The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1)

The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1) Page 6

IN THE END, JALDIS AND RHION did not go to Nerriok after all. The morning after their hunt for the grim-harrowed child, Jaldis slept long and heavily and woke weak with fever. Their little stock of medicinal herbs had been one of the things left behind in the attic of the Black Pig; Rhion hunted patiently through the snowy thickets and road banks for elf-dock and borage to take down the old man's fever and clear the congestion he feared was growing in his lungs. But the winter woods kept their secrets, and when he returned to the inn, well after noon, he found his teacher no better and dared not leave him again.

He was up with Jaldis, trying to work healing spells without the wherewithal to aid the physical body, for most of the following night.

"Look, I need to get you to some help," Rhion said to him, during one of the intervals in which the fever had been reduced by means of a spell which had left Rhion himself feeling ill and shaky. He took from the pouch at his belt his own scrying-crystal, a lump of yellowed quartz half the size of his fist, and held it to the wan light from the single window he'd unshuttered when daylight came. "I'm going to try to contact the Ladies of the Moon. They're the closest place we can take you."

Jaldis sighed, and his groping hand touched the voice-box long enough for it to whisper the word, "...corrupt..."

But the shake of his head was only of regret, not refusal, and Rhion settled himself into a corner of the old kitchen with his crystal to work.

He chose the kitchen hearth - which he suspected had been the main hearth of the original inn - because at that point a minor ley crossed through the building. Though he couldn't yet, like Jaldis, simply close his eyes and hear the silvery traces of energy like thin music in the air, he had had the suspicion that the inn was built upon a ley, and a brief test with a pendulum-stone confirmed it. He guessed it was the one connecting the Holy Hill beyond Imber with one of the now-inundated shrines of the ancient city of Sligo. Cradling the crystal in his hands with its largest facet angled to the pallid window-light, he slipped into meditation, and after a few minutes saw, as if reflected in a mirror from over his shoulder and a great distance away, the Gray Lady's face.

He had never met the Lady of the Drowned Lands, though he had heard of her, from Jaldis, Shavus, and travelers who had passed through the fogbound mazes of swamp and lake and cranberry bog that tangled the Valley of the Morne. She looked puzzled, to see in her scrying-mirror a stranger's face; but when Rhion explained to her who he was and that Jaldis the Blind was ill and in need at the old inn on the Imber road, she said immediately, "Of course. The Cock in Britches..." Her wide mouth flexed in a smile. "Once the God of Bridges, though I think the sign has a rooster on it these days. There are Marshmen who serve us living near there. I shall send them to fetch you here."

In the days before the earthquake the city of Sligo, built on a cluster of granite hills where the Morne estuary narrowed to its valley between the hills of Fel and the great granite spine of the Mountains of the Sun, had been among the richest of the Forty Realms, rivaling the inland wealth of Nerriok and ruling most of the In Islands and wide stretches of valley farmland along the great river's shores. Now all that remained of those fertile farmsteads were the marshy hay meadows and lowland pasturage for the thick-wooled, black-faced sheep, isolated oases among the sweet marshes and salt marshes, thick miles-long beds of angelica and cattail, bog-oak and willow, a thousand crisscrossing water channels where the tall reeds met, rustling overhead, and redbirds and water-goblins dwelled as if the place had been theirs from the foundations of the world. For the rest, Mhorvianne the Merciful, Goddess of Waters, had claimed her own. But whether An, the Moon as she was worshipped in Sligo of old - in Nerriok they worshipped Sioghis, Moon-God of the southern lands - was in fact merely an aspect of Mhorvianne as some said, no one these days knew.

As for the Lady of the Moon, some said she ruled the Marshmen by ancestral right, descended as she was from the Archpriestesses of the ancient shrine; some, that she held sway over them by means of her enchantments. Others claimed that she and her Ladies traded their magic for foodstuffs and wool - still others claimed they traded their bodies as well.

Crouched uneasily beside Jaldis' head in the stern of the long canoe, watching the black silhouette of the Marshman on the prow, poling with uncanny silence through the dense, fog-locked silence of the salt marsh, Rhion understood why no one could say anything for certain about the Drowned Lands. To enter here was to enter a whispering, sunken labyrinth, where the bulrushes and water weeds grew thick and the footing was uncertain - where the water was never open water, the land never dry land. Hummocks of maple, willow, and moss-dripping salt-oak loomed like matte gray ghosts through wreaths of coiling fog. Now and then, nearly obliterated by tall stands of reeds and almost indistinguishable from the root snags of dead or dying trees, the moss-clotted tips of stone spires and gables could be discerned, rising up through the brown waters, the decaying remains of the buildings sunk deep underneath.

The Marshmen themselves were a silent folk, wiry and small, impossible to track and difficult to speak to even when they consented to be seen. They used the Common Speech intelligibly enough, though with a strange, lilting inflection, but Rhion had to invoke the Spell of Tongues, the magic of hearing words mind to mind, to comprehend what they whispered to one another in their own dialect. Eyes green as angelica or the uncertain hazel which was no identifiable color - the color of the sea where it ran to the salt marsh's edge - peered watchfully from beneath loose thatches of thick brown hair at the two wizards. Often during the three-day journey, by sled across the frozen sweet marshes, and down here among the brown reed beds of the salt, Rhion had felt the sensation of those strangely colored eyes watching him from somewhere just out of sight.

