Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (26 page)

A chill shook him, as if the air in the room had grown colder, and he had the uneasy sense of things taking place beyond the boundaries of human perceptions. He glanced at the watch again and wrote down the time: 10:23. The girl seemed to notice nothing.

At ten minutes after eleven, she got to her feet again and began to pace once more, endlessly rubbing her skinny brown arms. There was nothing in the room, no food, no water, no blanket or source of heat. Rhion wondered whether that was a condition of the experiment or whether they had simply not thought about it.

Power was everywhere around him now, creeping like thin lines of phosphorous along the paneling, dripping down the grain of the cupboard doors at his back, crawling along door sills and floorboards. A kind of mottling had appeared on the wall to his left, near the backstairs door, as if light were buried deep within it, and he had the sensation of something moving behind him, near or perhaps in the cupboards, almost—but not quite—visible from the tail of his eye. He was too experienced to turn and look. He knew he’d see nothing. One never did. Sweat stood out on his face and crawled slowly down his beard. Sometimes he thought he heard voices speaking, not shouting in agony, but simply muttering with angry, formless rage. It was the third blood-rite, the third sacrifice, of men and women chosen for psychic power or occult knowledge. Their curses would linger.

I’m sorry
, he wanted to cry to the cold, beating air.
Nothing I could have said would have saved you!
But the rage of the dead was not selective. It did not hear.

They’re fools… God, get me out of here!
But he knew he was as much a prisoner as the girl in the other room.

At 11:24 she stopped in her pacing, her shaved head jerking up suddenly, as if seeing or hearing something that startled her. Rhion noted it, and the time. But she shook her head and paced on, back and forth, endlessly, tirelessly, not seeing the yellowish ooze of cold light that had begun to drip down the walls, not sensing the freezing iron tightness of the air, not hearing the formless whisper, in Yiddish and German and Romany, that seemed always to growl on the other side of the air. Agony, horror, despair, and a gloating sexual delight filled the air, poisoned ectoplasmic wool from which von Rath’s mescaline-saturated mind was endeavoring to spin its magic strands. Sick and wretched, hands shaking and breath coming shallow and fast, Rhion tried vainly to stop his ears and to wall his mind against it, wanting nothing but to get out, to escape this place and never come back…

At thirty-five minutes after midnight, the girl wedged herself into a corner of the room again, wrapped her thin arms around her bony knees, and stared into the room dully, her fear at last blunted by exhaustion. She moved as if startled once more, at five of one, but by the way she looked around the room she saw nothing.

At quarter to three, just when Rhion could smell the beginnings of dawn in the lapis infinity of the world outside, Gall knocked on the door to tell him that the experiment was over.

11:00—cat

11:24—face on wall

11:24—Stopped pacing as if startled, resumed immediately

12:10—glass of water

12:45—spider

12:55—Raised head and looked around room as if checking for something, settled down almost at once.

“Promising.” Von Rath laid the two sets of notes on the library table before him, aligned their edges with his habitual neatness, and surveyed his fellow mages with eyes like glacier ice. “Your impressions?”

“It was—astounding,” Baldur whispered reverently, black-rimmed nails picking at the edge of a nearby book. “I c-could feel the power flowing into you, you blazed like a torch with it.”

“You were losing twenty-nine thirtieths of it.” Rhion leaned back in his chair. His whole body ached from lack of sleep, the few hours of dream-tortured slumber he’d fallen into that morning doing nothing to make up for two nights without and his exertions on the astral plane on top of that. The splinters of sunlight forcing their way between the library’s snuff-colored curtains were agonizingly bright in the room’s brownish twilight; Poincelles and Baldur both squinted and winced whenever they turned that way. Gall, as usual, sat stoically in a corner. From his window during one bout of sleeplessness Rhion had seen him at dawn, walking calmly nude down the path beyond the wire to Round Pond for his morning swim.

“There was power in the room,” von Rath insisted doggedly. “I know it. I felt it.”

“Some of the Shining Crystal texts mention a Talismanic Resonator,” Baldur put in diffidently. “They do not say what it is, but they speak of it as establishing a field of power.”

