Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (17 page)

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, pick locks… 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? far?

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, moreover, 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.

THE DUKE OF MERE GREETED SHAVUS THE ARCHMAGE
with great cordiality when the old man appeared at the gates of Bragenmere, four nights before the last new moon of spring. For all his bluff, warrior heartiness, the Duke was a man of learning, and welcomed scholars—mageborn or otherwise—to his court. Even the most disapproving of the cult priests, the chill-eyed Archimandrite of Darova and the silent Mijac, High Priest of Agon behind his funereal veils, dared not remark. Sitting at supper the first night, Tallisett couldn’t hear what the Duke and the Archmage had to say to one another; but, looking along the glitter of the high table at the two big, middle-aged men, the dark crimson velvet of the one in no way belittling the shabby brown-and-black homespun of the other, she rather thought they were comparing the finer points of shortsword technique with the salt spoons.

But on the second night, as she was hurrying down the corridor toward the vestibule where the Duke’s guests assembled before walking in procession, two by two, into the state dining hall, she was stopped at the head of the stair by a pale, precise figure that materialized from between the malachite columns, and a cool voice inquiring, “Whither away, little cousin?”

It was Lord Esrex.

She curtsied politely, but her eyes were wary. She had never trusted her brother-in-law, even before his attempt seven years ago to have Rhion executed and herself disgraced—his friendliness now put her all the more on her guard. “I’m late. They’ll be going in soon…”

“Not until I’m there.” He leaned a narrow shoulder against a column drum and drew the white silk of his glove through his slender hand. “Surely you know the reason they’re having a state dinner? I’m the guest of honor—your father’s chosen to make me governor of the lands for which he married that brainless little slut at the turn of the spring.”

Tally felt her cheeks heat with anger, for she liked her new young stepmother, but she only said calmly, “If you’ve received the impression she’s a slut, I’m afraid the spy network of the Cult of Agon isn’t as accurate as it’s made out to be. Even the most careless gossip in the court could tell you Mirane of Varle is devoted to my father.”

She was rewarded by the color that flamed to the tight-skinned, delicate face. He would, she knew, have been delighted to be able to prove the Duke’s new wife unfaithful, even as he had sought for years to prove that Rhion of Sligo, and not her husband Marc of Erralswan, was the father of Tally’s children, and for the same reason—to discredit any heirs to rival his own son’s claim to the Dukedom from which his grandfather had so rudely been thrust.

But with icy and bitter precision the scion of the White Bragenmeres waved her words away. “He thinks he can make it up to me, giving me that pittance for the wrong he has done my family. And if he’s deluding himself that he’s still man enough to father a child on that straw-headed little lightskirt. Is that why he welcomed the Archmage to court? To get him a tincture of potency, now that his own tame conjure has disappeared?”

She realized he was baiting her, seeking information, and shook her head, reaching to straighten the pendant pearl that hung at her throat with a hand cluttered by unaccustomed rings. For the full ceremonial of a state dinner she wore her husband’s colors, emerald green, ribboned and tasseled in silver, the bronze-blue eyes of a peacock’s tail hanging around her half-bared shoulders in a delicate collar. “I’m not in his confidence, cousin.”

“They tell me other wizards are arriving in the city now,” Esrex went on softly, his pale eyes studying her face. “The Serpentlady of Dun came in last night, they say—carrying her lover in a basket, I should expect—and Harospix Harsprodin from Fell. So the ears of Agon are not as inaccurate as you might think.”

“Since everyone who enters the gates, mageborn or not, is under Father’s protection,” Tally replied steadily, meeting his gaze, “there’s no particular reason why wizards should conceal their movements. I suppose Agon’s spies simply like to feel important, telling their masters at the temple what they could have learned by the asking.” She tilted her head at the sound of a muted fanfare of music echoing in the deep arches of the stairwell, so close above their heads. “Shall we go down?”

The ceremony of investiture, in which Esrex was given temporary governorship of the dower territories Mirane had brought to her middle-age husband, took place between the great course and the sweets, and Tally took her leave as soon as Esrex, Mirane, and the Duke had resumed their seats and the musicians had begun the light, flirty tunes that traditionally heralded the entry of dessert. She did not like the way Esrex’ pale, heavy-lidded eyes sought out her own two sons—Kir rosy and vigorous and just turned seven, four-year-old Brenat already asleep with a chicken bone clutched in one plump hand—or the way he glanced sidelong at the Duke’s fair-haired bride of ten weeks, as if trying to guess the reasons for the blooming sparkle that seemed to radiate from the core of her body.