The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,67

moved to Rhion, still sitting curled together on the bed. “This is crazy-stupid.” The break in her voice was infinitesimal. In spite of everything, Rhion thought, she was young enough to grab at even crazy-stupid hope. She put the pills in her purse.

Rhion took a deep breath. “You say you can pick locks. Will you help me with something else?”

With an almost instinctive gesture she moved a step or two away, putting the iron-spindled footboard of the bed between them and folding her hands around its upper bar. “Like what?”

As Rhion had suspected, there were rooms in the cellar under the north wing, directly beneath the temple, on the ley-line itself, the door hidden behind the piled boxes.

“Yeah, I saw that door,” Sara said, as they climbed down the shaft of the disused kitchen dumbwaiter—an invention Rhion made a mental note to mention to the Duke’s kitchen steward when he got back, if he got back—clinging to the old rope while their feet sought the tiny slots let into the brick of its sides. “By the scratches on the floor it didn’t get moved back and forth a lot, so obviously they weren’t keeping anybody down there.” Her voice sank from a whisper to barely a breath as they crawled out into the damp, pitch-black cavern of the southern part of the cellar. As they ghosted through the huge main chamber, where the furnace slept like some somnolent monster in its aura of oily dust, the tinny echo of the wireless could be heard from the guards’ watch room opposite the door to the cellar stairs. “How the hell can you tell where you’re going?” Her hand pressed his shoulder from behind; without her high-heeled shoes she was an inch shorter than his own barefoot height.

“I told you. I’m a wizard.”

“Sorry I asked.”

She fished the flashlight she usually carried with her from her purse, put her fingers over the bulb and flicked it quickly on to scan the far wall. “There.”

“Just as I thought.” He glanced at the ceiling beams in the blackness.

Even though several feet of floor joists, he could feel the cold evil of the temple as they came beneath its bounds. True to his word, he had gotten Horst to take him down to the Woodsman’s Horn the night before last—the night of the moon’s dark—and had remained there drinking bad beer and listening to a Beethoven concert over the wireless until the place had closed. It hadn’t helped. Even at a distance of twenty miles he’d fancied all evening that he felt what was happening at the Schloss, and had dreaded returning there, fearing what he would find in spite of the doubled and trebled spells of protection and dispersal he had taught von Rath. He didn’t know what he’d have done if one of the chosen victims had been Sara’s father, but it wasn’t. They had used another gypsy woman and a noted German runeologist—Aryan to the core—whose runic system had contradicted the one favored by the Bureau. After one attempt at sleep from which he’d been jerked, sweating in horror, by his dreams, he’d spent the rest of the night staring at the rafters. It seemed to him that the screams of the victims had permeated the very fabric of the house.

That afternoon von Rath had shown to him the talismans they’d made, disks of bone and crystal and stretched skin written over with the dark sigils devised by the accursed Adepts; he had talked for hours, lovingly, eagerly, obsessively, fingering them with wonderment and not seeming to remember that they had been made of the bodies of men like himself. He had spoken of the power within them and how it could be utilized and what he would do when that power was his... only that. Rhion did not have to touch the things to know that the power was there, glowing in them against the workroom’s lamplit dark as phosphorous glows in the heart of a rotten tree. But neither he nor von Rath could utilize that power for even the simplest of spells they’d tried.

And that, he supposed, was just as well.

The boxes in the cellar were filled with moldy books, smelling of silverfish and mice; it took him and Sara a few minutes to move them aside. Behind them, as Sara had said, was a door, new, stout, and padlocked shut. “Probably used to be a wine room,” he remarked in an undervoice, holding the flashlight as the girl knelt