The Rainbow Abyss

Chapter Ten

IN HIS SUBSEQUENT account of the ambush Rhion mentioning to the Duke just what he and his master had been doing in Halberd Alley at that time of night. He said only that they had been returning from an errand in the Upper Town, and the Duke, a man of great courtesy, did not ask further. Rhion wasn't sure how much either Tally or her sister had confided in their father; but, remembering his dealings with his own father, he guessed it hadn't been much.
While the Duke listened gravely, his face crossed by the swift, purposeful shadows in the guest room's mellow lamplight, his physician - a perfectly orthodox, black-robed little representative of Alucca, God of Healing - removed the arrowhead from Jaldis' shoulder, and an assistant bound up Rhion's slashed arm.
"And you have no idea who might have wanted to slay you?" If he did not, Rhion reflected, use the word "murder" - since technically it was not murder to kill a wizard - at least the word he did use was one that applied equally to man as well as beast.
Rhion shook his head. On the guest room's narrow bed Jaldis was slowly returning to consciousness, white hair spread out over the pillow and voice-box lying under one frail hand. Though too weak to use it, he had refused to be parted from it. For years he had lived in fear of losing either it or his spectacles, mostly, Rhion suspected, because he doubted he had enough strength to create replacements. Under the bandages, his naked flesh looked almost transparent, sunk against knobby bones like damp silk draped across a pile of sticks. Though the tall windows were open upon a small garden court, the room, airy and small, smelled of herbed steams and of the medicines the physician had given to counteract the effects of the foxglove he had smelled on the arrowhead, odors which did not quite mask the smell of blood.
"Marc," the Duke said, half-turning in his chair of silvered poplar wood. The young Captain stepped over from the door where he'd stood. "Send some of your men out to the houses of Lorbiek the Blood-Mage, and Malnuthe the Black - that Ebiatic who lives in the Shambles - and May the Bone-Thrower down in the Kairnside shanties, and let them know what happened. It's frequently the case," he added to Rhion, as the young soldier departed on his errand in a dramatic swirl of crimson cloak, "that when people take it into their heads to murder wizards, they attack several at roughly the same time, wanting to make a sweep of it, you know. It's happened before, I'm sorry to say."
Rhion nodded. In their first month in Felsplex they'd gotten a warning from another Morkensik wizard in the town that a mob was out to fruge wizards, but nothing had come of it. As far as he knew the woman who'd given them the warning hadn't contacted either the local Hand-Pricker or the Earth-witch who operated in the same quarter.
"Believe me," the Duke went on, "I'm truly sorry such a thing came to pass in my realm. I believe - I've always believed - that, as long as they use their powers for good and as long as they don't interfere with other men's affairs, wizards have every right to live and study free of interference."
Rhion scratched at a corner of his beard. "I'd be lying if I said I didn't agree with you."
The Duke's eyes twinkled appreciatively. "You may have heard that I'm a scholar," he said. "Or a dilettante, at any rate, who'd like to be a scholar and who can now afford to surround himself with scholars..."
"No," Rhion said quietly. "No - 'scholar,' unqualified, was the word I heard used, actually."
And to his surprise the Duke blushed with pleasure. "Well, whether it's true or not it's good of you to say so." He wore a dandy's elaborately ribboned doublet and a broad necklace of gold work and rubies that must have cost the price of a small house, but his weapons - dagger and short sword - were by a smith whose name and price Rhion recognized at a glance, a man whose fame stemmed not from ornamentation.
"In any case," the Duke went on, "I know enough to know that learning, and the structure of the universe, rather than spells and cantrips, is the true study of wizards, and I also know that a man would be a fool to pass up the chance to taste a little of that knowledge. If any person threatens you again, or you have cause to believe yourself in danger - or if you learn who is responsible for the attack upon you tonight - let me know, and believe me, I will do for you all that I can."
Rhion nodded again. He had his own suspicions about who had been responsible for the attack, but it would hardly do to suggest to the man who had just saved their lives that his own daughter had hired assassins in order to prevent blackmail about a love-philter to get her errant husband to sleep with her - particularly if the father was the one who'd selected the husband in the first place. And besides, as he had told Tallisett, like physicians, the Morkensiks were sworn to secrecy by their vows.
