The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1)

The Rainbow Abyss (Sun-Cross #1) Page 9

"RHION!" THE SHARP RATTLE of pebbles striking the jalousies startled him from sleep. The room was suffused with the moonstone pallor of very early morning, the window at the far end a blurred screen of silver-shot grisaille, the air tender. The voice had been human, a hissing attempt to combine a whisper with a shout, not the buzzing tones of Jaldis' box.

And indeed, all that was visible of Jaldis was a hunched twist of bone and white hair beneath the single sheet of the other cot, rising and falling with the slow, steady rhythm of sleep.

Rhion rolled hastily to his feet and, clutching his own bed sheet about him and fumbling his spectacles onto his face, hurried to the window. Outside, Shuttlefly Court was drowned in shadows still, though the sky overhead was the color of peaches, the hills beyond the roofs like something wrought of lavender glass.

Tally was down in the square, standing up in her mare's stirrups with trails of sugar-brown hair floating mermaid-like from under her cap.

"Could you really hit my window from down there?" Rhion asked softly, as - decently robed and scratching at his beard - he let her in downstairs a few moments later.

"Of course. Can't you?"

"I couldn't hit it from inside the room with the shutters closed. You shouldn't have brought your horse. You rarely see good horseflesh in this part of the city. People will notice..."

"I left the charm you gave me tucked under the saddle blanket." She dropped into one of the rickety kitchen chairs and disengaged a small bag from the voluminous pocket of her green riding habit. "I brought coffee."

"Dinar of Prinagos has just won my unqualified support against the perfidious White Bragenmeres under any circumstances, at any time, in thought, word, deed, spell, and incantation." Rhion tweaked open the bag and, holding it cradled in his hands, inhaled deeply and lovingly. Their small stock of coffee - copiously adulterated with dried acorns - was another of the things left behind in Felsplex. Beans like these they had not been able to afford since their days in Nerriok, when they'd been patronized by nobles of the court.

"I also brought all the little doings," she added, getting up to fetch cups from the shelf while Rhion set the sack down and went to dip water into the kettle from the big - and now mostly empty - jar in the corner. "A grinder and a strainer and sugar and cinnamon..."

"Will you marry me?" The jest was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and she looked around swiftly, their eyes meeting, and for one flashing second it wasn't a jest.

"Forget I said that," he apologized quickly, which only made it worse. She looked away and he saw the color rise to the roots of her hair. He knew he should say something, make some other light remark to cover his own confusion and hers, but the air between them teemed with unsaid words, with possibilities unthinkable, like tinder which a spark would set ablaze.

The women he had loved had all been affairs of affection, begun in the knowledge that, as a wizard, he was legally a dead man with no position in the laws of any of the Forty Realms - unable to marry, unable to hold property, unable to enter business or trade or to sign a binding contract. And yet looking at this girl...

She took a deep breath after far too long, set down the cups on the table, and stammered, "Will... I suppose the talisman you gave me will keep people from noticing a full-grown horse?"

"I'm not sure," he said, gladly accepting the offer of a straight line. "It might keep them from noticing half of it but then the rest would be awfully conspicuous."

She giggled, her painful blush fading; to the relief of both, the moment passed in laughter.

"Where'd you learn to make coffee like this?" she asked a few minutes later, when he poured the inky, bittersweet liquid into the bottoms of the two red-and-black Sligo cups which were much too large for the tiny quantity to be consumed. "If wizardry ever quits paying, you really will be welcome in my father's service."

"What do you mean, if wizardry ever quits paying?" Rhion demanded in mock indignation. "For one thing, as you may have noticed, wizardry doesn't pay, and for another, making good coffee is wizardry. Why do you think I've been apprenticed to Jaldis for ten years? Because I like climbing over slippery roofs in the snow? No," he added, fishing in another lidded pot for yesterday's bread and putting it and the small jar of honey on the table between them. "It's just one of those things rich young men are supposed to learn, like dancing."

