The Magicians of Night

Ten


SARA WAS WAITING for him when he got to his attic room. The door was barricaded; he tapped at it softly and spoke her name, and after a moment heard a chair being moved. Her hair was rumpled, half the buttons torn off her dress to show a sailor’s paradise of bosom, her smile sardonic. “Big hotshot wizard and you can’t levitate a little chair?” The electric bulb over the bed was on; Rhion automatically switched it off and took a match from his pocket to light the candles. In the diffuse glow of the yard lights outside Sara put her hands on her hips. “Now, look, boychik, I’ve had enough...”

“I hate that light,” he said wearily, pushing up his glasses to rub his eyes. From his trouser pocket he took the notes he had been given—notes von Rath had insisted on going over with him, while Gall cleaned up something in the corner of the temple that clattered with soft metallic noises—and put them in the drawer with the wristwatch he never wore these days. “Horst brought you up here?”

She sniffed, sitting back on a corner of the bed but watching him warily. “After a couple of the boys in the watch room who’d heard old Pauli declare open season got done pawing me, yeah.”

He winced. “I’m sorry.”

“The hell you are. You got a cigarette?”

He shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

“You and Hitler.” In the candlelight her eyes were dark and very angry. “You’re all bastards.”

“Do you want to go home?”

“Home?” She laughed bitterly. “I haven’t got a home. You think after all this I’m gonna be able to go back to Aunt Tayta and Uncle Mel in New York and be their little girl again?” She turned her face from him, the wide mouth clenched taut under its smeared lipstick. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her as he would have comforted anyone in that much pain, but he knew if he touched her she’d break his jaw.

Then she drew a deep breath, forcing some of the tension to ease. “Oh, hell,” she said in time. “I get pinched and kissed all the time at the tavern—it wasn’t anything I don’t do every day.” Rhion thought about the two Storm Troopers and wisely said nothing. “ ‘Invest in good faith,’ Uncle Mel is always saying—he’s a tailor. ‘Make them smile when they remember you.’ Auntie would kill him if she knew how I was applying that particular sample of avuncular wisdom.”

And still she watched him, like a cornered animal, waiting for him to make a move toward her, to prove to her that he was, in fact, like very other man. After a long minute, when he didn’t, she said in a much quieter voice, “I want to see my Papa. You say you’re a wizard. You show me him in that damn crystal of yours.” She jerked her head toward the scrying crystal’s hiding place in the rafters and he realized she must have taken some opportunity, either now or during her earlier searches of the place, to go through his room. “Then I’ll go back to town.”

Rhion took a deep breath, brought over a chair, and fetched the crystal down. “I can’t show you him.”

Her mouth twisted. “What a surprise!” she said sarcastically. “How come it’s always the wizard who gets to squint into the crystal ball? It’s only his word to the marks what this person or that person is doing.”

“Well, it’s the goddam best I can do!” Rhion flared. “Now do you want it, or do you just want to get the hell out of here and let me go to bed? Jesus, why do I always end up dealing with you at three in the morning?”

“I want to see him,” Sara said, her voice suddenly small and tight, and looked away.

She had, as she’d said, slept her way through every SS barracks between here and the Swiss border to find him. Rhion felt the anger go out of him, remembering that. Of course she expected him to cheat her. Sitting on the bed with her disheveled hair and rumpled dress, she looked very young and alone. Rhion moved the chair out of the way, wincing as the cut on the back of his arm pulled, and said, “All right, give me the glasses. But I can guarantee you right now, if your father’s as wise as you think he is, that what he’s doing is sleeping.”

He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and sketched around himself a Circle of Power. As he settled his mind, deepening it into preliminary meditation, he noted that Sara, chatty as she was with the men in the tavern, seemed to realize the need for silence. Of course, he thought. She’s a wizard’s daughter. Whether she thought it was hooey or not, her father had taught her the rules.

The moon stood low, a sickly scrap of itself tangled in the black of the eastern trees. Even the crickets’ endless screeking in the warm spring night had fallen silent. With the moon’s waning the dark field of power enveloping the house felt stronger yet. Rhion guessed he could have tapped into that field to make the scrying easier, but instead blocked it from the Circle as best he could; as a result, it took him the usual endless forty minutes to raise the strength. His head began to ache, but nothing would have induced him to partake of what had been done tonight. The pince-nez lay like an insect’s cast chitin in his right hand, the crystalline lattices of the glass holding the psychic energies that had surrounded them; in his left the scrying crystal flashed sharply in the reflected candlelight. He pursued those flame reflections down into the stone’s structure, sinking through the gem’s familiar pathways until colors came, then darkness, then the clear gray mist that rolled aside so suddenly to reveal a tiny image, like something reflected over his shoulder or in another room.

