The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,166

here of any great strength. It was the first time he’d seen mages of so many different orders working together, something that probably wouldn’t have happened, he thought, if any of them had been very powerful alone.

He whispered, “Thank you,” and the effort of it took all he had. He closed his eyes and for a time heard nothing but the voice of the rain.

“Rhion, I’m sorry.”

He looked up again. The room was empty but for Tally, still sitting on the low stool at the side of his bed. The single candle made a halo of her short-cropped hair. He moved his hand a little to touch it, then whispered in mock severity, “I won’t beat you this time, but you’d better grow it back,” and it surprised her into laughing, as he’d hoped it would.

“No,” she said, her gray eyes growing somber again. “I’m sorry that after all you’ve been through to come home, home isn’t... isn’t...”

“Isn’t what I left?” He looked around him, at the age-bleached stone of the walls, dyed amber where the candle flame touched, and at the half-opened shutters and the glisten of green-black ivy in the rain beyond. Her fingers over his were cool, as they always had been; he knew that his own hands had lost the chill of death.

“But it is, you know,” he said. “I just didn’t know it at the time. What did Jaldis say? We can afford to think neither of the future nor of the past we leave behind... He was wrong.” He sighed. “He was wrong.”

“Tally?” The door curtain at the far end of the room moved aside; framed in the darkness were two dark blurs of shadow, one his own height, the other tall. “Vyla of Wellhaven says she has seen in her crystal the armies of Bragenmere moving down the passes toward Fel,” Gyzan’s voice said. “They will be besieging that city in the morning.”

The Gray Lady added, “If the worshippers of Agon don’t open the gates to them, under the impression that doing so would please the Veiled God.”

“So,” Rhion said, as Tally’s fingers closed involuntarily tighter over his. “It’s started here.” As if at a great distance, he thought he saw peace and darkness beckon to him, like a tiny figure at the crown of a far-off hill. But he turned from it, as he had turned from the Dancing Stones, and said softly, “There’s work to do.”

“Now?” Tally looked down at him worriedly, as the dark figures melted back into the shadow of the door, leaving the whispering, rainy stillness of the night to close them round.

Rhion smiled and drew her down to him. “In the morning.” And he fell asleep with his head on her arm.

Author’s Note

THIS WAS AN EXTREMELY difficult book to write for a number of reasons, chief among them being the number of books that could have been written. But I did not want to write a book about the Holocaust, I did not want to write a history of the SS, or an examination of the Occult Bureau, or an account of occultism in general, or the Blitz, or Operation Sea Lion. All of those books have been written, by people more qualified than I.

What I did want to do was to do justice to those topics where they touched upon my own piece of magical fantasy, without being led too far astray. This I hope I have accomplished—I certainly did the best I could. World War II is an area awkwardly placed historically as far as I am concerned. It lies beyond the scope of my own memories, but it is close enough in time to the present to be massively documented, and I frequently found myself swimming in a morass of details, trying to decide which to include and which would only bog down the storyline in endless sidetracks.

I know that I got many things wrong. To the best of what I could learn, there was a distinction between the smaller labor camps and concentration camps per se, and everything I have read indicates that the systematic construction of death camps for the stated purpose of exterminating Jews, Poles, gypsies, and other “undesireable races” did not begin until early in 1941, though the intention and the plans predated that time. I have tried to be accurate about vehicles, weaponry, and technology, and about the major events of the war insofar as occasionally conflicting accounts would let me. I have stuck to the attitudes expressed in