The Magicians of Night

Eight


“I NEVER LIKED the idea of you staying in the attics.” Von Rath handed Rhion a chunk of raw beef and frowned down at him severely. “Now you see what happens?”

“It was my own fault.” The meat was cold on the gruesomely swollen flesh. A glance at the mirror had showed him the whole area had turned purplish black. “And I’d rather fall down the stairs once than wake up every morning with a headache from the cigarette smoke in the rest of the house.” Rhion leaned back against the iron spindles of the bedframe and shut his other eye, hoping his explanation had covered all the physical evidence and that the sentry hadn’t seen fit to report the unlocked door of the laundry room.

“I shall speak to the men...”

Rhion waved his free hand irritably. “No! They think I’m a lunatic already, for Chrissake. The last thing I need is for the guards to have a grudge against me for keeping them from smoking in the lodge.”

Von Rath frowned. Rhion guessed the concern in his eyes was genuine, but mixed with it was a Prussian officer’s almost disbelieving indignation that his orders might not be obeyed. “They would not dare.”

“They would.” He cocked one nearsighted blue eye up at the tall black figure standing over him. “Ordinary Troopers have ways of getting back at people who cause them trouble. It’s something I don’t want to deal with. Besides, you’d have to tear out the paneling and burn every rug and curtain in the house to get rid of the smell. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

“You are not ‘fine.’ ” Von Rath folded his arms and looked down at the little wizard with an expression of exasperated affection. “I have not noticed any smell of tobacco, though I am not a smoker myself, but I will take your word for it. I have sent for Dr. Weineke from the labor camp at Kegenwald. She should be here this afternoon to do something about getting you new eyeglasses. All right?”

“All right.” The knife cut on the back of his right arm hurt damnably under a clumsily improvised dressing. Though shallow, it would take twice as long to heal unstitched and leave an appalling scar, but Rhion could think of no way to work that into an explanation of a fall down the stairs. Fortunately he was left-handed, and the arm’s stiffness could, with luck, pass unnoticed. “Thank you.”

Curious, he thought, as von Rath’s footfalls retreated across the attic and creaked, with a slight vibration, down the narrow stairs, how the young SS wizard was equally capable of such consideration and charm, and of that calm arrogance, that close-minded assumption of his own rights at the expense of everyone whom he considered less than himself. It was, Rhion had found, one of the things that lay at the heart of Naziism, along with a paranoid sense of persecution by imperfectly identified forces—and one of the things that reminded him most of the masked followers of the Cult of Agon, the Eclipsed Sun.

Only here the mask that hid the follower from himself was subtler, not concealing the face, but changing it as it was perceived by other and by the face’s owner. An illusion, if you would—an illusion of altered perception.

Yet another of those things, he thought wryly—like horseless vehicles and flying machines, like artificial light and the ability to talk across great distances—that was magic without magic: magic without the disciplines and limitations that all mages learned.

He shut his eyes against the thin, white afternoon light, and wondered just how much of what he had said von Rath believed, and whether he should dig his boots from their hiding place beneath the bed and clean the pine needles off them—wondered for all of five seconds before he dropped into a heavy and exhausted sleep.

He woke, late and suddenly in the afternoon, from a confused dream about the Dancing Stones. Tallisett had been there, sitting on the altar stone in the old green gown she sometimes wore, her unbraided hair a wheaten cloak stirred by the faint night winds. Though he’d been far away in the deep grass of the meadow he could somehow see her face, calm and serene and a little sad, and past her shoulder saw the looming darkness of a shape and the glint of cold starlight on a blade. The Gray Lady, he thought dimly, remembering the sacrifice of the equinox... the blood black upon stone in starlight, the calling down of power. Frightened, he’d started to run, weeds pulling at his knees and his boots sucking in the heavy mud, stumbling, calling out her name, knowing he must reach the place by midnight and that midnight was near.

But when he’d gotten there she was gone. Only the stones remained, and on the altar stone, like a long puddle of ink in the darkness, lay a pool of blood. His chest hurt from running and he stood over the stone, fighting for breath, while all around him the whisper of crickets and tree toads murmured in the meadow below.

A terrible sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him, as if he had been here before—as if he knew what must happen here. He could feel magic rising up through the hill, radiating from the stones, the earth, the turning wheel of the Universe, fragmenting out along the ley-lines to the farthest corners of this magicless earth and back again to the place where he stood at the crossing of the leys. Then faint and very close, as if the unseen musician stood at his elbow, a flute began to play. He looked around and saw no one. But in the chancy glimmer of the summer starlight, slow and ponderous and infinitely graceful, the Stones began to dance.

