The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,68

and began probing the lock with the various wire tools she’d taken from her purse. “There’s marks of an older lock here above the new hasp.” Shielding the light with his body, he strained his ears to hear any creak of footfalls in the hall overhead, any sign of approaching guards on the stair, or any clue that their activities were suspected. At this point, they could never hope to get the boxes replaced in time.

“This door isn’t more than a year or so old,” Sara breathed. “What the hell do you think old Pauli has in here, anyway? All the booze is in the cupboard in the library—all the booze he knows about, anyway; Poincelles has a stash of his own. I don’t think he knows about the coke Baldur gets from Kurt at the Horn, or those little odds and ends Gall steals from the workroom...”

“Gall?”

“Yeah. He’s got these little sacks of seeds and herbs and crystals hidden all around his room, a couple of amulets tucked under a loose floorboard, a mortar and pestle, a set of rune-stones, and a crystal ball cached in the bedsprings. It was a whole education, going through this place. Bingo,” she added, an expression not translatable even with the Spell of Tongues. The padlock fell open.

His heart beating fast, Rhion pushed the door inward.

The Dark Well was there. The smell of the room was the same as he remembered from those first instants of consciousness: moist earth, wet stone, power... the strange, ozoneous air of the Void. It was here they had garnered, not in that boarded-up chamber upstairs; it was here they had taken their drugs and reached out over the Void’s darkness to guide him and Jaldis. It was here Eric Hagen had died.

The pang of remembering Jaldis again twisted in him like a turned knife. Even now in this nightmare world, he still caught himself thinking that when he returned home the old man would be there. His too-active imagination wondered for a gruesome second whether his master had actually been killed by the Void or was drifting there somewhere, still alive but unable either to escape or die... He pushed the thought quickly away. It was something he would never know.

Drawing a deep breath, he stepped back through the door to where Sara waited, staring behind her into the cellar’s dark.

“I’m not sure how long this will take,” he murmured. “Get back up to the room; if they catch you down here you might be in real trouble.”

“Not as much trouble as you’re gonna be if they flash a light down the stairs and find all those boxes moved and the door open,” she replied, peering hard in the direction of his voice. “I’ll stick around.”

“Thank you.” Not that a warning would do him much good, he reflected. Even if he and Sara managed to reach the dumb-waiter shaft and get out of the cellar and up the backstairs to the dressing room on the second floor, the boxes being displaced would tell von Rath everything he needed to know. At this point he was certain von Rath would dismantle the Dark Well to keep him here—and that would only be the start of his worries.

Sara closed the door, leaving him alone in darkness.

In darkness he could see the traced lines of chalk and long-dried blood that marked where the original rites of opening had been done. The ritually charged swastika that had been his beacon across the Void’s darkness was still there beside the triple circle of the Well itself, the symbol of the sun-cross at which he could now barely bring himself to look. Beyond it hung the shimmering brown column of shadow that even mageborn eyes could not pierce.

His pulse thudded loud in his ears as he approached it. The Well was quiescent—he could, he supposed, have passed his hand through it with no ill effects, but nothing would have induced him to try it. And it was so tenuous, he thought—the power that held it here so ephemeral that merely the breaking of the Circles, the erasure of any of the marks upon the floor, would destroy the Well and his chances of contacting the help he needed forever.

For a long time he only stood looking at the place, trying to steady his breathing and his thoughts.

A window into the Void.

A way to get home.

The thing that had killed Eric Hagen.

He could dimly sense the ley running deep beneath his feet, like groundwater