The Magicians of Night

Six


FROM HIS WINDOW in the darkness, Rhion watched the cadaverous shadow of Poincelles cross the yard to the wire. The sentry had been loitering in the spot, smoking, for some minutes now—it was this which had first caught Rhion’s attention. Now he saw the Frenchman hand the Storm Trooper something and, reaching out with his mageborn senses, heard him say, “...maybe all night. Square the next man, will you?”

“Jawohl, mate.” The guard saluted. “Heil Hitler.” And he strolled away lighting a cigarette, his shadow fawning about his feet like a cat as he passed beneath the floodlight.

Fascinating. Rhion scratched his beard and leaned an elbow on the sill. With his room unlit behind him, there was little danger of being seen as long as he kept back far enough to prevent the glare from catching on his glasses.

His first thought, that Poincelles was out to do some courting in the woods, was banished by the rather large satchel the French mage carried. Services rendered were usually paid for more neatly than that. Besides, he knew the man generally got his boots waxed, as the saying went, in the village, or had Horst Eisler bring one of the barmaids up to the Schloss itself.

When von Rath had mentioned that morning that someone had been working in the laboratory, Rhion had immediately suspected Poincelles. Deeply interested, he continued to watch as the Frenchman unshipped two short lengths of wood from the satchel’s carrier straps and used them to prop up the lowest of the three electrified strands of the fence. That particular stretch, he realized, at the southeast corner of the compound, was not only hidden from the rest of the yard by the corner of the SS barracks, but was the closest the fence came to the surrounding woods. Though the fence followed the contours of the ground closely, at that point, where a little saddle of land connected the Schloss’ mound with the rising ground of the hills behind it, there was a shallow dip where, with the aid of props to keep from touching the wire, a man could get under.

Poincelles removed the sticks, picked up his satchel, and, brushing dust and old pine needles from his tweed jacket, strode quickly into the woods.

The guard had not reappeared around the corner of the barracks.

Rhion tucked his boots beneath his arm and padded in khaki-stockinged feet down the darkness of the attic stairs.

In the upstairs hall he turned softly left along the corridor past von Rath’s study door. It was shut, and through it he could hear the murmur of von Rath’s voice and Baldur’s eager whine. It was only an hour or so after sunset, barely full dark, and far earlier than he would have liked to try his maiden excursion outside the wire. Beside the big chamber where the Dark Well had allegedly been drawn, there was what had once been a dressing room, with a bank of closets along one wall and a discreet door leading to the backstairs and so down to the disused kitchen on the ground floor. The backstairs was narrow, smelled powerfully of mildew and mice, and was choked with bales of old newspapers and bundled-up bank notes, several million marks that had been printed in the crazy time fifteen or twenty years ago when, according to von Rath, this world’s paper money had lost its value through fiscal policies that Rhion’s banker father wouldn’t have countenanced on the worst day he ever had. Rhion emerged into the old kitchen, and crossed it to what had been the laundry beyond, also dusty and disused, for both cooking and washing were done for the mages in the SS barracks. He cautiously unbolted the outside door that looked out onto the deserted corner of the yard facing the hills.

It was still empty. Poincelles had paid the guards well.

Retracing his steps quickly to the kitchen, Rhion collected a couple of short logs from the bottom of the old woodbox. Then he pulled on his boots, took a deep breath, and stepped outside.

No one challenged him. There was no guard in sight. Behind him, in the shadow of the ornamental turrets, the russet curtains of von Rath’s study were shut.

Rhion crossed to the fence, propped the wire as he had seen Poincelles do, and, taking meticulous care not to touch it, slithered under.

He was free.

Free of money, food, and identity papers, he reminded himself firmly as he removed the logs and carried them to the shadows of the woods, all the while suppressing the impulse to leap in the air, to shout, and to dance—without the slightest idea of where he was or any convincing account of his business. Wonderful—I’ll be shot as a British spy before von Rath has time to figure out what’s taking me so long to come down to breakfast.

But free nonetheless! The cool thin smells of pine and fern were headier than von Rath’s cognac. He stashed the logs where he could easily find them again and set off after Poincelles.

Had Poincelles been able to see in the dark, as the wizards of Rhion’s world could, or had he been in the slightest bit used to traveling cross-country, Rhion would never have been able to track him. But the Frenchman was a city creature, a denizen of those bizarre places of which Rhion had only heard tales—Paris, Vienna, Berlin—and moved clumsily, leaving a trail of crushed fern, broken saplings, and footprints mashed in the thick scented carpet of fallen needles underfoot that Rhion, after seven years among the island thickets of the Drowned Lands, could have followed, he thought disgustedly, if he hadn’t been night-sighted. He overtook his quarry easily and moved along, an unobtrusive brown shadow in the denser gloom, while the gawky form plowed through pockets of waist-deep bracken and wild ivy and scrambled over fallen trunks or the granite boulders that dotted the steeply rising ground.