So Rhion contented himself with their being carried home in a couple of sedan chairs by the Duke's slaves, escorted by Marc of Erralswan and a handful of guards.
By the time they got to Shuttlefly Court, it was close to dawn. Most of the prostitutes who hung around the Baths of Mhorvianne on Thimble Street had gone, and the mazes of little courts that made up the Old Town were silent and dark. Rhion followed Marc and the two guards who supported Jaldis up the rough ladder to the upper floor and made sure the old man was comfortable in his bed. He had amplified the physician's tinctures with spells of healing, though he could tell the man's remedies to strengthen the heart and cleanse the blood were sound. Jaldis already seemed better, though far too ill to speak.
He himself was shaking with fatigue and the chilled aftermath of shock as he descended once more to the stuffy darkness of the kitchen to see his escort to the door. His arm hurt damnably, and the remains of the poultice they'd put on the back of his neck where the arrow barbs had cut stung as if they'd laid a burning iron in the flesh. As the bearer slaves - eight big, strapping men with the brown complexions of southerners - were picking up the litter poles to go and the guards were exchanging a few final remarks with one of Rhion's fair neighbors who happened to be coming home from work at that hour, Marc of Erralswan paused in the patchy, dust-smelling darkness of the arcade and, leaning down to Rhion, whispered, "The Duke mentioned love-spells... Do you deal in them? There's a girl at Court, one of the Duchess' waiting maids... I realize you're probably tired now, but if I came back tomorrow evening do you mink you could... ?"
After bidding him a polite good-night Rhion laughed, with genuine amusement only slightly tinged by exhausted hysteria, all the way back up the stairs.
The Duke was as good as his word. A messenger arrived the following day, his stiff politeness speaking volumes for his personal opinion of those his master chose to patronize, inquiring after Jaldis' health and asking him to dinner at the palace the following week, so that the Duke might better apologize for the ignorance of his subjects. "And might demonstrate his protection, to anyone who is interested, while he's about it," Jaldis mused, who was well enough to sit up in bed, his shoulder bandaged and a sheet over his knees.
"Well," Rhion commented, perched tailor-fashion on the other bed with the remains of his master's breakfast tray, "he also sent this." He bounced in his hand the small leather sack which had accompanied the message. It jingled with the comfortable sweetness characteristic of the nobler metals. "So you can afford to get yourself a new robe. I wonder why we didn't think of hiring assassins to beat us up before?"
"Possibly," his master returned disapprovingly, "because in most cities, passing strangers, once they knew who and what we were, would have been likelier to participate in the fray on the side of the assassins."
The dinner was an intimate one, the company comprised of the Duke, his pale, fair-haired Duchess and one of her ladies, Ranley the physician who, like his master, was genuinely interested in the metaphysical underpinnings of the visible world, Tallisett, and Syron, the Duke's thirteen-year-old son and heir. "You must excuse the absence of my older daughter and her husband," his Grace said, seating Jaldis on the spindle-legged chair at his side and himself placing the supper crown of red anemones on his brow. "Her husband, my nephew Lord Esrex, is indisposed tonight, and she has remained with him in his rooms to bear him company."
"And on the whole," Tally murmured as she passed behind Rhion on her way to her own seat beside her brother, "that's probably just as well."
Musicians played through supper, preceding each course with a trilling fanfare; afterward the talk went late. The Duchess, who despite her gracious efforts to seem interested had begun to wear the frozen-faced expression that comes of stifling yawns before the fish course was finished, departed with her lady and her son as soon as the slaves had carried out the finger bowls on the heels of the last sorbets. "My poor darling." The Duke smiled, when the crimson door curtains had fallen softly shut after them and the pad of their slippered feet had faded on the white honeycomb of the hallway tiles. "She is an educated woman and not at all prejudiced, but her tastes run very much to poetry and political philosophy, not to the mathematics of planetary movement or variations in the forms of snails and fish. And Syron, of course, isn't interested in anything he can't either ride or make come after him with a sword. I suppose at his age it's natural; all I can do is try to teach him, if not my interest in, at least my tolerance for powers and abilities he can not himself possess."
