plain brown robes of the two wizards stood out like hens in a coopful of ornamental pheasants; Tally's butter-yellow gown with its embroidery of carnelian and jet must have cost the price of a good horse. She stammered, "I only thought it would be more comfortable for you here. And safer."

"And so it would be." The old man propped his crutch beneath his arm and reached out to take her hand. Looking down the length of that high-ceilinged marble room, Rhion caught a glimpse of Esrex and Damson in the shadows of the pillared space beneath the musicians' gallery and felt the young man's pale impersonal gaze like the prick of a knife in his side.

"Your father is a true friend to me and a generous one," Jaldis went on, his sweet artificial voice blending into the underwhisper of viols and flutes from the gallery. "But did I live at court, I would be under an obligation to him - how could I not be, were he my host and protector? What I gave to him last week was a gift freely and joyfully given. Though I would never feel such gifts to be a duty, still I would hesitate to put myself in a position where either of us would ever feel that it was less than spontaneous. And you know that in the celebrations for the birth of your sister's son, or when your brother enters his first warrior lists as a man, or on the occasion of your lady mother's birthday, there will be those who will expect something equal... or greater."

Not to mention the fact, Rhion thought dryly, that the last time you were a court wizard, you ended up getting arrested in your patron's downfall and losing your eyes and your tongue and the use of your legs into the bargain.

"And it is a fact," Jaldis went on, as they continued their descent toward the groups of brightly clad courtiers gossiping in the pillared hall, "that many of the great feasts of the year - the Winterfeast, the Rites of Summer, the Festival of Masks in the spring - fall upon the solstice or equinox-tides, when certain spells are possible and certain powers available, as at no other time. I know your father would not see it as a conflict, but gossip would be inevitable."

They passed beneath the shadows of the vestibule, and Esrex, rather pointedly, escorted Damson away from danger of contamination. Even upon court occasions, Rhion noticed, Damson had abandoned the corsetry that had always given her the look of a gem-encrusted sausage, and curiously the flowing eggplant-colored silk that she now wore bestowed upon her an infinitely greater dignity.

"As I told your father, my child, I hope sincerely that my choice will not make my welcome here any the poorer, or change his friendship toward us."

"I don't think it will," Tally said frankly. "Father is just and he likes you very much. I don't think he's ever - How do they phrase it? 'Ejected from his favor,' I think the term is - anyone who disagreed with him. That would be like refusing to speak to someone who outran you in a race. And in any case," she added, as they came to a halt before the great outer doors, "it won't change my feelings toward you."

Jaldis inclined his white head, the sunlight streaming in from outside making hair and beard sparkle like snow. "Then, my child, you have indeed relieved one of my fears."

And as the red-cloaked guards in their bronze mail bowed them through, Rhion's eye met Tally's again.

As the weeks advanced toward midsummer, Rhion and Tally met more and more frequently. Sometimes Tally would angle to be seated near him when the Duke invited Jaldis to supper or find him working in the Duke's great library in the octagonal tower which overlooked the main palace square; sometimes they met when a hunting or hawking party of young courtiers would encounter they two wizards as they gathered herbs in the marsh.

Or, as often chanced, Tally would steal out of the palace at first light in the summer dawns to have breakfast with Rhion in the long adobe kitchen in Shuttlefly Court.

Those times were the best. With the deep warmth of summer evenings, Rhion would frequently stay up all night, reading or studying the plants he'd gathered, working on mathematics or sigil making, and sleep in the heat of the day. In the early mornings, when he suspected Tally might be coming to visit him, he'd call to his scrying-crystal the image of her mare; if the mare was contentedly dozing in her stall, he himself would go to bed or sally forth to do the early shopping while the teeming produce markets were still torch-lit and the vegetables in the barrows wet with dew. But at least once a week - which quickly became twice, and now and then thrice - the image in the crystal would be of the rangy bay hunter trotting quietly along the streets of the Upper Town, all the little glass chips that swung from her bridle flashing softly in the pearly light; or else he'd see her standing outside the Bakery of a Thousand Joyful Buns, which stood at the foot of the palace rise, while Tally bought hot rolls.

