The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,43
was.
“Are you all right?”
“Uh—yeah,” he managed to say, breathless with the shocked disorientation of being brought cold out of a deep trance. His hands were shaking as he fumbled the knife back into his pocket. “Fine. Just—just give me a minute.”
Von Rath stepped back, clearly puzzled. Shutting his eyes, Rhion tried to gather what remained of the trance back into his mind to close it off, but fragments of his consciousness seemed to be floating everywhere around him in a cloud, and his head throbbed painfully. “I did knock.” Von Rath’s voice was apologetic and concerned, grinding disorientingly into his consciousness. “It is not the time for meditations...”
“Oops.” Rhion grinned shakily. “I’ve been looking all over for the piece of paper with the meditation schedule on it... Never mind,” he added, seeing von Rath’s baffled expression. “Joke. Very small joke.” And one that would be lost on a German anyway. He inhaled deeply a few more times, then gave it up as a bad job. In time his head would clear, certainly after he slept again, which didn’t sound like such a bad idea. He finger-combed back the thick curls of his hair. “What is it?”
“Dr. Weineke is here. For your eyeglasses.”
Dr. Weineke was a cold-faced woman of forty or so whom Rhion hated on sight. Having been startled from deep meditation, he was far more conscious than usual of the auras that clung to things and people, and in her voice and her hands when she touched his face, he felt an evil terrifying in its impersonality. The place she had come from had left a smell upon her soul, like the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes that permeated the ugly female version of the SS uniform she wore.
She examined his eyes in the dining room, a long and rather rustic hall with heavy beams and what was obviously intended to be a Gothic fireplace at one end. Wide windows looked out onto the south end of the compound yard, facing the garages. Beyond the wire, molten patches of late sunlight lay halfway up the rusty coarseness of the pine trunks and gleamed far-off on a pond away among the trees. Poincelles, Horst, and an older SS Trooper named Dieter were drinking coffee at the far end of one of the several long tables that occupied the room, Poincelles in his booming voice listing every rival magician, former in-law, and disapproving scholastic colleague he knew in Paris and just what he hoped the Gestapo—the Secret Political Police—would do to them.
“It will take at least ten days for the dispensary to fill this prescription,” Dr. Weineke said as she put away the last of her small glass sample lenses and jotted a note on a piece of paper. “Perhaps much longer, with the demands of the troops in the field.” She gave a cursory glance to the bruise on Rhion’s face and made a small disapproving noise with her tongue. Then she turned to von Rath, who sat on the table nearby like a schoolboy with his feet on the seat of his chair. “Knowing the importance of the Professor’s work, I took the liberty of bringing an assortment of eyeglasses that might serve him in the interim.”
“How very clever of you!” Von Rath’s smile, like his words, were something he’d obviously learned in a manners class, gracious and warm for all they weren’t genuine. Weineke colored up like a girl as she reached under the table and brought up a cardboard carton, which she set on the table beside Rhion. It was half full of pairs of eyeglasses.
“Try them on,” she invited in what she evidently considered a genial voice. “One will surely be close enough to allow you to continue your so-valuable labors.”
Rhion put his hand into the box and nearly threw up with shock.
The psychic impact was as if he’d unsuspectingly plunged his arm into acid. Yet at the same time what was in the box—the dim miasma floating over those neat, insectile frames and dust-covered lenses—was ephemeral, gone even as he jerked his hand out, sweating and gray-lipped and sick. He glanced quickly to see if von Rath and Weineke had noticed, but they were talking together, the SS doctor dimpling under the young mage’s adroit courtesy as if his words were a glass of cognac. If she’d known how she would have smiled.
Hands shaking, sweat standing cold on his face, Rhion looked back at the box. For a moment it seemed to him that those flat,