The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,36

through the damp weeds toward the road, he heard the girl cry out in rapture, but something in the timbre of that outburst of ecstasy told him it was faked. He shook his head. His father had always said you got what you paid for.

But it left him definitely back at square one, facing the prospect of stepping into the Dark Well alone. “Always supposing I can get at the damn thing,” he added dryly, stepping out of the shadows of the hedges into the rough surface of the main road.

The moon was rising, edging every pine tip, every weed stem, and every sunken pond in milky silver. The night breathed with its singing. Curious, thought Rhion, that even the spirits seemed to have deserted this world. The luminous mirrors of pond and marsh should have been alive with nixies and water goblins, the long grasses aflicker with the half-seen ectoplasmic wings of the faes and the brown, scurrying feet of lobs. He would almost have welcomed the ghost-cold shadow of an errant grim. Had those bodiless life essences, like the power in the ley-lines, sunk to hibernation in the ground?

He turned back and studied the sagging black roof line of Poincelles’ barn. Tonight’s expedition was far from wasted, he thought. He’d found another place where power of a sort had been raised—enough of it would cling so that the place could serve as a beacon to Shavus, perhaps enough to give him a fighting chance of opening a gate, if coupled with the power of the upcoming solstice midnight, though he would have preferred a place situated on a ley.

But that thought led to another. It was still early, he thought, looking at the stars. Instead of turning left, up the hill toward the Schloss, he moved on down the road, following its curve back up the other side of the hills.

The moon stood clear over the distant eastern ridge when he reached Witches Hill. Soaked in the pallid light, the Dancing Stones seemed to shine with the wan limmerance of forgotten spells as Rhion waded up the hill in the dew-heavy grass. Exhausted as he had been on his first visit there with Gall and Baldur, Rhion had sensed no magic in the place. But now it seemed that for once Gall had been right. The magic that had been there once was not dead, only deeply asleep.

It was obvious to him now which of the two shapeless stones lying in the ground had been the altar of the ancient rites. Sitting on its higher end, Rhion pressed his palms to the age-pitted surface and felt it cold and wet with dew. Rain and sun had almost rinsed away whatever had been there, dimmed it beyond what could be detected when the sun was in the sky. But in the sleeping hours between midnight and dawn an echo of it whispered, like the memory of voices after the singers have gone.

Closing his eyes, he let his mind sink deep.

It had all been a long time ago. Very little was left: the faded impression of a drum tapping, the memory of other moons. There had been blood—a lot of blood, animal and human. Some of it was mixed with semen—a virgin’s first experience, the psychic charge still glittering faint as pyrite crystals deep in the fabric of the stone; elsewhere lay the deeper and more terrible charges of power drawn from pain and death. Power had been raised here, again and again, from that ancient triad of sex, death, and sacrifice, sometimes unwilling and at other times freely given, the magic woven of that power now lost in the turning winds of time.

But its residue remained.

Rhion took off his glasses, bent forward until his face touched the stone. Unlike Gall—or unlike what Gall claimed—he had no visions of eldritch priests, no cinema-show reenactments of the past. But the stone now felt warm to his palms. Like unheard music, he felt the power whisper along the leys that crossed beneath the altar, drawing power from the net of silver paths that covered the earth, dispersing it back to the world’s four corners again.

After a long time he came back to himself, lying facedown on the altar, all his muscles aching, his hair and the back of his khaki uniform shirt damp with sweat. He groped around for his glasses and put them on again, to see Orion’s belt hanging low in the east. He muttered, “Verflucht!” and stumbled to his