He woke staring at the ceiling rafters, the music of that ancient dance fading from his mind. He tried to hold it, to call back the shape of the tune, but it slipped away—in the yard below his window a sentry called out a joke to some crony about why Hitler held his hat in front of him while reviewing military parades, and the music slipped away and was gone.

Stiff and aching, Rhion rolled from the bed. Though it hurt to move, he fished out his boots and laboriously cleaned them, using rags torn from the bloodied shirt. Fortunately it was one of four or five identical Wehrmacht hand-me-downs and unlikely to be missed. He’d already torn off part of it to fashion a bandage and swabs for the alcohol he’d pilfered from the workroom downstairs; he started to rip off another piece, and, as the effort pulled agonizingly at his injured arm, he fished from his pocket the knife he’d picked up in the kitchen last night.

It was a folding clasp knife of the kind many people in his own world carried, but contained in its handle of old yellow ivory several blades instead of just one, blades of varying sizes and types. The longest had been recently sharpened to a deadly edge; the second was smaller, of a convenient size to carve feathers into pens, had these people done such a thing. Pens here were metal tubes that either held ink or more usually sputtered it broadcast over documents, hands, and shirt pockets. The third blade seemed to be a punch, the fourth a corkscrew, the fifth a short, flat-tipped slip of metal Rhion could guess no use for but that was bent and scratched as if it had, in fact, been used. He cut the shirt apart, folded it carefully, and hid it behind the loose board with his coffee beans. Then he returned to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed, back propped against the iron-barred footboard, the knife gripped lightly in his hands.

He closed his eyes and sank into meditation, feeling the smoothness and age of the ivory, the coldness of the tiny silver pins that held it to the body of the clasp, the curious, hard lightness of the steel, while his mind probed into the fabric of the tool itself, as it had probed into the stone last night.

Dimly he became aware of the smoke stench and racket of the Woodsman’s Horn, the dirty songs and the stinks of tobacco, men’s bodies, spilled beer. Overlying it he felt the charge of the perceptions of the one who had held the knife, bitter red rage, disgust, hatred—a poisoned hatred of men, of self, of Germany. A woman, he realized, a little surprised—one of the barmaids almost certainly. The pungence of sex clouded all surface impressions, messy, dirty, and dangerous, a thing to be gotten through quickly, a tool to be used as men were all tools to be used...

For what? He probed deeper, feeling the texture of that rage. Violent, despairing, contemptuous... but not hopeless. A moving anger. Moving toward a goal.

Searching. Searching this house.

Searching for what?

He slowed his breathing still more, deepening his trance. He sank past the images of greedy, fumbling hands and obscene laughter, of smutty songs and the smell of incense—incense?—seeking what lay in the deeper shadows beyond.

A man. Age and wisdom, or at least what were perceived as such... And beyond those perceptions, overlain by all else, he became aware of the man himself. Long ago this had been his knife. Then sharply, distantly; Rhion saw a gray-bearded man using this knife—yes, to carve feathers into pens like a civilized human being. To write... To write...

... magic.

??!?!!

“Rhion?”

The touch of a hand on his shoulder broke him out of his trance with a gasp and he nearly cried out as his startled jerk wrenched every bruise and ache and cut. Von Rath caught his arm—fortunately the left one—to steady him, and Rhion stared up at him, sweat springing out on his face, for a moment not recognizing who or where he was.

“Are you all right?”

“Uh—yeah,” he managed to say, breathless with the shocked disorientation of being brought cold out of a deep trance. His hands were shaking as he fumbled the knife back into his pocket. “Fine. Just—just give me a minute.”

Von Rath stepped back, clearly puzzled. Shutting his eyes, Rhion tried to gather what remained of the trance back into his mind to close it off, but fragments of his consciousness seemed to be floating everywhere around him in a cloud, and his head throbbed painfully. “I did knock.” Von Rath’s voice was apologetic and concerned, grinding disorientingly into his consciousness. “It is not the time for meditations...”

“Oops.” Rhion grinned shakily. “I’ve been looking all over for the piece of paper with the meditation schedule on it... Never mind,” he added, seeing von Rath’s baffled expression. “Joke. Very small joke.” And one that would be lost on a German anyway. He inhaled deeply a few more times, then gave it up as a bad job. In time his head would clear, certainly after he slept again, which didn’t sound like such a bad idea. He finger-combed back the thick curls of his hair. “What is it?”

“Dr. Weineke is here. For your eyeglasses.”