"Oh, I don't know," Rhion said. He'd had a long discussion with the boy on the subject of the general irksomeness of dancing lessons, and Syron had expressed undisguised astonishment that a wizard's apprentice had ever been subjected to anything so mundane. "He did ask me if it were possible to lay spells on a dog to drive away fleas, so it shows he's thinking."
"Is it?" Tally asked curiously. "Possible, I mean. Because my dogs suffer something cruel in the summer."
"Of course," Rhion said, "The problem is that for the spell to last more than a few days, you have to shave the dog and write the runes on its skin, and even then they don't work for more than a couple of weeks."
"Oh, the poor things!" Tally laughed, evidently picturing her own red and gold bird-hunters naked and crisscrossed with magical signs.
"Why is that?" the Duke inquired, leaning forward as a slave entered with brazier, grinder, and pot, and the room was slowly filled with the languorous scent of coffee. "I mean, how does a spell like that work and why can't it be made to work indefinitely?"
And while the Duke himself poured out the aromatic liquid into tiny cups, and Jaldis explained the problems inherent in causing fleas to believe that a certain dog was actually made of copper, Rhion's eyes met Tally's across the table in an unspoken comment on the Duke's cook's coffee, and they both had to look aside to keep from giggling.
After that, Jaldis was asked to dine at the palace fairly frequently - as often, Rhion guessed, as the Duke was not required to entertain nobles who might have objected to the presence of wizards at his board or members of the various priesthoods who most certainly would have done so. A nobleman who was seen too often in the presence of mages frequently came under suspicion of using the wizards' powers to oppress his subjects or spy upon his neighbors, just as a businessman was usually suspected of using wizardry to ruin his rivals, or a shopkeeper, to cheat his customers. And the Duke, tolerant man that he was, was still a usurper, a man who had overthrown his liege lord, no matter how many years ago it had been and how badly that liege had misgoverned. He had to be careful what people said.
But in private, he did not conceal his interest in Jaldis' company, and what had started as an intellectual patronage blossomed into genuine friendship as the summer advanced. Hardly a week went by that a messenger did not arrive at Shuttlefly Court with a gift: food from the Duke's table, game birds, fatted beef, or the sweet-fleshed orange fruits of the south; coffee; sometimes lamb and rabbit skins beautifully cured for the making of talismans, or small gifts of silver and gold.
In gratitude for this, on the last night of April, the night of Summerfire, Jaldis did what he had not done since he'd been court mage to the ill-fated Lord Henak in Wemmering - he agreed to use his magic to enliven the Duke's Summerfire masking.
To Rhion's surprise and delight, Jaldis abruptly taught him a whole new series of spells of whose very existence he had previously been ignorant, and together the two of them spent three days manufacturing and ensorcelling a powder of nitre, crushed herbs, pulverized bone, and silver, which the servants of the Duke then dusted over every tree and shrub in the palace's garden.
"What'll it do?" Tally asked, pacing at Rhion's side down the graveled path that skirted one of the garden's canals.
Rhion laughed. Morning sunlight filtered warm on their faces through the overhanging lime trees; the small lawns that lay between copses of willow and myrtle and jacaranda glittered with quick-burning dew. Tally had offered to guide him through the maze of pools to the small grotto that marked the garden's farthest corner, and on all sides they were surrounded by the bustle of the upcoming fete. Slaves were stringing garlands around the cornices of the little gazebos and shrines, pulling the ubiquitous, spiky leaves of dandelions from the miniature lawns, plucking pondweed from among the miles of water lilies and setting up tables for buffets or platforms for musicians. Others - with a disgruntled air and suspicious care - were dusting the faintly musty-smelling powder over rosebush, laurel, and linden tree that made up the intricate knots of foliage at the crossings of the shaded paths.
"Theoretically," he said, "it'll glow. It's one of those silly, useless spells that someone came up with and handed down, something only a court wizard out to delight the heart of his patron would think up in the first place. I'll show you..."
