Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (22 page)

“You want this locked up again?” she asked softly, touching the padlock. “I can put it like this but not snib it closed. That way you can get in here again if you need to.”

“I will need to,” he said. “But von Rath’s getting more suspicious of me every day. If he finds it open, he’ll know it’s me tampering and will probably destroy the Well. I’ll need your help getting in here again, two, maybe three more times…”

She muttered something really terrible in Polish and helped him lift each box to avoid scratching the floor and put it back in the order they had been, as precisely as they could recall. As she picked up the flashlight to turn it off she looked briefly at his face in the finger-hooded glow.

“You okay?”

He nodded, turning his face from her and taking her elbow; she switched off the light and let him guide her across the cellar, through the archway, to the old dumbwaiter with its rope and its tiny set-in steps.

The candles in his room had guttered out. He reached with his mind to relight them, then fumbled tiredly in his pocket for a match, the ache of thaumaturgical impotence bringing back the hurt of all that other pain. While Sara put on her high-heeled shoes he sank down onto the bed, head pounding, struggling to keep his grief at bay until she was gone.

“First time I ever left an evening here wearing the same lipstick I came in with,” she remarked, though she renewed it for good measure, the glossy red giving her thin, triangular face a pulchritudinous lushness in the candle glow. “Come down to the tavern Monday and I’ll let you know how things went. I’ll tell Papa not to take the pills till Monday, so we can go through with the rest of this
mishegoss
Wednesday when the shop’s closed… Hey? You okay?”

He nodded, not looking at her. Worried, she came around the end of the bed to stand looking down at him with her arms folded beneath the soft shelf of her breasts.

“What happened in there?”

“Nothing,” he whispered.

She leaned down and gently removed his glasses from his face, putting them on the shelf beside the candle. He ached to touch her—to touch someone, only for the comfort of knowing he wasn’t absolutely alone. But to her a man’s touch meant only one thing, and she had enough of that, so he didn’t.

After a moment she pulled the thin coverlet up over him, turned and blew out the candle. He heard her high heels click away into darkness as she descended the attic stairs, and a few minutes later heard the car engine start outside and fade as it drove off into the night.

In the iron hour before dawn his dreams were evil. Perhaps it was what he had read of the rites of the Shining Crystal; perhaps the souls of the gypsy women, of the young Jewish clairvoyant, and of the elderly runemaster still lingered to vent their bitter rage on one who had acquiesced in their murders. Perhaps it was only fear. In the dream, Rhion found himself bound to one of the pillars in the black-draped temple, forced to watch the rite again and again—saw von Rath, gaunt and yellow as a man with fever in his long white robe, and Poincelles in bloodstained red. Over and over he heard the screaming, as if the sound itself were being drawn and twisted as a spinner twists wool into yarn, drawing strands of power from death and pain. He saw the power itself collecting, like dirty ectoplasmic slime, in pools on the altar, pools that moved a little when no one watched.

And in the morning, at the rites of meditation that they still performed, though to Rhion’s mind they had become a travesty of the calm opening to ritual work for which they had been designed, he observed their faces, wondering if they, too, had dreamed.

Gall, it was hard to tell. There was always a weird serenity about the old man, a calm that had nothing to do with right or wrong but depended entirely on his rigid apportioning of bodily and psychic energies, as if, for him, ultimately nothing really existed beyond the bounds of his own skin. Baldur, standing under the bloodred rune of Tiwaz at the northern “watchtower,” was twitchy and nervous, eyes glittering behind his thick glasses as if, between his endless quest for knowledge in the ancient books and the psychoactive drugs he was taking, cocaine was the only thing keeping him together.

Poincelles… If Poincelles dreamed, Rhion thought, regarding the gangling, dirty man with sudden revulsion, it was with a smile on his lips. That smile lingered now, as he made his responses with an air of amused tolerance for the peccadilloes of others. If von Rath sought the wine of power in the bloody rites of the Shining Crystal, Rhion now understood, what Poincelles enjoyed was the pressing of the grapes.

But it was von Rath who frightened Rhion most. Standing by the dark-draped altar, his hands outspread over the ritual implements there—sword and cup, book and thurifer—he was visibly thinner than he had been a week ago, as if the obsession with power—with converting power to operancy—were slowly consuming both flesh and mind.