At length they reached the road, neglected and overgrown, but still passable through the hills. Rhion recognized the road cutting in which they’d been stopped on that first excursion to Witches Hill by the work party of slave laborers from the Kegenwald camp. Now on level ground, Poincelles strode on more swiftly, jacket flapping and the frail starlight gleaming on his greasy hair, trailing an odor of cigar smoke and sweat. Atop the cut bank in the green-black gloom beneath the trees, Rhion followed. On the other side of the hills—perhaps three miles’ swift walk—Poincelles turned off to the right down a weed-choked cart track, and in time, through the straight black of the pine trunks, Rhion glimpsed stars above a cleared meadow and the dark outlines of a barn. Part of the old estate farm of Schloss Torweg, he guessed, which had fallen to ruin in the crazy-money years, as Baldur had said. The meadow, like that around Witches Hill, was thickly overgrown and mostly turned to a sour and spongy swamp as the ponds and lakelets that dotted the landscape had spread and silted. The path that led to the barn was nearly invisible under saplings of dogwood and elder, and Poincelles, burdened still with his satchel and puffing heavily now, fought his way through them like a man in a jungle, making enough noise to startle the incessant peeping of the marsh frogs to offended silence.

He was clearly headed for the barn. Arms folded, Rhion waited in the tepid shadows of a thicket of young maples on the other side of the road. In time the crickets recommenced their cries, the frogs taking up the bass line, and after a moment, a nightingale added a comment in a liquid, hesitant alto. Only after several minutes had passed and Rhion was certain he would be unobserved as he crossed the relatively open meadow did he move on.

Not a light showed from the barn; but, as he approached it, Rhion scented incense, thick and oversweet, on the warm spring air. A moment later the deep, soaring bass of Poincelles’ voice sounded from within, and Rhion glimpsed a sliver of golden light high up one side of the wooden structure that told him it must be curtained within.

They all kept something back, Poincelles had said.

The Frenchman had created a second temple—a secret one, for his own use, though it was good odds he’d pilfered the incense—and whatever else had gone into its construction—from Occult Bureau supplies, even as Rhion had stolen the components of the Spiracle. That could explain, Rhion thought, the disturbance of the lab. Coming closer, Rhion heard the Frenchman’s words more clearly. He was chanting in Latin, a language in which many of the ancient books at the Schloss were written, and which, like German or any other tongue, he could understand when Baldur read aloud to him from the unknown alphabets. By the rise and fall of his voice the Frenchman was clearly speaking a magical rite of some kind, not unlike the ones the Torweg wizards used to raise power for their experiments and exercises.

“...invoke and conjure thee, O Spirit Marbas... by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes, and the most potent princes Genio, Liachide, Ministers of the Tartarean Seat... forthwith appear and show thyself unto me, here before this circle... manifest that which I desire...”

The voice rolled impressively over the nonsense names of the invocation of demons as Rhion pressed himself to the door. Peering through the cracks he saw that heavy sheets or curtains of some dark material swathed the inside of the structure, whose rotting wooden walls were chinked everywhere with split or missing boards. Finding a thin line of light between two of these curtains, he reached through a gap in the wall and fingered them gently apart, angling his eye to the opening.

In the center of huge interior darkness Poincelles stood, naked and hands uplifted, piebald with the upside-down shadows of seven black candles arranged around him in a wide ring. With his wrinkled and sagging buttocks jiggling at every jerk of his upraised arms, his voice booming out the names of imaginary devils to re-echo in the harlequin of rafter shadows overhead and his head jerking every now and then to flip his hanging forelock out of his eyes, he should have been ridiculous, but he wasn’t. “Asmodeus I conjure thee; Beelzebub I conjure thee, King of the east, a mighty King, come without tarrying, fulfill my desires...”

Standing in the cool outer darkness, Rhion sensed a kind of power being raised, dim and inchoate as all power was in this diminished world but present nevertheless. It reminded him strongly of some of the slimier rites of the renegade sects of the Blood-Mages, with its stink of irresponsibility, of greediness, of contempt for everything but self—contempt even for the demons it purported to summon. Before Poincelles, a woman lay on the altar beneath an inverted pentacle, naked, also, with a chalice between her thighs. Her head lay pointing away from Rhion, her face obscured by the blackness of the altar’s shadow, but the candlelight caught a curl of cinnabar hair lying over a breast like a rose-tipped silk pillow. Beneath the cloying incense, the muskier pong of hashish lay thick in the air.