Tally led the way down a twisting path that turned from the ponds, leading through a myrtle grove and around the side of an artificial hill crowned with gum trees. A tiny pavilion had been built out of one of the hill's sides, its domed roof half-covered with mounded earth which supported full-grown trees and dangling curtains of flowering vine. Doves fluttered, cooing, from beneath the eaves as they entered, and far in the back, where the marble walls gave way to rock, cool even in the summer heat, a fountain whispered its secrets to the dark.
On a bench of green porphyry and bronze that stood near the fountain's rim Rhion set down the satchel he'd been carrying, and took from it the things he'd prepared the night before: long slips of beaten silver inscribed with traced runes; three milky lumps of rose quartz the size of his thumb; candles; chalk; and half a dozen tubes of glass in which, capped with red wax, tiny rolls of parchment and learner could be seen.
"This," he said, "is a talismanic resonator - or it will be, when I've got it assembled." He knelt beside the bench, and Tally sat on the fountain's rim, pulling off her big straw gardening hat and letting her hair hang down in a big sloppy fawn-colored braid, like a child's.
"After the feast," Rhion went on, "your father's going to announce the masking. Everyone goes outside, to find the terrace dark. The maskers are assembled just below the terrace steps, and under the terrace itself, in that huge room where they keep the orange trees during the winter, is Jaldis, weaving a spell - and it's not a very complicated one - that will make this particular combination of bone and silver glow in the dark."
His hands worked while he spoke, quickly weaving the thin strap work of ensorcelled metal into the proper patterns around the quartz. He paused, taking off his spectacles to concentrate, his mind summoning the runes, the constellations of power his master had taught him; Tally was silent, observing with grave interest. For a time there was no sound but the gentle plashing of the fountain; even the stirring in the main gardens was left far behind.
At length Rhion went on. "The trumpeters strike up a fanfare, which I'll be able to hear even this far from the terrace. Jaldis speaks the word of power, I set the talismanic resonator into life, the resonator creates a field from the original spell, and in that field the stuff will glow all night. And everyone goes home saying how clever your father is."
Tally leaned across to pick up and examine one of the glass tubes, turning the little talisman over in her long fingers. "Why the resonator? I mean, couldn't Jaldis just put a spell on the powder?"
"He could, but it wouldn't cover anywhere near all the garden, and it probably wouldn't last all night. A talismanic resonator expands the area covered by a specific spell, and can be used to lengthen its effects as well, provided it's got talismans of power to keep it going... these things." He took the crystal tube from her hand, and with his other fingers gestured to the other talismans - not only tubes of glass and crystal, but little round discs of bone bound in gold, or slips of carved ashwood inscribed with sigils of power.
"Resonators," Rhion continued, "draw one hell of a lot of power to keep up a field, even for a piddling little spell like this one." He sketched a small circle of power in silvered chalk on the flat top of the bench, closing in the strange little tangle of silver and stone. "That's why it isn't practical politics, for instance, to keep a building illuminated all night - or even a ball of witchlight burning all night - with one."
"Oh," Tally said, disappointed. "Pooh. And I thought I'd just devised a new source of illumination..."
"It's been tried. Also, with some spells - and light's one of them - you get pockets in the field. In a house, for instance, illuminated with a ball of witchlight and a resonator, you might get places where someone would get lost, for no reason at all, on the kitchen stairway or on the way down the hall; or places where everyone would get furiously angry at nothing; or drop and break everything they touched. Or the pocket might draw every ant in the city to it... or every streetwalker. You never know." He set the talismans around the initial circle of power, and was silent for a time, weaving the spirals of power to include them in the greater spell.
"Why is that?" Tally asked, when he straightened up again.
He readjusted his spectacles. "No one really knows. My guess - and Jaldis' theory - is that it's because of the impurities in the materials. A wizard's always at the mercy of the materials he has to work with. The resonator magnifies even the smallest flaws of a crystal, or the slightest traces of copper or lead in silver. Which is the reason wizards have to work with as pure materials as possible..."
"Is that the story, then?" a thin, rather cold voice queried from the grotto's vine-curtained entrance. Looking up, Rhion saw the slim gray shape of Lord Esrex framed against the silken light.
