Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (8 page)

“I’ll search,” Baldur promised, bending down clumsily to gather his notes again from where he’d dropped them on the floor. His hands were nervous and fidgety, his eyes flicking restlessly from von Rath’s face to the shadows of the bookshelves, thick with ancient knowledge, that crowded the long room. “The ancient societies performed the rites in safety. The p-proper rites, the correct means of making the sacrifices, have to be there… I’ll find them for you, P-Paul… C-Captain…”

“Books.” Gall got to his feet contemptuously and shook back his snowy mane. “Books are the refuge of those who need such things. It is by the purification of the body and the mind that the True Adept will come to an understanding of the
vril
within him.” He was still muttering as he left in Baldur’s shuffling wake.

Von Rath expelled his breath in a sound of mingled amusement and exasperation, and got to his feet. “Children.” He laughed, shaking his head. “All of them—jealous and quibbling and fractious. In the past six months I’ve acquired an enormous respect for my old nanny… Would you care for some cognac?” He crossed the room to a cabinet whose brass-grilled doors formed one of the few places in the wall not solidly paved in books. Rhion wondered where the Occult Bureau had collected so many; according to von Rath, Himmler, the Bureau’s head, had a library of his own three times this size.

The young Captain paused with his hand on the cabinet door. “Or did you have enough of liquor among the camel drivers?”

“Camel drivers?” Rhion leaned back against the arm of the red leather chair, looking up at von Rath in the swimming halo of candlelight. Two minutes ago he’d been furious with outrage at this black-uniformed wizard’s callous readiness to practice blood-sacrifice; for weeks he had lived with the knowledge that von Rath was his jailor and that the wizard was lying to him about the existence of the Dark Well and had lied from the moment Rhion had regained consciousness. But the other side of the man was genuine, as well: the quiet courtesy, the soft-voiced charm, the gentleness with which he handled Baldur’s nervous worship, and the homesickness that he had made clear he understood Rhion felt.

“
And some who went into the wilderness
,” von Rath quoted, returning with two fragile glass bubbles of henna-colored liquor, “
and thirsted with the beasts of prey, merely did not want to sit around the cistern with the filthy camel drivers
. Nietzsche. A wise man and a brilliant one—I’ll have Baldur read him to you sometime, if your German isn’t up to it yet, as a break from the
Malleus Maleficarum
. Do you still thirst, my friend?”

“For something that hasn’t obviously come out of a cistern, yes.” Lacking a friend, the undeniable pleasure of the man’s company was difficult to resist.

A smile of great sweetness momentarily swept the cold angel face. For a time he stood cradling the glass in his hands, his eyes like smoky opals gazing into a candlelit middle distance, his face in repose young and very sad.

“You understand what is at stake here?” he asked softly, after a long time in thought. His gaze returned to Rhion’s, tiredness and old wounds in his eyes. “It is not only victory over the English, you know; not only doing what our Führer demands that we do. It is the ability to do it that will be our victory, a victory over magic’s true foes—a matter less simple. It is… vindication. Do you understand?”

Sitting on the hassock, bespectacled and unprepossessing, Rhion looked down into his glass for a moment, unwilling to admit how much he understood. “I think so.”

“Since I was a boy,” the young wizard continued slowly, “I have felt—I have
known—
that there had to be something else, something other than the sterile pragmatism of Freud, of Marx, and now of this man Einstein—Jews all, incidentally, but it goes deeper than that. Something… I don’t know. And as the years went on and I kept looking, and there was nothing… Just the world closing in and bleeding to death without even being aware of what it was losing or what it had lost.”

He shook his head, returned to perch on the arm of his chair, and stared for a time into the depths of his glass as if to scry there where the magic had gone. “But it had died,” he said, very simply, his voice almost too low to hear.

“Eric said he had felt the same thing,” he went on after a time, and his eyes flinched shut for a moment in remembered pain. “Eric was the first man I ever knew who had felt it. He and I…” He shook his head quickly.

“Without magical operancy—without the ability to transform the will into physical being—magic remains only a legend, and the fire that consumes me—that consumed us—is no more regarded by other men than a thousand similar crank curiosities, on par with phrenology and ginseng and that mediocre bureaucratic, keyhole-listener Himmler’s stupid attempts to locate the ancient races that are said to dwell in the hollow earth. And so it will remain, unless you and I can prove to them that it is… real.”

