The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,86

thought of trying to manipulate the power of the Void, even at his most alert.

But some obscure instinct prickled at him, like a damp wind ruffling at his hair; an awareness that tonight would, for a dozen half-sensed reasons, be better than waiting for tomorrow. Tonight was Wednesday. If they put things off until tomorrow night Sara would have to find an excuse not to be at the tavern, and too many of those would begin to make someone suspicious. Tonight the moon would be at its full—a slender source of power, but one the Lady had taught him to use. Tonight von Rath was likelier to be asleep, and tomorrow might see some kind of preparation for the solstice sacrifice itself afoot. He groaned inwardly and wondered if he could manage to steal a nap during the afternoon.

The others were still arguing. He should have been keeping his mind on them but couldn’t.

“There are other d-drugs listed in the Anascopic Texts—”

“That are pharmacologically absurd.”

“Not to mention that the body ought to be purified, rather than polluted, before the working of magic.”

“Nonsense.” Baldur pushed back his lifeless dark hair with one twitching hand and sniffled. “The potion Major Hagen used in the D-Dark Well ceremony—”

“Which killed him.”

“We don’t know what killed him. It was the same potion P-P-Paul—Captain von Rath—used last night, and at the rites before, and it elevated him, exalted him.”

“He could have been flying in circles around the chandelier,” Rhion spoke up wearily, “and it wouldn’t have done him any good. Without the ability to convert power to physical operancy, you can disembowel every Jew in Germany, and it’s not going to buy you one damn thing.”

“Then I will disembowel them.” Von Rath looked up, his face a skull’s face in the gloom. “Every occultist, every medium, every psychic—every child whose house was visited by the poltergeisten—every source of personal manna, of the inner power, the vril, of magic, that we can lay our hands on, will be sacrificed. If we can raise enough power it must convert, it must answer to my bidding. And for that we will sacrifice every one.”

He was looking at Rhion as he spoke, and Rhion felt the blood drain from his face as he understood.

The soft voice sank still further, like the murmur of the angry ghosts whose power whispered still in the colder corners of the house. “Every one. You say there is no physical operancy in this world. So. Yet one of the so-called Jew wizards incarcerated at the Kegenwald labor camp escaped only the night before last, escaped across an open yard under plain sight of the guard towers without being seen.”

Dear God, no, not when I’m so close... “That’s possible with illusion.”

“And illusion is what we are trying to raise against the RAF. The thing that you say cannot be done.”

Poincelles laughed. “Escaping from a prison doesn’t need illusion. Just a little...” And he rubbed his fingers together suggestively.

“In France, perhaps,” Gall replied coldly.

“This is the real world, my dear Jacobus.”

To von Rath Rhion said quietly, “It isn’t the same.” His lips felt numb.

“So you say.” Von Rath stood up, for an instant in the shadows seeming to be a skeleton in his black uniform, with his wasted face and frostburn eyes. His voice was the dry stir of demon-wings. “We have trusted you, Rhion. We have believed your assurances that you have made with us—with the Holy Order of the SS—with the destiny of the German Reich—a common cause.”

He tipped his head to one side and regarded Rhion, not even as a friend once trusted and trusted no longer, but as a stranger as unknown to him as the men he had killed last night.

“The summer solstice is coming—a time of power. The universe is moving to its balance point, when its powers can be turned by a single hand. On that day we will make a talisman of power, a battery, against the day later in summer when we can give our abilities to the assistance of our Fatherland in the breaking of our enemies’ stronghold. We depend upon the aid you have professed yourself willing to offer us. And if we find that you have lied to us in your assurances and betrayed our trust, I tell you now that it would be better for you if you had never been born.”

Sara and her father were waiting for him in the redolent darkness of the trees beyond the Schloss’ yard lights. The full moon