The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,82
rather not know about?”
She pulled her hand away from her sister’s moist grasp and stood for a moment considering her, the cold weariness in her heart that comes with the final realization that the one you have loved has not existed for a good many years. It was a woman of thirty-five she saw, finally, and no longer the unconscious image of a plump, witty, brilliant girl of eighteen. She felt tired, and just a little sick—not like a child who has lost a cherished toy, but who has discovered in that toy a breeding place of maggots and grubs. “I suppose the real question,” she finished quietly, “is whether you’re a fool or Esrex’ whore.”
And turning, she left the vestibule and strode down the corridor, her long green skirts billowing in her wake. For a long time Damson stood without moving, round face irresolute, upon the threshold of the Shadowed God.
Sixteen
THE GIRL DIDN’T LOOK to be more than sixteen. She’d probably been pretty once, in a haunting wildcat way, before they’d shaved her head, and even now, after months of starvation and ill usage in the Kegenwald camp, some of that beauty remained. In bistered pits, her eyes seemed huge; the bones of her wrists and hands appeared grotesque as she rubbed her bare arms for warmth. The unfurnished chamber in the south wing—the great master bedchamber in which the Dark Well had supposedly been drawn—never really got warm. From his post behind a one-way mirror in the adjacent dressing room Rhion could see the girl’s pelvic bones outlined under the worn fabric of her ragged and dirty gray dress as she paced back and forth, barefoot on the uncarpeted oak planks.
When they had first brought her into the room she had huddled unmoving in a corner, like a partridge freezing into stillness in a hopeless hope that the hawk will pass it by. Having talked to Rebbe Leibnitz and the guards in the watch room and having seen the Kegenwald camp, Rhion understood this. Only an hour ago had she begun, cautiously, to move about, first doggedly examining every corner of the room, trying its three locked doors and its boarded-up windows, peering curiously into the dark sheet of the one-way mirror on the wall. These explorations had taken her rather less than two minutes, for the room was empty save for a latrine bucket in one corner. After that, she had simply paced, hugging herself for warmth and staring nervously all around her with huge, obsidian eyes.
Rhion wondered whether her fear stemmed wholly from being in the power of the Nazis—a condition that scared him sick—or whether, animallike, she sensed what was going on in the house tonight.
He glanced down at the watch that lay on the padded leather arm of his comfortable chair. Eight-thirty. The sun would have set by this time, though twilight would linger till after nine. He found himself listening intently, though he knew that both these rooms and the temple downstairs on the other side of the house were quite soundproof.
Nevertheless, he felt it when they started, as he had felt it when the sun had dipped behind the somber black pickets of the hills. His scalp prickled and he felt the sweat start on his face; if he closed his eyes he could see von Rath lying upon the naked black stone of the altar, like a sleeping god in the thin white robe—“vestis albus pristinissimus et lanae virginis”—save for the febrile tension of his muscles and the tautness of eyelids bruised with stress and lack of sleep. Rhion knew the horrors of the opening rites, for he had seen them again and again in tormented dreams: Poincelles pacing out the bounds of the temple, a white puppy held aloft by its hind legs in one massive hand, its dying struggles splattering his crimson robe with blood; Gall and Baldur like strange angels in black, merged with the greater shadows that followed their movements back and forth across the velvet-draped wall; the reflection of candlelight in the eyes of the victims. Bound at the foot of the altar, they would know, as occultists themselves, what would come next.
“I told you I didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he’d said to von Rath that morning. They had finished the early ritual work—for which Rhion had barely made it back from bidding farewell to Rebbe Leibnitz—and had been on their way out of the temple’s small robing room: Rhion, exhausted