"I know." Tally gravely spooned enough honey onto her bread to satiate a regiment of bees. "My deportment master used to crack me over the elbow with his stick if I didn't curve my arm properly when I weighed out the sugar or added the cinnamon. My brother Syron has to put up with all that now." She held the spoon high above the bread for the sheer joy of watching that lucid amber curtain flow to its destiny. "Were you a rich young man?"

"Once upon a time." Rhion smiled, remembering the ruby doublet buttons which he'd cut off to buy the opals and gold for Jaldis' spectacles. Somewhere in the maze of courts, a rooster crowed. The mare nickered outside their door, the sound loud in the thin cool of morning. Other than that, the square was silent. Even Mistress Prymannie had not come out to unshutter her schoolroom. The rich smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled with the faintly prickly velvetiness of dust, the steamy whiff from the laundry in the next street, the odor of privies and stale cheap cooking, a strange, slubbed tapestry of fustian and silk.

"Well," Rhion went on more briskly, "did you just come to see me because your father's cook can't make a decent cup of coffee, or..."

"My father's cook makes a perfectly good cup of coffee and would demand that you be beheaded for treasonable utterances if he heard you say different. But," she went on, "I've figured out what to do about Damson. And she's agreed."

"I'll have to talk to her about that," he warned, and Tally nodded.

"You will." She set down her coffee, cradling the round smoothness of the cup in her hands. Something about her matter-of-factness - or perhaps the gesture of warming her hands in the steam of the cup - reminded Rhion strongly of his sister, and he felt a curious pang when he realized that he still thought of her as a girl of fifteen... She must be married long ago, with children...

"There's a disused pavilion at the end of the kitchen gardens of Father's palace," Tally was saying. "You can reach it through a postern in Halberd Alley. Damson will be there tonight, masked and hooded and the whole thing. I've told her you don't know who she is..."

"Thank God she didn't see us when we rescued her daughter."

She ducked her head shyly, then looked back at him again with her gray eyes bright. "I thought that, yes. The house is right on the palace wall. If you didn't know it was actually connected to the palace, you couldn't tell it by looking. It really could be anywhere. That should lay to rest her fears about being blackmailed or about word of it getting back to Esrex. I told her that I told you that she was a rich merchant's wife and I was her maid, so remember to treat us that way, all right?"

"Sure thing, lamb chop," he leered in his slangiest street dialect, and she laughed and shoved him playfully. For all her usual gravity there was a sparkle of humor in her eyes, lurking like a wildflower in a bed of well-bred tuberoses, and he suspected she spent a good deal of her time, as he did, explaining Joke... that was a joke...

Regretfully, he gave her his hand. "I think you'd better be getting back. They really will be wondering where you are..."

"I told them I was going hawking in the marshes," she said, standing up and shaking out her long green skirt. "And I really am, though it'll be awfully late by the time I get there. I told Marc - Marc of Erralswan, the Captain of the Palace Guard, who's supposed to be meeting me and my waiting lady Amalie there - that I had some business to attend to in the kennels and that we'd be late. Amalie will cover for me. She's getting the hawks and will tell them at the mews..."

"You're full of tales today, aren't you?" he teased, as they passed beneath the suspended thickets of drying herbs towards the door. "First you're posing as your sister's maid, now you're playing cross questions with your escort..."

"Well..." When she averted her face that way she looked like a very dignified ten-year-old caught raiding the jam. "Didn't you do that?"

She put her hand to her cap, a modest little thing his sister would have called paltry. He'd seen the wealthy virgins of Bragenmere sporting cap wings that would have lifted them out of the saddle if they'd ridden at any speed, had some of the wearers not been a solid half-hundredweight heavier than they should have been, that is. But not Tally. She was too thin, if anything, with scarcely more breast than a gawky boy. The light of the open door, strong now that the sun was slanting down over the tiled roofs, cast a gauzy crescent against her cheek and made the amber of her necklaces glow like the honey that still dabbled the plates on the table behind them.

