Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (12 page)

After a long time he came back to himself, lying facedown on the altar, all his muscles aching, his hair and the back of his khaki uniform shirt damp with sweat. He groped around for his glasses and put them on again, to see Orion’s belt hanging low in the east. He muttered,
“Verflucht!”
and stumbled to his feet, knees trembling. It was an hour’s walk back to the Schloss, and after last night’s efforts at scrying he was achingly short of sleep.

On his way down the hill he paused and looked back at the Dancing Stones. They seemed to have sunk back in on themselves, returned to being no more than three massive, almost shapeless slabs of rock, half hidden by the long grass of the neglected hill.

If any living magic remained in them it was too dim, too deeply buried, for his own attenuated powers to raise. But at solstice-tide it would draw on the powers of the leys, and that would help. And it was bright enough to serve as a beacon, provided he could get word to Shavus about what to look for in the dark of the Void.

He turned and headed back to his prison again.

He reached it an hour before the early summer dawn. Watching from the edge of the woods, he saw no sign of a guard. “At least Poincelles got his money’s worth out of
something
tonight,” he muttered, as he set up his props and wriggled under the fence. On the walk back, he’d felt sick from the strain of concentration; now that had passed, and he was ravenously hungry. As he slipped through the laundry room door his mind was chiefly occupied with ways to sneak a few hours of unnoticed sleep during the day.

Then he saw that the door into the old kitchen was open. He’d closed it behind him—he knew he had.
A guard?
he wondered, and then his eye lighted on two pieces of wood, suspiciously similar to the short logs still tucked beneath his arm, lying against the wall where the shadows were thickest. If he hadn’t been night-sighted he wouldn’t have seen them at all.

Poincelles would have bolted the outside door when he came in. So would a guard who found it open.

God damn it.

So someone else was poking about the Schloss at night, undoubtedly the same someone who had searched Baldur’s room, perhaps who had searched his own.

He set down one of his props silently and hefted the longer one clubwise in his left hand. He wondered if he should summon a guard to take care of the intruder, if there was an intruder, but realized in the next instant that it would only lead to questions about what
he
was doing wandering about at two in the morning with dew-soaked trouser legs and pine needles sticking to his boots.

Pushing his glasses firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, he tiptoed to the half-open door.

Like the disused laundry room, the old kitchen was dark and almost empty, containing little but old counters and a big stone sink. The door opened to his left. Taking a deep breath, he sprang forward and slammed it back fast and hard.

Unfortunately the unknown intruder was hiding under a counter to the right of the door, and an arm was around his neck and jerking him backward before he could react to the swish of trouser cloth and the stink of ingrained tobacco smoke behind him.

He twisted against the grip, fighting for balance. Tearing pain sliced his upper arm; he flailed with the club, wrenching and thrashing, and half felt, half heard a knife go clattering at the same moment an elbow smashed him full force across the face, sending his glasses spinning off sideways as he crashed back against the sharp edge of the sink. Before he could get his breath a fist caught him in the solar plexus with an impact like a club.

For an instant as he crumpled over, he remembered the knife and thought,
This isn’t fair
… Then swift footfalls retreated and left him lying at the foot of the sink wondering if his lungs would ever work again. He had just come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t when other footfalls, distant but purposeful in the opposite direction, warned him that the SS was on its way.

“Just what I need,” he gasped, lurching painfully to his feet. “Protection.” For a moment he thought he was going to vomit; the small of his back where he’d slammed into the sink hurt more than he’d  thought possible, and he could feel the side of his face beginning to puff up. His right arm hurt, but he could move it, and he felt blood soaking into his shirt sleeve. It took him a nerve-wracking minute to find what was left of his glasses, twisted metal frames and shards of glass scattered broadcast over the flagstone floor. With the heavy footsteps coming nearer he swept the bits into a black corner beneath the sink; and there he found the knife, a folding pocket blade honed to a deadly edge and still bloody. He shoved it and his bent glasses frame in his pocket and, holding his bleeding arm, ducked into the nearest closet and pulled the door to.

