The Magicians of Night (Sun-Cross #2) - Page 16
THE GIRL DIDN'T LOOK to be more than sixteen. She'd probably been pretty once, in a haunting wildcat way, before they'd shaved her head, and even now, after months of starvation and ill usage in the Kegenwald camp, some of that beauty remained. In bistered pits, her eyes seemed huge; the bones of her wrists and hands appeared grotesque as she rubbed her bare arms for warmth. The unfurnished chamber in the south wing – the great master bedchamber in which the Dark Well had supposedly been drawn – never really got warm. From his post behind a one-way mirror in the adjacent dressing room Rhion could see the girl's pelvic bones outlined under the worn fabric of her ragged and dirty gray dress as she paced back and forth, barefoot on the uncarpeted oak planks.
When they had first brought her into the room she had huddled unmoving in a corner, like a partridge freezing into stillness in a hopeless hope that the hawk will pass it by. Having talked to Rebbe Leibnitz and the guards in the watch room and having seen the Kegenwald camp, Rhion understood this. Only an hour ago had she begun, cautiously, to move about, first doggedly examining every corner of the room, trying its three locked doors and its boarded-up windows, peering curiously into the dark sheet of the one-way mirror on the wall. These explorations had taken her rather less than two minutes, for the room was empty save for a latrine bucket in one corner. After that, she had simply paced, hugging herself for warmth and staring nervously all around her with huge, obsidian eyes.
Rhion wondered whether her fear stemmed wholly from being in the power of the Nazis – a condition that scared him sick – or whether, animallike, she sensed what was going on in the house tonight.
He glanced down at the watch that lay on the padded leather arm of his comfortable chair. Eight-thirty. The sun would have set by this time, though twilight would linger till after nine. He found himself listening intently, though he knew that both these rooms and the temple downstairs on the other side of the house were quite soundproof.
Nevertheless, he felt it when they started, as he had felt it when the sun had dipped behind the somber black pickets of the hills. His scalp prickled and he felt the sweat start on his face; if he closed his eyes he could see von Rath lying upon the naked black stone of the altar, like a sleeping god in the thin white robe – "vestis albus pristinissimus et lanae virginis" – save for the febrile tension of his muscles and the tautness of eyelids bruised with stress and lack of sleep. Rhion knew the horrors of the opening rites, for he had seen them again and again in tormented dreams: Poincelles pacing out the bounds of the temple, a white puppy held aloft by its hind legs in one massive hand, its dying struggles splattering his crimson robe with blood; Gall and Baldur like strange angels in black, merged with the greater shadows that followed their movements back and forth across the velvet-draped wall; the reflection of candlelight in the eyes of the victims. Bound at the foot of the altar, they would know, as occultists themselves, what would come next.
"I told you I didn't want to have anything to do with it," he'd said to von Rath that morning. They had finished the early ritual work – for which Rhion had barely made it back from bidding farewell to Rebbe Leibnitz – and had been on their way out of the temple's small robing room: Rhion, exhausted and ravenous, to a breakfast he felt he had heartily earned; von Rath upstairs to his study. "I don't even want to be in the Schloss when it's going on."
"You disapprove of what I do?" The German tilted his head a little on one side, eyes cold and flat, like frozen quicksilver, voice gentle but perilous.
"If I wrote it on ancient parchment in Latin with illuminated capitals would you believe it?" Rhion retorted, covering his outrage, his anger, his panic with sarcasm. "What you are doing is dangerous. It's always dangerous to do a blood-rite – it's always dangerous to do any rite drugged…" And within him another voice, made furious by everything he had learned from Leibnitz, everything he had seen and sensed of the camp – by the scenes in the crystal and the laughter of the guards – screamed How dare you – How DARE you – murder human beings, men and women, for ANY reason… while fear of von Rath and guilt at his own cowardice nearly stifled his breath. Sara would have spat in von Rath's face and died.
He took a deep breath. "You don't have the control over the forces you're releasing. Without a conversion to physical operancy, you can't."