It was a land of strange superstitions, Jaldis had told him, and beliefs which elsewhere had long since died out. Wrapped in the gray-green plaid of the native blankets, Rhion could see the curling line of blue tattoo marks on the boatman's hands and ears, and could count half a dozen little "dollies" woven of feathers and straw dangling from the lantern on the canoe's long prow.

"Rhion..." The voice of the sounding-box was soft as a single viol string, bowed in an empty room. The fog down here in the salt marshes was raw and thick, especially now that night had fallen; in spite of the blankets in which the Marshmen had wrapped him, Jaldis' breathing sounded bad.

"They will try to take the books," he murmured, as Rhion bent down close to him to hear. Rhion cast a quick glance up at the Marshman on the prow, then at the bundles of volumes stacked behind Jaldis' head: books containing the secrets of the Dark Well, the means to look behind the very curtains of Reality; scrolls of demon-spells, and the Magic of Ill.

Like twists of driftwood wrapped in rags, the cold fingers tightened urgently over Rhion's hands. "The Ladies are greedy for knowledge, stealing it where they can from other mages, other Orders. Do not let them do this..." The voice of the box paused, while Jaldis bent all his attention on stifling a cough, the sound of it deep and muffled with phlegm. He turned his head, feverish again and in pain, as he had been throughout the journey despite all that Rhion could do. "Do not... whatever they may offer. Whatever they may do."

A drift of salt air stirred the clammy fogs, shifting them like the shredded remains of a rotted gray curtain. Blurs of daffodil-yellow light wavered in the mists. Before them Rhion descried the huge, dim bulk of a domed island, dark masses of trees rising from the waters like a cliff. Below them was a floating platform, designed to rise and fall with the seasonal level of the marshes and the inundations of the tides. Just beyond the circle of the lamplight which surrounded it, marsh-faes skimmed like silver dragonflies above the mist-curled surface of the fen. Looking up at the island, Rhion could see where the long roots of trees and dangling, winter-black vines gripped the ancient blocks of hewn stone walls just visible above the waters; everything seemed thick with moss and slimy with dripping weed.

On the platform itself stood four women, dressed not in the robes of any order of wizardry, but like the Marshwomen themselves, in belted wool tunics of dull plaids or checks, or brightened by crewelwork flowers. The Gray Lady he recognized. Even if he had not seen her in the scrying-stone three days ago, he would have known at first sight of her that she was, like Jaldis, a mage.

"Welcome," she said, stepping forward. "You are most welcome to the Islands of the Moon."

When communicating through scrying-crystal, a wizard's appearance was not the same to another wizard as it was in the flesh; Rhion noted that the Lady was older than she had appeared in the crystal's depths. Certainly ten years older than he, if not more, her square, homey face was framed in heavy streams of malt-brown hair: There were blue tattoos on her ears, and her hands were knotted and strong from bread bowl, distaff, and loom. The ladies behind her were clearly as used as she to manual tasks, for they lifted Jaldis from his bed in the canoe as easily and deftly as if he had lain on a couch and carried him up the zigzagging wooden stair.

Another lady stepped forward to take the books... "I'll get those," Rhion said and shouldered once again the heavy sack. Deeply as he regretted the volumes left behind in Felsplex, he had become very grateful he hadn't let the impulse to take them all overcome his better judgment.

"As you will," the Gray Lady said, and he thought he detected a deep-hid flicker of ironic amusement in her hazel eyes.

Like all the Ladies' dwellings on what had been the tips of Sligo's hills, the house they had prepared for Jaldis had once been a palace, now fallen into deep decay. Vine and morning-glory from ancient gardens had run riot in centuries of neglect, and the heavy pillars, wider at the top than the bottom, were sheathed thick with cloaks of vegetation that, in several rooms, had begun to part the stones themselves. The walls of the sleeping chamber were still intact, but the windows, glazed with random bits of glass like pieces of a puzzle, were nearly obscured under a thick brown jungle of creepers, an open latticework in the leafless winter, but promising to be an impenetrable petaled curtain in summer months. Throughout the night, as he sat up with the Gray Lady at Jaldis' bedside, the faint scrape and rustle of that living cloak blended with the Lady's murmured healing-spells and the bubble of the kettle whose healing steams filled the room with the scents of elfdock and false dandelion; in the morning, their shadows made a dim harlequin of the pearly fog-light where it fell upon Jaldis' pillow.

"He should rest better now." The Lady ran her strong brown fingers through her hair, and shook out the cloudy mane of it as she and Rhion stood together in the villa's ruined porch. Through the milky fog, the glow of the community ovens, not ten yards away amid the overgrown riot of laurel and thorny bougainvillea around what had been a shrine, was no more than a saffron blur, like a yellow pinch of raveled wool, though the fragrance of baking bread hung upon the wet air like a hymn. Beneath it, Rhion smelled damp earth, water, and the sea; beyond the matted vines that enclosed the tiny chamber of the porch, the marsh was utterly silent, save for the isolated notes of stone chimes stirred by a breath of wind. It seemed to Rhion that they were cut off in that shadowy ruin - from the Forty Realms, from his life, and from the future and the past.

