The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,55

through at all.)

Hole in floor—23.50

In a room at most a hundred feet away, which von Rath had been in scores of times, into the mind of someone who knew him and hero-worshipped him and concentrated on his every word and expression and who was, moreoever, magically trained himself and out of his skull on drugs.

But he’d done it.

Rhion folded the papers and sighed. He took off his glasses, lowered his head to his hands.

Shouldn’t you do something? a part of him asked.

For instance? Every time he closed his eyes he saw the mutilated body of the woman, like some twisted shape of driftwood in the bitter electric glare, and the two other forms beneath dripping blankets. He saw the camp, the guards, Weineke, the commandant—all the structure of power that made it so easy for von Rath to order up victims as he ordered up silver or mandrake roots or anything else he wanted from the Occult Bureau; he saw, too, the fleeing women and children scattering before the diving planes, and the boxful of spectacles that turned before his eyes into neat little corpses, folded up like frozen insects awaiting disposal.

The implications were more appalling still.

He had the sensation of being trapped in a nightmare, of teetering perilously on the edge of a dragging spiral of horror incomprehensibly worse in its dark depths than it was up here at its crown.

The gray beach he’d seen in the scrying crystal came back to him, too, men standing in the sea while boats bobbed toward them—brightly painted pleasure boats, some of them, or big, strange-looking craft with unwieldy mechanical paddles on their sides and rumps, crewed by men and women too old, too soft-looking—too kind-looking—to be soldiers. English civilians, Horst Eisler had said. A stupid and decadent race, von Rath had called them, but a race nevertheless willing to brave the choppy sea in whatever craft they could find to take those men off the beaches, out from under the flaming death of the German guns. In the crystal, he’d seen the British war planes, too, searing soundlessly overhead and fighting heart-stopping midair battles with the German fliers.

We can take out the British air cover, von Rath had said. With illusion at his command, he could.

And then... they’ll give me anything I want.

The thought of what that might be made him shudder.

How much command von Rath would ever gain over illusion was problematical, of course. No matter how much power he raised, unless the hallucinations could be directed consistently and accurately into the minds of large numbers of strangers it wouldn’t do much good, and Rhion knew that without magical operancy such control simply wasn’t possible.

But having seen the demon unleashed in von Rath’s eyes, he knew also that von Rath would not hear him when he said that. From his own experience of having the long-denied magic within him released, vindicated, broken forth into the air, he knew just how strong were the forces driving the young mage—how strong they would have been even were it not for the centuries of denial and disbelief being thrown off, as well. He would continue trying, continue the hideous blood-rites, continue raising the ghastly energies and releasing them unused and without any sort of control, until...

Until what?

Rhion didn’t know. He was wizard enough to be academically curious about the results, but every instinct he possessed told him to get out and get out fast.

For a few moments he toyed with the notion of aiding Sara and her father to escape to England, wherever the hell England was, and offering his services to the English King. But aside from the fact that once away from the Dark Well he would lose forever his chance of contacting Shavus and establishing a pickup point for his jump across the Void—in effect, exiling himself here permanently—there was no guarantee that the English King wouldn’t have him imprisoned. Like the Solarists, he seemed to believe that magic not only didn’t, but couldn’t, exist. Moreover there was always the chance that the English King was as evil as the Chancellor of Germany, though the thought of another realm as comprehensively soulless as the German Reich was something Rhion didn’t want to contemplate.

No, he thought. The best thing to do was to contact Shavus, establish a point where their power could reach out to guide him across the Void, and get the hell out of this world of luxurious insanity. And for the first time since he’d come here, that