Rhion was silent, remembering again his first meeting with Jaldis on the bridge in the City of Circles.
Are you searching for secrets
? Remembering the sensation of ice-locked bone breaking open inside him, when he had first called fire from cold wood. Remembering the aching relief of knowing he was not mad.

“How old were you,” von Rath asked quietly, “when you first understood that you were a wizard?”

“Twelve,” Rhion said slowly. “I mean, I didn’t understand what it was then, but I knew I was different.”

“I was fourteen.” His voice sank almost to a whisper, as if he spoke not to another man but to the quiet, gold-haired boy he saw across all that gulf of years. “Immured in a military academy in Gross-Lichterfelde, learning parade drill and classical Latin, while outside a pound of sausage was going for a million marks… The fact that you had any choice in the matter makes me so envious that I could kill you.”

Choice. Had there really ever been any? Tally had asked him once why he’d become a wizard, if he had known what it would mean: that he could not marry the woman he loved to desperation; that he could not admit that the children she bore were his for fear that they would be killed; and that he and Jaldis would spend most of their ten years together as outcasts, living on the love spells he concocted for sale to people who despised them. He remembered the growing fear of what he was, pain so awful he had wanted to kill himself, hollowness and fear of what he sensed was growing in his dreams, then the worse pain of knowing what it would cost him to pursue those dreams.

I tried so damn hard to be good
, he had said to her.

And for Paul von Rath there hadn’t even been that choice—only the disreputable shadow world of cranks and covens and charlatans, of theosophists and hollow earthers and those who sought Atlantis or Shangri-La, infinitely less thinkable for the only child of Prussian aristocrats than a career as a wizard had been for the son of the wealthiest banker in the City of Circles.

“I’m sorry” was all he could say.

Von Rath shook his head and smiled again. “No, it is I who should apologize to you for becoming maudlin in my cups. I like you, Rhion, and I truly regret that you are here in my world against your will… and I know it is against your will. I know you miss your own world, your loved ones. Do not think that I don’t know.”

Rhion was silent, remembering Tally—remembering his sons—remembering his home in the Drowned Lands—with a poignance that shook him to his bones.

Von Rath hesitated, struggling briefly with some inner decision, then said, “I promise you that as soon as the war with England is won we shall… we shall open another Dark Well, no matter what the risk to us, and search through it to find the wizards of your home.” His voice was wistful at the thought of a world in which his dream of magic was reality. “But for the time being we must serve destiny. Yours—mine—the Reich’s.” He sighed softly. “Heil Hitler.” His hand barely sketched the salute.

“Heil Hitler.” Setting his glass down quietly, Rhion returned the gesture, then rose and stepped out into the brassy electric glare of the hall.

IN THE DARKNESS OF HIS ATTIC BEDROOM RHION
fetched the hard wooden chair from the corner and put it beneath a certain spot in the rafters. Through the wide windows opposite the foot of his iron-framed bed shone a broad rectangle of chalky arc light from the yard below, making eerie runic shadows of the bare ceiling beams with their trailing curtains of cobweb. Through the open window he could smell the pinewoods, and the drift of smoke from the cigarette of the guard patrolling the fence; the peep of crickets and frogs and the occasional cry of a nightbird came to him like comforting echoes of a life he’d once known.

Standing on the chair, he stretched to reach the rafter, edging along it with his fingers until his hand encountered a small wash-leather bag. Thrusting this in his pocket, he climbed carefully down, moved the chair to another place, and climbed up again. This time he brought forth a packet wrapped in several sheets of the
Volkischer Beobachter
, a packet that weighed heavily in his hand.

He put the chair back in its corner. The room had been searched three times in the seven weeks he’d occupied it, the last occasion less than a week ago.

Rhion had originally asked for the small south attic room—a servant’s, in some former era—because the rest of the Schloss was permeated by the smell of cigarettes. But he’d found that from its big window he could see the light that fell from the window of von Rath’s study to the bare ground at the side of the lodge, and thus tell when the young Captain went to bed.