“It’s a cell about eight feet square,” he murmured, and somewhere behind him the bedsprings creaked as Sara leaned forward. “Cement walls, cement floor, iron cot, bucket in one corner.” A part of him whispered in relief. He had been afraid to look into the place where the glasses had come from, afraid of what he might see. “There’s a window high up, floodlight outside... A man sitting on the edge of the cot. Tall and skinny...” Rhion frowned, concentrating on details. “His head’s been shaved, the stubble’s gray and white... Long eyebrows, curling—gray. There’s a scar on his lip, not very old...”

The glasses still between his fingers, he touched the place and heard Sara’s hissing intake of breath. “Bastards. Bastards!” Poisoned tears shook in her voice. “He had a mole there, under his beard. They shave them when they put them in the camps.”

If he thought about it—if he let anger or outrage or anything else intrude on the effort of concentration—he would lose the image altogether and be unable to get it back. His training had given him discipline to exclude even the worst of horrors from his mind. But it was a near thing.

After a moment he went on, “He’s wearing dark pants of some kind, patches... gray shirt in rags. His knees are skinny, bones sticking out through the cloth—long thin hands, brown age spots—He looks too old to be your father.”

Dimly he heard her voice say, “He was forty-one when he met Mama.”

“He’s standing up, walking to the window, trying to look out but it’s over his head. He’s worried, fidgety, pacing around.”

“Can you tell where the place is?” She leaned forward, her hands with their bitten red nails clasped on her knees. “Is he still at Kegenwald?”

“I don’t know.” He spoke dreamily, detached, struggling to keep his concentration focused on the old man’s face. A curious face, beaky and strong in spite of its egglike nakedness, the dark eyes as they gazed up at the narrow window filled with horror and concern that held no trace of personal fear. Rhion felt a kind of awe, for having tasted the aura of the place, through the box of glasses and through Dr. Weineke’s cold smile, he knew he himself would have been huddled in a corner puking with terror. And he knew there were still things about this that he didn’t know.

“Have you seen the camp?” he asked softly. “I can go up and look through the window myself, describe what I see...”

Within the crystal he saw the old man look up swiftly, at some unheard sound outside. Then he pressed to the wall beneath the window, straining to hear, and Rhion concentrated on moving past him, up the wall until he was level with the opening, which, he saw now, was barred, wire laced into the glass. Through it he could see a vast, bare yard under the glare of yellow floodlights, row upon row of bleak wooden barracks beyond and, past them, a wire fence closing off the compound from the dreary, endless darkness of the pinewoods. Wooden towers stood along the fence, manned by dark shapes with glinting machine guns. Between two such towers was a wire gate, which gray-clothed sentries opened to admit the smaller of Schloss Torweg’s two flatbed transport trucks.

The truck turned in the yard, pulled to a stop before a building opposite the barracks; more guards emerged from the building’s lighted door into the floodlit glare. With them was Dr. Weineke, her graying fair hair pulled back tight and every button buttoned, though it must be nearing four in the morning, and another man in a more ornate black SS uniform whom Rhion guessed was the commandant of the camp. Auguste Poincelles climbed down from the truck cab, rumpled and unshaven but moving with that gawky, skeletal lightness characteristic of him. He said something to Weineke and gestured; she nodded, and the camp commandant craned his head a little to see as guards untied the canvas flaps of the truck’s cover.

They brought out three stretchers, one of which they hadn’t had a spare blanket to cover.

“Jesus!” Rhion shut his eyes, but not fast enough—for an instant he thought he was going to be sick. The facets of the crystal bit his palm as he clenched his hand over it, as if that could let him unsee what he had seen. “Oh, God...”

“What?”

He pressed his hands to his face, unable for a moment to speak. By the face—or what was left of the face—of the woman on the stretcher, she’d been conscious for most of it.

Then anger hit him, terror laced with rage. Though violence had never been part of his nature, he’d have horsewhipped a man who’d perform such acts upon so much as a rat. Baldur had read him secondhand accounts of the accursed Shining Crystal group, but the thought of such things actually being done, no matter in what cause—the thought of the kind of power that would result and what it would do to those who summoned it—turned his stomach and brought sweat cold to his face.

“Are you all right?’ Hard little hands touched his shoulders, soft breasts pressed into his back. “What did you see? What is it?”

