“when did you last get any sleep? Or have anything decent to eat? And I’m not talking about that lousy porridge. If Poincelles can get eggs and sausage out of the cook, you sure as hell should be able to.”
The younger man pulled his arm away impatiently and stepped back toward the stair. “Later, maybe,” he said in his quiet voice. “There is too much for me to do now. Perhaps other rites of the Shining Crystal have survived, either in code as something else, or in fragments in letters—I haven’t yet found their correspondence with St. Germain or Jean Bodin, and I know there must have been some—that can be pieced together. With our position in France solidified we must be able to deal with Britain. Time is of the essence now.”
He passed his hand over his face again, and when he looked up his eyes had changed, as the hard edge of his desires crept slowly back into command. In the golden bar of light that streamed down the hall from the open door of the dining room, he looked, with his immaculate black uniform and electrum hair, like a daemon roused, blinking, from the dark of its cave.
“We aren’t asking you to be part of the ceremony, you know.” The voice was gentle, but inflexible as steel again. “Only to observe the subject and to take notes. We will be working on a naïve subject tonight, one whose mind I have never encountered. It will take all the energy the four of us can raise, but it is something in which no outsider should be allowed to meddle. Will you do that much?”
Reluctantly, Rhion had agreed.
Wearied with her pacing, the girl—a gypsy, von Rath had said, a race traditionally reputed to number a large percentage of psychics—sat again on the floor in the corner and lowered her head to her folded hands, rocking her body like a whipped child. Rhion glanced automatically at his watch. Six minutes after ten. He could feel the power growing in the house, a whispering behind him that seemed to be lodged within the walls, a terrible vibration in his bones. The bank of closed cupboard doors at his back made him nervous, as did the small, shut door of the backstairs to the kitchen, which led down from this little room. Part of him wanted to slip down that way and out of this accursed house before something happened, but terror of what might be waiting in that dark and cluttered stair stopped him. He wanted to open the main door into the hall, but feared what he might hear—or see—in its empty shadows.
A chill shook him, as if the air in the room had grown colder, and he had the uneasy sense of things taking place beyond the boundaries of human perceptions. He glanced at the watch again and wrote down the time: 10:23. The girl seemed to notice nothing.
At ten minutes after eleven, she got to her feet again and began to pace once more, endlessly rubbing her skinny brown arms. There was nothing in the room, no food, no water, no blanket or source of heat. Rhion wondered whether that was a condition of the experiment or whether they had simply not thought about it.
Power was everywhere around him now, creeping like thin lines of phosphorous along the paneling, dripping down the grain of the cupboard doors at his back, crawling along door sills and floorboards. A kind of mottling had appeared on the wall to his left, near the backstairs door, as if light were buried deep within it, and he had the sensation of something moving behind him, near or perhaps in the cupboards, almost—but not quite—visible from the tail of his eye. He was too experienced to turn and look. He knew he’d see nothing. One never did. Sweat stood out on his face and crawled slowly down his beard. Sometimes he thought he heard voices speaking, not shouting in agony, but simply muttering with angry, formless rage. It was the third blood-rite, the third sacrifice, of men and women chosen for psychic power or occult knowledge. Their curses would linger.
I’m sorry, he wanted to cry to the cold, beating air. Nothing I could have said would have saved you! But the rage of the dead was not selective. It did not hear.
They’re fools... God, get me out of here! But he knew he was as much a prisoner as the girl in the other