The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,54

of the chalked circle, candlelight warming the translucent pallor of her face and throwing wavery thread-lace shadows from every tangled red strand of her hair. Then she looked down at the tin flask still in her hands, and twisted and untwisted its metal top as she spoke. “That’s the other reason I’d put up with Poincelles and those grunts in the barracks to get a chance to search the house. It wasn’t only word of him—records and files—I was looking for, but documents, seals, signatures to fake—anything. I’ve been out to look at the camp—I know all the roads around here—I’ve got faked i.d.s, ration cards, clothes, picklocks... But I know that’s not gonna get me spit, walking in there alone. A woman...” She shrugged. “I thought maybe Poincelles...”

Her mouth flinched with distaste at the memory of the darkness in the barn temple, and Rhion saw again the point of the downturned pentacle like a silver dagger aimed at her nude body, heard Poincelles’ evil chant.

“You tell him anything?”

She shook her head. “I was always afraid to, when it came down to it. He really believes that crap...” She paused, her eye darting up to meet Rhion’s, and then grinned apologetically. “Present company excepted. But he’s... Some of the stuff Trudi told me about what he did with her... some of the stuff he asked me to do. And there was some rumor about him and one of the local League of German Maidens, a kid about twelve... Jesus! There was a stink about that—it was before your time. So I never had the nerve. And besides, I don’t trust the momzer to keep his word.”

“Don’t,” he said. “But you’re going to have to trust me.”

After Sara had left, Rhion looked over the scrawled pages of notes.

He had mastered sufficient spoken German to understand radio broadcasts, and enough of the spiky, oddly curliqued alphabet to read simple notes, though the thick tomes of histories, records, accounts of magic over the centuries still defeated him. But though Baldur’s handwriting had been made no easier to decipher by the vast amount of mescaline the boy had taken, the meaning was clear.

22.17—Buzzing. Large bee in corner of ceiling near door.

22.38—Three red lights about seven inches apart on the wall behind me, four feet above floor.

23.10—Something in corner of room? fur?

23.50—Hole in floor, three feet in front of door. Twelve inches across. Can see edges of floorboards cut cleanly as with saw. No light down inside.

Below, in von Rath’s neat handwriting, was appended the note: “Illusions projected for sixty seconds at a time, perceived for between Five and thirty seconds.”

It was dawn. The sky had been lightening when he’d walked Sara down to the waiting car, which had passed Poincelles’ covered flatbed in the sunken roadway before the gates. Birds were calling their territories in the dew-soaked pockets of bracken among the pine trees, the thin warbling of the robins answering the chaffinch’s sharp “pink-pink,” reminding Rhion hurtfully of mornings when he’d sit in meditation on the crumbling stone terrace of the library in the Drowned Lands, listening to the marsh fowl waking in the peaceful silence.

Around him, the forces that had been raised by the blood-rite were slowly dispersing with the turn of the earth. He could feel them clinging to the fabric of the house like some kind of sticky mold—called up, incompetently tampered with, but unable to be used or converted to operancy, they lingered in shadowy corners, ugly, dirty-smelling, dark. Did the rites of the Shining Crystal even include dispersal spells? he wondered wearily. It was lunacy to suppose a group capable of raising this kind of power wouldn’t have the sense to use them, but any group fool enough to raise power out of an unwilling human sacrifice, a pain sacrifice, a torture sacrifice, was probably too stupid to realize what they were tampering with in the first place. In any case that part of the ritual might have been taken for granted and not written down—they frequently weren’t—or written down elsewhere and lost. He should, he thought, have gone down to the temple himself and worked what he could to neutralize the energies raised.

But there wasn’t enough money in Germany to make him go into that temple tonight.

Rhion flipped to the next sheet. That was in von Rath’s handwriting, neat and precise, having been written out before he’d taken the potent cocktail of mescaline, peyote, and psilocybin himself.

Bee—22.17

Triangle of red lights—22.38

Fox—23.09

Glass of beer—23.25 (That one evidently hadn’t gone