The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,50

knew.

They had raised power.

The whole lodge—even the air around it—was lambent with energy, darkly glowing with a horrible, unfocused strength. Sara asked him again softly, “What is it?” as she felt his breath catch in horror; she sat up and pushed back her ruffled curls, but by her voice he could tell she felt nothing. A guard came whistling casually to open the gates. Horst cracked a joke with him about Goering’s wedding night that he’d heard at the Horn.

In the luminous square of the lodge’s open door von Rath stood waiting. He still wore his white ceremonial robes, and the electric glare in the hall behind him showed his body through. It was only when Rhion got close that he saw blood spots on the hem and sleeves.

“We’ve done it!” Von Rath sprang down the steps to seize his arms and staggered. Even allowing for the lesser light of the floodlit yard, the younger wizard’s eyes were dilated to black, and he swayed on his feet like a drunken man. His hands, gripping Rhion’s shoulders, were convulsively strong. “We’ve done it!” The smell of his robes was horrible: fresh blood, burned flesh, incense. Past him Rhion could see the air in the hall pulsing with power, power that flowed uncontrolled down the paneling and moved like snakes of cold light on the stairs. Instinctively he balked when von Rath tried to draw him over the threshold.

“Horst,” he ordered shakily, “take the girl up to my room. Sara, wait for me.”

Von Rath waved impatiently. “Let the guards have her, you don’t want a woman at a time like this. Come.” His hand like iron on the nape of Rhion’s neck, he dragged him up the steps and into the accursed house.

“Baldur was right, you see,” he whispered exultantly as he pulled Rhion past the watch room and down the wide, paneled hall. His drugged eyes had a hard, terrible shine, like opals in which some evil spirit had been bound. “Gall was right. The Adepts of the Shining Crystal—they knew! They had the secret of how life force can be woven into magic! Baldur found the rites—they were coded, concealed in the Lucalli Diaries... How to draw forth power, all the power we need...”

As von Rath pulled him through that hideously vibrant house Rhion held out his hand, summoning witchlight to his palm. Nothing happened. He fumbled a match from his pocket and held it out, half afraid to call fire to the dried red sulfur-paste at its tip. He felt almost afraid to speak, for fear of waking some terrible force by the softest of words.

No fire burst onto the match, but out of an obscure fear that things were on the verge of uncontrolled chaos Rhion put the match tip into his mouth and wet it thoroughly before dropping it onto a table in the hall. “Were you able to convert it?”

“Not yet.” Von Rath halted with him before the temple’s doors.

There were no guards in this part of the house, no lights. The temple doors stood open, and Rhion recoiled before the dark power he saw moving within, shifting and quivering in the blur of candlelight and smoke. Within the long, black-painted room he could see horribly half-familiar marks scrawled everywhere on the parquet, save around the altar, where Gall, stripped to his underwear, was engaged in washing the floor.

The smell told Rhion what had gone on that night, and the hair lifted on his neck.

“But don’t you see?” von Rath giggled, shivering all over with triumph and glee. “We won’t need to. I made Baldur see the things I wanted him to see. The three of us here in the temple, performing the blood-rites of power, and him on the other side of the house... I made illusions in his mind and he saw them!”

Rhion pulled away from the clutching hands, disgusted and horrified. “If he was as crocked as you are I’m surprised he didn’t see Venus on the half shell rising out of the sink!”

“No.” He caught Rhion’s face between his palms, staring down into his eyes and seeing in them nothing but his own triumph, his own vindication, his own joy. “He saw nothing, no hallucination, but those that I projected into his mind. He wrote them down, with the exact times of their appearances—they were the same, Rhion!

“Don’t you see? Maybe we can’t convert power to physical operancy, not yet, though that will come. But once we can control illusion, we can