to the fifteenth century... I keep a close eye on how much he takes.”
If you’re his only source, thought Rhion. But, anxious to turn the Captain’s thoughts away from who might have been using the laboratory at night, he suggested, “Do you think the problem of raising power might be with the composition of this group?” He pushed his glasses more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose and followed von Rath as the younger wizard started moving about the laboratory, turning down the kerosene lamps until their wicks snuffed to nothing and the shadows hovered down about them like the fall of night.
“According to Gall, and to what Baldur’s read to me, the old covens seem to have been much larger than ours. Five men isn’t a lot, even if they are mageborn and more or less trained. Magic can be raised from the emotional or psychic or life-force energies of human beings, as Baldur pointed out last night. But blood-sacrifice, either voluntary or involuntary, isn’t the only way of doing that, you know. Perhaps if you worked with twice as many men as this, and an equal number of women, you’d get better results.”
Von Rath chuckled wearily and turned from replacing a lamp chimney, shadows of irony flickering in his tired eyes. “My dear Rhion, have you any concept of the contortions Eric had to undertake to gather even this group? To find men whose loyalty was as reliable as their potential for power, and who were even willing to work as a group?” He shook his head with a half-comic smile and led the way out into the sunlit upstairs hall. “And as for women...” The gesture of his hand, as dismissive as a shrug, raised the hackles on Rhion’s neck. “Women have no place in magic.”
“WHAT?”
“Not true magic.” Surely you must know that, said the flex of his voice, as Rhion stared at him, too dumbfounded even to feel outrage. “Their emotions are uncontrollable—surely you’ve tried to have a reasonable argument with a woman? Their intellects are on the average less than men’s. That’s been scientifically proven. Oh, there are one or two exceptions...”
“I’ve met enough exceptions to constitute a rule, personally.”
But the little smile and the small, amused shake of his head were impenetrable. It was not, Rhion saw, a matter even for serious argument, as if Rhion had suggested petitioning the help of the kitchen cat.
Von Rath gave him a boyish half grin, a man-to-man expression of complicity. “It’s hard to explain, but you know. It’s one of those things that a true man knows by intuition. And at bottom, magic is a masculine trait. A woman’s emotionalism and wooly-mindedness would only delay us, always supposing we could find a woman with even a tenth the level of power of a man.”
Given the intolerable pressures a mageborn girl would have faced in Germany, Rhion hadn’t been terribly surprised that the Torweg group was entirely masculine. And yet from Poincelles he knew that there were and always had been women occultists. But not, it appeared, in Nazi Germany.
“And in any case,” von Rath went on, turning down the hallway toward his rooms, “the question at the moment is an academic one. We must find a way to raise power—we must find a way to convert that power to operationality—and we must find them soon. Only through those—only through the victory that such power will bring—can magic be returned to this world.”
“And did little ratty die?” Cigar in hand, Poincelles looked around from the doorway of the watch room at the foot of the stairs. Beyond him Rhion—who had changed once more into his usual fatigue pants and a brown army shirt—could see that the room had been curtained to dimness, and the portable screen set up on which cinemas were displayed; the black-and-white images of newsreels of the war in the West flickered across it like jiggling ghosts.
“Did you have money on it living?”
The Frenchman grinned broadly. After the dawn ritual of meditation to raise power he hadn’t even bothered to attend the experiment with the talisman. He’d changed out of his robe back into the same loud tweed trousers and jacket he’d had on last night—the same shirt and underclothing by the smell of it. “Boche idiots,” he said.
Past Poincelle’s angular shoulder the fluttering images of huge war machines appeared on the screen in the gloom of the watch room, monstrous metal beetles rumbling down the cobbled streets of towns with their turret