He smiled again. "All the time."

Catching his eye, Tally laughed again, brightness passing across her face like spring sunlight in the Drowned Lands, breathtaking, fragile, and swiftly dimmed. "I don't like to," she sighed. "There'd be a hideous to-do if I was found out."

"To put it mildly, yes."

Across the square beyond her shoulder, boys and girls were arriving to school, loitering outside in their clumsy wool and serge clothing or chasing stray chickens in the weeds. Knowing from his own schooldays how easily anything other than lessons will hold a child's attention, Rhion drew about himself and the girl, and about the mare standing with reins hitched to the cottonwood post, a thin, numinous aura of Look-Over-There.

Tally's mouth, well-shaped without being either full or soft, tightened, the dimple beside it flexing again into a tired line. "It's just that... They want so much of you, you know?" Her gesture failed, half-made. "And I want..." She shook her head, scanning his face helplessly, not sure, in fact, what it was that she did want.

"To be alone?" The incessant grind of his father's demands seemed to echo along the corridors of his mind - learn this, help me with that, meet all the right men and be sure to be friends with their sons... And his mother's hands forever straightening the already-perfect set of his sleeves, her fussy disappointment in him pursuing him wherever he went.

"Sometimes." Her face softened again. "And sometimes..." She broke off once more, her eyes on his, and he understood, and she knew he understood. It had to do with music, some of it, and some of it with silence, but there was no clear word for what it was that she sought. His hand moved instinctively to touch hers, but he thought twice and closed his fist instead.

She turned quickly from him. "I'll come for you after dark."

And Rhion, reaching out with mind and magic, nudged the schoolmistress into a bustling fit of self-importance, so that she fussed the last of her pupils into the building and got them seated, distracting their minds from the sight of Tally mounting her mare and reining away across the court.

As Tally had promised, the pavilion near the kitchen gardens could have been any small house in the Upper City, with its modestly slanted roof of red tiles and its pale stucco bleached silver by the light of the bright spring stars. After the eternal mists of the Drowned Lands, the dry, hard brightness of the air in the Mountains of the Sun made everything seem slightly unreal, like a child's drawing; every weed stem growing along the alley walls and every pothole and broken brick in the road were distinct, even in this wan and shadowy light. The air was redolent with the flower and vegetable markets a few streets away, with the smells of the Duke's extensive stables, and with dust and garbage. Here at the back of the palace complex, the walls lacked the intricate ornamental brickwork, the tiled niches, and the marble statuary that characterized its front, and Rhion guessed as they climbed the tiled steps from the little pavilion's hall that the place had been built originally to house some married stable master or chief cook and his bride.

The light of the single candle in Tally's hand darted fitfully over painted rafters and bright frescoes on the walls and glinted on the spectacles hidden deep within the shadows of Jaldis' concealing hood. "Can we get ourselves seated before she comes into the room?" Rhion whispered. "That way, with luck, she won't see him standing up at all to know he's crippled."

Tally nodded. They were all cloaked and hooded like conspirators in a cheap street-corner melodrama - Jaldis had shifted his voice-box up onto his back, so that its smooth roundness, combined with a deliberately assumed crouch, gave the impression that he was hunchbacked; in place of his crutches he leaned on a long staff, and upon Rhion's arm.

"Good idea... Drat this mask - it won't stay tied..." She set her candle on a pine hall stand to tangle with the ties of her mask, and Rhion had to stop himself from reaching to help her. Under her cloak he saw she wore the plain, black frock and short petticoat of a serving-maid, her ankles slender as willow switches above sensible shoes. "There. The light's pretty low in there; I don't think there's much danger of her recognizing either of you, once you get your mask on."

