The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,74
into the night.
It was not an easy illusion to maintain. With his own awareness split into dim ectoplasmic twins, he had to keep within his mind from instant to instant the separate realities of the two watchtowers—the hollow clunk of wooden floors underfoot, the dark webwork of the struts that supported the roof and the pattern the wires stapled to them made, leading up to the lights above; the moving sharpness of the air from the bristled darkness of the woods; the murky nastiness of the men’s dreams. To the older sentry Rhion breathed songs dipped from the man’s cramped and limited mind, the taste of liquor and blue tobacco smoke woven into fantasies of endless, repetitive, impossible intercourse with woman after woman, and all of them alike, all gasping with delight or sobbing with grateful ecstasy. To the younger, after searching the narrow hate-stained thoughts, he wove a different dream, of assembling, disassembling, assembling again some kind of automatic weapon, polishing, cleaning, making all perfect. Oddly enough he sensed the same pleasure in the precise click and snap of metal and the neat, controlled movements as the first Trooper had in his reveries of bulling endless willing blondes.
What facets of human nature these dreams revealed he couldn’t allow himself to speculate, nor upon how close this magicless magic of dream and illusion was to the very devices von Rath hoped to use against the British pilots when the invasion began. It was difficult enough to maintain them, to renew again and again the sharp sweetness of their pleasure, as if every time were the first—to inject the tiniest twinge of regret and hurt if either man turned his eyes even slightly toward the hillside between the woods and the barbed-wire fence, or thought about looking back at the stretch of open ground behind them that separated the fence, with its electrified inner pale, from the long gray building of the camp infirmary.
Fence and camp lay starkly naked beneath the floodlights’ acrid glare, exactly as Sara had described them, exactly as he had glimpsed them in his crystal; the hillside was bare of cover, clothed only with a thin scrim of grass against which, now, Sara’s gray trousers and pullover stood out dark and unmistakable as she crept toward the fence. She moved as he had instructed her, crouched close to the earth. A few slow steps and stillness, count ten, two more slow steps and stillness again, an even, gentle progression that would not catch the guards’ dreaming attention. In a long, lumpy, muslin flour sack at her belt, she carried wire cutters, wire, and wooden props to get her under the inner electric fence. Edging forward under the barrels of the turret guns, there was nothing else she could possibly have been.
Yet neither guard moved. The slight relaxation induced by the nicotine they smoked Rhion subtly deepened, increasing with his songs the influence of the drug. To them it had never tasted so good, to them their dreams had never been so fulfilling, so hurtfully satisfying...
Just as Sara finished cutting a slit in the wire of the fence, the back door of the infirmary opened. Through a haze of oiled machinery and shuddering bosoms Rhion was aware of the tall, rawboned form standing in the shadowy opening, the floodlight throwing a coarse glitter of silver on scalp and jaw as he turned his head, looking doubtfully from one tower to the other. Then he looked across the open ground.
It was nearly seventy feet from the shelter of the shadowed door to the wire. The infirmary stood a little apart from the ugly ranks of green-painted barracks, ground commanded by the wooden towers and the dark muzzles of the guns. Between the towers Sara was a sitting target, propping up the electrified wire of the inner fence with two lengths of wood. The old man shrugged and walked forward—slowly, as Rhion had hoped Sara remembered to specify in her whispered instructions of last Sunday.
... red lips parted in a gasp of ecstasy, a white throat exposed by a thrown-back head... Oh, thank you, thank you... Just so much solvent on the patch... ram home...
One of the guards shifted his weight to scratch his crotch, started to turn toward the yard behind him. But sudden cold, sudden sorrow, overwhelmed him, an aching loneliness—and there was, after all, no need. Everything was quiet. His daydream smiled and beckoned, a warm cocoon of virile joy. He gave a sort of sigh and