Barbara Hambly - Sun-Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss

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The Rainbow Abyss
v2.0
November 5, 2006
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The Rainbow Abyss
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The Rainbow Abyss
DEMONS OF THE NIGHT
Rhion came awake from a deep sleep, sensing the grims outside. Then he heard a
woman scream. He was on his feet and outside the inn into the freezing night almost
before he could think. A second scream split the air.
Calling all the spells he knew against the grims, he ran. Ahead, amid the tangled bog-
hummocks of the edge of the marsh, he could see a flickering, greenish light. There were
hundreds of the demons, thick as flies above a summer midden—semitransparent
skeletal forms with huge eyes and dangling feet. They were driving a woman on a horse
toward the frozen sloughs, far out on the ice.
As she turned, the noxious ur-light of the grims revealed the girl’s face. It was Tally,
daughter of the Duke of Mere!
Then the ice cracked beneath the horse, and it plunged, forehooves first, into the
heaving brown water beneath!
The Rainbow Abyss
Book II of Sun-Cross
Barbara Hambly
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The Rainbow Abyss
contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
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The Rainbow Abyss
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The Rainbow Abyss
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright ® 1991 by Barbara Hambly
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America
by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-91971
ISBN 0-345-37101-1
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: September 1991
Cover Art by Romas
Map by Shelly Shapiro
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The Rainbow Abyss
For Mary Ann
ONE
Top
Next
“IT MAY NOT HAPPEN HERE.”
“That’s what they said about the Plague.”
Shavus Ciarnin, Archmage of the Order of the Morkensik Wizards, flashed an irritated
look at his old friend’s pupil—Rhion the Brown merely pushed his spectacles a little
more firmly into place on the bridge of his nose with one pudgy forefinger and returned
the glare calmly. Old Jaldis the Blind brushed a tendril of milk-white hair from the
tattered blanket that wrapped his thin shoulders and moved a little closer to the brown
wall of chimney bricks which was the tiny attic’s only source of heat. “So they did,” he
observed mildly. “I do not see how it can happen here… or how it could have happened
at all. But this lack of understanding on my part does not alter the fact that it has
happened there…”
“Don’t be a fool,” Ciarnin snapped irritably. His scarred, sun-darkened face seemed to
darken still further, cold blue eyes appearing very light in their deep sockets. “Magic
can’t just cease to exist! Magic is! It’s an element, like the light of the sun, like the air we
breathe! Men could no more stop it from existing than they could keep the sun from
rising by shaking their fists at it.”
“To our knowledge,” the blind mage replied in his curiously sweet, toneless voice.
Huddled in his threadbare cloak at his master’s feet—the room only boasted two chairs—
Rhion could barely recall what Jaldis’ true voice had been like. He’d only heard it upon
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The Rainbow Abyss
one occasion, when he was sixteen, a few months before the old king’s troops had
arrested Lord Henak, Jaldis’ then-patron, and torn out Jaldis’ tongue and eyes to keep
him from witching them while they’d brought the traitor earl and his court mage to trial
in the High City of Nerriok. The only reason they hadn’t cut off the wizard’s hands as
well was because they’d feared he’d die of gangrene before judgment could be passed.
For the eleven years since his acquittal, Jaldis had spoken by means of a curved
rosewood box which hung strapped to his chest, a sounding-chamber filled with
intricate mechanisms of silver, reed, and gut, even as he saw—after a fashion and with
head-splitting concentration—by means of a pair of massive spectacles wrought of opal,
crystal, and gold. Charging the left lens with spells of seeing had been Rhion’s first
attempt at major magic, and he still remembered the shuddering surge of joy he’d felt
when he’d seen the lattices of the crystal’s inner structure shift and change, seen life stir
deep in the opals’ pale, fiery wells. The sense of release had been almost like the physical
breaking-open of some locked core of bone deep in his chest, the realization that all
those dreams, all those longings, all the strange madnesses which had whispered in his
mind since childhood had been real…
He remembered, too, the week of vomiting and delirium which had followed, for of
course he’d been far too young to attempt anything like the power needed for such
spells. He’d tried desperately to keep his illness hidden—it had been his parents’ first
clue to their only son’s abilities, and he’d come back to consciousness to the news that
they had published, in all the temples of the Forty Realms, the notices of his death.
Though he’d never told Jaldis, Rhion’s own extreme shortsightedness dated from the
casting of those spells.
“And yet you must admit, Shavus,” that thin, buzzing drone went on, “that there are
places in this world where there is no air—in the depths of oceans and rivers—and no
light, in caves and crevices… indeed, for half the turning of the day there is no light
anywhere. And there are places, as we all know, where magic does not exist.”