She was right about that, anyway, Rhion thought when he and Jaldis entered the room. A single candle in a crude brass holder provided all the illumination - if such it could be called - available; the candle, moreover, placed not on the oak table in the center of the room but on a sideboard, where its feeble glow would leave everyone's faces in deepest shadow. "Why do they always have the lights so low they won't be recognized?" wondered Rhion aloud, helping Jaldis to his chair at one end of the table and moving the candle to the far end of the sideboard so that its light was almost directly behind him, leaving nothing visible of his face but a black shadow within his hood. "Don't they realize wizards can see in the dark?"

He took his own seat and removed his spectacles, putting on the scarlet mask he'd bought for three dequins with some of the money Tally had advanced them and pulling up his hood again. Carnival had been over a month ago - in the slop shops of the Lower Town masks were cheap this time of year. His back was to the candle, his face toward the door, which at this distance was only a muzzy line of shadow on the wall. Good God, he thought suddenly, what do I do if I can't tell Tally and Damson apart at this distance... ?

But the concern was set at rest a moment later, as the hall door opened and he saw two nebulous figures framed in the darkness. He'd momentarily forgotten: one form, lithe and freemoving and graceful, was a good seven inches taller than the other.

"Mistress...." Rhion deepened and hoarsened his voice as much as he could and half rose to his feet to bow. Jaldis, to nonmageborn eyes a black form almost invisible in the dark, merely inclined his head.

"My maid has told you what I want?" Damson groped around for the chair back in order to sit - as far as visibility went, her identity, Rhion thought, would be safe from this potential blackmailer, anyway. Without his spectacles, at a distance of three feet only the fact that the boiled leather mask covering her face was silvered let him know she was masked at all. He could make out the blurred shape of lips where a cut-out had been made for speech, but couldn't have taken oath whether they were long and squared, like Tally's, or round and pouty - only that they were darkened with a considerable quantity of rouge. A dark shawl the size of a bed sheet concealed her hair. She wore a cloak over her dress, and the only way he knew there was any kind of decoration on either covering was when an occasional sequin or gem would catch the candle's light and flash in the dark like a purple star.

"A philter, she said," Rhion replied. "To win the love of a man."

Damson leaned forward. Her scent was patchouli with a heavy dollop of ambergris and touches of lily and spikenard. Any wizard, trained as all were in the identification of herbs by scent, could have picked it out from among hundreds. That was another thing they never thought about. "These are his." From beneath the all-enveloping cloak she pushed a silken scarf containing a big knot of ivory-fair hair-combings, and a rolled-up linen shirt. The scarf itself was worked with a pattern of red pomegranates, the house badge of the Prinagos.

Nice disguise, Sis.

"I want him to be drawn to me, to love me..."

"You understand," Rhion said, "that such a philter will only work for a short time? And that afterward, because of being drawn to your bed, he may be angry with you? May even hate you?"

"No." The plump woman shook her head so that the amethysts flashed in the silk of her shawl. "He thinks he hated me before, but I made him love me. He's only a boy - I know what his needs are, better than those callow hussies... Better than he does himself. He needs me, though his pride won't let him admit it... And in any case, what he thinks doesn't matter. If I can bear his son, he'll not be able to have me put aside."

Tally's head turned sharply; Rhion heard the catch of her breath. "Did he say that?"

"Of course he did," Damson snapped, not looking back over her shoulder at her sister, keeping her eyes on the two wizards before her like a duellist watching circling foes. "Why do you think I agreed to this in the first place? I can't let him go - I won't let him go! He's mine. I'll be whatever he wants me to be - he'll see that, once I've got him back."

"If this is true," Rhion explained patiently, "it won't be because of the philter. If what you say is true, he may very well go on loving you afterward - or he may not. A spell such as the one I'll weave for you has only a limited, and a very specific, action, namely, a surge of unreasoning desire for you so powerful it would take an extremely strong-willed man to resist. But it cannot affect what he will feel about this desire, or about you, once its effect has passed."

"But it will bring him to my bed?"