Neitzsche, philosophical guru of the Nazi Party, had spoken of the triumph of the will, but as things were in this world it was physically impossible for von Rath’s will to triumph.

And as the warm spring days crept past and the moon waxed to its first quarter and then to a bulbous distorted baroque, Rhion saw more and more frequently that icy flatness in the young wizard’s eyes, and felt them on his back as he came and went.

It made things no easier that on Monday evening, in between her desultory flirting with the local Party official and a couple of guards from the Kegenwald camp—Monday was a quiet night in the tavern—Sara slipped him a note under his beer mug that simply read:
No soap
. In German the phrase indicated only that bathing would be an unsatisfactory experience, but in the parlance of American cinemas it meant a miscarriage of plans.

“Scum-sucking momzer didn’t even let us in,” Sara muttered savagely two nights later, when she was once again up in his room. The tavern was closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and she and the leggy blond Ulrica had been brought out to the Schloss at Rhion’s request and Poincelles’. Her hair, dyed brown on Sunday for her visit to the camp, was now stiffer, frizzier, and redder than ever in the dim glow of the candles and the reflection of the primus stove they’d pilfered from the workroom, a scalding frame for her alabaster pallor that clashed loudly with the pink of the worn and pilled angora sweater she wore.

“We waited from seven in the morning until nine at night—some of those poor broads had been on the train since nine the night before, coming in from Berlin and Warsaw and God knows where—just sitting outside the gates of the camp on the ground, without water, without nothing.” Her small, quick hands squeezed out a rag in the water she was heating; it steamed in the balmy warmth as she crossed to the bed and dabbed at the half-healed knife cut on the back of Rhion’s arm.

As she worked she continued bitterly, “We were scared to walk across the road to take a squat behind a bush in the woods, for fear they’d say
okay, come on in
while we were gone, with the guards all coming around and hassling whoever they thought was worth it. And there was I, feeling like I was sitting naked in the middle of Ebbets Field, praying the ones I’d screwed wouldn’t recognize me because I sure as hell wouldn’t recognize them, hiding behind a pair of fake glasses and trying to look frumpy and middle age… Christ!”

Her hand where it steadied his bared arm squeezed tight with rage so that even the chewed-short nails bit into his flesh. “And at the end of it some tight-assed kapo comes out and says ‘No visitors today. The prisoners are being punished.’ ”

“For what?”

“Who knows? Who cares?” She dropped the cloth on the floor, and the smell of cheap gin filled the room as she soaked a second rag—the last scrap of Rhion’s old shirt. The alcohol stung his skin. “Still looks clean, but you’re gonna have a bitch of a scar,” she added, binding the wound up again.

“Whose fault is that?” He pulled on his sweatshirt again, though the night was warm enough to have given him no discomfort; Sara gathered the discarded rags and draped them over the edge of the table to dry, then bent to light a cigarette in the flame of the primus stove. “That pushes it till next Sunday.” His eyes went involuntarily to the spot in the rafters that was the Spiracle’s latest hiding place. “And that’s the last Sunday before the solstice.”

“You don’t think I know that?” She dropped angrily back onto the bed, back propped on the iron-spindled headboard, and reached across to the tableful of bedside candles to take an angry swig from the flask of medicinal gin. “Crazy goddam witchdoctors…” She blew a stream of smoke.

Rhion decided not to mention that von Rath had spoken of doing another experiment—not merely the making of talismans, but an attempt to convert the power of the sacrifice into workable illusion—on the night of the full moon, six nights hence and a few days before the greater rite and talisman-making on the solstice itself. If they were lucky, Sara’s father would be out of danger by that time anyway. The thought of what he’d have to do if they
didn’t
succeed in freeing the old man brought the sweat cold to his face.

“What is that thing, anyway?”

He glanced across at her with a start. Sara, her knees crossed in a soft waterfall of skirt gores, was looking up at the Spiracle’s hiding place. “That iron and silver gismo with the crystals in it. Do all wizards hide little
tchotchkes
around where they live? Papa did.”

