The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,87

rode high, limpid and regal; a whispered catch of the hymn the Ladies sang to her floated through Rhion’s head as he stood motionless in the shadows of the old kitchen door, watching Poincelles stride like a lean and feral tomcat from the direction of the guards’ barracks, a couple of props under his arm.

I left the house of the Sun,

I left the houses of light,

To walk in the lands of the stars,

in the lands of the rain.

Children living in darkness,

I give you what I can.

Children of the earth,

I give you what I can.

Children of magic,

I give you what I can...

By the drenched quicksilver light, the Frenchman set the props up—Rhion thought wryly that the ground in that little gully must be getting pretty well grooved—shoved his little bundle of implements under the wire, and then followed with that curious, gawky agility that seemed almost spiderlike in the dark.

Rhion hated him. Early in their friendship, Sara had shown him the place where Poincelles had taken up the threshold-board at the entrance to the attic to put a talisman of badly cured lambskin where Rhion would cross it a dozen times a day, a talisman, she informed him, consecrated to bringing him under Poincelles’ influence—“Bastard paid me twenty marks to help him raise ‘sex magick’ to charge it,” she’d remarked, screwing the board down again above the rotting, mouse-eaten thing. “I should have charged him fifty.” Having no power, it didn’t trouble him. But in dreams, again and again, he had unwillingly witnessed the torture rituals of the Shining Adepts and had seen how they were accomplished; he knew who had laughed when the knife went in.

As Poincelles approached the shadowy verge of the trees, a figure appeared. For an instant Rhion’s heart stood still—then he saw that the waiting girl was smaller than Sara and the pale blonde of the most Teutonic type. Long braids hung down over the white uniform blouse of the League of German Maidens, framing a face at once pretty and sensual, with a lush mouth and discontented eyes. When Poincelles put a hand upon her waist she raised her arms to circle his neck. Scarcely louder than the rustle of the pines, Rhion heard his throaty chuckle.

Then they were gone.

“If he thinks he’s gonna deceive Asmodeus with that little tchotchke he’s out of luck,” Rebbe Leibnitz remarked dryly, when Rhion had reached the lichen-blotched granite boulder behind which the old man and his daughter waited. The old scholar had traded his camp rags for an ill-fitting utility suit of the kind a workman might wear on his day off; his hands were shoved deep in the shabby jacket’s pockets; under the bill of the cap that hid his shorn head, his dark eyes gleamed with amusement. Beside him, Sara was dressed as she had been two nights ago in a man’s trousers and pullover, with only a frizzed red tangle sticking stiffly out from beneath a cap of her own. Close to, her clothes smelled of smoke, but she hadn’t lit a cigarette for fear of the smell or the pinpoint of its light alerting the guard. Her pockets bulged with her housebreaking tools.

“He doesn’t seem to have much luck getting virgins, that’s for damn sure,” Sara sighed, with a shake of her head. “But you’d think he’d have more sense than to go looking for them in the League of German Mattresses.” She glanced over at Rhion, her dark eyes, like her father’s, a gleam in the shadow of her capbill. “Even money he’s going to ask those demons of his to bring you under his power again.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rhion put aside the brief memory of Sara’s nude body stretched on the altar beneath the downturned point of the inverted pentacle, candle flame like honeyed gold on the spread legs and perfect breasts. “What matters is, he’s paid the guards to look the other way between here and the house.”

Rhion crossed the open ground first, setting up his props, slipping under the wire, and returning to the darkness of the old laundry room that he had so recently left. He sank his mind down through the stillness of the black house, picking out the dim chatter of the wireless in the watch room and the creak of a lazy body shifting in a chair. Mice scratched behind the dining room wainscot and in the stuffy backstairs, beetles ticked like watches, timing the coming of the summer-tide. The very air of the house felt uneasy,