“As the Holy Grail did,” Gall said, shifting his slender form in his chair, the harsh afternoon sunlight making of his long white hair a glowing halo. “And as certain other sacred relics could. The crystal tip of the golden pyramidion atop the ancient Pyramid of Khufu.

“Which you were privileged to buy from a trusted antiquities dealer in Cairo?” Poincelles inquired sarcastically, glancing up from filing a broken fingernail back into a neat point.

“A Talismanic Resonator will work only if there’s something for it to resonate with,” Rhion said, firmly cutting off Gall’s indignant rejoinder. “And in this universe you’d kill yourself raising a field as little as a mile across.”

“Perhaps a stronger drug? Or another type of drug?”

“Be my guest,” Rhion retorted sourly. “Only don’t ask me to take any—or to be in the building when you start screwing around with power while under the influence.” He took off his glasses to rub his red and aching eyes. Von Rath looked far worse than he had yesterday morning when they had spoken outside the temple, as if he had not slept at all. Good, thought Rhion. It meant he’d sleep soundly tonight.

Hurting for sleep himself, Rhion considered putting off breaking into the Dark Well and activating the Spiracle for another twenty-four hours. He needed rest desperately—Rebbe Leibnitz probably did, too—and there seemed little chance of getting any during the remainder of the day. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to manipulate the power of the Void, even at his most alert.

But some obscure instinct prickled at him, like a damp wind ruffling at his hair; an awareness that tonight would, for a dozen half-sensed reasons, be better than waiting for tomorrow. Tonight was Wednesday. If they put things off until tomorrow night Sara would have to find an excuse not to be at the tavern, and too many of those would begin to make someone suspicious. Tonight the moon would be at its full—a slender source of power, but one the Lady had taught him to use. Tonight von Rath was likelier to be asleep, and tomorrow might see some kind of preparation for the solstice sacrifice itself afoot. He groaned inwardly and wondered if he could manage to steal a nap during the afternoon.

The others were still arguing. He should have been keeping his mind on them but couldn’t.

“There are other d-drugs listed in the Anascopic Texts—”

“That are pharmacologically absurd.”

“Not to mention that the body ought to be purified, rather than polluted, before the working of magic.”

“Nonsense.” Baldur pushed back his lifeless dark hair with one twitching hand and sniffled. “The potion Major Hagen used in the D-Dark Well ceremony—”

“Which killed him.”

“We don’t know what killed him. It was the same potion P-P-Paul—Captain von Rath—used last night, and at the rites before, and it elevated him, exalted him.”

“He could have been flying in circles around the chandelier,” Rhion spoke up wearily, “and it wouldn’t have done him any good. Without the ability to convert power to physical operancy, you can disembowel every Jew in Germany, and it’s not going to buy you one damn thing.”

“Then I will disembowel them.” Von Rath looked up, his face a skull’s face in the gloom. “Every occultist, every medium, every psychic—every child whose house was visited by the
poltergeisten—
every source of personal
manna
, of the inner power, the
vril
, of magic, that we can lay our hands on, will be sacrificed. If we can raise enough power it
must
convert, it
must
answer to my bidding. And for that we will sacrifice every one.”

He was looking at Rhion as he spoke, and Rhion felt the blood drain from his face as he understood.

The soft voice sank still further, like the murmur of the angry ghosts whose power whispered still in the colder corners of the house. “Every one. You say there is no physical operancy in this world. So. Yet one of the so-called Jew wizards incarcerated at the Kegenwald labor camp escaped only the night before last, escaped across an open yard under plain sight of the guard towers without being seen.”

Dear God, no, not when I’m so close
… “That’s possible with illusion.”

“And illusion is what we are trying to raise against the RAF. The thing that you say cannot be done.”

Poincelles laughed. “Escaping from a prison doesn’t need illusion. Just a little…” And he rubbed his fingers together suggestively.

“In France, perhaps,” Gall replied coldly.

“This is the real world, my dear Jacobus.”

To von Rath Rhion said quietly, “It isn’t the same.” His lips felt numb.

“So you say.” Von Rath stood up, for an instant in the shadows seeming to be a skeleton in his black uniform, with his wasted face and frostburn eyes. His voice was the dry stir of demon-wings. “We have trusted you, Rhion. We have believed your assurances that you have made with us—with the Holy Order of the SS—with the destiny of the German Reich—a common cause.”