Rhion sighed. He sometimes wondered why he bothered with the warning - they almost never listened. Inevitably they brushed it aside with, But it WILL work, won't it?

"Unless he's a very strong-willed man, or unless he has some kind of counterspell from a stronger wizard than I... Yes."

"That is enough, then." She sat back a little and there was a self-satisfied note in her crisp, high-pitched voice. "It's all that matters. I'll make him need me, once I'm past his silly pride - once he sees that he does need me. It's only his pride that makes him spiteful, anyway."

Rhion was silent. Loving and hating were so close, two sides of a coin whose name was Need. He wondered if Esrex' hate and cruelty had been weapons of defense rather than offense, a final bastion to protect himself, not only against the demands of the daughter of his enemy, but against his own lust for one whose family had already taken away from him all that he had. In that case the breaking of this last bastion of his personal integrity wasn't likely to make him any more pleasant...

But he didn't know and he couldn't know. And, as Jaldis had said, it was none of his business to judge.

For a moment he smelled sawdust and stale beer and looked again into cowlike brown eyes above a sequined veil; and behind the woman at the Black Pig he saw clustered like a spectral regiment all those other encounters in darkened kitchens and inn parlors and the faces of every other man or woman who'd ever asked him to use his powers to get them between somebody else's sheets.

It all had so little to do with magic, with what magic actually was.

And Tally had asked for his help.

He held out his hand for hers. "As you wish, my lady."

"One other thing..." Her hand held back from his, as if fearing to touch. It was a very round, delicate little hand, all four stubby fingers and the thumb tightly ringed in elaborate confections of opal, ruby, and pearl whose design could have been recognized like a signature. "Another tincture, or powder, or spell that will guarantee that I conceive and bear a son."

In for a lamb, in for a sheep... Somebody might as well get some good out of this...

Again, Rhion inclined his head.

Of the two spells, the love-philter was by far the easiest. Rhion heaped the standard base-powder on Damson's scented hand, then feathered it onto the shirt which had been laid down like a table-cloth for him to work on, and around them wove the circles of power and need. The Gray Lady had taught him many variant spells of this kind, different mixes of ingredients, and he'd calculated which to use tonight to take into account the phase of the moon - which was four days past the third quarter - and the position of the rising stars. Having observed Damson in the crystal he knew what she looked like and was able to weave into the spells a specific hunger for that plump white body and no other, a thirst unquenchable save by the scent of her mouse-brown hair. Esrex was young, Tally had said, barely twenty - impecunious, unpleasant, bitter, and proud, but male and young. With them, he wove spells of luck and hope and the image of Damson in her husband Esrex' arms.

Jaldis, in silence save for a little cracked humming in his broken throat, wove the stronger geas, the more difficult one, a spell of conception, and, more importantly, to prevent miscarriage, accident, or the spontaneous shedding of the child in the first few fragile weeks. They had guessed that Damson would request such a tincture and had come prepared for it, remembering that she had miscarried at least one child already. With luck, the Duke's elder daughter would be able to keep her husband returning to her bed for several weeks. Unless the young man himself had become sterile, that should suffice.

And during the whole proceedings, Damson sat with her plump hands folded, the steel grip of her will almost palpable in the leaden gloom. She would have that young man, bring him to heel from his spiteful strayings! Now and then the jewels on her fingers would flash as they tightened, her protuberant gray eyes would shift behind the eyeholes of the silver mask. She was wondering, Rhion supposed, whether either of the wizards she'd hired would guess who she really was.

Only after Damson had gone, leaving behind her a fat pouch of coin, and Tally was leading them down the stairs to the postern gate once more, did Rhion relax, pulling the mask off and shaking the sweat out of his tousled brown curls, and putting his spectacles back on.

