The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,78
the mystical gobbledygook in the Schloss library and most of what Leibnitz had just said. “You’re right. Magic and those who can work it are distrusted in my own world, hated, legislated against...”
“It is because magic is arbitrary,” Leibnitz concluded. “And so it is. And unfair, and in many cases against the Will of the Creator. It is cheating. What business is it of mine to use the powers of the universe to make myself richer, when for whatever reasons the Lord thinks that in this lifetime I could learn more as a poor man?”
“He used to give Mama that argument when there wasn’t money to buy milk.”
They had reached the edge of the old meadow where Poincelles’ secret temple stood. Though woods crowded thickly on its higher end near the barn, down here the ground was boggy, standing water glinting between patches of rank, waist-high grass. The crying of a thousand frogs prickled the night.
“Can you walk, Papa?” Sara asked worriedly, turning in the driver’s seat. “I don’t dare try to take the car through this. Even if we didn’t get stuck we’d leave a track they could follow from hell to Detroit. Besides, I have to get the car back to the Mayor’s...”
“She not only steals cars, she steals the Mayor’s car,” Leibnitz informed—presumably—God, looking skyward as he clambered out.
“He was the only one who had a gas ration.”
“I’ll take him up to the barn.” Rhion slid along the seat and scrambled out the same door Leibnitz had, for the lane was narrow, and tangled ditches filled with stagnant water and blackberry brambles flanked it on either side. As he put his hands on the doorpost to pull himself out, Sara caught his wrist, dragging him back. Her whisper was carbon steel in the darkness.
“You tell him anything about how I’m living now and, so help me God, I’ll kill you.”
Shocked that she’d even think of it, Rhion started to demand What the hell do you think I am? But the vicious glitter in her eyes told him what she thought he was—a man, coarse, careless, and stupid. He shook his head, an infinitesimally small gesture that her father, standing by the corner of the car staring raptly around him at the milky darkness, would not see. “I promise.”
She threw his hand from her grip, despising his touch, and turned her face away to put the car in gear. Its rear wheel nearly ran over Rhion’s foot as she popped the clutch and drove off without a word.
“Poincelles, feh.” Leibnitz picked his way through the long weeds that surrounded the barn and its three crumbling sheds, disregarding, as Rhion did, the black and terrible Seals of the demons Andras, Flauros, and Orobas written in secret places to defend against intrusion. “A paskudnyak out for what he can get. I knew him when he was still with the Order of the Golden Dawn, and even then I didn’t trust him. What can you expect of a man whose numerological key works out to be sixteen? And if you trace out his name on the number grid of the geometric square of Saturn...”
“In here.” Rhion pushed aside a plank on the back of the barn, slipped through the crack, and edged along between the splintery boards of the wall and the tarpaulin that hung inside until he found the opening between two tarps. Behind him, he heard Leibnitz breath hiss sharply, though it was pitch-dark in the barn until he drew from his pocket a match and the stub of a candle. The tiny light spread gradually outward but did no more than hint at the dark shapes of the draped altar, the black candlesticks, and the shadowy gleam of the inverted pentagram beneath which Sara had lain. The smell of old tar and dust was almost drowned by an ugly medley of dried blood, snuffed incense, the thick choke of burned wood.
“Chas vesholem,” the old man whispered, looking around him in the dark.
Hating the place himself, Rhion moved swiftly to the far wall, where, behind another join in the tarps, he found the tin box of food and the bundle of clothes and blankets Sara had left there the day before. Rebbe Leibnitz did not move from where he stood; when Rhion returned to him, the box and bundles under his arm, he turned firmly and, slipping through the tarps again, went out the way they had come.
“Poincelles has already bribed the Troopers at the Schloss to stay away