Rhion grinned, remembering Jaldis’ propensity for secret devices. “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s the thing I need your father’s help—and yours, since you’ll have to get us into that room in the cellar again—to finish.” He pushed the delicate wire frame of his spectacles more firmly up onto his nose. “The rite of charging it has to be done by the solstice,” he added, more quietly. “If we can’t get your father out by then…” He shivered at the thought of taking the thing down to the cellar and stepping into the Dark well without another wizard present to keep him from being drawn in and destroyed.

“Then we’ll get him out afterward.” Sara’s gaze, holding his, was flint. “Won’t we?”

Rhion said nothing. If they didn’t get the old man out before solstice-tide the odds were horribly good he himself would be dead afterward. If he wasn’t, it would be because he’d lost his nerve at the last moment—in which case it was one
hell
of a long time to the equinox, too long to count on—or because he’d succeeded, impossibly, in charging the Spiracle himself.

And in that case, he thought, could he leave Sara to her own devices? He remembered the brief vision in the scrying crystal, the old man with the scarred lip raising his eyes to the window far above his head. He owed neither of them a thing—his arm still hurt every time he moved it and he was damn lucky, given his inability either to work healing spells or get proper attention to the wound, that it hadn’t festered.

But he knew the man was a wizard. He’d seen it in his eyes. And yet it was the solstice or nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to make that choice.

Walking to the window, he felt Sara’s dark eyes follow. Out in the yard one of the floodlights had gone out, and upon the ground below him he could see the ochre smear of reflected candlelight that marked von Rath’s study window. A shadow passed across it: the SS wizard pacing, restless, fevered, an animal driven by invisible goads, far into the night.

SARA WHISPERED, “THIS HAD BETTER WORK.”
her hands, as she shoved her crazy hair up under a man’s cloth cap, were steady and her white face calm, stark without its habitual disguise of lipstick and paint. But the brazen glare of the camp floodlights at the bottom of the hill caught the fine glitter of sweat on her short upper lip.

Rhion only nodded. He wanted to reassure her, but was too deep in his trance of concentration to speak. In any case they had been through it all on the drive from the crossroads near the Schloss where Sara had picked him up.

In the surrounding dark of the pinewoods a nightingale warbled. Six miles away, the Kegenwald village church clock spoke its two notes, the sound carrying clearly in the moonless hush of the night. These sounds, like Sara’s voice, seemed to come to Rhion from a very great distance, clear but tiny, like images in the scrying crystal. Far more real to him were the two watchtowers of the Kegenwald camp perimeter visible from this hillside, open wooden turrets mounted on long legs like sinister spiders, each ringed in floodlights and dark within.

He stood in each of those watchtowers, a shadowy consciousness more real to him now than the body kneeling in its scratched protective circle just within the gloom of the woods’ edge. He spoke to each man separately—a flaxen-haired boy in the left-hand turret, an older man, tough and scarred with a broken nose, in the right. They did not precisely hear his voice, as he whispered to them the dreamy, buzzing songs of nothingness that the Ladies of the Drowned Lands had taught him. But they listened nevertheless, gazing idly in opposite directions, outward into the night.

It was not an easy illusion to maintain. With his own awareness split into dim ectoplasmic twins, he had to keep within his mind from instant to instant the separate realities of the two watchtowers—the hollow clunk of wooden floors underfoot, the dark webwork of the struts that supported the roof and the pattern the wires stapled to them made, leading up to the lights above; the moving sharpness of the air from the bristled darkness of the woods; the murky nastiness of the men’s dreams. To the older sentry Rhion breathed songs dipped from the man’s cramped and limited mind, the taste of liquor and blue tobacco smoke woven into fantasies of endless, repetitive, impossible intercourse with woman after woman, and all of them alike, all gasping with delight or sobbing with grateful ecstasy. To the younger, after searching the narrow hate-stained thoughts, he wove a different dream, of assembling, disassembling, assembling again some kind of automatic weapon, polishing, cleaning, making all perfect. Oddly enough he sensed the same pleasure in the precise click and snap of metal and the neat, controlled movements as the first Trooper had in his reveries of bulling endless willing blondes.