The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,165

its arrests,” someone else agreed, and in a half-forgotten chamber of Rhion’s mind the ghost of a former self smiled, for it was Chelfrednig of Imber, who’d once had him and Jaldis run out of town for practicing magic in the territory of the Selarnist wizards. “I was only fortunate that I was gathering herbs that evening...”

“It explains the arrests of Mernac and Agacinthos in Nerriok, and the Blood-Mages in the In Islands last week,” added Cuffy Rifkin, an Earth-witch from up the Marshes whom Rhion knew well.

“And it certainly makes clear how they managed to get the better of Shavus and the other Morkensiks at the turning of summer.”

So that’s what happened...

But it was still apart from him, still distant. More near, more important, were the smells of peat smoke, herbs, and water, the smells of the Drowned Lands: wet fern, mossed stone, and bread. The gray curtain of sound that rustled like silk in a darkened room was the stirring of rain on the ivy of the walls of his own house and in the long cattail beds below the terrace.

He was home.

Something would have stirred within him at that, he thought, only it had not the strength.

“What I’m saying,” the witch Cuffy’s voice went on, “is that, though he’s the only Morkensik we’ve got, he’s not what you’d call a powerful mage.”

“I don’t know,” the Gray Lady said softly. “The magic that carried him across the Void—the strength I felt out there on the Holy Isle—was not the magic of sun-tide or star-tide or anything else I have felt. I don’t know what he is now, what he has become.”

Lying in darkness, Rhion knew. Beneath the drugs, beneath the drained exhaustion left by the traversing of the Void, beneath the agony of splintered ribs and torn flesh, he knew. Power lay in him like a fist of light, sleeping in the core of pain that lay at the center of his being. He could open that fist, and the power would radiate forth from his hands...

If he was willing to do it. But he knew what it would mean.

It would mean taking responsibility for this ragtag of mages who had gathered here. It would mean putting himself against the might of the Cult of the Veiled God, and against the men who found it increasingly convenient to use its lies. It would mean enduring what that responsibility, that leadership, would cost.

The power was in him, willed to him by those murdered Kabbalists, by the gypsy woman whose body he’d seen, by the old runemasters and young psychics, and even by the darkly grinning Poincelles—fragments of power that could never have been power in the world to which it had been born, fused now in darkness and in light.

But to use that power...

Dying would be easier. And no one could say he hadn’t earned that right.

A hand brushed his hair, touched his beardr and his hands. Someone whispered, “Rhion?”

And it wasn’t any thought of power, or responsibility, of sacrificial shoulds or future ifs that made him open his eyes. Only that hearing her voice, he couldn’t do otherwise—couldn’t imagine doing otherwise, though he knew that the choice was between that sweet, dark peace and going through all that he had gone through again...

But this time he would go through it with her beside him.

Tally had cut her hair. Without the sugar-brown silk cloak of it, her head looked small and delicate, like a bird’s.

He wondered how he could ever possibly have considered dying.

“The boys?” he asked, after their mouths parted again. His voice was inaudible and the two words left him as breathless as if he’d lifted them, like huge rocks. She had to bend close to hear.

“They’re safe. The Lady’s keeping an eye on them through her Mirror—we’re bringing them here as soon as we can figure out how to do it safely.”

The mages gathered round: the Lady, with her long hair graying where it hung over the lilies embroidered on her dress; Gyzan, touching his forehead with spells of healing and ease in his mutilated hand; Cuffy Rifkin in rags and necklaces of spell-bones; Chelfrednig and his Selarnist companion Niane, their white robes stained and patched; a couple of Ebiatics in black; a scrawny, chinless Hand-Pricker with a big gray cat in his arms; and others.

Rhion thought that, if there’d been a concerted roundup of wizards by the authorities, it had clearly gone after the powerful ones—aside from the Lady and Gyzan there was no one