Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (29 page)

Then he dreamed, much more clearly, of Paul von Rath, sitting in his own study, that dark, vast room choked with stolen books, unkempt, unshaven for the first time since Rhion had known him, gaunt cheeks spotted with the dry fever of his obsession and gray eyes chilled and narrowed to cold silver-white as he bent over his books, reading… He wore no uniform, only the dressing gown of thick, dark silk he’d had on in the cellar, his naked chest visible beneath it and the steel swastika on its chain at his throat catching the light in a flat, hard flash. Like something scried at a distance, Rhion saw him raise his head as the study door opened and saw Poincelles there, dark face flushed with spite…

Then he woke, gasping, the heat pressing upon him like a slow ruthless vampire, and sweat running down his face, matting clothes and beard and hair. The sun was sinking. The three splinters of light from the louvered vent had stretched to arrows, then to attenuated javelins, and now were fading altogether; in the yard were the sounds of truck engines and the dulled, angry grate of men, foul-mouthed with disappointment and fatigue.

“They sound beat,” Sara whispered, her lips twisting in a grin as she flipped over a card. “Good—by two in the morning, we’d be able to take a steam calliope and horses out of here without them noticing.”

The sentries around the perimeter of the house had been doubled, but the men were, as Sara had said, exhausted from a day of combing the woods, and it was a simple matter to create an illusion near the fence in a spot just out of view of the gully under the wire. It was a fairly ordinary illusion—two dogs copulating—but of sufficient interest to the type of men who made up the SS to hold their attention. Rhion, Sara, and Rebbe Leibnitz crossed the yard together and slipped under the fence and so into the woods.

Rhion and Leibnitz spent the following day hiding in the woods on the slopes behind Witches Hill. The guards from the Schloss, fortified with Waffen divisions from Kegenwald and even from Gross Rosen, were still searching, though not very energetically, Rhion thought, scrying for them in a pool of standing water. Still, the danger from them was real enough to prevent him from sleeping much or from sinking for long at a time into the meditation he knew he’d need to gather his strength for tonight.

He attempted to scry for the SS wizards both in water and in his crystal and, not much to his surprise, could not. At another time of year, perhaps, with greater concentration… But for them, too, the sun-tide held some little power; their seal after all was the sun-wheel, turning in reverse. He did manage to see the Schloss from far off, a tiny image in the pond, and as the afternoon lengthened and the shadows began to cool he saw the gray truck with its black swastikas creeping like a poisonous beetle on the straight track that ran from the Schloss’ gates away toward Round Pond and thence to the Kegenwald road.
I will disembowel them
, von Rath had said, leaning forward in the stifling gloom of the Schloss library.
Every one… Every one
…

They would be saving the most powerful wizard they had for tonight’s sacrifice, Rhion thought, and shivered. More than one, probably, to draw out their souls, the essences of the lives, their torment, and their pain, focusing them by those ancient rituals through von Rath’s drugged mind to make talismans of power in the vain hope that quantity might somehow make a qualitative difference.

If they caught him between now and midnight, Rhion had a horrible certainty about what his own fate as well as Leibnitz’ would be.

At sunset, Sara returned. Rhion had scried for her half a dozen times during the day, at intervals in a thoroughly enjoyable argument with Leibnitz about the multiplicity of God, not because he thought he could help her at this distance but because he could not do otherwise. But her errand had been uneventful, and she came up the path to the clearing where they were to meet, pushing a stolen bicycle before her with a cardboard suitcase of clothes strapped to its handlebars. “I got train tickets,” she said briefly, opening her handbag—a considerably older and more conservative one than she usually carried—to hand Rhion a bar of black-market chocolate and extract a cigarette for herself. She wore a sternly tailored brown dress and low-heeled walking shoes, in keeping with the persona on her identity papers, an assistant bookseller’s clerk traveling with her boss on a buying tour. To her father she tossed, from the suitcase, a shabby tweed jacket, a clean shirt, and a better-looking cap. “I also got you a razor, Papa—you don’t have enough beard yet to look like anything but an escapee from a camp, and if you shave, it’ll look like you’ve got more hair than you do.”