He tipped his head to one side and regarded Rhion, not even as a friend once trusted and trusted no longer, but as a stranger as unknown to him as the men he had killed last night.

“The summer solstice is coming—a time of power. The Universe is moving to its balance point, when its powers can be turned by a single hand. On that day we will make a talisman of power, a battery, against the day later in summer when we can give our abilities to the assistance of our Fatherland in the breaking of our enemies’ stronghold. We depend upon the aid you have professed yourself willing to offer us. And if we find that you have lied to us in your assurances and betrayed our trust, I tell you now that it would be better for you if you had never been born.”

Sara and her father were waiting for him in the redolent darkness of the trees beyond the Schloss’ yard lights. The full moon rode high, limpid and regal; a whispered catch of the hymn the Ladies sang to her floated through Rhion’s head as he stood motionless in the shadows of the old kitchen door, watching Poincelles stride like a lean and feral tomcat from the direction of the guards’ barracks, a couple of props under his arm.

I left the house of the Sun,

I left the houses of light,

To walk in the lands of the stars,

In the lands of the rain.

Children living in darkness,

I give you what I can.

Children of the earth,

I give you what I can.

Children of magic,

I give you what I can…

By the drenched quicksilver light, the Frenchman set the props up—Rhion thought wryly that the ground in that little gully must be getting pretty well grooved—shoved his little bundle of implements under the wire, and then followed with that curious, gawky agility that seemed almost spiderlike in the dark.

Rhion hated him. Early in their friendship, Sara had shown him the place where Poincelles had taken up the threshold-board at the entrance to the attic to put a talisman of badly cared lambskin where Rhion would cross it a dozen times a day, a talisman, she informed him, consecrated to bringing him under Poincelles’ influence—“Bastard paid me twenty marks to help him raise ‘sex magick’ to charge it,” she’d remarked, screwing the board down again above the rotting, mouse-eaten thing. “I should have charged him fifty.” Having no power, it didn’t trouble him. But in dreams, again and again, he had unwillingly witnessed the torture rituals of the Shining Adepts and had seen how they were accomplished; he knew who had laughed when the knife went in.

As Poincelles approached the shadowy verge of the trees, a figure appeared. For an instant Rhion’s heart stood still—then he saw that the waiting girl was smaller than Sara and the pale blonde of the most Teutonic type. Long braids hung down over the white uniform blouse of the League of German Maidens, framing a face at once pretty and sensual, with a lush mouth and discontented eyes. When Poincelles put a hand upon her waist she raised her arms to circle his neck. Scarcely louder than the rustle of the pines, Rhion heard his throaty chuckle.

Then they were gone.

“If he thinks he’s gonna deceive Asmodeus with that little
tchotchke
he’s out of luck,” Rebbe Leibnitz remarked dryly, when Rhion had reached the lichen-blotched granite boulder behind which the old man and his daughter waited. The old scholar had traded his camp rags for an ill-fitting utility suit of the kind a workman might wear on his day off; his hands were shoved deep in the shabby jacket’s pockets; under the bill of the cap that hid his shorn head, his dark eyes gleamed with amusement. Beside him, Sara was dressed as she had been two nights ago in a man’s trousers and pullover, with only a frizzed red tangle sticking stiffly out from beneath a cap of her own. Close to, her clothes smelled of smoke, but she hadn’t lit a cigarette for fear of the smell or the pinpoint of its light alerting the guard. Her pockets bulged with her housebreaking tools.

“He doesn’t seem to have much luck getting virgins, that’s for damn sure,” Sara sighed, with a shake of her head. “But you’d think he’d have more sense than to go looking for them in the League of German Mattresses.” She glanced over at Rhion, her dark eyes, like her father’s, a gleam in the shadow of her capbill. “Even money he’s going to ask those demons of his to bring you under his power again.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rhion put aside the brief memory of Sara’s nude body stretched on the altar beneath the downturned point of the inverted pentacle, candle flame like honeyed gold on the spread legs and perfect breasts. “What matters is, he’s paid the guards to look the other way between here and the house.”