And they would talk: of magic, of dogs; of music and mathematics, for Tally, like many musicians, had a bent that way; or she would play her flute for him softly, so as not to wake Jaldis sleeping overhead.

And after she left, to return to her dancing lessons and music lessons and dress fittings at the palace, Rhion would tell himself that these meetings had to stop before the inevitable happened. But a few mornings later she'd be back.

"They want me to get married, you know," Tally said softly one morning as the two of them sat with their backs propped on either side of the kitchen doorjamb, consuming bread and coffee and listening to the water sellers' cries in the strange, breathing coolness of summer dawn. "Father needs the alliance. He doesn't trust the White Bragenmeres, who still keep their own men-at-arms, a private army, almost. They have support among the old land-barons, the ones Father took power from when he passed laws saying they couldn't punish their serfs at their whim. And some of the priesthoods are angry at him for entertaining wizards the way he does."

Rhion said nothing. He had been awake all night; going up through the trapdoor to the flat, tiled roof, he had practiced the spells which summoned beasts by their true and secret names, calling and dismissing geckos and sand lizards and drawing down the bats which feasted on night-flying moths. Later, as the night deepened, he had slipped into long meditation, breathing the dark luminosity of the night until every whisper of sage scent from the looming mountains, every movement of the night winds, was as clear to him as song, and he could identify the position of every rat, every lizard, every chicken and pig, and every sleeper in the crowded courts that spread all around him like a lake of grubby humanity, by the colors of their dreams.

And all that calm, all that sense of wisdom and knowledge and peace that lay like shimmering light within his hand, was sponged away as if it had never been by the thought of Tally in some other man's arms.

She was tearing the roll she'd bought into smaller and smaller fragments, not eating any of it. He knew she never ate when she was upset. Trying to keep her voice steady, she went on, "It was stupid of me to think it wouldn't happen - that I'd be able to stay here, to live at Father's court, the way Damson is doing because Esrex and his family live on Father's allowance, and to think I could go on just... just practicing my music, and training the dogs, and..." She shook her head quickly and did not finish the thought.

Her voice shifted quickly over Damson's name. Rhion knew that Tally's relations with her sister had been strained since that night in the pavilion, and his altercation with Esrex had not helped matters. For many years, the younger girl had been the self-appointed protector of the older. But now that all Damson's will was bent upon Esrex - now that Tally was seeing a side of her she could not champion - she was left, Rhion guessed, feeling a little bereft.

"Every few weeks another nobleman from somewhere in the Forty Realms appears at court, and there are dances, maskings, new dresses to be fitted, the same tedious small-talk, and all my friends saying, 'Well, he isn't so bad.' And I can't get away. I can't think. I can't just... just be still. I used to be able to talk to Damson about it, but..." She turned her face to him, her gray eyes dry but desperately sad. "There are days when I wish I had never been born."

Don't take her in your arms, Rhion thought quite clearly, his concern for her sorrow, his helpless wish to make her life other than it was, almost drowned by the thought of that tall fragile body and the way those long limbs would fold against his. If you take her in your arms, you're a dead man. If not now, soon... very soon.

But her misery was more than he could bear.

"Father's being so good about it," she went on, her head pillowed on his shoulder and her hair a pearl-twisted smoky rope across his chest. "He doesn't want to rush me, but he truly needs a foreign alliance. And he's so... so hopeful... every time some good-looking peabrain or some muscle-bound martinet comes strutting around. I can just hear him thinking, Well, is she going to like this one, finally? And I just... I just don't. And Damson's worse, since she's been expecting. She keeps saying, 'Oh, when you bear your husband's child, you'll know what true happiness is...' until I want to slap her. I wish Jaldis had never made that silly tincture."

She wanted comfort, not love. So Rhion kissed her hair, and held her, and in time sent her on her way, then went back to his studies as well as he could.

Then in the second week of June, Shavus the Archmage came.

