The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,32
guns swinging watchfully back and forth; then, with dreamlike quickness, they were transformed to images of men—Rhion did not have enough German unassisted by spells of understanding to catch who they were—being herded out of a building somewhere, herded into boxcars with their hands above their heads. The Ministry of Propaganda sent these newsreels, these moving pictures, out regularly to the SS, even as it sent whatever American cinemas they wanted to see... they had taught Rhion more about the German Reich than von Rath had counted on. Most of all, they had taught him that the Reich was sufficiently proud enough of those fearsome columns of marching men, those lines of resistant “slave peoples” being shot for intransigence, to have them thus immortalized and displayed.
Baldur, clattering down the steps behind Rhion in his own ill-fitting and dirty trousers and rumpled shirt, paused and snapped spitefully, “For a man whose country will be the next to fall to the victorious German Armies you have no room to talk!” He pointed into the watch room, where columns of armored trucks and marching men flickered across the screen. “You know where they’re headed now? France! Your cowardly government is on the run and they’ll be in Paris before the week is out!”
Poincelles only raised the back of his fist up under one hairy nostril and snorted in a mime of inhaling cocaine. Baldur’s fleshy neck turned bright red and, wheeling, the youth lumbered away to the dining room, tripping on a corner of the hall rug as he went.
“Does he think I’m going to weep when the Krauts march into La Belle Paris?” The Frenchman’s skeletal face grimaced with scorn. “I am a citizen of the world, my friend, born and reborn down through generations. What is this war to me? What is France to me? I was high mage to the court of Kublai Khan, who conjured for him the eldritch secrets of the Aklo and the Hyperborean races. Before that, in the dark years of glory in the seventh century, I conjured for Pope Leo those things that would have caused his name to be stricken from the pages of history, had any known of them but I. In the black abysses of time I was High Priest of the Cult of Thoth for the Pharaoh Ptah-Hotep, who was accursed in the Red Land and the Black Land for the things that he caused to be done...”
He took the cigar from his mouth and blew a stinking stream of blue smoke into the sunlit air. In the watch room Rhion heard the men give a great delighted cheer; on the screen he saw a country road, jammed with people—old men pushing bicycles laden with household goods, women hurrying, stumbling, dragging frightened children by the hand, old cars maneuvering slowly through the choking throng of people fleeing with whatever they could carry...
And from the sky the war planes descended, lean and deadly with the twisted sun-cross emblazoned on their silver sides, opening fire with their machine guns on the fleeing civilians below. The guards in the watch room cheered and whooped at the sight of the women running for shelter, dropping all they carried and catching up their terrified children, men scrambling like scared sheep into the bushes alongside the road, faces twisted in silent cries.
Rhion felt sick and cold. Beside him, Poincelles’ voice went on, “That Baldur, he puts on airs because he wants to be in the SS, to be one of Himmler’s darlings. Himmler, huh! A mediocrity, a crank—using the most powerful and dangerous elite the world has ever known to serve tea in white gloves at Hitler’s garden parties. It’s like using a Damascus blade to cut eclairs! Himmler claims he was the Emperor Henry the Fowler in his former life—pah! I knew Henry the Fowler! I served in his court in the great days of the Dark Ages, in the wars against the Magyars and the Slavs, and Himmler is no more his reincarnation than you are. I learn from them, yes”—he waved the cigar in the direction of the sun-washed dining room, where Baldur’s voice could be heard querulously demanding more sugar for his coffee—“as I learn from you. But all this is merely a step along the way.”
The black, knowing eyes gleamed and he reached out to pat Rhion’s cheek, the pointed fingernails pricking through his beard like dirty claws. “I am in this for myself, my little friend. You really ought to trust