The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,20

She shrugged her shoulders, oddly delicate above the jutting splendor of her breasts. In spite of the lines of cynicism and dissipation around her dark eyes, Rhion realized she couldn’t be more than twenty-two. “It gives the boys a laugh. They don’t mean any harm.”

Neither, Rhion supposed as the girl strolled away, had the guards in the Temple of Agon, the faceless servants of the Veiled God, who had pretended to set his oil-soaked beard on fire when Lord Esrex had had him imprisoned there.

He looked back to meet Poincelles’ narrow, speculative eyes behind a haze of putrid smoke. “What price?”

“I want you to teach me.”

Rhion gave his beer mug another quarter turn. “I am teaching you,” he said quietly. “I have been teaching you for over six weeks now, and aside from the fact that you now know spells that work in my world, and your technical knowledge is cleaner than it was, none of the four of you is any closer to making magic work than you were before I came. You know that.”

“I know that.” Poincelles leaned forward and the smell of his breath, drowned in whiskey and cigar, was like the exhalation of a month-old grave. “And I know also that you’re keeping something back.”

Rhion kept his eyes on the beer mug but his hands and feet turned perfectly cold.

The Frenchman chuckled throatily. “My little friend, we all keep something back.” He drained his whiskey with a gulp, stood and shook back the limp swatch of hair from his forehead. Across the room Horst, engaged in buying a condom from the barman to augment the weekly barracks ration of one, hastily departed to fetch the car around. After a long moment, Rhion stood up also and followed the tall occultist shakily from the room.

If the man has to make one true statement in the entire night—which is not a bad average for Poincelles, Rhion thought as he climbed into the rear seat of the open Mercedes that waited for them in the harsh trapezoid of yellow electric light—why does it have to be that one!

For Poincelles was quite right. They all did keep something back.

What Poincelles had kept back in the course of the discussion was what von Rath and the others had been keeping back from the start—that the Dark Well had not, in fact, been destroyed.

Rhion had confirmed his suspicions a few weeks after the expedition to the Dancing Stones, as soon as his ability to use his scrying crystal had grown strong enough to get a clear image once more. Those weeks in between, those weeks of suspicion, of not knowing who was lying to him and when, were nothing he would care to go through again. He had known he was entirely at von Rath’s mercy for food and shelter and advice in this strange world—only during those weeks had he realized how much he’d felt comforted by the illusion that he was among friends.

He sighed and shook his head, glancing sidelong at the tall man beside him as the car shot with its eerie speed along the forty kilometers of woods between Kegenwald village and Schloss Torweg. He still felt keenly the disappointment that had come over him when it had been clear that Poincelles had no intention of telling him that the Well still existed; the fact that the Germans were in the process of invading his erstwhile country evidently did not mean that the Frenchman opposed them in principle. Had that little charade tonight been for Poincelles’ own purposes, he wondered, or at von Rath’s instigation, to find out if Rhion knew more about magic than he’d taught them in the weeks since his recuperation?

In either case, it made no odds. Poincelles was not to be trusted, and it left him in a horrible position, for he desperately needed the help of a wizard he could trust.

For Rhion, too, was keeping something back.

He had found—or thought he had found—the thing for which the wizards of the Occult Bureau had begged Jaldis to come here in the first place—the trick of making magic work in this magicless world.

The problem was that without the help of another wizard, bringing this about in order to get himself home would almost certainly kill him.

“Captain wants to see you,” the guard at the gate reported when the car pulled up and the electricity was turned off long enough for the gate to be opened. When the SS had taken over Schloss Torweg, in addition