He had met the youthful scion of the White Bragenmeres two or three times since the first dinner with the Duke, a slender young man not much taller than himself and perhaps six years younger, always exquisitely garbed in the height of fashion, with the coldest gray eyes he had ever seen.
Rhion's feelings about him had been mixed; knowing how wretched Esrex had made Tally over the previous winter, he had been inclined to dislike him, but sensed in him also the conflict of pride and his desire for his enemy's daughter. Mingled with this had been a kind of guilt at having been instrumental in breaking that pride - probably all that Esrex had left.
The sympathy hadn't survived their initial encounter. Esrex, coldly handsome in spite of a hairline already promising to betray him, had shown to Rhion and to Jaldis nothing but an impersonal and cutting contempt, and Rhion had observed that he treated the palace slaves - and such lesser members of the court whose lineages were not equal to his - in the same fashion. Rhion had been a little curious, up to that time, about Esrex' allegiance to the egalitarian cult of Agon, but guessed that it, too, was merely a tool.
Esrex stood now with his arm possessively around the waist of the plump little Lady Damson, whose unwontedly loose-fitting gown and smug, secret sparkle told their own tale. She said nothing, only eyed Rhion warily from the pillared porch. Rhion wondered whether it was because she guessed that he might have been the wizard who had woven the love-philter - if the assassins hadn't lied and said they'd accomplished their task - or because she was afraid, if she got too close to a mage, she'd miscarry. His beard might be recognizable - his voice almost certainly would be, if she were at all observant.
In any case her bulging eyes followed her young husband apprehensively as he descended the shallow rock-cut steps into the grotto, stepping daintily in his embroidered satin slippers with their ridiculously long, curled toes.
He stopped before the bench, and stood looking down at the resonator in contempt. "Pure silver," he commented.
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't touch it," Rhion said politely, standing up and regarding the young dandy with a wary eye. "Once the spells are in place, if the circles are crossed or broken the whole thing has to be done again."
"Is that so?"
Rhion could have bitten out his tongue with annoyance the next moment, because Esrex tucked the bouquet he carried into his belt, and, his eyes holding Rhion's in deliberate challenge, slowly removed his glove, wet his forefinger with his neat little pink tongue, and drew a line exactly bisecting the circle of power and two of the talismanic spirals, all with a slow relish of one who knows he may commit outrage with impunity because he is who he is.
"It would be a shame if Uncle's fete were a failure."
"I'm sure your aunt would think so," Rhion replied steadily, holding back the desire to slap that lipless little mouth.
Tally, who had no worries about ending up fruged in an alley, pushed her brother-in-law aside angrily. "Esrex, what a pill you are," she said scornfully, and he turned and regarded her like an adult contemplating the fury of a child - not an easy matter considering she topped him by an inch.
"My dear cousin," he said, holding his smudged finger to the soft harlequin sunlight that came through the vines. "Are you still so naive that you haven't guessed the real reason wizards insist on pure materials? And always, you notice, silver and gold? How much silver did your father hand that blind old mendicant - if he is really blind - to sprinkle into his trees? He says that was what it was for, at least."
Tally opened her mouth in angry denial, but Rhion only folded his arms and said, "Oh, probably about as much as he grants you for your monthly allowance."
Esrex' face blotched up an ugly red. "He does not grant me anything that isn't mine by right, witch..."
Rhion widened his blue eyes at him, and put a hand to his heart. "Oh, I understand that. It's a tremendous shame."
The young man's hand lashed furiously out, the white kid of the glove he held slashing across Rhion's cheek with a slap like wet cloth. Rhion flinched, then bowed even more deeply. "Ah. I see. That must make it less of a shame."
The red stains on those shallow cheekbones faded, leaving him almost yellow with impotent wrath. "You are a godless little cheat," he whispered, "and your master a whore." And turning, he stalked back toward the steps where his diminutive lady stood. The long toes of his embroidered satin slippers wobbled back and forth as he walked; it was nothing for Rhion to reach out with his mind and catch one of them underneath the other. Esrex went down with an undignified squawk, striking both bony shins on the edge of the worn stone step and tearing his white silk stockings like a clumsy schoolchild. He scrambled up as swiftly as he could, shins bleeding and eyes flaming, to meet Rhion's innocent, bespectacled gaze.