“Give me what I ask!” Poincelles switched to French in his excitement, threw his sinewy arms wide. “Give me and me only the keys that those men are seeking! Give me influence over the wizard Rhion! Place him in my unbreakable power, bind him to me, deliver him into my hand so that he cannot do other than my bidding. Make him teach me and me alone his wisdom! Cause him to trust me, lure him into my power, blind his eyes and soothe his fears...”

His voice cracking with self-induced frenzy, the lean shape stepped forward between the girl’s knees and lifted the chalice to the pentacle that flickered like molten silver as the vast shadow of his arms passed across it. “O Asmodeus, Lord of the Mortal Flesh! Beelzebub, Lord of this World! We offer this rite to you, this magic raised out of the flesh that You created, this sacred lingam raised in your honor...”

So much for Poincelles! Disgusted, Rhion stepped back and let the curtain’s tiny chink fall shut. Strictly speaking that should be a virgin, but that must be another one of those wartime shortages they keep telling us about, like ersatz coffee. He hoped Poincelles was paying her plenty for her trouble.

But knowing Poincelles, he was sure the money was probably coming ultimately out of von Rath’s pocket.

As he waded back through the damp weeds toward the road, he heard the girl cry out in rapture, but something in the timbre of that outburst of ecstasy told him it was faked. He shook his head. His father had always said you got what you paid for.

But it left him definitely back at square one, facing the prospect of stepping into the Dark Well alone. “Always supposing I can get at the damn thing,” he added dryly, stepping out of the shadows of the hedges into the rough surface of the main road.

The moon was rising, edging every pine tip, every weed stem, and every sunken pond in milky silver. The night breathed with its singing. Curious, thought Rhion, that even the spirits seemed to have deserted this world. The luminous mirrors of pond and marsh should have been alive with nixies and water goblins, the long grasses aflicker with the half-seen ectoplasmic wings of the faes and the brown, scurrying feet of lobs. He would almost have welcomed the ghost-cold shadow of an errant grim. Had those bodiless life essences, like the power in the ley-lines, sunk to hibernation in the ground?

He turned back and studied the sagging black roof line of Poincelles’ barn. Tonight’s expedition was far from wasted, he thought. He’d found another place where power of a sort had been raised—enough of it would cling so that the place could serve as a beacon to Shavus, perhaps enough to give him a fighting chance of opening a gate, if coupled with the power of the upcoming solstice midnight, though he would have preferred a place situated on a ley.

But that thought led to another. It was still early, he thought, looking at the stars. Instead of turning left, up the hill toward the Schloss, he moved on down the road, following its curve back up the other side of the hills.

The moon stood clear over the distant eastern ridge when he reached Witches Hill. Soaked in the pallid light, the Dancing Stones seemed to shine with the wan limmerance of forgotten spells as Rhion waded up the hill in the dew-heavy grass. Exhausted as he had been on his first visit there with Gall and Baldur, Rhion had sensed no magic in the place. But now it seemed that for once Gall had been right. The magic that had been there once was not dead, only deeply asleep.

It was obvious to him now which of the two shapeless stones lying in the ground had been the altar of the ancient rites. Sitting on its higher end, Rhion pressed his palms to the age-pitted surface and felt it cold and wet with dew. Rain and sun had almost rinsed away whatever had been there, dimmed it beyond what could be detected when the sun was in the sky. But in the sleeping hours between midnight and dawn an echo of it whispered, like the memory of voices after the singers have gone.

Closing his eyes, he let his mind sink deep.

It had all been a long time ago. Very little was left: the faded impression of a drum tapping, the memory of other moons. There had been blood—a lot of blood, animal and human. Some of it was mixed with semen—a virgin’s first experience, the psychic charge still glittering faint as pyrite crystals deep in the fabric of the stone; elsewhere lay the deeper and more terrible charges of power drawn from pain and death. Power had been raised here, again and again, from that ancient triad of sex, death, and sacrifice, sometimes unwilling and at other times freely given, the magic woven of that power now lost in the turning winds of time.

But its residue remained.

Rhion took off his glasses, bent forward until his face touched the stone. Unlike Gall—or unlike what Gall claimed—he had no visions of eldritch priests, no cinema-show reenactments of the past. But the stone now felt warm to his palms. Like unheard music, he felt the power whisper along the leys that crossed beneath the altar, drawing power from the net of silver paths that covered the earth, dispersing it back to the world’s four corners again.

