Free Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss by Barbara Hambly

was the scurrying of mice across bare wooden floors, and the chewing of beetles in the walls. Coming nearer, he found some evidence that a small troop of horses—maybe the mounts of bandits—had occupied the stables a week or so ago, but had been gone before the fall of the snow. No smoke curled from the chimneys, no track broke the snow crust around the woodpile outside the kitchen door.
    “There was sickness, I think,” Jaldis said sometime later, pressing his hands to the stones of the chimney breast in the dark and deserted common room. “It is hard to read. So many griefs and joys, so much talk and laughter have seeped their way into the stones here. But I feel most recently bad news from somewhere, early in the autumn… fresh apples. They had just picked the apples, the smell of them was strong in the room. Ullana… Ullata… some name like that. Ullata is sick, they said.”
    He shook his head, the white strands floating around his thin face rimmed with the new-coined brightness of the fire Rhion had kindled in the hearth. The warm light turned the rosewood voice-box the color of claret, and flickered in the talismans that hung from it, dancing chips of green and gold and red. He had put his spectacles away, and wore instead, as he frequently did when he went abroad, a linen bandage over the collapsed and sunken lids of his empty eyes.
    “Ullata is sick… and so we have to go.”
    Rhion looked up from adjusting massive iron firedogs meant to uphold wood enough to heat the enormous room. “Maybe Ullata was going to leave them some money.” Behind the blaze, tiny in the midst of all that acreage of blackened hearth bricks, a torture chamber ensemble of spits, hooks, and pot-chains loured in the shadows of the huge chimney. “At least Ullata didn’t get sick before they cut the winter’s wood.”
    Nevertheless, when he straightened up again he placed his own hands to the stone of the overmantle, and sent his mind feeling its way through the tight-crossed, gritty fibers of the granite, touching the voices, the images, and the fragments of other days which permeated the stone. The inn had stood for hundreds of years: he glimpsed a red-haired woman washing a new-born baby on the hearth and weeping bitterly, silently, as she worked; saw a young man sitting with his back to the iron firedogs, every window open into the heart-shaking magic of summer evening, greedily reading a scroll stretched between his up-cocked knees; saw an old man shelling peas and talking to a blond-haired child whose brown eyes were filled with a hungry wonder and the shadows of strange destinies. But he had not Jaldis’ fineness of perception. He could not separate ancient from recent—all these people might well have been dead for centuries—nor could he make out words. Only the smells of smoke and beer and roasting meats came to him, the echoes of bawdy songs and the clink of the little iron tavern puzzles that hung silent now in a neat row from spikes driven into the chimney’s stones.
    The widow woman had given them bread and cheese for the journey, as well as most of Rhion’s money back; there were yams, dried beans, and sweet dried apples from the trees along the inn’s west wall to be found in the cellar. After a meal of these, while Jaldis sat with his opal spectacles on his nose and his scrying-crystal—a chunk of spell-woven quartz the color of bitterroot tea—between his palms, Rhion put on his cloak once more and left the inn to make another circuit of it and draw wizard’s marks upon the surrounding trees.
    As he came back across the moonlit stillness of the yard, he noticed a gleam like a fleck of quicksilver near the door-handle, and, looking more closely, saw that a silver nail had been driven into the heavy oak. Thoughtfully, he picked his way over the slippery drifts to the nearest of the shuttered windows. Silver nails had been driven into the sills of them all—tiny, almost like pinheads, for the metal was