The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,80

use, including von Rath, it just needs too much power. So it has to be a Spiracle.”

He looked back, aware that the old scholar was regarding him quietly in the darkness.

“What you are doing,” Leibnitz said slowly. “It is irresponsible, you know.”

Rhion closed his eyes. From the first that knowledge had murmured in his heart, try as he would to turn his mind away from it, he knew that the old man was right. “It’s my only chance.”

“That does not matter. If for whatever reasons the Lord saw fit to withdraw operant magic from this world—if that is what happened—it says much for your opinion of your own judgment that you want to bring it back for your own convenience.”

“I’m not talking about my convenience, dammit!” Rhion said passionately. “I’m talking about my life! I wasn’t the first one who circumvented the rules; I shouldn’t even be here!” But he knew that any of the mages of his own world—Shavus, Jaldis, the Lady—would have told him that it didn’t matter. And in his heart he knew it didn’t.

But in his heart he could not bear the knowledge that he would never see Tally again, never see his sons. That he would be trapped in this hellish place, a prisoner of the Reich, for what remained of his life.

“Tzadik, please,” he whispered. “There’s only one place they know where to look for me now and only one time when I’ll be able to raise enough power to open the Void. Part of it’s that I think I really would rather die trying to escape than stay here, but as things are I think it’s only a matter of time before von Rath kills me anyway. With or without your help, I’m going to have to try.”

“There.” The old man’s hand was warm and strong on his wrist. The first nacreous grayness of dawn showed him the hooked nose, the long brows curling down over shadowed eyes, the strong lips with the shameful stubble of a convict and the red, raw circle of the scar. “You deliver me from hell and three hours later I’m coming on you like the balabos... You have given me my life, and you have found and taken care of my Sara. For that I owe you. And I can’t let you remain in this world long enough for these evildoers to figure out some way of bending your knowledge to their wills. So I will do what I can, and let the Lord of Hosts—Who knows more about the whole thing anyway—handle the rest.”

Fifteen

“HE’S SENDING ME AWAY!” Tallisett paced angrily to the long windows of her sister’s room, the dark-green wool of her skirt sweeping across the tufted green-and-purple rugs, her hair catching a wheaten gleam as she passed through the windows’ latticed light. Her sister Damson, seated beside the cold fireplace in the long brocade gown she favored in her rooms because it hid her partridge plumpness, didn’t look up.

“He wouldn’t even see me!” Tally continued passionately. “He said he was ill, but he was out hunting yesterday... He sent his chamberlain to tell me!”

“Father is ill,” Damson replied, her voice low. Her short, stubby fingers continued to move over the lace ruffle she was making, crossing and recrossing the glass bobbins over one another on the pillow with a faint, musical clinking as she worked, the sunlight sparkling on the jeweled galaxy of her rings. “It’s the summer heat, you know. It brings on the flux unexpectedly. He was taken ill last night. So were Esrex and Elucida, a little.”

“But why?”

Damson was silent for a few moments more, her hands like stout little overdecorated spiders spinning a web. In this room the strong summer sunlight was broken into harlequin shards by the window grilles and softened by the moiré shadows of the trees in the water garden outside; beyond Damson’s shoulder, Tally could see into the small room that had been fitted up as a private chapel to Agon, the Hidden One, Lord of the Eclipsed Sun. The smell of incense lay thick upon the air.

“Father thought it would be best.” She sounded maddeningly like Esrex. Tally sometimes tried to remember whether her older sister had been that secretive, that calculating, that single-minded, before she’d married their cousin. But it had been twelve years, and her recollections of that time were little more than a child’s, passionately worshipful of everything her sister said and did. In those days she had also had nothing to