"So." Von Rath's bloodless mouth tightened. "I find it curious," he went on, after long silence, "that of the two reasons you gave that deny me my power, one has already been proven a lie. Is the other a lie, as well?" He placed a hand on the nape of Rhion's neck, slim fingers cold as steel and terrifyingly strong, and looked down into his eyes. Against a feverish flush the old dueling scar on his cheek stood out cold and white. "Are you lying to me, Rhion? Is this world truly bereft of the point of conversion, the crossover between will and matter?" His thumb moved around, to press like a rod of steel into the soft flesh under Rhion's jaw. "Or is that merely your final secret, the thing that in your opinion should not be shared with those whose destiny it is?"
Backed to the wall at the foot of the dim stairs, Rhion felt the tension of that powerful hand that could, he guessed, snap his spine with a madman's strength; in von Rath's eyes he saw nothing human at all.
"It's my final secret," he said. "I just thought I'd hang around until you got tired of waiting and started sticking hot wires under my fingernails before I disappeared in a puff of smoke." He pulled away from the thoroughly nonplussed wizard's grip. "You brought me here as an advisor, all right? And I'm stuck in this world – for the duration of the war, considering the risk of someone else dying to open another Dark Well. That might be years. I'm not happy about that, but do you think I'm going to trade decent food and a comfortable place to live for a permanent berth in an English insane asylum? If I understood how to convert to physical operancy, you think I wouldn't better my own position here by telling you?"
Von Rath flinched, as if from the blow that could break the self-perpetuating cycle of hysterics, and shook his head like a man waking from a dream. "No – I don't know." He passed his hand across his face, and for a moment his eyes were the eyes of the man Rhion had first known, the young man whose dreams had not yet become obsessions. There was even something like pain there, the pain of puzzlement, of knowing he was becoming something else and not quite knowing if he wanted it or not. "And yet for one second – Eric did. I know he did."
He frowned and shook his head. "That's odd, you know, it's been weeks since I've even thought of him… He was my friend…" He rubbed his sunken, discolored eyes. From the half-open door of the watch room across the hall came a guard's laughter and the nauseating gust of cigarette fumes. "But without operant magic we could never have brought you here."
"You don't think I've been living on that knowledge, that hope, for the past three months?" Rhion put his hand on the sinewy arm in its clay-colored shirt sleeve, led the way down the shadowy blueness of the hall. "I'm still trying to figure that one out. I keep telling you, I was only brought along to wash out the bottles. Jaldis was the one who knew what the Void is and how the Dark Wells work. Look," he added more gently, "when did you last get any sleep? Or have anything decent to eat? And I'm not talking about that lousy porridge. If Poincelles can get eggs and sausage out of the cook, you sure as hell should be able to."
The younger man pulled his arm away impatiently and stepped back toward the stair. "Later, maybe," he said in his quiet voice. "There is too much for me to do now. Perhaps other rites of the Shining Crystal have survived, either in code as something else, or in fragments in letters – I haven't yet found their correspondence with St. Germain or Jean Bodin, and I know there must have been some – that can be pieced together. With our position in France solidified we must be able to deal with Britain. Time is of the essence now."
He passed his hand over his face again, and when he looked up his eyes had changed, as the hard edge of his desires crept slowly back into command. In the golden bar of light that streamed down the hall from the open door of the dining room, he looked, with his immaculate black uniform and electrum hair, like a daemon roused, blinking, from the dark of its cave.
"We aren't asking you to be part of the ceremony, you know." The voice was gentle, but inflexible as steel again. "Only to observe the subject and to take notes. We will be working on a naive subject tonight, one whose mind I have never encountered. It will take all the energy the four of us can raise, but it is something in which no outsider should be allowed to meddle. Will you do that much?"
Reluctantly, Rhion had agreed.
Wearied with her pacing, the girl – a gypsy, von Rath had said, a race traditionally reputed to number a large percentage of psychics – sat again on the floor in the corner and lowered her head to her folded hands, rocking her body like a whipped child. Rhion glanced automatically at his watch. Six minutes after ten. He could feel the power growing in the house, a whispering behind him that seemed to be lodged within the walls, a terrible vibration in his bones. The bank of closed cupboard doors at his back made him nervous, as did the small, shut door of the backstairs to the kitchen, which led down from this little room. Part of him wanted to slip down that way and out of this accursed house before something happened, but terror of what might be waiting in that dark and cluttered stair stopped him. He wanted to open the main door into the hall, but feared what he might hear – or see – in its empty shadows.
