Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (28 page)

“There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of the cupboard,” Sara panted, pointing to the dark line of doors that had made him so nervous last night. “It leads up to the crawlspace above this wing. You have to go first, Papa… you’re tall, you can pull me up. Rhion, you get your
tochis
back to your attic and get in your jammies. There’s still time to come down rubbing your eyes and asking what the fuss is about.”

“No,” Rhion said softly. He did not look at her—he stood, instead, with his hand on the wing of the leather armchair, gazing transfixed into the gleaming black rectangle of the one-way glass.

“God damn it, we’ve got no time.” Her hard little hand jerked at his sleeve, and he shook it off. He felt chilled all over, as if out of nowhere he’d felt the whistling descent of a sword blade pass within centimeters of his face, as the implications of what he saw beyond the dark glass sank in.

“Help me up there.” He turned abruptly and dove into the closet, where Leibnitz’ kicking feet were just vanishing through an inconspicuous square hole in the ceiling. Below, he could hear the voices of the guards as they emerged from the cellar to search the house.

“For Chrissakes…” Sara began, and he caught her waist, lifted her toward her father’s reaching hands.

“Get me up there!”
He shut the closet door behind him and reached up. Leibnitz caught one of his wrists in both big bony hands, and after a second, Sara caught the other. In the low, cramped space between the ceiling and the rafters of this wing, a dead lift wasn’t easy, but they managed to get his shoulders up to the level of the rafters on which they crouched; after a certain amount of puffing and kicking, he pulled himself through the hole and fitted the neat plank trap over it behind him.

“Well, you sure put your foot in it now.” Sara switched off her flashlight, leaving them in pitchy dark. “Old Pauli has no proof who was potchkeying around in there.”

“No.” Bent nearly double, he edged around behind Sara where she sat balanced on one rafter and stretched himself out on the one beyond. The crawlspace rose to a peak of about four and a half feet above either of the lodge’s two wings—only in the center block was there a half-story for attic rooms. Away in the darkness he could see—and smell—the nests of the rodents that lived there, and catch a glimpse of their angry eyes.
Sorry about violating your
Lebensraum, he thought wryly.
Into every life a little
Anschluss
must fall
.

“There’s no reason for him to guess it was you,” Sara went on. “Personally, I’d love to see that momzer Poincelles sashay in here an hour from now and try to explain where he’d been.”

Rhion shook his head, though Sara saw nothing of the gesture in the dark. “No,” he said again. “They changed that room, the one where they put the people on the receiving end of their experiments… the room on the other side of the glass.”

“Huh?”

“It’s a one-way mirror.” He felt carefully in his trouser pocket where he’d shoved the Spiracle in his haste. “I could see into that room.”

“Oh, come on, it’s pitch dark in there.”

“I saw,” he insisted quietly. “They’ve put furniture in there in the last twenty-four hours—a bed, a chair, a desk—and they’ve unbolted the door into the washroom on the other side.”

Footsteps thudded in the hall below, and though they had been barely whispering before, all three fugitives fell silent. A thready line of diffused light briefly outlined the square of the trapdoor in the dark, but by its angle the guards didn’t even aim their beams at the ceiling. In a guttural murmur of curses they were gone. Rhion laid his head down on his folded arms and breathed again.

For nearly an hour none of them spoke. Closing his eyes, stretching out his hyperacute wizard senses in the dense and stuffy blackness, Rhion found he could track the men back and forth, not only on this floor, but on the one below and in the central block and north wing of the house. He heard their voices and the thick uneasy drag of their breath as they moved from room to silent, haunted room; he felt the zapping tingle of electricity as they switched on light after light, unwilling—ignorant though they were of the inchoate powers lurking there—to be moving through the place in the dark. He heard a sergeant curse, and the opening and shutting of closet doors. Then far off, dim and deep, a voice came to him, chanting spells of breaking, of dissolution, and he heard the distant scrape of metal and soap and brickbats on stone.

Von Rath was dismembering the Dark Well.

Rhion shut his eyes, a shudder going through him at this last severing of any means of communicating through the Void. He fumbled in his trouser pocket again for the Spiracle.
This has to have worked
, he thought despairingly.
Don’t tell me I’m really stranded
.

His fingers touched the twisted iron, and he knew.

