The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,73

moon, six nights hence and a few days before the greater rite and talisman-making on the solstice itself. If they were lucky, Sara’s father would be out of danger by that time anyway. The thought of what he’d have to do if they didn’t succeed in freeing the old man brought the sweat cold to his face.

“What is that thing, anyway?”

He glanced across at her with a start. Sara, her knees crossed in a soft waterfall of skirt gores, was looking up at the Spiracle’s hiding place. “That iron and silver gismo with the crystals in it. Do all wizards hide little tchotchkes around where they live? Papa did.”

Rhion grinned, remembering Jaldis’ propensity for secret devices. “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s the thing I need your father’s help—and yours, since you’ll have to get us into that room in the cellar again—to finish.” He pushed the delicate wire frame of his spectacles more firmly up onto his nose. “The rite of charging it has to be done by the solstice,” he added, more quietly. “If we can’t get your father out by then...” He shivered at the thought of taking the thing down to the cellar and stepping into the Dark well without another wizard present to keep him from being drawn in and destroyed.

“Then we’ll get him out afterward.” Sara’s gaze, holding his, was flint. “Won’t we?”

Rhion said nothing. If they didn’t get the old man out before solstice-tide the odds were horribly good he himself would be dead afterward. If he wasn’t, it would be because he’d lost his nerve at the last moment—in which case it was one hell of a long time to the equinox, too long to count on—or because he’d succeeded, impossibly, in charging the Spiracle himself.

And in that case, he thought, could he leave Sara to her own devices? He remembered the brief vision in the scrying crystal, the old man with the scarred lip raising his eyes to the window far above his head. He owed neither of them a thing—his arm still hurt every time he moved it and he was damn lucky, given his inability either to work healing spells or get proper attention to the wound, that it hadn’t festered.

But he knew the man was a wizard. He’d seen it in his eyes. And yet it was the solstice or nothing. He hoped he wouldn’t have to make that choice.

Walking to the window, he felt Sara’s dark eyes follow. Out in the yard one of the floodlights had gone out, and upon the ground below him he could see the ochre smear of reflected candlelight that marked von Rath’s study window. A shadow passed across it: the SS wizard pacing, restless, fevered, an animal driven by invisible goads, far into the night.

Fourteen

SARA WHISPERED, “THIS HAD better work.” Her hands, as she shoved her crazy hair up under a man’s cloth cap, were steady and her white face calm, stark without its habitual disguise of lipstick and paint. But the brazen glare of the camp floodlights at the bottom of the hill caught the fine glitter of sweat on her short upper lip.

Rhion only nodded. He wanted to reassure her, but was too deep in his trance of concentration to speak. In any case they had been through it all on the drive from the crossroads near the Schloss where Sara had picked him up.

In the surrounding dark of the pinewoods a nightingale warbled. Six miles away, the Kegenwald village church clock spoke its two notes, the sound carrying clearly in the moonless hush of the night. These sounds, like Sara’s voice, seemed to come to Rhion from a very great distance, clear but tiny, like images in the scrying crystal. Far more real to him were the two watch-towers of the Kegenwald camp perimeter visible from this hillside, open wooden turrets mounted on long legs like sinister spiders, each ringed in floodlights and dark within.

He stood in each of those watchtowers, a shadowy consciousness more real to him now than the body kneeling in its scratched protective circle just within the gloom of the woods’ edge. He spoke to each man separately—a flaxen-haired boy in the left-hand turret, an older man, tough and scarred with a broken nose, in the right. They did not precisely hear his voice, as he whispered to them the dreamy, buzzing songs of nothingness that the Ladies of the Drowned Lands had taught him. But they listened nevertheless, gazing idly in opposite directions, outward