"That was well done," Jaldis murmured softly, his arthritic grip tight upon Rhion's sleeve. The night had turned cold, as spring nights did in these dry highlands; the smells of lotus and jasmine from the Duke's vast water gardens breathed through the window lattices, like subtle colors in the creamy dark. "As good a love-spell as any I ever cast."

"Great." Rhion sighed, and flexed the crick from his chubby fingers. "Just the reputation I always sought. The pimp's delight, provided my clients' husbands don't kill me." The memory of all those other love-spells, the sour sense of having prostituted himself, still clung like the redolent musk of Damson's perfume. "Why do they call them love-spells, anyway?" he added bitterly. "It isn't love, you know."

"Maybe because some people can't tell the difference." Tally slid back the postern bolts, and stood her candle in the near-by niche of the little gate god to open the door. "Or if they suspect there's a difference, they don't want to know."

In the candle's reflected light her gray eyes were troubled and sad. Without his spectacles, he wouldn't have been able to see her face during the conjuration, even had she not been masked; now he saw that she had been thinking about what she'd been watching. She'd gotten what she'd gone after - all of her life, he guessed, she had been Damson's champion: riding into the woods to save her child; seeking out what means she could to alleviate her heartbreak at Esrex' cruelty; and submerging her own thoughts in the necessity of fixing her sister's life. Clearly the steely self-will of Damson's words had troubled her deeply.

In her face, as she looked mutely at him in the shadows of the gateway, were questions deeper than could be asked here on the threshold of departure, the questions of a girl who has begun to realize that love was not what she thought it was, and magic was not what she thought it was... perhaps nothing was what she thought it was.

"Or maybe," she added, nearly inaudibly, "they think it really is love. Rhion..." There was sudden pleading in her voice for reassurance, for forgiveness, and for help against a revelation she would rather not have seen.

He couldn't answer. More than anything in the world he wanted to go somewhere quiet with her, talk to her, and share with her what he had seen of the muddled affairs of the human heart - and to have her reassurance against his own bitter confusion of mind. To get to know her.

But it was out of the question.

Their eyes held. The silence rang palpable as a tapped chime.

Then, aware that it was madness - cruelty to her and stupidity of the most suicidal kind to him - he left Jaldis leaning upon his staff, and gently taking Tally's hands, brushed her lips with his.

Her fingers crushed desperately over his, trembling and urgent, and for an instant he felt not only her body, but her spirit sway toward his, like a young almond tree in the wind's embrace. In the limpid glow of the candle, he saw tears silver her eyes; in the eyes themselves, dilate with the night, he saw the reflection of his own desire, his own knowledge that this should never be.

It should end here, he thought, with what little sanity was left to him. In all propriety - in all sanity - we should never meet again.

But he knew even then that they would.

Turning quickly she fled from him, brushing past Jaldis and vanishing up the stairs in a swirl of black fustian and a shuddering smoke-stream of tawny unhooded hair.

Quietly Rhion closed the postern gate behind them and used his spells to shoot the bolt on the palace side. Taking Jaldis' arm, he led the way back down the alley, making once more for their rooms in the Old Town.

If he had still been the only son of the banking house of Drethet, he thought, guiding Jaldis carefully along the wall where the pavement was unbroken and the footing better, he could have said, Can I meet you one day in the marshes to go hawking? He could have put on a mask of red leather and pheasant feathers and ridden in his sedan chair up to the palace on carnival night, to dance with her at least. He guessed she was a good dancer, as he himself had been once upon a time. He could have heard her voice, if nothing else; touched her hand... Gone to the market to buy the finest porcelain flute purchasable, or a scatterbrained red hunter pup that would please her...

Academically he had known when he made the decision to become Jaldis' pupil what he was giving up. His family - the love he bore for his sister and his friends - all rights under law, among them the right to marry and by implication the right to fall in love with honest women, let alone the daughters of Dukes. And his blood, the blood of a wizard born, did not question the decision.

After a long time Jaldis' sweet, thready voice, still muffled by the cloak, broke the silence. "There is enough silver in the bag she gave us," it said quietly, "to allow you to get drunk, you know."