A chill shook him, as if the air in the room had grown colder, and he had the uneasy sense of things taking place beyond the boundaries of human perceptions. He glanced at the watch again and wrote down the time: 10:23. The girl seemed to notice nothing.
At ten minutes after eleven, she got to her feet again and began to pace once more, endlessly rubbing her skinny brown arms. There was nothing in the room, no food, no water, no blanket or source of heat. Rhion wondered whether that was a condition of the experiment or whether they had simply not thought about it.
Power was everywhere around him now, creeping like thin lines of phosphorous along the paneling, dripping down the grain of the cupboard doors at his back, crawling along door sills and floorboards. A kind of mottling had appeared on the wall to his left, near the backstairs door, as if light were buried deep within it, and he had the sensation of something moving behind him, near or perhaps in the cupboards, almost – but not quite – visible from the tail of his eye. He was too experienced to turn and look. He knew he'd see nothing. One never did. Sweat stood out on his face and crawled slowly down his beard. Sometimes he thought he heard voices speaking, not shouting in agony, but simply muttering with angry, formless rage. It was the third blood-rite, the third sacrifice, of men and women chosen for psychic power or occult knowledge. Their curses would linger.
I'm sorry, he wanted to cry to the cold, beating air. Nothing I could have said would have saved you! But the rage of the dead was not selective. It did not hear.
They're fools… God, get me out of here! But he knew he was as much a prisoner as the girl in the other room.
At 11:24 she stopped in her pacing, her shaved head jerking up suddenly, as if seeing or hearing something that startled her. Rhion noted it, and the time. But she shook her head and paced on, back and forth, endlessly, tirelessly, not seeing the yellowish ooze of cold light that had begun to drip down the walls, not sensing the freezing iron tightness of the air, not hearing the formless whisper, in Yiddish and German and Romany, that seemed always to growl on the other side of the air. Agony, horror, despair, and a gloating sexual delight filled the air, poisoned ectoplasmic wool from which von Rath's mescaline-saturated mind was endeavoring to spin its magic strands. Sick and wretched, hands shaking and breath coming shallow and fast, Rhion tried vainly to stop his ears and to wall his mind against it, wanting nothing but to get out, to escape this place and never come back…
At thirty-five minutes after midnight, the girl wedged herself into a corner of the room again, wrapped her thin arms around her bony knees, and stared into the room dully, her fear at last blunted by exhaustion. She moved as if startled once more, at five of one, but by the way she looked around the room she saw nothing.
At quarter to three, just when Rhion could smell the beginnings of dawn in the lapis infinity of the world outside, Gall knocked on the door to tell him that the experiment was over.
11:00 – cat
11:24 – face on wall
11:24 – Stopped pacing as if startled, resumed immediately
12:10 – glass of water
12:45 – spider
12:55 – Raised head and looked around room as if checking for something, settled down almost at once.
"Promising." Von Rath laid the two sets of notes on the library table before him, aligned their edges with his habitual neatness, and surveyed his fellow mages with eyes like glacier ice. "Your impressions?"
"It was – astounding," Baldur whispered reverently, black-rimmed nails picking at the edge of a nearby book. "I c-could feel the power flowing into you, you blazed like a torch with it."
"You were losing twenty-nine thirtieths of it." Rhion leaned back in his chair. His whole body ached from lack of sleep, the few hours of dream-tortured slumber he'd fallen into that morning doing nothing to make up for two nights without and his exertions on the astral plane on top of that. The splinters of sunlight forcing their way between the library's snuff-colored curtains were agonizingly bright in the room's brownish twilight; Poincelles and Baldur both squinted and winced whenever they turned that way. Gall, as usual, sat stoically in a corner. From his window during one bout of sleeplessness Rhion had seen him at dawn, walking calmly nude down the path beyond the wire to Round Pond for his morning swim.
