The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,89
its wick.
Beside him, Leibnitz breathed, “Kayn aynhoreh...”
The dim patterns of protective circles drawn upon the floor, the marks of old blood and ashes, lay undisturbed in the darkness. In their center was nothing to be seen, even with a wizard’s sight, yet somehow, though its light touched the dirt-crusted stone of the opposite wall, the candle flame did not penetrate that inner dark. The air here seemed colder than in the cellar outside; the silence had the anechoic quality of unseen infinity.
“What... is it?”
“Can you see it?” Rhion nodded toward the circles.
The old man’s grizzled eyebrows knotted, and the dark eyes beneath them were suddenly the eyes of a mage. “Not see.”
Rhion took from his pocket the other candle stubs he had brought. Doubled and trebled, the soft glow filled the room with a wavering underwater light. Around him he sensed the heavy calm of the earth that grounded away the horrors that had been raised in the house; for a second he seemed to hear the stirring of the night breeze through the long grass of the meadow beneath Witches Hill, and see the glimmer of the full moon in the round pond near the ruins of the old Kegenwald church. Far-off he sensed other things, long lines of stones in the molten glow of the moon, earthen mounds shaped like serpents among summer trees at dawn, stone crosses, many-roofed shrines gleaming like gold on distant hills in dry afternoon sun. Beneath his feet he was aware of the slow pulse of the ley that joined that dim net of power overlying all the earth.
He set the candles down. His shaking fingers fumbled at the buttons of his shirt, and drew from under it, on its string around his neck, the Spiracle of iron and silver and salt, each of its Five crystals seeming to speak one glinting, unknown word as the lights touched then. The candle glow slid along the silver in a running flow of amber runes.
“This is not a good thing that you do,” the old man whispered. “But you must be got away from this—this abomination of a place, to let these men here destroy themselves as they will.” He stood stroking the round, ragged scar on his stubbled lip, gazing with a kind of reverie into the dark colors of the circle’s heart. The wistfulness Rhion remembered in von Rath’s eyes from the early days, the yearning to know only that it was true, shone briefly on his face. “I am glad that the Lord let me see this,” he added simply. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
As when he had worked with the Dark Well just after the new moon, once Rhion entered the trance state necessary to raise power he had only the vaguest idea of time. For awhile he and Leibnitz worked together, drawing out signs of protection and concentration, he in his own blood, the Kabbalist in the ochre chalk he’d instructed Rhion to procure from the wizards-kitchen above. In the candles they burned a tiny pinch of the dittany the old man had insisted was proper for such spells; as a background to his own meditations, Rhion heard the murmur of that deep old voice framing one by one the names of the angels of the Sephiroth of Malkut, the protectors of the material world, but, oddly enough, the sound was soothing rather than distracting, a familiar mantra of magic, no matter what form it took. From the Circle of Power they drew a corridor to the edge of the Dark Well, and for a long time Rhion stood on the brink of the abyss, staring into a cold darkness of colors he could not consciously see.
But it was there. Endless, lightless, it yawned just—and only just—beyond the perception of his mind, a column of nothing into which it would be perilously easy to step. An angle of perception... a degree of difference from the sane and material earth... The twisted metal of the Spiracle seemed cold and dense in his hand, and through the concentration of his spells he wondered if he shouldn’t have taken the safer route and set up a simple resonator after all.
But it was far too late. The spells of charging coiled like smoke through his exhausted brain, spells he had learned in the Drowned Lands, in the octagonal library tower in Bragenmere, and in Shavus’ strange stone house; he had no notion of whether they would work or not.