"You should get some rest yourself," she added. She deftly separated and braided the streams of her hair, and her hazel glance took in the grayness of his face, the blue-brown smudges of fatigue more visible when he removed his spectacles to rub his eyes. "You look all-in." Her voice was low and very sweet, like the music of a rosewood flute heard across water in the night. At times last night, Rhion had not recognized the spells she wove, but had had the impression that the voice was an integral part of them, a lullaby to soothe weary flesh, a bribe to tempt the wavering soul to remain.

"It was just that I'd been working healing-spells without the medicines to go with them," he said, shaking his head. "I didn't have much sleep on the way here. Thank you..." He yawned hugely. The queasiness which sometimes assailed him after he had overstretched his powers was fading, and he felt slightly lightheaded and ravenous for sweets.

"You did well with the spells alone. I've seen men much worse in like case."

Rhion smiled a little. "I don't think that was my efforts so much as just that Jaldis is too stubborn to let illness get the better of him. I did try to find some herbs - you can usually find borage if you look long enough - but in the winter it's hard."

"Perhaps while you're here you'd like to speak to some of our healers, and see the scrolls and herbals we have in our library." She gestured out into the impenetrable wall of fog, toward what Rhion had originally taken for the dim shape of a hillock of willow and vine. Now, looking again, he saw the outline of what had been a pillared porch, a few crumbling steps, and the primrose trapezoid of an uneven window, lighted from within.

"Our library goes back to the days of Sligo's glory, though much of it was lost in the earthquake and the floods that came after. We add to it what we can."

The words, Yeah, I was warned about that, were on his lips, but he clipped them back. The Gray Lady was his host and might very well have saved Jaldis' life last night. Moreover, in spite of Jaldis' warnings, after a night of working at her side, of seeing her patient care and her willingness to perform even the most menial of healing chores, he found himself greatly inclined to like the woman.

"Come." She took his hand and led him to the buckled terrazzo steps. "Channa - the cook - will get you bread and honey... Or shall I have one of the girls bring it to you here?" For she saw him hesitate and glanced back into the slaty gloom of the house, where Jaldis lay helpless with his books piled in the corner near his bed.

"What did he mean," she asked, his hand still prisoned in those warm, rough peasant fingers, stained with silver and herbs, "when he spoke in his delirium of the Dark Well?"

Rhion had taken the voice-box from him, seeing the sudden intentness of the Lady's eyes, but not before the old man, clinging to it in fevered dreams, had stammered brokenly of the Well, of the Void, and of voices crying out to him from the iridescent dark. After Rhion had removed it, Jaldis had groped urgently amid the patched linen sheets, his movements more and more frantic, though he had not uttered a sound. Even in his delirium, his pride had flinched from the broken, humiliating bleatings of a mute; in ten and a half years of traveling with him, Rhion had never heard him break that silence.

Now the Lady was watching him again, with sharp interest in her face. "The most ancient scrolls in the Library make mention of something called a Well of Seeing," she continued. "It was said to 'grant sight into other worlds and other times.' Not 'other lands' ...the glyph is very clear. 'Other worlds.' "

"I... I don't..." Rhion stammered, wanting to avoid the clear, water-colored gaze and unable to look away. "He found reference to it in some notes he'd inherited from another wizard in Felsplex. He was searching through them when the mob broke into the inn. We got out with our lives, but the notes were destroyed." The story sounded lame and thin even to him. He cursed the exhaustion that seemed suddenly to weight his tongue and clog his brain, as if the inventive portion of his mind had taken the equivalent of pheelas root and subsided into numbed oblivion.

The Lady leaned one broad shoulder against the marble hip of a caryatid nearly hidden within the vines beside her, and her hand, still enclosing Rhion's, had that same quality that Jaldis' sometimes did, as if through her grip she could read the bones within his flesh and plumb the shallow, sparkling shoals of his soul. "You escaped with your lives - and with the books?"

"With what we could seize." He felt a kind of confusion creeping over him, his mind distracted by the question of whether it would be worse to avoid her eyes or to try to hold that clear, tawny gaze... wanting to will himself to meet her eyes but obliquely aware that if he did she could read his heart. And through it all her sweet alto voice drew at his concentration as it had drawn back Jaldis' wavering will to live.

"The books, but not the notes, that so filled his fevered dreams?"

"I... That is..." He knew he should make some reply but could not frame anything even remotely believable. He felt tangled, enmeshed in his own evasions, between the strength of her hand and the strength of her gaze and the gentle, drawing sweetness of her voice. To lie seemed, not useless, but unspeakably trivial, like a child lying about the size of a fish it has seen. She waited quietly, watching him, as if they had been there together, with her watching and waiting for the truth, since the foundation stones of time were laid...

