The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,41

is for the guards to have a grudge against me for keeping them from smoking in the lodge.”

Von Rath frowned. Rhion guessed the concern in his eyes was genuine, but mixed with it was a Prussian officer’s almost disbelieving indignation that his orders might not be obeyed. “They would not dare.”

“They would.” He cocked one nearsighted blue eye up at the tall black figure standing over him. “Ordinary Troopers have ways of getting back at people who cause them trouble. It’s something I don’t want to deal with. Besides, you’d have to tear out the paneling and burn every rug and curtain in the house to get rid of the smell. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

“You are not ‘fine.’ ” Von Rath folded his arms and looked down at the little wizard with an expression of exasperated affection. “I have not noticed any smell of tobacco, though I am not a smoker myself, but I will take your word for it. I have sent for Dr. Weineke from the labor camp at Kegenwald. She should be here this afternoon to do something about getting you new eyeglasses. All right?”

“All right.” The knife cut on the back of his right arm hurt damnably under a clumsily improvised dressing. Though shallow, it would take twice as long to heal unstitched and leave an appalling scar, but Rhion could think of no way to work that into an explanation of a fall down the stairs. Fortunately he was left-handed, and the arm’s stiffness could, with luck, pass unnoticed. “Thank you.”

Curious, he thought, as von Rath’s footfalls retreated across the attic and creaked, with a slight vibration, down the narrow stairs, how the young SS wizard was equally capable of such consideration and charm, and of that calm arrogance, that close-minded assumption of his own rights at the expense of everyone whom he considered less than himself. It was, Rhion had found, one of the things that lay at the heart of Naziism, along with a paranoid sense of persecution by imperfectly identified forces—and one of the things that reminded him most of the masked followers of the Cult of Agon, the Eclipsed Sun.

Only here the mask that hid the follower from himself was subtler, not concealing the face, but changing it as it was perceived by other and by the face’s owner. An illusion, if you would—an illusion of altered perception.

Yet another of those things, he thought wryly—like horseless vehicles and flying machines, like artificial light and the ability to talk across great distances—that was magic without magic: magic without the disciplines and limitations that all mages learned.

He shut his eyes against the thin, white afternoon light, and wondered just how much of what he had said von Rath believed, and whether he should dig his boots from their hiding place beneath the bed and clean the pine needles off them—wondered for all of five seconds before he dropped into a heavy and exhausted sleep.

He woke, late and suddenly in the afternoon, from a confused dream about the Dancing Stones. Tallisett had been there, sitting on the altar stone in the old green gown she sometimes wore, her unbraided hair a wheaten cloak stirred by the faint night winds. Though he’d been far away in the deep grass of the meadow he could somehow see her face, calm and serene and a little sad, and past her shoulder saw the looming darkness of a shape and the glint of cold starlight on a blade. The Gray Lady, he thought dimly, remembering the sacrifice of the equinox... the blood black upon stone in starlight, the calling down of power. Frightened, he’d started to run, weeds pulling at his knees and his boots sucking in the heavy mud, stumbling, calling out her name, knowing he must reach the place by midnight and that midnight was near.

But when he’d gotten there she was gone. Only the stones remained, and on the altar stone, like a long puddle of ink in the darkness, lay a pool of blood. His chest hurt from running and he stood over the stone, fighting for breath, while all around him the whisper of crickets and tree toads murmured in the meadow below.

A terrible sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him, as if he had been here before—as if he knew what must happen here. He could feel magic rising up through the hill, radiating from the stones, the earth, the turning wheel of the Universe, fragmenting out along the ley-lines