"There was power in the room," von Rath insisted doggedly. "I know it. I felt it."
"Some of the Shining Crystal texts mention a Talismanic Resonator," Baldur put in diffidently. "They do not say what it is, but they speak of it as establishing a field of power."
"As the Holy Grail did," Gall said, shifting his slender form in his chair, the harsh afternoon sunlight making of his long white hair a glowing halo. "And as certain other sacred relics could. The crystal tip of the golden pyramidion atop the ancient Pyramid of Khufu.
"Which you were privileged to buy from a trusted antiquities dealer in Cairo?" Poincelles inquired sarcastically, glancing up from filing a broken fingernail back into a neat point.
"A Talismanic Resonator will work only if there's something for it to resonate with," Rhion said, firmly cutting off Gall's indignant rejoinder. "And in this universe you'd kill yourself raising a field as little as a mile across."
"Perhaps a stronger drug? Or another type of drug?"
"Be my guest," Rhion retorted sourly. "Only don't ask me to take any – or to be in the building when you start screwing around with power while under the influence." He took off his glasses to rub his red and aching eyes. Von Rath looked far worse than he had yesterday morning when they had spoken outside the temple, as if he had not slept at all. Good, thought Rhion. It meant he'd sleep soundly tonight.
Hurting for sleep himself, Rhion considered putting off breaking into the Dark Well and activating the Spiracle for another twenty-four hours. He needed rest desperately – Rebbe Leibnitz probably did, too – and there seemed little chance of getting any during the remainder of the day. He didn't relish the thought of trying to manipulate the power of the Void, even at his most alert.
But some obscure instinct prickled at him, like a damp wind ruffling at his hair; an awareness that tonight would, for a dozen half-sensed reasons, be better than waiting for tomorrow. Tonight was Wednesday. If they put things off until tomorrow night Sara would have to find an excuse not to be at the tavern, and too many of those would begin to make someone suspicious. Tonight the moon would be at its full – a slender source of power, but one the Lady had taught him to use. Tonight von Rath was likelier to be asleep, and tomorrow might see some kind of preparation for the solstice sacrifice itself afoot. He groaned inwardly and wondered if he could manage to steal a nap during the afternoon.
The others were still arguing. He should have been keeping his mind on them but couldn't.
"There are other d-drugs listed in the Anascopic Texts – "
"That are pharmacologically absurd."
"Not to mention that the body ought to be purified, rather than polluted, before the working of magic."
"Nonsense." Baldur pushed back his lifeless dark hair with one twitching hand and sniffled. "The potion Major Hagen used in the D-Dark Well ceremony – "
"Which killed him."
"We don't know what killed him. It was the same potion P-P-Paul – Captain von Rath – used last night, and at the rites before, and it elevated him, exalted him."
"He could have been flying in circles around the chandelier," Rhion spoke up wearily, "and it wouldn't have done him any good. Without the ability to convert power to physical operancy, you can disembowel every Jew in Germany, and it's not going to buy you one damn thing."
"Then I will disembowel them." Von Rath looked up, his face a skull's face in the gloom. "Every occultist, every medium, every psychic – every child whose house was visited by the poltergeisten – every source of personal manna, of the inner power, the vril, of magic, that we can lay our hands on, will be sacrificed. If we can raise enough power it must convert, it must answer to my bidding. And for that we will sacrifice every one."
He was looking at Rhion as he spoke, and Rhion felt the blood drain from his face as he understood.
The soft voice sank still further, like the murmur of the angry ghosts whose power whispered still in the colder corners of the house. "Every one. You say there is no physical operancy in this world. So. Yet one of the so-called Jew wizards incarcerated at the Kegenwald labor camp escaped only the night before last, escaped across an open yard under plain sight of the guard towers without being seen."
Dear God, no, not when I'm so close… "That's possible with illusion."
"And illusion is what we are trying to raise against the RAF. The thing that you say cannot be done."
Poincelles laughed. "Escaping from a prison doesn't need illusion. Just a little…" And he rubbed his fingers together suggestively.