Leibnitz put a defensive hand over the half-inch of grizzled stubble that covered his jaw. “The Rabbi Isaac ben Solomon Luria says—”

“Well, Isaac ben Solomon Luria didn’t ever have to pass himself off as a
goyische
bookseller on the way to Switzerland, so shave! Papa, please.”

“The child is a staff for the hand, the Yebamoth says,” the old man muttered, turning back toward the pool that still reflected the sweet silver green of the sky, “and a hoe for the grave. ‘Even a child is known by his doings…’ ”

Sara turned back to Rhion and, for the first time, reached out and took his hand. “Please come with us.”

He smiled and shook his head. Hate himself though he might for the selfish cowardice of it, with the dipping of the sun behind the black hackles of the hills, he had felt himself relax. Von Rath and the others would be beginning their ceremony. He knew where they were, knew that the SS mage’s attention would be fully occupied until after midnight. And in spite of his horror at what he knew would be going on, in spite of his loathing for what they did and were trying to do, what he felt was relief. He was safe. It wouldn’t be he who lay on the black granite of the altar under Poincelles’ knives; it wouldn’t be his pain, his magic, his death, that they wove into their unholy power.

It occurred to him that he perhaps owed it to this world to return to the Schloss and burn the place and its books to the ground. But even the ability to convert what energy he could raise to physical operancy wouldn’t help him against several dozen Deaths-Head Troopers. He could not risk even the chance of delay, and his own reserves of strength were perilously low. With the power of the solstice behind him, it was still going to take everything he had and everything he could summon from the lambent magic of the stones even to open the Void; Shavus, back at the Duke’s palace in Bragenmere, had better be on the other side with one hell of a lot of magic to get him through.

“I’ll be all right.”

“You don’t even have a goddam identity card!” Her hands, small and delicate and hard, tightened over his and she shook him, as if this would somehow make him understand.

“I keep telling you I won’t need one.”

She stared into his eyes for a long minute, then shook her head and turned away. “Okay,” she sighed. “You win. Papa, you stay here. Rhion, I’ll go with you to these rocks of yours. If you go poof and disappear, I’ll admit I was wrong. If you don’t… You come out of the country with us, because you’re gonna need all the help you can get. Deal?”

It might have been the turning of the earth toward the darkness, the lengthening of the shadows of the black ridge of hills, but it seemed that cold came over him, the leaden taste of defeat and death. He shivered. “It might be better if you got away while you can,” he said quietly. “Von Rath’s… busy… tonight; I don’t think the search will be heavy between now and midnight.”

“The hell with that, we can take the seven
a.m.
train as easy as the eleven
p.m.
Papa, if I don’t come back…”

“Then I won’t come back,” he said placidly, returning from the pool with a nicked and dripping face, tying his tie. “I’m coming with you. This,” he added, with wistful eagerness, “I want to see.”

Light lingered in the midsummer sky as they made their way down the mountain. During the long afternoon Rhion had cut an elder sapling with Leibnitz’ clasp knife, the only weapon or tool either of them possessed, to make a staff, on which he mounted the Spiracle as a headpiece. Now, as they walked, the last glow of the day flickered along the rune-scribbled silver, and it seemed to him that the five crystals knotted within it whispered to one another in some unknown speech. On the western side of the hills, power was rising, power called from pain and savagery and the black crevices of the human soul, but here in the hill’s long shadow the night was untouched. Among the dark pines and bracken, the cool air whispered of old enchantments. Rhion could feel a second ley when they crossed it, wan and attenuated but living with the life buried deep in the ground, pointing straight and glowing to the crossing at the Dancing Stones. Sunk in a half trance as he walked, Rhion sensed the lift and swell of the solstice power, as sun, stars, moon, and time drifted to their balance point, and it was as if every leaf, every fern, every mushroom, needle, and fallen fir cone gave forth a faint silvery shine.

The Stones, when he reached them, seemed to glow with it in the dark.

