The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,83
and ravenous, to a breakfast he felt he had heartily earned; von Rath upstairs to his study. “I don’t even want to be in the Schloss when it’s going on.”
“You disapprove of what I do?” The German tilted his head a little on one side, eyes cold and flat, like frozen quicksilver, voice gentle but perilous.
“If I wrote it on ancient parchment in Latin with illuminated capitals would you believe it?” Rhion retorted, covering his outrage, his anger, his panic with sarcasm. “What you are doing is dangerous. It’s always dangerous to do a blood-rite—it’s always dangerous to do any rite drugged...” And within him another voice, made furious by everything he had learned from Leibnitz, everything he had seen and sensed of the camp—by the scenes in the crystal and the laughter of the guards—screamed How dare you—How DARE you—murder human beings, men and women, for ANY reason... while fear of von Rath and guilt at his own cowardice nearly stifled his breath. Sara would have spat in von Rath’s face and died.
He took a deep breath. “You don’t have the control over the forces you’re releasing. Without a conversion to physical operancy, you can’t.”
“So.” Von Rath’s bloodless mouth tightened. “I find it curious,” he went on, after long silence, “that of the two reasons you gave that deny me my power, one has already been proven a lie. Is the other a lie, as well?” He placed a hand on the nape of Rhion’s neck, slim fingers cold as steel and terrifyingly strong, and looked down into his eyes. Against a feverish flush the old dueling scar on his cheek stood out cold and white. “Are you lying to me, Rhion? Is this world truly bereft of the point of conversion, the crossover between will and matter?” His thumb moved around, to press like a rod of steel into the soft flesh under Rhion’s jaw. “Or is that merely your final secret, the thing that in your opinion should not be shared with those whose destiny it is?”
Backed to the wall at the foot of the dim stairs, Rhion felt the tension of that powerful hand that could, he guessed, snap his spine with a madman’s strength; in von Rath’s eyes he saw nothing human at all.
“It’s my final secret,” he said. “I just thought I’d hang around until you got tired of waiting and started sticking hot wires under my fingernails before I disappeared in a puff of smoke.” He pulled away from the thoroughly nonplussed wizard’s grip. “You brought me here as an advisor, all right? And I’m stuck in this world—for the duration of the war, considering the risk of someone else dying to open another Dark Well. That might be years. I’m not happy about that, but do you think I’m going to trade decent food and a comfortable place to live for a permanent berth in an English insane asylum? If I understood how to convert to physical operancy, you think I wouldn’t better my own position here by telling you?”
Von Rath flinched, as if from the blow that could break the self-perpetuating cycle of hysterics, and shook his head like a man waking from a dream. “No—I don’t know.” He passed his hand across his face, and for a moment his eyes were the eyes of the man Rhion had first known, the young man whose dreams had not yet become obsessions. There was even something like pain there, the pain of puzzlement, of knowing he was becoming something else and not quite knowing if he wanted it or not. “And yet for one second—Eric did. I know he did.”
He frowned and shook his head. “That’s odd, you know, it’s been weeks since I’ve even thought of him... He was my friend...” He rubbed his sunken, discolored eyes. From the half-open door of the watch room across the hall came a guard’s laughter and the nauseating gust of cigarette fumes. “But without operant magic we could never have brought you here.”
“You don’t think I’ve been living on that knowledge, that hope, for the past three months?” Rhion put his hand on the sinewy arm in its clay-colored shirt sleeve, led the way down the shadowy blueness of the hall. “I’m still trying to figure that one out. I keep telling you, I was only brought along to wash out the bottles. Jaldis was the one who knew what the Void is and how the Dark Wells work. Look,” he added more gently,