For a moment they stood there in silent impasse, Esrex almost trembling with anger, Rhion with his head inclined in solemn respect. Then furiously the younger man turned away, lashing his way through the curtain of vines and striding off across the lawn in the sunlight beyond.
"That was foolish of me," Rhion said quietly. He took a rag from his pocket, and began to wipe up the violated chalk-lines. "Now I'll be stuck here for the rest of the day guarding the thing."
"Tally," Damson said in her high, rather squeaky voice, "you'd better come away."
"He won't be here tonight," Tally said, disregarding her. "The cult of Agon has their own rite tonight. That's where he'll be."
"Tally..." Damson's eyes flicked nervously from her sister to the sturdy little form in the patched brown robe. "Come with me. Please. Esrex didn't mean any harm - not really. You know how prejudiced he is, and he is under a good deal of strain."
"Are you saying his 'prejudice' is an excuse for..."
"Tally, please!"
Tally hesitated for a long moment, her fine-boned face held deliberately expressionless, and Rhion guessed that things were not as they had been between the sisters. Then with a quick graceful stride she gathered her skirts and sprang up the steps. And as the two sisters crossed the lawn outside together, Rhion heard Damson's high, clipped tones floating back on the balmy stillness: "It doesn't do for you to be unattended with such a man. You know what they say about wizards seducing young girls with love-spells..."
Rhion sighed and shook his head. "A love-spell," he muttered to himself, digging his chalk out of his pocket again, "under the circumstances, is about the last thing I need."
The fete itself was a dazzling success. In addition to the masking and allegorical dances, there was a carousel dance of gaily caparisoned horses in which, Rhion later heard, Marc of Erralswan distinguished himself sufficiently to win the hearts and eventually the corset ribbons of several of the young ladies of the court. At the first chime of the trumpets Rhion lighted the candles of the fire circle which activated the resonator and, in the night's windless stillness, heard, like the drift of sea-roar, the gasp of admiration and delight from the assembled guests. Coming out of the grotto a few moments later, he saw the whole of the enormous garden with every tree and leaf and grass blade outlined in a fine powder of bluish light, as if the Milky Way, stretched like a banner overhead, had been gently shaken to release a carpet of diamond dust upon the world beneath. Even the lily pads and the waxy yellow blooms upon the water were touched with light, and the glowing shapes of the trees were repeated, like the magic echo of a song, in the still sable mirrors of pool, fountain, and canal.
A beautiful spell, he thought, leaning against the mottled bark of a sycamore trunk to watch the weaving of colored lights on the far-off terrace that signaled the masque. Tally would have been standing in one of the places of honor. She would have seen that first moment when the brightness began to spread, like dye in water, to the far ends of the velvet dark.
But later, when strollers passed the lightless, leafy bulk of the grotto hill, he overheard a woman mutter what a shocking thing it was that the Duke had caused magic to be used on a night originally consecrated to the Sun God, and a man grumble, "Well, you know what they say about wizards. I only hope his Grace weighted out the silver he gave them to work the trick and made sure they used it all as they said."
Esrex' insinuations came back to his mind a few days later as he and Jaldis were on their way up from the Old Town toward the palace on its rise, where the Duke had asked them to supper. They had spent the afternoon in the making of talismans from a crystal the Duke had sent them and the gold melted down from several of his coins, reveling in the ease with which power flowed into the unflawed materials.
"Why gold?" he asked now, as they passed through Thimble Lane where all the tailors and embroiderers were putting up their shutters in the gathering gloom and the lights of lamps made great ochre squares of warmth in the liquid blue dark. "I mean, why do certain materials - gold, silver, and gemstones - hold magic that way? What is it about them that makes them better than copper or tin?"
The old man shook his head. "To learn that," he said quietly, "is every wizard's dream. To understand, not only how magic works, but why. What it is..."