"In France, perhaps," Gall replied coldly.
"This is the real world, my dear Jacobus."
To von Rath Rhion said quietly, "It isn't the same." His lips felt numb.
"So you say." Von Rath stood up, for an instant in the shadows seeming to be a skeleton in his black uniform, with his wasted face and frostburn eyes. His voice was the dry stir of demon-wings. "We have trusted you, Rhion. We have believed your assurances that you have made with us – with the Holy Order of the SS – with the destiny of the German Reich – a common cause."
He tipped his head to one side and regarded Rhion, not even as a friend once trusted and trusted no longer, but as a stranger as unknown to him as the men he had killed last night.
"The summer solstice is coming – a time of power. The universe is moving to its balance point, when its powers can be turned by a single hand. On that day we will make a talisman of power, a battery, against the day later in summer when we can give our abilities to the assistance of our Fatherland in the breaking of our enemies' stronghold. We depend upon the aid you have professed yourself willing to offer us. And if we find that you have lied to us in your assurances and betrayed our trust, I tell you now that it would be better for you if you had never been born."
Sara and her father were waiting for him in the redolent darkness of the trees beyond the Schloss' yard lights. The full moon rode high, limpid and regal; a whispered catch of the hymn the Ladies sang to her floated through Rhion's head as he stood motionless in the shadows of the old kitchen door, watching Poincelles stride like a lean and feral tomcat from the direction of the guards' barracks, a couple of props under his arm.
I left the house of the Sun,
I left the houses of light,
To walk in the lands of the stars,
in the lands of the rain.
Children living in darkness,
I give you what I can.
Children of the earth,
I give you what I can.
Children of magic,
I give you what I can…
By the drenched quicksilver light, the Frenchman set the props up – Rhion thought wryly that the ground in that little gully must be getting pretty well grooved – shoved his little bundle of implements under the wire, and then followed with that curious, gawky agility that seemed almost spiderlike in the dark.
Rhion hated him. Early in their friendship, Sara had shown him the place where Poincelles had taken up the threshold-board at the entrance to the attic to put a talisman of badly cured lambskin where Rhion would cross it a dozen times a day, a talisman, she informed him, consecrated to bringing him under Poincelles' influence – "Bastard paid me twenty marks to help him raise 'sex magick' to charge it," she'd remarked, screwing the board down again above the rotting, mouse-eaten thing. "I should have charged him fifty." Having no power, it didn't trouble him. But in dreams, again and again, he had unwillingly witnessed the torture rituals of the Shining Adepts and had seen how they were accomplished; he knew who had laughed when the knife went in.
As Poincelles approached the shadowy verge of the trees, a figure appeared. For an instant Rhion's heart stood still – then he saw that the waiting girl was smaller than Sara and the pale blonde of the most Teutonic type. Long braids hung down over the white uniform blouse of the League of German Maidens, framing a face at once pretty and sensual, with a lush mouth and discontented eyes. When Poincelles put a hand upon her waist she raised her arms to circle his neck. Scarcely louder than the rustle of the pines, Rhion heard his throaty chuckle.
Then they were gone.
"If he thinks he's gonna deceive Asmodeus with that little tchotchke he's out of luck," Rebbe Leibnitz remarked dryly, when Rhion had reached the lichen-blotched granite boulder behind which the old man and his daughter waited. The old scholar had traded his camp rags for an ill-fitting utility suit of the kind a workman might wear on his day off; his hands were shoved deep in the shabby jacket's pockets; under the bill of the cap that hid his shorn head, his dark eyes gleamed with amusement. Beside him, Sara was dressed as she had been two nights ago in a man's trousers and pullover, with only a frizzed red tangle sticking stiffly out from beneath a cap of her own. Close to, her clothes smelled of smoke, but she hadn't lit a cigarette for fear of the smell or the pinpoint of its light alerting the guard. Her pockets bulged with her housebreaking tools.
"He doesn't seem to have much luck getting virgins, that's for damn sure," Sara sighed, with a shake of her head. "But you'd think he'd have more sense than to go looking for them in the League of German Mattresses." She glanced over at Rhion, her dark eyes, like her father's, a gleam in the shadow of her capbill. "Even money he's going to ask those demons of his to bring you under his power again."