The glow was there now, a citreous smudge on the hard-packed earth below him and to his left. Von Rath must have retired there from the library after their cognac together, to meditate and to write up the endless reports demanded by the Occult Bureau of their daily experiments—with magic, with electricity, with talismans, with pendulums, with anything they or any writer before them had ever been able to think of that might possibly hold a key to the return of magic to this thaumaturgically silent world. But even as Rhion watched, the glow dimmed as von Rath snuffed the candles one by one.

He’d be asleep in an hour, Rhion thought. Resting his forehead on the sill, he closed his eyes and reached down through the ancient lodge with a trained mage’s deep, half-meditative senses. He heard Gall’s sonorous murmur as he recited runic mantras before retiring and the jittery crackle of parchment and pen from Baldur’s room and the youth’s endless muttering and sniffling. Farther down, he heard the tinny staccato of the radio in the guards’ watch room at the foot of the main stairs, repeating names he did not understand: Leutze, the Scheldt, Dunkirk. A guard spoke. Newspaper rattled.

Too early. Much too early.

Turning, Rhion crossed the room to the rough plank wall behind the head of his bed. In a tin box—for there were mice in the attics—behind a loose board he kept a stash of coffee beans. He’d had a beer and a healthy jolt of cognac, and had never had much head for liquor. Eating half a dozen coffee beans made him slightly sick to his stomach, but at least he wouldn’t fall asleep.

Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he took up the newspaper-wrapped package, unfolded it, and looked at the thing that lay within it in the dark.

He thought about the nature of magic.

The thing in his hands was a metal ring, roughly the diameter of his palm, formed of strips of iron of varying thicknesses—some of meteor iron, some drawn of iron mixed with salt or with certain other impurities—all carefully pilfered over the course of the last five weeks from the supplies requisitioned from the Occult Bureau. Twisted around the iron were an equal number of strips of the purest silver obtainable, silver so pure it was soft, each strip scribbled with a hair-fine line of runes. Between the iron and the silver, five crystals were twined, in a specific shape Rhion hoped he’d calculated properly—he’d never made one of these for the purposes he planned for this and wasn’t entirely sure whether his theoretical estimates would stand up in reality. He had been weeks assembling this, laboriously raising what little power he could in this world, whispering spells as he worked in the laboratory in the dead of night—hoping, as he worked, that von Rath wouldn’t guess what was going on, and wondering fearfully what would happen to him if he did guess. There was still a great deal Rhion did not know about the Nazis, and he didn’t want to find out.

And the making of the ring, he reflected with an odd, cold feeling behind his breastbone, was the easy part.

Since he had come to this world, Rhion had given a great deal of thought to magic: what had happened to it here; why it had failed; and how it might be brought back. As the Torweg group had found out very early, power of a sort could still be raised through the rites of their morning meditations. But it cost an enormous amount of energy to raise even the smallest power, and it was never enough to do much with, even had they been able to convert it to physical instrumentality. The power levels of this world had sunk, as water sinks back into the earth in drought, but it was still there, like the slow silvery pulse of the ley-lines that he had felt through the wheels of the car as they’d driven along the ancient road from the village back to the Schloss.

What had vanished utterly from this world was the point of conversion between power and operationality.

And that, Rhion thought, turning the iron circle over in his hand, was why he and Jaldis would have died in the Void but for Eric Hagen stepping to his death in the Dark Well.

Baldur had almost guessed it tonight. But, his mind running on the ancient cults and societies that he so endlessly studied, the efforts of past wizards to solve the problem of waning levels of power and not the conversion point between power and magic, the youth had seen only Hagen’s death, and not the fact that for one second, before the Void had killed him, Hagen had been working his spells
outside the confines of this world
. For those few moments, he had been standing in the Void itself.

And there was magic in the Void.

Every mythological Fire-Bringer Rhion had ever heard of, when faced with the problem of Darkness, of Night, had had to steal fire from a source. And so, Rhion thought, must it be here. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to create a Dark Well, for Jaldis, fearing Rhion’s connection with the Ladies of the Moon, had never taught his student the mechanics of the multiplicity of Universes. But in his pursuit of information about water goblins, Rhion had manufactured Spiracles of Air, devices that, charged with the element of air and then bound upon his forehead, had held that element around him while he walked the muddy bottoms of the Drowned Lands’ endless ponds and canals, seeking the goblins in their forests of ribbon weed and cattail root.