The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,18
lungs. The air was blue and acrid with tobacco smoke, and Rhion, sitting in a dark corner at a table with Auguste Poincelles, pushed up his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and hoped to hell this trip would be worth the headache he was going to take back with him to the Schloss.
“Ten ships, ten of them!” a weedy, middle-aged merchant at the bar was whooping triumphantly to the impassive counterman. “Our boys are blasting the damned English out of the water! We’ll be in London by this time next week!”
So much, Rhion thought wearily, for our enemies attacking us at any moment. He wondered that he could possibly have been naïve enough to have believed von Rath’s version of the progress of the war, no matter how it had started. But he had not mentioned the discrepancy to von Rath.
Beside him, Poincelles raised one dirty, pointed fingernail to the nearest barmaid. The girl slithered like a weasel from among a pawing crowd of uniformed admirers and came across the room to them, splendid haunches switching under the thin blue cotton of her dress. It was Poincelles who had proposed tonight’s expedition, to discuss matters that could not easily be mentioned in the presence of Baldur, Gall, and von Rath, Rhion guessed.
He couldn’t possibly have come here for the beer.
“A whiskey, Sara, if there is such a thing in this place.” Poincelles glanced inquiringly at Rhion. “Professor?”
Rhion gestured with his three-quarters-full steel mug, smiled, and shook his head. The barmaid Sara regarded him with eyes black and bright as anthracite coal in a pointed, triangular face, skin pale to translucence save for the garish redness of her painted mouth.
“So this is your famous professor?” She sized him up with a professional eye and shifted the tray she held so that her breasts bulged like white silk pillows beneath the half-unbuttoned bodice of her dress. “Glad you’ve finally come out of seclusion in that monastery they’re running out there. We’ve heard tell about you. Go on, have another beer, Professor. Old Pauli’s good for it.”
“Later.” Rhion smiled gallantly. “That way I get to watch you walk across the room again.”
She laughed, tossed her frizzed red head, and returned to the bar to fetch Poincelles’ whiskey, deliberately undulating her hips to the noisy approbation of the group around the piano.
“Nice little piece, that,” Poincelles remarked. He produced a cigar from his pocket and a lighter—a small gold box containing flint, steel, and a highly combustible liquid fuel, as good as a fire-spell, Rhion thought, at least within arm’s length and while the fuel lasted. Rhion coughed in the ensuing cloud of smoke and resigned himself to being ill for the rest of the night. “The girls here are the only decent thing about the place. That beer has no more relationship to hops than the petrol in the car does. At least the whiskey’s more or less pure.”
“Pure what?” Rhion demanded, coughing. Poincelles laughed, as at a witticism, and handed another cigar back over his shoulder to Horst, their SS driver-cum-bodyguard. The young man accepted it gratefully and strolled off to join the group around the piano. The other two barmaids were there already, one a honey-fair girl who reminded Rhion heart-stoppingly of Tally, the other a little black-haired minx who had only moments ago emerged from the back room with an elderly man in the gold-belted brown uniform of a local Nazi Party leader. The piano thumped tunelessly, the stout barman paused in his steady dispensing of beer to sell condoms to a couple of Storm Troopers, someone turned up the radio to better hear the latest bulletins from the war in the West, and someone else shouted, “Hey, you know what they’re going to get Hitler for his birthday? Frontier posts mounted on wheels!” The noise was deafening, the smoke nauseating as a gas. Rhion sighed, closed his eyes, and wished with everything that was in him that he could simply go home.
May was fading into June. Even at this hour, light lingered in the sky, soft as the color of pigeons’ eggs, and the air outside was thick with the smell of apple blossoms from the nearby farms. Now and then the wind stirred, carrying the scent of pinewoods, whose dark wall enclosed the village, as it enclosed the Schloss, the undulating sandy hills, and, it sometimes seemed to Rhion, the entire world in a whispering monotony of somber green. In the Drowned Lands, the streams would still be high,