For an instant it seemed as if that were, in fact, the case - a moment later it flashed through his mind, Nonsense, if we'd been here since the beginning of time we'd have felt the earthquake... and somehow that gave him the last foundering grasp of logic needed for him to look away from her eyes. He found he was panting, his face clammy with sweat in the raw dampness of the morning. Desperately he fixed his thoughts on Jaldis' buzzing voice: They are greedy for knowledge ...greedy for knowledge... the gentle coaxing did not seem to him like greed, but that, he understood now, was part of the spell.

He pulled his hand from her grasp and it came easily - he had to catch himself against the caryatid opposite the one she leaned upon, as if she had drawn him off balance physically as well as in his mind.

After a moment that flute-soft voice said, "I see. A thing of great power... a thing to be kept hidden at all costs."

Face still averted, Rhion managed to whisper, "I don't know about that."

There was silence, filled with the scents of water and fog, but he felt her mind still bent upon his, surrounded by the implacable strength of her spells.

He took a deep breath. "Please let me go."

Her fingers, firm as the fingers of the caryatids would be, but warm and vibrant, touched his brow, feeling the perspiration that wet his skin. "You work very hard for a man who claims nothing to protect." But she was teasing him now. Instead of the heart-dragging beauty of her spells, her voice was light, like a healer's magic flute playing children's songs for joy.

He looked around at her again and saw only a sturdy brown-haired woman with one braid plaited and the other still undone upon her shoulder, and a smile, half mocking, half affectionate, in her eyes. Abstractedly he identified the crewelwork flowers on her homespun gown as marigold, lobelia, thistle, and iris; a thin strand of blue spirit-beads circled her throat.

"Go back and sit with him," she said gently. "I'll send someone over with bread and honey - and I promise you I won't dose it to question you further or to send you to sleep." And she smiled again at his blush. "You may sleep, if you will. No one will trouble you."

Rhion wasn't sure he could believe her on that score - he'd been badly shaken by the spells she'd cast - but as he stumbled back into the dimness of the house, he reflected that he probably didn't have much choice in the matter. He stood for a moment in the doorway of Jaldis' room, looking at the cracked black-and-white mosaic of the ancient tile floor, the frescoes of birds and dancers on the walls, faded now to cloudy shapes, like music heard too far away to distinguish the tune. His body hurt for sleep, and more than that for food, particularly sweets; he knew, too, that any circle or spell of protection he might lay around the books stacked in the corner beyond the bed would be, at this point, no more potent than the chalk scribbles around the bed itself, smudged by feet and bereft of their power.

Propped upon pillows, Jaldis lay in the narrow bed of cottonwood poles, deeply asleep, a vessel of gently steaming water on either side. For some time Rhion stood looking down at the ruined face, too exhausted to feel much beyond a tremendous sadness for which he could find no name.

In time he picked up Jaldis' cloak and mashed it into a rude pillow and, wrapping himself in his own cloak, lay down in front of the books on the floor. He slept almost at once and dreamed of starlight and witchfire and snow-clad silence, all reflected in shy gray eyes.

Jaldis mended slowly. The Gray Lady and the other Ladies of the Moon whom Rhion quickly came to know well nursed the old man by turns, not only with the healing spells and herb-lore for which they were famed throughout the eastern realms, but with a patient diligence and unstinting sympathy that, he suspected, had more to do with healing than all the medicines in the world. After that first morning, the Gray Lady made no further effort to question him regarding the Dark Well, though Rhion would generally volunteer to sit with his master at night, when his fever rose and he sometimes spoke in his dreams.

"You did rightly," Jaldis said, when Rhion told him about why he had taken the voice-box from him that night. "It is not well that the Witches of the Moon learn the secrets of the Morkensik Order." His voice was a fragile thread; his hand stroked restlessly at the silky curve of the dark red wood, toyed with the glittering flotsam of talismans among the faded quilts.

"I don't think she learned any secrets." Rhion glanced across at the books, still heaped in their corner with his discarded blankets and the empty bowl from his breakfast. In spite of the Gray Lady's assurances, he'd been a little dubious about the breakfast; much as it was his instinct to like her, he wouldn't have put it past her to dose his porridge with pheelas root; and several times in the course of the morning, he'd summoned a little fleck of ball lightning to the ends of his fingers, just to make sure he still could.

"But you were speaking of things you had seen - of boats with metal wings that flew through the sky, of carts that moved without horses. Of magic things without magic."

"Magic things without magic," the blind wizard echoed and his powerful chest rose and fell with his sigh. "Things that can be used by anyone, for good or ill, for whatever purposes they choose, without the training or restraint of wizardry. And the wizards themselves, born with magic in their bones, in their hearts, in their veins, even as we were born, for whom no expression of such power is possible. Wizards who are taught to forget; who, if they cannot forget, go slowly insane."

Rhion was silent, remembering his own days of slow insanity.

"They are calling to us, Rhion," that soft, mechanical drone murmured. "We must find them again, somehow. We must go and help. For their sakes, and for our own." Then the arthritic claws slipped from the silky wood, and Jaldis drifted back into his dreams.

In those days Rhion had to contend with dreams of his own.

