The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,35
glimpsed a sliver of golden light high up one side of the wooden structure that told him it must be curtained within.
They all kept something back, Poincelles had said.
The Frenchman had created a second temple—a secret one, for his own use, though it was good odds he’d pilfered the incense—and whatever else had gone into its construction—from Occult Bureau supplies, even as Rhion had stolen the components of the Spiracle. That could explain, Rhion thought, the disturbance of the lab. Coming closer, Rhion heard the Frenchman’s words more clearly. He was chanting in Latin, a language in which many of the ancient books at the Schloss were written, and which, like German or any other tongue, he could understand when Baldur read aloud to him from the unknown alphabets. By the rise and fall of his voice the Frenchman was clearly speaking a magical rite of some kind, not unlike the ones the Torweg wizards used to raise power for their experiments and exercises.
“...invoke and conjure thee, O Spirit Marbas... by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes, and the most potent princes Genio, Liachide, Ministers of the Tartarean Seat... forthwith appear and show thyself unto me, here before this circle... manifest that which I desire...”
The voice rolled impressively over the nonsense names of the invocation of demons as Rhion pressed himself to the door. Peering through the cracks he saw that heavy sheets or curtains of some dark material swathed the inside of the structure, whose rotting wooden walls were chinked everywhere with split or missing boards. Finding a thin line of light between two of these curtains, he reached through a gap in the wall and fingered them gently apart, angling his eye to the opening.
In the center of huge interior darkness Poincelles stood, naked and hands uplifted, piebald with the upside-down shadows of seven black candles arranged around him in a wide ring. With his wrinkled and sagging buttocks jiggling at every jerk of his upraised arms, his voice booming out the names of imaginary devils to re-echo in the harlequin of rafter shadows overhead and his head jerking every now and then to flip his hanging forelock out of his eyes, he should have been ridiculous, but he wasn’t. “Asmodeus I conjure thee; Beelzebub I conjure thee, King of the east, a mighty King, come without tarrying, fulfill my desires...”
Standing in the cool outer darkness, Rhion sensed a kind of power being raised, dim and inchoate as all power was in this diminished world but present nevertheless. It reminded him strongly of some of the slimier rites of the renegade sects of the Blood-Mages, with its stink of irresponsibility, of greediness, of contempt for everything but self—contempt even for the demons it purported to summon. Before Poincelles, a woman lay on the altar beneath an inverted pentacle, naked, also, with a chalice between her thighs. Her head lay pointing away from Rhion, her face obscured by the blackness of the altar’s shadow, but the candlelight caught a curl of cinnabar hair lying over a breast like a rose-tipped silk pillow. Beneath the cloying incense, the muskier pong of hashish lay thick in the air.
“Give me what I ask!” Poincelles switched to French in his excitement, threw his sinewy arms wide. “Give me and me only the keys that those men are seeking! Give me influence over the wizard Rhion! Place him in my unbreakable power, bind him to me, deliver him into my hand so that he cannot do other than my bidding. Make him teach me and me alone his wisdom! Cause him to trust me, lure him into my power, blind his eyes and soothe his fears...”
His voice cracking with self-induced frenzy, the lean shape stepped forward between the girl’s knees and lifted the chalice to the pentacle that flickered like molten silver as the vast shadow of his arms passed across it. “O Asmodeus, Lord of the Mortal Flesh! Beelzebub, Lord of this World! We offer this rite to you, this magic raised out of the flesh that You created, this sacred lingam raised in your honor...”
So much for Poincelles! Disgusted, Rhion stepped back and let the curtain’s tiny chink fall shut. Strictly speaking that should be a virgin, but that must be another one of those wartime shortages they keep telling us about, like ersatz coffee. He hoped Poincelles was paying her plenty for her trouble.
But knowing Poincelles, he was sure the money was probably coming ultimately out of von Rath’s pocket.