The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,1
given them a window to the Void. “And it collapsed upon him. Fell in on itself around him. He screamed—the sound seemed to come from... from very far off. And when we pulled him out, he was dead.”
His hands had begun to shake again. Rhion whispered, “I’m sorry.” But, looking up into that set, ravaged face, he doubted the young mage heard.
While Paul had been speaking, a door had opened behind him, and a harsh bar of unnaturally steady yellow light fell through. Two forms stood there—Rhion fumbled for his spectacles, resting, he now guessed more than saw, on the small table near the head of the bed where he lay. The forms clarified into a very tall man in his fifties with hollow cheeks and a burning dark glance beneath a handbreadth of greasy black hair, and a smaller, slighter man, perhaps twenty years older, with flowing white mane and beard framing a pale, fanatic stare. The light behind them haloed them with its bizarre, motionless glare, brighter than a hundred torches. Rhion remembered Jaldis had spoken of electricity, artificial light that was made without magic, made for the benefit of anyone who cared to use it.
With his spectacles, Rhion was able to see a little more of the room, small and spartan and lined with more books than he’d ever seen in a private residence with the exception of the stone house of Shavus Ciarnin, Archmage of the Morkensik Order, his own Order of wizardry at home.
Paul seemed to pull himself together a little, sitting up in his leather-covered wooden chair. “These are Auguste Poincelles and Jacobus Gall, my colleagues in the effort to restore wizardry to this world,” he said in his soft voice. The tall man acknowledged the first introduction with a nod, the bearded fanatic the second. “Baldur Twisselpeck...”
“I’m Rhion of Sligo.” He saw the swift glance that passed between Poincelles and Gall behind Paul’s back. “The Dark Well is gone, then?”
In his own world, where magic still existed, simply breaking the Circles of Power that held the shuddering dark of the window into the Void was sufficient to destroy it. In this world, who knew?
“Yes,” Paul said, after long silence. “Yes.”
“You can see the place where it was,” the wizard Gall added, still standing, arms folded, in the doorway.
“We did everything we knew how to bring it back.” The wizard Poincelles gestured with one long arm, like a spider against the light. “But it was useless.”
Dizziness caught at Rhion as he stood up. Paul, clearly now the leader of these otherworld mages, put a steel-strong arm around him to keep him on his feet, and Gall and Poincelles fell back before them as they passed through the door and into the hall. Baldur trailed behind like a lumpish black dog at Paul’s heel.
The walls of the hallway, Rhion noted automatically, were of plaster and wood, like the houses in Felsplex, impregnated with stale incense and the smoke of burned herbs—some form of nicotina, he thought. Their feet rang hollow on the oak planks of the bare floor, and he guessed, even before he turned to glimpse a wide stairway leading down, that they were on an upper floor of some good-size building. Voices murmured from below, echoing in the well of the stairs; he saw Poincelles and Gall trade another glance, but their eyes were chiefly on him, wondering at this chubby, bespectacled little man with his scruffy brown beard and his shabby brown-and-black robes, as if they could not actually believe they’d seen him come stumbling out of that column of darkness.
He wondered what they’d made of Jaldis’ thick jeweled spectacles, whose magic gave his blind eyes sight, or of the wooden box of silver whistles and gut that to some degree replaced the voice that the old King’s men had cut out of him with their knives, to keep him from witching them all those years ago...
As they had said, the Dark Well was gone.
The stars and circles of its weaving still sprawled, smudged with a confusion of hurried foot scuffs, over the worn plank floor of the upstairs room a few doors down the hall from the one in which he’d come to. The air was heavy with the cloying sweetness of dittany and the copper-sharp stink of dried blood. Baldur put out his hand and touched a switch in the wall, and glaring yellow light sprang to being in the room from a glass globe in the middle of the