to shed the petty hates of the weak?” Von Rath broke off suddenly, dark brows flinching as if at the bite of unexpected pain. He put his hand to his smudged and sunken eyes, and shook his head.
“I—I’m sorry,” he said softly. When he looked up the metallic hardness had faded momentarily from his eyes, leaving them again the eyes of the young man who had dreamed of wizardry, who had asked only to be taught. “I don’t know what... Rhion, I respect your learning. You still have a great deal of technique to teach me, and I admit I am still a novice.” He frowned, trying to collect his thoughts. “But it is plain to me that you do not understand the nature of—of heroism, for want of a better word. There comes a time when a student must realize his own truth, not his teacher’s; when a man must see with his own heart and his own eyes, not through books written by other men. It is intuition and courage that lie behind great deeds, not hairsplitting pedantry for its own sake.”
“In other words experience isn’t valid if it isn’t your experience?” Rhion retorted dourly, recognizing the image of the intuitive Aryan hero from the cheaper sort of pulp fiction and the more fatuous articles in Der Sturmer available in the watch room. He knew that at this point he should have gotten up and left, but he was angry as well as scared, angry at that arrogance, angry for the old man he had seen with the wounded lip, angry for last night’s dead.
“I’m saying it is valid only up to a point. Then a man must learn, and know for himself. It isn’t the first time human sacrifice has been performed in the cause of the Black Order, you know.”
“No,” Rhion agreed slowly. “But as I understood it, the sacrifices performed by the SS at Welwelsburg were of volunteers, SS men themselves. A willing sacrifice is an entirely different matter, a completely different way of raising power.”
“Is it?” Von Rath tilted his head a little, that opaqueness, that curious opalescent quality, slowly filtering back into his fatigue-shadowed eyes. “I wonder. But in any case our needs now are different. We must obtain the wherewithal to defeat Britain and defeat her quickly. And in so doing, we will give the SS power to become the Holy Order it should be, so that it can take its rightful place in the defense of the Reich and its destiny.” His cool gaze seemed distant, fixed upon some unknown point, some ancient dream. “And that power now lies in my hands.”
“It doesn’t,” Rhion said, his voice steady but his heart beating hard. “And it won’t.”
The gray gaze didn’t even shift, didn’t acknowledge that anything could stand in its way. “It will. Given time—and correct teaching.” He turned back to Rhion, studying him with glacial, objective calm. “Tell me... Do you object to the blood-rites on so-called humanitarian grounds, or because of the danger?”
Rhion closed his eyes, seeing again the brown gypsy woman’s body, the inked blue symbols of the rites barely visible under the blood that glistened everywhere on the shredded skin. He understood then the black self-loathing he’d read on everything Sara had touched. “What you do with your criminals here is no concern of mine,” he made himself say. “But for preference I’d rather not be in the Schloss at all while you’re performing a blood-rite.” Everything within him was screaming Coward. Coward and whore. And looking up, he saw the words reechoed in the contemptuous thinning of von Rath’s colorless lips.
“Of course I respect your wishes,” the SS wizard said. “But you will give us the benefit of your wisdom and your teaching betweentimes? Because we will master this, Rhion.” His tone glinted like the blued edge of a knife. “And let us have no more—ah—judgments on your part as to what is and is not safe for us to know. Understand?”
And with a gesture infinitely graceful he drained his glass of mineral water and, rising, walked from the room.
“In other days,” Baldur read, his thin voice freed for once of its nervous stammer as it framed the sonorous Latin of the ancient text, “a mage alone could call forth power by simple acts, or by words spoken either aloud or within the mind, as in ancient times men spoke face to face with gods.”
He paused to turn a page: a narrow book, bound in brown leather