The first time he summoned Tally's image in his scrying-crystal he told himself that it was simply to ascertain that she and her sister and her sister's baby did, in fact, reach Imber in safety. The crystal had shown him the image of Tally, very properly attired in a rust-colored gown stitched with silver and sardonyx, sitting quietly in a corner of a painted marble hall while the short, plump woman who must be her sister argued in polite hatred with a colorless young man in gray. Though the crystal, used in this fashion, was silent, he could read frigid spite and contempt in every line of the young man's slender body, while all the jewels on the plump woman's sleeve fluttered in the burning lamplight with the trembling of her stoppered rage. Tally was looking away into the noncommittal middle distance of an unwilling witness forcing herself neither to see nor hear, but her hands, all but concealed under the pheasant feathers which trimmed her oversleeves, were balled into white-knuckled fists.

After that he told himself - for a time, at least - that he only wanted to make sure that this wretchedness, whatever it was, had passed. That she was all right. That she was happy.

And sometimes she was. When riding she was, in the brown frozen landscape of the Imber hills. He could see it in her face, and in the way she laughed with her favorite maid - a tall girl like herself, but full-breasted and bold - and the chief of her honor guard, a broad-chested and rather stupid-looking young demigod who flirted with both girls and everything else moderately presentable who came his way in skirts. She was happy with her dogs, a leggy, endlessly-circling pack of red and gold bird-hunters whose ears she would comb and whose paws she would search for thorns. Alone she was happy, curled up with a silken quilt about her beside a bronze fire-dish in her bedroom, playing her porcelain flute with two dogs asleep at her feet, the huge branch of cheap kitchen candles flaring like a halo behind her head and turning her hair to a halo of treacle and gold.

But more than once he saw her, white-lipped and silent, at table with her sister and the fair young man who must be her sister's husband, while servants displayed herbed savories and frumentaries on painted platters for their approval, delicacies which Tally was clearly barely able to touch. On one such occasion, during yet another mannered, vicious quarrel, he saw her quietly leave the dining room and return to her chair a few minutes later, chalky and trembling, having clearly just vomited her heart out in the nearest anteroom. Once - though the image was unclear owing to the fact that the room they were in had long ago been ensorcelled to prevent scrying - he saw her and her sister holding one another tight, like two victims of shipwreck tossed on a single plank in rough waters, weeping by candlelight.

And with passionate despair he thought Damn him! Damn him for doing that to you... !

In time he quit watching, and put the scrying-stone away as he would have put away an addictive drug.

But like a drug it murmured to him when he was alone.

Rhion had always known that such behavior was against the ethics of wizardry and never called up her image without a pang of guilt. Among the first things that Jaldis had told him, when he had taught him to use a crystal, and later to prepare one for use, was that the powers of a scryer were not to be used for private pleasure or for private gain.

"It is not only that the evil done by one wizard redounds upon all wizards," the blind man had said, putting aside his opal spectacles and rubbing the pain from his temples. "Not only that we are not perceived as being separate individuals, good and evil, but only as wizards, without distinction and without discrimination. But spying, peeping, prying is in itself a dirty habit, and worse for a wizard who can do it so much more efficiently. What would you think, Rhion, of a mage who uses this power to look into the bathing chambers of every brothel in the city, just for the sight of women's breasts?"

Rhion, being at the time seventeen, had promptly answered, "That he's saving himself some money," and had had to wait another six months before being instructed in the scrying-crystal's use.

But it was, in fact, a conclusion that Rhion himself had come to as a tiny child, the first time he'd called a friend's image in the nursery fire and seen that friend being placed on the chamber pot by her nurse. It had embarrassed him so thoroughly he'd been very careful about calling images after that.

But abstaining now from its use didn't help. He found that quasi-knowledge of Tally - knowing what her favorite jewels were, her favorite dresses and how she braided her hair, knowing that she liked to play the flute or the mandolin when she was alone, and that she loved her little niece with the delighted affection of a child - was not the same as being her friend. All he knew was that she was in pain and that he could not help. And would never be able to help.

In his hopelessness and uncertainty, Rhion turned, as he had always turned, back to the study of magic.

The library on the Island of the Moon dated back to the days before the earthquake, a small building all but buried under thickets of laurel and vine. At least a third of its score of tiny rooms had fallen into utter desuetude, the saplings that had sprouted in the earthquake's cracks now grown to massive trees, whose roots clambered over the broken blocks like rough-scaled, gray serpents and whose branches were in many places the only roof. From these rooms the books had been moved, to crowd the other chambers, both above the ground and in the unflooded levels of the damp clay-smelling vaults below; the whole place, like the islands themselves, was a maze and a warren, shaggy with moss and choked with ancient knowledge and half-forgotten things.

Here Rhion read and studied through the rainy days of the marshlands winter and sometimes throughout the night: herb-lore and earth-lore and the deep magics of the moon and tides; the legends of the old realm of Sligo, going back two thousand years; of the islands that had sunk in the earthquake; and tales of discredited gods. Here the Lady acted as his teacher and guide, for she had been the Scribe of the place before her ascension to her current status, and if there were chambers whose thresholds he was forbidden to cross, or volumes he was forbidden to open, it was never mentioned to him.