All gates stood open tonight. As he walked toward those two lumpish guardians and the broken altar between them, he felt as if he had been here on other solstice eves. His fear of pursuit, the sick terror he felt at what he guessed would happen to him if they were caught, eased and fell away. He sensed the whisper everywhere of freely given death and ecstatic mating, as if hundreds of bare feet all around him even yet swished the deep grass that washed the stones’ sides.

He had reached the Stones by midnight. He could escape. Jaldis…

He wasn’t sure why he thought of the old man just then—perhaps out of sorrow that for him there would be no returning, perhaps only some echo of a dream that he couldn’t recall.

Sara and her father stopped just beyond the edge of the trees that ringed the meadow. Rhion, his mind already settled into the rhythm of the triumphant sun, walked on alone.

The power of the ancient stone rose to meet him as he touched it. Every breath he drew drank light from the murmuring air. Overhead the moon stood, a day past full and half risen to its zenith, like the sweet swell of summer music drowning the stars. As he invoked the four corners of the earth, Rhion touched, like a ghastly shudder in the air, a fragment of the power that was being raised to the west, a stench of burned flesh and agony, and felt along the network of the leys that elsewhere it was the same, rites of hate being performed in ancient places of power whose names were only names to him: Nuremburg, Welwelsburg, Munich. The dread of pursuit touched him again, and with it the strange sense of
déjà vu
, but with the drawing of the Circle around the Stones he cut out both the thin psychic clamor and the evil power raised.

By the stars it was after eleven, though he did not need to see the sky’s great clock to know that midnight was near. Through a deepening trance he called the last remnants of his own power from his exhausted flesh, linking it with the altar stone and the turning firmament above, and he knew that no matter how many wizards Shavus had called in to help him on the other side, the jump was going to be bad.

A bluish haze of light trailed from his fingers as they brushed the altar stone, and everything that had been written there over the course of millennia seemed to swim to the surface: ancient runes; spells of light; handprints with fingers cut away in sacrifice; and the names of gods that went back to the name of the single power, the oldest names of the Mother and the Sky.

He stepped up onto the altar stone, barely aware of the world outside the Circle he had drawn and of the two dark forms of the only people he had cared for in this world watching from the edge of the trees. Raising the Spiracle on its staff he summoned, and seemed to see, far off and mere inches from his feet, a column of smoky darkness, stirring nameless colors, an abyss without light. All that was within him called forth the power of the Void, of the stone of sacrifice on which he stood, and of the turning stars.

He waited.

He knew when midnight came. The whole universe whispered a single word. Somewhere, dimly, there were shrieks, but the Circle he had drawn around the place held them out. The dark field of the Void’s magic enveloped him, and he reached out into it, seeking…

And found nothing.

No light, no sign, no answering call.

He deepened his concentration, forced his aching mind to focus more sharply, more clearly, searching that darkness, waiting, reaching, not thinking about what it meant that they were late.

If late was all they were.

He thought,
No. Please, no
.

In his trance state, time was not the same, but he knew when a half-hour passed, and then an hour. The wheel of the stars moved slightly overhead; the moon climbed, unconcerned, toward her shining zenith.

Please?

The power of the ancient stone, pouring up through him toward the balanced stars, began to fade at three. He clung to it for as long as he could, but felt it go, as the swinging momentum of the Universe slid away and its vast, lazy turning resumed its wonted course. Still Rhion remained, standing upright on the stone, the staff upraised in his hands, until his knees shook with the exhaustion of forty-eight hours of fatigue and dread, and the world lapsed back from its waking dream of magic into its accustomed sleep.

They hadn’t heard or couldn’t come—or had decided, for reasons best known to them, to leave him where he was.

Or it might just be that Sara was right. He had only dreamed of Tally and Jaldis, of his sons and his parents and the world in which he had grown up, dreamed while incarcerated in a madhouse somewhere. Perhaps the truth—the real truth—was merely something he had forgotten.

He closed his eyes, fighting to believe this was not the case. For a moment it seemed that everything within him ripped and gave, and inner darkness poured into the hollow that was left. Opening them, he called the last fragments of strength, or hallucination, to stare into the darkness—if it was darkness-seeking some tiny splinter of light, a mark, a rune, a thread of magic to guide him through…