The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,25

as the war with England is won we shall... we shall open another Dark Well, no matter what the risk to us, and search through it to find the wizards of your home.” His voice was wistful at the thought of a world in which his dream of magic was reality. “But for the time being we must serve destiny. Yours...mine...the Reich’s.” He sighed softly. “Heil Hitler.” His hand barely sketched the salute.

“Heil Hitler.” Setting his glass down quietly, Rhion returned the gesture, then rose and stepped out into the brassy electric glare of the hall.

Five

IN THE DARKNESS of his attic bedroom Rhion fetched the hard wooden chair from the corner and put it beneath a certain spot in the rafters. Through the wide windows opposite the foot of his iron-framed bed shone a broad rectangle of chalky arc light from the yard below, making eerie runic shadows of the bare ceiling beams with their trailing curtains of cobweb. Through the open window he could smell the pinewoods, and the drift of smoke from the cigarette of the guard patrolling the fence; the peep of crickets and frogs and the occasional cry of a nightbird came to him like comforting echoes of a life he’d once known.

Standing on the chair, he stretched to reach the rafter, edging along it with his fingers until his hand encountered a small wash-leather bag. Thrusting this in his pocket, he climbed carefully down, moved the chair to another place, and climbed up again. This time he brought forth a packet wrapped in several sheets of the Volkischer Beobachter, a packet that weighed heavily in his hand.

He put the chair back in its corner. The room had been searched three times in the seven weeks he’d occupied it, the last occasion less than a week ago.

Rhion had originally asked for the small south attic room—a servant’s, in some former era—because the rest of the Schloss was permeated by the smell of cigarettes. But he’d found that from its big window he could see the light that fell from the window of von Rath’s study to the bare ground at the side of the lodge, and thus tell when the young Captain went to bed.

The glow was there now, a citreous smudge on the hard-packed earth below him and to his left. Von Rath must have retired there from the library after their cognac together, to meditate and to write up the endless reports demanded by the Occult Bureau of their daily experiments—with magic, with electricity, with talismans, with pendulums, with anything they or any writer before them had ever been able to think of that might possibly hold a key to the return of magic to this thaumaturgically silent world. But even as Rhion watched, the glow dimmed as von Rath snuffed the candles one by one.

He’d be asleep in an hour, Rhion thought. Resting his forehead on the sill, he closed his eyes and reached down through the ancient lodge with a trained mage’s deep, half-meditative senses. He heard Gall’s sonorous murmur as he recited runic mantras before retiring and the jittery crackle of parchment and pen from Baldur’s room and the youth’s endless muttering and sniffling. Farther down, he heard the tinny staccato of the radio in the guards’ watch room at the foot of the main stairs, repeating names he did not understand: Leutze, the Scheldt, Dunkirk. A guard spoke. Newspaper rattled.

Too early. Much too early.

Turning, Rhion crossed the room to the rough plank wall behind the head of his bed. In a tin box—for there were mice in the attics—behind a loose board he kept a stash of coffee beans. He’d had a beer and a healthy jolt of cognac, and had never had much head for liquor. Eating half a dozen coffee beans made him slightly sick to his stomach, but at least he wouldn’t fall asleep.

Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, he took up the newspaper-wrapped package, unfolded it, and looked at the thing that lay within it in the dark.

He thought about the nature of magic.

The thing in his hands was a metal ring, roughly the diameter of his palm, formed of strips of iron of varying thicknesses-some of meteor iron, some drawn of iron mixed with salt or with certain other impurities—all carefully pilfered over the course of the last five weeks from the supplies requisitioned from the Occult Bureau. Twisted around the iron were an equal number of strips of the purest silver obtainable,