"We add to it what we can, year by year," the Lady said, setting down two cups of egg-posset on the table near the firebasket's warming saffron glow. She shook back the loose stream of brown hair from her shoulders. "Even in the old days, it was one of the great repositories of knowledge and the beauty of letters, the joy of tales for their own sake. Many of the volumes destroyed in the floods existed nowhere else, even in their own day. And now we know of them only through notes in the ancient catalogues and a quote or two in some commentator's work."

It was late at night, and the library was silent, the black fog that pressed the irregular glass windows smothering even the glowworm spots of light from the kitchen and the nearby baths. Rhion looked up from the smooth, red-and-black bowl of the cup to the Lady's face, the strong, archaic features serene with the calm of those marble faces that clustered everywhere beneath the wild grape and wisteria or gazed half-submerged from the waters of the marsh.

"The treatises of philosophers," she went on softly, "the histories of old border-wars, tallies of spell-fragments that do not work, even... For who can say when we will find another fragmentary work that completes them, and broadens our knowledge of what can be done with the will, and the energies sent down to Earth by the gods?"

And who can say, Rhion thought, remembering Jaldis' warnings, who will have access to those spells a year from now, or two years, or ten? Who can say one of the Ladies won't take it into her head to become a Hand-Pricker or a Blood-Mage and feel free to transmit whatever knowledge she gleans here to them? He remembered what Jaldis had told him of the uses to which the Ebiatics had put the knowledge of demon-calling, when they had learned it; remembered Shavus' accounts of wizards who had not the training that the Morkensiks gave in balance and restraint.

Do no harm, Jaldis had said. But six years of brewing love-potions had taught him that the definition of "harm," even by those without thaumaturgical power, was an appallingly elastic thing.

He started to raise the posset to his lips, the sweetness of honey within it like the reminiscence of summer flowers, then hesitated, and glanced over at the Gray Lady again.

She smiled, reading the wariness in his eyes, and said, "Would you like to see me drink it first? Out of both cups, in case I'd switched them..."

And he grinned at the absurdity of the position. "I'll trust you."

Her wide mouth quirked, and there was a glint in her tawny eyes. "Or hadn't you heard we also have a reputation for dosing passersby with aphrodisiacs as well?"

Rhion laughed and shook his head. In the topaz glow of the brazier she had a strange beauty, the light heightening the strength of her cheekbones and catching carnelian threads in her eyelashes and hair. "Now you have me worried."

"That Jaldis would disapprove?"

"That I'd burn my fingers playing with fire." He raised the cup to her in a solemn toast, and sipped the sweet mull of eggs, honey, and wine within.

As the winter wore on, he found in the Gray Lady's company a respite from his thoughts of Tally, from the sense of futility that overwhelmed him at even the thought, these days, of having a nonmageborn friend. That she was fond of him he knew, as he was increasingly of her; now and then it crossed his mind to let her seduce him, but fear always held him back. He did not believe, as the garbled tales told, that the Ladies of the Moon lured lovers to their beds with spells and later sacrificed them to their Goddess at a certain season of the year; but he hadn't forgotten the spells she'd laid upon his mind to try to draw from him the secrets contained in Jaldis' books.

But her company was good. With her he practiced the art of maintaining several spells at once under conditions of duress: he would try to turn aside the acorns she hurled at him while he concentrated on holding various household objects suspended by spells in the air, and they would laugh like children when the cook's chairs, buckets, and baskets went crashing to the kitchen floor or when she scored a fair hit between his eyes. She also showed him the secret ways of the marshes, leading him across the sunken root-lines that connected the innumerable hummocks of salt-oak, cypress, and willow when the tide was low. The watery labyrinths of the Drowned Lands changed from season to season with the rains that brought down water from upcountry and from hour to hour with the rhythm of the tides. When the waters were high, the twenty or so ancient hilltops, with their ruined shrines and overgrown villas, were cut off from one another and from the hummocks that had grown up all around, rooted to the immemorial muck beneath or to the half-submerged roofs of ancient palaces. But there were times when they could cross between them on foot, picking their way carefully over the sunken trunks and roof-trees, to hunt the rare herbs of the marshes or to find skunk-cabbages by the heat of them under the snow in the sweet marshes and, later, violets by their scent.

At such times she seemed to him like a creature of the marshes herself, born of the silent waters and fog; when she spoke of the ancient days of Sligo, she spoke as if she remembered them herself, of what the ancient kings and wizards had said and done, of how they lived and how they died, as if she had been there and seen what they wore, where they stood, and whether their eyes had been brown or blue.

Some nights they would sit out, shivering in a Marshman's canoe that she handled as easily as Tally had handled her horse, watching the water-goblins play around candles set floating in bowls. "Does anyone know what they are?" Rhion asked on one such night, in the wind-breath murmur that wizards learn, scarcely louder than the lapping of the incoming tide against the boat's tanned skin. "I mean, yes, they're goblins... but what are goblins?" He pushed up his spectacles and glanced sidelong at her, seeing how the bobbing brightness of the candle intermittently gilded the end of her snub nose. "Like faes, they don't seem to have physical bodies... Are they a kind of fae? Do they sleep? Do they nest in the ground or in the trees, the way grims seem to do? Why do they take food, if they have no bodies to nourish? Why do they steal children and drown them? Why are they afraid of mirrors?" They'd had to cover the one on the boat's prow before the goblins would come to the candle, though the straw luck-dollies still dangled, like misshapen corpses on the gallows, from the bowsprit. "Is there any work of the ancient wizards in the library that says?"

