The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,77
how much Sara told you...”
“What could she say, with all those chaperons standing around with rifles? She said you’d get me out if I took the pills, was sick two days, and then got up at two in the morning and walked out across the back exercise yard slow enough to let the guards take real good aim at me. She said I had to have faith.”
“It must have sounded pretty crazy.”
He shrugged. “They say the Red Sea didn’t part for the Children of Israel until the first man got his feet wet. But to get my daughter to believe you—now that’s magic.”
Rhion’s grin was wry. “Believing crazy things seems to be what’s done in this country. I’m working for the SS Occult Bureau. They’re keeping me prisoner at Schloss Torweg, an old hunting lodge about forty kilometers from here. Are you familiar with the theory of multiplicity of universes, or am I going to have to go through this explanation from scratch?”
“No, no.” Rebbe Leibnitz shook his head decisively. “Are you from another world on the same cosmic plane as ours—that is, Malkut, the plane of material reality—or from one of the spiritually higher planes?”
“Same plane,” Rhion said, since, as far as he knew, multiplanar cosmic reality was as unprovable in his own world as it was in this. “I’m a wizard there—operative magic works there as it no longer works here. That was originally the reason my master wanted us to come here—to find out why it no longer works.” He bit his lip, remembering Jaldis again with a sudden stab of unhealed loss.
“Well, my personal theory is that the roads from the spiritual Sephiroth of Tepheret to the Sephiroths of Yesod and Malkut have become blocked due to the increased influences of the elements of sulfur and fire, though that wouldn’t take into account why it still works in other universes than this. Numerologically this century lies under the influence of Mars, always a bad time for those under the protection of the Beni-Elohim, the Angels of the Sephiroth of Hod. But I’ve heard other theories. I’ve met wizards from other universes before, you understand, both of the dense physical plane and those who were of a higher spiritual order, merely disguising themselves in the form of matter. There was an Englishman named Galworthy possessed by a spirit named Angarb-Koleg—and that young fellow Inglorion who stayed with me in thirty-eight—and that Theosophist woman Zelzah the Red who was traveling from dimension to dimension preaching the true path to rightness. She used to hold seances at our apartment on Gestia Ulica to contact spirits in other universes—she said the vibrations there were sympathetic—and in fact it was there she met Antonio Murillo, who it turned out had known her in a previous existence when he was a priest of the ancient Egyptian cult of Ptah and she was a temple prostitute...”
Rhion had heard all about ancient Egyptian cults and their reincarnated priests from Poincelles. No wonder Sara looked at him strangely. “And you?”
Leibnitz made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, I’m just a student, a scholar,” he said. “All I can do is keep an open mind. All my life I’ve studied the Talmud and the Kabbala, searching for order in the universe, but it’s a dangerous thing to translate the power one channels down from Higher Aether through the Tree of Life into magic here—”
“Aside from the fact that it can’t be done, you mean?” Sara chipped in sarcastically, braking gently to ease the car into yet another rutted track.
Rhion opened his mouth to reply, but Leibnitz shook his head with a gentle smile. “Always she was like this,” he said. “Well, she’s a Taurus. And since she was born in the second degree of her sign, by multiplying the letters of her name by their position and adding the digits, it gives her a Tarotic key of twenty-seven, which is really nine—the Hermit, the sign of Science, but also the sign of skepticism. And added to the year of her birth this gives her a Natal Sum of one thousand nine hundred forty-four, which adds together to eighteen, the Moon, the sign of doubt... She has talked to wizards traveling in other bodies through the universe down from fifty thousand years in the future, and she’d say, ‘It can’t be done because it can’t be done.’ Now what kind of attitude is that?”
“The usual one, unfortunately,” Rhion said, remembering with a grin his own attitude about three-quarters of