The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,52
“All right, give me the glasses. But I can guarantee you right now, if your father’s as wise as you think he is, that what he’s doing is sleeping.”
He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and sketched around himself a Circle of Power. As he settled his mind, deepening it into preliminary meditation, he noted that Sara, chatty as she was with the men in the tavern, seemed to realize the need for silence. Of course, he thought. She’s a wizard’s daughter. Whether she thought it was hooey or not, her father had taught her the rules.
The moon stood low, a sickly scrap of itself tangled in the black of the eastern trees. Even the crickets’ endless screeking in the warm spring night had fallen silent. With the moon’s waning the dark field of power enveloping the house felt stronger yet. Rhion guessed he could have tapped into that field to make the scrying easier, but instead blocked it from the Circle as best he could; as a result, it took him the usual endless forty minutes to raise the strength. His head began to ache, but nothing would have induced him to partake of what had been done tonight. The pince-nez lay like an insect’s cast chitin in his right hand, the crystalline lattices of the glass holding the psychic energies that had surrounded them; in his left the scrying crystal flashed sharply in the reflected candlelight. He pursued those flame reflections down into the stone’s structure, sinking through the gem’s familiar pathways until colors came, then darkness, then the clear gray mist that rolled aside so suddenly to reveal a tiny image, like something reflected over his shoulder or in another room.
“It’s a cell about eight feet square,” he murmured, and somewhere behind him the bedsprings creaked as Sara leaned forward. “Cement walls, cement floor, iron cot, bucket in one corner.” A part of him whispered in relief. He had been afraid to look into the place where the glasses had come from, afraid of what he might see. “There’s a window high up, floodlight outside... A man sitting on the edge of the cot. Tall and skinny...” Rhion frowned, concentrating on details. “His head’s been shaved, the stubble’s gray and white... Long eyebrows, curling—gray. There’s a scar on his lip, not very old...”
The glasses still between his fingers, he touched the place and heard Sara’s hissing intake of breath. “Bastards. Bastards!” Poisoned tears shook in her voice. “He had a mole there, under his beard. They shave them when they put them in the camps.”
If he thought about it—if he let anger or outrage or anything else intrude on the effort of concentration—he would lose the image altogether and be unable to get it back. His training had given him discipline to exclude even the worst of horrors from his mind. But it was a near thing.
After a moment he went on, “He’s wearing dark pants of some kind, patches... gray shirt in rags. His knees are skinny, bones sticking out through the cloth—long thin hands, brown age spots—He looks too old to be your father.”
Dimly he heard her voice say, “He was forty-one when he met Mama.”
“He’s standing up, walking to the window, trying to look out but it’s over his head. He’s worried, fidgety, pacing around.”
“Can you tell where the place is?” She leaned forward, her hands with their bitten red nails clasped on her knees. “Is he still at Kegenwald?”
“I don’t know.” He spoke dreamily, detached, struggling to keep his concentration focused on the old man’s face. A curious face, beaky and strong in spite of its egglike nakedness, the dark eyes as they gazed up at the narrow window filled with horror and concern that held no trace of personal fear. Rhion felt a kind of awe, for having tasted the aura of the place, through the box of glasses and through Dr. Weineke’s cold smile, he knew he himself would have been huddled in a corner puking with terror. And he knew there were still things about this that he didn’t know.
“Have you seen the camp?” he asked softly. “I can go up and look through the window myself, describe what I see...”
Within the crystal he saw the old man look up swiftly, at some unheard sound outside. Then he pressed to the wall beneath the window, straining to hear, and Rhion concentrated on moving past him, up the wall until he was level with the opening, which, he saw