The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,48
he moved, Rhion’s heart went out to her. For all her hardness she was very young. She would, he knew, far rather have been hurt herself stealing the information, would rather have traded her favors for it, than simply ask it of a man. “He wasn’t dead, or in immediate fear of dying, when they took his glasses off him,” he said slowly. “But I have no way of telling how long ago that was, or what might have happened to him since. Do you know why the Occult Bureau is imprisoning wizards?”
“God knows.” She shook her head wearily.
“And the magic that he uses...” The name of it, half-glimpsed in the deepest fabric of the penknife, returned to him. “The—the Kabbala...”
Her eyes, closed in momentary frustration, flicked open again, and in them he saw the bitter look of a cornered animal. “So you know,” she said, and suddenly all the tautness seemed to go out of her, all the catlike readiness to scratch and flee. She sighed, her eyelids creasing with an exhausted irony. “The damned thing is that if he wasn’t a Kabbalist I think he’d be dead now. Most of the people they arrested in Warsaw that first week ended up dead—not just Jews, but gypsies, teachers, priests, Communists, newspaper editors...” She pushed wearily at her hair. “Papa’s brothers are all rabbis, they thought what he studied was crazy. But I think it’s the only reason he was separated out, locked up instead of shot. I’ve been searching the Schloss for information, something that might tell me if he’s still alive, and where, and what they want with him...”
“You’re a Jew, then?” Rhion said, enlightened but keeping his voice as quiet as possible.
Sara rolled her eyes ceilingward. “So what are you, the flower of Aryan manhood?”
He blinked at her, startled. “I’m from another universe,” he explained. “I don’t even know what a Jew looks like.”
“Holy Mother of... The boys in the barracks said you were crazy. Are you circumcised?”
“Yes,” Rhion said, nonplussed by the apparent switch in topic. “What does that have to do with anything?”
She regarded him, baffled, through the bluish haze of smoke, then shook her head. “I’m beginning to believe you’re from another universe,” she said in a tone that indicated she believed no such thing. “Just don’t get yourself picked up by the SS, pal. And you might remember that if you breathe one word about my own ancestry, they won’t even take me outside to spare the furniture before they shoot me. All right?”
“All right,” Rhion agreed, still puzzled. “How powerful a wizard is your father? I’ve heard von Rath mention the Kabbala, but he seemed to think it was worthless by definition, being Jewish. Is there power in it?”
“Is there...” Sara stared at him, mouth open. “It’s all hooey, you poor deluded shnook! The whole goddam business is about as real as the tooth fairy! If there was anything in it, do you think they’d be able to round up Kabbalists and their families like sheep for the...”
“Sara!” a voice behind her bawled, and two Storm Troopers came swaggering up. One of them, a guard from the Schloss, saw him and muttered, “Oh, Professor...” but the other eyed him with utter contempt.
“C’mon, Sara, the beer don’t taste as good without you to serve it.”
“What you want with this little kike, anyway?” the other added, pulling her to her feet and into his arms.
Sara smiled, kittenish, her body suddenly supple again, all hips and breasts and teasing little hands. “Well, what’s a poor girl to do if real men don’t give her a cigarette now and then?” She took one from the camp guard’s breast pocket and put it between soft pouty lips. The man’s arm was around her, his hand cupping her buttock, as the three of them vanished into the crowd around the bar.
Rhion sipped his beer, deep in thought.
So much, he thought, for the last country in the world to believe in and support wizardry. Evidently the Reich only supported such wizards as would give it what it asked for, and somehow it made him feel better to know that other wizards had had the good taste to be “enemies of the Reich.” There was a wizard as close as the Kegenwald camp, five miles at most from where he sat.
Adrenaline scalded his veins. There was, in fact, a possibility of getting out of here alive.
He thought back on what von Rath had told him of the Kabbala. It hadn’t