Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (9 page)

He was theoretically acquainted with the spells by which Spiracles of Heat could be charged to keep their wielder surrounded by warmth in bitterest cold, or Spiracles of Daylight that would permit, within their small field of brightness, the use of spells that ordinarily had power only during the hours when the sun was in the sky. Whether a Spiracle could be charged so that it would hold the essence of the Void’s magic about itself he didn’t know, for it had never to his knowledge been tried.

Theoretically, once he had a localized field of magic from the Spiracle, there was no reason why he had to be anywhere near the Dark Well to open a gate through the Void—all that it required was magic. Practically, of course, unless he wanted to perish in the airless cold chaos between universes, he needed the Dark Well, needed it to establish contact with the Archmage Shavus and the other Morkensik wizards so that they could draw him through the Void, back to his own world.

Not to mention the fact, he thought dryly, though his stomach was sinking with terror and dread, that he would have to be standing
in the Void
to charge the Spiracle.

And that meant the Dark Well.

That meant doing the thing that had taken Eric Hagen’s life.

And that brought him back to Poincelles and the conversation in the tavern tonight.

Rhion got to his feet and prowled restlessly back to the window. In the acid glare he could see the black-uniformed sentry, rifle on shoulder, walking the perimeter of the fence. He needed help, needed another wizard to ground him, hold him anchored to this world, while he charged the Spiracle with the Void’s wild magic, but the thought of putting his life in Auguste Poincelles’ nicotine-yellowed hands terrified him. For all von Rath’s gentle charm, it was perfectly possible that the SS Captain had put Poincelles up to making a pass at Rhion tonight in the tavern to test his intentions—to see whether he really was holding something back.

He didn’t know, and the uncertainty, the dreadful sensation of never knowing whom to trust and whether his instincts were correct or not, was profoundly disorienting and exhausting.

“And anyhow,” he muttered dourly, climbing back on the chair and replacing the Spiracle in its hiding place in the rafters, “the whole question is pretty academic until I can
find
the goddam Dark Well.”

He returned to the window and checked the stars. Shortly after midnight. By the glow in the east above the spiky black of the tree-clothed hills, the moon would be rising soon, wan and cold in its last quarter. First dawn was some three hours away. From the drawer in the dresser where he kept his old brown robes Rhion fished the wristwatch von Rath had given him, and after a moment’s study confirmed the timepiece’s accuracy, at least as far as he understood the way time was reckoned here.

He put the watch back in the drawer. Though he recognized the ingeniousness of the mechanism he seldom wore it, chiefly from annoyance at the obsession these people had with the correct time. But every now and then, when he handled the intricate golden lozenge, he sensed upon it a vague psychometric residue of uncleanness that repelled him, but that he could not quite place. Other things in the Schloss had it, too, odd things: the plates of a certain pattern in the big, sunny dining room in the south wing; the radio in the guards’ watch room; some of the books in the library. He wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with them—and indeed, it was something he sensed only intermittently. But he didn’t like it.

He listened now, and the lodge was quiet.

His stockinged feet made no sound on the bare floor boards as he crossed first the darkness of his own room, then the vast, dusty spaces of the main attic. The descending stair debouched close to von Rath’s study and bedroom. From the main stair to the lower floor he heard the soft crackle of the radio still. By now he knew enough German to follow the broadcast, though not most of Chancellor Hitler’s speeches. Now and then a Storm Trooper’s voice would speak, desultory and half asleep. In his long nights of quiet listening Rhion had learned that inside duty generally involved three sentries who made a patrol or two of the ground floor in between long periods of sitting around the watch room smoking, reading cheap tabloids like
Der Sturmer
, and comparing notes about the barmaids at the Woodsman’s Horn. Sometimes one or another of the barmaids was smuggled in, to be taken by a dozen of the men in turn in the deserted kitchen or laundry in the south wing—occasionally he heard Poincelles’ voice on those nights.