Rhion had been away - not with Tally, for once - most of the day. He had wandered the olive groves beyond the city walls and climbed the dry sheep pastures and the rocky mountain beyond, drenched in the hot brightness of the sun. He had observed the swooping patterns of the swallows' flight, and marked which plants grew in the rock-tanks high up the sheep trails; in the black pockets of cool pine woods on the mountain's flank he had observed the tracks of coyote, rabbit, and deer; high up, where the grass thinned over the earth's silvery bones, he had listened to the songs of the wind. Since his stay in the Drowned Lands, a love of woodcraft for its own sake had grown in him, and he explored, observed, and practiced stillness and silence, sinking his soul into the slow baking heat and the smells of sage and dust.

He returned to the city late, though the sun had only just set; above the Old Town's crowded courts, the sky still held a fragile and lingering light. In every court, the thick blue shadows were patched with primrose squares of lamplight: clear as amber in which men and women could be seen talking, eating, and making love; or else patterned and streaked with lattices or shutters, as strange a diversity, in their way, as the stones of the stream-beds or the plants that grew beside the tanks. Everyone in the city seemed to be abroad that evening, crowding porches and balconies with skirts hiked up or tunics off, throwing dice or watching the children who ran about like dusk-intoxicated puppies through the luminous blue of the narrow lanes.

Rhion could feel the whisper of magic in the air as he turned from Thimble Lane into the court.

He checked his steps, uncertain. Between the curious disorientation of returning to the city after a day in the hills and the deep, restless beauty of the night itself, it was for a moment difficult to be sure it was magic being worked that he felt...

But a moment later he was sure. And looking across the court at his door, he saw the green glow of witchlight through its many cracks.

Jaldis, he thought.

And then, But Jaldis is blind.

A skiff of children swirled by him, shrieking with excited laughter at their game. In the tavern at the corner of the square, someone plucked a mandolin and began to sing. With his mind Rhion reached out toward the two little rooms in the long bank of the adobe tenement, singling them from the quiet talk, the giggles, the rattling of dice, and the creak of bedropes on all sides, probing deep, listening, scenting...

A man in the kitchen downstairs. A smell of maleness - not young, he thought - road dirt, trace whiffs of incense and old blood, and the crackling whisper of pages turning.

Jaldis' books.

And below that was the muffled murmur of voices whispering beneath the ground.

Cautiously, Rhion approached the door.

"Come in," a deep voice said from inside, before he'd reached it. "You must be Rhion the Brown."

As he pushed open the door, a tall, thin, brown-faced man, head shining bald as an egg in the witchlight above the cowl of his black wool robe, rose from where he'd been sitting at the table and held out an emaciated hand. "I am Gyzan the Archer, a friend of Shavus and, alas, not to be trusted in the same room as the magic-working below."

Rhion dropped his satchel of herbs on the table and took his hand. A huge bow of black horn reinforced with steel stood unstrung beside the cellar's rude plank door and, with it, a quiver of arrows. The cellar door itself was shut, but through its cracks now and then flickered a ghostly, shifting light.

"What are they doing?"

"Weaving a Dark Well." He folded his arms, regarded Rhion with wise, ironic, gentle brown eyes.

Rhion had heard it said of Gyzan the Archer that if the Blood-Mages had possessed an Archmage, it would have been Gyzan. He studied him now, noting how the long brown hands were marked all over with scars like a Hand-Pricker's, the upper joints of both little fingers missing; his lips, too, and ear lobes were scarred where spell-cords had at one time been threaded through. But unlike the Hand-Prickers he was scrupulously clean, his head shaved - there were Hand-Prickers in the Lower Town that one couldn't get near for the smell of the old blood matted in their waist-length hair - and his nails cut short; unlike them, he seemed as sane as any wizard ever was.

"Shavus is going, then?" Rhion started to unpack his satchel and, as he did so, stole a glance at the cover of the book Gyzan had been reading - not one of Jaldis', after all, but a catalogue of star-spells he recognized from Shavus' library.

"So he says. Knotweed - very nice," he added, picking up a spiky stem from among the tangle of foliage. "Good for dysentery... And I'm going with him."

After the first moment of surprise that Shavus would have asked a non-Morkensik - even one who had been his lifelong friend - Rhion breathed a sigh of relief. He had once offered to accompany the Archwizard through the Void, but every instinct he possessed warned him that beyond it lay dangers with which he would be absolutely unable to cope.