She shook her head. "There are some that ask the same questions you ask, but none that gives an answer. Curious in itself - they are in their way much more an enigma than the grims, whose names at least can be known. The Marshmen think they fear mirrors because they can't stand the sight of their own faces, but look... You can see they aren't afraid of one another. And they really aren't that ugly, if you get close to them..."

"Well, I wouldn't want my sister to marry one."

She laughed at that, but she was right... outlined in the flickering candle glow the goblins were queer looking, with their huge, luminous eyes and froglike mouths, but the translucent, gelid forms did not shift, as the grims did; and if their limbs were numerous and strange, at least they remained constant.

"I think it may have something to do with the glass itself, or the quicksilver backing," the Gray Lady went on softly, as the long, thready hands reached up from the water to snatch at the flame. "You know you can put spells on fern-seed and scatter it behind you to keep them from dogging your steps in the forest..."

"I've heard poppy seed works, too. At least, according to the scroll I read in the library last week, it can be spelled to confuse human pursuit."

"I've tried to follow them a dozen times in a boat or across the root-lines on foot - twice I've tried swimming after them. But they always vanish, and it's dangerous, swimming down underwater among the pondweed and the roots."

On the whole, Jaldis seemed to regard the spells which the Lady taught Rhion as little better than the pishogue of Earth-witches, but approved of his learning the lore of the marshes and the Moon. "To be a wizard is to learn," he said, looking up from the tray of herbs he was sorting by scent and touch. He was able to sit up now, wrapped in the thick woolen blankets the Ladies wove, beside the green bronze firebaskets in his sunny stone room. On the afternoons of rare pale sunlight he would sometimes sit outside on the crumbling terrace that fronted their house, overlooking the silken brown waters of the marsh. For weeks now they had been remaking their supply of medicines and thaumaturgical powders, Rhion hunting them in the marshes as he learned a little of the mazes of islets, Jaldis ensorcelling them to enhance their healing powers.

"Though I don't suppose," the old man added, "they let you have access to the inner rooms of the library, or the inner secrets of their power." He rubbed the bandage that covered the empty sockets of his eyes. Etsinda, the chief weaver of the island, had knitted gray mitts specially for his bent and crippled hands, easy to draw on and keeping the useless fingers covered and warm.

"I haven't been told to stay out of any room."

"I doubt they would need to tell you," Jaldis replied, with a faint smile. "You would simply never notice the doors of those rooms, though you might pass them every day; or if you did notice them, your mind would immediately become distracted by some other book or scroll, and you would forget immediately your intention to pass that threshold till another day."

Rhion blinked, startled at the subtlety of such a spell... but now that he thought about it, he could easily believe the Gray Lady capable of such illusion.

"Beware of her, my son," the blind man said softly. "Some of their knowledge is corrupt, and inaccurate, being gleaned from all manner of sources. But like us, they are wizards, too."

And being wizards, Rhion knew perfectly well that the Gray Lady had never given up her intention of getting hold of Jaldis' books.

On their second night in Sligo, Rhion had set out, shaking with apprehension and clutching a line of thread to guide him back to firm ground, across one of the tangled root-lines to another islet, carrying Jaldis' books once more on his back. He'd used thread to guide him because he feared to leave wizard's marks, guessing that the Lady would have a way of reading later where they had been. The ragged remains of his old landlord's cloak had been ensorcelled with every sigil of preservation and concealment he and Jaldis had had the strength to imbue, and the hollow oak where he hid the wrapped volumes he had surrounded with the subtlest of his spells of warning and guard.

As often as possible he checked this secret cache, by scrying-crystal and in person, whenever he could - at least, he thought, the Lady could not call his image in a crystal, something no mage could do except for direct communication. The islet where he had hidden the books, far up the snag-lines from the Island of the Moon, was perhaps three-quarters of a mile long and no more than fifty yards across, thickly wooded and tangled with sedges and laurel, cranberry and honeysuckle, in places treacherous with potholes where vines growing between the overarching willow-roots gave the appearance to the unwary of solid ground. Several times such potholes gave way under his feet as he crossed the root-lines at low tide, and he narrowly avoided plunging through into the shadowy waters beneath. Now and then, on his surreptitious investigations of the islet, he discovered evidence that someone had been searching that island and others around it, though the books themselves remained, as far as he could tell, undisturbed.

Then one evening during the first of the winter thaws, as he sat reading in the dark library after the failing of the short winter daylight, something - a sound, he thought at the time, though later he could not recall exactly what it had been - made him look up in time to see the Gray Lady glide noiselessly between two of the massive king-pillars. Her homespun woolen cloak hood was drawn up over her face, and, moreover, she was wreathed in a haze of spells, which would have covered her from any but the sharpest eyes. She held a book cradled in her arms; though he only glimpsed it briefly, he thought that it was the red-bound Lesser Demonary which had been among the books in the secret cache.

