The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,9
chamber itself...
Dust motes sparkled in the mellow sunlight. On the oak planks of the floor every trace of the Circles of Power had been eradicated.
Jaldis, dammit, he thought, grief for his master’s loss mingling with exasperation and regret. Why didn’t you trust me with the secret of its making? Even though I worked for the Ladies of the Moon, you know I wouldn’t have passed that secret on to them. But Jaldis had never trusted wizards of any other Order, as far as his secrets were concerned.
“I’m sorry.” Von Rath’s soft voice spoke at his elbow. Rhion, leaning in the sunny doorway, glanced back to see the tall black figure in the shadows of the hall. He said nothing in reply, and there was a long moment’s silence, the younger wizard looking over his shoulder into the room, empty and filled with light, where the darkness had been.
“I’m sorry,” von Rath said again, and this time he was not simply apologizing for the interruption of their conversation by a telephone call from Berlin. His voice was quieter, gentle with regret. “You know, I do think that the use of drugs to create the Well probably had something to do with... with its collapse. With Eric’s death. I am sorry...” He shook his head, closing his gray eyes as if doing so would erase the image from his mind.
After a moment he went on, his voice hesitant as if he were carefully choosing his words. “I swear to you, Rhion, that as soon as it is possible to... to risk it... we will weave a Dark Well again. We will get in touch with wizards on your own side of the Void, to take you back through. But you understand that it is not possible now.”
“Yes.” Rhion sighed almost inaudibly, leaned once more against the oak doorjamb, weary in every bone. “Yes, I understand.”
“Spring is the time for war,” Paul said quietly. “When the weather clears... I fear that the English, the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Russians are only waiting for that. They will launch an attack upon us at any time now, and we cannot risk losing another one of us, should what happened to Eric happen again. Not when we have made this much progress toward returning magic to our world.”
“I understand,” Rhion said again.
The strong, slender hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, tightened encouragingly, as if willing him strength, like a commander willing his men to be brave in coming battle. For a moment something in that touch made Rhion think the younger wizard was about to say something else, but he did not. After a brief time, he turned away, and Rhion heard the highly polished boots retreat down the hall to his own small study, leaving Rhion alone.
In the silence, the faint chatter of the radio in the watch room downstairs seemed very loud. Outside in the yard, a Storm Trooper cracked a rude soldier’s joke, and another guard guffawed. Rhion remained where he was, bone-tired and hopeless, leaning in the doorway of that sun-flooded room, remembering...
There HAD to have been some magic on this side, he thought, even the tiniest fragment—there had to be magic on both sides of the Void for a crossing.
Somehow, just for that instant, at the stroke of midnight on the night of the spring equinox, some spark of magic had been kindled in a fashion that von Rath and his colleagues still did not understand. Enough to bring him through.
His mind returned to that fact, again and again. Perhaps Eric had known... But Eric was dead, destroyed in the Well that he had made. If that magic could be duplicated, even for an instant...
If he could only find some way to remake the Dark Well and contact the wizards in his own world.
But even if Baldur had found notes of it in the library, he reflected, they’d never reveal that to him. And without someone to read the texts to him he was helpless, illiterate, as utterly dependent upon them as he was for clothing and food and—he grinned wryly at the irony—Protection.
He stared down at the bare oak planks of the floor, seeking for some remaining trace of the Circles. He only remembered from seeing the ones Jaldis had made that they were hellishly complicated—blood, earth, silver, and light interwound and woven with smaller rings, curves, and crescents of power. And even so he did not know the words that went with their making.