"A curious thing, the Dark Well," the Blood-Mage went on, turning the herbs over in his scarred fingers, feeling the texture of root and blossom and leaf as he spoke. "Is it true that it shows other worlds, other universes, than our own?"

"I don't know," Rhion said warily. "I've only seen it once, and then it was quiescent, closed in on itself. But I don't know what else it could be." The Gray Lady had questioned him about it also, before they had left the Drowned Lands, and he had his suspicions about why Jaldis had begun the rites of its making on a day when he, Rhion, was away - well-founded suspicions, when he thought about them. Both the Gray Lady and the Archer were far stronger mages than he, and he wasn't quite sure what he might be likely to tell them under the influence of a really heavy drug or spell.

The Archer shrugged, long lashes veiling his eyes. Like many Blood-Mages, he'd had the eyelids and the flesh around them tattooed, giving them a bruised and slightly ominous appearance. "A reflection - a projection - of the way his own mind conceives the shape of the universe," he guessed. "Or an illusion, perhaps, designed by spirits whose very nature we can only vaguely guess."

Rhion knew the Blood-Mages believed in such spirits, wholly unlike grims and faes and the other bodiless Children of the Dark Air, and attributed their own magic to communication with them. As far as he'd ever heard, every Order except the Blood-Mages themselves and a few of the less sane Hand-Prickers described this belief as balderdash.

"But if it is what he says it is," Gyzan went on, raising his glance once more, "I consider it rather foolish of him - of them - to keep the means of its making and use so deep a secret. What if Jaldis were to fall ill while Shavus and I are on the other side of this Void they speak of? There is an unsteadiness to the aura he carries about his body; I do fear for his health. He is a very old man."

"I'd be here," Rhion pointed out, a little miffed.

Gyzan set down the stem of dragon arum he'd been examining and studied him for a very long time. In their blue-black bands of shadow his brown eyes narrowed, limpid and beautiful as a woman's - Rhion remembered uneasily the rumors that the man had second sight. But he only said, "Well... perhaps."

"Nonsense," Shavus blustered later, when he and Jaldis had emerged from the tiny cellar, long after Gyzan had gone up the ladder to the room above to sleep. "By looking into the Void - by looking into the darkness outside our universe - the Dark Well may very likely contain the clues as to what magic is. Its true essence, its reality. The Void seems to be filled with a magic of its own, a dreadful and powerful magic, and we'd be fools to let a Blood-Mage, or those Earth-witches in Sligo, anywhere near it."

"They're not Earth-witches," Rhion pointed out, annoyed at the Archmage's prejudice.

"Then they're the next thing to 'em, same way the Blood-Mages are only Hand-Prickers who bathe." Shavus did not bother to lower his voice. Presumably he did not express sentiments behind his friend's back that he had not also said to his face. His thick, gray hair was plastered with sweat to his massive skull, and his broad face, usually clean-shaven despite its scars, was gritty with stubble. Jaldis said nothing, only sat, bent with exhaustion, his spectacles lying on the table before him, massaging the bridge of his nose with one crippled hand. He looked, as Gyzan had said, very old, and rather unwell. Rhion came quietly around the table and rubbed the old man's shoulders and back, feeling, not tension there, but a kind of dreadful limpness.

"Besides," the Archmage added, "who's to say one of 'em won't spread the knowledge to others, the Earth-witches or some Bone-Thrower who chances by? The Gray Lady didn't seem to have any qualms about you making free with their library."

He tore off part of the loaf Rhion had set in front of the two of them - it was well past midnight, the court outside steeped in the silence of sleep - and sopped the bread in the honey pot. "You ask Gyzan how willing he'd be to let me have the spells to contact that 'familiar spirit' of his and see what he'd say," he went on around a sticky mouthful. "Is there a baths in this neighborhood that'd be open at this hour, my little partridge? Ah, well - the Duke likes to pretend his town's a cosmopolitan city, but when all's said you can tell you're not in Nerriok. We'll be at it again in a few hours..."

"Will you need my help?"

"In that gopher-hole? Only if you bring your own space with you."

