Read Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss for Free Online

dressed, patiently, with twisted fingers, lacing his boots. He raised his head inquiringly as Rhion fumbled the latch open with his mind from the other side.
    “Lord Pruul’s men,” Rhion gasped, crossing immediately to the table and beginning to shove things into his pockets—packets of herbs, precious bits of bronze and gold and rare woods for the making of talismans, scrying-crystals, and bread. “That woman I sold a philter to earlier tonight was the wife of his business-partner. She used it to seduce his son, though from what I know of Pruul Junior I wonder that she needed to bother.”
    Jaldis slipped into the leather harness that bound the voice-box to his breast, found his spectacles without groping for them, and hooked them onto his face. The talismans on the voice-box clinked with fragile music as he erected his crutches and climbed to his feet. “My books…”
    Rhion turned to view the row of volumes along the back of the table, the stacks on the floor beside the chimney wall, the little bin of scrolls beside his master’s customary chair, and cursed. It was appalling how much impedimenta they’d picked up in two and a half years here. They’d come to Felsplex with twenty-one books of various shapes and sizes—grimoires, demonaries, herbals laboriously copied from volumes in Shavus’ little library in that stone house in the forest—and in the years they’d been here they had, at great pain and expense, acquired a dozen more. Precious volumes, some of them irreplaceable. While court mage for the traitor Lord Henak, Jaldis had collected a library of nearly a hundred volumes of magic and wisdom over the years, added to what had been passed on to him by his own master. The High King’s men had burned them all. Rhion had heard Jaldis say that he regretted that loss more than he did the loss of his eyes.
    He cursed again, feeling already exhausted and defeated, and cast a quick glance at the window that he already knew would be their means of egress. The shouts of the mob were audible through the walls, furious and frustrated as they wandered helplessly in the maze of twisting streets. If he’d had time to cast a more elaborate spell…
    Swiftly he tore the blanket from the bed. “It’s going to be close,” he warned, and crossed to the window at a ran. Once the shutter was thrown back, the cold was brutal, making his eyes water and his numbed fingers ache, even with both gloves and writing-mitts on his hands. The wind had died down; the sky was iron-black above the slanting jumble of tiled roofs. Most were too steep to hold snow, but moisture had frozen on them and they’d be slick and treacherous. Rhion thought about negotiating them with forty or fifty pounds of unwieldy paper on his back, not to mention trying to guide a blind man on crutches, and shuddered.
    “We can’t take all of them.” The words cut like a wire noose—Jaldis loved those books like children, and there were several that Rhion had not yet studied. But he knew as surely as he knew his name that if he tried it, they would both fall to their deaths. “I’m sorry. We just…”
    A spasm of sorrow contorted the old man’s face. “Then you choose.” The arthritic hands passed, trembling, along the volumes on the table, touching them as he would have touched the faces of people he loved. “For they will be yours now longer than they will be mine.”
    “Don’t say that!” Rhion spread the blanket on the bed and dove back toward the table, steeling himself against the agony of decision and thinking desperately,
    
    
     That
    
    
    
     spell won
    
     ’
    
     t hold them long
    
     … “We’re going to get out of here just fine… Can you call fog?”
    “In a moment.”
    
     Jaldis remained beside the table, head bowed, hands touching this book or that as Rhion worked hurriedly around him…
    
     Dammit, that one’s got the Summoning of Elementals in it! I hadn’t learned that yet
    
     …
    Shavus will have it
    
     ,