Through the cracks he could see the beam of an electric flashlight pass to and fro, then fade as the Storm Trooper crossed the room. Cramped in the mildew-smelling darkness, Rhion considered remaining where he was until the man had checked the laundry room and departed for good, but realized that he’d find the outer door open and, if he was worth his pay—which half the SS weren’t, but Rhion didn’t feel like betting his liberty on it—would come back and make a thorough search.

With swift silence and an earnest prayer to whatever gods were in charge of magic in this world that he wouldn’t encounter an unscheduled wall or chair in his myopic flight, Rhion slipped from the cupboard and ducked through the door into the hall. He made it back to his attic room without further mishap, trembling with nerves, shock, hunger, and exhaustion, just as the wide window was turning dove-gray with the first light of summer dawn.

“FOOLS.” THE SLANT OF THE MORNING SUNLIGHT
, bright and hard as crystal in these high, arid foothills, splashed into the shadows of the Archmage Shavus’ cloak hood and made his blue eyes glint like aquamarine. At one time the great southeastern gate of the city of Bragenmere had overlooked a wide stretch of open ground, between the walls and the broken slopes leading down to the plains and the marshes of the sluggish Kairn; but in the years of peace since Dinar of Prinagos’ usurpation of the Dukedom, a cattle market had grown up there, and then a produce market for those who did not want to cart their wares through the narrow streets to the market courts within the city, and lately a number of fair new houses had been built by merchants eager for more spacious quarters than were available within the walls. Even at this hour, barely after sunrise, the gate square was bustling with drovers, butchers, and greengrocers, the warm summery air choking with yellow dust and thick with vendors’ cries. “Imbeciles, both of them!”

Tallisett of Mere, every inch the Duke’s daughter despite the plain green gown she’d pulled on that morning when driven from her bed by strange, craving dreams, folded her arms and looked across at the cloaked and hooded old man who had been waiting for her on the steps of the fountain by the gate. “You didn’t seriously think Rhion would let poor old Jaldis walk into the Dark Well by himself, did you?”

“I seriously thought Jaldis would have had the sense not to go without my help.”

“Nonsense,” the Gray Lady said from her seat on the worn sandstone steps at the old man’s side. She looked up at him and Tally, shaking back the long braids of her malt-brown hair. “You spoke to Jaldis—you know how he was about his dream of helping the wizards of the world without magic…”

“And
you’re
the one who spoke to our little partridge Rhion just before they left,” the Archmage countered. “You could have forbidden him to go, and without him Jaldis wouldn’t have been able to.”

“I think you’re wrong, my friend,” said the quiet voice of the third hooded form on the steps, a tall, thin man leaning on a long black bow of horn and steel—Gyzan the Archer, greatest of the Blood-Mages. “Jaldis would have gone with or without his pupil to help, and how would Rhion have stopped him? He wasn’t that powerful a mage, you know…”

“He still should have done something,” Shavus snapped irritably, and glanced back at Tally. “And
you
might have done something, missy, to keep them both out of trouble, instead of letting them lose themselves, perhaps for good, at a time when the Order of the Morkensik Wizards needs all its strength.”

“And we others don’t?” the Lady inquired tartly. “As I’ve heard it, the rumors of a conspiracy among wizards speaks now of one Order, now of another. Vyla of Wellhaven says the Earl has banished all the Hand-Prickers from the In Islands, but in Killay it was Filborglas they arrested…”

“Oh, Filborglas.” With a scornful wave, Shavus dismissed the Archmage of the Black Ebiatics. “His creditors were behind
that
arrest, most like.”

“I would not be certain of that,” Gyzan said. “There has been unrest everywhere, like a pervasive malaise. In every city of the Forty Realms one sees posters and broadsides denouncing wizards and workers of magic, depicting us as seducers, liars, and thieves. Even those people who have spoken with us, who know the untruth, are uneasy.”

