The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,72
Standing by the dark-draped altar, his hands outspread over the ritual implements there—sword and cup, book and thurifer—he was visibly thinner than he had been a week ago, as if the obsession with power—with converting power to operancy—were slowly consuming both flesh and mind.
Nietzsche, philosophical guru of the Nazi Party, had spoken of the triumph of the will, but as things were in this world it was physically impossible for von Rath’s will to triumph.
And as the warm spring days crept past and the moon waxed to its first quarter and then to a bulbous distorted baroque, Rhion saw more and more frequently that icy flatness in the young wizard’s eyes, and felt them on his back as he came and went.
It made things no easier that on Monday evening, in between her desultory flirting with the local Party official and a couple of guards from the Kegenwald camp—Monday was a quiet night in the tavern—Sara slipped him a note under his beer mug that simply read: No soap. In German the phrase indicated only that bathing would be an unsatisfactory experience, but in the parlance of American cinemas it meant a miscarriage of plans.
“Scum-sucking momzer didn’t even let us in,” Sara muttered savagely two nights later, when she was once again up in his room. The tavern was closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and she and the leggy blond Ulrica had been brought out to the Schloss at Rhion’s request and Poincelles’. Her hair, dyed brown on Sunday for her visit to the camp, was now stiffer, frizzier, and redder than ever in the dim glow of the candles and the reflection of the primus stove they’d pilfered from the workroom, a scalding frame for her alabaster pallor that clashed loudly with the pink of the worn and pilled angora sweater she wore.
“We waited from seven in the morning until nine at night—some of those poor broads had been on the train since nine the night before, coming in from Berlin and Warsaw and God knows where—just sitting outside the gates of the camp on the ground, without water, without nothing.” Her small, quick hands squeezed out a rag in the water she was heating; it steamed in the balmy warmth as she crossed to the bed and dabbed at the half-healed knife cut on the back of Rhion’s arm.
As she worked she continued bitterly, “We were scared to walk across the road to take a squat behind a bush in the woods, for fear they’d say okay, come on in while we were gone, with the guards all coming around and hassling whoever they thought was worth it. And there was I, feeling like I was sitting naked in the middle of Ebbets Field, praying the ones I’d screwed wouldn’t recognize me because I sure as hell wouldn’t recognize them, hiding behind a pair of fake glasses and trying to look frumpy and middle age... Christ!”
Her hand where it steadied his bared arm squeezed tight with rage so that even the chewed-short nails bit into his flesh. “And at the end of it some tight-assed kapo comes out and says ‘No visitors today. The prisoners are being punished.’ ”
“For what?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” She dropped the cloth on the floor, and the smell of cheap gin filled the room as she soaked a second rag—the last scrap of Rhion’s old shirt. The alcohol stung his skin. “Still looks clean, but you’re gonna have a bitch of a scar,” she added, binding the wound up again.
“Whose fault is that?” He pulled on his sweatshirt again, though the night was warm enough to have given him no discomfort; Sara gathered the discarded rags and draped them over the edge of the table to dry, then bent to light a cigarette in the flame of the primus stove. “That pushes it till next Sunday.” His eyes went involuntarily to the spot in the rafters that was the Spiracle’s latest hiding place. “And that’s the last Sunday before the solstice.”
“You don’t think I know that?” She dropped angrily back onto the bed, back propped on the iron-spindled headboard, and reached across to the tableful of bedside candles to take an angry swig from the flask of medicinal gin. “Crazy goddam witchdoctors...” She blew a stream of smoke.
Rhion decided not to mention that von Rath had spoken of doing another experiment—not merely the making of talismans, but an attempt to convert the power of the sacrifice into workable illusion—on the night of the full