Rhion froze, stilling his breath. The Lady passed without glancing his way through a lopsided doorway and down four steps into another of the library's tiny chambers. Without so much as a rustle of robes, Rhion gathered his cloak about him and slipped out into the raw iron gloom outside.

Jaldis was deep asleep already in the big stone room with its black-and-white floors. Taking his scrying-crystal from his pocket Rhion angled a facet to the light of the room's bronze fire bowl, calling the image of the hollow oak. But the image was unclear; he seemed to see a tree that looked something like it, but the surroundings were wrong - he had only a general impression of vines and reeds, as if fog hid the place. But the night, a rare thing for winters in Sligo, was clear, with the promise of coming rain.

"Damn her!" He shoved the crystal back and was tucking his robe up into his belt as he strode from the room. "How the hell did she know where to look? If they're taking them to copy one at a time..."

There were half a dozen boats tied to the jetty when Rhion scrambled down the long ladder - the platform floated low on the slack tide. He took the one with the lightest draught, knowing he'd probably have to haul it over shoals and snags - he still had not acquired much of an instinct for the tides. The sluggish waters whispered around the prow as he poled away, skirting the wide beds of reeds, sedges, the silken puckers of the water's inky surface that marked submerged snags, and the moss-crusted stone spires raised like dripping skeleton fingers from the deep. Once he saw something glowing pass under his boat and felt a tentative tug at the pole - he cut down sharply at it, and the tugging ceased. There was a mirror on the bowsprit and half a dozen woven straw dollies and god-hands; Jaldis called it all superstitious nonsense, but Rhion found himself hoping his master was wrong.

There would be grims, too, on the wooded isles, lurking and whistling in the trees. For no reason, he heard Tally's low, husky voice: Since it's such a lovely night and I've had a wonderful time so far...

And grinned.

His grin faded. As deliberately as he would turn from a painful sight, he pushed the image of her thin, elfin face from his mind and forced himself to pursue that line of thought no further. As soon as spring cleared the roads, he and Jaldis would return to Nerriok, the City of Bridges. With luck he'd never see the Duke of Mere's young daughter again.

The boat's shallow keel scraped on snags and bars as he tried to negotiate the twisting channels through house-high beds of dripping reeds; twice he had to pull the little craft up over root mats, his feet sinking to his boot calves in icy ooze. Thank God it's winter, and night, he thought, bending his back to the pole as he tried to force a passage through jungles of blackened cattail. In summer the midges would eat you alive. You can't hold spells that make them think you're made of garlic all day.

At last he hit the long, sunken ford that led to the islet of the books. He left the boat, keeping the long pole for balance, and made his way gingerly along the dripping, snakelike strands of exposed roots, hearing the water lap and gurgle, black and shining as obsidian beneath his feet. These sunken hummocks, treacherous with slime, wound for miles through this part of the marsh, the islets widening and rising from them like knots in a string.

Even if the Ladies had seen me coming this way, he wondered, how the hell would they have known which islet I went to? They're all pretty much alike. They can't have searched every tree...

A flash of bluish light behind him caught his eye, and he swung around, remembering the goblins. Clouds like stealthy assassins were already putting pillows over the pale face of the baby moon; he smelled the sea and rain. In the growing darkness, a lantern would have burst upon his eyes like an explosion.

But it was only a half-dozen marsh-faes, fragile, naked sprites darting away in every direction from something which had startled them in a reed bed. A fox, perhaps.

But there were no birds as yet in the winter-still marshes. No prey and no predators.

As if he had turned a page in a book and seen it written there in full, Rhion realized, The Ladies. They're following me now.

He could have hit himself over the head with the boat-pole. Idiot! he cursed himself, numbskull, dupe, goon! If the Gray Lady didn't want to be seen by you in the library, do you think you'd have been able to glimpse her, even if she walked up and hit you over the head with the silly book? He remembered the subtleness of the Archpriestess' magic, the coercion which had operated, not through force, but through the slightest of whispered illusions.

He wondered now how he could possibly have been so sure that the book in her arms was the Lesser Demonary - at that distance there had been nothing but its size and shape to go on. But she'd known that, if he thought she had it, he'd run immediately to the cache to check...

I'll strangle the bitch.

Oh, yeah, he thought a moment later with a grin at both his own outrage and at his thoughts of vengeance. Fat chance. You'd spend the rest of your life hopping from lily-pad to lily-pad catching flies with your tongue.

Though there might be some advantage, he reflected, looking around him at the dripping desolation of snags and roots, to being a frog in these circumstances.

His mouth set in a grim smile and he turned with elaborate casualness back along the snag toward the eyots and reed beds in the whispering dark. Well, my lady, if you want to go wading tonight, we'll go wading. I've got a pocketful of poppy seed and I'll use it just as soon as I've got you well and truly pointed in the wrong direction. We'll see who spends a soggier night.

Balancing himself with the pole with great and gingerly care he began to work his way up the snag-line, crossing the islet where the books were hidden and angling away along another ford towards the murkiest and wettest part of the marsh.

And in very short order, as he should have known he would, he got lost.