The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,29

with men whose faces and bodies were outlined in the sudden, terrible glare of yellow-white explosions—beaches littered with wrecked equipment, hideously strewn with tangled corpses in the shell-holed sand, and men standing knee-deep in water, or huddled in shallow holes they’d scooped out in the sand, desperate for even the illusion of shelter. A long quay extended into the sea, longer than Rhion had ever seen, even in the great harbor of Nerriok, and this, too, was jammed with men. They stood quiet, without shoving, while death spat and whistled around them, burning fragments of metal leaving red streams of fire in the dark. Men waiting. And far out over the water to the west, the gold pinprick of a ship’s light gleamed suddenly in the black.

Perhaps, Rhion thought wearily, closing his hand over the crystal again, he should be glad. These men would be the spiritual brothers of those who had blinded and mutilated Jaldis, who looked with distrust upon magic and all that it stood for, who could not see beyond their own pockets and their own bellies and who wanted to turn the world into the image of their own greedy, limited minds.

Perhaps he was simply weak; between the Reich’s obsessive racism, self-righteous closed-mindedness, and casual arrogance, and these corrupt and nameless servants of the mechanist English, there didn’t seem to be a lot to choose. The best thing he could do, Rhion thought, would be simply to go home.

If he could.

“Useless!” Paul von Rath thrust from him the body of the dead white rat and the pan of poisoned sugar water in which a seven-carat garnet gleamed mockingly, a talisman of protection inscribed with the colored sigil of the interlaced runes of Eohl, Boerc, and Ehwis. “Nothing—it did nothing at all!”

“I d-don’t understand,” Baldur stammered, his weak, bulging eyes peering from rat to gem and back again with baffled outrage. “The rite we used to charge this talisman came from Johan Weyer’s own private journal! There was no way he would have recorded a false rite, or—or changed details. I made every allowance, every transposition of the k-key words and phrases according to the best redaction we possess of the Dyzan manuscript...”

Rhion, hitching back the sleeves of the long white robe in which the wizards all worked in their meditations and occult experiments, crossed the big laboratory and picked the jewel from its glass petri dish. He wiped the poisoned solution off with a lab towel and turned the gem a few times in his palm. “It’s charged, all right.”

“Of c-course it’s charged!” Baldur whirled to paw through the stack of notes on the nearby bench as if for documentation of the fact, nearly knocking over a beaker of the strychnine distillate they’d used to test the poison spell’s effectiveness. “The formula was impeccable, the source absolutely certain!”

“Give me that.” Gall, in his flowing robe and shoulder-length white hair looking very much like the ancient priests of whom he was always having visions, almost snatched the talisman from Rhion’s hand. From a little labeled box on the laboratory table he removed a smooth stone tied to a silken string—this he held over the gem, watching its random movement with pale, intolerant eyes.

“No one is blaming you, Baldur,” von Rath said gently.

“But nothing can have gone wrong! The p-power you raised in this morning’s rite was enormous, stupendous...”

“It was certainly greater than it has been,” Rhion remarked, retreating to the corner of the lab. Like the temple immediately below it, the room that they had fitted up as a wizards-kitchen had had all of its windows boarded over—a pointless affectation from a thaumaturgical point of view but one that had allowed Rhion to work on the Spiracle late at night unobserved by the guards in the yard. The reflections of the kerosene lamps that illuminated the room in preference to electricity gilded the young Captain’s fair hair almost to the color of honey and glinted on the steel swastika he wore on a chain about his neck. On shelves around what had at one time been a drawing room on the second floor of the north wing an assortment of jars, boxes, and packets contained everything Rhion had ever heard of as necessary to the making of talismans: iron, silver, gold, and copper of various purities; salts and rare earths; every sort of herb and wood imaginable; gems, crystals, both cut and uncut; parchments and strange inks. There was a small forge, crucible, and press, even an