Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (3 page)

The gray eyes changed, losing their coldness. “Eric—Major Hagen—had used the morning ritual for years, since he was a youth at school.” His soft, steady voice still echoed with the grief of loss, a grief as sharp, Rhion knew, as his own mourning for Jaldis. Was it Gyzan the Archer who had said
Perhaps the ending of all dreams is death
… ?

“That was what first brought us together, years ago—the dawn opening of the ways to power. I had the Crowley texts and was looking for those that had been
his
sources—I was only sixteen, and terrified that the masters at the Academy would find out I was interested in such matters. A bookseller in Brandenberg gave me Eric’s name. He was living in the most awful garret while he pursued his studies…” He shook his head, his mouth quirking a little as he recalled the young student he had known, the haunted, conscientious little cadet he had himself been… “He was the only one who understood, the only one I could talk to about that which was within me—that which I knew
had
to be true.”

Then he laughed a little, like a sudden flash of sun on frost-hard December earth. “I remember the winter night in that garret of his when we first contacted Jaldis. It was a few days before Christmas and freezing cold. I had to be on the train home the next morning, to a true old Prussian Christmas with every aunt and uncle and cousin I possessed. With the drugs we were using to project our minds into the Void, I still can’t imagine why we didn’t kill ourselves…”

The car slowed as it swung into the shadows of the road cut, where earlier they had edged past the washed-down rocks and mud. Now a gang of men was there, chained together and wearing shabby gray shirts and trousers, shoveling the clayey yellow mud into a sort of sledge under the rifles of four or five gray-uniformed guards. One of the guards yelled, “Get that
verfluchter
sledge the hell out of the road!” Others cuffed and shoved the corvee to obey. The men moved with the slow shakiness of borderline starvation as they set down their shovels and stumbled to comply.

The officer in charge hastened to the side of the car as it pulled to a halt. “Heil Hitler. My apologies, Captain, we’ll have it clear in a minute. This road sees so little traffic…”

“That’s hardly an excuse for blocking it!” Baldur flared, but von Rath waved him quiet.

“Quite understandable, Lieutenant.”

“I—I heard about Major Hagen, sir,” the officer said after a moment, touching the brim of his cap in respect. His uniform was gray instead of black, but Rhion recognized the insignia of the SS on collar and shoulder tabs; he reflected that the Reich of Germany was probably the most comprehensively protected realm he had ever seen. “A great loss to the service of the Reich, but I was afraid something of the kind would happen. The drugs you were using for those experiments…” He shook his head. “He should have taken a little more time. After all the men who died while he was experimenting for the right dosage, he should have been more careful. Hell,” he added, nodding toward the workers, stumbling as they dragged at the sledge. “The Commandant would have sent him over as many more of these swine as he needed to make sure.”

“We were under a time constraint,” von Rath said politely. “Thank you, Officer…”

With a gravelly scraping on the rough asphalt of the road, the sledge was hauled clear. Horst put the car in gear and started to move forward slowly. The officer touched his cap again. “Ah, well, there it is. If you need any more, just let us know!”

“That troubled you.” With a touch on his sleeve von Rath halted Rhion in the doorway of the library, a long room occupying much of the main lodge’s eastern face, and let the others go past them along the upstairs hall to their own rooms to prepare for lunch. Only Baldur stopped and came back to trail them into the long, gloomy chamber, unwilling, Rhion suspected, to let his hero have a conversation with anyone in which he was not included.

Still shaky with shock, anger, and a vague sense of betrayal, Rhion didn’t much care. “Just a little, yes.”

Neither von Rath nor Baldur seemed to notice the heavy sarcasm in his voice. Baldur snuffled, wiped his nose on his crumpled sleeve, and said matter-of-factly, “I d-don’t see why it should. They were just…”

“I did debate about whether to tell you how we arrived at the drugs under whose influence we were able to project our minds into the Void.” Von Rath cut the boy off gently, seating himself at the library’s long table. “I did not know what your attitude toward it would be. Further, you were sufficiently grieved over your master’s death that I did not wish to burden you with the possibility of fancied guilt.”

“
Fancied
guilt?”