He sighed heavily, limping along on his crutches a half-pace ahead of Rhion, turning to lead the way up a narrow street and along an alley short cut that led to the great market square from which the main avenue to the palace rose. He wore his crystalline spectacles, but Rhion knew he wasn't using them to see with now and probably wouldn't do so all evening - they were worn as he sometimes wore a linen bandage, to conceal in politeness the ruin of his eyes from the other guests at supper. For the first several weeks in Bragenmere he had had Rhion take him up and down every street and every alleyway in the Old Town and the New, memorizing turnings, memorizing smells, learning to turn left just after the plashing of the fountain of Kithrak, if he wanted to reach the Joyful Buns Bakery, or that the slant of the ground immediately beyond the warm, steamy scents of the Pomegranate Bathhouse would lead him down twenty-five of his own limping steps to the herbalist from whom he bought ammonia and rue.
"We read the lists made by other wizards of what the metaphysical properties are of every herb, every metal, every jewel and fabric and wood and beast," he went on. "We know that, if one is making a staff for the working of magic, ash is the best wood to use and elm will disperse the power in all directions - cloud and sully it as well. We know that silver will hold impressions of spells, demons, and ghosts. We know that lead is impervious to nearly all magic, that tortoise-shell is necessary in any spell involving learning or memory but that no talisman inscribed upon it will work. We know that sigils inked with the feathers of a swan or a goose will be more powerful, and of a crow, less so, unless the spells be of mischief and chaos - we know that brushes or pens made of the feathers of a pheasant or a wren, or of grasses or reeds, are likely to produce spells less efficacious, more apt to have untoward results. We know that talismans will hold their power longer if they are wrapped in silk and stored in wood, and at that, certain kinds of wood. But why this all should be..." He shook his head.
"Could it have something to do with the energy tracks or the energy fields of the body?" Rhion asked. They had left the crowded tenements of the Old Town, and the walls on either side of the narrow streets were now those which enclosed the houses of the rich, pale pink or yellow sandstone ornamented with bright-colored tile or marble friezes and bas-reliefs white as meringues. Beyond the spikes which topped them and the blue or yellow tiles of the roofs, the heads of trees, willow and jacaranda and eucalyptus, reared like feathered clouds against the fading mauve of the sky. "I mean that there's something in the energy of a goose or a swan, that's more in tune with certain types of spells than a crow, for instance..."
"There is that theory," his master replied. "But it only leads back to the question of why. Energy travels in straight paths and collects in circles; certain types of energy are drawn to certain runes... but why, Rhion, is energy in the first place? Why is it humans who possess magic, and not the tortoises or elephants or crocodiles themselves? Or do they, and we are simply ignorant of what manner of magic it is?"
Rhion was silent. Trained as he had been in bookkeeping, he had a mathematician's delight in numbers and sometimes had a vague sense of seeing some kind of mathematical patterns in magic... only to have it dissolve when he looked more closely, like faces glimpsed in shadows on water. And the questions still remained.
"It is our business to ask why," Jaldis went on quietly, "and our need. Not only to understand how to make magic work, but to understand why it works. We see its outer rules - the laws of its balance, that power must be paid for somewhere - Limitations, and the summoning of things by their true names. But we do not see its heart."
"Yet it must have one. Everywhere we see the signs that point to it - or point to something..."
Far off, to their left and behind them, the nightly crescendo of market carts was in full swing around the big squares, where provisions, forbidden in the daytime on account of noise and traffic in the narrow streets, were being brought in. Now and then a slave would hurry by them as they made their way along the gently sloping alley, for the night was still early. From the top of a wall, a cat's green eyes gleamed.
"That is what I sought in the Dark Well," the old man continued softly, the talismans of his voice-box rattling with the rhythm of his hobbling stride. "A glimpse of the structure of the Void and the structure of universes that drift within it, hoping that seeing, I might understand."
"And did you?"
The old man smiled a little and shook his head.
"And the universe without magic?"
"Yes..." The murmur of the box was no more than a drawn-out sigh. "And its very existence, perhaps, will tell me more. Perhaps it is not an uncommon thing for entire worlds to lose their magic, for the magic to draw away, to depart as light departs with the falling of the night, or water with the ebb of the tide. Since we do not know what magic is, any more than we know what light is, we cannot tell."
"But if you had seen," Rhion said worriedly, "if you had learned... Would you then have been able to... to summon and dismiss magic? All magic?"
