The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,7

where earlier they had edged past the washed-down rocks and mud. Now a gang of men was there, chained together and wearing shabby gray shirts and trousers, shoveling the clayey yellow mud into a sort of sledge under the rifles of four or five gray-uniformed guards. One of the guards yelled, “Get that verfluchter sledge the hell out of the road!” Others cuffed and shoved the corvee to obey. The men moved with the slow shakiness of borderline starvation as they set down their shovels and stumbled to comply.

The officer in charge hastened to the side of the car as it pulled to a halt. “Heil Hitler. My apologies, Captain, we’ll have it clear in a minute. This road sees so little traffic...”

“That’s hardly an excuse for blocking it!” Baldur flared, but von Rath waved him quiet.

“Quite understandable, Lieutenant.”

“I—I heard about Major Hagen, sir,” the officer said after a moment, touching the brim of his cap in respect. His uniform was gray instead of black, but Rhion recognized the insignia of the SS on collar and shoulder tabs; he reflected that the Reich of Germany was probably the most comprehensively protected realm he had ever seen. “A great loss to the service of the Reich, but I was afraid something of the kind would happen. The drugs you were using for those experiments...” He shook his head. “He should have taken a little more time. After all the men who died while he was experimenting for the right dosage, he should have been more careful. Hell,” he added, nodding toward the workers, stumbling as they dragged at the sledge. “The Commandant would have sent him over as many more of these swine as he needed to make sure.”

“We were under a time constraint,” von Rath said politely. “Thank you, Officer.”

With a gravelly scraping on the rough asphalt of the road, the sledge was hauled clear. Horst put the car in gear and started to move forward slowly. The officer touched his cap again. “Ah, well, there it is. If you need any more, just let us know!”

“That troubled you.” With a touch on his sleeve von Rath halted Rhion in the doorway of the library, a long room occupying much of the main lodge’s eastern face, and let the others go past them along the upstairs hall to their own rooms to prepare for lunch. Only Baldur stopped and came back to trail them into the long, gloomy chamber, unwilling, Rhion suspected, to let his hero have a conversation with anyone in which he was not included.

Still shaky with shock, anger, and a vague sense of betrayal, Rhion didn’t much care. “Just a little, yes.”

Neither von Rath nor Baldur seemed to notice the heavy sarcasm in his voice. Baldur snuffled, wiped his nose on his crumpled sleeve, and said matter-of-factly, “I d-don’t see why it should. They were just...”

“I did debate about whether to tell you how we arrived at the drugs under whose influence we were able to project our minds into the Void.” Von Rath cut the boy off gently, seating himself at the library’s long table. “I did not know what your attitude toward it would be. Further, you were sufficiently grieved over your master’s death that I did not wish to burden you with the possibility of fancied guilt.”

“Fancied guilt?”

Even at this hour of the late morning the library, facing east into the little courtyard between the wings of the grim, gray lodge, was thick with gloom. The tobacco-colored velvet curtains, which were never opened, created a dusk, thick and palpable as the smells that seemed to have accumulated over the hundred-odd years of the building’s life: the odors of dust and the stale, gritty foetor of ancient wool carpets; the faint moldery atmosphere that clung to the desiccated trophy head of an antelope over the doorway; the dry breath of old paper, crumbling cloth and glue; and the beaten-in reminiscence of tobacco smoke that would never come out. The walls here were thick with books, more books than Rhion had ever imagined: Lanz and von List; Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and the Chymische Hochzeit; Nostradamus’ prophecies; the collected works of Charles Fort; and the Library of Those Who are Blond and Defend the Rights of the Male. They had overflowed the original mahogany shelves and stacked two deep the newer pine planks that had been erected over the ornamental paneling. Neat boxes of half-decayed scrolls and chests of parchment codices were arranged upon the floor; in