Rhion found himself remembering again that Shavus knew he'd been the Gray Lady's lover and that he'd been up here fraternizing with Gyzan; he felt a kind of obscure anger stir in him. But Jaldis only reached up to grasp Rhion's hand in thanks.

Whatever Shavus' reasons, Rhion did not see the Dark Well until it was completed, two days later, the day before the summer solstice itself.

It was as he first remembered seeing it in the attic of the Black Pig. Hellishly complicated circles within circles, spirals leading out of spirals, the interlinking lines of fire-circle and water-circle, blood and smoke and silver, woven together with the intricate tracings of pure light that floated above the floor and seemed to lie, glowing, several inches beneath the surface of the hard-packed damp clay. Within those circles, like a dark and beating heart, lay the strange shuddering gate of colors, as though darkness, like light, had been refracted into a rainbow...

And within the colors was - nothing. Quiescent, closed upon itself, the darkness had a brownish cloudiness that reminded him of nothing so much as an eye shut in sleep. Standing between Jaldis and Shavus, with his back to the crude ladder upon which Gyzan was forced to perch, Rhion felt the sweat start on his face, not so much from the stifling heat of the cellar as from a deep, primordial fear that the eye would open, would look at him and know him...

"Tomorrow night." Jaldis' voice was so weak with weariness as to be barely intelligible, the crippled hand clinging to his arm for support. "Tomorrow night, when midnight tilts the Universe to its balance point and lets its powers be turned by humankind... Then the wizards in that other world will have the power to make their voices heard. Then we shall open the Well, and search within."

"Ay," Shavus muttered, fingering the battered hilt of the sword at his waist. "But what we'll find - now, that's another tale."

Jaldis spent the rest of that day, and all of the one following, either sleeping or deep in meditation, gathering his strength for the night. Shavus and Gyzan, having a standing invitation to the Duke of Mere's palace from other years, went to pay their respects, and Rhion went with them. In part he only sought to avoid the uneasiness that whispered in the back of his mind whenever he thought about the Dark Well - the dread, not of the terrible unknown of that Void of chaos, but of something he sensed he had once known and then forgotten. It was a dread impossible to leave behind, exacerbated by his growing awareness of the pull of the sun-tide in his blood. But in addition to that, Tally's last visit had been four or five days ago, and he had begun to be concerned.

They found the palace in a flutter of excitement over the state visit by the Earl of the Purple Forest. This lord, who ruled the greatest of the In Islands and a whole archipelago of minor isles beyond it, was one of the most powerful in the Forty Realms: garlands were being strung in the gardens again, and among the pillars of the great entry hall. As the three wizards climbed the shallow steps and passed beneath the musicians' gallery they encountered squads of slaves with wicker tubs of flowers, trailing scent like rags of gauze in their wake, and the excited talk among the courtiers in the long pillared hall nearly drowned the floating sweetness of lyre and flute.

The Earl was seated in an ivory chair of honor beside the Duke when the three wizards were presented, a handsome, muscular man in his early forties, his red hair braided and crowned with jasmine, his mouth sensual, scornful, and hard when he forgot to smile. He expressed delight at meeting so notable a mage as Shavus Ciarnin, but, Rhion noticed, Gyzan was silent in his presence. The Duke invited them to keep the feast of solstice that night among his household. As Shavus declined gracefully, Rhion reflected again that Jaldis had been right: many of the great feasts did fall upon the occasions of solstice and equinox. Had Jaldis been a member of the Duke's suite, he could not always have had those occasions to himself.

It was only when they were descending the marbled spaces of the outer hall once more that Rhion overheard a woman saying, "Well, I'm sure he was worth waiting for - so handsome! I knew she could have no fault to find with him..."

And he realized what was going on.

The Earl of the Purple Forest had come to offer for Tally's hand.

And Tally, to judge by the Duke's relieved affability and the sheer magnificence of the decorations going up, must have accepted.

He felt as if his body were filled with broken glass. That he could not move - he could not breathe - without pain.

Why are you surprised? he thought, as the blue gloom of the vestibule closed around him like the darkness veiling the sun. She said it, the first time you met... "So it isn't a question of what I want... just when. And who..."