But tonight there was only the desultory conversation of men who have said everything they had to say months ago. He waited until he heard all three voices, then, barely daring to breathe, he stole soundlessly down the stairs and slipped like a shadow past the watch room door. There was, he knew, a backstairs leading down to the kitchen in the south wing, but its upper end was in the little dressing room attached to the empty chamber where the Dark Well had allegedly been drawn—the false Dark Well, to convince him that it had been destroyed—and that chamber was next to von Rath’s. In any case he would still have had to pass the watch room door to reach his destination on the ground floor, an old ballroom in the north wing that Hagen and von Rath, upon taking possession of the Schloss the previous fall, had converted into a temple for occult rites.

Its door lay at the end of a wide oak-paneled hallway and, like all the Torweg wizards, Rhion had a key. As he relocked the door behind him Rhion could feel a sort of afterglow of power whispering around him in the utter darkness of the vast, velvet-draped room, the residue of morning after morning of ritual work and occult meditation, of painfully tiny quantities of power raised and dispersed. Beneath that, he dimly sensed the even fainter silvery tide of the ley-line that ran below.

In years past the site of the Schloss had enjoyed a peculiar reputation—it was on this spot, Rhion guessed, crossing the worn parquet floor to the altar, here where the ley-line bisected the mound, that the ancient god had originally been worshipped and the witches had later held their sabbats. He settled himself cross-legged against the altar stone, a six-foot slab of black granite draped, like the walls, in black. Upon the altar a second drape hid the ritual implements of cup, sword, dagger, and thurifer. Coming here to scry was somewhat riskier than doing it in his room, but far quicker; in his room it sometimes took him as much as an hour of intense concentration before he was able to see anything in the crystal.

He lit the stub of candle he had to force himself to remember to carry in his pocket these days—thanking all the gods of wizardry that von Rath had seen fit to board up all the windows of this room and no light would show to the guards in the compound outside—and, taking the scrying crystal from its bag, angled its facets to the light.

The Dark Well was still there, wherever “there” was. It was quiescent, no more than a half-seen shadow in the absolute blackness of that other, windowless room. Studying it with his wizard’s sight through the medium of the crystal, Rhion estimated the size and proportions of that chamber: thirty feet wide and immensely long, the low ceiling propped with heavy beams, the uneven floor paved with the rough, damp stone he recalled. In fact, he reflected wryly, it was of a size and shape and composition to be directly beneath the ballroom/temple where he now sat. Ceiling, beams, and floor were as far as he could tell identical to those in the portions of the Schloss’ cellars that he had entered.

“I’m probably sitting directly on top of the goddam thing,” he muttered to himself, closing his hand over the crystal, the image dying in the darkness of his palm. The stairs leading down into the cellar were kept double padlocked, and it was a good guess that the only keys were in the hands of von Rath and of the SS lieutenant in charge of the guards. On one of his trips down there—unobtrusively supervised by von Rath—he had gained the impression that the portion of the cellar which should lie under the north wing was blocked off by a wall, the wall piled high with boxes. That meant a concealed door, undoubtedly locked, as well.

He cursed himself mildly for never having taken up Shavus on the old Archmage’s offer to teach him to pick locks. The only way he could get into that cellar was by magic… and of course he would not be able to use magic until he could get into the cellar and charge the Spiracle—if his spells worked, and if the charging didn’t kill him.

And unless he had another wizard to help him, it probably would.

Always, like an ox at the millstone, he came around to that again: to the Dark Well; to Poincelles… to trust; and to his instinct that stepping into the Void alone and unassisted would be safer than trusting the French occultist with the smallest information regarding his real intentions and abilities.

He sighed and pushed up his glasses to rub his aching eyes. Twenty days remained until the summer solstice, twenty days until he could—with luck—raise enough power from the turning point of the Universe to open a gap in the Void so Shavus and the others could pull him through…

If he could get in touch with them. If he could find another wizard he could trust. If…

He shook his head and, opening his hand, looked down into the crystal again.

