staggered, faintness rising through him with sudden, dizzying heat. He caught himself on the jamb of a door across the hall. Through that door the soft luminescence of candles wavered; his sight cleared again, and he saw within the half-lit darkness a tall man lying dead upon a leather divan, candles burning at his head and feet and an ornamental silver dagger unsheathed upon his breast. Rhion looked back quickly and saw beside him Paul’s drawn gray face. He was not, he realized, the only one to have lost a friend tonight.
“Eric,” Paul said softly. “Eric Hagen. It was he whose dream this was—the dream of bringing back magic to this world, before the enemies of magic who encircle our realm destroy us all.”
Perhaps ten years older than Paul, like him Eric had been strong-featured and fair, and like him he was clad in close-fitting garments of black and gray, with buttons and buckles of gleaming silver. A little emblem of the sun-cross, red and black and white, glistened like a drop of blood on the collar of his shirt. Behind him, illuminated in the hard bar of light that fell through from the hall, hung a banner, the sun-cross wrought huge in black upon a white circle against a ground of bloody red.
The sun-cross, Rhion noticed for the first time, was reversed, so that it turned not toward light, but toward darkness.
“My name, by the way,” Paul’s voice said quietly, “is Captain Paul von Rath, of the Occult Bureau of the Ancestral Heritage Division of the Protection Squad. And though it is a sorry and tragic welcome, I do welcome you nevertheless, in the name of the German Reich.”
Solstice
Two
“AS FAR AS we can determine,” Paul von Rath said, the light wind generated by their vehicle’s speed flicking the fair hair like a raw-silk pennon from his forehead, “magic has not existed in our world for at least a hundred and seventy years. Whether this was the result of the actions of the men who hated it—and in our world magic has been deeply hated by both society and the church, as Jaldis told me that it is in yours—or whether it was an accident, a natural event like the fall of night, we have not been able to determine.”
He sighed and turned his head, watching the endless monotony of dark pinewoods flashing past them: the low roll of moraine hills still shawled with cold blue shadows on their western sides, though the sky overhead was bright; the gray loom of granite boulders among soft green bracken or pine straw the color of dust; a landscape occasionally broken by abandoned meadows rank with weeds and murky with shallow, silted ponds; and here and there a crumbling barn.
“We only know that accounts of what can be termed actual magic became more and more sparse, and harder and harder to authenticate, until they ceased entirely. And that when we attempt to work what magicians of old claimed to be spells, we achieve nothing.”
Rhion shivered, wondering what it must have been to be born with the power of wizardry—as he had been born—in a world where magic no longer existed—where such power, such longing, such dreams, could never be consummated and could never be anything but the slow oncoming of madness.
It was something he didn’t like to think of at present. It was difficult enough to tell himself, as he did daily, sometimes hourly, that even the smallest of his own powers and perceptions—his ability to scry through a crystal, to channel energy into divining cards, or to deepen his senses to perceive sounds and scents and vibrations beyond the range of ordinary human awareness—would return and that they had not been permanently stripped away by the passage through the Void.
Three weeks isn’t so long...
The first two weeks had seemed an eternity of lying feverish and weak in the great, gray granite hunting lodge called Schloss Torweg, mourning for Jaldis, sick with terror, disoriented and more alone than he had ever felt in his life.
He had been up and around for some days, but it was good now to be out in open air.
They came onto the main road through the hills. Gold morning sunlight slanted into their eyes as they drove eastward, palpable as javelins of gold. It splashed with light the tangles of wild ivy crowning the steep banks of the road cut, turned to liquid gold the buttercups in the roadside ditches, and made stars of the frail white spangles