The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,71
to avoid scratching the floor and put it back in the order they had been, as precisely as they could recall. As she picked up the flashlight to turn it off she looked briefly at his face in the finger-hooded glow.
“You okay?”
He nodded, turning his face from her and taking her elbow; she switched off the light and let him guide her across the cellar, through the archway, to the old dumbwaiter with its rope and its tiny set-in steps.
The candles in his room had guttered out. He reached with his mind to relight them, then fumbled tiredly in his pocket for a match, the ache of thaumaturgical impotence bringing back the hurt of all that other pain. While Sara put on her high-heeled shoes he sank down onto the bed, head pounding, struggling to keep his grief at bay until she was gone.
“First time I ever left an evening here wearing the same lipstick I came in with,” she remarked, though she renewed it for good measure, the glossy red giving her thin, triangular face a pulchritudinous lushness in the candle glow. “Come down to the tavern Monday and I’ll let you know how things went. I’ll tell Papa not to take the pills till Monday, so we can go through with the rest of this mishegoss Wednesday when the shop’s closed... Hey? You okay?”
He nodded, not looking at her. Worried, she came around the end of the bed to stand looking down at him with her arms folded beneath the soft shelf of her breasts.
“What happened in there?”
“Nothing,” he whispered.
She leaned down and gently removed his glasses from his face, putting them on the shelf beside the candle. He ached to touch her—to touch someone, only for the comfort of knowing he wasn’t absolutely alone. But to her a man’s touch meant only one thing, and she had enough of that, so he didn’t.
After a moment she pulled the thin coverlet up over him, turned and blew out the candle. He heard her high heels click away into darkness as she descended the attic stairs, and a few minutes later heard the car engine start outside and fade as it drove off into the night.
In the iron hour before dawn his dreams were evil. Perhaps it was what he had read of the rites of the Shining Crystal; perhaps the souls of the gypsy women, of the young Jewish clairvoyant, and of the elderly runemaster still lingered to vent their bitter rage on one who had acquiesced in their murders. Perhaps it was only fear. In the dream, Rhion found himself bound to one of the pillars in the black-draped temple, forced to watch the rite again and again—saw von Rath, gaunt and yellow as a man with fever in his long white robe, and Poincelles in bloodstained red. Over and over he heard the screaming, as if the sound itself were being drawn and twisted as a spinner twists wool into yarn, drawing strands of power from death and pain. He saw the power itself collecting, like dirty ectoplasmic slime, in pools on the altar, pools that moved a little when no one watched.
And in the morning, at the rites of meditation that they still performed, though to Rhion’s mind they had become a travesty of the calm opening to ritual work for which they had been designed, he observed their faces, wondering if they, too, had dreamed.
Gall, it was hard to tell. There was always a weird serenity about the old man, a calm that had nothing to do with right or wrong but depended entirely on his rigid apportioning of bodily and psychic energies, as if, for him, ultimately nothing really existed beyond the bounds of his own skin. Baldur, standing under the bloodred rune of Tiwaz at the northern “watch-tower,” was twitchy and nervous, eyes glittering behind his thick glasses as if, between his endless quest for knowledge in the ancient books and the psychoactive drugs he was taking, cocaine was the only thing keeping him together.
Poincelles... If Poincelles dreamed, Rhion thought, regarding the gangling, dirty man with sudden revulsion, it was with a smile on his lips. That smile lingered now, as he made his responses with an air of amused tolerance for the peccadilloes of others. If von Rath sought the wine of power in the bloody rites of the Shining Crystal, Rhion now understood, what Poincelles enjoyed was the pressing of the grapes.