The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,49

been clear because it was a field of studies rather than any specific book or rite, a tangled labyrinth of meditation and spells rooted in a central symbol called the Tree of Life and spreading in endless thickets of numerological calculation, esoteric scriptural exegesis, and six thousand years’ worth of learned quibbling. Sara had taken the knife—her father’s folding penknife—from the table, but he recalled vividly the sense of magic deep within it, like the lingering brightness that lay within the Dancing Stones.

Horst appeared at his side, adjusting his tie by touch and clearly unaware of the immense smear of fuchsia lipstick under his left ear. The blond girl Ulrica was walking with that leggy stride back to the bar, already smiling a mechanical smile for the next man or men, and Rhion saw Sara heading toward the recently vacated back room with the two Troopers who’d taken her from him.

He glanced up at Horst. “Would you talk to whoever you have to talk to about having that Sara girl come back to the Schloss with me tonight?”

Horst’s face split into a grin of complicity and delight. “Sure thing!” he said, and then added hastily, “Sir. I mean—I knew you’d like her.”

He turned at once toward the bar and Rhion said quickly, “When she’s not busy.” No sense adding a couple of sexually frustrated drunk Nazis to his other problems.

He settled back in his chair, nursing his beer and wondering how difficult it was going to be to break Sara’s father out of Kegenwald.

“And don’t get any ideas, cupcake,” Sara murmured, snuggling against him in the dark backseat of the open car and running a hand along his thigh. “Your chauffeur eavesdrops—he can see us in the driving mirror, too. Unless that’s part of your price?” She turned her head against his shoulder, and he felt the tension in her muscles as he put his arm around that slim hard waist and drew her close.

“I have a wife and two kids at home and I never sleep with women who’ve tried to knife me.”

“I bet there’s lots of those.”

The men were leaving the tavern. As Horst turned the big blue Mercedes in the yard, the yellow headlight beams splashed across the Schloss’ three-ton Benz flatbed, catching a firefly glister of silver buttons and gleaming eyes beneath the rolled-up canvas cover. The gray-uniformed Kegenwald guards were mostly walking back to the camp, and as the open Mercedes passed them, striding along in threes and fours down the single narrow street of the village, one or another would wave and call out to Horst, or to Sara.

The street ran past the new church, and the old church, and so out into the dark of the endless pines.

It was thirty minutes’ drive to Schloss Torweg, a walk of nearly forty kilometers. Railway trains—the primary means of long-distance transportation in this world—went faster than that, flying machines faster yet. Rhion smiled, hearing the Gray Lady’s voice in his mind: To go so far at such speed, and yet you will still arrive there with what you are inside.

He leaned back in the soft leather of the seat, watching the stars flick in and out of the black frieze of branches. The constellations were the same ones he knew, though their names here were different.

This potential for perfection, for comfort, he thought as the wind riffled his hair, and what are they doing? Using their airplanes to strafe fleeing civilians and their radios to incite men to hate. He remembered what he had seen in the scrying crystal and in the Ministry of Propaganda’s newsreels.

Had the world gone insane when magic had disappeared?

Not a pleasant thought.

Then they turned a corner where the road returned to its ancient, sunken track, picking up once more the line of the Kegenwald ley, and his blood turned cold.

Power was running along the ley. He could sense it like a sound, a texture in the air, and even stronger, there came to him the chill psychic stench of evil. But as he reached to touch it, to see what it was and where, it was gone. Sara felt the flinch of his body and raised her tousled head sharply from his shoulder, and he realized that quiet as she had been, she’d been waiting tensely for his slightest move.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

But a hundred yards’ distance from the Schloss he felt it again, as the harshness of the yard lights glowed between the black trees, and this time he