Free Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss by Barbara Hambly Page A

expensive. The inn’s protection had doubtless owed more to its roaring fires and the lamps in their iron sconces which had ringed the yard and to the noise of its customers and the smells of their massed bodies and blood. But standing in the snow that lay glittering like marble all around the inn, listening to the forest silence pressing so close about its walls, Rhion remembered that in waste places at night there were more things to be feared than human prejudice and human spite.
    He hated the thought of risking the only thing that stood between him and starvation. Nevertheless, he swept the crusted snow from the bench beside the door, and sat on it to draw from his pocket the little velvet bag of coins. There were seven or eight silver royals among the copper.
    
     Minted in Felsplex
    
     , he reflected dourly, biting one.
    
     God knows if it’s even as pure as it’s stamped
    
     . His father, one of the wealthiest bankers in the City of Circles, had always held the Felsplex municipal council’s fiscal policies in utter contempt, and having seen them at medium-close range for two and a half years now Rhion couldn’t blame him. However, it was all the silver they had, even if it was less pure than the buttons of some doublets Rhion had worn back when he was still his father’s son.
    “Alas for lost opportunities,” he sighed to himself, and went to work laying small words of Ward on each silver coin. Then he buried them in the snow—with suitable, and invisible, marks over each so he could find them in the morning—in a loose ring around the inn, and drew a tenuous thread of spells from coin to coin, forming the protection of a Circle of Silver.
    And thus it was that in the dead of night he was awakened by the chittering whisper of attacking grims.

FOUR
     
    HE CAME AWAKE AT ONCE OUT OF A FAR DEEPER SLEEP THAN
    
     he’d meant to allow himself. By the dull ochre of the banked firelight he could just make out Jaldis, seated on a bench beside the shuttered window, listening with bowed head. Pulling his blankets tightly around his shoulders Rhion sat up, for it was the deep of night, and even here beside the common room fireplace the chill was like iron.
    “Did the Circle hold?” He groped for his spectacles, finding them by memory, muttering a curse as the lenses misted from the warmth of his flesh.
    Jaldis, still deep in his meditative listening, shook his head.
    “Damn inflationist idiots on the municipal council passing off silver-washed copper…”
    “They’re going by,” the voice of the box hummed. “They come from all directions, but they all go in one direction, and that is not here. They cross over the Circle on their way…”
    Even through the heavy shutters, Rhion heard a woman scream.
    He was on his feet and heading for the door almost before he could think—he and Jaldis both had been sleeping booted and clothed. He had his hands on the heavy door bolt before he remembered that grims frequently counterfeited the voices of women and children crying for help, to trick victims into opening shutters and doors and breaking what field of power the silver nails might generate. He thought the scream sounded genuine, but still…
    “
    
     Alseigodath, amresith
    
     , Children of the Dusky Air…” he muttered, collecting the first of the demon-spells Jaldis had long ago had him memorize and hoping he could call accurately to mind the long catalogue of the names of demons and grims and the strange pain-spells that held such creatures in check. He caught up his walking staff and flung the door open as a second scream cut the air. Hearing it, he knew it was no grim that made that sound.
    Calling up within him all the power that he could, he ran.
    Foul with ice and half-melted snow, the road dipped beyond the inn’s little hill to the thicker woods and broken jumble of ground that was the first frontier of the Drowned Lands of Sligo. In this season the pools and marshes which six hundred years ago