The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,44

folded shapes of metal and glass were the skeletons of men, stacked like cordwood for burning, sunken eyes sealed shut and mouths opened in a congealed scream of uncomprehending despair.

He blinked. The vision disappeared.

“Where did you get these?”

Weineke glanced over at him with a clinical little frown; von Rath, too, looked worried at the sudden whiteness around his mouth. The doctor said, “They were confiscated from political prisoners, criminals, enemies of the Reich. Is there something wrong?”

“Just... I—my head aches.” He turned away quickly and, aware of their eyes upon him, put his hand into the box again.

Now that he was braced for it, the sensation was almost gone. The gold-rimmed spectacles he picked up were only spectacles. The concentration of evil, of horror, of a depth of despair unimaginable to him—of the truest touch of hell he had ever encountered—had slipped beneath the surface of reality again like a bloated corpse momentarily submerging in a pool. He could have probed into the metal and crystal to look for it, but didn’t dare.

He hated the thought of putting them against his face.

They were an old man’s glasses, meant to adjust farsightedness rather than myopia. He blinked and took them off. One of the most evil men he’d ever encountered, the old Earl of Belshya, had been ninety-four, and he supposed the Reich could have enemies that ancient who were dangerous enough to be locked up in the hell whose aura hurt his fingers as he reached into the carton again. He didn’t believe it.

The next pair, silver-rimmed, he couldn’t even touch. The boy who had worn them was dead. Through the silver, the most psychically conductive of metals, he could still feel how it had happened.

Beside him, von Rath and Weineke were engaged in soft-voiced conversation. “...victory slipping through our hands. Those prisoners I asked you to hold in readiness for us...” The primrose air smelled of cigar smoke and coffee, and across the room Horst was roaring with laughter over one of Poincelles’ witticisms. Rhion barely heard. He doubted he’d have been so aware of the auras clinging to the glasses if they hadn’t been all together in a box, if he hadn’t just been shocked from a psychometric trance; but he realized now where he’d felt that aura before. It was the same sense that clung to the yellow-patterned dishes on which they were sometimes served lunch, to one particular chair he hated in the library, to the watch they’d given him and the books in strange tongues he found hard to touch.

Those were things that had been confiscated when their owners—those mysterious and ubiquitous “enemies of the Reich”—had been taken away to be tortured and to die for crimes, it was clear from the aura of the glasses, they for the most part did not even comprehend.

He picked a tortoiseshell pair—tortoiseshell being almost completely nonconductive—but the man who had worn them had been far more shortsighted than he, almost blind. Horst and Poincelles sauntered over, still carrying their coffee cups, the Frenchman’s cigar polluting the air all around them. “Oh, not those,” Poincelles objected, taking the tortoiseshells from Rhion’s hand, “they make you look like a mole.”

“How about these?” Horst took a pair from the box and tried them on, making faces through them; Poincelles laughed.

“Trudi will go for those. You know she loves intellectual types.”

The young Storm Trooper crowed with laughter—Trudi, if Rhion recalled correctly, was the little black-haired minx at the Horn who had yet to give any evidence of literacy. Of course, in a country whose ideal woman was a devout and pregnant cook, this would scarcely be held against her.

“These are close.” Rhion put on a pair of rimless glasses with fragile silver temple pieces. They weren’t as close as another pair he’d tried, but the horror that clung to these was less suffocating, less terrifying, than some.

Poincelles grunted. “They make you look like a damn rabbi.”

The word—not in German—came to his mind with the meaning of “teacher,” but was overlain with a complex of connotations Rhion could not easily identify. Von Rath laughed gaily. “You’re right! All he needs is side curls,” but Dr. Weineke gave him a long, thoughtful scrutiny that turned his blood cold for reasons he couldn’t guess.

“How about these?” Horst balanced a pair of gold-framed lenses without temple pieces on the high, slightly skewed bridge of his nose and assumed an exaggeratedly pedagogical air. “If the class will now come to order!” He rapped with his knuckles on