Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (11 page)

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.