The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,8
those few spaces of wall not occupied by books hung fragments of Assyrian carvings and the long, fading columns of Egyptian glyphs. Rhion, used as he was to the libraries of the Duke of Mere and the Ladies of the Moon, had been staggered at the prodigality of books in this world.
Here he spent most of his afternoons, listening to Baldur, Gall, or von Rath as they read to him from these endless texts. The Spell of Tongues that permitted him to understand German worked, in essence, from mind to mind—thus he could understand what was read aloud, if the reader understood it, though the written languages were a mystery to him. And here Baldur spent most of his nights, taking notes, looking up obscure references, reading his way patiently through collections of ancient letters, centuries-old diaries, crumbling grimoires, and yellowing broadsides and scandal sheets that the SS’s Occult Bureau in Berlin had sent them, searching for some scrap of knowledge, some clue that would show them how and why magic had died in this world and how it might be restored.
Baldur was sitting now, hunched over his notes, puffy, untidy, and sullen, snuffling and wiping his nose on his soiled sleeve. On Rhion’s world, Lord Esrex, son-in-law of the Duke of Mere and an old enemy of Rhion’s, was addicted to a drug brewed from certain leaves given to him by the priests of the dark Cult of Agon. Here a similar substance was—rather disgustingly, in Rhion’s opinion—rendered to a powder that was then snorted through the nasal membranes, with the result that Baldur’s sinuses always ran.
“Fancied, yes.” Von Rath’s well-shaped brows drew down slightly, shadowing his clear gray eyes. “The men who were used in Eric’s experiments were criminals, traitors against the state, men whose crimes in any society would have rendered their lives forfeit. The SS has the management of the labor camps and the concentration camps in which they in some measure atone for their deeds by service to the state they have tried to destroy. We had to find some way of speaking through the Void, some way of renewing contact, and drugs—mescaline, psilocybin, and others—were the only things we had found that worked. We were permitted an arrangement with the commandant of the Kegenwald camp to obtain men for experiments with the correct dosage. But the men themselves would have died anyway.”
There was a polite tapping at the door; von Rath looked up as one of the guards assigned to watch room duty in the old parlor at the foot of the stairs entered. “Reichsführer Himmler is on the phone for you, Captain.”
“Please excuse me.” Von Rath reached for the telephone on the corner of the library table, and Rhion, rising, left him in such privacy as Baldur’s company afforded. Telephones were another thing straight out of tales of wonder, though in marketplace fables the means by which two people without magical powers could communicate instantaneously over distance generally involved sight as well as hearing.
Curiously, though the Spell of Tongues held good when the speaker was in his presence, Rhion could not understand an electronically transmitted voice, either over the telephone or on that totally unexpected device, the wireless radio. Last night, when he had gone down to the big drawing room downstairs for the first time to watch a cinema being shown for the benefit of the guards—the simple and unspeakably tragic love story of a wise man for a whore—Poincelles had had to translate for him.
He turned down the hallway of the south wing, paused before the door of what had been the great master bedroom, pushed it open, and stood looking in.
The room was still empty. Yellow sunlight filled it from the wide south-facing windows; through the uncurtained panes could be seen the rude and hastily built block of the guards’ barracks and, beyond, the wire fence that enclosed the entire low hill upon which the Schloss had been built. Telephones, automobiles, even the huge quantities of books available in this world hadn’t staggered Rhion so much as the cheap plentifulness of wire. In his own world it was so difficult to manufacture that it was generally used only for decorative jewelry. When the gate was closed at night the wire fence was charged with enough electricity to knock a man down, and Rhion had been warned repeatedly against going anywhere near it. Not, he reflected wryly, remembering his experiences that morning, that the perimeter guards would let me.