The Rainbow Abyss by Barbara Hambly
Jaldis and his student Rhion make a scant living, like most freelance wizards in a hostile universe, from luck-spells, love-potions and fortune-telling. Love and Magic are dangerous practices: combining the two can be lethal, as he discovers when he sells a love-potion to the wrong woman. Before long the wizards are running for their lives, leaving a rare and dangerous spell unfinished.
Years pass before Jaldis can repeat the spell: to open a Dark Well across the void, the space between realities. From the Well he hears a voice crying for help: magic in their world is being destroyed - they need a wizard to save them.
Another one I really enjoyed, this book has a lot of heart and Jaldis and Rhion are really great characters. In the world they live in wizards are outcast. All the great churches go so far as to say they have no soul. Legally they have no rights, they cannot own land, cant be properly burried and cannot marry. This book really does a fantastic job of capturing persecution and prejudice, the churches jealous of their power, feeling that the wizards are robbing them by intervening directly with the greater powers. It is not even possible to murder a wizard, "fruge" is the word that is used, it means to kill an animal. One would fruge a rat in their barn, a rabid wolf in the woods......or a wizard. After all, your just getting rid of vermin. None of this is helped by the factionalism amongst the wizards themselves, all insisting that their own school of magic is the only one.
Against this adversity Jaldis and Rhion really shine, soldiering on and doing the right thing despite the persecution they recieve. Trust me, you'll really feel for these poor guys, especially as people they help and heal turn on them in angry mobs at the drop of a hat or a priests word. Full of novel twists on magic and full of interesting creatures and characters, Barbara Hambly has done a great job. This book is part one of a series, Ive yet to track down the next one but Ill review it when I do. I give the Rainbow Abyss 9 out of 10.
