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

had filled in the upper end of the Morne
     Valley were frozen, black cattails and the twisted stems of sunken oak and hornbeam protruding like skeleton fingers from the gray sheet of starlit ice. But with the recent thaw, even the shallow ponds were treacherous. Rhion’s foot broke through what had appeared to be solid ice in the roadside ditch as he scrambled across, soaking him to the knees in freezing water.
    Far off, amid the tangled bog-hummocks and leafless willows, he could see a flickering greenish light.
    There were hundreds of them, thick as flies above a midden in summer. As he whispered the words of the spells within his mind he could smell them, queer and cold and bodiless; see them through their own ghastly weavings of semivisibility and shifting forms. Like the intermittent hallucinations of migraine, grims flitted through the bare boughs of maple and ash, skeletal forms with huge eyes and dangling feet, strange organs heaving luminously through transparent skin, eyes and faces and limbs, human and bestial, materializing one moment, then vanishing or becoming, hideously something else. A thing came loping out of the black underbrush beside him in the form of a huge black dog, to snap and tear at his legs with teeth suddenly solid and real; Rhion struck at it, his staff ablaze with blue-white witchfire, and the creature screamed at him with a human face and went gibbering back into the dark.
    As he had suspected, they were driving the women toward the frozen sloughs.
    Through snow-clotted fern and bracken, it was easy to trace the rucked hoof-tracks of her panicked horse; far off he could hear it neighing with terror. They were out on pond ice already, though, from the high ground where he stood, Rhion could see the rider fighting to rein back to safer footing. He scrambled down the scarp bank, black tangles of wild ivy and vine snagging his feet like rabbit snares under the snow, swinging his flaming staff at the grims when they came too close. Their claws raked at his face and his hands—
    
     If they get my specs off me I’m a dead man
    
     , he thought detachedly—shrieking like the soulless damned, while ahead of him clouds of them blew like poisoned green smoke around the frantic dark forms wheeling in the starlight.
    They were far out on the ice, the horse’s hooves skidding and slipping, and underfoot Rhion felt the ice buckle and crack. The Drowned Lands were a maze of fen and swamp and pond, deep even this far inland, in these sweet marshes, two days’ journey from the salt marshes where the heart of the realm of Sligo had lain. By the bulrushes that fringed the gray glimmer of ice, Rhion guessed this pond was deep. Ahead of him he saw by the noxious ur-light the face of the rider, a girl of no more than seventeen, taut and scared as she tried to force her mount back into the driving swarms of eyes and claws that lay between her and the safety of the shore. Fingers like thorn-branches snagged and lifted a huge cloud of pale hair; another grim tore the long, full train of her riding skirt, and she lashed at it with her quirt, clinging to the rein as the terrified horse twisted out of control.
    Then the ice cracked beneath them and they plunged, forehooves-first, into the heaving brown water beneath.
    Rhion flung up his staff and cried “
    
     ALSEIGODATH
    
     ! Children of the Dark Air… !” in a voice of power, the trained, booming shout completely unlike his normal light tenor, and the grims, screaming with laughter as they swirled around their struggling victims, scattered in all directions in a vicious, glittering cloud. Summoning about him the essences, the true names, of silver and fire and burning sunlight, Rhion strode forward, blazing and flashing and crying out the tale of the demon lists he had memorized over the years, the true names of as many as these flickering, amorphous things as had been gathered by wizards of the past, weaving them into a net of illusion and power and