The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,27

terror and dread, that he would have to be standing in the Void to charge the Spiracle.

And that meant the Dark Well.

That meant doing the thing that had taken Eric Hagen’s life.

And that brought him back to Poincelles and the conversation in the tavern tonight.

Rhion got to his feet and prowled restlessly back to the window. In the acid glare he could see the black-uniformed sentry, rifle on shoulder, walking the perimeter of the fence. He needed help, needed another wizard to ground him, hold him anchored to this world, while he charged the Spiracle with the Void’s wild magic, but the thought of putting his life in Auguste Poincelles’ nicotine-yellowed hands terrified him. For all von Rath’s gentle charm, it was perfectly possible that the SS Captain had put Poincelles up to making a pass at Rhion tonight in the tavern to test his intentions—to see whether he really was holding something back.

He didn’t know, and the uncertainty, the dreadful sensation of never knowing whom to trust and whether his instincts were correct or not, was profoundly disorienting and exhausting.

“And anyhow,” he muttered dourly, climbing back on the chair and replacing the Spiracle in its hiding place in the rafters, “the whole question is pretty academic until I can find the goddam Dark Well.”

He returned to the window and checked the stars. Shortly after midnight. By the glow in the east above the spiky black of the tree-clothed hills, the moon would be rising soon, wan and cold in its last quarter. First dawn was some three hours away. From the drawer in the dresser where he kept his old brown robes Rhion fished the wristwatch von Rath had given him, and after a moment’s study confirmed the timepiece’s accuracy, at least as far as he understood the way time was reckoned here.

He put the watch back in the drawer. Though he recognized the ingeniousness of the mechanism he seldom wore it, chiefly from annoyance at the obsession these people had with the correct time. But every now and then, when he handled the intricate golden lozenge, he sensed upon it a vague psychometric residue of uncleanness that repelled him, but that he could not quite place. Other things in the Schloss had it, too, odd things: the plates of a certain pattern in the big, sunny dining room in the south wing; the radio in the guards’ watch room; some of the books in the library. He wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with them—and indeed, it was something he sensed only intermittently. But he didn’t like it.

He listened now, and the lodge was quiet.

His stockinged feet made no sound on the bare floor boards as he crossed first the darkness of his own room, then the vast, dusty spaces of the main attic. The descending stair debouched close to von Rath’s study and bedroom. From the main stair to the lower floor he heard the soft crackle of the radio still. By now he knew enough German to follow the broadcast, though not most of Chancellor Hitler’s speeches. Now and then a Storm Trooper’s voice would speak, desultory and half asleep. In his long nights of quiet listening Rhion had learned that inside duty generally involved three sentries who made a patrol or two of the ground floor in between long periods of sitting around the watch room smoking, reading cheap tabloids like Der Sturmer, and comparing notes about the barmaids at the Woodsman’s Horn. Sometimes one or another of the barmaids was smuggled in, to be taken by a dozen of the men in turn in the deserted kitchen or laundry in the south wing—occasionally he heard Poincelles’ voice on those nights.

But tonight there was only the desultory conversation of men who have said everything they had to say months ago. He waited until he heard all three voices, then, barely daring to breathe, he stole soundlessly down the stairs and slipped like a shadow past the watch room door. There was, he knew, a backstairs leading down to the kitchen in the south wing, but its upper end was in the little dressing room attached to the empty chamber where the Dark Well had allegedly been drawn—the false Dark Well, to convince him that it had been destroyed—and that chamber was next to von Rath’s. In any case he would still have had to pass the watch room door to reach his destination on the ground floor, an old ballroom in the north wing that