The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,164

twenty-third, when, as he later said, he’d looked out over the audience and actually seen around each patron a halo of colors, filled with pictures of their pasts, their hopes, their dreams...

An article from the Sentinel of Rattlesnake Mound, Mississippi, was about a sixteen-year-old Negro girl who’d found $8,000 worth of long-buried Indian artifacts by placing three pieces of brass in her hand and walking along the ridge where pirate treasure was said to be buried, late in the afternoon of that same day.

There was an account of a near-riot at the San Francisco Chronicle when representatives of eight prominent Chinatown families came demanding information on an alleged Japanese dawn offensive against Chinese nationalist forces around the Szechwan village of Weihsien in western China, about which they had heard from a geomancer making feng-shui calculations on Mt. Diablo in Berkeley... and an intelligence report, dated two weeks later, regarding such an offensive at dawn of the twenty-fourth—or two in the afternoon on the twenty-third in Berkeley—or midnight in Germany...

There were other reports: the death of a planter in Haiti when he inexplicably swerved his car into one of his own gateposts while going down his drive; rumors of werewolves among the Navajo and rumors of shamanic activity in Siberia against the marching Japanese; an unexplained fire in the barracks of occupying German forces in Denmark, and the discovery the following morning of a horse’s skull, inscribed with runes of hatred and defiance, close by.

And annotated in a woman’s hand, calculations backward and forward through time zones: all of these incidents had taken place at, or about, the twenty-third of September, at the hour when it was midnight on the sunken backroad in Germany that led to Witches Hill.

There was no explanation appended to any of them. Nor did Mayfair offer any, when he took the folder back.

But that lay in the future. Now Tom only sat, weary in all his bones with Sara’s head pillowed against his thigh, tasting the welcome bitterness of nicotine and watching the unsteady movement of the chill edge of starlight on Leibnitz’ face as he spoke.

“Oh, he made it, all right,” Leibnitz said softly. “But as to what his stay in this world made of him—as to what power will cling to him from the magic of sacrifice—it is hard to say. And those wizards who brought him back—I don’t think they quite know what they have.”

It will be all right, Rhion had said. It will be all right.

Tom blew a stream of smoke and reached down with his free hand to touch Sara’s hair. It was far from over yet...

Due to Mayfair’s good offices he knew Sara would be staying in London with her father, while he himself would be going back to the Commandos at Lochailort... But London wasn’t so far.

He glanced back up at the old man, already feeling that he’d known him and his daughter half his life and rather looking forward to knowing them for the other half. “We’ll never know.”

And in the faint gleam of the cockpit light he saw the old scholar smile as he folded bony hands about his knee. “And what makes you think one day we won’t?”

“Will he live?”

Rhion heard the words from deep in darkness—a darkness that flashed with pain at every breath he drew despite the cloudy blur of what he dimly recognized as poppy syrup and spells, a darkness safe and warm after the soul-fraying chaotic night of the Void. A darkness that beckoned deeper, and to which he wanted, more than anything, to retreat forever.

The Gray Lady’s voice said, “I don’t know.”

No, thought Rhion, drawing further back into that darkness. He didn’t know.

Soul and body he felt empty and broken, as he had when von Rath’s men had finished with him. The sweetness of the Lady’s voice-spells, like the scent of roses carried over water in the night, had drawn his spirit back to his shattered flesh, had given him something to hold to... if he chose to hold.

But he had had enough. And the voices he heard around him in that darkness, drifting nearer and then away again, were not encouraging.

“The Cult of Agon has to have wizards of its own in its employ,” someone said at one point, a young man’s voice that Rhion dimly recognized as belonging to one of the Ebiatic novices he’d occasionally met at the Duke’s court. “Powerful wizards...”

“It would explain how the Town Council of Imber was able to enter our House to make