After a long time he came back to himself, lying facedown on the altar, all his muscles aching, his hair and the back of his khaki uniform shirt damp with sweat. He groped around for his glasses and put them on again, to see Orion’s belt hanging low in the east. He muttered, “Verflucht!” and stumbled to his feet, knees trembling. It was an hour’s walk back to the Schloss, and after last night’s efforts at scrying he was achingly short of sleep.

On his way down the hill he paused and looked back at the Dancing Stones. They seemed to have sunk back in on themselves, returned to being no more than three massive, almost shapeless slabs of rock, half hidden by the long grass of the neglected hill.

If any living magic remained in them it was too dim, too deeply buried, for his own attenuated powers to raise. But at solstice-tide it would draw on the powers of the leys, and that would help. And it was bright enough to serve as a beacon, provided he could get word to Shavus about what to look for in the dark of the Void.

He turned and headed back to his prison again.

He reached it an hour before the early summer dawn. Watching from the edge of the woods, he saw no sign of a guard. “At least Poincelles got his money’s worth out of something tonight,” he muttered, as he set up his props and wriggled under the fence. On the walk back, he’d felt sick from the strain of concentration; now that had passed, and he was ravenously hungry. As he slipped through the laundry room door his mind was chiefly occupied with ways to sneak a few hours of unnoticed sleep during the day.

Then he saw that the door into the old kitchen was open. He’d closed it behind him—he knew he had. A guard? he wondered, and then his eye lighted on two pieces of wood, suspiciously similar to the short logs still tucked beneath his arm, lying against the wall where the shadows were thickest. If he hadn’t been night-sighted he wouldn’t have seen then at all.

Poincelles would have bolted the outside door when he came in. So would a guard who found it open.

God damn it.

So someone else was poking about the Schloss at night, undoubtedly the same someone who had searched Baldur’s room, perhaps who had searched his own.

He set down one of his props silently and hefted the longer one clubwise in his left hand. He wondered if he should summon a guard to take care of the intruder, if there was an intruder, but realized in the next instant that it would only lead to questions about what he was doing wandering about at two in the morning with dew-soaked trouser legs and pine needles sticking to his boots.

Pushing his glasses firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, he tiptoed to the half-open door.

Like the disused laundry room, the old kitchen was dark and almost empty, containing little but old counters and a big stone sink. The door opened to his left. Taking a deep breath, he sprang forward and slammed it back fast and hard.

Unfortunately the unknown intruder was hiding under a counter to the right of the door, and an arm was around his neck and jerking him backward before he could react to the swish of trouser cloth and the stink of ingrained tobacco smoke behind him.

He twisted against the grip, fighting for balance. Tearing pain sliced his upper arm; he flailed with the club, wrenching and thrashing, and half felt, half heard a knife go clattering at the same moment an elbow smashed him full force across the face, sending his glasses spinning off sideways as he crashed back against the sharp edge of the sink. Before he could get his breath a fist caught him in the solar plexus with an impact like a club.

For an instant as he crumpled over, he remembered the knife and thought, This isn’t fair... Then swift footfalls retreated and left him lying at the foot of the sink wondering if his lungs would ever work again. He had just come to the conclusion that they wouldn’t when other footfalls, distant but purposeful in the opposite direction, warned him that the SS was on its way.

“Just what I need,” he gasped, lurching painfully to his feet. “Protection.” For a moment he thought he was going to vomit; the small of his back where he’d slammed into the sink hurt more than he’d thought possible, and he could feel the side of his face beginning to puff up. His right arm hurt, but he could move it, and he felt blood soaking into his shirt sleeve. It took him a nerve-wracking minute to find what was left of his glasses, twisted metal frames and shards of glass scattered broadcast over the flagstone floor. With the heavy footsteps coming nearer he swept the bits into a black corner beneath the sink; and there he found the knife, a folding pocket blade honed to a deadly edge and still bloody. He shoved it and his bent glasses frame in his pocket and, holding his bleeding arm, ducked into the nearest closet and pulled the door to.

Through the cracks he could see the beam of an electric flashlight pass to and fro, then fade as the Storm Trooper crossed the room. Cramped in the mildew-smelling darkness, Rhion considered remaining where he was until the man had checked the laundry room and departed for good, but realized that he’d find the outer door open and, if he was worth his pay—which half the SS weren’t, but Rhion didn’t feel like betting his liberty on it—would come back and make a thorough search.

With swift silence and an earnest prayer to whatever gods were in charge of magic in this world that he wouldn’t encounter an unscheduled wall or chair in his myopic flight, Rhion slipped from the cupboard and ducked through the door into the hall. He made it back to his attic room without further mishap, trembling with nerves, shock, hunger, and exhaustion, just as the wide window was turning dove-gray with the first light of summer dawn.