Magic was in it. The cold of the Void whispered in his mind as he drew out the braided circlet. It seemed to him a faint spark glinted deep in the heart of each of the five stones. Holding it up, he could see through it down the length of the crawlspace—rafters, dust-clotted cobwebs, the accumulated nastiness of a century of mice—to the narrow black louvers at the end. Yet as if he looked through a smoked mirror, he knew.

Down below he heard the moist pat of von Rath’s bare feet, ascending the chipped stone steps to the downstairs hall. Baldur’s anxious, stammering voice demanded if he was all right and what he had done. Then he heard Poincelles’ deep tones and caught the sound of his own name. Rhion wondered fleetingly just what account the French wizard was giving of his evening, but, satisfied that von Rath’s mind was temporarily distracted, he risked one of the lowest level spells he knew and summoned a tiny ball of blue light to his cupped palm.

It lay there glowing, the size of his little fingernail, a luminous edge of cerulean along his fingers, a chill spark in the scratched glass of his spectacle lenses and the deep blue of his eyes.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Sara muttered, sitting up and stretching the kinks from her back. “All right, Merlin, what do we do now? Poincelles has got to be back by this time, so you’ve blown your chance of pretending it wasn’t you.”

Pallid dawnlight had begun to thin the gloom under the roof, and in the yard the muffled gunning of engines sounded, the clatter of metal, belt leather, boots. A man cursed.

“He is.” Rhion closed his hand, killing the light that Sara had not seen. “And it wouldn’t be safe for me to go back even if they didn’t think it was me. The bed they’ve put in the other room…”

“Yeah, what was the deal with that?” Sara asked. Beyond her, on the other side of the trapdoor, her father continued to lie full length on the beam, only turning slightly to prop himself up on one bony elbow to watch them with dark eyes under the brim of his grubby cap. “The room’s got locks on the doors and no windows, it’s the logical place if they’re gonna hold a prisoner. If you say they’re going to be making a big sacrifice on the solstice…”

“If they unbolted the washroom that connects to that room,” Rhion said quietly, “it argues for longer than a day. And that bed not only had blankets, it had pillows. There’s only one prisoner in this place I can think of who rates a pillow and an easy chair. That room was fixed up for me. They planned to lock me up the day before the solstice, just in case.”

“So, you think they don’t trust you?” Leibnitz inquired, and Rhion grinned.

“As for what we do now… We lie low.” He replaced the Spiracle on its string in the open neck of his shirt, the jewels gleaming softly in the dark tangle of chest hair. “Here, for twenty-four hours, while they’re out searching the woods. Tomorrow morning, just before dawn, we slip out and hide in the woods.”

“Great,” Sara muttered savagely. She pulled off her cap and shook out her hair with an impatient gesture, the grimy light catching metallic splinters of brass in the red. “You get the whole countryside up in arms—it’s gonna be a real trick for me to get back to town long enough to collect the food and clothes and money I’ve got stashed in my room, let alone getting the three of us to the Swiss border.” Her voice was soft—they were all whispering barely louder than breath—but dripped with sarcasm. “Not to mention the fact that we don’t even
have
identity cards for you, and on the run we sure as hell won’t have a chance to get them.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Rhion said softly. “I’m not coming with you. And once the solstice is over—after midnight Friday—von Rath won’t be searching nearly as intently for me. He knows he has to catch me before the solstice, before the pull of the sun-tide gives me the power I need to open the gate in the Void and make the crossing to my own universe. That’s why he’s turning out his entire force now.”

“Fair enough,” Rebbe Leibnitz agreed and, rolling over onto both elbows, pulled a stub of pencil and his pince-nez from his pocket and began making a numerological calculation of the most auspicious hour and minute to leave the attic on the dusty plaster beneath the beam where he lay.

“I hate to break this to you, cupcake,” Sara whispered dourly, “but there ain’t no Santa Claus. Von Rath has mobilized the goon squad because he’s afraid you’re going to hightail it to England and spill your guts to Winnie Churchill. Within a week, this search is going to be nationwide.” She sat up tailor fashion, slim and straight, with her red hair hanging down over her square, thin shoulders and jutting breasts beneath the grimy shirt. Some of the acid left her voice, and there was concern in her dark eyes. “You poor deluded boob, what do you think’s going to happen to you tomorrow night? You’ll just go ‘poof’ and disappear?”

“Yes,” Rhion said simply. “I hope so.”

