Sun Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

As Tally had promised, the pavilion near the kitchen gardens could have been any small house in the Upper City, with its modestly slanted roof of red tiles and its pale stucco bleached silver by the light of the bright spring stars. After the eternal mists of the Drowned Lands, the dry, hard brightness of the air in the Mountains of the Sun made everything seem slightly unreal, like a child’s drawing; every weed stem growing along the alley walls and every pothole and broken brick in the road were distinct, even in this wan and shadowy light. The air was redolent with the flower and vegetable markets a few streets away, with the smells of the Duke’s extensive stables, and with dust and garbage. Here at the back of the palace complex, the walls lacked the intricate ornamental brickwork, the tiled niches, and the marble statuary that characterized its front, and Rhion guessed as they climbed the tiled steps from the little pavilion’s hall that the place had been built originally to house some married stablemaster or chief cook and his bride.

The light of the single candle in Tally’s hand darted fitfully over painted rafters and bright frescoes on the walls and glinted on the spectacles hidden deep within the shadows of Jaldis’ concealing hood. “Can we get ourselves seated before she comes into the room?” Rhion whispered. “That way, with luck, she won’t see him standing up at all to know he’s crippled.”

Tally nodded. They were all cloaked and hooded like conspirators in a cheap street-corner melodrama—Jaldis had shifted his voice-box up onto his back, so that its smooth roundness, combined with a deliberately assumed crouch, gave the impression that he was hunchbacked; in place of his crutches he leaned on a long staff, and upon Rhion’s arm.

“Good idea… Drat this mask—it won’t stay tied…” She set her candle on a pine hall stand to tangle with the ties of her mask, and Rhion had to stop himself from reaching to help her. Under her cloak he saw she wore the plain, black frock and short petticoat of a serving-maid, her ankles slender as willow switches above sensible shoes. “There. The light’s pretty low in there; I don’t think there’s much danger of her recognizing either of you, once you get your mask on.”

She was right about that, anyway, Rhion thought when he and Jaldis entered the room. A single candle in a crude brass holder provided all the illumination—if such it could be called—available; the candle, moreover, placed not on the oak table in the center of the room but on a sideboard, where its feeble glow would leave everyone’s faces in deepest shadow. “Why do they always have the lights so low they won’t be recognized?” wondered Rhion aloud, helping Jaldis to his chair at one end of the table and moving the candle to the far end of the sideboard so that its light was almost directly behind him, leaving nothing visible of his face but a black shadow within his hood.

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