Even at this hour of the late morning the library, facing east into the little courtyard between the wings of the grim, gray lodge, was thick with gloom. The tobacco-colored velvet curtains, which were never opened, created a dusk, thick and palpable as the smells that seemed to have accumulated over the hundred-odd years of the building’s life: the odors of dust and the stale, gritty foetor of ancient wool carpets; the faint moldery atmosphere that clung to the desiccated trophy head of an antelope over the doorway; the dry breath of old paper, crumbling cloth and glue; and the beaten-in reminiscence of tobacco smoke that would never come out. The walls here were thick with books, more books than Rhion had ever imagined: Lanz and von List; Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled
and the
Chymische Hochzeit;
Nostradamus’ prophecies; the collected works of Charles Fort; and the
Library of Those Who are Blond and Defend the Rights of the Male
. They had overflowed the original mahogany shelves and stacked two deep the newer pine planks that had been erected over the ornamental paneling. Neat boxes of half-decayed scrolls and chests of parchment codices were arranged upon the floor; in those few spaces of wall not occupied by books hung fragments of Assyrian carvings and the long, fading columns of Egyptian glyphs. Rhion, used as he was to the libraries of the Duke of Mere and the Ladies of the Moon, had been staggered at the prodigality of books in this world.

Here he spent most of his afternoons, listening to Baldur, Gall, or von Rath as they read to him from these endless texts. The Spell of Tongues that permitted him to understand German worked, in essence, from mind to mind—thus he could understand what was read aloud, if the reader understood it, though the written languages were a mystery to him. And here Baldur spent most of his nights, taking notes, looking up obscure references, reading his way patiently through collections of ancient letters, centuries-old diaries, crumbling grimoires, and yellowing broadsides and scandal sheets that the SS’s Occult Bureau in Berlin had sent them, searching for some scrap of knowledge, some clue that would show them how and why magic had died in this world and how it might be restored.

Baldur was sitting now, hunched over his notes, puffy, untidy, and sullen, snuffling and wiping his nose on his soiled sleeve. On Rhion’s world, Lord Esrex, son-in-law of the Duke of Mere and an old enemy of Rhion’s, was addicted to a drug brewed from certain leaves given to him by the priests of the dark Cult of Agon. Here a similar substance was—rather disgustingly, in Rhion’s opinion—rendered to a powder that was then snorted through the nasal membranes, with the result that Baldur’s sinuses always ran.

“Fancied, yes.” Von Rath’s well-shaped brows drew down slightly, shadowing his clear gray eyes. “The men who were used in Eric’s experiments were criminals, traitors against the state, men whose crimes in any society would have rendered their lives forfeit. The SS has the management of the labor camps and the concentration camps in which they in some measure atone for their deeds by service to the state they have tried to destroy. We had to find some way of speaking through the Void, some way of renewing contact, and drugs—mescaline, psilocybin, and others—were the only things we had found that worked. We were permitted an arrangement with the commandant of the Kegenwald camp to obtain men for experiments with the correct dosage. But the men themselves would have died anyway.”

There was a polite tapping at the door; von Rath looked up as one of the guards assigned to watch room duty in the old parlor at the foot of the stairs entered. “Reichsführer Himmler is on the phone for you, Captain.”

“Please excuse me.” Von Rath reached for the telephone on the corner of the library table, and Rhion, rising, left him in such privacy as Baldur’s company afforded. Telephones were another thing straight out of tales of wonder, though in marketplace fables the means by which two people without magical powers could communicate instantaneously over distance generally involved sight as well as hearing.

Curiously, though the Spell of Tongues held good when the speaker was in his presence, Rhion could not understand an electronically transmitted voice, either over the telephone or on that totally unexpected device, the wireless radio. Last night, when he had gone down to the big drawing room downstairs for the first time to watch a cinema being shown for the benefit of the guards—the simple and unspeakably tragic love story of a wise man for a whore—Poincelles had had to translate for him.

He turned down the hallway of the south wing, paused before the door of what had been the great master bedroom, pushed it open, and stood looking in.