He shook his head, and managed to whisper, “Your father’s all right,” knowing that would be her first concern. “It’s just—I looked out through the window... He’s at Kegenwald, all right. Weineke was there, and Poincelles—Poincelles drove the truck...”

“What truck?”

He shook his head again, trying to rid it of what he knew would always be there now, as if burned into his forebrain.

“What did you see?” She pulled him around to face her where she knelt on the floor. When he wouldn’t answer she snagged her purse from where it lay at the foot of the bed, took out a tin flask, and pressed it into his hands. He wasn’t sure whether the stuff inside was intended to be gin or vodka, but it didn’t succeed at either one. Nevertheless, it helped.

After a long moment he whispered hoarsely, “Back in my world those in the Dark Traffic—the necromancers, the demon-callers—usually have trouble getting victims. I see now they just don’t have the right connections.”

“You mean von Rath’s doing human sacrifice.”

Though he knew she was only thinking in terms of throat-cutting, he nodded.

“Papa...”

“It’s all right,” he said quickly, seeing the fear in her eyes. “I’ll help you get him out.”

For the length of an intaken breath she was just a girl, wonder and gratitude flooding her wide dark eyes. But the next moment all that she’d done to get this far came back on her, and her body settled again, her parted lips close and wry. “And what do you get out of it?”

“I need his help. I need the help of a wizard to get me back to my own world.”

He almost laughed at the speed with which she adjusted the cynical exasperation on her face to an expression of grave belief.

“All right. What do I have to do?”

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Of course I—” She paused, regarding him for a steady moment, then shook her head. “No. But I know I can’t spring him alone.” For a moment they sat in silence, their knees almost touching in the smudged ruin of the chalked circle, candlelight warming the translucent pallor of her face and throwing wavery thread-lace shadows from every tangled red strand of her hair. Then she looked down at the tin flask still in her hands, and twisted and untwisted its metal top as she spoke. “That’s the other reason I’d put up with Poincelles and those grunts in the barracks to get a chance to search the house. It wasn’t only word of him—records and files—I was looking for, but documents, seals, signatures to fake—anything. I’ve been out to look at the camp—I know all the roads around here—I’ve got faked i.d.s, ration cards, clothes, picklocks... But I know that’s not gonna get me spit, walking in there alone. A woman...” She shrugged. “I thought maybe Poincelles...”

Her mouth flinched with distaste at the memory of the darkness in the barn temple, and Rhion saw again the point of the downturned pentacle like a silver dagger aimed at her nude body, heard Poincelles’ evil chant.

“You tell him anything?”

She shook her head. “I was always afraid to, when it came down to it. He really believes that crap...” She paused, her eye darting up to meet Rhion’s, and then grinned apologetically. “Present company excepted. But he’s... Some of the stuff Trudi told me about what he did with her... some of the stuff he asked me to do. And there was some rumor about him and one of the local League of German Maidens, a kid about twelve... Jesus! There was a stink about that—it was before your time. So I never had the nerve. And besides, I don’t trust the momzer to keep his word.”

“Don’t,” he said. “But you’re going to have to trust me.”

After Sara had left, Rhion looked over the scrawled pages of notes.

He had mastered sufficient spoken German to understand radio broadcasts, and enough of the spiky, oddly curliqued alphabet to read simple notes, though the thick tomes of histories, records, accounts of magic over the centuries still defeated him. But though Baldur’s handwriting had been made no easier to decipher by the vast amount of mescaline the boy had taken, the meaning was clear.

22.17—Buzzing. Large bee in corner of ceiling near door.

22.38—Three red lights about seven inches apart on the wall behind me, four feet above floor.

23.10—Something in corner of room? fur?

23.50—Hole in floor, three feet in front of door. Twelve inches across. Can see edges of floorboards cut cleanly as with saw. No light down inside.

Below, in von Rath’s neat handwriting, was appended the note: “Illusions projected for sixty seconds at a time, perceived for between Five and thirty seconds.”

It was dawn. The sky had been lightening when he’d walked Sara down to the waiting car, which had passed Poincelles’ covered flatbed in the sunken roadway before the gates. Birds were calling their territories in the dew-soaked pockets of bracken among the pine trees, the thin warbling of the robins answering the chaffinch’s sharp “pink-pink,” reminding Rhion hurtfully of mornings when he’d sit in meditation on the crumbling stone terrace of the library in the Drowned Lands, listening to the marsh fowl waking in the peaceful silence.

