The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,61
have waited for you to return, but when he showed me the rite he had discovered—decoded from the Venetian Lucalli’s diaries—somehow I knew we did not need to wait.”
“Like hell.” Rhion dropped into a chair. “It takes more than an hour and a half to push through the paperwork to get three prisoners sent over here from Kegenwald for you to disembowel. They’re efficient, but they’re not that efficient.”
The gray eyes met his, the cold opal gaze a stranger’s, and Rhion saw again the demon move in their depths. “Do you object to that?”
“I object,” Rhion said slowly, picking his words with the utmost care, “to you doing a rite involving human sacrifice, especially an unwilling human sacrifice, without consulting me. The field of power raised from such a sacrifice is septic and unpredictable. Without stronger guards than you can raise in this world, you could end up killing everyone in the house. You don’t know how to direct the power you raised last night—you sure as hell didn’t know how to disperse it.”
Von Rath frowned, genuinely puzzled. With a chill stab of shock Rhion understood then that the man had not even been aware of the horrors that had gibbered in the corners of the darkness last night.
“It was dispersed,” von Rath said. “We used the usual formulae...”
“The usual formulae are about as effective as a traffic citation against a division of Panzers! The whole house was glowing when I got here. What you did—human sacrifice, especially a torture sacrifice—is the most dangerous way there is of raising power...”
“Nonsense.” There wasn’t even defensiveness in his voice—only a kind of brisk relief. “Human sacrifice has been practiced since the dawn of time, and the Adepts of the Shining Crystal never spoke of danger, though they regularly used this method of raising power.” He spoke with the same matter-of-fact calm with which he had quoted his “scientific” statistics on the intelligence of women or the cultural superiority of the Aryan race. “And in any case,” he went on, “they were not true human beings. The women were gypsies, the boy a Jew.”
Rhion looked away from him, his fist clenching involuntarily with rage, fighting back words that wouldn’t change the calm conviction in those opaque eyes but would only put paid to what little freedom of action he himself might still have. Von Rath had once said to him Surely you’ve tried to have a reasonable argument with a woman... Rhion had had plenty of those, but what he’d never had—though he’d occasionally been foolish enough to try—had been a reasonable argument with a member of either sex in the grip of an obsession that amounted to lust.
After a few moments he said quietly, “I don’t care if they were Hitler’s charladies and the King of Belgium; unless the victim is willing, a blood-rite with a sentient intelligence runs the risk of releasing forces that can completely distort the powers raised. You raised a hell of a lot of power last night, but without physical operancy—without technique—you can’t control it.”
Von Rath leaned forward and, with slender white fingers still stained faintly brown under the nails, moved his porridge bowl just slightly, so that the edge of the saucer lined up perfectly with the waxed oak grain of the table’s wood. “And whose fault is it,” he asked gently, “that we do not have physical operancy?”
Rhion experienced a sensation exactly similar to that of a man hanging by a rope above an abyss, when he feels the first strand part.
Oh, Christ.
Von Rath went on in that soft, level voice, “You were the one who told us that the Rites of the Shining Crystal, should we decode them, would be of no use to us. Fortunately Baldur saw in them more promise than you apparently did.”
“What Baldur saw in them was the possibility of power.” Rhion had known that this would come, but still he felt the blood leaving his extremities. He was aware as he never had been before of his absolute isolation in this place, of von Rath’s absolute power over him... of the beating of his own heart. “What he didn’t see—what my guess is he didn’t want to see—is their danger to the magician who uses them.”
“And why was there no mention of this danger made by the Adepts of the Shining Crystal themselves?”
“Maybe because they were so goddam vain they wouldn’t admit there might be anything wrong with what they were doing?”