Tally was silent, thinking about her own coming out to the market this morning. Last night at dinner in her father’s hall there had been strawberries for the last course, cool and heartbreakingly sweet, and all night, it seemed to her, she had dreamed of them, dreamed of wanting more. Shortly before dawn the unreasonable conviction had grown upon her that she could find more strawberries like those in the market outside the gates—she no longer even recalled the train of reasoning that had led her to this conclusion—but the craving had grown in the predawn darkness to obsession. Perhaps had she slept in the same room with her husband, Marc of Erralswan, that lazy young nobleman would have talked her out of it, but they had never shared a bed, having married to scotch the scandal of her affair with Rhion. In any case, Marc was God knew where with God knew what woman…

At last, unable to stand the desperation any longer, Tally had risen, dressed in her plainest gown, and ridden down to the market by the gates, only to be met by Shavus, Gyzan, and the Gray Lady of Sligo and to come to the realization that the strawberries and the dream-inspired yearning had been part of a spell to bring her outside the gates to meet them.

And despite all the years she had known Rhion, despite her friendship for his master Jaldis and her understanding of their wizardry, her first emotion had been one of extreme resentment, of violation. They had tinkered with her freedom, tampered with the secret chambers of her dreams.

And she understood suddenly how easy it would be to fan this kind of distrust to consuming flame.

“That was why we called you here, Tally,” the Gray Lady said gently, almost as if the Lady had read her mind—or at least, Tally thought wryly, her expression. “To ask you if it is safe to be seen entering Bragenmere—to ask how things stand with your father the Duke—and so that it would not be seen that you had had a message from us, if it so befell that it is not.”

“Of course it’s still safe,” Tally said, a little uneasily. “Father has been under pressure from a number of people—merchants, the priesthood of Darova, and especially the priests of Agon—to ban wizards from the Realm, but he’s never gone back from his stand that they do no more harm than apothecaries or knife-smiths or rope spinners or anyone else whose wares can cause harm… or, he’ll add, for that matter, priests and lawyers. The rest of it he says is all silly rumors.”

“Silly rumors,” Gyzan murmured, his scarred hands shifting on the smooth shaft of the bow. His hairless, ugly face broke into a grin. “I like that.”

“Like the silly rumor at the turn of the spring that a Blood-Mage’s spells were responsible for the latest seizures suffered by the High Queen’s son?” Shavus demanded, his pale eyes glinting under the coarse shelf of his brows. “That was when the Queen locked Gyzan up, though no complaint was ever made and no trial would have been held… nobody even knew where that rumor had started, any more than they know who’d been putting up those broadsides and posters.”

“Was that what happened?” Tally remembered vividly the cold of that bitter spring night, standing in the black shadows of the gateway watching the procession of masks bob away into rain and mist, while she huddled in her ash-colored cloak, waiting for a man who never came. She still remembered the leaden awfulness of hearing the tower clock strike midnight and knowing that Rhion was gone.

Rhion was gone.

“But why would you have done such a thing?” she asked, turning to Gyzan. “That’s what those rumors never say. Why! You aren’t even in the employ of one of the Lords…”

“People believe anything of wizards,” Shavus returned dourly. “The Earl of March believes I can fly—that I just travel horseback, when I can afford it, to confuse people. Silly bastard. They call the Lady Nessa ‘Serpentlady’ because her patron the Earl of Dun’s got it through his thick skull that she has a snake with ruby eyes and couples with it to get her power. Your father’s been a good friend to us, missy, but these days with rumor spreading like bindweed, it pays to take precautions, that’s all.”

From the gates nearby there was a sharp clattering of hooves; Tally turned, startled, to see a small group of riders emerge, bound for a day’s hunting. She glimpsed her father, tall and broad-shouldered in his red leather doublet and plumed cap, and his fair, fragile, pretty second wife; saw her husband, Marc, like a bright bird of paradise in green, flirting already with one of her stepmother’s ladies; and near beside them, her sister Damson, corseted brutally into yards of plum-colored brocade and plastered with jewels. With her rode her husband, Esrex, pale, cold, and slender, looking as if he detested the whole business. Of their son, Dinias, heir to the Dukedom from which her father had ousted Esrex’ grandfather, there was no sign. Probably he was having another bout of chest pain and wheezing, Tally thought, trying to summon up sympathy for the boy in spite of his thoroughly unpleasant personality. She noted that her own son—Rhion’s son—six years old and rosy and fierce as a lion cub, had somehow finagled his way onto the saddlebow of one of the huntsmen, and shook her head.