Rhion sighed. He had never spoken to Jaldis about Tallisett, but it did not surprise him that the old man had guessed. "I'd only have to sober up again," he said resignedly. "I might as well stay..."

From somewhere off to their right - an alley, a doorway, a window, a balcony - came the vicious slap of a crossbow firing. Something sliced at the back of Rhion's neck, not even hurting in that first shocked second. In his grip Jaldis' body jarred and sagged, and turning his head Rhion saw, with a kind of numbed immobility of thought, a small arrow standing in his master's shoulder, blood welling forth stickily and copiously under the cloak.

Without thinking he ducked, dragging them both back as a second bolt slammed into the marbly stucco of the palace wall which had showed up their forms so clearly in the dark. Metal glinted in the shadows of a second-storey porch across the alley. In darkness that would have hidden them from other eyes, he saw a man and a woman, street-warriors, mugs by their dress, dodge back out of sight, crossbows and arrows in their hands. At the same moment half a dozen ruffians burst from the doorway beneath the balcony's shadow.

"Ambush!" Rhion yelled, and flung the first illusion he could call to mind - that hackneyed old stand-by, an exploding ball of fire - at their pursuers, and, flinging one arm bodily around Jaldis, staff and all, took to his heels.

He knew the arrow was poisoned. Pheelas-root would temporarily rob or weaken a wizard's power while leaving the rest of his mind clear, but it was expensive and hard to get. Most assassins contented themselves with cheaper alternatives, either a heavy soporific like toadwort or poppy or an outright, fast-acting poison like datura. If the poison didn't kill the wizard quickly, at least most of his concentration - if he were still conscious at all - would go into counteracting the deadly effects, leaving the assassins free to continue the assault with swords, ax-handles, chains, or whatever other hardware came to hand.

All this flashed through Rhion's mind in seconds as he half-dragged, half-carried Jaldis toward the refuge of the nearest alley. I can't let them corner me...

He collected his mind enough to fling behind him a spell of faulty aim and another one, a second later, of mechanical failure, though he was fairly certain the crossbows had been counterspelled... a suspicion which was confirmed by the bolt that splintered against the corner of the alley wall as he ducked around it.

Jaldis stumbled and slumped, and Rhion felt the last consciousness go out of the old man. He thrust him behind him into the shadows of a porch and caught up his staff, turning in time to strike aside the jab of the nearest sword. His father had never believed in weaponry training for the sons of the merchant class, and Rhion had been far too lazy, and far too much of a dandy, to oppose him in this opinion. It was Shavus the Archmage who, during his first year with Jaldis, had beaten into him the rudiments of self-defense. He swept the sword-thrust aside and reversed the staff to jab and sweep at the man coming at him from the other direction, straddling Jaldis' fallen body and trying frantically to call to mind some spell - any spell - to help him.

But it takes a trained warrior to fight unthinkingly. Backed almost to the wall, slashing with his stick at the five swords which surrounded him in a hedge of steel, Rhion could call few options to mind. A wall of fire in the circumstances wouldn't work - they were too close - and with Jaldis down an explosion of white light would not buy him enough time to get the old man on his feet and drag him away.

Desperately, he flung a spell of pain at them, the tearing and spasming of the organs of their bodies, but it took a powerful mage to do real damage in a short time. One of the men swore sharply, and he saw blood begin to trickle from the woman assassin's mouth, but her eyes hardened to an iron fury and she redoubled her attack. He'd now put them in a position of having to kill him to end the pain - and they knew it.

The Magic of Ill sapped his concentration, too. A sword-blade, slicing through the longer guard of the staff, cut his arm before he could catch its wielder on the side of the head; he had to whirl to block on the other side, ducking and weaving and hoping none of them had a projectile. If he didn't have to carry Jaldis, he might just be able to escape, he thought... if he wasn't defending a corpse already...