"Doesn't matter." Rhion put aside the brief memory of Sara's nude body stretched on the altar beneath the downturned point of the inverted pentacle, candle flame like honeyed gold on the spread legs and perfect breasts. "What matters is, he's paid the guards to look the other way between here and the house."
Rhion crossed the open ground first, setting up his props, slipping under the wire, and returning to the darkness of the old laundry room that he had so recently left. He sank his mind down through the stillness of the black house, picking out the dim chatter of the wireless in the watch room and the creak of a lazy body shifting in a chair. Mice scratched behind the dining room wainscot and in the stuffy backstairs, beetles ticked like watches, timing the coming of the summer-tide. The very air of the house felt uneasy, filled with angry dark things that waited behind some sightless angle invisible to human eyes, hunting for a way out into the world of men. When his fingers brushed the wood of the wall, it felt warmer than it should have, charged with unholy power. The whole house was turning into a giant battery, a hideous talisman of the forces released there.
He turned his mind quickly from it and sought in the thick dark air of those turning corridors, those closed-in rooms, for other sounds. He heard the slow, untroubled draw of breath from Gall's room – a panting, adenoidal snuffle from Baldur's. Then soft, shallow, and even, the breathing of von Rath sounded in a closed and seemly sleep.
At his low whistle Leibnitz and Sara left the shelter of the woods, crossed to the fence, set props, slithered under, took the props, and moved across the yard to join him with surprising agility and speed. Rhion pulled the door shut; his pulse was hammering and a cold tightness in his chest had driven out all tiredness or thought of sleep. There was no turning back now. The only way out was through.
"Here." By the reflected glow of the yard lights beyond the windows, Sara led the way to the old dumbwaiter shaft. "Can you manage, Papa?"
"Fifty years I am learning the wisdom of great men, the Torah and the Talmud and the names of the angels of each sphere of the world and the numbers by which the Lord rules the universe, and now at my age I find I should have studied to be Tarzan instead." He glanced at the neat footholds recessed into the shaft wall and the rope hanging down into darkness. "How many steps are those?"
Sara shrugged. "I don't know. Twelve or thirteen, I think."
He waved his hands and addressed the ceiling. "She doesn't know. If it's twelve it computes to three, which is fulfillment and the realization of goals, but if it is thirteen it computes to four, an astronomic squaring that implies legally constituted authority which around here is not something we want to be dealing with…" His voice faded into a mutter as he climbed gingerly down the shaft. "I should have known that when the sum of my birth's Gematria computed with this year's date to give me 3,255, I should have known then to watch out…"
Sara rolled her eyes ceilingward, and followed.
The cellar was pitch black. Sara fumbled her flashlight from the deep pocket of her trousers, but Rhion caught her hand and shook his head, then, remembering she couldn't see the gesture, breathed, "No."
"A light's not gonna call more attention than the sound of us tripping over boxes."
"I'll guide you." Their voices were barely a flicker of sound in the stillness, but nonetheless made him uneasy. They were close, so close. It seemed to him now that in the silence von Rath must hear, even in sleep, the thudding of his heart.
A rat skittered through the dusty coal bin as they passed it; ghostly sheets of spider floss lifted from the old drying racks with the breeze stirred by their passing. Rhion led them down the long abyss of the cellar, past the crouching, crusted iron monster of the sleeping furnace, his ears straining for the faintest sound from above.
But there was nothing. Only the faint underwhisper that had begun to grow in the house itself, the angry, buzzing murmur of its restless ghosts.
This has to work, he thought desperately, his hands cold in the warm strong grip of Leibnitz' fingers, the hard little clutch of Sara's. This is our last chance. Please, God, let it work.
But the gods of his own universe and of this one hated wizards. It figures.
They shifted the boxes as quietly as they could, and while Rhion and Leibnitz stood between the flashlight glare and the stairs that led up into the main part of the house, Sara went to work on the lock.
"This also you learn in America?"
Sara opened