Dr. Weineke was a cold-faced woman of forty or so whom Rhion hated on sight. Having been startled from deep meditation, he was far more conscious than usual of the auras that clung to things and people, and in her voice and her hands when she touched his face, he felt an evil terrifying in its impersonality. The place she had come from had left a smell upon her soul, like the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes that permeated the ugly female version of the SS uniform she wore.

She examined his eyes in the dining room, a long and rather rustic hall with heavy beams and what was obviously intended to be a Gothic fireplace at one end. Wide windows looked out onto the south end of the compound yard, facing the garages. Beyond the wire, molten patches of late sunlight lay halfway up the rusty coarseness of the pine trunks and gleamed far-off on a pond away among the trees. Poincelles, Horst, and an older SS Trooper named Dieter were drinking coffee at the far end of one of the several long tables that occupied the room, Poincelles in his booming voice listing every rival magician, former in-law, and disapproving scholastic colleague he knew in Paris and just what he hoped the Gestapo—the Secret Political Police—would do to them.

“It will take at least ten days for the dispensary to fill this prescription,” Dr. Weineke said as she put away the last of her small glass sample lenses and jotted a note on a piece of paper. “Perhaps much longer, with the demands of the troops in the field.” She gave a cursory glance to the bruise on Rhion’s face and made a small disapproving noise with her tongue. Then she turned to von Rath, who sat on the table nearby like a schoolboy with his feet on the seat of his chair. “Knowing the importance of the Professor’s work, I took the liberty of bringing an assortment of eyeglasses that might serve him in the interim.”

“How very clever of you!” Von Rath’s smile, like his words, were something he’d obviously learned in a manners class, gracious and warm for all they weren’t genuine. Weineke colored up like a girl as she reached under the table and brought up a cardboard carton, which she set on the table beside Rhion. It was half full of pairs of eyeglasses.

“Try them on,” she invited in what she evidently considered a genial voice. “One will surely be close enough to allow you to continue your so-valuable labors.”

Rhion put his hand into the box and nearly threw up with shock.

The psychic impact was as if he’d unsuspectingly plunged his arm into acid. Yet at the same time what was in the box—the dim miasma floating over those neat, insectile frames and dust-covered lenses—was ephemeral, gone even as he jerked his hand out, sweating and gray-lipped and sick. He glanced quickly to see if von Rath and Weineke had noticed, but they were talking together, the SS doctor dimpling under the young mage’s adroit courtesy as if his words were a glass of cognac. If she’d known how she would have smiled.

Hands shaking, sweat standing cold on his face, Rhion looked back at the box. For a moment it seemed to him that those flat, folded shapes of metal and glass were the skeletons of men, stacked like cordwood for burning, sunken eyes sealed shut and mouths opened in a congealed scream of uncomprehending despair.

He blinked. The vision disappeared.

“Where did you get these?”

Weineke glanced over at him with a clinical little frown; von Rath, too, looked worried at the sudden whiteness around his mouth. The doctor said, “They were confiscated from political prisoners, criminals, enemies of the Reich. Is there something wrong?”

“Just... I—my head aches.” He turned away quickly and, aware of their eyes upon him, put his hand into the box again.

Now that he was braced for it, the sensation was almost gone. The gold-rimmed spectacles he picked up were only spectacles. The concentration of evil, of horror, of a depth of despair unimaginable to him—of the truest touch of hell he had ever encountered—had slipped beneath the surface of reality again like a bloated corpse momentarily submerging in a pool. He could have probed into the metal and crystal to look for it, but didn’t dare.

He hated the thought of putting them against his face.

They were an old man’s glasses, meant to adjust farsightedness rather than myopia. He blinked and took them off. One of the most evil men he’d ever encountered, the old Earl of Belshya, had been ninety-four, and he supposed the Reich could have enemies that ancient who were dangerous enough to be locked up in the hell whose aura hurt his fingers as he reached into the carton again. He didn’t believe it.

The next pair, silver-rimmed, he couldn’t even touch. The boy who had worn them was dead. Through the silver, the most psychically conductive of metals, he could still feel how it had happened.

Beside him, von Rath and Weineke were engaged in soft-voiced conversation. “...victory slipping through our hands. Those prisoners I asked you to hold in readiness for us...” The primrose air smelled of cigar smoke and coffee, and across the room Horst was roaring with laughter over one of Poincelles’ witticisms. Rhion barely heard. He doubted he’d have been so aware of the auras clinging to the glasses if they hadn’t been all together in a box, if he hadn’t just been shocked from a psychometric trance; but he realized now where he’d felt that aura before. It was the same sense that clung to the yellow-patterned dishes on which they were sometimes served lunch, to one particular chair he hated in the library, to the watch they’d given him and the books in strange tongues he found hard to touch.