One of the men stepped back from the fray and unshipped a weighted chain from his belt. It lashed out at Rhion like the tongue of a hellish frog, and he was only barely able to avoid having his weapon pulled from his hand. As he turned to block another sword cut, the chain snaked out like an iron whip and crashed across his ankles, dropping him to his knees. He struck back hopelessly, knowing he was finished...

And the assassin lunging down at him cried out suddenly and turned, cutting at the two men who had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the alley behind them.

The newcomers were both big men and clearly trained to arms. The shorter of the two, a black-and-red ribbon work doublet bulging over shoulders like a bull, drove his blade through the woman assassin's chest and shoved her aside like a straw training dummy; the other man, wearing a soldier's short crimson tunic, pulled off one of the two men bearing down on Rhion, and Rhion struck upward at the remaining one, catching him in the solar plexus with the end of his staff and sending him crashing against the wall. In the dark of the alley there was a momentary confusion of struggling shapes. Then the assailants collected their wounded and fled, vanishing around the corner or swarming over the nearest wall, leaving behind only a few splashes of blood in the dirt, vegetable parings, and mucky straw of the porch.

Rhion, still crouched gasping over Jaldis' body, realized dimly that blood was streaming from a cut on his own arm, hot against the cold of suddenly opened flesh. The back of his neck burned where the arrow barbs had slit it, and he felt sick and faint. The man in the ribbon work doublet came swiftly to him, calling back over his shoulder "Don't bother, Marc!" to his companion, who had started to go in pursuit.

Rhion pulled his arm away from his savior's investigating hand, and shook his head. "Jaldis..." he managed to say, turning his master over and feeling at the lined, slack face.

Jaldis still lived. Rhion felt quickly at the veins in his throat to make double sure, then fumbled at the arrow still in the old man's shoulder. Waves of faintness were sweeping him, his vision narrowing to a tunnel of gray at the end of which stood the arrow, like a signpost on some strange dream path rising out of the little mound of blood-soaked brown wool.

"Poison..."

"Easy," the big-shouldered man said, kneeling at his side.

Again Rhion shook off his help, forcing his racing heart to slow with an effort of will, collecting a spell of healing around himself. His hands were shaking as he pulled his knife from his belt and slashed Jaldis' cloak and robe to reveal the blue-veined white flesh, smeared with the dark welling of blood. Marc, the soldier, had come back, much the younger of their two rescuers, tall, handsome, and good-natured, if rather stupid-looking. He wore the crimson cloak, tunic, and gilded leather cuirass of the Duke of Bragenmere's guards, and Rhion remembered where he'd seen him before: in the crystal last winter, hunting with Tally on the Imber hills. Marc, Tally had said. Marc of Erralswan. He was carrying a small bronze lantern, and its light splashed over the porch behind them. Rhion realized for the first time that it was - by the straw and oat-grains everywhere on the pavement - the rear porch of the Duke's stables.

The older man was helping him pull aside Jaldis' gore-soaked robes. He paused at the sight of the rosewood soundbox with its tangle of talismans glittering in the lantern-glow and looked across at Rhion with surprise in his handsome, fleshy face. "You are wizards," he said.

Rhion nodded, and raised a shaky hand to straighten his spectacles. "But don't worry," he dead-panned. "Even wizards don't turn around and put curses on people who've saved their lives."

"Don't they?" The man's teeth were very white against his healthy tan when he grinned; his black hair, carefully curled and smelling of expensive pomade in spite of the sweat that dripped from its ends, still retained a milk-white narcissus or two from an aftersupper crown. "Aren't they like other men after all, men? Marc, call a couple of the guards and get these two inside. Call Ranley, too... my personal physician," he explained, as Marc, leaving the lantern, disappeared through a postern into the stables themselves.

He held out a warm, strong hand to Rhion, thick with jeweled rings. "I am Dinar Prinagos, Duke of Mere."