Jaldis' reply was so quiet that Rhion did not know whether he had spoken with the box at all, or whether he only heard the words in his mind. "I do not know."
Emerging from the alley into a wider street, they found themselves face to face with a massive building, a gateway whose black basalt doorposts were unornamented and whose shut iron-sheathed doors were unrelieved by the smallest of decorative patterns, even the rivets pounded flush and soldered. The gray granite pylons which flanked it were windowless, bare of the marble, tile, or ornamental stone courses that made gay the houses of the neighborhood - bare even of stucco, so that the fine-hewn blocks that formed it faced the street with a hard, unblinking stare, like a skull disdaining the frivolous lingerie of flesh.
Even in the warmth of the summer evening, the place seemed to radiate cold - cold, and shadow, and the mingled smells of incense and blood.
Their way took them across the street and to the lane that led up the hill on the other side. But as Rhion and Jaldis moved onto the cobbled pavement, a man-sized slit opened in the featureless doors, and a figure draped and veiled in black stepped out and raised a black-gloved hand.
"Cross back over, witches," it said, and its voice, thin and cold and bodiless, might have been man's or woman's, a blurred harsh tone like scraped steel. "This is Agon's temple. The footfalls of devils are a pollution on the doorstep of the Veiled God."
"I'm sure they must be," Rhion replied, halting in the middle of the way. Against the black of the doors, the priest was rendered nearly invisible by the inky wool robes and the sable veils that fell from the top of a tall conical headdress to cover face, shoulders, and breast. Unlike the houses of this area, the temple had no lamps outside its door, and the whole street was very dark. Had he not been mageborn, Rhion would have been nearly unable to see anything. "And it must take up all your time, making judgment calls about who's fit to walk how close to the doors - do you have a scale? Five feet for lepers, six and a half for beggars, a yard for slaves... ?"
"Do not jest with the servant of the Eclipsed Sun, witch!" warned the voice. "You should be ashamed to parade the streets like whores, and the Duke should take shame for permitting it. As for lepers, beggars, and slaves, Agon has a welcome for them, as he has for all who serve him, who are not the children and spawn of illusion. Now cross back over and go on your way!"
Rhion drew in his breath to speak again but the door behind the priest opened again, and two other forms stepped out - definitely men, this time, both tall and heavily muscled in spite of the massive potbelly sported by one of them. They wore the short tunics and heavy boots of common laborers and, over their heads, close-fitting black masks that covered them down to the chins. The masks had eye slits and mouth slits, as well, for the potbellied man used his to spit on Rhion's face.
Jaldis' hand tightened hard over Rhion's arm. Rhion bowed with exaggerated respect to the priest and his two devotees. "Nice argument," he said pleasantly. "Very convincing. It tells me so much about Agon it makes me want to convert." And he and Jaldis crossed back over the street and went on their way. The priest and the two massive defenders of Agon's doorstep remained where they stood to watch them out of sight.
For a long time, Jaldis did not speak. Only when they started up the last long cobbled rise to the palace gates, ablaze with torches and gay with the crimson tunics of the guards and the yellow and purple irises that decorated their helmets, did Jaldis say, "That is why we must find that world again, Rhion. That is why someone must go there."
Rhion shivered. Part of his mind reflected that the practical upshot of all this was that he'd be moving shelves out of the cellar in the morning to make room for the drawing of the Dark Well, but part of him knew that Jaldis was right. The priests of Agon saw in wizardry what the priests of all the cults of the gods saw: a body of men and women who did not need to petition the deities for assistance, a challenge to their authority, and a living question about the way they said the world worked.
But unlike most of the other cults, which were content to thunder and jeer, the priests of Agon, if they were to hear that it was possible to do something about this situation, would bend every effort to try.
Knowing this, however, did not lift from him the nagging tug of unreasoning dread which filled him as Jaldis spoke.
"At the summer solstice," the old man said softly, "I will weave another Dark Well. I have contacted Shavus the Archmage. He will be here, he says, to help me listen, to help me cast my power through the Void, seeking out the voices that cried. And then..." His voice sank still further, until it was little more than the crying of the crickets or the humming of the insects in the redolent night. "Then we will see."