The room was still empty. Yellow sunlight filled it from the wide south-facing windows; through the uncurtained panes could be seen the rude and hastily built block of the guards’ barracks and, beyond, the wire fence that enclosed the entire low hill upon which the Schloss had been built. Telephones, automobiles, even the huge quantities of books available in this world hadn’t staggered Rhion so much as the cheap plentifulness of wire. In his own world it was so difficult to manufacture that it was generally used only for decorative jewelry. When the gate was closed at night the wire fence was charged with enough electricity to knock a man down, and Rhion had been warned repeatedly against going anywhere near it.
Not
, he reflected wryly, remembering his experiences that morning,
that the perimeter guards would let me
.

And in the chamber itself…

Dust motes sparkled in the mellow sunlight. On the oak planks of the floor every trace of the Circles of Power had been eradicated.

Jaldis, dammit
, he thought, grief for his master’s loss mingling with exasperation and regret.
Why didn’t you trust me with the secret of its making? Even though I worked for the Ladies of the Moon, you know I wouldn’t have passed that secret on to them
. But Jaldis had never trusted wizards of any other Order, as far as his secrets were concerned.

“I’m sorry.” Von Rath’s soft voice spoke at his elbow. Rhion, leaning in the sunny doorway, glanced back to see the tall black figure in the shadows of the hall. He said nothing in reply, and there was a long moment’s silence, the younger wizard looking over his shoulder into the room, empty and filled with light, where the darkness had been.

“I’m sorry,” von Rath said again, and this time he was not simply apologizing for the interruption of their conversation by a telephone call from Berlin. His voice was quieter, gentle with regret. “You know, I do think that the use of drugs to create the Well probably had something to do with… with its collapse. With Eric’s death. I am sorry…” He shook his head, closing his gray eyes as if doing so would erase the image from his mind.

After a moment he went on, his voice hesitant as if he were carefully choosing his words. “I swear to you, Rhion, that as soon as it is possible to…to risk it…we will weave a Dark Well again. We will get in touch with wizards on your own side of the Void, to take you back through. But you understand that it is not possible now.”

“Yes.” Rhion sighed almost inaudibly, leaned once more against the oak doorjamb, weary in every bone. “Yes, I understand.”

“Spring is the time for war,” Paul said quietly. “When the weather clears… I fear that the English, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Russians are only waiting for that. They will launch an attack upon us at any time now, and we cannot risk losing another one of us, should what happened to Eric happen again. Not when we have made this much progress toward returning magic to our world.”

“I understand,” Rhion said again.

The strong, slender hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, tightened encouragingly, as if willing him strength, like a commander willing his men to be brave in coming battle. For a moment something in that touch made Rhion think the younger wizard was about to say something else, but he did not. After a brief time, he turned away, and Rhion heard the highly polished boots retreat down the hall to his own small study, leaving Rhion alone.

In the silence, the faint chatter of the radio in the watch room downstairs seemed very loud. Outside in the yard, a Storm Trooper cracked a rude soldier’s joke, and another guard guffawed. Rhion remained where he was, bone-tired and hopeless, leaning in the doorway of that sun-flooded room, remembering…

There HAD to have been some magic on this side
, he thought,
even the tiniest fragment—there had to be magic on both sides of the Void for a crossing
.

Somehow, just for that instant, at the stroke of midnight on the night of the spring equinox, some spark of magic had been kindled in a fashion that von Rath and his colleagues still did not understand. Enough to bring him through.

His mind returned to that fact, again and again. Perhaps Eric had known… But Eric was dead, destroyed in the Well that he had made. If that magic could be duplicated, even for an instant…

If he could only find some way to remake the Dark Well and contact the wizards in his own world.

But even if Baldur had found notes of it in the library, he reflected, they’d never reveal that to him. And without someone to read the texts to him he was helpless, illiterate, as utterly dependent upon them as he was for clothing and food and—he grinned wryly at the irony—Protection.

He stared down at the bare oak planks of the floor, seeking for some remaining trace of the Circles. He only remembered from seeing the ones Jaldis had made that they were hellishly complicated—blood, earth, silver, and light interwound and woven with smaller rings, curves, and crescents of power. And even so he did not know the words that went with their making.