Around him, the forces that had been raised by the blood-rite were slowly dispersing with the turn of the earth. He could feel them clinging to the fabric of the house like some kind of sticky mold—called up, incompetently tampered with, but unable to be used or converted to operancy, they lingered in shadowy corners, ugly, dirty-smelling, dark. Did the rites of the Shining Crystal even include dispersal spells? he wondered wearily. It was lunacy to suppose a group capable of raising this kind of power wouldn’t have the sense to use them, but any group fool enough to raise power out of an unwilling human sacrifice, a pain sacrifice, a torture sacrifice, was probably too stupid to realize what they were tampering with in the first place. In any case that part of the ritual might have been taken for granted and not written down—they frequently weren’t—or written down elsewhere and lost. He should, he thought, have gone down to the temple himself and worked what he could to neutralize the energies raised.

But there wasn’t enough money in Germany to make him go into that temple tonight.

Rhion flipped to the next sheet. That was in von Rath’s handwriting, neat and precise, having been written out before he’d taken the potent cocktail of mescaline, peyote, and psilocybin himself.

Bee—22.17

Triangle of red lights—22.38

Fox—23.09

Glass of beer—23.25 (That one evidently hadn’t gone through at all.)

Hole in floor—23.50

In a room at most a hundred feet away, which von Rath had been in scores of times, into the mind of someone who knew him and hero-worshipped him and concentrated on his every word and expression and who was, moreoever, magically trained himself and out of his skull on drugs.

But he’d done it.

Rhion folded the papers and sighed. He took off his glasses, lowered his head to his hands.

Shouldn’t you do something? a part of him asked.

For instance? Every time he closed his eyes he saw the mutilated body of the woman, like some twisted shape of driftwood in the bitter electric glare, and the two other forms beneath dripping blankets. He saw the camp, the guards, Weineke, the commandant—all the structure of power that made it so easy for von Rath to order up victims as he ordered up silver or mandrake roots or anything else he wanted from the Occult Bureau; he saw, too, the fleeing women and children scattering before the diving planes, and the boxful of spectacles that turned before his eyes into neat little corpses, folded up like frozen insects awaiting disposal.

The implications were more appalling still.

He had the sensation of being trapped in a nightmare, of teetering perilously on the edge of a dragging spiral of horror incomprehensibly worse in its dark depths than it was up here at its crown.

The gray beach he’d seen in the scrying crystal came back to him, too, men standing in the sea while boats bobbed toward them—brightly painted pleasure boats, some of them, or big, strange-looking craft with unwieldy mechanical paddles on their sides and rumps, crewed by men and women too old, too soft-looking—too kind-looking—to be soldiers. English civilians, Horst Eisler had said. A stupid and decadent race, von Rath had called them, but a race nevertheless willing to brave the choppy sea in whatever craft they could find to take those men off the beaches, out from under the flaming death of the German guns. In the crystal, he’d seen the British war planes, too, searing soundlessly overhead and fighting heart-stopping midair battles with the German fliers.

We can take out the British air cover, von Rath had said. With illusion at his command, he could.

And then... they’ll give me anything I want.

The thought of what that might be made him shudder.

How much command von Rath would ever gain over illusion was problematical, of course. No matter how much power he raised, unless the hallucinations could be directed consistently and accurately into the minds of large numbers of strangers it wouldn’t do much good, and Rhion knew that without magical operancy such control simply wasn’t possible.

But having seen the demon unleashed in von Rath’s eyes, he knew also that von Rath would not hear him when he said that. From his own experience of having the long-denied magic within him released, vindicated, broken forth into the air, he knew just how strong were the forces driving the young mage—how strong they would have been even were it not for the centuries of denial and disbelief being thrown off, as well. He would continue trying, continue the hideous blood-rites, continue raising the ghastly energies and releasing them unused and without any sort of control, until...

Until what?

Rhion didn’t know. He was wizard enough to be academically curious about the results, but every instinct he possessed told him to get out and get out fast.

For a few moments he toyed with the notion of aiding Sara and her father to escape to England, wherever the hell England was, and offering his services to the English King. But aside from the fact that once away from the Dark Well he would lose forever his chance of contacting Shavus and establishing a pickup point for his jump across the Void—in effect, exiling himself here permanently—there was no guarantee that the English King wouldn’t have him imprisoned. Like the Solarists, he seemed to believe that magic not only didn’t, but couldn’t, exist. Moreover there was always the chance that the English King was as evil as the Chancellor of Germany, though the thought of another realm as comprehensively soulless as the German Reich was something Rhion didn’t want to contemplate.

No, he thought. The best thing to do was to contact Shavus, establish a point where their power could reach out to guide him across the Void, and get the hell out of this world of luxurious insanity. And for the first time since he’d come here, that didn’t look completely impossible.