In it he saw the sea. Black waves ran up onto beaches in darkness, beaches crowded with men whose faces and bodies were outlined in the sudden, terrible glare of yellow-white explosions—beaches littered with wrecked equipment, hideously strewn with tangled corpses in the shell-holed sand, and men standing knee-deep in water, or huddled in shallow holes they’d scooped out in the sand, desperate for even the illusion of shelter. A long quay extended into the sea, longer than Rhion had ever seen, even in the great harbor of Nerriok, and this, too, was jammed with men. They stood quiet, without shoving, while death spat and whistled around them, burning fragments of metal leaving red streams of fire in the dark. Men waiting. And far out over the water to the west, the gold pinprick of a ship’s light gleamed suddenly in the black.

Perhaps, Rhion thought wearily, closing his hand over the crystal again, he should be glad. These men would be the spiritual brothers of those who had blinded and mutilated Jaldis, who looked with distrust upon magic and all that it stood for, who could not see beyond their own pockets and their own bellies and who wanted to turn the world into the image of their own greedy, limited minds.

Perhaps he was simply weak; between the Reich’s obsessive racism, self-righteous closed-mindedness, and casual arrogance, and these corrupt and nameless servants of the mechanist English, there didn’t seem to be a lot to choose. The best thing he could do, Rhion thought, would be simply to go home.

If he could.

“Useless!” Paul von Rath thrust from him the body of the dead white rat and the pan of poisoned sugar water in which a seven-carat garnet gleamed mockingly, a talisman of protection inscribed with the colored sigil of the interlaced runes of Eohl, Boerc, and Ehwis. “Nothing—it did nothing at all!”

“I d-don’t understand,” Baldur stammered, his weak, bulging eyes peering from rat to gem and back again with baffled outrage. “The rite we used to charge this talisman came from Johan Weyer’s own private journal! There was no way he would have recorded a false rite, or—or changed details. I made every allowance, every transposition of the k-key words and phrases according to the best redaction we possess of the Dyzan manuscript…”

Rhion, hitching back the sleeves of the long white robe in which the wizards all worked in their meditations and occult experiments, crossed the big laboratory and picked the jewel from its glass petri dish. He wiped the poisoned solution off with a lab towel and turned the gem a few times in his palm. “It’s charged, all right.”

“Of c-course it’s charged!” Baldur whirled to paw through the stack of notes on the nearby bench as if for documentation of the fact, nearly knocking over a beaker of the strychnine distillate they’d used to test the poison spell’s effectiveness. “The formula was impeccable, the source absolutely certain!”

“Give me that.” Gall, in his flowing robe and shoulder-length white hair looking very much like the ancient priests of whom he was always having visions, almost snatched the talisman from Rhion’s hand. From a little labeled box on the laboratory table he removed a smooth stone tied to a silken string—this he held over the gem, watching its random movement with pale, intolerant eyes.

“No one is blaming you, Baldur,” von Rath said gently.

“But nothing can have gone wrong! The p-power you raised in this morning’s rite was enormous, stupendous…”

“It was certainly greater than it has been,” Rhion remarked, retreating to the corner of the lab. Like the temple immediately below it, the room that they had fitted up as a wizards-kitchen had had all of its windows boarded over—a pointless affectation from a thaumaturgical point of view but one that had allowed Rhion to work on the Spiracle late at night unobserved by the guards in the yard. The reflections of the kerosene lamps that illuminated the room in preference to electricity gilded the young Captain’s fair hair almost to the color of honey and glinted on the steel swastika he wore on a chain about his neck. On shelves around what had at one time been a drawing room on the second floor of the north wing an assortment of jars, boxes, and packets contained everything Rhion had ever heard of as necessary to the making of talismans: iron, silver, gold, and copper of various purities; salts and rare earths; every sort of herb and wood imaginable; gems, crystals, both cut and uncut; parchments and strange inks. There was a small forge, crucible, and press, even an icebox containing samples of the blood of various animals and birds. And yes, he thought, smiling to remember the first time Tally had come to the rooms he’d shared with Jaldis, even a mummified baby alligator…

And for all the good it had done them so far, the shelves might just as well have been stocked with twigs and pebbles, like children playing “store.”

Baldur snuffled and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his robe. “Maybe the formulae are p-poison-specific? It could explain…”