The red-cloaked guards opened the outer doors. Shavus and Gyzan descended the marble steps, brown robes and black like eagle and raven in the bright sun of summer, the bulky form and the gaunt. Rhion found he had stumbled to a halt among the pillars beneath the gallery, standing in the shadows like a milkweed-fae that fears the scorch of the sun.

Tally...

For an instant he was standing on the wharf, seeing the dust-brown hair haloed by the sunlight as the water widened between him and the ship that would take her away.

You should never have touched her. Never have taken her hand.

Of themselves his fingers had sought, in his pocket, the washed-leather bag where he kept his scrying-crystal - he let go of it in disgust. Don't you hurt enough yet?

The guards closed the doors, not noticing the plump, bearded little man with the flashing spectacles, who stood in the shadows of the vestibule. And he was, Rhion thought, withdrawing noiselessly to the huge square base of a drum-column where the diffuse light from the larger room behind could be caught in the crystal's facets, inconspicuous enough, and easy to overlook.

He sat on the column base and, taking the crystal from his pocket, angled its flat purple-gray surfaces to the light.

As if she sat in a room behind him he saw her, reflected in the crystal's heart. She sat on a bench of green porphyry and bronze, shawled in green-dappled light. Water flickered darkly in the shadows behind her. There was no expression on her face as she stared straight ahead of her, but the red-furred hunting dog lying at her feet twisted its head around to look up at her, and pawed anxiously at her skirts. Tears crept silently from her open eyes.

"Tally?"

He paused in the shadow margin between sunlight and gloom. The vines that curtained the little pavilion's entrance had not been cut this summer and covered the space between the slender pillars like a veil of petaled green silk. The buffets, the gazebos, and the stands for the musicians were all up by the long north front of the palace, on the other side of the network of canals and linden groves. Here it was silent. The heat, though strong on Rhion's back, lacked the dense oppressiveness it would have later in the summer; the grotto's dimness was almost chilly, the plashing of the fountain unnaturally loud.

Tally sat on the bench before it, bolt upright in her simple green dress. The silver and amber at her throat flashed softly as she turned her head.

For a moment she did not move, but he saw her shut her eyes and breathe once, a thick, dragging sigh.

Then without a word, as naturally as if she had known that he would come - and perhaps she had - as naturally as if they had been lovers for years, she got to her feet and walked into his arms.

Though it was the longest day of the year, still it was dark by the time Rhion got back to Shuttlefly Court.

The grotto faced east, designed to be a place of morning sunlight and silent coolness in the long summer afternoons. It was the dog who waked them, stealing quietly back in to lie across the feet of the sleeping lovers, though he would have barked, Rhion knew, at anyone's approach. Through the pillars and the gold-edged green of the vines, the hill's shadow stretched far out over the grass, rimmed by a line of burnished light. Against his shoulder, Tallisett's face was peaceful in sleep. It seemed to him that he had wondered half his life what her hair would feel like between his fingers. It was finer than it looked for its straight thickness, soft as a child's hair.

Dear God, what have I done?

But there was nothing he possessed, or ever had possessed, that he would not have traded for this time.

"Father needs the alliance," she said, quite some time after she woke up. "And I can't... I can't tell him I won't. Because there's no reason to - I mean, the Earl has never been anything but polite to me, courtly and gracious. But..." She hesitated, struggling with her fear that what she would say sounded silly. But at length she blurted out, "Rhion, his dogs are afraid of him! We all went hunting one morning - I could see. But he's never said a wrong word... Father likes him..."

And she clung to him again, as if he had saved her from drowning.

Still later she said, "I didn't want this to be something that had never happened."

Rhion nodded, his lips pressed to her hair. Their talk covered hours, a sentence or two at a time, and then long spaces where the only sound was the mingled sibilance of their breathing, the clucking of the fountain, and the occasional stir of breezes in the vines.

Gently, he pointed out, "He's going to know about it. At least, he'll know there was someone..."

"Do you really think he's going to give back the dowry over a little blood?"

Rhion remembered the Earl's sensual lips and cynical eye. "No," he said slowly, thinking how much of her naivete Tally had lost even since he'd met her in the icy winter woods. To himself he added, But he's going to hold it over you for as long as you live.