“Bah,” the Archmage grunted, and the back of his cracked and much-mended chair
creaked with the uneasy movement of his shoulders. The attic room above the Black Pig
Inn, which had served Jaldis and Rhion as lodgings for the last two and a half years, was
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The Rainbow Abyss
unheated, save for the warmth which radiated from the bricks of the kitchen chimney.
On snowy midwinter evenings like this one it saved them from freezing to death, but
when the turgid warmth of the low-plains summers held the city of Felsplex in its grip,
the room was unspeakable. There was no fireplace in the room itself, nor any kind of
candle or brazier—the landlord having an almost hysterical fear of fire—but, despite the
fact that the windows were closed against the bitter cold by heavy wooden shutters, the
lack of light posed little problem for wizards. Though the three men—young, middle-
aged, and old—sat in complete darkness, Rhion could see the Archmage’s square, ugly
face and coarse shock of iron-gray hair as easily as if the room were flooded with
daylight. And he saw how the pale eyes shifted at the mention of such things. “Any fool
knows about those.”
“But this is more than the Chambers of Silence,” Jaldis went on, “that lords build into
the dungeons of their palaces to hold a wizard’s power in check—more than the pheelas
root that numbs our skills, more than the spells of silence, the fields of silence, that a
powerful mage can weave to cripple his mageborn foes.” Behind sunken and shriveled
eyelids ruined muscles moved, as if his destroyed gaze could still encompass the gray-
haired old ex-soldier opposite him and the short, sturdy young man at his feet. From the
top of a stack of books beside his chair, Jaldis’ opal spectacles seemed to review the
room with a bulging, asymmetrical gaze, and the old man’s hand, deft and shapely
before arthritis had deformed it, stroked subconsciously at the talismans of power
which festooned the rosewood soundbox like queer and glittering seaweed upon a rock.
“I am speaking of a world, a universe, where magic does not exist at all, and has not
existed for many years.”
“And I’m saying such a thing’s preposterous,” Shavus retorted. “What you think you
heard… what you might have seen…” He shook his head again, angry and dismissive,
but Rhion saw the heavy, corded hand fidget uncomfortably with the snagged brown
wool of his robe.
“I know what it is that I felt.” Jaldis’ thin face hardened with a flash of angry pride,
though the monotonous voice of the soundbox did not alter. “I have opened a Dark Well
and through it have seen into the Void which lies between all the infinite number of
universes of which the Cosmos is made! And in that Void…” The sweet, shrill tones
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The Rainbow Abyss
sank. “In that Void I heard a voice crying out of a world where magic had once existed,
but now exists no more.”
“Jaldis, old friend…” Shavus leaned forward placatingly, causing the ruinous chair to
emit an alarming creak. “I’m not saying you didn’t see it, didn’t hear it. But I am asking
how, if magic has ceased to exist in some other universe, someone there could make his
voice heard in the Void? I’ve studied the Void as well, you know. I’ve opened Dark Wells
into it, to try to glimpse something of how the Cosmos is formed…”
“I’m glad someone has,” Rhion remarked, folding his arms around his knees and
huddling a little more deeply into his faded black cloak. “The other night when Jaldis
asked me to get a message to you about this was the first I’d even heard of the things.”
“Which is as it should be,” the Archmage snapped irritably. “It is not a branch of
knowledge for the young—or the light-minded.”
He turned back to face the blind man, bundled like a drying skeleton in cloak and quilts
which all but hid the tattered brown robes of the foremost Order of Wizards in the
world. His tough, seamed face softened. “Old friend, in all my studies of the Void, in all
my communications across it and through it, I’ve never encountered a world where
magic in some form didn’t exist. I’m not denying that you heard something. But one
piece of hearsay is damn little grounds to risk the hideous danger of crossing the Void
itself, as you’re asking me to do…”
“Not asking, Shavus,” the old man said softly. “Begging. Someone must go there.
Someone must help them. Don’t you see that…”
Heavy footsteps on the narrow wooden spiral of the stairs made the whole building
shudder. The Black Pig rose four floors above the common rooms and kitchens, a
rickety inverted ziggurat of ever-protruding balconies and upper floors seemingly
supported by a mystifying web of clotheslines and makeshift bridges over the streets
and by the surrounding buildings against which it leaned. Rhion frequently wondered
what would happen if any of the overcrowded tenements, taverns, countinghouses or
gimcrack temples of unpronounceable foreign gods that made up the river quays
quarter of Felsplex were to disappear. Beyond a doubt the entire district would come
crashing down like a house of cards.
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