The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,64

someone of greater power, greater magic, and we’ll make a talisman of p-power that’ll blow the roof off the building!”

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

Baldur heaved a sigh and slumped back in his chair, his weak brown eyes dreamy. “What a pity they destroyed it. The Shining Crystal... Do you think it might have been one and the same with the Holy Grail? Wolfram von Eschenbach describes the Grail as a stone, you know. Just like the Jewish-Christian Church to have pulverized such a talisman and slaughtered its guardians!”

“Jewish-Christian Church?” Rhion was startled. “I thought the Christians spent the last ten centuries killing the Jews!”

Baldur waved an airy hand. “They all come from the same source,” he declared, as if that made them a single organization. “They hate and suppress m-magic, the same way they’ve tried to suppress the pure Aryan Race, whose birthright true magic is.”

“And whose most sterling representative and spokesman you are?” Poincelles purred maliciously.

Baldur’s pasty face blotched with red. “My family can trace its German heritage back past 1640!”

“Ah, I see—that should get you into the SS with no problem, then, shouldn’t it?”

The boy jerked furiously to his feet, his pudgy hands bunching with rage, and Rhion caught his arm and pulled him back as he started toward the Frenchman. To Poincelles, Rhion snapped, “Look, if you’re going to waste your time pulling the wings off flies, why don’t you do it someplace where it won’t waste my time, too? Christ, it’s like being in a girls’ school—except if Baldur were a schoolgirl, you’d be doing more to him than calling him names.”

Poincelles grin widened appreciatively. “Touché,” he murmured, rising; book under his arm, he strolled out onto the veranda just beyond the long windows, where Gall, stripped to a loincloth, was engaged in boneless runic yoga in the pale afternoon sun.

“French-Jewish pig,” Baldur gritted, bending down to scrabble for the notes he’d knocked off the table in his hysterical haste. He puffed a little as he moved; the thin bar of sunlight, penetrating from the curtain Poincelles had left open, picked out a mist of sweat on his pimpled forehead.

“Is he Jewish?” Sara hadn’t mentioned it.

Baldur shrugged. “All the French are.” It was a statement Rhion knew to be untrue. “They’re a degenerate race—apemen, beastmen, whose only desire is genetically to pollute the Aryans, the true descendants of the Atlantean root race, through the s-sexual corruption of their wo-wo-women.” He straightened up, barely missing the edge of the table with his head, his hands shaking badly as he shuffled his papers into order once again.

His pouchy eyes gazed past Rhion after the older occultist with sudden, jealous hate. In a low, furious mutter he went on, “It’s against him and men like him that the SS was formed. The real SS, the inner core of the SS—the shining sword blade of the Aryan Race that will turn the tide of genetic slopwork that threatens to engulf us from the East! We’re more than just an imperial guard, you know,” he went on, turning to meet Rhion’s eyes. “We’re a religious order, like the ancient Teutonic Knights, a sacred band of all that’s best of the Aryan Race. It’s only fitting that we, with our birthright of magic, of vril, should be doing what we’re doing now—forming a point of adamant for the spear of our destiny. Paul—P-Paul understands.”

He gestured angrily toward the windows, beyond which, by Gall’s furious gesticulations, it was obvious Poincelles had succeeded in baiting the Austrian mage. “And Himmler uses men like that for his purposes! When P-Paul comes into his own, when they make him head of the SS—as they’ll have to, when by magic we encompass the British defeat!—the Order will be as it should be, as it has always been destined to be, a sacred band of blood and fire and m-m-magic—”

“Baldur...”

The boy almost leaped out of his chair at the sound of von Rath’s quiet voice. Without so much as an Excuse me he abandoned Rhion and hurried into the hall—from his seat in the wing chair, Rhion could see the two of them standing together, the boy clutching his notes to his sagging breasts and nodding, the man speaking softly, his head tilted a little to one side, sunlight from the hall window dappling his black shoulders, his pale hair, and the scarred left profile visible through the door with pallid gold. Von Rath said something and gestured toward the library door; Rhion thought the heard his