"And so long as I'm not with child..."

"Don't worry." Rhion managed a faint grin. "That, at least, is something wizards know how to prevent."

"Oh, Rhion..."

He gathered her hands together in one of his, and held them against his chest. The dog padded over to the fountain's edge, sniffed about a little, and settled itself leggily down onto Rhion's crumpled brown robe. The rim of light on the grass drew farther and farther away, then began to fade.

It was two or three hours short of midnight when Rhion reached home, to find Shavus pacing angrily, muttering oaths, back and forth down the length of the narrow kitchen, while Jaldis sat very quiet in his chair near the cold hearth.

"God's teeth, boy, where were you?" the Archmage exploded when Rhion let himself in. "Bird-nesting? I haven't spent three days weaving spells in a hole in the ground to have you spoil things by not showing up in time!"

"But I am in time," Rhion pointed out. From long watching of the stars he knew subliminally to within a few moments when midnight was, even on ordinary nights, and Shavus knew he knew. And to a wizard, the night of the solstice was not even a matter of subconscious calculation. He could feel the tide of the sun and the stars turning, pulling at his blood and could feel the draw of magic flowing along every energy-path on the earth, in the grass, or in his body, in a glittering whisper of half-heard music in the sky.

All over the city, as he had made his way home, he had been conscious of the magic in the night. Most of the great cults were holding some kind of special rite on this, one of the major turning points of the year. He had passed procession after procession in the streets: the golden image of Darova in her glittering boat, surrounded by torchlit banners and by the shaking tinkle of sistrums; and the white-draped priestesses of Shilmarglinda with roses in their hair and their little boy dolls in their hands ready to be tossed onto the temple fires. Every tavern where the warriors who followed Kidirak forgathered blazed like a bonfire, and in even the windowless granite monolith of Agon's temple there had been the suggestion of hidden movement.

Every wizard in the city would be preparing some special ceremony, the charging of talismans or the deep scrying for some sort of knowledge, taking advantage of the additional power that moved in the air that night. Children raced excitedly about the streets, eyes bright under tousled hair, waving candy or flowers in their grubby fists. The very air seemed to crackle.

And Tally had come into his arms.

It took all Rhion's training, all the concentration disciplined into him by years of meditation, to tear his mind from the image of her rising from the bench in the grotto's darkness, walking to him... It took all his will not to return again and again to the memory of her lips first pressing his. Of her hair untangling from its pearled net beneath his fingers...

She was his.

Only for two months, part of his mind said. Only until the dowry negotiations are complete.

But a part of his soul knew that she would always be his.

And he was aware of Gyzan the Archer looking at him with a kind of pitying sadness as they descended the ladder to the black of the cellar below.

Through the odd clarity of deep meditation, Rhion watched Shavus step to the edge of the earth circle, where the great sun-cross of magic's eternal power had been drawn, and lift his scar-seamed hands. Within the woven circles, something seemed to shudder and move, the blackness deepening, clarifying, and breathing of matters unsuspected and better left unsuspected in the realms of mortal kind. Panic struggled to surface in Rhion's heart as he saw the Dark Well opening, the livid rainbow of refracted darkness parting, widening, like the opening heart of a black crystal rose. Darkness opened into greater darkness, abysses at whose bottom new abysses gaped. A dream...

Cold wind stroked his face, and he shut his eyes. Midnight was upon them, the power of it crying in his blood; all his will, all his strength, he concentrated into the rite of summoning that power, calling it from the bones of the earth, from the silver tracks of the leys, and from the shuddering air and the turning stars. From the four corners of the hollow earth the wizards called it, feeding it into the crippled old man who limped forward to the edge of the chasm, opal spectacles reflecting the hellish rainbow of darkness as he gazed within, listening, seeking...

But whether it was because Rhion's concentration was distracted by what had passed that afternoon or because Jaldis himself was exhausted by the three days of spellweaving which had gone before - or for some other cause that none of them knew - the power of the solstice midnight came and went. But in the Void there was only silence. No light, no movement stirred within that terrible chaos, to show them in which direction the universe without magic might lie.