“
Oy gevalt
… We
all
hope so, but it doesn’t work that way.” She started to pull up her shirt to get at the money belt Rhion knew she habitually wore underneath, then paused, cast a quick glance at her father—obliviously working out some kind of calculation from a
vesica piscis
drawn over the Square of Mercury—and turned her back on both men. Rhion looked away from the girl’s slender rib cage visible beneath a bizarre strap-work of lace and elastic underpinnings, and tried with indifferent success to think of other things.

She turned back, shirt tail hanging out and a creased wad of papers and marks in her hand. “These might do us in an emergency, if I can’t get to the rest of my stuff,” she said. “And I might not. They know I’m your—ah—friend…” She cast another quick glance at her father, as if she feared that he had somehow, within the camp, heard rumors about the redheaded bar girl at the Woodsman’s Horn and intuitively connected them with his only child. “Once we get on the road it’s gonna be a trick to hide Papa’s head till his hair grows out a little.”

She transferred the papers to her pocket, withdrew from the same pocket a pack of filthy cards and shuffled them deftly, quietly, in the half light. In the yard below, the sounds of departure had died. The smell of dust was fading. A woodpecker’s hammering clattered unwontedly loud in the silence. Deep in his marrow, like a whispering of the leys that netted the earth, Rhion felt the stirring of the sun-tide begin.

“Rhion…” Sara looked up from the hand of gin she’d automatically laid out for the two of them between the rafters. “Why don’t you come with us? Forget the goddam summer solstice. We’ll get you out of this
vershluggene
country somehow. ”

He smiled and shook his head, touched by her concern. “I know you don’t believe me,” he said, “but tomorrow midnight really is my only chance to get home. It’s the only time the wizards of my world will know where to look for me, and the only time I’ll have enough power.”

For a long moment she studied him, worry softening the brittle cynicism of her eyes. Without her customary coating of lip rouge and makeup, she looked far younger than usual, exhaustion and stress darkening the lids of her eyes and sharpening cruelly the tiny lines of dissipation already printed in the tender flesh. Then she shook her head. “I wish to hell I knew where they got you,” she said softly. “Or where your home really is.”

“I’ve told you and you don’t believe me.” He smiled.

“I know,” she sighed. “Munchkinland.”

“So what’s not to believe?” Rebbe Leibnitz raised his head and adjusted his pince-nez reading glasses with long, bony fingers. “You remember Horus the Invincible, Saraleh, who stayed with us back in twenty-eight when
he
was an exile from his own dimension…”

“I remember he never returned the money he borrowed from you.”

Leibnitz shrugged. “So if he had, would we be hiding in a better class of attic today? He needed the money to continue his search for the Lost Jewels of Power that would open the Dimensional Gates…”

Sara rolled her eyes. “I give up. Give my regards to the Witch of the West.”

The day passed, oppressive and stifling. In the cramped, dark space beneath the roof tiles, the heat grew quickly intolerable; the inability to move about became torment in itself. In spite of it all, Rhion slept for hours, a breathless uncomfortable sleep on the eight-inch beam, tormented by cloudy dreams, while, unable to smoke, unable to pace, Sara fidgeted her way through endless games of solitaire and her father covered all the plaster within his considerable arm reach in a scrawled carpet of numerological abracadabra. Now and then Rhion opened his eyes to see the three hard splinters of brazen light that crawled along the slant of the struts overhead or Sara’s face, sweat-beaded and intent with her dark lashes turned to ginger by the sun. Then he would slide back into a gluey abyss of dreams.

He dreamed of Tallisett, riding in a swaying litter up the coiled road that led away from Bragenmere’s yellow sandstone walls and into the dry hills of the Lady Range… dreamed of the Duke, white-faced and ill, raising his head from the pillows of his sickbed to accept the cup Lord Esrex handed him with an encouraging smile, while in the background a dark, veiled shape stirred a little in the shadows… dreamed of the octagonal library tower against a robin’s-egg evening sky, its windows rosy with lights that gleamed on the steel helmets of armed men slowly gathering in the court below.

The dreams faded, turned cloudy and strange. Dimly, through his sleep, he felt the turning of the universe as the sun-tide strengthened and the year approached its pivot point, where its forces could be seized and swung by a man who knew its laws. Even those who knew nothing of magic felt it somehow, that at those two points—midsummer and midwinter—the doors that separated the mortal from the uncanny stood open, to admit sometimes fairies, sometimes the ghosts of the dead, and sometimes God. And even in his sleep, his hand, which lay curled around his glasses upon his chest, moved to touch the Spiracle, to feel there the whispered magic of the Void.