The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,26

silver so pure it was soft, each strip scribbled with a hair-fine line of runes. Between the iron and the silver, five crystals were twined, in a specific shape Rhion hoped he’d calculated properly—he’d never made one of these for the purposes he planned for this and wasn’t entirely sure whether his theoretical estimates would stand up in reality. He had been weeks assembling this, laboriously raising what little power he could in this world, whispering spells as he worked in the laboratory in the dead of night—hoping, as he worked, that von Rath wouldn’t guess what was going on, and wondering fearfully what would happen to him if he did guess. There was still a great deal Rhion did not know about the Nazis, and he didn’t want to find out.

And the making of the ring, he reflected with an odd, cold feeling behind his breastbone, was the easy part.

Since he had come to this world, Rhion had given a great deal of thought to magic: what had happened to it here; why it had failed; and how it might be brought back. As the Torweg group had found out very early, power of a sort could still be raised through the rites of their morning meditations. But it cost an enormous amount of energy to raise even the smallest power, and it was never enough to do much with, even had they been able to convert it to physical instrumentality. The power levels of this world had sunk, as water sinks back into the earth in drought, but it was still there, like the slow silvery pulse of the ley-lines that he had felt through the wheels of the car as they’d driven along the ancient road from the village back to the Schloss.

What had vanished utterly from this world was the point of conversion between power and operationality.

And that, Rhion thought, turning the iron circle over in his hand, was why he and Jaldis would have died in the Void but for Eric Hagen stepping to his death in the Dark Well.

Baldur had almost guessed it tonight. But, his mind running on the ancient cults and societies that he so endlessly studied, the efforts of past wizards to solve the problem of waning levels of power and not the conversion point between power and magic, the youth had seen only Hagen’s death, and not the fact that for one second, before the Void had killed him, Hagen had been working his spells outside the confines of this world. For those few moments, he had been standing in the Void itself.

And there was magic in the Void.

Every mythological Fire-Bringer Rhion had ever heard of, when faced with the problem of Darkness, of Night, had had to steal fire from a source. And so, Rhion thought, must it be here. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to create a Dark Well, for Jaldis, fearing Rhion’s connection with the Ladies of the Moon, had never taught his student the mechanics of the multiplicity of Universes. But in his pursuit of information about water goblins, Rhion had manufactured Spiracles of Air, devices that, charged with the element of air and then bound upon his forehead, had held that element around him while he walked the muddy bottoms of the Drowned Lands’ endless ponds and canals, seeking the goblins in their forests of ribbonweed and cattail root.

He was theoretically acquainted with the spells by which Spiracles of Heat could be charged to keep their wielder surrounded by warmth in bitterest cold, or Spiracles of Daylight that would permit, within their small field of brightness, the use of spells that ordinarily had power only during the hours when the sun was in the sky. Whether a Spiracle could be charged so that it would hold the essence of the Void’s magic about itself he didn’t know, for it had never to his knowledge been tried.

Theoretically, once he had a localized field of magic from the Spiracle, there was no reason why he had to be anywhere near the Dark Well to open a gate through the Void—all that it required was magic. Practically, of course, unless he wanted to perish in the airless cold chaos between universes, he needed the Dark Well, needed it to establish contact with the Archmage Shavus and the other Morkensik wizards so that they could draw him through the Void, back to his own world.

Not to mention the fact, he thought dryly, though his stomach was sinking with