Those were things that had been confiscated when their owners—those mysterious and ubiquitous “enemies of the Reich”—had been taken away to be tortured and to die for crimes, it was clear from the aura of the glasses, they for the most part did not even comprehend.

He picked a tortoiseshell pair—tortoiseshell being almost completely nonconductive—but the man who had worn them had been far more shortsighted than he, almost blind. Horst and Poincelles sauntered over, still carrying their coffee cups, the Frenchman’s cigar polluting the air all around them. “Oh, not those,” Poincelles objected, taking the tortoiseshells from Rhion’s hand, “they make you look like a mole.”

“How about these?” Horst took a pair from the box and tried them on, making faces through them; Poincelles laughed.

“Trudi will go for those. You know she loves intellectual types.”

The young Storm Trooper crowed with laughter—Trudi, if Rhion recalled correctly, was the little black-haired minx at the Horn who had yet to give any evidence of literacy. Of course, in a country whose ideal woman was a devout and pregnant cook, this would scarcely be held against her.

“These are close.” Rhion put on a pair of rimless glasses with fragile silver temple pieces. They weren’t as close as another pair he’d tried, but the horror that clung to these was less suffocating, less terrifying, than some.

Poincelles grunted. “They make you look like a damn rabbi.”

The word—not in German—came to his mind with the meaning of “teacher,” but was overlain with a complex of connotations Rhion could not easily identify. Von Rath laughed gaily. “You’re right! All he needs is side curls,” but Dr. Weineke gave him a long, thoughtful scrutiny that turned his blood cold for reasons he couldn’t guess.

“How about these?” Horst balanced a pair of gold-framed lenses without temple pieces on the high, slightly skewed bridge of his nose and assumed an exaggeratedly pedagogical air. “If the class will now come to order!” He rapped with his knuckles on the table and pinched his lips.

“You’re right.” Poincelles grinned. “I had a Greek teacher at Cambridge who wore some like that, the strait-laced old quean. You’ve captured the look of him...”

“Ah!” Von Rath laughed again, plucked them off the Storm Trooper’s face, and adjusted them on Rhion’s. “Now that’s the thing for you. Distinguished and scholarly.”

The old man. The thought came to him instantly and whole, and was as swiftly gone, a half-familiar face glimpsed while crossing a crowded street. He touched the delicate frame hesitantly—the lenses balanced by pressure alone—and, though afraid of what he might find, closed his eyes and dipped within.

It was the same old man whose personality he had felt buried in the depths of the knife. But he sensed clearly here a gray old city, a basement room of stove, table, thick-crowding shelves of worn books, and a bed behind a faded curtain of flowered calico; grimy windows afforded only the view of passing boots. He saw bony hands using the ivory clasp knife to sharpen old-fashioned quills. The smells of cabbage soup, the sound of contented laughter, constant learned argument, droning chants—a little dark-haired girl with coal-black eyes...

And beneath the patina of pain and shock and dread, of hunger and the ever-present stinks of filth, degradation, and death, he tasted again the elusive wisp of magic.

Beside him Horst was laughing. “No, a monocle! Hey, Doc, any of those dung-eating Communist Jews wear a monocle?”

“You don’t look well.” Von Rath’s voice slipped softly under the younger man’s coarse guffaws. He leaned one flank on the table next to Rhion, stood looking down at him, head tipped a little to one side, dark, level brows drawn in a frown of concern.

Rhion removed the pince-nez and inconspicuously slipped it into his shirt pocket, and eased the rimless glasses carefully on over the swollen left side of his face. Though he felt as guilty as if he’d erased a plea for help written in a dying man’s blood, he knew he’d have to ritually cleanse them if he was going to wear them regularly.

Did von Rath know? he wondered, looking up at that beautiful face, delicate even with its sword scar—dreamer, wizard, as much an exile in this world as he was himself.

He’d been talking to Dr. Weineke with the casual intimacy of longtime partners.

He knew.

Rhion closed his eyes, fighting the tide of inchoate realization about what the Nazis did and were. “My head aches,” he said truthfully. “You have no idea how stupid I feel falling down the stairs like a two-year-old, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back up and lie down again. I’ll come back in a couple of hours. Maybe you and I can work through the Dee and the Vatican letters tonight, so the day won’t be a total loss.”

Von Rath shook his head. “It does not matter if it is. Baldur and I will finish them. Rest if you need to rest.”

Horst and Poincelles were still playing with Weineke’s collection of eyeglasses as Rhion mounted the stairs to his own room.