The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,42
to the farthest corners of this magicless earth and back again to the place where he stood at the crossing of the leys. Then faint and very close, as if the unseen musician stood at his elbow, a flute began to play. He looked around and saw no one. But in the chancy glimmer of the summer starlight, slow and ponderous and infinitely graceful, the Stones began to dance.
He woke staring at the ceiling rafters, the music of that ancient dance fading from his mind. He tried to hold it, to call back the shape of the tune, but it slipped away—in the yard below his window a sentry called out a joke to some crony about why Hitler held his hat in front of him while reviewing military parades, and the music slipped away and was gone.
Stiff and aching, Rhion rolled from the bed. Though it hurt to move, he fished out his boots and laboriously cleaned them, using rags torn from the bloodied shirt. Fortunately it was one of four or five identical Wehrmacht hand-me-downs and unlikely to be missed. He’d already torn off part of it to fashion a bandage and swabs for the alcohol he’d pilfered from the workroom downstairs; he started to rip off another piece, and, as the effort pulled agonizingly at his injured arm, he fished from his pocket the knife he’d picked up in the kitchen last night.
It was a folding clasp knife of the kind many people in his own world carried, but contained in its handle of old yellow ivory several blades instead of just one, blades of varying sizes and types. The longest had been recently sharpened to a deadly edge; the second was smaller, of a convenient size to carve feathers into pens, had these people done such a thing. Pens here were metal tubes that either held ink or more usually sputtered it broadcast over documents, hands, and shirt pockets. The third blade seemed to be a punch, the fourth a corkscrew, the fifth a short, flat-tipped slip of metal Rhion could guess no use for but that was bent and scratched as if it had, in fact, been used. He cut the shirt apart, folded it carefully, and hid it behind the loose board with his coffee beans. Then he returned to sit cross-legged on the end of the bed, back propped against the iron-barred footboard, the knife gripped lightly in his hands.
He closed his eyes and sank into meditation, feeling the smoothness and age of the ivory, the coldness of the tiny silver pins that held it to the body of the clasp, the curious, hard lightness of the steel, while his mind probed into the fabric of the tool itself, as it had probed into the stone last night.
Dimly he became aware of the smoke stench and racket of the Woodsman’s Horn, the dirty songs and the stinks of tobacco, men’s bodies, spilled beer. Overlying it he felt the charge of the perceptions of the one who had held the knife, bitter red rage, disgust, hatred—a poisoned hatred of men, of self, of Germany. A woman, he realized, a little surprised—one of the barmaids almost certainly. The pungence of sex clouded all surface impressions, messy, dirty, and dangerous, a thing to be gotten through quickly, a tool to be used as men were all tools to be used...
For what? He probed deeper, feeling the texture of that rage. Violent, despairing, contemptuous... but not hopeless. A moving anger. Moving toward a goal.
Searching. Searching this house.
Searching for what?
He slowed his breathing still more, deepening his trance. He sank past the images of greedy, fumbling hands and obscene laughter, of smutty songs and the smell of incense—incense?—seeking what lay in the deeper shadows beyond.
A man. Age and wisdom, or at least what were perceived as such... And beyond those perceptions, overlain by all else, he became aware of the man himself. Long ago this had been his knife. Then sharply, distantly; Rhion saw a gray-bearded man using this knife—yes, to carve feathers into pens like a civilized human being. To write... To write...
... magic.
??!?!!
“Rhion?”
The touch of a hand on his shoulder broke him out of his trance with a gasp and he nearly cried out as his startled jerk wrenched every bruise and ache and cut. Von Rath caught his arm—fortunately the left one—to steady him, and Rhion stared up at him, sweat springing out on his face, for a moment not recognizing who or where he